The Convulsion Factory by Brian Hodge

Author:Brian Hodge [Hodge, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Horror, Fiction, Short Stories & Fiction Anthologies
Publisher: The Silver Salamander Press
Published: 1996-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

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He’s a man in a shell, and the shell used to feel. Used to flex. If he lost his mind, maybe he could leave the shell behind, free of care and no longer shackled to its tonnage.

When he’s dead, will he rot? Or lie as a stone mummy, his own flesh become his sarcophagus?

Stefan has ample time for contemplation. By admittedly loose calculation of dawns and dusks, he’s been here just over a month. Immobile, his limbs and trunk and neck no longer his own, instead a sculpture frozen in the pose of sleep. Muscles brittle beneath skin like stone.

Ossified. Flesh gone to bone.

And how has this happened? He remembers an evening a month distant, but in these two-plus fortnights of silent immobility, he’s lived a numbed eternity. Memories of vertical perspective and movement beyond eyelids seem ancient.

An evening of newfound companionship, it would do for a night or for a week. Her name was Connie — wasn’t it? It seems so very long ago since those guardedly suggestive introductions over drinks and happy hour hors d’ouevres, and since then she has never referred to herself by name.

Summernight sweat, they lathered each other well in this very bed. Their wetness flowed like earlier wine, and if by the end of the carnal netherhours he felt his joints stiffening, he thought it only as side-effect of her insatiability. Which he would not have classified as nymphomania, precisely. Such insatiability had to go deeper than the libido, a chute emptying into a bottomless chasm of need. She wore him out, and despite the landscape of an unfamiliar bed, he slept deeply and well.

Like a petrified log.

Awakening the next morning to a deep and overall soreness he had never quite known. Movement equated with pain, like muscles wrenched during autumn’s first pick-up game of football with friends a few years ago, before families were begun in earnest by so many of them. Stefan asked to sleep in, you don’t mind, do you? And she did not. He blithely loved her in that moment, her bright understanding, her trust.

Awakening later that afternoon to realize the pain was gone, while even the possibility of movement had been taken with it. His fear was great, an awesome weight to bear, the same fear the fox or mink must feel with the first slam of trap jaws on its paw. And then, compounding the misery, he knew the shame of embarrassment.

He was lewdly, permanently, erect.

Awakening with a hard-on had always been a matter of goofy pride, everything in working order and ready for action. It had become the most ironic of curses.

He glanced down along his length, could tell a difference in skin color, healthy fleshtones gone dusty white. His internalized horror at this was exceeded only by Connie’s nonchalance when she came home to find him this way, not as if she had been expecting it, but worse: as if it were the answer to some incoherent prayer. He knew the moment she walked in that she would never summon help.

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