Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions

by John Everson

  I tried to make Mum do what I wanted, like on the Day, but it didn’t work. Sometimes when I tried, a funny look crossed her face, but she kept on with what she was doing. One night I laid awake listening, and heard Dad telling Mum that I would be going through puberty soon, and that it might open new doors for me. “His mind is so incredibly developed, who knows what extra hormones will do for it,” he said. Mum murmured something unpleasant, and I smiled. Dad had books on everything and one was on ESP. I read it and realized that what I had done to Mum was like the powers the book talked about. Maybe I could learn to do it whenever I wanted.

  So I practiced by the tree. I’d look at an ant, and follow him a while with my eyes. Then, when he ran in a straight line, I made him stop and turn around. I did it over and over. At first it didn’t work, and I just got a headache, but gradually, the ants did my will. I played with them for hours, making them build grass towers and have mini-skirmishes.

  I started getting tiny black hairs popping out on my body. I felt strong, and I couldn’t play with the ants anymore. When I tried to make them do something, they curled up and died, like when you touch them with a lit punk. I realized that playing with the birds and squirrels was more fun anyway. Once a sparrow was sitting on the line making noise while I was sleeping, so I stared at it. It flapped its wings for a second like it was trying to keep its balance, and then rose from the phone wire and flew in a straight line through the kitchen window and onto the table where Mum was making dinner. She screamed and screamed. When Dad got home she cried again and called it an omen.

  On my 13th birthday, Dad brought me home a lot of electronic equipment from work. He works for the government with experimental nuclear stuff, and I had gone through all the texts he had brought home. I said I wanted to try some of my own experiments, and he made me a workshop in the garage. I built a laser and teased the cat with moving strobes of heat. Spider soon avoided the garage. I worked alone now, and went to the tree often.

  One night, I asked Dad about the neutron bomb, and he wouldn’t tell me how it worked. “You are not old enough to fool around with that kind of science yet, kiddo,” he said.

  He smelled acrid, like Mum when she wouldn’t look at me.

  “You stick with building the better mousetrap for a few more years.”

  “C’mon Dad, I need to know,” I begged, but he merely shook his head. His shoulders were slumped.

  I got mad. I hadn’t made a person do anything since the Day, but now I looked at him. His eyes widened, and gasping, he began reciting. When he was through, I thanked him and went to the tree.

  The night was clear, and the branches pointed to the stars. A jet left a wispy trail to the south, and the west was lit by the dull glow of the closest town. The wind blew hair in my face, mixing it with the tears streaming from my aching eyes.

  “I hurt my Dad!” I yelled at the tree. My tears ran down the white bark to wet the empty anthill below. I had killed all the ants. There were no birds or squirrels for miles. My fists beat bloody against the tree, and after a while I lay still panting. The stars shone steady and strong. I longed to go to them. But they were so far. I knew that I would find a way to them, but not yet. Dad had more to teach me. He had brought stacks of technical books home for me, but I yearned for his touch. His voice. His love. I slept.

  And woke in the dark. I sat up and knew I was imprisoned. The floor was cold cement in place of warm soil. The air was damp, and water splashed somewhere. I was blind and helpless. I knew all at once that I was trapped in our crawlspace. My mind woke, as my anger built. I strained to see and hear, and suddenly I could feel my parents just meters away. I pulled, and Mum screamed. A trapdoor opened, and Dad’s face was silhouetted in the opening. “I’m sorry,” he said, “But until you learn never to…” His voice cut off as his whole body went rigid and fell through the opening to the cement floor. I crawled over him and dragged myself up the short ladder.

  Mum and Dad learned to behave quickly. I didn’t feel bad, because they locked me up, so I just did it to them. I showed Dad what I was building in the garage, and a tear ran down his unshaven face. I noticed how large his bald spot was growing. He tried to tell me that I should use my talents to help humanity, not to destroy it, and I smiled.

  “Would they help me?” I asked.

  He turned away and wouldn’t talk anymore.

  I decided I wanted to see if other humans were like Mum and Dad. They would make fun toys. Then maybe I would visit the stars.

  This morning I woke up and they were gone. I guess I didn’t put them to sleep enough last night. It’s OK, though. They weren’t a challenge any more. If I need them, they’ll come back. Going to the tree helped ease my mind. If I go to the stars I have to take the tree.

  Somehow.

  Tomorrow I think I will go into the world. I rewired Dad’s car so I can work the gas and brakes from the steering column. I will see what people are like. My memories are fuzzy. All I remember is a doctor leaning over me with yellow, smelly teeth, and some ugly old ladies. Aunts, Mum called them. I could have fun making them stand on each other in pyramids like with the tree ants. “It’s a big world though,” Dad always said. It should at least prove more interesting than squirrels and birds.

  And if I don’t like it?

  I’ll go see the stars. And maybe use what I built in the garage when I leave. It would be fun. I could just push a button, and the earth would crack up like an egg, the slimy, yellow yolk oozing out of the middle.

  I’ve always liked eggs.

  Especially crunching them in my hand.

  Tomorrow should be a very good day.

  Voyeurism is an increasingly accepted pastime in our society of confining cubicles and don’t-need-to-leave-home satellites and Internet sex photo swapping. In our splendid isolation, the kink of anonymous others provides affirmation of our own “normality” and gives us, at the same time, a way to release the fantasies of our own darker natures. Despite our increasing amount of time locked in our own heads and space, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to look away from the perversities of others and stare hard at the black core within ourselves.

  Mirror Image

  y reflection is not a nice guy. I’ve known him all my life, but I first met him – really got to know him – last week. I was straightening my tie in the antique mirror in our bedroom when he frowned at me. “Just your imagination,” I told myself, but when I turned away, I could feel him watching; laughing, silently.

  The next morning, I kissed my wife Janine goodbye and then turned once again to the tall oval mirror in our bedroom. As the necktie looped, my reflection mimicked every move but one. While my face remained sleepily still, his began making moues – sarcastically imitating my recent kiss.

  My heart raced; this reflection had a mind of his own! The half-knotted tie dropped forgotten to the floor and I lifted a hand to touch the surface of the mirror. His palm rose in answer. When our fingers made contact with the glass, the surface of the mirror shimmered as if the touch was a droplet hitting a pool of mercury.

  Something icy wrenched my hand and I stumbled into the mirror. Instead of tumbling in a crash of splintering wood and glass to the floor, my senses suddenly cut off and I was pinned inside the glass. My perspective flipped; my reflection now stood outside the glass, and he was again laughing at me. This time out loud. I opened my mouth to scream, but there was only silence. And the cackles of my reflection, who whispered one thing as he turned to leave the room:

  “You’ve always told your bimbo wife you liked to watch. Well, I’m sick of watching. Now you’ll see how a life should be led.”

  As his steps echoed on the hardwood floor, I felt myself fade.

  Then he was back – and so was I. Hours had passed; the streetlamps shone sulphurous on my reflection, who was hungrily kissing Janine! My arms mimed his caresses, stroked nonexistent hair. Alarmed and enraged, I struggled to still my limbs and step through the mirror to reclaim my wife. But I couldn’t even
slow my fingers from following the intricate map of his lovemaking. The worst part of it was hearing Janine call out my name to him.

  “Oh, Terry,” she moaned, when they were finished. “That was the best! What’s gotten into you?”

  My double turned his head to stare back at me in the mirror.

  He winked.

  The next night he moved me closer to the bed.

  “I want to see you everywhere I look,” he told Janine as he scraped the mirror along the floor. She blushed and squealed. “Ohhh, kinky!”

  I couldn’t look away as two feet in front of me my reflection took my wife with savage glee.

  In the morning, he kissed her passionately in front of me. When she was gone, he peered into the glass as if I were far away. “Are you enjoying this?” he asked. “Your wife sure is. What a twit. Now watch closely tonight.” He grinned so wide I could see the silver in my back teeth. “I have a special surprise for you.”

  It was night again. I heard Janine’s moans before I could see her. And then she landed heavily on the bed before me, her eyes wide with a mix of lust and fear. Her wrists were bound together, but rather than trying to work her way free, she arched and stretched for him on the bed.

  As my double walked around the bed, he paused to stare directly into my eyes: “You always said you liked to watch, so you must be observant. Look around the room. What’s wrong with this picture?”

  My throat clenched at his tone. Something bad was going to happen tonight. I squinted hard at the room, trying to see beyond the limits his motions placed on me.

  They were well on their way to orgasm when I saw it. On my dresser. An open curio drawer.

  Empty.

  My reflection straddled Janine on the bed and I struggled to see what he held in his hand. I prayed to God it wasn’t what I feared – the gift my grandfather gave me when I first began to shave, a token from the days when his shop was the center of gossip in town, not the local bar.

  His barber shop.

  “I have a surprise for you,” my reflection crooned to my wife wriggling beneath him. His hand – my hand – glittered in the pale light from the street as he held the ivory-handled razor for a moment over his head before bringing it down.

  I opened my mouth to scream, to warn her.

  But all I could do was watch.

  Believe it or not, most of my stories have little to do with my home life (and given the nature of the women in many of the stories in this book, I should probably take this opportunity to point out that my wife is a sweet-natured girl who never turns up in our bed at night anointed with demonic sigils or brandishing sharp objects. Not often, anyway). The following story does have a real root, however. When I was in college, I brought home a handful of my roommate’s Elric books by Michael Moorcock during a vacation. My mother read the bit on the back covers about Elric being a “dark lord” and promptly shredded the books to keep their evil from her house and my head (never mind that they were not hers – or my – property to dispose of). If books and magazines represent the exploration of all aspects of the human mind and spirit – which by nature ranges from the bloody abominations of hell to the saintly missions of heaven – then whether books are filled with sacrilege, science, porn or prayer, they should all be sacrosanct.

  Murdering The Language

  retta’s breath hung heavy in the air as she huffed and gasped her way up the steps. The final load – at last. Her brown paper shopping bag (she never accepted plastic at the supermarket) was filled, not with carrots and Campbell’s soup, but with books. Library books. Gretta Dowler was the new President of the Parkville Library Board. She loved that title. Every time she thought of the election last week, a smile stole across her face. At last the good citizens of Parkville had come to their senses and unseated that liberal homosexual, Gary Worth. He lived with another man, for goodness sake! What kind of example was that for the children of Parkville?

  But now she could start undoing the harm. Mrs. Fellier, the fat busybody librarian hadn’t liked it, but she, Gretta Dowler, was personally going to review all of the fiction. The trash would be put where it belonged. Never again would an innocent child – or adult for that matter – leave the library with a novel to read, only to be led into sin and ill thought by stinky, perverted smut hidden inside. Gretta’s heart warmed with the thought. And the best place to start was the horror/science fiction section. It was unconscionable that publishers allowed some of these cretins to print such immoral evil. But if they wouldn’t be responsible…

  Carefully holding the storm door from slapping shut with her back end, Gretta stepped inside, dropped the bag on the kitchen table and shut the heavy wooden inside door. It was cold tonight, even for November. She unknotted the scarf from around her head, noting with dismay the pure white hair that clung to it. Her handsome silver curls were steadily losing even that vestige of color. Old and gray. It had happened so quickly. Her once thin and supple hands now looked gnarled, spotted with brown and lined with blue. Old and gray. She shook her head. The colors of age were not at all festive.

  Ice sparkled on the panes of her living room windows, she noticed while hanging her coat in the hall closet. Shivering slightly, she decided this would be a good night for a fire. Yes, a bright, happy orange, and red fire. And a pot of tea. That would set the mood just right for reading.

  Twenty minutes later, Gretta sat down on the couch near the fireplace, a book bag beside her, a steaming mug of tea on the lamp stand. She took a sip and closed her eyes momentarily, savoring the moment. The tea was sharp, the fire hot. Every few seconds it popped, like a cap going off, as it reached a pocket of moisture in the wood. Reaching into the bag, she pulled out a book at random. Clive Barker Imajica, it read. The cover showed two people of ambiguous sex curled about each other. One of them was purple. What sort of picture was that? Turning to the title page, she began to skim. He seemed a learned author, Gretta thought, noting his use of words like “vociferous” and “blandishments,” right off. But the tone… somewhat sinister.

  She went to chapter two and right away found him writing of “hard-ons” and “unloading his balls.” Simply disgusting. She turned the pages faster, noting references to sex on almost every one. “Deathbed fucks,” a ruthless murder, “conjuring,” and then, a three-page description of a man – contrarily named Gentle – sharing the sex act with a strange woman who turned out to be male. Gretta slammed the book shut. She felt soiled, dirty. How could someone so obviously educated contrive such filth?

  She tossed the book to the floor and grabbed another. Queen Of The Damned by Anne Rice. Now this woman she’d heard of. She wrote smut under another name. Dreading it, she flipped open the book anyway. It was about a vampire rock star. Ridiculous. Skimming the chapters, she saw that this, at least, did not use such foul language to accomplish its aim. But perhaps that only made it more insidious. For, as near as she could tell, it glorified these devils, these vampires. They sucked their victims dry, chatted over the quality of their evil, and slunk off to kill another day. In one chapter, one of the despicable characters turned to the hero – another murdering vampire – and proclaimed “Now you shall be a god with me.” Sacrilegious! And at the end of the book that same “hero” laughed “I’m a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!”

  Gretta tossed Queen to the floor. Glorification of murder and sex. Glorification of murder and evil. How could she let people be exposed to this trash?

  The pile grew through the night. Peter Straub, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison…Gretta couldn’t believe the trash these people concocted. The pile grew further. Isaac Asimov The End Of Eternity – men making themselves gods. Robert Heinlein The Number Of The Beast – she didn’t even have to read that one, the title itself was enough. Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos – immoral pilgrims going to worship some murderous monster on another planet. Michael Moorcock The Revenge Of The Rose. Gretta got so mad reading that one – which cast a horrible vengeful dark being named E
lric as the hero who sacrificed souls to a devil named Arioch – that she ripped out the pages.

  “Trash, trash, trash,” she pronounced, tossing the remains of Revenge into the fire. It caught with a whoosh of yellow flame. Satisfied, she went into the kitchen to refill her tea. It was almost midnight, and she hadn’t found a keeper yet. Mrs. Fellier was not going to be happy, but this was for the best. Couldn’t have people getting these warped ideas. Why do you s’pose there were homosexuals like Gary? She liked pronouncing that word to herself. Ho-Mo-Sex-U-Als. It sounded appropriately dirty. People like that Clive Barker made simple folk think making love to a man who looked like a woman might be a good thing. He perverted innocence. And why were there serial killers? Reading about vampires ripping people’s throats out and worshiping the blood, and some devil named Elric riding around lopping good people’s heads off with a soul-sucking sword. No wonder the world was in such sad shape.

  With fresh determination, and another steaming mug of tea – this time with some lemon in it – Gretta returned to the couch. From now on, the bad ones were going directly to the fire, she decided. No point in holding back. And if Mrs. Fellier didn’t like it – well tough. That’s what she was elected for. And she was sure some of those romance novels that chatty librarian was always carrying on about were going to be hitting the fire too.

  Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson caught Gretta’s eye next. The title certainly wasn’t promising, and she saw right away its main character was a leper called The Unbeliever.