Year's Best Body Horror 2017 Anthology

by C. P. Dunphey

  The phone rang. “Hello?”

  “Ted, where is she?” It was Erin’s sister, Lynn.

  “Erin?”

  “Yeah, Ted, Erin. And where the hell were you?”

  “Where?”

  “Ted, look, did Erin come home yet? She didn’t tell me where she went.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, Lynn, she’s home.”

  “Are you guys talking?”

  “Sure, she’s pissed but . . . yeah, things are better.”

  “Well put her on.”

  “She doesn’t feel well, Lynn. You should come over.”

  “Well, what’s the matter, Ted?”

  “I don’t know. I better go.”

  After Lynn, what he did to her, Ted couldn’t stay home. He packed a small bag and withdrew just enough cash to pay for a motel near Fun, leaving more than enough of the account for Erin to manage, at least for a little while. Soon he would disappear someplace, maybe Mexico, someplace where he could live as he had to now.

  The girls at Fun soon became the contrary; the two he had been with were no longer extinguishing the sunburst flames of his desire. His cash didn’t last long. He was half an animal, a reptile with the brain of Einstein. He was terrified of sexless sleep. He needed something new, something raw, something to keep the beautiful nightmares at bay. He chose Margo from his office.

  Ted hadn’t returned to work for almost a week. Surely Margo and all the office staff were aware of what happened. It made the prospect of the sex all the more searing. Ted knew where Margo lived, and hid there from early morning, waiting, shivering with want. It didn’t matter that he could be caught. He felt protected.

  Ted heard two voices from behind the opening front door: Margo and another woman he recognized from work. He smiled.

  Later again, Ted was worried about the blood. Could someone trace it back to him? “Of course,” he said to himself, snickering as if he told a joke. “Stupid blood. Ha!” At least he could sleep.

  The next morning, Allie from Fun was at his motel door. In the shade she looked the color of algae.

  “Ed, I’m sick. I don’t feel good.” She was nineteen, but could have as easily been fifteen.

  “No? Oh.” Ted was going to close the door.

  “Can I come in?” the girl asked.

  “Sure.” Ted closed the door behind her and began to take his clothes off.

  “No. Ed, I don’t feel good. I can’t do that right now.”

  “What?” Ted was erect and grinning. “Well, what are you here for? What do you want?”

  “I think I might be pregnant.”

  “Oh.” He pulled at himself, with more vigor at the word pregnant.

  “I don’t know, my tummy feels bad and look,” she pulled up her clean, white t-shirt, “does that look like a bruise to you? Do you get bruised when you’re pregnant?” Her belly looked dirty.

  “I don’t have kids yet. We’re waiting until we sell the house,” Ted explained, scratching his cheek with his free hand.

  “Oh,” Allie said, a fluttering expression between a grin and a grimace on her face. “That’s nice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, if I’m pregnant, I don’ know what I’m going to do yet, but I wanted to let you know.”

  “Thanks.” Ted reached out to Allie.

  “Please, maybe later.”

  “Oh, okay.” Ted stood naked in his door and watched Allie walk down the street to work. He was tired.

  He was fearful. Perhaps, he thought, one night without . . . it sickened him to think of a night without sex, the dreams were so much worse now, so much more exhilarating.

  Ted lay in salty sheets, burning from a heat he created, more intense than the season outside. “I won’t sleep,” Ted screamed.

  Was it sleep or something else? Suddenly or slowly, Ted was in the electric darkness. His body felt like a thousand bodies, his cry was a thousand sounds, he was traveling down a thousand pulsing corridors. Then a flash of white light, then light from a black sun, and before him wires, veins, vines, fingers, hairs, what was it that struggled in the black light? Nerves, dendrites, and holding the circuit together, a fleshy nucleus, shaking, square and round, blacker than the anti-sun, radiating electric sex death heat.

  Ted woke screaming, his manhood bleeding, and he knew. It was inside him.

  What may or may not have been growing inside the six women Ted saved, he did not know, but save them he’s sure he did, all their bellies greenish black and starting to harden. It didn’t matter where the gun came from. Ted couldn’t remember anyway. Every kill enflamed his desire more. Erin was the last. She had gone back to their home, an animal seeking sanctuary for birth or death. He fought the incinerating lust as best he could by trying to copulate with the spent body of his wife. But the nerves, the tendrils at his core sickened him with every touch of the cooling flesh. He had to end it all before he could no longer resist the insatiable call to procreate.

  He returned to the basement. The first bullet made a mess. It nearly blew the back of his head off. Ted, in shock, turned to the wall. The splattered black-green filigree disappeared into the pores of the cement. Ted felt the back of his head; it was closing. He put the gun to his mouth again and pulled twice. He put the gun under his chin and pulled. “Come on, come on.” He felt like crying, but he was dry. Frustrated, he fell to the floor and putting the gun to his forehead, pulled. Ted sat up and touched his head. It was already closed.

  The insidious need burned anew, Ted’s spine drenched in molten iron of passion. He needed to fuck. Every bullet was a tease, a tickle amplified outside any sensation and he realized what needed to be done. He remembered the last dream, the vision of the thing inside him. It resembled, at its basest depiction, a human brain and nervous system, inverted. Ted held the gun, and fighting the urge to vomit or pass out, self-preservation quickly getting the best of him, placed one final bullet in the empty cylinder. Ted Howard smiled and mumbling some obscenity to himself, placed the gun to his crotch and pulled the trigger.

  THE FACE IN THE MIRROR

  By Sean McCoy

  It fell out a little at a time and then all at once. I ran my hands through my hair in front of the mirror daily, checking for clumps and flecks of dandruff and other telltale signs that I was losing my hair. My wife watched me and through all of this, nodded calmly, saying that I was fine, that I wasn’t balding. That I had fine hair, not thinning hair. It was the product which made it look that way. I shouldn’t use so much product anyway. I looked good as I was.

  But I could see it. My hair had always been thick and my younger brothers, only a few years behind me, still had thick hair that they slicked back or puffed up at will, while mine had one or two styles that still worked.

  I switched to an organic shampoo and conditioner and tried out different lather/rinse rituals and experimented with how often I washed my hair. I stopped using combs because I read that the teeth pull your hair from the root. Better to just use my hands. I cropped it short too. My thin hair was long and clumped together, revealing my roots and pale scalp. That was the problem. It wasn’t thinning.

  I was too fat to shave my head, I told myself. I’d look like an inflated ball sack. So I kept it short, close cropped. No product. Just a little hairspray. Maybe start running some more. I could always grow it out long again if my hair loss plateaued.

  And then one morning when I got out of the shower and looked in the mirror I saw the first spot, the bald spot. Not at the back near my frustrating double cowlick. Not at the front either. My hairline wasn’t receding.

  My hair was falling out.

  The missing clump came from the top left side, seven inches above my left eyebrow. Above the hairline, just a fallow blank spot with a few putrid hairs sticking out of my pink scalp.

  I almost screamed.

  I thought back to the night before. Had I pulled my hair out in my sleep? Or sleep walked maybe and shaved my head on accident? Was my wife playing a practical joke on me to calm me down
or force me into making a decision about shaving my head? I raced through my memories trying to find a reason for the sudden bald spot.

  The internet held no solutions either. It was something akin to the hair loss that many chemotherapy patients suffer, but it was localized to one specific, round spot. Alopecia, I heard, could be the problem. I saw pictures of dozens of men with perfectly symmetrical circles of missing hair dotted across their heads and I feared the worst.

  When my wife came home I fretted about the spot for hours until she was sick of me.

  “I didn’t do anything to it and it’s probably all this stress that’s making you lose your hair. Stop messing with it. Shave it or leave it be.”

  We were short with each other all night but when I refused to take the hat off in bed she turned sweet and told me that it didn’t matter to her. This was normal, even if it wasn’t exactly normal, and that she loved me no matter what.

  I told her it mattered to me.

  The next morning the spot seemed to have grown more. To track its growth, I took a blue pen and marked a small spot that I thought only I would be able to notice. I was afraid that my wife would think I was paranoid.

  I spent hours on the internet comparing anecdotal similarities and ruling them out or questioning the original poster further on long since dead threads. I checked my inbox every ten minutes waiting for a reply from someone who knew what I was going through, but nothing came back to me. Just an endless sea of confirmation e-mails requesting that I confirm my new membership to eDocBBS.com, CareFriends.org, MaleHairAnonymous.net, and a dozen other forums, newsletters, and sites that all claimed firsthand experience with hair loss. Or strange hair loss. Was it that strange? It happened to nearly every man on the planet.

  The next day I saw that the spot really had grown. My tiny blue dot, once embedded in the ragged tree-line of my ever-thinning hair now stood alone on a fleshy hill. I showed my wife and she admitted, fine, I was right. I was going bald. What now? Was I happy now?

  It wasn’t that I was going bald that bothered me, but this was strange, wasn’t it? I showed her my research on Alopecia and the pictures and posts by men and women who had been afflicted by it.

  “Well if the internet says,” she said.

  I said something snarky and mean and she backed off. She told me to see a doctor or get a haircut, for the love of god, because if I was going to obsess over it, I should at least do something about it.

  I resolved to see a hairdresser. No, a barber. A man who would know what I was going through. No, a stylist. A woman. Someone who had seen men try to hide their baldness before and would know a way to help me hide as well.

  So I called a Cheap-Clipz down the street and made an appointment for the morning. I told my wife and apologized for how I had snapped at her. She was happy to hear that I was taking matters into my own hands, but I could tell she was still frustrated with me. We watched TV and fell asleep without talking about the spot any more.

  In the morning, I felt refreshed. I had my solution: the haircut. Maybe my wife was right. Maybe it was just the stress. To prepare, I did my daily double-wash, first with the homeopathic remedy, a mixture of apple cider vinegar and soap, and then with the product I had ordered direct, Restorox. I let that sit for a few minutes, pretending to wash the rest of myself, while the subtle burn trickled across my scalp. I counted an extra thirty seconds on top of the 120 I had already counted in my head just in case I was counting too fast, and then rinsed it out. I could feel it burn in my eyes a little, but that was okay. The burn would go away. My hair could not.

  At first, when I got out of the shower and looked in the mirror I was happy. The spot hadn’t grown, I had marked it with another dot this time, just in case. But when I ran my hands through my hair, another clump came, this time on the right side, just above my ear. It came out quickly, as smooth as stripping the covers off a bed. As soon as I felt it tug I made a noise, terrified at what I had done. Unable to undo it. I tried holding it up to the new bald spot, pressing and holding the loose hair so it would reattach, maybe through osmosis, but instead, it fell in a dead mass into the sink. I flushed the clump down the toilet, immediately regretting it, thinking that it might serve some future purpose.

  I called the hairdresser and cancelled my appointment.

  When my wife came home I was sitting in the dark trying to sleep but unable to, afraid that the oils on our pillows had suffocated my pores and clogged up any chance of my thin weak hair getting through. When she asked about my haircut, I told her we needed new sheets. When she responded warily I showed her the new spot.

  This time she had the reaction I was hoping for. This was too much too fast and for the first time I saw the fear in her eyes that I had, that something wasn’t right.

  She gave me a number to call and when the automated system picked up I left a vague message about scheduling an urgent appointment. I made sure to let them know that I didn’t think it was life threatening but that I did think it was time sensitive and so to schedule me as early as possible. I made it known that I would be willing to come in early if the Doctor’s schedule allowed.

  We didn’t fight about the hair that night. Instead I just slept on the couch with a fresh towel over the pillowcase and I took a shower right before bed without checking the spot for growth.

  In the morning, I decided not to wash my hair at all. I instead put all my product into a grocery bag to show the doctor so that maybe they could decide whether my treatment, admittedly self-designed, was doing more harm than good. I had received no callback from the doctor’s office, which I remedied right after brushing my teeth and seeing myself in the mirror again.

  It wasn’t another spot, it was seven. And they weren’t all circles either. Some were patchy and oblong while others snaked around like crooked veins tracing a pale path across my head, dividing it like farmland. I wanted to cry.

  I yelled at the nurse on the phone and when she didn’t schedule for an appointment, I threw on a hat and drove to the emergency room.

  They wouldn’t see me in the ER for what now seems like obvious reasons, but I was so worked up that they sent me to a quieter wing of the hospital to see a doctor. A patient man who explained his procedures calmly, and promised to get to the bottom of things.

  He asked me about my home life and my work, both of which I admitted were strained, but no more than usual.

  He barely looked at my products though, and when I started in about my routine and the precise scheduling I did to ensure that my hair received round-the-clock treatment, he tuned me out completely.

  What he recommended was cutting back on the care and just washing my hair every other day or so as normal. He did recommend that I shave my head for appearance’s sake, to which I replied that I wasn’t here for fashion advice, I had scheduled an appointment with a professional hair stylist for that.

  He again ignored me, nodding instead to himself. He concurred that Alopecia was a strong candidate for the cause, but a trichoscopy didn’t reveal any of the telltale “yellow dots” normally associated with the autoimmune disease. He took my blood work, but beyond that he couldn’t really say. He sent my home with a sample of Rogain.

  That night my wife gave me the Come-to-Jesus talk. After my unexpected trip to the hospital (and the bill it had accrued) she felt it was necessary to remind me that she loved me, and that aging was normal, but I needed to get on top of it, because it was getting on top of me.

  “Neither my father nor my mother’s father are bald,” I told her.

  “But it’s happening,” she said. “Here.”

  She handed me a pair of clippers and a towel.

  “I picked these up,” she said. “Maybe it’s time. If the doctor took your blood work then I’m sure he can figure out a solution, but in the meantime, you can control how you handle this.”

  She was right, I had to admit it. She was always right. She sat me down in the bathtub that night and wrapped a towel around my naked shoulders and we s
haved off what was left. Neck. Sides. Top. Everything. She gathered the clumps from the tub and threw them in a grocery sack before rinsing me and kissing my forehead.

  When I looked in the mirror, I felt a small resurgence of confidence. I looked like myself but not myself. A familiar stranger. My wife hugged me and smiled and said I looked sexy and I thanked her for doing this and that I was sorry for being so crazy. She left the room to throw away the bag of hair and I inspected my new face.

  She was right, it wasn’t bad. I looked clean. As I wiped a stray hair from the back of my head, though, I noticed my right ear was curling in at the edges slightly more than normal. I had never examined my ears this closely before. And now without the hair to cover them up I saw them as lacking a little context and proportion.

  I slept in our bed that night and my wife and I cuddled. We laughed a little bit about the strangeness of the days before and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  I slept in the next morning for the first time in a week. My wife had already left for work and I felt content now to prepare for the day at my leisure, unafraid of looking at myself in the mirror. I showered, without product (God, how much was I really spending maintaining this illusion?), and again felt fresh and clean. Whole.

  When I looked in the mirror though, I had a strange feeling, like my ears wouldn’t pop. I turned my head to the side to inspect my right ear with the extra curl at the top from the night before and that’s when I saw it.

  My ear was gone.

  Completely gone. A mangled bump where it used to be. I poked and prodded it, thumping against my temple and while I heard the dull thunk tapping against my skull, I couldn’t place where the sound came from.

  When 911 asked what my emergency was I was at a loss for words and yelled that they come over right away and that I was hurt. I took a picture and sent it to my wife via text and then called her, no answer.