The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  “Yes,” said Charlie. “It was me.”

  Rafferty swallowed hard, before saying: “Pardon?”

  “I did it. I murdered my wife, then I cut off my own hand.”

  The poor boy couldn’t quite grasp this one. He thought about it a full half-minute before replying.

  “But why?”

  Charlie shrugged.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” said Rafferty. “I mean for one thing, if you did it . . . where’s the hand gone?”

  Lillian stopped the car. There was something in the road a little way in front of her, but she couldn’t quite make out what it was. She was a strict vegetarian (except for Masonic dinners with Theodore) and a dedicated animal conservationist, and she thought maybe some injured animal was lying in the road just beyond the sprawl of her headlights. A fox perhaps; she’d read they were creeping back into outlying urban areas, born scavengers. But something made her uneasy; maybe the queasy pre-dawn light, so elusive in its illumination. She wasn’t sure whether she should get out of the car or not. Theodore would have told her to drive straight on, of course, but then Theodore had left her, hadn’t he? Her fingers drummed the wheel with irritation at her own indecision. Suppose it was an injured fox: there weren’t so many in the middle of London that one could afford to pass by on the other side of the street. She had to play the Samaritan, even if she felt a Pharisee.

  Cautiously she got out of the car and, of course, after all of that, there was nothing to be seen. She walked to the front of the car, just to be certain. Her palms were wet; spasms of excitement passed through her hands like small electric shocks.

  Then the noise: the whisper of hundreds of tiny feet. She’d heard stories – absurd stories, she’d thought – of migrant ratpacks crossing the city by night, and devouring to the bone any living thing that got in their way. Imagining rats, she felt more like a Pharisee than ever, and stepped back towards the car. As her long shadow, thrown forward by the headlights, shifted, it revealed the first of the pack. It was no rat.

  A hand, a long-fingered hand, ambled into the yellowish light and pointed up at her. Its arrival was followed immediately by another of the impossible creatures, then a dozen more, and another dozen hard upon those. They were massed like crabs at the fish-mongers, glistening backs pressed close to each other, legs flicking and clicking as they gathered in ranks. Sheer multipli cation didn’t make them any more believable; but even as she rejected the sight, they began to advance upon her. She took a step back.

  She felt the side of the car at her back, turned, and reached for the door. It was ajar, thank God. The spasms in her hands were worse now, but she was still mistress of them. As her fingers sought the door she let out a little cry. A fat, black fist was squatting on the handle, its open wrist a twist of dried meat.

  Spontaneously, and atrociously, her hands began to applaud. She suddenly had no control over their behaviour; they clapped like wild things in appreciation of this coup. It was ludicrous, what she was doing, but she couldn’t help herself. “Stop it,” she told her hands, “stop it! stop it!” Abruptly they stopped, and turned to look at her. She knew they were looking at her, in their eyeless fashion, sensed too that they were weary of her unfeeling way with them. Without warning they darted for her face. Her nails, her pride and joy, found her eyes: in moments the miracle of sight was muck on her cheek. Blinded, she lost all orientation and fell backwards, but there were hands aplenty to catch her. She felt herself supported by a sea of fingers.

  As they tipped her outraged body into a ditch, her wig, which had cost Theodore so much in Vienna, came off. So, after the minimum of persuasion, did her hands.

  Dr Jeudwine came down the stairs of the George house wondering (just wondering) if maybe the grandpappy of his sacred profession, Freud, had been wrong. The paradoxical facts of human behaviour didn’t seem to fit into those neat Classical compartments he’d allotted them to; perhaps attempting to be rational about the human mind was a contradiction in terms. He stood in the drear at the bottom of the stairs, not really wanting to go back into the dining room or the kitchen, but feeling obliged to view the scenes of the crimes one more time. The empty house gave him the creeps: and being alone in it, even with a policeman standing guard on the front step, didn’t help his peace of mind. He felt guilty, felt he’d let Charlie down. Clearly he hadn’t trawled Charlie’s psyche deeply enough to bring up the real catch, the true motive behind the appalling acts that he had committed. To murder his own wife, whom he had professed to love so deeply, in their marital bed; then to cut off your own hand: it was unthinkable. Jeudwine looked at his own hands for a moment, at the tracery of tendons and purple-blue veins at his wrist. The police still favoured the intruder theory, but he had no doubt that Charlie had done the deeds – murder, mutilation and all. The only fact that appalled Jeudwine more was that he hadn’t uncovered the slightest propensity for such acts in his patient.

  He went into the dining room. Forensic had finished its work around the house; there was a light dusting of fingerprint powder on a number of the surfaces. It was a miracle, wasn’t it, the way each human hand was different?; its whorls as unique as a voice-pattern or a face. He yawned. He’d been woken by Charlie’s call in the middle of the night, and he hadn’t had any sleep since then. He’d watched Charlie bound up and taken away, watched the investigators about their business, watched a cod-white dawn raise its head over towards the river; he’d drunk coffee, moped, thought deeply about giving up his position as psychiatric consult ant before this story hit the news, drunk more coffee, thought better of resignation, and now, despairing of Freud or any other guru, was seriously contemplating a bestseller on his relationship with wife-murderer Charles George. That way, even if he lost his job, he’d have something to salvage from the whole sorry episode. And Freud?; Viennese charlatan. What did the old opium-eater have to tell anyone?

  He slumped in one of the dining-room chairs and listened to the hush that had descended on the house, as though the walls, shocked by what they’d seen, were holding their breaths. Maybe he dozed off a moment. In sleep, he heard a snapping sound, dreamt a dog, and woke up to see a cat in the kitchen, a fat black-and-white cat. Charlie had mentioned this household pet in passing: what was it called? Heartburn. That was it: so-named because of the black smudges over its eyes, which gave it a perpetually fretful expression. The cat was looking at the spillage of blood on the kitchen floor, apparently trying to find a way to skirt the pool and reach its food bowl without having to dabble its paws in the mess its master had left behind him. Jeudwine watched it fastidiously pick its way across the kitchen floor, and sniff at its empty bowl. It didn’t occur to him to feed the thing; he hated animals.

  Well, he decided, there was no purpose to be served in staying in the house any longer. He’d performed all the acts of repentance he intended; felt as guilty as he was capable of feeling. One more quick look upstairs, just in case he’d missed a clue, then he’d leave.

  He was back at the bottom of the stairs before he heard the cat squeal. Squeal? No: shriek, more like. Hearing the cry, his spine felt like a column of ice down the middle of his back: as chilled as ice, as fragile. Hurriedly, he retraced his steps through the hall into the dining room. The cat’s head was on the carpet, being rolled along by two – by two – (say it, Jeudwine) – hands.

  He looked beyond the game and into the kitchen, where a dozen more beasts were scurrying over the floor, back and forth. Some were on the top of the cabinet, sniffing around; others climbing the mock-brick wall to reach the knives left on the rack.

  “Oh, Charlie …” he said gently, chiding the absent maniac. “What have you done?”

  His eyes began to swell with tears; not for Charlie, but for the generations that would come when he, Jeudwine, was silenced. Simple-minded, trusting generations, who would put their faith in the efficacy of Freud and the Holy Writ of Reason. He felt his knees beginning to tremble, and he sank to the dining-room carpet, his eyes too full now to
see clearly the rebels that were gathering around him. Sensing something alien sitting on his lap, he looked down, and there were his own two hands. Their index fingers were just touching, tip to manicured tip. Slowly, with horrible intention in their movement, the index fingers raised their nailed heads and looked up at him. Then they turned, and began to crawl up his chest, finding finger-holds in each fold of his Italian jacket, in each button-hole. The ascent ended abruptly at his neck, and so did Jeudwine.

  Charlie’s left hand was afraid. It needed reassurance, it needed encouragement: in a word, it needed Right. After all, Right had been the Messiah of this new age, the one with a vision of a future without the body. Now the army Left had mounted needed a glimpse of that vision, or it would soon degenerate into a slaughtering rabble. If that happened defeat would swiftly follow: such was the conventional wisdom of revolutions.

  So Left had led them back home, looking for Charlie in the last place it had seen him. A vain hope, of course, to think he would have gone back there, but it was an act of desperation.

  Circumstance, however, had not deserted the insurgents. Although Charlie hadn’t been there, Dr Jeudwine had, and Jeudwine’s hands not only knew where Charlie had been taken, but the route there, and the very bed he was lying in.

  Boswell hadn’t really known why he was running, or to where. His critical faculties were on hold, his sense of geography utterly confused. But some part of him seemed to know where he was going, even if he didn’t, because he began to pick up speed once he came to the bridge, and then the jog turned into a run that took no account of his burning lungs or his thudding head. Still innocent of any intention but escape, he now realized that he had skirted the station and was running parallel with the railway line; he was simply going wherever his legs carried him, and that was the beginning and end of it.

  The train came suddenly out of the dawn. It didn’t whistle, didn’t warn. Perhaps the driver noticed him, but probably not. Even if he had, the man could not have been held responsible for subsequent events. No, it was all his own fault: the way his feet suddenly veered towards the track, and his knees buckled so that he fell across the line. Boswell’s last coherent thought, as the wheels reached him, was that the train meant nothing by this except to pass from A to B, and, in passing, neatly cut off his legs between groin and knee. Then he was under the wheels – the carriages hurtling by above him – and the train let out a whistle (so like a scream), which swept him away into the dark.

  They brought the black kid into the hospital just after six: the hospital day began early, and deep-sleeping patients were being stirred from their dreams to face another long and tedious day. Cups of grey, defeated tea were being thrust into resentful hands, temperatures were being taken, medication distributed. The boy and his terrible accident caused scarcely a ripple.

  Charlie was dreaming again. Not one of his Upper Nile dreams, courtesy of the Hollywood Hills, not Imperial Rome or the slave-ships of Phoenicia. This was something in black and white. He dreamt he was lying in his coffin. Ellen was there (his subconscious had not caught up with the facts of her death apparently), and his mother and his father. Indeed his whole life was in attendance. Somebody came (was it Jeudwine?; the consoling voice seemed familiar) to kindly screw down the lid on his coffin, and he tried to alert the mourners to the fact that he was still alive. When they didn’t hear him, panic set in, but no matter how much he shouted, the words made no impression; all he could do was lie there and let them seal him up in that terminal bedroom.

  The dream jumped a few grooves. Now he could hear the service moaning on somewhere above his head. “Man hath but a short time to live …”; he heard the creak of the ropes, and the shadow of the grave seemed to darken the dark. He was being let down into the earth, still trying his best to protest. But the air was getting stuffy in this hole; he was finding it more and more difficult to breathe, much less yell his complaints. He could just manage to haul a stale sliver of air through his aching sinuses, but his mouth seemed stuffed with something, flowers perhaps, and he couldn’t move his head to spit them out. Now he could feel the thump of clod on coffin, and Christ alive if he couldn’t hear the sound of worms at either side of him, licking their chops. His heart was pumping fit to burst: his face, he was sure, must be blue-black with the effort of trying to find breath.

  Then, miraculously, there was somebody in the coffin with him, somebody fighting to pull the constriction out of his mouth, off his face.

  “Mr George!” she was saying, this angel of mercy. He opened his eyes in the darkness. It was the nurse from that hospital he’d been in – she was in the coffin too. “Mr George!” She was panicking, this model of calm and patience; she was almost in tears as she fought to drag his hand off his face. “You’re suffocating yourself!” she shouted in his face.

  Other arms were helping with the fight now, and they were winning. It took three nurses to remove his hand, but they succeeded. Charlie began to breathe again, a glutton for air.

  “Are you all right, Mr George?”

  He opened his mouth to reassure the angel, but his voice had momentarily deserted him. He was dimly aware that his hand was still putting up a fight at the end of his arm.

  “Where’s Jeudwine?” he gasped. “Get him, please.”

  “The doctor is unavailable at the moment, but he’ll be coming to see you later on in the day.”

  “I want to see him now.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr George,” the nurse replied, her bedside manner re-established, “we’ll just give you a mild sedative, and then you can sleep awhile.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, Mr George!” she replied, firmly. “Don’t worry. You’re in good hands.”

  “I don’t want to sleep any more. They have control over you when you’re asleep, don’t you see?”

  “You’re safe here.”

  He knew better. He knew he wasn’t safe anywhere, not now. Not while he still had a hand. It was not under his control any longer, if indeed it had ever been; perhaps it was just an illusion of servitude it had created these forty-odd years, a performance to lull him into a false sense of autocracy. All this he wanted to say, but none of it would fit into his mouth. Instead he just said: “No more sleep.”

  But the nurse had procedures. The ward was already too full of patients, and with more coming in every hour (terrible scenes at the YMCA, she’d just heard: dozens of casualties: mass suicide attempted), all she could do was sedate the distressed and get on with the business of the day. “Just a mild sedative,” she said again, and the next moment she had a needle in her hand, spitting slumber.

  “Just listen a moment,” he said, trying to initiate a reasoning process with her; but she wasn’t available for debate.

  “Now don’t be such a baby,” she chided, as tears started.

  “You don’t understand,” he explained, as she prodded up the vein at the crook of his arm—

  “You can tell Dr Jeudwine everything, when he comes to see you.” The needle was in his arm, the plunger was plunging.

  “No!” he said, and pulled away. The nurse hadn’t expected such violence. The patient was up and out of bed before she could complete the plunge, the hypo still dangling from his arm.

  “Mr George,” she said sternly. “Will you please get back into bed!”

  Charlie pointed at her with his stump.

  “Don’t come near me,” he said.

  She tried to shame him. “All the other patients are behaving well,” she said, “why can’t you?” Charlie shook his head. The hypo, having worked its way out of his vein, fell to the floor, still three-quarters full. “I will not tell you again.”

  “Damn right you won’t,” said Charlie.

  He pelted away down the ward, his escape egged on by patients to the right and left of him. “Go, boy, go,” somebody yelled. The nurse gave belated chase but at the door an instant accomplice intervened, literally throwing himself in her way. Charlie was out of sight and lost in the corridor
s before she was up and after him again.

  It was an easy place to lose yourself in, he soon realized. The hospital had been built in the late nineteenth century, then added to as funds and donations allowed: a wing in 1911, another after the First World War, more wards in the fifties, and the Chaney Memorial Wing in 1973. The place was a labyrinth. They’d take an age to find him.

  The problem was, he didn’t feel so good. The stump of his left arm had begun to ache as his painkillers wore off, and he had the distinct impression that it was bleeding under the bandages. In addition, the quarter-hypo of sedative had slowed his system down. He felt slightly stupid: and he was certain that his condition must show on his face. But he was not going to allow himself to be coaxed back into that bed, back into sleep, until he’d sat down in a quiet place somewhere and thought the whole thing through.

  He found refuge in a tiny room off one of the corridors, lined with filing cabinets and piles of reports; it smelt slightly damp. He’d found his way into the Memorial Wing, though he didn’t know it. A seven-storey monolith built with a bequest from millionaire Frank Chaney, the tycoon’s own building firm had done the construction job, as the old man’s will required. They had used sub-standard materials and a defunct drainage system, which was why Chaney had died a millionaire, and the wing was crumbling from the basement up. Sliding himself into a clammy niche between two of the cabinets, well out of sight should somebody chance to come in, Charlie crouched on the floor and interrogated his right hand.

  “Well?” he demanded, in a reasonable tone. “Explain yourself.”

  It played dumb.

  “No use,” he said. “I’m on to you.”

  Still, it just sat there at the end of his arm, innocent as a babe.

  “You tried to kill me,” he accused it.

  Now the hand opened a little, without his instruction, and gave him the once-over.