Hold on; let me back up a bit. A few months ago I moved Charlottesville, N.C. when a new embalming position opened up. I took the job and things went well for a few weeks. That was until I discovered a mysterious jar with an even more mysterious thing inside. It was labeled, ‘Harlequin No.7.’ I learned not long after that there were more of these worm-like things, as I found out the day after a botched attempt to study the freaky little bugger while embalming a man who died that same night. From what I could gather, they apparently live inside of people’s heads, doing whatever it is that they do until they decide to kill the host and corkscrew out of their brainstem. After a bit of research on the town death records and old newspapers, I came to the conclusion that these Harlequin things have something to do with a paper mill fire twenty something years back. As it would turn out, Mr. Havenbrook (the man whose head burst open on my embalming table) was a survivor of said mill fire. So were some of the others.
By “others,” I mean the first batch of crazies that came through my mortuary, all within the same week. It was the same story with each one of them; Someone starts acting weird and paranoid, seemingly due to dementia, before eventually having a seizure and dropping dead. They would end up undergoing an autopsy at the morgue, at which point the declared cause of death would be, “cerebral aneurysm.” Even with x-rays, toxicology screening, and in several cases invasive surgery, no one ever discovered the parasites. It wouldn’t be until I pumped their bodies full of formalin that the little bastards would make themselves known, in the most volatile way at that.
So far, I have seen six of these things. The first one, the one I found in the basement of Burnswick Funeral, got blown to bits by my friend, the lovely Miss Billie-Joe Kimble. Three through five I managed to capture.
By the time I got to them I had grown accustomed to the tell-tale signs of Harlequin infection. The lights flicker, the air shimmers, and occasionally if you’re near a radio tuned to an FM station you’ll start picking up some disturbing sounding feedback. Following that, the cadaver partially reanimates and the Harlequin explodes out of the back of the head (or in one case, the eye socket). So, like I said, I captured Harlequins No.6, No.5, No.4, and No.3 in mayonnaise jars filled with formaldehyde (I’m under the assumption that CH2O kills them) before fixing up the deceased in such a way to hide the evidence. No.2, the one from Havenbrook, slithered down the mortuary floor drain. That probably explains where all of the other weird shit that’s been happening came from.
Okay, I just want to say that none of this is my fault. Well, actually, most of it is, considering that I opened the initial can of worms (no pun intended), but I had no idea what an escaped alien brain parasite would entail. They don’t teach you this sort of thing in college. Where was I? Oh right, Lucid Marsh.
