by Barbie Wilde
“It’s not the air!” Vincent shrieked, writhing on the table. Colleen hurriedly prepared more Demerol and shot it into Vincent’s vein.
Then he heard one of the nurses scream. The pain in his gut became unbearable and he joined her. Colleen shouted, “Doctor, look at that!”
Dr. Stanson gave a startled yell, and that’s when it got really weird.
Vincent felt something deep inside of him rise up (the only way he could describe the sensation) and move down ... pushing the endoscope in front of it.
Dr. Stanson, meanwhile, was trying to understand why the endoscope was coming out of his patient’s anus at high speed, nearly burning his surgical glove-encased hands, without any help from the esteemed doctor himself. Finally, the endoscope came shooting out of Vincent’s rectum like a missile, whacking one of the nurses so hard on the forehead that she collapsed to the floor.
Then something else travelled down and blasted out of Vincent’s ass, ricocheting around the room like a bullet, entering the bodies of the unfortunate hospital staff at abdominal level—causing everyone in the room except Vincent to come to a nasty and unexpectedly sudden demise.
The ripping pain and chaos of the scene was all too much for Vincent, and he blacked out.
* * *
When Vincent finally came to and opened his eyes, the machines around him were still beeping contently. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. For a moment, he thought he must have had some midazolam-induced hallucination, but when he looked over his shoulder, he was horrified to see that the examination room was littered with blood and body parts. He sat up in bed and took in the eviscerated bodies of his doctor, the endoscopy nurse and the other nurses lying on the floor. Vincent turned and dry heaved over the other side of the bed.
He was still in pain, but it didn’t feel life threatening. Whatever had done this didn’t seem interested in him, but what had issued forth from his bowels to cause such mayhem?
Vincent carefully got off the hospital bed on the monitor side, not wanting to tread in the blood and guts slooshed all over the floor. He went over to the door of the examination room—but froze. Suddenly, he didn’t want to open it, worried about what else he would find.
Reluctantly, he pushed the door open and peeked out. It was bad. Blood everywhere, bodies everywhere. Ewomi was lying on the floor near the nurses’ station and he spotted her chest rising and falling fitfully. He walked over as quickly as he could and knelt next to her. Her uniform was soaked with blood and bits of mangled colon were poking out from her lower abdomen.
Vincent placed his hand on her forehead. It was feverishly hot. Her eyes popped open, she looked at him and screamed: “What did you do?”
He snatched his hand away and screamed back: “I didn’t do anything!” Ewomi convulsed, choked, threw up blood and died right there in front of him.
Vincent stood up slowly. Everyone in the recovery room was dead. He walked over to the small cupboard where he’d placed his clothes, and quickly dressed. He didn’t know what was going on, but one thing was for certain, hanging around in the Endoscopy Department of St. Stephen’s hospital in his “Dignity Shorts” was not going to be good for his health.
Vincent moved through the eerily empty corridors of the normally bustling hospital. Bloody, disemboweled bodies were all over the place, with entrails streaming out of their abdominal cavities. No one was left alive. His midazolam-fogged brain was trying to make sense of it all. Something very fucked up had just occurred. Was some rampaging polyp going nuts in the hospital? How the hell could something like this happen, especially to someone as unremarkable as him?
Vincent made his way down to the entrance hall. It was silent, with just the ringing of unanswered phones echoing throughout the building.
He stopped just as he was about to go through the revolving doors to the street, and turned around. The white walls of the hall were drenched in crimson arterial spray, like some crazed psychopath’s art exhibit.
Why was he still alive? Whatever had carried out this massacre could so easily have obliterated him, too.
Then he heard it. A sound. A sound like nothing he’d ever heard before, except maybe in some cheesy sci-fi film when he was a kid and his big brother had made him watch the black and white versions of The Thing from Another World or The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Vincent could have turned back to the revolving doors and gotten the hell out of Dodge, but he chose not to. He could have called the police, but would they have believed him? (“I think a polyp just came out of my butt and slaughtered a bunch of people.”) He didn’t think so. This thing had come from him, so it was his problem to sort out. Maybe he had some kind of immunity—it could have killed him, but chose not to. Hold on a minute, a polyp making a choice? His screaming brain wanted to reject the thought as soon as it emerged. But something had butchered all these people and he knew in his gut—no pun intended—that it had come from inside of him.
Vincent followed the sound as best he could. It was a bit difficult to pinpoint its source, but as he walked down the corridor it grew louder: a sucking, slurping, slushing sound, accompanied by an almost theremin-like whistling.
Vincent was walking past the Disabled Toilet when he realized the noise was coming from inside. He had never faced anything particularly dangerous in his life before. He’d always made a point of avoiding any conflict or confrontation, so he was literally quaking with fear. There was no question in his mind that he had to go in there and face it, whatever it was; however, Vincent was fervently hoping that his immunity theory wouldn’t prove to be unjustified.
With his heart thumping like a Keith Moon drum solo, Vincent cautiously opened the door to the Disabled Toilet. The squelching sounds quieted down, but did not cease. He was relieved to see that the lights were still on. He entered and spotted the polyp in the corner. It had grown terrifyingly fast and was at least 7 feet tall, slouching on the toilet like a disaffected teenager, human intestines piled up next to it. No features to speak of, just a huge, leech-like mouth containing a tripartite-jaw filled with hundreds of tiny sharp teeth that were busy masticating its unfortunate victims’ colons. Vincent noticed some black spots just above the mouth that might be eyes. At the same time, the polyp noticed Vincent and swallowed the remains of its dinner.
And smiled at him ...
Vincent felt like throwing up, but all he could do was gag. The smell of the thing was revolting—a vile combination of excrement and blood—and he wondered how long he could stay on his feet without fainting.
Then it spoke ...
“Hi Dad, how’s it hanging?” the polyp wheezed. Its voice had a strange, low-pitched, guttural, echoing resonance, as if the polyp had just had a laryngectomy and was using Esophageal Speech to burp out its words, like the now sadly deceased veteran actor, Jack Hawkins, in his later years.
Vincent’s balls shrank to the size of peanuts and a chill iced his extremities.
“I ... I’m not your father. You’re a ... m ... monster. W-Why have you murdered all these people?” Vincent stuttered.
“Hey, a boy’s gotta eat,” the polyp burped cheerfully.
“How did this happen? What the hell are you?”
The polyp reared back in what looked like a very human kind of annoyance: “Man, you want ME to explain to YOU what’s going on? Geez, you must be insane in the membrane. I AM, that’s what you got to get your head around. Forget about explanations. I exist and that’s all that you have to worry about right now.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Hey, you’re talking about the stuff I love,” the polyp burbled. “Shit and blood and all these millions of neurons I’m ingesting right now. Making me smarter, making me high on serotonin, the so-called ‘happiness hormone.’ Did you know that more than 90% of the body’s serotonin lies in the gut? I am eating. I am growing. I am smarter t
han you. I am happier than you. I am the ‘second brain’ of your nightmares, Daddy dearest.”
Vincent didn’t know what to do. It was rather alarming to be talking to an enormous fleshy bump, especially when it kept calling him “Dad.” He wanted to kill it, but he was being distracted by its personality. After all, no one, or no thing, had ever called him “Dad” before. And this polyp was a part of him. What would happen if the polyp died? Would Vincent die, too? What if it wanted to get back inside him, its former Host? It was too awful to contemplate.
Vincent pushed these thoughts from his mind. He didn’t care what happened to him anymore. This monster—created in his gut somehow—had massacred dozens of people, so his course was clear. He had to destroy it.
Vincent turned and ran out of the toilet, then down the corridor to the entrance hall. Being forced to watch all those old sci-fi movies back in his childhood, he knew that the most effective weapon against unknown creatures was fire. Of course, now that new regulations prevented any smoking in a public building, finding the required ingredients to burn the polyp to a crisp was challenging. By the time he’d found a fire ax, wrapped strips of cotton wound dressings around it and drenched it with rubbing alcohol, precious minutes had flown past. Finding a match or a lighter was the most difficult task, requiring him to rummage through the handbags and pockets of the corpses littering the entrance hall. Then he remembered that hospital staff were the worst offenders as far as smoking was concerned, so he concentrated his search on the bodies behind the information desk and was rewarded with a vintage gold Dunhill lighter.
Vincent dashed back down the corridor to the Disabled Toilet, armed with his makeshift torch. The slurping and munching noises had resumed, so the polyp was still in residence. Vincent squeezed through the doorway, just managing to hide the ax behind his back. The polyp stopped chewing and swallowed.
“You walked out in the middle of our conversation, Dad. That’s really rude.”
“Stop calling me Dad, you, you ... THING.” Vincent felt the insult was pretty limp, but he was simply lost for words when confronting the creature.
“Hey, Polyp is the name, Daddy-O. I came from YOU. So get over it.”
The polyp leaned over and grabbed some more intestines with its mouth, snorfling up the disembodied colons like spaghetti bolognaise. While its attention was momentarily distracted, Vincent took the opportunity to light the rags on his homemade torch. The polyp, instantly alerted, spat out its food and growled. Vincent doused the creature with alcohol, threw the torch and then ran like hell.
He stopped twenty feet down the corridor and turned around. The sound emerging from the toilet was horrendous: a crackling, hissing, squealing, throbbing racket, accompanied by wisps of greasy, miasmic smoke curling from underneath the door. Then, totally unexpected, an explosion ... blowing the door out so violently that it hit the wall opposite. Fire alarms began to wail and the sprinkler system kicked into action.
Vincent cautiously walked back to the toilet, wondering what he was going to find. Covering his mouth and nose with his shirt tail so he wouldn’t have to breathe in the truly repellent smell of fried polyp, he peered around the doorway.
The polyp was still on the toilet, but the top half of it was gone, the other half sinking slowly into the bowl—scorched and blackened, heat blisters growing on the surface of the creature, steam caused by the water from the sprinklers gently rose up like a mist from a harbor town. But it was what was inside of it that made Vincent fall to his knees, overwhelmed by the horror of it all.
He’d made a mistake. A big mistake. He could see that now. But how could he have anticipated that the diabolical thing would explode?
From inside of the polyp, hundreds of new fleshy growths were squirming and moving, tiny at first, but as they devoured their creator, they grew fast. Some of the more energetic ones were already busily crawling down their progenitor, onto the floor, slithering determinedly towards Vincent like inchworms hyped up on crack cocaine.
Vincent turned and crawled on his hands and knees out of the toilet, weak with fear and horror. He managed to scramble to his feet in the corridor and stagger to the entrance hall, just in time to see two firemen dash through the door and make for the source of the foul smoke. Vincent tried to stop them, tried to speak, tried to warn them, but he was too shocked by what had happened to make any sense and just waved his arms around ineffectually. As another fireman helped him out of the building towards a waiting ambulance, he heard a distant echoing scream come from the direction of the Disabled Toilet.
As he lay on the gurney inside the ambulance, Vincent looked through the small window as first firemen, then policemen, then the army streamed into the hospital. An attendant gave him something to calm his nerves, but no one bothered to ask him what had happened. They were too busy fighting the Polyp Horde inside. He wondered if the humans would win.
Then he felt something. Inside of him. That scuttling feeling inside his bowels again. And Vincent knew that it wasn’t over.
Botophobia
“Fear and Loathing in the Basement”
Lorraine dreaded going back to her childhood home, but her parents had recently died in a car accident and she’d broken up with her abusive creep of a husband who hadn’t given her a dime, so there was no choice really. To add insult to injury, she’d also just lost her job, so it was either the tired, brown, 1950s, ranch-style house in Opportunity, Washington (oh, the glorious irony of that name), or the streets.
As Lorraine drove up in her battered 1978 Chevy Monte Carlo, she parked the car in the same old asphalt driveway where she’d happily driven the neighbors crazy back when she was a kid, loudly lobbing a tennis ball against the metal garage doors every morning, imagining she’d grow up to be an international tennis player and then escape this jerkwater burg.
She sat in her car listening to the engine ticking over and contemplated the house where she’d spent her formative years. Of course, she’d visited her parents fairly recently, so Lorraine wasn’t surprised to see that the house hadn’t changed, but they could have paid someone to do some maintenance on the place. Guess they were just too old, too tired and too disappointed with life to give a damn.
After locking her car, Lorraine walked down the concrete path to the front door, fumbling her keys out of her purse. Her heart was pumping, adrenalin coursing through her veins. Why? She couldn’t figure it out. Why the fear response? Maybe too many bad memories? But her charmingly dysfunctional, fear-fuelled childhood hadn’t really been that bad, had it?
She hesitated before putting the first key into the rusty screen door. Struggling to hold it open (the hinges needed oiling, that’s for sure), Lorraine opened the weather-beaten front door and came into the hallway, which led down to the kitchen. On the left, there was a wide arched entry into the living room. It was like a time capsule: there was her mother’s beloved sapphire blue Indian rug decorated with flying birds and flowers, the turquoise blue couch and armchair, the modern paintings on the wall and, the real talking point of the house, a massive fossil stone mantelpiece that took up the whole western wall of the living room, with a large dark green slate hearth in front of the fireplace.
Nothing out of place. All dusted and neat. Empty of life. Totally, utterly depressing.
Lorraine turned and went down to the kitchen, stopping at the hall closet to turn on the electricity. She heard the hum of the fridge starting up and it was a strangely comforting sound. She nervously walked past the door to the basement on her left, turning to look down the opposite hallway where the three bedrooms and the bathroom lay.
Maybe she should just sell the place. Even in today’s market, she’d probably get a fairly good price. It would give her a bit of a nest egg. Some travelling money, so she could get out of Washington State and far away from Seattle, where the ex-asshole still lived. Maybe Southern California. Palm trees. That would be nice.
/>
Lorraine poked around the house, discovering that all her parents’ possessions were in good order. She folded up their clothes (keeping a few items of her mother’s costume jewelry and some of her outfits for sentimental reasons) and then packed the rest of it off to the Sally Ann, as her dad always used to call the Salvation Army. She couldn’t bring herself to move into her parents’ room, so she took over her old bedroom, the smallest one with the pink walls and the white four poster bed and desk set. The creepy doll nightlight that her mother had given her was still there, complete with dusty pale blue crinoline dress and staring blue eyes.
God how she hated that lamp.
Every night Lorraine would turn the doll’s head right around Exorcist-style to the wall so the doll wouldn’t look at her while she slept. And every day, her mother would come into her bedroom to clean and turn the head back around again, thinking that her daughter had lost her beans. After all, how could anyone be frightened of such a pretty doll?
The one place that she didn’t check out immediately was the basement. She’d always hated it. Unfinished, shadowy—with concrete floors and bare wood wall frames and ceilings, the better to hide the face-eating spiders that she was convinced lay nestled between the rafters. Unfortunately, Lorraine came from a family of scientists and artists, so they couldn’t understand her morbid and unreasonable fear of going down to the place where her mother sat happily for hours drawing portraits at a pink picnic table and her father read his tattered collection of sci-fi and fantasy magazines, lying on the bare mattress of one of the old bunk beds that didn’t fit upstairs.
And then there was THE ROOM, a locked storeroom in the far corner of the basement that her family weren’t allowed to have access to. Whatever lay behind the locked door belonged to the owners of the house, as her family merely rented their home for many years. When she was a kid, Lorraine would lie in her bed for hours, wondering what was going on down there. What if there was a dead body in the room, lying in an ebony coffin? Some poor soul horribly murdered by their landlord, who she’d never met, but was sure had to be a weirdo. And what if the dead body wasn’t dead? What if it was a vampire, or a werewolf, or a zombie?