Transcendental Mutilation

by Ryan Harding

Genres: Short Stories; Horror

Synopsis

SIGILS INCISED, A COMMUNION WITH THE BLADEA trio of young people stranded on an uncharted island discover its sickening secrets. A man contracts a degenerative disease through a webcam encounter. An office worker follows the object of his affection into a mysterious club where life, death, and anatomy have no limits. A reforming necrophiliac struggles to maintain the illusion of normalcy in a new relationship. A woman awakens with other captives in the basement of a madman using them to attract impossible prey.UNLOCK THE GATES OF FLESH, WORLDS WITHIN FLAYEDA decade after the infamous Genital Grinder, Ryan Harding returns with ten more stories, collected for the first time— including the Splatterpunk Award-winning tales "The Seacretor" and "Angelbait"— which plunder the depths of depravity and obsession, yielding offenses and transformations of the flesh never before seen or carved. His first solo work in years dissects its themes and characters alike in a sublime autopsy worthy of the hardcore horror pantheon. Even the vomitorium has its philosophy, and the keys to revelation are all serrated.EVERY JOURNEY BEGINS WITH A SINGLE SLICE... TRANSCENDENTAL MUTILATION

 

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Release date: December 5, 2023

Publisher: Death's Head Press

Print pages: 243

Sample

The Corpsefucker Blues

Off the grid no longer exists. Not in this world where we are seen, recorded, and mutated by everything. Even if it did, I am sure it would still come with that deep, unnamable loss and corresponding lack of fulfillment assured by our lives on the grid—because we are all connected, if only by the profoundest sense of disconnection. And what is a grid, if not a web?

—Transitory Bodies, Dr. Braedon Obrist

 

I.

 

CHASE RAN HIS FINGERS through the first woman’s hair, dry and tangled like tumbleweed. He clawed through the knots, yanking out a small tuft in the process.

She offered no encouragement or complaint.

He held the clump of hair away from their nude bodies and let it float to the ground. It didn’t have far to go with him draped upon her prone form on the hard earth. Despite the bed of grass, the ground rubbed his knees and elbows raw. It’s why he’d never consider camping out in the woods.

But for this?

Chase was only too happy to make an exception.

The harsh and uncomfortable environment scarcely mattered with her body so soft and inviting beneath him, slicker and wetter than their last time together; always wetter each time, as if augmented by his own rising desire. By herself she would have satisfied him completely, but, of course, one didn’t have to suffice tonight.

When he raised his head, he found the other woman’s toes right in front of his face, poised in midair. They belonged to a thicker woman with wider feet than most of the ones he saw around the office at work. He thought they were magnificent. He smiled up at her, though the shadows of the tree obscured her features. The toes drifted slightly back and forth, teasing him. He could see them in a hint of moonlight. He thought she had painted them an electric orange, though the paucity of available light did not permit him to confirm this. He reached up and stroked her calf, round and smooth. His fingers slid down until he found her heel and coaxed her foot forward. He fit four of her toes in his mouth and moan

The Corpsefucker Blues

Off the grid no longer exists. Not in this world where we are seen, recorded, and mutated by everything. Even if it did, I am sure it would still come with that deep, unnamable loss and corresponding lack of fulfillment assured by our lives on the grid—because we are all connected, if only by the profoundest sense of disconnection. And what is a grid, if not a web?

—Transitory Bodies, Dr. Braedon Obrist

 

I.

 

CHASE RAN HIS FINGERS through the first woman’s hair, dry and tangled like tumbleweed. He clawed through the knots, yanking out a small tuft in the process.

She offered no encouragement or complaint.

He held the clump of hair away from their nude bodies and let it float to the ground. It didn’t have far to go with him draped upon her prone form on the hard earth. Despite the bed of grass, the ground rubbed his knees and elbows raw. It’s why he’d never consider camping out in the woods.

But for this?

Chase was only too happy to make an exception.

The harsh and uncomfortable environment scarcely mattered with her body so soft and inviting beneath him, slicker and wetter than their last time together; always wetter each time, as if augmented by his own rising desire. By herself she would have satisfied him completely, but, of course, one didn’t have to suffice tonight.

When he raised his head, he found the other woman’s toes right in front of his face, poised in midair. They belonged to a thicker woman with wider feet than most of the ones he saw around the office at work. He thought they were magnificent. He smiled up at her, though the shadows of the tree obscured her features. The toes drifted slightly back and forth, teasing him. He could see them in a hint of moonlight. He thought she had painted them an electric orange, though the paucity of available light did not permit him to confirm this. He reached up and stroked her calf, round and smooth. His fingers slid down until he found her heel and coaxed her foot forward. He fit four of her toes in his mouth and moaned appreciatively. 

 They tasted sharp.

Years ago, he might have thrown up, but he’d come to appreciate the intensity of the flavor.

Something tickled his scalp. Several somethings. Exhibits 587-594 why he hated the outdoors. Nothing to do for it, though. He never could have brought these lovely ladies without an audience.

The discomfort of the woods hardly equated the drawback of the lack of privacy most anywhere in the city.

Chase found himself doing it, too: peeking through the spyhole when he heard voices outside his door—especially from an occasional argument—and cataloging the comings and goings of neighbors. Just part of the urban assimilation process. He’d notice if someone on his floor had company; ergo, he needed to stay the hell away from home to enjoy the delights of his special ladies. He brushed the crawling things from his hair, never missing a stroke in licking beneath and between the toes stuffed in his mouth.

He rubbed himself against the woman beneath him. Maria, he thought. Or maybe the electric orange toes were Maria’s. Regardless, one was Maria, the other Esther. He’d known the difference at some point, but not now. He only remembered his incredulity that such a sexy woman would have a name like Esther. That had to be a family name, donated by a family who obviously didn’t care if a lot of guys laughed at the thought of calling someone Esther while they pounded her quim like a railroad spike. He felt his mouth curling into a smile around Esther’s toes and let them slide out of his mouth.

Maria (?) felt almost twig-like now, as unyielding as the earth. He should have brought Esther to the ground instead. Her larger body would feel much better. Not too late to amend the error, of course, but he’d save that for a little later. No need to have the best stuff right out the gate.

It was a marathon, not a race.

More things landed on his scalp, one of them alarmingly heavy. Bastard things. Chase swiped it away. This wouldn’t do for much longer. It was becoming too much of a distraction.

He peered down at Maria, the moonlight enough to see her face. A tangle of worms formed a squirming mass in her eye socket. Even now he felt

some of that atavistic repulsion he thought he’d left behind. He thought he could hear it above the persistent ambient noise of the woods, the network of slippery bodies sliding across one another. Too many to be contained within the skull now, bursting through the eyeless hole in her face. The decay had reached a stage that moistened her skin all over, fish belly white and glistening. A cavern at the left side of her face revealed her teeth with an overflow of flailing grubs oozing through the egress.

He wasn’t prepared to give up just yet. Chase was the kind of man who would eat the gristle off his steak, after all. A few places with a flimsy texture wouldn’t put him off. He flattened his palm and spread his fingers against her belly, rubbing against the smooth expanse. It wasn’t just slick now; the juices were thick enough to spatter the tops of his fingers. He caressed the mound of her breast. It felt like wet leaves. Cringing like someone trying to creep up a set of stairs but setting off every loud pop, he squeezed the spongy tissue. The flesh sloughed right off, the whole clump like the sodden skin of a fruit stuck to his palm. He flung his hand away and the layer of her skin mercilessly sailed off somewhere beyond the moonlight.

Still loath to completely abandon his post, he clamped hold of her thighs and attempted to pry them open.

Chase might as well have been trying to shatter concrete with his bare hands. He strained anyway, hoping for more give at knee level and, when he heard the dry snap, an instant of terror at the thought that it might be one of his arms. But, no, it had just been Maria’s leg cracking, now sickeningly close to the shape of a capital L with a near right angle formed at the knee by the shattered bone.

Hmm. Definitely won’t be a “girlfriend” experience with you tonight, Maria.

Judging by the steady drip of crawling bodies on his head, Esther must not be faring much better. He boosted himself up. Esther’s feet swayed ever so slightly above the ground. He had a better look at her sturdy knees and plentiful thighs now, and the

silhouette of her head.

He’d tied her flowing hair around a massive branch—which had not been easy. The process required him to tie it at a lower hanging point of the branch then climb up and move her in increments until she lifted off the ground. He’d expected the branch to collapse under the weight of them both—or maybe for her scalp to simply detach like some dangling jellyfish—but it held.

That whole Rapunzel story was evidently no joke.

Something landed on his face. More damn grubs, pouring out like the sand through an hourglass.

This would have to be the last time with Maria and Esther, unfortunately.

For now, there was the bitter disappointment at the inevitable conclusion of the cycle. Though he came night after night as long as he could, it was never enough. The familiar self-loathing—knowing he could probably count on one hand how many people in the entire world were facing this same moment of disappointment and despair; i.e., the corpsefucker blues—would truly hit later, like a hangover.

Chase wiped his face and sighed.

“What do you say, Esther? One for the road?”

The patch of hair on her belly swayed at eye level now, which had been the whole point of the hair-hanging endeavor. He spread her thighs and stepped between them. Her head eclipsed the moonlight, but it showed him things moving somewhere in her hair, and lower still, a death factory cranking out a new maggot model every couple of seconds. Somewhere in his mind, it astonished him that the remarkable thing about his inexorable descent to her vagina wasn’t him going down on a dead woman dangling from a tree branch—branch notwithstanding; that was old hat—but that her name might be Esther.

The process involved plenty of turning away and spitting at first, though that wasn’t so unlike the removal of an errant hair on the tongue with lovers who shared the complete absence of an obituary. He brushed away as much of the sarcophagus activity as he could, pushing his fingers between her lips and swiping away what he could. Her nether

 lips offered dryer putrefaction, unfortunately, and he’d have to put in the work if he wanted something he could slide into without an entry arid enough to peel all the skin off his member. There were lubricants, of course, but he couldn’t bring himself to use them. He wanted to do it himself. Otherwise, he may as well buy a sex doll or one of those weirdo devices from InterphaZ.

And that was just pathetic.

He maneuvered Esther’s legs back over his shoulders after the clearing initiative to bring her right up against his face. He buried his mouth in her hole. He’d missed a few of the maggots—or could be the ol’ assembly line had cranked out some more—but it would do for now. It even sounded like the real thing for a moment: the slick, squishing sounds of oral congress. He didn’t know why he should cherish the token reflections of normalcy in something that was designed to be completely aberrant, but he did, undeniably. He supposed he must be something of a romantic.

He had to give up the fantasy rather abruptly when the rest of her weight fell upon him and knocked him down to the ground in something that resembled a poorly executed professional wrestling move. The wet white bone of Esther’s skull lay completely uncovered.

He groaned and exhaled, looked up at the sky. The moonlight had shifted enough to reveal the lower branches of the tree where a wig-like remnant of blond hair still dangled from the branch, the red and glistening underside of a scalp at its roots. He laid there as it dripped on him, thinking that a complete hand wasn’t required to count the people in the world currently experiencing a moment like this.

No, just one finger…probably the middle one.

 

II.

 

Diary of a Corpsefucker, August 20th.

Dear Diary,

I can’t keep doing this. God, I shouldn’t even be writing about it because what if I get hit by a bus or die in some kind of freak accident? Someone’ll find this and then what seemed like an awful tragedy might

start to seem like karma. Well, handy thing about screwing a dead body…you won’t find anybody talking about “an eye for an eye.”

It’s sick. I know it is. I swear it’s always the last time, and then I turn around and what do you know, I’m back in the old cadaver saddle again. Yee-haw.

I hate myself for doing it. I stare in the mirror and think that this couldn’t be the face of someone who’d do such a thing, but the kind that does must be right behind it somewhere.

Everybody has a secret face.

Would it be different if I didn’t have to kill them?

It would be so much easier if I didn’t.

But…it’s too dangerous. I’ll probably get caught someday as it is even without working at a morgue or a funeral home, but it’d be that much easier to get busted if I did. They’ve probably got security cameras just to discourage that sort of thing. They don’t think anybody would really do something so deviant, but might as well throw some alligators in the moat.

I just hope if it ever happens…if I do get caught…that I have time to kill myself. I don’t even want to imagine the headlines if I have to face my crimes. We haven’t had a good murderer/necrophile in the news in a long time as it is, and this would blow everybody’s mind.

Writing about it helps a little, if not nearly enough. All the stuff I’ve written in here about The Urge, it doesn’t really communicate the power of it. It feels like I’m out of control, completely out of my mind. I feel like I have as much choice as a werewolf on the night of a full moon. So…I have to go to the meetings. I’ve said that a hundred times in here before, but I’m really going to do it. I’ve said that too, but next time I write in here, Mr. Diary, I’ll be telling you what happened, and probably what a waste of time it was, but I’ll have at least gone. I don’t know what I’ll say, but the best lie stays close to the truth, right? So what? I find coma patients irresistible?

I have to try.

I have very little hope it will cure me, but it’s something. 

III.

 

Chase rubbed his hands on his pants. He couldn’t get them dry. It felt less like a room of his peers than a jury of them. He’d seen classified ads for the sex addiction group for the past couple of years and, while it seemed about as appropriate a place for him as a daycare, he figured it was his best bet. He still couldn’t believe he’d actually gone through with it and come. They held the meetings at a community center downtown. His nightmare was that there’d only be two people, including himself, but there were six others. Not enough to fade into the woodwork altogether, but enough to hopefully spare him from getting his arm twisted.

What brings you here tonight?

Can you talk about that?

You’ll feel better if you do.

We’re here to listen.

No judgments.

Don’t be shy now…we’ve heard just about everything you can think of…

Ha ha ha.

Yeah. Right.

There were two women and four other men, with one of the latter playing the role of moderator. His name was Neil. He’d thrown away his first marriage because of a pornography addiction.

That’s it? Chase thought during Neil’s introduction. Whacking off too much to porno was no great shakes. You may as well have a chronic jaywalker trying to tell hardened rapists and child killers that they too can turn their lives around.

And that’s when the sweaty palms really began; with the realization that some part of him actually believed he would feel better about himself by listening to other people’s struggles.

Unless some guy walked in late and announced he had a predilection for sodomizing roadkill, Chase doubted he would be granted any absolution.

They sat in chairs arranged in a horseshoe shape. The whole atmosphere couldn’t have been more awkward. Chase cursed his failure to sit closer to the

door. He’d done it so he wouldn’t try to bail out in the middle of the meeting if nerves got the best of him. He was trapped on the side of the room. Everybody seemed acutely aware of one another while simultaneously trying to pretend they weren’t all thinking about what degenerates they were deep inside.

Neil cleaned his glasses as he continued his story, the “icebreaker.”

“I couldn’t stop. I was spending most of my paycheck on hardcore pornography, week after week. We were falling behind on our bills, but I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered to me was buying the new Gaping Anus movie, even if I had to pay sixty bucks for it sight unseen.”

The man beside Chase, a rather hirsute individual with a military style coat and dog tags, spoke up. “Why didn’t you rent them? They had a bunch of those Gaping Anus flicks at Movie Heaven.”

Neil put on his glasses again and shrugged. “Most of them were four hours long. I had to see every ass-pounding minute.” He exhaled and laughed a little. “Can’t go down that road again, though.”

One of the women asked, “Is Movie Heaven even still around? I thought after that nutcase went on a rampage…”

After someone pointed out pretty much all video stores had gone the way of the woolly mammoth with or without bad publicity, Neil resumed his narrative. It played out like Chase expected. His wife’s happiness plummeted while stock at Jergens and Kleenex soared. He hit rock bottom when she found some nudie mags stashed in the child’s nursery for the nights when it was Neil’s turn to pacify the brat’s sob sessions. She hit the road before the sun came up and left Neil as the king of his empty castle—a castle with a foundation of jumbo box Gaping Anus videos and XXX-themed magazines, the mortar supplied by the jizz of an 8-jacks-a-day habit.

“But I haven’t bought any movies in seven hundred and thirty-seven days,” Neil reported. “And I get Kinslee on the weekends.” There was polite applause, as if he’d done something truly noble by trading his videotape habit for Internet ass-bang clips. It was probably easier to find a payphone these days than hardcore 

pornography on video cassette. Chase almost asked how long it had been since Neil bought any magazines, since he’d surreptitiously left out that detail but decided that the guy living in a glass house of dead body orgies didn’t need to throw any stones.

G.I. Joe went next. He admitted to a profound foot fetish. He’d shadow women in shopping malls for hours if their feet caught his fancy. He usually masturbated in the public bathrooms when the lust got to be too overwhelming. He was afraid he was going to cross the line soon and find a way to do it where he could look at the target’s feet while he stroked.

That’s what he called them—targets—and Chase wondered if his military background extended to clock referents.

Got a couple of froth-worthy soles at nine o’clock, I’m ready to fire at will.

G.I. Joe had this idea, see, where he could buy something at the food court where they’d give him his order in a tall paper bag. Then he’d hurry far enough ahead of the target and cut out a hole at the bottom of the sack through which he could cram his dick then feverishly work his inches upon the target’s approach while doing a primo acting job of relishing a hamburger.

He even had a name for it: Operation Hot Lunch.

The woman who’d asked about Movie Heaven hooked one ankle over the other and shifted her feet as far beneath her chair and out of sight as she could. The man who pointed out the collapse of the video industry then offered a grim forecast for the life expectancy of the local shopping malls. The zealous light that radiated from Joe’s eyes while explaining his prospective masturbatory caper dropped from a hundred fifty watts to thirty.

Chase would have laughed were it not for his despair. GI Joe’s tale—he’d given his real name, but Chase hadn’t paid attention—was sad and pathetic, but compared to his own, a virtual triumph of the human spirit. Joe hadn’t crossed the line in his paraphilia yet, whereas Chase had blown past it like he was speeding on the fucking Autobahn, never sparing so much as a glance back.

Everyone offered token assurances to Joe that he wasn’t going to sink to this feared level of (even more) public self-gratification.

Chase nodded as if he agreed, but he knew better: Joe was a dead man wanking.

He’d been a regular at the meetings for a while, but it was obvious it would only take that One Special Target for him to double-time to the food court for a combo meal and extra napkins.

Joe’s moment of therapy expired at last, and Neil looked around. His gaze fell on Chase and for a heart-stopping moment, Chase knew he was going to be called on, just like the old high school days in French class when he had no idea what the hell anyone was saying.

Mercifully, somebody else volunteered.

“I’m Cynthia.” She gave a little wave to everyone. Chase had almost forgotten about her since she was more in the corner of his eye. The other woman had asked about Movie Heaven and seemed like she might be more forthcoming, but she hadn’t drawn any attention to herself since trying to make sure her feet didn’t launch Operation Indecent Exposure.

Cynthia had black hair and certainly an attractive face, but her voice especially took Chase in. That was kind of funny because it was the sort of thing that really didn’t matter for his needs; his lovers didn’t tend to be big conversationalists, after all. But he liked the sound of Cynthia’s. The women at his office had a uniformly chirpy bombast that dogs would probably flee from, but her voice had a smooth and alluring frequency. He thought of Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog. Then he thought of her tits. Then he thought of her rotting in a shallow grave somewhere. He adjusted the front of his jeans under the guise of fixing his belt buckle as he listened to Cynthia.

“I guess I’m here because I can’t control myself sometimes.” She laughed with fake mirth. “Okay, most times. I know what I want. And I know how to get it. So I take it. People don’t like it much if women do that.”

“Unless the women are doing it to them,” one of the other men said.

There was a round of laughs at this. Chase wished everyone would shut up so they could get back to Cynthia. He was mildly curious what brought the

Movie Heaven woman here, but didn’t care to hear the sorry tales of panty-sniffing and frottage with which the other guys would probably “regale” them.

“You get so many chances, it’s kind of hard not to do it,” Cynthia said. “I kind of feel like I have to.”

There were sober nods at this. The room would be empty if they weren’t all locked in that cell, Chase especially.

“None of us are here long and there’s only so much we can do with it, isn’t there? So, I do it. I’m not always glad about it. My boyfriends definitely aren’t.”

Chase heard his laugh over everyone else’s.

Cynthia shrugged. “I wish I could stop. I’m not sure I can.”

Neil took this opportunity to weigh in. Chase tuned him out, watching Cynthia like she was still the one talking. It should be too early to tell, but she excited him. Not because she’d make a great cadaver—though God, yes, she would at that—but some combination of that voice, her smile, and the apparent “widespread’ availability that would ultimately alienate the men who fancied her…he wanted more of it. They were something alike if they were both here, he thought, selectively forgetting his rote condemnations of the entire group for being nothing like him.

Cynthia caught him looking and smiled, absently brushing a hand through her hair and using the moment to turn away from him.

He wanted her to keep

looking. He wanted her. ...