For the premiere season of Showtime Network’s Masters of Horror he adapted his own short story “Pick Me Up” for director Larry Cohen, and for the second season he scripted “We All Scream for Ice Cream” (based on a John Farris story) for director Tom Holland.
Schow also wrote forty-one instalments of his popular “Raving & Drooling” column for Fangoria magazine, later collected in the book Wild Hairs. His many other books include his fourth novel, Bullets of Rain, and seventh story collection, Havoc Swims Jaded.
He is currently on the verge of his next book, script, or chaotic house renovation.
“ ‘Obsequy’ was originally written to demonstrate the difference between a ‘half-hour’s worth of story’ versus an hour for the benefit of several TV executives,” reveals the author.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking: That would be like trying to train a dog to eat with a fork. And you would be right. The good part is the story came to life on its own and didn’t need TV for anything. One indirect result was that I was asked to rewrite the 2004 French film Les Revenants (released in the US as They Came Back) for an American production company.
“As American re-takes of foreign horror movies are mandated to provide lots of explanations for everything going on, I had to invent these. The reaction I got on my somewhat anti-linear take was . . . horrifying.
“Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass ‘rules’ than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed ‘requirement’ of a twist ending, going all the way back to H. H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such ‘rules’.
“Another landmine is use of the zombie archetype, which has become polluted with extra-stupid assumptions derived from an endless mudslide of movies featuring resurrected corpses who want to eat your brain. That’s fine, but it’s not what I wanted to explore here.”
DOUG WALCOTT’S NEED for a change of perspective seemed simple: Haul ass out of Triple Pines, pronto. Start the next chapter of my life. Before somebody else makes the decision for you, in spades.
He grimly considered the shovel in his grasp, clotted with mulchy grave dirt. Spades, right. It was the moment Doug knew he could not go on digging up dead people, and it was only his first day on the job. Once he had been a teacher, with a teacher’s penchant for seeing structure and symbols in everything. Fuck all that, he thought. Time to get out. Time to bail, now.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, almost mumbling, his conviction still tentative.
Jacky Tynan had stepped down from his scoop-loader and ambled over, doffing his helmet and giving his brow a mop. Jacky was a simple, basically honest guy; a spear carrier in the lives of others with more personal color. Content with burgers and beer, satellite TV and dreams of a someday-girlfriend, Jacky was happy in Triple Pines.
“Yo, it’s Douglas, right?” Jacky said. Everybody had been introduced shortly after sunrise. “What up?” He peeled his work gloves and rubbed his hands compulsively until tiny black sweatballs of grime dropped away like scattered grains of pepper.
“I’ve got to go,” Doug repeated. “I think I just quit. I’ve got to tell Coggins I’m done. I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Graves and stuff getting to ya, huh?” said Jacky. “You should give it another day, at least. It ain’t so bad.”
Doug did not meet Jacky’s gaze. His evaluation of the younger man harshened, more in reaction against the locals, the natives, the people who fit into a white trash haven such as Triple Pines. They would hear the word “cemetery” and conclude “huge downer”. They would wax prosaic about this job being perverse, therefore unhealthy. To them, digging up long-deceased residents would be that sick stuff. They all acted and reacted strictly according to the playbook of cliché. Their retinue of perception was so predictable that it was almost comically dull. Jacky’s tone suggested that he was one of those people with an almost canine empathy to discord; he could smell when something had gone south.
Doug fought to frame some sort of answer. It was not the funereal atmosphere. The stone monuments, the graves, the loam were all exceptionally peaceful. Doug felt no connection to the dearly departed here . . . with one exception, and one was sufficient.
“It’s not the work,” Doug said. “It’s me. I’m overdue to leave this place. The town, not the cemetery. And the money doesn’t matter to me any more.”
Jacky made a face as though he had whiffed a fart. “You don’t want the money, man? Hell, this shit is easier than workin’ the paper mill or doin’ stamper time at the plant, dude.” The Triple Pines aluminum plant had vanished into Chapter Eleven a decade ago, yet locals still talked about it as if it were still a functioning concern.
The people in Triple Pines never saw what was right in front of them. Or they refused to acknowledge anything strange. That was the reason Doug had to eject. He had to jump before he became one of them.
One of them . . .
A week ago, Doug had not been nearly so philosophical. Less than a week from now, and he would question his own sanity.
Craignotti, the job foreman, had seen Jacky and Doug not working – that is to say, not excavating – and already he was humping his trucker bulk over the hilltop to yell at them. Doug felt the urge to just pitch his tools and helmet and run, but his rational side admitted that there were protocols to be followed and channels to be taken. He would finish out his single day, then do some drinking with his workmates, then try to decide whether he could handle one more day. He was supposed to be a responsible adult, and responsible adults adhered to protocol and channels as a way of reinforcing the gentle myth of civilisation.
Whoa, dude, piss on all that, Jacky might say. Just run. But Jacky rarely wrestled with such complexities. Doug turned to meet Craignotti with the fatalism of a man who has to process a large pile of tax paperwork.
A week ago, things had been different. Less than a week from now, these exhumations would collide with every one of them, in ways they could not possibly predict.
Frank Craignotti was one of those guys who loved their beer, Doug had observed. The man had a relationship with his pilsner glass, and rituals to limn his interaction with it. Since Doug had started haunting Callahan’s, he had seen Craignotti in there every night – same stool at the end of the bar, same three pitchers of tap beer, which he emptied down his neck in about an hour and a half. Word was that Craignotti had been a long-haul big-rig driver for a major nationwide chain of discount stores, until the company pushed him to the sidelines on account of his disability. He had stepped down from the cab of his sixteen-wheeler on a winding mountain road outside of Triple Pines (for reasons never explained; probably to relieve himself among Nature’s bounty) and had been sideswiped by a car that never saw him standing there in the rain. Presently he walked with a metal cane because after his surgery one leg had come up shorter than the other. There were vague noises of lawsuits and settlements. That had all happened before Doug wound up inside Callahan’s as a regular, and so it maintained the tenuous validity of small-town gossip. It was as good a story as any.
Callahan’s presented a nondescript face to the main street of Triple Pines, its stature noted solely by a blue neon sign that said BAR filling up most of a window whose sill probably had not been dusted since 1972. There was a roadhouse fifteen miles to the north, technically “out of town”, but its weak diversions were not worth the effort. Callahan’s flavor was mostly clover-colored Irish horse apples designed to appeal to all the usual expectations. Sutter, the current owner and the barman on most weeknights, had bought the place when the original founders had wised up and gotten the hell out of Triple Pines. Sutter was easy to make up a story about. To Doug he looked like a career criminal on the run who had found his perfect hide in Triple Pines. The scar bisecting his lower lip had probably come from a knife fight. His skin was like mushrooms in the fridge the day before you decide to throw them out. His eyes were set back in his
skull, socketed deep in bruise-colored shadow.
Nobody in Triple Pines really knew anything bona fide about anybody else, Doug reflected.
Doug’s first time into the bar as a drinker was his first willful act after quitting his teaching job at the junior high school which Triple Pines shared with three other communities. All pupils were bussed in from rural route pickups. A year previously, he had effortlessly scored an emergency credential and touched down as a replacement instructor for History and Geography, though he took no interest in politics unless they were safely in the past. It was a rote gig that mostly required him to ramrod disinterested kids through memorising data that they forgot as soon as they puked it up on the next test. He had witnessed firsthand how the area, the towns, and the school system worked to crush initiative, abort insight, and nip talent. The model for the Triple Pines secondary educational system seemed to come from some early 1940s playbook, with no imperative to change anything. The kids here were all white and mostly poor to poverty level, disinterested and leavened to dullness. Helmets for the football team always superceded funds for updated texts. It was the usual, spirit-deflating story. Doug spent the term trying to kick against this corpse, hoping to provoke life signs. Past the semester break, he was just hanging on for the wage. Then, right as summer vacation loomed, Sheila Morgan had deposited herself in the teacher’s lounge for a conference.
Doug had looked up from his newspaper. The local rag was called the Pine Grove Messenger (after the adjacent community). It came out three times weekly and was exactly four pages long. Today was Victoria Day in Canada. This week’s Vocabulary Building Block was “ameliorate.”
“Sheila,” he said, acknowledging her, not really wanting to. She was one of the many hold-backs in his classes. Hell, many of Triple Pines’ junior high schoolers already drove their own cars to battle against the citadel of learning.
“Don’t call me that,” Sheila said. “My name’s Brittany.”
Doug regarded her over the top of the paper. They were alone in the room. “Really.”
“Totally,” she said. “I can have my name legally changed. I looked it up. I’m gonna do it, too. I don’t care what anybody says.”
Pause, for bitter fulfillment: One of his charges had actually looked something up.
Further pause, for dismay: Sheila had presented herself to him wearing a shiny vinyl mini as tight as a surgeon’s glove, big-heeled boots that laced to the knee, and a leopard top with some kind of boa-like fringe framing her breasts. There was a scatter of pimples between her collarbones. She had ratty black hair and too much eye kohl. Big lipstick that had tinted her teeth pink. She resembled a hillbilly’s concept of a New York streetwalker, and she was all of 14 years old.
Mara Corday, Doug thought. She looks like a goth-slut version of Mara Corday. I am a dead man.
Chorus girl and pinup turned B-movie femme fatale, Mara Corday had decorated some drive-in low-budgeters of the late 1950s. Tarantula. The Giant Claw. The Black Scorpion. She had been a Playboy Playmate and familiar of Clint Eastwood. Sultry and sex-kittenish, she had signed her first studio contract while still a teenager. She, too, had changed her name.
Sheila wanted to be looked at, and Doug avoided looking. At least her presentation was a relief from the third-hand, Sears & Roebuck interpretation of banger and skatepunk styles that prevailed among most of Triple Pines’ other adolescents. In that tilted moment, Doug realised what he disliked about the dunnage of rap and hip-hop: all those super-badasses looked like they were dressed in gigantic baby clothes. Sheila’s ass was broader than the last time he had not-looked. Her thighs were chubbing. The trade-off was bigger tits. Doug’s heartbeat began to accelerate. Why am I looking?
“Sheila—”
“Brittany.” She threw him a pout, then softened it, to butter him up. “Lissen, I wanted to talk to you about that test, the one I missed? I wanna take it over. Like, not to cheat it or anything, but just to kinda . . . take it over, y’know? Pretend like that’s the first time I took it?”
“None of the other students get that luxury, and you know that.”
She fretted, shifting around in her seat, her skirt making squeaky noises against the school-issue plastic chair. “I know, I know, like, right? That’s like, totally not usual, I know, so that’s why I thought I’d ask you about it first?”
Sheila spent most of her schooling fighting to maintain a low C-average. She had won a few skirmishes, but the war was already a loss.
“I mean, like, you could totally do a new test, and I could like study for it, right?”
“You should have studied for the original test in the first place.”
She wrung her hands. “I know, I know that, but . . . well let’s just say it’s a lot of bullshit, parents and home and alla that crap, right? I couldn’t like do it then but I could now. My Mom finds out I blew off the test, she’ll beat the shit outta me.”
“Shouldn’t you be talking to a counselor?”
“Yeah, right? No thanks. I thought I’d like go right to the source, right? I mean, you like me and stuff, right?” She glanced toward the door, revving up for some kind of Big Moment that Doug already dreaded. “I mean, I’m flexible; I thought that, y’know, just this one time. I’d do anything. Really. To fix it. Anything.”
She uncrossed her legs, from left on right to right on left, taking enough time to make sure Doug could see she had neglected to factor undergarments into her abbreviated ensemble. The move was so studied that Doug knew exactly which movie she had gotten it from.
There are isolated moments in time that expand to gift you with a glimpse of the future, and in that moment Doug saw his tenure at Triple Pines take a big centrifugal swirl down the cosmic toilet. The end of life as he knew it was embodied in the bit of anatomy that Sheila referred to as her “cunny”.
“You can touch it if you want. I won’t mind.” She sounded as though she was talking about a bizarre pet on a leash.
Doug had hastily excused himself and raced to the bathroom, his four-page newspaper folded up to conceal the fact that he was strolling the hallowed halls of the school, semi-erect. He rinsed his face in a basin and regarded himself in a scabrous mirror. Time to get out. Time to bail. Now.
He flunked Sheila, and jettisoned himself during summer break, never quite making it to the part where he actually left Triple Pines. Later he heard Sheila’s mom had gone ballistic and put her daughter in the emergency ward at the company clinic for the paper mill, where her father had worked since he was her age. Local residual scuttlebutt had it that Sheila had gotten out of the hospital and mated with the first guy she could find who owned a car. They blew town like fugitives and were arrested several days later. Ultimately, she used her pregnancy to force the guy to sell his car to pay for her train fare to some relative’s house in the Dakotas, end of story.
Which, naturally, was mostly hearsay anyway. Bar talk. Doug had become a regular at Callahan’s sometime in early July of that year, and by mid-August he looked at himself in another mirror and thought, you bagged your job and now you have a drinking problem, buddy. You need to get out of this place.
That was when Craignotti had eyeballed him. Slow consideration at reptile brain-speed. He bombed his glass at a gulp and rose; he was a man who always squared his shoulders when he stood up, to advise the talent of the room just how broad his chest was. He stumped over to Doug without his walking stick, to prove he didn’t really need it. He signaled Sutter, the cadaverous bartender, to deliver his next pitcher of brew to the stool next to Doug’s.
After some preliminary byplay and chitchat, Craignotti beered himself to within spitting distance of having a point. “So, you was a teacher at the junior high?”
“Ex-teacher. Nothing bad. I just decided I had to relocate.”
“Ain’t what I heard.” Every time Craignotti drank, his swallows were half-glass capacity. One glassful, two swallows, rinse and repeat. “I heard you porked one of your students. That little slut Shei
la Morgan.”
“Not true.”
Craignotti poured Doug a glass of beer to balance out the Black Jack he was consuming, one slow finger at a time. “Naah, it ain’t what you think. I ain’t like that. Those little fucking whores are outta control anyway. They’re fucking in goddamned grade school, if they’re not all crackheads by then.”
“The benefits of our educational system.” Doug toasted the air. If you drank enough, you could see lost dreams and hopes, swirling there before your nose, demanding sacrifice and tribute.
“Anyhow, point is that you’re not working, am I right?”
“That is a true fact.” Doug tasted the beer. It chased smooth.
“You know Coggins, the undertaker here?”
“Yeah.” Doug had to summon the image. Bald guy, ran the Triple Pines funeral home and maintained the Hollymount Cemetery on the outskirts of town. Walked around with his hands in front of him like a preying mantis.
“Well, I know something a lotta people around here don’t know yet. Have you heard of the Marlboro Reservoir?” It was the local project that would not die. It had last been mentioned in the Pine Grove Messenger over a year previously.
“I didn’t think that plan ever cleared channels.”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t for you or me to know. But they’re gonna build it. And there’s gonna be a lotta work. Maybe bring this shithole town back to life.”
“But I’m leaving this shithole town,” said Doug. “Soon. So you’re telling me this because—?”
“Because you look like a guy can keep his trap shut. Here’s the deal: this guy Coggins comes over and asks me to be a foreman. For what, I say. And he says – now get this – in order to build the reservoir, for some reason I don’t know about, they’re gonna have to move the cemetery to the other side of Pine Grove – six fucking miles. So he needs guys to dig up all the folks buried in the cemetery, and catalogue ’em, and bury ’em again on the other side of the valley. Starts next Monday. The pay is pretty damned good for the work, and almost nobody needs to know about it. I ain’t about to hire these fucking deadbeats around here, these dicks with the muscle cars, ‘cept for Jacky Tynan, ‘cos he’s a good worker and don’t ask questions. So I thought, I gotta find me a few more guys that are, like, responsible, and since you’re leaving anyhow . . .”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18 Page 34
