One wall held a windowless door and gradually she eased off the gurney and stood, holding on for support. The room was cool, the stainless steel cold on her fingers, the floor icy against the soles of her feet. She grabbed the thin brown blanket at the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. Despite feeling empty-headed, Liz forced herself to move to the door, expecting it to be locked, but it was not.
She felt weak but not about to faint. If anything, she was confused, not sure how she’d gotten to what was apparently a medical facility of some sort, not knowing what was the matter with her.
She wandered down a short hallway and headed toward a door at the far end. Halfway there, she came to a window and gasped at her reflection. Fear surged and a hand flew to her forehead. Only her eyes, nostrils and lips were visible; the rest of her head was bandaged. “What happened to me?” she whispered. Could she have been in an accident? Many questions, no answers, no memory of how she’d gotten here and into this state.
As the panic cranked down a notch, her eyes refocused and she saw the room within. It was a nursery, full of incubators, three of which formed a circle in the center of the room. Each held a newborn wrapped in a pink baby blanket, hooked up with many tubes to various equipment some of which she could identify, like the blood pressure monitors and the respirators. She had no idea what was going on but instinctively opened the door next to the window and went in.
She moved into the middle of the circle, surrounded by the three incubators; each of these infants was extremely tiny, more so than the newborns she’d seen, like Tiffany’s four. These babies were easily one quarter their size, and swaddled completely so that even their faces were covered, as if they needed exceptional warmth in this dimly-lit room. She guessed these were preemies, hooked up by many tubes and wires to the machinery keeping them alive until they could mature enough to survive on their own. Whose babies are these? she wondered. She glanced around but there didn’t seem to be any cameras monitoring these little ones, as if they’d been left to their own devices, as she had been.
She reached through the incubator’s sleeve to one of the babies and her hand slid into the latex glove at the other end. For some reason, she just had to see what they looked like. Gingerly, she unwrapped the blanket from the face.
And jerked her hand away with a gasp! “No! This can’t be!”
Quickly she unwrapped the faces of the other two infants. They were identical, their features distinct even at what must be just days, maybe only hours of life. Every one resembled Dr. Tod! Except for one thing: the antennae. The mechanoreceptors at the tips were all turned toward her!
This is insane! she thought. Her mind couldn’t grasp it. What were these insectoid creatures? She found a chair by the door and sat trembling, struggling to get her bearings. And suddenly realized that her body was different. She was much lighter, as if she had lost a lot of weight. She pressed the gown against her stomach—it flattened! The thirty pounds she’d gained over the last year were gone!
Realization of the more than possible, the probable crashed over her. She worked with insects and knew quite a bit about them. Viviparous roaches grow their eggs within the ootheca sac inside the uterus of the mother, surrounded by fluid. Just like mammals! And they recognize their mother. These were her babies and they had recognized her! And now she knew why she had never been conscious during the treatments with Dr. Tod. He’d given her a knock-out drug and raped her. Probably many times.
Revulsion overtook her and she bent to vomit but the heaving was dry, bringing up nothing, and finally she pulled herself up and sucked in air to get control. Either she was crazy and imagining all this, or it had happened—and the reality before her felt ultra-real.
In a panic, she peered again at her reflection in the window. Terrified but determined, she unwrapped the bandage covering her head. With quivering fingers she peeled away layers of gauze until she reached the final layer. Even before she removed it, she could see that her face was different now, not the smooth, even lines that had been sculpted and shaped by Dr. Tod over twelve months. And the color beneath the gauze was two-toned, pale and dark.
Liz took a deep, rattled breath; she had to know.
She unwound the last layer of bandage and screamed, waking the babies, who also screamed and cried. “My face! My face!” Behind her, Dr. Tod’s image appeared, so like those babies, so insectoid.
She spun around, shrieking, “What have you done?”
Expressionless as always, he seemed unperturbed. A little moan. A small click. His almost non-existent lips might have turned up in a smile and released a word that sounded like “Beautiful!”
“What have you done to my face?” she screamed.
He gestured toward the babies. She shook her head, confused, unable to comprehend the incomprehensible.
“Food,” he moaned matter-of-factly, clicking insect-like.
“Food,” she repeated dumbly. And then understood why he’d created the ‘normal’ face—one that did not disgust him as much, one rich in healthy, youthful, nutritious tissue. Why he’d brought her to his lair to give birth to his spawn. Why he’d stripped away pieces of that normal mask she’d worn for the last year and left this face with patches of skin removed.
Horror descended on her and she thought she would faint but instead found the path to madness welcoming and headed rapidly down it. Dr. Tod gripped her arm and led her back to the incubators.
“Hungry,” he said, moaning, clicking, gesturing toward the hideous, screaming things in the incubators, their antenna waving frantically in her direction. His offspring. Her offspring. Insects with human features.
He used a tweezer-like instrument to pull a new strip of flesh from her cheek, and she did not feel any pain; she felt nothing. He shred it into three small parts and began feeding the first of the demon newborns.
§
Liz watches the infant consume a part of her, watches from this new, safe place within her, abstractly fascinated, buried beneath a core shock from which she knows she is irretrievable. She recognizes that he is an entirely different species, ancient, one predating human existence. A creature devoid of human emotions and concerns, that has evolved to live among us, breeding with pheromone-producing human females in order to survive. But to what end?
As she stares at the tiny being devouring her skin she numbly wonders, Will they eat just this perfect face he’s created or will they also demand the less-than-perfect flesh from my body? Does it matter?
As Marti predicted, Liz now has everything she’s wanted—a husband, children… This must be the good life, she thinks. A life that will no doubt be short.
Tiffany was right after all. Like females, males of every species know what they want. At last she is perfect in someone’s eyes.
Cousin Phyllis had said, ‘You can grow to love any man, at least for a while.’ Even a man who is not a man?
She takes the last strip of her skin from his twitchy hand. “I’ll do it,” she says, and begins to feed one of her daughters, whose antennae wave longingly in her direction.
Down at the Bottom of Everything
E.R. Knightsbridge
I always run the bath too deep. I get in and submerge my entire body so that my face looks up from under a veil of someone else’s tears. And I stay there until the water presses down on my ribcage and fills my ears and everything starts to go black. Then my body saves itself and I sit up gasping for air.
I don’t do it because I like it; I do it because I have to. Because I have to beat the water, so that I am not scared to turn on the tap or leave the house when it rains or walk across a bridge or get on a tiny boat with my wife for a day-excursion on holiday.
I do it because if I didn’t, I’d be too frightened to live and I might as well have died in that knotted swarm of noiselessly waving plastic in the Pacific Ocean.
I was there as a researcher looking at environmental damage, there to see the floating islands of waste. It was darker than I’d ex
pected under the endless raft of disposed bottles and old mobile phone packaging.
I switched on the underwater light on my helmet, and it lit up flecks of the sea like dust in the light between curtains. It was silent down there, except for the gushing release of air from my tank. At first I imagined I could hear sonar radars pinging back and forth, but the sounds were only the ghosts of expectation filling in the gaps of the unknown.
Then I noticed my legs were caught on something. I kicked and kicked, expecting to set myself free but there was a raggedy stretch of police tape tangled around my right ankle, tethering me there. When I reached down to loosen myself, pain shot through my arm the minute my finger touched the tape. It was as if someone had stabbed a blunt pencil right through my hand. And in that moment of sheer pain, of distilled stinging, I saw flashes of an enormous, endless sea that ranged from dark black to translucent turquoise.
In some places it was frothy, bubbling with movement and in others it was almost perfectly still, tingling with tiny ripples from birds’ feet. I was looking down on it from above, swooping in to see the dreaded details. The ocean covered everything; mountains were made of cascading water, valleys were transparent rock pools and at the very edges of the horizon a solid wall of water formed a roaring barrier from the bottom of nowhere to the top of infinity. It made a sound like a perpetually revving engine that grew stronger and louder with every exhalation of power. The water-wall glistened orange and yellow from a dying sun and schools of fish looked like colored ribbons waving in the wind.
I was in a shimmering, iridescent world of seeping hues, as though my eyes were covered in the colors oil makes in a puddle. For a few seconds I was the happiest I’d ever been. Suddenly the door to the vision snapped shut and I was left trapped in an invisible sphere, spinning round in a ball of underwater fury there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A giant crab floated past me, disorientated and fat. When it reached touching distance it burst into a gruesome firework of vicious tiny crabs the size of fingernails. Agony immediately pricked my back, but it was pinpointed and specific, as though a bird with one claw had latched onto me. I heard a nightingale sing yet lacked the energy or time to realize I’d created it for myself.
The crabs were under my skin. I knew it as I knew the lines of my mother’s face; a dead certainty, an unavoidable, terrifying and comforting truth.
The burning sensation was positioned exactly over the top of a mole on my back that I got from falling asleep on an LA roof terrace 20 years ago but which then began crawling up my spine, dancing over my shoulders until it dragged itself onto my right hand. The pain I experienced in that moment broke me in a way that was obvious would be impossible to ever fix. I screamed into my breathing mask, as if maybe I had another self inside me that would come to the rescue and overpower the weaker me I’ve been carrying around inside my ribcage all of my life. By the time I’d roared all the air from my lungs, the pain had disappeared and the mole had hunkered down in its new and clearly visible spot. Even in the middle of the exhausted relief I felt when that pain was over, I could not escape one chilling thought: the mole would always be there, taunting me in clear view, waiting for me to pass my eyes over it when I reached for a pen or flushed the toilet. It would ask me every day if I was brave enough to remember what had happened.
I was so ashamed of my own pre-emptive cowardice that it took me a few moments to register that the only thing I could see all around me was blue. Not the blue of the sea, but the generic blue of a grocery-store bag.
My breathing mask had gone. The plastic bag over my head hovered around me like a determined jellyfish and then began forcing itself into my mouth, burrowing down my esophagus.
I was simultaneously being suffocated by nature and by one of the very things I’d been nurtured into needing. I was a fire inside an oven, I was the barbed wire eyed by a sniper’s eyes from the tower of a high security prison. I was a fake flower wrapped in cellophane, too, and a fan rotating robotically in the bedroom of a house blasted by a tornado. I was at once all of these things and more. I contained so many objects, vistas and strangers’ memories that my skin felt stretched too tight.
As it tried to choke me, I understood it was not just a plastic bag but an entity.
It didn’t speak any language I knew, or one I could ever hope to repeat, but it began burning me with a searing energy that communicated all of its anger, resentment and fear. It transferred all of its emotions past my eyes and ears and into my gut so that they trapped me like the solid water walls in my vision.
Its feelings towered over me until I was crushed in their clenched grip, they squeezed through my skin and became my own thoughts; “… endless floating. In a place that doesn’t exist to most living people… so little consequence that I can be tortured by time and the sun and the stinging salt water… I will never die, I will cling on forever to remind you people of permanence but I will do it in silence, a long way away so that the glimpses you catch of me will puncture you as they have today.”
I’m lying in the bath now. I’ve got a big rock I found on the beach when I was ten on my chest. I saw the mole on my hand when I placed it there. The rock helps to keep me under the water. I’m trebling but I know I have to do it.
I must win.
Spore
Amanda Downum
“I got it from my girlfriend,” the boy says. “Ex-girlfriend.” Color rises in his light brown cheeks. “Wow, that makes it sound bad.”
I shift in the unforgiving molded plastic chair, fighting a sigh and winning—just. My face feels awkward, as though my sympathetic-interviewer expression is about to tilt and slide off. I glance toward the window, but the glass gives nothing back. Outside the study room are tables littered with stray books, students with earbuds sprouting from their skulls, and the cramped rows of bound periodicals in the library basement. A fluorescent tube flickers in one corner.
I force my attention away from the soporific stutter of the light and back to the boy. Which isn’t fair—he’s only a few years younger than me, the second half of his twenties. My notes say he’s a grad student in Religious Studies, that his name is Aaron. I don’t know if that’s true, but he answers to it. He wears a worn tweed sport coat over a T-shirt for a band I’ve never heard of.
I should never have let Dora talk me into this ridiculous project.
Put your tits on, woman. Get this over with. “Where did she first come into contact with it?”
“I don’t know. She never talked about it.” He takes his glasses off for the third time, rubs the bridge of his nose. This time he folds them and sets them on the table out of fidgeting range. He looks everywhere but the little digital recorder on the table between us. Because he’s lying, or because he’s telling the truth? “She didn’t talk about a lot of things. It wasn’t a relationship based on trust and open communication. I probably should have figured that out sooner.”
“How did you know you’d been exposed?”
His cheeks flush the color of cinnamon. “It started with weird spots. And the dreams. I didn’t connect them at first. I went to the clinic. The doctor said it was a superficial mycosis and gave me antifungals. Before I started them, Dora—Dr. Muñoz—showed up. I didn’t believe her, but she knew about the dreams. Things I hadn’t told anyone. She introduced me to some of the others.”
“Were you scared?” Not what I mean to ask, but it slips out anyway.
“I still am. But—I don’t mean to sound all support-group here, but it’s true—I’m not alone. Not just the way counselors say you’re not alone. I can feel the others, like white noise in the back of my head. I know how that sounds,” he says with a grimace, making a vague woo-woo gesture.
He leans forward, squinting as he catches my eye. “You don’t really believe me, do you?”
“No.” The flickering light is giving me a headache. “Which doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” I add, a half-hearted sop toward professionalism. “But you’re not the only person Dor—Dr. Mu�
�oz asked me to talk to. Maybe I’ll understand it better after I’ve spoken with everyone else.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m an anthropologist. Recording stories is part of my job. Dr. Muñoz thought this would interest me.” Dora always joked that I became an anthropologist to learn how to talk to humans. We both knew it wasn’t really a joke.
“Good luck.” Aaron reaches for his glasses, and his myopic black eyes sharpen as he studies me. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”
§
That night I sit cross-legged on a hard hotel mattress, squinting at the transcript on my laptop. The recorder lies on the fantastically ugly floral bedspread, feeding Aaron’s words back to me. My own words, distorted and strange coming from outside my skull. I grimace at the catch in my voice when I said Dora’s name.
I never should have agreed to this. Never mind that Dora is paying for my travel expenses, that I was sick of ramen and job-hunting and staring down my student loans, and would have leapt at any excuse to get out my stifling apartment. Never mind that I still wake up horny and lonely more than a year after Dora left, or that I’ve only had a handful of dates or one-night stands since.
Not that I had so many more before Dora. But then the inevitable end of every relationship rarely bothered me. Maybe I missed the sex, or someone to split the bills with, but the person— I hadn’t really known how to miss someone, before Dora.
Oxytocin. Dopamine. Nothing but chemicals. Quitting smoking was easier than quitting Dora Muñoz.
I never should have agreed, because Dora is crazy. The kind of passionate manic brilliance it’s too easy to get caught up in. She took trips at a moment’s notice—South America, Asia—chasing after weird plants or fungus that might be the cure for cancer, or impotence, or the common cold. I envied her that—not the travel, but the drive. The way her eyes lit up when she caught a scent. Too often the trails led nowhere, though, and eventually funding dried up. But not Dora’s passion. Until one day she vanished after a lead and never came home. I received a stream of e-mails, then a trickle, then nothing except enough money to break our lease, and one final message telling me she was going off the grid. Leaving me to pack up her stuff and explain things to her friends and colleagues, most of whom proceeded to tiptoe around me like I was a widow, or like her crazy might have rubbed off on me.
Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Page 27
