Doctor Flesh- Director's Cut Read online

  Nobody remembered exactly how Mallardy entered the picture. Rumor had it that he was a seventh cousin, once removed, of the uncle of one of the original founding fathers of the Sugar Valley community. Mallardy hailed from West Virginia, had shown up one day at Steele’s doorstep in duck waders, brandishing a Bible and waving his foot-long grey beard in her face. She’d put him up in one of the guest rooms and made several frantic phone calls in the attempt to determine who he was and what he was there for. She was assured that Mallardy had been summoned to inspire solidarity among the members of the secret True Blonde Coalition, which had splintered off into the Total Disclosure cell and the Behead All the Bitches sect. At present, the BAB’s were dominating the conversation.

  “Maybe you’re wondering why I’m here in this den of iniquity, here in Sugar Valley with your Death Ball Jesus and your Godless experimentation,” said Mallardy. “I’m not here to preach that gospel, but to make you see the error of your ways. To renounce the spiked ball and return to the true church of the duck.

  “Many times I’ve been out there in the swamps and marshes, many times hiding behind a blind, waiting…for a message, for the answer to my prayers, for a sign from above that the ducks are coming. I’ve searched my soul and sought within for a solution. Oh, how I have agonized in my heart of hearts. And you know what I’ve found? Duck Jesus is the only way. He will hear the call of the sincere, but shun those without faith. And we must have faith, brothers and sisters of Sugar Valley. We must.

  “I want you to gather in a circle and pray with me. I want you to join hands as we put our fate in the palm of the Almighty. We will find that which we seek. But it shall not be through the violence of beheading, nor the chemical and shock treatments. Duck Jesus, please heed our call.”

  Courtney clasped hands with her husband, who was kneeling by the side of Father Mallardy. She was grateful for the pastor’s compassionate wisdom, although his rhetoric struck her as extreme and somewhat random.

  “No, a thousand times no, to the beheading,” said Mallardy. “But these memories must be dealt with. And if the children…” Fat tears rolled down his cheeks as he uttered these words. “I’m sorry…if the children find out what the fathers and the mothers have been doing in their name, their bitter legacy…perhaps…yes, it’s coming to me now. Perhaps we shall have to call upon the dark side. I hear Duck Jesus talkin’ to me now, in my good ear, and he’s sayin,’—blessed be his name—he’s sayin,’ use the fallen woman, the Jezebel, this Dr. Flesh, whose evil has contrived the blasphemy of the Reality Stack. Through her erotic torture devices, she will convert these memories that are surgin’ up and makin’ of our mothers and sisters and daughters a hot mess thereof, change the current…”

  “So that’s a definite ‘no’ to the beheadings?” asked Courtney, her voice tremulous.

  “Forces are in motion,” said Mallardy. “And Duck Jesus, for reasons known only to himself, has decreed that some shall indeed perish in that awful way. But for the rest, the other path shall be trod. That of the electrodes and the clamps and the bindin.’”

  Courtney observed, but quickly pushed out of her mind, that Mallardy’s trousers stretched a bit further when he spoke of Dr. Flesh, and she wondered if anyone else saw. She hoped there was a method to his very apparent madness, but aside from that, vowed to herself to patiently obey the will of the patriarchs of Sugar Valley, who kept her in bling and snuff boxes packed with the wicked candy.

  ***

  Victoria D’Allessandro closed the outer office door gingerly, feeling in her purse to reassure herself that scripts were indeed present. She could still taste Fassbinder’s ancient Teutonic pussy on her tongue, with all its accents of the Black Forest and revels in lederhosen. In the corridor, a hunchbacked figure waited, tracking Victoria as she exited the building by the back steps and walked towards her Jaguar, parked in the main lot of the industrial park.

  By the time she became aware of her assassin, the axe had already whistled halfway through its arc, cleaving off her head, which rolled across the tarmac to be followed by her body and her purse. The prescription fell out of the purse along with a roll of condoms, a hairbrush and a nail file, lifted by a sudden, strong gust of wind and carried away by a cartoon-like crow that seemed to emit its own weather system as it flew.

  ***

  “Oh come on now,” said Sweetback Glade. “I thought all those years in homicide made you hardcore. You’re acting like a green rookie.”

  He stepped aside to avoid getting vomit on his Italian dress shoes. His partner, Joe Oroborus, continued to retch until nothing came out but gasps and sobs.

  “You mean to tell me you never saw a headless body before?”

  Oroborus covered his mouth with one hand and raised an arm. Green juice trickled down his sleeves.

  “Fuck’s sake,” said Glade. “When we report this to the cops, we can’t be sick and dying and shit. That’s this girl’s job.” He nudged the corpse with a stick. “Right? And there ain’t even any fresh blood. It’s just that brown gunk.”

  Oroborus finally found his voice. “I was never in homicide. I was an undercover vice cop.”

  “You mean…”

  “Yeah, all that time I was assigned to track you. Your movements, your shenanigans and escapades.”

  Glide slapped his own face with a broad pink palm. “There’s such a thing as trust. So I trusted a lying, duplicitous motherfucker to cover my ass, and all along you were reporting on me? Good thing I kept my service revolver. I’ve got half a mind to let you join Headless Nelly over here.”

  ***

  Eighteen Years Previous

  “We’re ready for you, Mr. Shreck, any time.”

  Shreck dangled the megaphone between his legs. What to say this time that hadn’t already been said.

  This was not a movie anymore. It was corpses—piles of them, eyes fixed in horror at the last moment, caught blind in the throes of orgasm, axed in the trembling instant that flesh poured out like a muddy stream, the pure, sparkling bliss of its release fixed permanently on celluloid.

  There were so many, where they came from even Shreck didn’t know. The past week had swept through like a hurricane, teeming with bright-eyed starlets brought forth on their knees to taste the glory of video stardom, only to be shredded, beheaded, drilled, sucked to screaming dust.

  At first the operation had proceeded smoothly. Shreck understood what was needed, had rendered the blueprints with mathematical exactitude. The models he had made—of clay, of Styrofoam, of hair gel, of carpet garf—stood silently in the warehouse, templates of perfection. The goal, the vision, might take years to come to fruition: a race of flawless blondes, able to shop without fatigue, wear the clothes created for them, eat the foods designed for them, think the thoughts constructed for them, and when the time came, vote for the candidate with their best interests at heart.

  It all looked good on paper, or modeling clay, or foam blobs angrily melted together. But the reality was so very different. Shreck had practically broken down and cried at the feet of the mannequin, its head perforated and leaking with gokkun, its perfect blondeness evident even in its ankles, its toes, the wonderful arches of its feet.

  If it were only warm flesh, a real surf god; if, like some latter-day Pygmalion, the love he’d poured out before it, and onto it, the love he’d squeezed from a lifetime of longing and splashed on its six-pack, its smooth and unformed genitals, could bring the creature to life. Without the wading in gore, the hacking into the night, the bellowing, the frenzied fugue states in which all body parts began to blur into one another, as though human was just another word for modular unit, and science just a beast with a throbbing stiffie.

  But wishes wouldn’t bring the creature to life. Relentless masturbation wouldn’t animate it. First, it had to be conceived; then, the parts had to be found; then, assembled correctly, coldly, without ardor, according to the models and blueprints.

  The passage from premise to fulfillment was fraught w
ith bawling runaways and graphic close-ups, punched sockets brimming over with spunk, heads sutured together and then ripped apart in a spasmodic symphony of pain—all to find the exact configuration. The fit. Experimentation was a cruel business, even more so when the actors, plucked from the streets and alleyways of Horrorweird, had come to the city of dreams with stars in their eyes, hoping to become famous, smiling down from billboards, signing autographs on glossy prints, making themselves available to their many, many fans.

  It was said that here everybody wanted a piece of you. Shreck knew the bone-hard reality of that.

  But there was a time for contemplation and a time for action.

  “Ready when you are, Mr. Shreck.”

  He picked up the megaphone. “Action,” he said.

  ***

  Shreck’s creation was called Rocko Bentwood, after the man who had donated his brain. Rocko’s brain, formerly the command and control center for the 39-year-old lead singer of the doom metal band Funeralopolis, contained intelligence adequate to the task of voicing dreary, Lovecraftian lyrics about the imminent clown apocalypse. However, that was not the trait Shreck had selected him for. Simply put, Rocko had a genius for pussy—mesmerizing its owners and luring them back to his trailer for a session of the old “Who’s Your Father.” Except that when the groupie of the moment discovered that the expected package was only a carrot stick, she most often bailed. That deficit had been filled by Mort Zorn of Citizens, Inc., the child guitar prodigy turned porn impresario turned suspension artist, whose meat had been hailed as “impressive…daunting” by one of the top actresses in adult film.

  Rocko lost his head in a deadly game of “who can swallow the worst vomit,” in which a bolus of sick was expelled directly into the gaping maw of the next party in a circle, who added their own toxic payload, until the final recipient received an emetic cocktail so powerful they either keeled over on the spot or lived, forever transformed, to tell the tale. In Rocko’s case, he had actually chickened out at the point where the vomitus had begun to glow, fled into the night screaming and naked only to be instantly flattened—save for his brain—by a tanker truck that had jumped an embankment into a residential neighborhood of the Hollyweird Hills. At which point a sensor was activated, a team of masked pataphysicians was summoned, and the brain, still pulsing, was instantly frozen and delivered via bicycle messenger to Shreck’s secret lab. Zorn, less fortunate in some respects and more in others, lived on sans sausage, wiser and sadder, having lost his erotic instrument in an act of retribution by the above-mentioned adult film actress.

  The creature’s massive, chiseled torso, chest and belly came involuntary courtesy of “Thunk” Thornsen, the Norwegian wrestling champ, whose intake of steroids made his head shrivel on his neck and one day simply vanish, leaving the body to fend for itself. The arms had belonged to Biff Baxter, drummer for the semi-legendary Bozokill, the rest of whom was currently in the hands of the clowns. Which left bassist Vern Gormenstein, who lost both legs and head in the surf off Osso Beach. And thus, a village of rivetheads raised a Frankenchild with the deft assistance of Dr. Shreck and the Burp Me Melmo puppet now known as Dr. Fuzzly, injected with a solution of free-form DNA and released among the barely legal senior girls of Sugar Valley High to propagate the True Blonde Cohort.

  ***

  Present Day or Thereabouts

  Halfway through her sophomore year at Sugar Valley High, the girl known sometimes as Ravyn Blackstone and otherwise as a pixelated sigil paused with her fingers over her laptop’s keyboard, wondering how she had come to accumulate such bad social karma. The cafeteria was filled with the electric excitement that always preceded a home game and the Death Ball squad was engaged in a vigorous food fight, mashed potatoes sailing across the room, drumsticks wielded like clubs, soda squirted from high-pressure hoses, all with the tacit approval if not active encouragement of the school’s administration. Blackstone thought longingly of her days at the progressive institution in Missoula and the vicious carnival that had replaced it.

  She had very few friends, and even these were absent today, one girl recovering from cheerleader assault, another nursing wounds delivered in a role playing game gone wrong, and the fourth member of the Geek Squad, the only boy, having simply vanished.

  Ravyn very much wished she were 30 instead of 16 and that her mother hadn’t dragged her from Montana to California in the wake of mom’s second marriage, this time to real estate god Henry Hornburger. Sugar Valley High wasn’t simply a secondary school, it was an exclusive club that rejected people like Ravyn on principle. For one thing, she wasn’t a size 4 blonde, had no aptitude for or interest in sports, buffed-out guys, hair products or small salads. She was proud of her curves and her long, curly gypsy-black hair, loved goth rock and heavy metal and went out of her way to distinguish herself from the other girls, sporting Mayhem and Bad Religion T’s, denim jackets with swatches of band patches, ripped jeans and Chuck Taylor’s. And although she was very, very lonely, she kept herself in reasonably good spirits by writing down her thoughts, fantasies and schema for world conquest on her laptop. When she wasn’t being pelted with French fries and showered with strawberry milkshakes.

  She stood up, dripping grease, her face bright red.

  “Can’t take the heat, huh?” yelled the Captain of the Death Ball team, Bob Hufford. Ravyn tried her very best to ignore him, his obvious lechery disguised as harassment, his ripped stomach muscles and formidable biceps, his cruel, sensuous mouth. She closed her laptop, put it in her handbag, and carried her lunch tray over to the nearest trash bin. Hufford took this opportunity to get in her face.

  “Hi,” he said, his blond curls dancing over smooth, cover boy-handsome features. “You’re not going to leave now, I hope.”

  Ravyn averted her gaze. She found him attractive in a guilty pleasures kind of way, but would sooner chew ground glass than in any way reciprocate his crude advances. Even though he was playing to the groundlings, mocking her, she instinctively recognized that he liked her too, if only at a basic, sexual level. She stayed quiet. Hufford had her wedged between a table full of insufferable small salad-eaters and the trash bin. There was no polite or inconspicuous way to escape him.

  “Excuse me,” she said, moving forward with determined steps in the direction of the exit, about five feet away from the end of the lunch counter. At the last second, the Captain stepped aside and let her pass, but not without smacking her butt, which brought a howl from his team-mates and derisive giggles from the small salad-eaters.

  The cafeteria opened onto a hallway. With her head down, Ravyn walked past the utility room, the Drama Club office and an old, dust-laden trophy case from the pre-Death Ball era, turned right and fished in her jeans pocket for the key to the AV Room. She had work to do, and refused to be disturbed from it a moment longer.

  Inside the AV Room: glorious quiet. Ravyn set down her handbag on a long aluminum table, drew up a chair and retrieved the laptop. Her mind was brimming with a story idea that had come to her the week before, when she’d been visiting a friend in Horrorweird. She and her friend had been window-shopping when Ravyn saw a girl of about her own age sitting on a bus bench, a distracted look on her face. The girl was a short, plump Latina with big, startlingly beautiful eyes that seemed to hold tragedy in them. She was sipping from a plastic thermos and tapping her scuffed sneakers to some internal music. Watching her, Ravyn felt a sudden surge of empathy for the girl. It was almost as though the dark eyes were relaying a story to her and if she concentrated she could take it down by psychic dictation. Then the bus came and the girl was swallowed up and carried away.

  Ravyn bent to her task. “Paying no heed to the incoherent demands of the mother-mass plumped deep in an armchair that dominated her living room like a thrift store throne,” she typed, “Samantha Gomez ran straight to her bedroom, locked the door and hurled her body down on the pink comforter. Her shoulders rose and fell as she sobbed.”

  A sudden surge of noisy movement
came from the hallway as the cafeteria disgorged its contents. The buzzer rang shrilly, followed by a stampede as the students rushed to their next classes. Distracted, she looked up from the screen. With the disturbance, her story had vanished to some now irretrievable middle distance, and Ravyn thought hoped it might return if she focused on something else. Something random.

  Behind the table were four steel filing cabinets that glinted with the light from a horizontal window high on the wall that looked out over the Death Ball field. Ravyn closed her laptop, got up and began opening drawers in the first filing cabinet with no particular goal. It was filled with plastic binders full of photographs of school celebrities past. Sliding that cabinet closed, she decided on a random instinct to check the top one. At first it stuck, then suddenly shrieked open as a VHS cassette tumbled from the top of a stack and fell to the floor.

  Ravyn bent down and picked up the cassette. The white label was marked with a single word: “Shreck.”

  ***

  After twenty minutes of viewing the tape, Ravyn shut her eyes and folded her arms around her stomach. She didn’t want to pass out, not quite yet at least, although from the way her guts were jumping around, sweet oblivion wasn’t on the menu. She had thrown up in her mouth, more than a little, from the relentless battery of violent and disgusting images, redolent of the Cowin necroslushy aesthetic at its most advanced stage of decay.

  Whoever was responsible for the cinematic spew recorded on different types of film stock, HD video and other sources deserved the strappado, for starters, followed by boiling in oil and other medieval torture forms. Which didn’t quite account for the surge of pleasure that went immediately to her groin once she’d overcome the initial nausea, and the panty-soaking that followed shortly thereafter.

  The TV set she was using as a monitor seemed almost infected by the rank tableau that had crossed it; there was an unusual sheen over the screen that she’d never seen before, and even after she had stopped the tape, some of the images remained, as though their evil was so intense it had simply burned itself in.