The Sleeping Beauty Effect.

Everyone knows how strange traditions can be. (Not one of my best stories.)

The Sleeping Beauty Effect.

A short story by Kim Mathews.

         No one remembered when it started, or why; the only people who were alive at that time were the Elders of the village, and even they had been but swaddling babes when it begun. ‘It’ referring to the unique preservation of its citizens upon deaths arrival, that is.

         As parchment was both expensive and rare in this part of the world, the village at some point in time had begun the practice of making the skin of its departed into Vellum for book bindings and pages, which would then be added to the hundreds of others in the village library.

         Now, as it so happened, there had been not been a death in the township for some years, so when the village doctor was found slumped over at his desk, the populous was not at all depressed; quite the opposite, due to the fact that over the last few months there had been much clamor for a copy of Holts' and Tramer's Guide to the Human Anatomy.

         A few days after the Book Binders had come for the good doctor, his now widow was leafing through his notes, as he had always been most private concerning them. Most of them, as she had presumed, dealt simply with the everyday mumps and pox that had plagued them all at one point or another. As she stood up to walk of restlessness, though, a brown folder managed to separate itself from the remaining manila ones and fell to the floor with a light thud.

         Curiosity gripped her as she picked up the unknown folder. Opening it, she saw a fresh page of notes with the heading “Sleeping Beauty Effect” Her features composed a face of confusion as she read his attempts to make what he had dubbed an ‘anesthetic’ to put ones patients to sleep, allowing for more invasive procedures. Her confusion changed to horror as she continued to read how, unable to find a willing test subject, he had chanced to try the concoction on himself only days earlier.

         With a yell of pure horror, she tore from the room and out her front door, only to hear the piercing scream of a person’s skin being ripped from their still-living body echo throughout the village.

Author's Note

Not one of my best works... Sorry!

Reviews

[Bare trees]

Holy crap, that was a weird story. What a creepy tradition too. I didn't think it was bad at all. The beginning of the third paragraph is in some disaray, but other then that I wouldn't call this bad. Glad I read it. Creepy and scary.