THE BOWELS OF THE COUCH
by Lorna D. Keach
Jason fell asleep on it with a skinned elbow, and no one ever saw him again.
When Benny first moved in, Matt and Tori told him 'don't bleed' on it, which Benny thought was a little weird, but whatever. He was getting Jason's room, fully furnished, at just shy of 300 a month. Cable included. Matt and Tori didn't keep it in the living room anyway; it was stuck back in the garage where Tori smoked, her mashed Camel butts strewn over the concrete floor with shelves of old eggshell paint, bags of nails, water-stained books and lamps. That ratty Pink Floyd poster that Tori wouldn't allow Matt to hang up in their room hung on the wall above the couch.
Benny didn't know where they'd gotten the thing. Don't bleed on it? Hell, it probably had been puked on, pissed on, spat on, fucked on, and dragged through the mud. The upholstery stank like Colt .45 Malt Liquor and sweat. It reminded Benny of the old trash couch the hobos used to keep under the bridge in his hometown, the one they slept on and spilled their cheap cherry wine all over.
When Benny brought in his stuff, he didn't have enough sockets to plug in his strobe and his black-light lamp, so he put them in the garage, sure to catch his trippy fractal posters done in black-light reflective print, next to Pink Floyd. Worked out.
Then, Tori lost a finger. She wouldn't say how it happened; Matt and Benny just found her in the kitchen, her hand held under a stream of cold water from the tap, her face bled out white and twitching. Her index finger and the first two knuckles of her middle torn off, ragged with little ribbons of skin. She'd muttered something about looking for change.
Matt took Tori to the hospital, and Benny thought he'd go out to the garage and Light One Up. He still wasn't sure about Matt and Tori's stance on the Kine, but the garage was safe; it stank like a mechanic's used coveralls so no one would notice the smell. Benny plopped down on the couch and put the Zippo flame to his pipe, breathed deep, coughed. Then, he reached over his head and flipped on his lamp.
It occurred to him, the second before he tugged the chain, that he didn’t want to see the garage under black light. Certainly not the couch. He didn’t want to know what filth had settled in just shy of visual range, smeared splotches and splatters, glowing and strange in the haze.
Too late.
When Benny glanced down, his lungs still brimming with smoke, he saw words glowing in the skin of the couch. Long, jagged scribbles of writing--phrases like Skull-fuck your mother, I eat the Bones of Babies, the word KILL in huge caps repeated over and over again. Benny coughed violently, his pipe clattering to the floor, his knees knocking against the concrete as he scrambled to get the hell off the thing--
Benny fell forward, but not far enough. Something snagged on his jeans.
And he felt a long, cold finger hook his belt loop and scrape his spine, moments before he was yanked back into the cushions with a squeal. A low, throbbing noise hummed from the bowels of the couch as Benny's ass vanished, his arms and legs snapping up into the air.
Then, when Benny was gone--no hint of his existence left behind but a shattered pipe and muted screaming--an arm reached up from the crevice in the cushions, its nails clicking against the wall, its skin like pallid marble...
And it flipped the black light off.
"The Bowels of the Couch" originally appeared in Theater of Decay Magazine (Issue 4, October 2006) as by Lorna Dickson.
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