by Bob Shaw
This is getting crazier and crazier, Herley thought.
“What if you disguised the drug?” he said. “Or what if it was administered by force?”
“I don’t think the adipose organ would be deceived, especially after the first dose—and there is such a thing as the medical ethic.”
Herley stared at Corcoran’s flushed countenance, wondering what to do next. It was easy to see why Aldersley General had decided to part company with Corcoran on the quiet. Although a brilliant pioneer in his field, the man was obviously deranged. Had it not been for the independent evidence from the laboratory technician, Herley would have had severe doubts about the efficiency of Corcoran’s radical new drug. Now the substance seemed less attainable and therefore more desirable than ever.
“If that’s the case,” Herley said tentatively, “I don’t suppose you’d ever be interested in selling the pilot batch?”
“Sell it!” Corcoran gave a wheezing laugh. “Not for a million pounds, my boy. Not for a billion.”
“I have to admire your principles, sir—I’m afraid I’d be tempted by a few hundred,” Herley said with a rueful grimace, getting to his feet and dropping his notebook into his pocket. “It’s been a pleasure talking to you, but I have to get back to Aldersley now.”
“It’s been more of a pleasure for me—I get very bored living in this big house all by myself since my…” Corcoran stood up and shook Herley’s hand across his desk. “Don’t forget to let me have a copy.”
“A copy? Oh, yes. I’ll send you half-a-dozen when the article is printed.” Herley paused and looked beyond Corcoran towards the garden which lay outside the room’s bay window. “That’s a handsome shrub, isn’t it? The one with the grey leaves.”
Corcoran turned to look through the window. “Ah, yes. My Olearia scilloniensis. It does very well in this soil.”
Herley, moving with panicky speed, side-stepped to the bookshelves on his left, snatched the red box from its resting place and slipped it inside his jacket, holding it between his arm and ribcage. He was back in his original position when Corcoran left the window and came to usher him out of his room. Corcoran steadied himself by touching his desk as he passed it.
“Thanks again,” Herley said, trying to sound casual in spite of the hammering of his heart. “Don’t bother coming to the front door with me—I can see myself out.”
“I’m sure you can, but there’s just one thing before you go.”
Herley drew his lips into a stiff smile. “What’s that, Mr Corcoran?”
“I want my belongings back.” Corcoran extended one hand. “The box you took from the shelf—I want it back. Now!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Herley said, trying to sound both surprised and offended. “If you’re suggesting…”
He broke off, genuinely surprised this time, as Corcoran lunged forward and tried to plunge his hands inside his jacket. Herley blocked the move, striving to push Corcoran away from him and being thwarted by the little man’s unexpected strength and tenacity. The two men revolved in an absurd shuffling dance, then Herley’s superior power manifested itself with an abrupt breaking of Corcoran’s hold. Corcoran was forcibly propelled backwards for the distance of one pace and was jolted to a halt by the edge of the marble fireplace, which caught him at the base of the skull. His eyes turned upwards on the instant, blind crescents of white, and blood spurted from his nose. He dropped into the hearth amid an appalling clatter of fire irons, and lay very, very still.
“You did that yourself,” Herley accused, backing away, mumbling through the fingers he had pressed to his lips. “That’s what you get for drinking too much. That’s…”
He stopped speaking and, driven by a pounding sense of urgency, looked around the room for evidence of his visit. The whisky tumbler he had used was still sitting on the arm of the leather chair. He picked it up in trembling fingers, dried and polished it with his handkerchief and placed it among others on the sideboard, then went to the desk. Among the papers scattered on its surface he found a large business diary which was open at the current date. He examined the relevant page, making sure there was no note of his appointment, then hurried out of the room without looking at the obscene object in the hearth.
Herley felt an obscure and dull surprise on discovering that the world outside the house was exactly as he had left it—warm and green, placidly summery, unconcerned. Even the patterns of sunlight and leafy shadow looked the same, as though the terrible event in Corcoran’s study had taken place in another continuum where time did not exist.
Grateful for the screening effect of the trees and tall shrubs, Herley tightened his grip on the red box and started out for home.
“It’s wonderful,” June breathed, unable to divert her gaze from the small bottle which Herley had set on the kitchen table. “It seems too good to be true.”
“But it is true—I guarantee it.” Herley picked up the hypodermic syringe he had found in the red box and examined its tip. He had made important decisions on the journey back from Reading. His wife already knew where he had been during the day, so there was nothing for it but to wait until the news of Corcoran’s “accidental” death came out and utter appropriate words. If the body was found quickly: Good God! It must have happened to the poor man soon after I left him—but I don’t think there’s any point in my getting mixed up in an inquest, do you? If, as was quite possible, there was a lengthy delay before the corpse came to light: Fancy that! I wonder if it could have happened around the time I went to see him…
In either case, to prevent June talking about it and perhaps forging links in other people’s minds, he was going to lie about where and how he had obtained the drug.
“Just think, darling,” he said enthusiastically. “Four little shots is all it will take. No dieting, no boring counting of calories, no trouble. I promise you, you’re going to be your old self again.”
June glanced down at her squab-like breasts and the massive curvature of her stomach which the loosest fitting dress was unable to disguise. “It would be wonderful to wear nice clothes again.”
“We’ll get you a wardrobe full of them. Dresses, undies, swimsuits—the lot.”
She gave a delighted laugh. “Do you really think I could go on the beach again?”
“You’re going, dear—in a black bikini.”
“Mmm! I can’t wait.”
“Neither can I.” Herley opened the small bottle, inverted it and filled the hypodermic with colourless fluid. He had been disappointed to discover that the drug was not in tablet form, which he could have slipped unannounced into June’s food, but there was nothing he could do to alter the situation. It was fortunate, he realised, that he knew how to use a needle.
“I don’t think we need bother about sterilising swabs and all that stuff,” he said. “Give me your arm, dear.”
June’s eyes locked with his and her expression became oddly wary. “Now?”
“What do you mean now? Of course it’s now. Give me your arm.”
“But it’s so soon. I need time to think.”
“About what?” Herley demanded. “You don’t think I’m planning to poison you, I hope.”
“I…I don’t even know where that stuff came from.”
“It’s from one of the best Harley Street clinics, June. It’s something brand new, and it cost me a fortune.”
June’s lips had begun to look bloodless. “Well, why doesn’t the doctor give me the injections himself?”
“For an extra hundred guineas? Talk sense!”
“I am talking sense—giving injections is a skilled job.”
“You saw me giving dozens of them to your mother.”
“Yes,” June said heatedly. “And my mother died.”
Herley gaped at her, unable to accept what he had heard. “June! Is that remark supposed to contain any kind of logic? It was because your mother was dying that she was on morphine.”
“I don’t care.” June turned her
back on him and walked towards the refrigerator, the great slabs of her hips working beneath the flowered material of her dress. “I’m not going to be rushed into anything.”
Herley looked from her to the syringe in his hand and blood thundered in his ears. He hit her with the left side of his body, throwing her against the refrigerator and pinning her there while his left arm clamped around her neck. She heaved against him convulsively, once, then froze into immobility as the needle ran deep into the hanging flesh of her upper right arm. Herley was reminded of some wild creature which was genetically conditioned to yield at the moment of being taken by a predator, but the pang of guilt he felt served only to increase his anger. He drove a roughly estimated cubic centimetre of the fluid into his wife’s bloodstream, withdrew the needle and stepped back, his breath coming in a series of low growls which he was unable to suppress.
June clamped her left hand over the bright red lentil which had appeared on her arm, and turned to face him. “Did I deserve that, Brian?” she said sadly and gently. “Do I really deserve that sort of treatment?”
“Don’t try your old Saint June act on me,” he snapped. “It used to work, but things are going to be different from now on.”
A fine rain began to fall in mid-evening, denying Herley the solace of working in the garden. He sat near the window in the front room, pretending to read a book and covertly watching June as she whiled away the hours before bed. She maintained a wounded silence, staring at the dried flower arrangement which screened the unused fireplace. At intervals of fifteen minutes she went foraging in the kitchen, and on her returns made no attempt to hide the fact that she was chewing. Once she brought back an economy-size container of salted peanuts and steadily munched her way through them, filling the whole room with the choking smell of peanut oil and saliva.
Herley endured the performance without comment, his mood a strange blend of boredom and terror. Slipping away from Corcoran’s house could have been, he saw in retrospect, a serious blunder. It might have been better to telephone the police immediately and present them with a perfectly credible, unimpeachable story about Corcoran getting drunk and falling backwards against the mantlepiece. That way he could have kept the drug, hiding it in his pocket, and emerged from the affair free and clear. As it was, he was going to have some difficult explaining to do should the authorities manage to connect him with Corcoran’s death.
Why couldn’t the little swine have been reasonable! Herley repeated the question to himself many times during the dismal suburban evening and always arrived at the same answer. Anybody who was crazy enough to regard subcutaneous fat, simple disgusting blubber, as having sentience and a pseudo-life of its own was hardly likely to listen to reason in any other respect. The very idea was enough to give Herley a cold, crawling sensation along his spine, adding a hint of Karloffian horror to the evening’s natural gloom.
As the rain continued the air in the house steadily grew cooler and more humid, beginning to smell of toadstools, and Herley wished he had lit the fire hours earlier. He also found himself longing, uncharacteristically, for an alcoholic drink—regardless of the empty calories it would have represented—but there was nothing in the house. He contented himself by smoking cigarette after cigarette.
At 11.30 he stood up and said, “I think that’s enough hilarity for one evening—are you going to bed?”
“Bed?” June looked up at him, seemingly without understanding. “Bed?”
“Yes, the thing we sleep on.” My God, he thought, what if I’ve given her the wrong drug? Maybe I jumped to the wrong conclusion about what Corcoran kept in the box.
“I’ll be up shortly,” June said. “I’m just thinking about…everything.”
“Look, I’m sorry about what happened earlier. I did it for us, you understand. It’s a medical fact that overweight people develop an unreasoning fear of anything which threatens to…” Herley abruptly stopped speaking as he realised he had garnered his medical “fact” from some of Hamish Corcoran’s wilder ramblings. He stared down at his wife, wondering if it could be only an effect of his disturbed mental state that she seemed more gross than ever, her head—in his foreshortened view—tiny in comparison to the settled alpine slopes of her body.
“Don’t forget to lock up,” he said, turning away to hide his repugnance.
When he got to bed a few minutes later the coolness of the sheets was relaxing and he realised with some surprise that he would have no trouble in falling asleep. He turned off his bedside lamp, plunging the room into almost total darkness, and allowed his thoughts to drift. The day had undoubtedly been the worst of his life, but if he kept his head there was absolutely nothing the police could pin on him. And as regards the trouble over the injections, June’s attitude was bound to change by morning when she found there were no ill effects. Everything was going to be all right, after all…
Herley awoke very briefly a short time later when his wife came to bed. He listened to the sound of her undressing in the darkness, the familiar sighs and grunts punctuated by the crackle of static. When she lay down beside him he placed a companionable hand on her shoulder, taking the risk of the gesture being interpreted sexually, and within seconds was sinking down through layers of sleep, grateful for the surcease of thought.
The dream was immediately recognisable as such because in it his mother was still alive. Herley was two years old and his father was away on a business trip, so Herley was allowed to share his mother’s bed. She was reading until the small hours of the morning and, as always when her husband was away, was eating from a dish of home-made fudge, occasionally handing a fragment to the infant Herley. She was a big woman, and as he lay close her back seemed as high as a wall—a warm, comforting, living wall which would protect him forever against all the uncertainties and threats of the outside world. Herley smiled and burrowed in closer, but something had begun to go wrong. The wall was shifting, bearing down on him. His mother was rolling over, engulfing him with her flesh, and it was impossible for him to cry out because the yielding substance of her was blocking his nose and mouth, and she was going to suffocate him without even realising what was happening…
Mother!
Herley awoke to darkness and the terrifying discovery that he really was suffocating.
Something warm, heavy and slimy was pressing down over his face, and he could feel the moist weight of it on his chest. He clawed the object away from his mouth, but was only partially successful in dislodging it because it seemed to have an affinity for his skin, clinging with the tenacity of warm pitch. His fingers penetrated its surface and slid away again on a slurry of warm fluids.
Whimpering with panic, Herley heaved himself up off the pillow and groped for the switch of the bedside light. He turned it on. From the corner of one eye he glimpsed what had once been his wife lying beside him, her naked body bloody and strangely deflated, the skin burst into crimson tatters. The horror of the sight remained peripheral, however, because his own body was submerged in a pale, glistening mass of tissue, the surface of which was a network of fine blood vessels.
He screamed as he tried to tear the loathsome substance away. It ripped into quivering blubbery strips, but refused to be separated from him, clinging, sucking, tonguing him in dreadful intimacy.
Herley stopped screaming, entering a new realm of terror, as he discovered that the slug-like mass was somehow penetrating his skin, invading the sanctum of his body.
He got to his feet, dragging the glutinous burden with him, and in a lurching, caroming run reached the adjoining bathroom. Almost of their own accord, his fingers located and opened the bone-handled razor, and he began to cut.
Heedless of the fact that he was also inflicting dreadful wounds on himself, he went on cutting and cutting and cutting…
Detective-Sergeant Bill Myers came out of the bathroom, paused on the landing to light a cigarette, and rejoined his senior officer in the front bedroom. “I’ve been in this business a hell of a long time,” he said,
“but those two are enough to make me spew. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I have,” Inspector Barraclough replied sombrely, nodding at the lifeless figure on the bed. “This is the way we found Hamish Corcoran’s wife a couple of years ago, but we managed to keep the details out of the papers—you know how it is with false confessions and copycat murders these days. It looks as though we’ll be able to close the file on that case, thank God.”
“You think this man Herley was a psycho?”
Barraclough nodded. “He’s obviously been lying low for a couple of years, but we’ve established that he went to Corcoran’s house yesterday. Killing Corcoran must have triggered him off somehow—so he came home and did this.”
“It’s his wife I feel sorry for.” Myers moved closer to the bed and forced himself to examine what lay there, his eyes mirroring unprofessional sympathy. “Skinny little thing, wasn’t she?”
HUE AND CRY
Turbon stared fixedly at the mouth of the cave where the two-legged food creature was trapped. He had an uneasy feeling that something was beginning to go wrong with his plan, but was unable to decide what it could be.
His wife stirred impatiently, ripples of green morning sunlight running like water along her powerful body. “I still think we should send in a bunch of females,” she said. “If the food creature does kill a couple of them it will be so much the better. You and I can have the food creature and the others can have the dead females.”
Turbon suppressed a sarcastic reply. He had spent years building up his public image of the imperturbable Philosopher King, but there were times when Cadesk annoyed him so much he almost threw it all to the winds. For perhaps the thousandth time he wished fervently he had been born a female, in which case he would have destroyed Cadesk with one blow and—the ultimate insult—refused to eat her afterwards.