Interior Monologue

The empty house was dark and cold; he had been away for some time. The last vestiges of the day’s paltry warmth were a distant memory. He paused shivering on the threshold, and shed his soiled clothing, then padded through the common areas on bare, silent feet, clutching the last evidence of his humiliation to his chest in a bundle. Finally reaching his personal chamber, he knelt at the fireplace, stoking the embers, and dropped his bundle on the grate—boots and all. He waited in stillness for the fire to do its work, willing the flames to consume his shame.

Despite the glow of the fire, he could not feel any warmth, and a chill coursed violently through his body, nearly knocking him to the ground. He reached out instinctively to catch himself and stopped cold, noticing that his normally well-manicured hand was now filthy, nails caked and black, skin raw and grimy. His horror blossomed, and he stood, bringing both dirty hands to his face, pulling at his ears, and tearing at his hair, and feeling his mind stretch and twist with the undeniable reality of what he had done. His teeth clicked, jaw clenched, eyes rolling madly in their sockets. A strangled cry began low in his belly and rose through his chest, escaping grimly set lips and distending into a hysterical shriek.

A small part of his psyche observed all of this from deep inside his mind, unmoved by the spectacle. It calmly calculated the probability that he would recover from this mental schism. The house was blessedly empty, no servants or children, and so if he could manage to get himself into a bath, the Lord might yet salvage his sanity. It reasoned if he could refrain from visible injury—no facial abrasions, no bald patches from tearing hair—life might continue unaltered. It suggested that this outburst might finally purge whatever internal demon had been unearthed by his egregious act. It began to nurture a careful, cautious hope.

It was this small, quiet part of him that registered a fleeting movement in his peripheral, and so he stopped his screaming, and turned his head.

The Lord found himself locked in an unblinking stare with the fetid remains of his seemingly dead wife. She stood unmoving on the hearth, so close that he gagged on the musky stench of twice-turned earth and acrid sweat. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, her left hand rose with frightful stillness from the remnants of her shredded gown. The hand floated up interminably, and eventually the Lord could see only the dark opening of the pistol barrel and the flayed knuckles of his wife’s unnaturally steady hand. He watched in helpless terror as the grotesquely feline thumb stretched back, out of sight. He heard the flat click of a pistol hammer.

And the Lord screamed.