Horror Story: Beheaded

My name is Sam Womack. I am headless and immortal.

Six months ago my head was completely severed from my body, yet both pieces continue to live. At this moment, my cleaved head is sitting next to me on a bookshelf, frowning, and watching as my hand scribbles an account of the atrocious accident that dismembered me.

On the day of the disaster I was working as a market research programmer in downtown Chicago. Not exactly the most thrilling occupation, but better than wearing a costume and serving fries at some fast food joint. It was the morning of July 13th, a scalding hot day even though it was only eight in the morning. I sat in my supervisor's office attending our usual brief morning meeting, surrounded by five other colleagues. Every morning we would take fifteen minutes to schedule the day's tasks, decide which goals needed to be focused on, as well as inform each other on how we were proceeding with our respective projects.

Bernard, our supervisor, sat in his leather chair behind his computer, working away at his keyboard like a machine gun, while half-heartedly paying attention to our reports. He was wearing his customary condescending smirk, and his heavily bearded face lit up with secret jokes as he grilled us with a piercing sarcasm. He seemed to hate us all -- well, I knew for certain that he hated me. But I was all right with that because I hated him too.

His main objective in the company seemed to consist of thinking up more ways to inundate us all with more paperwork. For example, he would notice me shuffling down the hall carrying a folder for example, and then ask: "Have you finished that job, Sam?"

"Yes, I have," I would reply.

"Good, be sure to check all the data and fill out these four new sheets I just came up with."

He loved to torture us with trivialities.

After the aforementioned meeting, and filling out three more papers that Bernard had contrived, I went to file them away in a room containing our department's only copying machine as well as numerous filing cabinets. In the room, I noticed a young woman standing by the window seemingly contemplating something important. I didn't recall ever seeing her in the building before. She was short, about 25, attractive, with shockingly red hair. Her blue dress expressed exhibitionism. But a closer examination of her face divulged that she seemed despondent over something. I watched her long black eyelashes blink twice, and then a tear fell down her cheek.

"What's wrong, ma'am?" I asked, with all the delicacy of a chain saw killer. "Can I help you with something?"

"No," was all she said.

I raised my eyebrows, turned my attention to the gray file cabinet before me. I was slightly disappointed that she didn't say more. Then I heard her straining and a lever under tremendous pressure clicked. I watched her push open a window. (I didn't even know you could open the windows in that room.) Then she suddenly boosted herself up and went out onto the ledge.

I threw my papers down on top of the filing cabinet and moved closer. "What are you doing?"

She ignored me. She was a determined young woman and still crying. I yelled something at her again, I don't remember what exactly. But she wasn't there to chat with me. She was there to get a job done: to jump.

Before I could think further, I reached out and grabbed her leg. And that was when I heard someone galloping up behind me.

Fast. No time to turn around.

They ran up, reached around my waist and hoisted me up like a sack of potatoes and threw me out the window. I never saw who it was, but to this day I still suspect it was the man who I knew for certain thoroughly hated me. My boss, Bernard.

I fell and fell.

I remember the wind most of all. I could barely believe its profound force against my body, its inimitable roar against my ears. I was falling nine stories, rotating and twisting in the thin air. After a while (how long could it have been?), I came to be floating on my back while descending.

I looked up.

The woman I had tried to help was still standing on the ledge. But then, just before I landed, I watched her climb back into the building. She wasn't as determined to jump as I had thought.

It was all an act. Someone had wanted me disposed of.

I landed on a bench face up, with my legs pointing toward the street. The posterior of my neck hit the metal backing, and my head was cut off.

I remember my head bouncing. And my body smashing down against the seat of the bench. When my head began to roll across the sidewalk, I lost all consciousness.

I woke up on a stretcher inside an ambulance. I smelled rubbing alcohol, cotton, ointment, and other medicinal odors. The color white everywhere. Surges of agony ripped through both pieces of my body every time the ambulance jostled over a pothole. Then I noticed two paramedics talking casually -- no attempt being made to save me. My head was laying between my legs, and feeling myself in this drastically different position (the radical change of perspective) was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced. Nevertheless, I struggled to stay awake and I listened to what the paramedics were saying:

-- "What was that yellow liquid all over the ground?"

-- "New one on me. Never saw anything like that before. Maybe his body was riddled with drugs."

I had never taken any drugs in my life. I was known as a total square among my friends and acquaintances. Yellow liquid? I'd had plenty of cuts and abrasions over the years. And my blood had always been red.

- "Well, the guy is dead now. Can't believe how clean the cut is on his neck. Couldn't have sawed a head off better in an operating room."

I interrupted them: "I'm still alive. Save me. Please."

They jolted. One of them screamed. Then they both scrambled over and began hooking up tubes and machines. With all the commotion and shock, as well as the ambulance driver slamming over another enormous pothole, I lost consciousness again.

* * *

I have endured seven separate operations to re-attach my head over the last six months. But every attempt has been a total failure. Doctors sew it on, and it inevitably comes back off. The stitches either melt from the oozing yellow liquid before any healing can take place, or the tissue withers where it is supposed to rejoin. My flesh refuses to participate. Yet I do not die. And I don't know why. Nor do the doctors. Several of them have suggested that I travel to a special clinic in Norway for further study, and possible treatment of my abnormal malady. But I refuse. I have decided to stay as I am.

It goes without saying that people don't want to associate with someone who is forced to carry their own head around wherever they go. With the exception of my uncle, who helps me by running all my necessary yet mundane errands, I am socially and even spiritually isolated. I won't go into the gruesome details of my current physical state, or certain aspects of my day-to-day living -- such as how I manage to eat, for example. These troublesome circumstances are so ghastly that even Satan himself would swoon. Let me just say that the majority of my days are now filled with reading, staring out the window, and writing.

The latter activity is the one I enjoy the most. I write macabre fiction mostly, since that is a subject I can easily identify with. My severed head is capable of imagining the most supernatural and horrific things which I have never read about anywhere else. And for some reason, the stories I write seem to be the only things that deliver me from my extreme loneliness.

My name is Sam Womack. I am headless and immortal.

-end-

Jason Earls is the author of the books, Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Red Zen, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Heartless Bast*rd In Ecstasy, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); } and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover's books, Neometropolis, Wretched & Violent, Mathworld, Chiaroscuro, Switchblade, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG's Speculative Fiction, AlienSkin, Escaping Elsewhere, Werewolf, Recreational and Educational Computing, Thirteen, Theatre of Decay, Nocturnal Ooze, Prime Curios, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Swallow's Tail, and other publications. He currently resides in Texas with his wife, Christine.