"Wish you had seen her—the slight blush, the sweet smell of her perfume, and the sound of her voice when she said the words." Louise stopped to clean the wet, sticky mess that was his hands, then swallowed to soothe a throat burning with thirst. "I love you, please go out with me~ The memory is still fresh in my mind, a—"
[Please state your name]
"Ah yes, her name. Her name was… well, does it even matter? Tell me what you think—you've been awfully quiet."
But nobody answered.
Louise scoffed. "You used to never stop talking. I thought I might go crazy with all the shouting and noise, but now that I'm telling you about my life, you stay silent. Selfish, aren't you?"
[Please state your name]
"Yes, yes, the name. Now that I think about it, I never got your name. Don't get angry—it's not my fault I couldn't understand. What language was that, anyway? Chinese? French? No, maybe Russian. I heard Russian was hard. Who knows." A splash reached his face. "Agh, why is the human body so full of blood?—Ooh, that reminds me of the time my grandma raised a chicken. She said her grandma used to kill them instead of buying them, and that it tasted better. But let me tell you, I couldn't taste the difference. Good old chicken, I tell you."
[Please state your name]
"Oh yes, the reason I'm telling you this is because the way she killed the damn chicken was by tying a rope around the chicken's feet and hanging it upside down. Then, with a sharp knife, she opened the chicken's neck so all the blood would drain out before she took out the insides, she said. In any case, I wish I had a rope right now—although it probably wouldn't work without me being able to see in this bloody darkness."
[Please state your name]
[Please state your name]
[Please stay your name]
[Please stay your…]
It had been days since the damn voice started talking inside Louise's head—annoying and repetitive. Or at least what Louise thought were days; who knew? Days might have passed, or perhaps only hours, or in the worst case, weeks. The darkness was thick and unchanging. He wondered how long he had been here, barely moving, afraid that if he made too much noise, something he would rather not meet might eat him.
The monotony of his stay changed when, at a distance, he heard a shout—almost like a plea. Hope, like a beacon, guided him, and that was how he met the man. As quickly as happiness filled him, it drained just as fast. The man would not shut his mouth; he kept talking and talking and talking. Until one day, Louise had had enough—not only of the man's babble, but of hunger and thirst.
And for the good of humanity, Louise imposed this trial upon himself and decided to relieve the man of his madness. It had not been easy. The wounds where the man had scratched and bitten him were still hot and painful, but Louise knew he had done the right thing. How could someone bite another person without a care in the world? Madness—pure madness. Men like that should not walk the same place as him.
A few bites had done the trick, and the arm was free of hair. The simple act of having to remove it with his mouth sent shivers down his spine, but Louise was not one to eat with nasty hair.
"In any case, muscles are hard to swallow. The taste is not bad—not as good as the chicken my grandma had cooked. With salt and pepper, I could better this," but there was nowhere to find them, nor anywhere to look. The place where he had woken was… well, for lack of better words, dark.
He could not see. He could not sense anything beyond his sense of space and the images of his thoughts—the only thing that gave color to the black canvas.
Louise had expected his thirst to diminish with the blood, but if anything, the thickness of the liquid and its metallic taste made him crave the real thing even more. "Weren't people supposed to be made of seventy percent water? This must be the man's scheme—wicked bastard and waterless fool."
But not everything was lost. His stomach had stopped hurting, at the very least, even so he was still in dire need of water.
[Please stay your name]
[Please stay your name]
[Please stay your name]
[Please stay your name]
It felt as though claws were ripping through his nostrils, every breath an agonizing endeavor. Thirst had dried his throat, the meat had upset his stomach, and the weakness brought on by vomiting had left his arms and legs as useless as his eyes. It had happened after he had eaten—a terrible tiredness and numbing laziness overtaking him.
[Please state your name]
And to top it all off, the voice kept repeating and repeating. If not for Louise's strong mindset, he might have gone mad like the man.
"Water…" he said with all his remaining strength.
[Please state your name]
"Wa… ter," the word now breaking between breaths.
[Please state your name]
"Water!" he screamed. The pain was so great that the dry air struggled to pass into his lungs. The world was going black—but the world was always black, so that didn't matter.
[Water… Welcome, Water, to ○○○○○○○○. Live and adopt the Darkness to live as a loyal believer.]
It was all Louise heard before he dreamed of his grandma, and the chicken, of the girl he had loved since childhood but whose name he could no longer recall. In shifting sceneries, he dreamed of… someone. He did not know who it was, nor could he distinguish what it was—a man, a dog, a god; he couldn't say.
[Darkness flows within you, Water]
The smell was putrid and horrendous, but hunger was worse. Pain was gone, on the bright side—and better still, for the first time he saw… no, he felt. The rocky, humid touch all around him.
He gazed down, where his dark arms reached toward the grotesque figure that had once been a man.
Louise used his normal hand to scoop up the maggots. The creatures crawled and tried to flee, but in one quick motion he shoved them into his mouth—and the taste was just like chicken.