Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4

by Cheryl Mullenax

  “Hello?” she says, her voice a faint croak.

  The plain wooden door opens. A man peeks his head out. It is a sleek head, with greased black hair combed into perfectly straight and even rows like an empty, tilled field. His dark eyes shine. He smiles with his lips closed. Elaine is small, barely five feet tall, but this man is smaller. Much smaller. He wears a charcoal suit, white shirt, red tie.

  “Dr Smith?” she says.

  He opens the door and ushers her inside with the wave of a child-sized hand. As he retreats, Elaine takes in the room. An examination table, two chairs, a desk. There is nothing on the desk. No computer, no jotting pad, no pen. Elaine’s shoulders tighten even more. The start of a headache squeezes her scalp. She sits opposite Dr John Smith. He is smiling. His face is narrow and pointed as if swept back from the nose.

  “Fibroids,” he says. Then he wags a tiny forefinger. “Ah, but you don’t agree.”

  This takes her by surprise. She doesn’t know how to respond.

  “Tell me what you think they are,” he says. “Be frank, please.”

  “What for? You’ll assume I’m crazy.”

  Sombre, Dr John Smith shakes his pinched little head, and gestures for her to speak.

  “All right.” She lifts her chin. “At first, I thought my womb held a nest of mice.”

  “Mice.” He nods, mulling it over. “And now?”

  “Now I know it holds monsters. Dozens of them. Monsters with hair and teeth.”

  Dr Smith steeples his fingers, leans back in the chair and contemplates the ceiling. He says, “You believe you’re harbouring teratomas?”

  “Teratomas? I’m sorry. I don’t know what they are.”

  “A type of germ cell tumour that grows in the reproductive organs. Quite rare,” he says, and presses one tiny set of knuckles against his mouth, just for a moment, as if stifling a grin. “Misbegotten tumours. Often presenting with hair and teeth.”

  “Yes,” Elaine says. “That sounds about right.”

  “Mrs Grey, have you told anyone else of your suspicions?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  He takes a business card from his jacket pocket and offers it with just the tips of his manicured fingernails. “Tomorrow 9 am at this hospital. No food or drink after midnight.”

  “Tomorrow?” She takes the card. “You’re scheduling my surgery for tomorrow?”

  “Pack a bag sufficient for a two-night stay. Keep taking your medications as prescribed. It’s very important that you keep taking your medications. Very important.”

  “Don’t you have any other patients?”

  He interlaces his fingers and rests his hands on the empty desk. “You’re quite ill, Mrs Grey. Your womb is grossly enlarged and deformed. Some of the tumours have grown so fast, they’ve outstripped their own blood supply and become necrotic. That means the tumours are rotting, Mrs Grey. Decaying like corpses. You are pregnant with death itself, as it were.” He smiles and stands up. “Remember, nothing to eat or drink after midnight.”

  Elaine stands up too, breathless, faint, nauseated, bleeding, hot clots sliding out.

  Over dinner, Malcolm pats the back of her hand. “Well, Dr Smith must have had a cancellation,” he says. “You’re really poorly. Dr Smith said so himself. Count your blessings you don’t have to wait.”

  The hospital turns out to be a suburban brick veneer. Instead of gardens there is asphalt for parking. The morning is bright and cloudless, glaring. Elaine clutches the handles of her valise, biting her lip, as Malcolm steers their car into one of the many vacant spots and cuts the engine. Ordinary houses where people live are on either side of the hospital. In fact, the whole street is full of ordinary houses.

  “It’s a private clinic,” Malcolm says. “This is how they tend to look out here in the suburbs. Calm down, would you please? Stop chewing the inside of your cheek.”

  In the pre-surgery waiting room, behind a drawn curtain, Malcolm folds her clothes for her, ties the straps of her hospital gown, helps pull the compression stockings over her feet and up to her knees. He is whistling through his front teeth all the while.

  “Aren’t you scared?” Elaine says. “People can die during surgery.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he says. “You’re in good hands.”

  Elaine stares at her husband very carefully. It was Malcolm who encouraged her to see their GP in the first place. Malcolm who reassured her about Dr Smith’s deserted consulting room and unfilled surgery schedule. Malcolm who is sitting next to her, whistling a jaunty tune, now searching through a stack of magazines for something to read.

  No, she must be logical.

  Soon, she will bleed no more, not ever again. Her womb will be gone, thrown away. That is a good thing. I am safe, she tells herself. Not everything is a conspiracy. All is well. She stops staring at her husband. Instead, she looks around the room. It must have been a lounge room originally, back when the hospital was a family home. There are three other booths, each one with its curtain drawn back, each booth empty. Elaine clenches her toes against the linoleum floor, over and over and over again.

  The nurse comes in. It is the same woman from the reception desk. “Ready?” she says.

  No. Elaine has changed her mind. She doesn’t want to do this anymore. She wants to see her regular gynaecologist instead. She must insist on a second opinion.

  Malcolm takes hold of Elaine’s hand. Together, they follow the nurse to the corridor.

  The nurse stops and says, “Here’s where you part ways. Mrs Grey, you come with me. Hubby, you go to the exit and we’ll see you in a couple of hours, okay?”

  Malcolm leans down to kiss Elaine. A sob chokes off Elaine’s throat. She flings her arms about his neck and clings on, until he laughs, taking hold of her wrists to push her away. The nurse is laughing too.

  “I’m frightened,” Elaine says.

  “You’ll be fine,” Malcolm says, and leaves.

  Elaine watches him go, her fists pressed to her swollen abdomen, against her belly pregnant with monsters both dying and dead, against her womb filled with hair and teeth.

  “Come along,” the nurse says.

  Elaine trails behind, crying, hiccupping on sobs. She turns a corner and stops.

  There is a gurney with metal side-rails, a half-dozen people in green or blue scrubs. As one, they all look at her and smile with closed lips. None of them seems to mind or even notice that Elaine is weeping. A child steps forward. No, not a child, but Dr John Smith. She didn’t recognise him at first in his scrubs with the cap covering the greased ruts of his hair. He is rubbing his palms together, the skin making a dry whisking sound, his dark eyes shining with anticipation and delight. Everyone else stands very still. Motionless.

  “Sorry, I’m just a bit scared,” Elaine whispers, embarrassed, thumbing away tears.

  No one says anything. Their cold, perfunctory manner allows her to regain control. She is helped onto the gurney. The anaesthetist puts a catheter into the back of her hand. The monsters gnaw and rend and gnash. Elaine feels weak. Not long now. Not long.

  A couple of women push the gurney into another room. This is the theatre. It has an enormous light fixture with many bulbs hanging from the ceiling, trolleys covered in stainless steel equipment, machines on carts, a central table. The window looks out onto a clothesline.

  The women help Elaine to lie on the table. Someone puts a mask over her nose and mouth. Compressed air hisses out of it. The air smells like rubber and medicine. Someone else puts a syringe into the catheter in her hand and depresses the plunger. A sickly dropping sensation, like the downward swoop of a rollercoaster, surges through Elaine and momentarily stops the monsters from biting. Catching them, like her, by surprise.

  “Well, that feels weird,” Elaine says, and closes her eyes for a moment.

  She opens them.

  The pain is excruciating. Agonising. It claws and mauls and flails wildly throughout her body, violent and wrenching, taking her breath. She tries t
o bring her knees to her chest but is too feeble. A wail breaks from her throat.

  “Relax,” says a voice. “Calm down.”

  Elaine gasps, blinks. She is in a different room. The operation must be over. Her rotting uterus should be in a medical waste bin. Writhing, she cries, “Help me. Please help me.”

  “Calm down,” intones the voice again. This time, she recognises Dr Smith.

  She forces her eyes open. The entire surgical staff is arranged around her bed, watching her. Dr Smith stands at the foot of the bed, grinning. Elaine tries to lift her head.

  “Why didn’t you take out the monsters?” she says. “Why did you let them loose?”

  The teeth are roaming, unchecked, chewing rabidly at her bowels, biting her diaphragm in frantic search of heart and lungs, gnawing through muscle to burrow down into each thigh.

  “The operation was a success,” Dr Smith says. “Congratulations.”

  He looks around at his team. They look back at him and at each other.

  Elaine clutches her abdomen. “The pain,” she says. “I can’t stand it.”

  “Relax,” Dr Smith says. “You’re in good hands.”

  His hands are clasped to his chest as if in joy. The team members grip the metal side-rails of the bed. Their hands are white-knuckled. No one touches her. Smiling with closed lips, silently, they watch her as she winces, thrashes, struggles. Elaine understands now, too late, as the unleashed monsters tear and rip through her guts, that she is not safe. Everything is a conspiracy. All is not well.

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  I’ve always been fascinated by human physiology and disease. In a different life, perhaps I would have become a doctor or surgeon. Before I switched to fiction, I spent about twenty years writing (among other things) health and medical information across various media. I composed feature articles, web content, and patient information for every kind of physical and psychological condition you could imagine. My short story “Hair and Teeth” was inspired by a recent surgery. I wanted to create a grisly narrative that walked the line between reality and paranoia without flagging a definitive answer. My hope is that the reader decides what actually happens.

  RUT SEASONS

  Brian Hodge

  From New Fears 2

  Editor: Mark Morris

  Penguin Random House

  It was somewhere between the tenth and twentieth heap of roadkill Casey passed that the irony of their demises declared itself to her. These heaps of meat and smears of blood were white-tailed deer, mostly, and deer most obviously. It was early November, the start of rut season, and they were on the move and on the make, so desperate to propagate the species they forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.

  Did their mothers not teach them, or did they just not listen?

  Simmer down, boys. I know what drives you. I know it’s all you can think about right now. It drove your father too, the horny old rogue. But take a little care, for buck’s sakes. You have to watch yourselves on these hard gray rivers. A little pause here and there isn’t going to hurt anything. You’ll be haunches-deep in some nice perky doe soon enough, but not if you’re a big splattered tangle of antlers and legs and—oh, god, not again, I can’t keep watching this happen.

  They were distributed in wide clusters, bunched in the crossing regions where the woods and the lonelier fields edged close to the interstate. A few nauseating miles as messy as a deregulated slaughterhouse, then nothing for a long while, and then she’d be back in another kill zone.

  It weighed on a person. It grew nerve-wracking. It made her more watchful, not a bad thing in itself, but driving a few hundred miles under that level of tension was exhausting. Things would be exhausting enough once she got there.

  How many more Saturdays of this to look forward to? She really wanted to know, like right now, but dared not take a hand off the wheel to grab her phone from the console, much less take her eyes off the road. Plan B, then:

  “Hey Siri, how long does rut season last this year?”

  “Sorry, Casey, I don’t know the answer to that one.”

  “Hey Siri, what the fuck good are you?”

  “Your language!”

  “Hey Siri, you sound like my mother.”

  “You’re certainly entitled to that opinion.”

  Brought that on herself, hadn’t she? The wiring was old and the roots went deep.

  There was a time, when she’d left home twenty-odd years ago, that three hundred miles away sounded like the optimal distance. She could drive it in a few hours when she had to. Fly it in less, in case of emergency. Still far enough away, though. No drop-in visits, endured or expected. No “I was just in the neighborhood.” Yet it was close enough that it didn’t look like she was trying too hard. It wasn’t a thousand miles. It wasn’t the nuclear option of clear across the country, on the coast. It wasn’t Seattle, or L.A., I’d keep on going west but there’s this ocean in the way.

  Now, though? Now it was starting to feel like a trap she’d set for herself without realizing it, one that didn’t snap shut until it was too late. Yes, three hundred miles was a haul. But it was a doable haul, so there really were no excuses.

  If you’d get up early for a change, you could be here before lunchtime. That would give us most of the weekend. We don’t know how many more weekends we have left, do we?

  No, Mom. We don’t.

  Proof? Just ask the deer. These poor, single-minded deer.

  * * *

  As always, she stopped to see her father first, because it was on the way in, practically right there as soon as you took the off-ramp from the highway. When she’d moved away, after college, there was hardly anything out here, just gas and greasy food, but the town had gradually shed its oldest, northernmost skin and oozed south to straddle the interstate.

  The place they’d moved him to was nice, as assisted-living facilities went, but even here he was under an extra degree of sequestration. The memory care unit was…not solitary confinement, exactly; more like Death Row to a prison’s gen pop. Dementia, Alzheimer’s…nobody here was going to get parole. Just getting in to visit family took a staffer with keys. These were the folks at risk of wandering off, who might keep going until tragedy found them.

  While they were under twenty-four-hour lockdown, they at least had TV. That kept some of them occupied. The rest contorted themselves into chairs, at strange angles for reasons even they wouldn’t know, staring into space without seeming to see a thing.

  “How are you doing, Daddy?”

  He was one of the occupieds, watching TV, sort of. He knew it was on but appeared not to care, knowing only that he was supposed to watch it. And he knew her, once it penetrated that Daddy meant him. As the recognition swam up to register in his eyes, he broke into a big, slow smile. Just the sweetest man, still, now that he’d run out of reasons for anger. Something about him had begun to look soft, sexless.

  She hugged him, and he smelled okay, better than before he moved out here. They reminded him to wash and kept his clothes clean. They helped dress him, although he still looked like a ragamuffin, disheveled and diminished, forty pounds lighter than the man who used to pilot the family car and yell for quiet from the back seat.

  He asked her how she was. He said he was doing well when she asked him. He spoke with a lisp now, four of his top front teeth gone, having darkened and chipped away after he started neglecting to brush.

  “How’s David doing?” he asked.

  Casey patted his hand. “David’s fine. He’s keeping as busy as ever.”

  Daddy told her he was getting on well here, that there were friends to have coffee with in the morning but they were asleep now.

  “How’s David doing?” he asked when the next commercials came on.

  He remembered David, had always liked him. He never remembered the divorce.

  “He’s doing great,” she said. “He’s training for another marathon.”

  That made her fathe
r happy to hear.

  It was easier, making this visit first, like a warm-up act. It came with fewer expectations. Daddy just seemed happy to see her, and while the past was all he had, he didn’t seem inclined to dig around in the worst of it. The past was all he had, but he lived in the moment, because the prior moments kept crumbling behind him.

  “How’s David doing?”

  He asked about David eight times while she was there, and each was like the first. Until she kissed him on the cheek and told him she’d see him again soon, and it made him happy to hear that, and when she left, the countdown started again, how long it would take to slip his mind that she’d been there at all.

  * * *

  That was what it was like now, with both of them. Her parents’ existence had become a series of loops. There was no such thing as forward motion any more. Their health had banked into a downward spiral, while the rest of their lives circled back and back again to the same territories whether they liked it there or not. Her father’s loops were smaller, tighter—that was all.

  Her mother? Still in the house, under the same old roof, after a few brief detours. She’d tried the ACF route as well, three times, but it never lasted for longer than seventeen days. She had standards, you know, and once she got somewhere, always found reasons why the place didn’t measure up to them. The people weren’t nice. The food was bland. The apartment was too small. The shower curtain wasn’t pretty.

  There was no place like home.

  Casey had the keys so she could let herself in. Every time, it hit her anew that 3500 square feet was a tremendous amount of house for one person. The atmosphere still felt as brittle as it ever did when Mom was getting around normally, able to infuse each room and hallway by direct contact. The vibe was a lesser version of wartime killing grounds: People once fought here.