Morbid Metamorphosis

by Lycan Valley Press

  Finally, the old man seemed to be ready for something. He was sweating like a hog and was jittery with excitement or nerves or something. He had a look in his eyes that Ezzie didn’t like – his eyes looked like wet rocks and they had a crazy determination in them that made her guts cold.

  “Well girl, here it comes. The day is the day. You awake? You should be.” Ezzie moved her head around and flexed her hands and feet – still bound – and discovered that she was indeed completely awake and alert. Seeing the confused look on her face, the old man told her that he’d stopped dosing her a number of hours ago. She needed to be fully alert for her big day.

  “What big day; what’s happening?” He started to pace and fidget and spoke hurriedly.

  “Well, I’ve studied up a fair bit on how things work in a woman’s body. I know how things are put together pretty well and I know my way around by now. It wasn’t too much more to figure out how to take things out – so I figured it couldn’t be too hard to put things back in. See girl, my Helen and my boy died while she was havin’ him, but it took them a couple of days to die. He was born with his heart and lungs not right and she never healed up proper. He went to sleep and never woke up and she bled out next to me in our bed – the bed you’re in now. I couldn’t live you see? You have to understand that. There was no others, get it? No one ‘cause they were the only ones of them. So I figured someday I could find a way to fix it. I could take care a’ my family again and have it back best I could. Think I’m the only one ever thought a’ this, so I think it’s damn smart. You gotta ‘preciate the scientific part at least. I don’t know too much, but I know this pretty good.” He paused and looked at her anxiously.

  “I know it ain’t perfect, but I think it’ll be okay. Your fever went down some for awhile. I know it’s back up and I know you’re swollen some, but I think that’s just you gettin’ used to them.”

  “Getting used to what, what did you do, what the fuck did you do you fucking freak!” Panic was starting to well inside her and her voice was growing shrill. She knew she should look down, but she was afraid. His face rushed up to hers and she could smell his sour breath.

  “I need my family you little bitch, I need them! It’s gotta be you, it’s gotta be now! Be grateful, whore, I saved you. I fucking saved you from your filth, your sin. Now you got a purpose. You’re gonna bear Helen’s child, my child. You’re gonna give me back what God took.” He went over to the wall where they sat watching her and she felt her mind twitch and swirl. I have to look; I have to look. She looked down at her abdomen and started screaming.

  Her belly was swollen like a soccer ball and it had red lines that traveled all over her lower half. It was taut and crimson and it didn’t move with her breath.

  “What is it? What is it? What is it?” she wailed over and over until he came and clamped a sweaty hand over her mouth.

  “Shut up! Just shut up. I’ve waited thirty fuckin years for this and you’re not gonna ruin it for me, Helen. By god you shut your trap or I’ll goddamn well shut it for you.”

  “I’m not Helen. I’m Emma; my name is Emma. Emma Burson.”

  “Goddamn, Helen, we discussed this, you know what we’re doing. Don’t be scared now. We’re gonna have our baby today. We’re gonna do it today. I’ve made you whole again. I did it baby, I did it.”

  Shaking with fear, Ezzie looked at the table beside her and saw a jar. She could make out some globs of flesh in a lot of blood. It looked fresh. Next to it was another jar filled with murky yellow fluid and small gobs of grey tissue. A horror settled on her that made her turn into something else. She wasn’t real anymore; she was somewhere else. She had to be.

  “Oh my God, you didn’t, you didn’t do it!”

  “Of course I did. You needed your own flesh, honey. You needed your own self inside you to have our baby. I saved it, honey. I saved it just like it said in the book and now you’ve got yourself whole again. “Just give me a minute, Henry’s crying.” He walked away and started cooing and talking in a soft, sickly sweet voice.

  A voice inside her head spoke. “He took my womb out and he put hers in. He took my live flesh and he put her dead flesh in me. My body is dying around it. He put a dead woman’s womb in my body. And I’m helpless. I’m utterly fucking helpless.

  Death couldn’t come too soon. Death needed to come now, right fucking now because there was no more life, no more Ezzie, no more Emma, no more world. But as it stood, the old man had other plans.

  He picked up the withered skeleton of his dead baby from the crib and cradled it lovingly.

  “He’s so precious and good and sweet. He makes me laugh so much. I’m so lucky to have him. How’d you like a little brother or sister, Henry?” He cooed. “We’ll be a family again, baby boy. You’re gonna sleep now, though, like a good boy ‘cause mommy and daddy need time to make our baby.” He kissed the desiccated forehead and put him down gently. He turned toward the wall and looked at the withered and shrunken body of his wife and smiled with genuine joy.

  “Come on, baby, now’s the time. You look beautiful as always. Just like the first time I saw you.” Ezzie noticed with a crazy wonder that he had smeared red lipstick on the corpse’s papery lips. It had caved in her fragile skin and exposed her dead teeth even more. The old man picked her up with the gentlest touch and spun her around quickly a few times, humming a tune. “Our wedding song, honey. You remember, don’t you?” He kissed her dead lips deeply, caving in one of her cheeks. “I love you so much, baby. Things will be fine now. Things will be just fine.”

  He came towards Ezzie with the corpse and she tried to shrink away. Her body rebelled in its own way as her mind became unglued.

  “No!” she whined. “Nonononono! Please no, please no!” But Ezzie had ceased to be; there was only Helen. When he laid her corpse on top of Ezzie, she trembled as if having a seizure from the touch of Helen’s knee length skirt, high necked blouse and silk stockings. Her musty hair fell into her mouth and her body tried to vomit, but all she got was a mouthful of blood and foul tasting liquid. The man massaged his crotch and moaned.

  “Oh baby, what a day, what a day.” When he seized her hips and thrust himself inside her, the pain made her black out. When she came to, she saw him still at work on her, his hands on Helen’s sunken breasts, his fingers twisting off her dead nipples.

  “Easy does it, easy does it baby.”

  His penis was slipping in an out of her and it was covered with congealed black blood. When he came, Ezzie let loose a scream that the entire world probably heard. It was a scream that made animals puke up their own guts, a scream that made children tremble and wet their beds, a scream that made the undecided ones pull the trigger.

  Her mind went back to her dream and she saw a red glob of flesh crawling towards her womb with mewling cries and black veins. It was the devil’s abortion, an abomination.

  “Oh God!” she sobbed, but deep in her sick and ruined belly, she knew there was no God. Not now, not ever.

  FEBRILE

  Gregory L. Norris

  HUgh Monroe rested his cheek against the cool window glass. The metered cadence of thumps as the train travelled over tracks attempted to lull him to sleep. He was already exhausted, feverish, and desperate for sleep, only the nearest bed felt light-years distant, not to be enjoyed after the train’s next stop in the city of Stanhope, Connecticut.

  “The far side of the moon,” he whispered, chuckled. Then he checked the messenger bag hung by its strap around his shoulder, wedged protectively between his flank and the section of wall beneath the window. Still there, still safe. Good.

  He’d picked up something either in Siam or on the long flights connecting There with Here. Hugh’s throat had grown scratchy and dry. He unscrewed the water bottle’s cap and downed another swig. The liquid inside was tepid and tasted funky, of plastic and what his imagination translated as infected saliva. For a terrible second, he worried the noxious sip would surge back up, bringing the contents of his stoma
ch with it Aspirin—the small travel bottle was in his duffel bag, which he’d checked in with his fellow travelers’ luggage. He was burning up. Everything was starting to ache, as though his twenty-seven-year-old body had contracted more than an international jet-setting bug. The worst case of spontaneous arthritis in history, perhaps. Not even thoughts about the rare treasures contained within the messenger bag lessened his growing discomfort.

  He rolled his cheek along the glass, which was less cool now after cooking beneath his body heat. A gray industrial landscape flitted past on the other side of the train’s window—buildings with lit windows, proof of unknown lives visible one instant and gone the next as the train sped along the Northeast Corridor. A thin wedge of moon loomed over the city.

  Sleep. And after he started to feel better, he’d head back west to Arizona, richer than when he’d left. From there, he’d have enough money to indulge in any number of pet projects—the hunt for gold in Labrador, emeralds in Tennessee, or rare earth minerals like Promethium, Samarium, and Thulium. He’d be able to go wherever he wanted, do the work that excited him most. But first, he’d land a hotel room in Stanhope—preferably one with room service willing to score cold medicine on his behalf, decent soup, and a lack of bed bugs.

  “Next stop, Stanhope. Stanhope,” the conductor’s voice crackled over the intercom.

  Hugh blinked, and at first wondered if he’d hallucinated the announcement. Then the passenger train began to decelerate. Hugh glanced out the window. The landscape was still a humorless gray expanse of New England-style houses, former brick factories, and asphalt, with skeletal trees clawing at the twilight sky scattered between. The train’s speed had slowed, and the vision endured between blinks. He had arrived at his destination.

  The train crawled toward the platform. Hugh detached from the cool window glass. Standing was a miserable effort and, for another moment, it felt like the train was still in motion. Fresh sweat broke at his hairline. His clothes clung to his flesh with an unpleasant fit, reminding him of shed skin. Hugh plodded out of the train and onto the platform. His feet felt swollen, destroyed, in his shoes.

  He gathered his well-traveled duffel bag from the porter, fished out the aspirin, and chewed three down, his water bottle abandoned back inside the train car. The foul taste helped to distract him from the rest of his physical discomfort.

  Hugh pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and thumbed the third number down on his recent contacts list. The phone rang. Someone picked up.

  “Yes?” asked a woman’s voice.

  “Yeah, it’s Hugh Monroe. I’m at the station in Stanhope.”

  Station? There was no proper building with restrooms, concessions, or heat, just a shelter overhang with benches.

  “Do you see the tower?” she asked.

  Hugh drew in a deep sip of the crisp March night’s air. Even breathing hurt. “Tower?”

  He turned. Beyond the overhang, he spotted the only thing she could have meant. At first he thought it was a smokestack left over from the city’s industrial era, part of a factory that had closed its doors and had been knocked down long ago. But then his tired eyes acknowledged the thing’s indestructibility. The gray stone obelisk stretched up higher than the surrounding buildings, more castle than smokestack. Only the moon was taller.

  “Do you?” the voice pressed.

  “Yes, I’m headed there now.”

  “Good. I’ll meet you near the main doors. Be cautious.”

  “Of what?” Hugh asked.

  The connection ended without elaboration. Hugh pocketed his phone and adjusted the duffel’s strap on his shoulder. He started toward the tower.

  A cold breeze gossiped through the city and over his flesh. Hugh welcomed the chill. Too long outside, however, and he sensed the relief would devolve into chattering teeth. The pace of his footsteps quickened. He exited the train station’s parking lot, crossed the street, and hastened toward the tower, which loomed ominously over him.

  From the start, given the nature of the transaction, he’d assumed his mission to locate and secure the rock specimens hadn’t exactly been above-board. But as he neared the obelisk, for the first time Hugh’s instincts warned him that he was in danger.

  The tower soared up from a patch of desolate vacant lot, its wooden double doors padlocked shut. Starting to shiver, and with the duffel now weighing ten times what it had when he’d boarded the passenger train in New York City, Hugh shook it off his shoulder. He unzipped the messenger bag, found the silk pouch, and loosened its strings. His fingertips identified the cool acrylic casings of the two rock specimens. En route to one of those bare trees that looked like a giant, dead hand that had scratched its way up from the dirt, he withdrew the smaller of the two samples. The plan was to pretend to unzip and relieve himself behind the tree, just in case he was being followed. Then his bladder betrayed him. Attending to its complaint, Hugh located a divot in the tree’s bark. With a little manipulation, the rock sample fit into the cleft.

  Insurance, he thought while shaking off, tucking in, and zipping back up. How’s that for cautious?

  A ghostly finger stroked the fine hairs at the nape of Hugh’s neck. A shiver teased his epidermis. He fought it, failed. The shudder tumbled. This one had nothing to do with his state of health and owed to the fact that he was no longer alone.

  Hugh turned, expecting to see the woman. Instead, standing in the patch of dead hardscrabble between the tree and the tower’s outer wall were two men. One, Hugh saw, held his duffle and was pawing through the contents.

  “Um,” Hugh started, “I’d prefer that you didn’t manhandle my underwear.”

  The other man stepped forward, stirring a noxious cloud of too-thick men’s aftershave. “Where is it?”

  “It?”

  In the next second or so, before the man slammed his spine into the tower’s unforgiving stone exterior, Hugh recorded the height and formidable outlines of his two attackers. They were brutes—tall and muscular but not, he suspected, common criminals out for a random score, no. The men, he gleaned, were put together, dressed decently, and their flattops led him to believe they were either military or former service men.

  His back struck the wall, and a Fourth of July fireworks display that only Hugh could see erupted in front of his eyes during the Ides of March. The impact drove all the air from his lungs. As he dropped to the icy ground, the point man leaned down to remove the messenger bag that had likely spared him from permanent paralysis, and Hugh swore the brute’s eyes lit with a preternatural glow—an otherworldly purple that his febrile mind translated into a spark from another realm, a place of malevolent intentions.

  The man tore the bag off his person, riffled through the contents, and withdrew the real prize from among the jumble of plane and train ticket stubs. Holding the rock encased in acrylic, the brute dropped High’s messenger bag and righted.

  “Kill him,” the man said, and marched away.

  A dream, it had to be. He was still on the train, had nodded off as the bug further compromised his immune system and eroded what little energy he had left following jet lag.

  The second soldier reached down and seized hold of Hugh, dragging him up from the ground. If any doubt remained, the closeness of the other man’s face removed it. His eyes, too, flashed twin sparks of otherworldly light and color. Right as Hugh readied to fight back—he had to show some resistance to murder at the hands of these strangers—the man opened his mouth, baring rows of jagged fangs. The foul, charnel smell that struck his face again twisted Hugh’s guts into knots.

  The man was planning to eat him!

  “I wouldn’t do that,” a woman said.

  An unaffected sliver of Hugh’s panicking mind recognized her voice as the woman from the phone, his mysterious client. The man holding Hugh up spun around, taking Hugh with him, to face the new arrival. She stood cloaked in shadow.

  “And why not?” the man challenged in a voice full of gravel, one that barely sounded human.


  Hugh struggled. The man released him. He collapsed again, his legs seemingly forgetting how to stand. As he dropped, he caught a glimpse of her—blonde hair, heart-shaped face, she was beautiful but hardly fragile. To his surprise, the woman was naked, a pale figure in the wan moonlight minus all clothes in an otherwise dark corner of a hopeless city on a frigid March night.

  He blinked, and the woman was gone. The fever, sure, thought Hugh. Time to wake up.

  A low, throaty growl replaced the conversation between opponents. Hugh lifted to his elbows. Where the beautiful woman had stood an instant earlier was a dog. No, a wolf, big and primitive, its jaws quivering, its eyes as silver and vibrant in color as the fanged man’s had been purple.

  The wolf sprang, snapping at the brute. An inhuman cry sounded above him. Shadows danced, stirring breezes into motion. More shrieks, and a deep ripping of cloth and flesh raked at Hugh’s ears. Something heavy plopped on the ground beside him. It was a human arm, Hugh saw. The grisly trophy contained a bloody scrap of shoulder skin. There was a tattoo on the meat of the upper arm, a symbol that looked more burn mark than ink, a vision that unnerved Hugh’s insides nearly as much as the butchered limb itself. The arm’s fingers twitched, grabbed at air, and then stilled.

  A wolf’s howl shook the night. Hugh’s wide eyes darted toward its source. The wolf was turned toward him, standing triumphant over a lump of pulpy rags that had, a minute earlier, been Hugh’s would-be murderer. Fresh blood covered the wolf’s muzzle and collar. Slowly, it stalked his way, the silver glint in its gaze hypnotizing him.

  Fresh sweat poured down Hugh’s face.

  And then he passed out.

  ***

  “Welcome to Siam,” the man said.

  “Don’t you mean ‘Thailand’?”

  The man waved a hand through the air in dismissal. “Thailand. Before that, we were the Rattanakosin Kingdom. And before that, the Thonburi. Besides, I like cats.”