Doctor Flesh- Director's Cut Read online

  Doctor Flesh: Director’s Cut

  By Alex S. Johnson

  And Spewed Upon The Firmament From:

  ‘Doctor Flesh: Director’s Cut’ is published in the US and A by MorbidbookS and the Grace of God. Copyright Alex S. Johnson for words, cover art and music 2014. Edited by Alex S. Johnson and formatted by Steven Scott Nelson. The moral right, such as it is, of this author and his disjointed multiple personality disorders have been asserted. All Rights Reserved. No part of this fucked-up fiction may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, alien or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, drawing stick figures, seventeenth century printing press, chain mail, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of The Grim Reverend Steven Rage, Alex S. Johnson , The Great and Powerful Oz and the Hand that turns the Big Wheel, except where permitted by law or whatever the hell you think you can get away with. But you will incur the righteous disdain of The Reverend. Characters in this salacious tale are fictitious. Duh. Obviously. Any resemblance to real persons, be they living or dead, demons, succubae, demi-gods or the ‘formerly living’ (zombies) is purely coincidental.

  Morbidbooks Is A Grotesque Bizarro Ballet Where The Most Profane Things Occur. An Impious And Perverse Dwelling Of Dark Revulsion. A Cozy Cottage Where Torture Porn And Brutal Bible Tales Are Devised. A Quiet Place To Relax And Spin Tales Of Depravity And Wickedness. A Halfway House For The Disturbed Where Rules No Longer Apply. A Safe Haven For Deviant Serial Killers To Hatch Their Wretched Schemes. Bring Your Pets. The Tasty Ones Are Always Welcome.

  HTTPS://WWW.MORBIDBOOKS.WORDPRESS.COM

  “I shall set down in a few lines how uptight Maldoror was during his early years, when he lived happy. There: done. He later perceived he was born wicked: strange mischance! For a great many years he concealed his character as best he could; but in the end, because this effort was not natural to him, each day the blood would rush to his head until, unable any longer to bear such a life, he hurled himself resolutely into a career of evil … sweet atmosphere!”

  Comte de Lautréamon, Maldoror

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  “Doctor Flesh: Nude for Trankenstein” originally appeared in somewhat different form as a 25-copy limited edition chapbook from Dynatox Ministries, published by Jordan Krall.

  “Blood Ties” originally appeared in the Deathmongers anthology, edited by Robert Friedrich.

  “Bangkok Gunfighter Without Pointless Huck Finn” originally appeared on the Strange Edge blog, edited by G. Arthur Brown

  “Mr. Sugar Comes to Splatterville” originally appeared on the Cease, Cows blog, edited by Heather Nelson

  Front and back cover credits: Photography and concept by KC Focht Musser. Digital manipulation: Alex S. Johnson. Model: Lora Bloom. Venue: Eris Temple Arts, Philadelphia, PA.

  Doctor Flesh: Director’s Cut is dedicated to the fine folks in the Clown Horror Anthology chat on Facebook.

  Special thanks to RE Davis for his help with formatting fuckery.

  Table of Contents:

  Doctor Flesh: Nude for Trankenstein

  Doctor Flesh, Part Two: Pink Holocaust

  Blood Ties

  Bangkok Gunfighter Without Pointless Huck Finn

  Mr. Sugar Comes to Splatterville

  Doctor Flesh: Nude for Trankenstein

  I.

  Return with us now to the bump n’ grindcore in progress. The girls twitch and moan on their respective racks, exuding trickles of sweet juice. Meanwhile, Viola plummets through porous ceilings on her way to an encounter with a pair of legs clad in peppermint stick stockings and an ass marvelous to behold and fondle. She slides an ungloved hand between the legs and brings her fingers back to her mouth. The fragrance of fear and desire makes her dizzy. The girl’s upper body is jammed into what appears to be deep blue sky or perhaps a foam replica of same.

  Stationed at random intervals at the entrances and exits to Viola’s virtual labyrinth are a fake Catholic school girl, an actual crone and an intermediary who shuffles between them with infinite patience and slowness and is constantly getting in the way. The last time Viola jacked out, the school girl followed her back into the warehouse laboratory and appeared on occasion either as an erotic apparition or as a warning that the crone was somewhere in the vicinity. The crone’s pink hair had the texture of a Brillo pad and a slightly soapy feel. Viola could see the crone coming towards her, followed by the intermediary, who doubtless bore one of a thousand indecipherable messages relating the adventures of the fake school girl. At a certain point Viola Flesh simply pushed the girl through a block of utility fog which held her like a bug in amber unless the intermediary, whose name was Mel, released her with a wand resembling a Fourth of July sparkler.

  After consulting the appropriate passages in the Key of Solomon, Viola sits down in front of the editing bay, wearing the rubber body suit with studded fingertips. From the speakers overhead pour “Another Liddell Piece of My Heart” by Lewis Carroll Overdrive. The transdermal patch on her forehead pulses, pouring the trance medium through her blood. She places her hands palm down on the foam pad and slots the studs into metal cups, waits as the data streams connect

  Entering the darkfield, her body caressed by thousands of signals. They feel like tiny pinpricks erupting from a sheath of velvet cloth. The connection is made as a throbbing sensation begins in the base of her skull.

  The lab machines sing her a lullaby as stars smear across her vision. Gradually she feels her core separate from the body. The stars make flourishes and arabesques like the tracery of glowsticks. The darkfield splits and she sees her body on the other side as the invisible wall seals it off from view.

  A brief spike of panic as she feels all the molecules in her body loosen like a cloud of pollen and float in the void. Then, gradually, they collect again as her astral double—or whatever the hell it is—solidifies.

  She hits the jungle floor silent as a Ninja, inhaling the fragrance of the flowers and the musky scents of the animals that prowl her creation.

  ***

  Dr. Viola Flesh: celebrity narcissist, proxy mutant or original genius? For nearly everybody outside her circle, the jury is out. At the risk of hubris, she allows herself the best possible spin on an admittedly messy identity. As she sits in her own private jury box she listens to the testimony, still unclear exactly who they’re babbling about. At least for once the voices are outside her head.

  In a somewhat objective arena she’s right on the cusp of unveiling her new invention, for a limited audience at first: Beta-testers, some hand-selected (the blogger, Bilge), the majority randomly chosen by her mule, Solare.

  Solare’s gender is a mystery. One of the few successes—the term is provisional—sprung from Dr. Flesh’s early work. As a mule, Solare has been extremely effective in abduction, subtle mind-fucking and other, more inscrutable tasks unknown even to itself. The mule’s ignorance works in Flesh’s favor.

  Even Viola doesn’t know what to call the new thing, the prototype, the Object to Destroy Heart-Shaped Brides. The working term she uses is Reality Stack, but the bloggers have already circulated the meme of “fuck/shit stack,” and Viola’s backers can taste her blood, almost literally. The rumors trickling through the Supranet indicate that Dr. Flesh has “lost what’s left of her freaking mind” (Fanbloggia.com), “retired her sanity—if she ever had any” (Boringcrap.com) or “convinced herself once again that she is the love child of Leni Riefenstahl and Andy Warhol—which she ain’t” (Bittergeeks.com).

  Most of her previous innovations have been both extremely dangerous and far too bizarre for commercial use. A team of lawyers has been working around the clock to suppress victi
ms of the Stack’s precursor from venting their displeasure. Enormous sums have been administered, strong-arm tactics used as a last resort.

  Admittedly, Viola’s unorthodox blend of science, black magic and avant-garde cinema had created casualties, limping creatures whose dark hearts and minds were consumed with endless vengeance. Even Viola, whose very cells crawled at the idea of her own culpability, had to come clean on this point. After all, victimhood was something she regarded with an icy, Promethean disdain. Too close to home, too much like Oklahoma, the Drama Club, bullying, the dreaded Two Hole Punch, secret dreams of Family Bondage icon Val Valentine, and a pronounced taste for filmy, silky underthings (or were they underlings?)

  And an obscure pumpkin-based metaphysics. She could feel their presence now, her orange nemeses, carving themselves into jagged-tooth grotesques only she understood. The pumpkins had suggested that last project, Not Quite a Reality Stack But Darn Close, the beta audience for which had been transformed into Shamanic Druids with shaky hands and a penchant for outré vegetable sports.

  Yes, her earlier experiments had yielded victims, but NQRSBDC was not to be blamed solely. She would not yield on this one qualifier, although her lawyers had suggested that this was the whole point. Cinema remained for her a pure art form, with all the perils inherent therein. In the words of another practitioner, you bought the ticket and took the ride. Had she not herself submitted her sanity to the jaws of madness, the perilous orange fear that drove her to the brink of reality TV, and even beyond? Besides, nobody had put a gun to anybody’s head and forced them to participate.

  Actually, this was not quite true. The gun was of a decent caliber and many of the heads still bore the impress of its barrel. But the principle remained. Movies weren’t responsible for madness, death, dismemberment, the sudden urge to emulate a great horde of Sodomy Mimes and inject one’s self with the Dream Liquid, or to rage naked in the streets with prophesies of the last days, when the pumpkin horde would come to visit and stay to teach the malformed ontology of puppet-fucking.

  (Or would they?)

  Viola looked fondly across the warehouse at the upright coffin that housed Solare. The she/he/it embodied everything Viola loved: the glamorous ooze of androgyny, the seeping carnage dispensed nightly to Viola’s foes. Even its peculiar need for cookies took on its own charm under full moonlight. She thought she could hear it munching in there right about now, the sounds resonating through the naked pipes that ran up and across the ceiling, raising dust on the floorboards and a species of red army ant. So simple were its basic needs, and yet so complex a personality she had rarely known. Without Solare, she would be left with a private hell, with nothing to shield her from the pumpkins.

  Maybe it was asleep, dreaming of Amsterdam and sloppy, nameless holes.

  “Solare, can you hear me?” she asked.

  Silence.

  “Don’t be impertinent,” she said, her tender feelings shaded with irritation. Lately, Solare had developed an attitude and probably needed a hypnotic upgrade. Or downgrade. Or a head-butting. Or a cheese-grating.

  “I summon and succor thee by all the powers of Pokemon, wake and show thyself.”

  Petulant silence.

  “Don’t make me come over there,” said Dr. Flesh firmly. “I have a mission for you.”

  “Come out and kill for Mistress?” said Solare in its smooth, mellow voice.

  “In a way,” said Dr. Flesh.

  “No.”

  Viola sighed. It was time to make use of the stocks, the hypodermic, the shock therapy and direct anal injection of fuzzy worm bile.

  She picked up the coil up the coil of wire and experimentally squeezed the alligator-clip electrode attachment.

  “I guess you’ll miss out on the fresh batch of cookies I just had delivered,” she said. “Too bad. They sure look tasty.”

  She heard movement from the coffin. The lid slowly opened.

  “Cookies?”

  ***

  The unincorporated area just south of Noe, where Bunuel Avenue and Fulci Street briefly merged and the wrong side of the tracks peeled back in a Moebius striptease to become the full tracks, was a virtual No Man’s Land. This was outlaw territory, where surreal things happened to absurdist people.

  With sufficient perspective, you could see the point where the garment district halted abruptly and fled in abject terror, where the sweatshops curled up like the paws of imaginary roadkill, and all but the sketchiest felt a bone-deep sense that past this boundary line, all bets were off.

  Those traits that made SoNoe anathema to the nice and normal were precisely why Viola had chosen it. Here, if their instincts for self-preservation were intact, they left you alone. Even the ghetto birds stopped circling here, as if they had hit an invisible wall. The sidewalks crackled with fissures, and the glowing eyes of the mutated wrecks that lived beneath could be seen even in daylight.

  Of course, there were some disadvantages to living and working in SoNoe. Insurance agents wouldn’t set foot there on a dare. If a building burned to the ground, it stayed burnt, a grim reminder that some laws were not meant to be violated.

  Nevertheless, for one bent on meme-morphs and the construction of soft machines, the area had a definite bent appeal. It was a place where the sight of an oiled, nude hermaphrodite thumping down the street, its head encased in an arcane harness, barely registered. Nor would anyone think to call the authorities when an absurdly tall woman in a leather bustier, black PVC skirt, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels equipped with actual stilettos, armed with a tranquilizer gun and with a psychotic gleam in her eyes, sped down the sidewalk in hot pursuit. In SoNoe, you left well enough alone. That was the price of freedom.

  “Don’t make me use this,” Viola bellowed. Five feet ahead of her, Solare had stopped in its tracks, coughing and grunting. It turned around and shot Viola a defiant middle finger.

  “Oh, we’re playing Gingerbread Man now, are we?” asked Viola.

  “Sarcasm…will get you nowhere,” said Solare, its voice muffled by the harness. “I’m sick and tired of being your guinea pig, your test subject, your ass-worm host.”

  “Headset a little too tight?”

  “See, that’s what I’m talking about. You treat me like a thing. I am a human being, not an animal. I have feelings and thoughts. Surely you can recognize that.”

  “Of course,” said Viola in a wheedling tone. “I know that. Your humanity was never in question. But I thought we had an agreement. A contract.”

  Solare fought for breath. “One second,” it wheezed. “Boy, I really do need to exercise more.” Sweat was streaming down its flanks.

  “Why don’t you come back to the lab,” said Viola, “and I’ll try to make a slab a little more comfy. I promise.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Solare. “I’m sorry I ran out like that. It was the insects. I…I couldn’t take the bug shot.”

  “Bug shot?”

  “You…have no idea how uncomfortable that is. One hundred live centipedes playing nano-chess in your intestines? And they weren’t even following the rules. Half of them were cheating. And that—it tickles. It tickles bad.”

  “I promise I will extract the insects,” said Viola. “Let’s get you back to the lab, ok? I can’t do surgery here.”

  Solare sighed and slumped its shoulders, defeated.

  “Okay,” it said. “But there better be cookies.”

  “All you can eat,” said Viola. “I promise.”

  ***

  Nathan Hale Bilge, administrator, architect and chief staffer at Psychogremlin.com, licks the potato chip crust from his fingers and readies himself for another plunge into the cybernetic fray. He truly loves his work.

  “Dr. Flesh has a certain cachet among shithuffers and doomdoorbellringers,” Bilge writes, enjoying his own wit, “although personally I’ve never understood what all the fuss is about. Evil Ass III was a disappointment on just about every level, even as conceptual art. So far, all this auteur has managed is
to raise one’s gorge. Fandom cannot embrace her pretensions without the onset of severe brain atrophy, the general public won’t touch her, and the mainstream critics have so far eschewed her work. Yesterday I received an invitation to her new piece, Reality Stack. I have to admit I’m curious, despite my misgivings and skepticism about her talent. If nothing else, it should be good for a few laughs.”

  Bilge’s fingers hum like tiny engines. One final push, and he’s through.

  “With any luck, Reality Stack’s reception will convince Dr. Flesh to stay in the lab where she belongs, producing questionable inventions, the utility of which has never been clear.”

  He kisses his fingers and clicks “publish.”

  II.

  “I’m bored,” whined Solare from the depths of the coffin. “May I come out and kill, Mistress Mommy?”

  “Have some more cookies,” said Dr. Flesh. “Mistress is working.”

  This was the contrary nature of the beast. When she needed it to abduct and render, it got whiney, but when she needed to focus on something, it wanted to come out and kill for Mistress.

  She had tried several times to recode its hypnotic patterns, but the thing was developing an annoying will of its own. And the fuzzy worm bile just made it horny. So that was out.

  “Okay,” said Solare. But it was a petulant “okay.”

  A few minutes later, Viola spun away from the computer, stood up and began pacing the loft.

  This was no way to live. Keeping Solare in cookies was not a problem, but the munching sounds were going to drive her out of her freaking gourd. And if she stopped the cookie flow, which she’d tried on several previous occasions, the narcoleptic slave demanded chips.