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The police were coming.
He sat on the edge of the bed, back rigid. His palms were damp from checking and checking the locks, from smoothing and smoothing the blanket that had never stayed smooth for more than a minute. He knew it. He knew they were coming. They figured him out.
In the closet across the room, under a single hanging shirt, Paul McCartney’s body lay folded away for the past four days. It was nothing but a secret kept too long, but now it was evidence. Evidence that he wasn’t Paul. He closed the door on it all since the day he had done it. Told himself the smell would stop with the time. Time had not stopped it. Time had only taught the odor how to seep. It curled into the very grain of the floorboards. There were phases of the smell, ones that William had kept journaled in his pocket notebook. He scribbled down the word sour at first, putrid, fermented shit, then it was presence. And presence was scribbled down four times. Then four more times. Then again and again. Four and four and four and four. Over and over. The presence pressed at William’s ribs. It pressed at the back of his throat till there was no way he could not breathe around it.
There was only one way to hide it. He knew, with the clean, terrible certainty of a mind that had learned to latch onto one answer and refuse alternatives, that if he could contain the smell inside himself, let it sit where no one else could find it, then there was no way he could be guilty. No way they could smell the decaying fat coming from his closet.
He opened it.
He did not look for detail. He did not catalog limbs or faces or anything that would anchor him to the world’s sick geometry. He saw shadow and cloth and the angle of a jawline he had once obsessed over in photographs. The smell enveloped him.
It wasn’t just a smell anymore. It was a texture, meat thick, putrefaction pressing against his tongue every time he opened his mouth. He could feel it coating his teeth, but he couldn’t stop eating. He had to. More and more rot was shoved into his mouth and there was nothing he could do but gag around it. The sour stench was solid now. It was like spoiled stuffing crammed into him. It sat heavy at his chest, rotting from the inside out. The air itself had gone spoiled and every breath was another mouthful of decay. His stomach twisted, bile rising up fast, and he vomited over the floorboards. Yellow and stringy, bitter with acid, the puddle reeked instantly as it mixed with the smell already there. He stared at it, trembling. They’d test it, he thought. The police would come and test the puddle, and in it they would see proof. Proof of rot. Proof of guilt. His hands continued to shake as he clawed it back, scooping with his fingers, shoving it into his mouth, choking on the sour sting of bile and sick decay. It burned. It scraped. And his teeth ground against it. It was vomit and slime and shit-taste all mixed with Paul McCartney’s flavor. He gagged again, but swallowed. He had to. It was the only way to keep it inside. Erase the evidence.
He pressed his palms against his belly and it already felt tight, swollen, stretched with everything he had forced down. But it wasn’t enough. The smell was still leaking out of the closet, he knew. His head buzzed. His notebook was still in his pocket, numbers and words scrawled over pages. Presence. Presence. Presence. Presence.
The sight of Paul McCartney now only made him want to reel again. His skin had gone wax, flesh soft, collapsing. But yet it still crawled into him, wrapped itself around his lungs. He clamped his eyes shut as if that could stop it, but his mind betrayed him, feeding him pictures of fat splitting under pressure, meat sloughing away in his mouth, wet and stringy. He could feel it between his teeth. Rubbery, bloated, popping and sliding. He gagged again and again, gagged until strings of spit hung from his lips, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop tasting it. The rancid grease rolled down his throat and the rot turned to paste against his tongue. His belly was swelling with all the flesh that was shoved into his mouth, stuffed with spoiled meat and bile. His ribs hurt. His throat shrunk to a pinhole. He staggered back and slammed against the wall, clutching himself, gasping, laughing in short desperate bursts.
The smell pressed harder. His skin crawled, hot and damp, sweat dripping down his temples. He could feel it oozing into his pores, sliding under his skin. It was ballooning him up. He pressed both fists against his stomach and swore he could feel it bulge under his hands. He could feel it moving inside him, squeezing through his veins, clogging his throat. His head pulsed, filling with pressure, eyes burning until he swore blood was leaking from them. His skull throbbed and swelled, bigger, bigger, too big to hold steady on his neck. He laughed again, high and wet and broken, laughing because it was too late, because he was caught already. They’d cut him open, he thought. The police would cut him open and there it would all be, spilling out of him. The rot, the rancid meat, the stuffing. They’d see that for once that Paul was wearing his skin all along. In the end, he was Paul. He would die, suffocate from the rot clogging his throat. And yet, he would die Paul.
The laughter dissolved into wheezing, then gagging, his chest squeezed shut, the smell pressing in from every corner until his vision collapsed to pinpricks of light. He dropped sideways onto the floorboards, still laughing and choking, until he was finally out of it.
—
When he woke up nothing had changed. The closet still stood. The shirt still hung. The smell still seeped. His stomach felt hard, stretched, bloated with human meat and half digested bile. His lips were cracked with the taste of acid. He sat there in the stink. First his eyes slid toward the thing in the closet, what was left of Paul’s body. You couldn’t even call it Paul anymore. Just a heap of meat slumped under a shirt, sagging into itself. Then he looked down at his trousers. They clung wet to his thighs, dark and heavy. He couldn’t tell what fluid it was from. Maybe it was all of them mashed together into a damp crust that stuck to his skin. He was certain if he didn’t change soon that it would rot into his skin.
The police didn’t come. They were never coming. Only the stink came. Only the spoiled meat in his gut, swelling, rotting, pressing back up his throat. He was absurd. But he laughed anyway. He laughed and laughed and laughed until it shook his ribs, until vomit bursted out hot across his chest, dripping down his chin. This time he didn’t scrape it back into his mouth. He didn’t need to. No one was coming for him. No one knew.
He was Paul McCartney.