I know that someone found me eventually. I must have looked a hell of a sight, laid in the crimson snow with an open wound in my neck, screaming uncontrollably through a broken jaw.
The next thing I remember was waking up in hospital, doped up to the eyeballs and no idea how I’d got there. I caught sight of something flickering in the corner of the room and at first I was sure it was him, come to finish the job when I was too weak to stop him. I scrambled backwards in the bed as I blinked away the water from my eyes.
It was only the TV. I frowned when I saw my own face staring back at me, my university graduation photo was on display as a news ticker scrolled along the bottom of the screen. My portrait was replaced a second later by a blurred out clip showing me tied to the chair in his room. I could see my hand moving up towards his face, killing him with his own knife even through the censored footage. I had to squint and blink repeatedly before I could make out the words scrolling across the bottom of the screen. MURDER GOES VIRAL – Shocking clip gains 172 million views in less than four hours.
I sank down onto the bed and closed my eyes, a smile forming on my lips as I tried to resist letting out a bubbling giggle of insanity, unsure whether I’d be able to control it if I did. One thought kept repeating in my mind over and over. He got his six seconds of fame after all.
Forever Young
I only wanted to look younger. Now I’m trapped in this box, unable to move, unable to see and with no hope of escape. Worst of all nobody even cares. How did this even happen?
I hit forty a month ago and every morning since then I’d looked in the mirror and only seen an old woman getting older, staring back at me through watery eyes surrounded by crows feet. It seemed to happen so suddenly. One minute I was in the prime of my life and the next I was racing towards the grave with my skin sagging and my hair turning white at lightning speed.
I told my sister how I felt, expecting sympathy. Instead she posted me a voucher for a spa day with a heartfelt note attached. “Enjoy – I won’t come with you. I don’t want to see you naked. Haha.” Hilarious. Still, I wasn’t going to turn down the chance for a day of pampering, especially when someone else had paid for it. I went along, knowing in my heart that the only thing that would really make me feel better was surgery. I sat through a massage that left me bruised and aching and a sauna that was all steam and no heat, like sitting naked in city fog. After that I was left slumped in an armchair in a robe, a goat’s placenta mud pack soaking into my pores as I tried to relax, not an easy task with the stereo speaker directly behind my head blasting out panpipes loudly enough to make my ears ring.
I only found the card because I let my arm slide down the side of the chair. I’d never have noticed it otherwise. As my hand slid down the inside of the armrest something jabbed the edge of my wrist. I lifted a cucumber slice from my eye and looked down, spying a rectangular piece of cardboard poking up from the gap between the cushion and the armrest. I pulled it out. It was a business card, pure white with tiny black letters across the centre spelling out, ‘Forever Young.’ Underneath was a phone number.
“Everything okay Miss Murdoch?” I looked up to see my beautician, Cindy, glancing across from her desk in the corner. “You need to try and keep still for another half an hour. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” I replied, absently slipping the card into the pocket of my robe. I leaned back in the chair and sighed, thinking no more of it until the end of the day. I was on my way out when Cindy caught up with me, running across reception and waving her arm.
“Miss Murdoch, Miss Murdoch. I think you forgot this.”
“Forgot what?” I asked as she held the business card out towards me. I took it from her and let her hold the door open. “Thanks,” I said as I stepped outside. She nodded and headed back into the warm. As I climbed into my car the impulse to ring the number took over and before I knew what was happening I had my phone to my ear and was listening to the tone at the other end.
“Forever Young.” A woman’s voice, no hint of an accent.
“Hello?”
“Can I help you?”
I realised I didn’t even know what to say. “I’m not sure. I found your card at this spa and-“
“Would you like to make an appointment?”
“That depends,” I said, looking at my crow’s feet in the rear view mirror. “Can you make me young again?”
She laughed politely. “Perhaps. We do have a cancellation this evening. Could you make it for seven?”
I took the address from her and typed it into my GPS. Only ten miles from my house, plenty of time to go home and get changed first. At ten to seven I pulled up outside a towering office block, the top floors still unfinished, the walls wreathed in scaffolding. A dust covered ramp led up to a glass entrance door and I walked into what looked like a building site. The reception desk was covered in clear plastic sheeting, held in place by thick black tape. There was nobody around, it was eerily quiet, as if I was alone in the world.
I was about to turn and leave when I noticed the list of names beside the lift. At the bottom of a typed list of names and floor numbers I spotted the words, ‘Forever Young,’ handwritten in green ink with the number 13 scrawled beside it.
The lift pinged open, gentle muzak wafting out towards me. I stepped inside and pressed 13. The doors slid shut and the lift whirred into life, stopping a minute later with another ping. I stepped out into a long corridor, the walls lined with framed paintings of sculpted models, chiselled stubbly men, angular bony women. Tall pot plants were dotted about on the expensive looking dark red carpet. My heeled feet sank into the pile as I made my way along the windowless corridor and round the corner only to find myself at a dead end.
A woman sat at a plain desk in front of a floor to ceiling plate glass window. The desk contained only a single white phone. Besides the desk two chairs had been placed either side of a plain door.
“Miss Murdoch,” the woman smiled, looking up at me. “So glad you could make it. Won’t you take a seat?”
I sat, glancing across at her perfect skin, her immaculate hair, the aura of youth that seemed to take pride in my jealous glaze. “Can I ask how old you are?” I asked, certain she was barely out of her teens.
She smiled back at me. “I’m 52.”
“Wow, seriously? You look about 20.”
“Thank you. Forever Young works wonders-” The phone rang, interrupting our conversation. “Yes of course. Right away.” She replaced the handset and looked at me. “Mr Tanas will see you now.”
I stood up and pushed open the door beside me. I stepped into a palatial office, nearly half the space taken up by an enormous mahogany desk. A man sat behind it, leafing through a pile of papers. He looked up at me as I walked in. “Ah, Miss Murdoch. Won’t you sit down? Now I hear you’d like to be young again. Is that right?”
“I’m not sure. What exactly is it that you do here? Are you a surgeon?”
He laughed, throwing his head back. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat as he wiped his eyes as if what I’d said was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “A surgeon? Oh my, no, I’m not a surgeon. What on earth makes you think that?”
“Well renting an office this size can’t come cheap. Your receptionist said she was in her fifties but she looks like a child. You do plastic surgery, right?”
“Let me put your mind at rest Mrs Miss Murdoch. The very last thing I would want is to slice you open with a scalpel. I have no intention of gutting you like a fish, sliding a blade deeply into your tender flesh to watch the blood stream out onto the floor of my office. We have a much more-,“ he paused, “-subtle approach to restoring your youthful looks.”
“And what might that be?” I asked, unable to get the image of him holding a scalpel above my prone body out of my mind.
“I like you Miss Murdoch. I think we’re going to get along famously. I’d like to ask you a question if I may. What would you pay if I could make you look young again? Now hold on, I don’t mea
n crammed full of collagen or injected with Botox every fortnight for the rest of your life. I mean a single one off treatment that will last from today until the day you die. What would that be worth to you? How much have you already spent on creams and balms and everything else that made no difference at all except to your bank balance? How much will you spend in the next ten years? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? A million? What if I told you I have something in this office that will stop you aging for good? What would that be worth to you?”
“If this thing of yours works, I’d pay pretty much anything.”
“Excellent,” he said, standing up. “Then I think we can do business together.” He walked over to an oil painting of a nude woman on the wall to my left. I caught a glimpse of the face as he lifted the painting off the wall, she looked like a younger version of me. He set the canvas down, revealing an iron safe set into the wall behind it. He spun the dial one way, then the other, then back again until the safe door swung open. When he turned back to me he was holding a small wooden box which he slid onto the desk.
Sitting back down he turned the box and pressed the clasp, lifting the lid before turning the contents to face me. Inside was a row of slender syringes, each filled with a liquid the same colour as the carpet, a deep impenetrable red.
“That’s not blood is it?” I asked as he held a syringe up to the light to examine the contents with one eye closed.
He roared with laughter again. “Oh Miss Murdoch, you are priceless.” He cradled the syringe in his arms as he spoke, as if rocking a newborn baby. “Blood? No, no, no. In here is the latest advance from our own laboratories. Some of the most incredible minds working in science today created this. We poached two gentlemen from lung cancer, a toxicologist who worked for New York P.D and three of the people working on curing Ebola. The vaccine for that particular virus is six months behind because of me and now I’m offering the fruits of their labour to you.”
“How much?”
“Before I tell you that let me say first that this comes with my personal guarantee. If you don’t see a difference in 24 hours we tear up your contract and you won’t owe a penny. Does that seem fair?”
“What’s in it?”
“Ah, now that I can’t tell you. Trade secret I’m afraid. But if it makes you young again, what does it matter what’s in it?”
“Nothing illegal I hope.”
“No of course not,” he said, a little too sharply. “If you’d just like to sign this little form and then you can roll your sleeve up for me.”
He’d laid the syringe on top of the contract. I tried to concentrate on the tiny dense writing but the syringe kept drawing my eye, the liquid inside swirling in ceaseless hypnotic patterns. In the end I gave up trying to read the contract and made the worst decision of my life. I signed it. “You still haven’t told me the price,” I said, laying the pen down.
“Patience Miss Murdoch, patience. Plenty of time for all that later. Let’s get this into you first before you get another minute older.”
I rolled up my sleeve as he came round the desk and picked up the syringe, pulling the clear cover off the long thin needle as he leaned against the side of my chair. He held the syringe to the light and depressed the plunger just enough for a single tiny drop to bead at the top. He moved so fast after that I hardly had time to even wince. In under a second the needle was in the cruck of my elbow, the contents vanishing into my vein. Once empty he replaced it in the box.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it. We’ll be in touch for a follow up appointment sometime next week but don’t worry if you can’t get to the phone. We can always come to you.”
I left the office with a dull ache in my arm. By the time I went to bed that night, the ache had begun to throb and the point where the needle had entered my arm was swollen and sore looking. I was surprised by how quickly I went to sleep though, my head barely on the pillow before I was gone. I woke up the next morning feeling fresher and more alert than I had in years. I almost ran to the bathroom, staring at the surreal sight of someone I hardly recognised in the mirror. A twenty year old was staring back at me. I pressed a finger to my face. My skin was firm again. My nipples no longer pointed towards the floor, even my grey hairs seemed to have vanished overnight.
I spent the day in a delirium of happiness. I wasn’t recognised anywhere. It was blissful. Andrew in the newsagents tried to flirt with me, he’d barely looked up when I bought a paper normally. In the supermarket I had a group of three teenage boys approach and ask for my number. I gave it to them, giggling as they walked away fighting over who would text me first. I sat in the park for a while and it was delightful. My back didn’t ache from sitting on the bench for more than a minute, although my arm was still throbbing. At least the swelling had begun to go down.
I went to bed that night happier than I’d been for a very long time. When I woke up the next morning my skin felt firmer than ever. The varicose veins on my leg had gone. Good riddance. I smiled at myself in the bathroom mirror but felt a pang of concern when the reflection didn’t smile back. I ran a hand over my face, the muscles weren’t responding to my commands. It took nearly a minute to make my eyebrows raise at all and then they remained up, as if I was permanently startled by something.
I remembered what Mr Tanas had told me as I was leaving. “There might be a few fluctuations in the first 48 hours while your body responds to the treatment. Nothing to worry about. You’ll be absolutely fine.”
But that evening I felt worse than ever. The fashion magazine I tried to read kept slipping through my fingers. I couldn’t even grip my coffee mug properly. My body wasn’t responding to my commands. I tried to rummage in my handbag for the Forever Young card, in the end dumping the contents over the kitchen table. It took a concerted effort to punch in the number on my phone but it was all in vain. They didn’t answer, the phone just rang and rang. In the end I gave up, vowing to ring them again in the morning. They’d definitely be there in the morning.
I struggled to get to sleep that night. Every time I went to roll over, I woke up, my skin feeling taut and stretched too thin. I dreamt I was being pulled on a rack in a medieval torture chamber, grinning torturer standing over me, laughing just as Mr Tanas had. By the next morning I could hardly move, my skin as thin as tissue, as if it might tear open at any moment.
I walked more like a zombie than a person, making my way to the bathroom where a mannequin stared back at me in the mirror. I turned to leave, unable to look at myself any longer. I was losing the ability to bend my knees and by the time I made it halfway downstairs I lost my balance, falling forwards and sliding down the remaining steps, landing with a thud in the hallway. I managed to roll onto my side before I finally lost all sensation in my spine.
I felt ridiculous. My arms and legs stiff as boards, sticking out from me as if I were a wooden doll. I could still see but I couldn’t move, not even to blink away the dust falling into the corner of my eye as I lay there. All I could do was stare at the leg of the hall table that I’d narrowly avoided crashing into when I fell.
The shadows on the wall crawled their way towards the skirting board until it began to grow dark. I tried to force my limbs to move from time to time but in the end I gave up. Nothing seemed to work. After an eternity of night it slowly grew light again. I’d been laid there nearly twenty four hours when I heard my phone ringing. Sometime later I heard the letterbox being scraped open and then my sister’s voice reached me through the tiny slot. “Are you in? Hey why are you-Oh my God.”
She’d seen me, at last someone had seen me. I heard a thud, then another and then the door crashed open. She knelt down beside me, rocking my shoulder as I stared back at her, trying my hardest to blink. “Are you all right?” she asked, fear evident in her voice.
I tried to answer. I put all the effort I could into speaking but my jaw was locked in place, my tongue a dead weight in my mouth. I hoped she’d notice me breathing but she was already on t
he phone, pacing back and forth next to me.
“Oh God, come on, come on, answer. Hello? Ambulance please. It’s my sister. She’s not moving. She feels so cold. I think she might be dead.”
I couldn’t hear the response on the other end but they must have told her what to do as she began rolling me onto my back. She started chest compressions. It felt surreal seeing her hands ramming into my chest as she wedged the phone between her ear and her shoulder. “She’s so stiff. No, it’s not doing anything. Are they nearly here yet?”
I heard a siren approaching as she rolled me back onto my side and began slapping me on the back as if I had food wedged in my throat. A minute later a second pair of ankles appeared by my sisters. “Hi, I’m Gary,” a man said, kneeling down to look at me. “Can you hear me?”
He looked up as another person appeared in the doorway. They had my shirt pulled open in seconds, applying chest paddles before shocking me. I felt nothing except a bizarre sense of shame that I hadn’t chosen a better bra for two men to be staring at. A minute later I was in the back of the ambulance, Gary kept up the chest compressions all the way to the hospital.
Once we arrived I was wheeled into the building and then I got the shock of my life as a face I recognised loomed over me. He might have been dressed as a doctor but I recognised that smile. It was Mr Tanas. He shone a light in my eye, turning to Gary. “I’ll take her from here.”
“Don’t you want to know-?”
He smiled at the paramedic. “I know everything I need to. She’s dead. Go away.” He was already wheeling me along the corridor as he spoke, pushing me round the next corner and through a set of double doors.
“Oh dear,” he said, looking down at me as fluorescent lights passed by above his head. “Dead on arrival. Such a shame. Don’t worry Miss Murdoch, it happens to us all. And you certainly won’t get any older now.”
Night Terrors: 16 Horror Stories Page 2