“He’s finished,” she said, voice flat.
“What? Who’s finished?” Jim asked.
“The ceiling’s red. Twyla would like it.”
“Abby. Look at me.” I tried to keep my voice calm, steady. “What ceiling?”
She did look at us then, and her face lit up with that big, loopy Abby grin. “How was your dinner? Was it good?”
“Abby.” I must have failed at the soothing mom-voice, because Jim interrupted me.
“We didn’t get to eat. The lights went off before we even ordered our food.”
“Me too,” Abby said. “Sandwiches?”
Tuna on toast wasn’t in our plans for the evening, but it was one of Abby’s specialties, and she enjoyed making it for us.
Jim took his first bite and pronounced it, “Delicious!”
Abby glowed.
It was a normal family night, a happy family night. I relaxed and decided to go with the flow. Whatever was going on with my daughter, I couldn’t solve it then anyway.
◙
“Nancy and Kyle will be sad,” Abby said at breakfast.
“I love grapes.” Still on my first cup of coffee, I wasn’t paying attention.
“He was really hungry.”
She had Jim’s attention. “Who? Abby, who was hungry?”
“Twyla would like the ceiling, but I don’t think Nancy will.”
“Abby. Look at me. What are you talking about?” Jim used the serious dad-voice.
“Idunno.”
He couldn’t get another word out of her.
When the school bus arrived, she didn’t even say good-bye.
I’d known Nancy and Kyle all my life. Small towns are like that.
“Four kids. What were we thinking?” Nancy had told me. “We need a kid-free life—at least for a week.” Nancy and Kyle had left for a second honeymoon. Nancy’s mother stayed with the children.
When none of the kids showed up at school, and nobody answered the phone, the school called the police. The dispatcher sent a patrol car over to check on them.
Small towns are like that, too.
◙
Cops see horrible things. Jim seldom shared them with me, but when he needed to talk, I listened. Even on those occasions, I knew he spared me the worst of the details. This time was different.
He sat still—rigid—his head down and his voice emotionless. “They were…ripped apart. All five of them. The children…Nancy and Kyle’s babies…and the blood. So much blood. On the floor. On the walls. It was like…like…something…ate them.”
He was quiet for a moment, then raised his head and looked at me. “There was blood all over the fucking ceiling.”
My senses—the sound of Jim’s voice, the glare of the room’s lights, the lingering smell of dinner—became physical, solid, and pressed against me, heavy, smothering me.
Is this how Abby feels when she has a meltdown?
When I could breathe again, Jim was still beside me, holding my hand. We sat like that, in silence, for I don’t know how long. It felt like forever.
◙
I’ve taken sick leave from work, and I sleep while Abby’s at school. She’s safe there. Ms. Colley doesn’t allow rocking in class. The bus ride to and from school is short, and Abby’s well-buckled in.
But, when she’s at home, I watch.
“He’s hungry,” she keeps saying.
Every time I catch her rocking or swaying or retreating to Abby-land, I stop her.
“He’s hungry.”
“Who?” I ask every time, but I never get more than Idunno.
My nights, I spend in the big chair in the corner of her room. When she wakes up, I make her lie down, and we talk about silly things. Or I read to her. Jim and I don’t discuss it.
◙
Yesterday, Abby got her snow day.
I was tired and cranky, and to make matters worse, it was the day of our eye exams.
“Maybe they’re there.”
“Abby, everything is closed.”
“Maybe just the school is closed. You should call. Maybe they’re there.”
“They called us. They are closed. I have to reschedule our appointments.”
“Mom, can you call now and reschedule?”
“ABBY! They’re closed! I will call tomorrow. JUST DROP IT!”
She hates to be yelled at. She stiffened and went into Pause Mode.
“ABBY!”
“He’s very angry,” she said, softly.
“WHO? WHO IS ANGRY?”
“Idunno.” She shrugged and ran to her room.
I wanted to curl up into a ball and sleep—or cry—but I knew I should apologize to my daughter. I followed her.
Abby was sitting on her bed, rocking.
“ABBY!”
“Huh.”
I took a deep breath and tried to sound cheerful. “I’m sorry I yelled. We have a snow day; let’s make the most of it. We’ll bake cookies. Brownies. Watch movies. Make mac-and-cheese.”
Mac-and-cheese always got her attention.
We spent the day doing all that and anything else I could think of to keep us busy. The whole time, I kept up a stream of happy chatter. No pauses, no rocking, no time to think.
Perky did not come naturally to me. I was exhausted.
◙
Last night, Jim and I took shifts with Abby, two hours to sleep, two hours on watch. I struggled to stay awake during my watches, but I was almost sure I managed it—almost sure there was no rocking.
This morning, there was no real talk in our house, just grunts and monosyllables, the conversation of the sleep deprived—until Abby left for school.
As the bus pulled up, just before she went out the door, she turned to me, grinned that big lopsided grin, and said, “Twyla’s birthday party is today. She loves red. Her mom is picking us up. And five is just enough.”
The door slammed, and she was gone before I could ask, “Enough for what?”
Satyros Phil Brucato on Lucy Taylor's
“Wall of Words”
Lucy Taylor appears to be one of the lost voices in modern horror…which is a damn shame, as she writes with chilling clarity and a gift for messy surprises. I almost nominated the title tale from this collection, but “Wall of Words” won out over that story, thanks to its haunting strangeness. Where “The Flesh Artist” is a grotesque but conventional tale of misogyny and revenge, “Wall of Words” remains indescribable. Though smaller in scope, it reminds me of Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, The Cities”…not because of its subject matter but because of its nightmarish take on ordinary life. The Flesh Artist holds a place of honor in my collection. If you can find a copy of this book, by all means, grab it…and please tell Lucy I said hello! —“Wall of Words” Lucy Taylor, from The Flesh Artist, Silver Salamander Press, 1994.
◙◙◙
Clown Balloons
Satyros Phil Brucato
The floor at my feet is littered with clown-balloon corpses. Bright rubber screams into nightmare shapes. My ears ring. My wrists throb. This is my damnation, to twist and strangle rubber ‘til my brain runs dry.
It isn’t working, though. I’m running out of balloons.
◙
I may have been eight when the clown first appeared, a looming bright Satan against a sea of children. Flies buzzed lazy in the summer heat, but if the clown felt dizzy in his painted prison, it didn’t show. He laughed instead and did magic tricks, his face swollen and flat behind red-slashed masking.
Marcie Meyers, the Birthday Girl, flounced about, all pink and pretty, but it seemed like the clown was intent on me.
My world tilted. I recall that much. Sickness bloomed in my belly, greasy-sweet from too much cake. The birthday-hat elastic bit into my chin and throat. I wanted the bathroom. I wanted to go home. I nearly wet my pants when the clown leapt suddenly from the bushes, scattering children in a screeching herd.
Laughing harder, he beckoned us back…and trusting, we returned to him. T
he Birthday Parents beamed and reassured us as the clown went back to work. The other children giggled and clustered beside him. I held back, though, sniffling. His laughter held tiny screams just for me.
I stood apart. Is that why he had watched me?
I didn’t need to see his eyes to know that he watched me. The feeling was clear enough. His eyes burned my skin like sunburn, prickled like peroxide on a scrape. When I dared a glance, our eyes met and locked. He seemed to giggle, then, but that may have been my imagination.
Then he fetched his balloons, and it all grew worse.
I didn’t want to be there. To be watching. To be caught. I didn’t want to see him pull things from nowhere, to see the sun glare on bright baggy clothes. To feel flaming eyes set on black-rimmed white—eyes that scurried over me like roaches. I tried to brush that gaze away.
“Timmy!” cried Birthday Mom. “Don’t touch yourself there! It isn’t nice!”
“Can I go inside?” I begged, or something like it. “I gotta…”
“I see,” she said, and she led me by the hand. But she didn’t see. Not really. The clown did, though. I caught him smiling at me as we went inside.
When we came back from the bathroom, I heard balloons scream. I wanted to stay inside, but she wouldn’t let me. She said it was time to have fun, time to laugh, time to play. Marcie wanted all her friends to be there, and I didn’t want to miss the clown, did I?
How little we recall kid fears.
He caught my eye as I came out through the door. He’d been waiting for my return. At the middle of the yard, he tortured two balloons in his white-gloved hands, much to the other children’s delight.
I winced as tiny screams broke me into goosebumps. My friends didn’t notice, but I did. Dancing Marcie held a balloon-beast in her eager hands. Bruce and Katrina did, too. The clown gave his weeping balloons a final, vicious twist, then handed the result toward me.
It was hideous.
The clown was a master of his art. His creations were bent and broken things, agonizingly alive. The balloon-beasts quivered and mewled. Wet eyes pleaded for release. The one in Marcie’s hands looked worst of all.
I wanted to puke.
So I did.
It took forever ‘til Mom showed up to take me home. I burned as the other kids laughed. Even the clown seemed amused. I wished he’d stop looking at me! On the ground at his feet, balloon-things writhed. The clown smirked as he squashed one beneath his oversized shoe. It squealed before it burst. Bright blood spattered the white of his pants. Why didn’t anyone see it but me? And still, he brought freakish things to life, handing them out like treats. Like sacrifices. He seemed to sneer beneath his paint as he wrenched pathetic beasts from garish rubber. That grin promised similar treatment to me.
Later.
I still felt him watching me as Mom came to take me home. Marcie never forgave me for puking blue birthday cake at her party.
The clown came to see me that night in my dreams. Red, wet, sticky dreams smelling of greasepaint.
◙
Bruce Taylor called me “Party Puker.” Katrina Watkins called me “Timmy Toilet-Face.” Marcie called me things I never expected from a girl, and Gary Bright did a lunchtime impression of me that got him sent to Mr. Jordan’s office. I was out-cast all that month, and it would be a long time before anyone invited me to a birthday party again.
I still can’t eat cake, even now.
It wasn’t over, though. There was more.
I was in my backyard, pitching dirt clods at my G.I. Joes a week later or so, when I heard the squeak of rubber behind me.
“I know you want a balloon, Timmy.”
Nobody saw the clown with me, then. Nobody saw his hands on me. His eyes. His blazing white suit. I didn’t scream or cry or run away. I could see the sweat sheen on greasepaint as he held me close. The whisker-tips beneath it. His hot clown suit smelled unwashed against the pine-needle scene of my back yard.
I recall a finch feeding worms to her children that day.
◙
In high school, I could never come through. I graduated virginal, not quite a man. I’d go out on dates, sure, but when things got close the smell of greasepaint turned me small and useless for the night. Word spread between the girls by my junior year. I didn’t date again ‘til college. My girlfriends, though, couldn’t hear the squeak of rubber in my room back home. I didn’t share that part of me at all.
The clown, I’d soon learned, had passed his gift of creation on to me that back-yard afternoon. Now I could make animals, too. I hid balloons underneath my bed, and when I returned from dates with Jane or Alexa or Sherri or Mo, I’d dig out the bag and blow up and twist balloons until the skin pulled back beneath my nails and my head swam dizzily. Then I’d put the suffering things out of their misery with a pin, muffling their bursting bodies with my pillow before I slept.
I didn’t want to do clown things.
◙
Once, in college, feeling brave, I dropped some acid. Big mistake. The room soon filled with balloons and the laughter of clowns. Colored light crawled across the walls like blood. My feet brushed the bones of long-dead children as the clown stood, laughing, at the center of the room and blew bubbles shaped like heads.
Balloon-creatures writhed, broken, at his feet.
All around me, stoned girls watched my eyes and giggled when I met their gaze. My friends weren’t really my friends, it seemed. I stared at the floor to avoid their eyes.
I just wanted my balloons.
“I know you really want to be a clown, Timmy,” said the bubble-blowing trickster. I don’t think he was right, but back then, I wasn’t sure.
“Hey, Tim,” said a soft voice. Gypsy Alison, from my chem class. She took my hand in her own warm one. “Let’s get you some air,” she offered. “It’s kinda close in here.” I didn’t disagree.
Outside, we walked hand-in-hand as dying stars fell to the wet cement. Branches shook with nighttime wind. Our clothes clung, tight in drizzling rain. We brushed damp hair from one another’s faces as we kissed beneath a streetlight.
The next time I recall seeing Gypsy Alison, she covered her face and ran away from me. When I saw the clown again shortly afterward, he looked pleased. Although I never learned what else happened that night, I also never touched acid again.
◙
I made many balloon-things on my wedding night. My new wife Helen never saw them. I went outside and popped them in an alley while she slept. If the clown was there then, I didn’t see him.
I see him a lot now, though. At the edges of my sight, he waves at me. I buy plenty of balloons and then fashion horrors to make him go away. Sometimes, I miss pieces of them when I’m cleaning up. Helen finds them and wonders where the rubber scraps come from. I haven’t dreamed up a good enough lie.
“I know you really want to be a clown, Timmy,” he insists. No matter how far away he stands, I smell rancid greasepaint, sweat, and birthday cake. My fingers ache, stained and stinking of cheap balloon rubber.
Helen keeps to her side of the bed now, watching me with chilly eyes. Maybe I should have told her about greasepaint and pine needles. If I had, she might not look at me that way.
I should tell her, but I can’t anymore. It’s too late. Things have changed. The clown leers from every shadowed corner, now.
Maybe I should tell Helen that I’m running out of balloons.
But I can't.
So I sit in my den, surrounded by gasping shapes wrung from rubber, nightmares that look at me with glistening eyes. It’s late out, too late to buy balloons. The clown’s shadow falls across my shoulder. He brings the taste of sweet sugar cake and the tang of pine needles, and he’s chuckling.
Only two balloons left. Two balloons between me and my young son’s bedroom door.
Please help me, God.
I really don’t want to do clown things.
Rob M. Miller on Monica J. O'Rourke's
“Jasmine Garlic”
Buckets-of-blood stories are often derivative, not particularly scary, and even silly. But when quality meets gore, the results can be incredible. During 2001, at the World Horror Convention in Seattle, Washington, I met Monica J. O'Rourke, an incredible woman, who was gracious enough to spend time with a young developing writer. Soon after, Monica shared with me a preview of her short “Jasmine Garlic,” a riveting piece of extreme horror that can be accessed on Smashwords. Monica’s story, since my first read, has ever since served as a template when it comes to putting together an in-your-face piece of disturbed and disturbing fiction. With more than a hundred published shorts and a number of books, Monica’s been a long-standing staple in the horror community, but still almost an undiscovered gem. Her work’s primed to explode with a whole new crop of readers.
◙◙◙
I Am Victim
Rob M. Miller
THE ALLEY WAS TYPICAL. It sat long, dark, and bleak, collapsed underneath a cloud-filled, soot-covered night’s sky, from the air looking like an elongated, straight-lined incision—an infected cut.
Trash bins, syringes, and probably a billion cigarette carcasses—not to mention the dog-and-whatever-else-shit—filled its entire length.
Past the first fifteen feet, no clear line of sight could be made into its depths, and no vehicle had any hope of penetrating its maze.
Piss and mud puddles, along with scattered patches of broken glass sat as anti-personnel mines warning off all pedestrians. The city must’ve forgotten about the place, as it had so many others, as if the lofty urban-managers in power had simply said, "Screw it."
Or, perhaps the owners of the buildings sharing the alley’s borders hadn’t paid the waste bill in the past thirty-or-so years…say since 2003, preferring to have their own pseudo land-fill in closer proximity.
Noise came from the alley-adjacent sidewalk and street: blaring horns, curses, flirtations, whore-hounding pimps, sirens from futile efforts of succor, as well as the street talk of excited teenagers, full of hope and spunk, feeling foolishly-secure in their burgeoning freedom, as if they were adults…as if they were really prepared to take on the night.
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