Physique

As Ellen settled heavily into her chair at the breakfast table, she winced at the creaking of wood, which seemed louder than ever. It might have just been her imagination, but it seemed to creak a little louder every day.

She shifted uncomfortably and listened to it creak again. Feeling her cheeks flush, she slammed her teacup down on the table.

The cup shattered, sending hot tea and porcelain slivers over her hand.

With a little shriek she jumped out of the chair and ran to the sink in the adjoining kitchen. She ran the cold water over her hand and lower arm, letting the chill soothe the red, burning spots that dotted her skin.

When she shut the water off at last, she leaned her arms on the faucet and laid her head on them, feeling very weary.

She hated her body. She had lost count of the diets she’d been on, the exercise programs she’d tried -- in short, the efforts she’d made to gain the beauty she saw in the checkout aisle magazines every time she bought groceries.

No matter how little she ate, she didn’t lose a pound. When she tried working out, she didn’t get far before she ran out of energy and was forced to give up. And when she’d complained to her doctor for the umpteenth time, he’d frowned.

“Ellen, you’re perfectly healthy. You eat better than anyone I know. You have low energy, but that’s just the kind of metabolism you have, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Let it go -- enjoy the beauty you already have.”

Healthy was nice. Healthy was a good goal, healthy enabled her to keep feeling fresh and to have relatively good energy for normal activities.

But men didn’t care about healthy. Men wanted beautiful; men wanted slender and shapely.

Lifting her head from the faucet and looking down at her torso, she tried to believe that she was beautiful the way she was.

Nope.

She glanced at the pile of magazines on the breakfast hutch, and with a sigh, she walked over to them.

Each one pictured a beautiful woman with a waist somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen inches around. Each cover promised that somewhere inside, one could find the secret to such a figure.

Ellen had tried all twenty-seven of them, to no avail.

A thump from the direction of the door startled her, and she slowly turned towards it, waiting to hear a knock. It took her a moment to realize that it was only the morning paper.

With another sigh, she stepped to the door to get it.

After retrieving it and throwing the plastic covering away, she started towards her previous seat at the table, but the auburn liquid and white-and-green pieces of teacup reminded her of her accident. She should clean the mess up.

Instead, she seated herself at the bar in the kitchen. The barstools might be uncomfortable, but they never creaked.

Without interest, she scanned the first few pages of the newspaper. Nothing interesting. Nothing new. What good was news if it was not new? The same old things were happening in the world. The same things that had happened yesterday -- for that matter, the same things that had been happening since she started reading the paper fifteen years ago.

Worried about your weight?

The words caught her eye as she was about to turn the page, and she stopped turning to look down to the corner where the words were.

There was a small, black-and-white photograph of the figure she wanted to have. That she would do anything to have.

Have you tried a million miracle diets with no success?

Yes, she had.

Does exercise wear you out hopelessly?

Yes, it did.

Our no-fail method will have you shedding pounds like water off a duck’s back! Visit Madame Grayshed at 37 Mars Avenue.

That was all. There was no phone number or any other way to contact Madame Grayshed, whoever she might be.

She glanced at the kitchen clock. Only ten, and she had the day off work. It was perfect. Could this be the solution she’d been waiting for?

#

When she drove up to 37 Mars Avenue, she had to double-check the address to make sure that she was at the right place.

It was a good fifteen miles outside town, and instead of the large, clinical place she’d been subconsciously picturing, it was a broken-down shack, surrounded by a mostly-collapsed two-foot fence made of chicken wire. A chicken and a pygmy goat wandered the tiny space between the shack and the fence.

She was strongly inclined to just turn around and go back home.

Still, wasn’t it at least worth a try? These people probably had nothing to offer her, but there was always the possibility that it might help her. Her life was miserable now.

For an instant, she allowed herself to think back to two years ago, to a man with dark hair and dark eyes. She recalled the moment she’d learned that he’d left her for a blonde with a figure that made Beyoncé look like a dumpy old maid.

The next day, Ellen had gone out and gotten her long brown hair chopped short and dyed blonde. She’d changed the way she dressed. But she couldn’t change her body, no matter how hard she tried.

She slammed the door of that memory shut. She didn’t want him back. But she wanted someone to be able to love her. No man would care about her if she was shaped like a Clydesdale.

Yanking the key out of the ignition, she jerked the door open and stepped out of the car. Then she slammed the door shut, pocketed the key, checked for her wallet, and walked up to the shack.

If the people were loons, she could always get back in the car and go.

There was no opening in the excuse for a fence, but she stepped over it easily and made her way through the weeds to the crooked wooden steps. The goat and chicken didn’t bother her, didn’t even seem to notice her as she crossed their territory.

As she got closer, she saw that the rickety porch was adorned here and there with gaudy decorations -- flashy but faded movie posters featuring big-eyed starlets, bright scarves tacked on either side of the door, and a colored basket or two.

The door swung open as soon as her foot touched the first step.

She stared. An old woman stood there, long gray hair tied back with a bleached ribbon, sequined, gypsy-style clothes hanging off her wrinkled frame, neck and wrists hung with plastic beads, black eyes staring into Ellen’s with an intensity that seemed to pierce her soul.

Ellen had a sudden impression of heading into a witch’s cave -- or maybe a gypsy den, to have her fortune told.

“Good afternoon, my dear,” the hag said sweetly.

“I-I’m looking for Madame Grayshed,” Ellen tried not to stammer.

“I’m Madame Grayshed. Are you here for our weight loss program?”

It seemed like a dream. It was too weird. Maybe she had never waken up that morning. For good measure, she reached both arms behind her back and pinched herself.

Ouch.

“Y-yes.”

“Well then, come in, my dear. Don’t be afraid -- we only want to help you.”

“We?”

“My nephew is the one who developed the program.”

There was a man in the witch’s house. That didn’t sound safe. Maybe Doctor Hammond was right -- she was healthy. Wasn’t that a lot to be grateful for?

Her lips prepared to form the word “no,” but just then, Madame Grayshed’s gaze drifted casually to one of the posters on the wall of her house. Ellen’s eyes followed, and rested on the perfect figure of the scantily-clad girl on the poster. Ellen didn’t dare wear clothes like that. If she had the proportions of that girl--

“Thank you,” she said with a smile, and stepped up and into the tiny shack. Madame Grayshed closed the door behind both of them.

It was dark inside, and Ellen’s eyes took a moment to adjust. Once she could see, she made out a room that seemed larger than it should have been, judging from the outside of the house. A cot sat against one wall, a black, old-fashioned stove against the other. The only other articles in the room were a table in the center, and a shelf that covered almost all of one wall.

The shelf was ordinary enough, dark brown and dingy, like the rest of the place. But it was loaded with scientific equipment -- shiny, clean, organized bottles, medical apparatus like blood pressure meters, hypodermic syringes, and other things that Ellen couldn’t identify.

The table, too, was normal, also wooden and dingy. A single, naked lightbulb illuminated it from the ceiling, and a young man in a white lab coat leaned over a microscope that sat on top of it.

“Morry!” Madame Grayshed called, waddling over to him and leaving Ellen by the door. “We have another customer!”

The man looked up, and Ellen’s heart skipped a beat. He was handsome -- very handsome. Much more handsome than the man of two years ago.

He smiled at her and came forward with his hand extended. “I’m glad you found us.”

“This is my nephew, Mordred,” the old woman explained. “Mordred, this is Ms….”

“Ellen. Ellen Porter.”

“And you’re here for the treatment?” he asked courteously.

“Yes.”

Madame Grayshed put a frail hand behind her back and gently nudged her towards the table. “It’s very simple. There’s some simple dieting involved, but it mostly involves exercising. Explain it, Morry.”

Timidly, Ellen approached the table. Mordred strolled back to his microscope, and began speaking casually and professionally.

“We’ve encountered a lot of people who just can’t sustain exercise long enough for it to do any good. We started wondering if there was a way to use their natural instincts to help them overcome this.”

Ellen stole a glance at the gypsy-like woman, wondering if it was really “we” or just the distinguished young scientist who had started wondering.

He went on. “I’m sure you’re familiar with adrenaline, or epinephrine, and what it does. We did some experiments with epinephrine shots, and that was able to help some -- but it still wasn’t enough to be really effective. So I directed my research to the brain, studying what signaled the adrenaline and why.”

Turning, he strode to the shelf on the back wall. As he selected one of the shining bottles, Madame Grayshed leaned close to Ellen’s ear and whispered, “Morry’s a genius.”

Ellen agreed, but Madame’s warm breath tickling over her neck made her shiver.

Mordred walked back, holding up the bottle. “I succeeded a few months ago. All our patients have had incredible results.”

“Succeeded in -- what?” Ellen asked, eying the bottle dubiously.

“In triggering what we have been calling the ‘flight patterns.’ It’s fear that triggers the adrenaline that gives our bodies the strength to pick up another person and leave a burning building, or run from an attacking wildcat. The greater the fear, the longer the adrenaline will run. We discovered that triggering fear at the source was exponentially more effective than injecting epinephrine ourselves.”

Triggering fear at the source. Again, Ellen shuddered. “And it works?”

Madame’s voice tickled in her ear again. “It always works. It takes only ten sessions before the customer has a Hollywood body.”

Ellen stared at the clear liquid in the man’s hand. The dim light reflected off of it, and she was again struck by the eeriness of the situation.

“How long will it take?” she asked.

“Three weeks,” the old woman said promptly. “We have to space the sessions out.”

Three weeks, and she’d look like the girl who had stolen her fiancé. Three weeks, and she could have any man she wanted at her beck and call.

“How much does it cost?” she asked, though at this point she didn’t care.

“A hundred dollars per session,” the woman stated. “For our early patients, a special price. Once we get a better place with better equipment -- it will be much, much more.”

Only a hundred dollars for this time. How bad could it be?

It could be very bad. She was about to let a strange man and a bizarre old lady inject her with a homemade drug that would stimulate fear so that she would run until she could run no more?

It was too odd and unusual. She should thank them and leave, ask her doctor about it, then come back. She could wait another few days for her perfect body.

But it was only three weeks, only a hundred dollars a visit.

“I’ll do it,” she announced.

Without speech or hesitation, the old hag held out her wrinkled hand. Ellen dug into the pocket of her jeans for her wallet and pulled it out, glad she’d brought a good chunk of her savings, “just in case.” She pulled out one of the half-dozen hundred dollar bills and handed it to Madame Grayshed.

Mordred set the bottle down and reached for a hypodermic needle. “You’ll have to step outside,” he said. “We have a nice, clear field where you can run for miles. We’ll pick you up when it wears off; you won’t be able to walk back.”

She wouldn’t be able to walk back. A shiver shook her frame as she watched Madame fingering the bill, and then glanced at the clear, thin liquid being carefully poured into the syringe. This wasn’t a good idea.

Yes it was.

“Walk outside now,” he directed.

She obeyed, feeling as if she were hypnotized. Finally, after all the efforts, all the disappointments, had she found something that would work?

The gypsy woman hobbled out after them.

“Face the west,” she instructed. “Make sure you’re outside the fence. We’ll follow along at a good distance to make sure you don’t get hurt.”

She did as she was told, feeling goosebumps begin to prickle over her skin as the man approached her with the needle.

“You will feel great fear,” he whispered as she rolled up her sleeve. “Try to be prepared. You’re sure you want to do this?”

“Yes.” She closed her eyes and waited for the prick of the needle.

A few seconds, she counted one... two… three…

Then it pricked. She felt a slight burning in her veins and she waited.

A moment. Two. A slight breeze lifted her hair, and she felt her shoulders begin to relax, not realizing until then that she had tensed them. She heard a fly buzz by her ear--

Her eyes popped open, wide.

Something was behind her. Something was after her. She felt it. She could feel its glowing eyes on her back, and see its sharp teeth in her mind. It was almost upon her.

Not daring to look back, she darted forward, feeling her heart leap into intense action. It was chasing her. If she paused, stopped for a moment, it would be upon her, its teeth sinking into her flesh.

She could feel its breath upon her, and a scream welled up as a black bubble inside her, bursting in her throat. She heard no sound, but she tasted bile in the back of her mouth. She didn’t dare stop to swallow it, or spit it out.

A wail sang in her ears, the unearthly, devilish scream of her pursuer. She hardly noticed her legs skimming along the ground. She flew, her heart pumping as it had never pumped before -- it thudded against her chest, pounding until it hurt with every thump, and still she ran.

The world turned red around her, and she screamed, this time hearing the sound. On she ran, and she heard a roar and the thudding of terrible paws behind her. She ran faster, legs burning, but not feeling tired.

Something ate into her cheek, and she felt blood run down onto her neck, mixed with the sweat that was streaking down her body. It was everywhere, dripping from every pore, and still the thing pursued her.

What did it want with her?

Pain shot from her chest down into her abdomen and up into her throat, thudding with her pulse, but she couldn’t stop.

She couldn’t. It was there. She could feel it.

Every atom of her body was pure terror, flying from the face of the hideous predator she didn’t dare imagine.

She coughed as she ran, and tasted blood. She wasn’t moving fast enough. She forced her legs to work harder, feeling a jar throughout her skeleton as each foot hit the ground.

Everything inside her jolted, and she tried to run, but found her legs wouldn’t move. Her knees hit the ground, and she sat there, coughing, feeling something thick splash onto her hands with each cough.

She had to get up. She had to run. How far had she already run? It could have been miles -- she didn’t know. She couldn’t stay there! It would kill her! It was thundering upon her now -- she felt the vibrations as it leapt behind her--

She coughed again, and the redness dripped away from the world like watercolor paint.

For half a second she saw the sky, and in that half-second she remembered sitting down for a nice cup of tea that morning. Then the world turned black, and she felt her head slam to the ground.

Her heart thumped twice, and stopped beating.

#

Tires revved through dirt as an old blue pickup pulled up next to the form of a prostrate girl, her hands bloody and her clothes soaked in sweat. A gaudy old woman jumped out of the passenger side and sprang to the girl’s side.

“Dead,” she announced as a handsome young man stepped down slowly from the driver’s seat. “Just like the others.”

The young man approached as the old woman dug greedily through the girl’s pockets, and his eyes were expressionless.

“I wonder why she came to us?”

The woman shrugged as she thumbed through dollar bills. “The same reason they always do.”

“I’ve never seen such beautiful eyes,” he said slowly.

His aunt just kept looking through the wallet she’d found.

He kept looking at the girl’s sweaty face, red with blood from a gash that tree branches had cut in her cheek. Her clouded eyes were as deep blue as ever, wide open in death agony.

Content that she’d harvested everything of value from the girl’s pockets, the woman jumped back into the truck with surprising agility. “Come on, Morry. No one will trace her to us, this far away. She went a good five miles before it killed her. We’ll keep working on it. We’re getting closer.”

The man kept looking down at the girl. “I’m sorry,” he whispered at last. “I’m sorry no one ever told you that you were beautiful.”

Then he walked slowly back to the truck, got in, and drove back down the field.