Chuck’s challenge for the week: Diseased Horror.
I loved the idea at first but struggled to find a direction to take it in. Then it struck me that while bugs that travel through the air or the water or various bodily fluids are horrible enough in their own right, what about one that could travel even more insidiously — through the mind itself, or even just through eye contact?
The only thing I’m not really sure about is the ending. I’d love to hear some alternate thoughts, but I definitely wanted to convey that the disease doesn’t stop with the hero.
This initially came in way over the limit at about 1400 words, and I managed to trim the fat down to a very terse 999. I hope you enjoy it.
Self-Inflicted
The bus is running late, and my coffee is too hot. Ellen’s sent me a text message reminding me that she loves me — she knows this time of year can run me a little ragged.
I feel a prickle on my neck. I look up and lock eyes with this guy across the aisle. He’s staring at me, the top of his newspaper folded down covering his face below the nose, his eyebrows pulled together in an expression of cold fury. I look back at my phone.
He’s still staring at me.
I meet his eyes again and then there’s this pressure in my head, like I’m in an airplane that’s just climbed thirty thousand feet in thirty seconds, like I might get squeezed out through my own ears. There’s something strange about him. He’s got a horrible scar from his hairline to his cheek, but that’s not it. Then it strikes. He looks like me.
Not quite like me — the eyes are a little bit smaller, the chin stronger, the cheekbones sharper — but it’s too much like looking in a mirror. With a crack like a starter pistol, he snaps his newspaper back in front of his face.
I feel dizzy. My ears are ringing and there’s a cloudiness in my head that wasn’t there a minute ago. My phone buzzes. It’s Ellen, asking if I got her text. The bus driver is announcing my stop, fifteen minutes early. My coffee is barely lukewarm.
*****
By the end of the shift, my head is pounding. The bus home is standing room only, and it feels as if everybody on the bus is staring at me. Every time I try to catch one of them at it, though, their eyes dart away like startled goldfish. When the driver lets me off at my stop, he tells me to have a good night, and I swear it sounds like me talking.
*****
When I wake up, the pain in my head is unbearable. It feels like there’s some thing in my skull, skittering along on tiny insect legs, tearing at the grey matter with its rending beak. I can’t call in sick, though — it’s tax time and the firm is understaffed — so I lurch into the bathroom and pop a handful of Tylenol. I brace myself against the sink, taking deep, unhelpful breaths, then slam the cabinet shut. The mirror cracks from the impact, and I see it — a bright red weal, the skin puckered and angry — running from my hairline to my jaw, just around the outside of my eye.
It’s hideous. I’m hideous. I go into Ellen’s makeup drawer, rummage through piles of mascara and foundation, and find the concealer. In great gobs I smear it on the scar, smoothing it out like plaster. The skin underneath feels hot to the touch, like a pan left on the cooktop. I go to ask Ellen how it looks. Her body rises and falls beneath the sheet, and I decide not to disturb her. No sense in making this her problem.
*****
The boss calls me into his office and slaps down a pile of returns on the desk. Yesterday’s. I’ve screwed them up, apparently. My head starts throbbing and I can’t make out a word. All of a sudden he’s looking at me funny, and then his face changes. His sallow, pale skin tightens up and tones, his receding hairline creeps forward. The angry red scar I saw in my mirror this morning blooms on the side of his face. The eyes scowling at me are my eyes. Rage overtakes me. I leap from my chair, my fist finds his face — my face — and for a split second, the thunderstorm in my head goes quiet. The relief is so overwhelming that I grab the phone off his desk — one of those old-school jobs, stamped metal on the bottom — and smash it into his head, opening up a wicked gash to mirror the one that’s already there. He ragdolls to the floor. I straighten my suit and leave the office early.
My head feels better.
*****
I walk instead of waiting for the bus. Every face is a shadow of mine: my jaw here, my nose there. Every eye follows me as I hurry past. I’m bumped, then shoved, then I break into a run, throwing the false mes aside, ignoring their protests as they topple from my path. My headache creeps back in, threatening to sunder my skull. My own voice shouts at me from a hundred mouths.
*****
I hear Ellen moving around in the bedroom, just waking up. I sit down and turn on the television, and my fingers leave vivid bloodstains on the remote. I turn and see her in the doorway, but she’s not Ellen. She’s me. My face, imploring me in confusion and mounting panic. My voice, asking me if I’m all right. The only thing missing is the scar, so I grab a kitchen knife.
*****
The headache is better now that I’ve dispatched that pretender. My own distorted face leers at me from every person I pass. It’s too ludicrous not to laugh. I sit down for lunch and a cup of coffee, watching all the pale imitations of myself, and there — there — is somebody who looks different. She’s normal. I can’t take my eyes away. She sees me, and looks uncomfortably away, but I am spellbound.
A lightness builds in my head and then a stretching, like some invisible tail reaching up out of my head and spanning the distance between us. Then I have her eyes again and there’s a feeling of sweet release, like taking off tight shoes at the end of the day. The scar opens up on her cheek, invisible, beneath her skin, but glowing, white-hot.
A passing me asks if I’d like a refill. I scowl and tell me to get lost.
When I look up, the girl across the aisle looks just like me.
Accidentally Inspired 
Chuck’s challenge of the week: Build a story around one simple sentence.
I was inescapably drawn to the quirky and goofy sentence penned by Ryanjamesblack: “Merlin leaned against the bathroom sink, stroking his smoky beard self-consciously, studying the instructions on the “JUST FOR MEN” box with the surly frown he usually reserved for translating incantations scribed in a dead tongues.”
Here, then, is Merlin in Midtown.
Merlin in Midtown
“I’ve got a care package prepared for you when you arrive,” the man in black said. His name was Smith — obviously a fake — and Merlin much preferred the more ominous-sounding “man in black”.
“Clothes, shoes, letters of writ?” Merlin asked.
“We call them passports, but yes.”
“Hat?” The man in black held up a baseball cap before the mirror. Merlin passed an unimpressed eye over it. “Not pointy enough.”
“No pointy hats here.”
Merlin huffed through his prodigious mustache, blowing its points out toward the mirror. As likely, Smith would say “no beards” next.
“And about your beard…”
“Not a chance! I’ll not shear my face for some little upstart. Maybe in your time the men go around with their faces as smooth as the women’s, but –“
“Relax. You don’t have to cut it.” Smith reached into his devilish little contraption and pulled out a hand-sized box with a smiling, grizzled man on it.
“What in the name of Excalibur is that?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”
He had delayed long enough. Worlds needed saving. Again. The man in black had contacted him using all the appropriate passwords; he was a member of the Order, even if his appearance suggested nothing arcane in the least. Still, Merlin had seen stranger things in his time. “Stand back.” He hiked up the hem of his robe, stood up on the washbasin, and stepped through the mirror. Smith stood a respectable distance away as Merlin emerged from the bathroom mirror in his twenty-first century apartment. Now in the flesh, Merlin finally got a good look at the man in his sharp but nondescript black suit.
Of course, Merlin didn’t know what a suit was, but it looked sensible enough.
“Is that how you’re dressing me, then?”
“Not exactly.”
Merlin leaned against the bathroom sink, stroking his smoky beard self-consciously, studying the instructions on the “JUST FOR MEN” box with the surly frown he usually reserved for translating incantations scribed in a dead tongues. After massaging the foul-smelling goop into his beard and a good, healthy rinse, a less grey Merlin looked back at him from the mirror. “What sorcery is this?” he demanded.
“Less sorcery, more chemistry. Your wardrobe is in the other room.”
Smith exited the building in his black suit, got into a waiting black car with black windows, and drove off into a black tunnel. Merlin followed a few minutes after, wearing leather chaps and biker boots and a jacket studded with enough metal, he figured, to defend himself against a knight’s broadsword, not that he expected to encounter any such weapon in this time. At the curb, next to the lumbering steel beasts that glided past in puffs of faint fading smoke, stood a wheeled contraption that looked like some blacksmith’s nightmarish invention, a two-wheeled tangle of pipes and plastic and leather that the man in black had told him to ride to the destination. He tossed one leather-clad leg across its seat, cast a few protection spells about himself, and forgot to breathe as the thing roared to life and spirited him through the streets at ludicrous speeds. Tingles of excitement zinged through parts of him he’d forgotten about.
He dismounted the iron horse and pushed his way through the swinging doors of a tavern that felt a bit more like home than the rest of this world. It was dark and seedy and smelled of ale and smoke. Smith had given him a magical imprint of the man he was here to find, a lifelike image on a piece of glossy parchment which he held at the tip of his long nose as he cast his sparkling eyes around the room. There, bent over a green table in the back, was the very same boy, the likeness impossibly undeniable. In his hand, a quarterstaff, tapered to a fine point, with which he propelled a series of balls around the table. Merlin lowered the brim of his disappointingly un-pointy hat and strode over to the boy. “Arthur?” he used the voice he saved for royal decrees and portents, a deep, rumbling and ominous affair designed to awe and mystify.
“Scram, old man,” said the boy, in complete disregard of Merlin’s melodramatic tones.
Merlin tapped a finger on the table and the billiard balls exploded in a cloud of rainbow-colored dust. Arthur drew a tiny flashing blade and pointed it at Merlin’s nose. Merlin squinted his caterpillar-thick eyebrows and the dagger flung itself into the edge of the table, yanking Arthur’s hand down with it. The boy pulled and wrenched at the blade but it was stuck fast.
Merlin chuckled to himself. In his time, a child of destiny would reveal himself through a feat of strength or a demonstration of wit; this lad seemed capable of neither.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Enough, Arthur. I’m here to help you.”
“My name’s not Arthur, you psycho.”
Beneath his copious mustache, Merlin’s lips creased into a terse line. He left the youth bewildered and shouting obscenities at his back as he stomped out of the bar, the ridiculous garments of leather and steel disappearing in puffs of purple smoke and being replaced with his comfortable, grey robes. Outside, Smith, the “man in black” leaned against his black sedan, smiling a cheshire-cat grin. Merlin waved a hand and the slick facade dissolved, revealing a pale woman in a cascading, swirling dress of green and purple. She held a tiny blinking device in her hand, which she aimed at him with a series of maddening clicks. “Damn you, Morgan!” In her own wisp of grey-green smoke, she vanished.
By the time he arrived back in his own time, all the stained glass in the castle had been replaced with images of Merlin in his ridiculous leather outfit astride that horrendous metal horse intimidating a poor, helpless twenty-first century kid; his latest indignity immortalized in multicolored mosaic.