Alan Baxter - The Gulp - Five Tales of Horror

Come and help me, son.

Zack jumped. He must have imagined it, but the voice of his mother had been all too real. Stress maybe. She was dead. Really dead at last. He can’t have heard her.

Unable to help himself, he drew a deep breath in, held it, then opened her door for a look. The breath escaped him in a rush, his eyes going wide. He scrabbled his hand around for the light switch, not believing what he saw in the low light coming from the kitchen behind him.

The room burst into light as he flicked the switch, and he stared. What the hell was growing all over her?

Maddy crept ina little after 2 a.m., closing the front door and leaning against it for a moment. Physically satisfied – for a funny-looking fucker, Dylan knew what do with his gangly body – she was still mentally antsy. She was also pretty drunk.

A bead of light glowed from under the closed door to her mother’s room. She frowned. Zack must have turned it on, but she wondered why. Maybe he’d gone in again to look at her. This must be hard for him. He always kept some part of his heart open to some essential goodness he saw in their mother. Or believed in, even if he never saw it. It showed what a good person he was, but he suffered for it. Maddy had long-since locked away every part of her heart where their mother was concerned.

Well, she could lay there dead with the light on. Maddy wasn’t about to crack open that stench, even to flick the light off. She went and looked into Zack’s room and he was curled up under the doona, snoring softly.

She suppressed the urge to go in and kiss his forehead. Only thirteen months apart, it was ridiculous how much of an older sister she felt sometimes. Girls mature faster than boys and all that shit, maybe. With a sigh, she went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and washed her face, then headed into her bedroom, stripped to her undies and pulled her current sleeping t-shirt on. It was a gift from Dylan, a Bullet For My Valentine tour shirt. She kind of loved it. Poor Dylan, he was a good person too, and she hated the thought of breaking his heart. She’d have to do it soon, it wasn’t fair on him to drag things out. She wasn’t the sort to settle down, certainly not now, and hopefully never.

She fell into bed and sleep swept over her.

The alarm woke her at seven and it didn’t feel like she’d moved a muscle since she hit the sheets. With a groan, lamenting the background pounding of her head from last night’s beer, she stumbled up and went into the bathroom to piss. On the way back she leaned into Zack’s room to call him awake, but frowned. The lump wasn’t under the doona any more.

“Zack?” Jesus, her voice sounded like a sixty-a-day smoker’s croak. Should have drunk some water in the bathroom.

She went into the kitchen, planning to drink a big old glass of water before calling for Zack again. He was already in there, dressed in his school uniform. His eyes were haunted.

“You have to look at Mum.”

Maddy swallowed, went to get water and it was nectar on her parched throat. She turned and leaned back against the sink. “What?”

“You have to look at Mum.”

“What do you mean. Are you okay?”

“Please. Just go and look at her.”

She stared at him a moment longer and his steady gaze discomforted her. With a frown, she downed the rest of the water, put the glass down and went back along the hall to their mother’s room. She stood a moment, gathering herself, took a few steadying breaths. Then she held the last breath and opened the door.

The held breath rushed out of her along with her voice. “The fuck?”

The light was on still, the thin curtain shifted in the breeze of the open window. Her mother was in the bed, propped on the pillows exactly like the day before, but she was covered in… something. Maddy leaned forward, trying to see better without going in. The bedclothes were rumpled, stained near her mother’s corpse with yellowing patches. Her mother had on a t-shirt that before had clung to her bony frame like a rag, but now stood taller, as if the woman had gained weight overnight. Her bare arms lay either side of her torso, her scrawny neck emerged from the shirt, her skull face staring sightlessly up at the ceiling, but all that exposed skin had pale lumps over it. Rounded and smooth, white as alabaster, like half-ping pong balls dotted all over her. There was barely a centimetre or two of skin between each of them. One covered her left eye, her right eye down in a hollow between two others. One pushed from the side of her nose, another forced her mouth open in a silent scream. Several made a range of rounded hills out of her neck, more on her shoulders under the shirt. Her forearms were covered in them, the back of her hands. Her fingers were splayed as the smooth white half-orbs grew between them. In some cases, the lumps seemed to encircle her fingers completely.

“What’s happening to her?”

Maddy startled at Zack’s voice right behind her as he looked in over her shoulder. When did he get so tall? “What is it?” she asked.

“They’re like mushrooms. They feel soft.”

“You touched her?” The horror was clear in her sharp tone.

“Not with my finger! I poked one with that straw from the water glass by her bed. It’s soft like a fresh mushroom.”

Maddy shook her head. “Is she going mouldy?”

“They were half that size when I got in last night.”

“What?”

“I looked in when I got back from Josh’s. She was covered in them like that, but they were further apart, smaller, sort of like marbles. You weren’t here, I didn’t know what to do. I shut the door and went to bed. Didn’t sleep well, couldn’t stop thinking about it. I got up about dawn, came to see again and they were bigger, like that.”

“Jesus, Zack, this isn’t normal. This isn’t what happens to dead bodies.”

“Is it because of her sickness. She said it was nothing, we knew it was cancer, but maybe it wasn’t.”

Maddy ran a hand over her head, tucked her hair behind her ears. “I don’t know any sickness that would result in… that!”

“Looks like it’s all over her body.”

“Have you checked?”

“No!”

Maddy nodded, chewed her lower lip. “We need to check.”

“Why?”

“We have to move her. We need to figure out if that’s safe. I don’t want to get that stuff on me!”

“It doesn’t smell so bad,” Zack said.

“What?”

“Sniff. It’s covering the stink.”

Maddy allowed herself a slow breath in through her nose and he was right. The sick, cloying aroma of sickness and death was still there, but vastly reduced. Unpleasant, but not appalling like it had been. “Get the big scissors from the kitchen,” she said.

Zack said nothing but she felt him move away from her. Reluctantly she went into the bedroom and took another steadying breath, then lifted the bedclothes away. The stick thin remains of her mother lay in a shallow hollow on the mattress. The sheets beneath her were dark and sticky, some foul combination of blood and shit that had leaked out of her. Zack had tried to keep her clean, but admitted he’d stopped in the last week or so before she died, unable to bear it any longer.

“She shits this black stuff that stinks so bad,” he’d said. “It just pours out of her.”

The mattress would be soaked with it. Maddy crouched, looked under the bed. Sure enough, the stains had gone right through, a patch on the floorboards where it had dripped and spattered.

“Fuck me.”

Her mother’s legs were barely more than bones, the skin browned like leather except where it was red with lesions and sores. But those things were only partially visible now under the numerous smooth white blobs growing out of her. They pushed her toes apart, grew out from the soles of her feet. Zack held out the scissors beside her. She took them.