Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  I took off while he was rambling on. I ran down across the lawn, around the line of hemlocks, past the generator building, and then I saw them. They hadn’t reached my grandfather’s workshop yet, but they were closing in. Hundreds of huge frogs, hopping fitfully through the tall grass—toward the lodge, us. I turned around, ran back to the patio, and told my father what I’d seen. He just kind of went into a distant stare for a few moments.

  My mother, who was already wiping and dressing Mrs. Gault’s ankle-bite, said, “Perhaps we should all go inside.”

  “Or just leave,” Mr. Gault snarled.

  That was when McCarthy raised his hand and wagged his fingers at me. I went over to him. He pulled a key out his pocket and handed it to me.

  “In my room, in the large suitcase, there’s a couple of boxes of bullets. Go get them for me. Quick!”

  Looking back, I was caught up in it. I flew.

  The lodgekeeper, Karl Wirth, looked frozen, but Joe knew what had to be done. They could run like rats, or they could stop this in its tracks. It wasn’t really a choice.

  “Do you have any guns?” Joe asked.

  “A rifle, a shotgun,” Wirth replied.

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought this was a hunting lodge.”

  “Fishing, swimming, boating,” Wirth said. “A bit of hunting in season, but that’s for the guests. They bring their own rifles. I’m not a hunter myself.”

  “Get them,” Joe ordered. “And all the ammo you’ve got.”

  Wirth hurried away obediently. Joe told Mrs. Wirth and the Gaults to go inside the lodge. He walked out on the lawn, toward the lake. His leg throbbed, but the pain was not unbearable. He was a little past the generator building when he spotted them, a black and green wave surging forward. Ugly bastards. Oh yes, he’d put a stir in them, no doubt about it. But it was inevitable. These people, the Wirths, were living in a dream—oh, we don’t bother them, they don’t bother us. Just drifting along, until the time came when it was too late, and the moment became one of their choosing, not yours.

  The kid was back, with the bullets. “Ever use one of these?” Joe asked, handing Kurt the .22.

  “I did target shooting a couple of times.”

  “Good enough. Load up, and aim for the ones in front. Take your time, they’re not exactly fast on the ground.”

  Joe led the way and when they got to the old man’s workshop, they began plunking frogs along the advancing front line. It shook him, how many there were of the beasts. He knew then that they didn’t have nearly enough bullets. At some point, they would have no alternative but to run for their cars and flee. But Joe noticed that as he and the kid moved laterally, so did the frogs. Vicious, but very dumb creatures. Where could he lead them?

  I admit, I was into it. Maybe because it didn’t seem to be that dangerous a threat, really. We always had the option of leaving, and coming back later with some kind of professional or state help to eradicate the frogs—or whatever would be done with them. But I got a kick out of picking them off, one at a time, seeing their fat bodies pop in blood and pus. It was like, suddenly you’re in a movie, and you’re playing this part, and it’s more fun than what you’d normally be doing at that time of day.

  Unfortunately, we ran out of bullets fast, and there were a lot of frogs still coming. My father arrived then, with his rifle and shotgun and a couple of boxes of cartridges. McCarthy grabbed the rifle and started snapping in shells. He moved us away from the direction of the house, and the frogs followed, coming after us—I thought that was so smart of him, but I didn’t know what good it would do. McCarthy directed my father’s fire, a shotgun blast here, there, almost as if he were steering the flow of the frogs as they came at us. Whenever one edge of the wave appeared to be moving closer, McCarthy fired a couple of shots himself, picking off frogs that he took to be leaders in the throng.

  We got to the generator building, and the frogs had come around both sides of my grandfather’s workshop. My father and I stood there, waiting for McCarthy to say or do something, but he was standing there, letting the frogs get closer and closer. Finally, he turned to me.

  “You run that way around the building, back to the lodge,” he said. “If they start getting close, pack everybody in the cars and get out.” He turned to my father and said the same thing, except that he pointed my father in the other direction around the building. He slapped us both on the back. “Go!”

  “Wait,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Just gonna let them get a little closer and make sure they’re coming on both sides, then I’ll be right behind you.”

  Except that he wasn’t right behind us. My father and I met up on the patio, and moved out into the driveway area on the other side of the hedges so that we could see what was happening. We saw the frogs closing in on the generator building, and then McCarthy scrambled out on the side away from the house, running toward the edge of the woods. He was limping, but made good time. The frogs were coming around both sides of the generator building, toward the house. Some peeled off, to go after McCarthy. He dived into the brush at the edge of the tree line, and a moment later, rifle shots rang out. I was slow when it came to following his line of thought, but it became clear a few seconds later when he hit one of the propane tanks, and it went off, and the others followed almost immediately. Whoomph! Whoomph-whoom-whoom-whoomph!

  It took me years to decipher the visual images I have in my head. Yes, the fireball dominated, but eventually I began to see that a flat sheet of flame also spread out at the same time. Lower to the ground. It was lost for a time—I kept seeing sheet metal fly off the roof, cinderblocks blasted into chunks. We stood there for a long time while the smoke and dust and debris settled. Then we could see a lot of scorched frogs, dead on the ground, and I spotted a few others still alive, retreating toward the lagoon.

  Son of a bitch, it worked. Joe stood up and walked toward the house. He looked all around, but couldn’t see a live frog that wasn’t heading the other way. It would do for now, but the problem remained, and would have to be dealt with.

  He found the kid and his father on the patio, both looking shell-shocked, though the kid had a smile lurking on the edges of his mouth. Joe liked that, and slapped the kid on the back.

  “You did good.”

  “Thanks!”

  Joe turned to the father, was it Karl or Klaus? He wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. The guy was just standing there, hoping that normal life would somehow be restored to him. Joe smiled reassuringly.

  “You’ve got insurance, right?”

  It took a few seconds, but then the man nodded.

  “Ah, good, you’ll be fine then.”

  Joe went inside, packed his things, came downstairs, and tried to check out. Mrs. Wirth wouldn’t let him pay a cent. She was very apologetic, as was Joe. The lodge had no electricity now, so everyone was preparing to move out until repair work could be arranged and carried out.

  “Just a thought,” Joe said before he left. “I wouldn’t try to explain this in too much detail. An accidental explosion is an accidental explosion.”

  Tell her husband the same thing, and he probably wouldn’t get it, but Mrs. Wirth nodded immediately. When Joe was turning away from the front desk, he saw the kid crossing the other side of the lobby.

  “Kurt, would you grab a couple of these bags for me?”

  We got over it. We spent a few days at our winter house 40 miles away while Dad got the insurance and repair stuff taken care of, and the investigation went the usual path of least resistance. An accident is an accident, there was no question of gain in the case. And we went back, and had a good season. The new generator was a beauty and actually saved money.

  My grandfather never went back to his workshop. When he died a couple of years later, some people came in and took away his equipment, and my parents just let the empty building rot. As was always the case in my family, when there was no need to talk about
something, we didn’t.

  I’ve learned a lot about McCarthy since then, and it’s hard to find anything in it that I like. I think he grew up at a time and in a place where he learned that if you didn’t beat up the other guy, he’d beat up you, and he lived accordingly. I know what it’s like to grow up feeling alone. When I heard a year or so later that McCarthy had died in a hospital, that he was an alcoholic and had struggled with all kinds of health issues, I thought it was a very sad end to an important life. Later, after I got to know more about him, I came to think that it was just a sad end to a life. He was not a likeable man, but I have to say that I kind of liked him at the time.

  My father died of a heart attack a few years later. My mother had to sell Sommerwynd. For a long time nothing much happened out there, but there are a lot of very expensive summer homes on that lake now.

  The frogs? The state killed them off, as an invasive species. At least, I think they killed them all off. I don’t live there anymore. I’m in sales, in Madison. No wife, no kids, not sure how I ended up here. But I’m doing okay.

  Still a long drive ahead. Joe decided to kill it now. He pulled into a place called The Valley Inn while the sun was still visible in the sky. A string of bungalows in the middle of nowhere, on the road to nowhere. Let’s say nothing about the room, but that it had a television and got two snowy channels. He poured a couple of fingers of Jim Beam into a plastic cup, and lit a Pall Mall.

  Might as well have done this in the first place.

  Benediction

  By Tom Piccirilli

  The Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 looked like a cross between a foreboding Gothic castle and another foreboding Gothic castle. In a secret subterranean chamber Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler thumbed through his grimmoires, searching for the proper spell. The United States had entered the war, the Fuhrer seemed not to understand the importance of that, and Himmler realized that it was up to him to secure the Third Reich’s victory.

  The Fuhrer was interested in the supernatural, gave it lip service, and encouraged his underlings to learn what they could about it—but he didn’t really believe in it. At best, he admitted there might be something to it, and he funded research on it, but when push came to shove, he refused to trust in its power. And that left it to Himmler, who did believe, who knew it worked, to unlock the awesome force of the supernatural and harness its use for the Fatherland.

  And he knew he was under the gun, because word had reached him that America’s premier sorcerer had agreed to enter the fray against Germany. It galled him that the sorcerer was actually German by birth and now chose to battle against his homeland, but he knew how formidable the turncoat was.

  Himmler thumbed through the texts, trying to find the single spell that would produce the results he required. When he thought he’d located it, he lit five black candles and placed them on the five points of a pentagram that he had drawn on the floor.

  “Dark Messiah,” he intoned, “I implore you to come to the aid of your most faithful servant. Give me the wherewithal to withstand this new enemy and its turncoat sorcerer, and I pledge that you shall be worshipped throughout the Third Reich for all eternity.”

  He then uttered three complex spells, spells that had never been combined before.

  Finally, he reached into a cage that he kept next to the grimmoires, pulled out a newt, walked to the center of the pentagram, withdrew a knife, and slit the little amphibian’s throat, placing the newt on the floor and watching its death throes.

  When it expired, he uttered one more prayer, and concluded the obscene ritual with a cry of "Shemhamforash!"

  And an ocean away, the Allies’ greatest sorcerer climbed down the cellar stairs of his unimpressive frame house at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. (Well, unimpressive but for the billboard in the empty lot next door, with an arrow pointing to his house and a huge photo of him accepting his Nobel Prize next to the statement in foot-high Tempo Bold letters that the World’s Greatest Genius lived here.) As for the World’s Greatest Genius himself, he never knew what the word groupie meant until the village of Princeton built the billboard. Now he had two sets of bodyguards, one to ward off Nazi and Japanese assassins, and the other to protect him from wildly passionate women. More than anyone else, he knew that his adopted country was up against not only the awesome might of Hitler’s armies, but also the corrupt evil power that the Fuhrer’s mightiest sorcerer, Heinrich Himmler, had at his command.

  Albert Einstein was soon pouring over his holy books, preparing his spells to appeal to Tekno, a deity totally unknown to his German counterpart.

  When he was ready, he closed the books, dipped his forefinger in the holy ink, and began chanting:

  “The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides,” he intoned. “Pi, carried to five decimal figures, is 3.14159. A circle has 360 degrees.”

  After another five minutes of chanting the spells, and a supplication to the Mathematical Trinity of Pythagoras, Euclid, and Fermat, he pulled a slide rule out of his pocket, held it over the books, and sacrificed it, breaking it and letting the two halves fall to the floor.

  Then he uttered one last quadratic equation, and concluded the ritual with a triumphant cry of “Q.E.D.!”

  “Mein Gott, you’re big!” exclaimed Himmler as he looked at the army Satan had supplied.

  There were thirteen of them, each blond and blue-eyed, each armed with a magical scimitar (which is kind of like a curved light-sabre, but effective rather than pretty), each ten feet tall, each wearing naught but a leather kilt.

  “Ow!” cried the nearest as his head bumped against the ceiling, an action and a cry that was repeated twelve more times up and down the line.

  “Duck your heads, dumbkopfs!” snapped Himmler.

  “We bow to no one!” thundered one of them. “We’ll raise the ceiling!”

  So saying, he lifted his magical scimitar and punched a hole in the ceiling.

  “You see?” he said with a smile. “There is nothing to it.”

  Well, he tried to say, “There is nothing to it,” but somewhere between “There” and “is” a huge wooden desk fell through the hole and crashed onto his head. He collapsed beneath it, shoved it off to a side, and got groggily to his feet.

  “Maybe I should have sacrificed two newts,” muttered Himmler.

  The other twelve golden-haired warriors decided to lower their heads.

  “Excuse me, Boss …” began one of them.

  “That’s Herr Boss,” Himmler corrected him.

  “Excuse me, Herr Boss. But why have you summoned us from the very depths of hell?”

  “Not that we mind it,” added another quickly.

  “Actually, it’s much more pleasant here,” said a third.

  “A lot cooler as well,” noted a fourth.

  “You are here to defeat the American armed forces,” said Himmler.

  “What are they?” asked the first speaker, a contemptuous smile on his proud Aryan face. “Thirty or forty little men armed with rocks?”

  “More like two million men, armed with the latest in aircraft, ships, cannons, automatic weapons, radar, and sonar.”

  “Against thirteen of us—and none of us even wearing any pants?” said one incredulously.

  “You’re Aryans!” bellowed Himmler. “Aryans triumph over everything!”

  “Well, actually, my mother was half-Spanish,” said one of them.

  “And my Uncle Saul was Jewish.”

  “They always told me that George Washington Carver was a cousin.”

  "I will hear no more of this!” screamed Himmler. “You are Aryans, and you will follow my orders and march to victory, or I will return you to the fiery pits!”

  “Where’s Victory?” asked the last one in line. “I mean, if all we have to do is march there, I say we give it a try.”

  “Idiots!” said Himmler.

  “Hey,” said the last one, “we’re not the ones who are sen
ding thirteen men with skirts and pituitary conditions off to fight a mechanized army of two million.”

  “You are invulnerable!” insisted Himmler.

  “Then how come my head hurt when the desk fell on it?” asked the first one.

  “Wait a minute,” said Himmler. He opened his grimmoire and thumbed through it. “Aha!” he said at last. “You are invulnerable to bullets, torpedoes, knives, swords, bombs, and certain social diseases that you’re most likely to pick up in France, or perhaps North Hollywood, California. But I neglected to cast a spell to make you invulnerable either to stupidity or heavy objects falling on your heads. I will correct that oversight shortly.”

  “You’d better,” sniffed the nearest one, rubbing the top of his head tenderly.

  “I’ll let you know the moment it’s done,” said Himmler. “What’s your name?”

  The huge supernatural Aryan looked blank. “I don’t have one.”

  “Everyone has a name,” insisted Himmler.

  “Not me.”

  “Or me,” said another.

  “Me neither,” said a third.

  "You brought us here,” said a fourth. “Probably you should be the one to name us.”

  “That seems reasonable,” said Himmler. He walked up to the giant who was still rubbing his head. “You are Heinrich.”

  “Heinrich,” repeated the Aryan. “Heinrich. Is there some reason for that?”

  “It’s my favorite name,” answered Himmler. “It has a certain strength and nobility and just a touch of je ne sais quoi to it.”

  “How about me?” asked the next giant in line.

  “I will call you Heinrich,” said Himmler.

  “But you’re calling him Heinrich,” protested the giant.

  “You think there’s only one Heinrich in the world?” demanded Himmler. “There is enormous power and a certain gossamer gaiety to that name.”