The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  There’s nothing wrong with sleep.

  You just close your eyes and go into your little world.

  Walking Wounded

  Michael Marshall Smith

  When after two days the discomfort in his side had not lessened, merely mutated, Richard began finally to get mildly concerned. It didn’t hurt as often as it had at first, and he could make a wider range of movements without triggering it; but when the pain did come it was somehow deeper, as if settled into the bone.

  Christine’s solution to the problem was straightforward in its logic, and strident in delivery. He should go to Casualty, or at the very least to the doctor’s surgery just down the street from their new flat in Kingsley Road.

  Richard’s view, though unspoken, was just as definite: bollocks to that. There were more than enough dull post-move tasks to be endured without traipsing up to the Royal Free and sitting amongst stoic old women and bleeding youths in a purgatory of peeling linoleum. As they were now condemned to living on a different branch of the Northern line to Hampstead, it would require two dogleg trips down to Camden and back out again – together with a potentially limitless spell on a waiting-room bench – and burn up a whole afternoon. Even less appealing was the prospect of going down the road and explaining in front of an audience of whey-faced locals that he had been living somewhere else, now lived just across the road, and wished to both register with the surgery and have the doctor’s doubtless apathetic opinion on a rather unspecific pain in Richard’s side. And that he was very sorry for being middle-class and would they please not beat him up.

  He couldn’t be bothered, in other words, and instead decided to dedicate Monday to taking a variety of objects out of cardboard boxes and trying to work out where they could be least unattractively placed. Christine had returned to work, at least, which meant she couldn’t see his winces or hear the swearing which greeted every new object for which there simply wasn’t room.

  The weekend had been hell, and not just because Richard hadn’t wanted to move in the first place. He had wanted to, to some extent; or at least he’d believed they should do so. It had come to him one night while lying in bed in the flat in Belsize Park, listening to the even cadence of Chris’s breathing and wondering at what point in the last couple of months they had stopped falling asleep together. At first they’d drifted off simultaneously, facing each other, four hands clasped into a declaration, determined not to leave each other even for the hours they spent in another realm. Richard half remembered a poem by someone long dead – Herrick, possibly? – the gist of which had been that, though we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one of us is hurled into a several world. Well it hadn’t been that way with them, not at first. Yet after nine months there he was, lying awake, happy to be in the same bed as Chris but wondering where she was.

  Eventually he’d got up and wandered through into the sitting room. In the half-light it looked the same as it always had. You couldn’t see which pictures had been taken down, which objects had been removed from shelves and hidden in boxes at the bottom of cupboards. You couldn’t tell that for three years he had lived there with someone else.

  But Richard knew that he had, and so did Christine.

  As he gazed out over the garden in which Susan’s attempts at horticulture still struggled for life in the face of indifference, Richard finally realized that they should move. Understood, suddenly and with cold guilt, that Chris probably didn’t like living here. It was a lovely flat, with huge rooms and high ceilings. It was on Belsize Avenue, which meant not only was it within three minutes’ walk of Haverstock Hill, with its cafés, stores and tube station, but Belsize “village” was just around the corner. A small enclave of shops specifically designed to cater to the needs of the local well-heeled, the village was so comprehensively stocked with pâtés, wine, videos and magazines that you hardly ever actually needed to go up to Hampstead, itself only a pleasant ten minutes’ stroll away. The view from the front of the flat itself was onto the Avenue, wide and spaced with ancient trees. The back was onto a garden neatly bordered by an old brick wall, and although only a few plants grew with any real enthusiasm, the overall effect was still pleasing.

  But the view through Christine’s eyes was probably different.

  She perhaps saw the local pubs and restaurants in which Richard and Susan had spent years of happy evenings. She maybe felt the tightness with which her predecessor had held Richard’s hand as they walked down to the village, past the gnarled mulberry tree which was the sole survivor of the garden of a country house which had originally stood there.

  She certainly wondered which particular patches of carpet within the flat had provided arenas for cheerful, drunken sex. This had come out one night after they’d come back rather drunk and irritable from an unsuccessful dinner party at one of Chris’s friends”. Richard had been bored enough by the evening to respond angrily to the question, and the matter had been dropped.

  Standing there in the middle of the night, staring around a room stripped of its familiarity by darkness, he remembered the conversation, the nearest thing they’d yet had to a fullblown row. For a moment he saw the flat as she did, and almost believed he could hear the rustling of gifts from another woman, condemned to storage but stirring in their boxes, remembering the places where they had once stood.

  The next morning, over cappuccinos on Haverstock Hill, he’d suggested they move.

  At the eagerness of her response he’d felt a band loosen in his chest that he hadn’t even realized was there, and the rest of the day was wonderful.

  Not so the move. Three years’ worth of flotsam, fifty boxes full of stuff. Possessions and belongings which he’d believed to be individual objects metamorphosed into a mass of generic crap to be manhandled and sorted through. The flat they’d finally found to move into was tiny. Well, not tiny: the living room and kitchen were big enough, and there was a roof garden. But a good deal smaller than Belsize Avenue, and nearly twenty boxes of Richard’s stuff had to go into storage. Books which he seldom looked at, but would have preferred to have around; DVDs which he didn’t want to watch next week, but might in a couple of months; old clothes which he never wore but which had too much sentimental value to be thrown away.

  And, of course, the Susan collection. Objects in boxes, rounded up and buried deeper by putting in further boxes, then sent off to be hidden in some warehouse in King’s Cross.

  At a cost of fifteen pounds a week this was going to make living in the new flat even more expensive than the old one – despite the fact it was in Kentish Town and you couldn’t buy a decent chicken liver and hazelnut pâté locally for love or money.

  On Friday night the two of them huddled baffled and exhausted together in the huge living room in Belsize Avenue, surrounded by mountains of cardboard. They drank cups of coffee and tried to watch television, but the flat had already taken its leave of them. When they went to bed it was as if they were lying on a cold hillside in some country where their visa had expired.

  The next morning two affable Australians arrived with a van the size of Denmark, and Richard watched, vicariously exhausted, as they trotted up and down the stairs, taking his life away. Chris bristled with female cleaning know-how in the kitchen, periodically sweeping past him with a damp cloth in her hand, humming to herself. As the final pieces of furniture were dragged away, Richard tried to say goodbye to the flat, but the walls stared back at him with vacant indifference, and offered nothing more than dust in corners, which had previously been hidden. Dust, some particles of which were probably Susan’s skin – and his and Chris’s, of course. He left to the sound of a Hoover, and followed the van to their new home.

  Where, it transpired, his main bookcase could not be taken up the stairs.

  The two Australians, by now rather bedraggled and hot, struggled gamely in the dying light but eventually had to confess themselves beaten. Richard, rather depressed, allowed them to put the bookcase back in the van, to be taken
off with the other storage items. Much later he held out a tenner to each of them, watched the van squeeze off down the narrow road, and then turned and walked into his new home.

  Chris was still at Belsize Avenue, putting finishing touches to the cleaning and negotiating with the old twonk who owned the place. While he waited for her to arrive, Richard moved a few boxes around, not wanting to do anything significant before Chris was there to share it with him, but too tired to simply sit still. The lower hallway was almost completely impassable, and he resolved to carry a couple of boxes up to the living room.

  It was while he was struggling up the stairs with one of them that he hurt himself.

  He was about halfway up, panting under a box which seemed to weigh more than the house itself, when he slipped on a cushion lying on the stairs. Muscles he hadn’t used since his athletic glory days at school kicked into action, and he managed to avoid falling, but collided heavily with the wall instead. The corner of the box he was carrying crunched solidly into his ribs.

  For a moment the pain was truly startling, and a small voice in his head said “Well, that’s done it.”

  He let the box slide to the floor, and stood panting for a while, fingers tentatively feeling for what he was sure must be at least one broken rib. He half expected it to be protruding from his chest. He couldn’t find anything which yielded more than usual, however, and after a recuperative cigarette he carefully pushed the box the remainder of the journey up the stairs.

  Half an hour later Chris arrived, cheerfully cross about their previous landlord’s attempts to whittle money off their deposit, and set to work on the kitchen.

  They fell asleep together that night, three of their hands together; one of Richard’s unconsciously guarding his side.

  The next morning it hurt like hell, but as a fully-fledged male human, Richard knew exactly how to deal with the situation: he ignored it. After four days of looking at the cardboard boxes cheerfully emblazoned with the logo of the removal firm, he had begun to hate the sight of them, and concentrated first on unpacking everything so he could be rid of them.

  In the morning he worked in the living room, unpacking to the sound of Chris whistling in the kitchen and bathroom. He discovered that two of the boxes shouldn’t even have been there at all, but were supposed to have been taken with the others and put in storage. One was full of manuals for software he either never used or knew back to front; the other was a box of Susan Objects. As he opened it, Richard realized why it had hurt quite so much when making contact with his ribs. It contained, among other things, a heavy and angular bronze which she had made and presented to him. He was lucky it hadn’t impaled him to the wall.

  As it wasn’t worth calling the removal men out to collect the boxes, they both ended up in his microscopic study, squatting on top of the filing cabinet. More precious space taken up by stuff which shouldn’t even be there; either in the flat or in his life.

  The rest of the weekend disappeared in a blur of tidal movement and pizza. Objects migrated from room to room, in smaller and slower circles, before finally finding new resting places. Chris efficiently unpacked all the clothes and put them in the fitted wardrobes, cooing over the increase in hanging space. Richard tried to organize his books into his decreased shelving space, eventually having to lay many on their side and pile them up vertically. He tried to tell himself this looked funky and less anal, but couldn’t get the idea to take. He set his desk and computer up.

  By Monday most of it was done, and Richard spent the morning trying to make his study habitable by clearing the few remaining boxes. At eleven Chris called from work, cheerful and full of vim, and he was glad to sense that the move had made her happy. As they were chatting he realized that he must at some point have scraped his left hand, because there was a series of shallow scratches, like paper cuts, over the palm and underside of the fingers.

  They hardly seemed significant against the pain in his side, and aside from washing his hands when the conversation was over, he ignored them.

  In the afternoon he took a break and walked down to the local corner store for cigarettes. It was only his second visit, but he knew he’d already seen all it had to offer. The equivalent store in Belsize village had stocked American magazines, fresh-baked bread and three different types of hand-fashioned pesto. Next door had been the delicatessen with home-made duck’s liver and port pâté. “Raj’s EZShop” sold none of those things, having elected to focus rather single-mindedly on the Pot Noodle and cheap toilet paper end of the market.

  When he left the shop Richard went and peered dispiritedly at the grubby menu hanging in the window of the restaurant opposite. Eritrean food, whatever the hell that was. One of the dishes was described as “three pieces of cooked meat”, which seemed both strangely specific and discomfortingly vague.

  Huddling into his jacket against the cold, he turned and walked for home, feeling – he imagined – rather like a deposed Russian aristocrat, allowed against all odds to remain alive after the revolution, but condemned to lack everything which he had once held dear. The sight of a small white dog scuttling by only seemed to underline his isolation.

  When Chris returned at six she couldn’t understand his quietness, and he didn’t have the heart to try to explain it to her.

  “What’s that?”

  The answer, Richard saw, appeared to be “a scratch”. About four inches long, it ran across his chest, directly over his heart. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it seemed to have healed and thus must have been there for a day or two.

  “Another souvenir from the move,” he guessed. It was after midnight and they were lying in bed, having just abandoned an attempt to make love. It wasn’t any lack of enthusiasm – far from it – simply that the pain in Richard’s ribs was too bracing to ignore. He was fine so long as he kept his chest facing directly forwards. Any twisting and it felt as if someone was stoving in his ribcage with a well-aimed boot. “And no, I’m not going to the doctor about it.”

  Chris smiled, started to tickle him, and then realized she shouldn’t. Instead she sighed theatrically, and kissed him on the nose before turning to lie on her side.

  “You’d better get well soon,” she said, “or I’m going to have to buy a do-it-yourself book.”

  “You’ll go blind,” he said, turning off the bedside light, and she giggled quietly in the dark. He rolled gingerly so that he was snuggled into her back, and lightly stroked her shoulder, waiting for sleep.

  After a moment he noticed a wetness under his hand, and stopped, pulling his hand out from under the duvet. In the threadbare moonlight he confirmed what he’d already suspected. Earlier in the evening he’d noticed that the little cuts seemed to be exuding tiny amounts of blood. It was still happening. Constantly being reopened when he lugged boxes around, presumably.

  “S’nice,” Chris murmured sleepily. “Don’t stop.”

  Richard slid his hand back under the duvet and moved it gently against her shoulder again, using the back of his fingers, and cupping his palm away from her.

  The bathroom was tiny, but very adequately equipped with mirrors. Richard couldn’t help noticing the change, as soon as he took off his dressing gown the next morning.

  There was still no sign of bruising over his ribs, which worried him. Something which hurt that much ought to have an external manifestation, he believed, unless it indicated internal damage. The pain was a little different this morning, less like a kicking, more as if two of the ribs were moving tightly against each other. A kind of cartilaginous twisting.

  There were also a number of new scratches.

  Mostly short, they were primarily congregated over his stomach and chest. It looked as though a cat with its claws out had run over him in the night. As they didn’t have a cat, this seemed unlikely, and Richard frowned as he regarded himself in the mirror.

  Also odd was the mark on his chest. Perhaps it was merely seeing it in proper light, but this morning it looked like more than just a scratc
h. By spreading his fingers out on either side, he found he could pull the edges of the cut slightly apart, and that it was a millimetre or so deep. When he allowed it to close again it did so with a faint liquidity, the sides tacky with lymph. It wasn’t healing properly. In fact – and Richard held up his left hand to confirm this – it was doing the same as the cuts on his palm. They too seemed as fresh as the day before – maybe even a little fresher.

  Glad that Chris had left the house before he’d made it out of bed, Richard quickly showered, patting himself dry around the cuts, and covered them with clothes.

  By lunchtime the flat was finally in order, and Richard had to admit parts of it looked pretty good. The kitchen was the sole room which was bigger than he’d been used to in the previous flat, and in slanting light in the late morning, it was actually very attractive. The table was a little larger than would have been ideal, but at least you could get at the fridge without performing contortions.

  The living room upstairs also looked pretty bijou, if you ignored the way half his books were crammed sideways into the bookcases. Chris had already established a nest on the larger of the two sofas, her book, ashtray and an empty coffee mug placed within easy reach. Richard perched on the other sofa for a while, eyes vaguely running over his books, and realizing he ought to make an effort to colonize a corner of the room for his own, too.

  Human, All Too Human.

  The title brought Richard out of his reverie. A second-hand volume of Nietzsche, bought for him as a joke by Susan. It shouldn’t have been on the shelf, but in one of the storage boxes. Chris didn’t know it had been a present from Susan, but then it hadn’t been Chris who’d insisted he take the other stuff down. It had simply seemed to be the right thing to do, and Richard had methodically worked around the old flat hiding things the day before Chris moved in. Hiding them from whom, he hadn’t been sure. It had been six months by then since he and Susan had split up, and she wasn’t even seeing the man she’d left him for any more. To have the old mementoes still out didn’t cause him any pain, and he’d thought he’d put them away purely out of consideration for Chris.