Monstrocity

by Jeffrey Thomas

  I had a whim. I was still unsettled by my exchange that morning with Mr. Dove. I decided to check out one other fairly familiar location. I decided to go to Morpha Street. Subterranean level. Level B. 14-B, I wanted...

  The tube let me off at the same platform as in my actual quest. Just as then, the high roof was like a fossilized sky. A shunt rattled by on an overhead vine of cable and a phosphorescent snow of sparks drifted down. I headed along the sidewalk. I remembered what 14-B would look like: a building with walls of pale violet brick, with a jagged crown that nearly stabbed the ceiling...

  I stopped in my tracks. Pale violet bricks. Jagged, tapered summit. The building that housed Dove Books was like a miniature version of that building I had only just noticed outside my office window. That distant, larger edifice had seemed to me to have more irregularly shaped bricks or tiles for its hide, but the similarity was still there in shape and color. Synchronicity, I thought. Coincidence, was more like it. It was no doubt nothing more than 14-B having stuck in my mind, making me notice the larger building where I had never had reason to focus on it before.

  Resuming my walk, I craned my neck to see if I could spot my destination. It must be right up ahead now, but I hadn’t caught sight of it yet...

  I had passed the Japanese vid store (with its various categorized sections such as Yakuza, Anime, Rape) and a robot vendor that I almost wanted to buy a coffee from, until I remembered I wasn’t really on Morpha Street B. I walked on. And, finally, I came to a street corner.

  I turned, looked back the way I had come. I had gone too far.

  There was no 14-B.

  The building hadn’t struck me as a new one. Could it have been built, however, after this area had been recorded as a game template?

  To be sure I hadn’t passed it (maybe it had been painted another color?), I retraced my steps. But finally I stopped at the mouth of an alley where I realized the building should have been. Like a hole it had been extracted from. I saw a big old trash zapper back in there with filth-streaked sides, a few miniature shelters fashioned from shipping pallets. Spray-paint graffiti glowed in neon colors, so that the alley was bathed in blue, pink, green and yellow pastel light as if the sun beamed through stained glass windows. Several young prosties lingered in the throat of the alley, and one of them noticed me staring...moved toward me in an unsteady manner as if she might be drunk.

  “Hey, handsome,” she purred. There was a phlegmy rattle in her voice. She was small, thin, scantily dressed, and as she came out of the soft-colored gloom I saw that her long straight hair was dyed dark purple. The whites of her eyes were dyed soft violet. She was a Choom, but she had had her eyes made slanted like a human Asian. And I knew her.

  “Take me in the ass,” she gurgled in what was meant as a coo. She turned her back to me, spread her cheeks with her hands, smiled her huge Choom smile at me over her shoulder.

  But when I had met her...when I had taken her to bed...the young prosty had not had four bony extrusions branching out of her skull like malformed miniature antlers. Raw pink skin peeled from them to show bone white beneath. Another of these forked growths sprouted from a shoulder blade, and another from one elbow. Yet another was beginning to sprout inside her mouth, pushing out her wide lower lip.

  “Take me in the ass, handsome,” she gargled.

  I backed away from her. But I spoke to her. “Do you remember me?”

  “Don’t be shy...”

  “What happened to you?”

  “My dreams change me...”

  “What happened to the place that was here?”

  “It will be back...”

  When she faced front again, I saw that she didn’t have the tattoo on her chest that was meant to protect her. The star with the flaming eye her friend had put there. I backed away to the edge of the curb. She took one lurching step toward me, her arms moving weirdly in order to balance her.

  “Tell me what’s happening!” I demanded.

  “There’s someone at the door,” she said. I heard my door buzzer sound. I flinched. As if amused, the prosty smiled so broadly that the new stump of an antler popped out from behind her lip and glistened with saliva.

  I paused the game (afraid of what the mutant prosty might do to my character in my absence), got up from my desk and crossed to my door. There was a small security monitor beside it but it hadn’t worked since I moved into my flat. Close to the panel, I called out shakily, “Who is it?”

  “Gabrielle,” a muffled voice said.

  But for several moments, I didn’t believe it. The voice had seemed to be that of a man. Deep, chesty. Then again, it was distorted through the door. Maybe I simply couldn’t believe that Gaby would want to seek me out again.

  I reached out and unlocked the door.

  A sliver of a second after the lock came off, a mass of flesh exploded through the doorway, squeezing rapidly through as if it had no bones inside to impede it. It was a man or a woman, grotesquely obese, but moving with shocking speed, and it closed its hands around my throat and drove me back with its great bulk. It nudged the door closed with a thrust of its backside. It was a mountain of blue-tinged flesh in a smock like a black parachute. It was totally bald and without eyebrows. It was the creature I had seen standing on the tube platform. It was the creature that had been peeking at me in the hallway outside Gaby’s abandoned apartment.

  It was Gabrielle.

  Her hands were powerful. I couldn’t get a breath past them. She had me pinned against a wall now, and slid me up, up, until my feet kicked at the air, kicked at her immense breasts inside her smock. My feet danced like those of a hanging man; my heels caught in the front of her smock and tore it.

  I saw the window that looked into her chest. It was nearly healed up, just a small puckered opening like an infected anus. But the pane itself was gone; the hole opened directly into her. It was black in there, and empty.

  She snarled in my face, showing yellow, yellow teeth, and in a deep voice I didn’t recognize rumbled, “You’re too curious, Christopher. It wouldn’t be a problem if you were curious like I am. But you aren’t. You have a big mouth. You got Mr. Dove angry. Now he blames me. Now he might hurt me.”

  I clawed at her wrists. I clawed at her face. She squinted her eyes to protect them. She was enormous. There was no way for her to have gained such a vast amount of weight since I’d last seen her. But comically -- or pathetically – she still carried her same old pocketbook...only her fatty arm was much too gigantic to get the strap around. The strap of the handbag was instead knotted around the sash of her black smock, so that she wore it like a pouch at her waist.

  I was sure my face was black. The air prickled and fizzed as if it were full of fiery-colored swarming microorganisms. I couldn’t even say her name to beg for mercy. I dug and pushed at her with my heels. I raked her face with my nails. I tried to pry my fingers under her lids to gouge at her eyes but she rumbled and pulled me away from the wall so she could slam me back into it. My left leg shot out straight in more of a spasm than an attack and struck her pocketbook. It came undone from the mile-long sash around her waist and dropped to the floor. It sounded heavy.

  “Idiot!” she roared, and flung me down in contempt. I thudded more heavily than the pocketbook. Like a man resurfacing after nearly drowning, I sucked at the air in a pitiful whine. Tears filled my eyes and my fingers now clawed the floor. I felt myself teetering on a rail between consciousness and oblivion.

  Gaby stooped to retrieve her fallen pocketbook. Through my tears I watched her; it was too horrifying to be humorous that she could not kneel down on the floor, but had to lean down past the obstacle of herself instead. The thick stubs of her fingers caught the strap, but as she drew the handbag toward her I saw her palmcomp drop out.

  Her palmcomp. Was the red chip, Maria’s chip, with the Necronomicon still inside it? No wonder Gaby was so frantic to protect the thing...

  I got my knees under me. I reached to a chair to hoist myself up...held it to kee
p from falling back down. Those microorganisms still seethed, each one aflame. It was as though these bright flecks made up the air, made up everything, but only now could I see them.

  The palmcomp had been rescued. Straightening up, leaving the handbag where it lay for the present, Gaby glared over at me again, clutching the palmcomp close to her chest. No...not just that. She was inserting it into herself. Into that orifice where once her tattooed heart could be seen through a clear window. She tucked her precious device with its priceless contents into her very body for safe keeping.

  “You’re blind,” she snorted. “You might as well be dead, too.”

  “Gaby,” I choked. I was able to stagger out of her lumbering path, now. But she was taking her time. I had seen how fast she could move.

  “You’re lucky, Christopher. You’ll die now. You won’t be here when all the doors open. It would make you insane. It would make a blind man like you tear his own eyes from their sockets...”

  She extended those huge meaty hands in front of her. It felt like they had never left my throat. As she came, I smelled the stink of her insides from the gaping hole between the swaying planets of her breasts.

  Circling away from her, I sobbed, “Gaby, please don’t!”

  “Death...”

  “Gaby...”

  “Death, sweet death for little Christopher,” she whispered as if to soothe me.

  I circled until I stood over her handbag, and then I dropped to my haunches to plunge my hand into it.

  “Die!” Gabrielle bellowed, and it sounded like a dozen men had shouted the sound out of her one throat. An avalanche of corpse-blue meat in a blur of black. I tore from her handbag the small illegal handgun Gaby had taken to carrying after having been raped several times before I knew her.

  The avalanche was nearly upon me. I thrust the gun up at her. I fell onto my back. I hesitated for several seconds. The hands followed me down. Her eyes looked so small, so lost in her face now. Her face hung over me for all time. Time had stood still. Time. Somehow, it was Gaby herself who had peeked at me in that hallway outside her apartment. On the tube platform. The future Gaby, having stepped just far enough through the veil between now and then.

  It’s all about time. Time and space.

  The pistol was a gay yellow ceramic. It looked like a toy. It made a snapping sound when I pulled the trigger. I thought it was misfiring or clicking on dead cartridges, so I kept pulling the trigger again and again and again. I didn’t realize I’d been hitting Gaby – I saw no blood against her black smock – until I saw the neat black hole that popped open on her forehead. Another one opened right beside it. They were like new eyes.

  She lurched backwards like a dinosaur rearing up. She made a horrible liquid sound in her lungs, in her throat, a gurgle that seemed to go all through her, into her bloated limbs. She flopped back, one great arm smashing across my computer. It fell from the desk. She fell atop it. She did not rock comically. Instead, she seemed to spread amorphously across the floor, a gelatinous puddle.

  “Gaby!” I cried out. But I kept the gun pointed at her. As agonized as I was, I would shoot her again – again and again – if she so much as raised her hand.

  She didn’t.

  “Gaby,” I sobbed. And then, without warning, I vomited. It sprayed my chest and her bare feet. I dropped to my knees and vomited again. But I didn’t let go of that happy yellow gun.

  At last, dry heaves like forcing broken slate through my throat. A pool between my hands. After my throttling, and the vomiting, I had nearly blacked out again, but another ghastly burbling made me look back to Gabrielle. Made me rocket to my feet and point the handgun again.

  Just fluids moving from here to there. No real movement. No breathing. She was dead. I had killed her.

  Did I really have to do it? Couldn’t I have run away? Had I really been in mortal danger, or had I only been afraid of her? Repulsed by her?

  “Gaby,” I whispered, and crept nearer lightly as if afraid I might wake her from a nap. Gaby was a grouchy riser.

  Her eyes were closed, thank God. A little blood had seeped at last from the holes in her head, but it was more like a thick gray sludge; brain matter, then? I saw another hole in one of her bare arms. More of that gray porridge. Not brain matter, then. I spotted a fourth hole in one of her half-bared breasts.

  A new alarm filled me. Her palmcomp, inside her. What if a projectile had struck it? Ruined it? With the Necronomicon inside it?

  Part of me asked, What does that matter, anymore?

  And another part of me knew I had to reach my hand into that puckered wound in her chest and pull the palmcomp out of her.

  I knelt down beside her, again smelling her internal stink through that opening, so much uglier than the little holes I had made. I continued gripping my pistol in one hand, while I positioned the other over her. My stomach roiled as I bunched my fingers together, then guided them into her, trying my best not to touch the sides. But I had to, of course. As she had squeezed her impossible bulk through my threshold, so did I squeeze my hand through that fleshy ring. Her skin was cold against mine. When my hand was through, the lips of the wound closed again around my wrist, and I had an irrational fear that it would close and close until it had bitten my hand off.

  It was even colder inside. Damp, slick. But I didn’t have to probe deeply before I encountered the palmcomp. Anxiously I closed my hand around it. The lips of the wound had to stretch even further to permit my rude extraction, but I tore the device free without fear of hurting her.

  On my feet again, I backed across the room. At last I lay the pistol down, so I could operate the small device in my hands.

  It came on. I called up the contents of the disk currently inside it.

  The opening screen came on. A few recipes Maria had stored on the disk, either before or after. And – the Necronomicon.

  Another glance at her body. My computer pinned under her, my game interrupted. I would have to return to it again later on. If I dared to. I could use the palmcomp for that. But right now I had to get out of here. The neighbors might be calling the forcers even now. I was a murderer, you see. I had murdered my own lover.

  I changed my clothes hastily, panting in between sobbing. I washed my hands vigorously, especially the one that had been inside her blackness. I tucked the sunshiny gun into my waistband, then slipped into a jacket. The palmcomp went into my jacket pocket. Without packing a suitcase, except to almost blindly fill a plastic shopping bag, without having any idea of where I was fleeing to, I left my apartment. Locked it behind me. Locked Gabrielle still inside.

  PART TWO: SALEET

  PIMP MAMA T was sitting naked astride Slut Master E, when Bitchoney J burst into the room and stopped dead in the threshold, letting out his classic, much-imitated line, “God slap me dead!” The live audience roared. Slut Master E and Bitchoney J were played by two tremendously heavy black actors, OmarBlast M and MikeyMikey K, respectively. Slut Master E was Pimp Mama T’s cousin, and Bitchoney J was her son. But in tonight’s episode, Pimp Mama T was played by the diminutive white actress Jessika Heart Thatcher, who was probably younger than both male actors. In every episode of the sitcom Pimp Mama T, the title character was portrayed by a different actress (or actor, sometimes). Many famous movie actresses enjoyed guest-starring in the role, trying to outdo each other in their interpretations of the zany madam of a cheap Forma Street brothel. Her kooky family and friends were always played by the same cast, however..

  While Pimp Mama T scrambled and stammered and tried to explain to her staring, gaping son what she and her cousin had been doing, clumsily putting his gigantic clothes on instead of her own, I slouched watching the wall-length VT with a warm Zub in my hand and an ache packed solid behind one eye and the bridge of my nose, brought on by too much Zub and not enough food.

  It was a two room apartment. One largish room served as livingroom/kitchenette, with a kitchen counter functioning as a partial partition between the two sections. The sof
a folded out into a bed. The other room was a closet of a bathroom. The bathroom walls, floor and ceiling were scaled with aqua tiles, the grout between them a grimy black. The walls, floor and the ceiling of the livingroom/kitchenette were tiled a pale banana yellow. When I had woken that morning – my first morning in my new flat – I thought I was staring down at the floor instead of up at the ceiling, and I gripped my ratty blanket in my fists as vertigo yawned through me.

  There was a small kitchen table beside my armchair. That was the extent of the furnishings, besides the aforementioned sleeper-sofa. The glossy top of the table was sunflower yellow. So were the refrigerator, sink and cooking/cleaning units in the kitchenette. Happy, sunshiny yellow. Like Gaby’s gun.

  On the table at my elbow rested three empty bottles of Zub and the messy paper that had wrapped a gyro eaten hours before. An open can of mixed nuts was the rest of my groceries; the fridge held more Zub and creamer for coffee. Oh yeah, I had a can of coffee, too.

  Also on the table beside me was my palmcomp. Gaby’s palmcomp, that is.

  I hadn’t wanted to bother with closing my account, so I had withdrawn all my money from the bank except for the bare minimum required, and had then printed it out on paper bills. I had bought a cheap printer and hooked it up to the palmcomp on the table.

  I had called the candle shop at the Canberra Mall, and talked to one of Gabrielle’s coworker/friends, Ebonee. First, though, I angled the palmcomp so she wouldn’t see my apartment windows behind me. I didn’t want her or anyone to know I was calling from a new flat. If she saw the windows, she might see just enough through the yellow translucent curtains to know that my apartment was in the subterranean section of Punktown. B Level. One street over from Morpha Street B.

  “Hi, Ebonee,” I said, smiling into my vidscreen at the lovely young black woman. She had short straight hair dyed metallic red. “Is Gaby there? I haven’t seen her in days. I think she’s avoiding me...”

  “Aw, honey, didn’t you know? Aw, Topher...Gabe quit her job. She said she was moving out of her flat, too. Maybe even out of Punktown altogether. You mean she didn’t even tell you none of this?”