by Shock Totem
Penny crossed the road and walked onto the embankment. Up above she heard the needles rubbing against each other in the wind. In the dimness she saw the scarred bark and the flecks of red paint. What had happened? Had Meryl seen something on the road and swerved to avoid it? Or had something been in the car with her?
Again she heard a sound from above her, only this time she couldn’t dismiss the nagging thought that it sounded like something moving up there, something slithering down a branch to get closer to her. She felt eyes on her again, and this time her mind went back to those times when Alan sat at the breakfast bar watching her, back when he had been a different person.
She walked towards the road again. Just when she reached the point at which the grass met the tarmac, she heard something behind her, a sound like a heavy sack of laundry hitting the floor.
Penny saw car headlights coming around the corner from the direction of Alan’s house.
From behind her she heard gurgling, like the last dishwater going down the drain.
It’s been waiting for you to be alone.
Penny turned around to look at what was making the noise. It was too deep in the shadows to make out clearly. On the grass by the trunk lay a growing mound, dark and squirming. It appeared to be connected by a rope to the branches up above, only as she watched, she understood both the rope and the mound were the same thing, something living, lowering itself down from the branch where it piled like spaghetti.
It was still coming down when the bottom part began moving towards her, rolling and writhing, still coming down when she turned and ran down the road in the direction of the car. Her ears filled with the awful wet sounds it made through some impossible means, sounds her mind turned into words. “Don’t leave,” it wasn’t saying, it couldn’t have been saying.
She waved her arms and the car slowed to a stop.
Donald stepped out of the driver’s side. “Alan sent me after you, are you okay?”
She had already opened the passenger door. “Get in, Donald. We need to move, quickly.”
He got back inside and drove forward. They had been moving barely a second when Donald cried: “Jesus,” and the car briefly rose up as it went over something. “Jesus, what the hell was that.” He started slowing the car down.
“Just keep driving,” Penny said and shoved his shoulder “Don’t stop for God’s sake.” She looked behind them and saw something long, too long to be a snake, writhing across the entire width of the road.
“What is it, Penny?”
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I think that’s something Alan needs to figure out himself.”
• • •
In the year since Penny had last been to Alan’s house the garden had changed. The overgrown lawn was now trim; from the footpath Penny could see flowerbeds, shrubs and a pond, all illuminated by the security light perched above the front door.
She double-checked the invitation bearing the Green Party logo one last time, took a tension-relieving breath and headed up to the house.
Once inside she saw plenty of familiar faces from the campaign. Up on the wall was a banner reading: Congratulations Jennifer Swallow! MP! Without trying particularly hard, Penny bounced from conversation to conversation, never seeing anyone she knew from her time working in the house. Not even Alan.
Nearly an hour had gone by when she excused herself to find a bathroom. Noticing that most people were using the one downstairs, she snuck upstairs anticipating it would be empty. On her way down the corridor she noticed a large bookshelf now stood in front of the door to Alan’s bedroom. When she passed it again on the way back she stopped to inspect it, wondering if perhaps she’d misremembered the layout of the house. Peering behind, she saw the door was still there.
“Everything okay?” Alan said. Penny jumped.
He walked towards her from the direction of the stairs, although at first she didn’t know who she was looking at. Only when he came close enough for her to see his green eyes did she understand. “Oh my god, Alan. Where have you gone?” The man in front of her showed only the slightest sign of having once been overweight in the extra skin around his neck and around his jaw, although even that was mostly disguised by a well groomed covering of stubble. The contours of a different, even handsome face, had appeared from beneath its fatty covering like a dusted-off fossil.
She smiled and Alan returned the gesture which revealed new wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “How have you been, Penny?”
“I’m wonderful, thank you.” She hoped he hadn’t thought her strange for spying on his new house layout. “I’m a nurse manager for an out-of-hours clinic now. The wage is good because it’s at awkward times of the night and the weekend. Oh my god, Alan. You look amazing.”
“Even better, I can walk up the stairs without needing to lie down for an hour.” His eyes flicked to the bookcase.
“Can you believe that she won?” Penny said.
He looked at Penny, momentarily flummoxed. “Sorry, yes. Jennifer. Well, she was the strongest candidate and I think the area was desperate for a change.”
“And your money must have helped.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
The following silence felt unmistakably awkward and Penny was thinking of something to say when Alan beat her to it: “I saw you noticed the new furniture arrangement.”
“Yes, I’m not going crazy, am I? That was where the bedroom door used to be.”
“It still is there. But I don’t use it as a bedroom anymore.”
Another silence—Alan’s eyes once more flicked to the bookcase and back to Penny. She started to feel uneasy; was she imagining that the gaps on either side of Alan’s slim figure suddenly looked a fraction smaller? As if sensing her concern he stepped towards the bookcase. He placed his hands up against the side and with one remarkably easy shove the bookcase slid across the hardwood floor revealing the bedroom door. “There’s something I need you to see.”
At the top of the door was a hasp with a giant padlock. Alan reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He opened the padlock with one, all the while flicking his head back towards the stairs to check that no one was approaching, then used another key to open a lock above the handle.
“We need to be quick. I have nightmares about what would happen if anyone stumbled in here by accident. Stay close behind me, Penny.”
Alan opened the door and flicked on a light. Immediately she heard voices, lots of them all talking at once and over each other. Penny stepped inside the old bedroom right behind him so that his frame blocked her view until he stepped to one side to close the door.
The wardrobes and the bed had been removed. The only thing that remained from before was the giant flatscreen television, now surrounded on all sides by other flatscreen televisions, assembled to create a televisual wall. On each screen was a different 24-hour news channel.
“The room contains it,” Alan said. Penny didn’t understand at first, then her eyes were drawn to the middle of the room, where a sole chair sat facing the television wall. She drew a cross on her chest twice, her entire body instantly sapped of warmth.
In the chair, like a charmed snake, its bottom coiled, its top swaying from side to side before the screens, was what looked like living innards. The head, because she saw it was a head of sorts, was comprised of a complete set of teeth, set in floating gums around the entrance to the thing’s throat. She understood what she was looking at, her mind going back to her nursing training and the black-and-white diagrams in her copy of Gray’s Anatomy: a gullet, an enormous stomach set atop a pile of intestines, an entire digestive system from beginning to end.
“I tried everything, Penny. When the man from the local church literally ran from the place I bought in all manner of strange people. Lots of people from the Internet, most of them just made a mess of the place. Often it just hid until they left. Nothing worked. Then one night I woke up with that thing squeezing my neck again, pushing to get in my mouth
like it was trying to get inside me. Usually, I’d have been able to fight it off, but I just couldn’t do it. I was thrashing about and it was forcing my mouth open, when I somehow leaned on the television remote, which switched on the last thing I’d been watching. The thing went limp immediately and just sort of dropped off my body. It crawled into that chair and never moved. I must have sat there watching it for an hour afterwards but it just did what you’re seeing it do now.”
She hated looking at it and pushed herself against Alan’s side, wanting to take his hand, or better, for him to put his arm around her. “It’s awful, Alan. Can’t you kill it?”
“I doubt it. I think it’s dying, anyway, it looks more faded, less substantial, every time I come in here. And I don’t want to disturb it, just in case I break whatever hold the television has.”
“Is it a demon?”
Alan shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think it’s worse. When my heart stopped that night, Alan Roscoe really died and I think that this is his ghost. Whoever I am now, I don’t think I’m the same Alan Roscoe that collapsed on the bathroom floor. That Alan Roscoe, whatever remains after you die, is in that chair.”
“It’s your spirit?” Penny asked.
“Not mine,” Alan said. “Not now.” And then he did put his arm around her, and Penny didn’t think twice about taking a step towards him and pressing her face into his side.
S.R. Mastrantone writes, lives and occasionally plays music in Oxford in the UK. His novel-length fiction is represented by HHB agency, and his short fiction has appeared internationally in venues such as Lamplight, The Fiction Desk and carte blanche. You can read his blog at srmastrantone.com and he tweets here: @srmastrantone.
HOWLING THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
The stories behind the stories.
“Buddy”
“Buddy” began with a nightmare. I saw a child sitting primly, eating cereal, while an empty-eyed woman looked on. His brother sat beside him, and periodically the first child would attempt to feed the second his breakfast. The other child was clearly dead. I had the dream again a few weeks later, and then again, and while the setting changed, the three characters stayed. I jotted down notes when I awoke, and eventually wrote the story down so that I could get it out of my head. I didn’t have any specific goal in mind; I simply wrote down the images as they came to me.
At the time these dreams began, I was working with severely disturbed children. I watched these children build elaborate and violent fantasy worlds and talk animatedly to imaginary friends. I worked with a child who had a dissociative disorder. He had several distinct personalities, and the shift between them was visible; his face would twitch, and when he spoke it was in a completely different voice. One day, he was sitting next to me reading. Suddenly, he leaned over, pointed at an empty chair, and whispered in my ear, “There’s a dead guy in that chair, Teacher, and he’s looking at you.”
This child also once presented me with a picture he’d drawn: a gory image of a cat that had been run over by a bus. “I made it for you, because you love cats,” he explained. Another child, when asked to draw a picture of her family, handed me a picture of several black stick figures scrubbed over with yellow and orange crayon. “That’s my family,” she said. “They’re on fire.”
These children would study quietly, only to leap from their seats and run down the hall, screaming that they were being killed. They would tell me they loved me and that they were having a great day, only to fling their chairs at me five minutes later. It was from them I created D. Writing this story allowed me to examine the nightmarish world these children lived in, and dismiss them from my dreams.
–Kathryn Ohnaka
“Saturday”
When I was six, I realized that I was going to die one day. I remember crying to my dog, a chocolate lab named “Hershey,” about the unfairness of it all—and him not giving a shit. A few years later he got run over by a tractor, while I (at least at the time of this writing) am still alive...and still whining about death.
“Saturday” was something of a surprise for me—cobbled together from several unconnected ideas I’d been ruminating on for quite some time. I knew I wanted an untrustworthy narrator and a strange, apocalyptic backdrop; beyond that, the story just seemed to write itself. I could fill pages about where I stole various narrative flourishes, but that would only embarrass me. Really, I’m indebted to the “Writers Versus Gators 2014” crew for a weekend of sharpening, tightening, and Crispin Glovers. Without them, you probably wouldn’t be reading “Saturday,” in Shock Totem or anywhere else, for that matter.
For me, the most unsettling parts of “Saturday” aren’t the Things (although I love them all dearly), but Helen and the kids—living as best they can under the creeping shadow of inevitability. In some ways, Luke’s egocentrism, obsession, and madness feel like more reasonable, if less desirable, responses. It’s not strange that we’re all going to die, but that we live as if we aren’t.
I guess Hershey had the right of it.
–Evan Dicken
“Thirteen Views of the Suicide Woods”
I conceived “Thirteen Views of the Suicide Woods” as I sat in a two-seat, single prop airplane looking through the windshield at the white-capped peak of Mount Rainier rising above the clouds. I rode beside the pilot with that amazing scene and a second control stick in front of me wondering what it would feel like if the plane pitched and plummeted into Puget Sound. It wasn’t the first time I’d had a feeling like that.
The first time I remember contemplating dying I was six years old. I was in my bedroom debating whether I could shove the biggest kitchen knife from the butcher block downstairs into my guts hard enough to die like the man in the Samurai movie my grandfather let me watch. The time in between that night in my bedroom and that day in the plane has been a lifetime of intrusive scenes playing out in my mind, as if Hokusai had painted 100 Views of My Demise instead of 100 Views of Mount Fuji.
When it comes, the feeling leaves me breathless and frightened and a little exhilarated. In a place where violent death lives—like a swiftly moving river or a subway platform—some dark part of me longs for quietude and destruction and the sensation of that final moment. Not always, but often I find myself reflecting on what it would be like to drown or burn or break on the rocks below.
I used to think that there was something broken in me, a defect in my consciousness that made me experience a near-physical urge to let go and step into the darkness any time I came close to something dangerous. But it is an experience so widespread and powerful that the French gave it a name: “L’appel du vide.” As a concept it defies easy translation, but the most common translation is, “The call of the void.” It’s a quiet voice that says, “Lean over the edge; go ahead and let yourself fall.”
It’s probably not normal, but at least I know it’s common.
Not being alone, however, is not the same as not being lonely. During that flight I began to think of all the other people at that moment feeling l’appel du vide. The combination of the sight of the mountain and the call reminded me of a photo-essay I’d seen of a place called Aokigahara—“the Sea of Trees”—a forest in Japan at the base of Rainier’s sister mountain, Mount Fuji. It’s a dense, verdant forest that blocks the wind and has almost no wildlife. It’s nearly silent in the Sea of Trees. Perfectly peaceful. Except for the corpses. Around a hundred people a year hike into the woods to end their lives. So many, the police have put up signs in both Japanese and English encouraging visitors to seek help, begging all who stop to read them to turn back and not kill themselves.
I wondered what it would be like if there were places that amplify the call of the void—sites people visit solely in order to destroy themselves. Aokigahara, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Gap (the ocean cliff in Australia, not the clothing store). They set the hook in your guts and draw you closer to the edge and maybe even pull you over. Places like that are the void. I began to think about the effect living near those
places would have on people left behind. What would it be like to live in a city where self-destruction was the only constant? That’s where Brattle and Mt. Schoenborn came from.
I thought about the emotional experience of two people living a life together having a shared moment at death that transcended commitment and devotion. Shared death—not tragic mass suicide (murder) like Jonestown or the Heaven’s Gate cult, but something tender and destructive like Yukio Mishima’s “Patriotism” or Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide. Something terrible and heartbreaking but somehow linked to love and devotion.
My own experience with my girlfriend’s suicide† was like being in a crash in slow motion. I saw it coming. I thought I could stop it. I couldn’t. It lasted forever. And when it was over, I survived, but it killed something in me—a part that never regained feeling. The opposite of a phantom limb. A phantom extinction. That was the birth of my linked pairs in the story: Skip and Mandy; Kate and Rick; Danny and Schoenborn.
By the time we landed in Seattle, the first draft of the story was fully formed in my mind. I spent the flight back to Boston mentally revising before putting it down on paper in two feverish sittings once home. The first pass, I brought everyone (except Mandy) into the woods; then the second day, I led some of them out. The ones who had more to lose by staying alive.
The version you’ve read here is different than my physical first draft in two respects. First, I moved the piece from Seattle to my own fictional city of Brattle, an idealized city in the Pacific Northwest. Second, I changed the scene where Rick sees the corpse over Kate’s shoulder. Originally, that person had cut their stomach open. It was an homage to Mishima and my own obsession with belly cutting, but in the end it felt like too much. Too severe and distracting. I also wanted that anonymous man to be a reflection of what’s happening to Skip. A peek at his future if he doesn’t find his way down from the noose and home to his daughter. Otherwise, this story is pretty much as I originally conceived it soaring over the clouds, thinking about falling.
