She'd been admitted to Saint Vedast's by her mother who didn't know what else to do, what with the news spouting off about so-and-so coming back from the dead and her own child now claiming to be deceased herself. It became too much for her, too confusing and upsetting and giving her problem to someone else was all she could think of.
Typical Cotard Delusion, they called it, also known as Walking Corpse Syndrome. The poor girl thought she'd been dead for weeks, ever since she fell off a bridge and into the river beneath. She claims she hit her head on sharp rocks and saw her brain break apart and get carried away by the current. In reality, according to her mother, though she did fall from the bridge she landed in shallow water, had a small cut on her head and moderate concussion.
Nothing would convince the child that she was still alive, no amount of hearing her own heartbeat or seeing her breath fog up a mirror made even the slightest bit of difference and the doctors were loathe to start her on anti-psychotics at such a young age, much less any strenuous or potentially stressful tests that might make her fragile mental state worse.
Then she began to describe the way she felt her body beginning to decay, the bloating of her stomach as bacteria broke down the remains of her last meal and released gas into a chamber that would eventually either rupture or release. She claimed she felt flies crawl over her in her sleep, laying their maggots inside her ears, her nose and open mouth.
She said she could feel them eating away at her and that when they grew up to lay eggs of their own in new hosts it would only make her death spread further. It was always her death, specifically hers and it was different from the way humans "used" to die. She said hers was a new death that trapped your soul inside a body that was no longer capable of living.
We didn't believe her until she tripped and cut open her knee, putrid maggot-ridden ooze poured out where her blood should have been and a cloud of greyish mist was released like mushroom spores. It was the beginning of the end for all of us, we just didn't know it at the time.
It affected some in a few hours, others took days before they began to feel their bodies decaying.
We were all like her.
We were dead all along.
We just didn't know it.
Typical Cotard Delusion, they called it, also known as Walking Corpse Syndrome. The poor girl thought she'd been dead for weeks, ever since she fell off a bridge and into the river beneath. She claims she hit her head on sharp rocks and saw her brain break apart and get carried away by the current. In reality, according to her mother, though she did fall from the bridge she landed in shallow water, had a small cut on her head and moderate concussion.
Nothing would convince the child that she was still alive, no amount of hearing her own heartbeat or seeing her breath fog up a mirror made even the slightest bit of difference and the doctors were loathe to start her on anti-psychotics at such a young age, much less any strenuous or potentially stressful tests that might make her fragile mental state worse.
Then she began to describe the way she felt her body beginning to decay, the bloating of her stomach as bacteria broke down the remains of her last meal and released gas into a chamber that would eventually either rupture or release. She claimed she felt flies crawl over her in her sleep, laying their maggots inside her ears, her nose and open mouth.
She said she could feel them eating away at her and that when they grew up to lay eggs of their own in new hosts it would only make her death spread further. It was always her death, specifically hers and it was different from the way humans "used" to die. She said hers was a new death that trapped your soul inside a body that was no longer capable of living.
We didn't believe her until she tripped and cut open her knee, putrid maggot-ridden ooze poured out where her blood should have been and a cloud of greyish mist was released like mushroom spores. It was the beginning of the end for all of us, we just didn't know it at the time.
It affected some in a few hours, others took days before they began to feel their bodies decaying.
We were all like her.
We were dead all along.
We just didn't know it.
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