THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK - Strange devices, curious gadgets and other weird contraptions

An excerpt from THESE THINGS TAKE TIME.

She stared at him blankly, with her flat, cloudy
eyes and slightly ajar mouth, as he wearily undressed
beside the bed. He didn't want to look at her. His
eyes pretended to scan the room, but he didn't really
want to see anything else in here either. Old and
newly fashioned instruments littered the tops of small
tables and shelves and spilled onto the sticky floor,
all bearing the slightly disturbed aura of recent use.
Bizarre contraptions formed from greasy animal bones,
broken mouse traps and baby doll parts, ampules filled
with dried, white carcasses of strange, many-legged
bugs, and the reconfigured innards of countless
dismantled music boxes. He had never told her about
the similar items he’d found and half-heartedly toyed
with in his meandering inspection of the vacant units.
He never asked her what these things were for or what
caused her to build them. He didn't want to know what
she did in here. He didn't want to know the morbidity
that had afflicted his wife with its touch. He didn't
want to have any understanding of why the air in this
room was thicker now than in the rest of the
apartment, why the walls seemed so... damp.
He heard a splashing sound near his wife's head.
Greta's eyes never moved from him, or the indefinite
point in space she was staring at beyond him. He
looked past her to the nightstand and for the first
time, he saw the jar. He wished he didn't know what
that abhorrent thing in the jar was. Didn't want to
know anything about what it meant that it was writhing
in the yellow fluid the jar contained on their
nightstand. But he did. He had known before she had
even called his name.
She had coaxed another one of those damned things
out of the wall. Kept in her own urine. Blessings, she
called them. As was common of these matters, his
stomach sort of lurched when he saw this one. He
thought that it must have over sixty of those ugly,
little eyes. All of them tiny, black, festering,
jiggling beads, all engorged in a headskin plum of
smooth, purple fat, all leering at him, laughing. He
could taste the putrescence of their lust at the back
of his throat. He knew he had been promised to it. His
muscles tensed and puckered as he watched it swaying
its dark, eel-like tail through the yellow liquid,
flexing the opulent rings of thorny spines that
stemmed from just below the rim of its disgusting,
bulbous head.
"Touch it." Greta commanded through tight, barely
open lips. As if she thought she might tear her paper
skin by opening her mouth any wider. Randall timidly
did as she asked, hoping this would be all it took.
The past couple of times it hadn't been enough. He'd
had to do the other.