The Carver

By PROJECT MONROE · Melodic Death Metal · From the album A FULL YEAR OF MURDER

Elias Crowe hadn't always been the Carver. He was born Elias Harlan in a dust-choked Nebraska farmhouse in 1978, the kind of place where the wind howled like a dying animal and the fields stretched empty as a grave. His mother, Ruth, was a hollow-eyed woman who'd once dreamed of nursing school but ended up birthing six kids to a man who beat her like she was the reason the crops failed. Elias was the youngest, the "accident," as his father called him—small, quiet, with eyes that watched everything too closely.

It started with the animals. At seven, Elias found a litter of kittens in the barn, mewling blind things. His father drowned them in a bucket one rainy afternoon, laughing as bubbles rose. "Weak things die," he slurred. That night, Elias snuck out and slit his father's prize hog's throat with a pocketknife, watching the blood arc hot and black in the moonlight. He pressed his hands into the wound, felt the life pump out in sticky pulses. It wasn't anger; it was curiosity. What made something stop being alive? What did the inside feel like?

By twelve, the farm was a slaughterhouse of secrets. Rabbits went missing from hutches, their pelts tacked to the barn wall in bloody mandalas. His siblings whispered he was "touched," but Ruth knew. She'd catch him staring at her bruises, his face blank, and she'd lock her door at night. Therapy? In rural Nebraska? They sent him to Pastor Jennings instead, who preached about sin and demons. Elias sat through the sermons, nodding, but in his mind, he imagined peeling the pastor's skin like cornhusks, layer by layer, to see if God hid underneath.

The breaking point came at fifteen. His father, drunk again, backhanded Ruth so hard her eye socket cracked like eggshell. Elias waited until the old man passed out, then dragged him to the barn. He used the meat hooks—the same ones for hanging beef. Hoisted him up by the ankles, naked and snoring. When his father woke, Elias was already cutting. Shallow lines at first, tracing veins like a map. The screams echoed off the rafters. He flayed the thighs, peeling muscle from bone in quivering strips, the cleaver rising and falling with wet thuds that drowned out the pleas. By dawn, what hung there wasn't a man anymore—just parts, dripping, the floor a slick red lake. Elias ate a piece of the liver raw, warm and iron-rich, to "take in the strength." Ruth found him there, covered in gore, smiling for the first time she could remember. She called the sheriff, but Elias was gone by then, hitchhiking east with a duffel of tools and a new name.

Years blurred in the underbelly of cities: butcher shops where he learned the trade, dissecting carcasses with surgical glee. But animals weren't enough. The itch grew, a psychological worm burrowing deeper. Psychiatrists would call it dissociative psychopathy, born from trauma—a mind fractured by abuse, rewired to crave control through destruction. Elias saw it as evolution. Killing wasn't about hate; it was intimacy. Stripping away the shell to touch the raw, pulsing core. Each victim was a puzzle: How long could the heart beat outside the chest? What sound did a spine make when snapped section by section?

He'd been arrested once, in Chicago, for a bar fight that left a man with his intestines spilling like wet rope. But the shrinks declared him "rehabilitated" after six months in a ward, where he learned to mimic sanity like a chameleon. Released, he vanished again, building his freezer sanctum in an abandoned warehouse on the city's edge.

Now, at forty-seven, the freezer door groaned open at 3:07 a.m., the air thick with blood-mist that painted the bulb pink. Elias stepped inside, apron stiff with crusted remnants, boots sucking at the perpetual red slime on the floor. Claire hung upside-down, ankles chained to the rail, wrists zip-tied, her runner's body trembling in the cold. She was just meat now, but in his mind, she was Ruth—fragile, breakable, a vessel for the old wounds.

He started with the filleting knife, dragging from sternum to pubic bone, the blade whispering through skin like tearing wet silk. Fingers hooked under the cut, he ripped, flaps peeling down in crimson sheets. Her abdominal muscles shone briefly before blood flooded everything. A nicked artery hosed his face; he swallowed the spray, tasting her fear-salted life.

Flashbacks flickered as he worked: his father's gurgling screams, the hog's warm gush. He shoved a hand into her cavity, squelching through intestinal loops that coiled like lovers' arms. Pruning shears clipped fingers—snip, spin, trail red. Stumps wept. He severed Achilles tendons with pops, sawed heels until bone shards glittered in the meat.

Hauling intestines out, yards slithering in steaming ropes—the stomach tore free, slapping the tray; liver slid like bloody sausage, veins bursting. He fisted into it, scooping mush that oozed between knuckles, warm as childhood memories.

The reciprocating saw screamed through her pelvis, dust and blood clouding pink. The symphysis cracked like wishbones; organs avalanched—kidneys tumbling, bladder gushing acrid mix. Up into the chest, he gripped her heart, squeezed until rupture (soft pop), ripped it down with canvas tears. Fountain hit ceiling, rained thick.

Her eyes moved as he sawed the throat—crunch, head away, stump pulsing to stillness.

Disassembly: Cleaver thocked knees off, splashes; thighs split, muscle peeled in strips, fat scraped with teeth. Ribs snapped backward like kindling, torn free with sucks, lungs shredded in fistfuls like deflating bags.

By 5:42 a.m., packages stacked: filets, rolls, ovals. Skull cleaned, brain simmering like pork.

He hosed the floor, drain choking clots. Licked blood from thumb.

The worm itched less now. But tomorrow, it would writhe again.

It always did.

About Melodic Death Metal

A Gothenburg-originated fusion of death metal extremity with soaring melodies and harmonized guitar leads, balancing brutality with accessibility and emotional depth. Bands include: In Flames, At the Gates, Dark Tranquility

More from PROJECT MONROE