by Simon Bestwick
On the screen, there was a naked corpse, female, far gone in decay, face down. Behind it, a chubby balding man, middle-aged, gripped its hips and buggered it. There was something horribly familiar about both figures, and it took me a moment to register what it was. When I did—
“Oh, Jesus . . .”
Even through my nausea, I had to admit that the surgeons had done a great job. Even the corpse was a dead ringer for the original.
The dozen or so necros masturbating furiously in their seats cheered, or those who were confident enough of coming did. The corpse’s cheek split open and oozed pus. I grimaced and looked away.
Sharkey clapped me on the shoulder. “Come on. No worse than remixing Candle In The Wind.” He laughed coarsely, then caught my arm and towed me away from the open door.
We passed another two viewing rooms en route. In one, the screen showed Marilyn Monroe being gang-banged by Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, with the young Elvis and John Lennon about to join in. As we passed, one of them pressed the tip of a knife to her shoulder and carved a red path down her side to her hip. Blood ran over the china-white skin. In the other room, the Osmonds were getting up to antics in a farmyard that I’d have otherwise thought medically impossible.
Welcome to Mengele’s.
I never thought of Sharkey as the kind of guy who’d know about this kind of place, but he did.
Getting in wasn’t the problem. To come calling, someone has to have told you, and they don’t tell you unless they know you’re their kind of client. I don’t know what Mengele’s look for in a client. There’s one qualification that’s obvious, of course, and that’s money. Wads and wads of the stuff. This isn’t for you if your idea of paying for it is twenty quid for a knee-trembler down the alley, that’s for sure.
It was nothing to look at. A line of detacheds on a posh suburban street. Chintzy decor glimpsed through windows bordered with fronds of lace curtain. Retired majors, stockbrokers, power-dressing executives, all the true-blue backbone types with Jags and Beamers parked on their gravel driveways.
Then you come up to the fifth house on the right, crunch your way up another gravel drive and press the bell, which plays the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. Someone’s idea of a joke. The door opens and a smiling housewife type shakes your hand, takes your coat, welcomes you inside.
Money changes hands, or at least someone’s Gold Card does temporarily. And you’re in. Three floors, then a basement and sub-basement. Your blackest desires fulfilled on every one.
Sharkey was a mate from long ago, who’d ended up doing well for himself. Very well. One of those clawed-his-way-up-from-the-slag-heap types who’d rattle on about how he’d done it for two hours at a stretch at the slightest encouragement, like you’d never heard it before. A couple of hundred times before.
He’d been Mr Mood-Swings lately. Depressed and ready to take your head off one minute, then beaming, back-slapping, offering brandy and cigars and acting like the king of all the world the next. I’d been starting to feel nervous around him for a while, but I stuck with him. He was a mate.
Anyway, one night, there we’d been, Sharkey whipping out a cereal bowl full of enough snow to send Rudolph and all the reindeers airborne without Santa Claus’ help and snorting it up like an industrial hoover. I turned the offer down, although I said yes to the cigars and the high-priced Napoleon VSOP or whatever it was called. We talked over old times, with me leaning forwards or backwards out of bottling range depending on which way Sharkey’s pendulum was swinging at that minute. And finally Sharkey looked up, rings of white dust crusted round his snotholes, and said, “Who do you want to fuck?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, who?”
I thought about it, then mentioned his secretary, an incredibly luscious natural blonde who’d have been earning me Hail Marys from here to eternity if I’d still been a believer. Sharkey rolled his (severely dilated) eyes and shook his head. “No, no, no. Christ, you never did have any ambition. I say who, I mean anybody. Anybody ever. Man, woman, alive, dead. Whoever. Anybody. Shit, pick two or three if it’s a close run. Your ultimate fantasy fuck.”
Well, that’s a question, isn’t it? I mean, I thought of his secretary because you automatically get used to that kind of thing, don’t you? You let your dreams tone themselves down because it spares you the worst disappointments. And when the field’s thrown wide like that—shit . . .
I hemmed and hawed and thought it over for a few minutes till I started seeing Sharkey’s eyes rolling like the insides of tumble driers and decided I’d better get my finger out. So I took a deep breath and reeled off the roll-call for my ultimate foursome—Lauren Bacall (young) Ingrid Bergman (ditto) and from the present day, Gillian Anderson.
Sharkey nodded approval. “You’re sure?” he said. “Anyone else? That’s it, definitely?”
I nodded. “Yeah, why?”
He shook his head, wagged a finger naughty-naughty style and laughed. “It’s a surprise. You’re gonna love it.”
And a couple of nights later, here we were.
Yes, it was that Mengele—Josef, the Angel of Death, performer of lunatic experiments to the strains of Wagner’s Nibelung. The story ran that after the war, the mad doctor had carried on his obsession with twisting flesh out of shape. And it also ran that he’d had some successes. The big success had been in plastic surgery. Plastic being the operative word. See, there’s usually a limit to what even the best surgeon can do, and how often. Sooner or later, the body—skin, muscle, bone, whichever part you’re playing with—throws up the white flag and says forget it, I give up.
I don’t know the specifics—everything about Mengele’s is rumour, even its existence. You can only find out about it through friends, or the friends of friends. They can’t exactly advertise. Like I said, how they decide who finds out and who doesn’t is beyond me. Not that it matters right now.
Mengele linked up with a few more of the old Nazis. God knows what kind of a reunion they had, swapping mutilation stories and funny anecdotes about Himmler. But these were all medical men, the ones who’d got out before the Yanks could rescue them with Operation Paperclip or before being passed over for it and thrown to the wolves at Nuremberg or worse, the Russians. These boys all had their specialities. And when they all put their heads together . . .
Mengele was making headway with a process he’d come up with as an aid to his crazier experiments—trying to make arms grow out of people’s backs, grafting horns onto men or dogs’ heads onto women, that kind of thing. He ran up against that old brick wall, tissue rejection. He messed around with mechanical aids that connected the different bits, a kind of interface handling changeovers in blood and suchlike, but in the end it wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted perfect blending between one piece and another.
His process was something to do with plasticity, protoplasms—all stuff that went clean over my head. I’ve got a feeling that only a maniac could have discovered it, or probably, understood it.
Whatever. What it boils down to is that with this process, tissue stretches. It literally becomes putty in your hands, whether it’s flesh or bone. In that state, you can cut and twist and shape it like a sculptor, or, like clay, smooth it into another piece of tissue from something else. When the process is complete, the pieces are connected by a kind of hybrid tissue that neither piece rejects.
It was going well, but the mad doctor needed money. He was loaded as it was, of course, but he could see years of research spinning out ahead of him, and it was going to take a lot of the green stuff to sort it out. So him and his buddies hit on the perfect scam.
Want to fuck a movie star? Which one? Pick him or her from our exclusive catalogue, and if you don’t find the one you’re looking for, we’ll create them for you. To order. Do you want them to dominate you, or has it always been your fantasy to whip and fuck Audrey Hepburn? Or whoever? Strap them down and cut off their faces to mount on your wall as souvenirs, or just because you can? You only need to ask us; we’ll quote you a price.
You want them living or you want them dead? No problem. As amputees? Easy.
Movies featuring the above? Private screenings arranged at your local branch of Mengele’s. At an agreed rate (usually five or six figures, and seven or eight aren’t unheard of) videotapes, DVDs or, for the traditionalists, film (8 mm, 16 mm, 35 mm or even 70 mm, with and without widescreen format) are available. And with modern CGI techniques, it gets even better. The great, the good, the not-so-good, alive or dead—you can have them to do with as you please at Mengele’s.
Bestiality? Paedophilia? Naturellement, Monsieur. Down the hallways, second on your left. In the sub-basement, it was (again) rumoured that some of Mengele’s by-blows were kept. The dog-headed. The antlered men. Arms out of backs. Whatever. Maybe it was true and maybe it wasn’t. Do you want it to be true? As long as you’ve got the money, it will be. If the dog-heads don’t exist, they’ll make ‘em up just for you.
This was the ultimate brothel. You really could have anything, whoever your heart desired. And it worked. Mengele never quite got to reap the fruits of his endeavours—he got his comeuppance in some accident or other after a few more years of manufacturing refugees from Hieronymus Bosch paintings. But what he created lives on. Fantasies tailor-made, so minutely perfect you can’t see the join.
As long as you don’t think too hard about where the meat they’re made from comes from.
There was a waiting room with half a dozen wide video screens. At the flick of a switch, you could view whatever was running in the other viewing rooms, or you could take your pick from the wall to wall collections. All sorts. Some well known—Debbie Does Dallas, Animal Farm—others, imports, all pretty kinky as you’d expect here, and, of course—the bulk of the display—Mengele’s own homemade movies.
Production values straight out of the top drawer, of course. And the performers . . . well, they were all movie stars, weren’t they? Or other celebrities. Although why the hell anyone would want a porn video whose star was Margaret Thatcher was beyond me. Maybe it was an S&M thing.
There was a big fancy coffee table with a glass top, onyx ashtrays, and boxes of cigars and cigarettes so fancy I’d never heard of them. A bar stocked with every kind of booze I could imagine and quite a few I couldn’t. And magazines, of course, just like any other waiting room. Not that you’d be seeing the latest Whip Gazette while you were waiting to get your teeth drilled. And that was one of the milder ones.
It didn’t give me the most erotic of feelings. You don’t always want your fantasies to come true. Nothing’s ever as good as the anticipation. And knowing what this place was didn’t help—who set it up, and like I said, you shouldn’t think about where they find the raw material . . .
I tried to shut it out. Shit, Sharkey meant well, didn’t he? And this was supposed to be the foursome of my dreams. I tried to stop thinking about what lay under the surface, focusing instead on what it would be like to run my hands over their smooth skin, to . . .
And that was when the husband came in, playing host. He told Sharkey that his order was waiting in room 109, and took me up to 204.
Try to imagine it. Whoever the most attractive woman or man (or plural) you’ve ever seen on the small or silver screen might be. Try to imagine walking into a room and finding them waiting for you in a huge, soft bed, naked as the day they were born, with every costume and sex-aid possible close at hand. They get up, come over, and they undress you, run their hands over your body and purr with delight. Then they lead you to the bed, pull back the covers, and press you down.
One of them slips you a little red pill. Within minutes you feel randier than you’ve ever been in your life, and harder than a telegraph pole, wetter than the sea. And they start work—hands, tongues, hot, wet holes. Just for starters.
Then you start getting down to the really good stuff. They coax and cajole you for your fantasies, laugh and giggle if you’re shy and kiss and squeeze you to make you tell. And when you do, they dig out whatever odds and ends you might need in two seconds flat, and you’re away again.
And it’s good. It’s better than you’ve ever known. Whatever’s in that little red pill, it does the business. It never stops feeling good, and you think you can keep on going all night. Whatever it takes. It never stops feeling great.
Not even when you meet their eyes, and for a second see what’s really going on at the back of them.
And then you come, and you think you’ll come forever. You see light and colours and exploding stars, and it feels like the earth’s blown itself apart, sending you spinning out into space, floating like a star yourself, blazing, burning bright in the icy dark. Slowly, slowly, you drift, come down, down, down, till finally the pillows and satin sheets and soft smooth flesh kiss you and slam you back into the world, leaving you surprised to find it’s still here after all that.
And then the women pull the sheets tight and snug around you, all squeezing in close, pressing and rubbing together. And you drift some more.
And beside the bed, there’s a fridge, humming softly and contentedly, and one of them, leans down and creaks the door to pull out a bottle of champagne, fluted glasses too. A pop, gunshot loud, as the cork flies free and ricochets off the ceiling. White foam cascades. Glasses fill, stinging your fingers with cold. You yelp. They giggle, and wrap it in a napkin to make it easier. You drink.
They feel sleepy, snuggle down in the soft, soft satin. You’re not sure what to do now. Stay till someone tells you? Go back to the waiting room, or just out the door to wander your own way home, your whole life stretching desolately out before you, it seems, now this longing has been fulfilled, knowing that you’ll never return. One night. A treat. Then Mengele’s is always a distant memory, a tormenting one of guilt and ecstasy.
You want this night to never end, and you want it over, to get out, to go home. You swing your legs out of the bed, slither over a naked, flawless body shaped to its perfection by god knows what tortures, and reach for your trousers.
But you can’t get a grip. The denim slips through your fingers. And when you try to stand up straight, your legs won’t co-operate, will they? Totter across the floor a few steps. Then fall, plunge deep into the deep, thick pile of the carpet. Try to rise, but it’s like fighting quicksand. The dry, ticklish scent of the carpet fills your nostrils.
The door of room 204 is swinging open. The host steps through, flanked by two hefty types I recognise without ever seeing their faces before. Know the species. Hard fuckers with muscle and no mind of their own, wanting something to do that lets them knock someone down, but no idea what. The stuff they make coppers, soldiers, and prison guards from. In this place, what do they do?
The big guys lift me up and start to carry me out. As we go through the door, just before I go under altogether, I see Sharkey in the corridor; he’s having words with the management. Our genial host smiles, cigarette sticking up in its holder at a forty-five degree angle, and reaches into his breast pocket. And money changes hands.
The torture of this place is it’s so hard to die. Once, for a laugh, for someone’s amusement, they shunted me and another girl together, pasted us with that tissue-plasticity crap, welded us together. We clawed and fought like wild cats to rip free of one another. I gutted her to make my escape. They were taking bets on who’d do it to the other. Money changing hands again. Wads and wads of the stuff. I used to look at rolls of cash that size and burn with envy. Now the sight of it makes me sick to my stomach. They carted the girl off with her intestines trailing in the dirt. Then a couple of days later she was back on the job.
I was conscious through most of the operation; they kept me up just for the fun of it, held up a mirror to let me see them knead my face like a lump of dough, stretching and gouging before the real modelling started.
The doctors here are sick fuckers. Sometimes they’ll pull and stretch someone into a sheet of pain that covers half the room, pulling the body into a huge membranous skein that they walk under, watching the veins pulse and the eyes go wide with fear in the contorted, flattened-out mask of a face as they tickle the underneath with a knife. Sometimes they do rip it, just to see. It all goes on video, of course, and whatever’s left gets remodelled, put back together to use in one of the necro films.
And I thought Sharkey was a mate. No wonder he was doing so much coke; he’d been playing the stock market, a real financial smart-arse, but not smart enough. Too many eggs in one basket that turned out to be rotten through to the bottom. Out fell the eggs and smashed. Lots of lovely lolly swirling down the drain, and Sharkey looking the gutter he came from smack in the eye again. Hey, that rhymes.
So, he needed to recoup his losses. And what should he find? That Mengele’s is always looking for new material—pretty selective, they are, and they tend to have a bit of a staff turnover, what with all the necros and the over-enthusiastic S&M boys who want the chance to rip some beauty’s body to fuck just for the experience. And he sold me to them.
A kind of back-handed compliment, I suppose. I don’t know how much they paid, but I hear (rumour again, as always) the going rate usually runs to six or seven figures. Not bad for someone who never got out of the gutter Sharkey started in. Then again, I was in good nick; working in factories and scrapyards can do that, all the hammering and pushing and pulling and shifting shit honing you down to raw muscle. And clean; no illnesses, no disease—someone must have been having words with my GP. So much for the Hypocritical Oath.
They’ve remodelled me more times than I can remember now. It was a hell of a shock when I woke up after the first one, when I looked in the mirror and saw Marlene Dietrich looking back. Then when I looked between my legs and saw . . .
Still, they gave me my cock back a couple of times. I was Errol Flynn on one of them, so I got an improved model. And at least they haven’t turned me into Margaret Thatcher yet.
Like I said, it’s next to impossible to die here, unless they want you to. Whether you want to doesn’t come into it. I’ve tried, but they can almost always bring you back. I’m prime meat; got plenty of use left in me yet. I haven’t tried it since; the punishment’s a spell in the sub-basement wearing a dog’s head and with arms growing out of your back.
But I got a stroke of luck today. It’s my turn to be Princess Di this month. And guess who’ll be waiting for Sharkey in room 109?
He won’t know it’s me, of course. Not till my fingers drive into his throat and crush his windpipe. Not till I start using my teeth to finish the job before they come and take me away to whatever death they reserve for such offenders, which will never be bad enough not to be worth the revenge.
Not till I put my bloody lips to his dying ear and tell him that however bad it is, it’s no worse than that fucking remix of Candle In The Wind.
Simon Bestwick is the author of six novels, the novellas Breakwater and Angels of the Silences, four full-length short story collections, and two miniature ones. His short fiction has appeared in Black Static, The Devil and the Deep, and The London Reader and has been reprinted in The Best Horror of the Year and Best British Fantasy 2013. Four times shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award, he is married to fellow author Cate Gardner. His latest book is the collection And Cannot Come Again, recently reissued by Horrific Tales. He’s usually to be found watching films, reading or writing, which keeps him out of mischief. Most of the time. Bestwick lives on the Wirral while pining for Wales.