Morbid Metamorphosis

by Lycan Valley Press

  I turn down Eldridge and a half block ahead of me, skittering in the shadows between street lights, is the weird guy. Something about him being so repulsive fascinates me. He's twisted enough that I think he might be an artist, but he's no trendoid. I start wondering about where he lives, what his life is like. From the looks of him, he lives in the Bowery, same as me, but then a lot of students live here where it's cheap when New York city rents by the inch. Mostly I wonder what the hell he's enlarging.

  I reach Grand and should turn left but instead follow him two blocks through Chinatown into a six story warehouse that's got to be deserted this time of night. I'm just about to turn east and head back to the bar when he enters the building. I get to the glass front door in time to see the number over the elevator stop on six, the top floor.

  This building looks just like so many other buildings in the city--old, crumbling, red brick covered in Manhattan soot. I should get going. The redhead is calling. But maybe I'm bored. Maybe I don't feel good about the way he keeps staring at that missing girl's picture. Maybe I've seen too many movies. Just for the hell of it, I try the street door, and it’s unlocked. Suddenly I'm in the lobby and scanning the register. This is the kind of pastel deco architecture that needs the marble cleaned and the brass polished.

  I take the creaky old elevator, the heavy door slamming shut when I push it. The elevator is small, barely-lit with one yellow light-bulb, but I can make out what were once, no-doubt, colorful tiles along the walls, now broken and faded. I push SIX and the gears grind to life as the box jerks to a start. And jerks to a stop. The gears still clank behind me as I get off, telling myself this is crazy. What am I doing here? If the guy sees me, I could lose my job for stalking a customer! I've got to keep the job until I graduate and...

  I look around. The sixth floor corridor goes in one direction only, dimly lit by old incandescent bulbs in the high ceiling spaced about ten feet apart, most with a metal cage over them. I pass doors: a fur manufacturer's workroom, a ribbon company, a door with Chinese character painted on it, something called Baba-Cooper. No artist's digs. Around the corner are washrooms with a ladder between them that leads nowhere. The 'n' in 'men' is missing. I look inside: the urinal's crusty and the toilet's clogged; I change my mind about using either one.

  Being here is a waste of time so I go back to the elevator, but the weighty door won't open, which is ridiculous because I just got off the elevator and it should still be on six. Something must be wrong with the damn thing. I punch the elevator button three times, and wait. I'm met by dead silence; the elevator isn't coming.

  I decide on the stairs and head back down the corridor. I get to the exit door and stop. The push bar tells me that if I go in, the door will lock behind me and I'll probably be trapped in the stairwell of a building that no one visits regularly. I look around for something to prop open the door but there's nothing, and I'm not leaving my mag, that's for sure!

  The only other thing on this floor is a freight elevator next to the bathrooms. Big, battleship grey. The metal doors close vertically; there's a dirty glass-and-chicken-wire window and I peer inside. At the back of the shaft I see a window, probably one on each floor. Inches of decade-old dust clog the corners of the lead between the small panes. Light, but not much, filters through from the street lights on that side of the building. Above, the shaft is swallowed by shadow.

  What's in front of me is a maze of cables and pulleys black with grease and dirt. I wonder if the elevator still works. I'm thinking about that when suddenly the gears grind to life. One cord rises as another drops, then my view is blocked for a moment. The elevator stops. I step back. My heart's pounding, but the doors don't open. I look through the little window but can’t see much. I shove the top part of the door up and the bottom goes down automatically. Inside: dirty wooden floor boards. Flat iron bars for walls. Rotting plywood slats for a roof. Yet another dim bulb. Empty.

  I get in. The metal doors are the only doors and I pull them together. The elevator feels like a coffin and suddenly I'm claustrophobic. There's a corroded brass lever, the numbers worn away. I press it forward and the box descends. I pass five. Then four. A quick look through the small window at the back shows the rear of another red brick building as I descend to the first floor. At ONE I pull the lever back, but the elevator continues to descend. I'm about to panic when it jerks to a stop.

  The metal doors here have no window and when I open them, blackness invades. The air is hot and moist and there's not much of it. I want out.

  I try the elevator again but the lever doesn't do anything, no matter which way I move it. It's like the power's gone. "Great!" I say to nobody, trying to pump myself up so I feel as brave as I sound. I have to find the main elevator. I'll even take a chance with the stairs.

  I brave the darkness and move towards the tiny red EXIT sign ahead, barely a beacon, groping my way along the corridor. I don't want to touch the slimy walls but the blackness is getting to me and I'm losing equilibrium, and the further along I go, the hotter it gets. My cell battery is low but I flick the light on enough that I can see what's what--the main elevator does not come down to this basement level, which is depressing. It turns out the light is at the dead end of the corridor above the door that has to be the stairs. When I reach it, I push the door open.

  Earthy-smelling air wafts out. I use my cell phone light, which shows me that the stairs lead down only. It's black as hell down there. Maybe, I tell myself, they lead outside, but I don't believe it. Too many of the movies I've seen have been horror. Still, there's nothing I can do but go down. Unless...

  I head back to the freight elevator with a plan. One last try with the lever. Nothing. There's enough space between the cage and the shaft and the bars are wide enough and me slim enough that I just get through. I haul myself up the bars, ripping the back of my jacket, making a mental note to get back into bench-pressing. Finally I'm standing on the plywood on top of the cage. My idea is to climb the cables to the first floor, which isn't far, pry open the door and get the hell out. That's my plan, until the elevator groans into life.

  “Shit!” I yell, struggling for balance. The lever must have been stuck and my jumping on the cage probably loosened it, but none of that matters now. The small window lets me know when I pass ground level, then the second, the third. I grab a greasy cable for balance and slam the plywood with my boot heel. It begins to shatter. As I pass five I'm praying there's space between six and the roof. One rotting plywood slat falls to the elevator floor.

  Six goes by. I hunker down and protect my head with my arms and plunge to the chest into a maze of stickiness. The elevator jerks to a stop.

  Whatever I'm caught in feels thick and slippery but tacky, like Crazy Glue that is about to set; the more I struggle, the more locked in I am. I don't want to guess what this stuff is.

  My upper body's stuck but my legs are free and I stomp on another slat. I'm suffocating with the heavy, dirty air plus this stuff that's trapping me; I'm having trouble holding back the panic. The elevator light barely lets me see what I'm tangled in. Pale, smooth, fine strands. Webbed.

  I hear something. A wheeze. Above, a shuffle in the darkness. I feel a tremor. It's like something's sliding down the strands on all sides of me.

  A loud hiss out of the blackness, then another, shoots a chill up the back of my spine. I notice the stink. Mildewy fabric. Decaying meat.

  I kick frantically at the plywood, my leg pumping faster than I thought it could. Two more planks fall through. The opening's wide enough for me, if I can just untangle myself. I tense my sweaty hands and use them like knives to slice upward then down. The tough strands don't cut and they tighten like a cat's cradle but give in places when the pressure's right.

  I manage to free my head a bit and ease the sticky webbing from my chest. I can just reach my pocket and I pull out my cell. The battery is really low, the illumination dimming before my eyes. I slip down with a jerk and the cell falls from my hand to the elevator floor. It
's still working, the fading light showing me some of the filthy strands imprisoning me. I drop a bit further, the snare catching me; from the waist down I'm in the elevator.

  Not much more. Easy does it.

  Dry spiky hairs brush up my cheek and cross my forehead. An inhuman caress. I scream and jerk and shoot a tangled arm up karate-style to knock it away. The movement breaks another slat and more light springs up from the shaft. It also frees me. Just before I crash onto the elevator floor, before the cell phone fades to black, for one split second I glimpse things I don't want to believe exist. Enlarged color copies tacked like paintings to a living room wall. A human arm dangling in the pale strands. A livid mask so hideous it will haunt me forever. All of it surrounded by a stink that is familiar. Too familiar!

  If I'm injured, I don't know it. I yank the vertical metal door open as if I'm Hercules. I'm through the sixth floor, down the black stairwell and breaking the glass in the door that leads to the lobby. I'm out of the building, running, running, and I don't stop until I'm at the copy shop.

  I lock the door behind me and lean against it gasping. As my breath comes back, so does my sanity. I can't believe how much I panicked. What a hallucination! Maybe my blood-sugar level plunged, or my adrenalin surged, who knows?

  As I glance around the room, my eyes focus first on the poster of the missing girl, then to the color copier in the corner. On impulse, I head there, and look in the waste-paper basket beside the machine. Inside is one crumpled sheet of paper, 11" x 17". I pick it out and take it to the magnifier.

  The sheet's badly smudged and creased. Except one corner. Intersecting pale web-like lines. Imbedded in them are faded images and I'm not sure: the lobe of a flesh-colored ear? Strands of red hair? Half of a green eye, wide in terror? Most of a pink mouth frozen in a death scream? Just before the blue-black ink swallows everything, the clarity of the last image suddenly imprints itself into my mind: A fragment. The edge of an iridescent lens, round, glowing. An alien eye.

  The paper slips from my grasp. I feel trapped in invisible strands of horror. This unnatural pause lets part of my brain click into a cool philosophical mode and one question expands to gobble up everything that might hinder pure reason: I am human, but who or what are 'thou'?

  CROWDED

  Rod Marsden

  IT was a hot, stuffy night south of Sydney, Australia in the Illawarra area of New South Wales. I’d opened my window in the vain hope a friendly breeze might wander in. The nearby coke works choked the air with fumes from the process of turning coal into coke for the building trade. A midnight train thundered past on the nearby tracks, its empty carriages rattling with the demand for more coal. On such nights you’d give a lot for a cool gust from somewhere.

  Sleep eluded me for a while as I thought about the state of the world. People were talking about the lack of fish in the oceans and seas. They were also discussing the destruction of rainforests throughout the world. Yet no one of importance was doing anything about the main reason all this was happening. It was too politically incorrect to bring up the subject of human population density or how religion too often played its role in making sure a lot of people would never come to understand the harm they were doing to the environment and to other human beings.

  Before long, I was in a fast food restaurant buying a burger and French fries. The burger was so tiny it needed to be with its mother. The two limp, greasy French fries needed to crawl back into the safety of the frying pan. I was expected to fork over forty dollars and do so in a hurry. A huge line of people waited behind me, needing to pay and be fed.

  I sniffed the burger but couldn’t detect the smell of meat, tomatoes, or lettuce. There was the odour of coal being transformed into coke for the nearby makers of steel. There was also the stink of oil. As I was looking into the food to detect some form of nourishment I saw black crude seeping out of the bun. The sound of seagulls transported me elsewhere.

  There’d been a spill. This time it occurred not far from the shores of Wollongong. The seagulls hovered over the obsidian like muck unsure of what to do. There were dead fish floating on the surface for the taking. The seagulls that attempted to take them, however, ended up caught in the horrid goo and drowned in it. A cry went out. I think it was human. I was then sent by some unknown force, and as yet to be discovered personage, to a place that was far too dry and inhospitable. Was it the dead centre of the country? The continent of Australia had been drying up for so long it could have been anywhere.

  People were crawling all over the parched river bed wondering where the drinking water had gone. The sun blazed mercilessly down upon them. Somehow, I knew they’d all come by sea, but there was nothing there on the land for them. Millions of people had come already, drank all there was to drink and ate all there was to eat. Even the grass was gone. They wailed to their various Bronze and Iron Age Gods who didn’t seem to be doing much for them. Where was the Promised Land? Where was the milk and honey? Why weren’t there food and shelter and good jobs just begging for their attention? Their environment back home had been run into the ground. There had been too many mouths to feed. How come this environment had also been so badly depleted that it couldn’t sustain life? Why weren’t they told this would happen? Why wasn’t it in one of their holy books? Why didn’t the people back home, eager to be rid of them, say something?

  They crowded me, looking for answers, but I had none to give. I was sweating from the heat and my mouth had gone terribly dry. So many people! There were so many stupid, desperate people and nothing to be done for them because it was too late. The space between yours truly and these poor wretches became smaller and smaller as more came to me to find out what was going on. I had nothing to say to them. Space became tight. I was squeezed.

  Some of these pilgrims from the far corners of the earth were angry. They needed food, fresh water and shelter, and they wanted them now. I was supposed to give it all to them, but the only thing I had were the rags on my back. “We have given so much to your people,” I breathed out to them in gasps. “We can give no more.”

  I was jostled and pushed to the ground. A great weight came over me, as if a body were pressing down on mine. It was an invisible something and had nothing to do with the multitudes which were fast fading like future echoes. I detected a female voice on the wind. It was calling to my dream to desist and give me peace. Then I felt twin needles enter my neck and the warmth of the night leaving me. I tasted blood that was not my own. Coolness came and, with it, profound darkness. The darkness lasted a very long time.

  Within the darkness there was an episode that may have been taken out of reality. A boat load of refugees headed for Australia from Indonesia had been waylaid by a shipload of undead. There was feasting and merriment among the unliving as the refugees met their deaths. Perhaps some of them would have made good lives for themselves in my country but there were just too many of them. And their Bronze and Iron Age Gods would not in many generations allow them to see reason when it came to population control. “We eliminate more of the ones who come by plane,” whispered a female voice to me. “In this respect, there is fair play.” Her lips and eyes were red. She smelled of salt.

  I awoke in an unfamiliar, well furnished apartment. An attractive woman with long black hair and auburn eyes sat beside the divan where I lay. She was the undead woman who had spoken to me. She smiled, revealing fangs.

  “I understand your fears for humankind,” she told me. “I know the humans need culling or they will destroy their world through overpopulation and wastage of natural resources. As a vampire, you will now help with the culling.”

  I ran my tongue over my teeth and found I had fangs, too. I also had a thirst for the work that lay ahead of me.

  YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

  Jo-Anne Russell

  GENNA Kramer sat alone on her white leather couch, stuffing the last handful of buttered popcorn into her mouth. The horror flick was only half over, but she had already consumed two Twinkies, an ice cream sand
wich, a bag of microwave popcorn, and enough Chinese food for a family of four. She watched as the pretty young blond ran through the woods, screaming for her life, while a masked monster chased her with a bloody blade.

  The nineteen-year-old actress wasn’t any prettier, or older than her, and her acting was sub-par.

  “That should be me,” Genna yelled, spewing chewed popcorn down the front of her nightshirt. “My audition for that part was flawless!”

  The wall behind her couch thumped as the neighbouring apartment tenants gave it a whack.

  “Mind your own business!”

  Genna dusted the food off with her hand. She could feel every curve of her form beneath. Her swollen belly protruded with the pressure of the enormous meal. Disgust hit her full-blown as she swiped the spot. Leaping from the couch, she made a dash to the washroom, leaving the door wide open behind her. Genna threw up the toilet seat and slid two fingers deep into her throat.

  Tears filled her eyes, her stomach lurched, and the neighbours pounded the wall again as she emptied herself until even her bile was no longer coming up.

  “You don’t need that cookie. Genna, look at all that pudge! You are never going to land a husband if you can’t get rid of that fat!”

  It was her mother’s voice, of course, but it might as well have been her own for the amount of times she had repeated those same words to herself. But she had proven her mother wrong, hadn’t she? After all, she was an actress. She left that no-where town, went to LA, auditioned for countless gigs, and finally got her break! But it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough – not until she was the best.

  Genna showered, washing away the remnants of food and her mother’s words. She brushed her teeth, and went to her small desk with a glass of water, and a couple of laxatives. She swallowed them down, and opened her laptop.