It’s time for her, then. She must face it now; it cannot be put off, not anymore.
“How is your husband?”
“It’s my husband,” she says, not listening. Her voice breaks up momentarily under electrical interference. The signal reforms, but we are still separated by a grid, as if in an electronic confessional. “At twelve-thirty tonight his, what is it, now?” She bites her lips but cannot control her voice. “His EEG. It … stopped. That’s what they say. A straight line. There’s nothing there. They say it’s non-reversible. How can that be?” she asks desperately.
I wait.
“They want you to sign, don’t they, Emily?”
“Yes.” Her voice is tortured as she says, “It’s a good, thing, isn’t it? You said so yourself, this afternoon. You know about these things. Your wife …”
“We’re not talking about my wife now, are we?”
“But they say it’s right. The doctor said that.”
“What is, Emily?”
“The life-support,” she says pathetically. “The Maintenance.” She still does not know what she is saying. “My husband can be of great value to medical science. Not all the usable organs can be taken at once. They may not be matched up with recipients for some time. That’s why the Maintenance is so important. It’s safer, more efficient than storage. Isn’t that so?”
“Don’t think of it as ‘life-support,’ Emily. Don’t fool yourself. There is no longer any life to be supported.”
“But he’s not dead!”
“No.”
“Then his body must be kept alive …”
“Not alive, either,” I say. “Your husband is now—and will continue to be—neither alive nor dead. Do you understand that?”
It is too much. She breaks down. “H-how can I decide? I can’t tell them to pull the plug. How could I do that to him?”
“Isn’t there a decision involved in not pulling the plug?”
“But it’s for the good of mankind, that’s what they say. For people not yet born. Isn’t that true? Help me,” she says imploringly. “You’re a good man. I need to be sure that he won’t suffer. Do you think he would want it this way? It was what your wife wanted, wasn’t it? At least this way you’re able to visit, to go on seeing her. That’s important to you, isn’t it?”
“He won’t feel a thing, if that’s what you’re asking. He doesn’t now, and he never will. Not ever again.”
“Then it’s all right?”
I wait.
“She’s at peace, isn’t she, despite everything? It all seems so ghastly, somehow. I don’t know what to do. Help me, please …”
“Emily,” I say with great difficulty. But it must be done. “Do you understand what will happen to your husband if you authorize the Maintenance?”
She does not answer.
“Only this. Listen: this is how it begins. First he will be connected to an IBM cell separator, to keep track of leucocytes, platelets, red cells, antigens that can’t be stored. He will be used around the clock to manufacture an endless red tide for transfusions—”
“But transfusions save lives!”
“Not just transfusions, Emily. His veins will be a battleground for viruses, for pneumonia, hepatitis, leukemia, live cancers. And then his body will be drained off, like a stuck pig’s, and a new supply of experimental toxins pumped in, so that he can go on producing antitoxins for them. Listen to me. He will begin to decay inside, Emily. He will be riddled with disease, tumors, parasites. He will stink with fever. His heart will deform, his brain fester with tubercles, his body cavities run with infection. His hair will fall, his skin yellow, his teeth splinter and rot. In the name of science, Emily, in the name of their beloved research.”
I pause.
“That is, if he’s one of the lucky ones.”
“But the transplants …”
“Yes, that’s right! You are so right, Emily. If not the blood, then the transplants. They will take him organ by organ, cell by cell. And it will take years. As long as the machines can keep the lungs and heart moving. And finally, after they’ve taken his eyes, his kidneys and the rest, it will be time for his nerve tissue, his lymph nodes, his testes. They will drill out his bone marrow, and when there is no more of that left it will be time to remove his stomach and intestines, as soon as they learn how to transplant those parts, too. And they will. Believe me, they will.”
“No, please …”
“And when he’s been thoroughly, efficiently gutted—or when his body has eaten itself from the inside out—when there is nothing left but a respirated sac bathed from within by its own excrement, do you know what they will do then? Do you? Then they will begin to strip the skin from his limbs, from his skull, a few millimeters at a time, for grafting and re-grafting, until—”
“Stop!”
“Take him, Emily! Take your William out of there now, tonight, before the technicians can get their bloody hands on him! Sign nothing! Take him home. Take him away and bury him forever. Do that much for him. And for yourself. Let him rest. Give him that one last, most precious gift. Grant him his final peace. You can do that much, can’t you? Can’t you?”
From far away, across miles of the city, I hear the phone drop and then clack dully into place. But only after I have heard another sound, one that I pray I will never hear again.
Godspeed, Emily, I think, weeping. Godspeed.
I resume my vigil.
I try to awaken, and cannot.
III
There is a machine outside my door. It eats people, chews them up and spits out only what it can’t use. It wants to get me, I know it does, but I’m not going to let it.
The call I have been waiting for will never come.
I’m sure of it now. The doctor, or his nurse or secretary or dialling machine, will never announce that they are done at last, that the procedure is no longer cost-effective, that her remains will be released for burial or cremation. Not yesterday, not today, not ever.
I have cut her arteries with stolen scalpels. I have dug with an ice pick deep into her brain, hoping to sever her motor centers. I have probed for her ganglia and nerve cords. I have pierced her eardrums. I have inserted needles, trying to puncture her heart and lungs. I have hidden caustics in the folds of her throat. I have ruined her eyes. But it’s no use. It will never be enough.
They will never be done with her.
When I go to the hospital today she will not be there. She will already have been given to the interns for their spinal taps and arterio grams, for surgical practice on a cadaver that is neither alive nor dead. She will belong to the meat cutters, to the first-year med students with their dull knives and stained cross sections …
But I know what I will do.
I will search the floors and labs and secret doors of the wing, and when I find her I will steal her silently away; I will give her safe passage. I can do that much, can’t I? I will take her to a place where even they can’t reach, beyond the boundaries that separate the living from the dead. I will carry her over the threshold and into that realm, wherever it may be.
And there I will stay with her, to be there with her, to take refuge with her among the dead. I will tear at my body and my corruption until we are one in soft asylum. And there I will remain, living with death for whatever may be left of eternity.
Wish me Godspeed.
LISA MORTON
Poppi’s Monster
Lisa Morton lives in North Hollywood, California. She is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.”
Her feature film credits include the cult favorite Meet the Hollowheads, the vampire film Blood Angels and the mutant shark thriller Blue Demon.
She is a four-time recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for horror writing, and her 2012 release, Trick or Treat?: A H
istory of Halloween, won the Grand Prize at the Halloween Book Festival.
Her most recent books include the novels Zombie Apocalypse! Washington Deceased and Netherworld, and the novellas The Devil’s Birthday and By Insanity of Reason (with John R. Little).
Poppi had hurt her bad this time, worse than usual. She’d known it would be bad as soon as he’d walked in the door.
It was after 10:00 P.M., he was late and her babysitter Heather from down the street had left at seven.
She was sprawled in front of the blaring TV, last working on an Aladdin coloring book she’d bought with lunch money she had secretly saved. She hadn’t seen the movie, of course, but she liked to look at the bright printed scenes on the cover and the line drawings inside and pretend that she had. With her box of 64 Crayon colors, she could make the movie within the drawings look the way it did in her imagination. She liked the pictures in her head because they were all hers, Poppi couldn’t touch them.
When he’d come in he was muttering under his breath. He immediately crossed to the television set and lowered the volume to an inaudible level.
“Christ almighty, Stacey, you always have to blast the goddamn TV? Last thing I need is some complaint from the neighbors.”
As he turned, his foot kicked the box of Crayons, and they flew in a multihued arc across the room. “Aw, what is this … ?”
Poppi picked up the coloring book, glanced at it once and then shook it in her face. “Stacey, how many times do I have to tell you, you’re too old for this nonsense. You’re ten years old, too old to play with this little-kid bullshit.”
Stacey heard her Crayons crack under his shoes. Vermilion, Burnt Sienna, Cornflower Blue, three broken colors she’d never use again.
She knew Poppi was right, though—ten-year-olds weren’t supposed to play with coloring books, or Fisher-Price Farm Sets, or stuffed animals. The other kids in her class at school already had favorite bands, they could win video games and had posters up in their rooms of handsome TV stars. Not Stacey. She knew they thought she was weird or stupid; one teacher had used the word “remedial.” That had been when Poppi had taped a funnel into her mouth and forcefed her a bad-tasting vitamin mash he said would make her smarter.
Tonight, though, she knew it wouldn’t be that. He was already halfway out of his clothes, the heavy genuine leather belt tugging loose from the loops in his expensive slacks. She didn’t understand what he was saying, something about a boy in the office today who had screamed and bitten him. He showed her a tiny red mark on one finger. Stacey didn’t understand; the marks he left on her once or twice a month were a lot worse than that.
He told her to go into her room and lay on her stomach on her bed. She didn’t fight or try to escape; she knew that would just make it worse. She went into her room and grabbed Baloo her stuffed bear. If she held onto Baloo very tightly it helped a little bit. Not much, but a little bit.
Poppi had his belt off and held it in both hands when he lumbered in. He reached up under her little skirt, flipped it up and tugged her tights and panties down. She didn’t realize she was biting Baloo’s ear. The leather whistled, and she tried not to cry out or jerk—sometimes that just made it worse. All she could do was let the tears squirt out silently and hope Poppi was tired tonight.
When it was over, he took her by the wrist and put her in the closet. She heard the latch he’d installed click into place, then he left the room and she was alone at last.
What Poppi didn’t know was that she liked being in the closet. Her friends were there, Babar the Elephant and Pluto in his fuzzy orange fur. The tiny Watchman TV her Auntie Gina had given her last year was there. She even kept pillows and an old blanket in there; when she pushed her shoes aside it was really pretty comfortable. Or would have been if it hadn’t hurt so much to just lay down.
She snuggled her animals close to her and turned on the TV. It was tuned to a station that started showing cartoons at five in the morning, but Stacey didn’t really care what was on. The tinny voices and moving pictures lulled her, made her feel a little less lonely.
After a while she dozed off. When she awoke she was hot all over, her bottom an excruciating fire. She tried to find a comfortable position, and ended up on her side with her face only inches from the screen. There was a man on it, he was talking in front of some curtains, he had on a funny suit and a funnier accent. Then the man finished talking and words came on, but Stacey wasn’t a very good reader. She didn’t care what they said anyway. There were eyes spinning behind the words …
Stacey was sick, she knew what a fever was and that she had one. She remembered when Mommi had been alive, the way she’d lay a hand on Stacey’s forehead when she was sick, and could tell just by that how sick Stacey was. She remembered one time when she’d had a very bad flu with a very high fever, Mommi had gone into the bathtub with her and held her in the cool water, rocking her until the temperature had gone down …
Stacey awoke from the dream of her mother and found herself face to face with the dream on the TV. There was a man who looked like her Poppi, a man with dark hair and sunken eyes and thin lips. The man and his friend, who was bent all crooked and walked with a little cane, were cutting somebody down from a wooden bar. The man who looked like Poppi said the body was broken and useless.
Stacey couldn’t really sleep, but her eyes would close until the pain forced them open again. The next time she saw the man he was wearing the same kind of white coat Poppi wore at his work. He was showing the man with the funny accent how he had sewn a hand onto an arm it wasn’t born onto. Somehow Stacey understood that the man who looked like Poppi had built this other man—Monster, they called it—from all kinds of different parts. The Monster was scary-looking, but it was afraid of being burned, of being whipped, of being chained up, of getting a shot. Stacey understood all those things.
She even understood when a little girl—who wasn’t much younger than she was—used flowers to ask the Monster to throw her into a lake.
Stacey did fall asleep after that, relieved to know she wasn’t alone.
Poppi let her out in the morning, of course. She went to school dressed as always in heavy sweaters, skirt and tights, although it was nearly eighty degrees. She thought of the lovely blue swimming pool in their next-door neighbor’s backyard and knew she’d never be able to use it. If Stacey’s mode of dress was ever questioned, there was a standard response: her father was a pediatrician and said she suffered from a neurological disorder.
That covered a lot of the questions. Why Stacey often fell asleep in class, why she sometimes seemed to ache too much to participate in recess, why she had trouble concentrating or relating or remembering. There was also, of course, the story of how Stacey’s mother had died of cancer six years ago, and her father had raised her alone since.
In fact, many felt sorry for Stacey’s father, that a young pediatrician with such obvious concern for children should be left alone to care for such a dull-witted and sickly girl.
That night Poppi got home early enough to send the sitter off and fix dinner for them. He made Stacey a ghastly-smelling soup and told her to eat it while it was hot.
She could see the steam curling off it, but she picked up a spoon and ladled some of the stuff in. It burned her tongue and the roof of her mouth, but Poppi insisted it was good for her. He made her eat it all while it was still steaming.
After that she did the dishes, then went to her room, where she laid on the bed snuggling Baloo. Her mind drifted through images from the movie that had played last night on her TV. She floated with them, forgetting the burning in her mouth for a while.
Poppi is dressed in his white coat, but his office is bigger, darker, made of rocks. There’s lots of equipment she doesn’t understand lining the walls, some of it spitting sparks like 4th of July fireworks. Poppi is hunched over a worktable, his back to her, his hands moving rhythmically. The viewpoint moves around him until Stacey can see plainly what he’s doing.
There’
s a figure on the table before him, a human figure but one that’s unfinished, lacking. It has arms but no hands, legs but no feet, head but no face. Stacey sees a needle and thread in Poppi’s fingers and realizes he’s sewing, like Mommi used to when Stacey tore buttons off or ripped holes in her pants.
Stacey gets close enough to see what he’s sewing. He’s working on the mouth, which gapes like a blank black hole. There’s a lump of dead grey flesh in his left hand, one end dark with stitches, while his right moves up and down, up and down.
He’s sewing a tongue in.
The Monster is begun.
The next day Stacey’s own tongue is badly blistered. Poppi has treated the welts on her backside and they feel better, but the tongue causes her to be even more closemouthed than usual. Finally Miss Washington, of all people, who works in the cafeteria, sees the tongue and asks her what happened.
Stacey doesn’t want to answer, but the image of Poppi with needle and thread rears up before her vision. Unable to stop, she blurts it out.
“Poppi made me eat something hot.”
Miss Washington, who has never spoken to Stacey before, knows only her face, not her name, asks who Poppi is.
“My daddy,” Stacey says thickly.
Miss Washington, who runs the cash register, hesitates a long while. Then she says softly to Stacey, “Next time you say no, you hear?”
Stacey hurriedly gives Miss Washington her money and flees. She can’t even taste the lunch, can only feel.
A week later Poppi comes home with a bitter smell of beer clinging to him. Stacey is writing a letter to an imaginary penpal, carefully penning the words and laboring over the spelling; the letter is about Poppi. Poppi finds it, reads the first sentence, and tells Stacey if she likes those words so much she can eat them. Poppi tears the page into strips and forces them into Stacey’s mouth, holding it closed until she has no choice but to swallow. She is made to consume the entire page that way, then sent to bed with no other dinner.
That night Stacey sees Poppi at work again. His creation is more fully formed—there are the beginnings of features on the face now. Poppi has cut it up the middle, and he’s lowering in something that looks like a shimmery blue grey balloon full of jelly, with tubes dangling from either end. As she watches, he connects the tubes to those already within the Monster, then begins to sew it shut.
In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus Page 47