Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror (29 page)

Ian nodded and licked his lips. His heart pounded so fiercely his temples ached.

“Hold him tight, Caleb!” Ernest placed a funnel at the end of the tubing in Nolan’s throat. He turned back to the pot and filled a quart-sized metal measuring cup, and he then dumped the molten metal down the tube and into Nolan’s throat. He pulled the tube out as the throat and mouth filled with the liquid, the neck and throat bulging.

“Level Five!” Ernest cried, a look of triumph filling his eyes and spreading into an enormous grin. “Subject appears to be suffocating. His eyes are—”

Nolan’s movements were lightning-fast and unexpected; in the throes of his mindless, adrenaline-powered paroxysm, he broke through the last of the thick cords and bolted upright, his head whipping. Blood poured from deep gashes across his body where moments before he’d been restrained. His arms and legs pinwheeled and struck out in every direction at once, searching for help, his brain now mush, his actions primal, mouth gasping for air.

Metal, blood, and vomit flew everywhere, coating the walls and the young men. Nolan’s pupils disappeared, and he searched and pawed blindly, trying to scream through the terrible obstruction in his throat, trying to pull it out, gasping and retching, stuffing his fingers into his mouth and reaching down his throat, his body trying to vomit out the foreign objects.

Nolan was free from his restraints but his actions were primal and desperate. His bulging eyes had focused enough so that they trained on a terrified Ernest, who was now trying in a blind panic to remember where he had left the exit.

Nolan grabbed Ernest from behind, searching for help, a desperate young man tortured beyond recognition, searching for someone to save him from his living hell. So it was his fortunate luck, and Ernest’s pisspoor luck, that he was able to exact his revenge without even knowing it.

For in his final moments, Nolan—weighed down by the metal filling every major cavity in his body—gurgled and sputtered his final gasping breaths, falling forward, impaling Ernest’s tailbone, piercing major organs with what was possibly the world’s hardest and sharpest dildo.

This contorted mess of twisted body parts fell forward into the table, crashing to the floor. The metal-filled pot overturned, spilling its boiling contents on Ernest’s head. He howled, arms flailing, the liquid hardening into a layer on his head and shoulders, the skin beneath bubbling and dissolving off his bones.

He died melting like a crayon in the sun, his colon impaled by his very own test subject, who was dead as well.

Some time later, Ian pulled himself up off the floor. In a daze he extinguished the light and pulled the door closed, shutting the carnage in behind him. His mind was numb, his body trembling.

He remembered earlier walking through a series of doors and now just walked down the passageways shell-shocked, trying to recall the way they had come just a couple of hours before. It felt like he had been down there for days. He realized it would be years before the bodies would be found, if ever.

When he reached the third door, Caleb was sitting on the floor. Ian shined the flashlight beam in his glazed eyes.

“I forgot about you, man,” Ian said, sitting on the floor beside him. “When did you sneak out here?”

“Right after Nolan fell on Ernest. I got the fuck out of there. I thought you fainted or something.”

“They’re both dead. What are we going to do?”

Caleb exhaled and ran his hands through his hair. “Do? We’re royally fucked, Ian. Unless you know the combination. Look.” He shined the flashlight in the air and the beam fell on the lock, a keypad with the series of numbers 0–9.

Ian stared at it, remembering only that the combination was seven digits long.

“Oh, shit,” he squeaked, quickly getting up and entering random patterns of numbers into the keypad. “We can figure this out. I mean, how many combinations can there be?”

Caleb raised his eyebrows. “Are you serious?”

Ian pounded away at the keypad. He wailed on the solid oak door as well but only succeeded in smashing his knuckles and cutting the fleshy pads on his hands.

“What are we gonna do?” he cried, kicking Caleb, who stared into the darkness.

Ian searched the basement for an exit, a window, a crawlspace. All he found was hallway after hallway of solid rock.

Two weeks later the food supply was rotten beyond even their desperation. Every last drop of dead blood—their only source of liquid besides the small reserve of bottled water and their own urine—had been consumed.

Starving now, Ian, whose fingernails were bloody pulps from his efforts to tunnel through solid rock, his throat raw from screaming for help hour after hour, wondered how long he would be able to survive on Caleb’s dead body.

Caleb was wondering the same thing … only he wondered if Ian would last longer if consumed while still alive. Wondered if the body parts would heal, providing Caleb with an endless food supply. Wondered what warm blood tasted like.

Staring at one another from opposite ends of the torture chamber, Ian and Caleb began another experiment in human nature.

“The Burgers of Calais” was first published in
Dark Terrors 6, The Gollancz Book of Horror
, edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton, 2002.

‡

Graham Masterton was a young newspaper reporter when he wrote his first novel
Rules of Duel
with the encouragement of his friend William Burroughs, author of
The Naked Lunch
. He went on to become editor of
Penthouse
and
Penthouse Forum
magazines before penning his first horror novel
The Manitou
which was filmed with Tony Curtis playing the lead role. Since then he has published over a hundred horror novels, thrillers, historical sagas, short stories and best-selling sex instruction manuals. He lived in Cork, Ireland, for several years, and has written a new crime novel about a female Irish detective, Katie Maguire. He now lives in England. His wife and agent Wiescka established his name as the leading horror novelist in Poland, but passed away in April, 2011. He dedicates this story to her memory. Website: www.grahammasterton.co.uk.

† † †

“The Burgers of Calais” is both a pun and a metaphor on the suffering of the people of Calais who were almost starved to death in a siege by the English in 1347, and had to eat rats to survive. They were saved only by the self-sacrifice of six eminent burghers who agreed to surrender themselves and hand over the keys of the city. But it was mostly inspired by Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation which describes how foul the ingredients of most American fast food actually is. Not rats, but pretty close.

I never cared for northern parts and I never much cared for eastern parts neither, because I hate the cold and I don’t have any time for those bluff, ruddy-faced people who live there, with their rugged plaid coats and their Timberland boots and their way of whacking you on the back when you least expect it, like whacking you on the back is supposed to be some kind of friendly gesture or something.

I don’t like what goes on there, neither. Everybody behaves so cheerful and folksy but believe me that folksiness hides some real grisly secrets that would turn your blood to iced gazpacho.

You can guess, then, that I was distinctly unamused when I was driving back home early last October from Presque Isle, Maine, and my beloved ’71 Mercury Marquis dropped her entire engine on the highway like a cow giving birth.

The only reason I had driven all the way to Presque Isle, Maine, was to lay to rest my old Army buddy Dean Brunswick III (may God forgive him for what he did in Colonel Wrightman’s cigar-box). I couldn’t wait to get back south, but now I found myself stuck a half-mile away from Calais, Maine, population 4,003 and one of the most northernmost, easternmost, back-whackingest towns you could ever have waking nightmares about.

Calais is locally pronounced “CAL-us” and believe me a callous is exactly what it is—a hard, corny little spot on the right elbow of America. Especially when you have an engineless uninsured automobile and a maxed-out Visa card and only $226 in your billfold and no friends or relations back home who can afford to send you more than a cheery hello.

I left my beloved Mercury tilted up on the leafy embankment by the side of US Route 1 South and walked into town. I never cared a whole lot for walking, mainly because my weight has kind of edged up a little since I left the Army in ’86, due to a pathological lack of restraint when it comes to filé gumbo and Cajun spiced chicken with lots of crunchy bits and mustard-barbecued spare ribs and Key lime pies. My landlady Rita Personage says that when she first saw me she thought that Orson Welles had risen from the dead, and I must say I do have quite a line in flappy white double-breasted sport coats, not to mention a few wide-brimmed white hats, though not all in prime condition since I lost my job with the Louisiana Restaurant Association which was a heinous political fix involving some of the shadier elements in the East Baton Rouge catering community and also possibly the fact that I was on the less balletic side of 289 pounds.

It was a piercing bright day. The sky was blue like ink and the trees were all turning gold and red and crispy brown. Calais is one of those neat New England towns with white clapboard houses and churches with spires and cheery people waving to each other as they drive up and down the streets at 2 1/2 mph.

By the time I reached North and Main I was sweating like a cheese and severely in need of a beer. There was a
whip, whip, whoop
behind me and it was a police patrol car. I stopped and the officer put down his window. He had mirror sunglasses and a sandy moustache that looked as if he kept his nailbrush on his upper lip. And freckles. You know the type.

“Wasn’t speeding, was I, officer?”

He took off his sunglasses. He didn’t smile. He didn’t even blink. He said, “You look like a man with a problem, sir.”

“I know. I’ve been on Redu-Quick for over six months now and I haven’t lost a pound.”

That really cracked him up, not. “You in need of some assistance?” he asked me.

“Well, my car suffered a minor mechanical fault a ways back there and I was going into town to see if I could get anybody to fix it.”

“That your clapped-out saddle-bronze Marquis out on Route One?”

“That’s the one. Nothing that a few minutes in the crusher couldn’t solve.”

“Want to show me some ID?”

“Sure.” I handed him my driver’s license and my identity card from the restaurant association. He peered at them, and for some reason actually
sniffed
them.

“John Henry Dauphin, Choctaw Drive, East Baton Rouge. You’re a long way from home, Mr. Dauphin.”

“I’ve just buried one of my old Army buddies up in Presque Isle.”

“And you
drove
all the way up here?”

“Sure, it’s only two thousand three hundred and seven miles. It’s a pretty fascinating drive, if you don’t have any drying paint that needs watching.”

“Louisiana Restaurant Association … that’s who you work for?”

“That’s right,” I lied. Well, he didn’t have to know that I was out of a job. “I’m a restaurant hygiene consultant. Hey—bet you never guessed that I was in the food business.”

“Okay … the best thing you can do is call into Lyle’s Autos down at the other end of Main Street, get your vehicle towed off the highway as soon as possible. If you require a place to stay I can recommend the Calais Motor Inn.”

“Thank you. I may stay for a while. Looks like a nice town. Very … well-swept.”

“It is,” he said, as if he were warning me to make sure that it stayed that way. He handed back my ID and drove off at the mandatory snail’s pace.

Lyle’s Autos was actually run by a stocky man called Nils Guttormsen. He had a gray crewcut and a permanently surprised face like a chipmunk going through the sound barrier backward. He charged me a mere $65 for towing my car into his workshop, which was only slightly more than a quarter of everything I had in the world, and he estimated that he could put the engine back into it for less than $785, which was about $784 more than it was actually worth.

“How long will it take, Nils?”

“Well, John, you need it urgent?”

“Not really, Nils … I thought I might stick around town for a while. So—you know—why don’t you take your own sweet time?”

“Okay, John. I have to get transmission parts from Bangor. I could have it ready, say Tuesday?”

“Good deal, Nils. Take longer if you want. Make it the Tuesday after next. Or even the Tuesday after that.”

“You’ll be wanting a car while I’m working on yours, John.”

“Will I, Nils? No, I don’t think so. I could use some exercise, believe me.”

“It’s entirely up to you, John. But I’ve got a couple of nifty Toyotas to rent if you change your mind. They look small but there’s plenty of room in them. Big enough to carry a sofa.”

“Thanks for the compliment, Nils.”

* * *

I hefted my battered old suitcase to the Calais Motor Inn, changing hands every few yards all the way down Main Street. Fortunately the desk accepted my Visa impression without even the hint of hysterical laughter. The Calais Motor Inn was a plain, comfortable motel, with plaid carpets and a shiny bar with tinkly music where I did justice to three bottles of chilled Molson’s and a ham-and-Swiss-cheese triple-decker sandwich on rye with coleslaw and straw fried potatoes, and two helpings of cookie crunch ice-cream to keep my energy levels up.

The waitress was a pretty snubby-nose woman with cropped blonde hair and a kind of a Swedish look about her.

“Had enough?” she asked me.

“Enough of what? Cookie crunch ice cream or Calais in general?”

“My name’s Velma,” she said.

“John,” I replied, and bobbed up from my leatherette seat to shake her hand.

“Just passing through, John?” she asked me.

“I don’t know, Velma … I was thinking of sticking around for a while. Where would somebody like me find themselves a job? And don’t say the circus.”

“Is that what you do, John?” she asked me.