Tad Williams - A Stark And Wormy Knight

For a long time after he has finished swinging Karl only stands, the ax now hanging in his hands, heavy as an iron girder. His limbs tingle, even his scalp prickles. He is drained, as bonelessly weary as if he has just had a ten-minute orgasm. But there is a…thing…on the floor. No, many things, one big and the rest in all kinds of sizes and shapes. It’s hard to make out details because the kitchen is very messy. The walls are spattered and dripping red. Red everywhere.

The exhilaration is beginning to wear off. He sinks into a crouch in the middle of one of the larger scarlet puddles. The strangest, thickest, saltiest smell is in his nose. He’s trying to think, staring at what’s left of his wife. Call an ambulance? No point. No ambulance in the world is going to do any good. All the kings horses and all the king’s men aren’t going to put…that…

He wretches up what is in his stomach, a slurry of beer and less identifiable components. The smell combines with the blood and suddenly he is on his side in the warm red goo, unable to do anything further until he has emptied his stomach to its lining, until he is gagging out air and streams of mucus. Then, numb and unable to think about much of anything, he staggers to his feet, drops his shoes and clothes where he stands, then steps carefully over the abstract red splatters as he leaves the kitchen.

He stands under the shower for what seems like hours, hoping in a hopeless kind of way, like a superstitious child, that if he waits long enough and lets enough water run over him, when he goes back to the kitchen things will be…different.

But, of course, they are not. He stands shivering, looking down at the bloody meat and bone, the scatter of pieces that had seemed so inevitably connected once, but now seem as random as an emptied bowl of stew. His stomach lurches again but there is no longer anything in it to throw up.

Think, he tells himself. Think. Don’t panic. That’s when people make mistakes. Don’t think with your emotions. Be a man. Be…logical.

First things first. The shower was a mistake. He shouldn’t have left the room. The police, they have all this equipment now, special lights and chemicals to detect blood stains, even stains that are so small or so old you can hardly see them. He’ll put his shoes back on and stay in the kitchen, and if he has to go anywhere else, he’ll leave the shoes here so he doesn’t track any blood.

But he has to leave the room almost at once because the blood is pooled everywhere across the floor, right to the baseboards. He doesn’t think it will soak through the vinyl flooring, but at the edge of the floor it will definitely get into the gaps between the flooring and the walls and that will be that. So he goes to the garage and gets a big plastic tarp left over from camping and then, back in the kitchen, gingerly lifts the largest piece up onto it — it is surprisingly heavy for only part of a person — then begins piling the other decent-sized chunks onto the plastic as well. He has to stop several times to gag again, but after a while he gets used to the smell and a sort of gray haze covers his thoughts and he can work without thinking too much about what he’s doing. Still, the discovery of a finger with a wedding ring still on it makes him pause for a moment. It’s not that he loved her, or even gave a damn about her, but this…this is so…final. Not to mention the fact that he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail if he gets caught, and that’s if he’s lucky. And now he’s cleaning up. He’s trying to hide what he did. That could get him the death penalty.

Karl pauses for a moment, then gives a sort of shrug. Too late now. The bitch drove him to it. Admitting that he did it, calling the police, going to jail — that would be giving her the last word. That would be Norah having the last laugh as he spends the rest of his life, maybe fifty years or more, suffering for what she did to him.

But how will he get it all clean? He’s seen it all on television cop shows. Eventually, they’ll come, and he’ll be the first suspect.

Karl surprises even himself by laughing. Of course he should be the first suspect. Because he did it! He’s sitting naked in his kitchen in a pool of his wife’s blood!

No, think, he tells himself. Look. There are red splatters everywhere, and dozens of pieces flung all over the room still to find. And on top of everything else, ants, hundreds of the little bastards still crawling everywhere, oblivious, and if they aren’t already doing it, they’ll soon be tracking thousands of little bloody ant footprints everywhere. The ants are searching for food — they’ll head right for the blood and bone chips and bits of meat. And even if he keeps them off the body, how will he find all the pieces of Norah and get this kitchen clean?

The idea, when it finally comes, is so good that he begins to laugh again.

You dumb bitch, he thinks. You could have watched Oprah for a hundred years and you’d still never have an idea as good as this!

He gets to work.

Once he has every visible piece collected on the plastic tarp, some of them already crawling with tiny black insect bodies, Karl begins to scrub. He concentrates on soaking up blood first, as quickly and thoroughly as possible, using paper towels and rags from the garage. It takes a couple of hours, and after a while he realizes he is dizzy with exhaustion and hunger, so he stops to stand naked in the middle of the kitchen and eat corn chips from the cuPRETTY BOYoard. While he is getting them out he notices a few random droplets of red on the pretty board door, six feet above the ground. There must be hundreds like that, he knows. Still, he has a plan.

When he has finally mopped up all the blood he can see and mopped the whole floor with rubbing alcohol to kill the traces, he takes the red rags and the ruined torso and the forlorn, bloody pieces, even the ants climbing on them, and wraps them all together in the plastic tarp and tapes it shut. Then he sits down on the floor to wait. He has blotted up every ant he could find, mashing them into the bloody rags now wrapped inside the tarp, and for the first time today the kitchen is antless. Norah would be pleased, if she wasn’t dead.

The sky is darkening outside and the sounds of the empty house give him the strangest feeling that he should finish up soon because his wife will be coming home from work soon — but, of course, she won’t. Besides, it’s Saturday. The weekend. Tomorrow’s Sunday. He stares at the huge tarp swathed in duct tape. Day of rest.

His laugh, this time, is raspy and hoarse.

He opens a beer, but doesn’t have to wait long. Within ten minutes the first scouts of the ant army return to the kitchen. Karl sits, sipping on his beer, and lets them walk past him — hell, they can walk over him for all he cares. He’s smeared in blood again, so why wouldn’t they? But he’s waiting for something else. At last he sees a trail beginning, leading from the entry point in the sink cabinet, out to the wall beside the trash can, then looping back again. The trail becomes an orderly line. The ants are at work in earnest now. After a few more minutes, Karl moves the trash can. There, stuck to the wall down by the baseboard, is a sliver of something pale — bone, fat, it doesn’t really matter. He wipes it up with a piece of alcohol-soaked tissue and throws the tissue into a trash bag, then goes back to watch some more.

It becomes a weird sort of sport, following the busy ants as they do his work for him, locating with their ant-senses all the body pieces and bloodspots too small or too well-hidden for him to have found on his own. They find what looks like a tiny slice of eyelid and eyelash stuck to the refrigerator door handle — how did he miss that? More shockingly, they locate an entire toe that has bounced out of the kitchen into the hallway. That would have been a bit of a giveaway, wouldn’t it? Karl laughs again. He’s beginning to enjoy this, despite the mute presence of the bundled tarp.