by Tim Curran
Kitty swallowed. “I don’t know…Am I?”
Regis looked her straight in the eye. “You familiar with the theory of spontaneous combustion?” He saw that she was. “I was in on one of these investigations years back and that one was strange, but this is a little stranger. See, in a good many spontaneous combustion cases, the body will burn itself to cinders, yet sometimes the bed it lays on or the chair it sits on will remain un-singed. Go figure.”
“Are you saying these people just burst into flame?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all,” Regis explained. “It’s the investigating cops that are saying it. Those twenty stiffs went up and didn’t even melt the vinyl cushions on their seats. A few witnesses said they saw it…just those random twenty people all of a sudden billowing with smoke. By the time they realized what was happening, they were engulfed in flames.”
Kitty just nodded. “I see.” Oh, this was getting better all the time. “Tell me, did anyone…any of those witnesses…happen to mention what Ronny and the dummy were doing as this happened?”
“As a matter of fact, that was mentioned.”
“And?”
Regis shrugged. “Damnedest thing, really. These people are going up in flames, left and right…and Ronny’s dummy is cackling like a madman. Ronny finally dragged the both of them off stage. Does any of that mean anything to you?”
But Kitty just shook her head. “I guess not.”
“Some people might call that kind of thing witchcraft,” Regis said and said no more on the subject. “Crazy shit, all right.” He opened a folder and sorted through some papers in there. “Well, to the case in question now. What I learned is a composite of public record and inside information, mostly gleaned from cops that were involved in the tawdry history of the McBanes. Now, for starters…did you know that the mother—Dorian McBane—was killed? And I’m not just talking killed here as in getting run down by a bus, I’m talking killed.”
Kitty told him she knew about that. “A wild dog or something.”
“Yeah. That’s what the coroner put down in his report. But that was old Biggs, he’d write anything down to save his ass some paperwork. Anyway, yes, that was the official version, like it or not. But I talked to one of the investigating detectives and, well, Mama McBane, she was chewed-up pretty bad. But if it was a dog, well then it was one smart pooch because it locked-up on its way out.”
Kitty ignored the implications of that. “And she died from these bites?”
He shrugged. “More or less. Couple the bites with trauma, shock, blood loss…yeah, they did her in, all right. That was about ten years ago. Just a few years after Ronny McBane got himself into the ventriloquism racket.” Regis sat down, drumming his big fingers on the desktop. “The family had a history of trouble long before the mother’s death. Apparently, when Ronny was five or six years old, the father committed suicide. Ronny found him swinging in the basement. After that, it seems that Dorian—Mama McBane—kind of lost touch. Became some sort of hardcore Bible-thumper. I talked to one of her old neighbors, a woman listed on the police report as being the first person on the scene after Ronny found his old man. She told me some pretty wild stories. Lot of it was what you’d expect, you know, Dorian turning into a right pain in the ass knocking on doors and handing out leaflets. The usual. But some of the rest of it? Christ on the cross, you gotta hear this.”
Kitty figured she’d have to, too…not that she really wanted to.
“Get this,” Regis said, enjoying the dirt of other people’s lives maybe a bit too much. “Dorian told this neighbor lady that the father—his name was Robert—was some kind of witch or warlock, whichever, that he descended from what she called ‘witch-folk’ back in the old country…Scotland, I’m guessing. But this neighbor lady said that was crazy, because Robert McBane was a pretty good guy. Maybe his ancestors were a little loopy, but he was okay. She never saw him stirring any cauldrons or flying on any brooms. He was a good neighbor and a good father to the kids. He came from money, but he was no good with it himself. One failed business venture after another. The neighbor lady figured this is why he hanged himself. She also added that if there was a witch in the McBane family, it was the mother…Dorian was pretty screwy long before the old man’s suicide. And if his failed business dealings weren’t enough incentive, the shrew he was married to completed the picture.
“Of course, that wasn’t Dorian’s version of events. She said the old man was born ‘of tainted blood’ and Jesus had compelled him to take his own life. That was what she told the neighbor lady a few months after he was gone. Regardless, there were certain facts in the neighborhood that everyone knew. And one of them was that Dorian McBane was a mean, spiteful old bitch. Everyone felt sorry for the kids without the old man around. It was common knowledge that Dorian did not like children and that she took the belt to her own any chance she got. And after the old man made for the pearly gates? Well, Dorian not only found religion, but she began abusing those kids. There’s some pretty wild tales there, too, bits about her locking them up in the attic, not letting them go outside, burning them…you know the bit. It never changes with these animals.”
No, Kitty supposed it never did.
She sat there, thinking it over. She’d gotten real good at swallowing madness in raw chunks, letting it bubble away in her stomach while her brain tried to digest it without throwing it back up. It left a vile taste in her mouth, but thus far she’d been keeping it all down. Thus far.
“What happened to the children?” she asked.
“A series of coincidental mishaps that don’t sound real coincidental when you put them in the same basket.” Regis sorted through notes on his desk. “Okay. Ronny had a sister named Molly. A little sprite of two when she died. Suffocated in her little bed…or was strangled. Things get a little murky there. The coroner put it down as suffocation…but the cops I talked to, well, they said the kid’s window was wide open and they had suspicions that somebody had reached in and throttled her.”
Kitty tried to swallow, but couldn’t. Jesus, what kind of monster had Dorian McBane been? “What about the other child?”
Regis nodded. “He was six. Just turned six as a matter of fact. Dorian, the neighbor lady told me, was real hard on this one because she said he had the devil in him. A real terror. The neighbor lady confessed that he was just all boy, but Dorian had told her that she feared he was contaminated by the McBane ancestry. So, about a year after Robert McBane hangs himself, the little girl suffocates and about a year after that, the boy is found in his bed with a light cord wrapped around his throat. The cops figured it could have been accidental…kids do crazy shit.”
Kitty sat there, thinking, feeling it coming over her because she was seeing things now, feeling dark truths invade her and seeing connections where there could not or should not have been any. In a weak, airless voice, she said: “What was the boy’s name?”
“The boy?” Regis smiled the cold, dead grin of a beached fish. “The boy’s name was Freddy, but everyone called him ‘Piggy’.”
10
Kitty swallowed two Valiums just before eleven that night and washed them down with two double vodkas. Her head wasn’t right and she wondered if it ever would be again. She had come to Chicago to fill a hole in her life, to possibly get some closure on Gloria if that was even possible, but now that hole was bigger than ever before, so big she was afraid now that she would fall into it and never get out. Ronny M. and Piggy. Ronny M. and Piggy. The words kept running through her mind until she thought she would scream. You honestly don’t believe for a moment that Ronny’s dummy is his dead brother, now do you? All that witchcraft business is insane and you know it. No, she didn’t really believe any of that, but what she did believe in was Ronny’s madness which was so complete he might decide to name his dummy after his dead brother and commit crimes in its name.
But what about what Bascomb said?
Could some evil intelligence make a vent dummy that was kept in a co
ffin filled with black, wormy grave earth sit up and smile, start talking to you in the tormented voices of your mother and father—
No, no, no. That was Bascomb supposedly quoting Eddie Bose who wasn’t in his right mind anyway. She’d already more or less dismissed Bascomb as a nutjob. None of those things he said could be true. The dummy killing Bose, then killing his dog, then murdering his wife. Fantasy. It was only when Kitty linked it with what Regis had been hinting at and the possible spontaneous combustion at the Bamboo Club that she began to get the cold sweats.
You said there was a common thread to all this. You said it right from the first. Are you prepared to follow that thread even if it means looking at something that might tear your mind out like moist roots from soil? Are you willing to do that and accept the fact that even if you walk away from all this you can never be the same person again? Bascomb told you to walk away. Maybe it’s time to do that.
But no.
That would mean walking away from Gloria and her love for her sister could not allow that. If there was a thread, she would follow it. And when she reached the end, she would snip it.
Once again, as the alcohol and booze began to make her limbs slow and her mind slower, she laid all the evidence out and tried to make sense of it. This is what she came up with: Bascomb was crazy, Danny Paul Regis was spouting hearsay and local gossip, and Ronny McBane was very possibly a dangerous lunatic that had killed Gloria.
Kitty thought these things, arranging them carefully, sorting them out in her mind, smoothing out the rough edges. And it was as she did so that a fear of her own began to creep in that she was utterly wrong. That she was over-rationalizing things and that, in this case, could prove to be very dangerous.
All her life she had not shrunk from anything.
She faced all problems and challenges head on. Even though she knew that this was the point in a horror movie where you hoped the heroine would have sense enough to leave well enough alone, she wasn’t about to do that. She didn’t believe in witchcraft or ghosts, but there was definitely a common thread here as she had thought all along. Rational thinking aside, when you laid it all out end to end starting with what happened in Ronny McBane’s childhood and the unnatural dummy with the most disturbing of names and ending with the fire at the Bamboo Lounge, then the evidence was more than a little damning. Possibly circumstantial, but it was there. And the only way to prove or disprove it was to follow the thread to its source.
This is what Kitty thought as she drifted off on that night of revelations.
11
She came awake just after three with a sense of invasion. Her eyes blinked and then blinked again and she had the most unnerving sensation that they had been open for some time, perhaps peering around the room and watching the play of shadows along the walls as her mind continued to drift along in dream. Her lips felt dry. She licked them with a tongue that felt thick and ungainly. She could see the digital clock. The numbers flickered from 3:02 to 3:03.
She felt paralyzed.
It was the vodka and the Valiums. They always said not to mix them and she rarely did except on those nights when her mind would not shut down and her body remained tense from the day.
The sense of invasion did not lessen, it deepened.
There was a foul odor in the room that she associated with dankness, with subterranean crypts, with corpse-orchids rotting in mortuaries. It was a high, sweet smell and it did not belong in that room in the dead of night.
She tried to move, to reach over to the lamp and turn the light on, but her arms were leaden. Just the effort of lifting even one of them two or three inches left her feeling exhausted.
Listen.
Terror began to expand in her throat and she could not swallow it back down. It filled her chest with icy needles, traced its way down her spine like cold fingertips. The shadows seemed to shift and rustle about her. She heard them make slithering sounds. Something was in the room with her and she could hear it breathing with a low, rasping sound. It knew she was aware of its presence. She was certain of it. It was there, hiding in the darkness like some malignant little goblin waiting to jump out at her and press its mold-smelling mouth to her lips. It was there and it wanted her to find it.
And then she did.
With a tremor of fear that seemed to drain the blood from her vitals, she saw it. It was not in the room at all. It was outside the window. The curtains were parted and she could see Piggy floating out there like a wraith, staring in at her with a malevolent and hungry gaze. His dummy legs and dummy arms were spread out like a high diver dropping from the sky, like some engorged human fly buzzing at the window pane. He moved up and down as he floated as if he was hooked to wires being gently manipulated by a puppeteer.
The window began to slide open.
Oh no, oh no, you’re dreaming. You’re just dreaming.
He came drifting through the window, light as a column of gas, and she heard the subtle click, clack as his little, shiny black shoes touched the floor and bore his weight. He stood at the end of the bed, his puppet face pale as funeral lilies, his hinged jaw opening and closing. His eyes were huge, bloated white like boiled eggs. And his voice, when it came was scratching and dry: “I’ve come as I said I’d come, Kitty. I’ve come to show you tricks. I’ve come to perform for you. I’ve come to eat your pretty pussy.”
Kitty thought she screamed.
Her mouth opened and a dark silence blew out of her but it only echoed in the depths of her skull. Piggy was rising up like a patch of mist. He was drifting above her, arms spread out. She could smell a vaporous stench of dank rot coming off of him. It was chill like the breath of a freezer. She could see his dummy hands, impossibly white, the nails blackened and splintered like they had been clawing at the lids of caskets. In her head there was a thick liquid humming and she could hear his squeaking voice just beneath it telling her in grisly detail what he was going to do to her and what he had done to her sister.
She tried to scream again but all that came out was that same airless sibilance blowing past her lips.
Her limbs would not move.
Her body was heavy, rubbery, immobile.
He came down upon her and she could feel the grave-cold of his hollow weight. Her nightgown was stripped away from her bare thighs but not by anything as crude as searching fingers but by something like a hot wind. There was nothing beneath the nightgown. She had slept naked like that since a teenager, enjoying the freedom from confining underthings.
Piggy buried his face between her thighs and his wooden mouth was like thawing meat, his teeth needlelike as they were dragged over her vulva like the claws of a cat. He began to suck and chew on her, piercing into her soft tissues and laying her open. His tongue was a sliver of ice as it penetrated her, lapping and licking deep inside her as the mouth sucked and slurped, filling itself with her blood that steamed in his glacial aura. The agony was unbelievable, exploding in her head in white bolts but still she could not move and she knew it was more than Valiums and vodka by that point.
She was pinned down and made weak by the force of Piggy’s mind.
Lapping like a kitten with a bowl of milk, he rose up again and came down upon her, his puppet face smeared with her vaginal blood, his breath like exhumed coffins. He made obscene, almost animal-like grunting and groaning sounds as he entered her with a member that felt refrigerated, swollen and probing. It was long and burning cold like an icicle had been shoved up her.
“You have such a sweet, sweet pretty pussy,” he whispered into her face with that vile, mossy breath as he came and then came again, filling her with a cold sap, what seemed gallons of it that filled her and overflowed her channel, flowing over her thighs and seeping into the mattress in a bubbling, snotty goo. “Next time I’ll show you another trick and I’ll fill another hole…”
Then he was gone.
The room was empty of all but the commingled stench of him and the webby gush of liquid he had inundated her privates with. She
could feel it drying, thickening, becoming a cool-warm jelly that encased her, glued her legs together, and pasted her arms to her sides. She could barely breathe. It was like pine sap that held her, capturing her in amber like an insect. She felt herself sinking in it, drowning in sticky, phlegmy depths. It would cover her completely, gumming her eyes shut and filling her nostrils and flowing down her throat and filling her lungs, gallons upon gallons of slimy, ectoplasmic semen. Her mind raged, her mouth tried to scream, her body tried to thrash…but in the end she was pulled down and down, buried alive in darkness.
It was later when her eyes opened.
She could hear a constant, racked sobbing and it took her a moment or two to realize that it was her own. She could still feel the dummy’s ejaculation all over her, only now it had dried into a viscous, gelatinous emulsion that felt like cooling candle wax, rivers of animal tallow sealing her up and holding her forever in place. Her crotch burned, her thighs felt like they’d been scraped by forks. She could taste vomit in her mouth and bile in her throat, all the while smelling Piggy’s discharge which stank of gangrenous drainage, untreated wounds and running pus.
You were raped, you were raped, you were fucking raped! Do you hear me? You were raped!
But no, no, no, she would not and could not accept that. Her head thrashed from side to side on her sodden pillow and this was the first time her body seemed capable of any voluntary motion. The tears ran and the whimpering sounds bubbled from her mouth.
Do you hear what you’re saying, you silly bitch? Raped? Raped? RAPED? By a fucking dummy? A puppet? A ventriloquist’s doll? Are you totally out of your pea-brained fucking mind?
And she was. Oh yes, most certainly. The desecration she had suffered had kicked her mind right out of her skull. Even now it was circling her brain like a dying planet, trying to find its way back in, trying to cement itself to her psyche and her id and bring the terra firma of reality with it.
