The Everlasting Flesh

 

  “You always give back what you take out.”
 

The single line of black type was the only blemish on the thick, cream-colored card I was handed as I entered the mansion’s front foyer. The man handing them out, impeccably dressed in a cream-colored suit the same color as the card, was solemn in his work, but that didn’t stop Jonas from giving a laugh and patting the man on the shoulder as he took his card. The man shook from the impact of Jonas’ meaty hand, but his expression remained unchanged. Seeming disappointed, Jonas turned to me and rolled his eyes before pulling me into one of the parlors off the main hall where people were talking.  

I had met Jonas six weeks earlier when he contacted me after buying one of my paintings from a gallery downtown. He said he was an art collector and had been very impressed with my work. Did I have more he could see and perhaps buy? Yes, of course I did. Would I meet him for lunch one day and bring my portfolio? Yes, of course I would.  

In the weeks since that first lunch, we became friends and Jonas became a patron of sorts. He bought five more of my paintings, but he also started talking about me needing an actual studio rather than just painting out of a spare room in my apartment. I was always leery things were going to veer towards strangeness or turn sexual, but it never did. He never really asked anything of me at all until this party, and it never even occurred to me to refuse.  

He didn’t tell me much going in, other than it was a social club of ultra-wealthy people that was kind of weird. No orgies or anything like that he assured, and it was up to me how much I participated in any activity, but his precautionary preamble was enough to make me intrigued without really being worried.  

Once inside and mingling, I began looking for signs of strangeness, but found few. The oddest thing was that it looked like no one was drinking anything other than water. When I asked Jonas about it, he said alcohol was discouraged at these things, as it could dilute or corrupt the experience. What was the experience? Jonas just gave me a melodramatic lift of the eyebrows and a wink.  

We talked to a few people, all clearly wealthy, a couple I even recognized from some article or television show. Then an announcement was made to come into the main ballroom. People filtered from our and several other rooms, coming together into a large room lit by two massive crystal chandeliers and bare of adornment except for a large platform towards the far end of the rectangular room. It is near this platform that the forty or fifty of us gathered, being beckoned up by a small woman who stood atop it at a podium.  

She welcomed us all, saying that per custom, seven people had been predesignated for tonight’s “journey” and everyone else had been put into the random pool for the remaining three slots. She asked those three to come up first, each holding up a black stone that apparently indicated their right to participate. When she asked for the remaining seven, Jonas chuckled and grabbed my arm, guiding us to the front.  

I was starting to get nervous now, and I wanted to ask questions, but there was little time and I didn’t want to make Jonas angry or embarrass him in front of his weird friends. So I kept quiet as we were ushered through the heavy double doors behind the podium. We were in a smaller room that was empty except for two lamps and three men that were clearly some kind of guards. The woman gestured to the men and they proceeded to open the only other door in the room.  

This door was of metal and was locked by both an electronic lock tied to a keypad and three bar locks that even the large guards had to grunt to slide out of place. When the doors began to crack open, I could feel cool air rush out to greet us, scentless but carrying a strange weight about it. The woman led us in, and that’s when I first saw the body.  

It had been a middle-aged woman, and was dressed in a gauzy white dress. She had brown hair streaked with grey that cascaded down onto the stone dais she was laid out upon. Her skin was pale and clean, and at a glance she could have just been asleep. But at more than a glance, that clearly wasn’t right. She was too still, too inanimate. I couldn’t help myself at this point. I leaned over to Jonas and asked if that woman was dead. He nodded, continuing to talk as the woman gestured for one of their group to come forward.  

Jonas told me in lowered tones that the body was over 500 years old, but had never decayed. It happened sometimes, he said. Such bodies were called incorruptible, and it was sometimes viewed as a sign of sainthood. This woman, he said, had been a miller’s wife in eastern Europe, and had apparently just dropped dead one day. They didn’t embalm the body, of course, but it still did not rot. Eventually it was claimed by a local church, and a small monastery had been built around it for a time before it changed hands and ultimately wound up here.  

But why? I asked. He pointed to the front where the woman had spread open a slit in the dress to expose the flesh of the body’s stomach. This process, Jonas said, was called “wet cupping”. It was commonly used as a form of alternative medicine on the living, but it had been discovered that if it was used to extract fluids from an incorruptible body, the fluids could be drank to various effects.  

I felt myself involuntarily jerk back. I could tell by his expression, which was much different than his normal relaxed and jolly face, that he was serious. What effects? I asked.  

Visions, euphoria, intellectual and artistic breakthroughs. It was kind of like acid, but without any risk of brain damage or long-term physical harm. And while some people did have “bad trips”, it was pretty rare.  

While he was talking, I was watching the procedure unfolding before us. The woman had several tiny glass cups on a table nearby. With practiced precision, she took a small metal tool that almost looked like a toothbrush to ten different spots on the skin. As she did so, a black liquid would begin to well from the spot, and she would apply a cup, which had some mechanism on it to vacuum-seal it to the flesh. By the time she was done, all ten of the small cups were filling with the black liquid. She then went back to the first one, slid a thin piece of metal underneath its edge with amazing speed, and righted the cup. Wiping down its sides with a cloth, she handed the brimming cup of black ichor to the first participant, an older Hispanic woman.  

The woman’s wrinkled nose told me of the smell a moment before I smelled it myself. The scent was of dead flowers and decay, and I felt my gorge rising. I wanted to tell her not to drink it, but it was too late. After her, the rest followed in turn, including Jonas himself. They all seemed okay, and Jonas said that while it smelled terrible, it didn’t taste bad, and it was perfectly safe. The woman handed me my glass and they all waited, staring at me expectantly.  

I’d like to say that I told them no. That I handed it back, or threw it to the ground, or told them I wanted to leave. But I didn’t. I was scared and weak. I didn’t want to lose Jonas’ friendship or his patronage, and I could feel that I was on the precipice of something.  

So I held my breath and I drank it. Jonas was right, it didn’t taste bad. I felt it slide down my throat like some kind of foul milkshake, and then it was gone. I braced myself for some kind of reaction, but none came. When I looked questioningly at Jonas, he was grinning. Clapping me on the back, he told me that I’d done great. That it would probably be a bit before it kicked in.  

We all retired to a room filled with sofas and chairs, and while the other guests, the non-participants, were around, they kept a respectful distance. I felt my head getting lighter as I sat on an overstuffed leather sofa in a dim corner of the room. My vision began to dilate, and then the room fell away entirely. I was flying through some dark maelstrom, and I sensed it was the land of the dead, or at least one of them. I felt my body pick up speed as it hurtled downward through black clouds and purple arcs of lightning, and before long I could see the ground below me. As my descent slowed, I found myself shooting out across the landscape, grey ashy lands of bare earth giving way to dark forests, then to massive cities carved of towering red monoliths of crimson rock and dark sinew. I began to scream and cry from joy and terror, and then I was back in the room. I looked at my phone, and only a few minutes had passed.  

Jonas dropped me off at home in the early hours of the morning. He had told me he was proud of me, that he had wanted to see how it would affect an artist of my caliber, and not to tell him, but to show him what I had experienced through my work. Over the next few months I began doing just that. I was painting at an incredible pace, filling canvases with depictions of the things I had seen and images I continued to see in my dreams. Jonas bought many of them, but he was not alone. He bought me a new studio that had room for a full gallery, and by the end of the first year I was selling paintings as fast as I could finish them.
 

In many ways, that time and the months that followed have been the best of my life. I wish I could say I had enjoyed them more, but most of my time has been spent feeding my drive to paint, as though I’m trying to express corruption out of a wound. Still, I have become very successful doing the thing I’m most passionate about, so I wasn’t about to complain.  

Yesterday morning, three men broke into my studio and kidnapped me. They zip-tied my hands and pulled a black bag over my head before gently leading me outside and into a car. Two hours later, I was back in the room with the body. They had secured me to a metal table that had not been in the room before, thick leather straps over my thighs, torso and, after removing the hood, forehead. I could only turn my head slightly, but it was enough to see the body and to see that the men had left the room, shutting and locking the door behind them.  

I called out several times, but got no response. My pleading turned to angry rants, but soon I was tired, my fear overwhelming any sense of indignation. I didn’t know what was going on, or what was going to happen, and the uncertainty made it much worse. I found myself glancing periodically over at the body from the corner of my eye, but nothing changed. More time passed, and I thrashed against the straps, but they didn’t budge. After holding out as long as I could and harboring some insane hope that this would prompt a response, I wet myself. Still nothing.  

Finally, as I felt my urine cooling against me and my heart starting to slow as I accepted I wasn’t getting out of this, I began to cry. Softly at first, and then thick streams of tears ran down the sides of my face and into my hair. That’s when the lights went out.  

It startled me, but it didn’t stop me from weeping. Whatever new torture they were going to subject me to, I might as well cry while I could. Eventually I quietened, silent rivulets still coming from my eyes and pooling in my ears. That’s when I heard something.  

It was a small, stealthy sound. A rustle of fabric, then the light scuffing of flesh across the marble floor. I had not fallen asleep, and I knew no one had entered the room unless it was by some silent, secret entrance, as the main doors made too much noise. And the sounds…they were coming from the direction of the body.  

I remained perfectly still, half-frozen from fear now. I listened as I heard the small noises of movement come closer, felt the unmistakable sense of another’s presence close to me in the dark. My head immobile, I could tell there was a face floating above me. I heard or felt no breath, but I thought I knew why. I wanted to scream, was opening my mouth to, and that’s when I felt the rough, dry tongue on my cheek.  

The fleshy appendage raked itself carefully, almost thoughtfully, across my cheeks before following the trails of my tears down into my hair and even into the cups of my ears. I held myself perfectly still, as though I was being tasted by some venomous snake and was trying to avoid the subsequent bite. The tongue did its work meticulously, occasionally revisiting my cheeks and the corners of my eyes. Then it was gone. A moment later I felt a light kiss upon my forehead.  

I heard another slight rustle of movement, and moments later the lights turned back on. The body was back on the dais as though it had never moved. Soon the double doors were opened and I was escorted back outside to a car, where Jonas was waiting inside.  

He told the driver to take us back to my house, and while I was so shaken I didn’t even want to talk, Jonas wasn’t deterred. He apologized for how I had been taken, saying that it was always that way the first time to minimize any resistance. Now that I knew what was what, the next time they would just send a car for me.  

The next time? I asked. Yes, he said with a sour look. It would take a few times to give back what I had gotten, but by then I’d be ready for another round, he assured. And it would get easier. I asked what the fuck he was talking about.  

He frowned, looking genuinely perplexed. “You always give back what you take out. It’s part of the deal. And you’ll want to do it again, believe me. It’s life changing.” He gave a laugh. “Just don’t scare me like that again. When you took so long without crying…I was getting worried. I’ve seen other people not cry, and I’ve seen what happened to them. She has other ways of taking it back, and believe me, it’s not nearly as pleasant.” His face looked haunted by the end, and he looked as if he wanted to say more, but in the end he just turned and looked out the window.  

I was returned home, ten hours after I had been taken, and since then I’ve been thinking about what I should do. But I’m writing this not as a cry for help, but as a word of warning. Be careful what thresholds you cross and know yourself before you do. Because things have a way of getting paid for, and sometimes you may not like the price. 

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