Chameleon by Ken McClure

long time before she trapped anyone else with her looks. But, for him, it had all been too late. The whore had given him an infection. She had given him a terrible infection.
     
    At first it was just a burning pain when he urinated. He couldn't bring himself to believe that it was anything more than a slight urethritis but then the chancre appeared. It had disappeared on its own but he knew that this was just one of the symptoms, one of Treponema pallidum’s tricks for it would be sure to come back and next time it would bring the secondary phase of the disease, the rash, the invasion of his entire system, lesions in his bones, his joints, maybe even his central nervous system. He would go blind and maybe mad. The whore had given him syphilis.
     
    Modern antibiotic treatment should have dealt with the problem. God knows, it was embarrassing enough to be on the treatment at all and to have to attend that damned awful clinic where you were given numbers in a pathetic attempt to preserve anonymity, but fate had something else in store for him. The strain of syphilis he had succumbed to proved not to be amenable to such treatment. It stubbornly refused to die. There was a war going on inside his body and Treponema was winning. The clinic staff kept up an unending stream of platitudes and reassuring pap in order to convince him that things were under control and but he knew better. They were doing their best to treat him but they were failing. His condition was untreatable.
     
    All of us have within us, a mental threshold that decrees how much pain and anguish we can endure before we lose control and mentally start to fall to pieces. Fortunately, in times of peace, few of us ever approach this borderline. But for a man who had been a loner all his life, the oddball at school, the one the girls laughed at and the boys taunted, the one who had been unable to risk leaving the security of his mother's love, the disease within him was the last straw.
    He had first approached the threshold when his mother collapsed and died just over a year before. There had been no warning, no time for him to prepare. He had simply gone into her bedroom one morning and found her lying there, icy cold and with her eyes open. When that happened he had felt so betrayed and alone that he had been unable to speak for weeks. They had taken him to the clinic on the hill where he had sat in a wickerwork chair and stared at the wall for days on end, totally withdrawn and unwilling to communicate with the world for fear of what else life in might have in store for him.
    He had been given pills which allowed him to sleep and others which took the edge off reality during the day. He was artificially released from stress until, in time, he recovered enough to give life one more chance. He saw the disease as the result of his misplaced trust.
    This time he did not lapse into a trance. He did not capitulate to the overwhelming forces of fate and bow his head in anguished acceptance. There was no flirtation at the threshold between reality and madness. He sailed way over it and there was no going back. This time he was filled with anger. A deep, burning anger that knew no bounds. What he wanted now was not pills or kind words. It was revenge.
     
    He would have to protect himself against the evil charms of the whores for he was not yet immune. He had known this last night when the bitch had been tied up and he had felt the hardness come on. The hardness was even coming on now when he thought about it. He pulled down his fly and reached inside his trousers to grip himself while he thought about the wiles the bitch would use. The stockings, the underwear, the perfume, the laughing red lips. He had to protect himself. He turned out the light and in the darkness of the basement he relieved himself of the desire that would be such a weakness in the job ahead of him.
    With the surgical instruments wrapped in cloth so that they would not rattle and the blades in foil