Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  The Gross-out Contest, Yvette had told Zinc by the pool, is the heart of the World Horror Convention. So tonight the Mountie found himself packed into Tomb A with hundreds of hard-core conventioneers, all of whom hoped to be disgusted, revolted, sickened, and nauseated by each contestant who got his or her four minutes of infamy in front of the open mike. A motley crew of four mock-serious judges sat at a raised table spread with an assortment of cheesy prizes. Their nametags read Robert McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, Edward Lee, and Brian Keene. One of the judges picked up a set of chattering false teeth and slipped them under the table in the vicinity of his crotch, rolling his eyes and lolling out his tongue in lustful pleasure like the village idiot.

  The crowd cheered.

  “Does it count as head if there is no head?” a wag shouted.

  Approaching the stand-up microphone, the MC consulted his roster. A stocky fellow with a black goatee, he wore black suspenders over a Black Sabbath T-shirt above black jeans. His introduction was short. “Next, Wes Grimmer.”

  “Aw right!” someone hollered.

  An aisle down the middle of the room separated two ranks of chairs. From his seat on the aisle, Wes made his way to the podium with a sheaf of papers in hand. Positioning himself behind the mike, he waited for the hubbub to abate. Once the room was quiet, he announced the title of his offering to the crowd.

  “‘My … Horny … Prick.’”

  “The story of my life!” the wag called out.

  “Let him speak!” came the chorus from the audience.

  “The moral of my story is,” Grimmer began, “never take a piss in the Amazon. I know what you’re thinking: it serves me right. A veteran traveler like Wes Grimmer ought to know that the world is full of unexpected dangers. Yes, I heard about the fellow who explored China to research a book. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, they say. So he ate a local delicacy called a thousand-year-old egg, which infected him with a bone fungus that ate his skeleton. His bones slowly turned to mush, until finally they could no longer support his organs. The would-be epicurean caved in on himself and smothered to death.

  “And yes, I heard about the guy who stood barefoot on a riverbank in the Amazon jungle and wiggled his toes to squish mud between them like he used to when he was a kid. Unfortunately, loa loa worms lurked in the mud. They burrowed into the flesh of his feet and wriggled in his bloodstream until they found a suitable swimming pool in the ocular fluid of his eyes. There, the worms squirmed and grew until they were several feet long. First, their reluctant host went blind from overcrowding as the parasites usurped the space within his eyeballs, then, when the expanding pressure could no longer be contained, both orbs bugged out and blew a slew of slugs in someone’s face.”

  “Mine eyes have seen the glory—” someone yelled out.

  “Let him speak!”

  “But hey, I’d been drinking beer all day on the deck of the boat as it snaked its way up that tributary of the Amazon River, and I had to take one hell of a piss. So I set down the research notes for my next novel and ventured to the stern of the boat to relieve myself over one side. There I stood, legs apart, draining the snake in my hand, sighing a little sigh as the beery stream arced forth, when—was that the sparkle of sunlight in my piss?—I caught a glint of silver.

  “No, it wasn’t sunlight.

  “It was a little fish.

  “My warm pee hitting the cooler water must have been the lure. It scooted up the yellow cascade like a salmon fighting its way upstream to spawn—a fitting simile, as things have turned out. A moment before that sleek minnow vanished into my piss hole, its gills and fins, barbed with needles, shot forward to form a phalanx of spikes. It felt as if a cactus had been rammed up my prick—one of those ones with the needles that break off as soon as they pierce your skin, then fester and itch like crazy until you dig them out. My scream was shrill enough to be heard in Seattle. My urethra and my bladder were pincushioned on the inside, so there was no way to dig those slivers out in the Amazon jungle, where it was a four-day junket to the nearest hospital. I spent the remainder of the cruise curled up in a fetal ball from the pain.

  “By the time I got to a doctor, bad had slipped to worse. The doc pulled on latex gloves while I dropped my crusted pants, then he recoiled in shock from what assailed his horrified eyes. My prick—bloated twice the size it ought to be—was turning the sickly color of gangrene. The rot emitted a gagging stench. The spines that had broken off inside me had somehow sprouted, and now they stuck out through the skin of my prick like the bristles of a thorny thicket. The gunk that oozed out with them was a mix of blood and pus, a pukey yellow concoction of vile bile if ever there was one. And as for those squiggly white worms … yes, they were maggots.

  “One look at the doc’s face and I sensed that worse was heading for worst. After the blood tests, he gave me the prognosis. ‘There’s good news and there’s bad news,’ he said gravely. ‘Gangrene has set in, so we must amputate.’

  “‘God, no!’ I gasped. ‘What’s the good news?’

  “‘That is the good news,’ he replied.”

  The audience—including Zinc—burst into laughter. Grimmer had to wait for it to die.

  “‘The bad news is that the needles can regenerate. Some have traveled through your bloodstream to your heart and your brain. Less than a week will see those spikes begin to grow, and soon both organs will suffer the fate of your genitals.’

  “‘How can this be?’ I wailed.

  “‘It’s the Amazon.’ He shrugged.

  “Every doomed man deserves one last wish, and my wish was for a final all-night fuck. By then, my balls were swollen as big as my prick, but there was no way—thanks to the needles—to get a little relief. What I desperately needed was the company of like-minded friends, so that’s why I hopped a flight to Seattle to catch the tail end—you might say—of the World Horror Convention.”

  Hoots of laughter.

  “The pants I’m wearing hide the fact that my putrid, scabby, itchy, oozy, abscessed, wormy, horn-spiked prick is permanently erect. Special plastic diapers taped to my waist and thighs keep in not only the retching stench but also the rancid drippings. Hundreds of barbs protrude from the sloughing skin, each ready to pierce and snap off at any human contact. So much festering jizz juice has built up in me that I wouldn’t be surprised if I could come a dozen times. All that’s missing is the right receptacle.

  “Look! There’s Petra Zydecker!”

  The mob howled as Wes pointed her out.

  “What a foxy lady. Perhaps she’ll play Beauty and the Beast with me.”

  Hamming it up, Petra ducked out of sight.

  “Look! There’s John Pfeiffer!”

  Wes swung around and cocked a finger at the MC.

  “What a sweet mouth in the hair of that Freudian goatee.”

  Like a “speak no evil” monkey, the master of ceremonies whipped his hands over his mouth.

  “Look! There’s Bret Lister!”

  Zinc followed the cocked finger.

  “Doesn’t Bret have a regal ass? And, buddy, do I have a crown of thorns for you.”

  The laughter exploded.

  “In fact,” said Grimmer, shielding his eyes with one palm to gaze around the room, “everyone here has two—or three—raw pink holes that will do. So when it’s time for beddy-bye and you go back to your room, slipping the card into the slot to release the lock on the door, that sound you hear behind you just before you catch a whiff of chloroform … well, that sound could be me.

  “I’m Wes Grimmer.

  “My prick is horny as hell.

  “And I’ve got something to pass on!”

  Most were laughing. All were clapping. Some were nudging each other. But whatever the reaction, Grimmer was a hit.

  Except with Bret Lister, who slunk out of the room with a scowl.

  MASQUERADE

  “A trickle of blood?” Yvette suggested, holding up the tube of stage blood.

  “No thanks,” th
e Mountie replied.

  “I thought the role of an undercover was to blend in.”

  “I’m not undercover. I’m plainclothes.”

  “Suit yourself. How do I look?”

  “Dead,” he said. “As a doornail,” he added.

  “You say the sweetest things.”

  Blonde and fair-skinned in her natural state, Yvette had blanched her flesh beyond pale with a cadaveric base coat. Her clinging, gossamer gown was whiter than a shroud, and the only color she sported other than her blue eyes was the insipid blue of the lipstick that dyed her mouth the pallor of death.

  “Why so white?”

  “Virginal, don’t you think?”

  “If you’re saving yourself for a wedding in the afterlife.”

  “It’s so I’ll stand out.”

  “By bleeding yourself of color?”

  “The Vampire Ball is a goth affair. With everyone in black except me, I’ll be a neon sign.”

  The two had met up again outside the Gross-out Contest. Zinc had invited Yvette to have a drink with him, and she had agreed as long as she could first dress for the ball. So here they were in her hotel room on the second floor, where Yvette was transmogrifying from the living into the undead, while the Mountie pondered if he should step across the line from being an objective observer so he could escort this vampire to the midnight fest.

  “Chicken,” she taunted him with the tube of stage blood.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You can’t be my date if you won’t shed blood.”

  “Do puncture wounds count?”

  “Where? On your neck?”

  “I’ll be your victim. You can nibble off me.”

  “Be careful what you wish for.”

  “I wish,” said Zinc.

  Yvette squirted the edible liquid into her mouth and slackened her lower lip until one side began to dribble. Tilting her head curved the line down her delicate chin. She went into the bathroom to spit the excess in the sink. The bloodsucker who emerged had a pair of jutting fangs. So shocking was the red dribble against her pale skin that it shrieked louder than a blood-curdling scream.

  “About that drink?” she said.

  If you love horror, you love the Cthulhu Mythos, so as a result, the convention was earning the Cthulhu sculptor multitudinous bucks. Al Savory was the birth name of the model maker who ran the Lovecraft’s Realm exhibit in the Morbid Maze gallery, but the nom de guerre he used for his artwork was Dexter Ward, taken from H. P.’s eerie novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Horror fans are a collecting breed—the plethora of specialty houses that offer deluxe editions of popular works proves that—and exquisite Cthulhu monsters of cold-cast porcelain or acrylic resin mounted on heavy metal brackets make ideal bookends. Collectors are obsessive. Rarity counts. So the ones with real money want those treasures that are one of a kind. Dexter Ward cast severely limited signed-and-numbered runs from his monster molds, and if you had the money to buy the only copy, he would let you smash the die and all the clones.

  Big bucks in artificial rarity.

  Plus it can be fun to destroy.

  It tweaks the id.

  One of the sculptor’s best works was Pickman’s Model, his Gothic rendition of himself as Lovecraft’s tormented artist, painting the real-life monsters from the occult realm that he can use as models because he has opened that other dimension. Savory had a buyer, a guy who had the wherewithal to buy the only copy. They were to seal the deal in the bar in half an hour, then carry the prototype out to the parking lot, where the collector would smash it with a hammer.

  Al Savory’s hotel room was on the ground floor, tucked away in a short hall blocked by the delivery area. Seen from the aquatic center, it was off in the far corner, just around the bend from the long side stretch. His was the only door off this angled nook, so as Al struggled to make his keycard spring the reluctant lock, he was hidden out of sight by the maskers who came and went from their rooms along the straightaway side.

  In went the card.

  Out it came.

  Finally, the green light blinked.

  This time the door popped open.

  “Having trouble?”

  Al turned toward the voice.

  A figure draped in a black cape that swept down to the floor and a black hood that masked its face stood at the corner. A goth in costume for the Vampire Ball.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Al said, recognizing the voice.

  Zap. Zap.

  The Taser darts hit.

  With fifteen feet of take-down power, the handheld stun gun had more stopping force than a .357 Magnum. It released compressed nitrogen to hurl a pair of electric darts at a speed of 135 feet per second. Both 3/8-inch needle points jabbed into Al’s chest like the fangs of a vampire. Akin to that jolt of juice that galvanized the Frankenstein monster into life, a fifty-thousand-volt zap shocked the artist. The effect of this pulsating current on Al was opposite to the effect of that jolt on the monster. It penetrated the neural net that sheathed Al’s body and shut down communications between his brain and his muscles. Incapable of performing coordinated actions, Al’s wildly contracting muscles turned him into a spastic marionette with jerky arms and legs. Dazed and confused, the stunned artist succumbed to spinning vertigo.

  Al was vaguely aware of being propelled in through the open door to his room, and of crumpling in convulsions at the foot of his made bed, and of a cape being swirled away to expose a near-naked body, and of a figure bending down with something in both hands—a hammer and a long spike aimed at Al’s forehead.

  “The world is a masquerade,” the artist Goya once wrote. “Face, dress, voice, everything is feigned. Everybody wants to appear what is not; everybody deceives, and nobody knows anybody.”

  The idea behind a masquerade is that you dress up in a costume to hide who you actually are. But Zinc had the feeling that this masquerade turned that notion inside out. Goth was the essence of who these conventioneers really were, so tonight’s masquerade allowed them to shed the false face that masked their dark souls.

  The elevator that brought Yvette and the Mountie down from her room opened into a corridor throbbing with heavy industrial music. Zinc was transported back to those gender-bending days in the early seventies when the clergyman’s son Vincent Furnier spawned the phenomenon of shock rock by cross-dressing in black leather, transforming his face with clotty black mascara, and renaming himself Alice Cooper. Onstage, Alice was the best theatrical performer in the rock business. In a camp, grotesque pantomime of anguish, excess, bloodletting, horror, ruin, and warped sexuality, he hanged himself on a gallows in a mimic of the cover of his classic album Killer, cut off his own perverse head on a guillotine, simulated tearing off the head of a chicken and—his coup de théâtre in the annals of infamy—dismembered dozens of plastic dolls for the song “Dead Babies.”

  Shock rock begat new wave. And dark new wave begat goth.

  Goth is a mind-set that goes back centuries. Constantly reinventing themselves so they can luxuriate in death, doom, and desolation, the “new goths” who stalked the halls and shadows of the convention hotel tonight sucked inspiration from all that had gone before. Theirs was the gathered esthetic of Byron, Poe, Dracula, Hyde, Jack the Ripper, James Whale, Poppy Brite, David Lynch, and the Chapman brothers. Excessive was the norm. This was the fashion for those who would never be conventionally attractive. The black hair, black eyes, black lips, black nails, black satin, black velvet, black brocade, black leather, black fishnets, black tattoos, silver chains, and fetishistic body piercings smacked of S&M. Over the top and almost operatic in intensity, this group conjured images of a fang club congregating in the dark to use razors, syringes, and eyeteeth to drink each other’s blood.

  No wonder frontal-lobe puritans dread this genre.

  Because that’s the fear, isn’t it? Fear of the weak reed. It’s all very well for dark fantasists to indulge their Gothic inclination, as long as they keep a firm eye on the line that divid
es the occult realm from the reality of everyday life. But what about those deluded psychos who believe they have actually broken through to the other side and are now possessed by whatever lurks beyond? Hyde took over Jekyll while Jekyll still believed that he was in control, and that’s what Zinc had seen happen too often in his job. A breakthrough to the other side that was in reality nothing more than a psychotic delusion.

  “Who’s that?” Zinc asked Yvette, pointing out a woman on the edges of the throng.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. She set up in the dealers’ room to sell spankings at a buck a slap.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “I jest not,” said Yvette. “A horror con is bound to attract a lunatic fringe.”

  The female in question had no face. From their table in the bar, at the window that overlooked the pool and its satellite hot tubs, Zinc and Yvette watched the Blank enter their watering hole, stop to sweep the pub with her invisible eyes, then retreat. A black stocking hugged her head as tightly as the black leotard that sheathed her figure. Fluttering behind her was a black cape with a bloodred lining.

  “I feel like I’m at The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Zinc said.

  “Goths are theatrical.”

  Yvette was sipping a Bloody Mary while Zinc nursed a ginger ale. His drinking years were over, thanks to the scar in his brain. The goth at the table next to theirs had a sculpture of Pickman’s Model in front of him. From the way he kept checking and frowning at his Rolex, Zinc felt it was safe to bet that he had been stood up. Finally, the man and his model left the boisterous bar.

  Some of the conventioneers were cavorting around the pool. They shed their costumes to splash in and out of the hot tubs and the turquoise deep. Protecting his precious sculpture from the manmade water spouts, the jilted goth with Pickman’s Model emerged from the artificial jungle to skirt one side of the party pool and vanish into the phony thicket off in the far left corner.

  “I thought vampires were afraid of water.”

  “Times change,” said Yvette.