The Teratologist

by Edward Lee

  The Teratologist

  The Teratologist

  Midpoint

  The Teratologist

  by Edward Lee & Wrath James White

  Smashwords Edition

  Necro Publications

  2011

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  THE TERATOLOGIST

  THE TERATOLOGIST © 2007 Edward Lee and Wrath James White

  Cover art © 2011 Travis Anthony Soumis

  This digital edition July 2011 © Necro Publications

  Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  a Necro Publication

  5139 Maxon Terrace • Sanford, FL 32771

  http://www.necropublications.com

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  THE TERATOLOGIST

  Sharon could see and hear and, to a degree, think. But she couldn’t speak—she’d been born without vocal cords. She couldn’t make a peep, and she guessed that was the chief reason why the men who worked here liked to come in and do things to her. She couldn’t very well tell anybody—the home’s director, for instance—that she was being routinely raped in a facility that existed to help people like her, yet on the other hand, she didn’t really mind. It was sensation, nearly all she was likely to get, given her condition.

  They left the TV on, toward which she would loll her head, drooling on the rank pillow, her visual universe limited to whatever channel they chose to leave on, typically Channel 9: soap operas and talk shows. Hence, her lot in this strange life, to lie in the raised bed, to be fed sweet mush by nurses (Sharon had no teeth), to watch Jerry Springer, and to go to sleep every night after being fastidiously copulated with.

  Her missing vocal cords were just one sequent symptom of her hypo-osteopesis, a rare genetic affliction also less-than-clinically referred to as “curled-bone syndrome.” Her I.Q. was about 70, that of a low-level retardate, because as an infant, defected cranial development prevented her brain from growing into the proper shape. Her head was warped. The rest of her affliction left all of her long bones curled up like bows of pasta, the ribs on her right side curled inward, the ribs on her left curled out, and her hips splayed like a book lying open flat. Why don’t they just kill her? one of the janitors had muttered under his breath one time when he was in here changing her pan. Ain’t gonna get better—that mess? Just suckin’ up tax dollars… Yeah, someone oughta just kill her. Sharon wasn’t sure but she thought she knew what kill meant, and she didn’t want that, not really. She thought about what it might be like, but if they killed her then she supposed she would no longer be able to watch Springer, and she liked Springer. Sometimes they had people akin to her on the show, and she enjoyed seeing them, a relativity, perhaps. She especially liked the one with the girl with no arms and legs, who walked about on her buttocks. A man had even married her! Hope, perhaps, in view of the cruel joke nature had played on her.

  No men would be likely to marry Sharon, though. They’d just come in here and fuck her every night, unmindful of her wafting pissy odors and staggering halitosis.

  At ten o’clock, the night nurse turned off the TV and lights. She pulled the covers up, sniffing. “Wasn’t Louie supposed to give you your weekly sponge bath today?” the woman asked, knowing that Sharon couldn’t answer. “Lord, you don’t smell very good, honey. Not my problem, though.” She left in the dark. Sharon knew the routine now. About a half hour later, the door clicked back open and Louie entered. It was his job to check each patient several times throughout the night, to see if they’d died; most of the people in the state home were old—that’s what Sharon had heard. In fact, she was the youngest patient on the wing, twenty-five. Every now and then doctors from research centers and medical schools would come by to examine her. And always comment to each other how remarkable it was that she’d survived this long. Sometimes Louie would comment too, whispering to her as he lay between her curled legs, “I hope you don’t die for a long time, sweetie. I hope to be squirting my load in you for years to come!”

  Louie only turned on the little light with the bendable arm over the med chart, to keep it dark, but Sharon could still see him plainly. Tall and skinny, with stooped shoulders. Bald in the middle, with wiry gray-black hair sticking out on the sides. Pits in his face looked like someone had cleated him. “Lovin’ time, sweetie,” the familiar whisper announced. “Lovin’ time.” “Jesus, she stinks!” another male vice whispered back. Sometimes Louie brought other men here too. “Yeah, that’s great, ain’t it, Phil?” Louie replied. “I love the stinkers. I’m supposed to wash her but I can usually get away only doing it once a month.” “Good Christ!”

  She heard them cluttering, could see them moving about. Sharon had never seen the other man before, a fat guy with a doughy face.

  “And you—you—you’re…going to fuck her? Smelling like that?”

  “Yeah. I love it. Take a look.” Louie bent the little light around, shined it on Sharon and pulled her gown up. “Ain’t that sweet, Phil?”

  Phil’s fat face bloomed, cheeks billowing. He croaked, “Good Lord,” and then jerked away. Sharon knew by the wet, splattering sound that he was vomiting in the trashcan.

  Louie chuckled. He blew his nose into his hand and rubbed the mucus over Sharon’s gaping vagina. Then he climbed on. “God, you smell like shit,” he grunted, humping her immediately. “It just—turns me—the fuck-on!”

  Phil had finished relocating the contents of his stomach into the garbage. He stood back up against the wall in the dark. “You are one sick motherfucker.”

  “Yuh—yeah!”

  “How can you even get it up? The smell alone’ll kill my sex drive for a year.”

  “Naw, man. Try it once, you’ll never be the same.”

  “At least fuck her in the ass. You get her pregnant, there’ll be big trouble.”

  “Shit, Phil. She’s a genetic monster. Her genes are so fucked up she couldn’t get knocked up in a million years.” Louie just kept humping while Sharon’s motionless limbs joggled on the bed. Her breasts joggled too, like baggies of vanilla pudding, depending into her hairy armpits. “No fetus could ever live in his fucked up womb.”

  “Yeah? She lived.”

  Louie wasn’t concerned. “Ah—ah—ah, you shitty bitch! Ahhh!”

  Sharon could feel the warm trickle go into her as his thrusts slowed, then stopped. “Aw, fuck. What a nut…” Eventually he rolled off, heaving in breath.

  “And how often do you do this?” Phil asked, astounded in his revulsion.

  “Couple times a night. Couple other guys on the floor do too.”

  Phil’s face seemed pinched up in the dark. “You’re all a bunch of scat freaks. I’ve never seen anything so sick in my life.”

  Louie chuckled. “Hey, wanna make a bet?”

  “What bet?”

  Louie bent the light around some more, shined it right between Sharon’s sweaty legs. “Bet ya fifty bucks you ain’t got a set brass enough to eat that pussy.”

  Phil teetered in place, as though simply hearing the words might cause him to pass out. “I’d kill myself before I’d do that.”

  “Amateur!” Louie looked like the demented scatological erotopath he was, standing there in his white work tunic and no pants. He exten
ded his hand toward Sharon’s pale and malodorous form. “Sure you don’t want to take a bang? It’s good pussy, man.”

  Phil put a paw to his bulbous gut. The answer was invariably no.

  “Suit yourself. I got more work to do.”

  The other man could barely remain standing in his dismay. “Let’s get out of here before we get caught! You had your fun, let’s go. You’re telling me you aren’t done yet?”

  The big toothy grin seemed to glow in the dark. “I ain’t even close to being done, brother. You wanna see hardcore? I’ll show you hardcore—”

  Phil’s stomach was making fish-tank noises in objection. “No no no, please, God no,” he pleaded as Louie—shit-splotched balls swinging—climbed back up on the bed, on his knees. He was poised like a child about to push a peanut with his nose. “Oh, yeah, baby,” he chuckled. He parted Sharon’s bowed legs wide. “This is better than desert—”

  ”No, no, no, please, God no—”

  ”—Yeah, man, like a big cream pie—”

  And then Louie, with no hesitation nor compunction, proceeded to execute the act of cunnilingus on a drooling, insensate Sharon. “La la la la la,” he burbled. The noise of the act sounded like a big ravenous dog devouring a pile of Alpo.

  “How can you do that? She’s been shitting and pissing in a bed pan all day!”

  “La la la la la—”

  Louie’s tongue delved deep. At one point it looked like he was trying to push his entire face into the slack, nauseating mass of her vagina. Then came the obvious slurping sounds, which made Phil, quite gruelingly, think of someone sucking up the last of a milkshake through a McDonald’s straw. But there was no milkshake down in that furrow of filth. Louie was reclaiming his own semen, quite greedily.

  Phil fell back to his knees, to vomit some more in the trash. The regurgitation sounded like a drain backing up. When there was nothing left, he stayed down there a while, dry heaving as strings of bile dangled off his lips.

  “What a light-weight,” Louie chuckled, smacking. “It’s like eating chocolate cake.”

  He looked up from the parted thighs, runny excrement, semen, and pubic hairs around his mouth. “And you wanna know the best part? I’m on the clock! I’m eating this shit-bag’s cunt and getting paid eight bucks an hour!”

  The image alone, evidently, kept Phil where he was, and this was a good thing. He didn’t need to see what Louie was doing now: sucking Sharon’s toes, dirty inch-long yellow nails and all. His penis stiffened in no time—long and thin, like the rest of him. The glands looked like a pair of arthritic knuckles, with a glimmering hole in the middle. He rearranged himself on the bed, parted his ass-crack and carefully placed it over Sharon’s agape mouth. Then he began to vigorously masturbate. His stomach muscles tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened, along with periodic grunts, and then he whispered, “Phil, Phil! Watch this, it’s really cool! I’m gonna shit in her mouth same time as I come.” His hand shucked and shucked; he grunted some more. “She’ll eat it, too—she’s so stupid she thinks it’s food!”

  In actuality, Sharon did not think it was food but she essentially had no choice but to consume what he expelled into her mouth—otherwise she’d gag. Even if she had any significant mobility, her mind was too undeveloped to understand defensive impulses, such as biting, but she couldn’t bite him anyway because she had no teeth. She simply lay there, quivering as her air supply was depreciated. At one point her coated tongue wagged upward and accidentally licked Louie’s distended anus, which was just beginning to dilate. His loathsome scrotum slapped her crooked chin…

  Then—

  Snap!

  Clink!

  The great weight on Sharon’s face was suddenly gone. Had Louie fallen off in his fervor? He’d disappeared over the side of the bed and didn’t get back up again. Sharon wasn’t capable of wondering much about it, but she instinctively sucked in fresh breaths of air now that her nose and mouth were no longer obstructed.

  Did she see a shadow roving to one side of her?

  Phil had stood back up, wiping his mouth. “Louie? Where’d you go?

  Snap!

  Clink!

  Phil toppled to the floor. He was gone, too.

  The nicest voice Sharon had ever heard beckoned her. Though she wouldn’t have known the distinction, the words rolled out in a soft, articulate British accent. The voice said this:

  “Hi, there. You must be Sharon. I stopped those bad men from doing what they were doing. I’d like to take you out of this place, to a much better place where you’ll be washed and cared for and you’ll get to eat good food. Would you like that, Sharon? Would you like to go someplace nicer than here?”

  Sharon, of course, couldn’t answer, but she quivered where she lay in response to the question. Yes yes yes! she thought. More than anything else in the world, she’d like to go to a place nicer than this.

  “Here. Let me help. I’ll take you out of here right now.”

  Hands were on her, strong arms sliding under her back and her thighs. She was being lifted up and then she was very gently placed in a wheelchair.

  “We’re on our way. You’ll like where I’m taking you, I promise.”

  She rolled through darkness. The door clicked open and then she was being wheeled out into the hall outside. Sharon rarely saw this hall. It was bright and very quiet. Her warped head lolled to one side, a string of drool trailing. It was fun being pushed along. Every so often, though, something passed in her field of vision: people. A nurse, then a doctor, then an intern. A janitor, another nurse, a security guard. They were all lying sprawled on the floor, unmoving. Behind each of their heads, a halo of blood bloomed, shiny like wet paint. Sharon was too excited and confused and simply too mentally deficient to deduce what had happened to them all: they’d all been shot dead, each by a single small-caliber bullet to the head.

  “I’ve a nice big comfy van waiting to pick us up outside, Sharon,” she could hear the British man saying behind her. “It’s even got a television in it. We’ll watch anything you like. Would you like that?”

  Oh yes yes yes yes! Sharon’s misfiring brain thought.

  The wheelchair stopped. She heard a door open in front of her. Her head drooped—she had almost no control of her neck muscles so she couldn’t incline her head. What was happening? Another voice, not the British man’s:

  “Hey! You!”

  Sharon couldn’t move her neck but she could move her eyes, and she strained them forward and to the right. At the end of the hall stood one of the home’s security guards.

  “Visiting hours were over at—” The guard’s objection ceased when he noticed all the bodies lying in the hall.

  “I’m not here to visit, friend,” the British voice sprang out behind her. “I’m abducting this critical-care patient. And, yes, I’m obviously the one who killed all the staff on this floor.”

  The nice man’s hand shot up, gripping something. Sharon could only piece the generalizations together by what she’d seen on TV. No way, of course, for her to know precisely what the British man held in his hand: a Walther PPKs with an M9-SD integral quick-detach 40db sound suppressor. Then came a:

  Snap!

  —As the diminutive weapon’s slide cycled, and then a:

  Clink!

  —As one expended .380 brass cartridge arced out of the ejection port and hit the floor. There was no other sound. The sub-sonic hollow point hit the security guard in the bridge of the nose and he fell down like a hinged duck. A circle of blood spread behind his head on the glistening tile floor.

  “There. We’re off now, Sharon.”

  The British man wheeled her off the floor and out into the warm, windy night where a coal-black van sat in wait.

  (I)

  Westmore lit a generic cigarette and sputtered. The flight from LAX to Metro Detroit International had been delayed an hour on the runway because the ventilation system wasn’t working. “Can’t I just get off the plane for a few minutes and smoke whil
e you’re fixing the motherfucker?” he asked the stew. He was told he could not, but, if he liked, he could get a different flight with another airline. Then there was the fat guy sitting next to him who smelled like he hadn’t washed his shirt in a year. It’s my karma, Westmore resigned. Now he was sitting in the airport bar waiting for what’s-his-name-Bryant, the journalist. Westmore typically drank beer but after the grueling flight, he wanted to start with a little kick. He ordered a scotch and water and gasped at the first sip.

  “Do I look like I’m in the Rat Pack?” he griped to the barmaid. “I ordered a scotch and water. This seems to be sufficiently lacking the water.”

  She smirked back, too much lipstick, and bad hair. The blond perm looked like a pile of curly fries on her head. “Most drunks don’t complain when you pour them a hard drink.”

  Westmore, actually, appreciated the snide answer. He believed that what didn’t kill him made him stronger. “You got me pegged that fast?”

  “It’s easy, buddy. Most drunks are bad tippers, too.”

  “I like you already! Are you married?”

  She wandered away to some other chores, while Westmore nursed the scotch. It must be a rail brand, tasted like kerosene. When he looked around, he noticed he was the only one in the bar, and beyond, the airport concourse looked almost empty.

  It was only eleven a.m., which didn’t help Westmore’s impressions. It was the dichotomy: the safety of the late-morning and the black cloud he felt hovering over his head. He knew he wasn’t psychic but whenever he got the willies before a shoot, something often rang true. Like when he’d gone to the Hamptons to interview the famous abstract painter in the fussy beach house. Westmore thought his art looked like someone tossing paint on a canvas, not too tough a trick. The old geezer had croaked in his armchair before Westmore even had time to get a light reading. Heart attack. What am I supposed to do! he screamed to the fates. Take pictures of a fuckin’ corpse? Then there was the time the magazine had flown him to Redmond, Washington, to shoot some pictures of Bill Gates. Westmore got some serious willies on the way to the airport. His cab got a flat in rush hour on Sepulveda and he’d missed his flight. The plane crashed.