by Bryan Hall
“So ... here’s your money.” I offered him the envelope and he tossed it to the desk beside the other ones.
“You’re willing to do anything for this?”
I nodded.
“I need your dog. And I need you to wait here. You should say goodbye.”
My breath stuck in my throat for a second. “What? Say goodbye to who?”
He jerked his head slightly, gesturing toward Upchuck.
“No. You can’t have my fucking dog, man.”
“Why did you think I told you to bring it, exactly?”
“I—” What had I thought? The truth was, I hadn’t. I didn’t give a shit. The muscles. My body. Those were the things that mattered. When he’d said to bring Upchuck along, I hadn’t given it a second thought. The allure of his promise held too much sway. “No. I can’t give you my dog.”
He studied me a moment, then nodded. He pushed the envelope back across the desk. “Okay then. Have a good day.”
“You’re serious?”
He nodded.
I looked at Upchuck, who’d sat down beside me and was staring up at me, waiting to leave. He’d been a hell of a good dog. My companion, especially after Rhonda had left. She’d tried to take him but I promised her that she’d get the house before she’d get the dog, which was to say that there wasn’t a chance in hell of her getting either one. But he’d been a fifty-dollar pound rescue. As much as I liked him, it seemed like an investment in my body that I couldn’t pass up.
I’ve heard of alcoholics and crackheads stealing their momma’s jewelry to get the money for their next drink, their next hit. I know a guy who used to be the world’s biggest homophobe who now trades his ass to any man willing to give him twenty bucks or a dime of good meth. I’d never understood how you could let something get hold of you like that until I looked at my dog and realized that, if he could help me hit two hundred sixty-five, letting him go made sense.
“You guarantee this will work? That I’ll break this ceiling and start gaining muscle again?”
Mark shrugged. “If that’s what you really, truly want. Then yes. It will work. You’ll get what you want.”
“Guaranteed?”
“Guaranteed.”
I bent over and hugged Upchuck, stroked under his chin the way he liked and nuzzled his face a minute, then offered the leash to Mark. He slid the envelope back to the pile and walked around the desk.
“Wait here. Right here,” he said as he took the leash. It was the first time since I was a boy that I remember actually crying. Not much—just a couple of tears that I rubbed off in a hurry—but still, they were there.
Upchuck was muscular, and it took every ounce of strength Mark had to pull him out of the room. I was expecting my dog to bite his scrawny ass, but he surprised me.
Mark got to the closed door at the end of the hallway and glanced back to me before opening it.
A moment later, he was able to drag Upchuck through the door and close it behind him.
The house went quiet, but only for a few minutes. Upchuck’s barks punched through the walls, short vicious ones I’d never heard him use before. Angry, threatening barks.
The feel of the house changed. The scent of metal rushed in, the sweet, metallic taste of copper filling my mouth. My ears popped as the pressure changed, and each breath became a struggle. I was pulling air in, but it was so thin it barely seemed to have any effect on my screaming lungs. There was a sound like air rushing through the window of a car on the highway. Upchuck stopped barking and let loose a long, high-pitched whine that died with a yelp.
All the sounds and scents receded, plunging the house back into an abominable silence. The sound of the doorknob turning almost made me scream, and Mark came back into the room.
Without Upchuck.
In his right hand, where the leash had been moments earlier, he was clutching something else.
He walked back around the desk and sat down, then placed the item in front of me.
A syringe. Identical to the hundreds I’d used in the past, except for its contents. It was filled with a fluid blacker than used motor oil. Five ccs of pure darkness.
“That’s it?” I said. “You take my dog and my money and expect me to inject myself with whatever the hell that is?”
“I don’t expect you to do anything. I’ve seen so many different kinds of people that I know you can never count on them to act the way you expect.”
“This is a fucking joke. I want my dog back. And my money.”
He shook his head. “That’s not possible. This is yours. You bought it. It’s not for anyone else.”
I leaned forward, flexing my neck muscles and slapping on my most intimidating snarl. “Give me back my dog.”
“Your dog is gone.” His right hand rose up from behind the table and pointed a handgun at my chest. I wasn’t much on guns, but I’d seen enough TV to know it was a 9mm. And that no matter how ripped I was, that bullet could tear through my muscle and organs like a chainsaw through a birthday cake.
We stared at each other for a long while. I was three of him. Maybe four. But that little candyass hunk of metal in his hand gave him the advantage, and we both knew it. I stood and backed toward the door.
“The needle,” he said. “Take what’s yours.”
“I’m not using that.”
“You came here for it.” He smiled. “I suspect you will. But whether you do or not, you’ll take it with you.”
Another minute stretched out to seeming days. I took the syringe. It was like picking up an icicle—the cold stung my skin. I didn’t let Mark see the pain, though. It hadn’t bothered him. It damn sure wouldn’t bother me.
He followed me out and, twenty minutes after I arrived, I was back on the road for my house, alone and more pissed off than I could ever remember being.
I stared at that goddamn syringe for three hours when I got home. Put it on my own desk in my study and watched it as if it was going to grow wings and fly away. If I’d been a drinking man, I would have gone through a bottle that night. As it was, I only had a bottle of water to help me ponder my options.
It looked like tar. I knew the side effects of the chems I used. I knew the risks. This stuff? Pure mystery. An enigma as deep as it was dark. One that had cost me five grand and my best friend.
Was it worth risking more? My health?
I weighed myself a dozen times that night, never expecting a change but still compelled to look for one. If a single pound had been added, I probably would have thrown the needle away.
Left deciding between life as I was and the chance of improving even more, there was no real choice to make.
I uncapped the needle and slipped it into the ball of muscle above my hip. A moment’s hesitation, and I depressed the plunger.
The cold slid through me, spreading in tendrils like an oil spill caught in a tide. My legs went numb first, then my stomach. It crept upward until it coated my skull, shards of pain splintering my mind. There was an instant where my panic washed away, replaced by a sense that I was no longer alone. No longer a mere mortal.
And then my mind succumbed to the darkness.
I woke on the floor, sore and stiff but otherwise unaffected by the injection. Sunlight blazed through the windows, casting the tan carpet in shades of gold.
Food.
It was my only thought—the only purpose I could concentrate on. I’d never before been so famished.
The raid on the refrigerator was legendary. My strict dietary plan was forgotten in that instant, and before I’d sated the hunger I’d cleared nearly two shelves. There was no counting calories, no monitoring protein levels. It was all fair game and I the hunter.
Once I filled my belly, I felt better than I had in years. I’ve never been lazy, but the energy was phenomenal. And for the first time in months, I felt confident that the plateau would be erased.
The trip to the gym was ecstasy, each lift a revelation. My body burned with pleasure, demanding more. I obliged
, until finally the manager told me they were closing for the night. I drove home, shuddering. My body felt alive—each muscle and tendon singing in harmony.
I gave in to the urge as soon as I woke the next morning and climbed onto the scale. It announced two hundred forty-nine and I nearly screamed with joy. The ceiling was broken. The plateau nothing but a runway I’d used to sail off of, upward toward that mythical number. That magical goal.
The hunger was nowhere as profound as it had been, and I let myself go back to my diet plan. I knew it was pure muscle I’d added—there was no doubt that the calories from my buffet the day before had been burned away by my workout.
The next trip to the gym was no less a marvel, though this time the initial amazement had diminished. It gave my mind time to wander, to remember.
Two questions bored into my brain, blossoming wider the more I thought about them.
What had happened in that room?—the first and obvious one. A sacrifice? Whether financial or physical, spiritual or scientific, a trade had been made.
The second hinged on the question Mark had asked me during that initial phone call—Do you have someone close to you? A brother?
Would people actually trade those they loved for some promise within a syringe?
If so, and if these were the rewards from a dog ... what would it be like if a human was offered up in that sacrificial room?
It took will power, but I left the gym early that evening and went home. I logged back into the classified web site and started searching other listings.
I found the one I’d responded to easily enough, with a dozen more.
Plastic surgery results without the surgery! Roll back the years!
Escape the clutches of cancer without medicine or surgery!
Rebuild your self-esteem in days!
Enlarge your penis—no pumps, pills, or exercises!
Lose weight without dieting or exercising! Real results, real fast!
And more, all of them followed by the same local number.
If that’s what you really, truly want. Mark had said. You’ll get what you want.
My mouth was dry, my brain reeling with excitement. He offered perfection in all its forms. A chance to become glory incarnate, beauty made flesh. For a price, but what didn’t have one attached to it these days?
I drove back to the mouth of the subdivision Mark lived in. I found a strip mall about a mile from the house and left my car there. I was still in gym clothes, so I wouldn’t look out of place as a jogger.
I can run a mile in just under six minutes, but I kept my pace slow and Mark’s house came into view as the sun began to fall. I ran past until night had taken hold of the world and then doubled back. The darkness enveloped me and I crept around the corner of his house, well in the shadows.
I waited until after midnight, when the lights inside the house had switched off, before I gave up.
The days went like that for a week. Each evening after my workout I’d make my way to the house and hide, waiting and hoping for some other soul in search of salvation.
On the ninth day, one came.
She was middle-aged, pretty but not beautiful. Her thick lips and upturned eyes proclaimed her affection for cosmetic surgery. Nothing to be ashamed of, in my opinion. If surgery can help you look and feel better, why not? But it wasn’t as kind to her as it could have been. It was obvious. A good surgeon will do work you’d never be able to pick out of a crowd. I know. I bought Rhonda a lot of work and she left looking far better than when we’d met.
The man that she brought into the house must have been close to ninety. Frail, hunched over from the weight of life itself, a walker leading him into the house. I wondered if he knew he was making his final march, if he’d volunteered his last days to help the woman or if he was ignorant of what lay inside for him. Her father? Grandfather? Some poor old bastard she’d wooed with her fake tits and plastic smile?
I listened as their movements thumped and creaked and groaned through the house. I circled to the rear and found the room I’d made the deal in. Mark apparently cared little for privacy. The windows weren’t curtained and I could see him at his desk, talking to the mismatched pair across from him.
The conversation was short. The woman slid a stack of bills across the table, no envelope. It looked much thinner than my own had been. But of course, she’d brought a bigger prize.
Mark stood and led the man back out of the room. The old man followed willingly.
I tried to follow them as well, tracking them back along the rear wall of the home. I found what I was looking for as I rounded the corner. A window, painted black except for a few flaking spots near its bottom. The paint had begun to chip away there and, while it was barely more than a pinhole, I could see the room inside when I pressed my eye tight against it.
A large room, probably a master bedroom at one time, lay within. It was sparsely decorated or furnished; a half dozen cages of various sizes sat against the far wall, while the center of the room held a large oval drawn on the bare wooden floor. Around the oval was a series of symbols and letters, each so peculiar I couldn’t even begin to fathom just what they meant or symbolized. To one side of the oval, a table held a thick tome and an electric device that looked like a mixing board in a recording studio. A table on the other side of the oval held a bastardized lab device. A glass funnel protruded out of the table and just over the edge of the oval, its furthest extremity supported by a steel rod set in the ground. The funnel narrowed quickly, its tip ending over a small rack on the table. The rack held syringes, their plungers removed. Ready to be filled.
Mark was positioning the old man in the center of the oval, whispering into his ear as he did so.
The frail old man teetered there, almost fell, and then righted himself as Mark went to the tome and switched on the machine. Immediately the man went rigid.
I felt it outside, too. The same sensation as before, only much more intense now that only a thin sheet of glass separated me from it. Mark was reading from the book, but I couldn’t hear him. The air warbled, like a thin sheet of metal caught in the wind. The rushing of air was starting to come as well, along with the metallic odor.
I had to fight the urge to remove my eye from the hole. The sensations were overwhelming, making me want to vomit.
But inside, the show was beginning.
The ceiling of the room changed, shifted, began to dance. It rolled like ocean waves, a square body of water barely held in check by the walls. It darkened in places, grew brighter in others. Colors pitched and swirled and oozed like a massive lava lamp designed to defy the laws of physics.
It was more than a color show, however. Behind the nebulas and vortexes there was something else. Something organic. Huge.
The sliding shapes made it impossible to see it all at once, and as each part appeared it seemed to recede, then return, closer then further away, here then gone, obscured then revealed.
It squirmed and writhed, a single body made up from many.
Snouts and fangs, claw and tentacle. Hair and scale, skin and slime.
Legion.
Glory.
Alpha and Omega.
The old man’s screams cut through the din and his body snapped backward, nearly folded in half. It rose up off the floor, suspended by some unseen force, and then began to spasm.
He fell to pieces. His skin and tissue came off in chunks, tendons popping and veins drooping like ropes of spaghetti. Organs shook free from their mortal imprisonment, a kidney here, a liver there. Bones splintered and shattered into powder and fragments. The blood rained a crimson monsoon, but not a drop of it reached the floor. Nothing did. Each atom of his being was sucked up into the nightmare kaleidoscope above. Each bit of flesh that found freedom from the old man’s body was absorbed into its new home in that fabulous beyond.
The sacrifice claimed, the infinite being became harder to spot. The nebulas spread, blotting out the view and turning the ceiling into a rippling, black pool.
From that impossible surface salvation began to flow. A stream of black liquid dribbled from the ceiling into the funnel and rolled down into the syringe waiting below.
The blackness shuddered, the liquid slowed to a drip, and then the world righted itself.
Mark turned off the machine, bowed his head in some kind of prayer, and then took the syringe, reinserting the plunger before he left the room.
My ears popped; the dizzy-sick feeling subsided. But my mind and body were coursing with adrenaline. With excitement.
I’d witnessed a miracle. In fact, I was a part of that miracle. It coursed in my veins. Beat inside my heart.
But I could have more.
Two hundred sixty-five? It was a fool’s dream when there was so much more potential to be tapped here.
The path to perfection lay before me.
I had only to follow it.
The woman left five minutes later, a smile stretched across her face and a syringe of perfection in her hand.
The lights inside went out fifteen minutes later.
I waited an hour to make sure he was asleep. It was hard to be patient, but necessary. He’d already said that he didn’t sleep much. Which meant he was probably in there somewhere, awake. Staring at the walls. Thinking of the miracle he had dominion over.
The door was the problem. He locked it. Windows, too. It’s a habit that everyone has, but the fact is that if someone wants inside your house, they’ll get in.
And I wanted in pale, sickly looking Mark’s house.
I opted for the window in his office. I knew I was strong enough to kick in the door no matter what type of lock was on it. But the noise would be tremendous. There would be no questioning what he’d heard. With the window, there would still be a lingering “what if” in his mind. A hesitation. A doubt.
And I needed him to have that tiny doubt.
I wrapped my hand in my shirt and punched through the glass, then undid the lock, climbed into the room, and hurried across to the door. It took no more than thirty seconds, but before I’d reached my post I heard soft footsteps and saw distant light spill beneath the door into the office.
