Just a peep.
You don’t know how difficult it is to talk unless you have to retrain your vocal cords to vibrate.
Really.
Fucking.
Difficult.
I moved my mouth into different positions, forcing the air out, trying to get even a whisper of sound beyond the sickly death-rattle I was so far very, very good at. I should have been sweating under the exertion, but my skin remained smooth and clammy. Finally, my lips puckered in an imperfect oval, I was rewarded with a quiet but audible “ooh.” Not willing to stop and celebrate, I kept up the rhythm of air, devoting myself to my throat, feeling the muscles and tendons re-familiarize themselves with the patterns of speech. The oohs got progressively louder, to oohs to oohs, and eventually to a full-throated OOOO-AAAAHHH that filled the room and warbled off the walls.
It wasn’t my voice exactly; there were tonal similarities, but the sounds were barely human and growled with feral terror. I kept it up, screaming at full volume now, not willing to relinquish my triumph. It was only one vowel sound, maybe an arguable two, but ees and ays could not be far behind, and then consonants. I stood up and marched around the table, keeping the beat with my footsteps as I modulated my mouth and throat to get new sounds.
Step. AAAAAYYYYY!
Step. EEEEEEEEEE!
Step. EYE-EYE-EYE-EYE-EYE!
Break. I had limited time, and needed to modulate the voice to a more manageable, conversational tone. I curved my tongue against the roof of my mouth to get a hiss of air going, and contracted my lungs, forming my lips and tongue around my name:
It was a gruesome utterance, a word of putrefaction, splatting heavily on the floor like clotted cream gone rancid.
I tried again, smiling around the word this time, picturing kittens frolicking in a meadow with baby goats, dolphins performing back flips in a tranquil bay.
The sound of orphans being strangled in their cribs soaked into the walls. The goats head-butted the kittens into red mush, and the dolphins lined up to be mercury-laden breakfast treats for Chinese children.
One more time, quick and tight. Try to flatten it out, squeeze the horror out of it. Pop the lungs, don’t drag it out.
Shelley.
Sheldon.
My voice was grated, raw, shards of glass rubbing against shale and hamburger. I called to the cat a few times. “Sofa. Sofa. Sofa. Hey, Sofa. Come here.” I played with the modulation, managing to turn it from a bloodless whisper into a parody of friendliness. A pederast inviting the paperboy in for a cookie. Sofa eventually returned from wherever she had hidden herself and weaved her mass through my legs. I considered this proof of success.
I looked at the clock on the wall. Seven o’clock. In another hour or so, the sun would have fully risen on my first full day as a member of the undead. I’d call Rowan at half past eight to make sure I had enough time to get past her army of underlings and toadies.
In the meantime, the voice needed major calisthenics if I were to pass muster. I passed the time by petting Sofa on my lap while practicing some vocal warm-up exercises. I’d run through some tried-and-true tongue-twisters, childhood classics to limber up my aural mechanisms. I inhaled deeply, expanding my lungs to their absolute limit, then pushed the breath out over the words “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” my lips and tongue imperfectly meshing. It all came out peerpiperpitapetotpittedpedders, each syllable dripping from my lips in tones of black death.
“She sells seashells by the sea shore.” Shesellshellabaseshory. Angels wept bloody tears as my syllabic modulation killed all in its path.
“I am the very model of a modern major general, I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral.” Iamfhjdrlibbitableinmeraralrawwwwwwrrrrraaaagh. Sofa, before a subdued admirer of my linguistic proficiency when I practiced, bristled at that one.
Oh fuck it. Talking slow was the only option, and no matter what I did to make my utterances sound even remotely human, the sound of my voice rattled like dirt falling onto a freshly planted coffin.
“Oh . . . that this too . . . too sullied flesh would . . . melt,” I said slowly, metering out the beats with my breath and forcibly enunciating every syllable. Not too bad, that time. The words of Shakespeare’s Dane had never sounded so bereft of hope, but at least it suited his melancholy mood. Now, all I needed was an impresario who wanted to mount an all-singing all-dancing all-undead adaptation of Hamlet, and I was set.
“What the fuck?”
For an instant, I was illogically proud of the sentence. It sounded normal, human. Definitely something I would say. I glimpsed a shadow against the wall, moving quickly toward me, and realized I had not spoken. A baseball bat — a memento from childhood, I recalled, a fatherhood gift that never instilled a love of sports but kept alive a long-gone love of a parent — crashed against the wall behind me, narrowly missing my head, clipping my earlobe.
Startled, I threw Sofa at the blur.
n
Three minutes later, drenched in offal, I took stock.
My hunger was sated.
I was happily chewing on a forearm, said limb noticeably unattached to an owner.
My, I guess you’d call him boyfriend of three months or so, Fisher something, something Fisher, lay strewn about the table and chairs and floor and sideboard. His blood Rorschached the wallpaper.
Sofa was taking an experimental sniff of Fisher’s appendix and walking about the carnage, leaving charming little red paw prints behind her.
Great. Just . . . terrific.
Fisher had been nothing serious, a playmate, someone to talk to and occasionally swap spit with. He had a sad lost-puppy look to him that I have never been able to resist. Fisher and I had hooked up every few weeks. We had nothing to connect us, but his story of parental rejection, so common among those of our tribe, made me more accepting of his faults. He was shallow and immature and flighty but then so was I for a time. I decided to let him have some fun, perhaps I could serve as a mentor, and if we got our collective rocks off once in a while, no harm. He was intimate enough that he had a key, and had slipped in during the night, maybe wanting to surprise me after my “big audition” with a celebratory/pity boink. He must have been under the covers in my parents’ bedroom when I walked through the house — the bedcovers were mussed up when I bothered to take a closer look. Somehow I had overlooked him in my search for memories. Fisher had awoken during my yelling and screaming (the earplug I spat out as I sucked at his auditory canal reinforced this notion), and had taken the bat from out of the bedroom closet as a makeshift weapon. He came into the dining room — why didn’t he call the police, you ask yourself, and I wish I had an answer; maybe he didn’t want to explain why he was in a house he had no business being in — and seeing the drained, anemic demon sitting at the table and squawking nonsense, reacted rather appropriately under the circumstances.
His bad luck to have poor aim. His bad luck the surprise kicked in impulses I didn’t know I had. My bad luck to have to clean up the mess. My good luck the curtains to the large picture window I stood in front of, a speck of Fisher’s delicious pink arm muscle poking out from between my lips, were closed. I had torn him apart like he was made of tissue.
I checked the clock. 8:20. Pissed off, confused, irritated, but strengthened by unexpected breakfast, I went in search of trash bags and cleaning solvents.
At 8:30, I sat at the table and made a call to Rowan’s office. The phone wasn’t working, no dial tone buzzed in my ear. I shook the phone in annoyance, and the casing cracked slightly in my fingers as I thoughtlessly gripped the handset tighter. Gotta watch that, I thought, and switched the phone to my good ear. The dial tone was clear and strong.
I dialed the agency. A prim male voice answered on the first ring. “Masters Talent, how may I direct your call?”
I lifted the corners of my mouth and tried to force an airy,
businesslike nonchalance into my voice. I brought air in, and pushed in out past the vocal cords. “Rowan . . . O’Shea . . . please.”
Outside my house, all small mammals within earshot shriveled into fetal balls. Sofa, being a bit more in tune with the dark side (I suspect all cats are), shivered a bit at the noise but stayed put.
A long silence ensued, then: “I’m . . . I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
Again, quieter, with less conviction. Focus on clarity and a feeling of goodwill toward all. “Rowan. O’Shea. Please.”
Another pause, then a gasp. There was a sandpapery sound as the receptionist hastily covered the mouthpiece with his palm. In the background I could hear a woman’s voice (“Carl? Are you okay, honey?”) and what sounded like hysterical sobbing. The phone was dropped, and over the clunks I heard footsteps and a scream echoing quickly away as Carl scampered from his desk.
I hung up, thinking. I had a direct number to Rowan’s personal cell phone on speed dial — “For emergencies only, and I mean that, mister, this is not a line to complain that the stage manager screwed up your latte order, you had better be on fire if you call!” — and I figured a bypass of the usual route to her ear might be in order.
She answered on the sixth ring. “Sheldon, did you just call here?” She had caller ID, an option I had always detested, preferring anonymity until I had said hello. “What did you say to Carl, he’s crying in the washroom. I don’t know, get on the phones!” This last she shouted at an agency sycophant, not bothering to cover the mouthpiece or move the phone slightly away from her noisehole. “You like your job, you little fuck? Get on those fucking phones now! And tell Carl he’s fired! Christ, Sheldon, what’d you do? Thank god Carl’s a temp.”
“Rowan,” I said. “You called about—”
“What the fuck?” Rowan yelled. Then, more cautiously: “Who the hell is this?”
“It’s Sheldon,” I groaned.
“Shel? Holy shit, hon, you sound like grim death.”
“I . . . have the flu.”
“Well, sort yourself out quick or you’ll miss the last best hope you have of making a real honest-to-goddamned living.” It figured Rowan would be immune to whatever it was my voice did to people. She had been given an empathy vaccination when she became an agent, killing the emotion-processing modules in her brain and thus making her a highly effective contract negotiator. She was a fearsome opponent who would claw, scratch, and bite anyone to death, all on your behalf. Unfortunately, this meant my failure to become anything more than a bit-part character actor in Canadian/American co-venture syndicated television series was entirely my fault.
“Take some ibuprofen and get yourself down to the Intercontinental on Front Street for two o’clock, the Wellington Room. This is your shot, and I don’t mind telling you, if you blow this you are permanently doomed to a life of mediocrity and shame. I love you, boyo, but it’s truth telling time: you’re looking at being a mid-thirties failure, and a future career as a Wal-Mart greeter is your only viable long-term option if you don’t nail this part.” This was standard boilerplate, Rowan’s version of a pep talk.
“What’s the. Role?”
“It’s a remake of A Cry from the Basement, an Argentinian horror thingy from the nineties. I don’t know all the details, they just want an excuse to slaughter a Benetton ad’s worth of nubile young co-eds for the Halloween weekend box office. Something hard PG-13ish. You’re the older brother of this girl who gets killed in the first few minutes, you desire revenge, blah blah blah. You team up with a few teens who die in various creative ways, you get off a one-liner or two, maybe a pun, the least annoying most blonde bimbo fresh from the Disney pantheon of sweaty adolescent fuckables looking for ‘credibility’ somehow helps you shave the killer’s face off with a belt sander or something, blood spurts, music swells, cue Lady Gaga theme song over the end credits, and voilà! Your dimly lit face on marquee posters everywhere, promising vengeance on a mass scale. Instant cash grab for the Halloween crowd, a guaranteed two sequels if it makes a profit and how the hell could it not? This is gold, Sheldon, pure Peruvian flake, two months’ work with two hundred thou at the end for you minus my customary twelve percent.”
Two hundred thousand dollars.
If my heart had been capable of it, it would have stopped dead.
“Shelley? Hey, you there?”
I sat there, letting the phrase two hundred thou mambo its sexy self through my brain. “Jesus,” I finally mouthed, and then took an inhale to repeat the word aloud in a subdued croak, all thoughts about resurrection forgotten as the dollar signs shook their gold-dipped fannies at me. Two hundred thou.
“You’re damned right, Jesus! Someone’s looking out for you now, so don’t fuck it up royally, get yourself tuned up and go knock them dead!”
What was I thinking? I knocked my head back and forth, fancying I could hear the brain slosh about. Maybe I did hear it; I was decomposing, who knew what was going to happen upstairs once my head had dried up completely and my cerebellum lay gasping on the floorboards of my skull. I can’t go on an audition, I thought. Not now. Not like this, certainly. A zombie getting a job? The day just kept getting more ludicrous.
“Rowan,” I began. “There’s this. Thing . . .”
“Okay, I’m sensing hesitation here,” she interrupted. “You’re telling yourself that this is selling out, am I right?”
“Not . . . exactly, no.”
“Well, you are selling out, but remember this, you have a mom or dad in a care home, right? Something like that? You think of them for a second, and you think about how you’re going to afford to keep them alive without this job. This money could take all that pressure off your back. Go back to being an unemployed actor with your ethics and primitive concepts of morality afterward. Consider this an investment in your parent’s life. Or whatever remains of it. If it tips the scales, I’ll drop my percentage to eleven, that’s how sure I am of this.”
Mom. Goddamn it. Even now — medically delusional, incoherent, brimming with unfocused hatred and lashing out at every person who walked past her room — even now, Mom still managed to push a mountain range of shame in front of my path.
“I’ll be. There,” I managed, hanging up. Even in death I couldn’t catch a break. The zombie heads out for work, I thought, imagining a child’s picture book image of a brightly painted cartoon man in a suit, his skin gray, his hair falling out in patches, perhaps a few scabs over the face, waving goodbye to his cartoon zombie wife and cartoon zombie child as he headed out for another busy cartoon zombie day under a gaily smiling cartoon sun. I slumped down and lay my head down on my arms, noticing after a time that I was leaning in a tacky red pool of Fisher plasma. I wondered if I could weep, but decided it wouldn’t be worth the effort to try.
Groaning, loudly and purposefully, I stood and tried to work out the most effective, least damaging method of bathing in my condition.
Bargaining
Infestation.
I don’t believe anyone could have a real conception of horror until he has witnessed a fly hatch under his own skin and burrow itself out.
Certainly caught me off guard.
I don’t know why, neither did Rhodes or the specialists, but my body has proved remarkably resistant to insect life. Small favors. Normally, after the body has ceased its normal functions, the process of decay — a process, the internet gleefully informed me, that is continually ongoing no matter how healthy you are — takes a step forward as the insect kingdom decides your festering remains would be a decent place to annex for themselves. That’s in addition to the legions of microscopic organisms already making a comfortable living in your epidermis, your follicles, the folds of your scrotal sac.
It was Rhodes, dear Doc Dementia, who first called my attention to my next bodily dilemma. He had worked tirelessly at repairing the natural sloughage of my skin as the restraining cabl
es, freed of any renewal process that tended to repairs, relaxed and gave way, pinging like a chorus of snapped guitar strings. He had made a few minor incisions under the skin of my left arm, attempting to squirt crazy glue or some such shit into the widening gaps and thereby keeping my skin actually on my body. He pulled a mirror close and let me look as he pointed at the pockmarks that lined the underside of my flesh, poking at them with the tip of his scalpel and giggling at the wholesale lunacy of his circumstances. The dots wiggled and squirmed, and as I watched, Rhodes gently pried one loose and held it close to my eyes, where the tiny maggot thrashed in protest.
The city roared by me, simultaneously the bleached white of new tank tops and the filthy grunge of second-hand wife-beaters listlessly taking up space in a Salvation Army bin. There may have been a soft covering of shimmering angel droppings blanketing the city overnight, but as people stirred in their beds and realized that there wasn’t near enough of the precious white to declare a snow day, they trudged their sleep-addled selves toward their cars, cursing all the while, and angrily ground the new-fallen snow into slush and crud. Toronto had enjoyed a night of calming winter wonderment, but the city was fully awake now, cranky and out of sorts, and all the intrinsic winsomeness of nature was hastily metamorphosing into urban municipality excrement under incalculable tons of foreign-bought steel and Canadian salt rust.
I was slightly better at tempering my speech, infecting my consonants and vowels with only a smattering of the mausoleum. After finishing the cleanup of the dining room — I could save the furniture, but the wallpaper would have to be stripped and the rug was a goner — I chugged away at my voice for a few more hours, concentrating on keeping my breathing at a regular tempo yet attempting through repetition to make the operation of my bellows an unconscious rather than a noncompulsory act. I could never again achieve fully autonomous motion but if I could somehow operate the lungs, keeping them fulfilling their oxygenerational duties with only the merest hint of conscious decision-making on my part, I could then focus on content rather than audibility. If I kept the tones as low as possible but outside of whisper range my voice would possibly still cause stomach upset and nausea in the listener, but at least the sense of imminent death that ostensibly destroyed the sanity of Rowan’s assistant was tamped down to a more tolerable undercurrent of nebulous foreboding.
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