Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

DeVICE Stephen Gallagher

I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to hear this. I mean, it is pretty disgusting.

But I was sitting there in the corner of Flanagan's bar on Christmas Eve, on my own and starting to realize that I wasn't going to be meeting up with anyone that I knew after all, when this expensive coat with a bony old guy rattling around in it — he must have been at least seventy, and he was as white and frail as a scrap of rice paper — sat down across from me and, without even a hello or an introduction, said, "How would you like to make a thousand dollars for one night's work?"

I sighed and looked around the place. Christmas Eve seemed to be losers' night at Flanagan's; I mean, let's face it, nobody was going to be here if they had somewhere real to go.

And I said, "Thanks, but I don't do that kind of thing."

My friend Colin, he used to do that kind of thing. Colin was the one who told me the story about how he'd gone from this very bar to the hotel room of a visiting Japanese businessman, where for once all that he'd had to do had been to lie there without the guy even laying a finger on him. Apparently the man had used chopsticks. A wank, Colin would say, is just too coarse a word for it. I used to like Colin but we don't see much of him around, anymore. These days he spends a lot of his time checking for skin blemishes in a magnifying mirror and wondering if he'll ever be able to get up the nerve to go for a blood test.

But this big-money Methuselah said, "You don't understand," and, with the air of a man satisfied that he'd at last found the one he'd been looking for, he started to unbutton his coat. My heart sank, the way that it does when you open the door and realize that it's somebody who wants to talk about your salvation and you just lost the option of hiding behind the furniture until he goes away.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but I'm really not interested."

"A thousand before and a thousand on completion," he said. "And I'll guarantee that it'll involve nothing that affects you in any direct or personal way."

"And it doesn't involve chopsticks?" I said suspiciously, but he didn't understand.

Listen, I've got my pride.

But Christmas Eve is no time to be broke.

We went out to his car. It was a big Mercedes, and it had a driver in a uniform. The driver didn't even look at me as I got in. I sat there uneasily. The old man sat alongside, dropping back gratefully into the upholstery as if the evening so far had been something of a physical ordeal for him. Our arrangement was that I was going to hear him out, look the job over and then, if I didn't like the setup, I could walk and I'd still have five hundred for my trouble. It was all so painless, I hardly realized I was being carried along with it until I looked back and saw the Flanagan's neon disappearing into the night.

There was rain on the car's window. I was spending my Christmas Eve sitting in a strange car on my way to hear about a job which I just knew was going to be something dubious, at best. It made me feel pretty low.

But the thought of the money made me feel a little better.

He had a big house on the hill above town, with a big wall around it and gates on the driveway that opened at a signal. I looked back and saw them closing again behind us and the man said, "I can see you're nervous. But please don't be." And I tried to look as if I wasn't.

I mean, you hear things. I reckon I can take care of myself, but that driver — he looked as if he wouldn't have seemed out of place in a bloodstained apron with a beef carcass under each arm. And who could say what else was going to be waiting on the other side of that big door under a vast stone portico where only a single light burned?

We went up the steps. The car headed off around behind the house somewhere. The door was open before we reached it. The old guy held back and gestured me in, smiling, like I was some honored guest instead of a hireling that he'd picked up in a dive. There was a maid waiting in the hallway, and she offered to take my jacket, but I kept it on. She wore a uniform, too. One of those with a little hat and an apron. It might have been quite sexy if she hadn't been almost the same age as her employer. She didn't seem at all surprised to see me.

"Please," the old man said. "Follow Elspeth up to the library. Make yourself comfortable. I'll join you in just a few moments."

The library? I was moving up in the world. Most of the time I tended to reckon that I was in a cultured household if there was a book in it somewhere, even if it was only holding up a table leg. But this place didn't just have books, it had a library.

And it looked like one, too. It was all polished wood and red velvet and deep leather chairs with buttons on them. The books lined every wall and even went across the top of the door, and there wasn't a paperback among them. The maid asked me if I wanted anything to drink, and I said I'd like a beer, and she brought it to me a few minutes later on a silver tray with what I guessed had to be a crystal glass. After that she withdrew and left me alone. The old boy seemed loaded, all right.

But given that I'd told him how I was nobody's idea of rough trade, I still couldn't guess what he might need from little old me.

Nothing happened for a while and so I went over to look at the shelves. Most of the titles were foreign; I recognized some German, but most of the others I didn't recognize at all. I took one down and flicked through the pages. It was a picture book.

But, the pictures. .

I mean, I thought I'd been around. But as soon as I saw the one with the donkey I realized that I hadn't — at least, not as much as some of these people, and it was no great matter for regret. Just to give you an example, there was this woman and this man and they were… well, I've got my own idea of what constitutes a hot lunch, and that isn't it.

I never heard him coming in. When he cleared his throat, I slammed the book shut and I could feel my face burning redder than a desert sunset. As I fumbled it back into its place on the shelf, he was smiling. His eyes were a very pale blue, the palest blue I've ever seen. His weariness seemed to have vanished, and I wondered if he'd been off to take a shot of something. I think he might have been wearing makeup, just a hint. I didn't want to get close enough to be sure.

"My collection," he said. "I can see you've been getting acquainted with it."

"Strictly as an outsider," I said. "I'm not into that kind of stuff."

"Don't worry," he said. "Don't worry. All I'm proposing for you is a half-hour's wait around followed by a cab ride. For that, and for that alone, you get the two thousand."

"You've got a houseful of servants here. You've got a big car and a driver of your own. So what makes my time worth so much to you?"

"Come along," he said, "and I'll show you."

We went out of the library and up to the attic, with him leading the way. It seemed like a little-used part of the house; the carpeting on the stairs wasn't cheap, but it was old and dusty, and the walls were spotted with mildew. The attic door was double-padlocked, and it took him a few moments to undo the locks and get the door open.

The first room was nothing special — just a bare floor and boxes and a naked bulb and another door. There was a padlock on this one, too, even bigger than the previous two.

I swallowed hard, wondering what was I about to see.

We went in. Again there was a single unshaded bulb, again nothing to cover the unvarnished boards, but the mess and the bric-a-brac were missing. Instead, standing in the middle of the floor, where the ceiling was highest, was the most peculiar-looking device that I've ever seen.

How to describe it? Well, think of the Time Machine in the old Rod Taylor movie. Then cross it with one of those pieces of apparatus that they use to train astronauts, kind of like a big gyroscope, where they strap them into the middle and then spin them in two or three different directions all at once to simulate weightlessness, and then add lots of leather straps and strange pieces of knotted rope and a toilet seat and an elephant's tusk and a folding music stand, and you'll probably have a mental picture of what it was like. It had springs, it had levers. From the state of the brasswork and the well-preserved leather, I'd have guessed that it was some kind of an antique.

"You're looking at a true collector's piece," the old guy said to me. "Made in Italy by Vicenzo di Amain in 1875. Restored in Edinburgh by Robert Cotton sometime around 1932. Three previous owners ruined themselves just to have their hands on it for a little while. I picked it up more than twenty years ago from an estate that didn't know its actual value. There have never been more than half a dozen like it in the world, and this is the finest. You might call it a Stradivarius of pleasure devices."

A pleasure device? I looked again.

That knotted rope hung at head-height, and the knots were roughly where the user's eyes would be. The elephant's tusk was engraved with minute calibrations, and it appeared to be on a spring-driven arm. Its pointed tip was just below the opening of the toilet seat, which was equipped with a lap strap.

My idea of pleasure was a can of cold beer and a Clint Eastwood movie on the VCR, preferably in the company of Cheryl the Nurse from the apartment downstairs. She wasn't really a nurse, but if you could catch her in the right mood she'd sometimes dress up as one for you. This machine appeared to have been designed for torture rather than turn-on.

"You ever actually use this thing?" I said.

"Not yet," he said.

"Thanks for the drink, I'm out of here."

But he smiled to show that he wasn't taking me too seriously.

He carefully locked all of the doors behind us and, as we made our way down, he explained something of the background.

He was eighty-three years old (I'd thought he was a wasted-looking seventy; I suppose that for eighty-three, he didn't look so bad). He had inherited a ton of wealth originally made on the railways, had never done a stroke of work in his life, had never married and had no heir. He had one sister, whose family despised and disowned him and had a good chance of getting their hands on everything when he died.

"Leave it to a cats' home," I suggested.

"I wish it were that simple," he said. "And, besides, I can't abide cats."

We went back into the library.

The family rift, he told me, all dated back to the embarrassment of a court case and a brief period of imprisonment back in the early fifties. "But I've lived a blameless life for the past twenty-five years," he insisted. "I was something of a libertine, I admit…"

"A what?"

"A libertine. I existed for pleasure, all kinds of pleasure. As each was sated, the next became more extreme. Some people live out their lifetimes on their yearnings; I could afford to satisfy mine like that" — he snapped his fingers — "and then immediately look beyond. I was a libido with a bottomless bank account, and I was unstoppable."

He sat down in one of the big leather chairs.

"But look at me now," he said. I looked at him. He was old, but he was no Father Christmas. "You can only recharge a battery so many times. Mine died somewhere around 1965."

"What you're basically telling me," I said, "is that you can't get it up anymore."

And it was his turn to color up a little and look away.

I said, "But it hasn't bothered you in twenty-five years."

He shook his head.

"So why the sudden need?"

And it was then that he told me about the arrangements he'd been making.

And I sat down, because this was getting interesting.

The terms of his inheritance had been complicated. The essence was that it was family money and would ever remain so; he could spend all the interest, but the capital was out of his reach. On his death, the river of loot simply diverted to the next family member in succession.

And of course, he had no heir.

This, I suppose, should hardly have been a surprise in the case of someone who'd probably squandered his entire sex life on a succession of circus animals, French loaves, little boys, and various items of gardening equipment. But having seen how reproductive technology had come along in the past few years, he'd made plans. He'd fixed it all up with his lawyers, he'd hired a surrogate mother, and he had one of the most expensive and discreet clinics in town lined up and waiting; they'd handle all the test-tube stuff, and the member of his sister's family would probably chew one another's legs off with the frustration of it all when this infant appeared out of nowhere with the ability to sail through any legal or genetic test that could be put in its way.

There was only this one small obstacle. The clinic, he'd been assuming, would be geared up to handle every small technical detail; but there was one aspect on which his entire plan depended and around which it threatened to fall apart. It was a small matter of a private cubicle and an empty bottle and the clinic's well-thumbed copy of Penthouse.

And from the old battery, not a flicker.

So he'd dug out the device, the ultimate pleasure contraption of another age, and he'd dusted it down and made it ready to perform. If this didn't do it, he reckoned, nothing ever could. He'd been psyching himself up, and he believed that he was nearly ready; all that he needed now was someone who could stick around in case there were any problems and who would then be a dependable courier.

"And you can't send one of the servants?" I said.

"Oh, no," he said, and he seemed shocked at the very idea. "Oh, no."

I told him I wanted to think about it and asked if I could have the five hundred now. He said he'd have his man drive me home and I'd be handed the cash when I got there.

Which is exactly what happened.

There seemed to be nobody else around but me. I knocked on Cheryl the Nurse's door, but she wasn't home. Then I went upstairs and sat in my own place and fiddled around with the wire coat hanger that I've had to use to get a TV signal ever since the antenna broke, but it wouldn't come right. I looked at the mess on the screen and thought, Well, at least you're seeing some kind of snow this Christmas.

And then I went out to the pay phone in the hallway and called the number that the old guy had given me.

"I'll do it," I said.

I had to meet him out at the clinic on the next working day, mainly so that I'd know where it was and to give the staff a chance to get a look at me, since they were the ones who'd be releasing the second half of my money across the counter on receipt of what everybody was coyly calling "the material." It was an expensive-looking place that stood in its own grounds, and there wasn't a single sign anywhere to tell you what it was or what they did there. The reception-area nurses all looked like catwalk models, with outfits to match. They were polite to me and called me "sir."

I didn't kid myself.

The big night came two days later, the one before New Years' Eve. The pay phone rang, and when I got out there and picked it up, I heard him say, "I'd like you to come over as soon as you can, please," and under the politeness I could hear a kind of controlled tension in his voice that told me, Yep, tonight was going to be the night we launched the Shuttle.

The entrance gates were open. I stood under the portico and rang the bell. The old man's driver opened it — only now he was out of uniform and wearing an overcoat, and I supposed that he'd only been waiting for my arrival before he could leave. As I went in through the door, he went out and closed it behind him. We exchanged a nod and I was about to speak, but by then he'd already gone.

I stood alone in the entrance hall. I seemed to sense a great emptiness in the house. "Hello?" I said uncertainly, and I could hear the echo.

"Thank you for coming," the old man said, and, reacting to the sound of his voice, I looked up. He was upstairs and looking down over the rail. He was wearing a long white bathrobe and carpet slippers. His legs were skinny and were veined like marble.

"Please," he said, "please, come on up."

I went up the stairs. My heart was hammering. I can't explain it, but I was unaccountably nervous. I mean, I wasn't going to be doing anything much, and certainly nothing extraordinary; this was going to be the easiest money I'd ever made.

We went on up to the attic. All the padlocks were off, and the door between the two rooms stood open. Someone had cleared a space in the junk and placed an armchair in the outer room, with a small table and a few magazines alongside. Through the doorway, I could see the device.

It waited.

"First I want to run one final test, and then I'll have to ask for your help in getting aboard," the old man said apologetically. "I'd thought that I could manage on my own, but I find that I can't. After that, you can go outside and close the door and amuse yourself until it's over. I'll call you then."

I stood back and watched while he fiddled around. The device looked like the world's kinkiest piece of gym equipment. Or the world's most sadistic birdcage. After a moment it started to move, and the old man stepped back.

Clockwork. It all ran by clockwork. I could hear the whirring and the clicking and the spinning of escapements as the entire structure-within-the-structure began slowly to rotate. It was awesome, in its way: strangely cruel, strangely beautiful. When the central part was fully inverted, everything locked into place and a new phase of the mechanism began to operate. The elephant's tusk was now raised above the saddle like death's scythe on a cathedral clock tower, and as I watched, it began to bear down on its levered arm.

Jesus, I thought. No.

But it stopped. It stopped with its silvered tip protruding no more than an inch through the gap in the saddle, and there it began to oscillate gently.

I wanted to snort. And without thinking about it, I looked at the old man to share the joke.

But then our eyes met, and I stopped myself. Because I don't think I've ever seen anyone looking so utterly vulnerable; not before, and never since. His eyes seemed to be pleading with me.

So I said nothing.

The machine reset itself smoothly. The old man dropped his bathrobe self-consciously and stepped forward. I have to say that I've seen more meat on an X-ray. I held his elbows and helped him up, and that was the only contact we had. I noticed that there had been a couple of changes since I'd last seen the device. There was a magazine on the music stand, its pages pinned so that it couldn't fall off. It was an old movie fan magazine and it was open at a picture of Joan Crawford in a bathing suit. The other addition consisted of a small clear plastic bottle that hung empty on some buckle-on webbing. This, I had to assume, was the collection point. There was a drop of something swilling around in there already, maybe some preservative or anti-congealant. I had some gloves and a supermarket carrier bag folded up in my pocket; no way did I want to have any closer contact with that stuff than I had to, and I didn't even want to have to look at it.

"Thank you," he said. "I can handle it from here."

"Are you sure?" I said, not knowing how I'd respond if he were to ask me for anything more.

"I'm sure," he said. "I'll call you when it's done."

So I left him there, hooking himself up and strapping himself in, and went through to the other room and closed the door behind me.

I don't know how much time went by. Half an hour, maybe. No more than that. I sat in the chair and I tried to look through some of the magazines, but I couldn't concentrate. I felt disturbed. You come across something like this and, whether you want to or not, you find yourself taking a hard look at what makes you tick. I could sit there and honestly swear that there was nothing about this whole business that connected with me; not the pleasure device, not the books in the library, none of it. And yet…

And yet I still found myself fascinated, unable to look away. That has to mean something.

Doesn't it?

I heard him calling, weakly.

I hesitated for a moment, and then I stood, dropping the magazine, and went over to the door. I could hear him coughing on the other side. I went through.

The central part of the device was still in its inverted position. He was hanging upside down in the straps like a stranded hang glider. The knotted rope was across his eyes like a blindfold, which meant that he could no longer see the magazine or anything else. It was a comical sight. But I could feel only pity.

And then he coughed again and sprayed blood everywhere.

I ran to the machine and tried to find some kind of a release lever on the panel; I don't know what I did, but after a few seconds it all came back to life, and the entire inner cage began to swing back around. He coughed again, and the blood came out in a bright red foam.

The whole thing locked back into its original position; he whimpered at the slight jarring but otherwise made no sound. Something was different here, but I couldn't work out what it was.

And then I realized that the elephant's tusk was missing. The lever mechanism was there, back in its original position, but the calibrated ivory wasn't.

Stupidly, I looked around on the floor to see where it had fallen; as if it was something that you wouldn't notice if you didn't look twice. There was nothing on the floor but dust and footprints, and the old man's slippers lined up exactly where he'd left them.

And blood on the floorboards. The kind of blood splashes that you get under hanged meat.

And I thought with dismay, as I realized that this was no accident but the way that he'd actually planned it, What, the entire tusk?

"Did everything work?" he gasped, and I knew without a doubt that I had a dying man on my hands, here.

"Seems there were one or two things you didn't warn me about," I said.

"I know," he said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I've left letters, you'll be in the clear. But you've got to tell me. Is the material safe?"

I gave it a long pause before I spoke. He turned his head from side to side, like a blind man searching an empty room for reassurance.

And then I said, "I'm sorry. But you completely missed the bottle."

His face crumpled in despair.

"No," he said. "No."

And then he coughed up a couple more pints of his own lifeblood, spraying it all about like a lawn sprinkler first thing on a spring morning so that I had to dodge back or get spattered, and died.

I've no conscience about it. Not even though it had meant that I'd sent him on into the Great Beyond in the most acute state of misery imaginable; in the knowledge that all of the pain and the self-sacrifice were for nothing, and that his last act had been rendered essentially meaningless by what he'd think was a stupid miscalculation.

He hadn't missed the bottle, of course. I left him there for the servants to find and delivered the material to the clinic as we'd agreed. I completed the deal and I picked up the money. As far as I know, everything should have worked out and his relatives ought to be screaming and banging their heads on the walls about now.

But I see no reason to feel guilty at all.

I mean, come on, the man was a masochist.

So far as I could imagine, it had seemed like the kindest thing I could do.