"Weirder Than Weird" 18 Bizarre Tales From a Disturbed Mind Read online

“The doctor will see you now, Ms. Williams,” said the receptionist, not looking up from her paperwork. “Just go right in.”

  A heavyset woman gave an audible grunt and with much difficulty got up from where she was sitting and waddled her way through the office door. Once on the other side, she was struck in the face by the sudden rise in temperature.

  “Please have a seat, Ms. Williams. I’ll be with you in a moment,” came a deep voice behind a chair facing the opposite wall.

  The woman shuffled her way to the couch and plopped her hefty frame down hard upon the leather cushion; the air forced out by the impact made a sound as if a large animal in the throes of death had expelled its final breath. The woman looked around the room and batted away beads of sweat from her meaty face.

  The office was modern in appearance but the room was dimly lit; the only light coming from two ornate wall sconces that held solitary candles on either side of a large round wall clock. It was exactly one p.m. and in her mind she congratulated herself for being on time. It was a rare occasion that someone wasn’t waiting impatiently for her to arrive somewhere. She sniffed the air and thought, “Something smells just like…”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting Ms. Williams, let’s get right into it shall we?” the doctor said, spinning his chair around to face her. A thin elderly man stared back at her with dark penetrating eyes, his features held a grimly pallor, fully lacking in color and unencumbered by the slightest bit of hair except for a dark goatee that jutted pointedly from his chin.

  “Now what seems to be your problem Ms. Williams?” he asked perfunctorily as he scribbled something into an open folder.

  “Well…to be quite honest…” She stopped suddenly and gave a quizzical look. “Am I supposed to be lying down or something?”

  The doctor glared back at her and, with a tinge of annoyance in his voice, replied, “Whatever makes you more comfortable, Ms. Williams.”

  She maneuvered her enormous frame like an animal mired in mud but eventually gained a reclining position. Satisfied, she crossed her arms upon her chest and let out a deep sigh from her efforts.

  “Comfy now, are we, Ms. Williams? Good!” the doctor said, not giving her time to respond. “I must tell you that I am an extremely busy man. I think it will make things easier on us both if we can get to the crux of your problem right away.” He then glanced at the folder on his desk, “It says here that you’ve been having trouble sleeping at night.” He paused and looked over at her, “Let me be blunt, Ms. Williams… I think your problem really lies in the fact that you are hiding a terrible secret from the rest of the world… the likes of which are gnawing away at your very soul, thereby causing this annoying lack of sleep. Am I correct in this assumption?”

  The woman couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Now see here, doctor!”

  “Please tell me where I’m wrong, my dear lady!” he interjected, cutting her off. He stared back at her with a mischievous grin awaiting her reply but she seemed frozen by his words, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, void of any response partly because of her anger and partly because of his not-so-wrong assessment. “Right!” he shouted once again, forcefully slamming his hand down hard upon his desk. “Ms. Williams… since time is a factor, let me tell you a bit of what I do know about you…

  “When you were about nine years of age and just a mere shadow of your present monstrosity you found yourself at the doorstep of a most uniquely disturbed individual, your Aunt Martha. Your mother, who was obviously the epitome’ of womanly virtue, left you with her just before she ran off with a traveling vacuum salesman. Your Aunt was certainly poor by any definition but not without means when it came to providing sustenance for you. On occasion, she procured from a number of sources a most abhorrent and morally repugnant form of food for you both to partake in, one in which you quickly found an addiction for… wouldn’t you say, Ms. Williams?”

  The doctor looked over at her but she remained deathly quiet.

  “Now let me see… as I remember, you couldn’t quite get enough of that divine and succulent delicacy, you would beseech that poor unbalanced woman at all times of the day for the dish that you had become so enamored with, the taste that… shall we say… drove you mad with desire!

  “Of course, in the beginning you were certainly not aware of what it was you were ingesting, at least not at first. You did, however, have an opportunity for redemption and could have fled that charnel nightmare of a house once you discovered its true nature but that wasn’t to be, in fact, you accepted your discovery with a kind of indifference, I think it’s fair to say. Do you remember coming home early from school on that particular day, Ms. Williams? Your Aunt must have been running errands because she was nowhere to be found, but that familiar heavenly aroma wafted throughout the house and once again your mouth began to water uncontrollably. You made your way to the kitchen and peered into the oven. The thing roasting away inside was… well… let’s just say it wasn’t chicken!”

  The doctor laughed out loud and paused once again to check the woman’s reaction, but she was still unresponsive, her face only held the same blank stare that he was all too familiar with.

  “It would, of course, be reasonable to assume that most normal people would have reacted in a repulsive fashion after seeing such a sight but you my dear lady only shrugged your young shoulders and didn’t give it another thought. I suppose that in the back of your mind you probably suspected what the mystery meat was all along since every so often you would find a tiny knitted booty or small blanket disposed of in the trash. As for the rest of your adult life… well, I must say Ms. Williams, I am quite impressed by the fact that you have been able to keep your exotic tastes a secret all these years and your resourcefulness at acquiring such delicacies is quite impressive to say the least. You were obviously taught very well! I would go into detail but there really is no point, besides, to be honest with you… I am quite bored by it all!”

  He closed the folder and tossed it on the couch with her.

  “I’m afraid your session is now over, my dear…after all these years…payment has finally come due!”

  “Pure gibberish!” she managed to blurt out, finally awakening from her shocked induced stupor. “How dare you! What kind of doctor are you anyway, making those… those … horrible accusations! I’ll see to it that you are disbarred or whatever it is they do to rid people of quacks like you!”

  She looked up at the clock on the wall; only five minutes had passed since she first came into the office. She struggled to sit upright but was as helpless as a beached whale.

  “And another thing!” she added angrily, “I’ll be damned if I pay one cent for this farce of a session! Doctor indeed!”

  He shook his head and smiled. “Yes, Ms. Williams, you most certainly will pay… and as for your being damned…”

  At that moment, the couch that she was lying upon began sinking slowly downward.

  “What the hell is going on!” she screamed, her fingers clinching tight to the cushion in a vise like grip.

  “Exactly, Ms. Williams!” laughed the doctor. “You certainly have hit the nail on the head!”

  The dark shadows of the office walls disappeared and were now aglow with the burning hues of yellow, red, and orange as flames licked and curled their way around the sides of the couch. A legion of charred and broken hands appeared from the depths and clawed at the elephantine figure helplessly reposed there. Her face was contorted in a fantastic arrangement of horror and in one last desperate plea she managed to shout out, “But… but… I still have 55 minutes left!” before she disappeared into the abyss.

  Ten minutes had passed and once again a new patient entered the doctor’s office. A wiry tattooed figure stepped through the door and looked around.

  “Take a seat, Mr. Kupchak,” came a voice behind a turned office chair.

  The man sat down on the couch and immediately raised his hands, the leather for some reason was
uncomfortably hot to touch and he could detect a lingering hint of sulfur in the air. A moment later the office chair spun around and the old man sitting there began to write into an open folder. What appeared to be a wisp of smoke rose from his head as he looked up with a most diabolical grin and said, “Now Mr. Kupchak, time is running short today… what say we just cut to the chase shall we? So… just how many people did you actually murder last Friday?”

  The man’s fingers nervously found their way to his shirt collar, he stretched it out and swallowed hard.

  THE T. T. SOCIETY