by Brian Hodge
Looking away, she kept silent as she slowly spun him around. “There’s something on your butt. A pimple. Something.”
He could feel her applying the cortisone. It burned even worse than before. The wind picked up at that moment, howling now instead of whistling—a sentiment that echoed the pain in his mind and body. He hated the way the cream felt. Greasy, clammy, a discomfort on par with the burning sensation it meant to quell. “Is there a rash on my ass?”
“The pimple’s in the middle of a small red patch. It’s pretty big too…not the rash, the pimple. Looks painful.” She dabbed at it gently then said, “Put your boxers back on and try to get some sleep. It’s probably an allergic reaction to something. There’s an antihistamine in the cabinet. Take it before you go to bed.”
She snapped off the glove and exited the bathroom.
Jim took a deep breath looked at his face in the mirror. His good looks alone couldn’t keep Sharon around anymore, nor could the money he’d inherited when his mother passed on a year earlier. He’d lost his mother, and now he was losing his wife.
Can’t keep a job at the Mill? That’s the bottom of the barrel, no place to go after that. And that money your mother left you won’t last a lifetime. You’ll get five years out of it, if that.
Jim knew it too, but had decided that life might be more fulfilling coasting on the inheritance. Hunting trips, camping trips, secretive rendezvous, anything to get away from her complaints. But now, it seemed he was paying the price for freedom. The rash. It was like a social disease, an STD caught from his escapade with nature. And damn, he’d brought it home.
Might very well pass it on to his wife.
Feeling suddenly crazed, he grinned.
Consider it a parting gift, my love.
He gazed back at his chest in the mirror. The welts, they appeared bigger, swollen now, as if they were starting to grow their very own pimples. Trembling, he found himself wading through a life’s worth of regrets. If he could turn back the clock he’d do it all over again, with Sharon, but the way she wanted it: a happy marriage, family life, kids and all.
But that was too late, and here he was groping for a tube of cortisone with trembling hands.
He dropped it on the tiles, the sound of which seemed very loud in the stillness.
He started to laugh, a man on the verge of losing his mind. He looked at his eyes in the mirror. They were filled with empty glee, idiot fear. A startling combination of lost emotions. He was a man whose mind flirted with a choice of two lives, both of which he knew he couldn’t have now.
Again his eyes roamed over his body. The rash was spreading. The abscesses were swelling. “It can’t be here,” he said in a depressed tone before squatting down on the bathroom floor, closing his eyes and listening to the wind as it spread its merry tune along the walls of the house.
He awoke, shoulder against the tub. Nausea riddled his gut and he scrambled across the bathroom floor to the toilet. He reached for the rim and vomited, breathing hard between spasms, looking down at the floating gorge that had spilled from his stomach. After a moment’s debate, Jim knelt up and caught his breath, realizing only now that he’d fallen asleep on the bathroom floor, lights blaring.
Through a film of tears and sweat he scanned the length of his body. At once a rock formed in his throat. He could feel his eyes widening intuitively, his mouth grimacing with fear as the grotesque sight of his body filtered into his clearing sights. He was shaking all over. A loud pounding resounded in his chest. Something between a moan and a cough escaped him.
God, please don’t let this be happening. Please tell me that I’m just going crazy, that this is just some wicked hallucination.
But the pain was too real, and so was the rash on his skin. Jim sat there helplessly and let the menacing image of the rash enter his sights like a monster wave about to crash down upon him. He tore at it and brought bits of blood to his arms, his legs, his chest. There were hundreds of dark red spots on him, pimples, each one sitting atop a shiny abscess the size of a pea. Some oozed a white, pus-like fluid. They were everywhere on his body, serrating the underlying rash like rubber bumps on a welcome mat.
He made no effort to ease the pain. He was too numb with terror. So numb that he had difficulty standing when he tried, and he pinwheeled his arms for balance before stumbling out onto the hallway floor. He banged an arm against the door frame, which caused a number of the pustules to burst, bringing about a hot, painful ooze of syrupy fluids across his damaged skin. He ran a hand across the loathsome damage and went sick with horror. Damn…what’s happening to me?
He touched his face.
His body went ice cold with terror.
His face had been stricken. He could feel the bumps there. They were on his cheeks, his chin, his brow. His physical strength waned, along with his mental fortitude, and he used every last bit of determination to rise up and face his likeness in the mirror.
He felt his mind go mad with grief and terror. The man in the mirror couldn’t be him. No. Here was a beast, a thing whose eyes had gone yellow with something foul, something putrid. There were dozens of bumps on his face, a forest of them, small but thick on his skin, like mushrooms crowding the trunk of a tree. Some of the bigger ones had a black pinpoint spot in the middle; those that didn’t sported gummy white beads that apparently hadn’t ripened to the point of hardened maturity yet. The rash, although present, laid in the background now, a stage set for whatever surprises the bumps had next. Gazing at his body, it looked as if it had been boiled, then showered with cookie crumbs, the bumps a spectrum of sizes and shapes, each and every one sporting its very own dark spot.
“Jesus Christ.” Sharon stood at the doorway, arms crossed before her in an anxious, defensive posture. She looked just as scared as he did, face drawn, jaw trembling, not for the sake of her husband—the man she was fixing to leave—but for the fact that the monster before her just might try to eat her, or something.
Jim turned his attention back to the mirror and pulled down his boxers—the only piece of clothing he still wore. He let it drop to his ankles, stared at it just beyond the shriveled piece of meat that used to be his—
“What the hell is happening to you, Jim?” Her voice slid around in tone, as if caught in the motions of puberty.
He buried his face in his hands. He couldn’t bear to look at himself anymore. “I don’t know,” he moaned. Sure you do, Jim. Remember? You said it yourself earlier. It’s something you caught in the woods. Poison ivy, poison oak, poison something-or-other. Right? A contact rash…
Sharon disappeared down the hall and picked up the phone. “I’m calling the doctor,” she yelled.
Jim was out in the hallway before she finished dialing. In the living room he spotted her suitcases lined up against the door, seams stretching. Sharon turned and bowed her head in privacy as she spoke on the phone. She nodded her head in a steady, concentrated way, peering over at Jim and holding up a curt index finger. She said in a near-whisper, “We’re not going anywhere,” then nodded and hung up the phone.
She peered at Jim. Her pupils were huge, searching for detail in the gloom of the house. “The doctor will be here shortly.”
Jim looked at the clock on the kitchen wall, which read one-fifteen AM, then met Sharon’s dark eyes and steel face, which now didn’t look as frightened as it did just seconds earlier. Perhaps her sense of proportion had fled, leaving her tempting insanity just like himself?
Outside, the wind whipped against the kitchen windows, shaking them in their frames. Breaking the eerie silence between them, Jim said, “What kind of doctor makes house calls in the middle of the night?”
Sharon, unflinching, perhaps scared of the thing that had become of her husband, said, “I called emergency…they’re coming to take you to the hospital.”
Jim stood by in all his nakedness, blood-red from head to toe, peppered with hundreds of welts that had now grown to the size of jellybeans, black spots like reptilian eyes peering o
ut from beneath his skin. A fierce panic tightened the muscles in his body. His knees buckled and he crumpled to the floor in a woeful, grieving position. He looked up at Sharon, who kept her distance but hunkered down to his level.
“Jim…Jim, can you hear me?” Her head shifted in circles, as if she were contemplating the contents of a dark closet. “Do you hear my voice?”
Strangely enough, it felt as though his skull had been stuffed with cotton. He moved an ulcerated finger to the side of his head but couldn’t find entry into his ear. Maybe his finger had swelled too much, could’ve been that the canal had swelled shut. He gazed up and tried to find some worry in Sharon’s face, but failed to do so. Perhaps madness and fear had indeed swallowed her emotions. He assumed that if the situation had been reversed, then he too would force himself to act a little more alert and a little less wrapped up in the misery of the situation.
Now he saw that his vision was fading, not from the symptomatic progression of his affliction, but because the rash, bumps, and swelling had made balloons of his eyelids. His world had become kaleidoscopic, thin and lost in fragments. Through the fog he saw Sharon standing up, backing away, her lips forming an ‘O’ shape.
“Oh my God Jim…the pimples.”
He looked down at his arms. Yes, the pimples. The next stage of their foul progression had gone into effect. The black spots were breaking through the upper layer of skin, unfurling into what appeared to be two coarse bristles, each pair running perhaps two inches high and making tiny V-for-victory signs upon full erection. They popped out in rapid succession, like kernels of bursting popcorn, and in a mere five minutes his entire body was covered with them.
He knew there was something horribly comic about the way he looked. He must’ve looked like a human hair brush.
Oh my Jesus! He screamed. Help me Sharon! Help me! Like a man on fire, he hurled himself to the floor and twisted around in broken circles. He tore at his skin, pulling on the gross hairs which sunk back into his skin upon contact. Amidst the hell he looked up at Sharon, who’d backpedaled fifteen feet away into the kitchen, palms against the stove, answering him with cries of her own that signified just as much disgust as fear.
She had every right to react this way. His skin, which had a horrible apportioned look to it, had turned offensively pink in color, like burned flesh that had been healed over. The hairs were now moving, flicking back and forth as though charged with static electricity. The skin beneath, the pimples, swelled upwards into little cone shapes that eventually tore open. The pain was off the charts, blinding, and Jim had just enough life left in him to behold the true repugnant horror he’d become.
As it turned out, the coarse hairs sprouting all over Jim’s body weren’t really hairs after all. They were antennae, attached to something that couldn’t really be considered an insect, yet wasn’t definitively identifiable as anything else either. An amphibious hybrid perhaps. Something that might be found five miles down below the ocean’s surface.
Jim screamed out, “Bugs! Bugs! Bugs!”, but it wasn’t a very fair description. Each thing was maybe two inches long, slug-like, with the pallid tone of raw seafood. Tiny goldfish eyes floated on either sides of their writhing bodies, jutting around in alert circles. As the things slipped free from their fleshy casings, dozens of tiny appendages wriggled out and assisted them in their exploration of the new world. In minutes, hundreds of them were skittering about the pus, blood, and gore that had saturated Jim’s body.
Seeing past the pain, the torture and agony, past the blanket of parasites that he’d unwittingly played host to, he saw his wife Sharon, the woman he’d fallen out of love with, the woman who’d planned to leave him.
She came bravely close and said, “The doctor is here Jim. He’s going to try and help you. Just try and remain calm.”
Stay calm? He saw a figure looming over. A dark silhouette, wearing a sport jacket and fedora. Bare-handed, the doctor grabbed his wrist. A few of the bug-creatures wriggled onto the doctor’s hand, but he did not move.
“Jim…Jim…can you hear me?”
He followed the voice, coming from the doctor. He looked up. The doctor’s face was covered with the insect-things. They were on his cheeks, in his hair. Sharon stood right behind him. She smiled.
A single writhing bug-creature crawled from her left nostril.
Jim tried to scream, but the bugs had crawled into his mouth, down his throat, filling his lungs. The last thing he heard before his heart gave out was Sharon uttering a single, familiar word.
Pimples.
Sharon, breathing in great winded gasps, stood over Jim’s body as Doctor Allis reached down and grabbed his wrist. He prodded the veins with his fingers then let go. Jim’s arm thudded to the floor.
“It’s all right. He’s dead now.”
Sharon shuddered, an icy-wave racing through her veins. The hair on her arms stood on end. “Really? Are you sure?”
Allis displayed a smug grin. “Dead sure.” He ran a determined hand across Sharon’s hip then placed a gentle kiss on her lips. “Autopsy will show coronary failure.”
She paused for a moment. Then she hugged him, head against his chest. “I can’t believe it worked.”
“Hypnosis and the power of suggestion can be very convincing, if performed correctly. Evidently, Jim was highly susceptible, more so than we’d hoped for.”
She backed away from Dr Allis and looked at Jim solemnly. His naked body was pale, but unblemished. “He was brave. Whatever he thought was happening to him must have been terrifying. He fought to the bitter end.” Strange that she would let bravery enter her mind, when all she could think about prior was his fear, and how she wanted him to suffer for his indiscretion. Was this a shred of remorse for the man that spent his weekends “hunting” at the Motel 8 in Shrewsbury with Ellie Sanchez from three doors down?
“Did he say anything?” Dr Allis asked. “About what he thought was happening to him?”
She nodded weakly and sat at the kitchen table. “Well…yes. You told me say the ‘cue word’. Pimple. He immediately started complaining about a rash. Every time I said it thereafter, the rash apparently got worse. I even went so far as to rub cortisone on his skin to make him believe I was seeing everything he saw. He also mentioned something about bugs.”
Allis cocked his head in a dubious fashion, eyes narrowed. “Bugs? I never suggested anything about bugs when I put him under.” He emphasized the word ‘bugs’ as though to make sure Sharon heard him.
“It was just something he mentioned.” She traced a fingernail across an itch on her arm. “I guess I should call the paramedics now. Make it look official, as we planned.”
Dr Allis nodded then kissed her on the cheek.
“The money,” she said. “It’s in the suitcases by the door. I emptied Jim’s accounts yesterday. Take it with you.”
Allis grinned. “By tomorrow night we’ll be together. Forever.” Shrugging his shoulders, and covering up a bit of a smirk, he grabbed the suitcase and left through the front door.
She smiled. Then, reached for the phone.
There was a large red patch of skin on her hand.
In the center was a pimple.
A pimple with a growing black spot. Bugs…
She looked down at Jim’s body, could’ve sworn she saw a smile of retribution on his face a moment before the swelling abscess on her hand burst open to reveal two coarse black hairs.
Something in the Air
It all happened just three days ago, at a time when life was running its normal and rather mundane course through Darien Falls.
The day was January 18th. During the night, a northern front blasted through our little slice of upstate New York, dragging the temperatures down into the single digits. When morning rolled around, the sun exerted itself in the cloudless sky but couldn’t permeate the layer of frost on the front lawn. Breakneck gales were still beating their way across the hills into the village, and beyond the field out back, Capson Lake shimmered
beneath the spineless sun like a long flat mirror.
I’d just finished my breakfast, an egg sandwich that hardly sated my appetite. The growl in my stomach made me reach into the cupboard for some cereal, but Sharon sighed and gave me a bit of a cross look. I’d promised to pick up some things at Wegman’s, the essentials like milk, bread, cheese, etc, and was now being silently reminded of it. She’d run out of space for her notes on the magnetic refrigerator pad and had expressed displeasure with the slight inconvenience. I told her to simply hang another one. She ignored me and told me to go out and get the things she needed so she could start the list anew. It was a played-out routine between us, one not worth arguing over so long as I stayed married to the same woman.
“Weather’s gettin’ bad,” she said, despite the glaring sun.
“Sky’s clear. Ain’t no sign of a storm.”
“Wind’s still blowing, though.”
Indeed it was. It’d kept me up half the night, the endless sound of it howling about the eaves and whipping twigs and debris against the shingles. Toss single digit temperatures into the mix, and yeah, you had yourself some pretty nasty weather, cloudless skies or not. So I bundled myself up in the Gore-Tex jacket Sharon gave me for Christmas, then poked my head into the den. Kevin had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and was doing his best burrito imitation on the couch. Sharon leaned over to attend to the fire, amply providing me with a pleasant view of her rear. There I stood, admiring the scene until the wind rattled the windows and made me realize, with dismay, that I’d soon be leaving the warm comforts of home for a Sunday afternoon encounter with the elements.
Little did I know.
“Anything else you need before I leave?”
“You got the list, right?”