The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  But lifting the piece out of its bag with his white-gloved hands, Galen was intrigued. He’d never seen a design like the one on this pot before. A great comet swept across a dark sky, people fleeing on the ground. Normally Anasazi pottery portrayed abstract designs and geometric shapes. To rule out a hoax, he needed to run a thermoluminescence test to date it. Black chalky grime collected in the bottom of the pot. Galen didn’t know what it was – maybe some kind of charcoal residue.

  On the other side of the lab, his colleague Jason sighed heavily, crushed as well beneath the mountain of work piling up on them. They needed another lab tech. He turned to Galen, rotating in his seat. “Another one?”

  “Yep.”

  Jason craned his neck to see, and Galen held up the pot. “Wow. Never seen one like that before. It’s got to be another fake, right?”

  Galen stared at the pot, rotating it slowly. “It doesn’t look like anything else I’ve seen. Better get to it.”

  Jason slumped visibly in his seat. He returned to delicately drilling out a sample of an Etruscan statue.

  Resigned, Galen turned to the pot. He carefully drilled out a small core, crushed it to powder and applied it to an aluminium disc. Then he added acetone and placed it into the thermoluminescence reader. He irradiated the sample, waiting for the resulting glow chart with interest. Over time, objects absorbed radiation, and the TL test would show him how much radiation was present in the pot, and therefore how old it was. He leaned in eagerly, staring at the monitor as the result came back. Seven hundred years old, give or take seventy years. So it was Anasazi. But he’d never seen anything like it.

  Jason rotated in his desk chair when he heard Galen exhale in wonder. “It’s genuine?” he asked, voice tinged with surprise.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Amazing.”

  “I agree.”

  Jason stood up and stretched. He grabbed his coat off the back of his chair. “Well, what say we grab a bite to eat? It’s late.”

  Galen waved him off. “No, thanks. There’s still a test I’d like to run on this.” He rolled his chair over to his desk and took out the crystal phono pickup and wooden needle.

  Jason rolled his eyes. “That idea again?”

  Galen was not dissuaded. “That again.” The idea that sound waves could be recorded into a pot as it spun on a potter’s wheel fascinated him. Recently he’d learned about Richard Woodbridge, who’d reported in 1961 that he’d been able to play back sounds recorded in ancient pottery. Galen had been hooked ever since.

  “You’re not going to get anything doing that,” Jason said dismissively.

  “Maybe not. But it’s interesting.”

  Jason slung on his coat. “I’m calling it quits for tonight. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight,” Galen responded distractedly, as his colleague left. And then he went to work.

  But, as much as he despised Jason’s lack of imagination, in the end his colleague was proved mostly right. After more than an hour of messing around with the pickup and needle, he got very little. He recorded some white noise and a curious thrumming sound, perhaps the resonance of the chamber when the pot was thrown. But no voices. No laughter of ancient peoples. Still, the concept fascinated him, and he was glad he’d tried. Feeling tired, he packed up his things to go home. He locked the office, his left arm itching as it brushed against his lab coat. He scratched it absently, wondering if his dog had raced through some poison oak over the weekend and left him a little gift. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  He went home to his empty house. Sarah’s things still lay exactly where she’d left them. Her books filled the shelves. Even her teacup remained on the coaster in the living room. He hadn’t the heart to move it. She’d left more than four months ago, and his life remained in a holding pattern. She’d wanted kids more than anything, more than being with him. But he couldn’t bear the thought of bringing someone into this violent, overpopulated world. And so she’d left. Last he heard, she’d taken up with a high-school friend of hers, an old flame who’d become a Protestant minister.

  He wished her well, despite the vacant feel of the house, the emptiness of the bed, and the emptiness of his life.

  He fell asleep fully dressed on the couch, feeling overworked and grey. They really needed a third person in the lab.

  Jason was already there when Galen arrived the next day. Galen had overslept by two hours, an unthinkable mistake with the lab as backed up as it was. His friend looked up with a raised eyebrow as Galen dragged in.

  “Late night?”

  “Early night, actually. Just conked out.” He yawned, thinking about it.

  On the table sat the Anasazi pot and his paleoacoustic equipment. It would have been amazing if he’d gotten voices. He walked over to his computer and played back what he’d recorded the night before.

  “Breed.”

  Galen turned toward Jason. “What?”

  Jason looked over his shoulder distractedly. “What?”

  “You said something?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Galen frowned. “Oh.” He returned to his work, playing back the sound recording again. Just white noise and then the dull thrumming.

  “Devour.”

  “What?” he asked Jason.

  “I didn’t say anything, Galen. I’m trying to run a test.” His friend didn’t even look away from his monitor that time.

  Galen’s body ached with exhaustion. He turned bleary eyes back to his own monitor and the sound waves there. His head felt so heavy, then jerked, snapping him awake. He’d actually drifted off. “I’m going to step out for a bit,” he said to Jason.

  He knew it was a bad idea with so much work on the line, but he just wanted to sit in the dark campus tavern and rest a bit. Galen couldn’t concentrate on work when he was this tired. When were they going to get a graduate research fellow or even an undergrad lab tech to help out? It was ridiculous.

  He left the lab, heading for the campus bar. Inside students sat around the tables on comfy couches, talking excitedly about a bash the night before. Others studied quietly in corners. He took a seat at the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender recognized him, asking how he was. They made small-talk. Galen’s arm itched like crazy. The beer arrived and he sipped it slowly, trying to clear his head. Absently he scratched at his arm under the lab coat. He knew you weren’t supposed to scratch poison oak, that it only made it worse. But it itched so bad, he had to do something. He gazed around the bar sleepily, scratching and scratching. The bartender attended to a few other customers, then came back to Galen.

  “So how’s work in the – Jesus!” he exclaimed, jerking back from the bar.

  Galen raised his eyebrows in alarm, looking around. “What?”

  “Your arm!”

  He looked down at his lab coat. Blood soaked the sleeve, spilling down over his lap and the lip of the wooden bar. He jerked the sleeve up, seeing that he’d scratched clean through the skin, exposing glistening muscle. Slabs of wet flesh stuck to the inside of his white polyester coat.

  “Oh, God,” Galen whimpered, staring down at his arm. He slid off the bar stool, people stepping away from him, staring at him in horror. “Help me!” he said.

  And then he snapped awake.

  He sat on his high stool in the lab, the Anasazi pot in front of him, one hand on the Riso Minisys thermoluminescence reader. “What?” he said aloud. He took in his surroundings. Had he never stepped out to the bar? But Jason wasn’t in the lab now, and he had been before.

  The scratching. He jerked his sleeve up, revealing a perfectly healthy left forearm. Not a mark on it. He stared more closely, rubbing his fingers along his pale skin. It itched, no doubt about it, but there were no marks at all now, not even poison oak. He breathed out, running a hand over his soaked forehead. He had to get some sleep.

  As he tugged his sleeve back into place, something slithered underneath a tendon in his arm. He could feel it push aside his muscles, snaking inside him. He sho
ved his sleeve up, seeing something dark pass just beneath the skin. It vanished, digging out of sight. Then he felt it brush inside his elbow. Nerves went into spasms there, and he shrieked, grabbing his arm. Something swelled inside him there, straining outward. He could feel it moving between his bones. A sharp pain shot through his wrist as it surged into his hand. He grabbed a scalpel out of his cup of tools and, without hesitating, stabbed it downward into his arm. He struck the thing, impaling it, and for a second it slipped out through his split skin. He caught a glimpse of a black, wet, wormlike creature that quickly shrank back inside his arm. He screamed, slicing open his forearm, cutting through tendons and muscle to reveal a living thing inside him – a hooked, ebony thing with weeping boils and digestive juices devouring him from the inside out. He shredded into it with the knife, screaming in pain as he hit his own flesh. Blood seeped over his worktable, spattering the TL machine and all his samples.

  Then he snapped awake. He was at home, in his bed. He sat up, body soaked in sweat. The clock on the bedside table glowed 2.41 a.m. He snapped on the bedside lamp and stared at his forearm. It was fine. Perfectly healthy. No cuts. No parasites. A nightmare. He collapsed back on to the pillow, cursing the university for the stress they put him under. Tomorrow he was going to put his foot down.

  Galen arrived at work the next day, so exhausted it felt like he hadn’t even slept. He nodded at Jason, who gestured toward a cup of tea he’d brought him from the campus coffee shop.

  “Bless you, Jason,” Galen said, sitting down at his work station. On his monitor, the sound recording from the Anasazi pot still stood open. Galen clicked on it, wanting to listen again to the strange thrumming. Something else was there. He could hear it now.

  “Breed.”

  He knocked his tea off the table in surprise.

  The dull thrumming wasn’t just noise. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard it when he recorded it. A voice, low and raspy, could clearly be made out.

  “Devour.”

  “Holy crap!” Galen said, staring at the sound wave on his monitor. “I told you there was something to this!”

  Jason looked over his shoulder at Galen, brow furrowing. “What are you talking about?”

  Galen played it again, looking at Jason expectantly.

  “Breed. Devour.”

  His friend just raised his eyebrows, then a little smile started to appear.

  A joke.

  Galen’s heart fell. “You did this? You screwed with my sound file? Uncool. Very uncool.”

  Jason laughed. “How could I screw with it? It’s just hissing and garbled reverberation. I’m just laughing because you’re a total mess. You’re wearing your tea, you know.”

  Galen stared back at his friend. “You didn’t mess with it?”

  “No,” he responded, exasperated. “That test is a waste of time.”

  “But there’s a voice,” Galen insisted, playing it back again.

  “I don’t hear it,” Jason said.

  Galen couldn’t understand it. The voice was clear as anything. “Breed. Devour.”

  “You really don’t hear that? It’s saying, ‘Breed.’”

  Jason shook his head. “What the hell? No, I don’t hear that. And neither could you. Even if it was a voice, since when do you speak Anasazi?”

  Galen frowned. Jason had a point. He didn’t. But the words were still there. Clear as Jason speaking to him. He stood up, wiping his brow with the sleeve of his lab coat. Underneath, the skin of his left arm itched. “I’m stepping out for a bit,” he told Jason.

  Outside he sucked in fresh air and walked hurriedly across the quad. At the student centre store, he bought some hydrocortisone cream and smoothed it over his itching skin. It didn’t help. This level of exhaustion was intolerable. And now he was hearing things.

  He sat down on a bench in the sunshine, watching two students play Frisbee in the grass. The sun felt good, but his arm wouldn’t stop itching. He watched all the students hurrying into their classes. So many of them. So many people. They were everywhere. Walking, laughing, studying, talking. Galen pushed up his lab coat sleeve and stared at the itchy red flesh there. He’d scratched it so much that two slivers of skin were flaking off, and he moved to brush them away. But his fingers found them to be hard, not pliable. He stared closer. They weren’t bits of skin, but slender, translucent hooks curving out of his arm. He dug down and felt the sharp edges, unsure of what the hell it was. As he peered intently, something inside his eye twitched. He couldn’t focus. His heart hammered. His mouth went dry. Then the thing in his eye flip-flopped, like something living inside the membrane there.

  Bringing one hand to his eye, he raced into the nearest building and ducked inside the bathroom. He threw the latch and locked himself in. Under the bright fluorescent light, he stared at his eye in the mirror. Something twisted inside there, his eye streaming with tears. He opened the lid wide, studying the iris intently. Then something black, long and thin slithered under the clear membrane. It pressed against his cornea, then whipped around to the back of his eyeball. He slapped a hand to his eye, trying to force his lid open wider. The skin of his forearm erupted in unbearable itching.

  He grabbed his wrist, looking down at the hooks in his skin. With his thumb and index finger he grabbed them and pulled. Agony spread up his elbow into his shoulder.

  The sharp white hooks were attached to something under his skin, something long, slick and black. It tugged inward, resisting as he pulled, not allowing him to pull out the hook very far. Galen grabbed both hooks now, yanking as hard as he could. Two black, meaty strands of glistening tissue slithered out of the holes, attached to the hooks. Squirming and wet, they twisted in the fluorescent light like rancid, living flatworms embedded in his flesh. They writhed and whipped around with surprising strength, as muscular as tongues. He could feel them wriggling inside his skin and bile surged into his mouth. He pulled more than twelve inches out, and two more hooks appeared along the length of the thing, sinking deeply into his flesh. Dark meat squirmed under his pale skin. The new hooks sank in deeply, struggling to remain embedded. He stifled a scream. He ripped at it, tearing clean through one of the exposed invaders. Excruciating pain exploded in his skull, as if he’d cut through his own skin. He cried out, hot tears streaming down his face. The remaining parasitic flesh slipped out of his hand and slithered back inside him, causing the bile to spill out of his mouth. His right hand held the severed strand of wriggling meat. It thrashed violently, coiling around his fingers like a slimy earthworm. He threw it to the floor, where it flopped and rolled. A viscous strand of yellow liquid rained over his shirt.

  He clamped his hand over his arm, his body in shock. The severed thing slithered under the door into a bathroom stall.

  Galen ran out.

  He turned toward the campus clinic.

  They had to get this thing out.

  He raced across the quad, but the faster Galen ran, the more clouded his mind became. He couldn’t focus on where the clinic lay. He tried to force himself to speed up, but his motions grew sluggish and dreamlike. Suddenly he was ten years old again, dreaming of a monster chasing him, but unable to run, feet like cement blocks. He slowed to a walk, then to a dazed stagger.

  He had to get back to the lab. He had to become whole.

  With laboured movement, he struggled back to his office, hand clamped firmly on his arm. He paused at the lab door, rolling his sleeve down over the hooks. Inside Jason sat at his desk, back turned. “Hey,” his colleague said in greeting.

  “Hey,” Galen murmured.

  He hurried to the pot. Inside, black residue had collected around the bottom. He reached in, the hooked black parasite whipping out and rubbing itself against the residue in celebration, thrashing and twisting. Galen felt a surge of power and electricity as a blinding pain erupted in the back of his head. He could feel hooks in the base of his skull. His spine shuddered.

  He turned toward Jason. “I have to return to the crash site.”
>
  Jason pivoted in his chair, confusion on his face. “What?” He stared at his friend, dumbfounded. “You don’t look so good, Galen.”

  “I have to go back.” He turned toward the door.

  “Galen?” Jason rose, meeting Galen in the middle of the room. “Are you okay?”

  “You should come,” Galen told him.

  Jason regarded his friend with concern. “Maybe I should. Where are we going?”

  “ To the crash site.” Galen turned, Jason in tow.

  Twenty miles out, in the creosote-studded desert of New Mexico, Galen found the crash site. He remembered the out-of-control descent, the panic, the devastating, unforgiving collision with the ground and the ensuing fire. He’d been burned alive, crying out in agony. A lone Anasazi man saw the fireball and came to investigate. He’d sunk into him, hooks and flesh devouring him from the inside out, and forced the man back to his village. They’d all been so good, so fulfilling. But then he’d gone through them, and no one was left. He’d starved, stomachs twisted in outrage at the void inside him. And finally, growing sluggish, unfit, sleepy . . . dormant.

  “Where are we going?” Jason asked, worry tingeing his voice.

  “It’s here,” Galen told him.

  He got out of the car, walking to a spot on the hot desert floor. The sun dipped low behind the mountains, bringing with it the first cool breezes of night. In the distance, coyotes yapped. Galen fell down, digging with his bare hands.

  Jason frowned, staring at his friend. “I think I should call someone.”

  “We don’t need anyone.”

  As he dug, growing more and more excited, Galen sensed Jason walking up closer behind him. “Galen,” his friend pleaded. “Tell me what’s happening. I’m really worried.”

  A splintering agony exploded in Galen’s head. He stood up, reeling backward, stars erupting in his field of vision. He felt hooks in his eyes, pushing outward with tremendous force. Warmth streamed down his face as the aqueous humour burst. He squeezed his eyes shut then thrust them open, suddenly seeing in far more than the visible spectrum. He could see Jason’s heat, blossoming in a bright red glow before him. Veins, a pulsing, fluttering heart.