Year's Best Body Horror 2017 Anthology

by C. P. Dunphey

  You pull your shirt off over your head, lay it on the paper roll next to you.

  “Do you grind your teeth? Or clench them a lot?” Lync asks. Not until my fucking jaws locked shut, you want to say, but you can’t, so you just shake your head no. Lync presses several spots on your chest, your arms. What is he doing? Looking for pressure points? But you can’t ask.

  “That rules out TMJ, then,” Lync says, his face inches from your chest. “It might be soft tissue inflammation, but it’s not exhibiting anywhere else.” He steps back, rubs his chin thoughtfully as he looks at your body, then smiles as he makes eye contact again. “You’re a bit of a mystery, Mack. Tell you what, while we’re waiting for the blood tests, let’s give you the once-over. See if anything stands out.”

  Lync pats you on the shoulder, pointing down at the shirt next to you. “You can put your shirt back on,” he says, “but that’s only because I need you to drop the trousers a bit. Not off, just so I can check your prostate.”

  You nod and slide your shirt back on. Lync snaps a glove from the box on the counter and slides his hand into it. The room is so quiet that you can hear the clink of your belt as you unhook it and slide your pants down. “Just lean up on the bench here,” Lync says. “It’ll only take a second.” You turn around and lean down, your elbows crinkling the paper, it starts to tear under the weight.

  “Just relax a bit,” Lync says from behind you. You can feel his finger press into you firmly. “It’ll be over soon. One of the first things we tell our patients during an examination like this—OW!” You tense at the shock, and you feel him pull his hand free.

  You spin around quickly, grabbing at your pants to keep them from falling. You look at Lync, who is gripping his gloved right hand. The latex tip of the glove is torn and jagged, and his index finger is bleeding.

  “What the f—” Lync says as he stares down at his finger. “Something bit or cut my finger.” Lync snaps the glove off, and you both stare down at the wound. Squinting, you can see that the cut is actually a series of small punctuations, and you can see the half-moon shaped curve the punctures make across his fingertip.

  “Holy shit, that’s a bite radius,” Lync says. He raises his eyes, looks at you in stunned silence. “Mack, what the hell is going on inside you?”

  You button your pants, but don’t bother with the belt. You didn’t feel anything inside, nothing but his finger. There’s nothing wrong with you, you know it, and you’re not going to wait around and let people prod you. You hurry towards the door of the examination, throw it open, hurry towards the door.

  “Orderlies!” Lync’s voice echoes through the hall as you hurry towards the exit of the emergency room. “Grab that man, he needs to be quarantined, now!”

  You fumble at the keys in your pocket, pull them free, and you can feel your pants starting to fall. The automatic doors slide open and you hurry through them.

  Arms hook you around the waist, grab at your clothes, pull you back through the door. You want to yell for help from the people in the parking lot, in the waiting room, but you can only moan through your clenched teeth.

  They drag you back into the examination room, Lync slamming the door behind you. You kick at them, try to pull your arms free, but they’re stronger than you and trained to secure unruly patients.

  “Get him down on the bench here,” Lync says, ripping away the paper. The two orderlies press you down against the Naugahyde. One of them holds your head still, and you try to move, but he has you pinned in place. On the ceiling above you, you can see tiny, cute animal stickers, probably placed there for children to focus on when they’re given shots.

  You feel the pinprick on your arm, the rushing heat as whatever it was in Lync’s needle spreads out underneath your skin. “Hold him still until the succinylcholine arrests his muscle contractions,” Lync says.

  Then you feel it taking hold. No pain, no sensation, but a growing fear inside you when you realize you’re losing the ability to move. The rest of your body is as immobile as your mouth. You can feel the orderlies’ hands release you, but you can’t take advantage of the freedom.

  “Okay, it’s working, he won’t move now,” Lync says as he leans down into your face, peering into your eyes with a penlight. “Get his pants off.” You feel the tug and hear the clink of your belt as they pull off your pants and drop them to the floor. “Find the OB-GYN foot stirrups. I need to get his legs spread apart so I can . . .” Lync’s voice trails off.

  It feels like someone’s hand is on your penis, moving it side to side, but you can’t look down to see. You know it’s not that, though, because you can see Lync and the orderlies staring down at your waist, unmoving, eyes wide.

  “Why is his . . .?” the fatter orderly says, pointing at your waist.

  “That’s not an erection,” Lync says, tilting his head, looking closely. “It’s distended and moving. Is there something inside the urethra?”

  You feel it, suddenly, awkwardly. It feels like you’re urinating, but it’s not liquid coming out. A thin tentacle, a pale-yellow tendril, snakes out of your penis, lashing around in the air above your body.

  “What the hell is—?” The fat orderly’s words are cut off when the tendril wraps around the orderly’s neck. He struggles against it, coughing and wheezing, pulling against it. You can feel your body rock with the violence of the struggle.

  “What do I do?” the thinner orderly cries to Lync. “It’s choking him!”

  Lync grabs the tendril and pulls hard, but it won’t release the orderly’s throat. You watch Lync vanish from sight for a moment, and when he comes back into view, he has a scalpel in his hand.

  “Get that clamp,” Lync says to the thin orderly, pointing to the counter across the room. “As soon as I slice the tentacle, the stump of it will probably retract back into him. When it does, I want you to clamp the tip of his penis so it can’t come back out, okay?” The thin orderly nods, grabbing the clamp.

  Lync pauses, turns to look you in the eyes. You can’t say anything, and he knows it. He nods at you and turns back to the tendril. He grabs hold of it, swipes the scalpel across it. You watch as the two feet of tendril go limp and unravel from the fat orderly’s neck. The stump of the tendril snakes downwards and out of your vision.

  As the fat orderly stumbles backwards, gasping for clear breaths, the thin orderly tightens the clamp on your penis. You feel the pinch and the stab, so sharp and clear that you want to scream. You can’t activate your vocal chords, so the scream goes nowhere but through your head. You try to reach up and pull it off, to clench your fists, to shove them all away. You can’t.

  Lync leans down into your face again, and then you feel his fingers against your throat, pressing to find a pulse. “It’s contained now, whatever it is,” Lync says, turning to the orderlies. “Go to the next room, have Hanson look over both of you. I want this door locked from the outside while I continue my examination.” The two of them stare at him in silence. “Go! Get your neck looked at and don’t come back in here until I call you.”

  The two orderlies file out of the room, and you can hear the metallic clack of the door locking. Lync looks down at you again, then turns and walks across the room. You can’t see him, but you can hear the opening and closing of drawers, the shuffling of plastic and objects.

  “Mack, I’m sorry,” he says from somewhere on your right. “I don’t know what happened to you, but I have to put you under. The succinylcholine keeps you from being able to move, and you couldn’t talk because of the lockjaw anyway. The only thing that comes from you being conscious is that you’re going to feel all the pain.”

  Lync walks back over, hovering near you with a syringe in his hand. “You’re of no use to us conscious,” he says, leaning down towards you. You feel the pinprick again. “Don’t worry, I’ll figure out what’s going on.”

  You don’t remember the moment you weren’t looking at Lync anymore, the moment when blackness overtook your vision, all the sounds melted into
a single low-frequency buzz and your awareness of your body was a distant dream memory.

  You seem to remember someone telling you that when you’re in a chemically-induced sleep, you don’t have a sense of the passage of time, no awareness of yourself. That’s not this. You do feel something, but what is it? Like trying to talk with a mouthful of honey, everything is muted, slow, runny.

  And then, you’re suddenly crawling back into yourself, feeling your mind start making connections back to what your eyes are seeing. The light is blinding, painful, but it’s a welcome pain because it’s the first thing you can remember feeling since the needle stick.

  You blink. Whatever that medicine was, it has worn off, because you can move your eyelids. The light is slowly waning, but you still can’t see the examination room clearly. You try to open your mouth, but it still won’t open.

  You try to turn your head, but it barely moves. It’s not like your jaw, it’s not frozen; it feels held in place by something outside, something restricting. The light starts to ebb, the room makes itself known.

  It’s not the examination room. The ceiling is different, the stickers gone, fluorescents blasting down on you.

  “Sir, the patient is conscious, sir!” The voice is loud, barking. You can’t move your head, but you shift your eyes over to the right, and you can make out the blurry shape of a man in brown, a white helmet on his head. You’re almost certain he’s holding a gun.

  “Thank you, Corporal,” says a voice from somewhere on your left, and you know immediately that it’s Lync. You scan your eyes back and forth, but you don’t see him yet.

  Lync suddenly looms into your view, right above your face. “Hi, Mack,” Lync says. “You’ve been out for a while now.” The first thing you notice is that he looks different. His hair is shorter, cropped. Something is different around his eyes, too.

  “It’s been seven years,” Lync says, bending his eyebrows up in faux-sympathy. Your breathing speeds up, and you know he must see in your face how confused and angry you are. “It’s going to take you some time to adjust. You haven’t used your eyes or ears for a good long while.”

  You try to reach up, to grab him by his smug face, to punch him over and over until he either dies or someone tackles you, but you can’t move your hands, either. You’re not paralyzed, you’re immobilized.

  “Your limbs are secured,” Lync says, nodding. “Straps and bars. Don’t fight them, you’ll just tear your skin up.” Lync leans in close, speaking quietly. “As you start to come around fully, you’re going to notice some discomfort, tightness and pulling and localized pain.”

  As the words come out of his mouth, you can already start to feel it. Pressure, like lying at the bottom of a swimming pool, and small burning spots everywhere; it feels like someone is pressing cigarette lighters against every inch of your skin.

  “So just try to focus on me for a moment, okay?” Lync says, standing straight up and circling around to stand right in front of you. “I’ll try to explain everything.” He pauses, then smiles awkwardly. “This is going to be harder to sum up than I thought. Let’s see, how do I say this?

  “Mack, your body is . . . well, we don’t have a term for it. We’ve been calling you a nexus in the absence of a better term. Something about your physical make-up is a doorway to other places.” Your body is throbbing, but you’re focused on Lync’s words, rapt attention. “The orifices in your body all seem to lead to someplace. In the time since we initially put you under, we discovered that the tentacled creature that grabbed James was just an undersea creature from either a distant planet or another dimension, and it somehow got pulled partway into the portal that exited out of your . . . well, anyway, when we sent a camera down your urethra, we discovered what was on the other end, besides the tentacled creature, was plentiful fresh water, more than we ever could have imagined.”

  Lync holds his hand up for you to see. His index finger, the one that was bitten, is gone now. He wiggles the cauterized stump back and forth.

  “I had to have the finger amputated after it got infected from the bite,” Lync says. “It was an oversized insect. A camera in your rectum showed a dense, forest-like environment, teeming with thousands of tiny creatures which we have been harvesting and using for medication, research, more things than we could have imagined.”

  Lync smiles at you, shaking his head. “Honestly, I can’t thank you enough,” he says. “You don’t know what kind of changes the world has gone through, positive changes, because of you. There’s no water shortage in the world anymore. We’ve found cures for Alzheimer’s and muscular dystrophy.”

  Lync scratches his head. “I’m sorry to say we still haven’t figured out what’s going on with your jaw,” Lync says, shrugging. “It’s not medically related, we know that much. It’s possible that it’s the only portal in your body where whatever is on the other side knows about the portal as well, and they’re trying to prevent anyone or anything from coming through to where they are. Frankly, though, we haven’t spent much time trying to figure it out because we’ve been so busy making discoveries about all your other orifices.”

  You blink your eyes over and over, avert your eyes downward, towards your body. Lync watches you, confused, but then he finally understands.

  “Right, of course,” he says. “The pain I described and the restraints. Yeah, that’s going to be the hard part for you to deal with, but you won’t have to worry about it for long. Hang on, let me grab . . .”

  He moves away from you again. “After the first year of exploring all the places we could go by traveling through all the holes in your body, we started wondering about the nature of your body,” Lync says. “We wondered if all the places we could access through your ears, nose, anus, we wondered if those were the only ones we could get to.” Lync walks back over, a small square hidden in the palm of his hand, the sharp corners peeking around his fingers.

  “So we made a new one,” he said, pausing to look at your face. The heavy silence hangs in the air, and then he finally continues. “We created a biopsy hole on your arm to see what would happen. And sure enough, it led somewhere. Someplace empty, vacuous, no light or creatures of any kind, but definitely some kind of place. So we kept going, kept creating small holes to send our miniature cameras into. Mack, we found so much; our understanding of the universe, of reality itself, has multiplied a hundred times over because of the strange nature of your body.”

  Lync fiddles with the square in his hand, and you see a block of reflected light pass across his face. He must have a mirror in his hand, reflecting the fluorescents back up at his face. Why does he have a mirror? What does he want you to see?

  “So we monitor them all, send things through into the worlds with intelligent life,” he says. “Bring things back here through tiny tubes to use for research, or in the case of the water, we just keep pumping it out and filtering it to send to poor and desert populations. And it’s all because of you. Look what you’re doing for us.”

  That’s when he turns the mirror towards you, shows you your own face and body. Riddled with open wounds and sores, each one is kept open by clamps and wires, some with tubes going into or out of them. You look at your chest, pockmarked and spongy; you look like a porcupine covered in quills that curve and bend away from you, plastic and black, wires thick and thin, like the fibrous hairs on a fly.

  It’s not your face anymore, it’s not your body. It’s not you. You don’t know what you’re seeing, some kind of meat pile with electrodes sticking out of it, a mottled turkey carcass ravaged by a hundred thousand pop-up timers. You don’t know what you are.

  “I know, it’s hard to take in, Mack,” Lync says, lowering the mirror. “It’s a lot to deal with. Don’t worry, though, we’re not going to leave you like this. And I’m not going to send you back to that horrible half-waking twilight you’ve been in all this time. You deserve something better, more final than that.”

  Lync disappears again. You search the room as best you can, but
you still can’t see him. “Of course, you understand that we can’t stop utilizing your body,” Lynch says. “It’s too valuable. But I want to free you to whatever degree I can.”

  He steps back into your view, a syringe in one hand and an iPhone in the other. “So what I’m going to do is put you back under, just temporarily, so I can remove the higher thinking parts of your brain and get rid of them. All we need to keep your body functioning is the brain stem, so I’m going to end your consciousness instead of imprisoning it in here. It’s the least we can do for you.”

  Lync holds up the phone. “I looked through your playlist on your phone years ago, and I noticed that you played the Johnny Cash song “Peace in the Valley” much more than any other song,” Lync says as he swipes through your phone. “I want to play that for you, one last time.” You see standing tears in Lync’s eyes as he looks right at you. “Thank you for everything you’ve done.” He presses play on the phone.

  ‘I’m tired and so weary, but I must go along, till the Lord comes and calls me away . . .’

  Lync leans down and slides the needle in; you can’t feel the needle, not with all the holes and the wires and the skin damage. But you know he has injected something, because you can feel the world dimming around you again, blurring at the edges, losing its shape.

  Lync’s voice comes to you one last time, murky and poured through a sieve, but clear enough to be understood. “It will be better, I promise,” he says.

  The dark closes in around you now. In moments, the only part of you that is still fully you, the gray matter, will be sliced out and tossed aside. And your body will continue without you.

  Maybe Lync is right. Maybe it will be better. . . .

  GRUB

  By Alexander Lloyd King

  A final dinner was all he asked. Sure, she thought, what could be the harm in dinner?

  Ellie and Billy Goldstein started out romantically enough, two science majors in chemistry, and whatever fondness had spoiled between them was still digestible in small amounts. Dinner would be tolerable, somewhat constructive, especially if it offered Billy a little closure. She already had hers. His name was Luigi, and he was a far, Catholic cry from a Jewish atheist who wore a lab coat with house slippers.