Shock Totem 5: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  We started back home, and the numbness crept back in. I could still taste the failure on my tongue. I quietly slipped my mask back on. The mask we all put on to hide the pain, to show the world that we are all right. What else can you do?

  Time is voracious, chewing up our days and swallowing them whole. We moved on, had another child placed with us, but it wasn’t the same. We loved her, of course, but I felt like I couldn’t allow myself to get close again. Not like that. She went back to her family after six months, better able to cope with life. I still see her sometimes at the grocery store, grown up and with a baby of her own. It feels great to know that our meager efforts helped someone along the way. Some battles you do win, but they don’t erase the losses.

  Tonight, I’ll sleep in that same room where I found Ruth covered in blood. I won’t have her dreams or wake up to use her methods of coping with pain, but I’ve never completely lost that sense of numbness. I’ve not seen her since, but I think of her often, and I miss her. I lost something that day, something I fear is gone forever. You don’t allow someone into your life, even for a little while, without leaving a piece of your heart with them when you part.

  Canadian author André Berthiaume once wrote: “We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.” It’s like that when we see someone we love without their masks. We bear a little bit of that loss and lose some of our own skin, some of our own heart.

  If we didn’t, could we really say that we loved them?

  Nick Contor resides in southwest New Mexico with his wife and two children. He is a drummer, lyricist and vocalist for a Silver City heavy-metal band. Although he has written from an early age, his lone publication outside of Shock Totem can be found in 52 Stitches, Vol 2.

  LOVE IS

  “Do you love me?”

  “Of course I do.” His lips found her mouth; his fingers fumbled to undo her bra.

  “I don’t normally do this.”

  “It’s okay. We deserve it.”

  Afraid he’d ruin her bra, he let her undo the clasp. The weight of her breasts fell into his palms. She lay back and he followed her lead. Piece by piece, clothing was shed until they lay naked together. He paused.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “Can we hurry up and get this over with?”

  “Of course. But are you sure? Are you really, really sure?”

  “I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

  “Okay.” She shifted beneath him as she reached for the ice pick. “Now hold still.”

  Twice he saw the look in her eyes, a moment of purity and glory so blinding it filled the room...before the ice pick stole it away and everything went dark.

  The pain was surprisingly slight. A viscous fluid dribbled down his cheeks. He felt her tongue lap at the fluid as if it were tears.

  “Thank you,” he said, seeing things much clearer now. “Now where were we?”

  THE WOUND

  He inserted the needle into his flesh. As he worked, the wound talked.

  “What did I ever do except love you?”

  He pulled the thread through. The knot snagged, dimpling his skin. He inserted the needle again. The corner of the wound squeezed shut.

  “Please—can’t we just go back to the way it used to be?”

  He repeated the process. Puncture...pull...puncture...pull. The wound’s voice constricted.

  “I can’t believe you would do this to me. After all we’ve been through.”

  He hurried to finish, feeling the muscles in his fingers weaken, and with it his resolve.

  “See, you don’t really want to do this, do you? It’s all in your head. You’re just having a bad day.”

  He took a deep breath and sank the needle in. Three more stitches. The wound was nearly closed.

  “You’re crazy, you know that? I should have never opened myself up to you. You’re a selfish son of a bi—”

  He pulled the last stitch and tied off the thread. The wound howled beneath his skin, but the howling eventually abated. Soon, only the weeping of red tears marked the spot where his heart used to be.

  IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME

  “It’s not you, it’s me,” he said, as she sat on the couch beside him writing I love you two hundred and seventy-three times on the skin of her forearm with a sewing needle, one for each day they dated.

  “Believe me, I never meant to hurt you,” he added, as she tossed aside the needle and, using her slender fingers and sharp nails, gouged out her left eye, then her right. “I just want you to be with someone who can give you the love you deserve.”

  He got up to get a glass of water. While he stood at the kitchen sink, quenching his thirst, she slashed at her blouse with a razor blade. She then cut out her heart and set it on the coffee table. Her cat came over and began licking the now lifeless organ.

  He turned. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

  She nodded.

  After giving her a farewell hug, he left. He took the stairs to the street. When his feet hit the sidewalk, he took a deep breath, relieved, thinking, That went well.

  MONSTER

  I created her. I had my hands inside of her. I fiddled with her heart. Now, she says she loves me. What am I to do?

  She’s a monster. She lives, she breathes, she feels. She is everything that is human, and yet she is not God’s divine creature. She is mine.

  I told her I was simply her doctor, and she was my patient. Anything more would be wrong. In the end, I told her I didn’t know how to love. But I loved her anyway.

  I kept our affair a secret. We laughed and dined while she healed. At night, I took her into my arms, careful not to reopen her wounds. It was almost real.

  But my conscience overcame my will, and one day I confessed. I didn’t truly love her. So I set her free.

  She looked at me with utter sadness. She cried monster tears.

  It’s been months now since I last saw her, but I see her every day. Her blood still stains my hands. Her tears track slowly across my heart.

  She’s a monster.

  She’s a monster.

  No matter how many times I say it, she is still less a monster than I.

  BONFIRE

  She stood before the flames, the heat washing over her in waves of guilt and retribution. The clothes he had bought her, the books, even the leaflets and ticket stubs she had saved from their handful of dates, were now heaped and burning, consumed by the fire she had built in the back yard of their dream home.

  “Mommy?”

  She turned to see their future child, a frightened look in the young boy’s big brown eyes; a beautiful child; the child she had always wanted with the kind of man she had always dreamed of having. But it wasn’t to be; the man of her dreams was just an illusion.

  “Come here, sweetheart.”

  She clutched the young boy to her breast before tossing him onto the flames. The child shrieked and squirmed, the flames eating him up as quickly as the photographs of her imagined honeymoon.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” she said. “Momma’s coming.”

  Then she too stepped into the inferno. Flames licked at her skin, peeling away layer after layer of reality, until all that was left was the essence of her desire and the black char of memory.

  Kurt Newton’s fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Dark Discoveries, Shroud, and Shock Totem. His novel, Powerlines, was recently published by Gallows Press. He lives in Connecticut.

  JIMMY BUNNY

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  This was a bad place. He could feel it. It was not a good idea to enter this house.

  Of course he had been entering other people’s houses for quite some time now. Even when he was a kid, when he and his mother would vacation all summer in rural Maine, the scheme was that she would set up her paints and easel in front of some (hopefully deserted) farmhouse and knock off a suitably rustic scene in ersatz Andrew
Wyeth style while he, aged ten to twelve or fifteen, would climb in through a back window to see what he could find. As he grew into manhood, this turned into a profession. Now he was proprietor of something called Jim’s Junktiques which had actually supported the two of them for years.

  He made a game of it too. Not that he believed in psychic residues or anything like that. But he did like to figure out what he could about the people who had lived in these places, to reconstruct their lives, or even make up little stories about them, for all he couldn’t really finish those stories, or write them down. It was more like detection, an assembly of facts. He knew he wasn’t a creative type. But he did consider himself observant. An eye for small details was essential in his line of work.

  The lock clicked. Annabelle pushed the door open.

  She was supposed to be the sensitive one. She should have felt something. Instead she wrinkled her nose and said, “They really had to fumigate, but most of it’s dissipated by now.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Not that he had high expectations for this job. This was, after all, just a run-down row-house in a run-down part of Philadelphia—Harrison Street, in the Lower Northeast, Frankford district, right across from the high school, with at least three drug houses on the same block (“Location, location, location,” she explained to him), not to mention coincidentally right next door to where Annabelle herself lived. She was the widow of one of his few friends, and in the same line of work as he, though at the level called a “picker.” Her specialty was finding small porcelain objects, jewelry, and vintage clothes, which she sold to dealers. He went in more for books, pictures, cameras, lamps, and some furniture. But she was the one who taught him some of the key tricks of the trade, such as how, when the disruptive, dysfunctional, and otherwise highly dubious “family” next door inexplicably disappeared and the house went up for sheriff’s sale, it was not beyond the pale or even quasi-illegal to slip the cleanup crew twenty bucks in exchange for the key the night before the place was to be cleaned out. Everything was bound for the city dump, so whatever they took, no one would notice. That was how such things were done.

  Only she didn’t want to go into a strange house alone in the middle of the night. So here he was, more out of friendship than opportunism.

  He didn’t have much hope for this one.

  They stepped inside and closed the door behind them, but did not turn on the lights. Not-even-quasi-illegal or no, they didn’t want to attract too much attention, or find themselves explaining to the police.

  The place had indeed been fumigated. The air still had a thick, chemical smell. But there was something more, a wrongness he could almost taste.

  It wasn’t as if the house shouted to him in a sepulchral voice, Get out! Get out! No need for that sort of melodramatics. He knew.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to say anything about it, and she, laughing softly, not quite convincingly, hugged his arm and said, “Oooh! Scary!”

  Were they, after so many years of professional association, actually lovers? No. That part of his life had never worked out very well, and after a while he just put those sorts of concerns aside and let them die. Besides, his mother, who was now in her seventies and bedridden, didn’t approve of Annabelle. (“That slut, that gold-digger, that low-class trash,” she called her, and he’d long since given up trying to argue.) Wedding bells were not in the forecast, or even casual sex. He was what he was. She was what she was. They made a lot of Edgar Allan Poe jokes because of her name, and it was he, on an impulse that surprised even him, who once gave her a black cat named Roderick Usher. But that was as far as it went. They worked well together.

  They shone their penlights around in the darkened living room, still careful to avoid attention. Even with so little light, he could see why the place had needed its chemical armageddon. There were framed prints on the wall, ruined by thousands of roach tracks. This place had been a sty. Annabelle pointed out the impossible-to-remove stains on the floor where dogs or cats had been permitted to piss or crap over and over again. The steps going upstairs had concavities, like what you see in ancient cathedral steps of Europe caused by centuries of wear into the stone, only here it was because the filthy carpeting had been ripped up and the wood underneath sanded in a desperate attempt to make the place clean.

  “Who lived here?” he asked, even as he felt that appalling something that had been left behind.

  “There were always people in and out. Supposedly cousins of the guy who owned the place, but then he disappeared, and none of them seemed to know where or even who he was, and, yeah, they really trashed the joint before it was just found empty and put up for sale for back taxes. I can tell you they fought a lot. I could hear them shouting, through the walls. I almost called the police on them lots of times.”

  “Not too promising.”

  “You never know.”

  There was little to be had on the first floor. The kitchen had not been cleaned out very well. There were still bulging cans on the shelves and unmentionables inside a darkened refrigerator. Anna found a few ironwood dishes that might be worth taking, so she made up a cardboard box for them, padding it with crumpled newspapers, which she hoped did not contain assorted insects which had somehow survived the fumigation. (“I found one inside my microwave once,” she said. “It was perturbed when I turned it on, but the damned thing wouldn’t die.”)

  They went through drawers. The silverware looked like junk.

  Then they heard a noise upstairs.

  “There’s no one here,” Annabelle whispered. “There can’t be anyone here.”

  “Then why are we whispering?”

  He realized, then, that the sound was that of a metal file drawer clicking and sliding open. That could happen by itself, sure. Maybe the vibrations of their footsteps had set it off.

  At the base of the stairs, Annabelle called out, “Hello?” Both of them could still make a dash for the front door if they had to.

  No response.

  So they made their way slowly upstairs. He slipped his hand into his jacket pocket for the comfort of the old-fashioned cosh he carried for such occasions—like a leather sock, filled with lead weights at one end. You could, in theory, lay a man out cold with that, not that he ever had, or that it would, in further, extrapolated theory, do him much good against the wrongness he felt even more strongly when they found the office.

  Here, again, the walls were streaked with an impossible degree of roach tracks, almost as if at some time in the past the walls had been a solid, throbbing mass of wriggling insects. Maybe Beelzebub had once manifested himself here as Lord of the Cockroaches. There was little hope of finding anything worth taking in such a place, beyond a couple collectible fountain pens. He found himself increasingly fixated on the story implied here, trying to fit the pieces together even if they didn’t make sense. His penlight revealed framed certificates on the walls, badly stained but legible: several diplomas, a Ph.D. in Philosophy and another in Metaphysics, certificates from learned societies, even one for distinguished services from the Catholic Church. At one time, the owner had been a person of considerable intellectual accomplishments. A bookshelf stood behind the desk, off-balance, leaning slightly forward. For just an instant, he hoped he might find something good, but no, everything was too stained, much of it water-damaged. Einstein, Nietzsche, Aquinas, some Loeb Classical Library books that might have been worth something in better condition, but not like this.

  He opened the shallow, central drawer of the desk. There were indeed a couple good fountain pens, which he scooped into his pocket, and, rather incongruously, a large, heavy hunting knife, still very sharp, but with the tip of the blade chipped off. He picked it up, hefted it, and wondered how it fit into the overall scheme of things.

  “I didn’t even know his name,” Annabelle said. “I rarely saw him. He wasn’t exactly neighborly.”

  “Thomas Clayton, it would seem, from the diplomas.”

  Even if he was the clo
d, the insensitive one of the pair, he couldn’t help but wonder what terrible things, what passions and agonies had brought the very distinguished Thomas Clayton to such ruin.

  “The rumor was that after his wife left him, or died, he took to drink and just let everything go.”

  Jim looked up at the ceiling, which had gaping holes where the plaster had fallen.

  “That so?” He hefted the knife again in his hand. It was surprisingly heavy.

  “You’re not suggesting he slit her throat and buried her in the basement, are you?”

  “Care to dig up the basement?”

  “Not tonight,” she said. “That’s not funny. Would you please put that damned knife down?”

  He put it down, a little surprised at her vehemence. In an abstract way he realized that if even he felt like he’d wandered into a thick cloud of despair that no airing-out could ever remove from this house, how much infinitely worse it must be for Annabelle. Her emotional range went far beyond his own. She had her practical, business side, yes, but inside she really was a sensitive soul, the sort of person who felt “vibrations” and believed in Ouija boards and séances, and who was also, in a way he could never be, imaginative, creative enough to be an amateur painter, minor poet, and part-time medium.

  “Oh my God, look at this!” she cried out suddenly. She’d stepped through a doorway into what must have been a bedroom, though it looked more like something you’d find in the ruins of Dachau, he decided: a great deal of fallen plaster, a single bare, rusty bed-frame in the middle of the floor to which victims could be easily chained and tortured and raped...and he had to ask himself what kind of crap was this, why was he getting carried away so quickly to such conclusions.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God!” said Annabelle, running her hands over the walls. “I can feel them? They’re still here! They’re all still here!”