Steamy Screams: Anthology of Erotic Horror

KILLER NAILS MP Johnson

Some men kept their fetishes in their closets, where they remained unfulfilled. Chelz Dobbs chose a different route. He turned his into a career, into an art. Foot fetishists got jobs at shoe stores. Chelz’s fetish may have been a little less conventional, but a career path existed nonetheless, and he followed it. Long fingernails turned him on, so he became a nail technician and manicurist. He became a nail artist.

He hadn’t become just any nail artist, though. After years of making sacrifices and struggling at grimy West Hollywood salons, he had become Leilani’s manicurist. Yes, that Leilani. The blonde diva. The nineteen-year-old, leather chaps wearing, four octave belting singer of Mad Nite Love and other multi-platinum brain stickers. That Leilani.

Leilani wandered through his studio, examining his work. His skillfully designed nails graced the fingers of disembodied mannequin hands, some of which were frozen in stiff pageant waves, others as if reaching to pick ripe fruit from a tree. He followed her, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking more like a college kid hired to paint houses in the ‘burbs than a beauty school grad getting paid to tend the talons of celebrities.

The studio lights had been painstakingly arranged to maximize the gleam coming off the surface of each curved nail. In fact, his work—displayed museum style on a dozen short white pedestals—was the only thing in the room that gleamed. He had chosen off-white matte paint for the walls and hired people to dull the hardwood floor. Nothing else in the room could catch light, nothing to distract eyes from his art.

Leilani zeroed in on one design. The color on these nails stood out from the rest, a rich gold and wet green that blended perfectly, yet somehow remained distinct. It had a metallic sheen, but not as coin cold as the minx nails technique his peers had recently fallen in love with. He still had trouble describing it, the closest match he had seen being the shell of a tropical beetle on display at the museum. It seemed unworldly, and rightly so, considering its source. He hoped Leilani would keep walking.

She clapped her hands and exclaimed, “These are perfect. This color is totally unreal, but it will go with my dress for tonight’s show. I want!”

“No!” Chelz snapped. Catching himself, he softened his tone and added, “I’m all out of that color.” He hoped she’d buy his bluff. He had forgotten to take the piece down after designing it for a porn star he had worked for a few days before. She had declined in favor of pale pink, the boring bitch. He couldn’t give the design to Leilani. She had been good to him and his work. He needed to keep her around.

“Chelz-ee,” she cooed. “Remember when I found you working in that sweatshop of a salon in West Hollywood?”

Chelz nodded. He knew where this was going. She had held it over his head before, this idea of hers that she had made him. She hadn’t made him. If she only knew.

“Weren’t there others working there? Aren’t there, in fact, thousands of nail artists wandering the streets of Los Angeles right now who would kill to be in your position?” she asked, hands on hips, smiling a smile so true it had to be fake.

“Fine. Whatever will make your pretty little hands happy,” he said hesitantly, avoiding eye contact. “I’ll get everything ready. Go over to the station and make yourself comfy.” Chelz pointed to the table in the corner of his studio.

His studio also served as his apartment. He unlocked the door adjacent to his bedroom and opened it just wide enough to squeeze through. Locking it behind him, he looked at the pig lying on the hardwood floor. Chelz called the creature, covered in fine hair, a pig because of its bulk and its pink flesh. But the similarities ended there.

When he found it, he had been chasing his escaped cat through the alley behind his old apartment. Chelz thought he had stumbled onto a pile of dead dogs stripped of fur, until he noticed it breathing. Through one of the many tuberous pustules lining its back, it choked a glob of fluid onto his cat’s paw, fluid unlike anything he had seen before. Chelz had known right away what to do with that fluid, even before the pig had told him—in its wordless way—that it could help him, as long as Chelz helped it.

The pig had been smaller back then, able to use its six stumps to carry its weight up the steps to Chelz’s apartment. Now, it couldn’t move on its own. Couldn’t even lick the sweat and grime from the wrinkles of fat at the bases of the tubes, which drained into buckets on the floor. Chelz grabbed one of those buckets and frowned. Empty. The spigots had all but dried up. He only found one bucket with enough liquid in it.

Chelz didn’t like the idea of using it on Leilani, but he knew it needed to be done. If he waited any longer the pig might starve, might stop fulfilling its end of the bargain. And then Chelz would find himself back at Do Me Nails with the chirping Koreans. They didn’t get him. Like so many of his clients, they thought he was gay, gave him sideways glances and whispered, not that he could make out anything they said.

“I’ll feed you soon,” he whispered to the pig.

The pig snorted through a single cavernous nostril. Dislodged from the hole by the vibrations of the noise, a gob of dry muck tumbled onto the floor. When the pig’s tongue came out to reclaim what had been lost, Chelz left the room.

“What’s in there?” the diva asked.

“Trade secrets,” Chelz said, holding up the tin bucket of his special polish.

He sat across from Leilani at the manicure table. Holding her pale hands in his, he removed the chipped candy apple red polish he had applied last time. The look didn’t suit her. She had passed through a phase that involved covering herself with as much bright red as possible, from hats to heels. The acetone smell of the nail polish remover crowded the air between them. He hated that smell.

“I’m so nervous about tonight’s show,” Leilani said.

“Why? It’s low key compared to your usual shows.”

“That’s the problem, Chelzee. There’s no production to hide behind if something goes wrong, no dancers, no video screen. All eyes are on me.”

Chelz carefully filled the gaps between her cuticles and the bottoms of the inch-long acrylic nails, gaps created by the inevitable growth of her natural nails. The smell of ethyl methacrylate swirled around him, much sweeter than the nail polish remover. He loved how gorgeous his work looked, how much better it looked than the cheap press-on nails he had talked his girlfriends into wearing back in high school, before he talked them into giving him hand jobs, usually successfully, thanks to his clean cut, athletic looks.

He remembered the first and last time he had tried to explain his fetish. Kirstie Mickelson had asked him why he never wanted intercourse. When he explained, she had called him a fucking weirdo and punched him in the neck before jumping out of his car. After he graduated from beauty school, he made trades: manicures for hand jobs. He had found that much easier than dating. Looking at Leilani’s hands in his, he wished he had the guts to ask her for a trade. He would have liked her to touch him.

Shaking the thought, he asked, “But isn’t the crowd only a few hundred people?”

“That makes it worse!” Leilani started to gesture, but Chelz held her hand tight so she couldn’t move while he worked. “In an arena, I see the crowd as one mass, like the blob or something. With small crowds, it’s too easy to focus on faces. If I see someone not smiling or looking distracted, I start to wonder if I’m off, and if I start to wonder, I risk losing the song, which is possible since I’m mostly going to be doing new stuff that I don’t entirely know yet.”

“Come on. They’re there because they love you,” he said. “You’re there ‘cause you’re the best and you know it.”

“Awww… Chelzee, you’re the best!”

After the acrylic fills had set and dried, he filed the tips to a tight, rounded point. This was his canvas. He adjusted the table lamp, bit his lower lip in concentration and got down to the most important part. He applied an initial coat of his special polish. The stuff was watery, not being a professional grade cosmetic, after all. For it to come to life, he needed to add several coats.

Chelz remembered first seeing that color across his cat’s paw. His head had immediately filled with ways to use it. He knew he had to get the pig up to his apartment. Even though it had been smaller then, it hadn’t been willing to follow. Chelz grabbed his cat and ran to his apartment to find something to lure the pig in with. While digging through his fridge, his cat went crazy. It tore itself apart. He had never been attached to the cat, hadn’t even named it, but the scene freaked him out enough that he forgot what he had been doing. He collected the pieces of the cat in a dust pan and brought them out to the dumpster; the pig had been waiting for him on its feet, tongue reaching for the remains of the cat.

“Wow,” Leilani said as Chelz added the final coat. “I can’t even describe that color. It’s like a gem I’ve never seen but definitely want. What’s it called?”

Chelz shrugged and set the bucket aside. He pulled out a bottle of jet black polish, traditional polish. Opening it, he took a deep breath through his nose. The smells of chemical beauty still tickled his brain. As a teenager, the scent of an open bottle beside his bed had been enough for him to get off. That was before he had started dating, before he had gone to school and learned his profession and started making trades. Almost a decade had passed since then and so much had changed, thanks to the pig.

He applied the polish to the base of each nail. Using a clean white rag, he smeared it out just a little. The final effect looked like black flames emerging from the nail bed against the unworldly, metallic sky that covered the rest of the tips.

Despite his ulterior motives and despite the help he had gotten from the pig, he truly believed his art had merit. None of his peers did work like him, not Russo and not Tina W. If his art came in a traditional form, it would appear in the best galleries in the country. As it stood, his galleries were the walls of teenage girls. On these walls, posters and pinups of Leilani and other celebrities he had worked for found homes. His favorite: a shot of Leilani’s face, blonde hair pulled back, puckered lips painted blue, eyelids low over sultry green eyes, hands on cheeks, each curved and square-tipped nail a slightly different shade of silver. It had graced the cover of Rolling Stone before being turned into a poster. The thought of it still warmed his crotch. His art had benefits.

After a few minutes under the dryer, Leilani held her nails out for inspection. “These are amazing.”

“Aren’t they?”

“And to think you almost pulled the old ‘I’m out of that color’ routine.”

“What was I thinking?” Chelz asked, following her to the door.

On her way out, she put her hand on his forearm and opened her mouth to say something. Before she could, Chelz grabbed her hand. He wanted to hold it tight, feel its warmth while he still could. Seeing the look of surprise in Leilani’s eyes, he panicked and pulled her hand to his chest. That wasn’t where he wanted to put it, but he knew he couldn’t put it where he wanted to. Not yet.

“Your hands look so hot. Can you feel my heart beating faster?” He asked in a goofy voice, playing up the cheesiness of the comment for a laugh, but his heart really did beat faster.

“You goofball. You’re so great.” She pulled her hand away and flashed her nails.

Chelz suddenly regretted what he had done. He wished he would have talked her into a different style. She wouldn’t have replaced him. Hell, she would have loved whatever he had done for her. She always did. He easily could have found someone else to wear that color, to appease the pig.

As she walked out the door, she added, “Come to the show tonight.”

“Oh, I definitely will.”

After she left, he wandered around his studio. Picking up one of the mannequin hands, he ran its smooth black and red nails across his cheek, into his mouth. He pulled it out and put it back on the pedestal, stopping himself before he went too far. He took another sniff of the bottle of black nail polish. The scent intoxicated him, sending tingles down his spine, down to his groin. The scent had been much stronger at the West Hollywood salon he used to work at and sometimes, he missed the lack of ventilation.

He looked around at what he had now, amazed at how far he had come since he started using the pig’s gift, since Leilani’s personal assistant had stepped into the salon and hired him on the spot. He knew he hadn’t done it on his own. He knew the pig had fulfilled its end of the bargain, delivering Leilani to him after he had given the pig what it needed. Still, he deserved it. He had spent enough time doing boring manicures for whores, trannies and tranny whores.

He had made sacrifices.

That night at the Zero Club, Chelz made his way backstage. The trendy nightspot held a few hundred at most, all of whom had paid a couple hundred bucks to see the diva preview a handful of songs from her forthcoming album. The smaller venue was better suited for tonight’s events, planned and unplanned. The fewer eyes, the better, as far as Chelz was concerned. Plus, the bouncers weren’t letting cameras in. That meant no recordings, no evidence that could come back to haunt him. Not that anyone would ever be able to trace anything back to him anyway. They never had before.

“You made it,” Leilani greeted him at the side of the stage, taking his hands in hers. Instinctively, he lifted them to his lips. He kept himself in check, gently kissing the back of each. He did so slowly, allowing himself time to pore over the smoothness of her pale skin, the perfect parenthetical wrinkles around each knuckle. He skipped past gold rings to her fingertips and the long nails.

“You got through the day without a chip.” He let her hands fall away.

“I was super careful, Chelzee. I didn’t even wash my hands after going to the bathroom because I didn’t want to chip them turning the water knobs,” she explained enthusiastically. After a pause, she added, “Just kidding.”

Chelz laughed. He would miss her sense of humor. He would miss her warmth. He would miss her. Telling himself the pig would deliver another celebrity to fill his client list didn’t help his building sense of loss.

“Enjoy the show,” she said, as her intro music came on. She stepped onto the stage. Under the spotlight, she blew a kiss to the crowd. Chelz imagined that kiss floating past her soft palm, making its way over her diminutive digits and then engulfing those gorgeous nails, taking them in, becoming one with them.

“Hello!” She giggled conspiratorially. The first song started with a distant tenor sax boiling below words whispered into the microphone, releasing some of the old school rhythm and blues flavor she told Chelz she had been aiming for with her new music. The flavor disappeared quickly, replaced by the cold beats that dominated all modern pop, her voice the only thing to warm them up.

She pulled the microphone from its stand. In her black high heels, she took command of the stage, becoming larger than life by raising her knees just a little higher as she walked, by making each gesture just a little grander.

As the song built, Leilani put her hands to work. The fingertips of her right hand danced over her microphone as if it was too hot to hold. Her left hand caressed the air during a soft part of the song, eventually settling comfortably on her hip, nails gleaming under the white stage lights for the briefest of moments. Then her hand flew up again, high above her head, fingers spread wide as if reaching for all the energy released by her singing, trying to pull it back.

Chelz considered her the perfect vehicle for his art. All the other singers he worked with let their hands hang dead at their sides. Not Leilani. She was one of a kind. Chelz realized he couldn’t let her go. He could find some other way to keep his end of the bargain with the pig. He ran onto stage, ready to snap the nails off her fingers.

He didn’t even get close. A security guard grabbed him, pulled him back and put him into a headlock. Leilani didn’t notice his attempt, and neither did the crowd. He struggled against the guard’s grip, getting nowhere. His failed attempt made what happened next all the more difficult to watch.

At the start of her second song, a ballad, Leilani placed her microphone back on its stand and sang, “We are through… I’ll never miss you.” She placed her hands over her face, as if to mask the flow of tears, a melodramatic gesture that matched her lyrics. When she pulled her hands away though, she revealed the reality of the gesture. Tears pulled eyeliner down her cheeks as she sunk the metallic tips into the flesh above her eyebrows. Her voice tilted off pitch and then vanished as she dragged her talons through her skin, up her temples and then down. Struggling, as if cutting tough steak with a butter knife, she tore her left cheek off and tossed it to the stage floor. She gave up on the right, letting the flap of skin hang limp. Blood trickled from the wounds, brighter and wetter than her red lips.

She stared at her bloody hands, at the skin bunched up on the underside of her nails and opened her mouth as if to scream, but remained silent. The crowd did not. People rose to their feet, looking at each other, confused. Perhaps they thought this was part of the show. The security guard who held Chelz didn’t. He undid the headlock and ran, muttering, “Fuck this,” on his way to the exit.

From deep within the diva’s scratched face, eyeballs fought their way through muscle fibers, struggling to find a spot on the surface. Dozens of them, some as small as peas, others as large as baseballs, emerged, their matching green irises expanding and contracting like heartbeats. From where Chelz stood, her skin appeared to be boiling.

Her nose swung to the side and then dropped off. Eyes took its place, popping from the nostrils. Framed within her teased blonde hair, eyes took over her face. Only her lipless mouth remained. Whimpers emerged from between her too-white veneers, barely audible over the crowd’s screams.

Chelz had forgotten how horrible the process was. He wished he could stop it. This wasn’t some whore of a B-movie actress. This was someone he had spent time with, someone who supported his art. He cursed the pig and he cursed himself.

Leilani scratched her face again, raking the rounded points of her nails through the eyeballs, knocking some loose, cutting some open. From these gashes, more eyeballs bubbled to the surface, wet with pus. She fell to her knees, crying louder now, tearing out curls of hair that stuck to her hands amidst the blood and flesh.

Stage managers and members of Leilani’s crew ran back and forth in a panic around Chelz. Some yelled into cell phones. Some cried as Leilani disassembled herself. Eyeballs rolled free as she plucked them from her face, slicing and digging with her nails, making room for more to rise to the surface.

When she finally collapsed, Chelz gathered himself, pushed his loss aside and calmly walked onto the stage. Nobody noticed him as he pulled a garbage bag out of his backpack and scooped up as many eyes as he could. Nobody noticed him as he took out a butcher’s knife and chopped off the diva’s hands, nails still intact.

He had liked Leilani. He had liked her a lot.

Chelz entered his studio, his home. He breathed in the chemical smell of beauty. Another scent infiltrated his nostrils, one he didn’t like nearly as much. Kicking off his shoes, he wandered into the room that held his trade secret. The pig smelled like breakfast left out for days, bacon and eggs festering on a crowded kitchen table. He wondered if he should hose the pig down. It had never smelled like this before. Maybe he was too late. Maybe the pig was dying and this was the scent of death. Although the thought came with a sense of relief, Chelz wasn’t ready to let the pig go yet.

He reached into his bag and grabbed a handful of eyeballs. The pig caught their scent and its body rumbled in ecstasy. Its sideways slash of a mouth opened, revealing teeth like smashed cinder blocks. The pointed pink tongue slithered past them, reaching out to Chelz. He tossed an eye and the tongue snatched it out of the air. Instead of pulling it into its mouth and swallowing it, the pig used its tongue to crush the white orb against the front of its teeth. The sphere collapsed and its yellow juices trickled down the tongue into the pig’s mouth. It made a wet purr.

Chelz tossed a handful of eyes directly into the pig’s mouth. The flesh tubes swelled. When they began oozing, he put a bucket beneath each and left the room.

He took Leilani’s right hand out of the bag and put the other, along with the rest of the eyes, in his refrigerator. In the kitchen sink he washed the blood off the hand. He used a vegetable brush to clean the flesh from the undersides of the long nails. After he toweled the hand off, it looked as good as new. Cold, but still soft, still beautiful. He took it into his bedroom.

Dropping the severed appendage onto his bed, he took his shirt off. Slowly, he climbed in beside Leilani’s hand— a lover sneaking in after a late night. He lay on his back and pressed the hand against his bare chest. Running his fingertips over hers, he touched those long gorgeous nails, the nails he had made gorgeous. He should have felt good, but he didn’t. He wanted more.

That didn’t stop him though. He opened his mouth and inserted her index finger. He tickled the back of his tongue with the tip of the long, curved nail while he licked the underside of her finger. Pulling it out, he rubbed the slick surface of the nail against his bottom lip. He did the same with each digit until he reached the pinky, which he sucked for a moment before pausing. For once, he wished he had a whole body to play with, Leilani’s body.

Oh, well, he thought. He had known he would have to make sacrifices.

He licked the diva’s palm and unzipped his pants.