MY NAME IS GROBIUS SKRETT

My name is Grobius Skrett.

I was a defiler, a murderer, a slicer, a torturer and a by all accounts a fiend.

I was caught in the act, trepanning a maiden, boring into her head of final thoughts.

Under the yellow gaslight I can’t have been a pretty sight for the poor watchman who found me.  I imagine that it was the drill sunk into the woman’s skull that sent him whistling till his lungs near burst. Ha ha.

Held by the scruff, I was dragged from the heap as the matter gushed over my hands, my fine digits, such spiders of elegance and fingering beauty.

Manhandled violently by brutes, I just had the nick to lick my slick talons.

"You fuckin' fiend. Sick. Sick that’s what you are.  You'll get what’s coming to you Skrett!"

Far from the law I was quickly tried in the village court built more on superstition than the rule of torts.

"Grobius Skrett, you shall be buried alive, your hands and feet severed and your box wormed as is the custom of hereabouts for the rare monster that you are.  Your heathen ground will be the leper fields outside our walls. The worms shall be the most vicious we can gather.  No one will heed your screams.  Each one of us from the village shall relieve on your face before the box is sealed and the worms satisfied. No one will visit your hole.  No one will speak of you. Ever. From this day on you never existed!"

And so it was that I was taken to the village green, stripped, pinned to to the ground,

my hands and feet slowly sawn off, my wrist stump pushed into my mouth to keep me quiet whilst I was pulled over the cinder path to the leper graves shunned for a century.

Nobody spoke on that morbid cortege, my final stroll in the air which somehow moved me to puncture, to open, to wire, to truncate: my life’s work, a glorious pageant of blood and marrow misunderstood by these rural cretins.

I should have moved to the smoky city years ago where my name would live forever.  Grobius Skrett, the Da Vinci of flesh.

Burly gravediggers more used to Catholic rites had hastily dug a trench in the jaundiced tussocks. Beside it lay a roughly carpentered crate of thick timber, from which there would be surely no escape.  This was lowered into the trench, the sweating carpenter waiting nearby clutching the lid and his claw hammer, his eyes aglow with hate.

I was made to stand on my bleeding stumps beside the pit.  No attempt had been made to smoothen the wood and large splinters bristled inside.  Without a word the relatives of my victims came forward and were encouraged to defile my body further.  

My breast bone was first cracked with a mallet and then snipped open with the butcher’s iron scissors.  My genitals were sliced away with a cheese wire.  My skull was drilled; a rough mirror of the beautiful and lasting wounds I myself bestowed with scarce finesse upon those who came to know my work.

My mangled body was then thrown into the crate.  

As decreed, each of the village folk took turns to piss up on my face, the hot streams entering my mouth and burning my injuries.  I felt oddly cleansed as the steam rose and the village priest appeared over the trench shouldering a large wide-mouthed urn.

"This will be the last voice you hear Grobius Skrett.  The mouths which follow mine will not care for chatter but will consume you whilst you still think of what to say.  If you wish to repent to them, no matter, your prayers will be digested too. May your soul rot in everlasting hell."

The priest then tipped the urn and shook its heaving contents across my head and chest, where the blood was welling.  Although I could not see I could hear the timber lid being hammered shut.

I was alone with the worms.

In the faint dusky glow before the grave was fully filled I could see, albeit vaguely, the mouths of my hungry new friends opening and closing like fish out of water.  I was certain that I could also hear their ravening groans as they searched for ingress.

The moist beings entered first my split breast, no doubt compelled to follow the loud beating siren further in.

I had nothing but admiration for these limbless morticians and I dreamt of the fine slithering I might do should I escape, a man-worm, muscling like a walrus upon sleeping lovers.

I was arcing handless above a naked couple, smiling at the thought, when a large worm entered my head hole and gorged greedily across my brain, deleting my mind like a chamfer wizard.

I was done and Grobius Skrett was gone.