Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad!
Page 14
She’d only gone a dozen feet into the trees when she became enshrouded in a light mist, such as forms after a heavy rain. She pierced through the mist and found her son kneeling on the spongy forest floor, his hands clasped before his chest in prayer. A bulky shape crouched on a network of roots before him. At first, in her fanciful mind, the thing was a goblin or a squatting gnome. But, as she got closer, she saw that it was a conglomeration of metal slabs leaning around a thick wooden pole, with a series of old tubing hooked one to the other. Draped over this bizarre pile of junk was something long and stringy that resembled human hair.
She touched her son on the shoulder. He opened his eyes. He was shivering. When she asked him what he was doing, he pointed toward the junk pile and said he was speaking with the machine man, who had showed him the “hidden cabin” in the woods.
Unnerved, she picked him up off the ground and led him back through the mist, through the backyard, and back into the house, seating him at the dinner table. They spoke no more. When Jeffrey’s father came home and Maria told him what happened, Henry said that the boy had probably assembled the old junk to play with. But he agreed it wasn’t safe, and assured her he would get rid of it in the morning.
However, when morning came, he searched the forest and found no sign of the junk heap. Maria even led him to the exact spot, but they found only an empty space on the roots. They told Jeffrey he wasn’t allowed to play in the Mintano Wilderness anymore, and Jeffrey accepted this new limitation agreeably. But, one week later, they woke to find him submerged in his own feces on the kitchen floor, with a hole in the center of his face.
I had reached my limit at this point and put the file down, lit a fresh cigarette, and poured another glass of wine. Glancing at my wrist watch, I saw it was nearly midnight. The city lights twinkled in the darkness through my fourth-floor apartment window. I thought of what I had read, recalling the grisly photos and the “machine man.” My thoughts then wandered to the letter Mrs. Hogan had showed me, an absurd item signed by someone calling himself “The Amputator.” I shook my head and blew smoke—it all seemed crazy.
Reaching into my pocket, I took out the small antique key Maria had given me—the key to the lab, according to the letter which had been left on her porch. Luckily, Mrs. Hogan had agreed to keep the strange metal piece with the human teeth wedged into it. I wasn’t able to have something like that in my house. Yet, I stared at the key for a long time, wondering where it came from.
I called it quits and retired to bed, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept seeing visions from the case file—the junk heap, the swirling mist, the lights in the woods, the empty cavities where teeth should have been.
Eventually I dozed off, but the sleep was poor due to nightmares. I awoke in the middle of the night to a scratching sound coming from the wall. I sat up in the darkness, trying to unhear the sound, convinced it was some mental remnant from my nightmare. When it didn’t stop, I got out of bed and flipped on the light.
The sound came from the opposite side of the west wall. Mine was the final-most apartment on the fourth floor, which meant that, unless it was a bird, the sound-maker was hovering in midair or perched precariously on the building ledge.
I moved closer, saw that the scraping was accompanied by an indentation that moved correspondingly along the wall, as if something on the other side was digging through the bricks and plaster, the sharp tip poking through to this side into my room. Of course that was ludicrous. Still, I watched in awe as the impressing groove moved up and down the wall, scribbling like a pen.
After several minutes of watching, the sound stopped, and I stood staring at the words etched onto my wall.
The Amputator
I tried blinking them away, but they wouldn’t vanish. At length, I grabbed my blanket and pillow and went into the living room, turning on the TV and the lights, smoking and drinking more wine until I fell back asleep. This time, sleep was dreamless, and in the morning the words on my bedroom wall had disappeared.
I called Maria Hogan.
“Mrs. Hogan? Morgan. I finished reading your son’s case file.”
“And?”
“And ... I’m starting to think maybe you’re telling the truth.”
A pause, then a sigh. “That’s a relief. So you’ll go?”
I knew what she meant. She meant go into the Mintano Wilderness and search for this lab mentioned by The Amputator in his letter.
“I’ll go,” I said. “But first I’d like to speak to your husband.”
“No. He doesn’t know about the letter.”
“Can’t we inform him?”
“I’d rather not. He seems so fragile lately. His belief that Jeffrey did this to himself is the only thing keeping him sane.”
“I’d like us all to be in on this.”
A longer pause this time. “Okay, he’s here right now. I’ll go and tell him, if you want to stop by.”
“I’ll be right there.”
She gave me the directions and then I hung up the phone. I donned my coat and pistol and thrummed down the stairs, out into the overcast morning.
Henry Hogan sat in the armchair in his living room, staring out the window toward the dirt road leading to the highway, which I had piloted my Honda Civic up not five minutes before. He held a coffee mug and had a section of the newspaper spread on his lap. He wasn’t reading or drinking, just staring straight ahead.
When Mrs. Hogan had answered the door, she invited me in and then leaned her blond head beside my ear. “It wasn’t easy, but I told him,” she whispered. “I showed him this, too.” She held out the metal piece with the teeth wedged into it.
I walked over to the armchair. “Mr. Hogan? I’m Morgan Summers. You’re wife hired me to—”
“I know why she hired you.” His voice was gruff. When he flicked his eyes at me, they appeared weary and drawn. “Don’t expect to find anything. There’s nothing there. She made it all up. No hidden cabin, no laboratory. Jeffrey went nutso, plain and simple. The rest, well ... mothers get awfully attached to their children.”
“Stop being a jerk!” Maria snapped.
Henry sighed and his whole body seemed to deflate in the dirt brown suit he was wearing. He looked so small, so defeated to me, shrunken, like a sailor drowning at sea, going down with his ship. I immediately understood there was nothing to be gained by speaking with him.
“All the same,” I said, cultivating my most neutral, most tension-dissolving voice. “Since she did hire me, I’m going to have a look behind your home.”
“Cops been all through there,” he muttered. “You won’t find nothing.”
I didn’t deign to respond to him. I simply bowed slightly, and then turned and headed over to Maria. She looked on edge, arms crossed, chewing on her lip. “Satisfied now?” she said.
“I am actually, thank you. I’d like to see the spot.”
She nodded and led me through a narrow hallway lined with framed photographs, which I glanced at as we passed, catching Jeffrey’s baby-blue eyes staring back at me.
“We found him here,” she said as we entered the sizable kitchen. The floors were smooth and made of wood; a kitchen island encompassed the center of the room; the countertops, fridge, and sink were all made of stainless steel; and several rows of oak cupboards adorned the wall.
Next to where Mrs. Hogan stood, a dark spot about four feet in diameter stained the floor. I recalled from the case file that Jeffrey had sat in a puddle of his own excrement all night. I was slightly nauseated. “What exactly is that stain?” I asked. “Is it ...?”
“Most of it,” she said. “Blood, too. And something else, something the investigators said they’re unsure of—add that to a hundred other things they’re unsure of.” The bitterness of her tone cut into the kitchen air. “They said it would come out, but it didn’t. And no matter how much I scrub and mop, the stain remains. I’ve given up.”
I then told her I was ready to go into the Mintano Wilderness. She nodded and I
followed her through the adjacent back door. The wall of trees and bushes seemed to rear itself forward right up to the back of the house. The density of the foliage was astounding, like an encroaching tsunami of leaves and branches that was going to crash into the porch at any second.
“Jesus,” I said. I reached into my pocket to retrieve my pack of cigarettes.
“The City has made a significant effort to preserve this section of the Mintano Wilderness. All the houses in this area border it. I believe there’s a bike path winding through it, several hiking trails ... the rest is feral nature.”
“Amazing,” I said. And I meant it.
She turned and started toward the house. “Guess I’ll leave you to it.” She stopped on her way, glancing at my cigarette. “Make sure you dispose of that properly.”
I nodded. “You got it, ma’am.”
She started walking, and then stopped again. “Thank you, Morgan. My husband ... he ...”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand this has been hard on both of you. Besides, I’m doing my job, and ...” I suddenly recalled the scratching sounds of the previous night, and the pair of words that had magically appeared on my bedroom wall. “I have my own reasons for checking this out.”
“Oh?” There was a pause, and I knew she wanted to ask what they were. But instead, I just turned and headed across the grass, denying her the opportunity. In no time, I had been swallowed by the darkening wilds.
When I came across the first letter—the A—I gazed long at it, questioning the reliability of my physical senses. I did drink and smoke a lot. But by the time I spotted the lowercase R on the oak trunk—the collection of the seven letters coalescing into the word Amputator—I was pretty much convinced I was crazy.
I stayed for a while with the R letter, leaning against the tree. I smoked a cigarette or two, making sure to bury the butts properly. Finally, I summoned the nerve to continue, telling myself I had to play out this movie to the end.
I hadn’t gone more than twenty paces when the mist appeared, the air hanging beneath the branches swirling and churning. I was soon meandering in the thick of it, groping blindly, certain I was getting increasingly lost.
The mist grew thicker and I saw shapes materialize out of the softly swirling gas. Abstractly humanoid, they bent through the network of branches, weaving in and out of the treetops, bodies elongating and stretching like taffy, and then shrinking down to their original size.
I stopped to admire the apparitions—ghosts, spirits, whatever they were—magical with their yawning mouths and hollow eyes. I felt a storm of emotions rising within me, admonishing me to release whatever resistance I was harboring as to whether or not this was real—to just accept it.
I forged ahead through the bluish mist, like some kind of hero from a fantasy novel. The spirits of the dead drifted around me until, at last, I spotted the ominous cabin in the distance. I climbed the series of terraces leading to the grassy eminence and headed for the front porch.
It wasn’t very large, about the size of any other cabin you might find in the woods. Except that it was only one story, which seemed odd, especially since this person—The Amputator—was supposedly conducting full-scale scientific experiments in there.
I drew my pistol. The weight of it, the cold of the steel, felt good, comforting. Each step had me sinking a little more into the soft, mulchy loam. The porch boards creaked and crumbled beneath my feet, and I glanced behind me and noticed the mist had stayed back in the trees. I was grateful.
I felt in my pocket for the key. Was I just going to walk in the front door? Perhaps a little audacious, so I did a quick beat around the perimeter, searching for other doors and openings. Finding none—only more darkened windows, begrimed to the point of opaqueness—I returned to the front, withdrew the key, and approached the door. Unlocking it, I pushed the door creakingly open and gripped the handle of my pistol as I entered.
I immediately cursed myself for not bringing a flashlight. The darkness was so thick that I could only see the faint outlines of objects and the dim wood surfaces of walls. The further I went into the cabin, the greater my fear became. My breathing accelerated, my heart pounded like a hammer, and I began to sweat.
I emerged from the hallway into a spacious room. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I could see hulking mounds all along the floor that I presumed were pieces of furniture—a mirror, reflecting back the silvery blackness; even gossamer webs clinging to the higher corners and ceiling.
In the center stood another large shape, still as lake water on a windless day. I approached with my fingers raised and extended. I felt drawn to it, and when I got close enough, I touched the surface, which was cold and hard, like touching the skin of a reptile. As I moved my fingers higher, I felt harder surfaces—most likely metal, as well as rubber tubing and looping chains—and higher still, I felt something like stringy human hair. Suddenly, I knew this was the strange “machine man” before which Jeffrey Hogan had been found kneeling. As my fingers neared the top, I somehow sensed it was going to move. In a panic, I raised the pistol.
It came jerking to life with a tremendous burst of motion that swept the darkness along with it. I dashed to my left, back around, and then whirled, flailing the pistol butt. The machine man was quicker. It resembled some kind of idol or tribal totem pole as it danced around me like the Tasmanian Devil of cartoons. A dark hunk arced out and down from the top of the pole, crashing onto my head with the weight of a tree branch. I screamed as it crushed me to the floor—then I was hit again, and my vision dimmed. I felt myself hurled into a place of emptiness.
Then the world abruptly winked out.
When I came to, dreamy, gauzy ribbons of blue and white, like the auras of planets, swam before my eyes. My body weighed a thousand pounds. I attempted to move my limbs but was met with strong resistance. And something else ... some foreign metallic element that was connected to me, that permeated whatever parts of my organism I could still register.
I managed to re-illuminate the world through the faculty of sight. Darkness and blues and whites bled away. I saw that I was strapped with metal bands into a corrupt wood chair, like an antiquated electric chair. The room around me was crowded with huge pieces of buzzing, bulky scientific equipment, which my fuzzed-out mind could only begin to comprehend. Lights, computer monitors, keyboards, EKG readouts.
“You’re not the boy,” said a voice. “But you will have to do.”
It was not a pleasant voice.
I blinked again and saw a grotesque being standing over me. I knew at once it was The Amputator. He was tall, lanky, and wiry like a weasel, with beady eyes and a scraggly beard. He wore a stained white lab coat; greasy spectacles clutched his face. Behind him was a storm of misty spirits, like those I had encountered in the Mintano Wilderness.
“How do you feel?” he said.
“I—” But I could not speak. I felt crazy, delusional, nothing made sense anymore.
“Speechless,” The Amputator murmured. He eyed me suspiciously. I didn’t like the intent of his gaze—it was as if a giant rat was considering whether or not I’d make a good meal.
“The left side of his brain has been successfully quarantined,” he continued. He turned to his right, speaking to someone in the darkness. “Bring me the mediumistic rod.”
The furious totem-pole machine man came whirling into view. The shock of seeing it this close up and under the harsh yellow lights sent me into convulsions. My soul felt like it was going to jump out of my flesh.
The Amputator accepted a long copper rod from the automaton, that terrible assembly of wire and tubing and metal with a flat head of long, dark, horse-like hair. As it spun away into the blackness, I thought of Robby the Robot, a fictional character from a movie I’d seen as a child called Forbidden Planet. The bulbous, robotic humanoid machine in that movie scared the pants off me as a child. Seeing this weird totem thing now recovered the same childhood fear.
The Amputator leaned over my right
side. As I followed him down with my eyes, I began to scream, and my hoarse cries echoed about the room. My body shook and sweat saturated my brow. I was convinced I was dying—had died—would die.
“Calm yourself,” The Amputator said.
But I couldn’t. Where my arm used to be now extended a bloody metal appendage, looped with silvery wires and colorful blinking lights. It pulsed inwardly with a glowing orange fire, as though it had a heartbeat. The fibrous metal materials of which it was composed stretched up to my right bicep, where the sleeve of my shirt had been cut away. The appendage itself was neatly squashed into the flesh of my arm.
I thought I would never stop screaming.
Very carefully, he placed the rod in my hand, and the fingers closed of their own accord, clutching it like a baton. The Amputator moved aside, and the misty wall of spirits moved forward.
Without warning, the metal bands retracted with a snap and I was free. Yet, suddenly, I was yanked forward by the metallic arm which was now flailing and jerking, swinging the copper rod like a conducting baton. My teeth clenched and sweat poured down in my eyes. I was nearly blind as my feet, led by the insane metal arm, drew me out of the chair.
I began walking across the floor, while the swelling blue orb of spirits moved closer. The Amputator tracked my progress, a greedy little figure at my right. Opposite him spun the madly whirling totem, which, I now realized, was functioning as his assistant.
“It’s working!” he cried. “They are bending to his will! Embrace them, you fool! Embrace them!” He slapped me on the back, hard, and I pitched forward, almost falling onto my face.
Abruptly, the wall of spirits was before me, flowing around me, enveloping me, pressing close. I could make out their hollow eyes and gaping mouths as they darted about like guppies in a fish bowl. I sensed music from somewhere, a simple melody, but soon I was blind and lost, the laboratory obscured in the churning blue cloud.