The Body I Gathered
Compendium 2020 Story 35
By Andrew Hawnt
They are my treasures, and they have been hidden for long enough.
Discarded by life, they joined my depths at various points over the years, each of them being drawn by my current into the central abyss at my core.
I was not always like this. I was just a lake once. Just a mass of dirty water that people shoved shopping trolleys into and pissed in at night. I was just the wet thing at the back of the park. The bit where nobody really came unless they were up to no good.
I became aware many years ago, when the corpses of men, women, children and animals had already half-filled the abyss. They became the heart. When the final flickers of life left their bodies, they became one with me. Eventually, my waters had absorbed enough to build a mind of my own. A soul formed of the dying moments of people whose lives had been snuffed out by murderers, muggers, gang members and pitiful accidents.
Deep inside the abyss, I pushed my waters around the human detritus, winding it with discarded rope, barbed wire, lengths of cable and even the skin of the dead. Eventually, it had all melded and swollen into one gigantic mass of limbs and bloated flesh.
I arranged the heads in one cluster above the middle of its rudimentary torso. Arms and legs are arranged in tangled masses at its sides. Legs and torsos and whatever filth I could amass make up the base, like the foot of some gargantuan mollusc.
The body I gathered accepted me as its mind, and when I let my consciousness flow from my dank, stagnant waters and through the amassed clumps of skin and bone and sinew and joints and teeth and emptied eye sockets, I knew the names at last.
They flooded me as though their banks had been burst, places, family and friends, experiences, the individual suffering of those poor wretches who had been thrown into me.
I felt memories coursing through my new form, being strangled as a puppy, being stabbed by a lover, being shot by a gang boss, having necks broken and hearts burst and bones smashed with hammers.
The body I gathered reached out from its gestation space and I pulled myself up from the depths that had been my paradise and my prison since long before I could think. My strange limbs worked hard to pull our gelatinous bulk towards the surface, and when the first of my many hands broke through and felt the freezing night air, my collective limbs and foetid blubber wriggled with the thrill of the other world.
The body I gathered rose up from the lake and heaved its mass onto the path by its shore.
A man was attacking an elderly lady walking her terrified dog. She was desperately holding onto her bag, even though she could see the man had a kitchen knife in his hand.
The darkness and their little drama had hidden my wet emergence. I pushed the slop and mangled people of my new self towards them and reached out.
I pulled the man's head away from his body and consumed it.
The suffering of my selves radiated through his terrified brain and I absorbed the extremity completely.
The elderly lady escaped with her dog, not really comprehending what was going on.
With the absorption of the thug's head, my new form felt stronger, euphoric, emboldened.
The body I gathered wanted more. I listened to the remains that lined my bulk and found the oldest mind. She told me where to find the man that had killed her and dumped her in my lake.
I set off in the dark, the cheers of the dead roaring in my new mind. I was a thing of living consequences, and there were many heads I needed to claim.
© Andrew Hawnt
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About Compendium 2020:
Compendium 2020 is a project from author Andrew Hawnt that consists of 52 original short stories, flash fiction stories and vignettes given away for FREE in 2020. Featuring science fiction, fantasy, horror and more, this began as a personal quest and due to the weirdness of 2020 has become an ambition to provide free distractions for anyone who needs them.
About Andrew Hawnt:
Andrew is based in Nottingham, England. Known for his music journalism career, comics writing and film critique work, Andrew is a prolific writer and is the author of a growing stack of books, including the cult hit VHS Ate My Brain. He made the movies The Demon And I and The Demon And I: Birthrite completely in lockdown with cast members filming their scenes remotely, and new films are coming.
Andrew is also the creator and presenter of the YouTube shows Planet Hex and Turn One Shock as well as the video versions of the Compendium stories.
Follow Andrew: YouTube Mixcloud Facebook Instagram Twitter
© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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