by S. T. Joshi
If I had been yelling in pain before, now I was screaming in terror. I looked down and discovered my shoe had come off. My sock was still on, but the foot inside it was horribly shapeless—and by now my entire right leg was curved in a very unnatural way.
My co-workers had pulled back away from me.
I heard Bob Shaw on the phone. “No, I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” he shouted, “but send an ambulance right away. The man is dying!”
But the pain was not through with me yet. It spread across my groin, scalding like acid. I can’t even begin to describe my horror as it passed through my genitalia and then into my left leg, once again racing down and feeling as if it was burning my bones away.
I could not stop screaming.
The speed with which it spread through me seemed to be increasing. In moments, my left leg, like my right, was strangely limp, and I found I could no longer hold myself upright. I flopped backward just as the pain and burning began to climb up my spine.
I began to be racked by spasms that set my legs thrashing about, but they no longer bore much resemblance to legs. They rippled and squirmed, they seemed to slither across the floor. My right sock had now slipped completely off and the obscenely pink flesh it had revealed did not resemble a foot. There were no signs of toes or nails, or ankles and soles, only a featureless fleshy tube tapering gracelessly to a rounded tip. Worse, it had begun to itch mercilessly.
By now, the siren could be heard on the street below and the screech of tires braking on asphalt. I hoped the paramedics would hurry.
My co-workers, my office-mates, had backed as far away as they could, and panic spread among them.
“Oh God! Look! His skin is writhing.”
“What’s happening to him?”
“It’s like his bones are melting!”
“Do you think it could be catching?”
That last question sent some of them fleeing to the elevators and the rest strained to back yet further away.
I wanted to sit up and gain control of myself, but I could not. The strange tide of transformation continued unabated and the pain seemed to be increasing. I fear my yelling had degenerated into bursts of sound that hardly resembled anything human. I was exhausted, my throat raw from screaming at the top of my voice. My cries now were more a harsh bleating and moaning.
Strangely, no matter how my body was being changed, I could feel my heart steadily beating. It was a hypnotic rhythm that was at once petrifying and weirdly reassuring.
The feeling of something coursing through me had now reached my neck and shoulders, and spread rapidly into my arms. I was still thrashing about, but it was as if I had been trapped inside my head and was being forced to watch as everything about me—everything that went into my concept of me—was irrevocably changed.
Then, suddenly—mercifully—the pain stopped.
And I looked over to see my left hand, which had been flailing uncontrollably, and saw no hand at all. My eyes grew wider as I stared in terror. It looked as if some giant pink worm was crawling out of my coat-sleeve.
There was a commotion over by the door and three paramedics came bustling through, pushing people aside. Two maneuvered a gurney and the third carried the medical bag. But even as they approached, I felt/heard/guessed the final transformation occur. My head sank back squishily and I knew that my skull had just gone the way of the rest of the bones in my body.
As the lead medic knelt by me, I attempted to speak and tell him I was in no pain. I could not lift my head, yet I still was under the delusion that I would be able to communicate. I was wrong. What issued from my mouth was a gelatinous baritone belch, accompanied by a horrible stench.
I think I was as shocked as the medic.
Certainly his face revealed his disgust. “What the hell is this?” he asked angrily.
Shaw stepped up and stared at me with consternation. He cleared his throat and, after a few false starts, he managed to say, “Until a few minutes ago, he was our co-worker, Mr. David Thompson. This is his desk. He was sitting there working quite normally before whatever...happened...began...er... happening.”
“Are you telling me this is a human being?” asked the medic.
“Yes, as far as I know,” said Shaw.
Had I been able to control my movements, I would have embraced him then and there. I was filled with gratitude. I tried to lift my arms and found that it did set the worms into motion. The pink protuberances seemed to leap up from the floor like writhing tentacles, but I had no control.
The medic jumped back, a look of fear on his face. Shaw and everyone else backed further away as well.
I tried again to speak, but this time all I managed was a noisy exhalation of noxious gases.
I then discovered that it was very difficult to get a breath. It was as if some giant was sitting on my chest. I gasped.
The medic approached again. Tentatively, he reached out to me, trying to take my wrist, but I really no longer had one. He stopped that movement, and then placed a stethoscope on my chest. He face relaxed a little when he heard my heart beat.
“What happened?” he asked aloud.
Shaw shrugged. “I don’t know. He was working at his desk and then cried out, as if in pain. He fell to the floor and began to writhe about, and, over the course of several minutes, he seemed to collapse in upon himself. We tried to help him at first, but the changes were dramatic, startling, and frightening. His thrashing about became dangerous and we all had to pull back. That’s when I called for you.”
“We’ll take him in,” said the medic. He gestured to his companions. “Load him on the stretcher.”
What happened next might have been funny had it not been so macabre.
The two other medics collapsed the gurney, placed it by me, and moved to lift me onto it. They each took an arm—or what used to be an arm—and pulled, but the transformed limbs just seemed to stretch impossibly and the bulk of my body lay where it had been.
The lead medic moved in to help. They folded my long tubular limbs atop my body. The three of them got their arms under my torso and what had been my hips, and tried to lift me up.
I guess it was like trying to move a puddle of Jello with toothpicks. They tried several times before realizing it wouldn’t work.
Finally, they simply rolled me over the edge and up onto the stretcher, rearranging my limbs as best they could and using my clothing as a sort of sling.
Mercifully, they threw a sheet over me as they rushed the gurney to the elevator, to the ground floor, the waiting ambulance, and, at last, to the local hospital with sirens screaming.
IT HAS BEEN SOME HOURS NOW. THEY CHECKED ME IN, put me in a private room, and left me here. I wish I could say I lost consciousness, but I did not.
The strangest thing was that my mind remained my own. No matter how traumatized I had been, the cessation of pain brought a kind of detachment, almost as if I was floating above myself. I did not understand my transformation, but I then became curious.
If I had no skull, what was protecting my brain? What remained of my face was pressed into the bed with some amount of my own flabby body forcing it into the padding, yet I had a sense that I was unharmed. If I had no ribs surrounding it, how did my heart continue to beat? Yet it did, with a strangely reassuring regularity.
I concentrated on moving one of my limbs—what had been my right arm. It twitched.
I focussed my thoughts on reaching up to touch my face. The appendage hesitantly squirmed toward my eye.
I knew an illogical sense of jubilation. For the first time since the onset of the pain, I began to sense that I might have some minute, fragmentary, miniscule, bit of control over something.
Ever so slowly, painstakingly, I guided my right arm. When it finally, tentatively, brushed my face, I discovered two things.
First, that I could still feel things with the limb, changed though it might be. In fact, the sensation of touch seemed to have been enhanced—as if the entire limb had the
sensitivity of a fingertip.
Second, what had been my skull was not completely gone. A hard but malleable kind of gristle formed a protective cage around my poor human brain, a cartilaginous cranium, and some kind of similar ridges protected my eyes.
My mouth, however, had been transformed into a lipless, toothless maw that seemed to exude a viscous liquid. My nose was simply gone—not even nostril slits remained.
But I was still breathing...in some way.
That was when I began to hear the Bronx-cheer buzzing again, and realized it sounded from what had once been my neck. I focussed on moving the arm again and managed to brush it over a place where ripples of flesh seemed to rise up when I exhaled and draw down when I inhaled.
Sudden realization swept over me. Gills? Great God, I had gills!
A BUSTLING SOUND CAME FROM THE DOORWAY AND A whites-mocked male figure entered the room, closely followed by two nurses.
He stopped when he reached the foot of the bed and looked at the chart. “This is supposed to be a David Thompson,” he said sarcastically. He threw back the sheet in front of him, exposing my midsection and upper thigh. “This is not a human. Is this a hoax?”
I felt his hands move over what had been my hip and over what used to be my thigh.
“Wait!” he said suddenly. “What’s this?”
I felt him squeeze the skin of my former thigh together and felt an uncharacteristic lump under the skin.
“I bet I can get this without even requiring a local,” he muttered to himself. He looked around and took a scalpel from a tray, then made a sudden quick, small incision. I felt a bit of pressure and then something seemed to pop. I can’t describe it any other way. It actually clattered on the tray.
“Some sort of round metal object,” he observed, picking it up carefully. “It’s about the same size as a bottle cap.” He turned to the second nurse. “Suture that incision closed. I’m going to look at this through the lab microscope.”
But he took only a few steps before he seemed to freeze. “What the fu...!”
He never finished what he was saying. His voice rose up in a rapid wail and became a scream. His hand snapped into a fist around the object, and he fell heavily to the floor. There he continued to writhe, his screams growing more shrill.
I could not sit up to see clearly, but I guessed immediately what was happening.
Poor bastard, I thought. Now there are two of us.
Substitution
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
Michael Marshall Smith is a widely published British author of novels, short stories, and screenplays. His novels include Only Forward (HarperCollins, 1994), Spares (HarperCollins, 1996), and several novels published as by Michael Marshall. Among his short story collections are What You Make It (HarperCollins, 1999) and More Tomorrow and Other Stories (Earthling, 2003). He is a five-time winner of the British Fantasy Award.
HALFWAY THROUGH UNPACKING THE SECOND RED BAG I turned to my wife—who was busily engaged in pecking out an e-mail on her Blackberry—and said something encouraging about the bag’s contents.
“Well, you know,” she said, not really paying attention. “I do try.”
I went back to taking items out and laying them on the counter, which is my way. Because I work from home, I’m always the one who unpacks the grocery shopping when it’s delivered: Helen’s presence this morning was unusual, and a function of a meeting that had been put back an hour (the subject of the terse e-mail currently being written). Rather than standing with the fridge door open and putting items directly into it, I put everything on the counter first, so I can sort through it and get a sense of what’s there, before then stowing everything neatly in the fridge, organized by type/nature/potential meal groupings, as a kind of Phase Two of the unloading operation.
The contents of the bags—red for stuff that needs refrigeration, purple for freezer goods, green for everything else—is never entirely predictable. My wife has control of the online ordering process, which she conducts either from her laptop or, in extremis, her phone. While I’ve not personally specified the order, however, its contents are seldom much of a surprise. There’s an established pattern. We have cats, so there’ll be two large bags of litter—it’s precisely being able to avoid hoicking that kind of thing off supermarket shelves, into a trolley and across a busy car park, which makes online grocery shopping such a boon. There will be a few green bags containing bottled water, sacks for the rubbish bins, toilet rolls and paper towels, cleaning materials, tins of store cupboard staples (baked beans, tuna, tinned tomatoes), a box of Diet Coke for me (which Helen tolerates on the condition that I never let it anywhere near our son), that kind of thing. There will be one, or at the most two, purple bags of frozen beans, holding frozen peas, frozen organic fish cakes for the kid, and so on. We never buy enough frozen to fill more than one purple carrier, but sometimes they split it between a couple, presumably for some other logistical reason. Helen views this as both a waste of resources and a threat to the environment, and has sent at least two e-mails to the company about it. I don’t mind much as we use the bags for clearing out the cats’ litter tray, and I’d rather have spares on hand than risk running out.
Then there are the red bags, the main event. The red bags represent the daily news of food consumption—in contrast to the contextual magazine articles of the green bags, or the long-term forecasts of the purple. In the red bags will be the Greek yoghurt, blueberries, and strawberries Helen uses to make her morning smoothie; a variety of vegetables and salad materials; some free-range and organic chicken fillets (I never used to be clear on the difference, but eleven years of marriage has made me far better informed); some extra-sharp cheddar (Helen favours cheese that tastes as though it wants your tongue to be sad), and a few other bits and pieces.
The individual items may vary a little from week to week, but basically, that’s what gets brought to our door most Wednesday mornings. Once in a while there may be substitutions in the delivery (when the supermarket has run out of a specified item, and one judged to be of very near equivalence is provided instead): these have to be carefully checked, as Helen’s idea of similarity of goods differs somewhat from the supermarket’s. Otherwise, you could set your watch by our shopping, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor—and this continuity of content is why I’d turned to Helen when I was halfway through the second red bag. Yes, there’d been spring onions and a set of red, green, and yellow peppers—standard weekly fare. But there were also two packs of brightly coloured and fun-filled children’s yoghurts and a block of much milder cheddar of the kind Oscar and I tend to prefer. And a family pack of deadly-looking chocolate desserts. Not to mention a six-pack of thick and juicy-looking steaks, and very large variety pack of further Italian cured meats holding five different types of salami.
“Yum,” I said.
I was genuinely pleased, and a little touched. Normally I source this kind of stuff—on the few occasions when I have it—from the deli or mini-market, which are both about ten minutes’ walk away from the house (in opposite directions, sadly). Seeing it come into the house via the more socially condoned route of the supermarket delivery was strangely affecting.
“Hmm?” Helen said. She was nearing the end of her e-mail. I could tell because the speed of her typing increases markedly as she approaches the point when she can fire her missive off into space. She jabbed send and finally looked up properly. “What’s that you said?”
“Good shop. Unusual. But I like it.”
She smiled, glad that I was happy, but then frowned. “What the hell’s that?”
I looked where she was pointing. “Yoghurt.”
She grabbed the pack and stared with evident distaste at the ingredient list. “I didn’t order those. Obviously. Or that.” Now she was pointing at the pile of salamis and meats. “And the cheese is wrong. Oh, bloody hell.”
And with that, she was gone.
I waited, becalmed in the kitchen, to see what would unfold. A quick l
ook in the other bags—the greens and purples—didn’t explain much. They all contained exactly the kind of thing we tended to order.
Five minutes later I heard the sound of two pairs of footsteps coming down the stairs. Helen re-entered the kitchen, followed by the man who’d delivered the shopping. He was carrying three red bags and looked mildly cowed.
“What it is, right,” he muttered, defensively, “is the checking system. I’ve told management about it before. There are flaws. In the checking system.”
“I’m sure it can’t be helped,” Helen said, cheerfully, and turned to me. “Bottom line is that all the bags are correct except for the red ones, which both belong to someone else.”
When I’d put all the items from the counter back into the bags I’d taken them out of, an exchange took place. Their red bags, for ours. The delivery guy apologised about five more times—somehow making it clear, without recourse to words, that he was apologising for the system as a whole rather than any failure on his part—and trudged off back up the stairs.
“I’ll let him out,” Helen said, darting forward to give me a peck on the cheek. “Got to go anyway. You’re all right unpacking all this, yes?”
“Of course,” I said. “I always manage somehow.”
And off she went. It only took a few minutes to unpack the low-fat yoghurt, sharp cheese, salad materials, and free-range and organic chicken breasts.
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED, HOWEVER. WHEN I BROKE OFF from work late morning to go down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I lingered at the fridge for a moment after getting the milk out, and I found myself thinking:
What if that had been our food?
I wasn’t expressing discontent. We eat well. I personally don’t have much of a fix on what eating healthily involves (beyond the fact it evidently requires ingesting more fruit and vegetables per day than feels entirely natural), and so it’s a good thing that Helen does. If there’s anything that I want which doesn’t arrive at our door through the effortless magic of supermarket delivery, there’s nothing to stop me going out and buying it myself. It’s not as if the fridge or cupboards have been programmed to reject non-acceptable items, or set off a siren and contact the diet police when confronted with off-topic foodstuffs.