Burnt Tongues

by Chuck Palahniuk

  “One moment.” He whips something out—something like an aeroplane’s black box recorder but travel size.

  Bringing it close to the grinning jack-o’-lantern, Jack spanks the relic cassette player once—like the time our parents smacked my brother after he dared me to poke a power socket with a walkie-talkie aerial. Twice—for the bang that blew it from my hand, tripping the house lights, toasting the fuse box.

  Thrice—for the black starburst it left around the socket pips and faceplate, for the indefinite grounding he was slapped with, as well as a raw arse—and I juggle another hot chestnut on my tongue.

  “Those tea lights cooking smells of pumpkin pie.” Jack nods towards the residential lanes, buying himself time. “Those lights burning brightest also burn the shortest.”

  He says, fingers clambering all over the junk player, “It’s those lights that also make the scariest pumpkins.”

  My brother was always the kind to burn the candle at both ends—up to no good, since time immemorial—and when Jack finally thumbs the right button, uncrittered music rings out to soundtrack his narration.

  “Wow,” the Ghoulfriend deadpans. Over the naff chills and mediocre thrills of scratchy organ music, she huffs, “Lame.”

  Tourists always love a stunt, something kitsch. Even if tour intros boil your blood, strangers will follow you to the end of the strangest places if you attach a gimmick. Before rain washes away chalk outlines or tribute wreaths begin to rot at crime scenes, already queuing at your service are a cluster of leisure and tourism mercenaries, dying to help you relive the grotesque.

  Even after death you can visit hot spots like the cobbled streets of Whitechapel where Jack the Ripper disembowelled prostitutes in 1888. Or the claustrophobic Pont de l’Alma tunnel where Princess Diana’s chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz wiped out in Paris in 1997. Or outside übercool LA nightclub The Viper Room where actor and teen heartthrob River Phoenix collapsed after fatally ODing Hallowe’en morning in 1993.

  Not so much exploiting death as it is catering to a niche market.

  “So let us reveal tonight.” Jack turns and smiles through clenched teeth, patching the veneer of his eroding performance. “And revel”—he takes tentative steps towards the dark of town, his cheap eerie music playing—“in the ghosts of Echmond . . .”

  “To Echmond!” BeetleKurt, his makeup running, pupils massive like open urns, toasts up high, startling the dog walkers’ mutts into barking. He sloshes cider onto the tourists flinching beside him, inviting a host of WTF stares.

  The thing is on a tourist trap of morbid fascination like a ghost walk; you have to perish first before you become interesting. Before anybody cares. That’s what excursionists through hearse-tinted spectacles really long for: where someone died, how it ended, where it all went wrong—begging you to dress it with backstory, build expectation, and deliver a payoff.

  To Pied Piper punters around on hokey ghost tours at Hallowe’en.

  “And ghosts!” BeetleKurt toasts again, wet landing on my neck as he crumples the can in his fist, but before Jack can turn to berate—tourees barging, shunting, and kicking the heels of those in front—BeetleKurt’s already gone.

  Already he’s walking across the village green alone. With the collar up, his outfit’s vertical stripes evaporate the farther he gets from the amber of Jack’s lantern.

  And just before he disappears for good, his breath an ignited cloud left floating overhead, he pitches his can into

  the darkness.

  “Weirdo,” the Ghoulfriend says, unSamaritan-like, triggering a moronic chortle from the group. I roll my eyes, then pop another chestnut.

  “Let us endeavour once more,” says Jack, winding his routine back up to torture me—but I’m losing focus and blah, blah zoning out.

  Already I’m looking around, where I am and who I’m with—but not because I’m lazy. My brother’s the half-arsed one. Such a bad liar, like the time he pushed me on a park swing, double daring me to go 360 and not to worry because gravity and science will take care of me. It’s because I’ve heard it too many times:

  Death.

  Eyeing the ghost tour attendees surrounding me, I consider too many kooky scenarios, too much apparatus, too many fancy names for it, like foaming canine gums . . . savage dog walker petting bite . . . hydrophobia rabies . . . blah, blah, blah . . .

  The tightrope between rehearsed tour anecdote and recent town fatality blurs. The old and the new. So I forget which death was what. How I know it. And what town I’m in. Looking around the group, wishful thinking, such as murdered boyFiend . . . jealous Ghoulfriend . . . victim precipitated police homicide . . . blah, blah, blah . . .

  Muddled tour or tragedy tales, such as packed tourist coach . . . icy midnight motorway . . . multiple-lane collision . . . blah, blah, blah . . .

  I have to block out the morbid and remind myself how I got here. Live to the end of every ghost walk just to con guides like Jack out of rumours, about my brother, the Amazing Dipstick—who isn’t dead dead.

  Not exactly.

  Only in a magician’s sawn-in-half-, impaled-, drowned-assistant kinda way.

  Magicians with monikers such as the Outstanding Klutz or Magnificent Spazmo. Specialising in hocus-pocus stunts such as conniving apostle stitch up . . . sturdy wooden cross . . . public crucifixion . . . blah, blah, blah . . .

  So switching off—a habit bullied in from tramping through dozens of these tours in the cold, wishing winter was warmer, so I could then at least treat this like a holiday—I follow the tour into the Echmond dark, who themselves follow Jack and his lantern’s amber safety.

  Blindly, like lemmings.

  %

  Before the addictive computer game and celebrated false myth, lemmings gained a reputation for killing themselves—ironically—because of a natural instinct to survive.

  When their population reaches a certain boom point, a crux in overcrowding, hundreds and thousands of the furry Indiana Joneses migrate in search of food and shelter, questing in all directions and coastlines, not full of death and suicide, but life and optimism.

  Hope.

  Norwegian lemmings’ reproduction oscillates so violently, so severely, that every four years they expand from overpopulation and shrink to near extinction, and no one knows why.

  Every four years, the Lemming Leap Year of Death.

  “. . . Noncustodial father . . . cliff-parked car . . . coastal drowning . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack’s maybe droning on his walk, I’m not sure, still occasionally thumping his cassette player, still flogging his tragic tour theme. Leading us down residential lanes and past houses with lobotomised jack-o’-lanterns glowing beside welcome mats, the candles melting grins into grotesque gurns that flicker up onto brickwork, he’s possibly boring. “. . . Cold turkey quit alcoholic . . . top-floor council flat . . . defenestration . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”

  If everybody else jumped off a bridge or a cliff, would you do it, too?

  Or would you rather be the first lemming—the infamous martyr who started it all? Because among my bungee cord–fastened tour notes you’ll find suicide’s a dangerously popular pastime: the most common fatality of teenagers in the UK.

  At Beachy Head, the highest sea cliff in Britain, around twenty people a year plummet to their deaths. The same figure goes for The Gap in Watsons Bay, Sydney, Australia.

  Late noughties in the small town of Bridgend, Wales, twenty-five youngsters committed suicide in a little over two years, up from the annual average of three.

  The majority by hanging.

  And most having known each other.

  All through junior school, there were party invites I got that my brother didn’t. Where the birthday peep would rather cancel than invite him. It wouldn’t have hurt him during high school to dress better, talk to girls, but his popularity’s boomed since then. These days, the Great Anti-Socialite is quite the unsocial networker.

  Now it’s never him that misses the party.

 
“. . . Bullied transvestite . . . loft-beam noose . . . asphyxia . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack might be chivvying us, his lit pumpkin leading us into dodgy cul-de-sacs and down dark alleyways. Shuffling behind like some zombie chain gang, wearing the shadows of those in front the same way those behind wear ours, he could be goading, “. . . Bedroom tax repossession . . . industrial pesticide . . . toxic poisoning . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”

  Yet these suicide cliques are nothing new. They’re really just the modern story of Werther—from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther—where the failed “hero,” plagued by unrequited love, commits suicide by pistol. Except his suicide became so de rigueur for other losers sucker punched by love that back then as many as two thousand young men took their lives in the exact same way.

  As nonfiction.

  For real.

  So much so that shortly after publication the book became banned—one of the first examples of copycat suicide. In what became known as the Werther effect, young men even began to dress like Goethe’s “hero” out of Werther-Fieber: Werther Fever.

  The same trend of misery back then that we see in the Ghoulfriend’s boyFiend imitating right now: black eyeliner, tight jeans, and high-maintenance hair, sucker punched by love until panda-eyed, maybe misunderstood, seeking attention and a way out, like Werther.

  Fashion sells, but death sells more.

  Even Napoleon was down with the kids. The young Bonaparte writing Goethe-style monologues during his war campaigns, The Sorrows tucked in the back pocket of the fashionable Werther threads of his day.

  Trying to conquer Europe, looking like a girl.

  “. . . All-girls’ school . . . body dysmorphic disorder . . . hunger apocarteresis . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack could be yadaing as buildings become sparser. Tarmac losing out to dirt track, tall grass more frequent than brick wall, he maybe badgers, “. . . Job redundancy . . . railway platform . . . train decapitation . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”

  In the late 1940s America, right after a front-page suicide story was run, around fifty more people would kill themselves. Simultaneously car-crash fatalities would also spike. And unproven suicides by auto wreck became a trend in US journalism for over two decades until new codes of ethics were introduced to stop influencing incidents. This also being why self-death can’t be promoted. Why your Sky+ box set doesn’t have a Suicide Channel—yet. Probably. Coming soon—terminal reality television.

  Then at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, USA, like clockwork, one person jumps and dies every fortnight.

  At the base of Mount Fuji in the forest of Aokigahara, seventy-eight suicides were found in 2002 alone.

  Throughout the rest of Japan, online and group suicide pacts have tripled since police started keeping records in 2003.

  I bite into another tepid, rubbery chestnut. All this info is catalogued in my tour notes—from following my brother, the Excellent Numbskull. And the ghost walk before tonight’s, an ambulance response call away in nearby Brichford, so far fourteen teenagers have thrown themselves off the town’s coastal pier and drowned. All because they heard about some new urban legend, some new prank-stunt myth. Some new adolescent choking game they thought they could get their teenage kicks from, get away with.

  A game and faux cries for help that snowballed and went viral from one Brichford victim to the next. Each casualty also hearing of the Fantastic Phlegm Head who did it and somehow survived. So maybe to those kids this just seemed like a harmless game to play. A safe way to stop being ignored and invisible and make others pay attention.

  But naïve to think this wouldn’t be permanent. The consequences terminal.

  My brother, always excelling at trouble as a way to win recognition in my shadow, him and these cluster victims, their motives aren’t so different really.

  But when the exit methods echo those that were used before, the experts in my ghost walk folder of newspaper clippings call that a copycat suicide. The Werther effect.

  These copycat suicides cumulatively bumped together with a quick knock-on effect, like a line of falling dominoes, they call that a suicide cluster.

  The same repeated cluster location, they call that a suicide hot spot—and whether it’s lemmings overpopulating, then

  disappearing to near extinction, or young men idolising Werther like Kurt Cobain before throwing themselves off bridges, like clockwork, there are these patterns and trends that appear and disappear.

  Then pop up somewhere else.

  And then pop up somewhere else again.

  “. . . Fled war refugee . . . visa refusal . . . self-immolation . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack might be hounding while I snack on another lukewarm chestnut, leading us over hilly bumps past decaying barns and skeletal ruins. Past hedgerows spiked with thorns and nettles flickered with lantern orange, he could be irking. “. . . Adolescent teen angst . . . safety razor blades . . . exsanguination . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”

  Trending patterns that pop up somewhere else like here in Echmond and recent as only last week: The 8 Lives of 9 pub where we met on this one-night stand gimmick of All Hallows’ Eve tonight. That stocks-coloured tree on the village green opposite.

  The one shaped like an inverted L—which witness statements in The Echmond Guardian are calling the “hangman tree”: the word game where careless wrong guesses score gallows frame pieces.

  Where so far five teens—each somehow knowing the previous—have snuck under and knotted yachting rope around their throats.

  Then hung themselves from the lowermost branch.

  And no one knows why.

  Police cordon sighing in the wind, flower bouquets stacked below, ever since Echmond DIY and haberdashery stores have put an ID restriction on buying rope, sheets, and curtains.

  All summer, it’s been easier for the GhoulFiends to stockpile underage booze than to buy a ball of heavy-duty string.

  Yet if any of the names dedicated on the floral tributes placed beneath that tree had held on for just one more day, for just one more night—they just might’ve felt different in the morning.

  Happier.

  With the noose-thick stack of notes I’ve accumulated across these tours, because of my brother—the Super TombstoneLicker, I’ve made their loss my loss.

  The thing I carry heaviest is the weight of his guilt trip.

  It’s because of him and the Werther effect why parents won’t let their kids trick-or-treat tonight along the streets of Echmond copycat dressed as tiny devils, vampires, and warlocks. Let them chase each other as teeny ghosts, revenants, and zombies back from the dead haunting Boo instead of Boo hoo.

  “. . . Crippling arthritis . . . accidental painkiller overdose . . . acute renal failure . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack possibly bangs on in the near dark, traipsing along until my feet are numbed into stumps. The squelch and smell of damp sod and earth the only proof there’s any ground below—ruining my trainers, staining my jeans—he maybe pesters, “. . . Inoperable bowel cancer . . . disposable BBQ . . . carbon monoxide euthanasia . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”

  Even without iconic Werther threads, my brother still fancies himself a rock star these days, a Cult of Personality.

  Leader of an existential popularity contest, the Incredible Plebeian thinks everyone’s dying to be him—literally, because this lemming Russian roulette is now his idea of fun.

  But continually pit stopping, forever day tripping, eternally chasing him as a constant tourist isn’t mine. Because it’s not as simple as walking into a travel agent and taking a brochure. Bad taste or not, it’s illegal to promote suicide—ethics, morals, journalism codes, blah, blah, blah—so local tourist boards won’t help you.

  Some small towns—Brichford, Echmond—don’t even have a tourist board.

  But every dead-end town with a population big enough for a cluster invariably has a ghost walk. Some spooky village tour with secrets and skeletons in its community closet that nobody wants to talk about.

  Apart from me—schl
epping county to county, town to town, my red Sharpie ringing round clues inside local newspapers. The ink-blotting stories of shady deaths near the front, and ghost walks at the back. Ads no bigger than postage stamps, jammed beside clairvoyants and house clearances.

  From bereaving families. Moving town. Trying to start again.

  “. . . Postnatal depression . . . electrical appliance . . . filled bath electrocution . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack perhaps nags as we pass frost-glazed fields, my ears stinging with cold, and turn—welcome’d—back into the jack-o’-lanterned veins of residential streets. My nose numb and dripping snot, pumpkins gurning with the smiles kicked out, he arguably bugs. “. . . Spurned lover . . . 12-bore shotgun . . . severe ballistic trauma . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”

  Death lives longer underground. Obituaries may be filed and forgotten, but I’ve learnt the failed-actor ghost guides placing these ads are the unsung heroes of local folklore.

  Heroic Pied Pipers like Jack—my light in the dark—chronicling and regurgitating creepy facts to flesh out their tour narrative, glossing over years of wasted am-dram theatre, thinking limelight and an audience—like reality television—will solve their amphitheatre of self-esteem issues.

  My brother and Jack, they’re maybe not so different really.

  And even though my Sharpie’s fading and clippings are tattering, I know I can’t be that far behind.

  Always a step off the pace on this suicide tourism, this damage-control duty, I frisk the ghosts of yesterday for just enough info to foil him inspiring another copycat. Triggering another cluster. Defining another hot spot that somewhere ruins another community.

  Wearing silly tight jeans, the Majestic Nincompoop,

  looking like a girl.

  And I pop another heatless chestnut.

  The last I saw my brother were the gap years we took

  before the unis we never went to. As we sat facing each other on our old garden seesaw, he said he didn’t hate me.

  With his packed duffel bag waiting on the grass, he held up his hand’s Hallowe’en jack-o’-lantern carving scar. The same flesh hyphen burned onto mine from melted walkie-talkie plastic.