For fifteen years, my husband seemed normal. Then he started cutting off his own body parts.

I loved my husband. I love my husband. George. We met studying abroad in Germany, and against all odds kept in contact when we returned to the United States. We dated a year before we got married and we had two kids shortly after, Zoe and Mark.

We didn’t have a perfect life, but we had a great one. George got a job writing for the local paper, and I supplemented our income with a part-time job at the library.

George was good at his job, too. If he’d been in a bigger city, I swear he would have won a Pulitzer for some of his stories. He pursued stories like a bloodhound. On two separate occasions, he solved a crime the police hadn’t figured out yet, and he kept the local politicians honest, a feat I’m not sure has been rivaled anywhere else in the world.

When he told me that he was working on the biggest story of his career, I knew it would be something special. He started working longer and longer hours, and he would come home with his hair messy, his shirts wrinkled and sweat-stained, and with dark circles under his eyes.

Every night, I wanted to tell him to stop, or at least take a break. I knew he never would, though. I pretended not to notice when he started losing weight. I packed him food to bring to work. Months passed and he kept losing weight. I began to miss his dad bod. I was afraid Zoe and Mark would notice. 

Then the newspaper went under. I was worried, of course, about George not having a job. But I admit, I was mostly relieved that he could finally stop chasing this story. For a few days, we lived a normal life again. George started looking for a new job and had some more time to work on projects around the house. 

On his third day home, I woke up to see a note on his pillow. “Gone to see about a lead. Back tonight. Love, G.” I could barely get the kids to school that morning. I called George’s cell phone, but it went straight to voicemail. I sent him a text, and then a few more. “Call me,” they said. “Stop this.” “Come home.”

I’m not sure what I did that day. I remember it feeling like time was moving slowly. Like the minutes were hours. But I do not remember anything I did until the kids got home from school. I made dinner and helped with their homework and got them to bed. Then I waited. And waited. 

It was after two when I saw George’s headlights in the driveway. Throughout our marriage, the newspaper job had kept George out late a few dozen times. Each time, he would walk in with a sheepish smile, as if to say, “Sorry I’m late, but I was saving the world.”

This time, there wasn’t even the faintest hint of a smile. His face looked grey, his eyes black. His clothes were damp and reeked of smoke and a briny smell that almost smelled like the ocean. He didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what to say. I helped him undress and crawl into bed. He immediately fell asleep. I lay next to him and watched him toss and turn the rest of the night. At several points, he cried out in his sleep, and I my neck went cold, followed by shivers up my spine.

George slept until noon, and then he stumbled out to the kitchen table and sat down. It wasn’t easy to say what I needed to say. I couldn’t even look at him. I told him he had to stop. That he was killing himself. That he was killing our marriage, our family. I kept going through tears, and when I got too choked up to continue, I turned to look at George.

He had cut all four fingers off his left hand. Blood had pooled onto the table and started to drip off onto the floor. I froze. George inspected the stumps of the four fingers he had just cut off, gave them a blow like he was blowing off sawdust, and put his hand down flat on the table. Without a second thought, he held the bloody saw attachment of his multitool to his thumb and started cutting.

“Stop!” I screamed, as I lunged across the table to wrestle the tool away from his grasp. He let me take it and then looked at me blankly for a few seconds. He looked down at his hand, and his eyes went wide. Tears immediately began to run down his face. He opened his mouth as if to scream, but no sound came out. 

I stood stunned, but not for long, I called an ambulance, and I went and grabbed a towel and tried to stop the bleeding a little. I gathered his fingers in a napkin. When the ambulance crew arrived, we told them that it was an accident. It seemed easier than trying to explain the truth.

At the hospital, George was put into surgery to try to reattach his fingers, and I went to pick up the kids from school and bring them back. We waited at the hospital for another couple hours before a doctor told us we could go see George.

George was all smiles in his hospital bed. His hand was wrapped in about a hundred feet of gauze. He talked about how it was an accident, he didn’t know what he was thinking, that’s why you should be careful with knives. But his smile seemed forced. And his eyes were still black.

We brought George home that night and he went right to sleep. It took longer to get the kids to bed. I didn’t make it to bed until late, and I couldn’t fall asleep until after the room started to get light at dawn. I was glad at the time that it was Saturday and I could sleep in. 

I slept until almost noon. I reached across the bed for George, but he wasn’t there. And his side of the bed was wet. I opened my eyes and saw blood. My breathing quickened, and I could feel a cold sweat form on my head. There was a lot of blood on that bed. I called for George and frantically looked around. 

The first thing I saw on the floor by his side of the bed, in a pool of blood, was his big toe. Around the big toe lay four smaller toes. A trail of blood led out of the room, down the hall, and into the garage. I’m not sure how I followed the trail. I felt like I was floating.

I opened the door to the garage and was hit by the squeal of the table saw. George had his back to me, so I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I had a guess. The saw made a different noise when it was cutting, and I must have stood at the door for a full minute, unable to bring myself closer, unwilling to see what I knew George was doing. In that time, George made ten cuts, then fifteen, twenty. I forced myself to move closer.

“George!” I shouted. “George, stop!”

He turned to me. Blood covered his clothes, his face, the table saw, the floor all around him, the wall behind him. It dripped from the ceiling. He had been cutting his arms off, a little bit at a time. Slices of his arm had piled up around the saw. More had fallen on the floor. The only thing I could see in the garage that wasn’t red was the white of George’s teeth as his smile grew and grew.

“That should just about do it,” he said. And then he fell to the ground.

By the time the ambulance got there, George was dead.

The weeks after my husband’s death went by in a blur. My sister’s family took in Zoe and Mark. I couldn’t sleep, so I tried sleeping pills, and then different sleeping pills, and then more sleeping pills. I started to fear overdosing, even as part of me welcomed the idea. And every time I started to sleep, I would see George’s smile from the garage, just one spot of white in a sea of red. 

I stopped trying to sleep. I barely ate. My clothes grew large on my frame. I lost track of days and nights. I became little more than an animal for a time. Maybe a little less.

And eventually, I decided to find out why my husband had chopped off his parts until he died.

I wish I could tell you the investigation gave me new life, but I probably looked more like a zombie than ever. I spent all my time in front of a computer screen in a dark room, reading the notes my husband had made for his article.

What I read seemed like something I would have dismissed immediately if I had read it in a tabloid. But these were my husband’s notes, and something had made him do what he did, so I read on.

The notes all involved mysterious events centered around a small town about an hour away. The locals attributed the events to aliens, to secret government experiments, to cultists, to God. None of the stories were believable, really. One involved a boy gone missing who showed up ten years later the same age he was when he disappeared. Others involved ghosts, or aliens, or Bigfoot. 

I couldn’t see what made my husband give these any credence until I saw an article about cult activity in the town. The group was known as either The Brethren, or The Brethren of the Impure Prophet. The town had been growing steadily for several years. The rest of my husband’s notes were about The Brethren until the last page, which was handwritten, and it was just an address. 

Before I could even think about it, I was in the car, following directions to the address on my phone. I don’t even know what time it was, but it was the middle of the night. The route pulled me into the town from the stories, through its small downtown, and into a neighborhood that seemed like it would have fit in pretty much anywhere in the country. Except for the address at the destination. It was just a patch of dirt with a small, shed-sized building in the center. 

I felt cold as I got out of the car. My hands were shaking so bad I tried to shove them in my pockets and then cursed these pants for not having pockets. I crossed my arms and tried to slow my breathing. As I got closer to the building, a tiny voice in my mind told me to go back, to forget all this. But I kept going. I had to see why.

The door to the building was hanging slightly ajar, so I pulled it open and saw an elevator door behind it. One button: down. I pushed it. The door opened, revealing an elevator that seemed perfectly normal except for where it was located. 

I took a big breath and I got in. Only two buttons were on the inside: G, B. I pressed B, for basement, I guessed. The doors closed, and the elevator started moving. It went down for a long time. I didn’t think to start timing it for a few minutes, but after I did, it was twelve minutes to the bottom.

It opened to a cave. Inside the cave, people in robes tended to bonfires. Hundreds of people, dozens of bonfires. The ceiling of the cavern was too high to see.

One of the robed people looked up at me as I stood in the elevator. She smiled, and waved me in her direction. The hand she waved had four stubs instead of fingers. I took one step in her direction, then another. As I approached her, she slowly turned and started walking away before turning back and motioning for me to keep following.

I followed her as she weaved her way through all the other people and fires. I could see sleeping bags and blankets scattered everywhere. She brought me to a hot spring, and motioned for me to get in. I put a foot in, and I found the water comforting. Pleasantly warm. It seemed to be welcoming me inside of it. I went down to my neck and then took a deep breath and went under.

I kept my eyes open for as long as I could, but the brilliance under that water was too much. Lights, shapes, colors, objects and patterns of bizarre geometry, all twisting together before my eyes, and it is hard to describe, but it was like some of what I saw was behind my eyes as well.

I don’t remember much of my trip home. I have flashes of riding the elevator, of driving the car. A flash of opening the door to the house and stepping inside, flashes of turning the computer on and typing this. 

I don’t remember cutting off the fingers of my left hand. What I do know is this: I have seen the hole in the universe, and I have to make myself fit.