Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad (43 page)

Speaking of things that just weren’t that fun anymore ...

He unlocked the deadbolt securing the cellar door and descended the steps. When he flipped on the light switch, he watched in amusement as Praggart’s guests tried—unsuccessfully—to remain defiant. They blinked away tears as the light blinded them and tried in vain to cover their nakedness, forgetting momentarily the shackles that held them in place.

“Had enough?” he said.

The female nodded, eyes wide with fear.

Brennan sighed. He walked around behind the girl and removed her catheter. He unlocked her ankle restraints and finished by freeing her wrists. The girl rubbed the angry red welts on her wrists and emitted a tiny “thank you” while Brennan began to decatheterize, unshackle, and otherwise detach the male.

“I trust you enjoyed your stay?” he said to the boy.

“W—will we g—get to meet him now?” the boy said.

Brennan raised an eyebrow at this. “Did he not come to see you?”

Both of them shook their heads.

Brennan frowned. That wasn’t usually how it worked.

Brennan had gotten the message on his way to his agent’s office. Don had asked if Brennan would mind “attending to the company,” a term Don had used, when he and Brennan had shared a flat in college, whenever he had guests who had overstayed their welcome. Don’s place was only twenty minutes or so from Brennan’s, and Brennan was quite familiar with his old friend’s strange appetites, so he didn’t mind stopping in.

“Who locked you up, then?” Brennan said to the couple.

“Housekeeper,” the girl said.

“Ms. Procell,” Brennan said.

The girl nodded.

“I see.”

Brennan looked around, sighed, and said, “Well, the show is over, kids. Wasn’t it fun? Nothing like a weekend in the cold and dark, eh? Did you learn any ‘mysteries of the flesh’ while languishing down here, hungry and alone?”

“It was horrible,” the girl said.

“Well, of course it was.” Brennan said. “You came looking for a horror story, and you found it.”

“W—what if we t—t—tell ...?” the boy said.

Brennan tuned in to his film persona and regarded the boy gravely. The kid shrunk down upon himself and started to cry.

“Do you think anyone would believe you?” Brennan said coldly.

He glared at them menacingly as they dressed in their ridiculous faux gothic clothes, and he walked them to the door. From the window, he saw the girl look back once, her eyes swimming in and out of focus.

Brennan sighed again. This was the problem with the fetishists. They loved the idea but not the reality. Reality was uncomfortable and humiliating and more than a little bit painful.

He climbed the stairs and walked down the hall to Donald’s office. It was empty, but the desk was overflowing with a flurry of papers. He walked past the desk and opened the closet door. A ladder set into the wall inside led up to the attic, where Donald really worked when he was writing.

Brennan stepped up onto the first rungs of the ladder, though his knees protested and his lower back threatened to revolt. The large, empty room above, with its bare wood floors and the single bulb hanging from the ceiling, was Don’s preferred working space. He would sit there, with pen and notebook in hand, and craft whole universes. He wrote, sometimes, for days at a stretch without sleep or food.

When Brennan climbed up out of the hole, though, he first noticed that the room was vacant.

Then he saw that Donald had been up to something.

The floor was covered in plastic sheeting. Several spotlights on long tripods stood around a small work area in the middle of the room. A small hand mirror lay, cracked, near a metal worktable. Brennan took a few steps closer, saw the power drill lying on its side, the canister of metal hooks that had spilled onto the table, and a number of blades fanned out on a white cotton cloth. And he saw the arcs and spots, the dark, tacky pools and the dry, brown patterns that had painted the well-lit attic in shades of crimson and ochre.

Brennan stared. He’d known Praggart for most of his life, knew the man as a serial blasphemer, pervert, and occasional sadist, but he had never really
hurt
anyone (the occasional flogging or fisting notwithstanding, of course).

What the hell had happened? And how was Brennan supposed to deal with it?

He didn’t want to be an accessory to whatever horrible crimes it appeared that Don had committed, but he also wasn’t about to turn in a friend, even if the bastard had screwed them all when he stopped playing the Hollywood games and handed over the franchise to a bunch of cocky little shits who wouldn’t know horror if it crawled up inside their urethras and laid eggs.

There was a paper there, on the floor, partially saturated in what Brennan had to believe was blood. He stepped closer and looked at it.

Medical diagrams of some sort. A cross section drawing of a human head. Certain notes had been scribbled, in pencil, at some points of the drawing, but the writing had smudged and Brennan couldn’t read any of it.

After a thorough investigation of the scene, Brennan climbed back down the ladder. He planned to grab another of Praggart’s Heinekens, give the cat a little extra food and water, and leave an appropriately scathing message on Don’s voicemail on the drive home. He hadn’t planned on finding the black lacquered box on the previously empty dining room table.

As he approached the box, he noticed the flowing, spidery script on the note, and knew it immediately.

It read, “For Brennan—a new vista. I look forward to seeing you again.”

Don’s handwriting, naturally.

Brennan turned the note over, checking to see what, if anything, he’d missed.

It was blank.

He opened the box and looked inside. None of it made sense. The box was filled with a seemingly random assortment of newspaper clippings, some handwritten notes, a few bizarre-looking charts, a book—a—a textbook survey of linguistics—and a badly faded black-and-white photograph.

“I see you have received the package.”

Brennan, startled, spun to face the speaker: a tall, thin blonde woman, with pale skin and eyes.

“Ms. Procell,” Brennan said, regarding the strange, cold woman. “This is your doing, then?” He gestured to the box.

Ms. Procell cocked her head strangely as she looked at the box. “Mr. Praggart wanted you to have it.”

“Did he give you any messages in regard to why?”

Ms. Procell looked up at him again, and he couldn’t help feeling that her strange, glassy eyes were not seeing him.

“Where is Don, Ms. Procell?”

“Gone,” she said, the faintest whisper of a word.

“Gone where?”

Her eyes focused then on Brennan’s face, and she smiled.

“Fucking crazy bitch,” Brennan muttered to himself. With the late-afternoon traffic, it was after seven by the time he got home.

The box sat innocently upon the passenger seat, and Brennan found himself occasionally placing a protective hand upon the cool, lacquered lid.

He had taken the thing and left Praggart’s after realizing that he was getting nowhere with Procell. Brennan had never cared much for Don’s taste in friends and lovers, but Amelie Procell was the oddest. Once, when Brennan had dropped by to return Don’s latest script draft, the woman matter-of-factly disrobed in front of the two men and had begun masturbating. Her low, incessant giggling during the act had given Brennan the chills.

Thinking back, Brennan remembered something Don had told him when he was preparing for the first
Razor Dawn
film. Don had said, “I don’t want you to be the boogeyman. I want you to be the dark.” And while it was only a low-budget horror film, Brennan had taken it seriously. He took Don seriously.

For his role, Brennan had become the dark. He’d seen and participated in things that most people couldn’t imagine. But Don ... Don always took it farther. And sometimes, Brennan had learned, the dark gets inside, like a chill, and you can’t shake it.

Brennan parked in his garage and took the box inside.

He fixed a meager dinner and ate while trying to watch television, but the inanities on the screen bored him. He had a small video library that he kept locked in his bedroom safe, but those films were not the sort of thing one watched while eating.

After dinner, he showered. He shaved, looking at his form in the steamed mirrors, appreciating the shape of his jaw, his eyes, his muscle, bone, and sinew. He could easily imagine them distorted, mutilated by the work of a team of artists over a span of hours. He’d spent thousands of hours in the makeup chair, transforming into the creature that had once graced toys, lunchboxes, comic book covers, and T-shirts all over the world.

Now he saw a man. An aging, slowly decaying man.

Nothing special.

He slipped on his robe and opted to leave Praggart’s strange box of nonsense for the morning.

And when he climbed into his bed and closed his eyes, Brennan dreamed.

Slick, red walls breathing. A hungry, painted mouth, lips parting, teeth shining. Stumbling in a darkness filled with wicked, barbed things that slid into his skin and refused to let go. Procell’s exhibitionist tendencies on display in the middle of a costume ball, except that, as Brennan pushed past masked faces and painted smiles, he saw that the emaciated and nude body splayed and wildly attending to itself was headless. The body changed. He knew, in the way that dreamers know, that it wasn’t Procell anymore.

It was Kim.

Men in the crowd gazed hungrily at the stump of the neck, and Brennan felt himself wanting to join the queue that had lined up for a turn at the gaping raw meat of her neck.

He sat up. The taste of bile filled his throat, and he thought for a moment that he would be sick, but the sensations faded. He was hot, his skin reddish and covered with a sheen of sweat.

He stumbled into the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. He took a drink and quickly spit out the oily chunks into the sink. He checked the date on the container but saw the milk should have been fine. With a sigh, he put coffee on instead, knowing that sleep wouldn’t be returning to him soon anyway.

He could feel the box there, sitting on a chair. He had to admit the strangeness of it all attracted him. He wanted to know, to understand.

After pouring himself a cup of coffee, he removed the lid and began to read.

The first several newspaper clippings had something to do with a scientist in Chicago. Brennan noted there was a pencil scribble just under the byline. Don’s handwriting again. Something from the Bible: “In the beginning was the Word ...”

Brennan read the articles, but the whole story wasn’t there. He knew the scientist was doing some kind of work with sound. Sound as it related to what? To medicine? The rest of the story didn’t make sense until he realized that Don had put the articles in chronological order with photocopies of scientific reports and an obituary feature. The scientist, it seemed, had saved a young woman, an Eve Christie, from what should have been a mortal wound (a car accident according to one report, though other reports listed a fatal stabbing and a self-inflicted gunshot wound) with some sort of mysterious acoustical technique. The article wasn’t clear on this point. Brennan continued reading and found that the story quickly turned rather bizarre.

The girl, it seems, woke up one morning, bought a shotgun, and gunned down her boyfriend for reasons unknown. She then drove to the nearby university, found the scientist who had—by all accounts, however conflicting—saved her life, and blew his head off. Then, in a bit of the text highlighted, presumably, by Praggart, the girl died. While that newspaper didn’t mention how, another report included in the box did: her body was found by grad students just after she had shot the scientist. Her body, by the students’ accounts,
disintegrated.

Brennan frowned and got another coffee.

The next piece of information in the box was a photocopy of the International Phonetic Alphabet chart, listing—Brennan would find—every sound the human vocal apparatus is capable of making, regardless of language. The chart represented these sounds with strange-looking symbols, and documented how each sound was made via anatomical “articulators” like the lips, teeth, palate, etc.

Brennan briefly glanced at the chart, didn’t understand either how to read it or its possible significance, and tossed it aside. He picked up instead the crumpled black-and-white photograph. It was a simple photo of a whitewashed house, with laundry-laden clotheslines and a child playing in the front yard. Brennan stared at the photo, unable to articulate exactly why the picture disconcerted him so ... until he saw a shady silhouette cast through a bed sheet on the line. The figure was clearly humanoid, but there was something wrong with it. Its proportions, the angle of its limbs ... something Brennan couldn’t pin down.

The textbook followed, and Brennan was puzzled by it as he flipped through the heavily highlighted and underlined passages. A cross-section diagram labeling each of the articulators for speech had been drawn over in pencil. Various fanciful swirls, dot patterns, and whorls adorned the figure, with no explanatory notes.