Whisper House Press

content warning: body horror

A Taste

by Theodore Hill

He told himself it was just the stress. Once things calmed down, he’d cut the habit again.

Still, he stood in front of the sink and stared at the cratered mess of his face. He told himself it wasn’t serious even as his fingers found their way to his lower lip and worried a scrap loose, pulling it free with a satisfying snap and the taste of metal on his tongue. He told himself he could stop at any time as he stared at the fragment of his skin, thin and translucent as a pastry flake, between his thumb and forefinger. 

He dropped the scrap of skin down the stopperless drain in his bathroom sink, with the others. 

His hand wandered to the back of his neck, fingernails grazing his scalp. Dozens of rice-sized scabs marred every inch of the surface already. Every time he found one, he’d work at it. Every near success sent a sharp, hot flush of agony ending in the satisfying slide of the loose bit of flesh dragging along adjacent hairs. These went in the sink’s maw, too. 

If he threw them in the trash, he’d have to face just how many small fragments of himself he’d picked free and discarded. Looking at his pocked and divotted cheeks, he’d rather not consider the lost volume. It was bad enough there was always blood under his fingernails. If he tossed the evidence down the sink, at least it would really be gone.

The rumbling from the drain was quiet, at first—so quiet, he didn’t notice it until the pipe from the basin to the wall distended like a bolus. Like the sink had found something hard to swallow or was choking. The pipe groaned one final protest and then the porcelain bowl of the sink cracked in two. 

Before he could step back, a fleshy pipe shot out and coiled around his throat. It felt like a tongue, slick and muscular and prehensile, dragging his struggling body toward a widening mouth. 

There were more tendrils. Dozens, hundreds more. Some were slender, like the one choking him, but others were broad and flat, covered in toothy, ovoid mouths like a dozen leeches made one flesh. 

They were grasping. All of them wanted a taste. 

He grasped for anything solid. His already bloodied fingernails cracked and splintered on the tile bathroom wall. The towel rod snapped off the wall in his grip. The first mouthy arm  pressed its face to his, gnawing sharply at what skin remained. 

When the leechthing pulled free, it took too much with it. The tentacle around his throat pulled him into the jaws of the mess of his sink. Shards of porcelain pressed in on his skin, the shrill shriek of his body rubbing along the wet surface briefly eclipsing the rumble of whatever lurked below. 

When he tried to scream, a leechthing slithered between his lips, latching onto his tongue and gagging him with foreign flesh and hundreds of needle teeth. The slime-slick walls of the passage he was being dragged through compressed his shoulders, crushing his body ramrod straight. All he could do was wait and choke and hope and pray that whatever was waiting for him at the end of the tunnel had teeth enough to cut short his miserable, rib-cracking suffocation.

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Theodore Hill (he/him) is a writer, librarian, and queer horror living somewhere on the East Coast of the US. He spends the majority of his non-work hours maintaining his recreational spreadsheet collection and regaling his friends and loved ones with deeply worrying story pitches. He can be found online at theodorehill.weebly.com.