Word count: 808 words.

It looked like a corpse.

It had grey skin and an inverted smile. Cracked lips and teeth like tiny spears. Bones jutting out at impossible angles, it banked against the far wall of the cell. It smelled bad, too — smelled like . . .

. . . death.

Gaurav knew what death reeked of, and this was it.

He closed his eyes, but that was like fighting the sun with a torchlight. He could still see it clearly, that snake of a tongue shambling towards him. Shambling, stretching, reaching . . .

His eyes sprang open. There it was, still. Smiling its wicked, inverted smile.

Gaurav's own lips quivered as he mumbled a quick prayer, then another, then another. He prayed to all the gods he could think of, and more that he had made up during his time locked up in this hole, and even as he prayed he could hear it hissing at him quietly.

No prayer would help. He knew that. It knew that.

Gaurav hugged his knees, buried his head in his lap. Stayed this way for a few seconds before he heard it moving.

He jerked his head up, cold breath rushing into his lungs, heart shaking. Rubbed his eyes, the way a cartoon might.

It had moved, all right. It was no longer inclined against the cell's far wall. Now it was tipped across the floor like a thing broken twice-over, spine twisted like a ladder, eyes shining like notorious bulbs.

It looked like a corpse, no doubt, but it wasn't one.

Gaurav repeated his prayers, willed his lids close again. This time instead of it he saw Anushka in his mind's curtain, saw Anushka with her eyes wide in horror and her mouth hanging open, her stomach vomiting blood from where the knife had punctured it, painting her pretty dress in a most awful shade of red.

He saw himself, standing in front of her wearing an honest mask of anguish. Holding the knife's hilt, pulling it out from her stomach, pushing her down to the ground.

"Blood, blood, everywhere, all the drops he spilled."

His eyes bulleted open. There it was, still. Smiling its evil, inverted smile. Forked, dry tongue flopping out of its mouth and onto the grubby cell floor.

Gaurav could have sworn it had said something. Could have sworn something had.

His eyes darted around the cell, looking for some other apparition which perhaps intended to harm him. Maybe Anushka herself, or at least her ghost, come to make his life a portrait of pain for what he had done to her.

This thought made him feel a giddy sort of relief that he was only haunted by it, whatever it was.

He smiled at it, seeing the way of things.

It smiled back, that horrible, inverted smile. 

Torturing people, making their lives a picture of revenge? That had never been Anushka's style. He had loved her, once. He knew how her mind worked. He had euthanized her German Shepherd for her a long time back, in another life it appeared, when the vet had said there was nothing to be done about its zoonotic disease.

She was always all for putting people out of their misery. People and beasts, both.

It was her. She was it.

Gaurav forced himself to look at it, really look at it. Studied the angled features, the shining eyes, the matted patches of hair once glorious . . .

It was lying by his feet now, the corpse-like messenger.

Its serpentine tongue distended out of its foul mouth. Between the fork at the end of it was a shard of glass, sharp as the feel of handcuffs around your wrists, sharp as a lover's scorn. 

Gaurav grinned, his own grin no less wicked and inverted than its.

He extended his own hand and accepted the glass-blade, its lips touching his hand as he did — one last kiss from lover to foe.

He put the sharp thing against his wrist, where the handcuffs' mark was freshly embossed; a permutation of his guilt.

He looked at it, and it — with her lively eyes lodged inside the corpse-snake's maggot-crawling sockets — looked back, grey skin glistening, teeth jagged as the glass. Anticipative. Encouraging.

He pressed the glass against the blue-green veins beating like drums against his skin.

His other fist bunched around the blade.

His spine as boneless as its.

His eyes on it.

Its stolen eyes on him.

Didn't feel so scared when sticking the knife into her, did you?

With this thought — tragically his first, and last, comprehensive thought in days — Gaurav drove the glass into his wrist. The makeshift blade pierced his skin and blood vomited out.

He collapsed, like his will to live, onto the grubby cell floor. And there it was besides him, still. Smiling its sinful, inverted smile.

"Blood, blood, everywhere, all the drops he spilled."

Thoughts?

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