by Shane Staley
He was staring at Lynn.
Or rather, they were staring at Lynn. They were looking through the blankets and through her flesh, marveling at the biological profusion and the intricacies of the physiological machinery therein. Art was seeing these things, too. Simply repelled not so much by what was inside Lynn, but the way in which those eyes showed it to him, the way they must have seen not only the human machine, but all things of flesh and blood…as something to be dissected and rendered to their base anatomies and basal chemistry. Not the engines that fired brains that allowed men and women to make music and write poetry and to love one another, but as mechanistic things that could be altered, reengineered, taken apart and put together as they pleased.
A knife.
The thought emerged in his head unbidden, a cold and alien thought. Had he thought it or had they?
Use a knife.
Yes and no, he had thought it, but so had they. What he heard in his head was not their voices or even reflections of the same, but just some primitive translation of their thoughts and objectives, the best his mind could do at transcribing what it was they wanted.
She can be opened with a knife. The membrane can be severed with a knife.
Something in him cringed and something else cried out. If he had had a voice, he would have screamed. Screamed loud and clear. But even that was gone. They had infested not only his eyes, but his brain, and he was powerless over the stark immensity of their will.
A knife. A simple vertical incision, lengthwise through the thoraco-abdominal cavity, severing the epidermis and dermis and musculature, and we can begin our investigation.
Art pulled himself away. He pulled himself right off the bed and stumbled out into the corridor. What they wanted, what they intended on doing was monstrous and awful beyond words.
Imagine holding her still-beating heart in the palm of your hand.
He choked back a cry and fought his way downstairs even though they had shut his vision off. But if they thought that was a punishment, they were sadly mistaken. There was serenity and peace to being blind. Better that than looking on those things they could show him or doing those things they demanded of him.
But they fought.
They fought hard, not only with blindness and searing agony in his eyes, but with a thrumming mindless pain in his head that made him dizzy, squeezed tears from his eyes.
“You want a knife…” he managed. “I’ll get you a knife…oh yes, I’ll get you a knife…”
Laughing under his breath, he found a carving knife in the kitchen drawer. He was tired and run-down and beyond caring. He brought the knife up, seeking his left eye with the tip. He would start with that one, carve it out at the roots and then proceed to the other.
And he almost got away with it, too.
But in the end, they numbed his arm until it was dead and rubbery and absolutely limp.
On his knees on the kitchen floor, he tried to formulate a plan, a way out, something, anything. But there was nothing. Only a mad acceptance of it all. He could not only feel them in his eyes now, but in his brain, wrapping themselves around his thoughts and free will. All he could think about was Dr. Moran, the man who had placed that alien tissue in his eyes. And the more he thought of him, the angrier he became.
Given time, you’ll be shocked at the results. You’ll see things you never thought you would in ways that will astound you.
Yes.
That’s what Dr. Moran had said. It had struck him strange at the time, but then Dr. Moran was nothing if not strange. But it had been more than a simple odd, offhand comment from doctor to patient; it was a confession and possibly even a warning.
Dr. Moran had done this on purpose.
And as the realization of this filled him, Art felt activity in his eyes. A new activity, a degenerate hothouse profusion, a nameless fleshy cultivation and germination. Whatever was in his eyes was growing, expanding, blossoming, replicating its own genetics with his chemistry and his biology, feeding off him and leeching him dry. It would live and thrive and reproduce…and he would die.
As he sat there, knowing it all to be true, there was a searing pain in his left eye as something viscid and moist like a slimy spider leg emerged, the tip of it tapping against his cheek. Then another and another like the tentacles of an octopus reaching from its lair and examining the surrounding terrain.
There was only one thing left to do: he had to go see Dr. Moran.
* * *
Dr. Moran had given him his home number in case of an emergency and Art used it without further delay.
“Dr. Moran? This is Art Reed. You performed a transplant of tissue into my eyes.”
“Yes, yes. Is there something wrong?”
“Yes, there is. I’m going over to your office now. I’ll meet you there.”
“Mr. Reed, I—”
“I’ll meet you there.”
Then the sound of Dr. Moran swallowing. “Yes.”
Art scrawled Lynn a note, something about going for a walk, and left.
* * *
Maybe they didn’t want Art going to see Dr. Moran and maybe they did, regardless the pain in his eyes multiplied beyond anything he had known before. As he drove, trying to stay on the road, it felt like his eyes had doubled in size if not tripled. They swelled in the sockets, threatening to explode the very orbits they were set in. The pain was red-hot and ice-cold, wet and tearing and unspeakable. Things stretched and wriggled and bunched like muscles. By the time he reached Dr. Moran’s deserted office building, there was a wet ripping in his right eye that made him cry out.
Moran had opened the doors and he was waiting for him.
“What in the fuck have you done to me?” Art said.
Moran was still nervous and twitching, but there was something empty and beaten about him now. “I did what was expected of me, Mr. Reed. I did what they demanded.”
“I should kill you,” Art said, his vision blurring momentarily, fresh tears splashing down his cheeks. But not tears of sorrow or even pain, but just fluid letting go like a woman whose water had burst as what grew inside prepared to be born.
“Go ahead. You’d be doing me a favor, I suppose.” Dr. Moran seemed completely noncommittal to the idea of violence. It did not look as if he would even fight back or raise a hand in his own defense. “But understand, it won’t change anything. I didn’t do any of this because I wanted to. I did what they made me do.”
“How many of these transplants have you performed?”
“Hundreds.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Dr. Moran shook his head. “No, no, not all of them were like…yours. I never know. There’s no way I can know. It’s only after the operation that I discover that they have migrated into the tissue I used in order to propagate themselves. They invade the fetal tissue, Mr. Reed. Somehow, some way. They use it to regenerate themselves at the molecular level. A few atoms, then a molecule, then an entire cell body. What dark genius, eh? What other organ would give them such mastery and what other sense would so surely hand them the keys to the city?”
Art was dizzy, feeling like he was going to pass out. They were sucking the blood out of him. “Who…what are they?”
“I don’t know. They’ve never shared that with me.”
“But you go on infecting people with them?”
“I don’t have a choice, Mr. Reed.” Dr. Moran rubbed his own eyes, buried his face in his hands. “I lost my sight in a car accident. My optic nerves were damaged beyond repair and then months later, my vision began to return. They chose me because I was an eye surgeon. I was the one who could give them a foothold in this world…and a window.”
“But you could have fought!”
“There’s no fighting. There’s no violence. They abhor such things. Primitive, animalistic reactions and they’ll have no part of them. They have infested me as they’ve infested you. I can no more stop them than a car can stop me from driving it or an oven can stop me from cooking with it.
We’re machines to them, Art. Can’t you see that?”
Dr. Moran pulled his hands from his face and then there was no doubt.
His eyes were red and crystalline, set with knobs and bumps and protrusions. They were immense and oozing like raw egg yolks, a clear slime running from them, a series of gelatinous feelers sprouting forth like the wavering, transparent tentacles of a deep-sea anemone.
Art’s vision darkened and went completely. He was a host, a nursery, a petri dish and nothing more. But he could still feel and what he felt was a blazing, white-hot agony as the spawn in his eyes was birthed. He could feel them unwinding and worming, spreading out their feelers like the fingers of an unclenching hand. The sounds were hideous...slithering and sliding and slopping. He felt those feelers erupt from his/their eyes. Felt them reaching upward towards the ceiling and the stars far above, the empty black wastes of space beyond. That was what they understood. The yawning, soundless gulf of mad darkness. Art stumbled forward because it was what they demanded. His dripping and jellied feelers reached out to touch those of Dr. Moran’s. There was a joining and a communion.
And as they were born, Art dropped away into fathomless blackness.
* * *
When Lynn woke the next morning, she found Art’s note and saw it as a good thing. Evidence that maybe he was coming around, finally leaving the house and rejoining the world at large. Maybe, maybe. Hopefully.
Well, if he was doing his part, then she would do hers.
It had come to her when she woke up. A simple plan, really, but maybe exactly the sort of thing that would bring her husband out of his dementia and back to her. They always said that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach and she supposed that was true. There was also another school of thought that said the way to a man’s heart wasn’t through his stomach, but via what was in his pants. Both viable theories, in Lynn’s way of thinking. But her friend Laura Klyman, who was more than a little rough around the edges, put it best: there was no man on Earth that could not be won over with a good blowjob and a T-bone steak.
It was funny. It was crude. But it was also true.
So Lynn walked down to the market and picked up a nice bottle of wine, some baking potatoes, salad fixings, and two huge T-bones nearly two inches thick. She would, this day, make Art forget all about monsters living in his eyes. It would begin with the wine and end with the steaks and in-between, there lie the magic like the meat between two slices of bread.
When she got home, she called out for him. “Art? Are you here, honey?”
Well, she knew that he was.
She could sense it.
He was upstairs. She climbed the stairs and by the time she reached the top her good mood began to melt away, replaced by a growing fear. He was not in their bedroom. She found him in the spare room. She looked at him in the chair by the window and everything she was ran cold inside her, puddled at her feet, and evaporated.
It was not the sight of her husband that made her scream.
Him slumped there in the chair, head thrown back, mouth hooked in an agonized silent scream. Or even his bloody, empty eye sockets or the way they looked, like something immense had pushed out of them, expanding them like birth canals until the skeletal orbits around them shattered.
No, it wasn’t that.
It was the two things on the wall, the things that had left clear slime trails like those of slugs…down her husband and up the wall to their present position. Huge, cantaloupe-sized balls of pulsating jelly with a feathering web of tissue dangling from each like optic nerves that had been ripped out at the roots. The things were threaded with an intricate system of bright blue vein tracery and set, at the very centers, with brilliant red crystalline orbs like monstrous, swollen pupils or perhaps nuclei.
From them reached long, transparent tendrils, dozens of them that waved and vibrated in the air as they reached for what they needed most.
Her eyes.
About the Authors
Richard Farren Barber was born in Nottingham in July 1970. After studying in London, he returned to the East Midlands. He lives with his wife and son and works as a Development Services Manager for a local university.
He has written over 200 short stories published in Alt-Dead, Alt-Zombie, Blood Oranges, ePocalypse–Tales from the End, Murky Depths, Midnight Echo, Midnight Street, Morpheus Tales, MT Biopunk Special, MT Urban Horror Special, Night Terrors II, Siblings, The House of Horror, Trembles, and broadcast on BBC Radio Derby and Erewash Sound.
Richard was sponsored by Writing East Midlands to undertake a mentoring scheme in which he was supported in the development of his novel Bloodie Bones. His novella The Power of Nothing was published by Damnation Books in September 2013.
His website can be found here: www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk.
Franklin Charles Murdock is a fiction writer from the midwestern United States. Though most of his work is harvested from the vast landscapes of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, Franklin strives to spin tales outside the conventions of these genres.
His work has appeared in Yellow Mama, Heavy Hands Ink, Three Line Poetry, WEIRDYEAR, Phantom Kangaroo, Thirteen Myna Birds, PrimalZine, and various other publications. Most recently, he’s been coauthoring the serial epic Beard the Immortal.
Michael Pignatella lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children. His short fiction has appeared in or is scheduled to appear in such venues as Strange Critters: Unusual Creatures of Appalachia, Nameless, One Buck Horror, Fantastique Unfettered, Tales of the Unanticipated, Sounds of the Night, Murky Depths, Wicked Hollow, Aiofe’s Kiss, Dark Corners, nanobison, Modern Magic, All Possible Worlds, Withersin, and Wondrous Web Worlds: Vol. 4. His story “Remember the Face of Your Son,” which appeared in Withersin, Birth:1, received an Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008. He is currently shopping a novel while he works on producing yet another. You can reach him through his blog—portablemagicblog.com—or on Twitter: @mpignatella.
Samuel Marzioli was born and raised, and that’s all you need to know about that. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications, including Penumbra eMag, Stupefying Stories, Space and Time Magazine, and the anthology A Darke Phantastique by Cycatrix Press. You can find updates about his latest projects by visiting his website at marzioli.blogspot.com.
Brady Golden lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, daughter, and an indeterminate number of cats.
Tim Curran lives in Michigan and is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, The Devil Next Door, and Biohazard, as well as the novella The Corpse King. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh&Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, and anthologies such as Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu, and Vile Things.
For DarkFuse and its imprints, he has written the bestselling The Underdwelling, the Readers Choice-Nominated novella Fear Me, Puppet Graveyard, Long Black Coffin and Nightcrawlers.
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.