Andy Lane - Slow Decay

While Gwen went back for a trolley, Jack opened up the door to the cell. He had his Webley ready, just in case the creature — what had Jack christened it? Paul? — made some attempt to escape the cage of dead flesh that was holding it.

Owen just watched, still kneeling on the ground, as the two of them released Marianne’s left arm from the restraints, placed her body on the trolley, then released her right arm from the restraints and placed that beside her. His heart had dropped away into that unfathomable abyss within him. He couldn’t feel anything. There was nothing left to feel.

With Marianne on the metal surface of the autopsy table, and with Gwen and Jack watching silently from the gallery, Owen carefully cut the clothes off her body. Part of him remembered how desperately he had wanted to see her naked, but the sight of her body did nothing for him now. Marianne wasn’t there any more. What was her was the way she had held herself, the way she had tilted her head, the way her eyes had seemed to come alive when she got talking about her favourite things — that had been Marianne. And that had gone.

Mechanically, Owen made a deep lateral incision from shoulder to ruined shoulder, dipping down to touch Marianne’s xiphoid process as he crossed the sternum, then a second incision from the xiphoid process down to the groin, cutting through muscle and yellow body fat. Blood welled thickly from the incisions. Using his hands, he pulled the incisions apart, revealing the internal organs. Normally he would cut through the ribs and cartilage next, exposing the heart, lungs and trachea, but he wasn’t conducting an autopsy — he was looking for one very particular thing.

Looking up at the gallery, where a grim-faced Toshiko and Ianto had now joined Jack and Gwen, he nodded at Toshiko. She pressed a button on a remote control she was holding, and the image of Marianne’s torso, taken by Toshiko’s ultrasound scanner, flashed up on the high-definition screen that hung above the table. The colour-coding showed where the creature was — or where it had been. Palpating Marianne’s duodenum, Owen quickly located the right stretch of intestine. He could feel something in there more solid than pre-digested food. It seemed to shift slightly under his questing fingers. Reaching out to the instrument tray, he retrieved a couple of clamps and used them to secure either end of the organ, above and below the creature. A few strokes with a scalpel and he had isolated that entire section — about a metre’s worth of wet, pink flesh. He lifted it clear and placed it in a metal bowl, then placed the bowl on the table beside Marianne’s abused body.

Ianto, unbidden, had retrieved a large glass jar from storage. It had a lid that could be fastened securely on top, and nozzles top and bottom so that liquid or gas could be introduced or extracted. It was about the size of Marianne’s head. Owen had sometimes used it for chemical experiments, but it suited his purpose now. From his chemical store, he obtained some hydrochloric acid and poured it into the jar, along with some distilled water and various other chemicals. By this time, guessing what he was doing, Gwen had scoured the Hub for whatever scraps of food she could find — old pizza crusts, sandwiches, bags of sweets, stuff from the refrigerator, anything that could be used to replicate the internal environment of a digestive system. Owen tipped them into the jar. Within moments the mixture had turned cloudy and curdled, and the sharp smell of the acid had been replaced by something nastier and more faecal.

Owen retrieved the section of Marianne’s intestine from the metal bowl and held it up above the jar. This was going to be the tricky bit. Somewhere in the background, he could sense Jack bringing his revolver out of his coat, holding it ready in case the creature tried to escape, as it had from the receptionist at the Scotus Clinic.

Owen held the scalpel in steady hands, preparing to make the final cut. He held the length of intestine by one end, just above the clamp, and sliced vertically downwards. The cut gaped open, pressed by something heavy within. For a moment, Owen was worried that the creature wouldn’t relinquish its grip, but it must have sensed a change in the health of its host. Whatever means it used to maintain hold on the inside of the gut, whatever hooks or suckers it was using, had been released. As Owen watched, a slimy black and blue mass slid out of Marianne’s intestine and fell into the jar, splashing the liquid up the sides where it stuck in globs, which then slid down again to rejoin the mass.

Ripples spread across the surface of the liquid, but Owen thought he could see the creature moving, digging itself deeper into the biological muck.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Paul,’ he said, the first words he had spoken since he had found Marianne’s body. ‘Paul is formerly the occupant of Miss Marianne Till. Paul will be staying with us for a while. Please make him feel welcome.’ He gazed up at Toshiko. ‘Tosh, you’re the most technical one here, so I’m going to tell you what to do next. The hydrochloric acid and the scraps of food will resemble the contents of a gut, which will make Paul here feel at home. I don’t fancy keeping it like this, however — too messy and it’s going to stink to high heaven. What I want you to do is drain the jar in about four hours, and while you’re draining it, flush it through with nutrient solution. You’ll find bags of it labelled up in the fridge. Set up a drip so the nutrient solution gets introduced into the jar at the same rate as it’s removed. Set it up so that a bag lasts about two hours. That may be overdoing it, but I don’t think these things can be overfed, somehow. All clear?’

Toshiko nodded.

Gwen tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at her. ‘Owen,’ she said: ‘what happens now? You’re talking like you’re not going to be around.’

‘I’m not, for a while,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go and find a dark corner somewhere, and I’m going to get as drunk as I can, as fast as I can. And then I’m going to have sex with as many people as I can in as short a space of time as I can. I don’t know how many records I’m going to break, but alert the media anyway. Someone named Owen will come back later on, when he’s ready, but it won’t be me. I’ll be gone.’

He placed his mobile phone on the instrument tray and walked out without looking back.

Owen left the Hub via the lift that led up to the water tower in front of the Millennium Centre. He stood there, on the slab of stone that had been touched by something special in the past and from where nobody could see him, no matter how close they were, and he watched people walk by, individually, in couples and in groups.

The world went on. Life went on. Just because Marianne had died, it didn’t mean that anything else had changed.

After a while he stepped forward, off the slab and onto the wooden slats that paved the entire area in front of the Centre. Still, nobody noticed him. They walked around him, barely avoiding touching his arms, but nobody would look him in the eye. It was as if he had ceased to exist.

He headed for a bar on Bute Street where he could get absolutely wrecked in the sure knowledge that they would keep on serving him drinks. He started on beer with a whisky chaser, on the basis that it was fast and effective. While he was drinking, he tried to let all conscious thought drain away. Sensation washed over him and receded. The only things that mattered were the warm, smoky taste of the whisky and the coldness of the beer, sluicing his throat.

When he realised that he had lost count of how much he had drunk, he moved on to another bar, and then another. All around him people were picking each other up or picking fights with each other, but nobody tried to talk to him. There was a deadness in his eyes, or in his soul, that discouraged them. Life just washed around him.