The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  Dragged myself back here and spent last night shivering and crying with frustration. I disinfected the head wound, which is just above the right temporal lobe, and bandaged it as well as I could. Just a superficial scalp wound plus minor concussion, I think, but my ankle . . . it’s a bad break, involved in two places, possibly three.

  How will I chase the birds now?

  It had to be a plane looking for survivors from the Callas. In the dark and the storm, the lifeboat must have carried miles from where it sank. They may not be back this way.

  God, my ankle hurts so bad.

  February 2

  I made a sign on the small white shingle of a beach on the island’s south side, where the lifeboat grounded. It took me all day, with pauses to rest in the shade. Even so, I fainted twice. At a guess, I’d say I’ve lost twenty-five pounds, mostly from dehydration. But now, from where I sit, I can see the four letters it took me all day to spell out; dark rocks against the white sand, they say HELP in characters four feet high. Another plane won’t miss me.

  If there is another plane.

  My foot throbs constantly. There is swelling still and ominous discoloration around the double break. Dis coloration seems to have advanced. Binding it tightly with my shirt alleviates the worst of the pain, but it’s still bad enough so that I faint rather than sleep.

  I have begun to think I may have to amputate.

  February 3

  Swelling and discoloration worse still. I’ll wait until tomorrow. If the operation does become necessary, I believe I can carry it through. I have matches for sterilizing the sharp knife, I have needle and thread from the sewing kit. My shirt for a bandage.

  I even have two kilos of “painkiller,” although hardly of the type I used to prescribe. But they would have taken it if they could have gotten it. You bet. Those old blue-haired ladies would have snorted Glade air freshener if they thought it would have gotten them high. Believe it!

  February 4

  I’ve decided to amputate my foot. No food for four days now. If I wait any longer, I run the risk of fainting from combined shock and hunger in the middle of the operation and bleeding to death. And, as wretched as I am, I still want to live. I remember what Mockridge used to say in Basic Anatomy. Old Mockie, we used to call him. Sooner or later, he’d say, the question comes up in every medical student’s career: how much shock-trauma can the patient stand? And he’d whack his pointer at his chart of the human body, hitting the liver, the kidneys, the heart, the spleen, the intestines. Cut to its base level, gentlemen, he’d say, the answer is always another question: how badly does the patient want to survive?

  I think I can bring it off.

  I really do.

  I suppose I’m writing to put off the inevitable, but it did occur to me that I haven’t finished the story of how I came to be here. Perhaps I should tie up that loose end in case the operation does go badly. It will only take a few minutes, and I’m sure there will be enough daylight left for the operation for, according to my Pulsar, it’s only nine past nine in the morning. Ha!

  I flew to Saigon as a tourist. Does that sound strange? It shouldn’t. There are still thousands of people who visit there every year in spite of Nixon’s war. There are people who go to see car wrecks and cockfights, too.

  My Chinese friend had the merchandise. I took it to Ngo, who pronounced it very high-grade stuff. He told me that Li-Tsu had played one of his jokes four months ago and that his wife had been blown up when she turned on the ignition of her Opel. Since then there had been no more jokes.

  I stayed in Saigon for three weeks; I had booked passage back to San Francisco on a cruise ship, the Callas, first-class cabin. Getting on board with the merchandise was no trouble: for a fee Ngo arranged for two Customs officials to simply wave me on after running through my suitcases. The merchandise was in an airline flight bag, which they never even looked at.

  “Getting through US Customs will be much more difficult,” Ngo told me. “That, however, is your problem.”

  I had no intention of taking the merchandise through US Customs. Ronnie Hanelli had arranged for a skin diver who would do a certain rather tricky job for $3,000. I was to meet him (two days ago, now that I think of it) in a San Francisco flophouse called the St Regis Hotel. The plan was to put the merchandise in a waterproof can. Attached to the top was a timer and a packet of red dye. Just before we docked, the canister was to be thrown overboard – but not by me, of course.

  I was still looking for a cook or a steward who could use a little extra cash and who was smart enough – or stupid enough – to keep his mouth closed afterward, when the Callas sank.

  I don’t know how or why. It was storming, but the ship seemed to be handling that well enough. Around eight o’clock on the evening of the 23rd, there was an explosion somewhere belowdecks. I was in the lounge at the time, and the Callas began to list almost immediately. To the left . . . do they call that “port” or “starboard?”

  People were screaming and running in every direction. Bottles were falling off the backbar and shattering on the floor. A man staggered up from one of the lower levels, his shirt burned off, his skin barbecued. The loudspeaker started telling people to go to the lifeboat stations they had been assigned during the drill at the beginning of the cruise. The passengers went right on running hither and yon. Very few of them had bothered to show up during the lifeboat drill. I not only showed up, I came early – I wanted to be in the front row, you see, so I would have an unobstructed view of everything. I always pay close attention when the matter concerns my own skin.

  I went down to my stateroom, got the heroin bags, and put one in each of my front pockets. Then I went to Lifeboat Station Eight. As I went up the stairwell to the main deck there were two more explosions and the boat began to list even more severely.

  Topside, everything was confusion. I saw a screeching woman with a baby in her arms run past me, gaining speed as she sprinted down the slippery, canting deck. She hit the rail with her thighs, and flipped outward. I saw her do two mid-air somersaults and part of a third before I lost sight of her. There was a middle-aged man sitting in the centre of the shuffleboard court and pulling his hair. Another man in cook’s whites, horribly burned about his face and hands, was stumbling from place to place and screaming, “HELP ME! CAN’T SEE! HELP ME! CAN’T SEE!”

  The panic was almost total: it had run from the passengers to the crew like a disease. You must remember that the time elapsed from the first explosion to the actual sinking of the Callas was only about twenty minutes. Some of the lifeboat stations were clogged with screaming passengers, while others were absolutely empty. Mine, on the listing side of the ship, was almost deserted. There was no one there but myself and a common sailor with a pimply, pallid face.

  “Let’s get this buckety-bottomed old whore in the water,” he said, his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets. “This bloody tub is going straight to the bottom.”

  The lifeboat gear is simple enough to operate, but in his fumbling nervousness, he got his side of the block and tackle tangled. The boat dropped six feet and then hung up, the bow two feet lower than the stern.

  I was coming around to help him when he began to scream. He’d succeeded in untangling the snarl and had gotten his hand caught at the same time. The whizzing rope smoked over his open palm, flaying off skin, and he was jerked over the side.

  I tossed the rope ladder overboard, hurried down it, and unclipped the lifeboat from the lowering ropes. Then I rowed, something I had occasionally done for pleasure on trips to my friends’ summer houses, something I was now doing for my life. I knew that if I didn’t get far enough away from the dying Callas before she sank, she would pull me down with her.

  Just five minutes later she went. I hadn’t escaped the suction entirely; I had to row madly just to stay in the same place. She went under very quickly. There were still people clinging to the rail of her bow and screaming. They looked like a bunch of monkeys.

  The storm
worsened. I lost one oar but managed to keep the other. I spent that whole night in a kind of dream, first bailing, then grabbing the oar and paddling wildly to get the boat’s prow into the next bulking wave.

  Sometime before dawn on the 24th, the waves began to strengthen behind me. The boat rushed forward. It was terrifying but at the same time exhilarating. Suddenly most of the planking was ripped out from under my feet, but before the lifeboat could sink it was dumped on this godforsaken pile of rocks. I don’t even know where I am; have no idea at all. Navigation not my strong point, ha-ha.

  But I know what I have to do. This may be the last entry, but somehow I think I’ll make it. Haven’t I always? And they are really doing marvelous things with prosthetics these days. I can get along with one foot quite nicely. It’s time to see if I’m as good as I think I am. Luck.

  February 5

  Did it.

  The pain was the part I was most worried about. I can stand pain, but I thought that in my weakened condition, a combination of hunger and agony might force uncon sciousness before I could finish.

  But the heroin solved that quite nicely.

  I opened one of the bags and sniffed two healthy pinches from the surface of a flat rock – first the right nostril, then the left. It was like sniffing up some beautifully numbing ice that spread through the brain from the bottom up. I aspirated the heroin as soon as I finished writing in this diary yesterday – that was at 9.45. The next time I checked my watch the shadows had moved, leaving me partially in the sun, and the time was 12.41. I had nodded off. I had never dreamed that it could be so beautiful, and I can’t understand why I was so scornful before. The pain, the terror, the misery . . . they all disappear, leaving only a calm euphoria.

  It was in this state that I operated.

  There was, indeed, a great deal of pain, most of it in the early part of the operation. But the pain seemed disconnected from me, like somebody else’s pain. It bothered me, but it was also quite interesting. Can you understand that? If you’ve used a strong morphine-based drug yourself, perhaps you can. It does more than dull pain. It induces a state of mind. A serenity. I can understand why people get hooked on it, although “hooked” seems an awfully strong word, used most commonly, of course, by those who have never tried it.

  About halfway through, the pain started to become a more personal thing. Waves of faintness washed over me. I looked longingly at the open bag of white powder, but forced myself to look away. If I went on the nod again, I’d bleed to death as surely as if I’d fainted. I counted backward from a hundred instead.

  Loss of blood was the most critical factor. As a surgeon, I was vitally aware of that. Not a drop could be spilled unnecessarily. If a patient hemorrhages during an operation in a hospital, you can give him blood. I had no such supplies. What was lost – and by the time I had finished, the sand beneath my leg was dark with it – was lost until my own internal factory could resupply. I had no clamps, no hemostats, no surgical thread.

  I began the operation at exactly 12.45. I finished at 1.50, and immediately dosed myself with heroin, a bigger dose than before. I nodded into a grey, painless world and remained there until nearly five o’clock. When I came out of it, the sun was nearing the western horizon, beating a track of gold across the blue Pacific toward me. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful . . . all the pain was paid for in that one instant. An hour later I snorted a bit more, so as to fully enjoy and appreciate the sunset.

  Shortly after dark I—

  I—

  Wait. Haven’t I told you I’d had nothing to eat for four days? And that the only help I could look to in the matter of replenishing my sapped vitality was my own body? Above all, haven’t I told you, over and over, that survival is a business of the mind? The superior mind? I won’t justify myself by saying you would have done the same thing. First of all, you’re probably not a surgeon. Even if you knew the mechanics of amputation, you might have botched the job so badly you would have bled to death anyway. And even if you had lived through the operation and the shock-trauma, the thought might never have entered your preconditioned head. Never mind. No one has to know. My last act before leaving the island will be to destroy this book.

  I was very careful.

  I washed it thoroughly before I ate it.

  7 February

  Pain from the stump has been bad – excruciating from time to time. But I think the deep-seated itch as the healing process begins has been worse. I’ve been thinking this afternoon of all the patients that have babbled to me that they couldn’t stand the horrible, unscratchable itch of mending flesh. And I would smile and tell them they would feel better tomorrow, privately thinking what whiners they were, what jellyfish, what ungrateful babies. Now I understand. Several times I’ve come close to ripping the shirt bandage off the stump and scratching at it, digging my fingers into the soft raw flesh, pulling out the rough stitches, letting the blood gout onto the sand, anything, anything, to be rid of that maddening horrible itch.

  At those times I count backward from 100. And snort heroin.

  I have no idea how much I’ve taken into my system, but I do know I’ve been “stoned” almost continually since the operation. It depresses hunger, you know. I’m hardly aware of being hungry at all. There is a faint, faraway gnawing in my belly, and that’s all. It could easily be ignored. I can’t do that, though. Heroin has no measurable caloric value. I’ve been testing myself, crawling from place to place, measuring my energy. It’s ebbing.

  Dear God, I hope not, but . . . another operation may be necessary.

  (Later)

  Another plane flew over. Too high to do me any good; all I could see was the contrail etching itself across the sky. I waved anyway. Waved and screamed at it. When it was gone I wept.

  Getting too dark to see now. Food. I’ve been thinking about all kinds of food. My mother’s lasagne. Garlic bread. Escargots. Lobster. Prime ribs. Peach Melba. London broil. The huge slice of pound cake and the scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream they give you for dessert in Mother Crunch on First Avenue. Hot pretzels baked salmon baked Alaska baked ham with pineapple rings. Onion rings. Onion dip with potato chips cold iced tea in long sips French fries make you smack your lips.

  100, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94

  God God God

  February 8

  Another gull landed on the rockpile this morning. A huge fat one. I was sitting in the shade of my rock, what I think of as my camp, my bandaged stump propped up. I began to salivate as soon as the gull landed. Just like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Drooling helplessly, like a baby. Like a baby.

  I picked up a chunk of stone large enough to fit my hand nicely and began to crawl toward it. Fourth quarter. We’re down by three. Third and long yardage. Pinzetti drops back to pass (Pine, I mean, Pine). I didn’t have much hope. I was sure it would fly off. But I had to try. If I could get it, a bird as plump and insolent as that one, I could postpone a second operation indefinitely. I crawled toward it, my stump hitting a rock from time to time and sending stars of pain through my whole body, and waited for it to fly off.

  It didn’t. It just strutted back and forth, its meaty breast thrown out like some avian general reviewing troops. Every now and then it would look at me with its small, nasty black eyes and I would freeze like a stone and count backward from one hundred until it began to pace back and forth again. Every time it fluttered its wings, my stomach filled up with ice. I continued to drool. I couldn’t help it. I was drooling like a baby.

  I don’t know how long I stalked it. An hour? Two? And the closer I got, the harder my heart pounded and the tastier that gull looked. It almost seemed to be teasing me, and I began to believe that as soon as I got in throwing range it would fly off. My arms and legs were beginning to tremble. My mouth was dry. The stump was twanging viciously. I think now that I must have been having withdrawal pains. But so soon? I’ve been using the stuff less than a week!

  Never mind. I need it. There’s plenty left, plenty. If I have t
o take the cure later on when I get back to the States, I’ll check into the best clinic in California and do it with a smile. That’s not the problem right now, is it?

  When I did get in range, I didn’t want to throw the rock. I became insanely sure that I would miss, probably by feet. I had to get closer. So I continued to crawl up the rockpile, my head thrown back, the sweat pouring off my wasted, scarecrow body. My teeth have begun to rot, did I tell you that? If I were a superstitious man, I’d say it was because I ate—

  Ha! We know better, don’t we?

  I stopped again. I was much closer to it than I had been to either of the other gulls. I still couldn’t bring myself to commit. I clutched the rock until my fingers ached and still I couldn’t throw it. Because I knew exactly what it would mean if I missed.

  I don’t care if I use all the merchandise! I’ll sue the ass off them! I’ll be in clover for the rest of my life! My long long life!

  I think I would have crawled right up to it without throwing if it hadn’t finally taken wing. I would have crept up and strangled it. But it spread its wings and took off. I screamed at it and reared up on my knees and threw my rock with all my strength. And I hit it!

  The bird gave a strangled squawk and fell back on the other side of the rockpile. Gibbering and laughing, unmindful now of striking the stump or opening the wound, I crawled over the top and to the other side. I lost balance and banged my head. I didn’t even notice it, not then, although it has raised a pretty nasty lump. All I could think of was the bird and how I had hit it, fantastic luck, even on the wing I had hit it!

  It was flopping down toward the beach on the other side, one wing broken, its underbody red with blood. I crawled as fast as I could, but it crawled faster yet. Race of the cripples! Ha! Ha! I might have gotten it – I was closing the distance – except for my hands. I have to take good care of my hands. I may need them again. In spite of my care, the palms were scraped by the time we reached the narrow shingle of beach, and I’d shattered the face of my Pulsar watch against a rough spine of rock.