Fishing in Brains for an Eye with Teeth (Thirteen Tales of Terror) (32 page)

“Come,” she tells him, taking his hand. “Let’s go hunt your first male.”

Jack is pleased he finally has the opportunity to surprise her.  Slyly, he asks, “Who said it was my first?”  

After a hearty laugh, Jill wonders, “Whose turn is it?”  She tells Jack, “We need to play some more Truth or Dare!”

THE END

Bob Bodey’s Body Parts

_________________________

This story originally appeared in Issue #346 of
Weird Tales
Magazine, November 2007— as well as in the
Anthology: Weird Tales, the 21
^st
Century; Volume One
.   

_________________________

Bob Bodey is bored.

He hates not being able to drive.  It’s a pain in the butt.  His driver’s license was suspended three months ago when he totaled his car, mistakenly trying to park it in a space already claimed by a tree.  Luckily, he was so drunk at the time, he wasn’t injured.  

If being arrested for D.U.I. wasn’t bad enough, he also had no car insurance at the time of the accident.  His case goes before a judge next month and, with the lousy public defender assigned to him, Bob thinks he’s in big trouble.

He has no way of knowing he won’t be making his court date because of a bizarre problem with his body parts.

Bob Bodey is a twenty-two-year old virgin living in modern day Midwestern America.  He’s not mentally retarded; he just appears as if he is.  His eyes don’t always look in the same direction, the left one is slightly askew.  He has unruly, oily black hair and a nearly perfect uni-brow.  His cheeks are droopy, meaty, and his mouth seems unusually far from his nose, as if sunken.  Two small but frighteningly thick forests of black hair grow in Bob’s elephantine ears, looking a lot like fuzzy caterpillars.  Bob is beefy, tall and wide, with a Buddha belly.  His feet and hands are so big they make him appear clumsy, even though he isn’t.

Bob’s mother died in childbirth giving birth to Bob, who was a big nine-pound baby.  Bob was raised by his father, who eventually remarried, but then divorced five years later, and died five years after that.  His only family is his grandmother, his mother’s mother, and she lives in Florida.  Bob talks to her twice a week on the phone but he hid the automobile accident from her, not because it would worry her, but because it was his grandma that bought him that car.

Thankfully the Burger King where he’s employed is within walking distance of his apartment, as is a little grocery, a barber, a Keg-n-Bottle liquor store, and a laundry mat.  Still, he’s tired of eating at Burger King, tired of not having a washer and dryer, and
really
tired of walking.

Here is it, Friday night, a
rare
Friday night when he’s not scheduled to work, and where does he find himself?

At the laundry mat, doing laundry.

The place is dead, deserted.  Everybody
else
has something to do tonight.

Bob is bored.

He paces back and forth.  If there were other people here, he’d have a seat.  He might even pick up one of those free
Employment Source
newspapers and look at it, even though he has no hope of finding a different job, not without any transportation.

The laundry mat is deserted, however, so Bob paces, walking back and forth down the long row of washing machines, with dryers built into the wall on the other side. 

At the far end of the laundry mat is the busted door to the grungy bathroom.  It’s been patched with a small piece of paneling where a hole was made by someone’s fist.  There’s a long table for folding clothes.  And on the wall is a bulletin board where people hang Help Wanted, Lost Pet, and Babysitter Available postings.

At the other end of the laundry mat—near the plate glass windows and doors—are the vending machines.  Next to a Change machine sits a dirty old Suds ‘n Such vending machine which provides little boxes of Tide, Cheer, Downy, Oxi-Clean, and Bounce.  Beside it are the gumball machines and the dispensers which give cheap junk prizes.  Here are Super Charged Thunder Bolts (apparently some kind of jawbreaker), Wonka Nerds Gumballs, Laser Lights, Rave Jewelry, and Bouncing Balls provided by the A&A Company.  Finally, next to these mechanical kid magnets is a Coca-Cola machine.

One of the vending machines suddenly catches Bob’s eye, a prize capsule dispenser he doesn’t remember seeing here the last time he did laundry.

He wanders over and looks at it.

There’s a cardboard display inside the machine and written on it, in what looks like dripping blood is, 

REAL BODY PARTS.

The parts attached to the cardboard sign include a very realistic (albeit small) ear, a long flapping lifelike tongue, what looks very much like a human belly button, a nose, and a pair of wind-up chattering teeth.

Bob smiles when he sees the sticker on the inside of the dispenser which reads,
WARNING:
REAL means REAL!

In the Rave Jewelry machine right next to the body parts, the warning reads, CHOKING HAZARD!  THE SMALL TOYS, MARBLES, OR BALLS IN THIS MACHINE ARE NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN UNDER THREE YEARS.

It’s the teeth that catch Bob’s attention.  He fondly remembers a larger set of chattering teeth he had as a boy.

As it so happens, Bob has seventy-five cents in his pocket left over from doing laundry and Real Body Parts only cost fifty cents.

Just as Bob is reaching into the silver chrome-plated flap to retrieve his prize, the buzzer on one of the dryers goes off with the volume of an air raid siren, startling him.

Bob slips the plastic egg into his pocket without even looking at it.

He unloads the dryers, walks home to his tiny apartment (just a living room/bedroom, a small bathroom, and a small kitchen), and puts away his clean clothes.  He then kicks off his shoes and empties his pants pockets, putting everything he’s carrying on his dresser— his keys, his wallet, his pocket knife, his dental floss. 

He finds the plastic bubble.

When he looks at his prize, it looks back at him, giving Bob quite a start.

The real body part he bought is an eye.

Bob grabs his chest, laughing a nervous titter.  His heart is beating twice as fast as it was a minute ago.           

The eye inside the plastic bulb stares at him, the pupil fat and black, the iris a shade of dull brown identical to Bob’s.

He twists the cap and pulls it off.  As he reaches for the eyeball, his right index finger gets to it before his right thumb and immediately sticks.  Startled by the wet, spongy feel of the eye, he hisses and pulls away, only to discover the eye is stuck to his finger.

Bob Bodey is stunned as a new visual field opens up to him.

His third eye sees.

He gasps and nearly swoons.  He’s healthy as an ox, never squeamish, never sick; he rarely even gets a hangover.  Never in his life has he ever come close to fainting but he’s suddenly close now.  An intense head rush shrivels his brain.

He looks down at his fingertip . . .

The fingertip looks back.

This split vision is like nothing he’s ever dreamed or could ever imagine.  He’s quite comfortable with his eyes receiving input directly into the place where he thinks.  Bob likes having sight and consciousness neatly stitched together, thank you very much, and suddenly having eyes where there is
no
thought, only touch, is like having mental sutures ripped open somewhere deep inside his brain.

There is an immediate sting of pain behind his old eyes.  He winces and unconsciously reaches up to clasp his aching head, causing dizziness as his new eye races up toward his hair.

He stops the movement of his right hand, holding it before his face, looking at it.

He peers back from his finger at his face, which looks really frightened and pale.

Trivision is overwhelming.  Instinctively he closes the only eyes he can, the lidded ones on his face.

Possessing only monofocal instead of bifocal vision, he’s amazed at the depth and breadth of the field of his third eye’s vision.

Bob doesn’t like fingerseeing how pallid his own face is.

He tries to close the fingereye but can’t.  He keeps trying, straining nonexistent muscles in his finger until it finally sinks into his head that the eye
can’t
close.

It has no lid!

He needs a glove. 

Bob opens his real eyes without thinking about it, intent on going to the coat closet for gloves, and feels another surge of dizziness.  His forehead knits, his face scrunching up as if he’s suffering horrible agony.  He’s not in any pain but having two distinctively different sets of visual impulses hitting his consciousness at the same time is mind-wrenching.

He quickly closes his real eyes again.

Bob pulls his finger back toward him, his nail before his old eyes, his new fingereye pointed forward.  Doing this, he tries to recreate with his new eye something familiar for his old beleaguered brain. 

He puts his nose on the second knuckle of his index finger to steady it, to lock the movement of the eye to the movement of his head.

He realizes suddenly he’s burning up, drenched in nervous sweat, and he wants to take off his sweat suit, but that would require two hands and he’s keeping his fingereye right where it is.

Nose and fingereye leading the way, Bob stumbles across his tiny living room to his coat closet.  Even though he hasn’t worn gloves since last winter, he knows right where they are, on a high shelf beside a stack of scarves and stocking caps.

He starts to reach out with his right hand but then pulls his finger back to his nose and reaches out, instead, with his left hand.  Grabbing the gloves, he knocks over the stack of stocking caps, spilling them to the closet floor.

Wincing, he opens his headeyes, knowing he needs them too.

Bob is holding tight black leather gloves.  When he looks at the size of the eye puffing out the end of his index finger, he realizes there is no way whatsoever it’s going to fit.

He growls with frustration and throws the gloves down.

He needs an artificial lid for his third eye!

Seeing a black stocking cap on the floor, he grabs it up and plunges his right fist into it.

Just closing his finger into a fist obstructs most of the third eye’s vision and the stocking cap does the rest.  He still receives visual input from that third eye but that input consists of total darkness.

Now that his finger is a finger again (mostly) and his vision is back conjoined to his thoughts, he starts using his brain to question what’s happening to him.

He remembers the sign that advertised
REAL BODY PARTS.

And the:
WARNING
: REAL means REAL!

Bob needs a drink.

He has a brand new twelve pack of cheap beer in his fridge he bought earlier this afternoon after picking up his paycheck but he needs something a lot more potent than beer.  He has a bottle of Captain Morgan’s he was saving for a special occasion.  This wasn’t what he had in mind when he bought it but he’s thinking anything that can help him deal with the fact he now has a real third eye connected to his right index finger would be really special indeed.

He doesn’t bother with a glass.  He retrieves the bottle from beneath the sink in his kitchen, uncaps it, and guzzles rum like it’s water.

Bob likes Captain Morgan’s tremendously and one of the big reasons why is it seems to get him drunk quicker than any other booze. 

Bob sets a new personal record tonight, getting totally plastered in a flat ninety seconds.

He burps loudly, feels like he might throw up, and decides it’s time to stop guzzling.

He looks at the stocking cap on his right hand and realizes he wants to see it.  Now that he’s got a little Captain Morgan in him, he thinks he’ll be able to look at the fingereye without freaking out.

He plops down on the couch, holding the rum bottle between his legs.

He holds up his hand, unclenches his fist, and removes the stocking cap.

The single fingereye looks at the pair of headeyes with a glint of envy.

Bob realizes now that he’s gotten drunk, it’s much easier to deal with visual stimuli coming from different parts of his body.  He begins moving his finger about, waving it in the air, and doesn’t feel the least bit of vertigo this time.

Now that he’s inebriated, there’s very little thought going on behind his old eyes and that helps enormously.  Instead of being a thinking creature, he becomes a creature of trisight.

He brings his third eye closer to the other two, moving his fingertip within two inches of his nose. 

His third eye is the same width as his normal eye, about an inch and a half wide.  The normal width of his index finger is half an inch.  That finger has swollen up like a balloon to accommodate the eye.  It would be a comedic clown finger if not for its stare.

He flips the finger over, his fingereye looking out across his living room, while his headeyes examine the back of his finger.

The back does look humorous, like a fat puppet finger.  The fingernail is as big as a Kennedy half dollar.

Bob flips his finger over so the eye is facing up, looking at his face.  He crouches over, resting his right arm along his leg, right palm up. 

Without thinking about what he’s doing (Three Cheers for Captain Morgan!), he places his left index finger on top of his right index finger, where it joins his hand.  Pressing down hard, he then pushes his way slowly up the finger.

And just like a pea being squeezed from a pod, the eye pops out of his finger.

Bob then goes into a kind of crazy spasm, his head and body rolling in jerky circles.  This happens when Bob’s third eye hits the floor and rolls away.  Despite the fact the eye is now detached from him, Bob can still see with it.

It bounces off the base of his entertainment center and rolls back toward him, coming to rest pupil up almost directly in front of his feet.

The dizziness returns and so does the queasy belly.  He again fights throwing up.