The Coliseum

by Patrick Lestewka

  Harlan recognizes something in the rudiments of the man’s flayed-open features. He was one of the men he’d flown on the plane with, ridden the bus with, entered The Coliseum with. A regular, ordinary guy with a regular name, Hal or Sal or maybe Al...

  The wall-holes are alive with hectic birth.

  “Get…out,” Lazarus says.

  Harlan stares at the space where Al’s legs once hung. Scattered rags of flesh, which had previously been Al’s attached limbs, have been strewn in a wide radius, anklebones and kneecaps and assorted knobs of cartilage forming a jumble of useless knickknack beneath what’s left of his body. Al’s splintered thigh bones protrude just below his hips like a pair of candles from a toddler’s birthday cake, weeping curdled marrow. The man’s nipples have been sliced off, with scissors or another sharp instrument, to reveal the corded sinew of his chest. A hole has been cut around his bellybutton, the flesh pulled away, and a six-inch loop of bowel drawn through the hole. Harlan watches, sickened, as weak contractions push half-digested food, or perhaps excrement, through Albert’s milky-white intestinal tract.

  “Who…what…did this to you?”

  Albert’s remaining eyelid flutters. He stares at Harlan—stares past him, at the network of holes that speck the walls. “Not…not trying…to escape,” he breathes. “Make…making…homes.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Homes!” he screams, his mind unhinged like a sprung trap door. “Homes! Homes!”

  “Whose hom—?”

  “You should have gone.”

  Lazarus has risen. His body, swaddled in a blue plastic tarp, utterly dwarfs Harlan’s. His skin is translucent and spiderweb veins track the dome of his bald skull. Harlan wraps both hands around his weapon, which once felt so menacing and now feels as impotent as a toothpick. His heart is on the verge of bursting from his chest.

  Get out get out get the hell OUT—

  “Do you know how it feels,” Lazarus says, “to bring something into this world? How it feels to create life from life?”

  The wall-holes are now livid; questing limbs dart from each and every opening. Some are brachial, segmented, arachnid. Others are as corpulent and greasy as maggots. Still others are shingled with coruscating scales, their tapered appendages tipped with brittle black claws.

  What the fuck are those things?

  “We all want to think it is possible to control what we create, don’t we? But how many times have we lost control of the monster?” Lazarus staggers forward. Underneath the tarp, his body is horridly malformed. Things twitch and clench beneath the worn blue plastic and, from the wall-holes, other things begin to emerge. “The people who built this prison think they can control what goes on inside. But they can’t. Not anymore.”

  Harlan tries to gauge the distance past Lazarus and down the hallway. How far? Five-hundred feet? Two-hundred?

  “I knew there was something wrong with the first one,” Lazarus says. “I was so afraid of what I’d done that I killed it. The second one I had down here. It was a game. I was fascinated with the…things…I was capable of producing. It was magical…at first.”

  Lazarus let the tarp fall.

  “Dear Christ…”

  Lazarus’s body is a wasteland. The albino flesh is networked with angry red fissures and ragged scar tissue mantling nearly every inch of exposed skin. His…her…its…chest is hung with bulbous Earth-mother teats, nipples nicked with shallow puncture-wounds dripping reddish milk. Thin strips of skin have been ripped from his face and shoulders to hang in curling tatters resembling peeling wallpaper, or dead birch bark. In other locations the damage smacks of frenzied aggression: Swaths of flesh have been torn—or more likely chewed—from his forearms and upper thighs, deep angry wounds revealing the stark gleam of bone. Only his strange fount, a lunatic mishmash of penis and vagina, is unmolested.

  Lazarus turns away slightly, as if embarrassed by his nakedness; Harlan’s heart flatlines for a moment as he glimpses the intermittent white wink of Lazarus’ spine, neat circles of flesh removed around each vertebrae to create a bowed constellation of exposed bone traversing his back from hipbone to neckline.

  Things were closing in, all around them, rank on rank, silent as death…

  “They were once sated on my milk alone. But in time their tastes...matured. They have hurt me more times than I can remember.” Lazarus tries to smile. “But isn’t it natural for children to return love with scorn? And they will not let me leave. They love me too much for that.” His fingers stroke a bastard sex, matriarch and patriarch co-mingled. “They leave me alone…down here. It is instinctive; they treat it with reverence. But I’ve heard noises in the darkness.” The massive man-woman shudders. “They are reproducing themselves, I think.”

  Harlan’s mind is stretched taut, a rubber band on the verge of snapping. To the left of him, or perhaps to the right, he heard a stealthy rustling sound, dry autumn leaves skating across an October sidewalk. “Just…just move out of the way and let me by. I won’t hurt you.”

  Lazarus shakes his head sadly. “Don’t you see? It is you who will be hurt.”

  The first one to emerge is perhaps three feet tall. Its head is black, sloped, smooth as polished obsidian. Compound eyes stare up at Harlan, betraying a massive hunger. Its fishbelly-white lips are spread to reveal scalpel-sharp teeth spiraling in ever-tightening circles. It lopes forward with a menacing simian gait, scabrous tongue testing the dank air.

  Oh Jesus oh Jesus Christ what is that THING—

  Others follow. One is completely bald, the tired flesh of its face pulled tight on an insectile skull so it shines with tension. There are stains of decay and disease on its skin, and in places the ropy muscle has withered to black pus, through which its strange bone structure glints nakedly. Drool black as polished ebony drips from it cruel maw to sizzle in stinking puddles on the floor.

  The topmost portion of another one’s skull has been removed as one might remove the crown on a soft-boiled egg, the pinkish-gray walnut of its brain glistening in the shadows. Things—tiny and white and contentedly-squirming things—crawl amidst the runnels of its exposed mind, things Harlan wants to believe are maggots for the slim normalcy such a sight might afford, yet knows, instinctively, are not. The creature’s mouth spans half the circumference of its face and hangs wide open. Blue-black tubes spill from the maw, dark liquid pumping through their mucous-coated length. Harlan stares closer… and sees, with the minute eye for detail that only utter terror confers, that it is not liquid coursing through those dark tubes but rather tiny moving shapes, very alive, sentient, and purposeful; realizing, with awed revulsion, that the creature itself—its very insides—is composed of other, smaller creatures…

  He steps back, mind yammering. His back hits the wall and a bony knob brushes his spine and he jerks away with a frantic yelp. He feels something bursting up inside of him, something insane and dark with colors.

  They come. The newest arrivals inhabit the rough size and shape of spider monkeys, but all similarities to man or beast ends there. The texture of their flesh is red but shifting, dimming and brightening like embers in a gusting wind; and the skin of their bullet-shaped heads is stripped back in narrow ribbons that dance and circulate around their raw faces in the manner of streamers tied to an oscillating fan. A sea of eyes—some cyclopean, some slitted, others lidless, still others free-floating on red stalks in the manner of snails—appraise the shivering creature in their midst. The combined noise of their repulsive anatomies approximate, by turns, a poorly-tuned clock and a dying animal: Ticking, crackling, sobbing, whimpering, ratcheting…

  Something terrible has happened down here, something has created these hideous mutations that could never have survived under the eye of the sun; nature would have forbidden their existence. But down here, far beneath the Coliseum’s dark dome, nature has taken on another ghastly face…

  They continue to appear. The latest ones are horrendously fat, freakish travesties of healthy
newborns: These crawl forward in the manner of grubs, hideously eager, the feeble clawing of their flipper-like arms aided by the peristaltic contractions of their horridly-distended abdomens. Harlan watches, breathless, as one of these grub-babies excretes something black and noxious-smelling and wriggling from its anus. The blob of shit shimmers fitfully on the cracked concrete and Harlan sees, or thinks he sees, tiny stunted appendages pushing themselves out of the dark mess, each dwarfish digit webbed with runners of slime…

  And it slams into him, the wrecking-ball of complete understanding:

  That isn’t an anus.

  And that isn’t shit.

  Something shatters then, deep in Harlan Ruddock’s head, and he starts to scream.

  “Everyone has something to give the world,” Lazarus says, switching off the first of the two remaining track lights. As he moves to the next his children crawl, and scurry, and slither from their warrens. Harlan mouths no, no, no, no as they move towards him. They are so attracted to his fear, to his revulsion…but mostly to his soft, warm flesh.

  Lazarus dims the other light. In the darkness, his voice seems terribly tired, terribly sad.

  “But sometimes the world does not want what you have to offer.”

  Harlan does not hear him. He is running. Running through the darkness.

  He takes only a few steps before something attacks his legs above the cuffs of his boots with biting lunges. Then something else, light as a straw-doll but reckless, latches onto his kneecap and sinks a sharp appendage—a claw, or a stinger, or a fang—into the flesh of his upper thigh. Harlan reaches down blindly and grasps the creature in his hand, its bone structure like a whicker ball, its bones hollow and bird-like, and crushes it and feels it burst apart in his fist and then fluid is running between his fingers that burns horribly.

  Adrenaline redlined, he misjudges the tunnel’s curve and slams headlong into the wall. His skull rings off the cinderblock and his blackened vision explodes with formations of tiny burning birds. He turns, swinging the railing bar crazily, hearing it smack into something with a sudden wet ripping noise before clanging off the wall. Then a warm flabby body is pressing itself into the crook of his armpit, biting. He swats at it with his right hand, screaming, and his fingers stray too close to something they shouldn’t have because every digit except his thumb is torn out with tremendous force and blood from the madly-jetting stumps plasters his face. Harlan crushes its squirming body against the wall; it bursts like a balloon filled with warm tar and then he’s running again, the railing bar lost somewhere behind with the whisk and patter of a thousand pursuing infants.

  He’s nearly three-quarters of the way back when something leaps onto his backside. The sound of ripping canvas is followed by another, meatier ripping sound. Suddenly he feels much lighter, as if he’s lost several pounds in the span of seconds, and coldness is spreading in conical waves up his back and down his legs. On the heels of this comes pain, earth-shattering and fibrous, and he reaches back with his good hand and it passes unimpeded through the space where, only moments before, his buttocks had been. Harlan gropes, desperate and whimpering, eventually touching the wet bone of his hip-socket and, bizarrely, disturbingly, he can feel his femur rotating in this socket and a dim shockwave each time his foot pounds the cement. His boots are heavy with blood. His head is swimming and he hears bells ringing somewhere.

  A huge whirring fills the darkness. Harlan turns as a solid flying shape smashes into his face, knocking him against the wall. Its body buzzes against his cheeks and a febrile proboscis injects into his left eye to vacuum the eyeball out in a convulsive flex. A tail, ringed and hairy as a rat’s, whips around his neck, cutting off his breath, and a pair of membranous wings flap noxious wind into his face.

  Harlan makes a fist and smashes it into the writhing, biting body again and again. He is dimly aware that he is screaming, and that his screams are baffled by the greasy membrane of flesh covering his face. The body falls away and he stomps it under his feet. Things are running in a tidal flood around his calves, between his legs.

  He breaks into a stumbling run, equilibrium totally shot, bouncing off one wall, turning, glancing off the other, a human pinball. Something is hanging persistently to his left side. He pushes at it with his fingerless hand, managing to shake it free. He touches the spot where it had been and feels a bulge protruding just below the ribcage, its surface tight as patent leather: his kidney, or what remains of it. Then another of Lazarus’s offspring hits him broadside, spinning him around in a drunken circle. It shimmies up to his head, squealing and slobbering, and rips away a section of Harlan’s scalp. He falls to one knee, then starts to crawl forward. His hands make wet slapping sounds against the concrete. His ears are filled with the gibber and screech of the things that pursue him.

  Something tears his boots off. In the darkness all Harlan can feel is these small bodies pressing close. Something is eating his toes, or perhaps only biting them off, for the elemental pleasure the act affords. Harlan feels his body growing numb. His head floats somewhere above his body, seeking the light. He gives one last heave, stumbles over a skeletal body, and lies down. He starts to laugh, a keening, lunatic sound.

  And maybe this is best. This careless insanity.

  So Harlan Ruddock, the Beast of Fulgate, laughs into the darkness.

  Until something clambers down his throat and begins to eat him inside-out.

  ««—»»

  “They’re all dead, sir.”

  “All of them?”

  “Looks like it.”

  The Master Guard can see bodies rotting in the third tier stands. Movement beneath the rigor-hardened torsos as rats feast on soft organs. The last turf war had dropped the prison population to seven inmates; this one was even more effective.

  “Well I’ll be god-damned,” the Master Guard says. “You think they skunked the place?”

  The young guard scratches his head. “Maybe a few buzzards still around, never know. Motion sensors detect movement in the basement.”

  “Probably more rats. Joint’s lousy with them.”

  “Probably.”

  The Master Guard passes a hand through his brushcut. “You know what,” he says. “I say we go in there.”

  “Sir?”

  “Watch closely for the next couple of days, right? We’ll know who’s left when they come for the food. We storm in, shackle the few freaks left alive, remove them while we update the place—install new cameras and clear out some of the bodies, maybe plant some new toys for the boys to stick their sorry selves with.”

  “The basement…”

  “Hey, if there is anything down there, we lock and load, blow the sad-sack freaks a new asshole. You get?”

  “Sure,” the guard says. “I get. Should we call in some guys from Fulgate?”

  “Nah. We got what, eight guys? More than enough.”

  Inside the prison, down in the basement, Lazarus Cranston and his offspring wait in the darkness. They are eager to meet and greet, make a few new friends.

  Eager for a chance to see the wide, wide world.

  “Yeah,” the Master Guard says. “Let’s do it.”

  — | — | —

  Patrick Lestewka is the pseudonym of Canadian writer Craig Davidson. The Preserve is his first book. He has a collection, Rust and Bone and a novel entitled The Fighter.