Shock Totem 9: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  “What’s wrong with her?” Emma whispered after the woman’s muttering had faded into the wind.

  “It happens sometimes—people come unmoored, lose their connection to what’s real.”

  “Why is she walking around?”

  “Geometry is always the last to go. Soon she’ll slip away, climb the fence, and…” Luke shrugged. “No one really knows.”

  “Why don’t you stop her?” J.J. asked.

  “No point when someone is that far gone.”

  The twins leaned into the circle of his arms, and Luke quietly congratulated himself again for bringing them here.

  Like the field, the forest had been left to grow wild. Once, maybe recently, maybe years ago, Luke had set gardeners to trim back the underbrush, only to see it back the next day, twice as thick. There were paths—thin, looping tracks cut by the steady tread of the damned. Luke took the largest of these, giving Emma and J.J. a little tug when they hung back.

  “They’re just trees, perfectly safe. I come here almost every day.” It wasn’t much of a lie. Helen probably had them believing he spent all his days behind a desk, so really, he was just balancing the score.

  The fence was chain links strung across aluminum poles. Bits of trash, receipts, utility bills, and other paperwork fluttered in the wind, secured to the fence by plastic ties. It did nothing to stop the Great Things, but the lesser ones seemed repelled by the detritus of civilization, prosaic reminders of daily existence.

  Beyond the fence, Luke could see the unfinished skeleton of the barrier wall—ruined concrete, scoured by tumbleweeds of twisted rebar—a testament to wasted time and effort. They’d spent years on the wall, only to see it swept aside in a few furious moments. The fence, though, had stood seemingly forever. Most Things respected the tacit border, going about their terrible business while humanity stood by, helpless for all their power, unable to turn away.

  “Go on. Look.” He pushed the twins forward.

  J.J. hesitated, but Emma moved as if sleepwalking, squinting up at the distant bulk of the Crawling Thing.

  The Watching Thing bloomed in the lattice of shadow a short distance away from the fence, its soap-bubble eyes breaking the afternoon light into sprays of unnamed colors. Long-bodied, with a tangle of crooked arms, it resembled a stand of willow trees fashioned from braided rope.

  J.J. whimpered as the Watching Thing shuddered. Luke lifted the boy and held him as he had when J.J. was small and woke screaming from ravenous dreams. Usually, Helen would sing, her voice slipping through choruses of half-remembered nursery rhymes. Luke stroked J.J.’s hair, forced to settle for a soft, tuneless hum. The boy didn’t seem to know the difference, but Helen’s absence galled Luke nonetheless.

  He imagined her with her lover, maybe at brunch, maybe visiting one of the public cinemas. She would be wearing one of the dresses he’d bought her—the red one; maybe the black with gold embroidery along the hem, the one with the straps she could slip off with a shrug. Her image filled his thoughts, and he saw himself running a hand up the her ribcage, cupping her breasts, his thumb gently tracing the dark flesh around her nipples, feeling them harden at his touch.

  J.J. buried his face in the curve of Luke’s neck, his tears first hot then cold as the wind kissed them. Luke shifted to steady him on his hip, jaw tight as he imagined another man’s hands on Helen. How many dates had they gone on? How many had it been before she’d taken Luke to bed? He was surprised to find he couldn’t remember.

  “Sir? Excuse me, sir? Step away from there!”

  Luke turned to see a patrolman hurry from the tree line, the woman from the field trailing behind him like a tattered cape.

  “That’s him.” He dragged my children into the woods…just like before.” She tried to point, but her finger and her gaze kept slipping to the expanse behind the fence. The woman moaned.

  The patrolman ignored her. “This is a prohibited area. By order of the Protectorate, I’ve got to take you into custody.”

  “Stand down, officer.” Luke fished the ID from his pocket then let it fall open to display the badge, hoping the man hadn’t yet heard of his recent retirement.

  “Director, I’m sorry. I didn’t—I was just walking the line and she came up to me, and, well, she seemed lucid, so I—”

  “He takes them, again, again, again.” The woman’s circles reminded Luke of a dog about to lie down. Even those whose minds were mostly gone were capable of bursts of lucidity, clinging to their few remaining ties with desperate strength.

  “These are your children, sir?” The patrolman had dark eyes, thick, arching eyebrows, and a patch of stubble along his neck where the razor had missed. There were laugh lines around his mouth. Luke imagined him smiling—over brunch, maybe at the cinema.

  “What’s your badge number?”

  “Sorry, sir. Sorry I have to ask. It’s just, this really isn’t a safe place to bring—”

  Luke backhanded him across the face.

  The patrolman’s fists clenched, then slowly opened.

  “Leave, now.” Luke glanced to J.J., saw his eyes were wide. Good, let him see his father was a man to be respected. He nodded at the madwoman. “Take her with you.”

  The patrolman grabbed the woman’s arm and roughly jerked her back toward the tree line. When she struggled he shook the woman so hard Luke could hear her teeth click together.

  Luke set J.J. down.

  Emma was close to the fence, seeming not even to have noticed the altercation. The Watching Thing had drawn near as well, its broken-finger branches quivering a few feet from Emma. Thin membranes unfurled from the tips of its arms, then stretched and pulled into vague features, like rough negatives of human faces. Luke pulled his daughter away before the faces began to resemble anyone she knew.

  Neither child said anything on the trip back through the woods.

  “One word about this to your mother, and I’ll bring you back here,” Luke said to J.J., as he buckled him in. Closing the car door, he turned to Emma. “One word from you, and I’ll never bring you back here.”

  Each time he checked the rearview mirror on the way home Luke saw the twins watching him. He smiled, sure they would never forget.

  Yes, this trip had been a good idea.

  • • •

  The days seeped into his bones, each no more than the blurry prelude to another night of moth-eaten dreams. When Luke grew hungry he slipped down to the commissary to gorge himself on synthetic food, tasteless but plentiful. He would eat mechanically, then trace the smooth porcelain plates with his fingertips until the staff made him leave. The rest of the time he spent pacing and drinking by turns. His world shrank to the small apartment, circumnavigated in a dozen quick steps. When the waiting became too much he would stare out at the Crawling Thing, always coming, but so slowly.

  At some point, he realized he didn’t know what day it was. The angles of the television felt sharp enough to draw blood, and when he finally managed to turn it on the sound of the canned voices scraped across his nerves. He forced himself to focus on the date in the lower corner. Tuesday, only Tuesday.

  He went down to the commissary and bought a pack of cigarettes. Every night when the sun went down he would light one, burn a nice deep circle on his forearm, then smoke the cigarette down to the filter.

  He wondered if the twins dreamed about him.

  On Thursday, a letter came. The envelope was too thin to open, so he ripped the sides off. Although the writing wasn’t human, he recognized Helen, Emma, and J.J.’s names amidst the scrawl. He carefully tore them out and swallowed the scraps of paper. Then went back to waiting.

  When the burns told him it was Saturday he showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, then did it all again for good measure. Helen had hesitated last week, but this time he was sure he could convince her to come with him. They would go to one of the small parks that dotted the spiral habs, away from the nuclear plant and the synthetics factory. He and Helen would play hide-and-seek with the twins, stea
ling the quiet moments to trade close-mouthed kisses.

  It had been over three months, enough was enough. Luke’s affair, if you could even call it that, had only been for one night. He would apologize, but he would also be firm. She had to see it would be better once things got back to normal.

  After dressing, Luke packed his things, loaded them into the car, and drove home.

  A strange man answered the door.

  “What are you still doing here?” Luke asked.

  The man gave an odd grimace. “I’m sorry, you have to go.”

  “It’s my house. My wife and children are waiting for me.”

  The man put a hand on Luke’s shoulder. He shook it off, more confused than angry, then wedged his foot into the doorway to keep the man from shutting it. There was a brief scuffle.

  “Stop!” Helen forced herself between them.

  Luke stopped.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

  “It’s Saturday.”

  Helen shared a look with the stranger. “Go on inside.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded twice, arms crossed across her ribs. After the man was gone, she stepped out onto the porch, shutting the door behind her.

  “Helen, it’s Saturday. I’ve been waiting all week to—”

  “Didn’t you get the letter?” she asked.

  Something shifted in Luke’s thoughts—the vague memory of names on paper, of making them part of him.

  “Your custody has been revoked. You can’t come here anymore.” Helen looked sad as she spoke.

  “There’s been a mistake.” Luke shook his head as if to clear it. “They’ve gotten it backwards. This is the weekend I come home. We need to go to the Courts and get this straightened out. C’mon, we’ll just—” He made a grab for Helen’s hand, but she stepped out of reach.

  “No mistake, Luke.”

  “How did you—?”

  “You took the twins to the fence. What were you thinking?”

  “I just needed to be sure they’d remember, that I’d always be here.” Luke glanced back over his shoulder, drawing comfort from the blot on the horizon. “You drove me to it. One day’s not enough. This has gone on too long already.”

  “What?”

  “This.” Luke flicked his fingers at the house, and the stranger inside.

  “It’s not what you think. He’s just—” Helen flushed, then took a long, slow breath. “No. I’m not doing this again.”

  “We’ll go to the park, the one with the curvy slide Emma likes. We’ll play games, laugh, eat lunch on the overlook, then come home. I’ll apologize, you’ll ask me to stay. It always comes back around. Like this, see.” Luke paced a quick, desperate circle on the step. “See.”

  “You need help, Luke. God, look at yourself.”

  And for a moment, he did—hair disheveled, his breath smelling of scotch and toothpaste, wrinkled shirt pulled from uniform pants stained by days of wear, raw, red points on his sleeve where the cigarette burns had bled through.

  He shook his head. “My house, my family, my day.”

  “Dammit, Luke, I’m calling Director Samuelson.”

  “Samuelson.” Luke said the name as if tasting it.

  “She’ll send someone for you, get you help. Just wait here.” Helen slipped inside, but left the door unlocked.

  After a moment, Luke quietly followed her. He could hear the twins in the TV room, and Helen talking in hushed tones with the stranger.

  “I just pity him,” the man said as Luke padded down the hall.

  “I tried, I really did, but he’s—” something said in Helen’s voice.

  “I know. I know.”

  The twins were sitting cross-legged in front of the television, too close, as always. The alphabet program was on again. Luke edged into the room, but the man in the tweed suit stopped him with a glare.

  G...Get...Gone...Go.

  Luke left the house. He couldn’t remember how to open the car door, so he just walked—down the street, out past the factories and along the long access road. Periodically, he would pause and walk a slow circle to reorient himself to the Thing on the horizon.

  No one stopped him. There was no point.

  Gravel, then dry grass crunched under his boots. A sepia-toned woman paused in her pacing to watch him cross the field.

  “Bring them back.” Her voice was crumpling paper, her face a flat expanse of nothing.

  The trees were red and gold. Luke kicked through drifts of fallen leaves, ignoring the branches that clutched at his clothes. He kept his gaze on the bits of light that filtered through the copse. He only needed to forge ahead, to make it another week.

  Beyond the fence, the Watching Thing waited. Tarpaulin faces stretched between its branches, smiling, urging him on. Emma, J.J., Helen, Samuelson, and others, so many others—they all wanted him, needed him.

  He knew he could do it, knew he could hold out as long as it took for things to come back around. Time, time was all he needed—another week, maybe two.

  “Like this.” He chuckled to himself, walking a tight circle, then looked to the horizon. “Like that.”

  Luke couldn’t believe he’d ever hated it, couldn’t believe he’d ever hated any of the Things.

  He spun before the sea of plastic faces. His family, Samuelson, none of them understood, but they would.

  Luke would always be there. And Saturday was coming.

  By day, Evan Dicken battles entropy on behalf of the State of Ohio. By night, he spreads it however he can. Strangely, he hates being scared, but loves being terrified. His fiction has most recently appeared in Daily Science Fiction, The Lovecraft eZine, and Escape Pod, and he has stories forthcoming from publishers such as Chaosium, Darkfuse, and Woodland Press. Feel free to visit him at evandicken.com.

  MORNING BOOKS AND EVENING BOOKS

  A Conversation with F. Paul Wilson

  by Barry Lee Dejasu

  For the past thirty years, bestselling author F. Paul Wilson has written his way from one genre into another and back again—and sometimes mashing them all up together.

  Beginning with a hard science fiction trilogy in the late 1970’s, Wilson broke into the horror fiction scene in 1981 with a WWII-set novel called The Keep, in which German soldiers find themselves being offed by an unknown force in an ancient Romanian castle. A New York Times bestseller, The Keep worked its way into an adaptation by Paramount Films—but the subsequent 1983 motion picture directed by Michael Mann was a critical and financial disaster, and Wilson himself has never been one to shy away from his own feelings on the film.

  In 1984, Wilson made waves with The Tomb, in which he introduced the character named Repairman Jack, a New York-based freelance “fixer” of situations that are above and beyond the involvement of the law. Although Jack ideally keeps his trades in fixing more grounded situations (such as the theft of toys from a children’s hospital), he finds himself frequently—and increasingly—involved as a pawn in an ongoing supernatural conflict, whether he likes it or not. Though the demand for a sequel (or even a series) was high from the get-go, Wilson held off for almost two full decades—until 1998, when Jack’s sophomore adventure, Legacies, hit bookstores. Jack would appear in over twenty novels (to say nothing of various short stories), including a trilogy of YA fiction featuring a teenaged Jack getting into weird adventures in rural New Jersey, and more recently, an “early years” trilogy showing Jack becoming the titular Repairman in 1990’s New York. (Ironically, although a Repairman Jack movie has long been in the works, studios have gobbled up and spat out numerous screenwriters, directors, and actors in a definitive developmental hell.)

  Supernatural horror continued to be the name of the game for several other novels, including The Touch, and on up through a trilogy of sorts, Reborn (1990), Reprisal (1991), and Nightworld (1992). This trilogy took characters and events from The Keep and The Tomb and planted them amidst rising forces of darkness in a cosmic conflict that would have
made Lovecraft proud, making for a six-novel series known as the Adversary Cycle. (When the new Repairman Jack novels began in 1998, however, Wilson deftly revised these other novels to accommodate various interweaving storylines from Jack’s evolving world, making for a massive, 20+ book saga).

  Not all of Wilson’s works are (directly) involved in this cosmic conflict, however. Having dabbled in everything from historical fiction (Black Wind, 1988), medical thrillers such as The Select (1994) and Implant (1995), a new age novel, The Fifth Harmonic (2003), and even a children’s book, The Christmas Thingy (2004), Wilson has always had a story to tell in almost every genre.

  Wilson’s work didn’t stop in traditional fiction writing, either; he’d collaborated with fellow novelist Matthew J. Costello on a TV microseries for the Sci-Fi channel, FTL Newsfeed, from 1992-1996, which featured broadcasted news reports from a far future. Costello and Wilson went on to write two novels, Mirage (1996) and Masque (1998).

  In the year ahead, Wilson will be releasing several new works, including a new “early years” Repairman Jack novel and several collaborative works, including a novella with novelist Rhodi Hawk, a young adult novel with Tom Monteleone, and a short story with Heather Graham.

  I recently had the pleasure to chat with Mr. Wilson about his career, his upcoming works, and just how the heck he manages to write everything.

  • • •

  BLD: You have several collaborations already out, and a few more to come, including A Necessary End with Sarah Pinborough, a novella with Rhodi Hawk, and Nocturnia with Tom Monteleone. Were all of these in the works at the same time?

  FPW: Well, the one with Sarah began a few years ago, probably 2011. I was reading her book Forgotten Gods—it’s called Dog-Faced Gods, over in England—and there’s a character called the Man of Flies, and I just had an image of a whole bunch of flies in the shape of a man, and a story started coming out of that. So I e-mailed her and I said, “Listen, I got this idea that comes out of your [book], do you want to have anything to do with it?” We went back and forth a little bit, and she said it sounded interesting.