His heart was beating him. A great fist was breathing inside of his chest, trying to escape the barriers of his ribcage, a cage formed to hold the beating animal vomiting a black, rotten soup of cancer that swirled around inside of his body, carving streams of red hatred rushing with anger and hate, crushing all in its path, and returning through tunnels coloured into icy-blue by sloth and decay, poison of knives that was carving through his flesh and acid that vaporized inside his veins until he became bloated with decay so that the fumes threatened to burst his skin and let the toxins out, out into the world so they could see him, see him for what he truly was and what he had become.

It pounded restlessly onto his soul, thrashing it with blows that vibrated his body with force that felt like pure evil that wanted him dead. His own heart wanted his life. It wanted to disembowel his soul and stuff it like a trophy onto the wall. It wanted to extinguish his blood upon the surface of the marble floor to give it an illusion of colour. It wanted him dead, the one thing he had hoped that he could rely on, that was his life and his feeling. But now this very feeling threatened to kill him.

Dunk, dunk, dunk, it sounded like a hammer striking the anvil forming the iron into steel. It told him he was alive, told him that something was still driving him forward, that something forced him, endlessly, to exist. But then he realised something. His heart sounded different. But still, not. It sounded as it always had sounded, which is a way that it never had sounded. Du-dunk, du-dunk, du-dunk. Two beats. All the time. Not one, but two. All hearts beat twice, he knew that. But that meant that his heart was beating him twice. It was someone else inside of his heart. Someone who was beating him. Someone who wanted him to die. Someone who rested inside of him, and had a fist holding the source of his blood, filling it to the brim with poison and knives, cancer and decay. And this someone hated him, and wanted him to die.

He listened to the beating fists, one of which was him, and the other was himself and someone else. He listened, as they tortured his soul and flesh, and eventually faded from existence, drifting into the cold cradle of the grave when they had destroyed everything that was him.