by Bryan Hall
The next minutes stretched into hours. I heard him in the hallway; saw his shadow dance in the glow on the floor. Heard the doorknob twist and watched as the door swung open. It stopped inches from me, concealing me behind it.
Through the crack in the door, I watched him enter the office slowly, the gun out in front of him as if he were clutching a cross before a vampire’s attack. I waited for him to switch on the light, to step into the room, to see the open window.
Then I was on him before he had time to react. My left arm wrapped around his head, enveloping him in the muscle. I squeezed tight, cutting off the air. My right arm grabbed his wrist and twisted. The bone snapped almost at once and the gun dropped to the carpet. I could feel him try to scream against my arm.
I waited for him to stop his feeble struggle. It was a short wait. When his body went limp I moved my arm and gave him back his breath.
Everyone wakes up from being knocked unconscious differently. Scrawny Mark didn’t do it peacefully. His legs twitched and he sat up with a scream, looked around with wide eyes to try to figure out where he was and what happened. As his synapses started firing off and it came rushing back to him, his pale face flushed.
We were in the sacrifice room. I’d put him into one of the larger cages on the wall and secured the closure with a lock that had been dangling from one of the others.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He spat out the words.
“I’m impressed. I expected you to shit your pants as soon as you woke up. You sound pissed. Maybe you’re more of a man than I thought.” I gestured to the room, to the strange oval. “Not enough of a man to deserve this, but still ...”
“You’re a goddamn idiot. You have no idea what this is.”
“I know enough. I may be big, but I’m not stupid. I know you’re wasting this chance for a few dollars.”
“I’m not wasting anything.”
“Look at you. You sell the chance to be perfect to anyone willing to pay. And you haven’t bothered to even try to improve yourself. You’re weak, emaciated, pale. Ugly. You could be a god. But you’re too pathetic to even see it.”
“This is beyond that.”
“What is it?”
He said nothing.
“How did you find it?”
“I looked.”
“These cages ... for the animals people bring?”
He shrugged.
“What is it?” I asked again.
He shook his head, smiled smugly.
“Doesn’t matter.” I grabbed the cage and dragged it across the floor. Once I left it in the center of the oval, his resolve shattered.
“Please, no. No. I’ll tell you what I can. This won’t work!” he was crying already, blubbering and pleading and wailing. “It won’t work. Strangers barely give you anything. The person has to know them. Love them.”
“But I do love you, Mark. You gave me the greatest gift in the world.” I switched on the machine. It emitted a low, pulsating warble. I didn’t bother with the knobs or dials.
“Please!” He cried out.
The book was in another language, one I’d never seen. I sounded out the words phonetically in my mind before I started speaking them.
“Chryu alanion Dis! Ralo U Sym Dantalion! Pepe! Pepe! Carthun Chryu alanion nu! Kesto, Kesto Dantalion! Pepe!”
It happened. The sounds and the scents and the change in the air all came at once. I sucked deep breaths to fill my lungs, trying to focus on what was happening. The room itself blurred, bent as the ceiling transformed.
Mark’s screams reached a crescendo. He rattled and thrashed in the cage, trying to escape. He lay on his back and kicked at the door. The thin metal wires bent, but it was no use. Already the thing of a million faces was drifting through the display overhead.
Mark rose off the ground, touched the top of the cage, and carried it up with him. They hovered in the air for a moment, and then his screams of terror took a different timbre. They were wails of agony. The shrieks of the damned.
He flailed once, twice, and then his body went rigid. Then the convulsions took him. He came apart much like the old man had, though the cage made it worse. His body shredded itself, but the chunks were too large to escape the cage bars. He was sucked upward, his body splitting and squeezing and pressing through the bars in thin sheets. The blood had all left for the beyond while half his body remained in its confines. It twisted and crunched, a pink and white and gray mess that bore little resemblance to the scrawny, pathetic thing it had been moments earlier.
The cage crashed to the floor and the miracle above abated.
The air thickened, breaths came back to me in gulps. I fell to my knees, staring and wondering and so grateful for what I’d been given.
I checked the syringe. Half full—2.5 ccs. Not much, but a start toward something great.
The ads could stay up on the web site. Even one customer a week would be enough. They wouldn’t even have to bring a loved one with them anymore, either. Not where they’d be going.
So, two hundred sixty-five would be easy to hit. And after that goal was attained, there was still so much more to change, to mold, to sculpt.
Whatever my heart’s desire.
I could be the pinnacle of man.
Adonis.
Perfection.
TAUT
BY SHAUN MEEKS
It was getting cold, or at least she felt it was. Her body swayed slightly, nausea coming in and moving out in waves. Tina didn’t want to throw up, what little there might be to bring up, afraid of dehydration as much as anything else. The sick feeling was a combination of a few things. No doubt, keeping her eyes closed wasn’t helping anything. Yet she didn’t want to open them; didn’t want to face the reality before her.
The reality was, she was going to die.
Cold.
Alone.
Her back throbbed and she bit back the pain she felt rippling across her body, bile burning the back of her throat. She wanted to cry out, scream, but there was no hope. Screaming and crying wouldn’t do anything but make her feel worse. There was nobody around that would hear her, so it would be useless to expend the energy.
Tina wondered how James had found this place; an old, beat-up warehouse that stood like a decaying tooth in an equally rotting mouth. From the outside, the building was something from a bad horror movie, a lost building that seemed as though it would be haunted with malicious memories and putrid souls.
When they had pulled up to it in James’ old sedan, Tina looked at the place and told herself there was no way she was stepping foot into a building that undoubtedly housed rats, bugs, and one or two homeless people. Some people would look at her dreads, piercings, brandings, and surface implants and think “A freak like her lives for places like this.” Those people, she thought, are idiots. Her body modifications didn’t mean she liked the macabre; she wasn’t into horror movies or shock value. Tina altered her body for spiritual reasons.
James knew that. So why he had brought her out to this warehouse close to nightfall was beyond her. He had told her he had a surprise for her, an early birthday present.
Right.
“Here we are,” he said. He pulled his keys out and got out of the car. “You coming?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Come on, T. You’ll love it!”
James smirked at her, giving Tina that look that he knew melted her resolve.
Bastard.
She looked back at the building, a husk of its former self, appearing both too dark and too luminous in the fading light. Turning to look at James, she felt a trust in him that she had never felt in another, and had no idea why. He was no fairy tale, though. A string of fuck-ups led up to this moment, and he was sucking up large.
Below her now, James is only visible in parts, where the moonlight breaks through broken window, walls, and a dilapidated ceiling. What she is seeing is enough though, as his destroyed body is being visited by a family of raccoons.
She sways and can hear what she is happy not to be able to fully see.
Wet sounds.
Hungry sounds.
The sounds of noisy eaters, feasting on meat; feeding on her boyfriend. Even though she can’t see it, hearing the sounds, just able to make out his body jerking in and out of the shadows as the little animals tear away bits of him, would have been enough torture for her. She closes her eyes again, wishing she hadn’t trusted his smile; she blames herself almost as much as she blames him. It’s not like it was the first time he dragged her into a bad situation. Like the time he convinced her to climb over a chain-link fence to watch the meteor shower in a clearing and they were chased by a shotgun-wielding farmer. Or like the time they went skinny-dipping in a large stagnant pond and came out covered in huge leeches. She’d never forgotten how it felt to pluck the slippery, fat bodies off her, leaving tiny little wounds behind.
Her back and legs cry out in protest, screaming at her for her stupidity. She knows her mother would tell her she deserved this, that it was her punishment for making some pretty stupid choices.
When Tina had first gotten into body modification after meeting her first boyfriend, she told Tina that she was a freak. And that had only been a lip piercing. The more she did, the worse her mother’s reaction had been. She was “an abomination in the eyes of God.”
Her mom didn’t get it, though. Most people didn’t.
The things she did to modify her body weren’t about looking a certain way, and definitely weren’t about fitting in with any group. It was about how they made her feel. For Tina and many others, it was a spiritual thing—a way to be pulled out of her body and see and feel things most people never do. Each new piercing, tattoo, alteration of skin and flesh brought her one step closer to something greater.
Something more.
Yet as soon as each incision was closed, or the hot pink of a brand faded and healed, came a feeling of not enough. Never enough. She began reading up on different religions and cultures that used body modification to reach spiritual enlightenment and wanted nothing more than to experience each one, to feel it for herself.
Now, hanging in the dark, her body cold and numb in places and alive with pain in others, she sways over the partially devoured body of her greatest love, contemplating the cost of her lust for hooks.
James had known about her obsession with enlightenment, had joined her on many of the same paths. But there was one thing she had been seeking, one that seemed to be the ultimate release. It was so attractive in that it seemed impossible to achieve. Her body, she was sure, could do it. But it was pretty hard to find people who knew how in this little town.
Then, fast forward to the dirty warehouse and the “surprise” he had waiting for her. “Oh my god!” Tina gasped, standing in the open doorway of the old building. “How the hell did you set this up?” She was already forgetting the state of the building’s exterior, now that she could see the guts.
“I take it you like?”
“What do you think?”
The interior of the building was a shock; almost medically clean, the smell of bleach still strong in the air. It wasn’t perfect; there were holes in some of the outer walls, smashed windows, and spots missing out of the ceiling. But otherwise, it was cleaner than she could have imagined, as though an army of Molly Maids had stormed in and performed their magic.
It wasn’t the cleanliness that amazed her, though. It was the apparatus and gear in the middle of the room that she was focused on. It was her dream come true.
“Now, I set up a small generator here, too, but it won’t last long. We won’t really need it too much anyway, T. This will be your first time, so I don’t think it will be a long one.”
“Who’s setting me up?”
“I am.”
Tina had raised her eyebrow at that. James was deep into modifications himself, but she knew he’d never performed any before. Especially not something this complicated.
Below her, as James continues to be eaten, chewed on by the shadowy animals, she tells herself that she should have listened to her own reason, knowing that James was a complete novice. Totally untrained. She wishes the stink of bleach, the wet sounds below, and the throbbing in her back would just go away. As she grits her teeth, biting back at the bursts of red-hot pain exploding across her flesh, she shifts to try to bring relief. It’s no use. And it wouldn’t be an issue if she hadn’t been so damned excited about what James had done for her.
“I’ve been reading up on this and checked out some videos and documentaries. I even did some messaging to make sure I don’t dick it up on you, T. Trust me; this is going to be amazing.”
She had smiled at him, walking over to the set-up, admiring the amount of work he had put into it all, which he begun to explain. “Cleaned it all myself. That alone took over eight hours, and you know how much I love to clean.”
“Yeah, right!”
“Exactly. So everything after that was a cakewalk. The main chain and crank was easy enough, but I had to climb all the way up to that beam to set it.”
She looked up as James pointed out the “I” beam close to the ceiling, nearly forty feet up. “When we get going, you can go as low as you want, or just below that. You’ll know what feels right.”
“I want to feel like I’m flying. I want to feel so free!”
She looked at the rest of it—the cords, the frame, and the hooks. There were ten in all—six thick ones for her back and four thinner ones, two for each leg. When it came to suspensions, the hooks scared a lot of people, but the pain was the key. Sometimes you have to push your pain threshold to its limits before you can let go and find out who you are. And there was pain, but nothing she couldn’t tolerate, nothing unbearable.
She stripped down to her panties, and laid down on a tarp James had brought, beginning breathing exercises before he started.
Then the first hook pierced her back. She took a quick breath in, and then out as James pushed the point of the metal into the skin he was pinching. Tina was already so in tune with herself, so close to a peaceful state, that she was even able to hear the popping sound of the hook as it broke through the other side.
“You good?”
“Perfect.”
Each hook went in.
Quick breath.
Pop!
And with each one, she felt more and more relaxed, feeling a release from the world around her. The warehouse began to fade around her, as though it was set on a dimmer switch. The only sounds she could hear were James, her own breath and heartbeat, and that of the hooks going in.
She could sense how close she was to that place she had always sought, her personal Nirvana. After the last hook was in, she stretched her arms out and waited.
“I’ll go slow. Tell me when you’re ready for me to stop.”
Tina said nothing, but gave him small nod, not wanting to lose her headspace. She heard the crank turning, took in a deep breath, then almost forgot to let it out again. Never in her life had she felt what she had at that moment. Her bond with the earth was suddenly gone, like an umbilical cord being cut; she was free of the womb that once held her and kept her safe.
She was flying.
She was free.
Tina was everything and nothing all at once.
Around her, everything became instantly silent and dark, her mind totally absorbed in the moment. She felt the pain as she rose in the air, but only so much as someone is aware there are other planets or galaxies above them. To her, the pain became her air; a tool of necessity to get beyond the physical.
She closed her eyes, began to breathe meditatively and flew on her physical and spiritual plane.
It was glorious.
Then, suddenly, the feeling was lost.
“Shit!”
Tina opened her eyes and she looked down at James, fifteen feet below, standing at the crank and looking pissed off.
“What is it?”
“Something is wrong. You’re jammed. Damn it
!” He looked up and the problem was clear. “Looks like there’s something wrong up top. If you want higher, I have to clear it.”
“Make it fast!” Tina called out and bit back laughter. Her body was filling with endorphins and she was feeling a huge natural high. Light-headed and giddy, the pain was evaporating.
“I’ll try.”
Tina’s body hummed with an electricity she’d never felt in her life. Each nerve ending seemed to pulse, to throb with its own pleasant heartbeat, slowly moving toward a unison that she knew would be the final key to finding her true self.
Throb. Throb. Throb. Throb. Throb. Close.
She could sense it, feel and see in her mind’s eye, her dream coming true. Her own inner heaven was about to be seen.
Then, James screamed.
Loud and abrupt.
Her eyes shot open in time to see her boyfriend of three years, the man she loved and trusted—hit the concrete almost directly below her.
His body smashed into the ground hard, and he let out a grunt that was nearly drowned out by the thudding sound of the impact, and the awful sound of many bones breaking. She screamed his name, shaking the cords and hooks that held her in the air, but the only thing that came out of him was the blood that pooled under his body.
Tina began to scream for help right away, and it took her nearly fifteen minutes to realize and remember that they were nowhere, out in a part of town lost and forgotten. Abandoned.
She felt hope drain from her as time passed, a feeling of doom setting in. Losing the high meant losing the endorphins, too. Pain came slowly at first, seeping in as it had faded out only minutes earlier. The shadowy ache quickly became brighter and more intense. Those pleasantly throbbing nerves were now like small bombs exploding, burning with stronger and stronger intensity.
Within the first hour, the generator died.
Then the last of the fading sun went with it, leaving her alone and terrified in the cold open space.
The night was clear and the moon spilled just enough of its pale light for her to see the floor as the first scavengers, dirty gray rats, found James’ body and made tentative plays at him. She could see them nibble at his fingers, their fat bellies smearing the blood into a fuzzy shape, streaked at the edges from their tails.
