THE SHOWER CURTAIN
By Simon Wood
Steam swirled in the bathroom and Patrick wiped the condensation from the mirror to see his reflection. Although the temperature was balmy, he was shivering. The razor slipped from between his trembling fingers. It wasn’t the flu or malaria causing the shakes. It was the reflection--the reflection of a face in the mirror.
The face was pressed into the fabric of the shower curtain. The contorted features stretched the material to breaking point until every characteristic of the man’s face could be seen. The reflected face dissolved as fresh condensation consumed the mirror.
Patrick knew no one was in the bathroom. He lived alone. The bathroom had no windows. No one could be playing a joke.
Too afraid to turn, too afraid to run, too curious to ignore, Patrick wiped the mirror clean again. The face was still there and this time it wasn’t alone. A woman’s face joined the man’s. Disembodied arms grew out of the plastic to join their disembodied heads. Their arms, their faces, pleaded. They needed his help. He turned towards them.
The plastic curtain hadn’t molded itself to the bodies behind it. The curtain itself was the faces and limbs. Patrick’s shower curtain was alive. It was too much to take. It was all his feeble legs could do to back away from them.
The curtain people watched Patrick’s actions with dismay and others came to their aid. Before he stumbled into the door, the curtain was a boiling cauldron of faces and bodies. As one new face came to the forefront another was lost. Each face was a deathly shade in the magnolia plastic.
Patrick groped for the doorknob. His hand snatched humid air three times before he clasped it. He twisted the handle but the door didn’t open. His clammy hand slithered off the condensation-slick knob.
The curtain was at full stretch with a dozen half-bodies extruding from the plastic. Patrick started to whimper, as he smelled their sterile, rubber flesh. The smell had never bothered him before now. Not until it was part of a living thing.
A curtain ring popped and the molded faces came precariously close to his. Plastic mouths pleaded but without plastic vocal chords no words came.
Another curtain ring popped and a hand touched him. The limb’s warm but inhuman touch was all the incentive he needed. Patrick ripped open the door.
But the door opened inwards and he would have to run headlong into the curtain people’s snapping grasps. But he didn’t care, it would be only for a moment. He flung the door open and tried his best to ignore the intimate caresses from unwanted admirers. He flew out of the bathroom and slammed the door behind him.
The curtain rings lost their battle with the curtain people. He heard the rat-a-tat-tat of snapping rings and something heavy thudded into the door. He knew it was the shower curtain. Then silence. Only the whining of the extraction fan could be heard.
Patrick slunk away from the door and plopped down on the bed. Water droplets from his shower still coated his body but sweat more than amply filled the gaps. He needed another shower but nothing would get him in that bathroom again.
***
Patrick came and went three days without using his bathroom. He chose to use the gym’s facilities rather than his own. He had bound the bathroom doorknob with an extension cord and tied it to a nearby closet door--just in case anything wanted to venture further than the bathroom.
But after three days he hadn’t heard a peep. Armed with a claw hammer, he decided it was time to win back his bathroom. He snipped the cord and it tumbled to the ground. He raised the hammer and slowly twisted the handle.
He expected faces, fluid in pliant plastic. But they weren’t to be found. The lifeless shower curtain lay fallen on the vinyl floor. The curtain people were gone.
But they had left a message. The curtain puckered and wrinkled around a single word. The word melted in the plastic like a brand into flesh.
‘HELP,’ it said.
The hammer sagged in Patrick’s hand. He bore the curtain people no malice. Their heartfelt message made him feel sorry for them. How the hell had they ever gotten in there?
No matter how much the curtain people touched him, Patrick wanted the damn thing out. He put the hammer in the sink and gathered up the shower curtain. His heart fluttered, half expecting the pale faces to spring back into life and take him. But the curtain didn’t as much as twitch. It was inanimate, just a plastic cloth.
He carried the curtain to the apartment complex’s dumpsters and dropped the bundle in. Immediately, the curtain started to unravel like a flower coming into bloom. The corner popped out and the manufacturer’s trademark introduced itself--a pair of back to back R’s with the company’s name underneath, Recycled Rubber Products, Inc. He gave the curtain another scrunching and crushed it with a car battery from the dumpster.
His bathroom looked bare without the shower curtain--not to mention the curtain people. He surveyed the room again. He could live without a shower curtain.
***
Patrick had been without a shower curtain for two weeks when he came across the newspaper advertisement. He didn’t know what made him follow it up. He had a perfectly good job as a sales engineer, so why did he send in a job application to Recycled Rubber? The thought crossed his mind when he read the letter inviting him to an interview. He came up with a thousand lame excuses but he put it down to curiosity. They made his shower curtain and he wanted to know how they did it. Were they all like the one he had?
Mr. Flores was a stout man who breathed heavily but moved with a quickness of pace that gave the appearance he was aided by unseen hands. He interviewed Patrick and ran him through potential tasks he would perform as a production worker. Mr. Flores seemed satisfied that Patrick was the kind of man Recycled Rubber was looking for and told him so.
‘Any questions, Patrick?’
‘I was wondering if I could have a site visit?’
‘Of course.’ Mr. Flores led Patrick through the plant. ‘We manufacture many different products here--bathroom products, kitchenware, etc. There isn’t anything we can’t mold into any shape here at Recycled Rubber.’
They stood on a mezzanine and Mr. Flores pointed out different production stages from their vantage point. Patrick’s face sweated under his safety glasses. The heat from the ovens on the shop floor was intense. Flores walked Patrick into the cooler confines of the raw material stores. A truck was backing into an unloading bay and a forklift was ready to receive it.
‘Ah, you’re just in time, Patrick. We receive about four deliveries a day from various sources.’
‘What, raw material suppliers?’
‘No, as our name implies, all our products are recycled. We take our deliveries from all different sources. This load is from Goodyear, but we take old rubber products from anyone. Then we melt them down into a liquid state and make them into new products. That’s the beauty of thermoplastics.’
‘Very eco-friendly.’
‘Quite right.’
Mr. Flores completed the tour and thanked Patrick for his time. A week later, Patrick had a letter offering him a position on the nightshift. The money wasn’t as good as his sales job but he took the job nevertheless. On the first of the month, he was a Recycled Rubber employee.
Patrick spent a week working on each of the different production processes to give him a full grounding in Recycled Rubber’s operations. This week, he was in the raw materials department. José, raw material’s leadman, took him through his paces.
‘We unload the trucks and grade the material by product type. If the plastic is best suited to Kitchenware then it goes into the Kitchenware store.’
‘How do we know which plastic goes with which product?’
‘Simple, man--experience. Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up.’
The bay door rolled up with a shudder.
‘Showtime, man.’
The unmarked truck slid into the building. Being unmarked and black gave it a covert quality. And the cover of night only accentuated the situation. The driver opened up the trailer.
‘Sorry, guys, no pallets this time. We’ll have to hand off.’
José cursed in Spanish.
The driver tossed Patrick a vacu-packed bag. The weight threw him back three steps. If the weight wasn’t bad enough, the flexibility of the bag made it even more difficult to carry. He peered through the clear wrapping and saw the bag was filled with rubber sheeting.
‘Where do you want this, José?’
‘In the checking area,’ he said, carrying two bags easily.
Patrick flopped his load onto one of two forty-foot long benches. The checking area’s limits were emphasized by yellow paint.
‘Start piling them on the floor,’ José advised.
It took the best part of an hour to unload the truck and send the driver on his way. José slit the first bag and tore off the wrapping. Patrick did likewise.
‘We have to cut out anything that isn’t rubber or plastic. So, studs and zippers have to go.’ He unraveled the black-gray rubber sheets--but they weren’t rubber sheets.
‘José, are these body bags?’ Patrick took a step back.
‘Yeah, man.’
‘Jesus. Have these been used?’
José laughed. ‘Of course, man. What’d you think?’
The thought of touching the bag that a corpse had been slopping around in made his flesh crawl. The scent of rubber filled his nostrils and slithered down his throat, tainting his taste buds. He was glad it wasn’t decomposition he smelled.
‘Are these things clean?’
‘Relax, man. They are all sanitized by the time we get hold of them.’
Gingerly, Patrick approached his body bags. ‘Sick, dude.’
José laughed again. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
Patrick wasn’t so sure.
‘So what’s the story?’ He copied José and filleted the bag, removing the zipper and tossing it in the trash.
‘Body bags can only be used so many times before it becomes impractical. Especially with the police and sheriff’s departments.’
‘Why?’ Patrick started on his second body bag, ignoring his unpalatable work in favor of José’s explanation.
‘Evidence has been spoiled because of the chemicals used to clean the body bags or particles left behind by the last occupant. Not all the blood and tissue is totally removed.’
Patrick’s hands tightened as he felt the inside of the bag. He wondered whose blood and tissue was coming off on his hands.
‘If you don’t like touching them, put on some rubber gloves.’
Patrick followed José’s suggestion. He snapped on the first glove.
‘But don’t ask what they were before they became gloves.’
Patrick didn’t.
He returned to his work. It was appalling to think about what he was doing with these body bags. Slicing, cutting, and throwing the metallic entrails in the waste made him feel like a mad scientist performing perverse operations on unwilling victims.
‘So do the cops get much for these body bags? There has to be a couple of cruisers worth here alone.’
‘No. They’re free. They can’t get anyone to take them and most counties are asking all government departments to recycle. Lead by example and all that bullshit.’
‘How conscientious.’
‘But it’s not just the cops,’ José continued. ‘The military keep us well stocked too.’
‘Long live a violent world.’
‘You said it, man.’
It took half their shift to prepare the body bags for the next stage. They loaded the bags onto a handcart and wheeled them over to José’s pet.
‘Meet José junior, man. He’s a hungry child.’
Patrick stared into José junior’s mouth. A multitude of lethal blades intermeshed with each other. He was glad the machine wasn’t on.
‘We can’t just melt the bags down as they are. It would take too long and wouldn’t mix well with the color pigments we put in. So, José junior takes care of it for us.’ José patted the machine and showed Patrick to the rear. ‘And, this where little José takes a dump.’
A mobile hopper was pressed up against the back of José junior. Scattered in the hopper lay the remnants his last meal--various colored penny-sized pellets.
‘Can I leave you to get on, man? I want a smoke.’
‘No worries.’
‘Cool.’
José started the machine. José junior whined into life. His blades flashed in anticipation of a feeding. José dropped in the first body bag. Little José gobbled it up with relish. His wail changed momentarily as he chomped through his rubber snack. Patrick demonstrated he understood José’s directions as best he could above the din and José slipped out a side door, cigarette in hand.
Patrick continued to feed José junior. Each body bag disintegrated on contact. Rubber shards spewed upward only to fall into José junior’s unforgiving teeth for a second time.
Happily, Patrick disposed of the body bags. They were ugly things in shape and purpose. It was a pleasure to see them destroyed.
Patrick snatched up the next bag and shook the folds out of it. It hung like a cheap suit and he shook it again. The body bag refused to lie flat. In fact, the bag had shape. He felt the shape develop in his grasp. He now held a pair of rubberized wrists. He wanted to let go but couldn’t. The wrists slipped his grasp and rubber hands seized hold of his arms. A black-gray face bulged in the fabric and stared him in the eye. It tried to speak but only the putrescent waft of death slithered from the slit. This body bag hadn’t been cleaned.
Patrick fought his gag reflex. He was wrong. He didn’t want to know to these people. He got rid of the curtain people and he would get rid of the body bag man. He edged over to José junior and flopped the bottom of the bag over the side. The body bag man gripped even tighter to Patrick as he dropped him into the hungry blades. The blades tore at the rubber flesh. The body bag man’s face contorted and his grip loosened.
Patrick, dragged down by the body bag man, straightened as José junior took over. But instead of his balance returning, it worsened. He glanced at the floor. It writhed with body bag people coming to life. They trembled beneath him. He couldn’t ride their rubber wave and toppled into José junior. He watched the body bag man disintegrate before him and knew he shared the same fate.
***
The woman panicked. She clutched her towel like it could help her. Patrick reached out for help. His plasticized flesh stretched easily to touch her. She slapped his hand away. She didn’t understand. She was like all the others before her. He hadn’t understood at the beginning but he did now. The curtain people had explained it all. They were the restless and they needed their release. Would they ever find anyone who could help?
The End.
Author's Bio:
I am British living in the US with my American wife. My first publishing credit started with MSF&F, since then I've had over twenty story sales. I have up coming publications in Parchment Symbols, Goblin Muse, Ideomancer, Steel Caves, Gentle Reader, Fables, Black Petals, Shadowkeep and Antipodean SF.
