Cannibal Corpse, M/C

Fish, is what Slaughter thought as he got a good look. Like a fucking fish cannery.

Which was something he knew about because he’d worked at one long ago one summer. Except it wasn’t fish, of course, but humans. They were netted and brought here to be cleaned. Dozens of them were hanging from the ceiling by the feet, each of them ghastly white and thoroughly hollowed. Heads were speared on sharpened dowels and arranged in great racks upon the walls. Corpses, in whole, were pressed like witches beneath slabs of stone until their intestines burst from their asses and mouths. Most of it was old death, three or four days, a fine and putrescent vintage, slimy and rotten and falling apart, carpeted in ants and beetles and noodly pockets of worms. A great number of victims were held immobile by the throats in something like wooden stocks, the tops of their heads sawn off, the brains either missing or decayed to a soft gray pulp. Along one of the walls, hearts—at least thirty or forty of them—had been speared with knitting needles and driven into corkboards. Eyes were secreted into jars like kernels of corn for proper aging.

Children were skinned and heaped in red piles.

Women had been violated with pitchforks.

Men were strung by nooses of their own viscera.

It was all appalling, but what was even worse and nearly inconceivable to the sane mind were the vats of creamy oil that held living humans with mad staring eyes glazed like windows. They were huge, bloated, greasy with oil and lubricated with their own septic foulness, fattened calves that were soaked in seasoned brine like rare cuts of meat or exotic pickles, allowed to absorb the fatty excretions until they swelled up into soft, tasty shanks of delicate sweetmeat for the palettes of discerning ghouls.

Slaughter had to look away, for the insanity etched into those fly-specked faces was simply too much. But everywhere there was more and more and more until he was so utterly physically ill he had to cough out a tangle of bile, steadying himself by momentarily dropping his shotgun and placing one gore-speckled, shaking hand on a barrel. There were many barrels and all of them were packed with human organs and human meat, floating in sharp-smelling serums.

He grabbed up his shotgun, breathing in the dank rot and exhaling.

There were maybe seven or eight wormboys in there, but they were almost pedestrian compared to the thing that sat in an altar chair of knotted human bone high above all else, three prostrate and shivering boys kneeling at her feet. When Slaughter saw her, he knew who she was. This was the death-goddess, as he had called her, from Exodus. The one that had pointed at him and gotten inside his mind for those few brief moments before the Red Hand rolled in.

Here she was now, looking down at him.

She wore the fresh and bloody skins of slain children over veils of mold-specked spiderweb silk, scarves of human bowels lovingly wrapped around her throat. Over her head was the same tanned mask of the hag she had worn the last time. He could see her mouth, the puckered lips, the gloss-black fangs awaiting something to tear.

“How does thee fare, biker boy?”

It was a voice he knew. At first it was that of Black Hat, scraping and dry and worn like bones in a catacomb rubbing together, but gradually it became another voice and he tried to place it but his thoughts scurried madly in his skull. They could find neither common ground nor cohesion.

“Who are you?” he heard himself say.

“Who exactly, biker boy?”

She stood now and the veils parted so he could see, yet again, her porcelain-white belly with its black autopsy stitching running from pubis to breast, the symbolic signature of Leviathan burned deep into the flesh. Her vulva was engorged and teeming with parasites. Gouts of black menstrual blood dripped from between her thighs. He knew her voice, he knew it well. But all his mind could see was the death goddess, the consort of Leviathan, the zombie witch, the black Madonna who gave birth to children that she in turn fed upon and skinned. These were the stark and haunting images in his mind.

But he had to remember.

Remember.