Chapter 3: The Birth of Grosse Merde
The cold marble bit into his knees and palms. Loic scrubbed, the heel of his hand a poor substitute for a cloth, smearing rather than lifting the faint, acidic residue. His breath hitched in ragged gasps, fogging the black surface. He scrubbed until his skin felt raw, then pressed his face close, squinting for any sign of his own weakness. The floor seemed to drink the evidence, leaving only a faint, ghostly smudge, a watermark of his disgrace.
He didn't know how much time passed. The chandelier’s flicker was the only clock, and it was broken. He worked until his muscles seized, then worked through the pain. Spotless. The word echoed with the finality of a tomb sealing. Make it spotless.
The click of a heel on stone.
He froze, mid-wipe, his heart a trapped bird against his ribs. He didn’t look up. He kept scrubbing, frantically now, over a patch that was already clean.
“Stop.”
He stopped. His arms fell to his sides, leaden.
Lilith stood over him. She didn’t look at his face, or his shivering body. Her gaze was fixed on the marble where he knelt. She tilted her head, a connoisseur inspecting a flawed gem.
“You missed a spot,” she said, her voice casual, almost conversational.
Loic’s eyes darted across the obsidian expanse. It was a perfect, unbroken mirror. “I… I don’t see…”
“There.” She pointed a gloved finger at a point just before his knees. “A film. A breath of your failure. Can’t you see it? It’s screaming at me.”
He stared until his eyes watered. Nothing. “Please,” the word scraped out of his dry throat. “I’ll clean it again. I’ll find a bucket, I’ll—”
“You had your task. You failed.” She knelt beside him, a sudden and terrifying intimacy. The scent of ozone and burnt sugar enveloped him. Her leather-clad fingers reached out and cupped his chin, forcing his face toward hers. Her red eyes held no anger. Only a deep, appraising curiosity. “The dog fetched. It learned. It pleased. You?” She released his chin with a slight, dismissive push. “You just make messes.”
Her gloved hand trailed down, her index finger tracing a slow, deliberate line through the invisible stain he had supposedly left. “This is your essence now, Loic. Not an architect. Not even a passable dog. Just… a stain that needs to be cleaned up.”
A coldness began in his gut, different from the chill of the marble. It was a deep, dissolving cold. He tried to speak, to beg, but his jaw wouldn’t obey. His bones were softening. His skin prickled, then bloomed into a slick, porous dampness. The world didn’t twist this time; it melted. Perspective collapsed. He was sinking into himself, form and thought bleeding into a thick, helpless pulp.
The pressure of his own weight became immense. He was a mound of quivering, off-white flesh, boneless and soft as over-ripe fruit. He tried to scream, but his face had been replaced by a gaping, wet maw. From it lolled a tongue, enormous and heavy, a slab of slick meat that slapped wetly against the cold floor with a sound that echoed in the cavernous foyer.
He could see, but through a bleary, distorted lens set high on his new mass. He saw his own bulk, like a giant, hairless larva. He saw Lilith, standing now, looking down at him with a faint smile of satisfaction.
“There,” she purred. “A form for a function. You are a thing that cleans. Specifically, you lick.” She nudged his side with the toe of her boot. His entire body jiggled, a grotesque, gelatinous wave. “This floor is yours. Your world is this marble. Your purpose is to make it shine with your own juices.”
He tried to form words. A desperate, internal plea: No, please, not this, never this. All that emerged from the massive mouth was a thick, glottal gurgle and a rope of saliva that joined the tongue on the stone.
“You can understand me. That’s the fun part.” She crouched, bringing her face level with his elevated sensory cluster. Her beauty was a sharp, painful contrast to his revolting form. “You will crawl. You will lick. You will do nothing else for all the days that remain. Which, since you are now this, might be a very, very long time. I think I’ll call you ‘Grosse Merde.’ It has a certain elegance.” She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. “And I will never make you human again. That shape was wasted on you.”
She stood, the finality in her words as solid as the mansion’s stones. She walked away, her boots clicking a slow rhythm on the marble he now covered.
Panic, raw and formless, bubbled inside his mound of flesh. He tried to move. A weak, undulating clench that pushed him forward an inch. The cool touch of the floor on his underbelly was a constant, shocking sensation. His tongue, that enormous, heavy thing, dragged ahead of him, a constant tactile anchor.
He tried to resist. To lie still, to starve, to will himself to die.
But the form dictated the function. The need was not psychological. It was cellular. A deep, biological imperative crawled up from his core. Lick. Clean.
A pathetic, shuddering contraction rippled through him. The great tongue lifted slightly, then flopped down onto the polished black surface with a wet smack.
He began to crawl. A slow, agonizing undulation. The tongue dragged, then lifted, then dragged again, leaving a wide, glistening trail on the marble. Slurp. Slurp.
The sound was obscene, filling the silent foyer. It was the only sound he could make. The proof of his existence. Grosse Merde. Licking his way into eternity.