“Level Five!” Ernest cried, a look of triumph filling his eyes and spreading into an enormous grin. “Subject appears to be suffocating. His eyes are—”
Nolan’s movements were lightning-fast and unexpected; in the throes of his mindless, adrenaline-powered paroxysm, he broke through the last of the thick cords and bolted upright, his head whipping. Blood poured from deep gashes across his body where moments before he’d been restrained. His arms and legs pinwheeled and struck out in every direction at once, searching for help, his brain now mush, his actions primal, mouth gasping for air.
Metal, blood, and vomit flew everywhere, coating the walls and the young men. Nolan’s pupils disappeared, and he searched and pawed blindly, trying to scream through the terrible obstruction in his throat, trying to pull it out, gasping and retching, stuffing his fingers into his mouth and reaching down his throat, his body trying to vomit out the foreign objects.
Nolan was free from his restraints but his actions were primal and desperate. His bulging eyes had focused enough so that they trained on a terrified Ernest, who was now trying in a blind panic to remember where he had left the exit.
Nolan grabbed Ernest from behind, searching for help, a desperate young man tortured beyond recognition, searching for someone to save him from his living hell. So it was his fortunate luck, and Ernest’s pisspoor luck, that he was able to exact his revenge without even knowing it.
For in his final moments, Nolan—weighed down by the metal filling every major cavity in his body—gurgled and sputtered his final gasping breaths, falling forward, impaling Ernest’s tailbone, piercing major organs with what was possibly the world’s hardest and sharpest dildo.
This contorted mess of twisted body parts fell forward into the table, crashing to the floor. The metal-filled pot overturned, spilling its boiling contents on Ernest’s head. He howled, arms flailing, the liquid hardening into a layer on his head and shoulders, the skin beneath bubbling and dissolving off his bones.
He died melting like a crayon in the sun, his colon impaled by his very own test subject, who was dead as well.
Some time later, Ian pulled himself up off the floor. In a daze he extinguished the light and pulled the door closed, shutting the carnage in behind him. His mind was numb, his body trembling.
He remembered earlier walking through a series of doors and now just walked down the passageways shell-shocked, trying to recall the way they had come just a couple of hours before. It felt like he had been down there for days. He realized it would be years before the bodies would be found, if ever.
When he reached the third door, Caleb was sitting on the floor. Ian shined the flashlight beam in his glazed eyes.
“I forgot about you, man,” Ian said, sitting on the floor beside him. “When did you sneak out here?”
“Right after Nolan fell on Ernest. I got the fuck out of there. I thought you fainted or something.”
“They’re both dead. What are we going to do?”
Caleb exhaled and ran his hands through his hair. “Do? We’re royally fucked, Ian. Unless you know the combination. Look.” He shined the flashlight in the air and the beam fell on the lock, a keypad with the series of numbers 0–9.
Ian stared at it, remembering only that the combination was seven digits long.
“Oh, shit,” he squeaked, quickly getting up and entering random patterns of numbers into the keypad. “We can figure this out. I mean, how many combinations can there be?”
Caleb raised his eyebrows. “Are you serious?”
Ian pounded away at the keypad. He wailed on the solid oak door as well but only succeeded in smashing his knuckles and cutting the fleshy pads on his hands.
“What are we gonna do?” he cried, kicking Caleb, who stared into the darkness.
Ian searched the basement for an exit, a window, a crawlspace. All he found was hallway after hallway of solid rock.
Two weeks later the food supply was rotten beyond even their desperation. Every last drop of dead blood—their only source of liquid besides the small reserve of bottled water and their own urine—had been consumed.
Starving now, Ian, whose fingernails were bloody pulps from his efforts to tunnel through solid rock, his throat raw from screaming for help hour after hour, wondered how long he would be able to survive on Caleb’s dead body.
Caleb was wondering the same thing … only he wondered if Ian would last longer if consumed while still alive. Wondered if the body parts would heal, providing Caleb with an endless food supply. Wondered what warm blood tasted like.
Staring at one another from opposite ends of the torture chamber, Ian and Caleb began another experiment in human nature.
The Burgers of Calais
Graham Masterton
“The Burgers of Calais” was first published in Dark Terrors 6, The Gollancz Book of Horror, edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton, 2002.
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Graham Masterton was a young newspaper reporter when he wrote his first novel Rules of Duel with the encouragement of his friend William Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch. He went on to become editor of Penthouse and Penthouse Forum magazines before penning his first horror novel The Manitou which was filmed with Tony Curtis playing the lead role. Since then he has published over a hundred horror novels, thrillers, historical sagas, short stories and best-selling sex instruction manuals. He lived in Cork, Ireland, for several years, and has written a new crime novel about a female Irish detective, Katie Maguire. He now lives in England. His wife and agent Wiescka established his name as the leading horror novelist in Poland, but passed away in April, 2011. He dedicates this story to her memory. Website: www.grahammasterton.co.uk.
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“The Burgers of Calais” is both a pun and a metaphor on the suffering of the people of Calais who were almost starved to death in a siege by the English in 1347, and had to eat rats to survive. They were saved only by the self-sacrifice of six eminent burghers who agreed to surrender themselves and hand over the keys of the city. But it was mostly inspired by Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation which describes how foul the ingredients of most American fast food actually is. Not rats, but pretty close.
I never cared for northern parts and I never much cared for eastern parts neither, because I hate the cold and I don’t have any time for those bluff, ruddy-faced people who live there, with their rugged plaid coats and their Timberland boots and their way of whacking you on the back when you least expect it, like whacking you on the back is supposed to be some kind of friendly gesture or something.
I don’t like what goes on there, neither. Everybody behaves so cheerful and folksy but believe me that folksiness hides some real grisly secrets that would turn your blood to iced gazpacho.
You can guess, then, that I was distinctly unamused when I was driving back home early last October from Presque Isle, Maine, and my beloved ’71 Mercury Marquis dropped her entire engine on the highway like a cow giving birth.
The only reason I had driven all the way to Presque Isle, Maine, was to lay to rest my old Army buddy Dean Brunswick III (may God forgive him for what he did in Colonel Wrightman’s cigar-box). I couldn’t wait to get back south, but now I found myself stuck a half-mile away from Calais, Maine, population 4,003 and one of the most northernmost, easternmost, back-whackingest towns you could ever have waking nightmares about.