Voices of the Damned

by Barbie Wilde

  Nat’s head rolled off down the stairs and into the darkness of the basement, but Gaia didn’t care. She exulted in her victory. She had successfully executed both her intruders; demons sent by the god of the heavens to take her away. She was the powerful one now.

  After a while, the ecstasy faded and she disengaged from Nat’s headless body. The real world began to intrude. Gaia knew that she needed to clean up the basement and get rid of the bodies, but every muscle ached with the effort of killing the two men.

  Gaia went back into her sanctuary, locked the door behind her and had a shower. She dried herself and lay down on the bed, needing a rest before she cleaned up the basement carnage.

  She couldn’t close her eyes, with all that adrenaline pumping through her body. Gaia looked up at the ceiling and was startled to see a tiny golden light floating in the air like a firefly. The light started to move in concentric circles that slowly spiraled out. She heard a faint whooshing sound with every circle completed, like some distant, celestial helicopter.

  Gaia was puzzled more than anything else. She stood on her bed, reaching up with her right hand, trying to touch the ever-increasing, bright spiral of light. She bounced gently on the bed in an attempt to trampoline up to the light. She jumped and her hand entered the spiral and for an instant, Gaia felt a freezing, vacuum-like force pull her hand up, before it lost its grip and dropped her back down.

  Gaia landed on the bed and her knees collapsed underneath her. She lay on her back, terrified, and stared at the whirling, galaxy-like, spiral of light. The whooshing noise grew louder, the spiral got bigger and it felt like cold water was being poured over her loins.

  Finally after all these years, Uranus, god of the sky, was coming to carry her up to the heavens.

  A wave of almost sexual relief flowed through her. If Uranus wanted Gaia, he could have her. She had proved that she was strong enough. She had made blood sacrifice of two of his minions, so that should count for something.

  She stood up on her bed again, both arms raised in homage to the swirling golden light. The breeze coming from the vortex lifted her hair up around her face, making her look like a female astronaut serving on board the International Space Station. She bounced one more time and her arms entered the vortex. She felt drawn up, into the blinding, shimmering, yellow light. Something icy cold seized her hands and Gaia was sucked into the arms of her long-lost, lover-rapist god and out of her room in an instant.

  The vortex speeded up, reversed, drew into itself, and then disappeared with a distant sizzling crackle.

  * * *

  It didn’t take the authorities long to piece together what had happened at 16 Pandora Crescent. Nat and Genko hadn’t shown up at their usual watering holes for few days and Jerry, the delivery guy, started to worry when he didn’t get any response from the crazy lady, especially since he was the one who’d tipped off the boys in the first place. Jerry called in an anonymous tip and the police checked out the house, discovering the jimmied back door. It was obvious that something bad had happened in the house as soon as they entered the kitchen, judging from the copper-flavored stench coming up from the basement. The officers went down the stairs and found the decapitated bodies of Nat and Genko. One of them threw up on his shoes while the other one called CSU and the big boys.

  Homicide and the ME came in to assess the scene. A nasty, brutish end to two nasty brutish lowlifes, is how the lead detective, McPherson, coined it.

  But where was the lady of the house? Jerry, the only person who’d ever had any contact with the owner, was escorted into a small, windowless room in the station house and grilled over his part in the mess. He caved easily, bleating that the bad boys had made him spill the beans on the crazy lady and her riches.

  McPherson returned to the basement. A couple of heavies called Jace and Bingo were trying to open the door to the panic room, where everyone figured Gaia Iliopoulos must have been living at the time of the break-in, considering the state of the rest of the house.

  He wondered what they would find when they finally broke through. Had Ms. Iliopoulos run away from the scene, locking the panic room as she left? Was she still in there, half-starved and scared to death? Had she been wounded in the mêlée and dragged herself into the panic room to die? Had she really killed ... no, not killed, fucking massacred, those bozos? From what he’d heard, he didn’t think it could be possible. She was a shut-in and not known to be a violent individual. But, hey, if you confront a couple of mooks breaking into your house, then maybe you would turn into some kind of avenging Fury.

  A shout from Jace broke through McPherson’s reverie. They’d managed to cut a hole in the steel plating of the door using oxyacetylene torches. McPherson peered into the room. The lights were on, albeit at a low level, and a computer screen was shining brightly in the corner. “Ms. Iliopoulos? It’s the police. Are you okay?” he called. No response. McPherson snaked his arm through the hole, hoping to find a key still in the lock on the inside. He found it, turned it and the door finally opened.

  McPherson stood at the entrance, while Jace and Bingo went upstairs for a coffee break. He called out again, but the room looked deserted. He was about to peek under the bed when he decided to check out Ms. Iliopoulos’s computer instead. McPherson wandered over to the desk to wiggle the mouse so the screensaver would disappear. He was staring at the computer screen, trying to make sense of the website he was looking at, when an excruciating pain sliced through his spine. For an instant, he thought he’d put his back out, but then he looked down and noticed a large steel blade coming out of his chest. He coughed up blood and collapsed on the floor. He tried to look up as he felt the knife being pulled out of his back; to see what was doing this to him.

  A dirty, naked woman was standing over him. He tried to say something as she rolled him over. She started to stab him in the neck, sawing away at his throat. The last thing he saw was her face, lit up by the craziest, sexiest smile.

  Guess he should have checked under the bed first after all.

  * * *

  Uranus wanted more blood. Gaia had been sent back from Olympus because another sacrifice was required. That was Gaia’s excuse and she stuck to it throughout the trial. Of course, no one believed her, but she didn’t care. She was above all this trivial human nonsense of life and death. She was a goddess now and no mortal could take that away from her. Even when she rode the lightning to her final meeting with her god, Gaia had a smile on her face. That crazy, sexy smile.

  Polyp

  “The ‘Second Brain’ of Your Nightmares”

  In the deep, dark, softly pliable depths of shiny moist and mucky pink, brown and white, it was stirring. Slowly emerging from the dream years. Waking up for the first time and yet always cognizant of something. Waiting for its moment to come. Its hour upon the stage. Biding time, space, sanity. Waiting, waiting. Leeching nourishment from the Host. Sucking energy out of the stuff that came from above. Imagining what freedom would taste like.

  Hmmm. Freedom. It tasted of blood. And lots of it.

  * * *

  Vincent, a tall, nondescript, worried-looking man in his forties, waited for his colonoscopy appointment with a weary inevitability mixed with mild anxiety. He hated the whole rigmarole and yet, what was there to hate, really? It was a lifesaver, this procedure and that’s how he should look at it, dispassionately and scientifically. But Vincent was not exactly the dispassionate, scientific type.

  Not that a colonoscopy was painful, or even that unpleasant. After all, some people would pay big bucks to have a flexible tube with a camera at the end of it thrust deep up into their bowels, but not Vincent. Having a colonoscopy every year was a pain in the ... ah, well, the jokes would come thick and fast if he ever told anyone about it, but it was too humiliating, too embarrassing. His body had let him down, genetically that is, and because of a pretty frightening family history of colon cance
r, he had to have an examination every year. Luckily, he had a top gastroenterologist to do it, so the dire possibility of getting a perforated bowel from the procedure was remote. Still, having a man joke with you while he was threading an enormous tube up your ass was not exactly fun and games, was it? It verged on the pervy and Vincent was, if anything, not the least bit pervy, not the least bit exceptional, not the least bit an outstanding man of his immediate circle, which may explain to a small extent why he had to endure all of the worry and anticipation on his own.

  First he had to prepare for a couple of days. Day One: a low residue diet consisting of white bread, white meat, no fruits or vegetables, no dairy products, no fiber whatsoever. (Basically, the diet that is killing off the developed world.) Day Two: after a breakfast of white toast and coffee, he had to fast and drink plenty of liquids until the procedure the next day. During the afternoon of Day Two, he was required to consume what felt like gallons of an osmotic laxative called Klean-Prep, a sweetly foul-tasting liquid that would turn anything harboring inside his intestines into a veritable Niagara Falls of shit. Diarrhea for a day—so virulent that his butt felt like he’d been passing acid.

  Vincent used to drink to get through the ordeal: vodka martinis (sans olives, of course, because of the fiber) or white wine, but he eventually realized that the booze just made him feel worse the day of the procedure, not better. So, he decided to look upon the regime like a brief spell in detox, something that movie stars and royalty would shell out thousands for. Of course, if he was a movie star or royalty, he’d be in some swanky drying-out clinic in the countryside, with beautiful babes giving him seaweed massages and gently caressing his temples, not sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair in a dingy, urine-colored waiting room outside the Endoscopy Department of St. Stephen’s Hospital.

  His stomach was so empty that it almost made him feel sick and his colon grumbled noises of protest from the brutal treatment of the Klean-Prep experience. The magazines on the coffee table were at least six months old and there was a large, hopeful-looking television in the corner, but it was resolutely off, daring some brave soul to turn it on. But Vincent knew that late morning TV horror (property shows, cooking shows, phone-in shows, talk shows) would be the last thing in the world to cheer him up on this particular day.

  Then, after a wait lasting around half an hour, a nurse came in to escort him to a large room dotted with curtained-off hospital beds—all equipped with blood pressure and heart rate monitors. The tall, powerfully-built nurse—whose nametag proclaimed her to be Ewomi Abayomi Sullivan—brusquely told Vincent to strip from the waist down. This was the kind of invitation that he would normally obey with alacrity, but from someone like Ewomi, who looked like she was permanently chewing on a wasp, it was more an order that he had to follow, or risk severe consequences to his manhood. As she left, Ewomi pulled the curtains around his bed for privacy, but they never quite met—gaping holes meant that if they really wanted to, the other nursing staff could spy on him. But, then again, why would they want to?

  The faded, flower-patterned hospital gown lay on the bed. (Why flowered-patterned? Couldn’t they have found a more manly garment for him to wear?) He had his pants halfway down to his knees when Ewomi bustled in without apology, holding what looked like Baby Doc Duvalier’s leftover Bermuda shorts. A fetching shade of turquoise and made of some kind of disposable, papery cloth material, Ewomi announced that these were Vincent’s “Dignity Shorts,” a new “Politically Correct” innovation created to prevent people of certain religious affiliations from getting too embarrassed by the inevitable discovery that hospital gowns open at the back are prey to.

  Vincent put on the “Dignity Shorts” and felt anything but dignified. Rather than a handy opening in the front for any necessary trips to the toilet, there was a slit up the back, which provided easy access for Dr. Stanson and his long black tube of joy.

  Ewomi returned with a couple of forms and fired some questions at Vincent. They were all the usual suspects: did he have the human variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? (Like he would know?) Did he have any dental work that might get knocked out by a careless elbow of the medical staff? What medicine was he on? Did he still have his tonsils, etc. (Why ask the same questions every year? Couldn’t they just file his answers away in a computer?)

  Finally Ewomi left him in peace. Vincent lay down on the bed and placed his hand on his lower abdomen. It felt a bit weird down there, although it was hard to judge, considering what he’d put it through in the last couple of days. And if he was an alcoholic, maybe his colon was too—desperate for an invigorating margarita or a nice glass of crisp and fragrant Chablis.

  Then there was movement. Down there. As if a ferret was scuttling through the winding passages of his bowels. Vincent nearly levitated off the bed in alarm, but after the initial shock, he put it down to some kind of fart-fuelled spasm.

  * * *

  Nestling in Vincent’s colon—an area the length of 20 meters and, if flattened out, the surface of a football field—it was building up to the crisis point. It didn’t want to hurt the Host, so its first tenuous attempts at freedom were cautious. It gathered its intelligence from the hundred million neurons embedded in the “second brain,” or the enteric nervous system that controlled the gastrointestinal system of Vincent’s body. Although only containing one thousandth of the neurons residing in the human brain, the “second brain” was capable of operating independently of both the brain and the spinal cord. But whatever had evolved in Vincent’s gut was beyond the wildest dreams of the most unconventional of neurogastroenterologists.

  * * *

  Colleen, the head endoscopy nurse—a cheerful soul with an Irish lilt and a charming manner—pushed back the curtains so she could roll Vincent’s bed into Endoscopy Room 4. He lay back and stared up at the ceiling as it whisked past.

  Dr. Stanson—movie star handsome and prosperous-looking—was already in the examination room and a couple of other nurses bustled around, getting the equipment ready. The nurses connected Vincent to the blood pressure, heart rate and blood oxygen level monitors and then inserted a nasal cannula: a thin tube with two small nozzles that protruded into Vincent’s nostrils that delivered supplemental oxygen.

  Colleen asked Vincent to roll over on his left side, with his right arm lying down his body, the palm of his hand facing upwards, so she could administer his procedural medication intravenously into a handy vein in his wrist: a relaxing cocktail of Buscopan (an anti-spasmodic, 20 mgs), midazolam (a sedative, 2 mgs) and pethidine (AKA Demerol, a pain-killer, 25 mgs).

  As Colleen injected the sedatives, Vincent felt their effects swirl through his bloodstream, instantly melting away his anxiety. He didn’t give a damn anymore and it was wonderful. He wished he could have the stuff on a permanent drip feed 24-7. The one time that he opted out of sedation—because he had an important presentation in the afternoon and needed his wits about him—was a pretty appalling experience. It wasn’t necessarily the discomfort that remained burned into his memory, but the abject humiliation.

  Vincent was facing a color monitor that was connected by a lead to the endoscope camera, so he could watch the whole thing on the screen if he wanted to. It felt like he was in a cheap version of Fantastic Voyage, colonically journeying through his own body, loosey-goosey with the drugs, day-dreaming about Raquel Welch in that tight-fitting white bodysuit of hers—floating around in a tiny ship in his circulatory system.

  Vincent was grateful he didn’t have to see the freak show behind him, as his doctor skillfully threaded the Pentax Zoom Colon 18 Endoscope through his anus, up his rectum, then his colon: sigmoid, then descending, then the transverse and ascending colon, then the cecum, and ultimately ending up at the last junction in town, the terminal ileum.

  The only pain involved was when the doctor gusted some air through the tube to distend his colon. From a camera’s eye view, his colon looked as co
rrugated as an accordion, or his ex-wife’s clothes dryer extractor tube. Hard to spot incipient fleshy growths—or polyps, as they were known—amongst the ruffled terrain of the colon that way, so the endoscope was equipped with air tubes along with a camera and a lighting device. It also was able to squirt blue dye up there, a most disconcerting sight, but it helped the doctor spot any polyps, which, if left to themselves, might go over to the dark side and become cancerous in the future.

  Vincent closed his eyes and tried to drift away with the drugs, but was alerted by Dr. Stanson saying something about a polyp. He opened his eyes and was a bit shocked to see a prominent growth attached to the side of his colon displayed on the monitor. How do the damn things grow so fast? Vincent wondered. He watched as Dr. Stanson attempted to perform a polypectomy by lassoing the polyp with the cold snare electric wire device that was also contained within the endoscope. Dr. Stanson looped the wire over the polyp and tightened it. He gave a little tug, which normally would slice the polyp away from the wall of the colon, at the same time cauterizing the wound, but the polyp stubbornly held on for dear life.

  Then something happened. The polyp was loose, but when Dr. Stanson tried to suck the fleshy growth into the endoscope for retrieval and later biopsy, it refused to go in. It seemed to expand, right there, on its own.

  Vincent was watching the show on the monitor with a drugged fascination. He heard the puzzled responses from the staff behind him as they tried to figure out what to do. Then a pain shot through Vincent’s bowels like a shard of broken glass. He cried out and tried to move. One of the nurses placed her arms over him to hold him down. “Easy, Vincent, easy,” Dr. Stanson soothed. “It’s just the air I’ve pumped in. Let it out if you need to.”