The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  Vincent turned and crawled on his hands and knees out of the toilet, weak with fear and horror. He managed to scramble to his feet in the corridor and stagger to the entrance hall, just in time to see two firemen dash through the door and make for the source of the foul smoke. Vincent tried to stop them, tried to speak, tried to warn them, but he was too shocked by what had happened to make any sense and just waved his arms around ineffectually. As one fireman helped him out of the building towards a waiting ambulance, he heard a distant echoing scream come from the direction of the disabled toilet.

  As he lay on the gurney inside the ambulance, Vincent looked through the small window as first firemen, then policemen, then the army streamed into the hospital. An attendant gave him something to calm his nerves, but no one bothered to ask him what had happened. They were too busy fighting the Polyp Horde inside. He wondered if the humans would win.

  Then he felt something. Inside him. That scuttling feeling inside his bowels again. And Vincent knew that it wasn’t over.

  Almost Forever

  David Moody

  “Immortality! You’re just taking the piss out of me now. Come on, mate, you know as well as I do, that’s just science-fiction bullshit.”

  “So what exactly are you talking about?”

  “You haven’t been listening, have you? I’m not talking about living forever. I’m talking about massively improved cellular efficiency leading to substantially increased longevity throughout the body.”

  “And you think that’s achievable? Still sounds like science-fiction to me.”

  “Which part of this don’t you get? It works! I’ve already done it.”

  “Am I going out on my own tonight?”

  “What?”

  “I asked if I’m going out on my own,” Deanna repeated, sounding less than impressed. “Jesus, John, get off your backside and stop staring at the phone.”

  I still didn’t move. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Morgan had just told me. In the fifteen or so years I’d known him, he’d continually infuriated and inspired me in equal measure. There was no doubt he was brilliant and gifted, and if he said he’d made a ground-breaking discovery which would change medicine for ever, then I knew he almost certainly had. His qualifications and intellect were undoubted; everything else about him, less so. Back when we’d first met at university, I’d initially hung around with him because I’d thought I wanted to be a rebel too, but I soon discovered the real reason. Being with Morgan kept me on the straight and narrow. It turned out he was everything I didn’t want to be.

  “So what is it this time?”

  I watched Deanna as she sat in front of the mirror, fixing her makeup and hair. She looked stunning, as usual – the result of ninety minutes spent bathing, epilating, moisturizing and Christ alone knew what else. We were only going out for a meal, nothing special. All I needed was five minutes in the shower. A piss, a comb through my hair and a squirt of aftershave, shove some clothes on and I’d be done.

  “He says he’s made a miracle breakthrough,” I eventually remembered to reply.

  “Another one? As good as his last half-baked scheme?”

  I hesitated. Much as I wanted to deny it, everything he’d told me had made sense.

  “No . . . it’s different this time. I might regret saying this, but I think he might actually be on to something.”

  Deanna got up, snatched her handbag from the dressing-table, then breezed out of the room, leaving nothing behind but the smell of her perfume.

  “You’re a bloody idiot,” she said, her voice fading as she disappeared downstairs. “You’ll believe anything he tells you.”

  I followed her out and leaned over the banister. “No, Dee, seriously, I really think he’s got something.”

  She stood in the hallway, coat half on, staring back up at me.

  “So when are you going?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Morgan’s father’s house was a couple of miles out of town. Despite his dad having died several years ago, I still found it impossible to think of the large, imposing and increasingly dilapidated building as belonging to Morgan now. Being a homeowner implied some level of responsibility, and Morgan was regularly the least responsible person I knew.

  “It’s about time you arrived,” he said. as he opened the door. “You were supposed to be here hours ago.”

  “Got stuck at work,” I said, staring at him. “Complications with a patient.” I stopped and stared some more. “For fuck’s sake, Morgan, what have you done to yourself?”

  He was half dressed, with long, greasy black hair pulled back in a straggly ponytail. His painfully thin torso and arms were a mass of tattoos, so many that I couldn’t see where one ended and the next began.

  “That’s no way to greet a friend.”

  “You do realize you’re stuck with those?”

  “My dad’s dead, mate,” he said, grinning, “and I didn’t advertise for a replacement.”

  He walked further into the house. I followed at a cautious distance, picking my way through the carnage. The grubby carpet was tacky beneath the soles of my shoes.

  “Oh,” he said, stopping suddenly, “if you like the tattoos, you’ll love this.” He stuck his tongue out at me. The end of it had been split, and the two sides twisted over each other as he made shapes with his mouth. There were many things I didn’t understand about Morgan, and his recent addiction to bizarre body modifications was one of them.

  “What the hell did you have that done for, you bloody idiot? You’re going to look stupid when you get old. I can’t wait to see it, actually. Saggy old-man tits, trousers hitched up to your navel, wrinkly skin, bald head and all those tattoos. And what have you done to your earlobes? Jesus, I could get my finger through those holes. You look like one of those Amazonian tribesmen.”

  “Brazilian,” he said, correcting me, walking away again, heading down the steps to the basement.

  “Anyway,” I shouted after him, “I was forgetting. You’re going to live forever, aren’t you?”

  He stopped outside the door to his lab and looked back at me. “Not forever, just for a very long time.”

  Morgan sat opposite me in his overgrown back garden, smoking a foul-smelling herbal cigarette. On his lap was a tame grey rat which curled playfully around his fingers as he fussed it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing. I’d watched him inject it with enough poison to kill a horse less than ninety minutes earlier. For a while it had become lethargic, hissing with pain, then appearing on the point of death. But it had slowly recovered, coming around as if it was just waking from a particularly restless sleep.

  “So you’re convinced now, then?”

  I looked from the rat to Morgan and back again, desperately trying to find a hole in his theory, a way to disprove the impossibility I’d just witnessed. But I couldn’t.

  “Look,” he said, suddenly sounding marginally more serious, “there’s no bullshit, mate; this is completely on the level. This works, and it’s because I’m operating on a cellular level that the effects are so dramatic. Like I said on the phone, this isn’t immortality. I reckon it might double your projected lifespan, though.”

  I watched him for a while longer, my head swimming with a thousand different thoughts. Morgan looked like a stoner, a drop-out or a roadie for a band, as far from an influential, game-changing genius as you could get. Beneath the cocky façade, though, he was a troubled and lonely soul. We’d been through a lot together and, much as it sometimes pained me to admit, he was like a brother. An annoying, lazy, bad-mannered, but frequently quite brilliant brother.

  “So what are you going to do with this?” I asked. The rat scrambled up his open shirt and perched itself on his shoulder.

  “Nothing,” he replied. “I’m going to keep it to myself for now.”

  “But think of the people you could save . . .”

  “And imagine the problems this will cause. Fuck’s sake, John, we can’t have a world of people living past
a hundred and fifty, can we? The planet’s overstocked as it is. There’s no more room.”

  “That’s not for you to decide.”

  “Actually, it is. My discovery, my rules.”

  “But you can’t create something like this then keep it to yourself. That’s immoral.”

  “It’s all a bit dubious whichever way you look at it.”

  He leaned back in his chair and nuzzled the rat, then finished his cigarette and flicked the stub into the bushes.

  “So why did you do it?”

  “Because I could.”

  “And why did you contact me? If you’re intent on keeping this to yourself, why bother telling anyone?”

  He paused before answering. I’d already suspected what was coming next.

  “I haven’t finished yet. I need to try the procedure on a person. I’ve got a volunteer, but you know what I’m like, mate. I’ve never been one for official channels and ethics committees and all that bullshit.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “I need your help. You’re medically trained and you’re my closest friend. You’re about the only person I still trust. Who else am I going to ask?”

  “You should have seen her, John, she looked awful. She was literally having to hold her breath to get it on. And when she finally managed to do it up, there were bulges where there shouldn’t have been bulges, and the fastenings were straining. Honestly, she was twenty years too old and several stone too heavy for that dress, but it was the most expensive thing in the store so there was no way she was leaving without it . . . John, are you even listening to me?”

  “What?”

  “Bloody hell, what’s the point? Did you leave your brain back at Morgan’s today?”

  I reached across and grabbed Deanna’s hand. “Sorry, honey. Got a lot on my mind, that’s all.”

  “I remember when the only thing on your mind was me,” she grumbled. “Now I have to compete with whatever bullshit Morgan’s been filling your head with. Bloody hell, if you’re like this now, how will you be when I’m as old and ugly as Hilda Daniels?”

  “Who?”

  “You really weren’t listening, were you? Hilda Daniels. I was just telling you about her. A gross old crone with loads of cash but no taste.”

  “I don’t get you. I just—”

  “Forget it,” she said angrily, snatching her hand from mine and getting up.

  “Dee, please, I’m sorry.”

  She stood with her back to me, and I cursed my insensitivity. The longer the awkward stand-off continued, the more I knew I’d really upset her. Then, very slowly, she turned back around. I cringed, ready for the torrent of abuse I was sure she was about to let fly.

  “Bastard.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse and letting it fall from her shoulders, “what exactly do I have to do to get your full attention these days?”

  I was back at Morgan’s within the week. I knew little of his volunteer, save for the fact he had an incurable muscle-wasting disease. He’d been a friend of Morgan’s for some time, I understood. The friendship wouldn’t last much longer. Either the disease would finish him off or Morgan would.

  The two of them were in the kitchen. Morgan’s friend was in as unfortunate a condition as I’d expected. Although similar in age to us both, his body appeared unnaturally small. He was wizened and contorted, crammed awkwardly into a high-backed wheelchair. His neck was twisted to one side, his face fixed into a permanent strained grimace. One claw-like hand – the only part of his body over which he seemed to still have any real control – was stretched out, fingers wrapped around the stubby black joystick which operated the chair, holding on for dear life.

  “This is Colm,” Morgan said, putting a reassuring hand on the other man’s bony shoulder, “and without my treatment, he’s fucked.”

  “Jesus, Morgan, is this supposed to happen?”

  The emaciated man on the bed in front of me began to violently convulse. As quickly as the horrendous spasms started, they stopped. Morgan checked his vital signs, seemingly unconcerned.

  “He’s fine.”

  Phase one of the treatment had begun hours earlier with an initial dose of chemicals followed by an intense but brief bombardment of radiation. Morgan explained that the irradiated serum had to work its way around his entire body for the procedure to be successful. These convulsions were the first indication that it was almost time for phase two. I stood at the back of the cellar lab, redundant, as Morgan lined up a series of injections.

  “There’s only a small window of time to administer the second stage,” he said, watching Colm intently.

  “And if you miss that window?”

  “Then the effects of the first stage medication will kill him.”

  The room became silent, save for the metronomic bleeping of Colm’s heart-rate monitor. And then I thought it missed a beat. Then another. Then an awful, overlong, gut-wrenching gap between one beat and the next. I instinctively moved forward but Morgan blocked me. He waited a second longer, then sprang into life. He thumped the needles deep into Colm’s motionless chest, one after the other in quick succession, then stepped back.

  And he waited.

  It felt like forever, but it could only have been half a minute before the heartbeat trace returned, weak at first, but soon stronger and steadier than before.

  I stayed long enough to be sure that Colm’s condition was stable, then went home. I heard nothing more from Morgan for over a week. I’d given up on him, deciding that his experiment must have failed, when he finally called. I was out with Deanna at the time, and we immediately drove over. My uncertainty increased when I rang the doorbell and there was no reply.

  “Listen,” she said. “I can hear him in the garden.”

  We let ourselves in through the side gate and there, playing football on the lawn, was Morgan and another man. It took a while before I realized it was Colm, and a while longer for me to fully accept what I was seeing. The pitiful wreck of a man, who’d been unable to move without assistance last week, was now playing football! He remained painfully thin and occasionally unsteady, but the change in his condition was remarkable.

  “You’re bloody good, I’ll give you that,” I told Morgan that evening, as the three of us ate dinner together. Colm had skipped town a short while earlier, leaving his wheelchair and his old life behind. He’d decided to head off and start over again somewhere no one knew him – somewhere he’d just be Colm, not the man who’d made an impossible recovery from an incurable disease.

  “I always knew I was bloody good, just not that bloody good. I’ve surprised myself.”

  “I still can’t believe what you’ve done, Morg,” Deanna said. “And there’s honestly no trick or deception, just your treatments?”

  “It’s that simple,” he said, trivializing the scientific breakthrough of the century. “It’s the ultimate body mod.”

  “So what’s next?”

  Morgan didn’t answer her at first. He chewed thoughtfully.

  “I’m satisfied that Colm’s treatment was a complete success,” he said. “I want to see what effect it has on a healthy subject next.”

  “But there’s no way you’ll find anyone who would—” I began to say before he interrupted.

  “I’ve already started,” he said. “I’ve administered the first stage treatment on myself. I couldn’t say anything beforehand because I knew you’d refuse.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I asked you here to help with Colm so that you’d see the entire procedure. I need you to finish my treatment.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Never more so.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “Then that’s me screwed, isn’t it?”

  “What are you saying, Morgan?” Deanna asked. I already knew.

  “I’m sorry, mate, there was no other way. You’d never have agreed otherwise.”

  “H
e’s blackmailing me, Dee,” I explained, getting up and walking away from the table. “You’re a bastard, Morgan.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and carried on eating, completely unfazed.

  “I still don’t understand,” Deanna said.

  “If I don’t carry out the second phase of the treatment, Morgan will die.”

  What else could I do? I had no option but to help him, but I vowed that would be the extent of my involvement. I watched the life drain from his body – first unconsciousness, next the convulsions, and finally cardiac arrest – then sank the syringes into his flesh as I’d seen him do to Colm. Once his heart had restarted, Deanna and I left. That stupid, selfish fucker could look after himself, I decided, leaving his semi-conscious body on the slab in his cellar lab.

  We heard nothing further from him. Deanna mentioned Morgan frequently, but I did all I could to block him from my mind. He’d be all right, I told her, he always was.

  It was almost two weeks later, in the middle of a vicious summer storm, when he appeared at the door of our house, soaked through and clearly not giving a damn.

  “This is incredible,” he said, as I opened the door. “It works, John. It really works!”

  “Fuck off.”

  I went to slam the door but he stuck his hand out and caught it.

  “Morgan!” Deanna shouted, pushing past me and wrapping her arms around his scrawny, scruffy frame. She took his hand and led him into the house. “I thought you’d killed yourself, you stupid bastard.”

  “Far from it. Honestly, Dee, this is incredible. I mean, I’m not Superman or anything like that, but I feel—”

  “What?”

  “Different. I can’t explain. I’ve never experienced anything like this before.”

  “Me neither,” I said, taking my wife’s hand from his and going through to the living room. Morgan sat down opposite us, soaking the sofa and dripping on to the rug.