The Shambling Pariah of Loved Cadavers

The butcher's cleaver came down with straight precision, separating bone, tendon, and muscle. Mr. Johan Briggs had closed his shop for the remainder of the afternoon. He'd inherited the little butcher's shop from his late wife's side of the family. He'd always hated the fact that he'd married into it. Butchering animals and smelling the fresh blood day after day, had turned him off to eating meat, which had been the center of many jokes and passive aggressive comments, particularly from his father-in-law... back when he'd been alive.

They were all dead now. Unable to mock him for his "lack of masculinity." Unable to butcher him with their words and terrible actions. The shop wasn't doing well anymore, but that didn't matter to Johan. It was, and had never been, his shop. He'd just inherited it through a spiderweb of unnecessary formalities. He had recently implemented a change for the shop, that had transformed it into something... a little more his style.

Johan rubbed his hands on the dirty rag, sticky with fresh blood. He walked past the various cuts of meat that hadn't been properly stored, and hadn't been given the chance to be purchased by the locals. The discolored meat was now crawling with maggots, but that didn't matter. Neither did the stench that would have sent anyone running out of the store, gagging. Johan found the stench soothing. It matched his own rotten soul, mangled from years of abuse. This was the cry for help coming from his core, begging for retribution against the abusers that had wronged him all his life. But this wasn't the truth. The truth was that he'd been rotten and mangled inside from the very beginning... from the moment he came crying out of the womb... a terrible blood-soaked, fleshy thing, destined for nothing good.

Johan closed the door behind him and made his way down to the cellar by candlelight. Down there lay the essence of his true shop: a privately owned business of dead bodies, caked in a still-perfecting recipe of homemade embalming fluid. Johan had bribed the town's gravedigger to deliver him the fresh corpses of those who had died. Richard Chamberlin, a young man in his early twenties, had agreed to do this after some much needed convincing. It seemed wrong because it was wrong... but he needed the money, if he were to ever escape the clutches of the small town of Rye in East Sussex. It was 1635, and smuggling corpses, though unholy, was the least of his problems. Not when there were much more dangerous smugglers lurking around of the murderous variety.

The corpses were lined up on the cold, stone floor, wrapped in linen. To avoid any suspicions from the other townspeople, Johan had provided Richard animal parts, which he could put in the coffins to be buried in the cemetery, for loved ones of the deceased to visit. Johan had chuckled at the thought of people sobbing while mourning coffins filled with dead pigs, cows, and sometimes chickens.

"So, what shall it be?" said Johan, speaking to himself, as he ran his dirty fingers through his long and greasy black hair. He ran his fingers along the petrified arms of a dead man, lying lifelessly on the table. Johan moved the candle closer, causing a few drops of wax to drip down onto the corpse's wrinkled, porcelain skin.

You're doing it again. Those clumsy hands. I told you. You need an artist's touch.

"Silence, or I'll burn you in the fire until you're nothing but a piece of charcoal!" Johan snapped back at the mummified corpse of his late wife, who was strapped to a chair in the corner of the dark room.

No, you won't. You can't lie to yourself... and especially not to me. You've never been able to lie to me.

Johan stared at his dead, skeletal wife and raised the cleaver in his hand. He wanted to throw it at her face and shatter her skull, like he did every day that he spent down there in his cellar hideout. "Artist" repeated Johan to himself. He realized then, for the tenth time, like a demented old man, that he didn't have a clue about what he was doing. He wanted to create something stitched and terrible, yet beautiful... something that portrayed his own image to the world, perfectly. Johan put the cleaver down and went upstairs to retrieve his needle and thread, as well as some knives designed for more delicate work. He went to work, slicing limbs, twisting joints, and stitching together pieces of biological matter that were not evolved to be joined. He was creating an abomination, made from the town's history. Men, women, children... it mattered not. They were all stitched together using strong threads. Johan even doubled and tripled each thread to ensure that this creature... this masterpiece, would outlast the lifetime of any mortal creature to have ever walked this earth. He worked and worked, hacking and combining over and over again, until his fingers could no longer hold the needle and thread anymore. There was a loud knock on the front door, upstairs.