Chapter 13
When Vanessa woke, two men were standing over her bed. One held her down as the other gagged and blindfolded her. They grabbed her by the hands and legs and strapped her down to a nearby stretcher and wheeled her into the corridor. She could smell Tiny’s remains in the hall as she passed and could hear the men kicking her body aside.
After a short journey she heard a door close behind her and the blindfold was taken off. She was in an operating room. The walls were made of white sheets stretched over metal frames, shadows of other people passed behind them. Dr. Phalanx was there with two assistants, including Dr. Ferngehn. The stretcher was placed in the middle of the room and Dr. Ferngehn clamped the wheels. He removed the sheets from over her body and peeled off her underwear and bra. Her cooked pigment looked alien to her against the white of the sheets. Her nipples, once pink and large, were now shrunken and brown. She was always warm. She could see what the doctor was doing to her, turning her into the common man’s ideal woman: a porn star. She didn’t know how snakes fit into it though. Her guess was influenced heavily by her encounter with Tiny. They were going to do terrible things to her jaw.
Dr. Phalanx stood at the side of the room with his back to her. He was mulling over a selection of balls placed in order from smallest to largest on an instrument tray.
“Size is always an issue,” he said. He turned to her holding the first ball in the selection: a tennis ball. “See this? This is bullshit. This is your upper middle-class college girl breast right here. This is turning eighteen and getting your parents to buy you boobs for your birthday. This is college blowjobs, trophy wives and swimsuit models. This is useless to me.”
He placed the ball back down on the bench and picked up the next one: a softball.
“This isn’t bad. Getting warmer. This is your high-end stripper, the redneck housewife, biker porn, Playboy.” He walked over to Vanessa and cupped her enormous breast in his cold, pale hand. The other one clasped the ball like a big ripe apple ready for eating. “Your boobs are already too big for these. They would just hang from your chest like overgrown tumors and cause your skin to stretch and sag like old bags of rice. Not very attractive.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Vanessa asked.
“Nothing is wrong with me! It’s you that’s imperfect.” He stepped back and threw the ball high up towards the factory roof. It came down somewhere at the far end of the building and something smashed. “Oops.” He went back over to the bench and returned with a red bowling ball.
“I love bowling,” he said. “I love the heaviness of the balls, the sound of the pins when they explode. It’s so simple and effective.”
He held the ball over his head and stood over Vanessa.
“I can’t tell you how much I’d love to smash your face in right now. Bowling balls have that effect on me. I always want to destroy things with them. I’d love to get a whole bunch of little babies and send them crawling down a big hill. I’d stand at the top and just randomly throw bowling balls down. Imagine how the baby would explode on impact.” He put the ball back down to his waist and stared into the distance, lost in his imagination. “Patches of stained red grass. Rotting baby limbs at dusk. The sound of cicadas and laughter; picnics with madmen by the black lake at noon.”
He broke from his daze and looked down at the ball and back up at Vanessa, who cried silently, certain she was going to die at the hands of this lunatic.
“But this is not for you. You’re a hard bag to fill.”
He walked back over to the table and hugged a beach ball, turning to her with an enormous smile. “Amazing!”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Vanessa protested.
“Yes. I am kidding. This is a pipedream of mine. Something like this would take years of stretching. And we don’t have that much time.”
He bounced the ball around the room, off the heads of his assistants, watching to see if they’d crack smiles.
He took a scalpel from the instrument tray and cut a long line down the side of the ball, the thing deflated and fell limp in his rigid hand. “I fucking hate the beach.”
He walked back over to the bench where the last ball sat and picked it up.
“I don’t like basketball,” he said. “I remember once when I was a kid, I used to think that playing basketball made you taller, and that was why the players were all so tall. It never occurred to me that tall people had decided to play basketball. It seems a little simple doesn’t it? If you’re tall, you become a basketball player. That’s it? Why not become some kind of human daddy long legs, and go around poisoning people smaller than you? Drink their blood. Rape some midgets… Options, Vanessa.”
“Are you going to put basketballs inside my breasts?”
“No, no, no. Not basketballs, just implants the size of basketballs.”
“My god!”
“It’s all a part of making you perfect. Your boobs will be small enough to keep you mobile, but too big to go out in public. You’ll be a housebound plaything. Back problems wont be an issue if you’re lying down all day, legs wide open, mouth gaping, these two giant orbs rolling around on the top of your chest. You’ll be my best work yet.”
“That will never happen.”
Dr. Phalanx stared her down then smiled. “Yes it will.”
He turned to Dr. Fernghen. “Administer the anesthesia.”
Vanessa struggled, but soon gave up. The mask was placed over her mouth and Dr. Phalanx pressed down on her throat.
“This is just the beginning,” he said, and she faded into unconsciousness.
Chapter 14
Detective Gill entered the autopsy room where he met Forrest, the district’s coroner. Forrest had performed the autopsy on the girl found in the creek. Her body lay on its back under sharp white lights. The dog that was removed from her mouth jutted from a large metal bowl on the bench at the side of the room.
“Detective Gill,” Forrest said, “I’ve just finished.”
“What have you found?”
“Very strange things,” he said. “Come. Look.”
Gill and Forrest stood over the body of the unknown girl.
“You can see that her breasts have undergone augmentation surgery — very recently by the looks of it. The scars are still quite fresh.”
“They’re big.”
“’Bout as big as bowling balls, Sir.”
“Yes they are. What else?”
“The toxicology reports haven’t been finalised yet, but we seem to have found a number of separate DNA results from samples taken from her anus and vagina.”
“How many?”
“At this stage we’ve isolated ten.”
“Jesus. Does it look like rape?”
“It’s hard to say.” Forrest moved over to her genitals and spread her legs slightly.
“What is that?” Gill gasped.
“Her vagina has been injected with human fat taken from another part of her body — likely the buttocks. The labia has been inflated to maintain the tightness of her vagina, but you see here,” he pointed to an under section of her vagina where the flesh was marbled blood red. “The friction from the intercourse has caused the surface to open and the fat has leaked inside her vaginal canal and is rotting all the way up to her uterus.”
“That’s what that smell is.”
“Like a thousand rotting fish, sir.”
“Like a thousand rotting fish.”
“Then it gets interesting.” Forrest moved back up towards her head. “The face seems to have undergone some kind of procedure. It’s not a facelift; the scars are all in the wrong places. Some advanced surgery has taken place ranging from her eye sockets to her lower jaw. It may have something to do with how she fit that puppy into her mouth.”