Terror Incognita (15 page)

Molly crept downstairs, to the door, out to her car...still expecting him to leap out at her from the study, from behind a bush. Wearing that mask again. He didn’t. She drove away.

*     *     *

The jungle was on fire.

Molly lay in bed, naked, without sheets, while the trees burned all around her...but there was a clear protective shield surrounding the bed, its walls flush to the sides of it. Molly knew there was a shield because not only didn’t she feel the heat of the inferno, but maddened tropical birds were occasionally plummeting blindly out of the forest, their wings in flames, only to smash against the invisible walls and rebound dead.

The screams from the depths of the burning jungle were horrifying; a cacophony of shrieks, screeches, wails. Rising up on one elbow, she watched a hippo...or so it appeared...lumber along within the line of approaching flame, moaning forlornly with head thrown back, its heavy body burning, charring, a raft of fire in an ocean of fire. Monkeys leapt aflame from one torch of a tree to another. The fire was closing in on all sides of her simultaneously, at the same rate. It was like looking into an aquarium full of hell on each side...or being lowered by bathysphere into hell itself.

The first mandrill fell against the glass, its tormented face only inches from hers, just as the fire reached the barrier on all four sides, and then the mandrill fell away. But across the bed, fists pounded on the glass. Behind her now. Cries of agony lanced into her head from all sides. Molly saw black hunched shapes inside the fire, just shadows, clawing at her walls, jumping up against them and bouncing off, piling over each other in desperation. Frantic black figures all around her now. And she wanted to reach out to them, draw them in, but of course it was too late. She couldn’t let the fire in...and besides, there wasn’t enough room in here anyway...

*     *     *

The phone woke her; she went up on one elbow, her heart punching. She clawed at the light. Third ring. She made no move to get out of bed yet, waited to hear her answering machine’s message, then the voice of the caller. While her own voice played, a glance at her clock. Only 1:15, but she had work tomorrow...

She knew who it would be, even before she heard his voice. It had been over a week and he hadn’t replied to her letter. Now as she heard him the first thing she thought was that she should have called the police that first night, just to let them know about him in case anything happened to her. How could she have begun to think it was so easily over?

His voice was pained...hoarse. Weak. “Molly...”

She shivered, made no move to get out of bed. His voice was a croak, barely human...

“Molly please...”

“Go away,” she whispered.

He chuckled sadly. “It was a mistake, Molly. I made a zoo. The cage is too small. They want to be free...they’re wild things—you know? How could I have thought they’d want to live in me?”

He grunted abruptly, then groaned, causing Molly to flinch. “Please, Nat,” she said to the phone across the room.

“Once a zookeeper, always a zookeeper, huh?” he said.

He needed help. She couldn’t just sit here. But who to call? Who would care, who was prepared to help him? Did she have a right to make a move like that? Shouldn’t she just ignore him until he went away?

A scream came from the answering machine. Shrill, piercing. A shriek of the damned. A shriek from her dream...

The phone beeped. The tape rewound.

Molly slid out of bed—through the invisible wall.

*     *     *

The police had already arrived when she got there. And there was an ambulance. People standing about, some in bathrobes.

Molly came up beside a young woman in a nightshirt, a baby in her arms. “Excuse me...I know him. What happened?”

“Ohh...are you a friend?”

“Yes. Is he okay?”

“Oh, man...I’m sorry...really. You aren’t his girlfriend?”

“No. He isn’t...dead?”

“I’m sorry, really. Yeah...he is, honey.”

Molly looked up at the house. In the bright upper windows shadows of policemen passed across the shades. “How did it happen?”

“Somebody said it looked like a heart attack, but he was only in his thirties, wasn’t he? Was he into coke or anything?”

“I don’t know. No...”

“I really am sorry...”

Molly sighed. She wasn’t crying, wasn’t even going to. Not tonight. But there was a great emptiness that opened inside her, as if the floor of her soul had fallen away, leaving her to hang above a void. It was a horrible, helpless sense of loss too immense for her to comprehend.

The young woman removed one damp arm from under the weary infant to touch Molly’s arm. “You okay? Maybe you should talk to the police...”

Molly saw that windows were broken, curtains snagged in the shards. She faced the woman. “Did you hear anything?”

“Christ...yeah. I’m sorry, but that’s why I asked you about drugs. He had a real fit up there. Throwing things...screaming. When I came out I saw him jumping around up there. It was pretty scary. At first I thought he was being murdered.”

“Why?” Molly asked wanly.

“Well.” The woman glanced at the upper windows, visibly shivered. “You know how lights can throw a lot of shadows from one person...but it looked like a whole bunch of people were throwing a fit up there. I saw shadows like leaping up and down in more window than one...you know? Like, in all of them...”

Molly didn’t say anything when the woman waited for her reaction, so she continued.

“And it sounded like...lots of voices. Lots of people screaming. I guess...maybe it was just echoes. And then suddenly they all just faded away.”

Molly nodded. Turned to gaze up at the house.

“Are you gonna talk to the police?”

“Thanks,” Molly told her, and walked back to her car...

*     *     *

Again and again Molly played the tape from her answering machine, listening to the end of that scream, so many times that it no longer caused her to tremble. Listened and listened...as if on the next listening...this next one...she would finally hear, before it was cut off, the one scream split into many.

She sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed, safe away from its edges, but feeling guilty for her safety. And listened.

DISFIGURED

Mrs. Kingston’s new forehead was high and broad, culminating in a plateau over-hung with a close fringe of bangs. Just under the fringe were a few metal clasps, and a long scar ran down her forehead from one of them. Her eyelids were weighed heavily three-quarters shut. Another long scar ran under her jaw, passing over one of the two steel bolts protruding from the sides of her slim throat.

She still lay on the table. Mr. Roy swiveled a monitor screen down to her so she wouldn’t yet have to raise the alien weight of her head.

“Oh,” she croaked, still drowsy, a small smile emerging. “Beautiful.”

Roy smiled humbly, nodded, touched buttons that gave her different angles and magnifications. She hadn’t wanted green skin, as he had suggested. She wanted to be partly recognizable. He agreed that that was desirable. Normally he didn’t consult with the clients, but some wanted to work along with him, and he had to tolerate such individuals. Normally his clients delighted in his surprising them, and he preferred that artistic license.

For Mrs. Kingston they had consulted a book on old, old horror films. He had steered her easily from her first attraction to the Bride. “Just hair,” he told her. “That isn’t enough...that won’t catch the eye.” She had agreed on the Monster. Jack Pierce’s design. Roy liked that name. He had briefly considered changing his professional name to Roy Pierce but decided that was too phony. He despised phoniness.

Mrs. Kingston had been inspired to seek out Mr. Roy when she saw his masterful transformation of her friend Mrs. Violet into Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, accomplished by shaving her hair back, bulging her eyes, drawing back her lips and making her nose skull-like. Normally Roy preferred not to work so closely from an existing model, another man’s art, but it was nice for an occasional change, and he had become intrigued with Lon Chaney. To play a hunchback, Chaney had strapped a huge heavy appliance onto his back with a harness which prevented him from straightening. For the Phantom, he had pulled at the skin around his eyes and lips and nose with a variety of painful means, as in some self-inflicted torture. Roy admired that sense of commitment, but his creations were surgical, were painless, and were not performed on himself.

*     *     *

May couldn’t help but steal glances over the top of her magazine at the man across from her. Sometimes she saw only his eyes over the top of his magazine. He was reading a glossy-covered copy of
Disfigured!,
 the soft porn magazine which appealed so to both men and women. It also contained articles, reviews, fashion layouts, but was most famous for its glamorous photo spreads of clothed and unclothed men and women, surgically deformed, maimed, transfigured.

There was still enough to see, however. The man’s head was a mushroom cloud of flesh, a bulbous mass hung with lank scatterings of hair. At one point when the man traded one magazine for another May saw how his mouth was twisted into an uneven sneer, and the man caught her gawking. She began to look away, but he spoke to her.

“The Elephant Man,” he said. “John Merrick. I was lucky to get rights—others have inquired since. Normally Mr. Roy doesn’t do work based on unoriginal sources but he says he’s always been intrigued by John Merrick. He’s sworn to make me an exact duplicate. I have only a few sessions to go. How about you?” The man eyed her up and down. May’s face was smooth and untouched but maybe there was some amazing work evolving under her clothing which Mr. Roy had yet to complete. Huge warts? A network of distended purple veins? Dozens of moving, blinking human eyes scattered across her body?

“I’m not sure. I guess I want to be surprised.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s fun, too,” said the man, though not
too
 enthusiastically—not wanting to seem unhappy with his choice.

“May?”

May looked up at the smiling hostess, who in leaning over her gave May a good look at the deep ragged fissure which ran down the center of her face from hairline to chin. “Mr. Roy is ready for you.”

*     *     *

Roy sent Armand Pittman out of his office to the front desk to make his next appointment; the bat wings which had sprouted from the sides of his head could flap, fold and retract, controlled by a chip implanted at the base of the skull, but he wanted next to have the webs of the wings tattooed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. At his desk in his office, Roy had a few moments to scan the application of May Azul for the first time on his monitor. There was a long waiting line to this, one of the most renowned offices in the city.

College student. Wealthy parents. There was a photograph.

A knock, and the hostess Iris opened the door to let in May Azul. Roy stood to extend his hand. Iris left May to advance with a shy smile.

His eyes ate up her face like a horde of ants swarming over it, scurrying in and out of hollows, nostrils, through the forest of eyebrows, all at once. He was filled with a dismay he had felt surfacing the moment his screen unveiled her photograph.

She had shoulder-length auburn hair, with an almost brassy undertone, and green-gray eyes, drowsily  lidded, though not in the manner of Mrs. Kingston’s new eyelids. Her face was not “perfect”...her nose was a bit boyishly unrefined and her “bee-stung” lips (he loved that term) were asymmetrical, this more pronounced with her lopsided bashful smile. But she was immediately striking. Her skin was white and silken, her neck long and thin, her body encased in a tight black sweater falling just to her upper thighs and banded at the waist with a realistic plastic snake (another college fad). Her legs were long in their black nylon sheaths. All this black only further heightened the snowy smooth perfection of her exposed flesh.

“Pleased to meet you.” Her hand was small, soft, a little damp in the hollow palm. “Please make yourself comfortable.” They both sat. Roy’s smile was professional, didn’t reveal his discomfort...he was as adept at smiling as at his art. He took in May’s profile as she scanned photographs on the walls and his framed credentials in art and medicine. Why should she be so striking? At this time, medicine being what it was, there were nearly no natural deformities. After a fire or accident there was no need to remain scarred. There was no need to go bald, become obese, and shrivel up with age so quickly. Roy had seen perfection for most of his life. That was why people came to him and his kind, in fact. For something different. To stand out, make a statement, express their individuality. Almost everyone who could afford it wanted some kind of embellishment, ornamentation, or full transformation—young or old, male or female. Business was booming.

She shouldn’t stand out to him, but she did. She wasn’t perfect. That was it. She was beautiful, but she had a singular kind of look—that is, he would recognize her again in a crowd. She had features he had seen before but in a fresh arrangement. She already looked individual.

“Do you have any idea what you want, May?” Her application showed three question marks on the line below a similar question.

“Well,” her attention came fully upon him, “not really. I like the idea of being surprised with an original creation...I’m sure you could think of better things to do with my face than I could.  You’re the artist. The only trouble is, my parents are a little tight with their money and a little old-fashinoned and they told me they wouldn’t pay for it again if I don’t like what I get.”

That was the risk with the surprise approach, but Roy had very few dissatisfied customers come back (or go elsewhere) to have his work undone or converted to something else. As May had just said, he was the artist, he knew best, his clients trusted his decisions, no matter how wild or surprising. And sometimes he really got elaborate—inspired. He would sweat over one work for eight hours straight, then. The work could be undone, converted (for a heavy extra charge), but usually this was only done for those who came back every year or even sooner than that for a fresh new look.