Seeds Of Fear

by Gelb, Jeff

  The lightbulb popped as the lamp shattered, and suddenly the afternoon room was engulfed in darkness.

  "Did you come?"

  "Yes," she panted dryly. It had happened so fast that beads of sweat were only now beginning to form on her forehead. Her aching arms twitched loosely.

  "So did I. Are you still wet?"

  Cynthia brought her fingers close to her face, rubbed them together.

  "Yes."

  "So am I," he laughed. "I always have a big mess to clean after I talk with you."

  The image of him lying on his bed, the sheets like an ink blotter, came to her again.

  In the shadows, her own wet hands were slicked with darkness.

  And a smell drifted from her fingers, whose tips had dipped gently inside her.

  It was a flat, acrid smell, metallic. The smell of dirty metal and copper pennies.

  Blood.

  Her stomach, which she had ignored, leapt uncontrollably. It was all she could do to drop the phone and lower her head before she vomited.

  As she shook and gasped, the man's tiny voice chirped from the receiver on the floor.

  "Hello? Are you still there? Are you all right?"

  But she could not answer him, could not even pick the phone up, her hands shook so badly.

  It was all she could do to stumble into the bathroom, vomit again into the open toilet, fall into the shower.

  There, she checked her fingertips to see the blood.

  But they were unstained.

  Cynthia stayed in the shower until her skin pruned, obliterated the phantom smell with soap and water.

  It was dark again when she awoke, the covers curled like a lover around her naked body. She inhaled deeply, hesitantly, expecting the blood odor, but all she smelled were the warm, clean sheets with their stolen scent of the fabric softener.

  Her stomach rumbled, loud enough to hear, and she realized that she'd had nothing to eat since getting sick yesterday.

  The mere thought of eating brought a rush of saliva.

  Swinging her feet off the bed, she stood, wobbly and stiff.

  She grabbed the robe hanging from the bedpost, thrust her arms into it, pulled it closed and knotted the tie.

  The kitchen was flooded with the moon's translucent silver light until she snapped on the harsh fluorescents, whose light seemed to ooze from the fixture, creep across the countertops and the white tile.

  An omelette, she thought, that really sounds good right now.

  Soon she was beating eggs, pouring them into a hot skillet.

  The refrigerator held any number of ingredients that would be good in her omelette, but she selected grated cheddar cheese, mushrooms, and a tomato. Her movements were as spare and unconscious as any cook working in a familiar kitchen.

  Until she opened a drawer to get a knife to cut the tomato.

  They gleamed from where they lay within the drawer, long and tapered like a mouthful of razor teeth.

  Cynthia reached tentatively for one, as if the drawer might close around her hand like a hungry mouth.

  Snatching the knife out, she slammed the drawer shut with her hip.

  She'd selected a paring knife. It was slim and tapered, curving to a point like a miniature scimitar, its gentle, upward angle not unlike that of a ...

  Shaking her head, she frowned, thrust the knife into the tomato, cored it, divided it.

  In her haste, though, the knife slid across her finger, whisper-soft.

  She didn't even realize she had cut herself until she had dropped the cubed tomato into the bubbling center of the omelette and washed her hands.

  Under the water, blood welled from the cut, hair-thin but deep. When Cynthia, grimacing even though it did not hurt, pulled its edges apart, it opened to reveal a moist, red interior.

  It made her finger feel warm, her body a little faint.

  Was this what her caller felt each time he did this to himself? she wondered.

  Did it heighten his sexual response?

  Her gaze drifted back to the cutting board, to the compact knife that rested there on the damp, red cutting board.

  Her fingers curled around it, tickled the back of her other hand with its tip.

  Behind her, the tomatoes melted into the mass of the omelette.

  Her robe slipped open, and she pressed the flat of the cold blade against her breast, the sharp edge just circling her nipple. It became hard immediately.

  She flicked the blade's tip to her other breast, traced the nipple.

  Goose bumps rushed in a wave up her abdomen, across her collarbone, down her arms.

  The knife's blade became warm, moved.

  There was a momentary sensation of heat, which swept across her like a scouring, dry wind.

  Then a sudden coldness that engorged her nipples so much, she thought they might explode.

  She cried out.

  Simultaneously, and quite unexpectedly, she or-gasmed, her legs buckling beneath her.

  Her free hand caught the counter as she fell to her knees, bent her head, and gasped for breath.

  Beneath her, bright red pennies dripped unnoticed to the ground from her nipple, pooled loosely on the floor.

  The omelette burned in the pan.

  Cynthia was in control.

  She'd cleaned the kitchen, scouring the charred egg and cheese from the pan. She'd mopped the floor, trying not to distinguish between the pulpy tomato drippings and the other spots that were thicker, more red.

  The bandage she had applied after she had collected herself chafed the sore, raw nipple it covered. She had already changed it twice, and blood still oozed from the wound, soaked through the bandage, her T-shirt.

  When she had first gone into the bathroom, she was surprised at first to see blood, dripping from her nipple like red milk, running in a rivulet down the curve of her breast, beading on her stomach like water on a finely waxed car.

  With hesitant, probing fingers she discovered that the sharp little paring knife had nearly sliced off her entire nipple. It now hung from her breast by a small flap of skin. When she touched it, it moved away like an opening door, exposing bright, red tissue beneath.

  She quickly closed it.

  Amazingly, it had taken nearly an hour for it to begin to hurt, first in a tentative, stinging way, then in great, gasping throbs of pain that made both breasts ache in rhythm with her pulse.

  Once the kitchen was clean, she poured herself a glass of soda, gathered her robe around her, and sat down in her chair near the phone.

  She did not cry, and her stomach ached only in a vaguely threatening way.

  Rather, she felt she understood the caller better, as if they had bonded in some secret, bloody way. For the first time, she felt she could handle him better when he called next.

  Cynthia felt in control again.

  And, she had to admit, for some strange reason, what she had done, and done almost unknowingly, had felt. . . good.

  Or at the very least, it hadn't been merely painful.

  The phone on the table next to her rang shrilly, and she set the glass down, answered it.

  "Hello? Hi, Steve," she purred to one of her regular customers. "Is your wifey asleep? Great. Yes. Uh-huh. I bet you are hard, Stevie.

  "I've got something with me tonight that's hard, too."

  Steve stayed on the phone, angry at first, then scared, then weeping.

  When she was through, he asked if he could call her again.

  The phone rang, as it did more and more often these days.

  So many calls, so many callers.

  Many times, they didn't like what Cynthia wanted to offer them.

  With most, though, it only took a phone call or two to turn them on, just as it had been with her.

  Then they were easy to control.

  But it was getting harder with each caller.

  It took more and more of her to keep that control.

  Cynthia grunted as she fought to pull herself up from her sticky, crusted bedshee
ts. She spent most of her time here these days, the phone now moved to her nightstand, where it was within easy reach.

  Cynthia was naked, as she was all of the time now. She found that clothing of any kind, even a loose robe, chafed the many wounds on her body, some still oozing fluids, some scabbed over, some already covered with thick, ropy scars.

  There were far too many to worry about Band-Aids.

  It was difficult to walk now. She was weak so often, and it was hard to maintain her balance without any toes. The neighbors had started to complain, too, first to her, then to the building manager, about the screams, the strange smells coming from her apartment.

  "Cynthia?" asked the voice on the receiver, and it trembled through her.

  Her ex-boss. Her ex-lover.

  "Hello," she croaked, her voice hard and hoarse. It had suffered the most over the last six months or so, through all of the shouting, the shrieking, the crying. The toll of that stress was as apparent in her voice as it would have been in the lank, lusterless hair or wrinkled, saggy body of a burned-out topless dancer.

  For a moment, she felt like she had when he had fired her; when the man who cut himself had called her for the first time.

  Powerless. Out of control.

  Pushing that aside, her hand fumbled for something on the nightstand, just out of reach.

  It sparkled in the low light of the room as she brought it around, settled back in bed.

  It was awkward to hold the knife these days. All the fingers on her left hand were gone, and on her right hand only a single finger and thumb remained. This, she found, was the minimum number of digits necessary to hold the knife.

  "Ralph told me to call you."

  "He did? What else did he say?"

  "He said I'd never forget it."

  "Ohh, you'll never forget it. I'll make sure of that. You'll never forget."

  "What are you doing?"

  "I'm stroking the tip of the knife over my skin . . .ahhh . . . goose bumps are covering me everywhere," she whispered.

  Clumsily she moved the knife, trembling a little when the tip of the blade skipped over a scar, slid through a raw, wet patch. She sought out something she had given to no caller as of yet; some part of her body that was whole and unscarred to offer him.

  To control him.

  "Ahh," he groaned, a noise that sounded as if it were ripped involuntarily from somewhere deep inside him.

  "Ummm. It feels nice. Doesn't it?"

  "Yes," he answered shakily.

  He hesitated briefly when he heard something in the background, underneath her heavy breathing; the corrugated sound of metal cutting into something soft.

  The knife moved against her, into her.

  "Yes."

  Warmth spread within her, upon her.

  Her voice cracked with pleasure.

  "Good. So good."

  She screamed, her hips bucking up from the bed uncontrollably, shuddering with the powerful waves that crashed through her, the warm liquid that spattered over her.

  Through everything, she heard him, on the other end, gasp through the spasms of his own orgasm, his breath grating in her ear.

  She smiled fiercely as her vision lurched, dimmed.

  It came out with little difficulty, and she held it glistening and dripping in the blackness of the room. She was surprised by its smallness—no bigger than her fist—and the fact that it still shuddered timidly in her hand.

  "Never forget," she muttered thickly as the receiver dropped to the bed, the still-beating heart squeezed slickly from the ruin of her hand.

  Cynthia was in control.

  BLACK AND WHITE AND BED ALL OVER

  James Crawford

  They were wild and crazy times. Hollywood was still new and stars were being born every day. You couldn't turn around without bumping into someone who had just made a film. Studios formed and disappeared. Cameras cranked nonstop and movie productions were multiplying like rabbits.

  There were actors and then there were the Stars. The brightest of the stars weren't just found, they were made for the camera. An actor might be typecast, but these new players could do anything. No stunt too dangerous, no pratfall too outrageous—they were like the early gods of film.

  There was jealousy, of course, but most of us were in awe of them. Many a live actor would have sold his soul to be able to do the things the Animates could. Director didn't like your looks, you changed them. Got flattened in a bad fall, reinflate yourself and do something else. They were amazing.

  They made us laugh and that was a good thing, because some of them were not so comical in private. Some of them could be downright nasty. I'd heard stories about pranks Animates had pulled on Reals, stunts that put the less resilient Reals in the hospital. They were wild, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about them. I mean, how do you lock up someone who can turn into a pool of ink and pour himself down a drain?

  There was also talk about what happened to Reals who had sex with the Animates. No one had any specifics, but the word was, it wasn't anything you'd ever forget. A friend of mine had heard there was a special wing at the laughing academy reserved for those Reals crazy enough to do it with an Animate. He said they were all checked into the rubber room wearing the latest in straitjacket fashions. I told him he was full of it, but I was curious.

  My name is Josh Merriweather and I come from a small town in the East and made my way west by working odd jobs till I got to California. Once there I found HOLLYWOODLAND and my fate was sealed. It was magic and I wanted to be part of it.

  There were jobs all over the place. No one knew what they were doing, so everyone was making it up as they went. I worked behind the scenes on a couple of pictures and even did some work as an extra.

  I had heard some of the others talk about the Animates, but hadn't actually seen one. Sure I'd seen them on the screen, but I'd never met one on the street.

  Then my life changed, maybe not for the better, but it changed.

  The word was out that one of the newer studios was looking for help. No big deal; until I heard it was a studio that only produced Animated films. That's all I had to hear. I think I knocked a couple of guys over as I ran out the door and made a beeline for the Fletcher Studio. It wasn't far, so I ran all the way. When I got there, I was so out of breath that I couldn't even tell them why I had come.

  Finally I caught my wind and told them I wanted a job. They sent me to talk to the head man. Mack didn't much look like a tycoon, but he had given a start to some of the biggest Animates in the business. I admit I was a little in awe of him when we first met.

  "Well, kid, what do ya want?" Mack looked up from a viewer as I came into the room.

  I knew what I wanted to say, but my tongue had gone on strike.

  "You want a job?"

  I took a deep breath. "Yes!"

  "A man who knows what he wants. Good. Okay, you're hired. What's your name?"

  "Josh, and I just want to say—"

  "Enough talk; you think I've got time to interview every little schmuck that comes along? You can thank me later. Now I want you to run these pages over to that big building over there. Can you do that?" I nodded my head so hard, I could hear my brains rattling around. "Then go already."

  Off I went, and that was the beginning of my time with the Fletcher Studio. Wild times and a couple of scary times. I got to work with the Animates, and for the most part they were a swell bunch of guys. Maybe "guys" is too loose a term; they were a swell bunch of clowns, dogs, creatures, and things. It was amazing.

  My job description varied from day to day. One day I was a gofer, the next the light man. I never knew where Mack would send me next, but for him I would do anything. Which is what got me into the biggest trouble of my life, because one day Mack asked me to do something that again changed my life.

  It started out like any other day. I was running errands and stopping to watch the filming whenever possible. Mack had three Animates he was grooming for stardom. Two had real
ly good careers in radio and comics, and one had something that Hollywoodland had patented . . . sex appeal. I had seen the studio's other stars, the mumbling merchant marine and the big blue Boy Scout, but I had yet to catch a glimpse of her.

  It was about time to do a deli run when Mack saw me and called me over. "Hey, Josh, I got a job for ya."

  "Yes, sir, anything you want." Mack liked enthusiasm.

  "Great, I want you to get your ass over to Stage Five. Tell the director you're to talk to Tiffany about the matter she and I discussed."

  "Tiffany?" My blood started pounding. I was finally going to meet her.

  "Yeah, Tiffany. Josh, you do this for me and I'll make sure you go far in this business." Mack clapped me on the shoulder and pushed me toward my destiny.

  Tiffany had it. She had already done a couple of films for Fletcher Studio, and the audience loved her. There was a bit of innocence mixed with a whole lot of lust. You saw her up there in a short little skirt and garters and you had thoughts that could get you thrown in jail in most states. I'd seen her on the screen, and now I was going to see the real thing. Hooray for Hollywoodland.

  I found the director, Mack's brother Morrie, and delivered the message.

  "Thank God!" Morrie seemed genuinely happy to see me. "That little tootsie has been driving me nuts. I want you to go to her dressing room and help her."

  "Me?" My throat closed up and my knees developed a rhythm all of their own.

  "Listen, kid, Tiffany likes them young and handsome. You play your cards right and this could be the day you become a man." Then he looked around to see if anyone else was listening and said under his breath, "Just watch out for yourself, and if things get too weird, don't be afraid to run for it."

  "You mean, she might. . . ?" I began to wonder if this really was a good idea.

  "I mean the little honey has a libido the size of Texas. She's tired of the Animates she usually hangs around with and wants a Real to play with. Sometimes it can get a little hairy. You got a problem with that?"

  "A problem?" Sex toy to an Animate? What if the stories I had heard were true? Would I ever have another chance to find out? Curiosity got the better of me and I shook my head no.