The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  He felt a strange sensation on his forearm, and looked down in time to see the gash there disappearing, from bottom to top, from finish to start. It went quickly, as quickly as it had been made. He turned to look at the verdant patch of grass, expecting to see it move, but it was still. Then he felt a warm sensation in his crotch, and realised it too would soon be whole. He had hacked at him there long after he knew Ayer was dead; hacked symbolically and pointlessly until the penis which had rootled and snuffled into Susan had been reduced to a scrap of offal.

  The leaves moved again, faster, and the garden grew darker, as if some huge cloud had moved into position overhead. It was now difficult to see as far as the end wall of the garden, and when he heard the distant sounds from there Richard realized the ground was not going to open up. No, first the wound in his chest, the fatal wound, would disappear. Then the cuts on his stomach, and the nicks on his hands from where Ayer had resisted, trying to be angry but so scared he had pissed his designer jeans.

  Finally the pain in his side would go; the first pain, the pain caused by Richard’s initial vicious kick after he had pushed his drunken rival over. A spasm of hate, flashes of violence, wipe pans of memory.

  Then they would be back to that moment, or a few seconds before. Something would come towards him, out of the dry, rasping shadows, and they would talk again. How it would go Richard didn’t know, but he knew he could win, that he could walk away back to Chris and never come back here again. It was time. Time to go.

  Time to move on.

  Changes

  Neil Gaiman

  I

  Later, they would point to his sister’s death, the cancer that ate her twelve-year-old life, tumours the size of duck eggs in her brain, and him a boy of seven, snot-nosed and crew-cut, watching her die in the white hospital with his wide brown eyes, and they would say, “That was the start of it all,” and perhaps it was

  In Reboot (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2018), the biopic, they jump-cut to his teens, and he’s watching his science teacher die of AIDS following their argument over dissecting a large pale-stomached frog.

  “Why should we take it apart?” says the young Rajit as the music swells. “Instead, should we not give it life?” His teacher, played by the late James Earl Jones, looks shamed and then inspired, and he lifts his hand from his hospital bed to the boy’s bony shoulder. “Well, if anyone can do it, Rajit, you can,” he says, in a deep bass rumble.

  The boy nods and stares at us with a dedication in his eyes that borders upon fanaticism.

  This never happened.

  II

  It is a grey November day, and Rajit is now a tall man in his forties with dark-rimmed spectacles, which he is not currently wearing. The lack of spectacles emphasizes his nudity. He is sitting in the bath as the water gets cold, practising the conclusion to his speech. He stoops a little in everyday life, although he is not stooping now, and he considers his words before he speaks. He is not a good public speaker.

  The apartment in Brooklyn, which he shares with another research scientist and a librarian, is empty today. His penis is shrunken and nutlike in the tepid water. “What this means,” he says loudly and slowly, “is that the war against cancer has been won.”

  Then he pauses, takes a question from an imaginary reporter on the other side of the bathroom.

  “Side effects?” he replies to himself, in an echoing bathroom voice. “Yes, there are some side effects. But as far as we have been able to ascertain, nothing that will create any permanent changes.”

  He climbs out of the battered porcelain bathtub and walks, naked, to the toilet bowl, into which he throws up, violently, the stage fright pushing through him like a gutting knife. When there is nothing more to throw up and the dry heaves have subsided, Rajit rinses his mouth with Listerine, gets dressed, and takes the subway into central Manhattan.

  III

  It is, as Time magazine will point out, a discovery that would “change the nature of medicine every bit as fundamentally and as importantly as the discovery of penicillin”.

  “What if,” says Jeff Goldblum, playing the adult Rajit in the biopic, “just what if you could reset the body’s genetic code? So many ills come because the body has forgotten what it should be doing. The code has become scrambled. The program has become corrupted. What if . . . what if you could fix it?”

  “You’re crazy,” retorts his lovely blonde girlfriend, in the movie. In real life he has no girlfriend; in real life Rajit’s sex life is a fitful series of commercial transactions between Rajit and the young men of the AAA-Ajax Escort Agency.

  “Hey,” says Jeff Goldblum, putting it better than Rajit ever did, “it’s like a computer. Instead of trying to fix the glitches caused by a corrupted program one by one, symptom by symptom, you can just reinstall the program. All the information’s there all along. We just have to tell our bodies to go and recheck the RNA and the DNA – reread the program if you will. And then reboot.”

  The blonde actress smiles, and stops his words with a kiss, amused and impressed and passionate.

  IV

  The woman has cancer of the spleen and of the lymph nodes and abdomen: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She also has pneumonia. She has agreed to Rajit’s request to use an experimental treatment on her. She also knows that claiming to cure cancer is illegal in America. She was a fat woman until recently. The weight has fallen from her, and she reminds Rajit of a snowman in the sun: each day she melts, each day she is, he feels, less defined.

  “It is not a drug as you understand it,” he tells her. “It is a set of chemical instructions.” She looks blank. He injects two ampules of a clear liquid into her veins.

  Soon she sleeps.

  When she awakes, she is free of cancer. The pneumonia kills her soon after that.

  Rajit has spent the two days before her death wondering how he will explain the fact that, as the autopsy demonstrates beyond a doubt, the patient now has a penis and is, in every respect, functionally and chromosomally male.

  V

  It is twenty years later in a tiny apartment in New Orleans (although it might as well be in Moscow, or Manchester, or Paris, or Berlin). Tonight is going to be a big night, and Jo/e is going to stun.

  The choice is between a Polonaise crinoline-style eighteenth-century French court dress (fibreglass bustle, underwired décolletage setting off lace-embroidered crimson bodice) and a reproduction of Sir Philip Sidney’s court dress in black velvet and silver thread, complete with ruff and codpiece. Eventually, and after weighing all the options, Jo/e plumps for cleavage over cock. Twelve hours to go: Jo/e opens the bottle with the red pills, each little red pill marked with an X, and pops two of them. It’s ten a.m., and Jo/e goes to bed, begins to masturbate, penis semi-hard, but falls asleep before coming.

  The room is very small. Clothes hang from every surface. An empty pizza box sits on the floor. Jo/e snores loudly, normally, but when freebooting Jo/e makes no sound at all, and might as well be in some kind of coma.

  Jo/e wakes at ten p.m., feeling tender and new. Back when Jo/e first started on the party scene, each change would prompt a severe self-examination, peering at moles and nipples, foreskin or clit, finding out which scars had vanished and which ones had remained. But Jo/e’s now an old hand at this and puts on the bustle, the petticoat, the bodice and the gown, new breasts (high and conical) pushed together, petticoat trailing the floor, which means Jo/e can wear the forty-year-old pair of Doctor Martens boots underneath (you never know when you’ll need to run, or to walk or to kick, and silk slippers do no one any favours).

  High, powder-look wig completes the look. And a spray of cologne. Then Jo/e’s hand fumbles at the petticoat, a finger pushes between the legs (Jo/e wears no knickers, claiming a desire for authenticity to which the Doc Martens give the lie) and then dabs it behind the ears, for luck, perhaps, or to help pull. The taxi rings the door at 11.05, and Jo/e goes downstairs. Jo/e goes to the ball.

  Tomorrow night Jo/e will take another dose
; Jo/e’s job identity during the week is strictly male.

  VI

  Rajit never viewed the gender-rewriting action of Reboot as anything more than a side effect. The Nobel Prize was for anti-cancer work (rebooting worked for most cancers, it was discovered, but not all of them).

  For a clever man, Rajit was remarkably shortsighted. There were a few things he failed to foresee. For example:

  That there would be people who, dying of cancer, would rather die than experience a change in gender.

  That the Catholic Church would come out against Rajit’s chemical trigger, marketed by this point under the brand name Reboot, chiefly because the gender change caused a female body to reabsorb into itself the flesh of a foetus as it rebooted itself: males cannot be pregnant. A number of other religious sects would come out against Reboot, most of them citing Genesis 1:27, “Male and female created He them,” as their reason.

  Sects that came out against Reboot included: Islam; Christian Science; the Russian Orthodox Church; the Roman Catholic Church (with a number of dissenting voices); the Unification Church; Orthodox Trek Fandom; Orthodox Judaism; the Fundamentalist Alliance of the USA.

  Sects that came out in favour of Reboot use where deemed the appropriate treatment by a qualified medical doctor included: most Buddhists; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; the Greek Orthodox Church; the Church of Scientology; the Anglican Church (with a number of dissenting voices); New Trek Fandom; Liberal and Reform Judaism; the New Age Coalition of America.

  Sects that initially came out in favour of using Reboot recreationally: none.

  While Rajit realized that Reboot would make gender-reassignment surgery obsolete, it never occurred to him that anyone might wish to take it for reasons of desire or curiosity or escape. Thus, he never foresaw the black market in Reboot and similar chemical triggers; nor that, within fifteen years of Reboot’s commercial release and FDA approval, illegal sales of the designer Reboot knock-offs (bootlegs, as they were soon known) would outsell heroin and cocaine, gram for gram, more than ten times over.

  VII

  In several of the New Communist States of Eastern Europe possession of bootlegs carried a mandatory death sentence.

  In Thailand and Mongolia it was reported that boys were being forcibly rebooted into girls to increase their worth as prostitutes.

  In China newborn girls were rebooted to boys: families would save all they had for a single dose. The old people died of cancer as before. The subsequent birthrate crisis was not perceived as a problem until it was too late; the proposed drastic solutions proved difficult to implement and led, in their own way, to the final revolution.

  Amnesty International reported that in several of the pan-Arabic countries men who could not easily demonstrate that they had been born male and were not, in fact, women escaping the veil were being imprisoned and, in many cases, raped and killed. Most Arab leaders denied that either phenomenon was occurring or had ever occurred.

  VIII

  Rajit is in his sixties when he reads in the New Yorker that the word change is gathering to itself connotations of deep indecency and taboo.

  Schoolchildren giggle embarrassedly when they encounter phrases like “I needed a change” or “Time for change” or “The Winds of Change” in their studies of pre-twenty-first-century literature. In an English class in Norwich, horrified smutty sniggers greet a fourteen-year-old’s discovery of “A change is as good as a rest.”

  A representative of the King’s English Society writes a letter to The Times, deploring the loss of another perfectly good word to the English language.

  Several years later a youth in Streatham is successfully prosecuted for publicly wearing a T-shirt with the slogan I’M A CHANGED MAN! printed clearly upon it.

  IX

  Jackie works in Blossoms, a nightclub in West Hollywood. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Jackies in Los Angeles, thousands of them across the country, hundreds of thousands across the world.

  Some of them work for the government, some for religious organizations or for businesses. In New York, London and Los Angeles, people like Jackie are on the door at the places that the in-crowds go.

  This is what Jackie does. Jackie watches the crowd coming in and thinks, Born M now F, born F now M, born M now M, born M now F born F now F . . .

  On “Natural Nights” (crudely unchanged) Jackie says, “I’m sorry you can’t come in tonight,” a lot. People like Jackie have a 97 per cent accuracy rate. An article in Scientific American suggests that birth-gender recognition skills might be genetically inherited: an ability that always existed but had no strict survival values until now.

  Jackie is ambushed in the small hours of the morning, after work, in the back of the Blossoms parking lot. And as each new boot crashes or thuds into Jackie’s face and chest and head and groin, Jackie thinks, Born M now F, born F now F, born F now M, born M now M . . .

  When Jackie gets out of the hospital, vision in one eye only, face and chest a single huge purple-green bruise, there is a message, sent with an enormous bunch of exotic flowers, to say that Jackie’s job is still open.

  However, Jackie takes the bullet train to Chicago, and from there takes a slow train to Kansas City, and stays there, working as a housepainter and electrician, professions for which Jackie had trained a long time before, and does not go back.

  X

  Rajit is now in his seventies. He lives in Rio de Janeiro. He is rich enough to satisfy any whim; he will, however, no longer have sex with anyone. He eyes them all distrustfully from his apartment’s window, staring down at the bronzed bodies on the Copacabana, wondering.

  The people on the beach think no more of him than a teenager with chlamydia gives thanks to Alexander Fleming. Most of them imagine that Rajit must be dead by now. None of them care either way.

  It is suggested that certain cancers have evolved or mutated to survive rebooting. Many bacterial and viral diseases can survive rebooting. A handful even thrive upon rebooting, and one – a strain of gonorrhoea – is hypothesized to use the process in its vectoring, initially remaining dormant in the host body and becoming infectious only when the genitalia have reorganized into that of the opposite gender.

  Still, the average Western human life span is increasing.

  Why some freebooters – recreational Reboot users – appear to age normally while others give no indication of ageing at all is something that puzzles scientists. Some claim that the latter group is actually ageing on a cellular level. Others maintain that it is too soon to tell and that no one knows anything for certain.

  Rebooting does not reverse the ageing process; however, there is evidence that, for some, it may arrest it. Many of the older generation, who have until now been resistant to rebooting for pleasure, begin to take it regularly – freebooting – whether they have a medical condition that warrants it or no.

  XI

  Loose coins become known as coinage or, occasionally, specie.

  The process of making different or altering is now usually known as shifting.

  XII

  Rajit is dying of prostate cancer in his Rio apartment. He is in his early nineties. He has never taken Reboot; the idea now terrifies him. The cancer has spread to the bones of his pelvis and to his testes.

  He rings the bell. There is a short wait for the nurse’s daily soap opera to be turned off, the cup of coffee put down. Eventually his nurse comes in.

  “Take me out into the air,” he says to the nurse, his voice hoarse. At first the nurse affects not to understand him. He repeats it, in his rough Portuguese. A shake of the head from his nurse.

  He pulls himself out of the bed – a shrunken figure, stooped so badly as to be almost hunchbacked, and so frail that it seems that a storm would blow him over – and begins to walk toward the door of the apartment.

  His nurse tries, and fails, to dissuade him. And then the nurse walks with him to the apartment hall and holds his arm as they wait for the elevator. He has not left th
e apartment in two years; even before the cancer, Rajit did not leave the apartment. He is almost blind.

  The nurse walks him out into the blazing sun, across the road, and down on to the sand of the Copacabana.

  The people on the beach stare at the old man, bald and rotten, in his antique pyjamas, gazing about him with colourless once-brown eyes through bottle-thick dark-rimmed spectacles.

  He stares back at them.

  They are golden and beautiful. Some of them are asleep on the sand. Most of them are naked, or they wear the kind of bathing attire that emphasizes and punctuates their nakedness.

  Rajit knows them, then.

  Later, much later, they made another biopic. In the final sequence the old man falls to his knees on the beach, as he did in real life, and blood trickles from the open flap of his pyjama bottoms, soaking the faded cotton and puddling darkly on to the soft sand. He stares at them all, looking from one to another with awe upon his face, like a man who has finally learned how to stare at the sun.

  He said one word only as he died, surrounded by the golden people, who were not men, who were not women.

  He said, “Angels.”

  And the people watching the biopic, as golden, as beautiful, as changed as the people on the beach, knew that that was the end of it all.

  And in any way that Rajit would have understood, it was.

  Others

  James Herbert