Hideous Faces, Beautiful Skulls: Tales of Horror and the Bizarre

by Mark McLaughlin

  The next cartoon was about a little girl whose imaginary playmate, a giant wise-cracking caterpillar, was always getting her into trouble. He had to admit that the animation was of a slightly higher quality than the previous show. Strolling through a park, the girl sat down on a bench next to a tramp sleeping under newspapers.

  The caterpillar crawled after the girl and—what was this? The tramp tore away the newspaper and began to cackle insanely; his swollen belly shook with each laugh.

  It was not an animated figure. It was Mr. Linfield.

  The mad-eyed old man pulled a length of wire out of his pocket and wrapped it around the girl’s neck, tighter, tighter—

  Michael grabbed the remote control. On another channel, Mr. Linfield was strangling the Reverend Tillson Parker with a ragged handful of copper wires.

  Michael turned off the television. For a moment, he simply sat and stared. Then he went to the door and opened it a crack.

  He could hear faint sounds from the other apartments. People talking. Televisions blaring. But no panic. No screams of horror.

  * * * *

  That afternoon, Michael went to the mall with a group of friends.

  Walking from store to store was a nightmare. He never realized how many televisions were on display. Some store windows were completely filled with them. There were cameras and monitors everywhere, to discourage shoplifters. And on each screen loomed Mr. Linfield for only Michael to see. Mr. Linfield, eyes shadowed with hatred, strangling anchormen, sports figures, shoppers.

  At one point, Michael saw his own image on a store monitor. He ran out of camera range when he saw an approaching figure on the screen.

  Outside of a shoe store, an elderly woman in ragged clothes asked him for spare change. He dug up a few coins from his pockets—eighty-five cents, total. He gave her a dime and hurried on.

  * * * *

  The next morning, Michael did not watch the news.

  Fortunately, there were no TV sets in the office where he worked. Even so, his boss complained that he seemed distracted. So he concentrated—concentrated on the bland invoices and shipping orders with a fervor that made his head pound. He needed this job and could not afford to slip up.

  * * * *

  Cross moved his pillows to make room. “I didn’t expect you back.”

  “You didn’t say that I would keep seeing him.” Michael was about to scratch an itch on his cheek, then stopped when his hand touched the handkerchief. Briefly, he recounted his experiences at home and at the mall. The wires hummed incessantly.

  “I don’t understand,” the pale man said. “What you have told me is impossible.”

  “Why? Where is Mr. Linfield now?” Michael looked to the dresser, then to the nightstand. There were no photographs of Card in the room. “In Hell?”

  Card reached under his mattress and pulled out handful after handful of sketches and photographs. “Fodder,” he said, piling them on the bed and on Michael’s lap. “Mere fodder. He’s within me, forever. They all are. Now tell me who’s in Hell.”

  Michael stared at the faces. Thin-skinned old women. Young, hard-looking men. A boy with bad teeth. A deformed infant. A girl with dark, blank eyes. Dozens of faces, many ugly, many mean-spirited. The unloved. The unwanted.

  Most of the sketches were discolored and brittle. Some of the photographs were faded with age. Michael swept the faces off his lap. “What are you?”

  “You’ve asked me that before,” Card said, “and my answer remains the same. A man in a room.”

  Michael pointed to the sketch of Mr. Linfield. “I don’t want to see him again.”

  Card sighed wearily. “There’s nothing I can do. It’s just in your mind.”

  * * * *

  Michael pulled the cord out of his television. He stayed out of the mall. Even so, he could not help but catch glimpses of his friends’ sets, or those in businesses.

  In the weeks that followed, Mr. Linfield’s video image grew more violent. After strangling his victims, he would begin to gnaw at their faces.

  Once, while walking home from the grocery store, Michael was accosted by a streetperson in a ragged sweater. He cried out—but it wasn’t Mr. Linfield. The old man grabbed his coat sleeve and offered to carry the groceries for a dollar. Michael set down the sacks and shoved him out of his path, into a row of hedges. There was a can of insecticide in one of the sacks. For one frenzied moment he considered spraying the old man’s face. Instead he grabbed his groceries and ran off.

  Michael began to wonder. Was Card more or less real than himself? Was this all a game? The pale man was clever, like a demon. He had a pained, kind face, but still, a demon could wear a mask.

  * * * *

  Soon Michael’s dreams were filled with televisions. Televisions depicting moments from his life, like scenes from home movies, always with Mr. Linfield lurking in the background.

  In one dream, Michael watched a huge TV screen floating through space and saw himself as a boy, talking with Mother on the front porch of his parent’s house. Mother was cross with him: he hadn’t finished cutting the lawn. She explained that he had to learn responsibility. Why, if he didn’t, there was no telling what would become of him. Lecture over, Mother gave him a big hug. His face was smothered against her bosom; her lilac perfume made his nose itch. But then the smell of lilacs was overpowered by a hot, meaty smell. He tore free of Mother’s embrace and screamed. Mother’s throat was wrapped in a bloody snarl of wire, and Mr. Linfield was biting into her cheek.

  The dream-scenes all ended that way. Mr. Linfield would appear with his wire to devour the face of a parent. A sibling. A coworker. A lover.

  Michael stopped seeing his friends. He stopped going to work. He felt sure that Mr. Linfield had been sent by Card. A puzzle filled his mind, and he needed time to work it through. His continued existence depended on the answer.

  He sat home alone, frightened, thinking. He didn’t use the phone or answer his mail. He kept his life to a precarious minimum so that the evil threatening him could find no new avenue for intrusion.

  * * * *

  Card’s brow wrinkled with alarm. “You didn’t cover your face. What are you doing?”

  Michael moved in a straight line from the door to the bed. In the yard of the gray house, he had picked up an old board. He used this to pound and snap the wires. His foot caught the cord on the electric fan, pulling it to the floor. The hum of the wires died. “He’s in my dreams now. I haven’t slept for days. You’ve got to call him off.”

  “It’s just in your mind,” Card cried. “There’s nothing I can do. Don’t break the wires. Go away or…or…”

  The pale man began to—swell. His flesh seemed to be billowing out from the muscle and bone.

  Dust sifted before Michael’s eyes, and he put a hand to his face. His skin was softening, turning to dust. Already his nose was half gone. “Stop it, Card,” he whispered. “Stop playing games with me. Don’t you have any feelings? What’s inside of you? What are you?”

  Card said nothing. So Michael rushed forward, lifted the board and brought it down on the pale man’s head.

  Card’s flesh began to tear from the pressure within. Eyes peered out through the widening fissures. Then the skin split open, spilling a nightmare cloud of faces. Michael sank to his knees. Mr. Linfield’s face emerged from the cloud, confused and pathetic. Completely harmless, even after death. Card had been right.

  Michael turned to leave, then stopped. He could not see the door. Or the walls. The man was gone and so was his room. All that remained was an infinity of mad faces and tangled copper wire.

  OUR ANNE, PAXTON CATAFALQUE, AND THE INFANTE SARKAZEIN

  I must have a word with Our Anne.

  She’s not quite right: bony body, bonier face, and what teeth she has left resemble a sick
ly rabbit’s stools. The poor girl’s health is twig-fragile, and her mind—That snapped years ago. Yet we love her, yes? We love our miserable darling, Our Anne of Green Molars, Ms. Anne Thropic, Ms. Shapen, Ms. Creant.

  Oh why must she tug around that loaded-up, rickety shopping cart? To think: she used to be so fashionable, so accommodating…used to chainsmoke black clove cigarettes, used to make all the tabloids. Such talent! Painter, sculptress, chanteuse extraordinaire! But then she met him.

  They say she found him reading his bleak blank verse to chic neo-Goths in a warehouse. She gazed into his predatory eyes and with a wee sigh, fell into the flame-lick’d cauldron of her own sweet candyfactory. How she adored the poet’s sharp, fierce face, his needle-teeth and piebald flesh and incessant, monkey-shrill blabber. Truly he was monster-gorgeous, delectably repugnant—a ranting, chanting demogorgon of desire. And his name was Paxton Catafalque.

  Our Anne took him out for espresso and was soon driven mad by all things little and big: the touch of his lean little fingers (she didn’t mind the occasional scratches from his curved black nails), the little ear nips and neck nibbles, and of course, the big tingly barbarism slung between his lanky legs.

  The gossip columns made much of their nonstop goings-on. Our Anne and Mr. Catafalque traipsed about in tiger-striped sunglasses, from club to club, island to island, for a glorious season—during which, five Movies of the Week were released based on their saucy intrigues and misadventures and general joie de vivre. Surely theirs was a union destined to make history, to create mad wonders—and after months and months of glowy earthmother bulbousness, Our Anne plopped out the maddest wonder conceivable: the Infante Sarkazein.

  They say he was born with the cuticles already pushed back. That squealing bundle of fuzz cried out for goat’s milk laced with cigarette butts; he draped his own shapely ass with perfumed pages of fin de siécle melodrama; he paraded about in frilled pirate shirts and silky pantaloons and a gilded monocle. At three months of age, he received a grant to publish a deliriously campy arts journal. Within a year, his first novel became a riotous bestseller and his paintings were displayed in galleries so trendy, no one was allowed admittance.

  The boy grew fast, and soon, supermodels and millionaires and glamorous criminals were vying for his affections. Media vultures circled his summer cottage in smoke-churning chug-a-bug helicopters. And sad to say, no one even bothered to turn an eye toward Our Anne or Mr. Catafalque. Their careers were now the stuff of yawns.

  Paxton without the paparazzi is merely a shallow beast; and Our Anne needs too many flash bulbs to brighten her day. They grew dull and dowdy in the shadow of their magnificent urchin; and likewise, the assorted glitterati and ne’er-do-wells clustered about the Infante gradually lost their zest, their style, and even some of their hair. Wrinkles crinkled ’round their drab eyes; their hands curled into spotty, shaky talons. They dwindled and kept on dwindling—none died, but who knew they were alive? One by one, they could no longer keep up with the Infante’s breakneck schedule; as each fell away, a fresh new celebrity was drawn into the fold. Thusly did each sweet rose surrender its bloom.

  Our Anne learned to accept her curiously reduced state; she loved her dapper boy and could not bear to be parted from him. But Paxton—! He decided to set the lad straight…such a sad mistake.

  What’s worse, Mr. Catafalque initiated the confrontation before the cameras on a public TV telethon (the Infante Sarkazein, for all his faults, did support the arts whenever possible). I happened to be watching and I must say, it was a rare moment indeed. Paxton cried out against his son, calling him a leech, a praying mantis, a crazy-ass vampire. The poet’s shrill monkey-voice grew louder, faster, higher—a spray of spittle sizzled from his thin wry lips. I could not tear my eyes from the screen! The Infante simply smiled and gently put a hand to his father’s cheek. And he said, so sweetly, “I love you, Daddy!”

  Paxton Catafalque shut his mouth.

  The boy said it again—“I love you, Daddy!”—and the poet began to fall in upon himself—as though someone had stuck a giant syringe in his bottom and drawn out a gallon of blood. Once more the words rang out—“I love you, Daddy!”—and a look of surprise popped into Paxton’s eyes—then bliss, then excruciating rapture—

  Sarkazein, no longer an Infante, is now more beautiful, more powerful than ever. And still Our Anne orbits her glorious son. Oh, she is a bony, horrid thing. It’s not quite right—and to make matters worse, she insists on towing around that shopping cart and its reeking cargo.

  I must have a word with her. Even if she wanted to keep the cart, surely no one would fault her for dumping that vile load: a loose, leathery sack of wretchedness that can only twitch its long black nails and whisper, faint but still monkey-shrill, “That’s my boy.”

  SOFT BONES

  THURSDAY

  Last night in bed I thought really hard and tried to get my bones to turn into metal so I could walk. I imagined all the shitty calcium being replaced atom by atom with cast-iron, or bronze, or stainless steel.

  Gopher thinks he’s such a hotshit writer. Well, I can write too. Someday I’ll write a novel and make lots of money and he’ll be real old and have to depend on me, and he’ll want to go out and I’ll say fuck you, Gopher. Sit in your wheelchair and rot.

  I’ll be out of my chair by that time. They’ll come up with some kind of artificial bone made out of metal. When I’m a big bestselling author, I’ll be writing mysteries and spy stuff and not those shitty romances Gopher writes. And mine will be real books, not cheap-ass paperbacks.

  There’s this dizzy woman with fake eyelashes on the back of all Gopher’s books. My first book will be a big shocking thing about how Veronica Blakely is really my stupid dad, a potbellied guy with hairy ears and buckteeth. Real romantic.

  Gopher and his new girlfriend Mona have been going out for a couple months now. Mona’s way too good for him. She’s going to be spending the weekend with us while her apartment’s being painted. She’s real pale and about five years older than me. She wears lots of black and all kinds of necklaces with crystals and weird stones on them.

  Now why would a hot love monkey like Mona go out with a saggy old pusbag like Gopher? Maybe it’s because of that big sexy lump in his pants. Yeah. That fat, juicy wallet.

  Not much of a day. Not much of a life. Tonight I’m going to concentrate on my bones again. Cast-iron leg bones, warm bronze finger bones, and an indestructible stainless steel spine. Chrome ribs, copper hips and a platinum skull.

  FRIDAY

  Mona showed up after lunch carrying an overnight bag. Gopher had to go to a meeting with his publisher—it was soooooo gross watching him kiss Mona goodbye with his big floppy lips.

  After Gopher left, Mona helped me onto the couch so I could get comfortable.

  “Gordon told me some more about your bone thing,” she said, all serious and pouty. “I really hope they find a cure, Jacob.”

  “It’s all Gopher’s fault,” I said. “His genes are screwed up. His whole side of the family has all kinds of bone disorders.”

  Mona wrinkled up her nose. “Eeuw. Like what?”

  “Like, my aunt Sandra has bone spurs. My grandma’s fingernails are real thick and soft. And there’s something wrong with Gopher’s jaws. That’s why he can’t wear braces.”

  She bopped me lightly on the nose with the tip of a finger. “You shouldn’t call him Gopher. Gordon’s very sensitive about his overbite.”

  We watched TV for a while. Next we played chess and I won. Mona got out her bag, pulled out a metal box and opened it up.

  I looked inside. “What’s all that junk?”

  “It’s not junk,” she said. “My mentor gave this to me. Brother Starwind. The greatest genius in the cosmos.”

  My first thought was that Gopher’s little sex puppy was into New Age. But then I realized her toys were way
too weird.

  “These are the Candles of Knowledge,” she said, holding up a handful of thick stubs with dead beetles embedded in the wax. Then she gave me three milky crystals. “These are Moon Eyes. They’re really, really important. I think they can help you. You have a strong sense of concentration.” She handed me a diary-sized book bound in oily-looking green cloth. The title was inked in big old-fashioned curlicues across the cover: Banefulle & Wyck’d Unctions Of The Insekt Moste Effluvious. “And this is the book that says what to do. Sort of.”

  “Sort of…?”

  Mona shrugged. “It wasn’t meant to be a manual, but it’s got all the information.”

  Suddenly Gopher’s car pulled into the driveway. Mona packed up her weirdbox. “Hang onto the Moon Eyes. We’ll talk later.”

  * * * *

  Later, in my room, I looked over the Moon Eyes. Each had a cloudy oval in the center. Like, well, an eye.

  I held one of the Moon Eyes up to the lamp on my nightstand. There were bugs inside the crystal—four tiny, hairy worms.

  I laid back on my pillows and rested the crystals on my forehead. Just to see if the Moon Eyes worked.

  Nothing.

  The crystals kept falling off my forehead, so I arranged them in a triangle on my chest. I concentrated on metal bones again but all I could picture was a giant cockroach, sucking the neck of a cut-off head like a baby with a bottle.

  I shook the sight of it out of my head and sat up in bed. I looked down and the crystals were still stuck to my chest. When I pulled at them, they came off with a little sucking noise. They even left red marks on my skin.

  It’s midnight now, and I’m still not sleepy. I hope I can get some rest tonight.

  SATURDAY