DISABLED BY THE LOW SPIRIT by Daniel Spicer

A disturbing TKnC horror debut by Daniel Spicer. Welcome in Dan.

Disabled By The Low Spirit

Nothing could get as low as a prisoner in a cell surrounded by shit. Behind the glass, the scrutinizers were making sure I was not completely dead yet. On the ground, there was no place else for me to be other than up.

But I couldn’t rise. I was swimming in my own shit. It was in the eyes, in my mouth, up my nostrils. It wasn’t that the toilet was backed up, or that I was incapable of using it; I just didn’t have the strength anymore to lift myself up onto the stainless steel bowl.

The person in charge of this prison was Madam Marshmore. The kind of person that relives her own nightmares. She was considered an innovator, creating an institution for society’s rejects, males in this case that had nowhere else to be, nowhere else to go. I can’t say I’ve ever seen her, which doesn’t seem to suggest anything about her, but she wasn’t strict when it came to messiness. She had heard about my predicament: shit was coming out of me and there was no way anyone was going to clean it up for me. My fault. I was malnourished and unable to sit squarely on the toilet for mere seconds, much less a whole minute. So the shit just got squeezed onto the floor and this became my prison life. Me wandering from the corner to the trapdoor in the door to fetch my breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Some might call it a nightmare. Who wouldn’t? But you can’t judge me for not trying to look after myself. This was just how things were. If they just brought the hose in and washed away everything, I would be okay.

I wasn’t a criminal. I sought imprisonment for the sake of my sanity. You’d believe me if you’d known me from my fall from grace, when I had been a horror author creating a short novel for a local writers’ festival. I didn’t have the right to call myself an artist – artists usually draw upon extensive experiences of pain and damnation. So my books didn’t take me anywhere. And I wasn’t surprised because I hadn’t been through shit in my life. I had always been a pretty boy, well-educated, well-supported, but never creative enough to succeed. And when my final eviction notice came by, I was out on the street.

At the time, Madam Marshmore was collecting up pieces of worthless trash like myself, putting them inside her facilities and out of the way. What I had hoped for, a bit of charity. Most people in here wouldn’t say that. They weren’t tortured or anything, you were just left in a room all day and all night. A brown-painted concrete room with a stainless steel toilet. You weren’t given a bed, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t improvise. The crippling effect of sleeping on the hard ground left me without the lift to get to the toilet. But then, sleeping on shit was softer now that it was spread right across the room. I could lay on my back and float just a few centimetres off the ground.

This was a nightmare in any case. No one could call this a bright existence. How could you? You’d hear the scrutinizers journeying past the window talking in loud voices, saying I was disgusting, I couldn’t even look after my barren cell. Easy for them to say; I didn’t even know who they were and I wonder if I’d be allowed to judge how they live.

Pretty soon, I had become accustomed to the smell. It is, after all, the product of my own body and why should I denounce my own normal bodily functions? Shit is shit. It’s nothing special. I wasn’t having a great time, but at least I wasn’t totally out of my mind at that point.

But then they opened the door, right after the scrutinizers left and gave me a mate. She was not the most attractive woman I’d ever seen. I called her Mrs Butterface. She allowed me all sorts of access to her body. Due to the excrement, we had playtime in between fornication, but the time I spent inside of her was the most fun. Eventually, she grew pregnant and miscarried. I believe the problem had been her sleeping on a hard surface. She refused to shit anywhere other than in the toilet which was so ironic seeing as she needed to shit on the ground in order to have a neat place to nap. We certainly flushed the baby down the toilet, but the rest was history when one day I woke up and the door to my cell was wide open.

People die all the time. I felt like I had died an important death, more important than other regular people who don’t matter in the long run. Living in the vein of pigs, I thought my world had just fallen apart. I was being released, or at least that’s what I thought. Someone had accidentally left the door open, or maybe I was being liberated. I didn’t want this! I DIDN’T WANT THIS FREEDOM! My pig-mentality faced with this predicament sent me reeling. I was covered in rashes at this point and I certainly could save myself a lot of trouble by getting away from this piss I was laying in, just for a little while.

Running now. Down a corridor. I didn’t know where my energy had come from. I was now able to use my legs, glory be. None of the other doors were open. It was just me and freedom. No more shit. No more piss. No more sex with Mrs Butterface. It was on my way out of this nightmare, a nightmare I was so used to. I didn’t know what to believe. Shit, piss and sex, the ultimate in disgusting acts that I was grown accustomed to. The evils of society and now I had been released from that.

There was a spiral staircase I needed to climb. I did so, then changed my mind. I didn’t like the look of what was up there. Changing tact, travelling through the grotty sin that blocked up my soul for so long, I was still running trying to escape and at the same time I was scared. Infused with disgust, I fell to the ground and wept. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, I realised where I really was.

At my desk, typing up a horror novel where a blank screen remained.

I am dirt.

BIO:

A pseudo-Christian with horror on the brain, Daniel Spicer has been to hell and back over the ten years he's been teaching himself to write. Only now is he confident enough to approach publishers concerning a manuscript about dinosaurs. His blog is danielspicer1.blogspot.com.