Every day, a 70-year-old retired woman bought 40 kg of meat from a familiar butcher. One day, the butcher decided to follow her, and when he saw where she kept the meat, he called the police.

Chapter 1: The Woman of the Butchers
The town of Oakhaven, Maine, in the fall often takes on a melancholic beauty. Chilling winds from the Atlantic wind seep through the cracks in the doors of Miller’s Prime Cuts butcher shop.

Frank Miller, a man in his fifties with rough hands and an apron always stained with dried blood, is cleaning the ice counter. The doorbell rings with a dry, sharp “ding.” He doesn’t need to look up to know who it is. Exactly 4 p.m., every day, for the past three years.

Eleanor Thorne enters. At 70, she still retains the refined appearance of a former biology professor: her neatly tied silver hair, sharp metal-rimmed glasses, and the faint scent of disinfectant mixed with lavender.

“Hello, Frank,” she says, her voice as still as a frozen lake. “The usual.”

Frank nodded, beginning to load the large plastic bags filled with scraps of meat, beef offal, and large chunks of ribs onto the scales. Total: 40 kg.

“Mrs. Eleanor,” Frank hesitated as he loaded the last bag of meat into the trunk of her old Volvo. “I don’t want to pry, but 40 kg of meat a day… Your German Shepherds must be as big as bears. Have you ever considered switching to cheaper dry food?”

Eleanor stopped, her thin hands gripping the handles of her bag. She looked straight into Frank’s eyes, a deep, empty gaze that sent a shiver down his spine.

“They can’t eat grain, Frank. They need real life.”

She got into her car and drove away, leaving Frank standing bewildered in the fog that was beginning to envelop the town.

Chapter 2: The Fortress of Silence
That night, Frank couldn’t sleep. He started doing calculations in his head. Forty kilograms of meat a day is more than a ton a month. Oakhaven is a small town; everyone knows each other. But no one had seen Eleanor walking her dog. No one had seen any animals roaming around her Blackwood Manor – a grey stone fortress perched isolated on a hilltop.

Moreover, Eleanor had lived alone since her husband, Dr. Thomas Thorne – a renowned marine biologist – disappeared in a shipwreck six years earlier.

Frank’s curiosity turned into a trembling unease. Something was wrong. The smell of fresh blood, the old woman’s solitude, and the 40 kilograms of meat haunted him.

The following afternoon, instead of staying at the shop after Eleanor left, Frank took off his apron, got into his pickup truck, and secretly followed the dark blue Volvo.

Blackwood Manor emerged in the blood-red twilight. Eleanor struggled to drag the bags of meat down the passageway to the basement. Frank hid behind an old oak tree, watching through binoculars. He saw her open a heavy steel door, which seemed to have been reinforced to prevent anything from escaping.

And then, he heard it.

A roar. Not a dog bark. It was a deep, suffocating sound, like boiling water mixed with the hiss of a giant reptile. The ground beneath Frank’s feet seemed to tremble slightly.

Horrored, Frank recoiled, bumping into an iron bucket with a loud crash. The basement door slammed shut. Eleanor appeared at the upstairs window, her eyes scanning the woods with extreme vigilance.

Frank rushed to his car, his heart pounding. He knew he couldn’t remain silent any longer. He picked up the phone: “Oakhaven Police Department speaking… I want to report a suspected animal abuse or… something far more disgusting at Blackwood Manor.”

Chapter 3: The Climax – The Revelation of the Mud
Fifteen minutes later, two state police patrol cars and Detective Elias Thorne (a distant relative of Eleanor) arrived at the scene. Frank was also there, his hands trembling.

“Eleanor, open the door! We have a search warrant!” Elias shouted through the megaphone.

The heavy oak door swung open. Eleanor stood there, strangely calm. She was still wearing her elegant beige dress, but there was a fresh, not yet dried, bloodstain on her sleeve.

“You are invading my privacy,” she said, her voice unwavering.

“We received reports of strange noises and an unusual amount of food, Eleanor. Show us the basement,” Elias ordered.

They descended the narrow staircase leading underground. The pungent smell of rotting flesh mixed with chemicals made one of the accompanying nurses nauseous. When the police flashlight swept across the final chamber, everyone fell silent.

In the middle of the cellar wasn’t a dog kennel. It was a massive glass tank filled with an amber liquid. And inside it…

A huge, slimy mass of flesh was pulsating. It had no fixed shape. Thin, thread-like tentacles and reddish muscle fibers intertwined. But most horrifying was the center of the creature: a human face, disfigured, flesh melting into organic tissue, yet its eyes remained wide open.

It was Thomas Thorne. Or at least, what remained of him.

Chapter 4: The Twist – The Testament of Loyalty
“My God, what have you done?” Elias collapsed, his gun trembling.

Eleanor approached the glass tank, placing her thin hand on it.

The creature inside pressed against the cold glass. The mass of flesh reacted by pressing its bright red flesh against her hand. A faint hiss escaped from the crevices of the mass.

“Thomas didn’t disappear in the shipwreck,” she said, her eyes filled with blind love and pain. “He found it in the Mariana Trench – a primitive parasite capable of perpetual cell regeneration. But an accident in his home lab infected him. It doesn’t kill its host; it assimilates and transforms the host into a part of itself.”

“You’ve been raising it for six years?” Frank stammered, horror etched on his face.

“I didn’t raise it. I raised my husband!” Eleanor shrieked, her composure finally breaking for the first time. “He’s still there! He still recognizes me! 40 kg of meat a day is to keep that bio-mass from eating away at Thomas’s brain. If it gets hungry, it will start digesting the remaining human parts in that glass tank. I promised him… in his last verbal will before he lost his human form, he begged me: ‘Don’t let me disappear completely into the darkness.’ I kept my promise at all costs!”

The brutal twist is revealed: Eleanor is not a murderer or a madwoman who enjoys raising monsters. She is a wife so loyal it’s disgusting, using her life and fortune to prolong the existence of a bio-ghost, simply because she cannot accept the silence of death.

Chapter 5: The Purge of Execution
The police cannot charge Eleanor with murder, since Thomas is technically still “alive.” But they cannot let that creature exist.

A week later, the federal bioreactor arrived. Eleanor stood on the hill, watching the men in yellow protective suits carry the glass tank out of her fortress. She didn’t cry. She just silently watched the truck drive away toward a secret military base – where her husband would become a permanent test subject in a sterile laboratory.

Frank Miller returned to his butcher shop. He no longer sold 40 kilograms of meat a day. The butcher shop was quiet, and every time he looked at the glistening slabs of meat on the counter, he saw Thomas Thorne’s eyes looking back at him.

The will of silence had ended. Eleanor had broken it to save her husband’s honor, but in the end, she had plunged him into another hell – the hell of in vitro immortality.

Chapter 6: The Writer’s Conclusion
The story ends with Eleanor Thorne sitting alone in the empty drawing-room of Blackwood Manor. She sipped her lavender tea, gazing out at the forest shrouded in darkness.

In the world of glamour and civilization, we often speak of eternal love. But we forget that sometimes immortality takes a terrifying form. Eleanor executed the will of love in the most brutal way, only to realize that: There are silences that must be respected, and there are deaths that must occur to preserve the last vestiges of human dignity.

In her cellar, the fresh bloodstains had been wiped away, but that deep, guttural hiss seemed to still echo in the dreams of the entire town of Oakhaven.

The author’s message: Never be too curious about the silence of others, for behind it may lie a burden you cannot bear. Love can be a healing balm, but it can also be a poison that transforms us into demons in the name of nobility.