Midnight Echo 8

by AHWA

  MY: Is the world of The Corpse-Rat King a world in which you’d like—or even plan—to spend more time and pen more stories? Are we going to see Marcus and co in other stories? Perhaps even short stories?

  LB: I’ve written two novels now, and there’s room in the contract for a third if Angry Robot decide to commission it. I have the basic outline for volume three ready to go, so there is still at least one more story to be told if needs be. But I’ve tried to write the two completed novels as stand-alones as much as possible: they’re separate, discreet tales, so if volume three never happens it won’t be like readers only get two-thirds of the story.

  MY: What’s next after The Marching Dead?

  LB: I’m halfway through a Father Muerte novel, which I started working on whilst going through the Angry Robot Open Month process, so I’m going to go back and complete it and see what happens. I’ve also started to block out ideas for a post-apocalyptic revenger’s tragedy I’m calling The Sin-eater’s Lonely Children. All being well I should have four or five novels completed by the end of next year, and if I can place them all then I can really think about starting to call myself a novelist with a straight face. Eventually I’d like to write full-time, so the next couple of years could provide the springboard to do just that, provided I can sit myself down and finish some good-quality work.

  MY: And to finish, I hear you love Lego. Would the word be a better place if we were all made out of Lego?

  LB: Minifigs: no genitals. I rest my case. :)

  Tooth

  Kathryn Hore

  David Malloy watched the young woman walk hesitantly through his surgery doorway. She had long brown hair that fell to hide her eyes, biting at her lip and moving slowly, as if unsure of her physical place in the world. He did not smile, but made his face into something kind, paternal, something he considered she might find comforting. He knew this type of girl, the shy and the naive. He knew what they needed. She was young, couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or three, but didn’t have that brash confidence so common of young women today. He was glad. He didn’t like the coarseness of modern women. This one was nice. She reminded him of the women of his youth, a kind of déjà vu, a fond nostalgia. She was a wee, timid thing, not wanting to offend, all nerves and insecurity. A special client. Just the type he’d always liked—although after a while they all looked the same.

  “Miss Smith?”

  “Janey,” she nodded quickly. “And you are … Dr Malloy? The dentist?”

  “Call me David.” He tapped the faux-leather dental chair in the middle of the gleaming white surgery. “Take a seat and tell me what the problem is.”

  A toothache. Of course. A dreadful toothache. She confessed she was scared of dentists. She’d had a bad experience with one once, a long, long time ago. It had left her with a terror of dentistry; it had left her with scars, if only psychological. She had put off coming here for as long as she could, but the toothache was now so bad she just had to do something.

  She needed fixing.

  She told him her tooth was sensitive to touch, to heat, to cold. Even her tongue moving in her mouth would occasionally brush past it with agonising consequences. She was desperate for help. Could he help her?

  Of course he could.

  He snapped on disposable latex gloves while calling the nurse to assist. Nurse Osman was a large, stern woman with grey hair pulled back in severe neatness; she would not tolerate a strand being out of place. When she strode in she stood over the girl, peering down without smile or word. Judging, appraising. He was never sure what private criteria Nurse Osman judged the patients against, but he didn’t believe she had ever found one she deemed worthy.

  The girl shrank back in the face of Nurse Osman’s stare. He barked a command and the nurse turned away to busy herself with the preparation of three big, long needles, all sharp and metallic. He positioned the equipment tray not quite out of the girl’s sight, so its sinister gleam would hover in her peripheral vision, then watched her body tense as the nurse laid the needles down, one, two, three.

  He smiled his most comforting smile and told her not to be scared. He would take care of everything. She would not feel a thing.

  “Th-thank you, Doctor,” she stammered, worried eyes shifting from the nurse to the needles and back again. She wore contact lenses. Bright blue ones, artificially coloured, like some fashion item. He didn’t much care for them. They did not suit her. They were too typical of young women today.

  “Now, which tooth is it?”

  “Se-second from the back. Up the top, to the right.” She paled as he lifted forceps and placed them on the tray just to the edge of her vision. “It … it aches, throbs. It feels like something foreign in my mouth. It feels like it’s full up to bursting on the inside and about to erupt. Something desperate to get out.”

  He nodded, hiding his amusement at her fanciful descriptions of a plain old tooth ache. “Ah yes. Well, it sounds like an abscess, young Jane. The tooth is probably full of pus. Shall we have a look, then?”

  It was an abscess. He knew immediately from the swelling on the side of her gum, from the sensitivity she showed, yelping as he prodded the tooth, not quite so accidentally. Her eyes, around those horrid contact lenses, were large, fearful. But trusting. So trusting. There was just something about the fear of a trusting woman that got him every time. He fought the urge to kiss her forehead. He fought the urge to pat her thigh and enjoyed the way her fingers dug into the arms of the chair. He lowered his biggest needle into her wide, open mouth.

  “I’m afraid, young Jane, that this is going to kill.”

  She could do nothing with it already in her mouth, though she uttered a low sound, a strangled moan from the back of her throat. Tears formed, squeezing drops at the corners of her eyes, though she clenched her lids against them, those blue contacts hidden for a moment. There was tension in every limb, every muscle of the lithe young body laid out before him. Her breath kept catching even as her mouth was forced open by the massive needle he stuck hard up into her gum.

  He kept the needle there, just a little longer than necessary, and breathed in her pain with quiet enjoyment.

  “Right. Now ordinarily it wouldn’t hurt when we drill, not after a needle like that.” He smiled his broadest smile. “But with an abscess, well, you never do know. We may have to inject again. We may not. You just be sure to speak up when the pain starts, won’t you?”

  Her eyes flicked from side-to-side, a panic showing in their whites. She was like a trapped creature from the wilds, a sweet thing too gentle to find escape. She tried to look to the nurse for help, but the older woman only stared back with a thin-lipped smile.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” Nurse Osman said, in that dark, gravelly voice of hers. “No-one has ever complained about the pain afterwards.”

  He let the drill whir. Held it up high. She flinched. Its high pitch scream never failed to instil the most anxious of expectations. Almost all his patients, even the calmest, the bravest, the hardest to break, fell prey to its shriek. It was like something programmed deep into their instincts. A reaction as primal as fight or flight.

  He smiled at her tight-gripped panic and wondered if he should tell her now, or later, that this was only the beginning. She would have to come back for further treatments, in a week, two weeks. Prolong the experience, appointment after appointment. Root canal. He decided she would have to have root canal. That would need at least three appointments and then he could x-ray and find other cavities needing urgent fillings to keep her coming back. Pity she’d already had out her wisdom teeth. But he might be able to find something to get her in for full dental surgery, strapped down, a scalpel in his hand, ready to cut her gums to the bone.

  He would teach her to look after her teeth. By the time she came again, she would learn what consequences befell modern girls who did not take care
of themselves. And those horrid contact lenses, like plaque and forgetting to floss, would simply not be tolerated in his dental practice.

  He plunged the drill in, feeling the vibration extend from his fingertips up his arm. This was always his favourite part, with the patient lying rigid before him, mouth stretched uncomfortably open, and that whine of the drill making contact with the tooth. He could sense, without needing to look, when the drill and tooth connected. The patient before him, stiffening, screwing up their eyes, fingers twisted together, wanting it to be over when it had only just begun.

  So caught up was he in the sensation of that first drilling that it took him a moment to realise she did not scream. Some did. He would have expected it of her and it disappointed him now that she did not. No matter. This was only the start, there was so much more to go. He was sure he could get a reaction out of her if he put in the time and only a little effort. She did close her eyes and her fingers still clung on to the arms of the chair, but otherwise she lay still, just letting him do his work.

  Bits of tooth ground away. The nurse sucked up the debris almost as quick as he could create it, the enamel giving way to his drill, then the dentin, right to the pulp. The instrument burrowed in millimeter by millimetre. Her mouth stayed open and her eyes stayed shut until he had cleared almost all of it out, an empty space inside the rough shell of the tooth.

  With an annoyed twist of his mouth, he paused to change the drill head.

  Right. That should do it. The high pitch whirr gave way to the low, deep grumbling of the grinder he knew would shake her to the core.

  “Doing alright there, young Jane?” he asked after inserting that dark rumble deep into her mouth, holding it just above the cleaned-out tooth. With his other hand he pushed cotton wool into her cheek, puffing her face out, making it impossible for her to answer one way or the other. Her eyes snapped open, wide and staring. He thought they looked so pretty, pleading with him like that. At least, he read pleading in them. It was hard to tell behind those horrid contacts.

  “Uhhh …” It was the only sound she could make with his fingers deep inside her mouth.

  Something sharp pricked his finger.

  He jolted back, an automatic reaction, and pulled his fingers out of her mouth. The pain had been sudden, momentary, but the sharp prick continued to throb. He held up his hand to inspect the finger and frowned to see blood seeping behind the translucent glove, a small dot spreading wider beneath the latex.

  Shit. This wasn’t good. They wore gloves these days for a reason. What if she had some disease? What if some of her saliva got into the wound and he caught something bad?

  What was it that had pricked him anyway?

  He frowned, put the drill down. “Glasses please, nurse,” he commanded. Nurse Osman handed them to him with her usual prompt efficiency and a disproving frown for the disruption from procedure. She did like everything to be in its rightful place and in its rightful order. He ignored her, slipping the magnifying apparatus over his head and snapping down the strongest lens, before peering into the girl’s mouth.

  Maybe it was a sharp edge to the tooth he had caught his finger on. But there didn’t appear to be any sharp edges. The tooth was empty of its insides. He scrambled on the tray beside him for the long-handled mirror to get a better view, almost forgetting, for the moment, his broken glove and the spot of blood beneath.

  It was black inside the tooth. A black that kept on going. Not the black of decay, but the black of … nothingness. Of empty space. Of hollows.

  Suddenly it seemed such a dreadful emptiness.

  Maybe the root of the tooth was already dead. That happened sometimes. If so, she must have been in pain for a very long time before coming here, as the tooth died slowly inside her. A healthy root was pink and would bleed a little when drilled. An inflamed root, as he had been expecting, was swollen and red and bled profusely when drilled. Always painful, even with anaesthetic. He had been looking forward to it.

  But now he was in there, with the tooth drilled out and open, it just looked … empty. Withered roots no more than dust. There was only hollow and empty space going way back into the root canals and up into the gum. Darkened caverns.

  He had the sudden image of her as entirely hollow. As if the blackness inside was contained by this outer shell that only looked like a girl.

  And then he wondered where that thought, so unlike him, had come from.

  Something moved. Deep inside the tooth.

  He pulled back so fast he knocked the tray, needles and equipment crashing and scattering all over the floor. Unwittingly, he glanced at the nurse. She glared her darkest at him, all pursed lips and furrowed brow. On the chair between them, the girl only looked up with wide, trusting, artificially-blue eyes.

  “Doctor!” the nurse snapped.

  “Doctor?” the girl ventured.

  He swallowed against a dry throat and made a sharp gesture at the nurse to clean up the mess. She moved slowly, suspicious eyes not liking this disruption, but it gave him time to take a breath, to gather his thoughts. To look back down at the girl.

  “Apologies, young Jane, it’s just I thought I saw …”

  He went back for a second look. The girl opened her mouth obediently. He knew he should wait for the nurse to stand again, to finish gathering the spilled equipment; he knew he should at least re-glove his hands first but he could not help it, he had to look, even though he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He didn’t need the mirror this time. He didn’t even need the magnification equipment. He reached up with a shaking hand still seeping blood behind the latex glove and pulled the heavy glasses from his head, then looked into her waiting mouth.

  It came from out of her tooth. A pulsating black thing, long and slippery. As dark as coal, a cartoon black, the absence of all other colour. It was gleaming with her saliva and it was forcing itself out of the tooth.

  A worm.

  A snake.

  A thing, slimy and shining.

  It bulged as it squeezed through. Maybe as thick as his own little finger, wriggling around as it just kept coming, pushing, squishing, sliding from the tooth and onto her tongue.

  He squealed from behind his own clenched teeth. There was maybe three inches of it now resting on her tongue. Two white spots on the tip of it. The worm creature turned them in his direction.

  Eyes. Were those its eyes?

  He staggered back, tripping over the nurse.

  He crashed down, glasses flying from one hand, the equipment the nurse had been collecting scattering again as she was kicked aside with a cry of her own. The side of his head crashed against the bench. As he hit the ground a needle pierced his shoulder. His world flooded with sudden, slicing pain.

  Silence.

  He gulped back breath, trying to think, to isolate the sensations in his shoulder, his head, his ankle. Trying to decide what it was he had just seen. His eyes met those of the nurse across the surgery. Her glare was thunderous, that stern tut-tutting fury usually kept for the patients now turned his way. She hadn’t seen. She didn’t know.

  “What is going on!” Nurse Osman demanded. It did not sound like a question. And he could only shake his head in soundless warning, the words to explain too impossible to find.

  His only answer, in the end, was to look back up at the girl on the chair.

  She was sitting straight and watching the ruckus with wide eyes. Even as he turned his throbbing head, she brought one hand up and opened her mouth. First she took out the ball of cotton wool, which she flicked with casual disinterest into the corner of the room, and then she cupped her hand beneath her chin and leant over it. Something black and long and moving dropped out of her mouth and into her hand. It was maybe six inches, maybe eight, maybe more. It moved in her palm, curling up part of its body, but its head—he could not help but think that must be
its head—sat up higher and waving, shifting. Looking. Those dreadful white eyes so stark against its black.

  And fangs. Sharp white fangs, only visible now it had pushed its way out of her.

  “Oh … oh my … oh my oh my … oh … my … Doctor!”

  Terror had replaced judgement in Nurse Osman’s voice, but he ignored it, and her. He was too transfixed by the girl on the chair, unable to do anything other than stare at her and at … at that … that thing in her hand.

  The girl sighed. “I’m sorry, Doctor. That must have been a shock, I know,” she said, then tilted her head back, opened her mouth and dropped the black worm—if such was what it was—back inside. It slipped inside her and she closed her lips. With a single gulp, she swallowed it down.

  She lowered her head and looked over to where he was sprawled. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Not after you helped so much releasing the tension in my tooth.”

  He tried to push himself away but there was nowhere for him to go. He couldn’t put weight on his ankle and the long needle was still sticking out of his shoulder. His head throbbed. It was all he could do to drag himself backwards by the arms until he hit the wall.