by Clive Barker
Next she untied her wrists and dragged up the bedcovers to try and get Mummy warm again. She didn’t know what to do with the empty shreds of half-bitten eyes that were hanging out of each socket, so she carefully poked them back in again, and closed Mummy’s eyelids, and then she tied the scarf around Mummy’s head like a blindfold.
It didn’t occur to her to call for an ambulance. She had seen ambulances on television, but they were only in stories. She had never seen a real one, and she didn’t know that you could call one yourself, and it would actually come to your door.
Besides, the most important thing was that she had regained her beauty, and in spite of being so beautiful, she would risk going out into the world, no matter how jealous other people might be. Mummy might be blind now, but she was so beautiful that she would be able to become a famous actress, and become rich, and support them both.
It was only now that Fiona realized what a sacrifice Mummy had made for her—keeping her beauty in her own eyes for all of this time, in order to keep her safe. She must have known that one day the time would come when she would have to give it back to her.
She crossed over to Mummy’s closet and unlocked the doors. There she was, in her pink pajamas, which were spattered with a fine spray of blood. But something was badly wrong. She wasn’t beautiful at all. She looked the same as she had before, with that bulging forehead and those wide-apart flatfish eyes and that dragged-down mouth.
Perhaps it took time for the beauty to make its way into your body, she thought. After all, if you ate a bar of chocolate, you had to digest it first, in your stomach, before the sugar went into your bloodstream.
She sat down cross-legged on the bedroom carpet in front of the mirror, and waited for Mummy’s optic fluid to work on her face. It had to work. Mummy had said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and she had swallowed the beholders’ eyes. What more could she have done?
* * *
She woke up and the bedroom was filled with sunlight. She glanced over at Mummy’s bedside clock and saw that it was 7:17 am. It looked as if Mummy was still asleep, with her blindfold over her eyes. It was the blindfold that reminded her what had happened last night, and what she was doing here in Mummy’s bedroom.
She looked in the mirror. She hadn’t changed at all. She was still just as hideously distorted as she had been before. She couldn’t understand it. She had swallowed those eyes for nothing.
She slowly stood up.
“Mummy?” she said. “Mummy, are you awake?”
She went over to Mummy’s bedside. Mummy was very pale and she didn’t appear to be breathing. Fiona shook her shoulder but all she did was joggle unresponsively from side to side.
“Mummy?”
She realized then that she must have misunderstood what Mummy had said to her. The snail hadn’t been a beholder, and neither had Zebedee, or Mummy. She—Fiona—she was the beholder. It was she who had seen her own face in the mirror and thought that it was ugly. That was why Mummy had kept her away from mirrors, and stopped her from going out to meet other people. So long as she didn’t know what she really looked like, she had remained incandescently beautiful.
She went back and stood in front of the mirror. Her hideously distorted face stared back at her. It always would, for the rest of her life, every time she saw her own reflection.
There was only one remedy. She went over to Mummy’s chest-of-drawers. In the second drawer down, there was a purple biscuit tin with a picture of Prince Charles and Lady Diana on it, to celebrate their wedding. Mummy kept her sewing things in it—her spare buttons and her button thread and her needles.
Fiona picked out a large shiny darning needle and went back to face the mirror. With her fingers, she held her left eye open wide.
I feel pretty, she whispered, and stuck the needle into her pupil.
She felt nothing more than a sharp prick, but her eye instantly went blind. She held her right eye open in the same way, and stuck the needle into that eye, too.
She stood there, in total darkness. She couldn’t see herself now. She couldn’t see anything at all. But she could imagine how beautiful she was—so beautiful that if anyone tried to paint her portrait, their paints would burst into flames, and mirrors would shatter into a thousand thousand pieces if she ever looked in them.
She started to circle around and around, and as she circled she sang I Feel Pretty, over and over, until she was so giddy that she dropped to her knees. Outside, in the street, she could hear traffic, and people talking, and her blind eyes filled with tears again, although she no longer knew why she was crying.
Feel the Noise
Lisa Morton
I was on the club floor waiting for the show to start, feeling the anticipation in a wave of smells like a girlfriend’s body after a shower, the stage lights overhead making me taste whiskey, when a young man walked up to me. His approach brought the wary tang of mustard, and he sounded like an itch when he asked, “Private Jackson Howard?”
I’d been out of rehab at the V.A. hospital for two years, but it still took me a few extra seconds to turn his gush of sensations into words. Then I answered, “I haven’t been a private for a while.”
The kid—ironic, since he was probably my age, but I thought of myself as old—smiled, and asked if we could go outside to talk.
‘To talk’…sure. It was still easy for him.
* * *
His name was Kevin. He worked as a blogger for a news outlet.
Here’s what I told him, when he asked what being scrambled was like:
You wake up, and you’re not sure where you are or what happened to you. Some part of you recognizes a hospital, but the man standing over you tastes like aspirin, and the antiseptic smells sound like a low buzz, and the feeling of the meds in your system reminds you of the scent of your grandmother’s mothballs, back when you were a normal little kid playing in the attic in her big old house down in your home town. And you start to panic, you think back to your last memory—in the desert, and some bad shit had just gone down, and the sergeant was screaming and no one was paying attention as we made our way back to the Hummer, and—
Scrambler.
Suddenly you know. You were hit by a scrambler. You’ve got a condition now called “systemic synesthesia”, and it’s every soldier’s second worst nightmare; you’d rather lose an arm or a leg or an eye than have your brain rewired so no two senses match up right. In fact, a lot of scrambleheads say they wish they’d just died, so maybe it’s Nightmare #1. You frantically try to think back to that day in basic training when you sat in a classroom and they told you about this new weapon the other side had called scramblers, and how they’re electronic bombs that were really designed to mess up communications equipment, but they messed up soldiers instead, and you curse yourself—fucking idiot—for getting bored then, for sitting there thinking, That’ll never happen to me, and when do we finish with this pussy training and get over there to mix it up?
Mix it up. That’s rich.
They kick you out of the main hospital after a week and send you to the special clinic, and over the next year you hang out with a lot of other scrambleheads like yourself while they try to teach you how to alter your thinking and reprogram your brain, and you spend that year screaming a lot, but what comes out feels like a slap and looks jagged and smells like death. And after a while you start to figure it out: That seeing red means you just ate some meat, and hearing a screeching noise means you just smelled something bad. You learn to read again by examining the tastes the letters make, and you know who’s touched you by how nice the smell is. You scream a little less every day.
And then you find the one thing makes you feel something strong: Music. And if you want to feel like you’re with the world’s sexiest woman, and she’s rubbing all over you and you think you could take on everything, then you need it fast, loud, and hard.
And that’s why all the scrambleheads who used to spend their furloughs chasing pussy are chasing mu
sic now instead.
* * *
It took me another year to be able to figure out how to talk again.
And during that year, I went a little crazy (crazier?) locked up in my head, because I had to tell someone what happened. What I saw every night when I closed my eyes. What fucking Sergeant Dean Craig had done.
He’d popped off and shot a kid. The parents, too.
We’d been doing a routine patrol on the outskirts of a desert town. Searching abandoned houses, making sure the bad guys weren’t still hiding out, or hadn’t left some presents behind.
In one of the houses we found this family, this poor family. Mother, father, young son, couldn’t have been more than five years old. Sergeant Craig started screaming at ’em to put their hands on their heads and get on their knees, but they didn’t speak English and they just kind of flapped their hands a lot and argued.
The kid had started to reach for something inside his shirt.
Craig shot him.
Just like that. A five-year-old with a bloody hole in his chest. No one should ever have to see that.
The parents screamed and charged, and so Craig shot them, too. Three people dead. Three people who’d wanted nothing but an abandoned house to squat in, to be left alone to scrounge whatever kind of living they could. Now they were dead, because Sergeant Dean Craig was a fucking terrible soldier who should have been back home yelling at his junior salesmen, not deep in the shit with an assault rifle.
There were three of us who saw it. Craig turned on us next, and if he didn’t exactly point that rifle at us, he didn’t completely lower it, either. He told us the kid had drawn a gun, right? That’s what we’d all seen, RIGHT? And Private Quint, he was this o.g. from Detroit, he just walked out. And Craig followed him, shouting, and neither of them noticed the sensors in the sand, I guess, because the next thing I knew, I was in that hospital bed that felt like the stink of naphthalene, and I was screaming.
There, outside the house, with a five-year-old’s blood splattered on me, just as a scrambler hit, was the last time I saw Craig.
Of course I told them what had happened, once I could communicate again. I saw an army shrink who said he’d ask around, find out what’d happened. He couldn’t turn up anything on either the incident or Craig. Sergeant Craig had ceased to exist, as far as the feds were concerned. It was a convenient way to deal with an inconvenient problem. The war was already unpopular, and the government didn’t need to have the public hearing about soldiers gunning down five-year-olds.
And then my benefits ran out, and they threw me out into the world and told me to deal with it.
So I did. I got the simplest job I could find—washing dishes in a restaurant—and a one-room apartment that was the only thing I could afford. I slept a lot, got free meals at work, washed dishes, stayed to myself.
Dreamed a lot about five-year-olds wearing bullet holes, who followed me down dark alleys and looked at me with bloodshot, sad eyes, until I woke up gasping, maybe crying.
Only the music kept me going.
When you’re scrambled, you find out pretty quickly that music can still get you off, but it has to be live; recorded music is like watching porn—close but not the real thing. So you go to a lot of clubs and concerts, and you soon realize that some bands are better at it than others. But only one band really gets it and plays to scrambleheads: The Violence. They play medium-sized clubs, so all of us can stand right in front of those fucking amps and feel every guitar lick and wailed lyric right in our groins. There are always a few civvies at the sidelines, and they must be wondering what the fuck’s going on—they see a bunch of guys in old army fatigues jerking around near the stage with these ecstatic looks on their faces, because they can all feel the noise. We’ll be there all night, and we’ll come back every night.
The music was the only thing that kept my mind off the horror of what I’d seen. My job sure didn’t; there’s nothing more tedious than doing the same task over and over, and your thoughts start to wander. In my case, it always wandered right back to a desert on the other side of the world and a trigger-happy asshole who’d killed a kid. My elbows immersed in warm, sudsy water meant seeing a five-year-old take a bullet in the chest yet again. And again. And again. Of course everything meant that; I saw it while I worked, while I ate, while I rode the train from home to work, and in my dreams while I slept. I saw it while I tried to parse what the boss said, while I tried to buy the right breakfast cereal, while I tried to read or watch things on television that I couldn’t completely understand.
Sometimes I thought about really trying to find Craig; find him and somehow bring him to justice. If I could locate Quint, and the other two guys who’d been there, we could all testify. But then I’d remember that the dishes I washed felt like the smell of spoiled food, and I knew I’d never find Craig or any of them on my own. I was fucked, and Craig was free.
And then Kevin arrived.
* * *
When we walked outside, what it was like getting scrambled wasn’t the first thing we talked about; that actually came later. No, the first thing was what Kevin showed me. He held up his smart phone, hit a button, and let me watch a video.
I didn’t do well with movies—they unreeled in my head with a stream of tastes and the feeling of being prodded all over. I couldn’t figure this one any better than the latest 3D Hollywood blockbuster, and I asked Kevin what it was.
“It’s video from a helmet-cam. Your helmet-cam, specifically.”
My heart did an arpeggio in my chest. “Is it Craig? Is it…?”
Kevin nodded. “Shooting a little boy. And two other people. Do you remember this?”
I thought I might cry. My face grew hot, which in turn made me smell smoke. “Remember it? Man, I’ve been trying to forget it for three years.”
“We acquired this from a source. The government thought they’d squelched it, but they just don’t pay some of their workers enough.”
“I tried,” I told him, and I didn’t care if he saw me wipe at my eyes, “God damn it, I tried to get them to listen to me, but they wouldn’t, they told me it never happened, and – you’re going public with it, right?”
The heady scent of a meadow on a warm summer day nearly overpowered me just then, and I knew that meant Kevin had put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay. Yeah, soon the whole world’s going to see what Craig did, and know what happened to you. We just want to know that you’ll back it up.”
“I will. Fuckin’ A, I will.”
“Good. We’ll take him down, then.”
“If you can find him.”
I tasted something odd – Kevin was looking at me strangely. “Uh, Jackson…”
“Call me Jack.”
“Jack…” He stepped back, and I think he was looking deep into my eyes, like he was trying to see if my pupils were dilated, if I was high. I get that a lot. “He won’t be hard to find.”
“He won’t?”
Kevin made a sound like a muscle jerk. “You can’t recognize him, can you?”
My stomach started to knot. “Why?”
“Because he’s right inside. In the club.”
I went cold, and smelled nothing at all. “He’s…” I couldn’t get out anymore. It couldn’t be true. “Show me,” I said, a croak.
Kevin motioned, and I followed his blur of shifting flavors back into the club.
Just as we stepped inside, the band took the stage. The opening guitar chord struck me with a shiver, and I knew it’d hit the rest of the scrambleheads the same way. There must’ve been fifty of them there – every fucked-up vet on the eastern seaboard had come to get laid by the music, and as the guitar player lashed into the first song, they trembled with the foreplay stroke of fingers against skin.
I had to struggle to stay focused on Kevin, as he pushed through them. The rhythm had kicked in now, and the ex-soldiers before the stage had become a seething, gyrating mass. A lot of them must have been wearing their old fatigues, becau
se I tasted sand-blasted metal and sweat. Kevin paused just long enough to examine each face before pushing through again, pulling me after him. They ignored him; he was just a whiff of smell intruding on the beautiful noise they were feeling.
Finally Kevin stopped, and I tried to look where he was looking. He’d paused before a man who tasted the same as all the rest, whose gasps provoked the same sandpaper-y sensations that the others did. I must have looked perplexed, because Kevin leaned over, put his mouth up against my ear, and I felt, “Craig.”
I tried to look, God damn it, I tried, but the confused synapses in my brain sent the same wrong message. I had to take Kevin’s word for it, that this was Sergeant Dean Craig, that this flood of sour tastes that made me gag was the murderer who had haunted me for three fucking years.
And then I knew: It was Craig. It had always been Craig. Of course – he’d been here right next to me, every time the band had played, show after show, night after night, for at least a year, and I’d been too fucked up to know it. He’d stood by me, shouting and gasping and ejaculating into his stained army pants just like I had, and every night I’d let him walk away from the show. Every night I’d let this fucking killer go home; it was practically like I’d helped the army bury Craig’s crimes. Except they’d done it skillfully; I’d done nothing, just sat back like a useless lump of flesh and let them all go on.
No more. Not tonight.
“Can I have your phone?” I asked Kevin. My new best friend Kevin, a man my age who would never really understand what it was like to wake up screaming and feel the sound, although later I’d try to explain it to him, and he would nod and I’d taste his nod rather than see it, but he wouldn’t get it. And then he’d put Craig away while I struggled against my own senses just to wash other people’s food-stained plates.
Kevin gave me his phone. It was still set up to the helmet video, the one that would show the whole world what Craig had done, and his supporters had covered up. I fingered the “play” arrow. The video started. I hoped it was at the right place; I only knew I tasted something like the bottom of a garbage pail.