The mortician’s descent rang through the stairwell, each step slow and deliberate. The cold air met him with the sting of antiseptics and something heavier underneath. Sharp and acrid like vinegar, a tinge of formaldehyde that grew stronger with his descent. It wrapped around him as a greeting. Welcoming him home.
Above the living were always busy, noise following them everywhere. Here, in the mortician’s domain, there was quiet in abundance and he reveled in it. The freedom to work and think as he wished.
Fluorescent lights mercilessly bleached every shadow, stripping the room down to its bare essence. The mortician's steps echoed, the sound almost accusing in its sharpness while the faint hum of machinery droned in the background.
It was a small room with a large table in the middle, a slab of stainless steel that gleamed with surgical precision. Narrow grooves were edged in, designed to drain away whatever fluids were caught by the basin carved into the table. Nearby, a trolley waited with a blue cloth covering the tools that laid on it. Tools meant to rend flesh and break bones while glass jars would be filled.
The steel was spotless and gleamed in the light, but that reflection only seemed to enhance the clinical cruelness of it. This was built for a singular purpose, but not comfort. More akin to an altar of function that claimed the body that laid upon it.
Her hair spread like spilled ink across the polished steel. It absorbed the light around her, framing her head in darkness, while it touched those ashen and bony shoulders. Somehow giving the appearance that she was at ease.
Death had not dulled her, if anything it drew attention to the unsettling beauty of her. Thin lips that seemed curved into the ghost of a small smile. Elegant eyebrows and full lashes that tickled those she graced with a kiss. Her lips were almost as black as the hair that framed her.
"First time I"ve seen someone tattoo their lips like that." The words were a quiet murmur. Barely disturbing the silence.
The mortician pulled on his gloves slowly while he stood over her. Admiring the body as an artist would, with an appreciation for something that seemed almost sacred. The cool marble of her skin stretched along the gentle slope of the collarbone. While her body laid still but not in the usual way of those that graced his table. No, this was not mere emptiness, it was a pause, someone at rest.
The snap of his glove seemed almost violent in the quiet of the room and made the mortician flinch. A moment's break of his professionalism.
Her skin was not flawless he noted, small scars marked her body, whispers of old pain. But it was smooth, save for the bruising on her neck. A purple shadowed necklace, an amateur would think it was the mark of a rope.
"Auto-erotic asphyxiation according to the report. No rope burn and far too wide, you used a belt for your games." The mortician spoke softly, secrets that were not meant for the light of day, only for the two of them.
Two fingers pressed against the sternum, checking for texture, resistance. The small give of preserved flesh. But not for life. There was none to find. This examination held the routine care of his craft, tracing anatomy, not personhood.
His inspection of her limbs was done with a practiced precision but held a touch of care. Each action was soft and smooth, as if done for someone precious. The mortician cradled her hand while inspecting her fingers, a blueish tinge to them.
The rigidity of her joints was tested, lifting her arms he moved them in wide circles before placing them down by her side again. Black nails topped each finger, carefully painted with a red mark embedded in them. The nails were sharpened with a curve, looking almost like claws
"You took care of yourself, even in the small details." There had been many before her, bodies that held a story all their own. But this one seemed to strum beneath his fingers, a special kind of silence that drew him in closer.
The mortician's gaze fixed on the bruising of her neck once more before moving down. Wondering how someone so meticulous could end this way. It seemed a travesty to his mind.
Her chest drew his gaze and made it linger. Too perfect, too still. On the swell of her breast he found the subtle shape of two thin scars, surgical work. “A reduction, ” he concluded. “Function over form. Or perhaps practicality over beauty? Sensible.” The thought made him smile, the dead were often far more rational than the living.
With a light touch, the mortician traced down from her throat, with a moments hesitation over the woman's nipples and along her sides. Continuing down the sides of her body. Noting the faint discoloration along her flanks, postmortem setting in. Tarnishing the frozen beauty of her, the start of decay that would go on until this beauty was eaten away. But it would happen slowly and he would preserve every possible moment of her.
There was weight to her stillness. An inexplicable force that drew the mortician in. Capturing his attention to make him fall deeper into his work. Continuing with reverence to his subject.
When inspecting her, the man did not rush. He performed his routine checks of the legs and feet. Noting that she was a dancer, the musculature was graceful from her practice. While a smattering of small scars littered her lower legs. The writings of her life laid in the marks she bore.
For the blink of an eye the bruises darkened. The mortician paused, blinked again and they seemed to have lightened. Perhaps it was only a trick of the light but he could have sworn it had changed. He shook his head, age had its drawbacks.
Both the ankles and knees retained a measure of their flexibility, like with the arms they were slowly stiffening. But the body was still flexible enough for his purposes. Again he found black nails, the color was a recurring theme.
Only a simple motion was enough to lay her legs further apart, revealing scars on her inner thighs. The man had already noted part of them before. But now the pale, almost glistening lines stood out, revealed to the light above. The woman's legs now laid open as if she were inviting a lover in for a closer look.
The cold seemed to grow around him but the man had eyes for his subject and nothing else. "Only a few but still too many." There was something peculiar about them, almost all were small and neat. Surgical in their precision.
But there was one that stood out, large and jagged, raised from the skin. The mortician bent close and traced the edge with the tip of his finger. Raw even in death.
"You must have been suffering horrendously." As he spoke the words, he could almost imagine a shudder running through the body. The echo of remembered pain, the horror of it etched into more than her body. The sheer emotion that had called for the act.
It slashed across the tender inside of her thigh. Close to an artery where her life had once beat loudest. That horrible moment had become a secret meant to be hidden away. An old secret, one that had hurt but hadn’t killed.
Eventually his eyes strayed from the scars to the rest of her. Short hair in a thin strip, almost an arrow pointing down. Neatly kept with no redness marring her skin. He leaned closer, noting the tone of skin as he inspected her for injury. His eyes roved over every fold and contour with an exacting care. Noting that even now her inner lips slightly protruded from her.
Again his hands descended, following the contour of her mound, tracing along the edge of her before they rose to smooth over her hips. It was only then that the thought at the back of his mind came forward. "The skin isn’t just pale, it is grey."
Straightening to get another look at her, the man noticed something peculiar. Her fingers and toes had turned black, as if the color of her nails had bled into the skin. Spreading out like ink from her veins until it faded into grey.
He frowned, murmuring underneath his breath about possible causes but none would have such an effect. The man leaned closer, gloved hands hovering above her. The air seemed colder than it should, as if the body before him were emitting the cold.
When his fingers slid around her wrist to check closer there was the faintest tremble beneath them. The fluorescent lights above flickered while the hum of them deepened, thickening until it reverberated through his ears.
A sound caught him by surprise. The low sigh of someone breathing out after a good rest. The man's eyes flicked up from the woman's wrist to her face. Her lips had parted. White teeth glinted beneath the black. The chest rose and fell in such a slow fashion that it hardly seemed to move at all.
That bruise around her throat stood out more starkly than it had before. A blink of his eyes did not dispel the image. Before it had been washed out, now the bruise was fresh. The color of it spread, fine lines reached out from the mark. They climbed up her neck and down her chest. A web of veins that pooled between over her heart in that same inky blackness.
The mortician's breath came fast now. Panicked as he tried to move. To shout. But nothing seemed to work. His body bound to the sight before him.
Her eyes opened. Not a flutter of lashes. Nor a slow blink. A void. Wide and dark. The pupils a white slit, long and vertical that stood out against the blackness. A dark that came from a tunnel without end.
The man was screaming, he was sure of it. There was just no sound coming out. Only the dawning horror as the corpse before him sat up. Raising her hand to touch his cheek. A terrible cold, worse than that of dead skin spread through him. It almost burned his skin while her lips cracked open in a whisper.
"You handled me as something precious." A thin and raspy voice, like wind through bones. "How interesting."
The mortician's tongue was heavy inside his mouth, while dread moved within, snakes tangling in his stomach. A new scent drifted in his nose, sweet and cloying. Flowers that had been sitting in the water for too long, sickly sweet in their decay. The scent grew stronger the closer she came.
"Questions of my background, of my history. As if I were a patient in your care." Those unsettling eyes stayed fixed on him while she tilted her head. "Let me do some studying of my own."
The living corpse moved with a fluid grace. Death was a mere afterthought when she slid from the table. The hand on the man's cheek guided him. The sound of fabric sliding across living flesh far too loud in the silence. Part of him wanted it to be paralysis, chemicals mixed in the wrong way to bring a hallucination.
But another part whispered in encouragement. Thoughts that he had always ignored, speaking louder and louder.
Those cold hands undressed him, slivers of ice moving against him. Suspiciously soft in the way that she removed his clothes before dropping them to be forgotten on the ground. The table should have been cold underneath, but he was already freezing. It cupped his body in a gentle embrace, in place of the woman that now stood over him.
No longer the subject of ritual examination, she was the observer and he the specimen.
The eerie gaze bored deep into his own, alien in its aim. Unfathomable depths that kept him bound as surely as her spell did while the dead woman took his wrist and examined his hand. Caressing his fingers before turning the palm upwards, studying the lines as if there was a story within.
"Such neat hands that have caressed more dead flesh than living." A quiet murmur with a wicked edge to the words. An insinuation that made his mind sputter in protest.
One of her claws pressed just above the pulse on his wrist, the tip of a knife that could slice him open. When she moved it up towards his shoulder it felt that way. A painful sting followed by a burning line. As if his skin parted by her touch alone. A shiver of an electric fear followed that sharpness.
The man’s heart beat loud and hard against his chest, beating against the wall of an icy cave, beating to be let out.
"Not to worry." That enigmatic smile widened, her focus fixed on him. "No sense in spilling warm blood when I can still use its heat."
The panic and dread inside of the man screamed, wanting to be free of this horror. Of this terrible place, to sit in the light where shadows could not reach. The woman traced the outline of his ribs with the care of a sculptor tracing their newest object of devotion. And that same whisper within moaned in joy.
Strands of that inky hair broke the pure gray visage of that angel of death. Lines of black falling over her breasts but she was unmindful of it all, the dead held no humility. She now moved in a parody of his own examination, letting her hands roam across the man’s body as she tested his limbs. Felt the smoothness of his skin.
"Meticulous attention." The words fell as a description, an amused anecdote shared with a class. "As caring with your own body as you are with those left in your care." Moving his head from side to side she saw the thin line of a scar along his jaw. "Cut yourself while shaving? Perhaps that meticulous nature has a reason besides reverence."
Those fingers of hers swept down and up in great lines that made the heat within him rise against the cold of her touch. The merest flex of her fingers and he would have yelped from the sudden pinch of his nipples.
As foreign as those eyes were, the mortician still saw the sense of amusement in them as she repeated each of his actions. Mocking his own earlier impropriety.
The mobility of his legs was tested even as she laughed at his dainty feet. Embarrassment welled within, a thick viscous liquid that filled his stomach. Adding onto the chaos that raged within his mind.
Pushing his legs wide the woman crawled onto the table. That same fluidness in her every motion, a predator that had her prey ready to be devoured. Angelic beauty within every piece of her as she followed his own examination to the letter. Her hands stroked upwards from his thighs while she noted every ridge and bump of his half-swelled cock.
"Well now, that is..." The words trailed off before a wicked edge placed the nail in the coffin. "Decidedly average."
That embarrassment burned inside, hotter and hotter even as she took hold of him. "Is that why you are so careful with us? A learned deft touch to compensate for something average?" It was an idle amusement for her, mocking his own earlier comments of her body with a question. "Your partners must have felt so lucky to receive that attentive touch of yours."
Despite the slivers of ice that held him, stroked him. The mortician felt himself grow in her hands. Those black lips parted to reveal white teeth and an equally black tongue that ran from the bottom to the tip of him. "Ah, the taste of the living."
With her fist wrapped around him she pumped, her tongue playing with his head. While those wickedly sharp teeth made themselves known to make him wince. She delighted in it, in every piece of evidence that there was life within him.
The mortician laid beneath her, captured for a unique kind of torture as she played with his body to her own content. Letting her nails slice along the sides of him, savoring the sounds that came from him.
The parts of him that screamed were wild in their desperation but now seemed further away. Pushed back as death itself laid a claim on his body. She had righted herself, holding him against her while she pushed her own hips forward. Sliding the length of him against herself.
The motions obscene and holy as if death had mastered the dance of desire as well. There was no cold. A wet heat as if he had stepped into a shower after a long day. The man's body ached for that heat, wanted it. Needed to be enveloped in that terrible seduction.
Parts of him had been holding on with the edges of his nails to a semblance of sanity. But it had always been a thin veneer. The sheer want delayed for too long and a part of him broke. Surrendering to the blasphemous feeling.
The woman sensed it, two breaths became one as she sank onto him. Wet folds opening for him with a depraved pleasure. The woman moved, hips bucking as she claimed more of her prey with each moment.
"You were right, you know." His own wide eyes stared up at her form. Entranced as she moved up and down, the wet heat of her enveloping him in every way, dictating this moment of his life. "I do like belts for my games."
Those cold, black hands held onto his own belt. One with a wide design in smooth, brown leather that she wrapped around his own neck. Pulling it taut against his throat. And he felt every chance of freedom evaporate with the breath he could no longer draw.
That wicked grin on her face showed that even in death there was delight in her games. His breath had been the only freedom that the man had still possessed. Now it belonged entirely to the dead wraith that moved on top of him. Her wet heat pumped him while her own body shuddered. Pupils grown to white circles to capture every moment of his exquisite agony.
There was no pause, no relenting. His breath was stolen by moments before giving the slightest piece of it back. A profane pleasure etched into her as she stole it again and again. Darkness gathered from the edges of his vision while the pressure inside him continued to mount. The world narrowed to touch alone.
The wraith above him moved down. Pressing her chest against his own while her hips moved. The belt was pulled taut until not even a wisp of a breath could get through. Pressure mounted higher and higher, in his head as much as within his body.
A sharpness pressed on his wrist. His eyes shot open once more, fixed on her own. The endless white light in that tunnel of blackness drew him in. Something inside tore loose of him but she had no regard for what happened beneath her. The belt was pulled tighter even as that sharpness turned into a slice at the moment of his final breath.
A brilliant flare of life shook the world until there was nothing left to shake anymore. The dark reached up from every crevice to encompass the room. Devotion and death rising together.
Spreading out from the both of them like a dark sweeping mist. It obscured those two forms that had become one. Until finally nothing more remained when that mist faded. There stood only a table, a pool of red rapidly draining away while a heap of clothes laid forgotten on the floor.
The mortuary had always been a place for endings. Tonight it had gained a warmth that shouldn’t exist, a heartbeat entombed within. Ready for the next body to be laid in its embrace.
AN: A foray into dark erotica and horror, my first attempt so it was a bit of a search for the correct tone. Halloween seemed like the right time for such a story. However with a story such as this I do believe in the proper trigger warnings as it contains sensitive topics.
So, did I hit the right tone?