He fell hard to one side. She fell too, landing on top of him, feeling the beat of his heart slow, watching the pool of blood behind his head grow, weeping softly as the light in his eyes slowly faded away to nothing.
The four days that followed passed by like shadows on the curtains. Little Jessica Matthews managed to crawl off her attacker and into the corner of the room but was too terrified to go any further. She stayed there, without food or water or sleep, looking across at his body and that of her dead mother.
On the third night she could have sworn she heard her mother call out her name and shift towards her. She stared hard into her mother’s cold glassy eyes, willing her to say something else, willing her to move and wrap her up in her loving arms. It would only be years later, after she had trained in pathology, that she would learn the sound was simply the result of built-up gases escaping from her mother’s body as a result of decomposition.
Lighting streaming through the curtains on the fourth morning showed that her mother’s skin had begun to develop dark, bruise-like patches all over and had started to swell up significantly. Fluids began to seep out of every orifice and there was a strong smell of decay in the air. A smell that would stay with her for the rest of her life.
That same afternoon, alerted by concerned neighbours and work colleagues, police broke into the house. They found her father dead from multiple stab wounds at the foot of the stairs. It seemed he had used the last of his strength to try to reach his wife and child upstairs but had been unable to make it.
Jessica herself was close to death. She was badly dehydrated and malnourished and had painful sores on her legs and buttocks from barely having moved since seeing her mother murdered before her very eyes. Rushed to hospital, she spent the next two weeks in intensive care.
It was clear what had happened and what she had witnessed, but child psychologists cautioned against asking her to relive any part of her ordeal. Her mind, they said, was far too fragile and still in deep shock. There would, they insisted, come a time when she would be able to deal with what had happened, but it might be many years away.
Two months later Jessica left hospital and was taken into the care of a foster family. With the help of extensive trauma counselling, she slowly began to rebuild her life. Much to everyone’s surprise, there seemed to be little long-term damage as a result of what had happened to her. She enrolled at a new school, made friends easily and quickly began to warm to her new mother and father who did their best to make her feel welcome in their home. Two years later, they adopted her, changing her name to Robertson.
No one ever brought up what had happened to her parents or what she had done to defend herself, and Jessica never showed any inclination to speak about it. She became a normal, somewhat shy, happy-go-lucky and occasionally troublesome teenager before knuckling down to study for her exams.
She had dreamed of becoming a doctor since the age of twelve and worked hard to make it into medical school. It was only while she was there that the seemingly long-forgotten trauma of what had happened to her as a child finally returned with a vengeance.
It was towards the end of her first year as a medical student, during an anatomy class, that she saw a dead body close up for the first time since witnessing her mother’s murder. The class involved learning about the position of the organs of the body by dissecting a corpse.
Matthews did not react when the white sheet was drawn back to reveal the freshly chilled body. She did not react when the tutor pointed out the first signs of putrefaction on the skin, indicating bruise-like marks similar to those that had appeared on the body of her mother in the days following her death.
Nothing untoward occurred until Matthews was invited to make the first incision into the corpse. As the scalpel pierced into the skin, something happened. Something utterly unexpected. At first she attributed the tingling sensation to something to do with nerves, but it grew and grew. Then for a moment it felt as though time had stood completely still.
Her breathing went from being fully relaxed to little more than a series of short, desperate gasps. An electric tingling sensation began to spread out from between her thighs. The feelings grew and grew until she felt as though she were going to explode. Muscles all over her body started to go into contraction; her hands began to tighten up. Her back started to arch against her will. Her legs began to tremble, her toes started to curl under, and from somewhere deep within her belly she heard herself let out a low, guttural moan.
Desperate to hide what was happening from the other students in the class, Matthews faked a fainting fit, collapsing to the ground in dramatic fashion. It seemed to work. Students were always fainting during the early years of medical training, especially when it came to the less savoury parts of medicine, so her classmates were none the wiser.
Only Matthews herself knew the truth of what had happened. It had not by any means been her first orgasm, but it had been by far the best.
Her initial shock soon turned to concern. She knew what had happened to her parents and, although she could remember almost nothing about the night her mother died and the days that followed, she was also vaguely aware that she had been the victim of something brutal and violent. But none of that answered the question that was now ringing throughout her mind: what on earth was wrong with her if she reacted in that way to death?
It did not take long for her to discover that she was not alone. The links between death and sexual arousal were everywhere, and her position as a medical student gave her access to vast amounts of information on the condition. Both the legendary seducer Casanova and the controversial physician Magnus Hirschfeld wrote about women who masturbated while viewing public executions. Casanova personally witnessed the execution of a French criminal who had attempted to kill the king. He was tortured first with red-hot pincers; then the hand he had used in the attempted assassination was burned down to the bone using sulphur, molten wax, lead and boiling oil. Horses were then harnessed to his arms and legs and made to run in different directions with the intention of pulling him apart. Despite being in absolute agony, the man’s limbs refused to separate and he did not die. Finally the executioner used a sharp knife to cut into the man’s joints and the body was successfully torn apart. And all the while at least two couples in the middle of the crowd had frantic, passionate sex while they were watching the spectacle.
Matthews read on, flushed with excitement at the images flooding through her head. She learned that, so common was the notion of arousal by the sight of death during these times, it was said the best way for an Englishman to break down a woman’s resistance or scruples was simply to get her to attend a public execution. It was rated even more highly than wine.
She discovered that similar scenes were witnessed during Roman times. Their mass games, which included battles to the death between noble gladiators and desperate slaves, also included all manner of sexual shenanigans, followed by the mutilation and murder of those involved. The Empresses Messalina and Theodora routinely masturbated and had sex in the stands while watching these events.
From there Matthews read up on sexual deviation and decided she had developed necrosadism, a powerful fetish in which corpses led to sexual arousal. Her fetish was unusual, that was for sure, but, having discovered it, she realized that she had found the perfect way to service it at no risk to others. So long as she remained in the medical professional and had regular access to corpses, her needs would be satisfied and she would want for nothing more. Or so she thought.