D.O.A. Extreme Horror Anthology (5 page)

Even now I ask myself how I couldn’t have noticed what was happening. How couldn’t I see the dark, swirling kaleidoscope carrying me away in its awful wake into Helen’s private world of insanity? Perhaps I didn’t want to see. Perhaps I did see and decided not to care, for it was also during that unholy time when the change in our physical relationship occurred. It happened without any notice and it happened with her in control.

We were at my apartment a week after our initial talk about her ‘discovery.’ I was sitting on the floor going over some notes, when she came over and we playfully started wrestling as we had done many times in the past. She pinned me down then suddenly thrust her hand between my legs, rubbing my penis into a hard erection. She said nothing as she pulled off my clothes and began kissing my chest, biting my nipples, constantly moving further down until her mouth began to work up and down my shaft. Her tongue swirled over my balls while she jerked my member and turned my most erotic fantasies into dull imitations of this real life pleasure. She continued this relentless assault until I came.

“Now you learn how to do me,” she said victoriously, then firmly pushed my head down between her legs to her wet, shaved vagina, and proceeded to teach me about things I was too ashamed to even think about.

For everything we did do, we never made love. I clumsily tried now and then to enter her, but she was strong and quick, and since I, being a virgin, did not really know what to do, I acquiesced to her hands and mouth. I really never complained, yet still I yearned to be one with her, still dreamt of being inside her, being on top, being in control.

During this new time, this time of joy and love, I almost believed she had forgotten her dark questions. But she was not done yet. Her next “discovery” proved to be more insane than the first.

“I’ve found it!” she exclaimed one evening in her apartment after a brutal day in the ER. I was in no mood for another monologue on death and the soul.

I got one anyway.

Helen ran over to me as I stood in her kitchen making coffee. She placed her hands in my pockets and began to run her tongue lightly underneath the lobule of my right ear. “The final piece of the puzzle. You know where I found it?”

I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “No, Helen. Where?”

“Here.” She rubbed the glans of my penis through my pants pocket.

I reached down with my right hand and put it on top of hers. “Helen, don’t you think that, that maybe you should stop with this obsession about—”

“Obsession?” she said. Her voice rose in intensity with every syllable. “This is no obsession. This is a discovery of the ages.”

“What is it now?”

“The life, Douglas, the power of life. The heat opposite cold air.” She unzipped my pants, and pulled out my cock and began to jerking it into an erection. “I knew there had to be something more. I knew that the cold air was just a screen, a veil put there by God or nature or whoever controls it all to conceal the real truth.”

I said nothing while she continued to masturbate me and talk softly into my ear.

“It’s the life-force Douglas, the chi, the essence of what we are, the primeval spark of life glowing brightly before it’s extinguished forever.” She dropped to her knees and began working the head of my dick with her mouth and tongue. I came in less than a minute.

“Here, Douglas,” she said as she stared at my softening dick, “here from where our life begins, here is where life breathes its last breath, is where it ends and begins. I’ve seen it, Douglas, and it’s the most beautiful sight in the whole damn universe.”

I knew what she was going to try next. And maybe because I knew, because it scared me like nothing else ever has, I did nothing. Nothing except wait and try to force the disgusting thoughts from my mind, tried to bury them deep underneath mountains of facts and logic.

The denial lasted all of three days.

Helen had worked in the ER late into the early morning hours. Her car was in the shop with a busted timing belt and I offered to pick her up. She was reluctant at first, but then accepted my offer. She said her shift ended at five in the morning. Of course that night I could not sleep, so I arrived there at four.

I walked into the ER to find the nurse, Marvin Sanell, a rail-thin man with a face like a ferret, sorting through charts and drinking coffee in frantic sips. “Where’s Helen?” I asked.

“Down in the path lab,” he mumbled.

“What’s she doing down there?”

He finally looked up at me with beady eyes. “I don’t know. She took a patient down there about an hour ago.”

I sighed, trying to control my growing impatience. “Who was the patient?”

He flipped through some patient files. “A MVA victim we got in last night.” He closed the files then again looked over at me. “To tell you the truth, I really don’t know why she was so hip on getting into him. I mean, except for having that half-ton pickup turn his liver and kidneys into cheap ground beef, the boy was in fine shape.”

His last phrase, ‘the boy was in fine shape,’ kept running through my mind as I rushed down to the path lab. The basement was cool and silent, the halls dimly lit by a few hissing fluorescent lights. I almost called out to her, wanting to warn her to stop whatever she was doing before I entered. But I remained quiet as I walked in.

Pathology was partitioned off into four cubicles, and from the end of the lab I could hear sounds I knew were wrong. I walked down and saw that the third cubicle was closed off. I could hear Helen’s heavy breathing, and, God forgive me, while one part wanted to run, another part of me wanted to see.

I got down on my hands and knees, the tile floor cold and greasy, and crept through the curtains partitioning off the cubicles. At the third I hesitated, only for an instant, then parted them.

Helen was half-nude, her skirt, pantyhose, and shoes off, crouched on the table directly over the cadaver. From the corner of the cubicle I could see only one side of her face, but even that view showed me a dark facet of her that I never imagined could exist.

She hungrily placed the young man’s penis, which was surprisingly fully erect, into her vagina; her feet tightly clenched the slippery sides of the steel table. She began to pound her ivory-white ass up and down while she placed one hand on the man’s hairy chest to steady herself and used the other to rub her clitoris. Only when she was finished, only after she emitted a loud, orgasmic moan and collapsed on top of the cold, dead body, did I leave.

I don’t remember much of the next few minutes; there was just a vague sensation of movement up stairs and through antiseptic corridors, past questioning faces and wheelchair bound patients. Walking outside, I was hardly aware of the biting cold. My car sat waiting, a rubber and steel chariot that could take me away, and I believe I would have left and never come back had I not heard her voice.

“Douglas?” Helen called out. As she came closer, I could see her face. She was smiling.

I stood by the car, afraid to say anything. Without another word she walked up to me and kissed me deep and hard, her hands caressing my back, chest, and crotch. I was totally repulsed as the bright, painful images of her impaled on the corpse screamed in my mind, but in my loins my sexual urges were at full force. My penis was hard despite my mental disgust and my hands worked on her body, clawing under her skirt, finding her vagina hot and dripping with desire.

With one hand, Helen reached behind me, opened the car door and shoved me in. After she had my pants down to my hips and her skirt hiked up she guided my aching member into her vagina. The same vagina that just minutes before had contained a corpse’s penis. The thought of it almost made me lose my erection, but then she started to buck and rock on top of me, and I let myself go, forced myself to forget it all. I tore her bra off and squeezed her nipples hard, and she responded by pulling my dick out of her vagina and placing it in her ass before pounding up and down even harder than before. I felt flesh give, tear and didn’t care as I felt myself explode inside her.

Helen never asked that morning if I had watched her in the path lab and I didn’t ask. During the next days and weeks I played a game with myself, a great and horrible game called denial. It was a game that I was becoming very good at.

She was just getting ready to take a shower one morning, standing in front of a full-length mirror in my bedroom. Suddenly she twirled around to face me. “It’s working, Douglas,” she said excitedly. “It’s really working!”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to hide the fear in my voice. “I’ve wanted to tell you,” she said finally, in a voice like a child who has been caught in a lie, “but I didn’t know exactly how to say it.”

“Say what?” I asked instead of saying:
I know, Helen, that you’ve had a little fetish these past few months called necrophilia, but I don’t want you to say it because I love you and if you say it I might start to realize that you are totally insane and by loving you that makes me part of that insanity.

She sat down on my bed with a mischievous grin on her face. “Remember what I told you two months ago, about finding the opposite of the cold air, about discovering the source of the life force?”

I nodded.

“I want you to look.”

“Look at what?”

“At me,” she said, a hard conviction in her voice. “I want you to look and tell me if you see anything different.”

She stood up and I saw her nude body as I had many times before, but then I began to see more. Her breasts seemed fuller and her hips no longer sagged. Her stomach was flat, and with that flatness came the realization that her stretch marks, the scars of childbirth, were gone.

She could tell from the look in my eyes that I had seen what she had hoped I would see. “I’m younger, Douglas,” she blurted out. “I’m younger, and it’s from—”

“Your discovery,” I quickly intervened.

“Yes. My discovery.” She said it in a clear monotone voice as her eyes locked hard on mine. “You were there in the pathology lab last month, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry you had to find out that way,” she said to me in a soothing, caring voice. “Dear Douglas, I know it must have been hard for you to see, but—”

And it was at that point, at that phrase of hearing how hard it must have been for me, when I lost my composure. I pushed her back violently onto the bed.

“Helen, this has got to stop. This has got to stop now!” My voice was high with emotion, fueled by my anger and humiliation. “We can get you help. We can go to someone outside the hospital, someone who can help you realize just what’s been happening to you.”

Her eyes opened wide and she shook her head. “What’s been happening to me is a literal re-birth, a new lease on life. Haven’t you believed one word I’ve said?”

“It’s not about believing you.”

“What is it about?”

I stepped back from the bed. “It’s about a perversion, a disgusting act that you can’t even see as disgusting.”

“But look!” she cried, standing up from the bed and running her hands over her own body. “Look at what I’ve gained, what I’ve discovered! Think what this means!” A defiant look spread across her face as she got up and placed my hands on her breasts. “Feel these, Douglas. Feel these and tell me they’re the tits of a forty-five year old mother of three.”

I backed away, my anger gone. I was unable to meet her gaze, unable to find a passage through her insanity.

“I know it’s hard to believe. I know my methods are, well, strange, but I have found something. Something that poets and philosophers have dreamed about since we were banished from the Garden of Eden. I’m not quitting my search, Douglas. Not for anything.”

Or anyone
, I knew she meant. I walked into my small living room, feeling very alone and helpless, and the sudden loud ringing of my phone did not help my attitude.

“Yes?” I answered curtly.

“Is Dr. MacGuin, there?”

“No she’s not,” I lied. “Can I take a message for her?”

“Yes, that would be good. She said it was pretty urgent.”

“Go ahead.”

“This is Chuck Herbright, the nurse on the first night shift. Tell her that one of her patients she admitted through ER a couple days ago—”

“Name of the patient?”

“Leon Means. She wanted to know when he was crashing. I was just down in CCU and he’s pretty much had it. They expect to bag him in the next couple hours.”

“I’ll give her the message if I see her.” I hung up without another word and tried to stop my hands from shaking. Now she was getting information on when they died. Or almost ready to die.

I’ll go see our staff psychiatrist
, I thought to myself,
I’ll go see him and tell him that Helen is not adjusting well to our externship and if only he could get her some time off
—

“Did someone just call?”  Helen stood in the cramped hallway separating my bedroom and the living room, dressed in a conservative skirt and blouse, her hair still wet. “Was it from the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

I walked over to her and put my hands around her waist. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s sit down, have a drink and enjoy the evening.”

“The call was about Lean Means, right?”

I nodded.

“I have to go now.”

“Damnit, Helen, don’t,” I pleaded. “Just stay here. There are things about us that we need to talk about.”

“What things?”

“I thought maybe we should think about moving in together.”

“I don’t know,” she said coolly, and I knew she was really saying:
I don’t need you anymore, Douglas. I don’t care about you anymore
. Without another word she put on her shoes and coat and was gone.

I believe she knew I would follow her. Perhaps I thought I could stop her. Yet there is still a small, dark voice inside which whispers to me at night that perhaps I just wanted to watch.

I waited in my apartment for fifteen minutes, drinking and cursing, before I finally left for the hospital. I didn’t really think she would come back to me, but I still had hope. Even as I pulled into the hospital parking lot, my car next to hers, I still had hope.