The Itchy Head

One afternoon, an old man comes wandering into hospital, wearing his pyjamas and dressing gown. He looks confused, squinting about short-sightedly. When one of the nurses approach him and asks what is wrong, he tells her his head itches terribly. As a matter of fact, it has for quite some time.

The nurse takes him in to be inspected. It doesn't take long to work out what the problem is. His hair is crusty with dried blood. When she tries to clean it, his scalp peels away along with the hair and the blood. There beneath is a bloody hole, delving deep into his head. In the depths she sees the grey matter of brain. Not only that, but it's moving. Little white shapes wriggling madly away.

"Oh, God," says the nurse. The little white things, she realises, are maggots.

It's not long before the doctor's have worked out what's happened. The old man lived alone, and he's not in the best of minds. A cut on his head became infected, and the infection spread. Flies came along, landing and laying their eggs. Slowly, day by day, the infection ate away, worming down through flesh, through bone, deep into the soft stuff of his brain, until his whole head was open to the sky. The man was so frail that he never even knew; all he ever felt was that steady, stinging itch.

The Body In The Bag

A cat belonging to a young woman living in the city dies one day, of natural causes. The woman loved the cat very much, and wants it to be buried somewhere nice. Unfortunately she lives in an apartment with no garden, not even a communal one. As an alternative, the woman calls one of her friends--an artist who lives in the countryside. They arrange to meet at an out-of-town shopping centre, where the woman will hand over the body of her pet so that it can be buried out in the forest.

The woman wraps the body of her cat in paper and loads it into a boutique bag. She heads out to the shopping centre and goes to the food court, where she grabs a coffee while she waits for her friend. The artist eventually arrives, having been delayed by traffic. They chat for a few minutes, and then the woman goes to hand over the bag with the cat in it . . . only to find that it's missing.

They contact mall security and start a search, mostly to no avail. Someone must have taken their chance and stolen the bag while the woman went to the bathroom. The shopping centre manager apologises profusely to the woman, but there's nothing they can do.

Sadly, the woman and her artist friend head out to the car park. On the way they notice that there's some kind of commotion going on at the far end of the lot. They wander over to look. Lying there unconscious on the concrete, surrounded by a crowd of horrified onlookers is a large, middle-aged tramp. Lying there beside him is a familiar-looking boutique bag, the straggly head of the woman's cat poking out of the top.

The Deep-Fried Rat

A trucker pulls into a service station on the motorway. He's been driving all night and hasn't eaten since the night before. He needs some food, and so he heads for the fast-food bar and orders some fried chicken and chips. While he waits he glances around the place: it's not exactly sparkly clean--but then again he's been in some bad places in his travels. He takes his food and heads for a table.

He's about to bite into his chicken when something makes him stop. He pokes it with his fork,  inspecting the meat. For a moment all he knows is that it looks kind of weird . . . and then he flips it over and he sees the shape of it. He hurls it away from himself, almost vomiting.

The deep fried thing is not chicken at all. It's a rat, curled into a ball and slathered with batter. The poor thing must have fallen into the fryer, cooking itself whole in the remnants of a hundred meals-worth of grease.

The Sewer Workers

A group of sewer workers are down in the tunnels. They've been sent to clear out a blockage in one of the more far-flung pipelines under the city. The trouble is, they're working from plans that are way out of date. The further they go down, the harder it gets to be sure of where they are. At last, they come to a hatch in the floor of a junction.

"This is it, I think," says the foreman. "Let's head down."

They prepare their gear and open up the hatch, only to find that the tunnel beyond is narrower than they thought, and the ladder is long-since rusted. They can only send down one man to clear the blockage. A young workman volunteers for the job and is roped up and lowered down into the dark. A few minutes pass.

Then the man starts screaming.

Panicking, the others haul back on the rope. The guy down the hole sounds like he's screaming his lungs out. Eventually he comes back into sight, kicking and yelling, and they manage to get him over the lip of the hatch. He's shuddering violently, clutching at his clothes. His hair has turned a deathly white.

"What happened?" cry the other workmen. "What's down there?"

But the guy won't answer. He can't even speak. They shut up the hatch and manage to drag him back up to the surface, where he's carted off to hospital. But whatever the doctors do to him, he will not speak, will not say a word about what it was down there he saw.

The Carpet Store

A woman is out shopping for a new rug for her bedroom. She's wandering around a warehouse store, searching. She's looking for something exotic, something imported perhaps. She inspects some carpet samples and brushes her hand across a stack of rolled up rugs at the end of an aisle. Just then she feels a sharp pain in her finger, as though a pin or something was embedded in one of the rugs . . . but when she looks she can't see a thing. Sucking her finger, she leaves the store and heads back home.

A few hours later her neighbour discovers the woman lying dead in her kitchen. The police are called and the body taken down to the morgue. A pathologist examines her thoroughly, and eventually determines the cause of death. The woman was killed by the bite of an exotic spider.

It's a week before they track the woman's movements back to the carpet store she visited that day. And it's a week more before they discover the offending carpet. Imported from the Middle East, the thing is riddled with the husks of venomous spider eggs. The spiders themselves, however, are nowhere to be found.

The carpet is hauled away for further inspection, but the detectives know it's already too late. The spiders have spread already, and it's only a matter of time before the hatchlings start laying eggs of their own.

The Dead Grandmother

An American family are off on holiday; they're driving across the country: the mother, the father, the kids and the grandma. However, not long after they set off, the grandma succumbs to a heart attack and dies. She was pretty old, and they've been expecting it for a long time, so none of them are particularly shocked. It is inconvenient, however, as they're away from home, and don't know how to go about getting her buried in the state where they are. Instead, they decide to take her back home in the car, and bury her there.

The problem is, rigor mortis has already set in, and as such they can't fit her inside the vehicle with the rest of them. To get around this, they wrap her in a sheet and tie her to the top of the vehicle. Stuck up there, she looks like just another bundle, and they're satisfied that she won't be a problem. They all pile into the car and set off home.

A few hours later they stop at a service station and go inside to get some food. When they emerge, their car is gone. They search the car park, but it's nowhere to be found. They contact the service station security guard, and he lets them review the CCTV footage. They gather around and watch as a couple of guys in hooded tops saunter up to their car, slip the lock, clamber inside and drive off, without even realising that the corpse of the dead grandma is strapped to the roof.

The Abandoned Hospital

A small group of workmen have been assigned to clear out an empty hospital in the bad part of town. They're working in small groups, one in each part of the building. The men in the ward building are breaking down old pieces of furniture and carting out piles of trash. The hospital's been shut down for years, and the inside's pretty disgusting. There's dirt and dust and needles everywhere, not to mention rats the size of dogs.

About midday, the men break for lunch--all but one of them. His co-workers can't find him; he must have wandered off. They break for lunch anyway, call his mobile a couple of times (with no success), and decide to wait for him to turn up.

Towards the end of the lunch break, he does. He's behaving strangely though. His hard hat is pulled down over his face, his coat collar turned up. He doesn't stop to talk to his colleagues, but keeps his head down and heads quickly for the gate. His friends try to stop, to find out what might have happened inside the hospital, but he pushes past them and is gone.

It's puzzling, but they have a job to do. The workmen head back into the building and carry on with the clearing out. A few hours go by, and they've almost forgotten about their workmates strange behaviour. Then it happens. The foreman is checking ahead through the empty wards. Shining his torch into a dusty corner, he comes across a dead body. It's the man who they all saw leave the site earlier that day. Or the man who they all THOUGHT they saw leave.

The body is lying there on the floor. He's been stabbed, and his clothes have been taken. Whoever it was who went running away from the hospital earlier that day, it clearly wasn't him.