by Pete Kahle
As he stalked through that underground labyrinth, Kaleed could hardly help remembering what Tiskup had been telling him before his gaunt nurses arrived. About how he’d first met the client in a place just like this; a millennia-old tomb, pre-Islamic without a doubt, exposed by the effects of the 2009 drought on the Hadithah Dam.
He moved slowly in the inscrutable darkness, so not to alert any watchers, and at the threshold of every cell door— of which there were an uncountable number— he’d stop and pull away the cover of the viewing slot; staring inside and hoping to find Faisal, brutalised but still alive, on the inside.
His plan was necessarily simple. Find Faisal. Reach the surface by any means necessary. Steal any form of transport that would get them to the roads and then disappear into the backwaters of Mexico.
They couldn’t go back to the US but neither could they stay in whatever twisted private experiment Tiskup was running.
It was then that something happened which made Kaleed shrink against the nearest wall and practically hold his breath with fear and alertness.
He’d checked and passed one cell when, from the neighbouring room, he began to discern a familiar voice; the slow, deliberate and calm voice of Doctor Tiskup.
Kaleed remembered his training. He grew silent as a shadow and pressed yet further into the cold earthen walls. He tuned his ear in as well as he could to the muffled sound of Tiskup’s voice and he found that , between breaths, he could pick up a little of what the man was saying in the evidently occupied cell.
He was talking about the client again. He was talking about blood and flesh. Kaleed was sure that Faisal must be in that cell, locked in, alone, and with that maniac doctor. If it had been left to Kaleed’s gut feelings, he would’ve pulled the door open, rushed in, broke Tiskup’s kafir neck and freed Faisal that way.
He slowed his heartbeat and tried to remember the way he’d been trained to act.
How many were in the room? He asked himself. Were the nurses in there too; with Tiskup and Faisal? Could he take all three as he’d taken two in his own cell? What if there were more? What if they had guns?
Kaleed formulated his plan of action. He’d open the viewing slot just long enough to see inside the cell. He’d count the bodies quickly and make an appraisal of his chances on the spot. If they were favourable, he’d attack now. If not, he’d try to steal away again and wait for a more opportune time.
He moved as slowly and as stealthily as he could. He put his hand on the viewing slot’s cover and gently pulled it up. Then he positioned his eye and stared into the partial darkness of Faisal’s detainment chamber.
At first Kaleed couldn’t make out the shapes of what he saw and then, as he began to, he wished he hadn’t.
The strangeness of the scene all but paralysed him and, truthfully, he had no idea whether to open the door and fight or to run and never come back.
Faisal was on the ground by the dead bolted chair. His face had been pressed into the sanitised floors and he wasn’t moving. He’d been tranquilised again.
As the shadows parted from the figure of his friend Kaleed nearly vomited. It wasn’t Faisal anymore. The shivering, incoherent mass of flesh that lay on the floor was barely recognisable as human. Its legs and its arms had been surgically removed. Its buttocks were gone and instead of hair it wore a gory skullcap of exposed bone.
Doctor Tiskup— deranged— unhinged— obscenely perverse— was hunched down like some ravenous jackal on what used to be Faisal’s back. His bloody face was pushed up against the other man’s shoulder-bone and with his surgeon’s hand he twisted and gouged a bleeding scalpel into what remained of Faisal’s skin; ripping it off his red back in long strips and feeding it into the black hole of his own wet, salivating mouth.
Kaleed dropped the viewer’s cover and fell back screaming against the far wall. A torrent of vomit spewed out of his mouth, corrupting the stolen clothes he wore. He grabbed at his legs and pulled them into a foetal rocking.
Seconds later he heard Tiskup— that wild animal— rising in the cell beyond the door and beginning to move with an unbroken purpose in his direction.
The door opened and Kaleed stopped screaming. His eyes widened and he couldn’t find his voice.
Tiskup stepped out into the relative light of the hallway. The lower half of his face was greased by Faisal’s blood. When he smiled Kaleed could see strings of grey flesh in the interstices between his teeth.
The doctor was completely naked and Kaleed remembered feeling his sanity slipping as he observed the condition of the man’s body. On every spare patch of skin Kaleed could make out the small and blackened scar where a word had been carved into the flesh and stained with ink: The exact same word that the AMD had imprinted on Kaleed’s inner thigh.
“It’s okay,” Tiskup’s gory face was still smiling. “Just relax.”
Kaleed had lost all control of his body. Sitting there, in vomit and piss, he could do nothing but stare up at Tiskup in paralysis.
The last thing he remembered before passing out from the fear was the distinct feeling— which may only have been a trick of the underground light— that he could see something large and many-legged moving under the soft tissues of Tiskup’s stomach.
# # #
When Kaleed woke again, it was to the feeling of wrists bound down to the arms of a chair.
His head was spinning and painful and it seemed almost possible that the entire episode had been nothing but a drug-fueled nightmare.
Slowly the world began to sharpen into some recognisable focus and Kaleed’s stomach sank as he saw Tiskup again— fully clothed and clean now— and sitting like a benign physician on the chair in front of him.
Behind him the two nurses— they may as well have been the same two nurses— stood together by another gurney.
“You have offended the client, Mr. Masri,” Tiskup said. “I’m sorry, but that is inexcusable here.”
Kaleed shook his head woozily.
“There— there is no client,” he forced himself to say. “It’s you, Tiskup. It’s you. I saw— I saw what you were doing... to Faisal.”
“What you saw, Mr. Masri, was a service we provide for the client. When I met him, in Hadithah, he was quite, quite weak. Almost unable to go on. Our contract is one of mutual benefit. Quid pro quo, you might say. We give him everything he does not have and he gives us everything we do not have.”
The nurses, on Tiskup’s orders, had begun to move around to Kaleed’s side. They pulled the gurney along with them.
Kaleed closed his eyes.
“You alone do we worship,” he whispered to himself, “and You alone do we ask for help...”
He heard the nurses riffling through their razor-sharp scalpels.
“Guide us on the straight path,” Kaleed said. “The path of those who have received Your grace. Not the path for those who have brought down wrath, nor those who wander astray...”
Kaleed screamed as the nurse opened his legs and skewered the scalpel heavily into his inner-thigh. He screamed until he was weak, trying all the while to escape his bonds, but the nurse wouldn’t stop. He twisted and gouged with the vicious appliance until a piece of Kaleed’s flesh came off in his dripping, latex-sheathed hand.
Kaleed’s body went limp when the cutting stopped.
He watched through a haze of tears as the nurse carried the small scrap of flesh back to Tiskup. He presented the rag of skin to the doctor like an acolyte presenting a holy implement to the High Priest.
Tiskup picked up that piece of Kaleed’s thigh and Kaleed saw at once the scrap of Arabic as the doctor placed it between his teeth and began ravenously to chew.
“You sick bastard,” Kaleed whined. “You sick bastard!”
Tiskup swallowed the flesh and blood and Kaleed heard the man’s stomach gurgle with satisfaction.
Kaleed closed his eyes again, in despair. Slowly his lips began to move in the familiar and comforting syllables of the salat.
“Prayer,”
Tiskup’s voice mocked. “Prayer will do you no good in this place, Mr. Masri. God is quite deaf. But there is an angel that waits to kiss your eyes...”
Kaleed tried to block out Tiskup’s obscene blasphemy. If he died now he wanted to die with his ears full of the Word of God and nothing else.
“...you can’t imagine how desolate it must have felt.” Tiskup’s voice continued, wistful, dreaming, “all those countless years of space... through oubliettes of mind and form... abysses... voids... sudden radiance flashing... and then falling... all charts obliterated and suddenly you’re lost on a primitive world. The three-thousandth year since Adam, and the city of Akkad still stands, uplit by the shimmering Tigris, where Baghdad stands today. And a fire, still trailing in the sky, brings the pagans to your broken craft.”
Kaleed had not stopped praying and it was clear that the fact was more than irksome to Tiskup. How dare anyone retreat into fantasies of paradise and divinity? The earth was what the earth was. The stars were what the stars were. Certain and material.
The client was a living organism, not a god of stone or abstraction, and he had found him under the dam at Hadithah where the old Akkadians had built his dwelling.
Tiskup could still remember when the contract had been agreed and the client had entered him.
No spiritual entry of breath or spirit or recitation as the Qur’an and the Gospels describe. But a visceral inhabitation of one body by another.
Tiskup could still remember how his sphincter opened and his bowel swelled as the client’s lubricated body climbed inside.
“Open his eyes!”
For the first time Tiskup’s voice was anything but calm and Kaleed found that— despite himself— he began to beg when the nurses started following the order.
“Please, Tiskup!” Kaleed screamed. “Don’t do this! There is no client! There is no client! It’s you, Tiskup! It’s you!”
The nurses held his face tightly in their latex embrace and both began slowly to slice off one of his eyelids a piece.
He screamed in excruciating pain as the nurses removed the redundant flaps of skin and dabbed away the excess bleeding from his eyeballs with antiseptic towels.
With his mutilated and unblinking eyes Kaleed stared across the room to where Tiskup was beginning again to undress.
He pulled off everything; revealing again his putrid, grey skin engraved with a thousand fragments of mystic Arabic.
All at once Kaleed understood what had happened. His brothers in the AMD— not brothers at all— had carved that word into his thigh the same way one might brand a head of cattle. They’d meant him to be caught in the White House attack. They had meant for him to be brought here the way a dumb animal is led to the abattoir.
The nurses clamped their hands on either side of his head, forcing him to look at Tiskup.
The doctor was coming closer. He stopped so close to Kaleed’s chair that he could— if not bound— have reached out and touched him.
With slow and deliberate sensuality, the nurses fed the doctor Kaleed’s dismembered eyelids. Kaleed cried and gibbered as Tiskup licked his assistant’s rubbery fingers clean of blood.
Tiskup’s stomach— which, at that moment, was level with Kaleed’s lidless eyes— seemed to roll and undulate with its own autonomous pleasures.
Tiskup moved fluidly, dancing like a bacchanal, and Kaleed soon found that the doctor was sitting on his naked thighs.
The nurses pulled Kaleed’s head backwards into the metal rest and Tiskup licked the side of his captive’s face.
“You should feel honoured.” Tiskup smiled. “The client is all generous. Quid pro quo, Mr. Masri. Quid pro quo. You will give him your body. And he will give you Paradise.”
“Please!” Kaleed cried, “Oh God! Oh God!”
The nurses behind him started to stab into his arms with their razor-sharp implements. Kaleed screamed and Tiskup lunged forward like a wild jackal. He bit down through the skin and muscle of his captive’s unprotected face; tearing away jawfuls of Kaleed’s meat.
“Oh God! Oh God!”
The room, and the dizzying subterranean warrens of the deserted facility beyond, rang and echoed with Kaleed’s agonised screaming; even as they cut him to shreds and fed his body to Tiskup; even as Tiskup’s smiling face was smeared to the eye-line in frantic rubbings of his blood. Still Kaleed’s pleading voice could be heard.
“Oh God!” He screamed, “Oh God! There is no client! There is no client! It’s you! It’s you! It’s you!”
B.T. Joy is a British horror writer whose short fiction has appeared within the printed pages, internet presences and podcasts of markets such as Static Movement, Surreal Grotesque, James Ward Kirk Fiction, Human Echoes, Flashes In The Dark, SQ Magazine, Forgotten Tomb Press, Chilling Tales For Dark Nights and Pseudopod: The Horror Podcast, among others. His debut collection of horror stories, Long Dead Before Dying, is available through Horrified Press. He can be reached through his website: http://btj0005uk.wix.com/btjoypoet or on tumblr: http://btj0005uk.tumblr.com/
Apt Pupae
By John F.D. Taff
Red and viscous, it spattered onto the desk blotter, pooled on the filmy wax paper that had wrapped it.
Sal had barely taken the first bite of his morning jelly doughnut when the phone jangled. His mouth filled with raspberry jam, he seriously considered ignoring it.
"Yeah, Ant-E-Dote, can I help you?" he answered, slurping a string of jelly back into his mouth.
"We need an exterminator," said the voice on the other end.
"What's the problem?"
"Termites. Can you come right away?" asked the man, his voice curiously flat and monotone.
Sal looked at the doughnut with all the unrequited feelings of a spurned lover.
"Yeah, give me 45 minutes.”
"Can you come sooner?"
"They're not gonna eat your house up that fast." Sal took another big bite of the doughnut.
"They're very hungry.”
"Yeah, buddy, well so am I," he mumbled around the mouthful. "What's the address?"
# # #
The houses were well kept, bright and cheery. Inviting. And, they all looked vaguely the same.
Stepford Wives Estates is what the sign should have read, Sal mused. Middle-Manager Meadows.
Most of the houses were empty at this hour, their owners on the nearby interstate, stop-and-going to work. He turned onto a street whose very name made him cringe, Sunny Springs Court.
Unlike the rest of the subdivision, this court was not built up. Only one house clung to its tight arc as the street looped around a grassy island, swung back onto the main road.
He pulled into the driveway, swung his body out, trundled toward the rear of the van. The doors creaked open, and Sal leaned into the mess, digging through beer cans and Taco Bell bags to find his utility belt.
Utility belt, he repeated in his mind as he found it, pulled it from the mess.
He loved that description, loved the belt. Kind of made him feel like Batman every time he strapped it around gut and butt.
Rummaging further, his hand knocked against a spray tank with a hollow Bong! He grabbed this, too, and it slid heavily through the debris, trailing its long metal wand. Setting it onto the driveway, he closed the doors, examined his reflection in the van's grimy windows.
He adjusted his utility belt, the implements jangling like spurs, ran a finger over his teeth, picked out a stray raspberry seed.
The man that answered the door was conservatively dressed; a dark suit, white shirt and a bland red tie. His lank hair was combed straight back from his puffy white face, his dark eyes peering out like raisins from the slightly glistening folds of his doughy flesh.
"You must be the exterminator. We're so glad you're here," he said, reaching out to shake Sal's hand. It was a limp, cold handshake, like grasping a grocery store chicken. Sal bore down all the harder in disgust and felt the man's flesh slide disturbingly beneath the pale skin.
"Y
eah, buddy, that's me," Sal indicated with a jerk of his thumb back toward the truck. "If I can come in for a minute, take a look-see, I think I'll be able to get this done toot-sweet."
The inside of the house was sparsely furnished, funereally quiet. Plain white blinds sealed the windows, and the white, white walls were unadorned.
"Just move in?" asked Sal, setting the spray container down heavily onto the beige carpet in the family room.
"Yes, this was a move up for us," the man answered, standing stiffly in the hallway, keeping a wary eye on the spray gun.
Sal thought it rather strange that they'd need an exterminator so soon after moving in--especially for termites. Developers were required to do a thorough termite inspection prior to closing. He, in fact, had done hundreds of them over the years.
"Where've you noticed the termites?" he asked, turning to face the man.
"In the crawlspace."
The man led Sal through the kitchen, bare and bone white, to a well-stocked walk-in pantry. A small, attic-like doorway was set low on the far wall.
"If you need us, we'll be in the other room," said the man, standing in the doorway as Sal removed the cover from the crawlspace entrance.
"Sure, buddy. It'll be a while." He unhooked his flashlight, clambered into the small passage, leaving his spray can behind in the pantry.
# # #
The crawlspace was exactly that, no more. As he shimmied in, he felt the floorboards of the house scrape his back. Sweat began to run across his back, and the coffee in his belly rolled and growled uneasily.
The air was damp, sweet and musty, rich with the smell of old dirt and new wood. He could hear, feel the creaks and groans of the house above him, the footsteps of the man as he moved about.
