My husband had been admitted to the hospital after vomiting black blood. As I write this, he’s still unresponsive. I’m starting to hope he never wakes up.
I should backtrack.
Hi, I’m Helen. I’m 29 years old. For now, I’m a stay-at-home-wife. My husband, Henry, is a university professor at a state school I, for privacy reasons, won’t name. On the off-chance one of you readers out there on Reddit is one of his students… well, I can say with reasonable confidence that he probably won’t be in class today. Also, I feel bad for you! Henry isn’t an easy man to deal with. Of course I love him, though. I’m his wife; I quite literally married the man. Just in a courthouse, since Henry hates religion, but still.
Okay. So Henry has this… friend. M. That’s their name. Or, at least, their alias. I’ve never seen them up close; don’t know if they’re a man, woman, neither; don’t know how old they are; don’t know how my husband even knows them. But I do know that, about once every two months, M stops by to chat briefly with him outside on our front porch — conversations he doesn’t want me to listen to — and I know, too, that M has something to do with Henry’s mysterious ‘sickness.’
After Henry was taken to the ER, I rushed to his side. Sped to the hospital, parked without paying, announced myself as his frantic wife, and was taken by a pair of nurses, a man and a woman, to his bedside as I sweated, shook, and tried to cry. When I saw him, my first thought was that he looked vile. Immediately after, though, love swelled in my heart.
His hair was plastered to his face with sweat. His body was clammy and twitching. Almost immediately I noticed the black liquid, clotted, that was curling out of the corner of his mouth. My gaze fixated on it. It looked alive. It looked like some sort of alien worm. He retched, and a huge splatter of it landed across his chest. Something moved in it. A maggot. My eyes tracked down his chest where the liquid was dribbling. God, a whole swarm of them. Writhing on his chest. My husband had just vomited black blood and maggots.
I almost barfed too.
He was trying to talk. The love in my heart compelled me, beating down the bone-deep urge to fucking run. I leaned in, fighting nausea.
“Pfbheln,” he said, his voice burbling wetly as more and more maggots spilled over his teeth. “Heln. Helan. len. Hel-en, myll wi-illfe, myll lffight…”
“Henry,” I said, and took his trembling hand with the hand that wasn’t pressed tightly over my mouth to restrain my gagging.
He swallowed, a mammoth effort, as more liquid pushed past his lips. “I’m sorrrrblblry,” he gulged, his voice raspy. “I’m sorrblrby. I lofbfve you.” He touched my face, my hair, my arm. “Jusblt llike he wrobte…”
Then he passed out. Not, though, before almost upchucking more vile liquid all across me. I jerked away just in time.
For a long while, I just stood there, trying to shove air back into my lungs.
“Maggots?” I asked, sitting down in the chair beside his prone, unconscious body.
“We, um,” said one nurse.
“Haven’t seen this before,” completed the other.
“He’s unconscious now?” I asked stupidly.
“Mm-hmm. Vitals are fine.” They exchanged a nervous glance. “We might have to intubate him.”
“Okay.” I gathered my courage. Deciding I was just fine to be viewed as the worst wife of all time, I stood and told them I wanted to leave.
One of the nurses coughed lightly and motioned to the other to lead me out, saying Henry ‘needs his rest anyway.’ I turned around in the doorway, still so stunned I couldn’t think straight, just to see him more time.
M was standing over his bed.
I have to emphasize. There was no way M could have gotten into the room. If they’d walked by me, I would have noticed. If they’d climbed in through the window, I would have heard. I stopped dead in the hallway and stared.
M, one pale long-nailed hand extended, began to pace around Henry’s bed. Touched his hair, his cheek. It was intimate. It was almost erotic, a bizarre mirror of how he had just caressed me. M curled their hand into a fist and knocked, six times in quick succession, on the headboard of Henry’s cot. Then their fingers wrapped around his throat.
“HENRY!” I shrieked and bolted toward him. The other nurse — who apparently hadn’t noticed M — jerked her head up and stared at me.
“Miss,” she began. Her voice was so commanding I half-turned toward her, half out of reflex, half to plead for help, and heard a loud sizzle — I looked back, frantic — M was gone.
I stood completely still, my heart pounding in my throat.
I smelled rotten egg. Brimstone, came some unbidden thought unfurling from the back of my mind. Sulphur.
“Miss?” came a male voice at my elbow. The other nurse was looking at me with concern and apprehension.
“Sorry,” I said, knowing full well I looked insane. My head was spinning like a planet shoved wildly off its axis. “I need - to go. Love you, Henry,” I said quickly — that was full reflex — and dashed out once again, chucking my ‘Visitor’ lanyard onto the floor in my hurry to just get out. The medical smell — M — the maggots — christ, MAGGOTS? I bolted to my car, stuffed myself inside, locked the door immediately, and peeled out of the parking lot so fast I could hear my accelerator squeaking in protest. I got home, double locked the door, and collapsed against it. I wanted to throw myself onto my couch, but I felt like I had been fucking contaminated.
Two showers later, my skin sufficiently lobster-scalded and my drenched hair wrapped up in a towel, I finally calmed down enough to think in a straight line.
I, like an idiot, googled “M.”
A song by A$AP Rocky feat. Lil Wayne, a movie called M about a child-murderer, and The Correspondence of M. Tullius Cicero were the first results that met my eyes.
Not what I was looking for.
I googled “Em.” Results weren’t much better. I googled my husband, Henry _______. Nothing I didn’t already know. I fucking googled myself. Nothing out there on me.
I went deeper. Page two of google search results, colloquially referred to as ‘the dark web.’ (Kidding.) More information on my husband. Anything I could find. That love swelled up in me, and I shoved it down to no avail. Nothing in either of our digitized pasts gave me any information on why he suddenly had began hyurking maggots. I scrolled down and down, wondering—illogically—if the next result would be some announcement of his death. I scrolled so far I found our wedding announcement. The date — June 7, a summer day, unremarkable — had been four years after we’d met. He’s always loved me so much, and, after a while, I returned his feelings. Like a bolt-from-the-blue, as they say, when I agreed to go on a date with him, when I really saw him, when he caught my eye in a way he never had before. In a way no one ever had before. Honestly, between you and me, Reddit — before him, I can only remember liking one person, and even that was mostly out of convenience. But I guess when you meet the one, you meet the one.
That first date. It was truly like I’d been shot with an arrow; I understood that simile for the first time. Suddenly, all I could do was want him. Want him to take me home, to take me. And now here I am. Thrown my life away to be the bride to maggot man. But dammit, I love him. Fiercely. Stunningly fiercely. It’s long been the strongest thing I’ve been able to feel. He always said he would, and he did; he got me.
Sometimes I feel like his conquest. It’s like I’m bound to him by more than just the ring I wear. And, even though my mother and grandmother and even great-grandmother warned me about this exact feeling, I still can’t get used to it. it doesn’t feel right. And yet it does! When I met him, my heart fluttered like stupid girls’ hearts in the stories. All the pain I’d ever been through floated away, and all of life seemed new.
Internet exhausted — I was now getting results for random people I’d never heard of — I closed my computer and went up toward the attic to dig into our files. I pulled down the ladder, climbed into the attic, and pulled the ladder up behind me, a habit. I knew where Henry stored his will, and — god help me — I went there first, my heart aching. He kept it in our safe, in his box full of his most personal possessions, things only to look at in event of his death. Letters to family members, to me… I knew the sort of thing that he’d put in there over the six years we’d been married, but he had asked me not to look, and I respected him.
Well, barf-maggots outweigh promises. Besides, I figured Henry wouldn’t be alive much longer, so his papers and shit — and secret porn or whatever the rest of the contents of the box turned out to be — were fair game. Besides, there was evidently something weird about this — like, you don’t say! — and I wanted answers. It took me a long time to guess the code, which turned out to be the day of our first date. What a day that was. I let myself get lost in memories for another long moment, a sickening replay of our years together. Then, with trembling fingers, I opened the box.
There was no will. No secret porn. And just one letter.
“IN EVENT OF MY DEATH
TO HELEN MARGARET _______.
I love you. So much. I don’t think a man has ever loved a woman the way I love you. You filled each one of my days with light and love. All my wishes have been fulfilled. Though life may only last a moment, our duty is to live it — to always strive for the purest happiness we can find. You were always mine.
There is just one thing I want to leave you with, to keep you safe, as I’ve always tried to.
DO NOT SPEAK TO M.
I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. I’m so sorry to leave you early. I am yours and you are mine. Thank you for the happiest ten years of my life.
DO NOT SPEAK TO M.”
And that was it.
I cried. I cried a lot.
And then I thought.
How did he know we would have ten years together? Because we did. Ten years, almost exactly on the dot; the anniversary of our first date will be in a couple days.
There’s only one thing for it.
I have to speak to M.
But there’s… an issue. I keep replaying that six-beat knock M left on Henry’s bed. Knock-knock-knock-knockknockknock. I had some kind of musical education, I think, way back when, and that awful rhythm echoes in my mind like some sort of disjointed staccato melody, like something silly — or macabre — in ⅜ time. But I don’t think I’m just replaying it in my head. I think I heard it rapped against my door.
And, just now — don’t laugh at me — I think I heard it against the attic floor. I could physically feel the six beats hit beneath me. They hit against the attic door, which is embedded in the ceiling of the room below me, despite the fact that I pulled the ladder up after me.
I’m tagging this as ‘series’ so I can come back to it, if I live to tell the tale. I’m going to open the attic door.
I don’t think I have to go to M.
I think M came to me.