What I’d been dreading for so long didn’t seem quite so bad after all. The world was still beautiful and life would go on.
For some.
As I reached the platform, the sweet aroma of roses filled my head with blissful memories of summers past. The joy was as fleeting as the blink of an eye. Chased away by sudden, thudding, overwhelming sadness.
I remembered the merciful advice of a few minutes earlier. “Don’t hesitate or all is lost.”
I walked swiftly towards the motionless figure of Madame. She was all I had expected and more. Unyielding and merciless.
I kneeled at her feet and said a small prayer, then placed my neck in the half circle. Instantly, with false bravery, I held out my arms in readiness.
A bead of liquid dropped onto the sawdust, inches below my face. Perspiration, or a tear? I knew not. Nor cared. I just longed to see the blue summer sky one last time.
I heard a swoosh and the roar of a crowd. Then silence.
Madame Guillotine had done her job well. My prayer was granted. Once again I admired the summer sky, as my head settled in the basket.
The Lizard King
by Stephen Deas
Howard has his spot at the end of the platform. All the seats are long gone before the trains come as far as Leicester Square but it gets him close to the exit at Edgware. So he stands in his spot, tunes out the jostling, the background buzz of conversation, the Tannoy announcements that might as well be in Martian, and stares down at the shining rails and at the little black mice that live down there.
He watches one dart under the remains of a dirty plastic bag; it emerges in triumph a moment later, clutching the discarded end of a French fry. It skips along, heading for darkness.
Something shoots out from the heaving tide of business suits and briefcases, fast as a striking viper, long and sinuous like a rope. A blink and gone again.
So is the mouse.
Howard risks a glance down the line of shoes, up trousers and jackets and into faces. Dangerous territory this, eye contact with a fellow sardine. Maybe he's imagined it, but he's sure, over the clicking heels and rustling newspaper, that he heard a crack like a whip with a silencer. Maybe someone else heard it too. Their eyes will meet and they'll both know they weren't imagining things, that something odd really happened.
And then quietly forget about it.
It's a bit worse than that though. The man on the platform a few feet along from Howard is a lizard. Suit, striped accountant shirt, long dark blue coat, gloves, briefcase, the same uniform as all the people crowding beside him, but definitely a lizard. Hairless green scaled skin, eyes yellow and slitted, mouth far too wide.
Howard looks away. Staring is rude. Long days, too much stress, too much caffeine, that must be it.
A second glance. Still a lizard.
Around him, people fidget their feet and mutter about the time or the weather. No one seems to notice the alien in their midst.
Another mouse scuttles between the tracks. The lizard glances at his watch and then his eyes snap to the mouse. His jaw splits open, gaping wide. A snake-like tongue flashes out. With a crack of air it snaps back, mouse and all. The lizard man tilts back his head and swallows.
Shuffling of feet, the drone of idle chatter. A train comes. No one seems to notice when it stops in the tunnels between Warren Street and Euston, or when the doors open into a dirty brick wall. The lizard man picks up his briefcase and walks out. The doors close, the train moves off. The faces around Howard are blank. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened.
The lizard man is there again the next day. Same time, same place, same people standing around him. He looks like a regular, the way he stakes out his place on the platform near the edge. His snake-whip tongue cracks now and then, snatching passing mice from their myopic lives.
Howard stands behind him this time, careful to keep a few people between them. He doesn't want to get close, but the crowd doesn't like it, jostling to remind him he isn't where he's supposed to be. The commuter rush is a living thing. The rule of the waiting herd is simple: no eye contact. It resents how Howard pays attention now, as though it knows that one of its parts isn't playing the game but doesn't quite know who or where or how.
Howard knows them. The same faces, day after day. The rumpled, folded one, too much skin and not enough skull who always has a seat somehow, barricaded behind his Evening Standard. The young suits, sharp dressers, slicked back hair, striped shirts, three or four, not always the same but always the same place and the same presence, loud and expansive. The painted secretaries and the unpainted ones, the quiet woman who sits in the corner bunched into herself behind a book. The young man, stubble-faced, jeans and T-shirt, who stands as close to her as he can and sneaks glances into her cleavage when he thinks no one is looking. The older man with the thinning hair and the dark, almost latino skin, who watches the young man doing it and scowls because in his mind he wishes he could do the same.
And the lizard man.
Newspapers rustle, book pages turn, braying laughs don't stop. Pressed together the crowd has no secrets and so, by unspoken consensus, it sees nothing.
At the weekend the lizard man is a no-show. On Monday morning, Howard must explain why he's an hour late into the office, something other than the truth, riding the train back and forth looking for the lizard man to board. In the evening he travels home with a friend, Rogie. The lizard man is obvious, blatant, but Rogie doesn't see it.
The train comes. They all board the same carriage.
“OK,” says Rogie, “Where is he?”
Howard points him out with quiet words, though if Rogie was ever going to see yellow eyes and a green lizard head then he'd have seen without needing direction.
“You mean the Asian guy?”
“What Asian guy?”
“The one standing just behind the redhead and in front of the black dude.”
There is no Asian guy. There is a man with a lizard head.
Rogie thinks Howard is going crazy. Stress maybe. Too much caffeine.
Another stop goes by. Warren Street. Howard grabs hold of Rogie's arm.
“We're going to stop!”
Tubes stop in the tunnels all the time. Happens every day. Probably a slow train ahead. Rogie shakes his head. “You need help, man.”
“He's going to get off.”
“We're in the tunnels, Howard. He can’t get off.”
The train grinds to a halt. The doors open.
“See! The doors!”
Rogie can't hide the worry in his face. “The doors are closed,” he says.
The lizard man pauses to sniff the air and then steps calmly into the black outside. The doors close. The train begins to move again.
Rogie is frowning. He gives a strange look and pushes to where the lizard man was standing. The crowd hates him and vows vengeance, but by the time the train stops at Euston, Rogie has inspected every face and made no secret of it either. On the platform he watches the train recede. He stares after it long after it's gone.
“You're fucking with me,” he says.
They argue. It has to be a joke. A trick. No one can vanish between stations. The doors were closed. In the end, Rogie storms away. He's seen something he can't resolve. It scares him. He is angry and humiliated. Howard thinks he should try seeing a man with a lizard head and see how he feels then.
The next evening, Rogie is already there, waiting. He waves a phone. The lizard man is also there, same place, same time, right on cue. Howard nudges Rogie.
“Standing in front of the tall black guy.”
“Same guy I saw yesterday. Asian.”
Bold as brass, Rogie points his phone at the lizard man. Takes half a second of video. On the screen the lizard man is no longer a lizard. Howard doesn't quite know how this ought to make him feel. It's one madness swapped for another. Maybe he should get some rest. Take a few days off. Maybe he's been working too hard. People have nervous breakdowns from working too hard. Mayb
e he should see a doctor. Or maybe it's too late. Maybe the next stage it to wander around naked, digging holes in the back of his garden in the middle of the night.
“I don't have a garden,” Howard says.
“You can see he doesn't have a lizard for a head now, right? I think you need to see a shrink.”
They board the train. Three stops as always and then it slides to a halt between stations. Rogie pulls the phone out again. The doors open. The lizard man gets off. The doors close. The train moves away. Rogie pushes his way through the carriage, inspecting faces. The crowd hates him again. The faces don't expect to be noticed. It's not the way of things.
At Euston, Rogie and Howard look at Rogie's video. They see the doors open. The Asian guy is there, still with a human head. He steps off the train. Clear. Plain as the sun in the sky. Rogie plays it over and over, staring like he's seen his own death. “No way,” he says. “That didn't happen.” Then they get drunk together, throwing the strange lizard man into an oblivion of wine.
Howard sleeps badly that night. Tossing and turning, strange dreams. He sees men in suits peel back their faces and show the lizard beneath. Lizards, snakes, yellow eyes, narrow slit pupils. They carry him down a night-lit street as though a coffin. He sees a couple necking in an alley, a drunk, a police car. The drunk stares and rubs his eyes in disbelief, then turns to relieve himself behind a green plastic dustbin. The others see nothing.
When he wakes, he phones in sick. A gulp of water and then a rush to the bathroom to vomit up the night before, clutching his toilet-bowl like a lover. He stumbles to the basin, scooping handfuls of water to wash away the grime of sleep and the taste of bile. He looks at himself in the mirror.
A head of dull green scales stares back, yellow eyes with narrow black slits, the flicker of a long forked tongue.
Howard screams. The mirror slides to the floor with the roar of an onrushing train. The ceiling spins to take its place. He crashes and lies still.
He wakes in the middle of the afternoon, to the throb and lethargy of a hangover's end. The lizard is still there in the mirror. But that's okay. He doesn't feel human now. Not remotely. He feels hungry.
He goes outside. The sun is bright and its warmth is heaven. Birds sing. He drools, watching them in the trees, joyful at the heat of summer. Children walking their way home from school glance at this strange man beating his chest at the sun and then glance away, back to their idle conversations of football teams and trading cards and X-Box and YouTube. They don't see what he is.
Something moves in the bushes. Without thought Howard’s mouth yawns. A rope-like tongue snaps and lashes and snatches a flutter of wings. Howard swallows it whole. The feathers tickle.
He dresses. Too late for work but not too late for the rush. He rides the tube to Warren Street and sits on the platform and waits. The crowd grows as afternoon sinks to evening, the pulse of it as the trains come and go like the rhythm of a slow-beating heart. No one sees him while he sits, only when he stands. Then they embrace him, warmer than before.
He spies Rogie.
“Hello Rogie,” he says.
Rogie looks at him. Not the blank unseeing gaze of just another part of the crowd, but with eyes that stare and see. Really, truly see.
His mouth droops.
He screams.
Turns.
Runs.
Beyond the Flesh
by Diana Read
The horizon shrunk away into darkness. Rubber soles squeaked on the shining tiles, each step drowning Simon’s nasal passages in disinfectant. He always liked the perfect symmetry of the endless door-lined hallways. Simon counted the steel doors just as he counted the wooden ones in his old secondary school. The flow of numbers helped calm the people anxiety. He loved numbers, 12 especially. Door 12 belonged to Mr Harrison and that was where his talent was first recognised.
“I know your heartbeat, sir,” Simon replied on that gloomy September day, to an unwelcomed question about his home life. Mr Harrison had looked at the 12-year-old boy before him and laughed.
“Do you really? That would be quite a trick to see.”
Simon hunched over in his seat like a vulture, head tilted to observe a potential carcass. “155 beats per minute.”
Mr Harrison snorted, putting two fingers to his wrist and, humouring the boy, looked up to the clock.
60 seconds passed. “My God.” The teacher looked down at the lanky, dark-haired child. “That is exactly spot on. But how…” he trailed off, feeling disconcerted by the unblinking stare of those cold, brown eyes.
“158 beats per minute.”
Mr Harrison’s brow furrowed. “It’s a good trick but I’d appreciate if you stopped it now. We need to discuss why you’ve been late – ”
“162 beats per minute.”
“Stop it now. Please.”
“167 beats per minute. Are you scared of me, sir? I showed this to a girl I met and her heartbeat frequency increased too. I asked why and she said she was scared. She called me a freak and ran off. Do you think I’m a freak, sir?”
The man heaved a deep breath. “No,” he exhaled, “no, I don’t think you’re a freak, Simon. But I would like to know how you’re doing that.”
“I don’t know, sir. I look at the neck and I can see the vein pulsing. I look at the chest and I can feel the heart’s rhythm. I can always see it. I can always see people’s insides.”
“Well,” large hands clapped together, “if you’re that good at analysing people’s bodies, then I guess you should be a doctor.”
Simon’s tongue skimmed his dry lips. “Will that let me play with people’s insides, sir?”
“You’ll certainly be able to go inside and fix the problems people have. Think of the fun you can have healing them.”
“Yes, sir.”
12 became Simon’s lucky number, but he still liked counting the others. They were the second most loved thing in his life. 221, 222, 223, his feet turned down another infinite corridor.
224, 225, 226, a mournful wail echoed in the empty hallways, amplified by the drab concrete exposed underneath cracked plaster.
227, 228. Simon stopped, facing a steel door. This one was different to the rest. This one was his. Even without the counting, the small peg from which hung a white lab coat definitely showed this door to be his.
Scarred fingers ran over the coarse material, its colour off-white. Simon had it washed recently but he supposed it was too old to ever get back the brilliant shine. Just like his lab coats at university. They were always stained, his more so than others. But the tutors never shouted at him. Instead they called him ‘genius’ and ‘unrivalled’, but he didn’t care for those words.
And so it didn’t bother Simon when those same lecturers called him ‘strange’ and ‘disturbed’. Those words came when he started to explore his interest by cutting up the practice organs they were told to repair.
Simon couldn’t help it. He liked the way he could grope the soft, fatty tissue, compressing it between gloved fingers. Or the way the slippery muscle felt even more delectable than handling uncooked animal liver. Or the way the body part would wriggle, and twist through his hands. Or the way he could pluck at the sinews like fleshy guitar strings. Or the way his finger would slip into the organ, encompassing his digit with bloody, moist pressure.
Simon couldn’t help it. Just like he couldn’t help going through the metal door into a small, white room. One wall sported a window. Within was only space enough for a locker, a file cabinet and a cart trolley overflowing with gleaming instruments.
From the trolley, Simon lifted a scalpel with the delicacy of a mother handling a newborn. It was just as precious, kept meticulously cleaned and polished. A standard he maintained from his core surgical training within the NHS.
One month into his blossoming career, Simon helped operate on a patient for the first time. The operation had been messy and required much assistance, but they pulled through and the patient was stabilized. Everyone involved
, and some who weren’t, went to celebrate after a hard day’s work. But not Simon.
Simon stayed behind, looking at the crimson liquid dripping from the plastic wrapping around his fingers. Drip, drip, drip. His tongue darted across dry lips. In the partial darkness of the hospital, he snuck into the patient’s private recovery room, scalpel in hand. The man didn’t even wake up when the metal slowly sliced open the sewed seams of his skin.
Only when the blood started dripping onto the hospital floor did Simon become aware of a nurse’s banshee scream behind him. Drip, drip, drip, he worked at squeezing the thin blade between muscle tissue. Each new twist jetted out more blood like a partially clogged fountain. Thunderous footsteps came behind him. Rough hands threw him away from his craft.
Simon didn’t understand, as the night duty doctors came to shout in terror and the security guard’s hold cut the circulation in his arm, what the fuss was about. He put the patient together, he picked the patient apart. Both required a scalpel and only one Simon found truly enjoyable.
Yet others didn’t seem to share in his enjoyment. So with his unrestricted hand, Simon pulled out a spare scalpel from his coat. It stabbed into the guard holding him. The man reared back in pain and Simon ran. He ran and ran and ran, only stopping when his lungs screamed for death and his legs burned for oxygen.
172 beats per minute thundered through his skull. He breathed. He calmed. He walked into the dark alleyway plagued with rubbish and rats.
Mind coming back to the white room, Simon looked through the long window. On the other side was a much larger space, shadows sneaking around its corners, forced there by the blindingly bright beam shining down on a half-clothed patient.
Simon opened the narrow door by the window and pulled the cart trolley after him with its little wheels squeaking. His gaze focused on the female fastened securely to the chair for her own protection. He liked this patient. She was lucky.
Little whimpers came from the patient who Simon swore to help, the pathetic noises muffled by the duct tape. Those simpering sounds were just like the ones Simon made when he hunched in the grimy streets, hiding away from the flashing blue and red lights.
Twisted 50 Volume 1 Page 3
