Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

ROBERTA LANNES Pearl

The tumour resides in me like a condominium beside tenements. Its sleek, dangerous sides gleam in comparison with the worn surfaces of my surrounding organs. It pulses with purpose as veins begin to burrow graciously into its foreign body to feed it, along with capillaries whose only intent is companionship in the process. A nucleus throbs at its centre like a heart, growing a fort of malignant cells around it. A thousand minds, all programmed towards one goal, to think it larger, urge it on without conscience, vanquish any and all who seek to destroy it, and order it to spread until the host, me, breathes only for it. Urban redevelopment.

She sits on the edge of the bed, slumped against wakefulness. The new lace curtains flap stiffly in the morning breeze. She feels him lying there, her devoted and painfully needy spouse, silently yearning for attention from her. He’s feigning sleep. She has become so separate from him that she feels the distance as a pure weight. The moment his breathing quickens to signal his waking, she pulls herself up and begins plodding towards the bathroom.

She loves the bathroom with its rosy tiles, bright white grouting, fluffy ivy green and celadon towels and cheery framed prints of cottages in gentle gardens. More than these, she adores the scents trapped in the paint and ceramic from years of ablutions: hydrangea, orange blossom, eucalyptus bath oils, hairspray, deodorant, and talc in Lily of the Valley, musk, ylang-ylang and rain. The pot-pourri on the window-sill has gone dry and its gardenia aroma faded to a memory.

Avoiding her reflection, she passes the mirror to the toilet. Lifting her jersey slip gown, she sits down and urinates. The rush of warmth, the relief of pressure, makes her sigh. She wishes she didn’t have this thing growing inside her making her have to pee what seems like every hour. She hears him roll over. The bed creaks. Sheets shift. Her heart slams. She waits. The draining discussions that come with his invasions loom outside as unwelcome as that which grows inside her.

It’s been ages since she recalled their past together with gratitude and love. This man feels to her now like an ever-present rat she can’t quite catch to kill — to give her the peace of mind it will never surprise her in the night or steal her sleep or make her feel dirty — the thing that keeps showing up to remind her she’s vulnerable. Once he was everything she’d waited too long to find. Her ‘perfect match’. An artist as successful as she, who wasn’t the least bit intimidated by her, who shared her values, beliefs, and showed her she could be more than she imagined. They shared everything. Nothing ever went unsaid. Last year on their anniversary, she’d been astonished to find they had created a marriage that had surpassed her ideal, which was the envy of those who circled around them like the homeless around a fire.

But there was one value, one life choice they had never discussed, because at the time it seemed irrelevant. An impossible notion. And when it came up, they were diametrically opposed. And it was too late to compromise.

Within a dark pearl inside a tiny oyster, the thing has begun to grow hair, teeth and a tail. It bites every so often, reminding me I’m not alone. The pain is surreal. As if the tumour grows in an amputated foot and troubles the missing appendage instead of my gut. Its hair is wire, arcing, curling, imbedding itself into clean tissue, cutting, slicing, hoeing the site for brethren. The tail reminds me of a parasite I heard about once at a party. A thing that grew twenty feet long into the host’s stomach from the intestines, eating anything that was dumped there for digestion, starving the host. I can feel this parasite travelling up my spine towards my brain. Will it eat my thoughts? Will my body functions go haywire because that thing eats nervous impulses like snacks? Though kindred tumours have not yet grown rampant, they have sprouted. I detect them. Spawn. The mother is so big I have given her a name. Cybele.

Standing beside her agent, she considers her oil pastel paintings on the walls of The Culp/Griffey Gallery. They’re like a row of windows refusing to open. He tells her ‘they are impenetrable’, that the gallery owner has somehow imagined what she wants to see in them. What else would possess her to set up this show? She must be going through ‘the change’, he says with undisguised disdain. He warns her that the critics will say the same things he’s saying. Opaque. Dense. Obfuscations so cold that they make you flinch away. Obscure. Uninviting.

They hide nothing! They’re the reflections of the darkness in me, she thinks. The darkness born of the growth inside her that evolves every moment into a nemesis. Her demise.

Perhaps, she thinks, the work is of me inside of it. Each darkly coloured image is of a fast-faltering light, a weak beam that trains itself into the murky depths only to find indefinite, ill-defined edges. Subterfuge and vagaries. Here, a glimpse of buildings through a fog, warped in a funhouse mirror. There, a faintly glowing figure rushing past at twilight when you’re nearly blinded by the remnants of the day. Like dreaming under water, the sun a league above you.

She tells her agent she hates analysing her work, doesn’t he know that? She turns from him to the room. Everyone is wearing black in some form — leather, wool, denim, silk. They devour light as they stand about like iron nails pounded into blonde wood. They mutter and chatter over their latest personal acquisitions, ogling her pieces as if doing so was strictly required in order to sip the champagne and consume the designer hors d’oeuvres.

Someone asks if anyone knows the artist. Her husband is standing close and turns his bright eager face towards the question. She knows he’ll point her out, pride swelling him like a pigeon that’s eaten a bowl of uncooked rice, so she excuses herself. Too late. She must stand in the rain of forced adulation or stinging judgment without an umbrella once again.

A fashionable dowager looks her over, says, I was wondering if your series is indicative of the onset of menopause? The woman has a scaffolding of loose skin between her chin and collarbone like a tangle of jungle vines, her face overly lifted so her eyes are catlike. Her chest is flattened by a double mastectomy or gravity beneath a charcoal silk tent and obsidian pashmina shawl. Pearls the size of gumballs fall over that.

The consummate artist avoiding confrontation, she pulls at the hairs that curl onto her cheeks, then lets her hands fall slowly over her swollen, tender breasts to her hips, testing their sturdy presence, daring comparison. The woman sees this, swallows hard, her smile inching into a line perpendicular to the vines of her neck.

No, she says, going for a look that might bring adjectives to mind like sparkling and radiant, why do you ask?

Her agent has taught her many tricks. Artists are not the best advertisements for buying their work. They need grooming, he’s told her. Make the client talk; invite them to see what they will. They buy things they think they understand, especially if they think they understand them better than you.

The woman corrects the drape of her shawl and blinks rapidly under brows that grow closer and down. She is suddenly hard, saying that the pieces say barrenness. Fear of incompleteness. Disconnection.

She nods, appearing fascinated. Without reason for defence. Feeling something more sinister viscerally, nearer the objective of the thing inside her. Perhaps from it. Really, she says without a trace of rancour, tell me more.

He stares at me from across our studio when he thinks I’m involved in my work. I pretend not to notice. I feel so sorry for him, not knowing the truth. But I know him. He’d crumble; make me take care of his misery, his upset, instead of myself. He’d say ‘we can see this thing through together’, just as he always has, but he has no idea what ‘this thing’ is. That it’s bigger than he and I together.

He’s been working on twelve-foot-high paintings lately, where he has to get up on a ladder. He’ll make jokes about Michelangelo, a fear of heights, his SissyTeen Chapel, hoping the old me will surface and laugh myself sick on his tarps. There are moments I want to laugh. It won’t let me.

It has feet now that kick, hands that grab at my kidneys, intestines and yank. A tumour that uses Kung Fu. I have no defence against such a cunning opponent. Medicaments and interventions of the stealthy chemical or mechanical kind have had no effect. Talking to it when I am alone doesn’t still it. No. I can’t believe I’m going to be all right. This thing owns me.

I see the malignant thing in my mind. Its children, feral and aggressive, run wild inside me, finding purchase, growing. Calling to each other, over here — this looks like as good a spot as any to take root — try this tissue, it’s succulent and easy! They are crafty, deceptive. They have to be to resist all I have thrown in their way. They are so many, now. They have tiny faces, and though I can’t envision hard, evil visages on children, I know they must look like devils. Their mother has a large ovoid face with an angry vitriolic grimace, teeth sharp as needles, long as stalactites, eyes wide full of vengeance.

I give up. Take me. I don’t want a fight.

Elbows hooked inside the sink, she vomits. His hand is on her back, stroking, he’s purring words of comfort. She knows he can’t imagine that it is his touch that makes her retch. When she’s empty and all that comes up is the breath ofCybele, she unhooks her elbows and crashes to the floor.

Leave me alone, she tells him. I’m just sick. He sighs. Even his sighs have the effect on her of fingernails on a chalkboard. He threatens to call 999. Go ahead she tells him, knowing he won’t do anything to cause conflict between them. Nothing that might increase the distance. He walks out of the kitchen; his footsteps stop sounding on the carpet.

Her body is disappearing to bones that click and rattle like chopsticks in a paper bag. Starving the thing hasn’t worked. Still her belly swells full of the Cybele and her children, putrefying her insides. Cancerous maggots, roiling there. Reminding her of a life she cannot control, a being that threatens to throw everything that is free and light into an abyss, filling her with the dread of it.

Even as she loathes her husband, she fears he’s going to leave. Why not, she thinks? Who would want to live with a woman who harbours a monster so vile, so heinous, it will destroy everything? She sometimes reaches the point when she believes she has to tell him the truth so he’ll stay. But it won’t allow her to. It holds her tongue and chokes her when the words gather there.

Does she want to save him, or the world? She can’t decide if one will lead to the other, or if in saving one, the other must perish. He was once her world. No more. She is now the beast.

She thinks, I am Cybele.

I hear him on the phone. He says he knows. It all makes sense now. The dark moods, the distancing, her nausea and lack of appetite, the disappearance of her libido. She’s pregnant. How does he know? He’s found the white plastic stick with its tiny window with screaming red ‘plus’ sign stuffed into a cardboard tube from the toilet paper, along with the instructions. She’d shoved it between some old magazines and newspapers to be recycled out back. Accident or providence brought him to it. He doesn’t know why she couldn’t simply tell him. It’s not like her. Though she hasn’t been his her in months.

He says she lies in bed most days. Gets up to draw a while, loses interest, and wanders back to the bedroom. Maybe she is ill. Something could be wrong with the pregnancy. But at least now he knows. He smiles wanly at her as she passes him in the hall. She’ll only look at him out of the corner of an eye, furtively, as if catching his eye would dissipate her will to keep silent in her secret.

I know he’s thinking I know. If only.

He says he’s determined to confront her. He wants to know when it was she took the damned test. It could have been weeks, or months. She wears baggy things and won’t let him see her without clothes any more. She did say several months ago that she didn’t want to have a child. That she was too old anyway; it was a moot point. But that if we had one, we couldn’t be selfish with our time any more. We’d have someone else between us. He told his friend he thought the idea terrified her.

What if… she did something to it? I’ve found straightened coat hangers and paregorics and strange thin rubber tubing in the bathroom.

I hear him catch a sob in his throat. Oh, God, he says. Oh, God.

It affects all of me, now. My skin is becoming dry, tight, splitting at my heels, around my fingernails. Patches of skin on my face are tinted darker than the rest. My hair is thinning about my face and growing thicker everywhere else, my nails, once pink, look bluish. There’s a dark slash from my navel to my mons, like a scar. I wonder if it is a weakness growing on my belly where it will push its way out, like a creature in a thriller. Something plump, livid, and very painful, is bulging from my rectum, dripping blood into the toilet, when I dare to look. It’s eating me, my sanity.

Everything hurts. My back. My chest. I think I’m dreaming most of the time. A fever dream. Or a nightmare. I cannot bear to look at myself, not even as I wash, thinking with each glance another flaw will become evident, another defect Cybele has cursed me with in her unrelenting battle. I’ve given up, dear. I submit. Stop this.

Winter has come and she sits at the window. Her breath makes a frosty mask before her, but she stares past it at the icy lawn. She’s so weak from lack of food, lack of care, her elbow finds the windowsill to steady her. He piles another quilt on her shoulders, puts one over her knees until she’s a caterpillar in a cocoon. She knows there is no butterfly to break free. No magic wife returning from her spiral towards the end.

Outside the window, he’s made a snowman with stick arms. Is he mocking her? He whispers that he loves her when he thinks she’s asleep, as if telling her will make her love him back. If loving him could save her. She’s closed now, all of her willed to the thing.

When he taps his boots on the linoleum floor and tells her he’s off to the store, she closes her eyes. As the door shuts, she smells the clean scent of him in the wind that rushes in. Once it would have invited her to him, made her cling to his ardour. Now it reminds her of what she’ll never have again. Health. Innocence. Nothing to regret. She hates him. Hates him nearly as much as the growth that is slowly eating her life.

She throws off the blankets and quilts. With the strength she finds in her hatred, she pushes up the window. The cold hits her hard and she reels. It caulks her lungs as she breathes it in. She shivers, teeth clattering so hard she tastes fragments of enamel.

Her chest tightens and the pain in her arms and legs makes her wonder if she’s having a heart attack. Good, she thinks. If there is no life in me, you die. Take this, you motherfucker!

She sees them together; her husband stands beside the psychiatrist looking at her from the doorway. She’s lying there as if she’s dead, but her vital signs are only weak, not gone. She’s hooked up to so many monitors and feeding tubes, she thinks she must look like a dying plant in the garden, pinned to the trellis wall.

The psychiatrist sighs, tells him she’s stabilised, but still delusional. It may be as simple as her lacking calcium. That could affect her nervous system, her thinking. After all, she’s refused to eat. It makes sense. But she may also simply be nervously exhausted. A euphemism for nervous breakdown. Am I broke down, she wonders?

The psychiatrist asks, will he sign commitment papers? He shakes his head. Why not, she wants to scream! Do it! He tells the doctor that she’s simply not prepared to have a child and they will seek outside counselling. His love has made her strong before, it will again. The psychiatrist shakes his head, tells him he risks losing her. No, he tells him. She just needs a few more days in the hospital. Put her back on solid food. She’ll rally.

The psychiatrist mumbles something about murder and walks off.

The thing has stopped moving. The pain subsided. Its children have quit their frantic play. The mother has tired of this body and my embargo on her imports. I can’t yet allow myself the joy of victory because part of me wonders if this is an ambush in waiting. Or I’ve lost my mind. Or I’m already dead.

I know the ceiling of this room better than I once knew the geography of my husband’s body. I see faces and expressions that change. A Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ kind of image. And the cobwebs dance over the window in the early spring breeze. The light fixture is a great frosted globe with the chafe of dead bugs and dust of the attic in its bowel. I imagine the stuff moving, but I am safe from it down here.

He’ll come in now. I turned off the light. He only comes when he thinks something’s happened. Like it’stime. Or I’ve fallen asleep and stopped breathing because he wasn’t there to breathe for me. When he thinks he can save me. It.

If he only knew. There is no other choice. My life must take the life of this thing. Maybe then I’ve saved the world. If it’s worked, at least I’ve saved him. My lost boy, my husband. A man I once loved so much, I was the sun. I was the centre of creation.

Why am I thinking of him now? Because Cybele has ceased her assault? She realises I’ve given up! Yes. I should be thinking of what will come next. Perhaps when all is safe, I can find the sun in me again.

I’m so cold, though. I shut my eyes but see a vast brightness of congealing hues. There, a Kandinsky, a Klee! The colours and shapes! Now I want to paint, to put all the colours into my work that disappeared. I want to be free!

She smiles now. She reaches up to the light, feels as if the bed and the earth are being pulled softly down away from her. She senses he’s there, rushing towards the bed, but she doesn’t care. Her work is done here. The best work is ahead of her.

The blanket and sheet ruffle, her hair ripples about in an unseen breeze, her face is beatific. The fabric obscures her face a moment as she writhes, then a grunt, a sound like ‘aug-huh’, stretches out into a sigh. All is still.

His fingertips touch her face, too dry, too cool. His heart is tapping quickly, fear makes his breathing shallow, sporadic. He grasps the blanket and peels it back. His tears come quickly, falling onto her. He kneels onto the bed to hold her, beg her to hold on. She grows colder as his quaking quiets, stops.

He sits up, turns on the light. He wails.

She has curled into a waxen foetal rose, all bones, and dry flesh. There, nestled against her buttocks in a ragged circle of blood is a dark mass of tissue. It’s huge, bulbous, with large blue veins and yellow-white strands like long pale fingers, soft bones beneath a thin membrane. He can see faces in the thing, as if there are tiny children trapped in silvery rose bags of jelly, their hair wrapped around their heads. Embryonic cherubs. Horrible and yet benign. Their child. Children. From her. This softens him.

He moves down beside it and tenderly rests his hand on the side. It’s warm and moist, like her skin right out of a hot shower. He senses a slight trace of movement. An eye in one of the faces searches. When it finds him, all the eyes settle there, watching him. Waiting. He thinks he sees mouths grinning. The mass shivers and purrs beneath his touch. He smiles. He’s a father.