Fishing in Brains for an Eye with Teeth (Thirteen Tales of Terror) (34 page)

These are supposed to be Real Body Parts but the little wind-up crank on the side destroys the illusion.

And yet, when he touches the teeth, they stick to him exactly the way the eye did, the gums trying to merge with his finger flesh.

Bob pulls the dental floss from its spool, cutting off a piece about three feet long.  He ties one end of the dental floss securely around his right wrist.  Carefully, meticulously, he then ties the other end to the crank on the chattering teeth. 

One of the teeth has a cavity.  Touching it causes the twinge of a toothache in his fingers.  These teeth are definitely Real Body Parts, despite their wind-up crank.

Bob Bodey looks at the chattering teeth and asks himself if he actually intends to go through with this.

Seeing bloody brains, he cares only about shutting that third eye.

He doesn’t know if this is going to work or not but it’s the only idea he’s come up and he’s determined to try.

Bob holds the teeth very delicately, not letting them make a mouth out of his fingers.  He winds them up, as tight as he can.

When he lets go of them, the teeth immediately begin bouncing up and down as they chatter.

There is no hum of a little motor, the way Bob would expect.  The only sound is the teeth themselves, clicking like the chattering teeth of a child who’s bitterly cold.

Bob doesn’t hesitate.  He raises the teeth to the right side of his head and throws them, aiming straight (hopefully) at the eye inside his skull (brains).

He misjudges entirely, using too much strength.  The chattering teeth fly into the side of his head, passing through his skull like it’s made of shadow.  He sees the teeth with his third eye as the chattering zips past, through his brains, only to come out his head on the other side. 

The dental floss string goes taut in Bob’s hand, now stretched directly through his head, the teeth dangling on the other side, chattering below his left ear.

Startled by this outcome, Bob lets out a little yelp as he gives the teeth a vicious yank, pulling them back through his head again.  This time the teeth come so close to the third eyeball they almost hit it, which is exactly his intention. 

He hopes to catch the eye in the jaws of the chattering teeth so he can drag the orb out of his brains.

Barring that, he doesn’t care if the teeth
crush
the eye, so long as they make it stop seeing brains.

But the teeth only come close and don’t even leave any kind of wake in their trail as they fling through the bloody gray-matter.

The chattering teeth come free of his head, with not even a drop of blood on them to mark their flight through his brains.

Bob is encouraged.  He saw the teeth
twice
, he was
close
, and if he just throws the teeth with a little more care, he believes he can hook the eye.

And so Bob Bodey prepares to again go fishing with teeth for an eye in his brains.

First he winds the teeth up again.

Then, gently, he gives them a little toss, lobbing the chatter into his skull.

The teeth drop into his head, causing a hint of electricity strong enough to make hair stand up.

The chattering teeth land far behind his third eye, at the back of his brain.

Frustrated by his bad aim, Bob gives the dental floss an angry little yank . . . only to have it break with a snap of pain.

Bob holds a strand of dental floss still tied to his wrist and the end of this piece
is
bloody. There’s a painful spot near his right temple, now oozing blood, where the floss broke.

Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he understands he got lucky.

As long as the line was attached to the teeth, it remained as intangible as the teeth themselves.  The moment the dental floss broke, the end no longer connected to the teeth became solid again.  If the line had snapped inside his skull, instead of just outside it, it probably would have given him a brain clot.

At this moment, however— as Bob realizes he now has
two
Real Body Parts inside his skull (brains)—he would actually welcome an aneurism.

He can’t exactly feel the chattering teeth inside his brains but he can hear them somehow, clicking away.  He prays they will stop soon.  He tells himself they can’t keep chattering forever!

Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he’s unsure of anything.

He looks at the impotent, drooping dental floss hanging from his wrist and wonders what to do now.

He knows there is only one way to get the Real Body Parts out of his brains. 

He’ll need to use more Real Body Parts.

Frantic, hearing chattering teeth, seeing brains, he digs into his pockets to see what other Real Body Parts he bought tonight.

He has four capsules in his pocket.  He pulls them out one at a time.

 The first egg contains a small nose, which he promptly throws in the trash.  Seeing brains is bad enough; he doesn’t want to smell them.

When he looks at the next little egg, he isn’t certain at first what he’s seeing.  It looks almost like a pink snake (he fleetingly wonders if it’s a penis) but then he sees the stretched nail and realizes it’s a coiled up finger.

Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he realizes this is
exactly
what he needs.

Laughing nervously, Bob rubs his chattering head, then polishes off his beer.  He almost grabs another but decides instead it’s once again time for Captain Morgan. 

After taking a long guzzle of rum, Bob sits down and opens his plastic capsule.

His heart pounding, he carefully shakes the finger out onto the couch.    

The moment it’s out of its shell, the finger loses its serpentine elasticity.  It hardens, acquiring the length, diameter, and joints of a real finger.

Being careful not to touch it (seeing brains) he holds up his own finger next to it (hearing chattering teeth) and confirms the finger is exactly the same size as his own right index finger (now eyeless and quite happy about it.)

Bob bites his lip, worried about his reach being long enough.

Hoping maybe he got a second finger, Bob digs into his pocket for the last two eggs.

In one of the plastic capsules is an organ Bob can’t begin to recognize.  It’s a miniature duplicate of his own gall bladder and he sends it after the nose, throwing it in the trash.

Seeing brains with his third eye, he isn’t certain of his other two eyes when he sees the final plastic egg.  All the other capsules were clean and clear inside. 

This one is filled with blood.

And suspended in the oddly transparent blood is a tiny human heart.

It creeps Bob out to see it beating.  He almost throws the heart away but then spontaneously decides not to.  He places it gently on top of his stack of
Playboys
, then pulls off his stinky sweatshirt and covers the egg up.

Seeing bloody brains already, Bob really doesn’t care to look at a bloody heart.

Sweating, seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob takes another swig of rum.  He knows he should stay sober but being drunk makes it so much easier for him to deal with seeing brains and hearing chattering teeth.

He doesn’t understand why the teeth don’t wind down!  How can they just keep
chattering?

Bob tries to focus his attention on the finger again.

The finger is lying on its side, pointing, the end that would attach to a knuckle cleanly chopped off.

His hands are shaking violently.  Bob grabs his arm with his left hand, steadying his right hand as he makes a fist, then extends only his right index finger, which he slides carefully along the couch until his fingertip connects with the bottom of the Real Body Part.

The moment the connection is made, the fusion is made, with just a hint of electric current.  His normal fingernail disappears, becoming the fourth joint of a six joint finger.

Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he holds up the monster finger and looks at it with the two eyes focused outside his own skull.

He can’t bend it backwards, it functions like a perfectly natural six-jointed six-inch-long finger.

He prays it’s long enough to reach the eye and the chattering teeth.

Getting up, Bob moves into his tiny bathroom, over to the rusty sink.  Looking at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, (seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth) he begins the operation.

 He reaches his extended finger up and, without hesitation, plunges it into the top of his head.

With his third interior eye, he sees the finger enter his brains.

 He laughs, finding hope, thinking this might actually work!

He pushes his finger down into his head, bringing it right up next to the third, brain-buried eyeball, close enough to see his own bloody fingerprint.

He stops himself just as he’s about to nudge the eye.

The sound of chattering teeth reminds him in clicking Morse code that hearing chatter is
way
worse than seeing brains.

Realizing it will be easier to extract the teeth if he’s not blind, Bob decides to get the teeth first, then the eye.

Instead of spinning the eye around to face backwards, however, he makes a mistake and simply reaches over and behind the third eye, searching for the teeth.

The teeth find him.

He experiences fluttering jabs of sharp pain as his finger is repeatedly bitten by the chattering teeth.  Yelping, Bob reacts instinctively, yanking his finger back.

And just as cleanly as the dental floss snapped, his extended finger now breaks off inside his own head.

He pulls back his normal three-joint three-inch finger and moans with bitter disappointment when he sees how stubby it is.

Still hearing chattering teeth, still seeing brains, he now adds touch to the list of senses which don’t belong inside his skull.  His eleventh finger can somehow
feel
the wrinkles of his cerebrum.

Bob nearly hyperventilates.  His chest is so tight, he can’t catch his breath.

After a few chattering bloody wrinkled minutes, he rushes out of the bathroom, thinking he needs more fingers, he
must
have more fingers, and he knows where to get them.

He doesn’t bother with his shirt or his jacket.  The only thing he pauses for is money. He gathers up $3.00 in coins, as well as four dollars he can feed into the change machine.

Bob leaves the door of his apartment wide open as he dashes out.

He runs all the way to the laundry mat.

The streets are deserted and he expects the laundry mat to be empty also.

He stops just inside the door, huffing and puffing, seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, and he is quite startled to discover he isn’t alone.

The girl is obviously from the nearby college; she’s wearing a t-shirt with their mascot on it.  She’s not particularly hot, she looks brainy to Bob, with her black plastic framed glasses and her dark hair done up in a bun. 

She appears to be just as startled as Bob.          

Bob doesn’t even bother looking at the vending machine offering
REAL BODY PARTS
.

He knows the warning won’t read
REAL means REAL!
until he’s alone.

Meaning this college chick needs to go.

Still trying to catch his breath, he looks at her and tells her to leave.

She looks confused then surprises Bob by actually looking concerned (but that just might be his bloody lumpy chattering brains playing tricks on him).  She asks him if something is wrong.

He doesn’t just shout, he bellows, roaring inarticulately at the top of his sizable lungs.

The girl bolts.  Bob moves out of her way and she rushes through the door without a word, her hand digging into her pocket.  He sees her pull out something silver— a cell phone— as she disappears around the corner.

Luckily the grocery store closed hours ago so she won’t find any immediate help in the area.

But he’s certain she’ll call the police.

Seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, he rushes over to the vending machine that dispenses Real Body Parts, yanking his coins out of his pocket.  A couple dollars spill to the floor but he holds on to his quarters.

Looking at the machine, he sees the display has changed. 

There are two blank spots where the chattering teeth and the nose used to be.  On the cardboard backing, there are silhouettes of the missing Body Parts with a message written inside each symbol:
ONLY ONE PER BODY!

His hands shake so bad, he drops the quarters as he tries to feed them into the vending machine.

Finally, knowing time is short, he suddenly rears back and kicks the plastic vending machine as hard as he can.  He then kicks it a second time, shattering the plastic, causing the entire side to collapse inward.   Still panting, he reaches for the eggs.

A trachea, a thymus gland, a miniature liver, a testicle, and a tiny pancreas.  He tosses all these aside and digs for more.  He handles several kinds of bones, a miniature lung (just one, not two— 
ONLY ONE PER BODY!
), a miniature kidney, a spleen, tonsils, coils of shrunken intestines, hair (exactly the color of his own), tiny parts of the inner ear, even what looks like strings of empty veins.

Nothing he finds does him any good.  He wants more fingers, he needs more fingers, and he knows there are no more.  He looks at the silhouettes of the nose and chattering teeth, both of which stubbornly read,
ONLY ONE PER BODY!

Furious, harried beyond all reason, seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob goes wild then, jumping around, tromping as hard as he can on all the little Real Body Parts inside their little eggs.  Plastic capsules crack beneath the hard heels of his shoes.  And while he sees no blood on most of the clean little organs before squishing them, when they pop underfoot, they splatter like bloated mosquitoes, splashing sometimes as high as his knees.  Bob does a psychotic blood dance, trying unconsciously to move his feet as fast as the chattering teeth inside his head.