Mad Stacks: Story Collection Box Set

by Scott Nicholson

  Parrish shifted position, allowing the legs to droop and splay even further apart. Standing by the woman’s torso, he checked for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  "Diener," he said. "Fetch a thermometer. I’ll need you to take a measurement."

  Gary sauntered off to do as bidden.

  "Quickly!" Parrish called after him.

  Gary returned a moment later with the thermometer in hand. He wavered as he stared at the body, his indecision clear.

  "In the rectum, man!" said Parrish, leaning across her face to feel for breath.

  Gary eased the glass device into the orifice. Expectancy was clear on his face. Even Parrish looked down with anticipation. Instead, nothing. Heartbeats later, Gary removed the thermometer and arranged the woman’s legs in a more modest pose.

  "What's the reading?"

  "Umm ... a few degrees above room temperature," Gary cocked his head, "Isn’t that what you expected?"

  Parrish didn’t answer. Instead he was fixated on something near her breast. "Get me a magnifying glass."

  Gary dutifully complied. Within moments, the magnifying glass was in the doctor’s hand.

  "Come here," the doctor motioned. "What do you see?"

  Gary leaned forward, awkward in close proximity to Parrish, and stared through the magnifying glass.

  "Well?"

  Gary pulled his gaze from the glass and focussed instead on the woman’s chest and abdomen.

  Dr. Parrish traced a line with his finger from underneath her breast down to below her abdomen. "There! It looks like a scar. A faint one, but definitely a scar." He began to trace the line back toward her other breast but pulled back, whirling to face Gary.

  "Tell me about the initial incision," Parrish demanded.

  Gary stepped back, flinching from the doctor’s fervour. "Umm ... it’s a deep cut, down to the bone. It’s a ‘Y’ shape, starting from the front of the shoulders and goes down to the ..."

  "Go on."

  Gary stared harder at the corpse, at the near-invisible scar. The line Parrish just traced. "Down to the abdomen."

  "Someone’s been at her before me."

  Gary nodded but shrank back. Confusion was rife in his eyes.

  "I don’t like this one bit. We have to cut her open." Parrish moved with purpose, repositioning himself next to the trolley. "Normally, the diener makes the first incision, but I think I’ll spare you that honour today."

  Gary stood in the shadows.

  The woman’s chest lay exposed, propped up, and at the mercy of Parrish’s scalpel.

  "I am commencing the initial incision," Parrish declared to the recorder.

  He stabbed the scalpel into the right shoulder, furtively at first, but was soon slicing along the scar in a barely controlled rush. Parrish used hungry sawing cuts to part skin and flesh. Trickles of blood and other fluids seeped from the monstrous incision, spilling down the woman’s torso and onto the table.

  A tiny moan escaped into the room, almost unheard, as the scalpel sliced through the woman’s stomach tissue.

  Parrish's response was sluggish as he shook himself from the task. "What was that?"

  "What?"

  Parrish gaped at the corpse. "Did you hear a noise? Like a sigh?"

  The woman’s face was locked in a death mask as before. Her closed eyes were lost to the world, her mouth open in the tiniest of pouts. All identical to when Parrish first entered the room.

  "I’m continuing the incision," he said to the recorder, as he plunged the scalpel deep into her stomach, picking up the weeping thread of the cut. He was approaching the lowest end of the incision but proceeded with caution, having lost his earlier vigour.

  Gary. A voice called to the diener. A feminine voice. Foreign. Stop him! He’s not doing it right.

  Gary looked about the room in alarm but saw nothing—no one other than the doctor and the corpse. Parrish’s tentative scalpel was nearing the abdomen and the pubic area.

  Diener! Dr. Parrish looked up from his bloody handiwork to stare Gary in the eye. He lowered his mask, exposing a demented grin. His voice, the screech of a harpy. Punch me in the face!

  Gary shook his head, timidly at first, but more fervently as the doctor’s grin darkened to a snarl. He tried to back away but his limbs tingled with energy, a sudden desire to violence.

  Punch me, knock me out! Or you’re fired! The doctor’s voice was out of sync, built of raw menace. You incompetent fuck! Diener! If you don’t punch me in the face right now, I’m gonna gut you next.

  The threat cut to Gary’s core, spurring him into action. The tingling in his limbs hit critical mass.

  Gary lunged, grabbed Parrish by the wrist, and wrenched at the scalpel. It was freed from the woman’s abdomen with a slick sound.

  "What are you—" Parrish stammered. All trace of the harpy’s voice was gone. The doctor appeared dazed in the heartbeat before Gary’s fist slammed into his face.

  The bloodied scalpel clattered to the floor as Parrish crumpled. The crunch of bone and cartilage ghosted the room before fading away.

  "Gary."

  Confused, he looked down at the woman. Blood spilled from the incomplete incision spanning her torso. Her breasts were still propped up and within reach, their bareness enticing. He wanted to move but her eyes—her open, lightning-streaked eyes—held him in thrall. His thoughts were trapped in the blue-white zigzags. The tingle surged through his extremities; his skin itched and burned.

  "Pick up the scalpel," she commanded. The lilt of her voice was intoxicating. Compelling.

  He picked up the scalpel.

  "Finish the incision." The woman’s eyes swirled with electric fire as she raised her head to study him.

  Gary hesitated.

  The corpse gripped the edges of the table and pulled her legs up, spreading them suggestively.

  "Finish the cut, Gary," she commanded. Her voice was insistent, echoing through his mind a fraction of a second after it reached his ears. "But do it slower, deeper. With care."

  Wavering, Gary fought the suggestion and the incessant energy under his skin.

  The woman writhed on the autopsy table, arching her head back, breasts and hips forward, in an entrancing rhythm. More blood, crimson shading to black, spilled from her wound and was smeared across the slab by her gyrating buttocks.

  Gary struggled against the betrayal of his groin. Sweat banded across his forehead and along his back. His skin crackled with latent energy; his scrubs were saturated—damp plastic chafing his skin.

  Finish the incision, diener! She screamed without opening her mouth. The words lingered in his mind; a wave of nausea in his gut.

  The moment he stepped forward, scalpel raised, the nausea and heat diminished. Everywhere except his throbbing crotch.

  He wiped his brow and blinked the excess sweat out of his eye. He’d already positioned the scalpel over the woman’s stomach.

  The woman stilled. They both watched the blade slide into her abdomen. The upward thrust of the scalpel forced out a breathless gasp from her.

  With a mix of delicacy and clumsiness, he started the upward cut toward her left breast. He pressed his groin into the side of the table; the cool metal was a mixed blessing. Static electricity discharged up the front of his scrubs.

  The woman renewed her gyrating, soon filling the examination room with moans of pained delight. Gibberish punctured her moans; a chant that was both familiar and foreign.

  The scalpel blade was greedy despite his awkward hand. Urged on by the corpse’s desire, it sliced through her flesh and soft organs. Blood and intestinal fluids spilled from the incision as he arced up the side of her abdomen and further. The smell was fetid yet tinged with saccharine sweetness, as though he were dissecting a mouldy gingerbread woman.

  He scraped across her ribs. Every scoring of bone wrenched stuttering whimpers from her. Gary lifted her breast with his free hand and tentatively ran the blade beneath its curve—generating whimpers, followed by a shuddering mo
an as the scalpel circled her breast and finished at her shoulder. White skin disappeared beneath her fluids as the incision wept.

  Gary pulled the scalpel free. His erection diminished as the press of cool metal took effect and the electricity abated. The clamminess remained, along with an intense headache pounding at the base of his skull.

  The lightning-eyed woman continued to writhe, exulting in the expanding pool of blood. The table was awash with it; gravity and motion eased it down the blood grooves, burgundy thinning to silver.

  After long moments of revelling in the pain and the blood, she petered off. She then fixed Gary with a predatory smile, running her fingers along the incision. In their wake, the cut healed over, leaving only a bloody smudge.

  "Diener," she purred, sliding from the slab and stepping over the fallen form of Dr. Parrish. "You have executed your task well."

  She paused to examine the surgical tools, testing the weight of each item. She seemed especially fond of Parrish’s knife, fingering it with the appreciation of a true fetishist. Blood coursed down her legs and pooled at her feet. Appearing to grow bored with the tools, she abandoned them and crossed the room for the door, spattering a bloody trail across the floor.

  Two snowy figures with matching pairs of zigzag eyes hovered outside the door, pressing their faces against the tiny inset window. The woman paused before the door, turning from her kind to fix Gary with one last stare.

  "We may meet again, diener." She smoothed a palm over her hip; her gaze lingered on the bloodied scalpel in Gary's hand.

  Gary shuddered, dropping the surgical blade. Unsure what to do, what to touch, he held his hands up, palms open, like a pre-op surgeon. His heart and skull thumped in unison.

  "Remember, diener." The woman pointed to the plaque above the door. She uttered the phrase in imitation of Dr. Parrish, perverting it. She paused to blow him a kiss before slipping through the door. Joining her companions in the corridor, she disappeared from view, leaving a bloody smear on the door handle and her translated words lingering on Gary’s conscience.

  "This is the place where the living help to delight death."

  THE END

  Award-winning author Shane Jiraiya Cummings has been acknowledged as "one of Australia's leading voices in dark fantasy". His latest releases include the ebooks Shards, The Smoke Dragon, Requiem for the Burning God, and the Apocrypha Sequence. More information on Shane's books can be found at www.jiraiya.com.au.

  Gateway Drug Table of Contents

  Master Table of Contents

  ###

  WORK IN PROGRESS

  By Scott Nicholson

  The cutting was the most demanding.

  During his career as an artist, John Manning had sliced glass, trimmed paper, chipped granite, chiseled wood, shaved ice, and torched steel. Those materials were nothing compared to flesh. Flesh didn't always behave beneath the tool.

  And bone might has well have been marble, for all its delicacy and stubbornness. Bone refused shaping. Bone wanted to splinter and curl, no matter how light John's touch on the hammer.

  How did you build yourself alive?

  Bit by bit.

  Karen on the wall was a testament to that. Because Karen never lied.

  And was never finished, an endless work in progress.

  So building himself had become a mission from God. John knew from his time at college that art required suffering. He'd suffered plenty, from no job to canceled grants to broken fingers to Karen's last letter. His art had not improved, though he'd faithfully moved among the various media until his studio was as cluttered as a crow's nest.

  He crushed out his cigarette and studied the portrait. Much of it had been done from memory. The painting had grown so large and oppressive in his mind that it assumed capital letters and became The Painting.

  When he'd started it three years ago, the memory had flesh and was in the same room with him. Now he had to stagger through the caves of his brain to find her and demand she undress and model. And she had been so elusive lately.

  Karen.

  Her letter lay in a slot of his sorting shelf, just above a cluster of glass grapes. The paper had gone yellow, and rock dust was thick across its surface. If he opened the letter and read it, maybe she would come out of the smoky caves inside his skull. Except then he'd have to finish The Painting.

  Looking out the window was easier, and had a shorter clean-up period. Painting had been foolish anyway. Every stroke was wrong. When he needed a light touch, he cut a fat swath. When he needed bold colors, he bled to mud.

  He was born to sculpt, anyway. And now that he had the perfect subject, his frustrations could fall away. The anger and passion and sickness and hatred could go into the new work in progress and not poison his brain any longer. No more dallying with oil and charcoal, no more dancing with acrylics. That was a dilettante's daydream, and the dream was over.

  Because this was real.

  This was the most important moment in the history of art.

  This was The Living Painting.

  Except the materials didn't cooperate. Not Cynthia nor Anna and not Sharon in the trunk of his Toyota.

  Life was a work in progress. Nothing was sacred. Art was a work in progress. Nothing was sacred.

  If you rearranged the letters of "sacred," you got "scared."

  John had not been scared when he asked Cynthia to be his material. Cynthia was a work in progress. Cynthia was an artist. Cynthia was art.

  The body beneath the canvas in the corner of John's studio dripped.

  John wondered if the blood would seep between the cracks in the floor and then through the ceiling of the used bookstore below. Even if it did, no one would notice for months. His studio was above the Classics, a section almost as long-dead as the authors themselves. Proof that even when you created something for the ages, the ages could care less.

  So all that was left was pleasing himself. Envisioning perfection, and striving for it. Pushing his hands and heart to match his mind's strange hope.

  He lifted the razor and was about to absolve himself of failure forever when the knock came at the door.

  The studio was a shared space. John loathed other human beings, and other artists in particular, but his lack of steady income had forced him to join five others in renting the makeshift gallery. They were drawn together by the same fatalistic certainty of all other dying breeds.

  Knock, knock.

  And the knock came again. Some people didn't take "no answer" for an answer.

  One of the five must have knocked. Probably wanted to chat about art. Not like they had anything better to do. John threw a spattered sheet of canvas over the corner of the room and went to the door.

  Karen.

  Karen in the hallway, glorious, almost perfect.

  The last person he expected to see, yet the right person at this stage of the work in progress.

  Karen as a statue, as a painting, as the person who shaped John's life. John tried to breathe but his lungs were basalt. Karen had not aged a bit. If anything, she had grown younger, more heavenly. More perfect.

  John could read her eyes as if they were mirrors. She tried not to show it, but truth and beauty couldn't lie. Truth and beauty showed disapproval. That was one look she hadn't forgotten.

  John weighed every ounce of the gray that touched his temples, measured the bags under his eyes, counted the scars on his hands.

  "Hello, John," Karen said.

  Just the way she'd started the letter.

  "Hi." His tongue felt like mahogany.

  "You're surprised." Karen talked too fast. "My old roommate from college still lives here. I had her look you up."

  "And you came all this way to see me?" John wanted a cigarette. His hands needed something to do.

  "I was passing through anyway. Mountain vacation. You know, fresh air and scenic beauty and all that."

  John glanced out the window. A plume of diesel exhaust drifted through his brick scenery. College buildings
sprawled against the hillsides in the background. The mountains were lost to pollution.

  John had been silent too long and was about to say something, but his words disappeared in the smoky caves inside his head.

  "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?" Karen asked.

  "You're not interrupting. I was just thinking about my next piece."

  That meant his next sculpture rather than his next sexual encounter. Karen knew him well enough to understand.

  She could never interrupt, anyway. John was an artist, and artists never had anything to interrupt. Artists had years of free time, and artists would rather give their free time to other people. Art was sacrifice.

  His time was her time. Always had been. At least, it had been years ago. Now she lived two thousand miles away with no forwarding address and John had endless buckets of time to devote to his art.

  Except now she stood at the door of his studio, eyes like nickels.

  "Can I come in, then?"

  Come.

  In.

  To John's studio.

  With Cynthia lying in the corner, weeping blood and becoming. Becoming what, John wasn't sure.

  Himself, maybe. His soul. The shape of things. A work in progress.

  John tried on a smile that felt fixed in plaster. "Come in."

  Karen walked past him and lifted objects from his workbench. "A metal dolphin. I like that."

  She touched the stone sailboat and the driftwood duck and the rattlesnake walking stick and John watched her until she finally saw the portrait.

  Or rather, The Painting.

  "Damn, John."

  "I haven't finished it yet."

  "I think you just liked making me get naked. You painted me slow."

  Not as slow as he should have. He wanted the painting to take a lifetime. She had other plans, though she hadn't known it at the time.

  "It's a work in progress," he said.

  "What smells so funny?"

  Oh, God. She had flared her wondrous nostrils. John did not like where this was headed.

  "Probably the kerosene," John said. "Cheaper than paint thinner, and works just as well, if you overlook the stink."