Horror Short Story

A door opens.

– I’m back.

Maybe it’s a lover caressing you. Could it be the blonde boy from the afterparty you went to with Violet? The two of you looked pretty cosy, sharing smoke between your lips and slips of fingers down waistbands. Violet, the only butch at the party, was trying to turn some cheerleader on the back porch, so you both had your hands full.

– Great, here you go.

But the metallic echoes from dirty water droplets breaking the water surface in a bucket tells you something else. When they replaced your eyes, sewing together new optic nerves to the ones resting out of the caves in your face, they might have misconnected a wire or two, and now you’re not sure what that dragging, wet sensation could be… This isn’t even your bicep, let alone your own arm anymore. You’ve been so heavily drugged that you can no longer tell anything apart as the thundering presence of the ventilation system’s reverberation encapsulates you and deafens your orientation. If it weren’t for the pressure on the back of your body, you’d have no idea you were lying down. The several slight pulling sensations around your neck start to tip you off to the fact that there might be something else that’s been replaced… 

If only the moonlight had been as violent last night as the spotlight on your borrowed retinas is right now. You might have decided to sleep over at Violet’s place and not have had the brilliant idea to… to…

You have a vague memory of being offered something to smoke, there’s a flash of a sniff, and after the pink lava lamp on the ashed-out sofa table turned fuzzy, you don’t remember anything.

– It’s opening its eyes,

If your eyes had been razors, they would have cut that boy who just spoke a hundred times over. Immediately, you fixated on him and could identify each strand forming his curled eyelashes. He was dressed as a nurse, but you could still recognise the blonde curls from last night. You turn to another man, catching a glimpse of the oil from his cup noodles reflecting ever so slightly on the tip of his bulimic moustache emanating from ragged phosphor dots.

– Pulse is rising,

Your focus backs up to encompass the entire room. There are countless faces on several screens all around you. An electronic woman fills the void in the darker frequencies the ventilation couldn’t meet:

– User “HitlerDidNothingWrong420” donated 2 bitcoins. Comment: Cut its vagina again.

The one in a doctor’s coat lets out a perfect sigh, like something out of an anime. She feels rehearsed.

– Now, chat. We’ve been through this; we are not here to mutilate. We are to blur the boundaries between man and fauna. Therefore, we do not accept those kinds of requests; mods, please refund that donation. Now, be creative, chat! The eyes have been replaced with eagle eyes; the reproductive organs have been swapped from human female to lizard male; the arms are now octopus tentacles, and the mouth is that of a panther. So, what do you think, chat?

– User “PedoBearenstein88” donated 0,1 Bitcoins. Comment: can we put a tail, plz?

– I love it when you’re polite, chat! A tail, of course!

Tears are cascading down your face. Maybe that’s the one thing these people won’t be able to take away from you and turn into whatever perversity they are spawning on you now. If you cry hard enough, you might convince them to set you free. To see you as human. As kin. 

The doctor’s hard office shoes clank away on the wide tile. With only the vile spotlight and frying screens to decorate your periphery, you hear a gate open, a bone crunch, and a monkey scream. The gate closes, and the clanky shoes return. The doctor and nurse stand towering over you. They take a long, slow, calculating, hungry look at your body and kiss passionately. 

They flip you over like you were a slab of meat on a grandmother’s chopping block, albeit a bit heavier, apparently not minding at all the work they did on your front side. The pain doesn’t cut through the heavy wall of protection the sedatives built. But that still doesn’t change that the rough blow busted open the patchwork of flesh and fat of panther and girl, with polyester threads coming undone and exposing your infrahyoid muscles underneath.

Your head lays angled to the left. In your field of vision, you see both of them completely engrossed in the task at hand.

– They’d never let us do this in lab class!

He says this excitedly. You could almost mistake him for a kid talking about sneaking in candy.

– Haha, you don’t say.

With their heads lowered to get as close as possible to your coccyx, trying to perfect the suture with the slab of the monkey tail, you notice something moving in the shadow bordered by the doorway. You recognise Violet. She is naked. Bleeding from small puncture wounds on her arms. Staggering as quietly as possible towards you with a surgical saw in one hand and the other against the wall to steady herself. 

Your tears start to run again. Hope fills you, and it trickles out to the skin that’s still your own. She’s getting closer. They still haven’t noticed her. 

She’s letting go of the wall, saw high. Her legs can barely hold her. She casts a quick eye towards you, and you can see the blood that’s dried on her eyelashes from what’s running down from the sutures on her forehead, painting her body like red zebra stripes.

– User “BreivikLover95” donated 0,002 Bitcoins. Comment: The dyke is behind you!

They turn around just as Violet lunges at them with the saw, and she loses her grip.