Twisted 50 Volume 1

by Wessell, Stephanie

  Four of its pincers pinned him at the wrists and ankles while its other legs gathered the cocoon of blankets from on top of him and cast them aside, exposing him.

  It swayed above him, the uncountable tiny legs over its surface thrashing and thrumming impatiently, scratching at Pete’s skin. He clamped his lips tight and tried to turn his head away.

  Then the beast’s pincers carefully and deliberately severed the webs with which it held itself together and one creature became hundreds, raining down on young Pete. He disappeared beneath a scuttling mass of them. They ran up his pyjama legs, scrambled up his sleeves and swarmed under his jacket. An agony of itching.

  They cascaded over his face and into his hair. Despite his gritted teeth, they flowed into his mouth, slipping and skittering between cheek and gum and down his throat. He choked and they came boiling back out, then another wave swept in. They clogged his nostrils and his ears as they desperately, determinedly forced their way inwards.

  Sliding their needle sharp legs under his lids, they dragged Pete’s eyes open and two swollen mother spiders stabbed their abdomens into the wet skin of his eyes, puncturing the pupils and squirting their eggs into the warm reservoirs within. Shadow spiders hatched and swam in Pete’s vision, swirling and swarming, supping and sucking and swelling, until they quickly grew too fat and tore their way out through his raw sockets.

  The searing pain was everywhere within him. They were filling his guts – from both ends – spewing their enzymes and dissolving him and sucking him up into their own guts.

  What was left of Pete was being digested within the torn, sagging bag of skin which had once contained the entirety of him.

  Eventually, the pain became a memory. Even being Peter became a memory. The transformation was complete, he was gone and all that was left was the spiders. White spiders.

  Thousands of Petes peered through thousands of tiny eyes aware, as spiders are aware, of each of his other spider selves. He remembered what they remembered and felt what they felt, as though connected to them by a web. They, in turn, remembered his fear.

  Now white spider Petes crawl into the bedrooms of terrified children every night and, every night, he dies a thousand times. He feels the trauma of each death and he remembers it. He can’t forget.

  Flat Hunting

  by Gordon Slack

  Mmmmm! I do love a G&T. Another quick sip. . . Mmmmmm!

  It can’t be long now. They always arrive on time.

  From the reply, I’ll bet he’s about 45, and a bit nervous (well, they all are). Bound to be married, which makes it more fun. And particularly when they’re nervous!

  Can’t see him yet; too many people at the bar blocking my view of the door.

  Oi Oi! Here he comes. Head around the door and he’s in. He’s actually rather good looking.

  Undo another top button; spray a bit more scent on and. . . I’m ready. “Mr. Johnson, I’m over here.”

  He’s coming over. “Miss Smith?”

  “Yes, that’s me; like a drink?” He’s hesitating; didn’t expect such a gorgeous creature, did he?

  “Well. . . Miss Smith. . . if you really. . .”

  “Up to you, Mr. Johnson, why don’t you sit down? We can discuss the flat here.”

  He’s tempted. But he’s looking around. He wouldn’t want to be seen in a bar with some. . . TART! Hee, hee, hee.

  OK, better put him out of his agony. Plus it’s getting rather late. “Probably best if we go now, Mr. Johnson, and see your flat, your new abode!”

  “Yes, I think that would be best.”

  “Your car?”

  “OK.”

  It’s an E Type Jag. Not bad. Get to the grand finale in style.

  God, he’s really good looking. I’m definitely pinging down below.

  His driving is steady; he must know London quite well, I guess. Probably works in the City. Yum yum!

  I do love these leather seats; love squirming around in them. And I do so want to have him.

  Oh dear, has my skirt slipped up? Did I show some Oooh La La? He glanced over, but I can’t see anything happening downstairs.

  I’m fondling the large wooden sporty gear knob. “Rather big, isn’t it?”

  “Please leave that alone.” Oh, I see.

  I’ll have another squirm. Come on now, my skirt must be a good inch above c level. No reaction. OK. We’ll concentrate on business. “If you turn left here, Mr. Johnson, then go straight on.”

  “Are you sure this is the right area?”

  “We’ll go to my office first, to show you the details of the flat.”

  They always get confused at this point. “You said it was a one floor flat in central London?”

  “Yup, that’s what you paid your deposit for.” I mean! I think a two thousand pound deposit is very reasonable for central London.

  “By the way, Mr. Johnson, did I mention that it was of timber frame construction?”

  “Well, no. . . I didn’t think that was used anymore.”

  “That’s the best choice, Mr. Johnson. You can’t beat some good old wood, eh! OK, pull up here, please.”

  Here we are. Standing in front of my building; my own business. Well, it is now, following the untimely death of my parents and the disappearance of my sister. But then none of them ever loved me.

  “Is this really your office? The area looks a bit, well. . .”

  “Mr. Johnson, please bear with me. You won’t be disappointed, I can assure you.” Hold it. Put on seductive charms. See what happens this time. “Mr. Johnson, would you like to come upstairs with me?”

  He’s following.

  I’m walking up the stairs just ahead of him. Doing my wiggle. And now another wiggle.

  “Where is your office, please, Miss Smith? It’s getting rather late.”

  OK matey. That was your last chance. “Here we are. This is my office. And here’s your flat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Right, while he is confused, just get the small hammer. Now come up behind him…

  “Miss Smith, I really don’t understand.”

  Big swing and THWACK! Good one on his head. He’s reeling. And again. SPLAT! Good blood spray; 8 out of 10. What a big bruise, like a large plum. THUMP! A really big spurt this time; he’s down on his knees.

  Get the heavy hammer now. Aaahh, it is heavy. This is my special one; coming in from the side. SPLAT! Nice one. Some bone flew off. God, he’s really bleeding now.

  Just one more go. If. . . I. . . can. . . lift. . . this. . . hammer. Yes. SPLURT! Well, I’ll be damned. He cracked open like an egg. Best let him drop to the floor and completely drain out.

  There’s brain all over the hammers; just wipe it off. It gets so damn sticky if you leave it.

  Stop for a quick break. I think a. . . a Bacardi and Coke will do; just to relax. Where’s the Bacardi? Ah, here. Pour it in the glass; now some Coke. Give it a quick stir.

  It’s delicious.

  I have always liked this drink. Can remember going on holiday with my parents when I was 13. I snuck some into my room and got my younger sister to try it.

  She was so pissed by suppertime, I told my mother she had gone down with a tummy bug. At least there were some happy days, I suppose.

  Right. Let’s have a look. All this blood; how could he hold so much?

  Now, lift his legs in. Then his middle. . . didn’t think he was so heavy. And now put in the rest. Pheww!

  Let’s have a look at him. Well, Mr. Johnson. You didn’t want me, eh? None of them ever do. Pull down his trousers and pants. Blimey! What a fucking waste. Anyway, it’s too late now.

  Just cut if off with Dad’s old multi-purpose scout knife. Now ram it into his mouth; looks a real treat. Put the lid on. Look for some nails. He’s getting his single floor, timber framed flat, as promised.

  Quick sip of the Bacardi. Lovely. But hold on. No, I mustn’t. But I just have to.

  Take the lid off. Slip myself in next to him. Put my arms around his
waist. That’s better. It’s good to hold another human being so tightly. It’s been so long. Yes, it has. It really has.

  Why was I treated like shit? For all those years. All those bloody years. Anyway, have to get over it, as usual. Just hate everyone.

  Get back out. Nail him in. Oops! Mind your fingers.

  Good job done. And another satisfied customer. Bastard!

  Lolitasaurus

  by Richard Craven

  First nothing, then something. Long, white corridors. Long strip lights flickering like strobes. You are, you ain't, a million times a moment. Our thighs, coated in plastic, rub together as we walk. In all the corridors, doors are spaced evenly along the walls, doors and more doors, plywood and cloned grain and standard handles. If I ever opened a door, then there would be another long, white corridor, with long strip lights flickering like strobes, and more plywood doors, and if I were to open one of these, another corridor with strip lights and more doors. Sometimes you think you are inside the body of a whale, a clean whale, purged and bleached, with straightened curves and standardised sphincter valves.

  There are not many people around here. The occasional cleaner. Either they're bent cataleptically over the shaft of a mop – you walk past them and at the end of the corridor you reach your door, and you turn around for another look, and they're still there, motionless, drooping with the fatigue of the inert; or they're hard at work, mop grasped in whitened knuckles, mechanised repetition of motion, scrubbing eternally the same maculation in the margin between carpet and wall, erasing the lingering trace of the last quark of dirt.

  I found a nice sharp screwdriver once, or someone else did, or it found me. I walked up soundlessly behind one of the cleaners. He was in a state of absence, leaning on his mop, eyes turned inwards on the emptiness. I stuck the screwdriver into his throat and jumped back and watched the blood spurting all over the walls and the carpeting and the strip lights. He never made a sound. He just crumpled slowly to the floor, almost deliberately, as though he were making space for himself after a satisfying picnic. His leg twitched spasmodically and upset his bucket, so that some dirty water got spilt on the carpet. When he’d stopped moving, I pulled down his trousers and tried to toss him off, but he wouldn't rise to the occasion. There was some bother, but I didn't get any blood on me and I hid the screwdriver, and the CCTV was too grainy.

  I am in the room. The one where you eat sleep think fuck shit and take pills. If you are going to piss or talk you go to another room. If you are not eating sleeping thinking shitting fucking taking pills pissing or talking, then you are in a corridor, my friend. You see how if you are in the room long enough, then everything you do in it merges into a single process, a mono-event in a monoverse where 'time' and ‘change’ are meaningless. So I am in the room doing what comes to me there. They've got newspapers for you to wipe your arse on, they've got pormags and TV and inflatable dolls with adjustable valves, and straitjackets and wooden spoons, and a kiosk with nurses in zip-crotched underwear who dose you up with Largactil and fiendish anti-psychotics which turn you into a dribbling lard arse with no fashion sense.

  Thus am I, when men come for me and lead me silently down the corridors. We pass the spot where I killed the cleaner and there is not the faintest lingering scintilla of a ghost. At the end of the corridor the door swings open into the room where you piss and talk.

  “You are Mr Moffatt?” says one of the men.

  “Is correct.”

  “Our files indicate that you…” blah blah.

  “Come again?”

  “You're cured,” he says, “no more than averagely unbalanced. You're free. You can go.”

  I am standing on a gravel drive outside a large door. I look down at my hand grasping a black valise. I seem to remember another valise whose exterior details correspond exactly to this one, the same combination lock, the same dents and scratches and tarnishments. I wonder, and not without reason, although it is no more than the idlest of speculations, whether they are one and the same valise. The contents are not the same. The one before had all kinds of useful things: Rohypnol, an oil-stained boiler suit, a couple of syringes, plastic cable-ties. This one's just got clothes and money in it, and not enough of either.

  The sky is uniformly white. The house of corridors stretches out behind me. Underneath my mackintosh I have a two-piece suit, underneath the suit nothing, no shirt no pants no socks, just some torn plimsolls. In front of me is a lawn, clumps of grass and big dog skid marks strewn with deadened leaves, beyond the lawn a line of fir trees bisected by an opening for the drive. I hear no sound save the low continuous roar of traffic.

  The town is approached by a slip road feeding off the bypass. I trudge along the side of the road, on a path worn by the untold migrations of others. I slip on mud and sweet wrappers and cold condoms. My only companions two or three huge crows, who flap their wings, and make ungainly landings in the road, and eye me quizzically as I pass.

  I come upon a drama in its whimpering denouement. A small collection of caravans, lines of rags hanging limply in the lifeless cold. Fetid travellers gathered in a patchouli-pungent knot around a squad car. The doors are open, the blue lights revolve, cops bulked out in hi-viz jackets bundle a semiconscious youth into the back. His head cracks against the doorframe. Nobody speaks. Inside the squad car, a radio crackles.

  “Wossis?” says one of the policeman, catching hold of me, “You see anything?”

  “You bet, I say.” I stand there smiling dumbly at the moments elapsing before he turns from me disgustedly.

  “Funny fucking fucker,” he says to noone in particular, “go on, fuck off out of it.”

  The slip road runs past fields, and past dirty little paddocks with iron troughs and forlorn ponies. After a bend, I see skyscrapers in the distance. I find myself trudging past hillsides down which spill rows of prefabricated terraces.

  The town is one of those hi-tech affairs, laid out like the spokes of a wheel with shopping at the still point of the turning world and concentric circles dedicated to brave new industries and brave new housing. The roads and roundabouts are awash with late model jelly-moulded cars, suits speeding from pointless appointment to pointless appointment. The still, sclerotic air balloons in every wake, crackling tangibly with the potencies of the doomed.

  The hostel when I find it proves at first to be surprisingly agreeable. It is one of those community-centre-style bungaloids built out of glazed maroon brick. I am expected and a single room has already been prepared for me. I even find a pormag in the bedside cabinet. I take off my suit and express my autonomy all over my crisp new linen bedsheets.

  The pleasure I derive from my new surroundings soon begins to pall. The rooms are over-heated, the food stodgy and institutional. I meet my fellow inmates. I am disturbed by the revelation that to a man they are qualitatively identical: all ex-child prodigies in their late thirties, thin hair, glasses, glazed dough-grease faces, paralysed, motorised wheelchairs, dribble-bag smells. By far the most alarming feature, though, is the voices. Each has had his vocal chords replaced by a voicebox from some Californian factory.

  During the endless hours of free association, they earnestly discuss with each other the state of their preparedness for independent living. The heated somnolent dayroom air is rent with vulcanized American platitudes. They try to engage my participation. They think I am lonely. I am.

  I find, after this, that time is quite abruptly wrapped in an enigma. I suffer from vague presentiments of clingfilm and knotted nylon cords. There are flashing lights and disembodied voices rasping in a fluorescent haze, then the sensations of jolting, cessation, fatigue, and finally stillness in a numb white landscape.

  I am outside, in a small clearing. Snow on the ground, broken by footprints. Undergrowth merges with sickly trees. A huge, grey bust of a bearded man stares balefully at me through the thickets. I am conscious of the cold, but only as though somebody else were feeling it. If I turn my head I can just make out the shape of a whe
elchair lying athwart a rough path. I smell sewage petrified at the precise moment of its deliquescence.

  When the doctor says I am well enough, the fat nurse with latex gloves removes the tubes. Then the detectives come for me and put me in their car, two in front, two either side of me in the back. We are driving through London, through some inner-outer scene of non-description like Perivale or Edgware.

  “Give him the blanket, then, George,” says one of the detectives in the front.

  “Rock on,” says George, pulling a dirty grey blanket over my head.

  Underneath the blanket it smells of sweat and piddle and detective fart. I can feel the fat, warm thighs of the detectives pressing into me whenever the car rounds a corner. I hear their voices. They talk about beer and QPR and bestiality videos.

  The car stops. One of the detectives in front gets out. After a minute, the blanket is pulled from my head. I blink in the sudden brightness. A hand appears from nowhere and thrusts into my face a scalding kebab covered in mustard and tomato sauce. I hear myself gasp.

  “What makes you do it, you twisted little cunt,” says George, slapping me across the cheek with a ringed knuckle.

  My nose and upper lip throb under layers of muck and gristle. I raise a hand to wipe my face, but it is snatched away and the blanket is thrust over my head again.

  “Mad cunt,” says George.

  It is warm and fetid and close underneath the blanket. I can feel the mustard and the tomato sauce, cooler now, as it slides down my face. I taste blood.

  The court rises. The judge clears his throat. I don't hear much, just the standard crap about repugnant crimes and duty to the public weal. Probably does both, bouncing up and down on some rent boy. I watch him. I watch his jaw moving spasmodically, the clean-shaven face under thick eyebrows, the fright-wig rented from Nanny Whiplash. It seems so far away, so shallow, where is the man beneath all this stuff?