The Second Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®: 20 Tales by Modern and Classic Authors

by Fritz Leiber

  Never mind that anyone who bought those clothes could never, never look that good in them—as long as those clothes hung just so while being propelled down the runway under the popping glare of the fashion photogs come that all-so-important Spring or Fall showing, the designers could sell beaucoup numbers of each garment to the retailers and the couture buyers sitting out there on those uncomfortable little folding chairs surrounding both sides of the runway. To achieve that all-important bottom line, you needed models thinner than a paper-cut.

  And once said girls materialized at the castings, you hired them. No questions asked about how or why they managed to become that mind-blowingly thin.

  “I wonder if they flinch when she does that to them?”

  “Does what—starve them, or brand them?” Shane began back-combing his girl’s hair, grabbing one fistful of hair hard enough to pull the underlying flesh away from her skull, while furiously ratting the brittle strands with his comb. Jacob moved around to look at the model’s face—like all of her fellow Anabe Agency models, Annot or Pavla or who the hell ever she was just kept on half-smiling, lips pulled up at the corners into a sort of half-moon crescent of thin lips leeching out into a mere wrinkle in her cheeks. And her eyes—they didn’t track, as Jacob discovered when he moved his own forefinger back and forth before her face. All she did was quasi-smile and stare. In the time he stood before her, she did blink a couple of times in well over two minutes. But that was about all.…

  * * * *

  00Size00: Pill diuretics only go so far, you have to supplement them with foods that do it naturally. Plus you can never get too far from a bottle of really icy water—put it in the freezer for half an hour before you go anywhere, so it’s a little bit crunchy when you sip it. Chewing on ice works too, but it’s noisy, and sometimes you can crack a molar. But what I wanted to tell you about was something I saw on cable TV, a show about these Buddhist monks, over in Japan a few centuries ago—they achieved something beyond anorexia, something so totally perfect I can barely type this, I’m so excited.

  They were living mummies. Like no body fat, anywhere on their bodies. The thought of it is so exciting, I know my body is devouring calories by me just thinking about it. Of course they did die eventually, but before that, they were flesh, muscle and bone, and that’s about it. Perfection…wasted on guys, of course, but still.… And what is coolest of all is, they did it by eating, yet not really eating-eating. Like eating food. For seven years prior to them digging a hole in the ground then going down to sit in it, they ate nothing but things like bark off certain trees, pine needles, and not much else. And they stood under icy waterfalls…we all know how useful shivering is, don’t we? ;-)

  So, once they’d melted off all that body fat, their bodies were virtually mummified, so that when they’d go sit in their holes, once they were covered up by another monk, all they had to do was wait for two weeks or so, and then, if they were lucky, they were perfectly preserved for like forever after that. If they were slack, and snuck something to eat-eat, they didn’t mummify properly. And they rotted. What a tribute to them, to stay perfect after death. No wonder the other monks worshipped them.…

  * * * *

  “Everybody, ten minutes until curtain—”

  Jacob walked back to his waiting model and, despite the time warning, took a few precious seconds to lift up his girl’s hair, and bend down to study the nape of her taut-fleshed neck. He’d been hoping against hope that those initials wouldn’t be there, that Shane’s model was merely into body art…but they were there, a little lighter in color, not so recessed into the skin. Like something from a bad Nazi movie…those two repeated letters indented in the skin. Jacob wondered what sort of metal they used to make the brand—Steele, perhaps?

  “Jake, bring your girl over here, ok? She still needs her make-up—”

  Across the room, Marcia’s voice cut through Jacob’s reverie like a scissors lopping off split ends.

  Helping his girl to her feet, Jacob turned her bodily in Marcia’s direction and told her, “Go over there,” before giving her an asexual swat on her nonexistent ass and pushing her toward the waiting make-up artist. He’d never really noticed before, but this model—like all the Anabe Agency girls—had this shuffling gait, not quite lifting her feet up, but lurching forward, like something from a very bad indy horror movie. Something not even as good as the early George Romero pictures. And as he continued to watch the model (someone had mentioned her name to him—Zelinka? Kaoline? Mora?—one of the strange names like that written on those sheets of paper attached to their hangers on the racks, names Jacob never saw listed in the birth announcements in any newspaper he’d ever read in all his life) he wondered, did Miss Steal pick the names out for the girls, or did they?

  Judging from the way all the models in the room more-than-meekly sat there, or stood there, letting people tease their hair into static-random puffs of fragile follicles sprayed and ratted into a quasi-life-form squatting on their scalps, surmounting lipstick smears extending from their natural lips to their concave cheekbones and still onward, to touch their barely-fleshed earlobes, and all of that unnaturalness resting on necks so thin, so sinewy, that they resembled the damned Watts Towers, rather than anything still human, Jacob allowed the truth to finally sink in—these things had no free will, no ability to name themselves, or choose what they wanted to do. Didn’t they all come in a van, and leave in the same vehicle once the show was over? Did he—did anyone working in the fashion industry, let alone those reporters from those cable fashion and entertainment channels who were virtually interchangeable, save for the different logos on their mike flags, did any of them every try to talk to an Anabe Girl, attempt to interview her? Hear her say anything?

  The people who bought the clothes they wore on the runway may have been fashion slaves, but these…things, what were they? Fashion zombies?

  Once thought of, the word blossomed in his mind, each petal taking on the image of George Romero extras nibbling bugs off trees in stark grainy chiaroscuro or Haitian sugar cane workers lurching off platforms into vats of steaming processed cane in that grade Z Bela Lugosi film from the 1930s…Something-or-other Zombie. But it made no sense—real zombies (if there was such a thing as a real zombie, aside from the living-dead, only enslaved and salt-deprived) ate, couldn’t get enough to eat, as long as it was available for the ripping and gnawing with the teeth.

  He’d never seen these girls open their mouths, not to protest whatever weird-ass thing the hair and make-up people did to them, not to complain about the asymmetrical nightmares they had to have pinned and all but glued onto their bodies just so they’d stay on for the duration of the runway appearance before the dressers back stage would rip them off and throw something else on their bodies…not even if someone stuck them with a pin, as he’d seen countless dressers do in those panicky seconds before clothing changes.

  “Maybe if you offered one of them a French fry, she’d come back to life.”

  Shane’s voice so close to his ear startled Jacob for a second, jerking inside the confines of his Henley shirt, he recovered quickly enough to snap, “I doubt any of these girls would’ve allowed themselves to drink a zombie potion in the first place…it might have more than a calorie in it.”

  “And I don’t think you can drink one of those portions on ice…does something to the blowfish poison in the mixture.” Shane laughed, only his eyes didn’t crinkle around the corners as they usually did when he was joking. They watched as the dressers began shoving the first of the girls past the curtain, and out into the glare of the runway proper—it didn’t matter how high their heels were, none of them walked fast enough or lifted their feet high enough to have to worry about falling off their heels…if anything like worry could seep into their calorie-deprived brains.

  While Jacob stared at the last girl he’d done take her place in line near the curtain, al
l he could see was that burned-on “SS” on the back of her neck, in the same spot where a fashion doll might carry the incised name of her maker, or her country of origin…not placed anywhere where even an upswept hairdo would reveal it, but still there, like a brand name, or a bar code. Or a mark of ownership.

  “Don’t look, but you should see who’s standing in back of us,” Shane whispered, while bumping up against Jacob’s right shoulder with his own narrower left shoulder.

  Still staring after that last model he’d worked on, Jacob murmured, “So…who aren’t I supposed to look at?”

  “The Steel-Woman herself…come to oversee the slaves, I guess.”

  “She packing the branding iron?”

  “Nope…just a pissed look on her puss. Didn’t I say don’t look back there?”

  Jacob didn’t care if he’d be turned into a pillar of salt for taking a look at Miss Steal, if that’s what the All Mighty still did to those who dared look into the face of pure corruption. He just had to stare the mistress of starvation in the eye.…

  * * * *

  Not2ThnYet: I saw that special on TV, too…did you notice the gorgeous robes those monks wore? Like frozen fashion models. Now if those guys had been born now, and they’d been girls, they would’ve been models. Not just models, the best, most perfect models. Never eat, never drink, just be perfect. And wear even more perfect clothes. Everything hanging, so people know that you’ve made it past size 0, down to Thin. Just pure body, nothing getting in the way, no fat, no excess water, just the essence of a person. I suppose it’s like thin goes beyond a diet, beyond a way of life, into a religion. The same dedication, the same faith that as long as you believe, you’ll make it. Total thinness. Better than a model thin. Of course, I’d even settle for model thin right now.…

  * * * *

  Gaunt cheekbones jutted out on either side of Stephanie Steele’s almost lipless mouth, the coating of lipstick turning her lower face into a bloody paper-cut rather than anything like a smile or a frown, as she stared at her lined-up Girls from the back of the dressing area. Jacob was vaguely reminded of that magazine editor, Helen something-or-other Last-Name’s-a-Color, who was practically self-embalmed when she finally died a couple of years back…same anorexic body type, same concave lack of a gut under her barely-there bust-line. Wearing one of those totally non-styled quasi-Vera Wang sort of shifts with a stark lack of ornamentation, curves or anything else which made a woman look female. Super-pointy toes on her spike-heeled shoes, which matched her jutting beak of a fleshless nose. Malnourished moussed hair, the kind that is held on the head by the layers of hairspray alone. Like someone who came in fifth on Survivor before the rest of the people on the island voted her off for fear they’d wake up the next morning to find her dead of starvation. Only, Jacob could sense just from looking at the self-satisfied glitter in those slightly-bulging eyes of hers that this woman liked herself skeletal…no, make that loved herself that way.

  But even as Jacob saw that Miss Steal had achieved calorie-deprivation-Nirvana years ago, there was one thing starvation couldn’t give her…height. Four-inch spike heels couldn’t bring her up to five-five, if that. Even Kate Moss was five-seven barefoot, and at her skinniest. Jacob could smell a WannaBe across a roomful of models’ cigarette smoke, and today, the room was wholly free of nicotine—openly staring at her now, Jacob mouthed the words Whoremaster bitch…white slaver (Oh that was it…that Lugosi film was called White Zombie) in her direction, turning only when he was sure she’d seen him.

  Beside him, Shane whispered, “I wonder where she finds them…let alone how she gets them that skinny—”

  Before Jacob could come up with an answer, he heard a staccato slap-tap sound behind him, which quickly became louder and sharper, until it stopped altogether, about a foot or so away from him.

  “They get themselves that skinny…before they die,” came a voice gone raspy from frequent bouts of puking and grazing her throat with the tips of her fingernails. Shane and Jacob exchanged brief wide-eyed stares before turning around to face the Wraith Mistress in Vera Wang silk. That lipsticked slit opened to reveal teeth permanently striated from within from vomit-rot, as Miss Steal continued, “They seek each other out over the Internet…help is just a search engine away. They trade web addresses the way the fleshies trade recipes for smoothies. Only way to find sisters in a world of flab…always seeking out means to achieve their ends. Perfect is a mouse click away, if you know where to look. Then they diet until the last “t” is gone…but don’t you see how much better I’ve made things? Look at this room…no choking on second-hand smoke, no tripping over ice-water bottles, no listening to diva rants. The other models, they’d cause so much grief before they backslid and got fat, or up and died from overdoses. I’ve made things so much better, for everyone. And everyone is happy…the designers have their elusive drape and the buyers have the illusion that those clothes will make them look thin, too. No tantrums behind the curtain, either.

  “My girls are past all that foolishness…they’ve stayed the course, stuck to their plans, and achieved—”

  “A state of perfect cliché?”

  Miss Steal wrinkled her lips into an ass-tight moue at Shane, before saying to Jacob, “You can call me a white slaver, but you don’t know squat…I just find them right before they’ve consumed that last calorie, and I—I complete them. This is what they all want, you know. To have people gape in amazement at their impossibly perfect bodies, to make people envy them, even as they claim to be repulsed. Not everyone can starve themselves just so…it takes dedication. Like modeling. Besides, do you really want to go back to the old way, of dealing with whiny hungry models coked up on blow who snap your head off if you look at them cross-eyed? Do you really want to work in all that cigarette haze? Or listen to them popping their gum—”

  “Nobody can live on air, lady, I mean, you move the car, you gotta gas it up first. Simple law of I think physics—energy needs fuel. If it don’t eat, it don’t breathe—”

  “Breathing only makes you look fat—makes the rib-cage stick out,” Miss Steal answered serenely, before crossing her bony arms over her non-existent breasts, and going on, “And besides, since when did the dead need air?”

  “This is too freaky for moi.” Shane dismissed them with a two-handed pushing-away motion, and headed for his workstation, tossing his combs and cans of styling products into a zippered bag.

  Jacob continued to watch him as Miss Steal kept on whispering in that vomit-roughened voice of hers, “If you really, really want to be thin, to stay thin, are you going to let something like death stand in your way? Desire can be a powerful nutrient…once you’re tough enough, physically hard, you won’t rot. Not at all…did you realize, it’s far easier to cremate someone fat” (she spat out the word as if it were a curse) “than to cremate a lean person? People like us, we don’t go easily. We endure…we go on. Look at Vibeke, over there in the yellow—” Jacob saw the last model he’d been working on, returning from her latest march down the walk, as one of the dressers shucked off her yellow dress to reveal a naked body of such skeletal fleshlessness it transcended any hint of raw sexuality despite her nudity, to become a mere construct of parchment flesh stretched drum-head taut over a framework of symmetrical bone rebar— “Would you believe, before she started on the path to perfection, she weighed close to one-twenty-five? On a five-foot-nine frame? Obscene…just disgusting When she was surfing the pro-ana sites, she called herself ‘Not2ThinYet’ which was so, so true. Her first trigger was horrible…convex belly, pockets of flab on her upper hips…just obscene—”

  “‘Trigger’? Are we talking Lone Ranger or that other cowboy guy?”

  “Photos, posted on the websites. Of women approaching perfection. Inspirational pictures, if you will. Encouragement for the flabby. Proof that dedication will pay off, if you don’t succumb to food—”

&nb
sp; * * * *

  GoddessAnaRex: I hate to spam everyone, but there’s this drink you simply must try—I got it from someone on another site, and it isn’t easy to make, but believe me, it will work. You’ll need to find a store that sells real Asian food, specifically raw fish, to make it, but if you follow the directions below precisely, it’s worth the effort (and effort equals calories spent!). They might give you a hard time over the blowfish, but just show them the $$ and you’ll get it. Some of the other ingredients might be harder to find, but I’ve included related websites where you can order them. Once you drink it, you’ll experience a backsliding effect—you’ll swell up for a short time—but after that…Calorie Free Zone. Trust me, this is it.

  * * * *

  “—used to post my own triggers, before I found a way to help more women in a lasting way. A lucrative way, especially since they’ll never waste a penny of earnings on food. Of course, my method is still out there, floating on the Internet—I tried to limit where I sent it originally, but a few of the girls who would become my girls passed it along to who knows whose mailing lists. But I found that marking my original girls, just so I can keep track of the authentic Anabe Girls, works well.… I know that imposters, wanna-bes, try to pass themselves off as real Anabe models at castings. But I’ve clued the people doing the casting in on my…secret, so they can check out anyone suspicious. And those girls, in turn, are told to apply for jobs with me…they get my card, the whole scouting treatment. Then I get the wanna-bes, before they can continue to go around ruining my agency’s reputation. And as I said before, everyone is happy—the designers, the buyers—”