The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  “Galen!” Jason screamed. Galen had grown much taller now, looking down on his friend. He fell upon him, his new, shining flat head wrapping around his colleague’s face. Hooks enveloped the sweet flesh of Jason’s head, and Galen vomited up some digestive juices. He drank deeply, lapping at Jason’s liquefied features.

  Then Jason pushed against him, and Galen felt a sharp stab in his side before stumbling backward. Looking down, Galen saw his torso, no longer pale and covered with hair, but blue black and moist, the flat, hooked body of a worm. Sticking out of his middle was a folding knife. He grabbed it with hooked fingers, flinging it out into the growing darkness. The wound closed instantly, completely healed.

  Jason grabbed his ruined head, backing away. His one remaining eye judged the distance to Galen’s car. But he didn’t have the key.

  Galen turned back to the earth, digging intently now. And then he hit it. Metal. He’d found it. He dug faster, dirt flying around him. He found the panel, the door, and pressed the ingress button. The ship hissed open, bringing with it the long-missed acrid scent of his homeworld. And there they were, all of them. Waiting in their stasis pods. There hadn’t been enough people before. Not even enough to sustain him. But now there were thousands. Millions.

  He flipped on the power button to the ship, the generator thrumming to life. Jason’s feet thrashed in the dirt as he tried to run. Galen reached out, his arm now a rubbery mass of hooks. He speared Jason in the leg, pinning him to the dusty ground. He gazed at the man, at the bright bloom of life in his chest. Galen’s brethren would find warmth there, food, a place to breed. Stasis pods hissed, releasing their cargo. A thousand wriggling bodies oozed into the dust toward Jason.

  Breed. Devour.

  Dog Days

  Graham Masterton

  Okay, Jack was much better-looking than me, but I was funnier than he was, and women love to laugh. That was how I picked up a girl as stunning as Kylie, when Jack was still dating Melanie Wolpert.

  Melanie Wolpert might have been a judge’s daughter and she might have screamed like Maria Callas whenever she and Jack did the wild thing together, but she had masses of wiry black curls and millions of moles and she thought that The Matrix was an art movie. Apart from that, she was a Scientologist and she smelled of vanilla pods.

  I met Kylie in the commissary at Cedars-Sinai. We were standing in line with our brown melamine trays, and both of us reached for the last Cobb salad at the same time.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “You have it. Please. I shouldn’t eat Cobbs anyhow, I’m allergic.”

  She peered into the salad-bowl. “I don’t even know what a Cobb is.”

  “You’re having a Cobb salad for lunch and you don’t even know what a Cobb is?”

  She shook her head. “I’m Australian. I’ve only been here for two weeks.”

  Yowza, yowza, yowza, she was amazing. She was tall, nearly as tall as me, with very short blonde hair, sun-bleached and feathery. She had strong cheekbones and a strong jaw and wide brown eyes the colour of Hershey’s chocolate. Her lips were full and cushiony, and when she smiled her teeth were dazzling, so that you wanted to lick them with the tip of your tongue, just to feel how clean they were.

  She had an amazing figure, too – beachball-breasted, with wide surfer’s shoulders, and long, long legs, and those wedge-heeled Greek sandals that tie up with all those complicated strings. I realized almost instantaneously that I was in love.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ll have the Five Bean Surprise.”

  “Okay . . .” she said. “What’s the surprise?”

  “Well, it’s not really a surprise, if you eat that many beans.”

  We sat down together in the far corner of the commissary, and I pointed out John G. Dyrbus MD, the proctologist, and Randolph Feinstein MD, who specialized in aggressive kidney tumors, and Jacob Halperin MD, who could take out your prostate gland while he was playing Nobody Loves You When You’re Down And Out on the harmonica.

  “I’m a physiotherapist, myself,” said Kylie. “Children, mostly, with muscular disorders.”

  “Kylie, that’s an interesting name.”

  “It’s Aboriginal. It means ‘boomerang’.”

  “You know something?” I told her. “I don’t believe in boomerangs. All that ever happens is, one Aborigine throws a stick, and it hits this other Aborigine right on the bean, so this other Aborigine gets really pissed and throws it back. So the first Aborigine thinks, That’s amazing . . . I throw this stick and five minutes later it comes flying back.”

  Kylie laughed. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  And that was how we started going out together. I took her to the Sidewalk Café at Venice Beach and bought her a Georgia O’Keeffe omelette (avocado, bacon, mushrooms and cheese). I took her to Disneyland, and she adored it. She met Minnie, for Christ’s sake, and I still have the picture, although it’s wrinkled with tears. I took her bopping at the Vanguard and I bought her five kinds of foie gras at Spago. We drove up to see my cousin Sibyl in San Luis Obispo in my ’75 Toronado, with the warm wind fluffing our hair, and Sibyl served us chargrilled tuna and showed Kylie how to throw a terracotta pot.

  Idyllic days. Especially when we went back to my apartment on Franklin Avenue, cramped and messy as it was, and fell into my bed together, slow-motion, with a full moon shining through the open window, and Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto tinkling in the background, and Juanita next door clattering saucepans in the sink like a Tijuana percussion band.

  For a beautiful girl, Kylie was a strangely clumsy and inexperienced lover, but what she lacked in experience she made up for in strength and energy and appetite. I’ll tell you the truth: there were some nights when I almost wished that she’d leave me alone, and give me a couple of hours to get some sleep. Just as my eyelids were dropping, her hand would come crawling across my thigh and start tugging at me, like I was some kind of bellrope, and much as I liked it, I used to wake up in the morning feeling as if I had been expertly beaten up.

  I should have counted my blessings. We had been together only eight and a half weeks when the inevitable happened and we ran into Jack.

  We were strolling along the beach eating ice-cream cones when I saw him in the near-distance coming toward us, with that monstrous mutt of his bounding all around him. Even if you hated his guts, which I didn’t, you had to admit that he was a great-looking guy. Tall, with dark, brushed-back hair, a straight Elvis Presley nose, and intensely blue eyes. He was wearing a black linen shirt, unbuttoned to reveal his gym-toned torso, and knee-length khaki pants.

  While he was still out of earshot, I turned to Kylie and said, “Why don’t we go for a latte? There’s a great little coffee-house right on the boardwalk here.”

  “Oh, do we have to?” she pleaded. “I just love the ocean so much.”

  “I know. The ocean’s great, isn’t it? So big, so wet. But I’m really jonesing for a latte and the ocean will still be here when we get back.”

  “How can you feel like a coffee when you’re eating an icecream cone?”

  “It’s the contrast. Cold, hot – hot, cold. I like to surprise my mouth, that’s all. I believe in surprising at least one of my organs every single day. Yesterday I surprised my nose.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I tried to walk through the balcony door without opening it. But – come on, how about that latte?”

  I glanced quickly toward Jack, trying not to make it obvious that I was looking in his direction. I was growing a little panicky now. Apart from Brad Pitt, Jack was the only person in the world I didn’t want Kylie to meet.

  “Well . . .” she said reluctantly “. . . if you’re really dying for one . . .”

  But then Jack’s dog ran into the surf, barking at a trio of seagulls, and Kylie turned and saw it, and said, “Look! Look at that gorgeous Great Dane! My parents used to have one just like it! Oh, it’s so cute, don’t you think?”

  “That dog is bigger than I am. How c
an you call it cute?”

  “Oh, it just is. Great Danes are so lovable. They’re intelligent, they’re obedient, and they’re so noble. I adore them.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I could really use that latte.”

  But I don’t think that Kylie was even listening to me. She clapped her hands and called out, “Here, girl! Here, girl!” and the stupid Great Dane came galloping across the beach toward her, wagging its stupid tail, and then of course Jack recognized me and shouted out, “Bob!” and ze game was up.

  “Bob! How’s it going?”

  “You two know each other?” asked Kylie, kneeling down in the sand and tugging at the Great Dane’s ears with as much enthusiasm as she tugged at my bellrope. “Oh, you’re a beautiful, beautiful girl, aren’t you? Oh, yes, you are! Oh, yes, you are!” God, it was enough to make me bring up my Cap’n Crunch.

  “Sure we know each other,” said Jack, hunkering down beside Kylie and patting the Great Dane’s flanks. His grin was ridiculously dazzling and his knees were mahogany brown and he even had perfect toenails.

  “Jack and I were at med school together,” I explained.

  “We were the Two Musketeers,” said Jack. I was beginning to wish that he would stop grinning like that. “Both for one and one for both, that’s what Bob always used to say.”

  “But – we went our separate ways,” I told her. “I chose oncology because I wanted to alleviate human suffering and Jack chose cosmetic surgery because he wanted to elevate women’s breasts.”

  “You’re a cosmetic surgeon?” Kylie asked him, and I could tell by the way she tilted her head on one side that Jack had half won her over already. A dishy cosmetic surgeon with a beautiful dog and mahogany knees. What did it matter if he didn’t know any one-liners?

  “How’s Melanie?” I asked him. “Still as voluptuous as ever?” I gave him a sassy wiggle and winked. Come on – I was fighting for my very existence here.

  “Oh, Melanie and I broke up months ago. She met a divorce lawyer. A very rich divorce lawyer.”

  “Sorry to hear it.” Jesus – Kylie was even kissing that goddamned dog. “You – ah – who are you dating now?”

  “Nobody, right now. It’s just me and Sheba, all on our ownsome.”

  Kylie stood up. “Listen,” she said, “Bob and I were just going for a latte. Why don’t you and Sheba join us?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to go for a latte,” I told her. “I thought you wanted to stay on the beach.”

  Kylie didn’t take her eyes off Jack. “No . . . I think I could fancy a latte. And maybe one of those cinnamon doughnuts.”

  The three of them walked up the beach ahead of me – Jack, Kylie and Sheba – and all I could do was trail along behind them, feeling pale and badly dressed and excluded. Thank you, God, I said, looking up to the sky – Ye who giveth with one hand and snatcheth away with the other. Kylie turned around and smiled at me and just as she did so a seagull pooped on my shoulder.

  The café was called Better Latte Than Never, which I thought was bitterly appropriate. I sat at the table with Jack and Kylie and tried to be witty but I knew that it was no use. They couldn’t take their eyes off each other, and when I came out of the bathroom after rinsing the seagull splatter from my shirt, I saw that Jack’s hand was resting on top of hers, as naturally as if they had been friends all their lives.

  “What a great guy,” said Kylie, as we drove back along Sunset. “He’s so interesting. You know, not like most of the men you meet.”

  “He’s multi-faceted, I’ll give you that. Did he tell you that he knits?”

  “No, he didn’t! Maybe he could knit me a sweater!”

  “I don’t think so. He only knits blanket squares. They’re not very square, either. I think it’s some perceptual weakness he inherited from his mother. Did he tell you that his mother played the glockenspiel? She only knew one tune but it could reduce strong men to tears.”

  “You’re jealous,” said Kylie. Her eyes were hidden behind large Chanel sunglasses – the same large Chanel sunglasses that I had bought for her on Rodeo Drive.

  “Jealous? What are you talking about?”

  “I can tell when you’re jealous because you belittle people. You always make it sound like a joke but it’s not.”

  “Hey, Jack and I go way back.”

  “And you’re jealous of him, aren’t you? I’ll bet you always have been.”

  “Me? I’m an oncologist. You think I’m jealous of some tit doctor? Besides, his breath smells of cheese. That was one thing I always noticed about him, but I never liked to tell him. His girlfriends always used to call him Monterey Jack, but he never figured out why.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  I looked at her acutely, but all I could see was two of my own reflection in her sunglasses, in my crumpled lime-green T-shirt with the damp patch on the shoulder.

  “Do I have anything to be jealous of, do you think?” I asked her.

  At that moment I almost rear-ended a dry-cleaning van and her answer was blotted out by the screaming of tires, so I never heard it.

  Of course, I knew what it was. I took her out to 25 Degrees on Thursday evening for hamburgers. We sat in one of the black leather-upholstered booths, which I thought would be romantic. It’s incredible what a reasonably supple person can get up to, in a black leather-upholstered booth. But she was unusually preoccupied, and she kept fiddling with her fork, around and around, and when our orders eventually arrived, she said, “I’ve been thinking, Bob.”

  “You’ve been thinking that you should have ordered the three-cheese sandwich instead of the turkey burger?”

  “No, not that.”

  “Let me see. You’ve been thinking that you hate this loose-weave sport coat I’m wearing? No, I don’t believe that’s it. Aha! I know what it is. You’ve been thinking that you and I should stop seeing each other because Jack has called you and asked you out on a date. A threesome. Him and you and the houndess from Hell.”

  She looked at me sideways and there was genuine remorse in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry because Jack has called you and asked you out on a date, or you’re sorry you waited until our food arrived before you told me about it? Because I can’t possibly eat a twelve-ounce cheeseburger while my throat is all choked up.”

  “I’m just sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Nobody ever does, Kylie. Nobody ever does. But I shall have my revenge. Jack may be good-looking and he may be able to charm the turkey-buzzards out of the trees, but you will very soon discover that Jack suffers from premature ejaculation, and because of that, your lovemaking will last for no more than nanoseconds. Don’t ever sneeze when Jack’s making love to you, because you might miss it.”

  Kylie looked away. “As a matter of fact, Bob, he’s very good. He’s tender, and he’s creative, and he can keep it up for hours.”

  I sat up very straight with my chin tilted upward and I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what upset me the most: the fact that she had already gone to bed with him, and that he was obviously better in bed than I was, or the Australian way she said “tinder” instead of “tender”.

  Eventually I shuffled my butt sideways out of the booth, and stood up. The waiter came up to me and said, “Something wrong, sir?”

  “Yes. This isn’t what I wanted, none of it.”

  He frowned, and flipped back his notepad. “I think you will find that you have everything you asked for, sir.”

  I shook my head. It isn’t easy to argue when you’re trying to stop yourself crying.

  “You’re going, sir? Who’s going to pay?”

  “The lady will pay,” I told him. “She – ah—”

  “Bob,” said Kylie. “Don’t let’s end it like this. Please.”

  “How else do you want to end it? You want violins? You let me take you out for hamburgers and you’d already gone to bed with him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Good,”
I told her. “Have a nice life. Jack and you and that bitch of his. Hope he can tell the difference between you.”

  I shouldn’t have said that, but I had fallen for Kylie in a way that I had never fallen for any girl before. It wasn’t only her fabulous looks, and the way that other men swivelled around and stared at her whenever we walked past together, although of course that was part of it. It was her utter simplicity, the way she trusted the world to take care of her, and her genuine surprise when it didn’t. It was the way she propped herself up on one elbow when we were lying in bed, and stroked my hair, as if she couldn’t believe I was real.

  She was magical, in every sense of the word. And that evening, after she had told me that she and I were through, all I could do was creep back to my apartment like a wounded animal and lie with my face buried in her pillow, smelling her perfume.

  The phone rang. After a long while, I heaved myself off the bed and answered it.

  “Bob? It’s Jack.”

  “Jack? Not my best friend Jack? Not my old med-school buddy? Both for one and one for both?”

  “Bob . . . I don’t know what to say to you.”

  “I have a good idea. You could say, ‘Bob, I’m going to go to the top story of Century Park East and I’m going to jump off.’”

  “Please, Bob. Don’t joke.”

  “Who the fuck is joking? You think I’m joking? I put a curse on you, Jack! I swear to God! You and your fucking Great Dane! I curse you!”

  There was a lengthy pause. Eventually Jack said, “Can’t say I blame you, buddy. Stay well. Don’t be a stranger for ever.”

  I hung up. There was so much I could have said, but most of it would have been obscene, and what was the point?

  Six weeks and three days later my curse worked.