The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  Vincent put on the “Dignity Shorts” and felt anything but dignified. Rather than a handy opening in the front for any necessary trips to the toilet, there was a slit up the back, which provided easy access for Dr Stanson and his long black tube of joy.

  Ewomi returned with a couple of forms and fired some questions at Vincent. They were all the usual suspects: did he have the human variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? (Like he would know?) Did he have any dental work that might get knocked out by a careless elbow of the medical staff? What medicine was he on? Did he still have his tonsils, etc., etc., etc. (Why ask the same questions every year? Couldn’t they just file his answers away in a computer?)

  Finally Ewomi left him in peace. Vincent lay down on the bed and placed his hand on his lower abdomen. It felt a bit weird down there, although it was hard to judge, considering what he’d put it through in the last couple of days. And if he was an alcoholic, maybe his colon was too – desperate for an invigorating Margarita or a nice glass of crisp and fragrant Chablis.

  Then there was movement. Down there. As if a ferret was scuttling through the winding passages of his bowels. Vincent nearly levitated off the bed in alarm, but after the initial shock, he put it down to some kind of fart-fuelled spasm.

  Nestling in Vincent’s colon – an area the length of twenty metres and, if flattened out, the surface of a football field – it was building up to the crisis point. It didn’t want to hurt the Host, so its first tenuous attempts at freedom were cautious. It gathered its intelligence from the hundred million neurons embedded in the “second brain”, or the enteric nervous system that controlled the gastrointestinal system of Vincent’s body. Although only containing one thousandth of the neurons residing in the human brain, the “second brain” was capable of operating independently of both the brain and the spinal cord. But whatever had evolved in Vincent’s gut was beyond the wildest dreams of the most unconventional of neurogastroenterologists.

  Colleen, the head endoscopy nurse – a cheerful soul with an Irish lilt and a charming manner – pushed back the curtains so she could roll Vincent’s bed into Endoscopy Room 4. He lay back and stared up at the ceiling as it whisked past.

  Dr Stanson – movie-star handsome and prosperous-looking – was already in the examination room and a couple of other nurses bustled around, getting the equipment ready. The nurses connected Vincent to the blood-pressure, heart-rate and blood-oxygen-level monitors, then inserted a nasal cannula: a thin tube with two small nozzles that protruded into Vincent’s nostrils and delivered supplemental oxygen.

  Colleen asked Vincent to roll over on to his left side, with his right arm lying down his body, the palm of his hand facing upwards, so she could administer his procedural medication intravenously into a handy vein in his wrist: a relaxing cocktail of buscopan (an anti-spasmodic, 20 mg), midazolam (a sedative, 2 mg) and pethidine (a.k.a. Demerol, a painkiller, 25 mg).

  As Colleen injected the sedatives, Vincent felt their effects swirl through his bloodstream, instantly melting away his anxiety. He didn’t give a damn any more and it was wonderful. He wished he could have the stuff on a permanent drip-feed twenty-four/seven. The one time he had opted out of sedation – because he’d had an important presentation in the afternoon and needed his wits about him – was a pretty appalling experience. It wasn’t necessarily the discomfort that remained burned into his memory, but the abject humiliation.

  Vincent was facing a colour monitor that was connected by a lead to the endoscope camera, so he could watch the whole thing on the screen if he wanted to. It felt like he was in a cheap version of Fantastic Voyage, colonically journeying through his own body, loosy-goosy with the drugs, daydreaming about Raquel Welch in that tight-fitting white bodysuit of hers – floating around in a tiny ship in his circulatory system.

  Vincent was grateful he didn’t have to see the freak show behind him, as his doctor skillfully threaded the Pentax Zoom Colon 18 Endoscope through his anus, up his rectum, then his colon: sigmoid, then descending, then the transverse and ascending colon, then the cecum, and ultimately ending up at the last junction in town, the terminal ileum.

  The only pain involved was when the doctor gusted some air through the tube to distend his colon. From a camera’s eye view, his colon looked as corrugated as an accordion, or his ex-wife’s clothes dryer extractor tube. Hard to spot incipient fleshy growths – or polyps, as they were known – among the ruffled terrain of the colon that way, so the endoscope was equipped with air tubes, along with a camera and a lighting device. It was also able to squirt blue dye up there, a most disconcerting sight, but it helped the doctor spot any polyps, which, if left to themselves, might go over to the dark side and become cancerous in the future.

  Vincent closed his eyes and tried to drift away with the drugs, but was alerted by Dr Stanson saying something about a polyp. He opened his eyes and was a bit shocked to see a prominent growth attached to the side of his colon displayed on the monitor. How do the damn things grow so fast? Vincent wondered. He watched as Dr Stanson attempted to perform a polypectomy by lassoing the polyp with the cold snare electric wire device that was also contained within the endoscope. Dr Stanson looped the wire over the polyp and tightened it. He gave a little tug, which normally would slice the polyp away from the wall of the colon, at the same time cauterizing the wound, but the polyp stubbornly held on for dear life.

  Then something happened. The polyp was loose, but when Dr Stanson tried to suck the fleshy growth into the endoscope for retrieval and later biopsy, it refused to go in. It seemed to expand, right there, on its own.

  Vincent was watching the show on the monitor with a drugged fascination. He heard the puzzled responses from the staff behind him as they tried to figure out what to do. Then a pain shot through Vincent’s bowels like a shard of broken glass. He cried out and tried to move. One of the nurses placed her arms over him to hold him down. “Easy, Vincent, easy,” Dr Stanson soothed. “It’s just the air I’ve pumped in. Let it out if you need to.”

  “It’s not the air!” Vincent shrieked, writhing on the table. Colleen hurriedly prepared more Demerol and shot it into Vincent’s vein.

  Then he heard one of the nurses scream. The pain in his gut became unbearable and he joined her. Colleen shouted, “Doctor, look at that!”

  Dr Stanson gave a startled yell, and that was when it got really weird.

  Vincent felt something deep inside him rise up (the only way he could describe the sensation) and move down . . . pushing the endoscope in front of it.

  Dr Stanson, meanwhile, was trying to understand why the endoscope was coming out of his patient’s anus at high speed, nearly burning his rubber-glove-encased hands, without any help from the esteemed doctor himself. Finally, the endoscope came shooting out of Vincent’s rectum like a missile, whacking one of the nurses so hard on the forehead that she dropped to the floor as if she’d been poleaxed.

  Then something else travelled down and blasted out of Vincent’s ass, ricocheting around the room like a bullet, entering the bodies of the unfortunate hospital staff at abdominal level – causing everyone in the room, except Vincent, to come to a nasty and unexpectedly sudden demise.

  The ripping pain and chaos of the scene was all too much for him, and he blacked out.

  When Vincent finally came to and opened his eyes, the machines around him were still beeping contently. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. For a moment, he thought he must have had some midazolam-induced hallucination, but when he looked over his shoulder, he was horrified to see that the examination room was littered with blood and body parts. He sat up in bed and took in the eviscerated bodies of his doctor, the endoscopy nurse and the other nurses on the floor. Vincent turned and dry-heaved over the other side of the bed.

  He was still in pain, but it didn’t feel life threatening. Whatever had done this didn’t seem interested in him, but what had issued forth from his bowels to cause such mayhem?

  Vincent carefully got off the ho
spital bed on the monitor side, not wanting to tread in the blood and guts slooshed all over the floor. He went over to the door of the examination room – but froze. Suddenly, he didn’t want to open it, worried about what else he would find.

  Reluctantly, he pushed the door open and peeked out. It was bad. Blood everywhere, bodies everywhere. Ewomi was lying on the floor near the nurses’ station and he spotted her chest rising and falling fitfully. He walked over as quickly as he could and knelt next to her. Her uniform was soaked with blood and bits of mangled colon were poking out from her lower abdomen.

  Vincent placed his hand on her forehead. It was feverishly hot. Her eyes popped open, she looked at him and screamed, “What did you do?”

  He snatched his hand away and screamed back: “I didn’t do anything!” Ewomi convulsed, choked, threw up blood and died right there in front of him.

  Vincent stood up slowly. Everyone in the recovery room was dead. He walked over to the small cupboard where he’d placed his clothes, and quickly dressed. He didn’t know what was going on, but one thing was for certain: hanging around in the Endoscopy Department of St Stephen’s Hospital in his “Dignity Shorts” was not going to be good for his health.

  Vincent moved through the eerily empty corridors of the normally bustling hospital. Blood was everywhere, bodies were everywhere, with entrails streaming out of their abdominal cavities. No one was left alive. His midazolam-fogged brain was trying to make sense of it all. Something very fucked up had just occurred. Was some rampaging polyp going nuts in the hospital? How the hell could something like this happen, especially to someone as unremarkable as him?

  Vincent made his way down to the entrance hall. It was silent, with just the ringing of unanswered phones echoing throughout the building.

  He stopped just as he was about to go through the revolving doors to the street, and turned around. The white walls of the hall were drenched in arterial spray, as if Jackson Pollock had been possessed by an alien and then gone mad.

  Why was he still alive? Whatever had carried out this massacre could so easily have obliterated him, too.

  Then he heard it. A sound. A sound like nothing he’d ever heard before, except maybe in some cheesy sci-fi film when he was a kid and his big brother had made him watch the black-and-white versions of The Thing From Outer Space or The Day The Earth Stood Still.

  Vincent could have turned back to the revolving doors and gotten the hell out of Dodge, but he chose not to. He could have called the police, but would they have believed him? (“I think a polyp just came out of my butt and slaughtered a bunch of people.”) He didn’t think so. This thing had come from him, so it was his problem to sort out. Maybe he had some kind of immunity – it could have killed him, but had chosen not to. Hold on a minute, a polyp making a choice? His screaming brain wanted to reject the thought as soon as it emerged. But something had butchered all these people and he knew in his gut – no pun intended – that it had come from inside him.

  Vincent followed the sound as best he could. It was a bit difficult to pinpoint its source, but as he walked down the corridor it grew louder: a sucking, slurping, slushing sound, accompanied by an almost Theremin-like whistling.

  Vincent was walking past the disabled toilet when he realized the noise was coming from inside. He had never faced anything particularly dangerous in his life before. He’d always made a point of avoiding any conflict or confrontation, so he was literally quaking with fear. There was no question in his mind that he had to go in there and face it, whatever it was. However, Vincent was fervently hoping that his immunity theory wouldn’t prove to be unjustified.

  With his heart thumping like a Keith Moon drum solo, Vincent cautiously opened the door to the disabled toilet. The squelching sounds quieted down, but did not cease. He was relieved to see that the lights were still on. He slipped inside and spotted the polyp in the corner. It had grown terrifyingly fast and was at least seven feet tall, slouching on the toilet like a disaffected teenager, human intestines piled up next to it. No features to speak of, just a huge, leech-like mouth containing a tripartite-jaw filled with hundreds of tiny, sharp teeth that were busy masticating its unfortunate victims’ colons. Vincent noticed some black spots just above the mouth that might be eyes. At the same time, the polyp noticed Vincent and swallowed the remains of its dinner.

  And smiled at him . . .

  Vincent felt like throwing up, but all he could do was gag. The smell of the thing was revolting – a vile combination of excrement and blood – and he wondered how long he could stay on his feet without fainting.

  Then it spoke . . .

  “Hi, Dad, how’s it hanging?” the polyp wheezed. Its voice had a strange, low-pitched, guttural, echoing resonance, as if the polyp had just had a laryngectomy and was using Esophageal Speech to burp out its words, like the now sadly deceased veteran actor, Jack Hawkins, in his later years.

  Vincent’s balls shrank to the size of peanuts and a chill iced his extremities.

  “I . . . I’m not your father. You’re a . . . m-monster. W-why have you murdered all these people?” Vincent stuttered.

  “Hey, a boy’s gotta eat,” the polyp burped cheerfully.

  “How did this happen? What the hell are you?”

  The polyp reared back in what looked like a very human kind of annoyance: “Man, you want ME to explain to YOU what’s going on? Geez, you must be insane in the membrane. I AM, that’s what you got to get your head around. Forget about explanations. I exist and that’s all that you have to worry about right now.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Hey, you’re talking about the stuff I love,” the polyp burbled. “Shit and blood and all these millions of neurons I’m ingesting right now. Making me smarter, making me high on serotonin, the so-called happiness hormone. Did you know that more than ninety percent of the body’s serotonin lies in the gut? I am eating. I am growing. I am smarter than you. I am happier than you. I am the ‘second brain’ of your nightmares, Daddy dearest.”

  Vincent didn’t know what to do. It was rather alarming to be talking to an enormous fleshy bump, especially when it kept calling him “Dad”. He wanted to kill it, but he was being distracted by its personality. After all, no one, or no thing, had ever called him “Dad” before. And this polyp was a part of him. What would happen if the polyp died? Would Vincent die, too? What if it wanted to get back inside him, its former Host? It was too awful to contemplate.

  Vincent pushed these thoughts from his mind. He didn’t care what happened to him any more. This monster – created in his gut somehow – had massacred dozens of people, so his course was clear. He had to destroy it.

  Vincent turned and ran out of the toilet, then down the corridor to the entrance hall. Being forced to watch all those old sci-fi movies back in his childhood, he knew that the most effective weapon against unknown creatures was fire. Of course, now that new regulations prevented any smoking in a public building, finding the required ingredients to burn the polyp to a crisp was challenging. By the time he’d found a fire axe, wrapped strips of cotton wound dressings around it and drenched it with rubbing alcohol, precious minutes had flown past. Finding a match or a lighter was the most difficult task, requiring him to rummage through the handbags and pockets of the corpses littering the entrance hall. Then he remembered that hospital staff were the worst offenders as far as smoking was concerned, so he concentrated his search on the bodies behind the information desk and was rewarded with a vintage gold Dunhill lighter.

  Vincent dashed back down the corridor to the disabled toilet, armed with his makeshift torch. The slurping and munching noises had resumed, so the polyp was still in residence. Vincent squeezed through the doorway, just managing to hide the axe behind his back. The polyp stopped chewing and swallowed.

  “You walked out in the middle of our conversation, Dad. That’s really rude.”

  “Stop calling me Dad, you, you . . . THING.” Vincent felt the insult was pretty limp, but he was simply lost for
words when confronting the creature.

  “Hey, Polyp is the name, Daddy-O. I came from YOU. So get over it.”

  The polyp leaned over and grabbed some more intestines with its mouth, snorfling up the disembodied colons like spaghetti bolognese. While its attention was momentarily distracted, Vincent took the opportunity to light the rags on his homemade torch. The polyp, instantly alerted, spat out its food and growled. Vincent doused the creature with alcohol, threw the torch and then ran like hell.

  He stopped twenty feet down the corridor and turned around. The sound emerging from the toilet was horrendous: a crackling, hissing, squealing, throbbing racket, accompanied by wisps of greasy, miasmic smoke curling from underneath the door. Then, totally unexpected, an explosion . . . blowing the door out so violently that it hit the wall opposite. Fire alarms began to wail and the sprinkler system kicked into action.

  Vincent cautiously walked back to the toilet, wondering what he was going to find. Covering his mouth and nose with his shirt tail so he wouldn’t have to breathe in the truly repellent smell of fried polyp, he peered around the doorway.

  The polyp was still on the toilet, but the top half of it was gone, the other half sinking slowly into the bowl – scorched and blackened, heat blisters growing on the surface of the creature, steam caused by the water from the sprinklers gently rose up like a mist from a harbour town. But it was what was inside it that made Vincent fall to his knees, overwhelmed by the horror of it all.

  He’d made a mistake. A big mistake. He could see that now. But how could he have anticipated that the diabolical thing would explode?

  From inside of the polyp, hundreds of new fleshy growths were squirming and moving, tiny at first, but as they devoured their creator, they grew fast. Some of the more energetic ones were already busily crawling down their progenitor, on to the floor, slithering determinedly towards Vincent like inchworms hyped up on crack cocaine.