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Guillermo followed Laszlo’s beckoning bellows into the study, only to find Nadja strapped naked to a table with Laszlo bent over her splayed form, listening to her chest with a hearing trumpet. Guillermo very deliberately didn’t look at her nude body. He still could never figure out whether they wanted him to look at them or practice discretion in these situations. It didn’t help that the answer was never the same twice in a row.
“Mas-Nandor says that I don’t have to help you with your sex stuff if I don’t want to.”
Laszlo scoffed. “Get your head out of the gutter. This isn’t sex stuff, this is a medical emergency.”
The lines between the two often blurred when it came to these two, Guillermo thought as he recalled a foreskin caught on a taxidermy fox’s tooth.
“Now— don’t be such a prig, for fuck’s sake, look here,” Laszlo said. The words look here carried that familiar tug on Guillermo’s consciousness. He could practically feel his vertebrae grind as he turned his head unwillingly.
Laszlo was bent over Nadja’s body, the two of them framed like a painting in the wan candlelight. His hand clasped a marker, which he was using to mark dashed lines across her torso. The contours of her body, her skin glowing in the pale light, gave the appearance of a wave-shaped shoreline at night.
Guillermo, in his determination to get through this experience with a minimum of knowledge acquired, did not account for how much Laszlo enjoyed the sound of his own voice.
“You remember when we went swimming off of Great Kills Beach?” Laszlo said, not looking up from his careful demarcation of his wife’s abdomen. “My darling ingested this infernal invertebrate with every intention of disgorging it later, but this blasted creature has made itself content somewhere in her ventral cavity.”
“It kept slipping through my fingers, so I had to catch it with my mouth.” Nadja shrugged, the motion limited by the ties criss-crossing her body.
Guillermo vaguely remembered Nadja crowing about catching something when they had last been to the beach, but he had thought at the time that she had just picked a fight with another seagull.
“Fortunately,” he continued. He stood up and extended a hand towards Guillermo, eyes not leaving Nadja. “I have some surgical expertise. Gizmo, scalpel.”
None of the objects arranged on the metal tray on the other side of the table appeared to be a scalpel. Guillermo grabbed what looked like a rusted kitchen knife and passed it over.
“There we go,” Laszlo replied, and without delay began to slice along the lines he had drawn, the knife parting skin and fat and flesh in its wake as Nadja peered down at her body dispassionately. He angled his wrist, and suddenly he was cutting beneath it all, fileting the flesh of her ribs like a fish until the tissues of her upper body could be peeled back and pinned to the table.
Guillermo’s stomach turned. He didn’t want to look, but his eyes were drawn inexorably to the flash of the blade. “It looks like you have it handled, so I’ll just go—”
“I need you to hold my ribs open,” Nadja said, as if she were merely discussing some candles she wanted replaced.
“What?” Guillermo stammered.
“If you don’t, they’ll keep trying to stitch themselves back together, and it’ll be a fucking nuisance,” Nadja replied.
Guillermo swallowed. He saw Laszlo pull a saw from the metal tray of implements that seemed more suitable for home repair than surgery, but he rounded the table and came to stand at its head.
Laszlo started to cut, the horrible sawing sound as it ground through bone the only noise in the room. He pried the ribcage open, revealing bits of the creamy marrow in its center, and gestured for Guillermo to grab their edges. Guillermo could feel them pull at his grip as if they had a mind of their own, driven to stitch themselves back together.
He looked down as if peering over the edge of a perilous high balcony. He could see the cold, clammy insides, not the colors from the high school textbook diagrams, but not the proper color either, not the expected warm reds. A cool pallor had settled over the wet pinks and maroons of these organs, a strange reflection of the greens of the walls. Nestled between them like a mussel in its shell, its soft surfaces rigorously clinging to the smooth, hard surfaces of her ribcage, was something pearlescent white, shimmering in blues and violets like sunscreen washing off in water. It looked like a living vein of opal embedded in rock, its weak pulsing the only indication it was alive.
Laszlo reached in and pulled at it, but he struggled to unwind it from where it clung to her lungs and heart. Some of its tentacles had nestled their way into the flesh of her lungs; Guillermo could see one sliding out of a slit in the tissue as Laszlo yanked at it.
“Reach in there, Gizmo, and give me a hand,” Laszlo commanded. Guillermo groaned miserably but complied.
As Guillermo’s hand approached, the thing flung itself away from its nestled space and lunged towards his hand. Guillermo flinched back, a moment too late. The strange creature had slid onto Guillermo’s hand and was now clinging for dear life. Its flesh felt slick and soft like the underside of his tongue.
In the split second before his mind caught up to what was happening, Guillermo saw that it was not quite an octopus or a squid, but something in-between. Guillermo could see the fleshy hollows of its empty eye sockets, gently pulsing like the tentacles wrapped around his hand.
A pinprick of pain made his mind snap to the present and he screamed. He shook his hand to get it loose, finally dislodging it and launching it to the floor, where it landed with a quiet splort.
“For fuck’s sake be careful!” Laszlo hollered.
“Don’t you dare hurt it!” Nadja shrieked.
“Why?” Guillermo said. Clutching his knees, he tried to catch his breath after his burst of panic.
“We’re going to put it in that tank over there and raise it,” Nadja said, nodding her head towards the dusty aquarium that Guillermo had not noticed previously.
Guillermo looked down, bewildered. The creature lay on the floor, as wet and fleshy as a newborn kitten. It certainly hadn’t intended to end up in Nadja’s chest cavity. He leaned over to pick it up, carefully, and slid it into the tank, where it began to slowly propel itself around its new home.
A thin trickle of blood dripped down his hand. Inside the tank, the creature unfurled its web of tentacles like a flower, revealing sharp spines beneath. Nadja and Laszlo peered over at it in awe.
“Oh, it’s a vampire squid! In spirit, if not in genus.”
“Oh, Laszlo, it’s just like us,” Nadja said.
“Congratulations to the happy parents. Can I go now?” he asked.
“Yes, yes, whatever,” Laszlo said, too busy unclipping Nadja’s chest tissue from its pins to look over.
Guillermo hurried out of the room. He needed to go wash his hands. And maybe disinfect them.