“No,” she said. What she had meant to say was, “No, I don’t want to see! Let me go!” What he must have heard was, “No, I don’t believe you!”
“You will believe me. I will show you. You never thought we would have children together, Ellie. Tonight, you’ll understand how wrong you were. Tonight, we’re going to make thousands of babies.” He lowered his foot from the table and lifted the top of another platter to reveal a small hatchet. “I’ll prove my findings as well as my love.”
Watching him run his thumb along the blade in that dim, pumpkin glow, her bladder released. Piss streaming down her legs and the chair legs, she understood that Billy was in fact no longer a man. He was immortal, as immortal as bloated roadkill with maggots squirming beneath, eternal in its provisions of fodder for those flies-to-be.
He reached her, brushed her dinner plate aside, wrapped his left hand around her right wrist, and raised it to the table with what seemed to be lamenting affection. Tears streamed down her face, but she could barely feel them.
“No, no, no, no.”
He gave her a sympathetic look that said, this may hurt like hell, but it’s necessary. Then he pulled her hand until her wrist was taut against the table, raised the hatchet, and brought it down with a force she never knew he possessed. Even in a semi-numb, semi-paralyzed state, she felt a level of pain she never thought possible. It came again and again and again because the first few chops were not enough to completely sever her hand.
Billy moved surprisingly fast for a man recently downgraded to nine toes. He jumped to a platter and revealed surprise number three: a blowtorch.
Cauterize, she thought. It was the only word her mind could muster before she passed out to the sound of the torch lighting and, in the background, that horrible music.
When she started to wake, she felt Luigi’s broad arms around her and thought, Thank God, it was a nightmare, only a nightmare, I’m safe.
A smile of relief was just starting to form when awareness and pain penetrated her mind, and she realized that she was not huddled in bed with her lover but sitting on a hard, wooden surface. The bed sheets she thought she felt were really that horrible, yellowed tablecloth dangling over her legs, and the sense of being held in Luigi’s arms amounted only to the broad weight of the drugs still gripping her system. Worse than anything, the tingling pain she at first took for a limb fallen asleep began to amplify into a high voltage wave of pain.
She could also smell charring. Head still pressed against the table, she opened her eyes to see the stump where her right hand used to be. Farther down her wrist, a grotesque cluster of blisters peeked out from the edge of heavy-duty gauze.
He stopped the bleeding, she thought. He wants to keep me alive, to torture me.
Tat-tat-tat-tat. She heard the sound first before feeling its corresponding vibrations through the table, where her facedown head was pressed, unable to look up. Something was crawling across the cloth, digging in with legs sharp and heavy enough to resound through the fabric and make an instrument of the hard wood beneath. Whatever it was kept getting closer. Tat-tat-tat-tat.
It pattered over to her and paused a moment, as if preparing to strike. But it didn’t strike. One of its tat-tat legs merely touched upon her scalp. Then another. Then another. It was climbing onto her head, sinking its spidery limbs into her hair.
Finally, Ellie found that she could move. She lifted her remaining hand and in a single, quick motion thrust it under the large tarantula and flung it off the top of her head. It landed on its back only a few feet away, still too close for her comfort, and emitted a squeal.
She summoned enough strength to lift her head from the table to the back of the chair. She then gazed down upon her recent assailer. It wasn’t a tarantula, nor was it any other kind of spider she’d ever seen.
The thing writhing on its back still somewhat resembled her hand. The skin was there, marked with small, porous pox where black hairs had begun sprouting. The wrist and its laceration had swollen to a lively size, which at first seemed impossible considering there was no longer—or at least should not have been—any blood flowing to or through that appendage; then she recognized the shape it was taking—a thorax.
Her severed hand was transforming into a spider.
“Do you see?” Billy’s voice rose from behind her. His arms dropped on her shoulders. “You were exposed to the agent, too. Now, Ellie-my-dear, we’re both immortal.”
“Bastard!” she cried, her adrenaline finally pushing through the drugs in her system. “It was in the wine.”
“Not the wine. What kind of sense would that make? I put the drugs in the alcohol, but I put the agent over the already cooked food. Alcohol would quickly dissolve the agent’s most pungent of properties . . . and they are pungent. Fast-acting as you can see by the sudden and dramatic change your hand has taken. Fascinating, isn’t it? I haven’t watched an entire human limb change until now. It’s as if the latent particles of insect mass I’ve manipulated spring forth from our decay in the forms most sensible based on their sizes and shapes. How fascinating!”
The spider-hand kept twitching in transformation. Her former fingers, its legs, clawed failingly at the air for at least another minute before settling, stilling. The sound of internal tearing cut through the music as each finger began splitting down the middle. The manicured nails fell to the table in pieces as little climbing hooks sprouted from the tips of each torn phalange. All but the thumb did this; rather than joining the eight legs and making nine or ten, it folded under the palm, fixed itself there, and split into two, dripping fangs.
She gazed in horror as Billy stepped around her and approached the final platter still on the table (she figured the one she had not watched him reveal had contained the gauze he used to bandage her cauterized wound). Her shock escalated as he lifted the silver dome and revealed what had been squirming beneath this entire time.
Larvae.
Using its new legs, the spider-hand sprang to an upright position and tat-tat-tatted over to the pulsing mess of a meal, where it dove in with a display of gluttony most likely derived from its human origins.
“How does dessert sound?” Billy asked, placing the silver dome over the predator and its prey. “Our boy sure likes it! Relax . . . those larvae weren’t from me.”
“There’s no way. It’s a trick. You’re deranged and playing a cruel trick on me.”
“Does the end of your arm feel like a trick?” he asked, though he did not wait for her response when he could easily read it on her face. “I’m not a magician, Ellie. I’m an entomologist and arachnologist. Truth or trick, science or fiction—what seems more plausible derived of a man you’ve known for the better end of two decades?”
She tried not to let him notice as her eyes scanned the rest of the table. Except for the larvae-filled platter and the jars he first unveiled to her, everything else had been removed from that ghastly yellow cloth while she was unconscious. There were no knives or forks or plates. Billy was being cautious, and she understood that she had to be a thousand times more cautious if she wanted to get out of this alive. He may not have expressed interest in murdering her, but she had a feeling that he wouldn’t view dicing her into tiny pieces as murder if those pieces sprouted antennae or wings or reanimated in some buggy form or other.
Closing her eyes, she listened to the still-playing background music, and she thought.
Her phone and pepper spray were both in her purse, which she had set on a decorative chair in the entryway. Although Billy Goldstein was a weak man, he was still a man—that was evident with the strength used to hack off her hand. And it was not as if she thought she had the luxury of waiting for Luigi’s suspicious nature to kick in and bring him kicking down the door. Compared to other corners, the one she was most backed into was an intellectual disadvantage. As intelligent as she was, Billy’s mind was more brilliant—genius.
She glared at him, at the smug, self-pleased look he wore. She wanted to complete the job
that his countless, sleepless hours in his basement lab started yet could not finish. She wanted to peel any lingering sense of humanity off the front of his skull. She wanted the fingernails (of her left hand, obviously) to scrape bone. She realized in a rise of perverse glee that this was not the first time she had experienced such murderous tones toward the man. How many times had she looked through the monstrous magnifying lenses perched on his nose and imagined how satisfying it would feel to dig her fingers into those wet, white, grub-like eyes.
There it was! In her rage, Ellie almost overlooked the one major advantage she had over Billy: her eyesight. She did not have to carry out her fantasy exactly. All she had to do was remove, and preferably destroy, his glasses. Without his visual crutches, Billy was a few decades from legal blindness. Exposing that weakness was her best chance of survival.
Her attention returned to the tabletop, to the glass jars in which Billy’s former pieces dwelled. They were close enough to grab. They weren’t much, but they would have to do. Two shots at escape were better than none.
Wait for it, she told herself, a higher sense of awareness taking over. His music is still playing, and he’s bobbing his head to it. It’s slight, but I can see it. Wait until that sound of spider webs lulls him into its comfortable trap. Wait until he doesn’t see it coming.
The cacophony of computerized coos continued. While it sounded disturbing to her, she figured Billy’s take on the music was epic. To him, it was the sweet surrender of seraphs to his secular self-righteousness. It reached high, it dipped low, and it culminated toward that moment of climax when he would be fully enveloped, a fly in a web. Building, building, building, and then—
Ellie lunged, ramming her stomach into the table and knocking the wind out of herself. Having just barely wrapped her fingers around the maggot-jar, she tightened her stomach and pushed herself backward.
Billy’s head snapped left, and he jumped at her. He was midair when the jar collided with his glasses. Neither jar nor lenses broke, but the impact pushed the frames into his brow with enough force to make them bounce away from his face. They did not come completely off, but instead landed on the tip of his nose.
He was still coming.
Without pausing, Ellie lunged forward again and grabbed the grub jar. This time, before she had the chance to lean back and send it at his head, Billy was on her, in her face, and she and the chair were on their backs. He wrapped his fingers around her throat, pressed them into any hollow spaces they could find.
“Don’t harm my babies!” he growled.
Blackness flared in and out along the outskirts of her eyes, and she realized that the back of her head had probably struck the ground when he tackled her and the chair. She figured that trauma, combined with his full weight focused into a death-grip on her airway, was responsible for the ecliptic flashes bordering her vision. Fortunately, she had one last chance, an ace up her sleeve—another jar in her hand.
He hadn’t seen her grab the second one.
She gripped the glass container and could hear the almost inexistent sound of hairline fractures running through it. Then, with everything she had left, she thrust it into his right eye, shattering the jar and sending the frames still dangling from his ears, as well as the toe-grub that had been inside the container, to the ground. Blood from Billy’s shard-shot socket sprayed her face and leaked into her eyes. He stood and began pacing the room.
“My babies! I give you my love! I give you the blessing of eternity, and this is what you give me, you bitch! You nasty, selfish, bitch!”
He stopped cursing her only when he heard something shatter beneath him. Billy’s foot had come down on the first jar she threw at him. He dropped to his knees and began sifting through the glass.
“Where are you, little buddy? Where’d you go? I’ll save you.”
This was her chance to run for the door. Ellie struggled to her feet and began turning her body in the direction of escape, but she only made it mid-turn before a fresh pain, an itchy pain, erupted in her eyes and pitched her into the table. It was a soapy sort of sting—only, a thousand times worse.
Is it glass? she wondered. I broke the jar above my face, so it must be glass.
She looked at the tablecloth through pained, watering eyes, and that was when she understood the source of her excruciation. The red puddles she had mistaken for her blood, for they had previously been her blood, were shifting under the dim glow and had been for some time. A countless number of mites.
She remembered something Billy said earlier: “The blood was also moving. It was red, so it became chiggers.”
Blood became chiggers, and his blood had just gotten in her eyes.
She had started to push herself away from the table when his left hand seized her right leg, tripping her over her own force. Her entire body screamed as she hit the ground, and hearing that beaten howl, she finally understood the gravity of what Billy had done to her. She was an ant-hill in waiting, a hornet nest to be. She was a tick, and she was a flea. No matter what she did, if she escaped the house and attempted to resume a normal life, she would always be haunted by her own infestation. Menstruation, she shuddered to think, would be the birth of a thousand, tiny bugs.
She looked at him. Even in dim light and through a red-mist veil of mites, she could see what had become of his right eye. A jagged splinter of glass had penetrated and deflated it, and dead inside the socket, it had metamorphosed into a dangling grub worm. Finally, it was true; the man’s eyes—at least one of them currently actualized as such—were now the white, wormy things they had always resembled.
He began crawling up her legs. The closer he got, the more she saw of his grubby gash. He too had a mess of chiggers crawling around the wound. Ants, as well, fiery-looking things, were collecting at the fresh lesion. They were even attacking the grub at center.
Immortality is a feeding frenzy, Ellie thought as his face hovered above hers.
Billy no longer seemed angry. Except for the few dozen arthropods gathered there, she had seen this look on his face many times, more so in the early days of their marriage. It was an unmistakable look; the same one he had always worn while running his insect-familiar fingers against her sex.
“I still love you,” he said, leaning closer. “I did this for us. I love you, Ellie-my-dear.”
Her left hand shot into the air, struggling to find any weapon, but all she managed to grip was the tablecloth. Billy’s face inched closer and closer, until his lips were pressing hard against hers, his teeth were grinding against hers, and his tongue was wriggling on the insides of her cheeks. She bit down, but he wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop, not even when his tongue landed in the back of her throat and began seconds later to flutter like a wood roach.
She tugged at the tablecloth, fighting despite choking. The remaining silver-topped platter, the one with the spider-hand and larvae inside, crashed to the ground behind Billy. No longer held down, the white-turned-yellow shroud she always hated slid off the table and fell over the two of them.
The music she thought might be an accurate depiction of the sound of spider webs being made filled her head, and then, after a few minutes, nothing.
It’s okay, Luigi told himself. She’s okay. That freak probably just coaxed her into one last pity fuck. That’s all.
The thought didn’t reassure him much, but he liked it far better than the other ones which periodically crossed his mind as he sat in his car across the street from the Goldstein residence. He knew what Billy Goldstein looked like, had seen him around town before, and the idea of an odd-looking oddball like him delivering it to a beautiful woman like Ellie gave him the same kind of phantom chill spiders gave him.
That’s all there is to it—she fucked him a final time, and when that wasn’t enough for him, he played on her heartstrings, coaxed her into staying the night. She wakes up a lot. I bet she’ll wake up any second and realize her mistake. I’ll count down from sixty, and by the time I’m done, she’ll probably ste
p outside, get in her car, and drive away.
Luigi didn’t count more than ten seconds. He stepped out of his car, felt a slight chill, and buttoned up his shirt as he crossed the street. He reached the door and heard something; it was music, probably that electronic shit Ellie said her husband loved so much. Muffled through the walls, it sounded eerie, especially nearing three in the morning.
He knocked on the door and this time tried to wait a full minute. Other than the music, there were no signs of life inside. He looked through the tall, slender window beside the front door and into the dimly lit dining room (he had been in the house on a few occasions Billy didn’t know about). There was something, some shape, lying under a sheet on the floor.
All he could think was: Murder, murder-suicide, murder, murder-suicide!
It skipped Luigi’s mind to try the knob. He raised his boot and sent it once, twice, third time’s a charm against the door. It splintered away from the frame, and he rushed inside, ripping his recently buttoned shirt open to throw down with whoever crossed his path and wasn’t Ellie.
A whoever would have been fine. Luigi wasn’t afraid of anyone. But as he approached the dining room’s dim glow, he encountered a whatever. Above the arch to the dining room in a thick, almost silky web was the largest spider he had ever seen. It looked like a tarantula, only it was muscular and fleshy and whitish. There was also something familiar about it. He watched, transfixed, as it crawled on eight bony legs across its thick-laced web to greet another guest, a single trapped fly still buzzing. The absurdity of a tarantula spinning a web to catch prey did not occur to him until years later, when he found an article about the many new species discovered at the Goldstein house and tacked it on the wall beside other stories he’d collected.
His sight returned to the mass on the floor. Deciding that the spider was too busy with the fly to bother with him, he swallowed his irrational fear long enough to pass under the oversized arachnid. The tabletop was bare, and the form he was staring at, the form he prayed was not Ellie’s corpse, was covered in what looked like the tablecloth.
Year's Best Body Horror 2017 Anthology Page 24
