Detective Gill sat at his desk and looked around the room. There wasn’t much to do. There was never much to do in Hopetown and being a detective seemed like a wasted title. There was a knock at the office door and the department secretary came in, a small woman with an old face and wiry frame, named Kathleen.
“Graham, there’s a lady on line two. She says her daughter has gone missing. Are you able to take it?”
“Sure,” he said, and put the call on speakerphone. He sat back in his chair.
“Detective Gill.”
“Hello, Detective. My name is Margaret Moore. I’m calling from Mount Baker. It’s about my daughter.” The woman sounded about sixty, her voice was frail and shaky.
“Go on.”
“Vanessa… that’s my daughter, she lives in Hopetown and I haven’t been able to contact her for several days. It’s not like her. I’m beginning to worry.”
“Would she have gone on a holiday without telling you?”
“I doubt that. She has a baby and I don’t think she’d bother with the hassle.”
Gill reached for a notepad. “I can go out to her house and see if she’s there.”
“I’d like that. I tried calling there, though, but the phone just rings out.”
“What’s her address?”
“Oh, wait, let me just get it.”
The woman shuffled through some papers.
“56 Herbert St. It’s near the park with the golf course.”
“Yes, I know it,” he said, writing down the address. “Where does she work?”
“She works at a bar. The Green something. The Green Tavern? I can’t remember.”
“I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”
“Detective?”
“Yes?”
“Please find out what’s wrong. I’d hate to think something terrible has happened. She’s such a lovely girl. And her baby is the sweetest little angel.”
“Who’s the father?”
“He’s a troubled boy, but he’s harmless. He lives out in Templeton. He has nothing to do with her.”
“What’s his name?”
“Benny. Benjamin. Benjamin Leeman.”
“I’ll look into it, don’t worry.”
He took her contact details.
“I’ll speak to you soon, Margaret.”
He disconnected the phone and looked over his notes. They were barely coherent scribbles. He was losing his touch — getting complacent with the detective game. Perhaps this missing persons case was what he needed to get back into it and get his brain ticking again. He stood up, put his jacket on and left the office.
“I’ll be out for most of the day,” he said.
“But what if your wife calls?” Kathleen said, knowing that at 2pm every day his wife called him and they spoke for twenty minutes about nothing much at all.
“Tell her I’m busy.”
“Okay.”
He arrived at Vanessa’s house a little past midday. The sky was overcast and the ground still muddy from overnight rain. The house was beige brick, coated in moss, paint flaked off the windowsills and the front lawn was littered with disused baby toys faded from sunshine. The neighborhood barked with distant dogs, engines started and stopped, screen doors banged shut and mothers called out to misbehaving children. It wasn’t a particularly good area and Gill had already begun to paint a picture of where Vanessa Moore may or may not be.
He knocked on the door and there was no answer. He strolled down the driveway to the back gate. He peeked through a hole and saw nothing but overgrown grass and a soggy wooden decking. He let himself in and walked up to the back door. He knocked again, and wandered to the side of the house peering through windows at dusty rooms full of unpacked clothes and more baby toys. He decided not to go in, as he hadn’t yet developed enough of a case. A visit to her work would hopefully answer some questions. He left the house as it stood and felt relief that this mystery was not so easily solved.
He pulled up in the car park outside The Greenhole Tavern, a gunmetal grey building with a faux balcony draped in fluorescent banners advertising bands he’d never heard of. He walked across the gravel lot to the side entrance and disappeared inside.
His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dark. The place housed few patrons: men in their work clothes with mud up to their shins, glancing around disinterestedly. A large man with a ginger beard and long, filthy hair stood behind the bar drying glasses and placing them on an overhead rack. Gill approached the man.
“I’m Detective Gill from the local police. I’m looking for a young woman named Vanessa Moore.”
“Vanessa hasn’t shown up for work for a couple of weeks now. As far as I’m concerned, she doesn’t work here anymore.”
“What was the first day of her no-show?”
The man turned around and walked over to a piece of paper with the staff roster on it. He ran a dirty finger over a column and came back.
“Last Saturday. That was a week and a half ago. It’s stupid because she was begging me for more hours, said she needed the money, so I put her on four nights this week and she ain’t shown for one.”
“Her mother suspects she’s gone missing.”
“Doesn’t surprise me, a girl like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s a looker. Got a huge set of tits on her.”
“So you’re saying it’s no surprise that somebody would kidnap her?”
“She’s not the kind of girl to stay away from bad news. Which is a shame, with her kid and all.”
“Do you know of anybody she was involved with?”
“Not by name. The dish hand, Adam, he’s friends with her, but he hasn’t seen her just the same.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“You can do whatever you like, Detective. He’s out back” The man pointed to a doorway at the back of the bar.
Gill walked into the kitchen and followed the sound of banging dishes. At the end of a narrow hall a young man was hunched over a sink, elbow deep in brown water. He looked up at Gill and then at the wall in front of him.
“I’m with the local police. I’m looking for Vanessa Moore. Your boss tells me you knew her. What’s your full name, kid?”
“Adam Hellier. I did know her.”
“Have you spoken to her recently?”
“Only at work, haven’t seen her otherwise.”
“What do you mean by you ‘did’ know her?”
Adam stopped what he was doing and looked at the wall in front of him again.
“I don’t know. Did I say that?”
“Yes, you did.”
“What I meant was, we hung out a bit when she first started here, but then she got pregnant and always worried about money. She kinda withdrew.”
“How old is her kid?”
“I dunno. She’s a baby. A year?”
“Has the father been around?”
“I don’t think so. I remember her telling me he lives a few towns over. Doesn’t want anything to do with it.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“To be honest, I really didn’t have a lot to do with her.”
“Well, if you hear anything let me know.”
Gill took his card from his jacket and Adam grabbed it with wet rubber gloves and stuffed it in his pocket and then got busy washing again. Gill went back to the bar and got the barman’s attention.
“I’m off. If you hear anything, call the station and ask for Detective Gill.”
“Sure thing.”
Vanessa was hungry and her baby, Heather, was famished. When Vanessa became a mother it was the one thing she swore to never let happen, but it did — her baby went unfed. She opened the pantry door and looked at the gutted selection of food on offer. Everything left in there was the same stuff her mother had bought her when she moved out of home a couple of years earlier. Stuff she was told she could use to make meals, but had never, to that day, bothered to cook. Chicken stock, canned tomatoes, pasta, an assortment of herbs and spices. There must be something I could make of this junk, she thought. She took some pasta from the pantry and opened the pack and took out the knot of edible wire. She then dropped it into a nearby bowl and boiled some water. When the water boiled she poured it over the pasta and let it sit. She left the kitchen and went to the living room where Heather sat on the old couch, sucking a dummy and looking confused. Not crying for a change.
She was a cute baby, Vanessa observed, nothing like her father. She would grow up to be as pleasant on the eye as Vanessa, though Vanessa’s looks were beginning to wane. Gotta stop smoking, she thought.
She sat beside Heather and stroked the top of her head.
“I’d date any crappy guy right now just to help pay the rent.”
Heather didn’t reply.
“Mummy’s doing it tough, girl.”
She got up from the couch and went back to the kitchen. She took a fork from the drawer and placed it on the lip of the bowl and drained the water into the sink. The noodles looked like a handful of wet, gray hair ripped from the scalp of a dying old woman.
“This is what it’s come to,” she said aloud.
She squeezed the last of some tomato sauce over the noodles and went back to the living room. She forked at the meal and ate it in awkward mouthfuls. She turned the television on and watched some ads. Heather began to cry at the sight of food but refused to eat any. Vanessa picked up the phone, turned the television off, left the room and called Adam.
“Hey. I need to score some stuff.”
When Adam arrived he kissed her on the cheek and she let him into the living room. She grabbed at his pockets with flirtatious fingers and he told her to slow down.
“I should have told you on the phone: I need to pay you later if that’s ok?”
“Vanessa, you’ve done this a few times now.”
“I know, but I’ve always paid.”
“I had to chase you down on pay day and demand it.”
“Things are just really tough right now. But I’m getting more shifts at work.”
“So I’ll hopefully see more of you?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re so beautiful, ‘Ness.”
Vanessa shied away from him. “Can we get high now?”
Moments later Vanessa sucked the smoke from the burnt smack into her lungs and she thought about her face, her skin, how Adam was a dish hand and didn’t earn enough to be worth her while, plus he was younger. She didn’t like younger guys. She missed Benny, Heather’s father. She sat back on the couch and five minutes passed and soon she wasn’t awake, but not really asleep either.
“’Ness?” Adam said. He looked around the room, at Heather sitting under the waft of smoke hanging in the dense air. He smiled at the baby and the baby smiled back.
“’Ness, you awake?”
He left the room and went to her bedroom. He opened the top drawer of her dresser and took out a bra. He looked at the cup size on the tag.
“E’s,” he marveled, his heart beating.
He put the bra back and left her room and returned to the lounge. Vanessa’s eyes were open.
“I thought you’d left,” she said, her voice sounded forty years older.
“Nah, just went to the bathroom.”
“What do you want to do?” she asked.
Adam sat down beside her. He looked at the baby. “I want to sleep with you.”
“But we’re just friends,” she said.
“I know. Just for fun. And you won’t have to pay me for the drugs.”
Vanessa smiled and looked at Adam from the corner of her eye. “That’s prostitution, Adam. I’m not a prostitute.”
“I know, I didn’t mean that. I just think you’re lonely.”
Vanessa reached for his pocket once again and made a lazy moan.
“You want to get higher?”
She nodded, too duped to speak.
“Okay.”
Vanessa spent the next ten minutes getting higher and when she was incapable of moving Adam took her top off and sunk his face in between her enormous breasts. Then he took her pants off and bent her over on the couch, her body a silent and dead weight. He peeled her underwear down to her mid-thighs, not bothering to take them off entirely, and began to fuck her. He pulled out after some minutes of not feeling much and licked his fingertips and touched her asshole, lubricating it enough to not wake her from her stupor as he jammed his penis inside it. When he’d come he got up and put his pants back on and then dressed Vanessa. He carried her by the wrists out to her car and put her in the backseat. He went back into the house and collected a sleeping Heather. When he had them both in the car he locked the front door of her house and drove to a secluded part of town full of rusted factories and empty fields. The town’s industry had atrophied to a dank wasteland. This was a place nobody wanted to go. He was going to be on time.
Vanessa was sitting on a log with her back to a dense forest, weakly clutching her baby in her arms. She looked up at Adam, who stood before an enormous abandoned factory. Vines clutched to the red bricks that reached as high as the broken windows thirty feet up. There was the vague sound of running water in the forest behind her, the low hum of machines from the building. Everything seemed soggy and on the verge of rusting away. Adam was panting from exhaustion for reasons Vanessa did not know.
“Where am I?” Vanessa mumbled.
“This is the place you wanted me to show you.”
“What place?”
“Remember? I told you about that research company, how they wanted volunteers.”
“No.”
“I guess you were pretty high. They’re paying people top dollar to test foods and stuff. You wanted me to take you. Now we’re here.”
“I don’t remember talking about this at all.”
“You wanted to come here. It’ll help you pay your rent. Hell, you could do a lot more with what they’re paying.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve rung the bell, they should be coming soon.”
“Who?”
“The people who run the tests. I’ve gotta go.”
“Don’t leave me here.”
“Your car is here, just drive home when you’re done.”
“But I don’t know where I am.”
Adam was already gone, vanished around the corner of the factory. She thought she mustn’t be far from home if he left without driving. She assured herself it would begin to make sense to her the more she went along. She needed the money enough to not get up off the log, and her body ached; her genitals throbbed. Her head was too cloudy to speculate why.
The roller door of the factory began to rise and she watched a man come into view, standing there holding the death switch on the side wall. He wore a white lab coat and black pants. His hands and face were pale, his features soft and bland like a defined crash-test dummy. He had a half smile and simply said: “Miss Moore,” the way a doctor calls you from a waiting room. She stood up, cradling her baby close. She bounced Heather in her arms like a shield as if to say, ‘don’t hurt me, I’m with child.’
“How did you know my name?”
“You called us earlier. You said you were coming in.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
Embarrassed, she began to believe him.
“Of course I did. That’s right.”
“Come this way, Miss Moore. We have many questions to ask you.”
She was lead into a portable office, the type commonly used on construction sites, and asked to sit down on a plastic chair before a desk. She was given a glass of water, which she downed in one go, desperately thirsty. The man introduced himself.
“I’m Dr. Ferngehn, operations assistant. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Vanessa.” He sat down behind the desk and pulled from the drawer several pieces of paper stapled together at the corner. He began by asking her name, getting her to spell it out. Then her address, occupation, he asked if she had any close relatives staying with her. She answered thoroughly, wanting to seem as capable and enthusiastic about the program as possible, worried her drug use would come under speculation. The questions veered towards what seemed irrelevant to Vanessa.
“How do you know Adam?” Dr. Ferngehn asked.
“Adam? I work with him. I know him from work.”
“He drove you here, is that correct?”
“Yes. What’s he got to do with anything?”
“Not much really, we just like to know how test subjects are referred to us.”
“Oh, ok.”
“And your child, does your child have any special needs?”
“Heather’s fine. My baby won’t be getting involved in… whatever it is I’m doing here. What am I doing here?”
“Your baby will be fine, we just don’t want the thing dying on us while you’re incapacitated.”
“Excuse me? Inca-what?” She began to panic.
“Please, go sit.” He pointed to a small couch at the rear of the office.
“I am sitting.”
“Yes,” he smiled, “but in a moment you’re going to pass out and we think the couch is a better place to do this.”
She looked at the empty glass on the bench.
“Go and sit down, Vanessa.”
She clutched her baby tight in her arms and stood up, wondering if she could make it out of the office and flee, but standing only made the drugs work faster, and she stumbled onto the couch. She looked down at her baby.
“Whatever you do, please don’t hurt my child.”
She made herself comfortable knowing that soon she’d be too drugged to move. Her mind filled with vague ideas of what strange atrocities possibly awaited. She began to mumble a lullaby, perhaps for the baby, but more for herself. She just wanted her mummy to come and tell her everything was going to be okay.
Vanessa woke up strapped to a bed in a dark room. The walls were made of concrete and soaked from rainwater seeping through the shabby iron roof. There was nothing in there but a toilet and a small hand basin with a blot of flattened glue above it where a mirror used to be. She could hear wheels moving toward the door outside. The door opened and another man came in, wheeling a television on a steel frame. He was tall and thin with white blonde hair, sharp features you could cut glass with, and baby blue eyes.
“I am Dr. Phalanx. You can call me Gerald.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“Watch.”
He plugged the television into a power socket and pressed play. The screen flickered to an image of long grass.
“I don’t understand,” she argued. “Where’s my child?”
“Your child is fine,” he said. “Watch the video.”
The video went from the thick grass to a clearing where a large python lay, slowly consuming a goat, headfirst. There was no sound on the video, just the silent swallowing of a full sized goat by an enormous python.
“I think you have the wrong video.”
“This is the right video.”
“Where is my baby?”
Dr. Phalanx put his finger up to his mouth then he pointed at the television. “Watch.” Vanessa watched the video.
After some time she began to seriously panic and started thrashing around in the bed but soon exhausted herself.
“What? It’s a fucking snake eating a goat. What about it? What is going on, you fucking psycho?”
The Doctor stood there and stared at her with a little twinkle in his eye. He looked at the snake on the screen, finally enveloping the goat inside its body. He raised a little pale finger and held it before him like a glowing stick of magic. He slowly moved his finger towards the screen and pointed directly at the snake.
“This is what you will become.”
He turned the television off, unplugged it and wheeled it out of the room without another word.
“Where’s my child? Who the fuck are you people?” she screamed.
The door closed with a heavy thud and the room was dark once again. She began to cry. She comforted herself with the idea that it was some kind of psychological experiment where everything would be ok in a minute; that she was just being toyed with. She looked around the room for cameras recording her every move, but it was too dark to see such a thing. She wished she could remember the conversation with Adam that had brought her there, although it occurred to her then that perhaps it had never happened.
Detective Gill heard the call on the fax machine from the breakfast table.
“What could that be?” his wife asked.
“I had the office fax over a photo of the girl I’m looking for,” he said, walking into the study.
“Well, that seems like a good start,” she said, not exactly joking.
He took the page from the fax and turned it over to examine the girl. It was a photo from her graduating year. Her hair was long and dark, her teeth white. What happened? he thought.
The phone rang in the kitchen.
“It’s like a call centre in here,” his wife said. Gill listened to her stand up and pick up the phone. “Hello?”
Silence.
“Graham,” she yelled, “it’s for you.”
Graham took the phone from his wife and listened. Still holding the photo in his other hand, he wrote something on a nearby pad, then hung up.
“What is it?” his wife asked.
“They’ve found a body.”
Graham pulled up beside another police car on the disused bridge on Croft Road. He walked to the edge of the stone construct and looked down at the other police and emergency services, scouring the surrounding area for evidence. In the middle of them lay a body, face down in a clear creek no more than eight inches deep. Gill walked down the side hill to the body and a deputy officer came up beside him.
“We haven’t turned her over yet, thought we’d wait ‘til you got here.”
“Thanks.”
Gill bent down to move the body.
“Ah, sir?” the deputy said.
“What is it?”
The deputy handed him a pair of gloves. “Oh, of course.”
He put the gloves on and the surrounding officers gathered closer. He got a firm grip on her shoulder and flipped the body up out of the water. Her face made a wet suck as it sprung from the mud. Several of the deputies turned away, one of them began vomiting in the nearby grass. Detective Gill looked at the dog stuck down the girl’s throat and was suddenly overcome with a panic he struggled to conceal. The skin was glazed and blue where the throat had expanded to fit the small canine. Her eyes were open and rolled back, the life long departed. The dog’s hind legs stuck from her face like the tail-end of one bounding leap, or perhaps a meal unfinished. Neither option made sense to Gill. He stood up and looked around at the other men, hoping one of them would explain it, like it was a new thing kids were doing that had gone horribly wrong. Wait, what was he thinking? What kind of activity would involve swallowing a dog?
“Is this your girl, Gill?”
“No,” he said, “the girl I’m after is in her mid-twenties. This one here’s only about fifteen.”
The forensic men got to work and Gill walked away to clear his mind. When he came back he asked them what they’d found.
“Her body has undergone some… procedures. Recently, it seems. Like her breast augmentation is quite recent. Her face and neck have a series of minor scars, likely the work of a professional surgeon. There’s something also quite odd about her genitals.”
“What is it?”
“Aside from being quite sexually active very recently, there seems to be some kind of fat injected into the labia. It’s a form of pussy pumping.”
“A form of what?”
“It’s a sex thing.”
“Any ID?”
“She was dumped with no clothes on, but we’re still searching the area. No form of identification found yet.”
“Keep looking.”
The deputy stood by him. “I didn’t think I’d ever see something like this in little Hopetown.”
“Me either.” Gill turned to the deputy, “What’s going on in this world?”
Vanessa woke up and everything was blue and warm. She was lying on a plate of glass and surrounded by fluorescent lights. She looked down at her naked body and felt her skin burning. She pushed on the top of the tanning bed and a chain tightened by her side. She was locked in there. She called into the dark room beyond the bed. She yelled and screamed and eventually a hand lunged in holding a cattle prod. She shrieked and attempted to brush it away, copping a zap on her forearm that sent her body into a momentary spasm.
“Be still!” a voice said from the dark.
She was still, and her tanning continued.
Vanessa woke up tied to a chair with a gag in her mouth. The chair was on wheels and somebody was behind her wheeling her, through a corridor and whistling. She heard distant screams bouncing off the high rooftop of the factory. Other people! Her mind shuddered to think what was happening to them.
She worried about Heather, but she’d cried too much already. The only thing that stopped her crying was presuming Heather was dead and that she would soon be too, and then they could be together again. The idea crumbled when she was taken to a room where Dr. Phalanx sat holding Heather. The orderlies placed her in front of a mirror and she could only laugh when faced with her dreadful state. The crying had reddened her eyes and her skin was now golden brown, a tan she’d never dreamed of achieving. A Mexican man with a big moustache walked into the room, came up behind her and started to play with her hair.
“Turn her to face me,” Dr. Phalanx said.
The Mexican man complied. Dr. Phalanx sat with his legs crossed, one arm cradled Heather’s tiny body. He toyed with the girl’s arm. “Say hi to Mummy,” he said. He made her arm flop up and down. Much to Vanessa’s relief, her baby seemed ok.
“Do you understand why you’re here, Vanessa?” Dr. Phalanx said.
The Mexican removed the gag but she refused to speak.
“I am a doctor. A surgeon. Ever since I was young I had the urge to correct people. To fix the misfortunes placed upon them by god. I started out doing this on socially acceptable terms; first I was a trauma surgeon, then I moved on to plastic surgery. Both valid professions. But plastic surgery didn’t satisfy. It’ll only ever go so far. Common people will only ever go so far. They only want to enhance their beauty to a set standard, one they’ve decided on before getting the work done. It just seemed like a such a waste to me when you consider the possibilities of what can be done when you merge the imagination with the flesh.”
The Mexican glanced at the insane doctor and then got back to work on her hair. Vanessa barely listened, focusing only on her child and what the doctor was doing with his hands while he held her.
“Women were not made properly,” he continued. “Women are born as diamonds in the rough; with many imperfections. Women have got to be the blandest excuses for animals in existence; the white noise of all living things. I admit some are gifted, but often lacking in other areas. Despite this, by default, women need physical manipulation of an extreme kind.”
Vanessa began to thrash around in her chair. The Mexican stood back, scissors and comb in either hand. He looked at Dr. Phalanx. “I can’t work like this,” he said.
Dr. Phalanx gripped Heather’s leg and held her upside down before him. Vanessa jolted still, watching with burning eyes at her dangling baby.
“You will sit still and silent or else I’ll hold this thing upside down until it gets brain damage and spends the rest of its life a retard, and there is nothing sadder than a retarded baby. You never know, it might be an improvement on the horrible cunt she’ll grow up to be. Now, will you be still?”
Vanessa nodded desperately and Dr. Phalanx cradled the baby once again.
“You just saved some poor nurse from having to wipe her ass every day until death, well done.”
He sat up straight.
“What was I talking about? Oh yes, manipulation. A woman’s body needs to be manipulated to coincide with man’s desires. Otherwise, in her original state, she is simply a walking mistake. god’s mistake. What I’m doing here is working to fix those mistakes. Giving women their purpose back.”
He sat and pondered for a moment.
“Look at it this way, if a woman bends over in the forest and nobody is around to stare at her arse, does her arse still exist?”
He sat there and stared into the distance for some time. Vanessa remained still, fearful of the doctor, as she finally understood just how crazy he was.
Dr. Phalanx stood up from the chair and placed Heather onto a nearby tray.
“When you’ve finished making Vanessa pretty, prep her for surgery.”
He wheeled the tray out of the room, the baby writhed, cold on the mirrored surface like a specimen before dissection.
The Mexican spent the rest of the afternoon making Vanessa blonde.
Vanessa woke to the sound of dripping. The room was the same one she’d been sleeping in for several nights. The damp and grim industrial interior had begun to attune to her idea of a home.
Her arms and legs weren’t strapped to the bed and she slowly made the effort to get up. She felt a wave of dizziness from the residual effects of the drugs she’d been fed. She took slow steps towards the door and hugged the doorframe. Peering around the corner she saw a hall with two other rooms and an exit at the far end.
She walked past the rooms, both dark inside, and went to the end of the hall. The exit was locked. By the door there was a small table and a chair. On the table lay an ashtray and a lighter. She grabbed the lighter and went back down the hall to one of the other rooms and went inside and lit it. The first room was much the same as her own: bed, toilet, no windows or doors. She left and went across the hall to the other. It was much larger and littered with filthy white linen piled up all over the floor, mounds of it casting shadows of mangled beasts.
Something moved under a blanket. Vanessa froze. She directed the light towards the thing and the flame blew out. She flicked it back on frantically. Her panting caused the flame to waver.
“Who’s there?” she said.
The blankets moved again. She stepped closer towards it, thinking maybe they’d put Heather in there.
“Heather?”
A small hand pulled back a sheet. Wet, dirty flesh tones were visible in the dim. Vanessa’s heart was beating out of her chest, terrified by what strange atrocity might be nearby.
The thing’s face birthed from the shroud of material, eyes black and glazed, wincing at the light, trying to focus on Vanessa.
“Can you help me?” the girl asked.
Vanessa came over to her and pulled back more of the sheets. The girl’s breasts were inflated so dramatically that she didn’t have the strength to stand. Her lips were so fat she could barely open her mouth. Small holes on either side of her top and bottom lips bled yellow pus that smelled of cat’s piss, crusted like dried remains of macaroni and cheese.
“What’s your name?” Vanessa asked.
“Tiny,” the girl said in a squeaky voice.
“Tiny, I’m going to help you.”
Vanessa cleared away some of the sheets restricting Tiny’s legs and saw that her genitals were horribly mutilated, like mince meat pushed through the opening of a handbag. Below the mess of her vagina lay a puddle of black, watery feces. Vanessa pulled her up out of the mess, almost vomiting from the roused stench. She held the girl’s boobs close to her for support, cradling Tiny’s head on her shoulder.
“I’m very hungry,” Tiny said.
“When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been here a while.”
“Do you have any family?”
“I’m good at sex.”
Tiny gulped on the side of Vanessa’s face, the expanse of her mouth was large enough to almost engulf her head entirely. Vanessa felt warmth and an intense sucking. She didn’t understand what Tiny was doing until she broke her head free and let Tiny fall to the ground. The girl slithered across the floor towards her. Vanessa backed away and tripped on a pile of linen, falling back and losing the flame. She grabbed at the ground beside her, desperately feeling for the lighter. She lit it again as Tiny crawled over the top of her with an enormous gaping mouth, flicking a forked tongue in circles, deep in the depths of her wet and black maw. Her eyes rolled back as she lowered her head dumbly over Vanessa’s face, weighing down her prey with her mammoth boobs, a tonne each. Vanessa brought the lighter up to the top of Tiny’s gums and burnt the inside of her mouth. Tiny slammed her jaw shut, cupped her mouth and slid away leaving black entrails of slime discharging from her anus. Vanessa ran back into the hall and went for the exit again, rattling the knob. She heard her pursuer coming after her. Tiny’s hands emerged from the room, gripping the doorframe. Both arms pulled her wet mass into the hall and she turned her body towards Vanessa as if smelling her in the air.. The monster lurched forward. Vanessa picked up the chair and shielded herself, jabbing at Tiny with the four small legs.
“Stay away from me,” she shrieked.
The thing came at her, in slow and blind lunges. Vanessa saw the opportunity and jammed the chair legs into the expanse of Tiny’s mouth. Tiny adjusted her jaw to fit the thing in and began to gulp down the chair. It didn’t get far before the legs halted at the entrance of her chest and the pressure began to rip her skin. Blood spilled from internal puncturing in Tiny’s neck and she gargled a scream, her voice box so distorted she no longer sounded human. Tiny thrashed around bleeding to death and Vanessa weaved around her and retreated back to her room. She sat in a ball on the corner of her bed, holding out the lighter and flicking it on every ten seconds, terrified that Tiny, or perhaps something else, would eventually appear in the doorway. Tiny’s screams finally stopped and Vanessa calmed herself enough to sleep again.
When Vanessa woke, two men were standing over her bed. One held her down as the other gagged and blindfolded her. They grabbed her by the hands and legs and strapped her down to a nearby stretcher and wheeled her into the corridor. She could smell Tiny’s remains in the hall as she passed and could hear the men kicking her body aside.
After a short journey she heard a door close behind her and the blindfold was taken off. She was in an operating room. The walls were made of white sheets stretched over metal frames, shadows of other people passed behind them. Dr. Phalanx was there with two assistants, including Dr. Ferngehn. The stretcher was placed in the middle of the room and Dr. Ferngehn clamped the wheels. He removed the sheets from over her body and peeled off her underwear and bra. Her cooked pigment looked alien to her against the white of the sheets. Her nipples, once pink and large, were now shrunken and brown. She was always warm. She could see what the doctor was doing to her, turning her into the common man’s ideal woman: a porn star. She didn’t know how snakes fit into it though. Her guess was influenced heavily by her encounter with Tiny. They were going to do terrible things to her jaw.
Dr. Phalanx stood at the side of the room with his back to her. He was mulling over a selection of balls placed in order from smallest to largest on an instrument tray.
“Size is always an issue,” he said. He turned to her holding the first ball in the selection: a tennis ball. “See this? This is bullshit. This is your upper middle-class college girl breast right here. This is turning eighteen and getting your parents to buy you boobs for your birthday. This is college blowjobs, trophy wives and swimsuit models. This is useless to me.”
He placed the ball back down on the bench and picked up the next one: a softball.
“This isn’t bad. Getting warmer. This is your high-end stripper, the redneck housewife, biker porn, Playboy.” He walked over to Vanessa and cupped her enormous breast in his cold, pale hand. The other one clasped the ball like a big ripe apple ready for eating. “Your boobs are already too big for these. They would just hang from your chest like overgrown tumors and cause your skin to stretch and sag like old bags of rice. Not very attractive.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Vanessa asked.
“Nothing is wrong with me! It’s you that’s imperfect.” He stepped back and threw the ball high up towards the factory roof. It came down somewhere at the far end of the building and something smashed. “Oops.” He went back over to the bench and returned with a red bowling ball.
“I love bowling,” he said. “I love the heaviness of the balls, the sound of the pins when they explode. It’s so simple and effective.”
He held the ball over his head and stood over Vanessa.
“I can’t tell you how much I’d love to smash your face in right now. Bowling balls have that effect on me. I always want to destroy things with them. I’d love to get a whole bunch of little babies and send them crawling down a big hill. I’d stand at the top and just randomly throw bowling balls down. Imagine how the baby would explode on impact.” He put the ball back down to his waist and stared into the distance, lost in his imagination. “Patches of stained red grass. Rotting baby limbs at dusk. The sound of cicadas and laughter; picnics with madmen by the black lake at noon.”
He broke from his daze and looked down at the ball and back up at Vanessa, who cried silently, certain she was going to die at the hands of this lunatic.
“But this is not for you. You’re a hard bag to fill.”
He walked back over to the table and hugged a beach ball, turning to her with an enormous smile. “Amazing!”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Vanessa protested.
“Yes. I am kidding. This is a pipedream of mine. Something like this would take years of stretching. And we don’t have that much time.”
He bounced the ball around the room, off the heads of his assistants, watching to see if they’d crack smiles.
He took a scalpel from the instrument tray and cut a long line down the side of the ball, the thing deflated and fell limp in his rigid hand. “I fucking hate the beach.”
He walked back over to the bench where the last ball sat and picked it up.
“I don’t like basketball,” he said. “I remember once when I was a kid, I used to think that playing basketball made you taller, and that was why the players were all so tall. It never occurred to me that tall people had decided to play basketball. It seems a little simple doesn’t it? If you’re tall, you become a basketball player. That’s it? Why not become some kind of human daddy long legs, and go around poisoning people smaller than you? Drink their blood. Rape some midgets… Options, Vanessa.”
“Are you going to put basketballs inside my breasts?”
“No, no, no. Not basketballs, just implants the size of basketballs.”
“My god!”
“It’s all a part of making you perfect. Your boobs will be small enough to keep you mobile, but too big to go out in public. You’ll be a housebound plaything. Back problems wont be an issue if you’re lying down all day, legs wide open, mouth gaping, these two giant orbs rolling around on the top of your chest. You’ll be my best work yet.”
“That will never happen.”
Dr. Phalanx stared her down then smiled. “Yes it will.”
He turned to Dr. Fernghen. “Administer the anesthesia.”
Vanessa struggled, but soon gave up. The mask was placed over her mouth and Dr. Phalanx pressed down on her throat.
“This is just the beginning,” he said, and she faded into unconsciousness.
Detective Gill entered the autopsy room where he met Forrest, the district’s coroner. Forrest had performed the autopsy on the girl found in the creek. Her body lay on its back under sharp white lights. The dog that was removed from her mouth jutted from a large metal bowl on the bench at the side of the room.
“Detective Gill,” Forrest said, “I’ve just finished.”
“What have you found?”
“Very strange things,” he said. “Come. Look.”
Gill and Forrest stood over the body of the unknown girl.
“You can see that her breasts have undergone augmentation surgery — very recently by the looks of it. The scars are still quite fresh.”
“They’re big.”
“’Bout as big as bowling balls, Sir.”
“Yes they are. What else?”
“The toxicology reports haven’t been finalised yet, but we seem to have found a number of separate DNA results from samples taken from her anus and vagina.”
“How many?”
“At this stage we’ve isolated ten.”
“Jesus. Does it look like rape?”
“It’s hard to say.” Forrest moved over to her genitals and spread her legs slightly.
“What is that?” Gill gasped.
“Her vagina has been injected with human fat taken from another part of her body — likely the buttocks. The labia has been inflated to maintain the tightness of her vagina, but you see here,” he pointed to an under section of her vagina where the flesh was marbled blood red. “The friction from the intercourse has caused the surface to open and the fat has leaked inside her vaginal canal and is rotting all the way up to her uterus.”
“That’s what that smell is.”
“Like a thousand rotting fish, sir.”
“Like a thousand rotting fish.”
“Then it gets interesting.” Forrest moved back up towards her head. “The face seems to have undergone some kind of procedure. It’s not a facelift; the scars are all in the wrong places. Some advanced surgery has taken place ranging from her eye sockets to her lower jaw. It may have something to do with how she fit that puppy into her mouth.”
“Interesting,” Gill said, scratching his chin.
“What’s interesting is the cell makeup of the skin and muscle surrounding the area. We took a sample of her flesh and found that it had an elasticity not common to rigor mortis. She’s been injected with a localized, unknown muscle relaxant that enabled the area to function while simultaneously performing movement beyond the capabilities of a normal human jaw.”
“How could she breathe with that in her throat?”
“Breathing would’ve been difficult. Only a small portion of air could get to the lungs while the dog was in her mouth. The process would involve a lot of time and discomfort and very minimal movement.”
“Like a snake.”
“Funny you should say that.”
Forrest led Gil over to the dog.
“This is where it gets really weird.”
“How so?”
“Well. As you can see, the dog’s head is almost gone, eroded away like it’s been placed head first into an insinkerator. This happened once the dog was already inside her mouth. We took samples off the dog and found that the erosion was caused by a rather acidic saliva, or a combination of that and general stomach acids. She has digestive qualities similar to that of a reptile such as a crocodile or a snake.”
“What does this mean?” Gill asked.
“The dog was already being consumed before it was entirely swallowed.”
“How can a human body withstand that kind of acid?”
“That’s what’s so amazing about it,” Forrest said. “The same toxin inside her face and neck also lines the entirety of her digestive system. Through its ability to strengthen human flesh and make it withstand enormous amounts of pressure, the acid has no corrosive effects on her organs.”
“That is amazing. This is big. There’s a lot of work gone into this girl. We’re after people who a very organized.”
“It seems that way, doesn’t it?”
“What was the cause of death?”
“It’s funny, because it could have been any number of things, considering, but this girl died from a combination of shock and malnutrition.”
“She died of hunger?”
“Perhaps that’s why she attempted to eat the dog, sir.”
“Perhaps. I can’t imagine it just crawling up there.”
“Not many people can, sir.”
Gill paced the room, shaking his head. Forrest stood and watched him, feeling the Detective’s anxiety.
“I can’t help but think this has something to do with my missing girl.”
“The Vanessa girl, sir?”
“Yeah. I think somebody out there is turning her into one of these… these Snake Girls.”
Gill arrived at the house of Adam Hellier, a small flat near the river docks. He knocked on the door and heard footsteps in the house. Adam answered and made eye contact with Gill and immediately shut the door again. Gill went for the handle and then stood back and kicked it open. Adam was already running to the back of the house and Gill pursued. Adam cornered himself in the bathroom and Gill pulled his gun out and pointed it right at Adam’s face.
“Now I know you know something. Where’s Vanessa?”
“The girl had it coming to her. She was wasting her life away. She had nothing to live for.”
“She had a baby girl.”
“She didn’t give a fuck about her kid.”
“Well I do. I’m going to put my gun down and you’re going to tell me where she is.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“At the moment you are, yes. But if you help me, maybe that can change.”
“Alright. I’ll show you where she is. But this can’t get back to me. If they know I led you to them they’ll kill me.”
Gill put his gun down and grabbed Adam by the arm. “Come with me, we’re going to my car. If you try to run, I’ll shoot your knees out.”
They left the house and went to the car. Adam sweated in the passenger seat. He tried the door when Gill wasn’t looking. He was locked in.
“Is she alive?”
“I don’t know!”
“Where is she?”
“At the factories off the highway. Freemont Rd.”
Gill started the engine and they drove off.
“What’s there?”
“There’s a group stationed out there, doing experiments on people. They were offering top dollar for participants.”
“How did you get involved?”
“They approached me at work.”
“They wanted you to take part?”
“Not exactly.”
“What then?”
Adam broke down crying. He hid his face in his hands and shook his head. “They wanted Vanessa.”
“They paid you to get her for them?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a pretty low dog, Adam. Some friend you are. How much did they pay you?”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
“Do you have any idea what might be happening to her right now?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, I have some idea, and let me tell you, it ain’t pretty.”
Gill pulled the car off the freeway and they came out an underpass. Large empty fields were on either side of the road, fenced off to intruders. Scraps of highway debris littered the area like abstract sculptures in an enormous wasteland. Adam wanted to vomit just remembering the place.
They travelled a few kilometers down the empty road where it met the beginning of the forest. It started to rain. At the end of the road there was a t-intersection that led to two separate groups of factories. Adam pointed to the right. “It’s down there.”
They passed a line of abandoned factories. On the other side of the road stood a wall of forest, dauntingly black and seemingly endless — no escape.
“It’s here, it’s this one,” Adam said, pointing to the place where he’d left Vanessa. The same roller door, the log she sat on when he abandoned her. “Her car’s gone.”
“Probably at the bottom of a lake by now.”
“Oh, god, what have I done?”
They got out of the car and approached the building. Gill pressed on the bell.
“I can’t be seen here,” Adam said.
“You know what I’ll do if you run.”
“They’ll kill me anyway.”
“Don’t worry, you’re with police now.”
“That’s the problem.”
There was no answer at the door and Gill motioned Adam to follow him around to the side. Gill held his gun before him, cautious as he passed empty dumpsters and burnt out oil drums. “Smells like death.”
Gill saw a small window high up at the top of the wall. “I need to take a look. Wheel that bin over here and I’ll climb up.”
Adam pushed the bin under the window and Gill stacked some boxes on top of the lid and made his way up to the window. He looked inside the filthy glass and saw nothing but a dark, wet and empty factory floor. “There’s nothing here,” he said, and turned to Adam who’d by then vanished. “Shit!”
Gill climbed down the boxes and jumped off the bin and ran to the front of the factory. The car was still there, the keys safe in his pocket. No sign of Adam. “That little rat.”
Gill looked far down the road but couldn’t see him. He turned to the thick forest and thought he could be anywhere. He didn’t have the energy to search for him.
“Looks like you’re walking, kid.”
Then something caught his eye in the thick shrubs. He made his way through the trees and came to the strange colorful thing draped over a branch, so very out of place.
“A beach ball?”