On the Generation of Animals

Perhaps the authorities might have been summoned, if not for the mouse plague that caused the whole building to stink like an overheated charnel house that summer. Nor was it particularly noteworthy that the old woman had not been seen about for over a fortnight: she kept to herself and had her groceries delivered, afraid of seeing neighbours she always feared were mocking her in words she could not understand.

The discovery of her body fell to a pair of teenage boys who guessed that the apartment was probably vacant, and wanted to try picking the lock.

When the door was opened the foetor was released, and the discoverers found themselves sickened by what, vastly intensified, struck them viscerally as an odour of despair so intense that they could form no words to express their shock. The boy on his knees remained there a moment; the other swayed on his feet and supported himself against the door jamb. They stared ahead without exchanging glances, into the miasmic apartment.

The elevator rattled behind them. Their response, instead of running away, was to enter the apartment of death and close the door. Stranger still, neither made any effort to shield his nostrils from the violently assaultive stench whose source they progressed towards, seemingly unaware of each other, so that they jostled comically in the bedroom doorway, although neither found it funny.

The volatile compounds were now producing a quite different effect, the boys’ open, drooling mouths tasting a fruity sweetness like the steam from a shisha pipe, while some flies explored these fresh orifices. As well as their salivary glands, the boys’ genitals also responded enthusiastically.

On a double bed lay the corpse in a state of active decay, glistening and swarming with maggots in the semi-dark. Beside it lay a further mass also resembling carrion, which, over and above the congealed effluvium that had puddled in the rumpled bedclothes about the corpse, suggested evisceration.

The mass began to move while the boys remained still, staring fixedly. The creature lifted its head, which rotated at an unnatural angle to face the visitors, and its long utterance was something between a yawn and a howl.

The paradoxical foetor intensified with the howl, as though reserves of it were now being released with the puncture of some distended organ. The creature’s toothless mouth hung open, pus-coloured gums and lolling tongue on display. The features were vaguely canine, but almost hairless, except in irregular patches.

Now this canid thing stirred its legs, seeming to resolve itself more completely out of placental inchoateness.

Then it flopped down onto the carpet and ran, in a manner of speaking, towards the onlookers, its tail dislodging maggots with each wag. Yes, it meant to welcome the intruders with all the means at its disposal, chiefly its bruise-coloured tongue that glistened with vile lethean fluid.

When others came along some days later, in search of the boys who had gone missing, they smelled only the natural, atrocious stench of death. The corpse lay on the bed in an early state of butyric fermentation. The bodies of the two boys, fly-blown and swollen where the skin remained intact, had been partially eaten and strewn about the room.

The unclean animal had now solidified its form, though its flesh remained putrescent. It lifted its head, turning a pair of blind-seeming, yellow eyeballs towards the intrusion, and bared its similarly pus-coloured teeth to emit a sort of wheezing snarl. Two newborn pups wriggled at its teats.