Conjugal Spice
The bedroom was quiet, with the thunderstorm abating. No rain rushing along the gutters. No wind whining through the chinks in floor and roof.
Time to catch up on sleep. Husband and wife snored soundly, giving a wide berth to each other's shape, which was easy because the old-fashioned bed was possibly big enough for three.
Then, unlike the erstwhile weather, came a pinpoint of noise. Quiet at first, like the gentle nose-nose of mice or, at the most, rats, coming from under the floorboards.
Maude sat bolt upright, her every faculty primed. "Wake up, George," she whispered loudly.
George grunted. .
"Wake up, I said," she softly squealed.
The noise was now free-flowing rather than the initial separate sound of tentative snuffling. George eventually sat up and said: "What's up, Gorgeous?"
"Listen to that noise - whatever is it?"
His ears pricked. The moonlight, filtering through the slight gap in the print curtains, picked out the tiny glistening beads of sweat on his upper lip. "Nope - can't hear a damn thing, Gorgeous."
"You must be deaf, George. Just be quiet for once..."
The quietness was fast filling with another sound as if bare bones were rattling inside the chimney breast.
By now, Maude had switched on the bedside lamp with a click that always seemed louder at this time of night (especially with the moon on the wane.) "Look!" she screeched from underbreaths.
And they immediately clicked the light off, since what they thought they saw noodling from the cracks between floorborads were bloated worms, fangs denoting where snouts should have been if they did not simultaneously liquefy.
Maude and George long continued to sit bolt upright, fearful that a resumption light would attract further incursions.
"Gorgeous..." "Yes, George?" "The noise has gone, if I'm not too much mistaken." "Oh, George, I'm shaking fit to break and my titties are freezing, and I've got a splitting headache. Rub my feet for me, George." "Okky Doke, Duchess."
He tunnelled inside the bed, but there was a fleshy jelly with a spicy stench which slightly reminded him of Maude's night soil in the old days, before she had taken to wearing stiff underwear designed for those little incontinent moments.
Moonlight later saw fit to well back from the darkest hour before dawn. Still, nothing could be seen except the outer margins of varying consistencies of shadow moving about across the ancient king-sized bed. There were belching snorts as body rubbed against body, the air being sucked from between the red raspberries of skin.
And so much later in the night, it must have been morning. Something seeped into the print curtains like light, bleeding through rose-weft filters and willowy patterns of melting rhubarb.
Laid out across the huge bed were the flesh-sucked husks of two identical human bodies that had, at long last, shared the conjugal bed with a third party. And another storm could be heard grumbling in the distance amid jagged moonlight.
(Published 'The Night Side' 1991)
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