The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  Now I’d ripped through the grass sod. And I plunged that backhoe deep into the earth beside Saxon Well. The pit soon started to fill with water from the spring. I didn’t stop. Down went the digger’s steel bucket with a splash. I scooped out more dirt. More muck. More of that brown gold. And I was laughing. I’d won. I’d be rich.

  When the digger’s arm smacked down into the water it splashed Ken and his team. Even Sneep got an eyeful.

  Ken used both arms to wave downwards. A signal to shut off the machine.

  I turned the key. The engine faded away, leaving a deadly silence.

  Until, that is, I stood in the doorway of the cab and roared, “Look, Ken! No bones! The plague bodies were never buried here!”

  “You’re insane, Baxter!” Ken Farley wiped dirt from his face. “Look at the state of my coat.”

  “No bones! No mass graves!”

  “You are out of your mind! What does one test pit prove?”

  “This soil is sweet and clean, Ken.”

  “I’ll need more than one fucking hole to prove that. You know this land’s worthless until we get hard evidence that there aren’t plague burials here.”

  I wiped a splash of brown from the cab window and licked my finger clean. “See? Tastes like money.”

  “He’s crazy, Mr Farley.” This witty diagnosis came from one of Ken Farley’s men; a big guy who thought he looked delectable with a curly red beard. What a jerk. “Everyone said that Tom Baxter lost his marbles when his hotel development went belly up.”

  “Get some professional help, Tom.” Ken Farley raised his hand. “See you around.”

  I pulled the old book from the cab and jumped down to the ground. “Here’s your proof, Ken. We’ve got everything here that will make these fifteen hundred acres the most valuable plot you’ve ever owned. Money, Ken. More money than you’ve ever made before.”

  Ken paused. “Money?”

  Money’s a magic word. Money opens doors. Money turns the piss-poor into gods. Money is god.

  Opening the book, I approached Ken. Then I began to read: “On the first day of the plague the aldermen, freeholders and tenants of Hangthwaite Vale were subject to transfiguration by God. Let it here be known that the sick did not fall, they rose up.”’

  The guy with the red beard spat dirt from his mouth. “He is mad. And he’s been wasting your time.”

  “Shut up, Greg.” Farley was interested. When he looked round the meadow he didn’t see wild flowers, or the long grass – or the bushes that marked where the long-gone village of Hangthwaite Vale once stood. No, he saw cash blossoming on trees. He saw fifty-pound notes flowing from the spring. Money lived here. The man wanted to set it free. Right into his bank account. I had captured Mr Ken Farley’s full attention. “Keep talking, Tom. I’m starting to think we can do business, after all.”

  “So it’s Tom again.” I smiled as I closed in on Ken and his wage-slaves. “Well, listen to this: it was written just after the plague struck. I, George William Meckwith, being the last living occupant of Hangthwaite Vale, doeth solemnly declare that the village was visited by plague.” I read it all. Even the bits about the fever, and the white blisters around the mouths of the infected villagers. And how the blisters gave off an awful stench.

  Then I read to him how the dying men and women floated away into the sky. And how the bodies drifted hundreds of feet above the village where they slowly rotted away. I got close to Ken so I could see the expression on his face, even if it was speckled with brown dirt from my enthusiastic digging.

  Red Beard gave a dismissive grunt. “That’s just some old folk-tale. Dead people don’t fly.”

  At last, Sneep made a contribution to what would be the most important conversation of my financial life. “Mr Farley. Old documents are full of such quaint phrases. They shouldn’t be taken literally. For example, one often finds in Victorian death certificates the extraordinary phrase ‘The patient died as result of a visitation from God.’ That doesn’t mean the patient died of fright upon seeing Our Lord. It was simply medical text-speak for a sudden death without obvious cause. When the records speak of the dead shrugging off the burden of gravity and—”

  “It means someone chucked the poxy corpses in the river.” Ken Farley was a fast thinker. I was impressed. He’d clicked on to the truth faster than I had. Ken grinned. “Some smart landowner didn’t want infectious bodies lying around. They dumped them in the water so they’d be carried miles away.” Ken’s grin broadened. “You know, Tom, even two hundred years ago there were shrewd men who thought exactly like us.”

  “Shall we talk money?” I asked.

  “I’d like nothing more, Tom.” He held out his hand.

  I shook it. “Fifteen hundred acres of prime building land with a river frontage. It’s going to be the jewel in your crown, Ken.”

  “Coincidentally, I was thinking precisely the same thing.”

  We talked for two hours in that meadow by Saxon Well. We talked acreage. Development potential. We talked money. We talked about huge amounts of money.

  Then something began to bother me. A certain something that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago.

  “Ken,” I said. “What’s that on your lip?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s something stuck to your top lip.”

  Ken chuckled. “There’ll be time for jokes later, Tom. We need to agree a payment schedule for this land first.”

  “No . . . I’m serious. There’s something white on your lip.” I looked round at the other three men of his team. “They’ve got them, too.” I turned to Sneep. “You as well.”

  Sneep’s eyes bulged. “A symptom of the plague . . .”

  “What symptom?” Ken sounded irritated.

  “Oh, God. The white blisters.” Sneep turned panicky. “The other symptom was fever.” He touched his forehead. “I’m sweating.”

  “If this is some kind of trick . . .” Even so, Ken touched his mouth.

  “Let me get a closer look.” I gripped his shoulders so I could examine his face. And there they were, erupting from the skin around his mouth even as I watched. Dome-shaped blisters. “Do you feel ill?”

  “I feel fine. Though I’m starting to be annoyed by your idiotic behaviour.”

  As I stood there a blister broke open: a thick, creamy liquid seeped out. The smell immediately made me step backwards. The stink was awful. Just awful.

  I ran my fingers over my own lips. Nothing there. At least, nothing yet . . .

  Ken’s guys were angry. They backed off. Red Beard said they should leave . . . that I was crazy.

  Sneep, meanwhile, had dropped to his knees. There he was: an old man in the middle of a field, wearing his yellow jacket, and howling so hard tears poured down his wrinkled face. “You opened up the plague pit! You let out the disease! We’ve been infected! The blisters! They’re a symptom of the plague! We’re all going to die!”

  Red Beard pulled Sneep up by his necktie. “Mr Farley, this one’s drunk!”

  “And this one’s mad.” Ken’s expression oozed disgust as he stared at me. “Completely mad.”

  Even as they started to walk away I could tell the change was coming. Their footsteps were lighter. Red Beard hardly left footprints in the grass. However, those four men refused to accept that they were infected. I admit it. I admit it here and now . . . when I used the mechanical digger to open up the hole it must have released the virus that had been lying dormant since 1803.

  “Come back here!” I screamed. “You’ve got to tie yourself to something . . . keep fixed to the ground . . .”

  “Go find a psychiatrist, Tom.” Ken Farley waved me away like I was nothing.

  Ken and his team walked towards the car. Ken, who was going to sign the contract. Ken who was going to buy these fifteen hundred acres . . . the money would have made me rich. “Don’t go, Ken . . . don’t leave . . . I’m broke . . .”

  “Broke in the head,” laughed one of the men. />
  “The blisters around your mouths are bursting,” I shouted. “You’ll soon get lighter and lighter until . . .” They ignored me. So, in desperation, I found myself quoting from the parish record: “Let it here be known that the sick did not fall, they rose up.”

  Then it came. The fury of transformation! The chaos of elevation! One of the men came adrift from the meadow. He simply floated upwards. His body sagged all limp as he died. Emotion overwhelmed me. I did this. I’m to blame! The shock was immense. Nevertheless, as I ran towards the men, I intended to save those that were left. I really did.

  This overwhelming determination to save lives gave me such incredible strength. I bundled Red Beard into the car. The roof of the vehicle would stop him rising. The other man ran from me. As he did so his feet stopped touching the ground. He still ran frantically, legs pumping like crazy, but now he was rising . . . rising . . . He soared up into the broad blue sky.

  I grabbed hold of Ken Farley as he became unstuck from the field. He screamed for me to let go, but I wasn’t going to do that – not ever! His hand would sign the contract. I would be rich. So, he must be saved at any cost. I dragged him back to the mechanical digger. There I pulled chains from the cab. Soon I had him tied to the machine’s caterpillar tracks. He bellowed and swore at me. Yet he was safe. Or so I thought.

  But the virus – which killed gravity as much as it killed the human body – would not be conquered. From the direction of the car I heard a terrific bang. The car’s steel roof had split wide open. Red Beard was dragged through the hole by some immense force. Then it thrust him up into the sky, too. The sharp edges of that raw gash in the roof had shredded his clothes and much of his skin.

  And now Ken Farley was rising against the chains, too. I did my best to hold him down. But the properties of that devil germ were too strong. They not only negated gravity, they reversed it. And with such force. Such power! Ken’s face turned bright red. He screeched. The chains bit deep into his body. I saw the links cutting through the black leather coat. Every part of him strained upwards. Even his eyes. They didn’t merely bulge from their sockets: those soft, white balls of flesh were brutally stretched until they resembled two thin tubes – milk-white, and patterned with purple branchlets of veins. Each elongated eye was as long and as thick as my middle finger, and tipped by a glistening, black pupil.

  Farley knew he was dying. His screams became a gurgle as blood spurted from his mouth.

  Then came the most intense part of that extraordinary day. I watched in horror as the plague destroyed the man. All of a sudden, the resistance of his flesh gave way. The chains that I’d looped around his body acted like blades. They chopped through his neck, shoulders, torso, thighs. His butchered body came apart.

  Yet the flesh still rose. The head, the arms, legs, internal organs, blood – they all soared upwards into the sky. I ran after the body parts as they flew. I jumped up to grab a severed arm.

  You see, the hand was still attached to the limb. The hand that would sign the contract. The hand that would transfer cash into my bank account. The hand that would save me from bankruptcy.

  I held on to the arm. The leather sleeve was slippery with blood. Raw meat hung from where the limb would have connected to Ken’s shoulder. Up it carried me.

  Up! And up! The green field, the yellow digger, the car, and the terrified Sneep grew small beneath me. The breeze blew my hair. Hold on, I told myself. Hold on! This is the hand that will sign the contract!

  However, the severed arm was slippery with all that blood. Eventually I lost my grip.

  There was a fall . . . I remember the long, long fall . . . then lying in the grass. There was blood on my hands. Then everything went hazy. Like a dream. Like flying . . .

  4.

  Dr Nolan tells me that the brain is like a chemical factory. Sometimes chemical production goes wrong. Then, he assures me, we sometimes see things that aren’t there. Or we have strange thoughts that we wouldn’t normally entertain.

  So, this hospital is my home now. Pale green walls. Rows of beds. A television room. Shuffling people with sad faces. The pills are all different colours. I take so many of them. So many! The red ones taste of chocolate. Funny that. Red pills are choccy flavour.

  I wrote it all out. The plague. How I tried to save Mr Farley and his team. I don’t know what happened to Sneep. I don’t care what happened to Sneep. I never liked Creepy Sneep, anyway.

  Believe me. I am truly sorry I dug the pit at Saxon Well. It’s my fault I let the plague out again. The symptoms are fever, white blisters around the mouth, the destruction of gravity – okay, yes, you know about those by now.

  The medical staff insist there is no plague. And that Farley and the others had a kind of accident. They talk about a bloody axe found in my car . . . let ’em talk!

  Because the truth of the matter is this: the plague has infected everyone here. I seem to be immune. But I must be a carrier. This morning I noticed the flushed faces of the nurses. The fever has started. Just now I saw white blisters around Dr Nolan’s mouth. He’s infected, too. Hallelujah.

  And when Dr Nolan walked through the ward just now his footsteps were light. Very light.

  In fact, he’s close to walking on air.

  Polyp

  Barbie Wilde

  In the deep, dark, softly pliable depths of shiny moist and mucky pink, brown and white, it was stirring. Slowly emerging from the dream years. Waking up for the first time and yet always cognizant of something. Waiting for its moment to come. Its hour upon the stage. Biding time, space, sanity. Waiting, waiting. Leeching nourishment from the Host. Sucking energy out of the stuff that came from above. Imagining what freedom would taste like. Hmmm. Freedom. It tasted of blood. And lots of it.

  Vincent, a tall, nondescript, worried-looking man in his forties, waited for his colonoscopy appointment with a weary inevitability mixed with mild anxiety. He hated the whole rigmarole, and yet what was there to hate, really? It was a lifesaver, this procedure, and that was how he should look at it, dispassionately and scientifically. But Vincent was not exactly the dispassionate, scientific type.

  Not that a colonoscopy was painful, or even that unpleasant. After all, some people would pay big bucks to have a flexible tube with a camera at the end of it thrust deep up into their bowels, but not Vincent. Having a colonoscopy every year was a pain in the . . . ah, well, the jokes would come thick and fast if he ever told anyone about it, but it was too humiliating, too embarrassing. His body had let him down, genetically that was, and because of a pretty frightening family history of colon cancer, he had to have an examination every year. Luckily, he had a top gastroenterologist to do it, so the dire possibility of getting a perforated bowel from the procedure was remote. Still, having a man joke with you while he was threading an enormous tube up your ass was not exactly fun and games, was it? It verged on the pervy and Vincent was, if anything, not the least bit pervy, not the least bit exceptional, not the least bit an outstanding man of his immediate circle, which may explain to a small extent why he had to endure all of the worry and anticipation on his own.

  First he had to prepare for a couple of days. Day One: a low-residue diet consisting of white bread, white meat, no fruits or vegetables, no dairy products, no fibre whatsoever. (Basically, the diet that is killing off the Western world.) Day Two: after a breakfast of white toast and coffee, he had to fast and drink plenty of liquids until the procedure the next day. During the afternoon of Day Two, he was required to consume what felt like gallons of an osmotic laxative called Klean-Prep, a sweetly foul-tasting liquid that would turn anything harboring inside his intestines into a veritable Niagara Falls of shit. Diarrhoea for a day – so virulent that his butt felt like he’d been passing acid.

  Vincent used to drink to get through the ordeal: vodka martinis (sans olives, of course, because of the fibre) or white wine, but he eventually realized that the booze just made him feel worse the day of the procedure, not better. So, he decided to look upo
n the regime like a brief spell in detox, something that movie stars and royalty would shell out thousands for. Of course, if he was a movie star or royalty, he’d be in some swanky drying-out clinic in the countryside, with beautiful babes giving him seaweed massages and gently caressing his temples, not sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair in a dingy, urine-coloured waiting room outside the Endoscopy Department of St Stephen’s Hospital.

  His stomach was so empty that it almost made him feel sick and his colon grumbled noises of protest from the brutal treatment of the Klean-Prep experience. The magazines on the table were at least six months old and there was a large, hopeful-looking television in the corner, but it was resolutely off, daring some brave soul to turn it on. But Vincent knew that late-morning TV horror (property shows, cooking shows, phone-in shows, talk shows) would be the last thing in the world to cheer him up on this particular day.

  Then, after a wait lasting around half an hour, a nurse came in to escort him to a large room dotted with curtained-off hospital beds – all equipped with blood-pressure and heart-rate monitors. The tall, powerfully built nurse – whose nametag proclaimed her to be Ewomi Abayomi Sullivan – brusquely told Vincent to strip from the waist down. This was the kind of invitation that he would normally obey with alacrity, but from someone like Ewomi, who looked like she was permanently chewing on a wasp, it was more an order that he had to follow, or risk severe consequences to his manhood. As she left, Ewomi pulled the curtains around his bed for privacy, but they never quite met – gaping holes meant that if they really wanted to, the other nursing staff could spy on him. But, then again, why would they want to?

  The faded, flower-patterned hospital gown lay on the bed. (Why flower-patterned? Couldn’t they have found a more manly garment for him to wear?) He had his pants halfway down to his knees when Ewomi bustled in without apology, holding what looked like Baby Doc Duvalier’s leftover Bermuda shorts, a fetching shade of turquoise, made of some kind of disposable papery cloth material. Ewomi announced that these were Vincent’s “Dignity Shorts”, a new PC innovation to prevent people of certain religious affiliations getting too embarrassed by the inevitable discovery that hospital gowns open at the back.