A man, quite mad and raving, was found two days ago near the city center in Seattle. He'd been in and out of clinics, was well known to the emergency crew who picked him up, and was taken to be just another loony stretched too thin by alcohol and drug abuse. He died hours later in the emergency hospital after streaming endless epithets and bewildering fabrications at nobody in particular. He claimed to be hearing, or rather feeling voices, and the medics had no doubts he was, though not for the reasons he'd claimed. They sedated him and put him in a dry-out cell and looked in on him from time to time. He never, for any length of time, quieted during his nearly two-day stay.

They ran a standard background check on him and discovered he had a life-long history of this "madness" and also found that standard medications failed to reduce his episodes. They also found that he had no arrest record which was very uncommon for a patient who was so delusional. His birth record revealed he was a surviving twin, the sibling, badly mutated, having died at birth. Sometime during the night his shrieking stopped and a short time later a night nurse looked in on him. For the first time he was reported as still, quiet, and sleeping. In fact, he was dead. This was not discovered until early that morning. A pathologist's report established time of death at just past 2:30 am despite the claims of the attendants present that he was quite vocal even at 3:00 am during their walk-around.

An autopsy was ordered, it being the norm for unexplained deaths, and a horror beyond describing unfolded there on the coroner's table. His skull was opened and explored and nothing unusual was found. His brain was removed and later subjected to an MRI scan. His torso was opened with the intent to explore his organs for damage and possible clues to his madness. The coroner's knife struck a brittle object where no bone should have been, and on stripping back the skin there was revealed a ghastly image of a face just beneath the deceased man's inner membrane. On stripping this way there was no mistaking it - a mal-formed human face, a full head, in fact, was found entombed within this dead derelict.

It was completely without bone and cartilage, and the skin was a thin pale white translucence. Blind lidless eyes stared out of the man's gut, and a nearly transparent tongue lay behind tiny teeth, one of which had caught the coroner's scalpel. Long filaments of hair were dispersed throughout the corpse's body cavity, and the face showed evidence of a fine, long beard. The brain, clearly visible within the cranial membrane, was badly formed, but had a stem which reached to the spine of the cadaver. A secondary autopsy of this horror suggested to those present that this was, for all the 38 years of the host's life, a viable intelligence. The ears were quite functional, the muscle tissue around the mouth and where the jaw belonged were well formed, and the trachea and vocal cords were well developed. It was described in the report that this grotesque thing had spent it's entire life screaming silently within the other man's body.

Cause of death was found to be a severely damaged liver, part of which was found in the mouth and throat of the morbid, bodiless head.

Happy Halloween.