Chapter 2: The Belly of the Beast
The weight in his gut was a lodestone, pulling him toward the floor. Arthur staggered, one hand clutching the terrible, rounded firmness beneath his sweater, the other flailing for balance. He knocked against the table; the pearl earring skittered into the shadows. The candles wavered, throwing the grooves in the wood into stark relief, a map of his own long turmoil.
He needed to get out of the room. Out of the scent of truffles and the empty chair.
His legs, numb and buzzing, carried him through the archway into the cabin’s dark kitchen. The air changed. Here, it was stale, thick with the ghost of burnt coffee and the sweet, decaying smell of half-peeled onions in the steel sink. The single bulb above it flickered, a erratic, yellow pulse that made the shadows jump.
Arthur lunged for the sink, his fingers gripping the cold, stained porcelain. He doubled over, a dry heave wrenching through his core. It pressed the mass inside him up against his diaphragm, a solid, unyielding blockage.
Nothing came up. Only a string of acidic drool, swaying from his lip before splattering onto the crusted drain. He retched again, his body convulsing around the intrusion. His stomach muscles fluttered, trying and failing to clench against the impossible volume.
Inside, something moved.
A slow, tectonic shift. A faint, rhythmic pressure that wasn’t his own pulse. Thu-thump. Thu-thump.
A heartbeat. Muffled, buried under layers of flesh and horror, but distinct. It fluttered against the underbelly of his own frantic ribcage, a trapped bird beating its wings in a sac of damp meat.
Arthur froze, his breath hitching. His wide, bloodshot eyes stared at the rusty drain.
Thu-thump.
“No,” he whimpered, the word dissolving into a groan. He pressed his forehead against the cool metal of the faucet. “Please, no.”
She’s still in there.
The thought was ice in his veins. Not just her body. Her life. The interviewer from Seattle with the sharp questions and the jasmine perfume was a pulse, a warmth, a presence, packed tight inside his abdomen.
From that warm, dense center, Oom’s voice uncoiled, rich with post-consumptive satisfaction. Oh, don’t sound so grim. The heartbeat is the best part. It’s the drum solo before the quiet. The voice was a physical sensation, a vibration alongside that other, foreign pulse. Listen. You can hear the systems winding down. The central nervous system is a persistent little scribble of electricity, but it’s fading. Adrenaline reserves depleted. Cognitive functions… well, they’re soup.
“Stop,” Arthur whispered, squeezing his eyes shut.
I’m just narrating, Oom purred. You’re the writer. You should appreciate the process. The gastric acids are introduced now. A lovely, biting chorus. Hydrochloric. Pepsin. They’re unmaking the pretty packaging. Breaking polypeptides into peptides. Fats into fatty acids. It’s alchemy, Arthur. Transubstantiation. She becomes energy. She becomes us.
Another shift inside. A sluggish, full-body contraction from his core. It wasn’t a struggle anymore. It was a passive settling, a collapse. The muffled thu-thump lost its rhythm, stuttered, became a weak, irregular tap… and then faded into a deep, liquid silence.
The warmth remained, but it was different now. Dormant. A vat of organic material, warming from the inside.
Arthur sobbed, a raw, scraped sound. He felt a profound, internal gurgle, a long, rolling churn as something foundational let go. A release of gases that traveled up, forcing another sickly, perfumed burgh into his throat. He swallowed it back, tears cutting clean tracks through the pallor of his face.
“You killed her,” he breathed.
I dined, Oom corrected, its tone flipping to one of light, conversational malice. And you provided the table. Really, Arthur, the self-pity is unbecoming. You made the soup. You lit the candles. You let me out to play. You’re not a bystander. You’re the venue.
The truth of it was a knife. Arthur’s knees buckled. He slid down the cabinet until he was sitting on the cold linoleum, his back against the oven door. He hugged his distended middle, feeling the hard curve of it. His sweater had ridden up. In the flickering light, the skin of his belly was stretched drum-tight, pale and veined. It looked like a stolen moon grafted onto his thin frame.
He stared at the opposite counter. A single mug sat there, a ring of tannins staining its interior. Tea he’d made days ago, forgotten. A relic from a time before this… this fullness.
The exhaustion was absolute. It washed over him, heavier than the physical weight. It was the exhaustion of the war lost, of the soul mortgaged. His chronicler’s mind, the part that observed and recorded even his own damnation, whispered: This is the aftermath. This is the chapter you never write.
It’s not so bad, is it? Oom murmured, its voice now a sleepy thrum from the center of his heat. The fullness. The silence. No more chattering. No more questions. Just… peace.
It wasn’t peace. It was a tomb. And he was both the crypt and the corpse sealed within.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, listening to the gurgling, chemical industry at work inside him. The flickering light seared his retinas. The smell of old onions clung to the back of his tongue, mingling with the phantom jasmine.
A sound cut through the silence.
Not from inside him.
From the other room.
A bright, digital chirping. A phone ringing.
Lila’s phone.
It was in her purse, which was slung over the back of her chair in the dining nook. The cheerful, generic trill was obscene, a needle of the mundane world stabbing into the dark.
Arthur’s head snapped up. His blood, which had felt like sludge, turned to ice.
The phone rang again. And again.
Someone was calling her. Her editor. Her roommate. A friend wondering if she’d made it down the mountain road.
Thu-thump.
The imagined echo of the heartbeat was just memory, but it was enough. The reality of what he’d done, of what was inside him, crystallized with every ring. She was a person with a life, with people who would miss her, with appointments and worries and a ringing phone.
The phone stopped.
The silence that followed was worse. It was a listening silence. A waiting one.
In the kitchen’s gloom, Arthur Pendelton—the gentle, shy novelist—remained curled on the floor, a hand on the taut, warm dome of his stomach, while in the next room, the world began to wonder where Lila had gone.