Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he understands he got lucky.
As long as the line was attached to the teeth, it remained as intangible as the teeth themselves. The moment the dental floss broke, the end no longer connected to the teeth became solid again. If the line had snapped inside his skull, instead of just outside it, it probably would have given him a brain clot.
At this moment, however— as Bob realizes he now has two Real Body Parts inside his skull (brains)—he would actually welcome an aneurism.
He can’t exactly feel the chattering teeth inside his brains but he can hear them somehow, clicking away. He prays they will stop soon. He tells himself they can’t keep chattering forever!
Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he’s unsure of anything.
He looks at the impotent, drooping dental floss hanging from his wrist and wonders what to do now.
He knows there is only one way to get the Real Body Parts out of his brains.
He’ll need to use more Real Body Parts.
Frantic, hearing chattering teeth, seeing brains, he digs into his pockets to see what other Real Body Parts he bought tonight.
He has four capsules in his pocket. He pulls them out one at a time.
The first egg contains a small nose, which he promptly throws in the trash. Seeing brains is bad enough; he doesn’t want to smell them.
When he looks at the next little egg, he isn’t certain at first what he’s seeing. It looks almost like a pink snake (he fleetingly wonders if it’s a penis) but then he sees the stretched nail and realizes it’s a coiled up finger.
Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he realizes this is exactly what he needs.
Laughing nervously, Bob rubs his chattering head, then polishes off his beer. He almost grabs another but decides instead it’s once again time for Captain Morgan.
After taking a long guzzle of rum, Bob sits down and opens his plastic capsule.
His heart pounding, he carefully shakes the finger out onto the couch.
The moment it’s out of its shell, the finger loses its serpentine elasticity. It hardens, acquiring the length, diameter, and joints of a real finger.
Being careful not to touch it (seeing brains) he holds up his own finger next to it (hearing chattering teeth) and confirms the finger is exactly the same size as his own right index finger (now eyeless and quite happy about it.)
Bob bites his lip, worried about his reach being long enough.
Hoping maybe he got a second finger, Bob digs into his pocket for the last two eggs.
In one of the plastic capsules is an organ Bob can’t begin to recognize. It’s a miniature duplicate of his own gall bladder and he sends it after the nose, throwing it in the trash.
Seeing brains with his third eye, he isn’t certain of his other two eyes when he sees the final plastic egg. All the other capsules were clean and clear inside.
This one is filled with blood.
And suspended in the oddly transparent blood is a tiny human heart.
It creeps Bob out to see it beating. He almost throws the heart away but then spontaneously decides not to. He places it gently on top of his stack of Playboys, then pulls off his stinky sweatshirt and covers the egg up.
Seeing bloody brains already, Bob really doesn’t care to look at a bloody heart.
Sweating, seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob takes another swig of rum. He knows he should stay sober but being drunk makes it so much easier for him to deal with seeing brains and hearing chattering teeth.
He doesn’t understand why the teeth don’t wind down! How can they just keep chattering?
Bob tries to focus his attention on the finger again.
The finger is lying on its side, pointing, the end that would attach to a knuckle cleanly chopped off.
His hands are shaking violently. Bob grabs his arm with his left hand, steadying his right hand as he makes a fist, then extends only his right index finger, which he slides carefully along the couch until his fingertip connects with the bottom of the Real Body Part.
The moment the connection is made, the fusion is made, with just a hint of electric current. His normal fingernail disappears, becoming the fourth joint of a six joint finger.
Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he holds up the monster finger and looks at it with the two eyes focused outside his own skull.
He can’t bend it backwards, it functions like a perfectly natural six-jointed six-inch-long finger.
He prays it’s long enough to reach the eye and the chattering teeth.
Getting up, Bob moves into his tiny bathroom, over to the rusty sink. Looking at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, (seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth) he begins the operation.
He reaches his extended finger up and, without hesitation, plunges it into the top of his head.
With his third interior eye, he sees the finger enter his brains.
He laughs, finding hope, thinking this might actually work!
He pushes his finger down into his head, bringing it right up next to the third, brain-buried eyeball, close enough to see his own bloody fingerprint.
He stops himself just as he’s about to nudge the eye.
The sound of chattering teeth reminds him in clicking Morse code that hearing chatter is way worse than seeing brains.
Realizing it will be easier to extract the teeth if he’s not blind, Bob decides to get the teeth first, then the eye.
Instead of spinning the eye around to face backwards, however, he makes a mistake and simply reaches over and behind the third eye, searching for the teeth.
The teeth find him.
He experiences fluttering jabs of sharp pain as his finger is repeatedly bitten by the chattering teeth. Yelping, Bob reacts instinctively, yanking his finger back.
And just as cleanly as the dental floss snapped, his extended finger now breaks off inside his own head.
He pulls back his normal three-joint three-inch finger and moans with bitter disappointment when he sees how stubby it is.
Still hearing chattering teeth, still seeing brains, he now adds touch to the list of senses which don’t belong inside his skull. His eleventh finger can somehow feel the wrinkles of his cerebrum.
Bob nearly hyperventilates. His chest is so tight, he can’t catch his breath.
After a few chattering bloody wrinkled minutes, he rushes out of the bathroom, thinking he needs more fingers, he must have more fingers, and he knows where to get them.
He doesn’t bother with his shirt or his jacket. The only thing he pauses for is money. He gathers up $3.00 in coins, as well as four dollars he can feed into the change machine.
Bob leaves the door of his apartment wide open as he dashes out.
He runs all the way to the laundry mat.
The streets are deserted and he expects the laundry mat to be empty also.
He stops just inside the door, huffing and puffing, seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, and he is quite startled to discover he isn’t alone.
The girl is obviously from the nearby college; she’s wearing a t-shirt with their mascot on it. She’s not particularly hot, she looks brainy to Bob, with her black plastic framed glasses and her dark hair done up in a bun.
She appears to be just as startled as Bob.
Bob doesn’t even bother looking at the vending machine offering REAL BODY PARTS.
He knows the warning won’t read REAL means REAL! until he’s alone.
Meaning this college chick needs to go.
Still trying to catch his breath, he looks at her and tells her to leave.
She looks confused then surprises Bob by actually looking concerned (but that just might be his bloody lumpy chattering brains playing tricks on him). She asks him if something is wrong.
He doesn’t just shout, he bellows, roaring inarticulately at the top of his sizable lungs.
The girl bolts. Bob moves out of her way and she rushes through the door wit
hout a word, her hand digging into her pocket. He sees her pull out something silver— a cell phone— as she disappears around the corner.
Luckily the grocery store closed hours ago so she won’t find any immediate help in the area.
But he’s certain she’ll call the police.
Seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, he rushes over to the vending machine that dispenses Real Body Parts, yanking his coins out of his pocket. A couple dollars spill to the floor but he holds on to his quarters.
Looking at the machine, he sees the display has changed.
There are two blank spots where the chattering teeth and the nose used to be. On the cardboard backing, there are silhouettes of the missing Body Parts with a message written inside each symbol: ONLY ONE PER BODY!
His hands shake so bad, he drops the quarters as he tries to feed them into the vending machine.
Finally, knowing time is short, he suddenly rears back and kicks the plastic vending machine as hard as he can. He then kicks it a second time, shattering the plastic, causing the entire side to collapse inward. Still panting, he reaches for the eggs.
A trachea, a thymus gland, a miniature liver, a testicle, and a tiny pancreas. He tosses all these aside and digs for more. He handles several kinds of bones, a miniature lung (just one, not two— ONLY ONE PER BODY!), a miniature kidney, a spleen, tonsils, coils of shrunken intestines, hair (exactly the color of his own), tiny parts of the inner ear, even what looks like strings of empty veins.
Nothing he finds does him any good. He wants more fingers, he needs more fingers, and he knows there are no more. He looks at the silhouettes of the nose and chattering teeth, both of which stubbornly read, ONLY ONE PER BODY!
Furious, harried beyond all reason, seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob goes wild then, jumping around, tromping as hard as he can on all the little Real Body Parts inside their little eggs. Plastic capsules crack beneath the hard heels of his shoes. And while he sees no blood on most of the clean little organs before squishing them, when they pop underfoot, they splatter like bloated mosquitoes, splashing sometimes as high as his knees. Bob does a psychotic blood dance, trying unconsciously to move his feet as fast as the chattering teeth inside his head.
When he finally stops stomping, panting, he realizes he could have used the intestines like a lasso to rope the body parts in his brain.
Too late now. The intestines— like all the other Real Body Parts— are now nothing but a splat on the floor.
Bob looks through the plate glass window, out at the dark street, remembering the college girl pulling out her cell phone.
He looks at all the blood on the floor and decides he doesn’t want to explain to the police that, while there’s not a scratch on him, all this blood belongs to him.
His eleventh finger twitching in the brain matter just behind his third eye, chattering teeth munching on the back of his mind, Bob flees the laundry mat and runs home. Instead of using the sidewalk by the street, he dashes through people’s yards, hiding behind trees and houses whenever he can.
Minutes later, he’s back at his apartment.
Once he’s inside and the door is locked behind him, he doesn’t know what to do.
If the police come— and they will come; he believes, somehow, some way, they’ll find him— he knows they’ll think he’s insane. Bob understands he probably is a little bit insane by now but that’s because the finger, teeth, and eye inside his skull are very real. They aren’t figments of his imagination. The extra body parts are causing his insanity; it isn’t insanity causing delusions of extra body parts.
No one will ever believe him.
He’s desperate, frantic, crying without even being aware of it. He must get these hellish things out of his head before the police come! Otherwise, he knows, there’s a good chance They might lock him up in a place where he’ll never be able to get the necessary tools to extract the seeing, chattering, feeling body parts!
He must get them out now!
There’s nothing to be gained by waiting. The machine is broken, it has no more Real Body Parts to dispense; Bob can’t expect any more help there.
He’s on his own.
He moves to the dresser where he put his keys and wallet, snatching up his pocket knife. He opens up the biggest blade, looks at it, and thinks it’s entirely too puny to cut through bone.
Seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob goes into his kitchen, opening up his silverware drawer. He takes out a long, sharp, serrated knife. He chooses it over a butcher knife, knowing he’ll need to do some sawing in order to uncap his tortured brain.
He doesn’t know if he’ll survive the procedure and he doesn’t care. He dimly remembers that the brain feels no pain, so, once he gets through the sensitive scalp, he thinks he might actually have a chance of saving himself before the police come.
Bob guzzles all that’s left of his Captain Morgan’s, polishing off the bottle. He hopes he has more than just a little pirate in him. He hopes there is also a little brain surgeon in there somewhere.
The chattering teeth seem particularly furious and they— even more than the sight of his finger submerged in bloody brains— are making it harder and harder for him to think. And yet he still has enough presence of mind to wrap his head in a couple of towels before beginning, intending to shield his old eyes.
Having one eye seeing through blood is more than enough for him.
Bob looks at his face in the mirror as he brings the knife to his forehead.
His entire body clenching up, Bob begins to cut.
The blood flows in a torrent, attempting to break over the towel dam in order to get to his face. The pain is bad but not hideous. He finds that by concentrating on chattering teeth, he’s able to ignore his screaming nerves (and screaming throat) and keep right on cutting.
Bob attempts making a circle completely around his head. He hopes to slice all the way to the bone, so he can lift off his scalp like a cap.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t cut deep enough in spots. He has to go back and do more gouging, and even then, he seems to be just making a mess.
Finally, bleeding profusely, he suddenly shrieks at the top of his lungs as he reaches up with both hands, grabs his hair, and yanks as hard as he can.
There is not only pain but a terrible pulling and, even through his wailing, he can also hear the rip of skin being flayed. A large irregular chunk of scalp comes off in his hands, exposing his bloody skull.
Bob drops his hair in the toilet, then puts his head between his legs, afraid he’s going to pass out.
The teeth in his brain quickly drive away unconsciousness with their chatter.
Bob turns on the faucet, splashing cold water on his face.
He looks again in the mirror at his exposed skull.
Smiling, seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob picks up his knife again.
He begins sawing into bone.
******
The college girl Bob frightened in the laundry mat does indeed call the police, who respond quite quickly. She is just down the street from the laundry mat, standing outside the closed liquor store, when she sees Bob exit the laundry mat and run off into the night.
The police arrive a few minutes later and the girl takes them into the laundry mat.
Bob didn’t realize it but he squashed every single body part, more than three dozen of them, and every one created an enormous bloodstain. Discovering enough blood to easily fill a real human body, the patrolmen call for back-up.
Only a few minutes later, police dispatch receives a call from two of Bob’s neighbors, who have been awakened by his screaming.
Four police units converge on Bob’s apartment building.
After speaking with the neighbors, the police knock on Bob’s door.
When he doesn’t answer, they eventually break in.
By a weird coincidence, just as the police break into Bob’s apartment, Bob finally breaks open
his own skull. Out of sheer persistence (and aided by an electric knife he retrieved when the manual kind proved less than effective), Bob has made a hole in his skull big enough for his hand.
His third eye watches, amazed, as the entire top of the skull is removed, allowing direct light to make bloody brains even brighter.
His eleventh finger twitches in anticipation.
His chattering teeth are eager as ever for more fingers to bite.
Watching himself in the mirror, Bob plunges his hand into his own open skull and begins rooting around in brains for stray body parts.
He dies with his hand in his head, just as the police burst into his bathroom, pointing guns at him.
On the coffee table in the living room, on top of a stack of Playboy magazines, beneath Bob’s shirt, a tiny heart in a plastic egg stops beating.
The autopsy is performed by a veteran coroner with thirty-six years of forensic experience. What he finds in the victim’s head, still glaring and chattering away, causes him to scream.
THE END
THIS HAS BEEN….
Fishing in BRAINS
for an EYE
with TEETH
By William Markly O’Neal
Author’s Note to You, the Reader….
The cover artwork for this book is by Aleksandar Žiljak. Thank you, Aleksandar, for your help with this! Also thanks to Ruth Egan: my wonderful editor. This anthology is dedicated to Ruth.
Trinity County and everything I describe there— including Bullet Lake and the city of Middleridge— exist only in my mind. Trinity County is based loosely on Wabash County, the rural Indiana County where I grew up. My late father first told me a version of The Legend of Bullet Lake when I was very young.
If you enjoyed this collection, please recommend it to a friend or two. Also please return to the Amazon page where you purchased it to rank it from 1-5 Stars as you see fit. If you would write a short review of it, I’d be especially grateful. The success of FISHING in BRAINS for an EYE with TEETH depends on people like you! I would greatly appreciate anything you could do to help me spread the word about this horror collection.
Fishing in Brains for an Eye with Teeth (Thirteen Tales of Terror) Page 26