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

by Mark McLaughlin

I glanced down and even though I wasn’t afraid of heights, I had a brief attack of vertigo. I had no idea what I was going to do once I reached the window. Would I be able to get inside? If not, would I be able to get back down the tree? What would I do if I found myself stuck on the roof? Suddenly my mission seemed incredibly foolish. I was risking my neck just to satisfy my curiosity.

  “Who’s up there?”

  The voice came from the base of the tree. I looked down through the branches and saw Richard standing there. He was holding hands with someone, but there were leaves in the way and I couldn’t see who it was.

  “It’s me, Brent,” I said.

  “You’re going to break your neck.” This was a girl’s voice.

  “Yeah. What are you doing up there?” Richard was now talking in a loud stage whisper.

  “It’s a secret,” I said. I leaned out to see who Richard was with (a girl with a partially shaved head…very retro-punk) and as I did, my foot slipped and I slid a bit down the tree. My foot caught the next board down, but I still cried out in surprise.

  “Oh my God, I think he’s going to fall!” the girl cried.

  “You wait here,” Richard shouted, “I’m going to get Chad.” So saying, he ran off to get help, even though I was in no danger whatsoever. I called out for him to come back, but he didn’t hear me.

  “Are you trying to rip off Nose?” The girl was stage-whispering like Richard. “Can I help?”

  I began to climb back down the tree—I didn’t want Chad to see me breaking into his father’s house. But on the way down, my pants leg caught on something. I looked down, and could dimly make out what was snagging me—it looked like a bent nail.

  “He’s up there,” I heard Richard say.

  “Brent! Are you okay?” Fortunately, Chad sounded more concerned than angry.

  “Yes, but I’m stuck. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  Chad said, “Thanks, you two. I’ll take care of this,” and I heard footsteps walking away.

  “Are we alone?” I said.

  “Yes,” Chad replied. “Why were you up in my treehouse?”

  “I didn’t get that far,” I said. I realized then that I could have used the treehouse as a perfectly good excuse for climbing the tree…but I had no real desire to lie to Chad. “I was trying to reach the roof. I wanted to look in your Dad’s attic.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Now Chad sounded frantic. Actually frantic. The tone of his voice answered my curiosity.

  “Your mother’s in there, isn’t she, Chad?”

  I heard Chad sigh. Then I heard a rustling in the leaves. The rustling grew closer, closer—and Chad appeared before my eyes. Floating. Floating up through the wide, flapping leaves of the catalpa tree.

  “Chad! You’re flying!” Now I was the one stage-whispering. He reached over and unsnagged my pants. Then he grabbed me around the chest and pulled me away from the tree. We floated slowly back down to the ground.

  “How did you do that?” I looked at Chad’s face in the moonlight. He was handsome. Boyish. A little too handsome and boyish. There was something a little…artificial? no, but perhaps surreal…about him.

  “If you want to see the attic, I’ll take you there,” he said. “But we’ll use the stairs.”

  I waited for him to take my hand, but he didn’t. He simply began walking. And so I followed him into the Saturnalia Coffee House.

  Nose watched us as we walked past the poetry reading. I could feel him watching us as we climbed the stairs to the second floor. Inside Nose’s kitchen, Chad opened the bread box and removed a key from between the slices of a moldy loaf of bread.

  “Chad? What’s going on up there?” Nose was calling from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Go back to the poetry reading, Dad,” Chad called back. Chad used the key to open a door next to Nose’s refrigerator. A smell of dead flies and ointment hit my nose as I looked into the attic stairwell.

  Chad flipped on a light switch. The stairs were covered with a thick, shining layer of dried-up dead flies and moths.

  Up the stairs we went, insect bodies crunching beneath our feet. The first thing I saw when we reached the top was the couch. It was huge and purple and turned away from the stairs. I looked around and realized that the far corners of the attic were filled with appliances and gadgets. Toasters. Microwave ovens. Food processors. Word processors. A dehumidifier. An old air conditioner. VCRs. Stereos. All of these things were, to some degree, disassembled. At the far end of the attic, I saw a work table loaded with bits and pieces of machines.

  Chad took my hand and led me to the front of the couch. “I’d like you to meet my mother,” he said.

  I looked down at the couch and stared in silence for about ten seconds. And then I screamed.

  Chad’s mother glowed with a pale blue light. She had an enormous, too-smooth bald head, dominated by the hugest eyes in the world. They were light green, like Chad’s. Her mouth was a tiny, red-rimmed slit. She had a small bonelike jut of a nose. Her fingers were probably about seven inches long. Her breasts looked like swirled white rosebuds. Her belly was enormous and her hips were utterly gargantuan. White, slime-streaked slug-tails flapped and twisted where legs should have been. Inset into the folds of her neck and into her armpits and tail-pits were…machines. Strange little machines that flashed and whispered and purred. They looked cobbled-together, like pathetic science-fair engines.

  That red slit of a mouth opened and a dry whisper wheezed out. “Chad. The friend makes a bad noise. Chad. Make the bad noise stop. Chad.”

  Chad squeezed my hand hard. So hard that I felt as though I would pass out from the pain. “You’re upsetting Mom, Brent,” he said. “Cut it out.”

  Suddenly footsteps thundered on the attic stairs. “Chad,” whispered the white couch-thing. “The Love is coming. Chad. The Love is angry. Chad. Make no bad happen. Chad.”

  Nose came running up to the couch. “What have you done, you idiot, you stupid moron idiot?”

  The couch-thing began to float a few inches off of the couch in Nose’s direction. “Love. No anger. Love. Make no bad happen. Love.” Her dry whisper of a voice was incredibly sad.

  She turned and looked at me. I looked back into those huge, moist eyes and felt sorry for screaming. I smiled at her because I could see that she liked me. Her eyes told me everything. These were kind, soft eyes. Loving eyes. She wanted to be my friend. My mother. Perhaps my lover. She wanted to be my everything. I could feel my soul begin to swirl down into the hungry vortex of her eyes. The sensation was indescribably delicious.

  “You whore!” Nose’s scream startled me, breaking the spell. The white slug-tails were crawling over my lower body. Chad and Nose were pulling the now squealing couch-thing away from me.

  “Bad. Me want yummy boy. Bad Chad. Bad Love. Me want. Me want. Bad.” The voice of the creature had risen to a shrill squeal. It seized Nose’s collar and popped most of his shirt buttons, revealing a hairy chest covered with open sores. The sores appeared to be coated with some sort of brownish grease.

  “He’s mine, Mom,” Chad said with an angry and incredibly odd rumble to his voice. “I just wanted you to look at him. Get your twisties off him. You’ve already got Love.”

  “You crummy whore!” Nose slapped the couch-thing across the face. “How many men do you want?”

  “Many. Many yummy boys. Bad Love. Many many yummy boys.” The couch-thing grabbed Nose by the throat. Nose responded by slapping at one of the many machines scattered on her body.

  “Stop it!” Chad screamed. “You’re going to hurt her!”

  “She’s hurting me!” Nose cried. “She started it!” He pounded and pounded at the whirring, flashing engine. Then he reached down and punched at some of the other machines until they shot forth smoke and sparks.

 
“Bad. Bad. Bad Love. Malfunction.” The couch-thing’s eyes did the impossible: they bulged even larger.

  Sometimes, when I’m having an especially bad time, I’ll find myself thinking about the humorous aspects of my situation. It’s a sort of kinky reaction to stress, I think. For example: if I’m at a funeral, I’ll ponder whether or not the corpse has stiff nipples. At that moment, I thought that the couch-thing’s cries seemed to resemble a badly written avant garde poem. As the creature continued to scream, I mentally reformed the words:

  “Bad.

  Bad Chad.

  Bad Love.

  Malfunction.

  Bad.

  Need repairs.

  Malfunction.

  Need.

  Need.

  Bad.

  Bad Love.

  Malfunction.

  Malfunction.

  Malfunc—”

  To this day, I think of the couch-thing’s final words as the last poem read within the walls of the Saturnalia Coffee House. It could say no more: pale bile spewed from its lips, choking it. The creature was in a sorry state. Flames billowed from its machines and milky ichor poured from the folds and crevices of its pale bulk. The couch-thing pulled Nose to its breast just as its little engines began to explode, one by one.

  I heard sirens outside of the house. No doubt someone downstairs had called the police when I’d started screaming.

  Chad threw open the nearest window. Tears streaked down his cheeks as he wrapped his arms around me. We floated out of the window and up into the night sky. We drifted for hours and hours. I didn’t try to console Chad. I simply couldn’t find the right words. Eventually I fell asleep.

  * * * *

  That was ten years ago.

  I once asked Chad what his Mom was (of course, I phrased my question with a bit more tact than that) and he told me that she was a Saturnian who’d crashlanded on our world, and that Nose had found her and nursed her back to health. When I told him there’s no life on Saturn, he said, “Oh? Have you looked?”

  Chad and I now live in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. We’re living off of the insurance money Chad collected after Nose died and the Saturnalia burned down.

  The locals don’t know about Chad. He started changing a few years back, so I keep him in the attic. I bring him appliances so he can build himself little life-support machines. He seems to know instinctually how to put them together. I let him suck my blood every now and then, and I have to rub a special ointment on the wounds. Chad makes the ointment out of a brownish secretion from a gland on his back of his neck. We joke about that every now and then. He’ll hand me a cup of the goo and say, “Just like Mom used to make.”

  Since he’s part Earthling, Chad doesn’t look a whole lot like his Mom. His cock is far too big for conventional sex now, but that’s okay, because he has grown a few other appendages—and some orifices, too—for my amusement.

  What can I say? I adore Chad, and I’ll stay with him forever, no matter how he changes.

  He is my best friend. My lover. My terror and my delight. You cannot imagine the pleasure he gives me. He is my god. My cosmos. And I understand his poetry now.

  Only too well.

  THE REVELATIONS OF McDETH

  I. Who am I?

  I am not like other men.

  I look, sound, smell, feel and probably taste like other men. But there is something different about me.

  My name is McDeth: M-C-D-E-T-H. I am the last remaining descendant of a very old and powerful family. In fact, Shakespeare named his character Macbeth after one of my ancestors. Shakespeare changed the name a little and switched the ethnic prefix from an Irish M-C to a Scottish M-A-C. Still, he pissed off my family. They didn’t mind that he named a character after a McDeth, but they did mind that he spelled the family name wrong. So they killed Shakespeare.

  You didn’t know that, did you? Shakespeare was murdered. By my ancestors. My studies of old family diaries reveal that Shakespeare was one tough son-of-a-bitch. Small but scrappy. It took five whole hours to kill him. But my ancestors applied themselves to the task and eventually Shakespeare joined the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the Land of Eternal Beddy-Bye.

  Yes, I am the last McDeth. But that’s not what makes me so different. Under certain conditions, when I put my mind to it, I can absorb knowledge straight out of the Universe.

  Don’t ask me how I do it. I just can. I just do. I just did a few minutes ago. And I will a few minutes from now.

  I suppose the reason or reasons I can may be because:

  a.) I am the Chosen One of a religion that hasn’t started yet;

  b.) Both of my grandmothers were witches;

  c.) I have an extra male chromosome; and/or

  d.) Self-confidence.

  Why I am sharing my knowledge with you? Because I have something to say. When I wait in line at the grocery store, I look at the tabloids on the racks there, and the headlines all scream and rave about four things: glamorous celebrities, weight-loss plans, the internet, and baffling ancient mysteries. Apparently those are the concerns du jour. So I’ll stick to those topics. They’re all equally esoteric. They seem to go so well together, like kittens and yarn, junkies and hypodermic needles.

  The usual disclaimers: celebrity names have been changed to protect blah-blah-blah, and I will not be held responsible in any way, shape, time-zone or dimension if people misuse or misinterpret my revelations and as a result, somebody loses a finger, unleashes a killer mummy, dies screaming, blah-blah-blah. You get the picture.

  Okay?

  Then let us begin.

  II. The Origins of the Loch Ness Monster

  A lot of idiots think the Loch Ness Monster is some kind of alien. But the thing is, the Monster is a water-dweller. Plenty of aliens visit the Earth, but none of them are aquatic. I mean, Duh! Aquatic life-forms and space travel don’t mix. That would be like a carp trying to build an airplane. Besides, the construction of space vehicles requires welding, and sea-things are completely ignorant when it comes to advanced thermal technology.

  The Loch Ness Monster is a dinosaur sorcerer—I call them dinosorcerers, though nobody else does. He put a longevity spell on himself back during dinosaur primetime, and it’s never worn off. Sometimes he uses an invisibility spell when news cameras start nosing around.

  I’ve talked with him in dreams. He’s a nice guy, though he talks really slooowww. Takes him forever to answer a question. But patience has its rewards. I have learned much in my dream-conversations with him.

  Little known fact about the Loch Ness Monster: one eye is blue and the other is black. Also, people think all dinosaurs had small, walnut-sized brains, but the Monster has a very large brain—as big as a watermelon. He is incredibly intelligent, a genius of global proportions—but he is also slimy and hideous, so of course the human race would never be able to accept him. Which is truly a pity. People could learn so much from him. Oh sure, he may eat the occasional sheep or tourist, but hey, it’s his loch. Finders keepers.

  III. How Heather St. Lorraine Lost 45 Pounds

  Heather St. Lorraine. Her friends called her H.S.L.

  Her enemies called her “that fat-assed rich bitch who thinks she owns the world.”

  Well, it’s rude to call anyone a bitch, but she was rich, she did have an ample rear end, and she really did think she owned the world. Probably because she was so incredibly wealthy.

  Her daddy was the third richest man in the world, and her first husband was the ninth richest. And she owned plenty of her own businesses, investments, stocks, bonds, all kinds of green. Her personal fortune placed her at No. 5 among extremely rich women.

  But despite all her money, all the astounding resources at her fingertips…she just couldn’t lose weight.

  Oh, occasionall
y she’d drop five pounds, maybe six, but the next week she’d pick up seven or eight. Diets, exercise and personal trainers couldn’t even scratch the surface. She was allergic to anesthetics, so liposuction was out of the question. Maddening.

  One day, while vacationing in Monaco, she met a slender, elegant, elderly man named Dr. Sakarna in the hotel lounge. He was quite charming in a grandfatherly sort of way, and they chatted about everything and everything else for several hours.

  Heather asked what he was a doctor of, and when he purred “Endocrinology” and mentioned that weight-loss research was his greatest interest these days, her eyes went quite wide and a smile curved its way across her pudgy face.

  Within two days, Heather began receiving regular injections from Dr. Sakarna. This new compound, he told her, was truly miraculous and totally natural, made from a hormone extracted from the female reproductive organs of a rare Brazilian tree-frog. The compound, he added, would speed up her metabolism in no time.

  Heather was so taken with the new doctor, she hadn’t even bothered to arrange a background check. That information would have revealed that he was not allowed to practice medicine in the United States. And if he ever returned to the U.S.A., he would be arrested on the spot.

  The compound did indeed speed up her metabolism.

  And her pulse-rate.

  And her mind.

  And the aging process—an unforeseen side effect.

  Heather St. Lorraine shrivelled into a gaunt, frantic, shivering old woman, screaming and screaming and screaming for the duration of the transformation.

  Eventually she stopped aging and shriveling and shivering and screaming. Her husband divorced her within the week. Oddly enough, she didn’t press charges against Dr. Sakarna. She really wanted to, but she also knew that she liked talking to him about everything and everything else.

  Two months later, they were married.

  They tell people they’ve been a couple for fifty years. They do look charming together.