Page 52 of Sinful Crimes for the Artistically Inclined
That’s when Joe felt the nails dig into his skin.
He looked down in horror at the dismembered arm, the foul black fingers working their way up his leg. A head—one of the heads—shifted, its black mouth gaping wide up at the ceiling, and then they both heard it, in a desperate, airless, wheeze, “Anima… tua…”
Joe kicked the hand off his leg and pulled his knife free. “Soul eaters. You know what to do.”
“Anima… tua…” groaned another. Then, in one sickening agreement, every leg and arm and joint and dash of sinew began to shake. The black blood on the walls congealed and began to creep and ooze down and down and towards the bodies.
Percy started, “No, Joe, I don’t know?—”
Then in quick, panicked succession, “You don’t know what a soul eat?—”
“No, I don’t fucking?—”
“Close your eyes!”
“How the fuck?—”
“If they look into your soul, they will take it.”
“It’s not?—”
“Close your eyes!” Joe shouted. “Do it or die!”
Neither Percy nor Joe waited another second to watch the cadavers reanimate, but reanimate they did with dizzying speed, odd hands and groping jaws and still-robed headless bodies overwhelming both men in a matter of seconds, even as the limbs threaded themselves back together. All was black, the crush of heavy bodies, the moans and cries of the recently undeceased, the stench of rotting flesh and the appalling heat of an eight-body brawl in an airless chamber deep beneath the ground.
Joe and Percy lashed out blindly with knives, fists, feet.Percy yelled as sharp teeth sank into his shoulder.
“Percy!” cried Joe. “Don’t let them open your eyes!”
Joe could hear the bodies, hear things being ripped and slashed, but what they were or whose blade caused the injuries he never could have deciphered. “Percy!”
He heard Percy take a deep breath, as though something had stopped him breathing for a time, then his rasping voice. “How do we kill them?”
He gasped his own sharp intake of breath with the knowledge Percy was still with him. “Their hearts. Take their hearts.”
“I can’t see!”
“Do it or we die!”
“Fuck!”
Killing a soul eater without sight is not simply a matter of slicing limbs until one gets a free shot at the chest. Every finger removed will work its way across the floor and back to the hand; heads will roll of their own volition until the neck falls down to allow access. Soul eaters do not stop, do not relent, until they are stopped by destruction of the heart or by magic, the latter being something neither Percy nor Joe had the first clue about as applied to soul eaters.
In the frantic, stinking frenzy of bodies, Joe could barely breathe, let alone find the curve of a neck that he may grab hold of in order to aim a knife for the chest. And he was losing the battle. For every creature he kicked off his leg, another would pull his arm away. For every cut he made in their decaying skin, he felt their sharp nails in his own flesh. He fought on, but with every failure a little more exhaustion assailed his limbs and he knew it wouldn’t be long until one of the things got a grip on his head, forced him down, and pulled his eyes open, and then it would all be over, forever.
Then Joe realised, amongst all the claustrophobic desperation,he could no longer hear Percy. No more swearing, no more threats, no more cries of pain.
“Are you still there?”
Nothing.
“Percy!”
A cold surge of desperation ran through him. His knife was wrenched from his hand. He dug his fingers deep into every piece of flesh he could grasp. He tried to roll, but was held tight. There were more of them. Not only the three from before. He could feel one on each leg. Another across his body, pinning his arms down. Now the next took hold of his head. He fought with every ounce of strength he had left in him and still his head hit the stone floor hard. The foul fingers were on his face, pulling and grasping and tearing as though it knew not where to find his eyes. It tightened its grip painfully. Joe prepared himself to look into the face of a soul eater. To have his eternal essence be consumed and deleted from existence.
“Dormio.”
All was the squelching and slapping of the violent and abrupt self-destruction of limbs, dispersing as quickly as they had knitted themselves together. Joe felt them fall on him, fall all about him. The black blood hit his face where they burst apart.
