Terror Scribes

by Adam Lowe

  I’m tired of writing pablum for the broken hearted wrist slashing nation. I need to reinvent myself. I need a new home.

  DocAught is coming tonight. A house call. Like he does every hundred years or so. Something has to go in the casket where Samantha should be. They may harvest every organ for the good of the people, every bloodshot eyeball and broken digit. But there is always something left. You’d be surprised how many useless parts we have. The vomeronasal organ, a tiny pit on each side of the septum. A set of cervical ribs left over from our reptilian days. The male uterus. A fifth toe. It isn’t pretty.

  I need to get ready, prepare myself for the transition.

  Silence has expanded to fill my tiny apartment. A section of candlelight throbs from the window ledge. A pair of forlorn window frames blast the studio with a foul chill. I am rotting from the inside out and have waited much too long. The door hangs open wide, a forlorn shriek that swallows the light. I will not be disturbed for this space does not exist. Not tonight.

  My pasty skin is a moonglow in the center of a collapsing star. Eyes closed, my face is buried in the lavender scent of the downy pillows. A thin sheen of icy sweat coats my body as my soul fights to escape. Any other night and my head would be filled with visions of fingertips and razor blades, bloodletting and rope burns, tongues shoved into every eager crevice. There is no room for that tonight. Shoulders twitch, my hands grasping and releasing the bedsheets, and I repeat one word over and over again.

  Transmogrify.

  I have lost myself again. Torches burn at the river’s edge. There is the sharp snapping of canine teeth and the grumbling of angry peasants.

  “No . . . no.”

  Convulsions and my neck snaps back, eyes rolling up into my skull, my tongue darting for moisture in every corner of my mouth.

  Forward, back. Forward, back. Flying sideways, a hard turn to the right, pulled around a corner, and gravity pulls my stomach down, pressure on my face, a great rush of wind.

  He’s here.

  I don’t need to see him to picture him clearly. So many times we’ve done this. My keeper. So many times we’ve hunted together. My lover. His hand is on my bare back, the size of a stingray. His weight crushes the bed and it cries out in resistance. Not a sound from him, not a word. I can’t remember the last thing he said to me. Yes. Yes, I can.

  “Go.”

  A tingle races over the surface of my skin as he runs his massive paw up the small of my back, stopping just short of my port. A sigh escapes my lips as a solitary bloody tear glides down my cheek.

  I picture him the way I last saw him, in a back alley of New York City, 1908. A bowler hat atop his bald, gleaming dome. The dark wool suit stretched taut across his broad shoulders, his legs like tree stumps ending in squared off shoes. His prominent nose crowding out small, gleaming eyes, a fire burning inside, his full lips tight. The clink of a beer glass dropped on cobblestone, and his patience had run out. Just like that.

  He leans over me and presses his body against mine, his cold musculature like a marble sculpture. I am slowly being suffocated by a distant god and I don’t care. A harp string vibrates and the clasp of a briefcase opens. Plastic unwraps and latex gloves snap on. The slow turning of a lid being removed fills my ears as a hint of birch mixed with sassafras drifts to me.

  I am waiting for the cord, the cable, the life. He is not.

  One hand is firm at the base of my neck and a device is shoved in the port. A leap drive. I struggle but cannot move. He holds me down with one giant palm as the toxic potion fills my nostrils, burning, and the drive comes to life with a hum.

  “There are creatures far worse than you, my love,” his baritone rumbles.

  I am emptying, spilling, falling from a great height as my eyes gush a river. A soul I thought to be long gone, diseased and broken—breaks. Not a single utterance, only the spinning and whirring of the pod at my neck. Outside my window in the suicide of winter there is a void of life. A crackling of ice as a solitary branch fractures under the weight and shatters on the ground.

  Richard Thomas was the winner of the ChiZine Publications 200. “Enter the World of Filaria” contest and Jotspeak. His debut novel, a neo-noir thriller entitled Transubstantiate (Otherworld Publications), was released in July of 2010. His work is published or forthcoming in the Shivers VI anthology (Cemetery Dance) with Stephen King and Peter Straub, the Warmed and Bound anthology (Velvet Press), the Noir at the Bar anthology, Speedloader (Snubnose Press), ChiZine, Gargoyle, Murky Depths, PANK, Pear Noir!, 3:AM Magazine, Word Riot, Dogmatika, Opium, Vain, Crime Factory, Metazen, Dirty Noir, Stepaway, Shotgun Honey, Cherry Bleeds, Rotten Leaves, We Are Vespertine, Blink-Ink, Leodegraunce, Eternal Night: A Vampire Anthology (Living Dead Press), Outsider Writers Collective, The Oddville Press, Colored Chalk, Cause and Effect, Gold Dust, Nefarious Muse, and Troubadour 21.

  He lives in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. He is currently pursuing a MFA at Murray State University in their low-residency program.

  Nine Tenths

  by Jay Eales

  Prologue

  “But it’s not my birthday for another week!” Sarah protested, though not too much at the prospect of an early present.

  “I know,” Marcus said. “I just wanted to surprise you.” He had a lunatic grin as he grabbed both her hands and led her onwards, paying no attention to the street furniture strewn in his path as he backed up the pavement. From time to time, he would jig Sarah’s arms up and down to encourage her using the medium of dance, enhanced by occasionally slipping on a discarded pizza box, or tripping over a chained up bike. Every so often, he would glance back over his shoulder, sizing up any substantial obstacles coming up. He particularly eyed up a battered old metal bin with ‘68’ daubed on it in magnolia paint, rubbish overflowing its boundaries and leaving the lid parked atop it at a rakish angle.

  “So . . . what have you got me?” Sarah could no longer hide her curiosity.

  “Patience! It’s just a token of my luuuuuuurve, baby!” Marcus suddenly let go of Sarah’s hands and skipped around her, making her turn on the spot to keep facing him.

  “Where’d you get all this energy from on a Sunday morning, anyway?”

  “I’m just high on life. That and the three espressos I necked before I woke you.”

  “Ah, that explains why your pupils are spinning,” Sarah said. “Anyway, don’t change the subject. You were about to spill the beans about my prezzie?”

  Marcus looked down the road again. “Nearly there,” he said. He continued to cajole her along the path with a succession of hit and run kisses wherever he could find some exposed skin. Sarah continued to make mock protestations at her boyfriend’s hyper behaviour, but her eyes were gleaming. They passed number 66, and Marcus spotted the bicycle chained to the street light outside the front door, and could not resist giving the bell a quick pump. A couple of curtains twitched at the nearby houses where the residents were already up and about, but nobody was looking for a confrontation, even with a mostly harmless looking Tigger-like twenty-something who was nine stone nothing ringing wet.

  “You’re an idiot,” Sarah said, as Marcus continued to caper around her like a court jester.

  “Yeah, but I’m your idiot,” Marcus shot her a camembert grin.

  “Who else would have you?” Sarah ruffled his hair fiercely, before pushing back his unruly cowlick. It took three attempts before it would stay.

  Marcus took the opportunity to swoop on her again, nibbling at her collar bone and across her bare shoulder to the nape of her neck, brushing aside her hair to better reach his target, and making a series of ‘mmn-mmn-mmn’ noises as he did so, until he was standing behind her. He put his hands over her eyes and nudged her forward again, as they approached 68.

  “Careful!” she said, as she stumbled blindly on, and Marcus adjusted his grip so that he covered her blindfolded with just his left hand. Sarah heard Marcus rummaging around in 68’s dustbin, dislodging and pushing aside bin bags in search of
something. She caught the sour tang of spoiled foodstuffs from more than a few days earlier. Luckily, the weather had been pretty mild or they would have been able to smell it all the way down the road at their flat. Students, she assumed, surprised that they had put out the rubbish at all. Marcus gave a small triumphant grunt as he hauled something free from the bin. At such an early hour on the Sabbath, and without a triple-espresso stimulant to help, Sarah could not fathom what it was that Marcus was doing, until he took his hand away from her face and got her to turn around to face him. He had his right hand behind his back, still hiding something from her.

  Before Sarah could comment, Marcus brought out his prize with a flourish, presenting it to Sarah with a courtly bow, and adopting a poor cod-Shakespearian accent. “For you, milady! Tis nought but a trifle, the merest token of my undying affection.” Sarah automatically took the proffered gift, a bouquet of flowers, amazingly, still wrapped in protective cellophane and with an attached message card, slightly crumpled from their extended stay in the dustbin. It would have been a lovely arrangement, had it been six or seven days earlier, when the flowers had been freshly cut and purchased. Whereas today, they were more tired than Sarah was, wilting and shedding petals at the merest movement of her hands. Any fragrance that the flowers might once have produced had long since been overpowered by the aroma of rotting fried chicken remains and cigarette ash from their proximity in the bin. Marcus had eyeballed the discarded flowers while passing on the way to the corner shop for milk the previous day, and the whole crazy plan was born fully formed by the time he had arrived back at the flat.

  “I’m . . . overwhelmed,” Sarah began to speak in Marcus’ cod-Elizabethan manner before thinking better of it, and wrinkled her nose at the pungent odour instead. As she held the flowers up for closer examination, she read the message card. “Who’s Lizzie?” She raised an eyebrow in mock outrage. “Is that your . . . strumpet?” With a theatrical flourish, she tossed the bouquet into the road between two parked cars. “Here’s what I think of your harlot’s cast-offs!” She giggled as the flowers shed petal confetti as they arced through the air.

  “Ah, that . . . ” Marcus said, pausing for thought as he leant forward to retrieve the discarded gift. “Obviously . . . Well, obviously . . . it’s my new pet name for you!” He held up one hand in supplication and he stretched between the cars into the road, and so did not even see the car that struck him.

  One

  “His eyes are open!”

  Marcus blinked at the cold white light, feeling the detritus of sleepy dust in his eyes. He made to raise a hand to wipe it away, only to find tubes taped to his arm, and let out an involuntary yelp of alarm. In front of him, he could see a lot of movement, but his vision was blurred, and the women in front of him were strangers.

  “Marcus?” One of the women, the one with a halo of blonde hair framing her face, leaned in to give him a cautious embrace. He accepted it. “Marcus? It’s Sarah. You were in an accident.”

  Marcus pulled back against his pillow and looked around him, blinking rapidly as he tried to clear his vision, but recognising the room he was in as a nursing ward, with pale green curtains instead of walls on two sides. At the mention of the word ‘accident’, the other woman, the one that Marcus now recognised as wearing the uniform of a nurse, put her hand on Sarah’s arm.

  “Sair . . . ” he attempted to speak, but the dryness of his throat made it difficult to get the word out. “Ahh . . . Cuh huv . . . wor?”

  Sarah turned to the nurse and sai. “Oh, could you get him some water, please?”

  “Of course,” the nurse said, but she squeezed Sarah’s arm a little tighter. “Sarah, it’s probably best if you don’t tell him too much about the accident for a while, okay?”

  “’m noh fuk’n deff!” Marcus spat at the nurse, his face flushed and veins pulsing at his temples.

  Sarah stood open-mouthed at Marcus’ outburst. She immediately felt the need to apologise. “I’m so sorry! He’s not like this normally . . . ”

  “Don’t be silly! He’s been through a lot, Sarah,” the nurse shrugged it off. “He’s bound to have a lot of pent up emotion rattling around in that noggin! Better out than in.”

  “But still,” Sarah continued. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him swear like that.”

  “We get a lot worse than that most weekends,” the nurse laughed as she parted a curtain to go in search of a water jug, and to notify the duty station of the change in Marcus’ condition.

  “Back soon,” she said with a smile through the gap in the curtain, before pulling it back across to maintain their privacy.

  Sarah returned her attention to Marcus, taking his hand, and rubbing the back of it with her thumb sympathetically, while trying to avoid the needles taped in place, drip-feeding him with saline and glucose. Mistaking it for him returning her hand-holding gesture, Sarah did not see that Marcus had balled his hands into fists. But she did not miss his parting comment, his eyes firmly fixed on the curtain.

  “Cunt.”

  Two

  The doctor’s office had an imposing amount of wood panelling on view. Enough to build a small ark. Sarah’s expression was grimmer than ever, and she kept tugging at her sleeves, as though her cardigan had shrunk in the wash.

  “What I’m trying to say, Miss Ford, is that Marcus has suffered an extremely serious head trauma, and it is astonishing that his physical recovery has been as accelerated as it has, in just a few months . . . ” Doctor Rothkiss exhibited his most practiced sympathetic air, but he had never been terribly good at it, and it mostly came across to people as vagueness and barely-concealed irritation.

  “It’s not his physical health I’m worried about,” Sarah butted in. “It’s his personality! He doesn’t remember anything from before the accident. Well, not anything, but he only seems to remember things after I remind him,” Sarah was on the verge of tears, unconsciously stretching her cardigan completely out of shape. “He’s not the man he used to be.”

  “Miss Ford. Take a moment to calm yourself, if you would. As I’ve tried to explain to you in our previous consultations, Mister Hales has had a life changing experience. It’s not unusual for there to be some memory loss. I can’t in good conscience promise you that it will return in time, though it is not unheard of.” Rothkiss shifted uncomfortably in his seat, as Sarah continued to sniff. He nudged his tissue box forward, encouraging her to take one.

  “He’s so angry all the time. I don’t know what to do for him,” Sarah finally took a tissue, if only to stop Rothkiss from pushing them at her in lieu of anything more helpful.

  “While it is more common to find hostility coming out in patients coping with a physical injury—perfectly normal behaviour when frustrated by limited mobility issues—I imagine that not being able to remember your childhood can also be a burden. Personally, I get into a right old tizzy just trying to recall where I left my car keys! Perfectly normal.” The Doctor attempted a warm smile, not entirely successfully.

  “Is this normal, Doctor?” Sarah stuck out her left arm and rolled up her sleeve at him, so that he was confronted with her bruises. And the scabbed over rings where Marcus had stubbed out his cigarettes on her. “Before the accident, he didn’t even smoke!”

  “Good grief!” Rothkiss said, for the first time properly looking at Sarah, and showing genuine emotion. “He did this to you? Have you spoken to the authorities?”

  “No!” Sarah said. “I don’t want him arrested! I just want him back. Back as he was . . . ”

  “Miss Ford—Sarah, you are endangering yourself if you remain in the home with him, if he’s capable of doing this to you.”

  “You told me there was no reason why he shouldn’t make a full recovery, Doctor! I thought that if . . . . if I could just hold on, he’d come back to me.”

  “Sarah! I never promised he’d be exactly as he was. I could never do that. I can only give a diagnosis based on past case histories. In some cases with similar injuries, simila
r degrees of brain damage, the patients achieve full mobility and life returns to more or less as before, but there are always examples where the results are less favourable.” Rothkiss stood up and moved around to Sarah’s side of the great oak desk, as Sarah pulled down her cardigan to cover the accusatory weals on her skin, the point made well enough.

  “You’ve heard of Foreign Accent Syndrome? It’s where a head injury or other trigger can cause an otherwise healthy individual to completely lose their native accent, sounding as though they have become French, or Japanese, or some other nationality. Just one tiny part of the brain, starved of oxygen just so,” he pinched thumb and forefinger together to demonstrate. “and it can cause a catastrophic change. We’re still learning all the time, but as much as we know today, it can still sometimes feel as though we’re blindly thrashing about in the dark.”

  “It’s like living with a completely different person. Sometimes, he doesn’t even look like Marcus any more. I keep thinking it’s a nightmare, and that I’ll wake up, and he’ll be Marcus again. It’s my fault. If only I hadn’t thrown those bloody flowers into the road.”

  “You can’t think like that, Sarah. If Marcus hadn’t gone to pick them up. If the driver hadn’t been using your road as a rat-run shortcut. If, if, if. You’re not to blame. Nobody is. Not for that. But these,” Rothkiss pulled back Sarah’s cardigan sleeve, bringing her injuries back into the light again. “these are down to Marcus, and nobody else.”

  “They’re not the worst of it,” Sarah said, and Rothkiss took a sharp breath.

  “He didn’t . . . ” His words trailed off into silence, not wanting to anticipate Sarah’s next words.

  “Oh, nothing physical. It’s all his mind-games. He’ll sometimes start talking like Marcus, the real Marcus, and it gives me hope. I think it’s over at last, and then I see him sneer. It starts in his eyes before it reaches his mouth. That’s when he laughs. He gives me hope, then he snatches it away, and I fall for it. Every. Single. Time. I don’t know who he is, but he isn’t Marcus.”