Tiffani soothed me with tender caresses, as she always had. She assured me everything would be all right. She told me that Basilisk had chosen me. She stroked my penis with her frail, soft hand.
They tied my wrists to my ankles and placed me on the bed with my ass in the air. I turned my head to avoid looking at P.J. Price’s gaping eyes and mouth. My cheek lay upon soft satin. Tiffani rubbed me with sharp-scented oils, massaging away my tension and fears. This was my Tiffani, after all. She wouldn’t let anyone hurt me. She loved me. I closed my eyes. Her hands spread the oils over my skin and into my pores. She lubricated my anus with it, inside and out.
At some point, the chanting began. Deep and throaty, the lullaby made me sleepier. It wrapped me with a blanket of security. I even forgot that the underside of my naked body was exposed to the room. I wanted to forget everything.
“Soon, darling,” Tiffani hissed into my ear. “It will all be over soon, and then we can go home.” She blindfolded me, and I welcomed the darkness. No one could look at Basilisk and survive, she explained.
Their voices rose. I smelled burning hair and sulfur. I tracked their softly padding steps as they danced around the room. I was losing sensation in my hands and feet. I made fists and curled my toes to pass the time. Cool air fanned across my buttocks. The chanting grew louder, ecstatic and more insistent. The air itself crackled with energy, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Someone touched me, and I instinctually tried to look behind myself. The blindfold denied me.
They were hands—large, masculine hands. They rubbed harshly over the fleshy hemispheres of my ass, kneading and spreading them. Something insinuated itself inside me. It was thin, limp and alive like a snake. Panic enveloped me, and my heart thundered. I cried out for Tiffani, for mercy and for God. I squirmed, but those hot hands held me firmly in place. The tentacle wiggled inside me, delving deeper and deeper. It swelled, filling me and spreading me wide. I screamed, I’m sure of it.
I thought my intestines would rupture from the sheer girth of it. It pulsed with a seductive new rhythm, with an alien heartbeat that tried to derail my own. The pain was excruciating.
Suddenly, the hands viced down on my hips. Basilisk raped me with a hard, heavy beat. He grunted with each thrust, then abruptly, the expanding tentacle erupted. It released its load of molten semen into my body. I heard Basilisk’s unearthly groan as the demon came inside me, and I felt hopeful relief thread through my soul. Soon, the pain would end. The tentacle slithered out of me and went away. Basilisk loosened his hold on my hips, and I swear I felt him caress me, tenderly, just like my Tiffani had done. My screams subsided into sobs. I think I lost consciousness.
When I awoke, my anus hurt. Sticky with drying semen and blood, it burned. I couldn’t move. My testicles descended from their clutch of fear and horror, to hang between the A-frame of my thighs. My knees ached. The sheet was hot beneath my cheek, wet with my own spit and rank with the perfume of anointing oils. The skin of my face tightened with dried brine and my throat felt as if I’d swallowed a handful of thistles.
They gathered around me; their master had retreated to his unholy realm. I felt their kisses, their caresses and their licking tongues as they cleaned me and adored me. They plugged me up, to keep the precious seed from escaping. Tiffani untied me, pulled away the blindfold and smiled into my eyes. She loved me.
The next couple days passed in a blur. The others took P.J. away and put new sheets on the bed. Tiffani stayed with me. We slept, ate and held each other, always naked. Tiffani insisted on doing everything for me. She fed me, spooning an herbal pudding into my mouth, and held the cup as I drank honeyed tea. She washed me and combed my hair. I began to feel like a king.
The egg formed slowly, soft and tender at first. The pressure coalesced into one place, like beads of mercury all rolling together to form one big, shimmery pool. Tiffani explained it all to me. I was going to be a father.
On the morning of the third day, the egg was a solid presence in my body. The thought of excreting it frightened me, but Tiffani assured me that everything would be fine. She was right. The egg came that evening. I squatted upon the bed, tears streaming down my cheeks, my groans and screams echoing in my head. It stretched me. It tore me. I thought for sure I would die, but finally, it was out. The egg was large, the size of a man’s fist, enough to hold a supernaturally tiny infant. The shell gleamed with black and blue opalescence. The others cleaned it off while I lay gasping on the bed.
Later, Tiffani and I curled around it, keeping it warm between our bodies. I petted its dappled surface with awe-struck fingers. My baby grew inside it. For two weeks, Tiffani and I took turns leaving the bed to stretch, wash and use the bathroom. Most of the time, we cuddled, stroked each other, and made love with our baby lying beside us. The bed became our love nest.
On November 13 at 7:53 a.m., the egg cracked. Tiffani and I cried together as our child stretched a perfect, little arm out of her shell. We helped her emerge and cleaned away the thick, clear fluid in which she had incubated. She was beautiful and healthy. I loved her immediately. We had already chosen her name, Coquette. In French, Coquette meant ‘flirtatious’. Lying there with my new family, I held Coquette’s hand carefully in mine and kissed the delicate, baby fingers with their tiny talons and cool skin. She looked up at me, beguilingly, with her mother’s black-amber eyes. I vowed to give her the world.
The Fear in the Waiting
C.J. Henderson
* * *
REPORT OF MEDICAL OFFICER MAJOR ERNEST T. WHITTAKER OPENING STATEMENT:
I do not quite know where to begin. As any who read this report and whom also know me or my work will attest, this is not a usual state of affairs. But, of course, as the select few who will read these pages already know, there is nothing usual about what I have been asked to analyze here.
When I was first assigned the examination of this report’s subject, various facts were withheld from me. I am not yet certain as to whether or not I should look on this as a disservice or not. Surely, if I had been told everything that was known of the madness into which I was being sent before I had entered, I would have been better prepared for all I was to be told. However, would I have been less receptive, more curious, cautious enough to wear perhaps a more skeptical layer of armor? And even if I had done any of these, could they have helped?
I can not answer. Nor, maybe, should I even attempt to. My orders were quite simple. With the death of Dr. Herbert West, I was to discover all I could from one of the only survivors of the disaster known as Project Starchaser, his assistant, Dr. Daniel Cain—not to whine on inordinately about how such orders affected me. Dozens of people are dead. Scores more are missing. Damages totalling in the hundreds of millions have been estimated, with the more pragmatic of the ledger keepers predicting that the final total will be over a billion dollars. A billion dollars. Even in the heavy inflation of the late forties, still the thought of a billion dollars worth of damage, all of it incurred in a matter of minutes …
I stopped where I did and began once more because I was losing my train of thought as well as my perspective. A dangerous admission, I suppose, when the psychiatrist begins to rant and ramble. I reveal this, not to make the case for sloppy emotionalism, or to suggest that my need to assess my own stake in this matter outweighs your own need for precise, uncluttered information, but as a means of supplying you a subtler type of intelligence that you yourselves might assess without my putting any kind of favorable “spin” on things.
I will admit to you now that this is the fourth draft of this report which I have begun. When I found myself rambling in earlier versions—hands shaking, mind wandering—I destroyed the copies and began anew, fearing that you might find me in need of more help than my own patient. But, I have decided after a long night of soul-searching that to get my thoughts down and then to revise them until they are pure and safe and reflective only of terror voiced from other throats would be a disservice to you, my superiors, and
to our country as a whole.
It is my decision in the final analysis that you need to feel what I have felt, the horror, the disbelief, the agony and pain, and ultimately, the hysterical fear that has left me trembling and doubting and no longer in any way certain that the world is what I once thought it to be. Cold ink on bright white paper will not suffice. To understand what you have charged me to explain, then you must touch the mantle of chaos as I have, as I did when I walked into the cell of Dr. Daniel Cain and stared into his eyes and learned the terrible truth that, for at least one man in this cosmos, there is no God.
BACKGROUND:
July 8th, 1947, First Lieutenant Walter G. Haut, the Public Information Officer out of the Roswell Army Air Base released what has already become known as “The Roswell Statement.” This is the document in which he announced to the world that the military had recovered the remains of a flying saucer.
This report was almost instantly dismissed in favor of a new release which claimed the supposed “UFO” was actually an experimental weather tracking satellite.
At the same time, two captured war criminals, Doctors Herbert West and Daniel Cain, Americans who had been working with the Nazis in the death camps, were sent to New Mexico, specifically, to U.S. Army Restricted Area 51, to spearhead a hastily put together covert project known only as Operation Starchaser.
West and Cain, unbelievable as it might sound, were supposedly experts in, and at this point I quote from General Order #25-A-892, “the highly experimental field of reanimation—that being the resurrection of dead tissues to a once more living state.”
So simply said, so casual a statement—isn’t it? Such deceptively calm words. I would imagine the scientists working on the Manhattan Project spoke in such pleasant euphemisms. Pleased to meet you, Dr. West. You’re the creator of the reanimation process everyone is talking about, aren’t you? Didn’t I read something about you in the latest journal? No, I remember, I heard it from your colleague, Dr. Cain. Something about the ashes of concentration camp victims being molded into a living, humanoid monster, and about the resurrected body of our Holy Lord chewing on your chin. And what’s all that about you transferring the essence of your consciousness from your mind to that of a young woman so that you might secretly become your assistant’s lover, then his son …
Again, I stop.
But, do not mistake this for some simple pause to reflect, a moment’s rest so that I might compose a sentence in my head. The above was not simply some clever bandy to help convey my disgust for this assignment. Actually, I am at present trying to keep from screaming. My hands are shaking so badly, they are so covered with the slime of my own perspiration that I can barely make contact with my typewriter without my fingers slipping across the keys. My brain is afire with the sins Cain has outlined for me, a hundred disgusting, abominable tales that have left me morose and fearful.
Suffice it to say that my patient claims to be close to sixty years in age, despite the fact he appears to be only in his late twenties. He claims to have died and been resurrected by West. He claims to have killed West more than once to try and halt his horrible experiments, only to have failed time and again. In short, Cain claims many things, each of them more repugnant than the next, and Heaven help me, I believe every word he said to me to be true. With what I have seen, how can I not?
I met Cain in a darkened room. I was told that due to his condition the patient himself had requested that no one be able to see him. He was fed only by intravenous drip, the tube extending from its bottle to his arm through the heavy curtains drawn around his bed.
Cain did not leave his bed throughout our conversation. I saw nothing unnatural in this at the time. Such a number of people had been injured in the New Mexico tragedy that I merely assumed him to have suffered some crippling wound, like so many of the others I saw in the same ward. I would later discover that I was correct. Hideously, monstrously correct.
Enough.
I have hinted at Cain’s past, and that shall suffice us for now. This report was to concentrate on Cain and West’s activities at Project Starchaser only. From here on in, it would probably be best if I were to allow Dr. Cain to speak for himself.
THE INTERVIEW:
“I think you should leave, Dr. Whittaker. For your own good, I think you should leave this room now.”
These were the first words spoken to me by Dr. Cain. He did not sound tired or sedated. Nor either did he sound deranged or lacking of the proper facilities to respond to the questions I needed to ask. Still, he insisted, “You don’t understand. I think something is going to … I mean, there is a danger … something is …”
And then, the most peculiar thing occurred. Cain suddenly broke off his attempt to get me to flee his chambers and began talking to himself. It was a mad buzzing noise of hisses and snaps. I could make out few of the words clearly, my patient’s none-too-internal debate muffled by the curtain around his bed. Finally however, he spoke to me once more.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? It’s all right. I am crazy, you know. Crazy to have allowed all that has happen to me to occur, crazy not to have killed West decades ago. But, but … of course, I did, didn’t I? I killed him. And then I killed him. And I think I may have killed him again somewhere in there. I’m not certain anymore, you know.”
The man rambled for some time after that, telling me in great and horrid detail the abominable tales I have but hinted at in the preceding pages. After several hours I attempted to get my assignment under way by abruptly changing the subject. Without warning, when my patient paused for a breath, I said, “Tell me about what happened at Project Starchaser.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Tell me what you saw, what you did, what you were brought there to do. Tell me what went wrong.”
There was a long pause at this point. Cain made small gurgling noises for a while, interrupted with disturbing, dry whistles. I must admit, despite my many years of medical service it was a noise I had never quite before heard. Finally, however, he managed to begin to answer my question.
“West.”
“What about Dr. West?”
“You asked what went wrong. It was West. He is what was wrong. What went wrong. What is wrong. What is wrong with the world, with the human mind, with existence itself!”
“Why do you say this, Dr. Cain? What makes you feel this way?”
“What makes me feel this way? Are you an idiot? Have you heard nothing I’ve said? What more does the monster have to do?”
“Yes, I understand that you believe Dr. West responsible for a great many horrors over the years you’ve been with him. But, even if I accept everything you say as true—all of it without any critical reflection—still, I need to report to my superiors exactly what occurred in New Mexico. There are considerations of national security.”
No response was made to that statement, merely the same dry whistling noise slithering outward from between the weighty curtains surrounding the darkened bed. I despaired for a moment. Normally I would want to work with a patient such as Dr. Cain for months before tackling the root center of his problem. But, I had not the luxury of time. My assignment was to get answers as quickly as possible—through whatever methods possible.
God help me, I did as I was ordered.
“There were reports of a flying saucer recovered by the Army Air Corp. The rumor is that this was what lie at the heart of Operation Starchaser. Can you tell me about that?”
“There was no saucer.”
I expected more, but again, the air was filled with only the rasping whistle. I was about to question this further, when Cain suddenly snapped fiercely.
“Am I an engineer? A physicist? Is West? We’re doctors, you fool. Reanimators! We were not taken to New Mexico to examine a space ship. Think, you idiot. What would they take us there for? What possible reason could your masters have to bundle us off to their desert prison?”
“My assumption had been that you were taken ther
e to examine, and possibly revive whatever bodies might have been recovered from the wreckage.”
“Oh, we went to revive a body all right, but there was no wreckage. Well, not from any unidentifiable flying objects.”
And then, at that point, my patient began to chortle. It was a thin, drooling sound, as if the notes were being strained through a thick gauze heavy with blood. After fifteen years of working in various mental wards, the laughter of the hopeless and the frightened is nothing new to me. I have waited by patiently while murderers and rapists have laughed themselves into stupors without so much as blinking. But this, this was different.
Cain’s gaiety was an inhuman thing, the noises of howling dogs and shrieking crows mixed with the various sounds one hears around wood-cutting machinery. It was shrill and piercing, yet somehow mournful. At the same time my brain held both contempt and yet pity for the creature which could produce such a noise. Finally, however, Cain broke off his wild cackling. The dry whistling returned, a grating irritant so unnerving I almost wished for the laughter instead. Then suddenly, the terrible noise ceased and Cain’s voice began speaking to me once more.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Whittaker. I’m sure you’re only here to help. You’re doing your duty, but still, you think it somewhere within your powers as a healer to rescue me. I suppose you deserve a decent chance at both. I will tell you about Project Starchaser.”
I waited in silence. Something puzzled me about Cain’s voice. The trembling in it, the hatred, had somehow become subdued. But, they had been replaced by a snide authority, a type of mocking piety I found most troubling. It was a tone I am quite familiar with, the range of vocal pitch used by the worst psychopaths when they are attempting to beguile.
It did not make sense to me, though. Unless Cain were harboring multiple personalities …
Enough. There is little to be gained by reviewing my inability to perceive what was happening then. All shall be revealed to you as it was to me.
Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror Page 13