This twisted little tale first appeared in (and was indeed written for) the cinematic horror anthology SILVER SCREAM, edited by David J. Schow. Not seen for many years, it's back now, a sick bit of squishy fun.

LIFECAST
by
Craig Spector

Lifecast© 1988 Craig Spector. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.

By the time the temperature hit ninety-nine degrees, Philip Thomas was completely insane.

He sat by the table in the cramped, airless confines of his kitchen, sweat pasting his Dawn of the Dead t-shirt to his back and sides. A white plastic egg timer sat on the table before him, ticking off the seconds. He still had some time to go, but he was getting impatient. The phone would be ringing any minute, sure as shit. It ought to be ready by now.

Phil cracked the door of the oven and peered in at the contents. Waves of heat leached out, adding a horrible stench to the already unbearable air in the kitchen. The contents of the oven peered back, unseeing.

Ready enough.

Inside, nestled in a baking pan, was an exact alginate replica of a human face. In the past hour it had dehydrated considerably, shriveling from its normal adult size to that of a child -- two, three years, tops. And getting younger by the minute.

Phil stared into the oven. It was an act of madness for several reasons, perhaps the least of which being that it was August in New York, which was a very good time to be someplace else. Another high pressure system had stalled over the entire eastern seaboard, and it had turned the concrete canyons of Manhattan into the world's largest convection oven, baking the unfortunate inhabitants into a miserable, short-tempered stupor. Nights were no better, as the accumulated heat of the day radiated out from the walls, the streets, everywhere. On his block alone -- a dreary strip of brownstones slicing across Avenue D in an area of the East Village that passed clear through trendy, into simple squalor -- there had been two shootings, three stabbings, and more fistfights than he cared keep track of. All related, directly or otherwise, to the heat. It was felony weather, every brutal second ticking off like a time bomb waiting to blow.

Phil could relate. He was feeling a bit murderous himself lately.

And inside the oven, the alginate was still shrinking.

He smiled; showtime. When he closed his eyes, he could almost hear the screams.

•••

Philip Thomas was a tad young to go over the edge: on the dawn side of twenty-two, with a lingering air of adolescent awkwardness that belied what experience he had. But he made up for his youth, with talent and intensity and an obsessiveness that bordered on mania. He was tall, thin, pale and stoop-shouldered from too many bright summer days spent hunkered over clay models and molds in the basement. Gaunt, haunted features shrouded coal-black eyes that picked up every detail and stored them forever, and but the barest hint of facial growth struggled to offset a prematurely receding hairline. He looked like a tuberculous Edwardian poet, if you were feeling neo-romantic, or a twerp-faced geek if you weren't. In truth, he was neither.

In truth, Philip Thomas was an artist.

He stood there, flaking dried bits of rubbery goo off his fingers and checking the alginate's progress with a perverse and resounding glee. Amazing stuff, alginate. It was a makeup artist's best friend: a chalky white powder, actually made from sea algae. Dry, it was inert and generally useless. But add liquid, mix it up, and presto! It became a gelatinous blob, which set to a rubber-like consistency in minutes and picked up the tiniest detail of anything it touched.

As with every other aspect of his craft, Phil took it very, very seriously. In his brief, struggling career he'd slathered veritable mountains of the stuff across the heads or tits or bellies or behinds of one low-rent starlet or has-been actor after another, in anticipation of their upcoming hatchet-in-the-face scene, or wet t-shirt/chain-saw sequence, or chest-burster Alien-ripoff, or whatever other bit of cinematic Cheez-whiz to which Herschel Floyd would periodically enslave him. Of course, for most applications you generally mixed it with water, but today called for an extra special effect.

And, except for the smell, blood worked surprisingly well Phil winced as a stinging trickle of sweat found his eyes. He slipped on an oven mit, gingerly lifting the pan up and out the heat. This was a delicate phase of the process; no sense in rushing things.

He carried the pan out of the kitchen and into the living room, where the heat went from unbearable to merely suffocating. Demons, mutants and mangled limbs greeted him from every surface of the room, throwing monstrous shadows across the walls and ceiling. They were his creations, and his friends: the great horned troll adorning the mantlepiece of the bricked-up fireplace, and the dwarfish minions flanking it, all cutting-room floor fatalities from Voodoo Vacation; the pair of hacked-off, shredded arms which looked so real in person and so ridiculous in Class of Splatter High. The human-faced spider-thing, with eyes of glistening marbles, that sadly spun its web across the mirror over the mantle, a pre-production reject from Invasion of the Maggot Eaters. Screaming skulls and mutant body parts adorned the bookshelves; even the cupboard at the end of the room held the headless female torso from Slaughterhouse Slumber Party, replete with pitchfork tines protruding below the breasts in neatly-spaced holes.

"Evening, dear," he said, laying the pan on another cluttered table. He flicked on his work light and began inspecting the cooling features. This was serious. Every crease, every wrinkle had to be absolutely perfect, even if the ritual didn't strictly require it.

The face in the pan was Herschel Floyd's, taken from the plaster positive Phil had for Chainsaw Cheerleaders. (In sleazoid Hitchcockian imitation, Herschel Floyd's ego asserted itself via cameo appearance as the exploding head in the obligatory bone-squat/make-out scene, thus acheiving him immortality while compelling some feckless bimbo to quaff the big-veined man-thang in take after take.) The positive from which the mold was taken was propped on the table, facing him: eyes closed, mouth frozen open like Mr. Bill in Hell, bearded jowls drooping, looking altogether more like a deathmask than a lifecast.

"Both, actually," he said to the face. He held up the negative, a bowl-shaped shell of the original with the features on the inside. The alginate's shrinkage had left the features looking more like a pissed-off raisin than a man: all pinched in and wrinkled, its little mouth a puckered sphincter in the center. "Your true character revealed, Hersch, ol' buddy." He looked at the shrunken form. "I do good work, yes?"

There was no reply: its lips were sealed.

"Aw, poor little fellah." Phil took an exacto knife and rectified the problem. "That's better, isn't it?" he twisted the alginate slightly, forcing the tiny mouth into a hideous tiny grin. "I've got big plans for you, you know." He addressed it in his best Mr. Roger's voice. "Can you say, 'san-tah-reeh-ah'?" The tiny face nodded in his grasp.

"I knew you could."

Phil Thomas had paid his dues-- films that were low-budget, more often no-budget, forcing him to make miracles out of next to nothing in the worst of all possible circumstances. He'd been abused and jerked off, conscripted into constructing the requisite monsters and mayhem out of foam latex and chicken wire, squibs and stage blood and pure heart-sweat, all in the hope of that one big break.

Three years into the business, and that one big break was still as elusive as ever. But Phil had gotten better. Much better. It was inevitable: no matter how vile or trashy the production as a whole, it was still his heart up there, his soul on the screen with his creations.

It was more than just a job, after all.

It was his life.

Phil smiled, laid the alginate face down and began sifting a few c.c.'s of Ultrocal-30 plaster mix into a bowl. "You've no one to blame but yourself, you know." He talked to the mask as he worked, a by-product of habitual solitude. "You shouldn't expect to go fucking with a man's lifelong ambition and go unpunished, should you?" He glared at the mask.

"Of course not."

And makeup had been Phil Thomas's dream ever since the he first saw Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, skulking out of the sewers of Paris and into his living room courtesy of WTAR's Creature Feature matinee. He went apeshit over the Creature From The Black Lagoon. He devoured the drawings in Creepy and Eerie comics before he was even old enough to read the words; in school he was extremely popular around Halloween and when they needed someone to run the magic show at the Spring Fair, and virtually ignored throughout the rest of the year.

All of which was fine by Phil. He was a loner by nature, given to pursuing his hobbies under his parents' indulgent inattention. Young Philip Thomas liked magic tricks, music, models, monsters.

And movies.

Especially horror movies.

They were the best, the ones that hit everyone right in the yahooties. Philip was culturally weaned in the seventies, at the dawning of the Age of Excessiveness; a time of ruptured ideals and empathy overload, with all icons fair game and no taboo beyond reproach. A lot of people were shocked at the new explicitness, the brazen disregard for propriety and restraint.

To Phil it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

By the time puberty kicked his glands into gear he'd witnessed thirteen thousand, nine hundred and forty-two murders and/or random killings, in varying degrees of detail, and easily twice that number of maimings, tortures and sexual assaults. He'd seen Linda Blair's head twist clean around as she turbo-fucked a crucifix in The Exorcist, observed tongues being ripped out with red-hot pincers as he collected his very own set of 'stomach distress bags' from Mark of The Devil, yucked it up with Count Yorga, Vampire and a veritable host of Hammer horror films by junior high.

By the time he saw the zombies overrunning the shopping malls in Dawn Of The Dead, destiny called.

Philip Thomas had found his niche.

But he wanted more than to just sit on the one side of the silver screen as the dark, awesome magic came to life. He wanted to make the line disappear altogether. He wanted to create the illusions, himself.

And he wanted to make them flawlessly, perfectly real.

Sloppiness always spoiled the effect: nylon wires hanging out of the creature's back, seams where the latex didn't lay properly, the flat waxy pallor of the obviously fake head that took the all-too real axe -- such gaffs Philip Thomas could not abide. He was fanatical about details, even unto the tinest minutae of continuity (if the killer got sprayed with blood before he ran out of the farmhouse, then the spatter-pattern had god-damned well better stay the same when he's next seen running through the woods with a chainsaw).

He would have offered heart and soul to any of a handful of truly great filmmakers, and any of them surely would have seen the extent of his talent. He came to New York because it was the next best place to L.A., and not too far from that oh-so vital familial support network. So he came to the big city, to hustle and schmooze and weasel his way into the Promised Land.

And he succeeded, after a fashion. Philip Thomas's hard work did not go unnoticed, and within six months of his arrival, he was hired to assist on his first feature length film.

"So who do I end up working with?" he asked the stifling air. His creations regarded the query in silent assent. "Do I get Cronenberg? Friedkin? Romero? "No. Floyd," he answered, the name flat as copper plating on his tongue. "I got fucking Floyd."

Herschel Floyd, the producer/director scheissmeister, grand high potentate of Trauma Productions, Inc.-- formerly Goldenrod Productions, masters of the technicolor blowjob. That was before, of course-- before video supplanted film as the preferred medium for adult entertainment, and the bulk of the porn film industry sank like a mastodon in a tarpit.

In a luckier world, he'd have gone down with the herd.

"But this is not a very lucky world, is it?" Phil asked the face in his hands. It frowned. "Nosirree."

Because Herschel Floyd fancied himself as more than a sleaze merchant. Herschel Floyd was an auteur. Herschel Floyd had mutated with survival instincts that would shame a cockroach, shifting into the one genre where people with a little bit of money, even less imagination and absolutely no talent could still make a killing.

And straight into a crash course with Philip Thomas.

Of course, he'd brought along the same delicate sensibilities that had allowed him to spawn such rip-off megahits as Bondage Bitches in Heat, Beach Blanket Bimbo, or a host of others. Which meant that Herschel Floyd made tons-o'-bucks, none of which ever seemed to find its way into the next production budget. He drove a black Mercedes coupe with a cellular phone in it, did prodigious quantities of cocaine and otherwise brandished his zeal in a way that attracted the young, the unconnected and the eternally hopeful.

And when he had gotten the hungry ones assembled, their vision burning to express itself, he did the only thing an auteur of his calibre could ever possibly do.

Hack. Slash. Chop.

He glared at the lifecast, blinking back saline beads from the corners of his eyes. "So what else is new? Herschel Floyd: killer of hopes, mangler of dreams. You attach yourself to real talent like a leech and don't drop off until you've sucked them dry." Hershel Floyd's ash-white image remained fixed, immutable. "You humiliate and bully creative people until they're only hope of survival is to become a twisted reflection of yourself."

"And worse yet," he added, under his breath and over the growing knot in his throat, "worst of all.

"We let you get away with it."

It was understandable, at first. He didn't know squat about the lurid guts of the dreaded Industry, and had simply tried to do his best. But the work on Slaughterhouse Slumber Party was ultimately buried by lame editing, a bone-dumb plot and Herschel's insistence on casting ex-Penthouse Pets and softcore burnouts for the female leads on the basis of their under-the-desk auditions. Of course, the cudos afforded his work in the otherwise scathing reviews in Cinefex, Fangoria, Cineteratologist and the other FX rags took a little of the sting out of seeing his work brutalized. And, slime though he was, Herschel was smooth, a consumate master of the buttered back-entry. Thus, when Herschel called him to work on Trauma's next project, Phil still had that brittle crust of hope, that this time, this time would be different.

He should have known.

Toxic Shock Avenger, the terrifying tale of a deformed boy menacing a wealthy all-girl summer camp with lethal tampons, was a nightmare quickly becoming a disaster. Phil had driven himself, under Herschel Floyd's aesthetic sword of Damacles, to the point of near-collapse on the project; designing and redesigning the prosthetics for the dreaded applicator scenes, making the Avenger's super-absorbent head seem really believable.

The on-location conditions were, of course, appalling: weeks at an abandoned dioxin dump in New Jersey, where one of the locals bragged that the E.P.A. had declared its inspection results safe because "they only test six inches down, and we buried it two whole feet". One of the actresses-- a former Miss November-- quit after an unsightly rash broke out on her thighs. Meals-- if you considered such delicacies as cold, blue-green spaghetti (so congealed that it retained the shape of the spatula a full half-hour after it was scooped) food-- were served on tables made from plywood sheets laid on recently-emptied waste barrels. The relentless heatwave made his prosthetics finicky and his chemicals unstable; Phil spent half his time inhaling noxious fumes and the other half trying to avoid blowing up.

But it was worth it. The Avenger was scary, dammit, a goddamned masterpiece. The best work he'd ever done.

Until Herschel. Gak. Spew. Plork.

The bastard ruined it, somehow: when they screened the dailies, the head came off looking rubbery and stupid, the horror reduced to cheesey laughability. Herschel blamed Phil. Of course, Phil knew who's fault it really was, whose negligent vision was ultimately responsible for the insipid awfulness unfolding before him. But that didn't stop the creep from screaming "Who's the incompetent twit that did this shit?" as Phil sank into his seat in the screening room. "Thomas, you asshole! This shit doesn't look real! It's doesn't work! It's garbage!! Jeezus, we're gonna have to reshoot all of this shit! You call yourself a makeup artist?! Jeezus! You're fired! Get the fuck outahere!

Phil had fled then, unable to cope with the abusive tantrums any longer. This was not the first time, but that was hardly the point. Something in him just snapped. The harangue continued on, echoing off the walls, burning in his mind long after he'd gone.

"You call this magic?!! I want to see some fucking magic, goddammit! Get me somebody who can do it right!! Now!!!"

That was two days ago.

"I got some magic for you now, alrightee," Phil muttered. "This one's so good that even your participation couldn't fuck it up." He surveyed the array of objects surrounding Floyd's lifecast on the cluttered tabletop: the telephone answering machine, a TDK hi-bias cassette, a wooden box drilled with airholes, a pair of heavy duty rubber- and-canvas workgloves, the large votive candle that he'd scored at Los Campeneros bodega on Avenue D, and the bowl of Ultrocal.

And, stippling the plaster surface of the lifecast, perhaps the most important ingredients of all. They were very small, unnoticeable to all by the most observant gaze. They'd been plucked accidently from the bristling expanse of Herschel's face, back when the original cast had been taken. A few stray whiskers, lifted by the pull of the alginate, then transferred again to the plaster positive, where they even now protruded like saplings on a snow-covered mountainside.

Phil looked at the candle. Its inscription read Siete Potencias Africana. It had a little picture on it, a crucified Jesus surrounded by a rooster, a ladder, snakes, swords, spear and skulls, with a wall of fire behind Him and ringed by what Phil presumed were pictures of the seven 'saints': African gods brought by slaves to Cuba, and annexed into legitimacy by the Church. Chango, Orula, Ogum, Elegua, Obatalia, Yemalia, and Ochum. The Seven African Powers.

He'd seen the candles every day for years now, crowding the bottom shelf near the door at Los Campeneros, wedged between the Nine Lives Super Supper cans and Goya bean section. They were big and gawdy and ugly as sin, with a cryptic inscription in Spanish on the back, and were every one manufactured by the Blessed Miracle Candle Company of East Laredo, Texas. Just light the candle, recite the prayer, and bang, zoom, your wish would be granted.

Maybe it was the crazy-making heat, which nudged adolescent revenge fantasies clear into the kill-zone. Maybe it was the fact that last night his video store had finally gotten him a copy of The Believers , which he'd missed in the theatres because he was too busy slaving for Herschel Floyd, and he loved the scene where the spiders crawled out of Helen Shaver's face. Maybe it was because he recognized the candle even before Martin Sheen did, and it inspired him.

And maybe it was because he knew that his phone would be ringing any minute now, because he just knew that Herschel Floyd knew that Phil was the best; certainly, the best Trauma Productions could ever hope for. He'd call, all right, with weasledick apologies and backhanded complements and just enough empty promises to suck him back into the fold.

The last time Floyd fired him Phil had held out, until Floyd actually agreed to double his salary. A big hundred bucks a week-- if the checks cleared. Last time, Phil had been sucker enough to take it.

This time, he wanted a little something extra.

He lit the candle and fed the cassette into his stereo, which was his pride and joy and his sole valuable possession. He'd taken the liberty of prerecording the chant, so that he could better concentrate on the moment. Mood was everything. He'd even mixed in a recording of African rhythms he' d found buried in his record collection, as a kind of a soundtrack. The sound swelled in the room, and his own voice came back as if from another planet. . .

Phil giggled; it sounded great. Real spookshow. He donned the work gloves and reached for the box. The weight shifted as he picked it up; from inside came the frantic skittering of tiny claws. Phil checked the dexterity of the gloves: so-so, the fingertips a bit too thick and squared and clubby for any real precision. He managed to pick up the exacto knife, thinking I'll have to be quick about it. He pried up the lid, reached in and ensnared one of the screeching prisoners. Good reflexes. He pulled it out.

It was a rat: the youngest one, eight, ten ounces maybe, its eyes shiny-bright and black as night. A heckuva lot easier to come by than a live chicken in Manahattan, and a lot more appropriate. He'd caught a few last night, just by setting the box-trap in the back alley. He hadn't bothered to feed them yet; they were panicked and pissed. The one in his hand tried to bite through the offending digits, got a mouthful of neoprene and duckcloth instead. Phil squeezed it so tightly that it screeched in helpless rage and flipped it over onto its back.

"Nighty-night," he offered by way of eulogy.

And he buried the blade in the soft fur of its breast.

Blood pooled instantly around the hilt, matting the rat's fur as its body went all stiff and trembly. Death was a foregone conclusion: the blade was sharp and long enough to crack its sternum like a dirt-gray walnut, skewering the heart-muscle beneath in an invasion of cold razored steel. It expended a few feeble kicks, and then it was lights out in ratville.

Before this afternoon, he'd never cold-bloodedly killed anything before. The first one he did to make the alginate. It gave him a giddy, queasy rush in the pit of his stomach. This one felt kinda neat.

It felt like he could get used to it.

The gloves were hotter than hell in the already stifling room, causing the palms of his hands to sweat like crazy. He peeled one off, the better to work with, leaving on the other to hold the ratty carcass. He held it over the bowl of Ultrocal and opened its throat, letting the blood squirt down to spatter the mound of powder. There was a surprising amount of it in such a tiny creature; it filled the bottom of the bowl, turning the Ultrocal into a frothy mush.

When it was drained he laid the corpse on the table, close enough to the box that the others could smell it. They reacted very, very strongly, gnawing and clawing and shoving whiskered snouts through the air holes. "Mmmmmm, yummy nums," he cooed. "Soon, soon." The rats were not amused.

Inside the bowl, the plaster and blood was combining.

Outside, the temperature read niney-nine degrees.

He peeled off the other glove and tossed it aside. His palm was moist with perspiration, as much from anticipation now as from the heat. He mixed the plaster, dipping his fingers deep into the bowl and stirring it into a creamy red paste. When it was done he picked up a pair of tweezers.

"Now, this won't hurt a bit," he murmured, then he thought about it a moment. "Wait a minute; who am I kidding?" He smiled grimly at the cast, and plucked a few whiskers off its surface.

"You're not going to believe this, but I read somewhere -- I think it was Psychology Today, but don't quote me on that -- that voodoo requires only the tiniest bit of the victim in order to work. A fingernail paring, a drop of vital fluid, a single hair"-- he held the tweezers up to the light-- " each contains all the genetic indentification necessary. Neat, huh?"

The lifecast said nothing as he placed the hairs in a crucifix pattern-- forehead, chin, cheek, cheek-- in the alginate shell. The fresh blood gave off a ripe, heady odor that permeated the still air of the room. The music on the tape throbbed. In Phil's imagination, which was working overtime, he saw it coming: like a black cloud, boiling up on the horizon. Alginate was versatile: you could shrink it, expand it, liquify it and remold it into yet another shape, again and again and again. It was infinitely finer than the banal repetitiveness of another dumb psycho-slasher pseudo-plot: he could literally let his imagination run wild. He wondered how Herschel Floyd's shrunken face would look grafted onto his armpit, say, or onto the end of his fat wanger. . .

The phone rang. Showtime.

"Lights…" he whispered, clicking off the worklamp. The candle's glow remained, wavering like a beacon. "Camera…"

The phone rang again.

"…Action."

He picked up. "Hello?"

"Phil, baby! Whoa, what's that shit in the background?! Turn it down, guy!"

Phil turned the tape down. A whine of static told him that Herschel was on the car-phone; probably cruising Eleventh Avenue, looking for a new female lead. "Herschel. What a surprise."

"Heh-hey, guy! We missed you today!"

"I bet you did." Phil began brushing the paste into the alginate shell. "What exactly do you want?"

"I want you, babe. On the set tomorrow, bright an' early."

"Forget it." Phil kept brushing; thick, hasty strokes.

"Aw, don't be that way, guy." Herschel's tone was silk-smooth and oh-so-hip. Mellow, even. "You know how I get when I'm under the gun. I get crazy, okay. I say things. But you know I love ya. You're the best…"

He was really laying it on. Phil kept right on brushing, coat after coat. The blood-smell was thick in the air. The rats were getting agitated; he could hear them ripping splinters out of the interior of the box. The room seemed to close in around the candle, hot and stifling. The chanting continued, building in intensity.

"…and hey, I'll even double your salary again. Two-hundred big ones, kiddo, every week. Accounting will kill me, but hey, you get what you pay for, right? And besides, we really need you here. The Avenger needs you. I need you. Trauma needs your magic touch, guy. Whaddaya ssssaaaaayyyy…?"

One of the problems with Ultrocal-30 is that it gets hard suddenly. It has a lot to do temperature, and timing. Sometimes it could be a real pain. Then again, sometimes the timing was just right.

"D'ja say something, Hersch?" Phil paused the tape. The voice on the other end of the line was one long, unhealthy vowel movement, spiralling up and up what sounded like intense pain.

"Herschel? Are you alright? Speak up!"

"Aaaaaaeeeeeiiiiiihhhh…"

He was reminded of the old Warner Brothers cartoon, the one where Bugs Bunny tortures the fat opera singer by filling his throat spritzer with liquid alum, and the opera singer goes "figaro…figaro…figaro" as his head gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

It was kinda funny.

For about two seconds.

Then the rush hit: his heart pounding suddenly in his throat, cold sweat breaking out from every pore on his body as he realized that this was real, this wasn't just an adolescent revenge-fantasy anymore, this was it he was really fucking doing it! He wished he could have a camera rolling, lens focused in tight tight close-up to drink in every awful detail. He closed his eyes, head reeling, as his mind-movie came to life. . .

….skin, muscle and ligament pulling taut, stretching his eyelids until the socketed orbs burst, follicles shrinking around the bristle of his beard until each shaft poked up thick as a pencil stub and then shrinking further still, until it was stretched tighter than the sheets on a boot camp bed; cartilage compacting, skull pressing in to trash-mash the brain, arteries blowing like high-pressure hoses, spraying blue-black blood to put out the fire that was the heat of the power, the heat of the plaster setting in his hands. . .

From the receiver came the sound of many things breaking, and a rush of car horns. A breeze stirred through the windows, hot as dragon's breath. Phil's vision glitched back into real-time, sweat pouring off him. Terror and adrenaline co-mingled, fueling the buzz in his brain. There was power in the room, uncoiling as days upon weeks upon months upon years of frustation came to a head.

"Hey, Hersch baby!" he howled. "How do you like my new effect, you bush-league douchebag amateur! Is it real enough for you?? Do you think it works?!" He was screaming now, his face flushed with excitement and rage. "You want my 'magic touch', huh?!! Is that what you want?!!! Huh?!!!

"Well, touch this, motherfucker!"

He stood up, the shrunken mask still in his hands, and shoved it into the trap.

"Touch this!"

The rodents fell upon the bloody fetish in a feeding frenzy: tearing it to shreds, taking little pieces out of the box, each other, everything. From over the phone came a high-pitched screech and the sound of tires skidding out of control. More horns, blaring hysterically. Phil cranked the volume of the stereo back up, louder than before; it was the point in the recording where he'd gone a little overboard, snatching at foreign bits of phrases as the rhythms built in intensity, until he was practically speaking in tongues, wailing little more than garbled incoherencies. It made for great soundtrack, true.

But very sloppy ritual.

Phil fell back from the table, as the box wrenched sideways to crash on the floor. The shadows closed in, a hot blanket enfolding him. The phone slipped thuddingly from his grasp, but Floyd's screams carried well.

They were matched, in perfect stereo, by his own.

He realized, in that dreadful instant of ultimate collaboration, that he'd underestimated something fundamental regarding the nature of the dark arts, and the even darker powers he'd called upon: how very much in common they had. They, too, took their craft very, very seriously. They, too, hated to see it abused. And They required very little of the victim to work it. A bit of hair, a fingernail, a drop of blood.

Or sweat.

Phil shrieked as he lunged toward the big mirror over the mantle, his voice spiralling up and up. It was small consolation to consider that a lesser artist probably couldn't have pulled it off at all. Blunders notwithstanding, he had given birth to the perfect effect: the line had finally disappeared altogether. His fantasy and reality fused.

From the telephone: a symphony of screaming metal. Before his bulging eyes: a twisted reflection. Flawlessly real.

And perfectly ravenous.

By the time he got both hands to his face it could fit neatly into the palm of one; by the time the first whiskered snout poked its way through the soft flesh of his cheek, he was too far gone to care…

•••

The rats remained, long after the tape had played itself through. They dined by candlelight, and invited many friends.


daysleeper