Horror Story 1

EE crawled from the metallic pod, his twisted form hissing with wisps of yellow gas. Flesh and bloodless muscle tore in strips from his palms as he hauled himself across the lab floor with his feet trailing yards behind his ankles on grizzled strips of ligament.

‘You...survived...the last Grisham novel,’ he gasped. ‘You...can make it.’

At the far end of the chamber, a tangle of cables and apparatus buzzed and flickered like a Jovian discotheque. He strained to peer through the gap in his bandages, desperate for a sign his experiment had worked — and there, on the one overhead display not showing reruns of Hell’s Kitchen, a pixellated image of Jeff Goldblum winked cheerily from the screen, lovingly retouched in Microsoft Paint, with the words 100% Complete shimmering over its grin.

A warm feeling welled up in his triply microwaved stomach; something he hadn’t felt since he last rejected a 300Ker. He paused to savour its comfort, crawling swiftly on when his skin split from sternum to perineum and his guts spilled out with a projectile vomit splash.

Picking his way up the wall to the mirror with raw elbows and half a tongue, he wobbled on his carbon-sapped legs like Max Schreck with a porcupine stuffed down his trousers.

At last, he beheld his face: a knot of bloody bandages to keep ER in props till 2029. Unable to contain his excitement (mainly thanks to lack of skin), he peeled away the fabric a strip at a time with a pair of Mrs Varmighan’s eyebrow tweezers till only a single sheet of muslin remained.

The moment of truth came and went with the weeeeeesh to rival bikini-waxed bumhair and a single blood-curdling scream.

His face hadn’t changed a whisker.

--Whirlochre