by Tim Curran
The nausea that took control of him forced him to his knees. His face went hot as cold sweat dripped from it. He convulsed with dry heaves, finally spewing out bile and mats of hair like the fur balls a cat might spit up. He hacked out half a dozen of them, watching with horror as they sprouted minute segmented legs and began to skitter across the floor. Making a low moaning sound in his throat, he smashed one with his good hand and it cried out in a tiny, shrill voice. More of the things raced over his shoes and tried to climb his legs. He kicked them away, swatted at one that crawled up his shirt. Another ran up his spine and he grabbed it in his hand, feeling the nipping, licking mouthparts and bloated, warm body, the bicycling legs. He crushed it to jelly in his fist and it screamed like the other one.
He was sure it screamed his name.
He crawled away, over to the head itself and vomited again. This time, there was only foamy warm beer that came out. It went into the stagnant water of the pot, roiling its surface as he gripped the metal bowl, shaking uncontrollably. The smell wafting up at him was more than the stench of his stomach contents, but a high briny stink of green weeds, rotting crustaceans, and polluted mud thrown up by the sea. He saw movement in the bowl. Looping tendrils were darkening the water, spreading out, multiplying, becoming slithering braids and writhing fibers, clotting the bowl and rising in a reef of knotted hair. And from it, parting the waters and undulant tresses like some obscene ova, was a huge fishlike eye, yellow-green and unpleasantly juicy like a peeled plum.
Riven white with terror, but still clutching the metal bowl as if it was the only thing that tethered him to this world, Charlie uttered a tiny scream as a flaccid mouth in the water puckered for a kiss. And then there was an explosion that threw him backwards with incredible force, slamming him into the wall. The toilet exploded with a rain of foul water and waste, brine and backed-up shit and ribbons of grease. Covered in filth and black drainage, he tried to climb to his feet, but they slid out from under him and he hit the wall, the stink hot and enveloping, a living moist miasma that crawled down his throat, seizing his stomach and dragging it back up.
His feet slid out from under him again and his head struck the sewage-painted wall and he went out cold, sliding to the floor in a rubber-limbed heap.
When he woke up, clods of waste were still dripping from the ceiling, dropping onto his face like bits of loose clay from the ceiling of a cave. He skated over the waste as he tried to stand and right himself. Even though he knew the water was turned off, he instinctively gripped the sink and turned on the spigots. They groaned and coughed, the pipes rattling in the walls. A trickle of tepid, rusty water came out followed by clumps of grease and sludge that were tangled with wiry hairs.
He stumbled out into the cabin. His head kept spinning and he went down to his knees against the bed, breathing hard and shaking, one arm tossed over the crumpled coverlet. He felt something brush his arm and then…then a moistness at his fingertips as something not only licked his fingertips, but lapped greedily at them.
But there was nothing there.
Nothing that he could see.
The cabin seemed to lose focus, it tilted, leaned, floor reaching up to meet ceiling, walls bowing like the broken backs of hags, reality morphing to dark fairy tale. Everything seemed fluid and runny, yet almost hallucinogenic in its clarity. When it righted itself and Charlie’s head quit spinning and his eyes once again took in things three-dimensionally, he saw that everything had changed. The walls were no longer covered in flowery wallpaper or painted a drab battleship gray, they had gone pink and glistening like new skin. They flexed like muscles and pulsated like quivering mats of flesh, engorged veins sluicing with blood standing out. Knoblike follicles put out long black wormy hairs that were like silken threads that proliferated, joining into greased plaits and snakelike braids. Thick and ropy tresses descended from the ceiling eagerly like tree roots seeking the charnel nourishment of buried oblong boxes. The door became a puckered oval like some quivering orifice that wanted to eat him alive.
Charlie screamed, but not because he seemed trapped in a throbbing pocket of tissue, but because he could hear her coming for him—the ghost in this machine of dread. She made a dry rustling sound, a scrabbling scratching sound of graveyard rats in narrow walls. Her breath steamed in his face, searing and foul. She exuded a perfume that smelled sweet and honeyed like summer wildflowers and lilacs and sandalwood oil, then a heavy hot musk like sex, and finally the rank meat smell of a woman’s menses flowing like lava.
As the cabin pulsed like a fleshy sac around him, hairs breaking against his face like midnight webs, he saw that the pink blisters and lesions and bioplasmic sores crowding his flesh were ever rising, swelling fat like fertilized eggs ready to burst. He tore off his shirt and ran his fingers over the pulpous oyster-gray buttons that pushed from inside him. They were meaty pearls and pink-red golfball-sized nodes that pulsed with the glistening afterbirth within him. He writhed on the floor like some white, corpse-greasy maggot.
He began tearing at the blisters with clawing fingers, popping them like boils and screaming at the agony of it. They erupted with gouts of cold pulp that burned his fingers. And from each of them there came a single black hair that divided, becoming two, then dividing again, becoming four, then dividing again and again, releasing a forest of worming rootlets that covered him like a living, rustling mink coat. The sores opened one after the other until his body was a rich luxurious pelt of glossy fur, each hair alive and squirming with obscene life. They grew out of him and netted him securely like fishing twine.
He crawled over the floor, an undulant rug, an animate hide, crying out with a squeaking, pained mewling that was far beyond a human voice.
But it was not over.
His body continued to rupture and grow new hairs, silk tresses emerging in strings and ribbons. Hair poured from his mouth and erupted from his eyes and from somewhere distant he heard a humming sound and realized it was his own voice. He was humming some nonsensical tune as he ran fingers through his thick, rich mane, marveling at the tactile delight of his luscious pelt. And the individual crawling hairs…yes, they were answering. Mocking him, celebrating him, humming as he hummed, ringing out like the plucked strings of antique lyres and exotic harps in shrill, discordant voices.
It was then that his host showed, exuding calming scents of jasmine, sweet vanilla, and rosebud-delicate perfumes that calmed his hairy, twitching mass.
She cooed at him, promising seduction and consummation, but the idea repulsed him…he could not become part of her, he would not be joined to that ambulant hairball despite the febrile chemical cocktail of pheromones and hormonal secretions she misted at him.
He made for the door, struggling to open it with the wooly nap of his fingers which were threaded together by fibrous hairs, but it was impossible. She came at him and he stumbled away, knocking over chairs and overturning a table in his flight. He could not run. He couldn’t even walk. The best he could do was a sort of frantic hopping, pulling away but leaving a silken train of locks in his wake that she seized like reigns and quickly overtook him.
Charlie let out a guttural hissing from his hair-clotted throat, but that was about it as she mounted him, clutching him with needling fingers like fish hooks.
She slid fangs like slivers of ice into the mound of his skull and when he fought no more, dosed on toxins that filled his head with rioting endorphins and explosive pleasure spikes, she engulfed him, unhinging herself like the jaws of a snake and pulling him inside her before closing up once again like some immense clamshell. He was vaguely aware of his insides pulping and his bones cracking and his skin ripping like wet canvas, but that was all. Even the viscera ejecting from his mouth under great pressure was no bother. There was only the formless, inert serenity of golden depths as he submerged into the murky microcosm of self.
Sometime later, bloated and moody, the thing that haunted the Yvonne Addams disgorged a set of shattered bones. They were well-gnawed and we
ll-used. They came out with undigested globs of marrow. By the time the sun came up, even these would be gone.
In the cavernous silences of the ship, joined in biochemical stasis, Charlie and his lover pupated as one, waiting to rise again and seed the night. And in the hot, placental darkness, this was enough.
14
When morning came, Arturo returned with the two sailors that had been waiting in the van. After steeling themselves with coffee, the three of them boarded the ship. They searched the decks and holds, cabins and lounges, but they could not find Charlie Petty. That was all the sailors needed, they left in a hurry. There was no way they were going to put a crew about this hoodoo vessel.
Arturo lingered. He went into the captain’s cabin. It was a mess. Sitting at the captain’s desk, he said, “It must have been some kind of night, eh, Charlie?”
His voice echoed and died.
In the head, something too thick to be water and too thin to be slime dripped and dripped. He did not go in there to look. He did not dare to. The porthole was open and yellow light pooled on the floor and glared against the walls.
He knew Charlie was here…somewhere. Oh, there was always the possibility a guy like Charlie might throw himself overboard as so many sailors had, but he didn’t think so. A guy with balls like Charlie Petty would tough it out right to the last.
Arturo opened a beer and ate a sandwich. “Looks like I better get this place cleaned up,” he said under his breath. He worked at it for the better part of an hour, washing and scrubbing and arranging things. Everything had to be right. There was no way his wife was going to spend the night in a pigpen.
About the Author
Tim Curran hails from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A full-time wage zombie in a factory, he collects vintage punk rock, metal, and rockabilly records in his spare time.
He is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, Skull Moon, The Devil Next Door, Hive 2: The Spawning, Graveworm, and Biohazard. His short stories have been collected in Bone Marrow Stew and Zombie Pulp. His novellas include Fear Me, The Underdwelling, The Corpse King, and Puppet Graveyard. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh&Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, as well as anthologies such as Flesh Feast, Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu, and, Vile Things. His latest book is a new novel from DarkFuse, Long Black Coffin. Upcoming projects include the novels Hag Night and Witch Born, and a second short story collection, Cemetery Wine. Find him on the web at: www.corpseking.com.
About the Publisher
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.
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