Flesh Wounds, page 6
“The mosquito’s stinger is actually a sheath that contains feelers, saw-tipped cutters, and two tubes. After the cutters have pierced the skin, one of the tubes is used to inject saliva. The second tube actually draws the blood. The saliva performs two functions. First, as an anesthetic. Second, the saliva thins the blood and makes it easier for the mosquito to suck it up.”
The mosquito’s stinger suddenly loomed from the screen, three dimensional, like one of those movies watched with special glasses. Bernie screamed, but the professor lectured on and the rest of the class scribbled notes, ambivalent to the proboscis reaching out across the classroom.
As Bernie watched in horror, it plunged down the throat of the girl seated next to him. She jerked spasmodically, arms and legs flailing, notes fluttering to the floor. Her throat convulsed and her eyes bugged out. Blood shot from her nose and ears. More ran from beneath her skirt, tracing crooked crimson trails down her pale legs. One of her sandals, kicked free, landed in Bernie’s lap.
Her struggles lasted but a moment, then her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp, hanging from the mosquito’s black lance.
The mosquito drank deep. Bernie felt his stomach rise as the girl’s body first bleached white, then began to collapse like a paper bag from which the air has been drawn.
Bernie struggled up from the dream and lunged for the light beside the bed. He was fumbling with the lamp switch before he realized there was plenty of light in the room.
He threw back the covers and studied his arm.
Not a mark on it. The swelling, the oozing suppuration, the radiating lines of infection, everything, gone.
He let out a long sigh and fell back against the pillows. The sheets were stuck to his naked body with sweat. His heart was pounding. But it had just been a bad dream.
He thought about getting up and turning off the lights, but the cool comfort of the pillow drew him down. He buried his face and blanked his mind.
Then he heard something. It was barely audible, a resonating sound that vibrated deep in his bones and rang like a tuning fork off his teeth. It made his head ache.
He buried his head under the pillow, but the sound was undiminished. He stuffed his fingers in his ears, but the sound echoed off the walls of his cranium.
Deep down, on some subconscious level, he knew what it was. He screamed at it to stop. To go away. To cease and desist at once.
The buzzing remained.
When he could stand it no longer, he leaped from the bed and dashed to the window. Hand on the curtains, he hesitated, knowing that once proven right, his subconscious would only be encouraged to show him darker, more terrifying images. But he couldn’t stay his hand.
No retreat, no surrender, his father would have said. There are no quitters in the Dewitt family.
Inexplicably, the window of the hotel room looked in on his bathroom at home. A stranger dressed in nothing but boxer shorts stood at the sink with his back to Bernie. From this angle, all Bernie could see was the back of the man’s head and his muscular, tanned back.
The scene was entirely familiar, precise to the smallest detail—Bernie had lived it just that morning.
The sound was Bernie’s electric razor. The stranger was shaving with it.
I came up the stairs ready to chew Charlotte out for using my razor on her legs, Bernie remembered.
The stranger’s biceps bulged like blown glass as he raised Bernie’s razor to his face. His thighs and calves were similarly corded with muscles tempered in a weight room. Though Bernie had no more proof than Charlotte’s sudden interest in nights out with her girlfriends and the calendar she’d hung in the laundry room, he pegged the stranger for a male stripper. Call it intuition, call it a wild guess, but Bernie knew he was right.
The shower was running. Behind the thin, opaque curtain, flesh-colored shadows shifted like restless ghosts, like distant faces best left unfocused. Bernie reached for the drapes to shield himself from the memory, but before he could close them, the shower shut off and the curtain slid aside to reveal his wife, naked and wet.
Charlotte stepped out, patting her body with a towel. The stranger smiled at her over the razor. His eyes roved leisurely, with obvious familiarity, over her glistening flesh. Dropping the towel, Charlotte molded her naked body to the contour of his back.
“Aren’t you finished yet?” she asked, sliding her hands into the front of his shorts.
“Just a minute. I’d do this every day, but the ladies who come in the club expect real men to have a five o’clock shadow.” He reached back and squeezed her buttocks with his free hand. “Besides, I need to do a good job. We don’t want to irritate your skin again.”
Weeks ago, Bernie had pointed out a rash on Charlotte’s neck. She’d passed it off as heat rash. Bernie had been content to believe her, even when he noticed the next morning that the rash had spread to her breasts and thighs.
“I’ll just start without you,” Charlotte giggled, sliding down his back. She tugged his shorts down far enough to extract his swelling organ and guided it into her mouth.
The stranger shuddered as she took him in. Bernie watched, trembling, as the stranger dropped one hand to the back of her head. Charlotte’s mouth worked up and down the length of his erection.
“No,” Bernie moaned. Despite the whine of the electric razor, his voice seemed incredibly loud.
Charlotte had looked up then, her startled eyes as big as silver dollars over her full mouth. She’d leaped away, caught up the towel and clutched it to herself as if she were afraid to have more than one man see her naked at the same time. “What are you doing home from work, Bernie? Why didn’t you call?” The explanations had started. Not hers—his. She’d packed him a bag and he’d left for the airport.
But this was not that morning. This, he told himself, is an encephalitic nightmare born of emotions I refused to confront.
On the other side of the window, Charlotte looked at him through slitted eyes. Her eyes were mocking, full of spite and derision. Her lover wrapped his hand in her hair, held her head, and thrust himself deep within her mouth. He switched off the razor.
“You never could satisfy her, Bernie-boy. Not when you were twenty-one, and certainly not now. Can you blame her for coming to me? Look at yourself. You’re an overweight bore.”
“Get away from my wife,” Bernie stammered—five words he should have said that morning.
The stranger smiled and something black flitted across his teeth. It was gone so fast that Bernie couldn’t say he hadn’t imagined it. The stranger continued to pound his groin against Charlotte’s face, but Charlotte no longer seemed cooperative. She struggled against the hand on the back of her head, her tiny fists beating vainly against his stomach and thighs. Her naked flesh went pale.
Bernie remembered the girl in Professor Dante’s classroom.
“You son of a bitch!” He pounded the glass with his fists, smearing the window with blood as his knuckles tore open.
“You should taste her,” said the stranger. “She tastes sweet... like strawberries.”
Charlotte went limp, her flesh ashen, her cheeks sunken cavities.
“I’ll kill you,” Bernie hissed. His next blow cracked the window in one glistening line from top to bottom.
“As you wish,” said the stranger with a mocking wave of his hand. He let the limp body drop. Where his penis should have been stood a black, foot-long, chitinous proboscis, lined with horned projections smeared red with Charlotte’s blood.
“But let’s dispense with the facade.” A black, living mass began to bubble over his lower lip and down his chin. “And let’s take our battle where it belongs. How about it, Bernie-boy? You ready to see your new home?”
The amorphous mass took flight, swirling and growing as more flooded from the demon’s mouth. It circled his head once, twice, thrice, then hurled itself against the window. When it hit, the cloud dissolved into billions of mosquitos, each thrusting its tiny stinger against the glass. The sound of their wings was like a billion tiny chainsaws. Their weight made the window flex as if it were no more than cellophane.
Bernie stumbled back and tripped over the corner of the bed. He hit the floor as the glass exploded and the swarm swept into the room. On hands and knees, he scrambled for the door, but they overtook him, pressing him to the floor by sheer weight. He flailed at them; they coated his arms and legs. He screamed; they filled his mouth. They were all over him, clinging to him like a second skin, crawling in every orifice. He couldn’t see, for they had covered his eyes. Their buzzing filled his head.
It wasn’t until jagged glass cut him in a dozen places on the way through the window frame that Bernie realized the mosquitos had lifted him off the ground.
“Time to go,” the demon cackled.
The rock upon which they dropped him was so hot it scorched his skin. Relief, as the mosquitos left, mingled with the pain of bleeding cuts and came out as a strangled, uncertain cry of terrified triumph. He lay shuddering, listening to their droning grow more distant with each passing second.
Bernie tried to get up and slipped in his own blood. The jagged mouth of the window had left long, deep cuts on his shoulders, hips, and thighs. He lay for a moment, sucking hot, sulfur-bitter air. When he opened his eyes and blinked out irritating mosquito corpses, he looked upon the world and screamed.
There were six suns blazing orange and hot from a blood red sky. The surrounding landscape was rock the color of rust, shrouded in heat waves and choking yellow gases. A river of molten magma meandered through bubbling pools of black oil. Geysers scattered randomly across the barren plain shot smoke and flames into the air. There was a sign of rusted iron. Despite the intervening heat waves and gas clouds, the message painted in red upon its pitted surface was clear:
WELCOME TO HADES
666 BILLION SERVED DAILY
He might have laughed. The landscape was convincing, but he’d seen special effects wizardry before. Hollywood could have created this set. The rocks, the sky, the river, it could all be a sound stage.
But the people were another matter.
The burning landscape was littered with bodies dressed in tattered strips of smoking flesh. They spasmed and crawled, trailing entrails and barren grey bones that had once been limbs. The stench of their decaying flesh assailed his nostrils and caught in his throat. Their moans blended to form a uniform wail that echoed across the barren landscape like a sour wind. Flies circled the pitiful wretches, feeding, depositing their larva, tormenting the damned with their strafing and buzzing.
The bubbling pools were decomposing corpses: men, women and children, dead by all practical standards, yet struggling against the maggots squirming within their flesh. Their eyes, milk white, stared at him, not beseeching help or even pity, but with an intense insanity asking nothing, not even release. Their mouths, full of rotting teeth and ravaged gums, drooled blood, vomit, and a cacophony of screams. Above each pool hovered a cloud of poisonous black vapor.
Skulls, bones, and wailing cadavers floated in the burning river. Twisted hands clutched at the crumbling banks and clung to drifting lumps of shapeless humanity.
Charlotte’s lover stood to one side. His boxer shorts were gone. His proboscis, still smeared with Charlotte’s blood, stood at rigid attention.
“Shall we set aside pretenses?” He stroked his swollen member. “You’ve suffered an extreme reaction to some Earthly disease. You dropped deader than a doornail, friend—which means you’re mine.”
Bernie forced himself to his feet. His brain sang with pain. Black spots danced across his field of vision.
“I’m Skaaven, one of many wardens here. You might say I’m your caseworker. Hades Management wants to make sure you get off to a good start.” Skaaven reached up with one hand and buried his fingers into the flesh of his face. Blood sprayed, sizzling like grease in a hot frying pan where it hit the ground. “It’s time we met face to face, Bernie-boy.” He began to strip the flesh from his skull.
Bernie ran. He heard a wet ripping as the demon stripped himself of his human guise. Bernie couldn’t help himself; he looked back.
The first thing he saw was the costume. Skaaven had worn a living man. Discarded now, the hollowed-out shell flopped about on the ground like a dying fish. It looked like an animated, full-body Halloween mask, all rubber and fake hair, a grisly diving suit minus the diver. Its mouth was open, wailing silently.
Next, he saw Skaaven. He—correction: it—stood on long, multijointed legs. Its feet were bird-like, taloned and spurred in silver razors. Its body was the carapace of a beetle, scorched-copper in color. It might have been female; something analogous to breasts hung like rotted fruit from its chest. Like mythical Shiva and Kali, Skaaven had four arms, each long enough to reach the ground. They were multijointed, like its legs. Each hand bore six incredibly long digits tipped with razors to match the feet.
A tail was pulled up and wrapped like a boa constrictor about the demon’s neck. The tip of the tail was barbed with hundreds of small hooks, many of which still held scraps of the disguise Skaaven had just discarded. Skaaven’s body dripped with dark blood from the same source.
Translucent wings unfurled from the demon’s back. The wings looked fragile, wet black lace strung on a frame of burnt bone, yet when Skaaven took to the air, nearby corpses were sent tumbling.
Bernie slipped in a bubbling puddle of cadaverine and went sprawling. He scrambled frantically to his feet and ran on, not daring to look back a second time. He could hear the heavy beating of wings closing the distance between them.
Razors sank into the soft muscle of his shoulders, tearing deep to curl around his collarbones. Warm, bright blood cascaded down his chest. For a second his feet left the ground, then he was crushed beneath the demon. The hot rock stripped flesh from the side of his face as he slid to a halt with the demon on his back.
“Nowhere to run, Bernie-boy,” Skaaven hissed.
Skaaven’s face was pressed close, its fetid breath hot in Bernie’s ear. Bernie looked back over his shoulder and got his first good look. Where a nose should have been, there was a dripping, wet cavern. Purple, scabrous lips drew back from a mouth lined with teeth that folded back, row after row, shark-like, gleaming white and sharp. Beneath heavy brows of barren grey bone, shone eyes of faceted silver, multipartite orbs in which Bernie saw a hundred terrified versions of himself.
Bernie struggled and screamed, but the demon held him fast, talons grating on bone.
“Two things you must accept,” Skaaven whispered in his ear. “The first is that you are mine. Mine to punish till time’s distant ending—any way I please.”
Something probed Bernie’s buttocks. He struggled desperately, kicking and screaming, ignoring the talons cutting into bone, ignoring the teeth that Skaaven sank into the back of his neck.
Penetration burned as if his insides were flooded with acid. The black phallus worked in and out, its horned projections ripping apart his tender anal track.
“Mine,” Skaaven hissed. “I could suck you dry if I wanted.” Its forked tongue lapped at the blood seeping from Bernie’s shoulders. It thrust deeper, sighing with each shuddering scream from its victim.
“Second thing you have to understand: you cannot die here. Makes sense, doesn’t it? You’re already dead or you wouldn’t be here.” The demon twisted Bernie’s head around so that they were face to face. Ligaments and tendons tore as muscles exceeded their elastic limit; Bernie wondered that his neck didn’t snap.
“Hold out your hand.”
Bernie gibbered madly.
“Don’t crack on me yet, Bernie-boy. The best is yet to come. Now, GIVE ME YOUR HAND!”
Bernie held out a trembling hand, scorched and bloody palm turned up.
With its last free hand, Skaaven reached down and clutched Bernie’s testicles. “You can’t die. You can only suffer. Here, all wounds heal given time... even this.”
Its hand clenched tight, razored talons interlocking like the teeth in a bear trap. Its arm pulled back and Bernie screamed hoarsely.
Laughing, Skaaven dropped the bloody prize in Bernie’s outstretched hand. “Understand?”
Bernie blacked out.
He awoke with the suns overhead, their positions unchanged, their heat undissipated. He was covered in blood and third degree burns. There wasn’t an inch of his body that didn’t scream in agony.
He wanted to die. Correction: He wanted his version of death, not this fundamentalist’s nightmare of Hell.
He’d been used and debased. Blood and the fluid of his bowels drained liberally from his rectum. Movement of any kind turned a lathe of broken glass within his stomach. In his hand, he held his testicles.
Why he still clung to the withered sacs, he couldn’t say, except perhaps because of the warnings he’d gotten as a boy using his father’s table saw. If you accidentally cut off your finger, Bernie, be sure you don’t lose it; then we can rush you to the hospital and get it sewn back on.
Bernie broke into mad laughter. “Think we can get these sewn back, Dad?” His laughter quickly evaporated in tears. He wasn’t even a man anymore, just some neutered plaything for a perverse demon. Bernie curled into a ball on the scorching ground and wept, each sob shaking his tortured body.
He drifted in and out of consciousness for a time—how long, he couldn’t even guess. At some point during that on-off period, he decided to hurl himself into the river. He reasoned that nothing could survive such a conflagration. Sure he’d seen screaming humans adrift in the river, but he’d also seen bones, remains of those far beyond pain and torture. Skaaven had said all wounds healed, but surely there was a limit. Bernie was willing to risk it—he had no intention of waiting till Skaaven returned to resume his casework.
The first inch Bernie crawled was the worst. Scabbed over wounds cracked and tore. Blood spewed liberally from the gash between his legs and his anus. Burnt skin peeled away, remaining behind him on the rock.
