Shock Totem 7: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  Fucking do it, Danny. Just stop the goddamn car and walk inside. Tell her that you want to know her, tell her that you can’t stop thinking about the things she said, tell her that you want to take her to dinner, to coffee, anything...

  Thoughts bumping against themselves, and my blood throbbing at my temples when I finally worked up the courage to go into the shop. Hoping she could be the thing to help me forget the house, the water, the beasts at the end of that long road.

  “Looks like you aren’t running away after all,” she said, a small stone glinting in the curve of her nose. I hadn’t noticed it before.

  I swallowed and told her the thing I’d been practicing for the past week. “Maybe it isn’t running away. Maybe it’s just taken me all this time to figure out what I was running to.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me with that line, right?” she said and narrowed her eyes, but there was a smile curling at the edges of her lips, and I dipped my head, tried not to grin.

  She taught me the names of flowers, my tongue tripping over the syllables, and at night when we lay in bed together I told her the stories locked in my head, the ones I knew by heart but was afraid to write down.

  “You should do something with these, Danny,” she said and pressed a hand against my chest.

  “Maybe one day.” Only I knew that I would never put them to paper. If I did, the world would come undone by its strings, and I’d be fifteen and on the long road again with Pop standing over me, his body dripping into the dirt.

  “I’m serious. You’re too talented to be stuck writing ad copy for some shitty, small time roofer.”

  “Maybe one day,” I repeated, but then her mouth was on mine, and her lips tasted of honeysuckle and wine, and for a long while, I lost myself in the movements of her body.

  When the nightmares took me, she didn’t speak, didn’t move until I came back to the world.

  She only asked me about them once. “What are they? You talk about them in your sleep.”

  “It’s nothing,” I told her, and she pursed her lips, nodded. She had her secrets, too. A mother she never mentioned. An expired bottle of anti-hallucinogens tucked deep inside her bedside table drawer. A long vertical scar on her right wrist.

  She filled my bedroom with flowers, and underneath the nightmare smells of salt and decay, the Carolina jasmine breathed its perfume into the night air, and slowly, slowly, the nightmares began to recede. The beasts becoming nothing more than shadowy figures, incorporeal wisps compared to Sarah’s sleeping form, her breath warm against my chest. My childhood shrinking against what we called love.

  Six months in, I wrapped a key to my place in an old watch box, lit some candles, opened a bottle of wine. She opened the box slowly, her fingers tracing the key’s jagged outlines, her face expressionless.

  “I’m sorry. It’s too fast. Is it too fast? Just so you can get in if I’m not here, you know? You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.”

  “Would you shut up for a second?” She lifted the key from the box, a momentary flashing of silver, and closed her hand around it.

  “If you suddenly morph into some asshole, I’m cleaning this place out and selling all your shit on eBay,” she said, and I brought her hand to my mouth, pressed my lips to her fingers.

  “Never.”

  She bought a delicate silver chain and wore the key around her neck; the metal nestled in the hollow of her throat.

  “You shouldn’t wear it there. Some weirdo could see it and follow you back here,” I told her.

  “You would protect me.”

  “Great. Have you seen me, Sarah? They’d probably rape me first.”

  “I like wearing it. The heaviness of it. It reminds me of you. Lets me know it’s real.”

  It took another six months to save for a ring—a fleck of diamond in a thin gold band.

  “It’s a beautiful ring. She’s a damn lucky gal,” the saleswoman said and smiled, winking an eye smeared with one too many layers of kohl black eyeliner.

  I told her we were going hiking. “Supposed to be the best weekend for fall color,” I said against her protestations. There was a small mountain to climb, and when we crested the top, our breath coming quick and shallow, I gave her the ring.

  “It doesn’t fit,” she said against her laughter.

  “We can fix it,” I said, and she pulled me deep into the forest, away from the trail. The smell of pine lingered in her hair for days afterward.

  But then winter came and the nights grew long, cold, and she began to vanish inside of herself. It was like watching her disappear, like watching her become a ghost.

  In January she stopped sleeping. She would lie in the dark with me, match her breathing to mine until I fell asleep. But when I would wake in the night, covered in the hard sweat of dreams, she would be gone, the place where her body should be cold.

  I could hear her moving about on the roof above me, whispering to the stars, telling the faceless gods her secrets as she chain smoked, the cigarettes burning down to the tips of her fingers.

  “It’s nothing. I’ll put some ointment on it,” she said, when I saw the burns. But each night she would leave me, find her way onto the roof, her voice floating down to me, words cut from nightmares.

  “They found me once, when I was a girl,” she told me one night in late January. There was snow, a light dusting of white over hard ground. “They came crawling out of the walls, made nests in my hair.”

  “What found you?”

  “Can’t you see them, Danny?” she asked, and her voice reminded me of Pop’s, of the deep gurgling of the beasts, and I had the sudden desire to wrap my hands around her throat, to make her choke on the words she offered up like holy baubles.

  “There’s nothing there,” I said, but she shook her head, turned from me and moaned.

  “They come out of the walls. Mother always said they come out of the walls. They want my skin, Danny. They want my skin.”

  I took her to the doctor, watched her as she took the pills he prescribed. But night after night, I could hear her moving above me.

  “They won’t leave,” she whispered, and I held her tight, her bones like knives threatening to cut through her tissue-paper skin.

  When she split open the old scar, peeled back her flesh to let the things step inside of her, I found her too late, her blood blooming around her like the flowers she loved.

  And I buried her, screamed what I had known was love against the frozen earth. Old Danny Boy and his fucking pipes are calling.

  • • •

  Sarah has been dead for two weeks, and I am on the long road. It’s certain what I will find waiting for me when I reach the end of it, and I listen for the beasts to begin their singing. Seems like I was always headed back here.

  The old itch starts up in my belly, and from under the water, the beasts move, the smell of salt and decay thick in the air. I do not think of Sarah, only of the itch that needs scratching.

  Pop is waiting for me in the house at the end of the long road. And when I get there, I’ll take the glass of water he gives me. I have been walking for a long while, and I am so thirsty.

  Kristi DeMeester lives, loves, and writes in Atlanta where she also serves as the fiction editor at Loose Change magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, Niteblade, and Every Day Fiction among others. Growing up both Southern and Pentecostal, she witnessed travelling preachers cast out demons. These demons still haunt her writing. Please visit her at www.oneperfectword.blogspot.com.

  STARGAZER BREECH AND CHOKING

  A Conversation with Violet LeVoit

  by John Boden

  Violet Glaze, aka Violet LeVoit. Renegade wielder of words as weapons. Not sleek, shiny words like razors or flip-knives, scary intimidating language like a knotted caveman club with dried brains and hair stuck to it. This woman writes shit that boggles the mind.

  The first exposure I had to her work was via John Skipp's Werewolves an
d Shapeshifters anthology and her wonderful story, “Warm, In Your Coat.” Then upon meeting Skipp in person at Necon 2011 and talking new blood, he must have dropped her name no less than six times.

  Skipp released her first collection, the uncompromisingly titled I Am Genghis Cum, on his own Fungasm Books, which is an imprint of Eraserhead Press. With a title like that I was expecting some hardcore bizarro shenanigans. LeVoit delivered. She didn’t lull me in with pretty prose and sneaky emotional foreplay. She kicked in my door, grabbed the book from my hands, and proceeded to shove it down my throat. She is unrelenting. There are no easy outs; her fiction just punches straight through.

  Recently I was fortunate to get to chew the proverbial fat with the lovely Ms. LeVoit, which went a little bit like this.

  • • •

  JB: Would you mind painting a little back-story for me, as to how a nice girl like you ended up slinging such vicious wordage at the masses? Your style is so insanely sharp and daring, I've really not read anything like it before.

  VL: Wow, thanks for thinking I'm a nice girl. Here's some theories how I got this way: I was born stargazer breech and choking on my own umbilical cord, in Baltimore, City of the Inbred Undead, stomping grounds of John Waters, Frank Zappa, Edgar Allan Poe and Madalyn Murray O'Hair. I had a perfectly delightful childhood where no one tried to bury me in the backyard, but through genetic luck o' the draw I got a brain that was, shall we say, more deluxe than most. It's full of delights, like synesthesia and lucid dreams, but I've also struggled with mental illness in lots of delicious flavors since the age of nine. The cherry on top was being in labor for 90 hours during the birth of my son. That'll PTSD you up real good.

  (People ask how women end up as horror writers—as if, shouldn't we be writing romances whilst ironing?—but to me, if you're born with a body that conspires to kill you, either by bloodletting, or childbirth, or being cancerously poisoned from a lifetime of percolating hormones, how are most women not horror writers?)

  The other thing about me is that I'm not actually a writer. All my formal training (until recently) was in fine arts, and I think that's how my brain is still primarily oriented. I'm a painter who types.

  Beyond that, I've got no idea why I can't write Nice Literary Fiction About Dismayed White People. It all comes out vomit and werewolves.

  JB: John Skipp is a big waver of the LeVoit banner. I’ve met the man and he is golden. How did you first meet him? Was the Werewolves story a blind submission and the rest is history?

  VL: Actually, I was lucky enough to be introduced to John through my comrade Mikita Brottman. She's an author and educator specializing in the horrific aspects of American culture, and we share a lot of the same dark sensibilities. I would run into her at film screenings in Baltimore (I'm also a film critic) and we immediately hit it off, because how can you not love a woman who's curated a book about the cultural significance of car crashes? She suggested I send that “Warm, In Your Coat” story you loved on to John. So I agree, the man is golden, and if it wasn't for him I wouldn't have known I'd been writing “bizarro” all this time. John's the guy who generously took my self-published manuscript of I Am Genghis Cum and spun it into the expanded Fungasm Press edition you're so smitten with.

  (While we're on the subject, Mikita's got two new horror books worth checking out: House of Quiet Shadows, published under John Skipp's Ravenous Shadows imprint; and Thirteen Girls, which is one of the bleakest, saddest, most un-put-down-able books about serial killer aftermath I've ever read.)

  JB: It may not be proper etiquette, but I don’t care—you have submitted several stories to Shock Totem, and while they have not been right for us because we don’t really deal in “bizarro,” they have all been so crazy. I’ve loved them. Your ideas are just off the charts. Your style has a certain stream of consciousness sort of vibe. Is that how writing is for you? Do you just turn the valve a bit and let it go?

  VL: You know when you get cotton candy at the fair? They turn on the machine and the perforated drum walls get all fuzzy fiberglass flossy, but it's not until they dip that paper cone that it spools into a thick sticky treat for you. Writing's like that for me. My brain spins invisible ideas but I can't tell they're there until there's something hard for them to catch on. The story comes out quickly as a series of scenes, at least up to the second act. I quickly scribble down the scenes, not as a draft but as beats to hit, and in the process of filling out those scenes the third act becomes visible.

  For example, one day I was thinking about the trendiness of geographic names for girls—Paris, Brooklyn, Dakota. You know what's a beautiful name that'll never catch on? Treblinka. And suddenly I knew who would get named Treblinka, and the first two acts of the story spun out as “When the Zoos Close Down They'll Come for Us,” which is included in the new John Skipp-edited Psychos anthology from Black Dog & Leventhal.

  Sometimes I dream entire stories and all I have to do is scribble the plot down in the morning. “Rough Trade Marks the Spot” in I Am Genghis Cum was born that way. It feels like I'm cheating when I do that.

  I took advice from Roald Dahl, who insisted that when you get an inspiration you must write it down immediately, even if it means squeaking out some words with your finger in the grime on your car. He's absolutely right about that. Good ideas don't wait.

  JB: How important is music to what you do? I find it obvious to references in your stories to the fact that I saw you robbed of the title at Necon karaoke with a wonderful rendition of “Bizarre Love Triangle.” You’ve got a voice! Have you done the music thing before?

  VL: I love, love, LOVE to sing. It's the one talent I vowed I'll only do for love and not money. So the next time you're on some file-sharing site and you find something either from Violet LeVoit or my noise-electronica project Vanishing Twin, feel free to download.

  JB: What is on the glorious horizon?

  VL: Graphic novels. I've partnered with illustrator Greg Houston to do an idea we've been kicking around for some time about Johnny Eck, the Baltimore-born sideshow performer who can be seen in the movie Freaks. He was born with no body below the navel, so he ambulated on his hands like R2-D2. He was a good-looking guy, too. He's sort of my Baltimore dream date. Any man who ends at the fourth rib has got to be good at other things.

  JB: Freaks is an all-time favorite of mine. Well, I just want to say thanks so much for your time!

  VL: You’re the best, John. And one of these days I vow I'll have something for Shock Totem readers to devour.

  THING IN A BAG

  by M. Bennardo

  Thompson shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he stood before the bulletin board in the Nashville Greyhound station. He hated, hated, hated it when things went bad. It was only partly because he was out the money, and only partly because all the work was for nothing. Mostly it was the queasy nervous feeling he got in places like this. It was the waiting, the interminable waiting. He was bored and keyed up at the same time.

  At least none of the photocopies on the board looked familiar. They were all kidnappers and rapists. What a hick town. What a filthy stupid hick town that would let kidnappers and rapists get away, but would stake out an honest little outfit like his.

  Thompson felt bad about leaving the rest of the gang behind, but that bug hadn’t just found its own way into Carl’s apartment. One of them had talked. This was the only way—a quiet getaway before the gang or the cops knew anything about it. By the time somebody else asked where he was, he’d be halfway to wherever he was going. Thompson checked his ticket again. Charlotte. Another hick town probably, but the quickest way out of Nashville.

  How long before the cops showed up? How long before they started asking: Have you seen this guy? Flashing a surveillance picture of him. Have you seen this guy? The guy at the ticket counter would scratch his head. Not sure, he’d say. When did he come through? The cops would shrug. Wednesday probably. Tuesday maybe. The guy at the ticket counter would scratch his head again. Well, I don’
t know, he’d say. Nobody on Wednesday, I don’t think. But there was this one guy on Tuesday.

  Thompson suppressed the urge to kick a trash can. There was nothing he could do now to stop himself from becoming this one guy on Tuesday. Yeah, the ticket guy would say. Yeah now that I’m thinking about it I’m pretty sure he did come through here. It was probably around eight o’clock on Tuesday night. I think he got on the Charlotte bus but let me just check the schedule here.

  Thompson stalked into the main terminal and slumped down on a bench. He already looked suspicious enough, going to Charlotte with no luggage. Better sit down. Better just keep his head down until he could get on the bus. He could think on the bus—think about how to get back to New York. And sleep. Right now he needed to look normal. He needed just to fit in.

  There was a big bag on the seat next to Thompson, the kind that sailors carry. But somebody picked up that bag and shifted it one seat over and moved over next to Thompson. Great. Here came a conversation. Thompson looked straight ahead, didn’t even glance at the other guy. Just looked across at the white tile wall while the gas fumes tickled his nose. He sneezed.

  “Gesundheit,” said the other guy.

  “Thanks,” said Thompson, wiping his nose with his sleeve. He still didn’t look at the other guy. He tried to look like a loser. He tried to look like the kind of guy nobody would want to talk to.

  “You got a cigarette?” asked the other guy.

  Thompson shook his head. “No.” He really didn’t. He could feel the guy hovering over him. Maybe he hadn’t heard. Thompson turned to look at him. He was a middle-aged guy with thinning red hair, a big nose, and watery blue eyes. He looked thin and shaky, like he was a drug addict. Or maybe he used to be one. “No, sorry,” said Thompson again.