Shock Totem 5: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  And he had to ask himself again, what kind of crap this was, but he didn’t, not out loud anyway, as his attention and fascination were drawn to those walls, as his penlight shone over them and he could discern, on the peeling wallpaper, a great deal of writing. At first there were names and phone numbers. A lot of female names. A call-girl service? From this dump? But further down there were more names and childish scrawls, and whole paragraphs that looked like diaries or letters or even poems, and drawings of houses and trees and animals and birds and airplanes, anything a child—imprisoned here?—might dream about.

  “Oh my God,” said Annabelle again, setting his own sluggish imagination off again in flights about some kind of horrific slave-labor orphanage, which was presumably impossible, even in this part of the city. Someone would have noticed. Annabelle would have heard the children crying through the walls. Had she? He had to admit that he, too, should have heard something—and oddly he never did, even when he frequently visited Annabelle next door for professional reasons, to evaluate or make an offer on something she’d found, or to divide up the loot after they’d gone flea-marketing together.

  So why was he thinking these things? Why was he imagining?

  He turned away from the wall, and pointed to the far corner of the room, where he saw the most incongruous object imaginable.

  He went over and picked it up. It was a toy battleship, gray plastic, about three feet long. He knew it was called The Fighting Lady, because he’d had one just like it when he was a kid, just like this one down to the detail that half of the bridge was snapped off where his kid brother Eddie (the one who died) had once smashed it with his fist in a display of spite that had Jim demanding revenge or compensation for most of the rest of Eddie’s short life.

  “Well, hot damn, look at this,” he said, holding it up, but Annabelle wasn’t paying any attention.

  “No, look here,” she said. “Here’s your name.”

  “What?”

  He put the battleship down on the bed and went over to look. There, indeed, was his name, in a childish hand that could very well have been his own: JIMMY, and next to it a crude drawing of a rabbit.

  At that, his heart seemed to skip a beat. At that, it was, for the first time, as if someone had slipped a knife into him and he hadn’t felt it go in, but now he looked down and there it was, sticking in his heart.

  When he was very small, his mother had given him a secret name, about the same time his appalling and terrible father, about whom his mother would never speak, had gone away under circumstances never explained to him. He still didn’t know what had happened, but later came to understand that whatever it was had left his mother damaged and clinging to him (and to Eddie, while he lasted) with such a death-grip that he never really did get out into the world on his own, other than for the “business” which barely kept the two of them from starving. When it had all started, his mother had whispered to him the name, which only the two of them shared: Jimmy Bunny. He was her Jimmy Bunny. She still called him that, in secret, in the dark each night before she (as she still did, as she still insisted) kissed him good night. He had never told anybody about that. Embarrassing for a grown man to admit his mother still kissed him good night. He had never written the name, except in secret letters that were only for his mother’s eyes, and he had certainly never written it on the wall of a slum row-house in the Northeast Armpit district of Philadelphia. No, he’d never been here before. He’d grown up in a vast, Colonial stone pile in the country, a mansion almost, with a wall around it, which began to fall into decay after his father disappeared and the money ran out. After he and his classmates read Great Expectations in school, it came to be known as the Old Havisham place, as if he were the son of the crazed Miss Havisham, whose most intimate and guarded secret of all was that she still called him Jimmy Bunny.

  It wasn’t so much that the house was screaming, “Get out! Get out!” It was whispering, very subtly, “Gotcha!”

  He turned to Annabelle. “Let’s call it a night. I think we’re done here.”

  “Yeah,” she said quickly. “Yes, yes.”

  But still, almost by rote, like a pair of windup toys, they went through their preprogrammed function of taking a few things. In the office, in the filing cabinet drawer which had slid open, was an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder the size of a briefcase, and several tapes. That was good. He didn’t doubt it was still in working order, however much dust and insect residue he might have to clean out of it. Yes, that was what he was here for, with Annabelle, to carry away stuff before the entire contents of the house went to the city dump tomorrow morning. In a different bedroom, Annabelle found some jars and bottles and other small items which she piled hurriedly into a tote-bag.

  The desk in the office was an actual antique, the only decent piece in the whole house. It could be cleaned and refinished. Without a word between them they dumped out the drawers and then lifted the desk, grunting and straining. They paused halfway downstairs on the landing to catch their breath and make inane comments about how they were both getting too old for this sort of thing. Not that what they said was particularly intelligible anyway since the only way they could see what they were doing was by holding their penlights in their teeth. The effect was almost comical, as if the two of them were talking around thick cigars.

  They made it out the front door, which he nudged aside with his knee, repeating the process again at her front door, until they deposited the desk on her enclosed porch.

  After one more trip to retrieve her tote-bag and assorted goodies, including the box of dishes, they locked the vacant house’s door behind them and retreated to hers.

  She seemed, he thought, quite shaken. For a moment she frantically brushed her clothing with her hands, as if to get every trace of that place off herself.

  But then she played the proper hostess and busied herself making tea.

  “Jimmy Bunny,” he said. The words came out of nowhere.

  “What?”

  “I said I forgot the tape recorder. I’ll have to go back for it.”

  “That’s not what you said. You said ‘Jimmy Bunny.’”

  “I’ll explain later,” he said, and before she could react he snatched up the key from where she’d put it down on a counter and was out her door, up the steps next door, and back inside that house.

  Only this time, he locked the door behind him, and threw the bolt. He locked himself in.

  He went upstairs.

  It was precisely because he and Annabelle were not lovers, because their lives had not intersected to such a degree that the contagion of his life crossed over into hers, that he did not draw Annabelle into what eventually happened. That was how she survived. That was why she had no part in the conclusion of the story.

  Of course he knew that the customary turn of events at this point would be that, amid the things they’d dumped out of the desk, or else in the filing cabinet, he’d find undeniable evidence of wrongness, a diary perhaps, and with a growing sense of dread which turned into terror, would learn the awful secret of the house, which no doubt involved degenerate rituals, a cult of zombie cannibals, and the trapped souls of damned victims, children or otherwise, writhing inside the walls; whereupon a thing would force itself up through the basement floor and come and get him.

  It wasn’t quite like that. Some of the formalities got skipped.

  Instead, he entered the office and saw that it wasn’t the same office at all, for all the desk was missing and the contents of the drawers had been dumped out. The certificates on the walls were gone. Instead, equally roach-tracked, there was a large, framed photograph of his mother as a young woman, only the eyes had been scratched out. Next to it, a photograph of himself as a small boy, no more than five or six, and the eyes had been scratched out. Among the papers on the floor were secret letters, some of them in crayon that he’d written to his mother and signed “Jimmy Bunny,” only they’d all been slashed to confetti with something sharp.


  The bookshelf no longer contained Einstein and Aquinas and Loeb Classics, but the “forbidden books” his father had left behind, which his mother had never moved or thrown out or destroyed, but which she had very, very strictly forbidden him ever to touch, and which he had indeed, even as an adult, never touched. Now he ran his penlight over the spines and saw that they were books on magic, grimoires, books in strange languages and scripts, some in university press editions which he realized were worth a great deal of money—but somehow he suspected he was past all such considerations of treasure-hunting now.

  He went into the adjoining bedroom and saw that it wasn’t quite as decrepit as before, that the bed was more than a bare frame now, and there were familiar pictures on the walls (of airplanes and animals and birds and trains). Plastic airplanes dangled from the ceiling. The toy battleship, broken precisely as he remembered it, was still on the bed. This wasn’t the room in the row-house next door to Annabelle’s place anymore. No, this was his room, the bedroom in which he’d slept since he was a child.

  He picked up the battleship and sat down on the bed in dull wonderment.

  That was when he heard a noise. A single footstep.

  He looked up, and what he saw allowed him, for just one brief instant, to cling to the bright hope that he might be merely insane, and that none of this was real.

  But he had to let that go.

  “Hello, Jimmy Bunny,” the other said.

  Bits and scraps of papers, secret, intimate papers fluttered to the floor, out of the hand of the huge figure that stood in the doorway of the office, between him and the stairs.

  The other was so tall he had to stoop, so broad his shoulders hardly seemed able to fit through the door, but the most incredible thing of all—but not insane, not mercifully, delusionally insane, no source of an excuse or escape—was that this person seemed to be wearing the headpiece, but not the mask, of a rabbit costume. The enormous ears brushed against the ceiling. It was just the right touch to make the nightmare complete.

  He set the toy battleship aside, then made to get up—to do what? He didn’t know. He sat down again.

  He saw that his father—for he knew without asking, without doubt, that this was his father, that same whom his mother had so desperately tried to keep out of their lives all these years—was hefting that heavy hunting knife with the terribly sharp blade and the broken point.

  He understood that for all his life he had been like someone running through a maze, only there was no way out, and that in the end, he inevitably returned to the point at which he had started, which was this encounter.

  “Jimmy,” his father said, “I have to go down and settle things with your mother. Then you and I will have to come to terms. I’m sure you understand that.”

  He didn’t even say, “Yes, Dad.” He didn’t say anything. He just sat there on the bed, listening, as the children in the walls explained a great deal to him. Yes, there were children trapped there, all of whom had suffered much pain before they died, none of whom could ever rest. They were the ones who told him that all the horrors that had gone on in the house next door to Annabelle’s, the hideous crimes of Thomas Clayton, didn’t matter, even though he’d been a murderer of children, a latter-day Gilles de Rais. Such things were entirely irrelevant to Jimmy Bunny’s story because all bad places are the same bad place, so that, inevitably, anyone who went into a bad place anywhere in the world would eventually encounter whatever he most feared or even dreadfully desired. You could meet the Devil there for sure, very easily, the Lord of the Flies or maybe of Cockroaches. And certain learned, evil, and powerful men, of whom Thomas Clayton was one and his father another, might move between these places, between times and across thousands of miles and go away for a hundred years and then return as if they’d never been absent, as if nothing had taken place in the meantime, and all the intervening years were an illusion. That was why and how his father had come back to him now, here, in this bad place.

  • • •

  It was only much later that Annabelle re-entered the house, accompanied by two policemen, who broke open the door. They found the tape recorder on the floor of the office upstairs. Someone had plugged it in and turned it on. The electricity in the house worked after all, so they could play the tape back and hear the screaming.

  Darrell Schweitzer's stories have appeared in Cemetery Dance, Night Cry, Twilight Zone, Interzone, The Horror Show, Postscripts, and in numerous anthologies. His novels are The Mask of the Sorcerer, The Shattered Goddess, and The White Isle. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award four times and won it once, for co-editing Weird Tales, something he did for 19 years. He has edited anthologies since: The Secret History of Vampires, Cthulhu’s Reign, and Full Moon City.

  STRANGE GOODS

  & OTHER ODDITIES

  Sweet Tooth Vol. 1: Out of the Wood, by Jeff Lemire; DC Comics, 2010; 128 pgs.

  Ever since the last issue I’ve been making my way around the globe, scouring ancient temples, and poring over secret texts—all as part of my epic search for clues as to how the world will end.

  Okay, that’s a lie.

  But I have been to a comic book store, and it was there I found Sweet Tooth, by Jeff Lemire.

  I’d seen it around...a lot...and I have to admit, I passed it by countless times because the picture of a half-deer, half-boy on the cover just didn’t spark my interest.

  I was so wrong.

  Sweet Tooth takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where a disease known only as “the Sick” has killed off most of the population. Sound familiar? Think again. In this world, ever since “the Sick” spread, every child has been born half-animal (going on six years at the time the story begins). The mystery starts there, as these “hybrids” have no powers, no special abilities or clear purpose. They’re just...there. In fact, most of them seem to be completely dumb. Are they a cure to “the Sick”? The cause? A curious byproduct? No one knows for sure.

  Long story short: Gus, a half-deer boy, is left alone in the woods after his parents finally die from “the Sick.” A mysterious man named Jepperd finds Gus, and convinces him to leave the woods on the promise that he’ll be escorted safely through the dangerous cities to a place called “the Preserve,” a legendary place where hybrid children can exist safely.

  What happens after that is violent, bloody, and heartbreaking. Despite the aesthetic, this is not Disney.

  With a fantastic story, a great spin on the tired post-apocalypse trope, and characters with real depth, Sweet Tooth has quickly become my favorite ongoing comic series. Horror and SF fans, definitely check this one out.

  –Ryan Bridger

  Ex-Patriots, by Peter Clines; Permuted Press, 2011; 310 pgs.

  When I reviewed Ex-Heroes, by Peter Clines, from the fines folks at Permuted Press, I called it one of the best zombie apocalypse novels I’ve ever read. Well, now that I’ve finished the follow-up to that morsel of hipness, Ex-Patriots, I can say that the author certainly didn’t take a step back in this second installment, but rather took a few giant leaps in the right direction.

  The story picks up a few months after the showdown with Peasy, the Seventeens street gang, and the Exes (zombies) that closes out that first book. Life goes on at the Mount as St. George, Stealth, Zzzap, and Cerberus do their best to fortify their movie-studio-turned-post-apocalyptic-bunker, while keeping up morale at the same time. The second obstacle proves to be the more difficult, since certain members of this new society come to the conclusion that these super powered individuals make and enforce all the rules. These people weren’t elected, after all—unless you consider being blessed by nature with the power to fly and spit flames as “nature’s election,” forgive the pun. It made for a very interesting theoretical quandary, one that I was slightly disappointed that the author didn’t expand further upon.

  Anyway, that’s enough of my discontent. A fireworks display the heroes put on in an attempt to keep spirits high on Independence Day ends up attracting the at
tention of what might be the last outpost of military might remaining on the West Coast. A drone is sent out, discovers the Mount, and soon it’s here comes the Army for the survivors. And as anyone who’s read any amount of post-apocalyptic fiction can tell you, those four words are just about the worst thing anyone in that situation might want to hear. However, this time there’s a twist—the soldiers who show up being much, much more than the heroes and survivors might have expected them to be.

  What follows is a plot full of subterfuge and action. Events grow dire, as certain facets of this military presence don’t seem quite up to snuff—even their own failsafes are proven to be less than reliable, and there is an underhanded presence within the ranks—and an epic battle between the heroes, soldiers, and the animated dead ensues.

  I must say, the combat was done spot-on (though again sometimes the intelligence of the heroes should be called into question: for example, St. George carries around on a chain a tooth of the zombie demon he destroyed in the first book; it is pretty much the only thing that can pierce his skin. Why, oh why, would you ever carry something on your person—as decoration—that could potentially be used as a weapon against you?), and the dialogue is ramped up to be so much better than in the first installment (Barry, or Zzzap, is fantastic for his witty banter). There are many surprises, and the unexpected return of an old enemy. The suspense was pulled off admirably, and the Now/Then format that Clines uses works wonderfully to reveal plot elements important to the tale in a timely manner. Also, as for the Army, I must say that the author did something rather unusual within the post-apocalyptic genre: he played fair and didn’t make them evil opportunists or outright idiots. I appreciated that.

  On a whole, this is a really, really good book. It’s written at a brisk pace, and there are actually some more philosophical elements (such as the concept of truth and the effect of going against one’s nature on your physical wellbeing, both in a metaphorical and literal sense) that caused this reviewer to step back, pause, and actually ponder the words on the page.