Haunted: Dark Delicacies® III

by Del Howison

  “This is connected to the fisherman, the one with the …” Larchette pressed the top of his head as if to check that it was still intact. “My God. We might be next.”

  “We could turn the car?” Powell suggested.

  “Even if we can, how would it run on flat tires?”

  “Walk,” Larchette stammered. “Start walking now—we’ll reach a road, at least.” He pulled out his cell phone. “The police can have cars waiting for us.”

  As he pressed the keys, his bearded face quivered. “No signal. Damn, damn! Try yours, Scarlet.”

  It took moments to confirm that cells were useless in this remote quarter.

  “Either shoot me or follow me,” Leo told them. “But this is the way.”

  Renewed hope made Larchette eager to be friendly. “How long, Leo?”

  “Twenty minutes, maybe.”

  “Then we should just make it before it gets properly dark,” Scarlet observed.

  “So?” Leo smiled. “You’re trusting me with your lives?” The smile broadened. “Deliciously ironic.”

  The light turned deeper crimson: a congealed quality that became streaked with black as shadows lengthened. Rich, earthy scents of fungi thickened the air. Dominic noticed that the woodland crowded in as they moved away from the demolished complex. Here, a thick loam allowed trees to sink their roots deep underground. He pictured pale tendrils snaking down through dark, moist soil to penetrate Cold War bunkers. For all the world, it felt as if they’d crossed a threshold. They’d entered an alien landscape of dense, primeval forest. Here, the dead might sing melancholy ballads. A phantom wolf could swallow up the moon to bring an end to humankind. Or so it seemed to Dominic.

  As they walked, a jittery Larchette sputtered, “It can’t be far now, surely? See? This is the old route to the highway.”

  But the abandoned road had skinned over with moss. Brambles engulfed it, forcing detours. Boughs overhung it to form a tunnel that was so devoid of light that sometimes they stumbled. A cold wind, born in the Arctic, ghosted through the foliage. Timbers creaked. Twigs plucked at the strands of an old wire fence until it sounded as if a lunatic guitarist was serenading them with jangling metallic discord as they found themselves once more swallowed by an army of trees.

  Dominic noted that his three “colleagues” were well equipped. Soon they produced slender flashlights to illuminate the path. They trudged on as a rising gale cried through the wilderness. Flanking the way were steel signs that were slowly dying of rust; nevertheless, he could make out Russian words that must have spelled out ominous warnings. Beneath that runelike text, etchings of death’s heads underlined the threats of danger. Dominic glimpsed domed skull shapes gazing out from the bushes. These morbid, decaying objects were concrete machine gun posts intended to protect the military complex in the time of yore. Twin slits in the front, from which the guns would have been fired, resembled eye sockets that imbued the domes with a cold, hating stare. Trespassers weren’t welcome.

  Larchette was worried. “Surely, it can’t be far now—hey!” He whirled round as if tracking an object that moved swiftly through the trees. “Did you see that?”

  “For pity’s sake, man, get a grip.”

  “I did see something,” Larchette protested. “A flash of white … like bare skin.”

  “If you go chasing elves, we’ll never get out of here.” Powell marched away along the overgrown track. “You’re a coward, Larchette. And that’s the word I’ll use in my report. You’re fin—”

  This time Powell stopped short. His anger vanished completely when he uttered, “I hope you’ve got strong stomachs.”

  “We’re dead,” Leo predicted with grim satisfaction. “As good as nailed into our coffins. As good as eaten by worms.”

  What blocked this weed-choked roadway to the outside world was a chain-link fence, ten feet high and topped with razor wire, clearly erected when the Cold War base was abandoned. This, however, hadn’t triggered Leo’s macabre statement.

  Everyone stared at what adorned the steel mesh. At what had so grimly fruited there in the bone-chilling northerly. Their eyes absorbed every detail of the dozens of corpses that had been strung from the wire. From the tiny corpses of sparrows, to crows, to rabbits, to the bloated cadavers of reindeer that swung heavily—blood-filled pendulums that sprinkled maggots into the grass when the wind blew.

  “Look at their heads,” Scarlet breathed. “Every single one of them.”

  “Just like the fisherman back on the beach, eh?” Leo enjoyed himself now that he detected fear in his interrogators. “So? What does this evidence tell you? Are you sure you will be going home to your families, after all?”

  Perhaps forty creatures hung there: tiny birds to man-sized deer. Each and every one mutilated. Probing beams from flashlights revealed that the tops of craniums were missing; the brains removed; eyeless sockets formed windows to redly vacant skulls.

  The cold seemed to blow right through the five as if eager to tug souls free of all too mortal bodies. Tree trunks groaned deeply while beneath the endless clawing of the branches, the domed concrete bunkers stared coldly, sullenly, as if knowing what awaited the foolhardy as nightfall sent forth its invasion of prowling shadows.

  A gunshot split the air. “There it is!” Smoke poured from Larchette’s handgun. “You must have seen it!” Screaming, he ran into the bushes in pursuit of the flitting form.

  Powell had seen it. Anyone could tell just by the expression on his face. Aghast, he backed off, then fled.

  Dominic called to Scarlet and Leo, “Get back to the beach. We can follow the shore to …” He didn’t finish the sentence. A spider scuttled out from the bushes.

  “Oh, dear heaven.” Like a frightened child, Scarlet’s hand found his.

  Because it wasn’t just any kind of spider. There in the light of Scarlet’s flashlight Dominic saw a crude spider shape. Only it was far too big, perhaps ten feet in diameter. Pale, almost hairless—flesh pulpy. Quite simply, the creature had been assembled from naked human beings, eight men arranged in such a way that they lay facedown with the tops of their heads touching. Skulls had been top-sliced to reveal the brains. Then the craniums had been fused, while some abhorrent surgical technique extended the spinal columns so they were bonded together. Sutured scalps formed a yard-wide knot of unruly hair in the center of that raft of flesh. With their heads conjoined, the men were forced to cooperate as they moved on all fours. They ran on the palms of their hands and soles of their feet, like monkeys trained to perform some weird dance with the crowns of their heads touching. Frequently, they moved sideways—giant, soft-backed crabs, their backbones pressing against skin, each rib visible in their straining bodies, bare buttocks clenching-unclenching as they moved.

  “They’re dying,” Dominic whispered. “They must only be able to survive like this a few days at most.”

  Already, the face of one man had turned a bruised purple. One eye had closed, the other bulged out, sightlessly, as red as a ripe cherry. A crash from their right heralded the arrival of another of these composite creatures. The eight pairs of limbs moved in a mad scramble, yet every so often the conjoined brains of the individual men must have bonded in perfect synch. Then legs moved with undulating precision, just as the millipede ambulates with a smooth, wavelike motion that carries it across the ground, while the arms that now protruded from what amounted to the underbelly of the beast supported its center where the eight heads were fused. When the gales stopped mauling the trees, a sudden quietude allowed the sound of the fused men to reach Dominic’s ears. Each surgically joined man grunted, panted, or whimpered with pain.

  He shot a glance back at the creatures adorning the fence. Bizarre trophies, or raw material for new experiments?

  Five more of the creatures emerged from the forest onto the weed-choked road. The largest moved clumsily, one of its component parts long dead. Its limbs hung limp, while the other bonded men tried to compensate. The bloated corpse painted a black trail of
slime across the grass. Another conjoined creature had also mastered locomotion, so each man moved with graceful precision: it seemed as if the multilimbed creature danced lightly through the dark toward them. Grunts of exertion turned into excited snorting as sweating torsos heaved upward to allow the faces, which were normally turned down toward the ground, to glimpse the intruders. With a cry, Larchette burst from the trees. In one hand he held the flashlight, in the other the pistol. Screaming, he raced toward one of these whirling stars of human flesh, their legs radiating outward. He fired into the press of bodies. With a roar of agony erupting simultaneously from eight mouths, it rose up onto two pairs of legs. Limbs writhed in the air, resembling the tentacles of some nightmare octopus. In the beast’s center, eight faces of those conjoined men were clearly visible. The skin along the hairlines had been stitched. Now, stresses of the facial skin tugged features out of shape. Sixteen misshapen eyes glared in both fury and agony at Larchette. He fired his last two rounds into the center, where eight skulls met to form a single structure of bone. While the creature howled, its freakish companions cried out in dismay. Then the wounded beast slammed down onto the turf, feet kicking wildly at the ground until toenails were ripped clean away. A moment later it lay still.

  The creature nearest Larchette pounced. As he lay beneath it, it began to resemble a huge pale fist that rested palm down on the earth. What its sixteen hands did to violate Larchette, Dominic had, mercifully, no way of knowing, but the man screamed in terror for a long, long time before his voice trailed into despairing, gulping sobs … then, at last, silence.

  Dominic didn’t know when he began running. Or where. Only that he ran alone through the nighttime forest. Pale tree trunks, phantom sentinels, darted by him. Cold gales provoked the branches to claw at his head as he ran. Twigs plucked the fence wire. Metallic notes punched his eardrums. Torrents of air raked the grass as if invisible claws were tearing at the earth in fury. He blundered by the skull-shaped domes of concrete bunkers, their gun slits watching his desperate scramble with mute amusement. Behind him, the stitched-together conglomerations of men followed. Once, he called out to Scarlet In answer, the storm raised sounds that aped scornful catcalls.

  On returning to what had once been the site of the Vortex buildings, he saw that running was a waste of time. A dozen of those fleshy man-crab creatures waited for him. Some had raised themselves onto two sets of legs so that limbs radiated like the petals of a sunflower. From its crowded center, a cluster of faces peered out, all those glinting eyes fixed eagerly on Dominic.

  When they rushed Dominic, he didn’t fight. In the face of those odds, what was the point? Powerful hands seized his limbs, then deposited him onto broadly muscular backs where they held him with strong fingers. Coarse body hair pricked his face. Man-sweat, spiked with hormonal excitement, filled his nostrils. As his consciousness retreated from the horror of it all, they carried him away. Like riding a dogsled, he thought dreamily. Low to the ground. Fast, smoothly fast … gliding …

  Any regrets, Dominic? Despite the surreal journey through the dark forest, he found himself musing on his life. He’d no regrets about his clandestine profession. But he felt a sudden, profound sadness. All those casual encounters he’d enjoyed at hotels … Why couldn’t he have invested time in nurturing a meaningful relationship? Yes, he had one regret as his life neared its end: he wished he’d mated emotionally with a woman.

  As he rode on the backs of the conjoined men who scrambled crabwise, he pictured himself opening the door of his increasingly lonely apartment to find, instead of emptiness, a smiling face. “How was your day, my love? Did you do anything special?” Briefly, he struggled to free himself. One of the beast’s hands gripped his throat. Above him, the stars appeared to spill out of the sky: falling, falling … they flowed through his skull until his brain was filled with fire.

  Grainy VCR color footage. A superimposed date: 03/03/1991. One of the fleshy man-crab beasts lies dead on a tiled floor. Fluids leak from the corpses. Dr. Lippisch addresses the camera. “I don’t have anti rejection drugs. So within days, these beautiful children of mine wither and die. But see what I have done. I can fuse separate individuals into a single, coherent being. I reprogram their minds, so they believe this is how they are meant to be.” She laughs. “See the torso, then legs … how they radiate outward like the limbs of a starfish. I name this creation Man-Star. A wordplay on monster, of course. Man-Star, my Man-Star … But one day this Man-Star race will be perfect.”

  —VCR anonymously mailed to Leipzig University

  To Dominic, it seemed a long, long night. One of absolute darkness. Then there were the dreams … of blood, of restraint, screaming … nightmares … They stained his soul …

  At last: LIGHT. A light that drove incandescent torrents through his eye sockets. As he tried to force himself fully awake, he realized that a woman in a white coat stood near him. Silver streaked her long hair. As she held a clipboard, she addressed a camcorder set on its tripod in the room’s center. “I am Dr. Lippisch, Senior MD, Project Vortex. Here you see my latest subject, aged thirty-three, a healthy male. Drugs, which I have at last acquired, will prevent the subject’s immune system from rejecting my surgical grafts. Composite brain is healthy, tissue pink, arterial blood flow satisfactory. Students, watch carefully. The abdomen wall is already clamped back in order to receive a very special passenger.”

  Dominic turned his head to one side. There on a line of tables lay Scarlet, Leo, Powell, and Larchette. The tops of their heads had been neatly sliced; empty skull cavities revealed that the brains had been removed.

  Dr. Lippisch walked quickly to the camera, tilted it so its lens would capture images of Dominic strapped to the operating table. Then she switched on a TV bolted to a tiled wall. In vibrant detail, it revealed Dominic as he lay there supine. Naked. Bloodstained. Belly slit from ribcage to pubic hair. The mouth of the wound gaped huge and red as steel S-shaped clips tugged back the flesh. His stomach now formed a great crimson cave of a thing. A gory void. A roomy vault from which arteries, expertly clamped, protruded.

  At that moment Dominic understood many things. An epidural killed any sensation below his collarbone. (Lippisch: “See the regular rhythm of the diaphragm. All is well”) What’s more, he knew that the woman—utterly insane—had remained in the bunker after the fall of communism. There, she’d secretly continued Operation Vortex. She had built her Man-Stars. (“Watch how I insert the grafted matter into the space once occupied by the right kidney. Now I connect blood vessels, which once fed that kidney, with the carotid and jugular stubs of the conjoined brains.”) Worse, he would know what it was like to carry the brains of Leo, Scarlet, Powell, and Larchette in his belly. And for those four moistly pink brains to be fed by his own lifeblood. (“Viewers, please check the website for updates. I fully expect this subject’s nervous system to gradually connect with those of the brains implanted in his abdomen. Soon, he will establish communication. The integrated brain in his stomach will talk to him via his own neural highway…. Just imagine the nature of such a conversation!)

  Lippisch was mad, of course. Completely delusional. An opinion proved when she accidentally caught the epidural embedded in his upper spine; the long loop of tubing had been left to hang carelessly down to the floor, and her foot had done the rest. Once the needle had popped out, his healthy liver stopped efficiently filtering the drug from his bloodstream. Pain was quick to show its unwelcome face. Within moments, the agony of the vast surgical wound in his stomach became a Pentecostal fire. Unconsciousness stayed cruelly at arm’s length, so he felt the nettle-like sting of the scalpel part yet more muscle. Then came the cold mass of his companions’ brain tissue being forced through the gory hole into his abdomen. Dr. Lippisch happily sang a Bavarian folk song as she operated. Dominic’s scream carried upward through the clay to the surface. Momentarily loud enough, it made Lippisch’s monstrous creations pause in surprise before they slid back into the all-engulfing shadows of the forest
.

  Success is sweet indeed. And with that success, even I am transfigured.

  —Dr. Lippisch

  “What is it, Dominic? Are we close?”

  “Yes … too close.”

  “Are you frightened?”

  “Terrified. If you believed me, then you’d be terrified too.”

  “Show us the site of the Vortex compound, then you’re free to leave.”

  How similar the replacements to Powell, Scarlet, and Larchette sounded. They looked the same too. HQ must use the same recruitment template. The woman was a career-driven ice maiden. One man appeared queasy at the sight of everything here on the beach. The third wore a permanently bitter expression.

  “You haven’t asked to see my scar,” Dominic began. “I can prove—”

  “We’ve been through that,” said the woman. “An old surgical wound proves nothing.”

  “Show us the Vortex site.” The queasy man switched on his digital camera. “You will be questioned and your responses filmed. Do you understand?”

  Dominic grimaced. “Follow me.”

  He led them up the beach, over piles of seashells that were as white as fresh snowdrifts, to a break in the dazzling cliffs, for which Rugen is justly famous, then he guided them into the forest. There, its silent, shadowed interior embraced them.

  The bitter-faced man spat questions: “You came this way with Scarlet, Powell, and Larchette?”

  “Yes.” The twelve-pound brain mass inside Dominic’s stomach grew hot, itchy; it began to pulsate. His inner companions were full of anticipation.

  “You found the site of the Vortex lab?”

  “As you will see for yourselves.”

  Overarching tree branches formed a tunnel of near darkness.

  “Do you know the nature of the Lippisch experiments?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed.”

  Dominic led the way. Contentedly, he rubbed a big, tightly full stomach. Behind him, a white-coated figure fell in behind his little, unsuspecting party. Hair tied severely back, she walked silently with a clipboard hugged toward her chest. When she lifted a hand, her Man-Stars sidled out of the undergrowth. The trio hadn’t yet noticed they were being stalked by naked men conjoined at the head, their long, pale legs stepping in unison through the gloom. But they would see them soon enough, when it was far too late to do anything about it.