by Ryan Harding
Ursula wasn’t about to be denied another metaphor. “If you accept the idea that the universe was a clock wound and abandoned by a creator, what happens in the time between when it is stopping and rewound? Maybe something new. We felt it. This wasn’t something we accidentally discovered. We knew it would work. We weren’t waiting for the right time, but no time. That’s where we are now. Artists all over the world could interpret the same subject to no effect, but when the three of us do it, it lives.”
Section VIII
The trial and error behind this had been the cause of its obscurity. It was not the kind of thing they wanted to publicly experiment with, because they could not afford any attention before mastery. To do what they’d just done with Rebecca . . . to make her exactly as they wanted . . . wasn’t innate. (I can’t say it took time to learn, because by that point there was no longer any such thing.) Their ideology valued art over humanity, and in their hands art was no idle expression awaiting admiration, condemnation, or indifference. Their golems were still hostile, but not toward the authors. It was the audience endangered now. Don’t blame the messenger; kill the recipients. I was like-minded, but that didn’t explain why Ursula wanted me there. The why behind their new talent was of secondary importance to me anyway; I wanted to know what. What could be done with it? And how. How far could it go?
“Want to try an experiment?” Geoff asked.
Section IX
If somewhere there is a race of almond-eyed extra-terrestrials bending time and space to travel great distances and dislocate the rectums of unlucky homo sapiens with their excruciating probes, perhaps they will land on this planet long after it is deserted and wonder where all the potential rape victims absconded. Maybe they will sift through the ruins to find clues to the great exodus. This would be the first.
From The Herald, article by Jackson Zirnheld.
“MAN CLAIMS ASSAULT BY ANIMATED VILLAIN”
While walking home from work, Peter Swaggerty was undeniably attacked. Beyond that, the facts are difficult to establish. Swaggerty insists that his broken limbs and extensive bruising resulted from the assault of a figure he claimed was an animated drawing.
“Sure, I know it sounds crazy,” he concedes, “but I know what I saw. It was like some kind of insane dream that I still haven’t woken up from.” He describes his assailant as “sleek and very powerful. We’ve all seen him for years on those old neighborhood watch signs, the guy who’s a black silhouette except for his crazy eyes. He’s the one who attacked me last night, as if he stepped right off the sign to pummel me. He looks like that Marvin the Martian cartoon in his face, but Marvin the Martian never said stuff like ‘I’m gonna pull your entrails right through your [backside].’”
Swaggerty suffered six cracked ribs, eight broken fingers, elaborate facial damage, a dislocated shoulder, a compound ulnar fracture, and two broken legs as he attempted to crawl away. He was walking the three blocks to his house from his job at a movie theater when he was ambushed on Bava Lane.
“No one will believe this, I know, but that guy’s still out there, and he’ll keep taking people down. I’ll be scared to walk the streets when I get out of here. From now on, I’m taking the bus.”
Police declined to comment on how seriously they are taking Swaggerty’s account of events.
Section X
It was the best review we could have asked for. Peter Swaggerty had seen what we could do, and he was afraid. Everyone was laughing at him, of course, and there would be no reappearance of this mysterious hybrid of Marvin the Martian and Edmond Kemper, but the skeptics would learn in time. It went like we’d hoped. Lee sculpted him, and Ursula and Geoff painted before and after representations of his violence to Swaggerty, whose routine they had noticed months ago. We probably didn’t have to model the victim after a person we recognized, but to be on the safe side we did. Swaggerty might have invented the dialogue, but maybe that was the kind of thing a black silhouette with crazy eyes was born to say. Lee speculated that Blackie (as we called him) used Swaggerty as the author of his own pain. After that, we took more chances in preparation for our masterpiece. I gave my input on what we might utilize in these unorthodox manifestations, such as the neighborhood watch assailant (which had always haunted me as a child; being kidnapped was my worst fear), but I could contribute little else. Lee, Geoff, and Ursula worked tirelessly, and the experiments multiplied.
A steel incarnation of Baphomet showed up at a highly publicized environmentalist festival, resulting in the deaths of six at the hooves of the uninvited guest and another twelve trampled as by-standers fled, screaming in abject terror. Blood, it turns out, was not seen as very “green.’ A midnight screening of Demons was interrupted when a helicopter inexplicably crashed through the theater roof. Miraculously, the propellers continued whirling, and a full house was treated to the privilege of live decapitations and torso halving (provided they weren’t the decapitatees and halvees). No crew members were ever found, nor was anyone ever able to determine where exactly the chopper had come from. That something almost identical happened in the movie was actually comforting to many, as though it proved it was simply a bizarre stunt rather than a paranormal phenomenon. No interpretations were offered for the letters EOTA painted on the side of the helicopter. The dream factory of the Gard Theater proved tragically cruel for another audience, some of whom were ground up in its cogs in something that would ultimately be called “the Gard Incident”. A teenager texting a friend (about something nobody cared about even after what happened) suddenly stood up, shrieking that she couldn’t see. Her boyfriend and another friend on her row came to her aid, while other jaded movie-goers told her to shut her trap. They needn’t have worried. The friend (the recipient of the text, two seats away) held her illuminated cell phone screen up to the screaming girl’s face. The faint blue glow revealed busy spools of blood gushing down her cheekbones. Her friends promptly joined her in a choir of ear-splitting hysteria (the boyfriend arguably more so). Someone else’s makeshift cell phone flashlight added some unfortunate radiance to the macabre display, just in time for the spectators to get a better view of the girl’s jaw suddenly unhinge from her skull. It was as though the integrity of her flesh and joints failed her instantaneously, the skin elongating like cheese from a slice of pizza. The weight of the jaw proved too much for the thinning strand, and the lower half of her face dropped to the floor of the auditorium. Now the screaming really began. By now, everybody close to this row had their cell phones trained on the cluster of the three of them. The girl with no mandible dropped back in her seat in a dead faint and, as one witness said, basically “exploded” on impact. Her head dropped one row back as if the top of her seat had been a samurai sword, and it careened into the lap of someone who hadn’t had to get up from his seat to see the action, his free jumbo popcorn refills now a non-factor indeed. The trunk of her body splashed in myriad directions, a torrent of splatter like a tire shooting rain water up the side of a road. The friend, who now could have been a stand-in for Sissy Spacek in Carrie after the bucket dropped . . . if the bucket had been a bathtub . . . stood glued to the spot by the strange surplus of blood—surely far more than normally part of the human condition—unleashed from the bag of flesh with whom she’d entered this theater. Muscle memory even now allowed her fingers to walk on the keypad of her phone to inform somebody, anybody, that OMG, it was a massacre (to which she received the strange response “LOLZ” from an unknown number). She vomited from the sheer unthinkable horror. By this point, nobody was left standing around to play “best boy grip” with the surrogate lighting scheme, but the screen still provided enough light to see that the emesis was the color of the carpets in the atrium—a deep crimson. She instinctively reached for the (now ex) boyfriend, who was backing away from the tableau in what seemed like slow motion. He yanked his free hand away from the girl. Her hand came with him from the elbow down. He stopped backing away and ran for the end of the aisle, heedless of the debris of his ex-gi
rlfriend still cluttering the way. The disembodied forearm burst beneath his shoe, and the backsplash of blood corroded his calves in quick succession. His momentum earned him one step, and then his leg wrenched itself away from the knee up, the foot still planted. It tipped over like an overloaded coat rack. He had nothing but the stump to come down upon, and as the now legless half of his body struck the seats to either side of him, he emulated the hot new trend of bodily decimation unwittingly started by his girlfriend. “Come on!” someone shouted above the chaos. “Let’s all go to the fucking lobby!”
But nothing else happened. This virus or biological weapon or whatever it was seemed isolated to just the three of them. A government agency most of the general public had never heard of before shut the theater down and quarantined the auditorium. All of the ticketholders are still being examined at an undisclosed location while biological experts look for the elusive “Gard Factor,” wishing to hell they’d gone to a matinee instead. (The “matinee” thing is conjecture, but the rest—right down to the line about the lobby, which I am proud to say was my own contribution—went directly as written, painted, and painstakingly sculpted over a series of weeks. I kept one of Lee’s fragmented body sculptures . . . like a mini Han Solo in carbonite, dropped and shattered into tiny pieces.)
There seemed to be a lot of mass hysteria going around by that point. You would almost think it was a communicable disease with its own variation of a flu season. The barely repressed panic had returned. I was hearing it in conversations at work while I wrote pamphlets I did not comprehend. I was seeing it in the relief of my neighbors when they made it back to their apartments without being beaten and sodomized by a cartoon. It was in everybody’s sudden mistrust of cell phones (and movie theaters), and the deep reluctance to go anywhere that a lot of people were gathered.
The success of the Gard Incident convinced it was time for our masterwork at last. We started by putting something different on the canvas and in the clay: ourselves.
Section XI
I agreed to go first, and the effect was instantaneous—needle-like punctures over my chest, like a mouthful of extended teeth perforating the skin. It looked like my heart had grown teeth and was attempting to gnaw itself out of me (see figure 11.1), with the ossific slivers simultaneously serving as an alien suture to seal the aperture. Such a disfiguration would disgust anyone who saw it, but Kathaaria changed all that.
Kathaaria was why Ursula wanted my contribution. My fascination with disease had impressed her with a vague poetic passion.
The results we wanted could not be adequately illustrated. Perhaps there could be a view of Earth as seen from space with mushroom clouds expanding all over, but why should we submit ourselves to such a conflagration? You can’t imagine the plans we have for a world running on a different clock. So how do we really draw the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem for those who won’t be included? Well, along with Lee’s molding of a triple-helix viral cell and Geoff and Ursula’s portrayals of its effects, that is the purpose of this pamphlet. The disease known as Kathaaria has a contagion rate of 100% among people without the deformity described above.
Don’t blame the messenger, but like I said, this never happened. It wasn’t written, and you aren’t reading it. It’s after the end of the world. For those in the next one, though, the suffering we have shaped for you will be very real, as you will see described below in the First Indications of Infection.
A few words about each of the preceding stories, for those with a morbid curiosity.
Bottom Feeder—This was written in January of 2000. If you knew that one of these stories was a tribute to Richard Laymon, you could be forgiven for guessing it was “Bottom Feeder,” which was informed in no small part by “The Tub.” I’m sure many who’ve had a one night stand have had a pregnancy scare—is this story any different? Well, maybe a little.
Damaged Goods—I believe I stitched this together the night before I drove to Atlanta for the World Horror Convention in 1999, where my last minute planning resulted in sharing a hotel room with a couple of guys I hadn’t actually talked to a whole lot before that point—Brian Keene and Mike Oliveri. Such were the benefits of being part of the Horrornet community, where even if you didn’t always know somebody, you may as well have. I’m not sure what I would have come up with given slightly different circumstances, but I had read Lee & Pelan’s Shifters shortly before this, and the whole “pizza cutter” scene communicated to me in no certain terms that I was going to have to go beyond the sensibilities of mere gore and bodily waste to make a real impression. That and a fairly steady diet of the hardcore solo offerings of Sir Lee at the time were integral to this metamorphosis. It was the best reception I ever got from a reading, before or since, and a lot of that was the payoff of no one knowing what to expect from me. The Gross Out Contest is sort of the exception to the rule about making a good first impression, or at least not “good” in the traditional sense. The judges were Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum (who offered some choice commentary throughout the readings), John Pelan, and Simon Clark. “Damaged Goods” took first place. It is more of a vignette than a short story due to trying to keep time limit considerations for the reading. I have updated this version to adjust continuity of later Von and Greg adventures and lend a bit more gravitas . . . such as it is.
Sharing Needles—This was the last of the stories, written in 2003. I was invited to submit to an anthology called Family Plots, where each story was to involve family members committing a murder. I’ve been a true crime aficionado since high school, and this seemed like a good opportunity to explore that fascination. The challenge was to set up a story where most of the internalizing came from journal entries and the details emerged through the dialogue. Not exactly “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time” as twist endings go, but I still like it. As I recall, there were going to be 30+ contributors for Family Plots and it probably would have been a logistical nightmare to get signatures from everyone for a publisher based in Australia, but the publisher folded and the project followed.
Genital Grinder: A Snuff Film in Five Acts—The World Horror Convention in 2000 was held in Denver, and I wanted to show up with something even more deranged. The funny thing is that it wasn’t originally going to be a sequel to “Damaged Goods.” I forgot about this until my friend forwarded me an old email, but I was using the same concept with different characters and a different tone. The problem was that I had to be cognizant of a sensible time limit on reading, and short of using an excerpt out of context I didn’t see how it was going to happen—it was taking too long to set up. The easy solution was to use Von and Greg again. There was a very different atmosphere to the Gross Out this time, though, and by the time I read (I went last), the collective interest was all but bled dry. I took 2nd to Mark McLaughlin, a far more animated reader. The story did impress Kelly Laymon, though, who wanted to put together an anthology to use “Genital Grinder” as the closer. An amusing irony, because I remember having an unemployment claim at the time and being denied a shot at benefits for the week because the temp agency didn’t deem the trip integral to my career. My college graduation would have been that weekend, but it wasn’t a choice to me; I was going to read “Genital Grinder.” This version of the story has been altered significantly and expanded by a few thousand words, once more for a new continuity and to embellish details I glossed over to have a more presentable story for a reading limit.
An additional fun fact to this is that Richard Laymon was once again a judge at WHC 2000, and asked me to mail a copy of the story to him. I was happy enough to do that with nothing expected in return—“Richard Laymon asked me to send him my story!” was reward enough—but an “equal trade” for him was to send me a copy of The Travelling Vampire Show—hardcover edition. So not to have gone to WHC 2000, opting instead to do menial clerical tasks for a business that probably wouldn’t have told me my time was up there until the very last day (just to make sure I didn’t do a half-assed job at zero hou
r or, you know, actually contact my temp agency about finding me a new place to land immediately afterwards instead of having to wait for a new gig with no money coming in, which I’ve found is SOP for pretty much every single business that ever hired a temp) and go to a negligible graduation ceremony . . . I may as well never have written the story at all. I am pretty sure its appearance in Kelly Laymon’s anthology for Freak Press is why this book is happening in the first place.
Laymon’s note in the book—“May all your travels lead to good things.”
See? Sometimes there’s more to a story about a snuff movie than people being indiscriminately snuffed. Now, no one tell Peter Straub about the Ghost Story homage, okay?
Development—The story that was intended for In Laymon’s Terms. The deadline was running out on me (I actually still have the email I sent to Steve Gerlach asking that I not be disqualified for submitting because I didn’t factor in the time difference in Australia), so I think I basically sat down and wrote all or the bulk of this in 10-12 hours on the last day left. This came before “Sharing Needles,” and I think I was a bit obsessed with the “twist” possibilities from stories which used journals or dictations as a device. I had caught up to Island not long before this, and it was undoubtedly the biggest influence. Well, that and a chance remark from a friend with a job developing film about the kind of snapshots he was seeing on a daily basis. This was before the digital camera age really took over, and these days Carl would probably do his thing with a cell phone (if he could part with the money for one), so that’s why I specifically tagged the journal entries with a year in this version. The irony of the marathon writing day needed to accomplish “Development” is that In Laymon’s Terms would not actually be published for the better part of 10 years, so there was a time capsule sensibility to it when I finally got to read ILT in summer of 2011.