I tell him I am glad that Jennifer did what she did. I can’t imagine how my life would have gone on otherwise. I can’t even remember all those feelings that used to hang over me like a heavy cloak. There was a lonely room. A shattered heart. An empty space. A multitude of disappointments and regrets, nurtured and tended, so they would never fade. They seem so small and insignificant now that I find it hard to believe they even registered at the time.
I stand there in the manager’s office, looking beyond him, to the stars blinking into darkness, the endless universe above, the black ocean below. There is a cold wind blowing in from places we could never even dream of and a whole new world waiting to engulf our own.
There are tears in my eyes and I am smiling, for my heart is finally full and I am so grateful for this gift.
I am so grateful Jennifer brought it to work.
Jack Lothian works as a screenwriter for film and television and is currently show runner on the forthcoming HBO/Cinemax series Strike Back. His short fiction has appeared in Helios Magazine Quarterly, Parsec Ink’s Triangulation : Appetites, Omnestream Entertainment’s Out of Frame and Down With The Fallen from Franklin/Kerr Press.
THE ENAMELLED CROWN
By Steve Toase
Seline sheltered in her bedroom and ran her tongue across the back of her teeth. Uneven and discoloured enamel tasted bitter. She reached down the side of the bed for a bag of sweets, unwrapped the first one and let it settle in the cup of her palm. With her other hand she smoothed the glittering crimson wrapper against the bedspread.
Just the one, to take the taste away, she said to herself, holding the toffee in the gap between jaw and cheek. Rich butter syrup melted against her gums. The flavour of plaque did not go, just swam in sugar that sweetened her throat for a moment, then was gone.
Her hand was back in the bag and unwrapping the second before the flavour of the first had faded. She held it in her fingers, letting it tack to her skin before placing it in her mouth.
“Where have you been hiding them?”
Her father shadowed the door, arms folded like a bird clasping its wings.
“I didn’t hide them,” Seline lied, sliding two unwrapped sweets out of the bag and up her sleeve. Hoped the light leaking around her father did not shimmer the foil.
“I went through this room and took out all the packets I could find. How did I miss that one?”
Seline shrugged, not wanting to give away any more clues, and tried to push two more into the gap between mattress and bedframe.
“And today of all days.”
“We have to go in,” her father said. They stood on the pavement, not even making it into the small, untended yard. From outside there was little to distinguish the dentist’s surgery from the homes in the rest of the terrace. Just a peeling sign proclaiming names and qualifications of those working, and heavy metal shutters to keep out those looking for free lidocaine. His fingers dug into her shoulder and before Seline could protest, they were up the path, the doorbell rung, and inside the building.
The dentist waiting room still had the cornicing and fireplace, now unused, from when it was the family lounge. In the corner, an aquarium stood on an old chest of drawers of yellowed and peeling pine. Goldfish and black mollies swarmed frilled weeds that rose and fell against the rhythmic water pump’s current. Seline’s father held out a magazine for her. She ignored it and went back to watching the fish chase each other, their scales paled by the fluorescent lights in the lid. Covering her hand with her sleeve Seline unwrapped the humbug, faked a cough and slid it into her mouth. With her fingernails she tapped the glass. The gilled spatters of colour streaked to the gravel and hid inside the plastic castle.
“They do have teeth.”
The dental nurse stood beside her, most of her pristine white uniform hidden behind a plastic apron spattered with liquids Seline did not recognise.
“Their teeth are at the back of their throats,” she continued, pointing a manicured nail past her own veneered and straightened incisors.
“They just fall out and then grow back. Imagine that. No need for us then.” She smiled, turning to Seline’s father who laughed as if they shared a private joke. “The dentist is seeing both of you today? Correct?”
Seline’s father nodded and stood up.
“Please, this way.” She held the door open, waiting while Seline’s father gathered their coats and gloves. Hand over her face, Seline crunched the mint to splinters and swallowed.
The surgery was in what was once the front bedroom, and smelt of deep cleaning and spit. Every surface polished to hygiene, the room spotless and pristine. The dentist was not. He hunched over the worktop, dressed in beige trousers and an old Argyll knit jumper, as if all the nicotine and faded colours of the wallpaper that once decorated the room had seeped into him. His hair was thinned and clothes tattered as if they couldn’t quite contain him. Noticing he wasn’t alone, he reached up to a peg and unhooked a white coat. Slid his arms inside. Seline watched his hands shake, until he noticed her looking.
“Nurse, please get the first patient settled,” he said. He paused and stared at Seline with watery eyes. “I’ll see the girl first,” he said, and turned back to what he was doing.
“Yes, Mr. Fortnum.”
The counter was covered in plaster-casts of teeth. Seline watched him trace a finger over the crowns and incisors, small plumes of white dust coming away on his skin.
“This way please,” the nurse said, ushering Seline away from her father toward the plastic-coated chair at the centre of the room. Against the far wall of the surgery was a second aquarium, this one murky, the water heavy with rotting vegetation. A yellowed fish swam out of the gloom and attached its mouth to the glass, a circle of razor sharp teeth gnawing away at the streaks of dirt.
“Seline, is it?” Mr. Fortnum said, handing a folder of notes to the nurse, who smiled and tucked them into the bottom level of the trolley. “Been a while since your last check up.”
“I try to get her to do the right thing. Sometimes I think she has it in her head that if these drop out more will grow back, but that doesn’t happen with your second set,” her father said, his words tripping over themselves. “Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”
“Exactly,” the nurse said. “You’re not a fish.”
Out of the corner of her eye Seline saw her father look confused and take a deep breath as he always did when making a point.
“I keep telling her that she needs to look after them now, while it’s free. Won’t get second chances later. She doesn’t listen.”
“Children rarely do,” Mr. Fortnum said. His voice was slow and considered, and as he settled Seline’s head into a better position she flinched away from his hand against her neck.
The chair tipped back, the light above came on. An electric sunburst robbed Seline of all sight apart from her peripheral vision.
She felt fingers in her mouth, the counting of her teeth a liturgy between the dentist and his nurse. Even through the gloves his hands felt rough against her cheeks, the coloured vinyl hiding some infection that plated his skin. His tremor returned. The probe twitched against her gum, and Seline flinched.
“Ow,” she tried to say, but the word could not find a way past the grip against her cheek.
“Sorry,” the nurse said. Mr. Fortnum stayed silent.
“Vacuum please,” Mr. Fortnum said, and Seline felt the tube slide into her mouth.
He moved around to stand beside her head, her face resting against the cotton of his white coat. The grinding sound reminded Seline of the noise her father made when he was asleep and bills were due. Anxiety chipping away his own enamel. This rasping was muffled. Close. She glanced up at Mr. Fortnum, then the nurse. Both wore masks obscuring their mouths as if the rot in Seline’s teeth might climb out and infect them. The sound was closer.
Mr. Fortnum reached over her while the nurse passed him a small mirror. The noise intensified, grinding away at nothing, then fell ba
ck as he began examining her teeth once more.
Above her head the intense light tilted away. Underneath Seline the chair pitched her up into a sitting position. Across the room the fish still gnawed at streaks of algae. Maybe the grating noise was the creature trying to chew an escape through the plated glass.
Mr. Fortnum pulled across a stool and sat in front of Seline, masking her father from sight. Hand still twitching, he reached into his pocket for a pair of smudged glasses, slid them in place and yawned. At the back of his throat she saw a flash of something bone white, then his mouth shut and it was gone. Seline glanced over at the fish-tank. The suckermouth had dropped back into the murk, hidden and out of sight.
“There is good news and bad,” he said, leaning forward. His breath smelt too clean and she tried to shift back in her seat.
“The bad news is that your teeth are in terrible condition. Terrible. There’s no point in sugar-coating it.” Behind him her father laughed too loud. “But you’re setting yourself down a very bad road.” He leaned back, wincing as he did so as if something sharp caught in his stomach. “Nurse, please can you pass me today’s extractions.”
“Of course, Mr. Fortnum,” the nurse said, passing over a tray crammed with bloody and yellowed teeth.
He took off his white coat and gripped the proffered metal.
“These are from an appointment I had this morning. A boy not much older than you. Liked his sweets too. His breath also had the reek of humbugs and toffees like yours.” He picked up a molar and turned it around, the light above Seline’s head reflected off the stained enamel. She watched him run his nail across the blackened edge of a cavity, scraping off a shudder of plaque.
“We had to extract seven of his teeth. That’s it. Gone. No more.”
Seline tried to listen to the words. All her focus was on the way he held the tooth, turning it one way or another like a jeweller assessing the clarity of some rare diamond.
“She just stashes the sweets around her room. Hides them under her pillow, and down the side of her bed. Don’t know where she gets the money from. I don’t buy them for her.”
Seline started to speak, and out of the corner of her eye was sure that Mr. Fortnum lifted the molar to his own mouth, swallowing it down.
Turning quickly to the tray she tried counting the still bloodied teeth lying on the stainless meta. They must have been jarred around and lay in a confusion making them impossible to number. Instead, she looked back at Mr. Fortnum. He sat as still as before, now holding a rotten incisor up to her. At the corner of his mouth she thought she saw a spatter of dried blood. His tongue flicked out and it was gone.
“They used to tell children, my father told me, that if I left decayed teeth for the tooth fairy, then the tooth fairy would empty my jaws. To make up for the short fall.”
Seline struggled to see Mr. Fortnum as ever having parents.
“Do children believe in the tooth fairy these days?” he continued.
“I’m not sure what she believes in these days,” her father said. The nurse smiled and shrugged, an unspoken understanding passing between them.
“Oh, it’s good to believe,” Mr. Fortnum said, reaching out and opening Seline’s mouth again. “Helps keep us on the straight and narrow. Just how I like teeth.” There was a pause before the nurse laughed, and even then it scratched out like a failing soundtrack. Seline avoided his wet gaze and stared at his stomach. Underneath the brown wool something undulated, rippling from one side to the other. To distract herself she glanced back at the aquarium. Deep in the undergrowth she saw a flash of gold. A streak of red plumed up through the grey water.
“I’m going to send you off to the hygienist’s room for my nurse to scrape your teeth. Get them clean. Pleasant. A good descale and polish. We might be able to slow some of the damage.”
Seline slid off the chair, the floor meeting her feet too soon. The nurse took her arm and led her toward the door. On the chair in the corner her father struggled to collect their outside clothes and follow.
“If you wouldn’t mind stopping here, Mr. Drayman, we can do your check-up, and sort out the finer details of Seline’s treatment.”
Seline paused at the door, resisting the nurse’s encouragement and waited for her father to follow.
“I’ll meet you downstairs,” he said, turning to take the official looking papers Mr. Fortnum held out. Seeing Seline staring, the dentist smiled, the corners of his mouth a little too far back. The grin a little too crowded.
“Come with me. We have other jobs to do.” The nurse pulled her out of the surgery room and back out onto the landing.
The hygienist’s treatment room was smaller, dirtier and crammed into what had been the attic. Once the nurse had Seline laid in the chair, various attachments scraped away the traces of poor care. Over the rotations of metal against her teeth Seline heard creaking from below.
“Just the building contracting in the heat,” the nurse said by way of explanation. “Spit.”
Jaw aching, Seline stood and waited for the nurse to follow her. She looked up as if only just noticing her patient again.
“You’ll have to find your own way out. I have to clean up here. Cleanliness is next to godliness,” she said, shutting her out.
Groping along the wall, Seline found the light switch, and stared at the faded carpet under her feet. No-one had bothered about hygiene outside the shine of the surgery. For a moment she stood on the top step, unsure what to do. Where to go. Whether to go at all. No-one to guide her back through the building. She held the bannister and pulled herself down through the house.
On the next floor the main surgery was off to one side, the door slightly open. Through the gap she saw Mr. Fortnum standing in the middle of the room, his shirt off. From a collection of surgical tools, he picked up a scalpel and made an incision in his chest. She watched him hold the tray he flourished earlier, more teeth than she remembered. He pressed one after the other into the pocket of flesh. Somewhere inside him Seline heard each one clatter into place. The enamelled crowns stretched his skin tight. Inside the gaping wound she watched still bloody roots of extracted teeth knit into his exposed ribs, severed nerves curling around the curved surface of the bone. In several places across his chest the sharp edges started to lacerate their way through. Tiny petals of blood streaked down to stain the waist of his trousers.
“You shouldn’t be loitering here. Your father will be wondering where you are.”
Seline turned to face the nurse as the older woman’s hand slammed the surgery door shut, then gripped Seline’s arm tight. “And this house is so old and so full of hazards we wouldn’t want you to come to harm.”
In the waiting room her Dad sat in the corner by the aquarium, slight streaks on his chin.
“Are you okay?” Seline said, wriggling away from the nurse’s grip.
He smiled, the gaps in-between the remaining teeth still raw and bloody.
“He said they were far too gone to save, rotted through. I only want to make sure you don’t have to go through the same as me,” his words slurred into each other.
“Remember,” said the nurse, opening her own mouth wide until Seline could barely see her eyes. “They don’t grow back.”
Seline stared, transfixed at the slight flash of white near the back of the woman’s throat, until a clatter in the corner of the room distracted her. A golden scaled fish smashed itself into the glass of the aquarium again and again.
Steve Toase currently lives in Munich, Germany.
His fiction has appeared in Aurealis, Not One Of Us, and Cafe Irreal amongst others. In 2014, “Call Out” (first published in Innsmouth Magazine) was reprinted in The Best Horror Of The Year 6, and his story “Fate’s Mask” was mentioned in the summation. His story “Not All The Coal That Is Dug Warms The World” was included in Ellen Datlow’s Honourable Mentions Longlist for Best Horror of the Year 8, and has just been featured on the Tales To Terrify podcast. He also writes regularly for Fortean Times.
Recently, he worked with Becky Cherriman and Imove on Haunt, about Harrogate’s haunting presence in the lives of people experiencing homelessness in the town.
www.stevetoase.wordpress.com
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@stevetoase
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REFLECTED IN THE EYES OF WOLVES
By Joachim Heijndermans
As a boy of ten, Jack laughed. He laughed along with the other boys and girls of his age. Oh, the fun they had from their place at the window, seeing the wolves come in their packs, rushing past their houses. Their great teeth gleaming in the moon's light, eyes bright with hunger. That elegant way they ran. Dancers of gray and white, gaining on the old farts whose bones creaked with each step. Beautiful hunters of the night, picking up the scent of their prey and claiming their prize.
Oh, how they laughed when they saw the elderly try to run. Run away from their certain doom. Run away from the teeth and claws that would rip them to shreds. Their arms flailing and that hilarious wobbling motion they made with each hurried step, which reminded Jack of scarecrows flailing in the wind. The children shrieked with joy when one of the geriatrics would trip and be shredded to pieces within seconds by the hungry pack. They would be so disappointed when one of them got away, but that rarely happened these days. No one would come to help those geezers. Not when the wolves hunted. What a sight! What a thrill. A fantastic show for everyone of all ages.
Well, all ages up until sixty that is. That's when you just might become the prey. That's when the wolves begin eyeing you up and hunt you down in the streets. And no one would do a damn thing to help you. That's the way things were. That's why the wolves were brought back. The packs need to eat. The herd, that is us, needed to be thinned. Executive decision. It's humane. It's fair. It's necessary.
Hinnom Magazine Issue 003 Page 7