Deadman's Tome: Monsters Exist

by Mr. Deadman

  More than this uneasy surveillance, the random opening and closing of the dummy's mouth began to make sense. Despite the lack of facial muscles and tongue, Harry read its lips, certain of the words being mouthed to him.

  Play dead! Play dead!

  Over and over again.

  Harry's ears rung. He struggled for breath like he had fallen on his back. With the tent closing in, he stumbled out of his seat and willed himself back outside into carnival row.

  A wooden spear almost gored him. Butchers on stilts stepped carelessly through the crowd. The stilts were strange, like they bent at the knee, but it was hard to tell how they were constructed hidden by the draping of the slaughterhouse aprons. The butchers balanced a lot of awkward weight, they all beer bellies and barrel-chests. Illuminated by the colored carnival lights, Harry caught a fleeting glimpse of the terrible ape masks they wore. He didn't have time to determine which genus and species of primate, as they raced quickly to whatever bizarro abattoir that employed them.

  None of the other carnival-goers flinched despite the danger of impalement. This was a crowd of sleepwalkers, the expressionless patrons meandering around serenaded by the hypnotizing loop of the calliope.

  Freak tents lined the final stretch of the carnival. Yet, by the advertisements, none were particularly impressive. The 'bearded lady' had little more than a few wiry hairs on her upper lip and chin. The 'tattooed gentleman' had his share of body art, but the faded green designs were passive and dull. The 'fat lady' was simply obese, not close to measuring up to the severe cases seen every night on various television docudramas.

  Given these dubious oddities, the strongman and 'Lobster Girl' were suspect deals considering the thirty and forty dollar admission fees. A lime and orange striped tent with a banner reading, The Old Man, piqued Harry's imagination. Even though he should be leaving, he paid the relatively cheap five dollars to quench a dizzied curiosity.

  Particle board that ringed the entrance was painted to look like a howler monkey's gaping mouth with white fangs and serrated molars protruding from disease colored gums. Harry stepped over the lower lip of sharp incisors to push through the velvety tent flaps that were dyed dark crimson like the back of a throat. He found himself seated before he even had the thought he should do so.

  On a raised stage, an old man sat in a wooden chair with his back to the audience. However, his actual age was unknown. From Harry's vantage, he could only see that the sitter had white hair and wrinkled hands. He needed to see the old man's face.

  Fifteen minutes passed. The old man didn't turn around, stand, or speak. His forearms and hands lay on the armrest. In an illusive state, they appeared ready to push away, but they never did.

  Harry wondered why he had waited this long.

  Because you're too damn agreeable.

  Harry knew this was exactly what his wife would say. Maddie would then be silent, surrounded by the frustrating in-progress construction of her purgatorial room like its incompleteness was all his fault. Harry didn't know what she wanted: he'd okayed every one of her ideas. If she wanted a nursery, he would even agree to have kids—and he would want kids—if it would make her happy.

  And if it didn't, then he would be just as happy not to have kids too.

  And you don't see the problem with that?

  Harry rose to leave, finally getting his leaden legs to stand.

  As he turned away, out of the remotest periphery, he thought he caught a glimpse of the old man finally rising from out of his chair.

  Harry turned his attention back to the stage, curious to see the face.

  However, the old man hadn't turned or risen. He sat as always, his back to the audience, hands looking like they were imminently about to push up, yet not doing so.

  Harry waited. Another fifteen minutes passed.

  Again, Harry unglued himself from his seat. But as soon as he turned from the stage, the same sixth sense told him that old man began to rise and turn as well.

  So how does it feel?

  Harry closed his eyes. He anticipated his wife's sermon about how if the old man insisted to always look in the same direction as he, that he would never reveal his face and be known.

  You're too damn agreeable, Harry.

  He stumbled out of the tent chased out by her imagined preaching.

  It was late, the moon hoisted high in the hot autumn sky. How long had he been distracted by these odd diversions? But there was only one tent left. As if anticipating his desire, an exit sign pointed to it. He would have to go in to get out.

  The hulking mustard yellow and wine-purple striped big top was the tallest thing here, even eclipsing the Ferris wheel. However, Harry hadn't noticed it until now. Perhaps being tucked in the very back, some trompe l'oeil made it seem smaller by forced perspective.

  No one worked the door, the lone free admission in the place, which was in itself perplexing. Two wooden totems guarded it, a stack of monkey faces carved into the oak logs. The eyes were drilled out, the profound darkness in the heart of the wood absent of light.

  Harry parted the canvas flaps that felt like perspiring strips of skin. The sweaty stench of frightened animal filled the tent. He expected to see abused bears or depressed elephants paraded around a ring that the carnival neglected to hose down between acts. But the space was devoid of any performance or spectacle.

  The vast big top had no poles. The tenting was draped over the twisted remnants of an old roller coaster. Grass and weeds grew thick around the metal base sunk into the earth. It wasn't recently built. But surely, he would have noticed this steel monstrosity traveling by the field every day to work. At least his wife or kids would have commented.

  Wait, kids?

  Harry pictured a little girl. Brynn. He remembered a boy, too. Colin.

  But, he and Maddie had no children. Nonetheless, these images were no made-up phantasms. These were stored memories that sprung from the incorruptible library of his consciousness. Deep down, he knew the difference between the actual and the imagined. He had was no doubt that the children were real, and that they were his.

  Rapid-fire memories of Colin and Brynn shuffled through the gallery of his mind. Harry could hear Colin's machine-gun laugh, as he could Brynn's stutter when she got animated. Everything was before he and Maddie had moved to Dover.

  Maddie.

  He needed to tell Maddie what he now remembered. Harry turned around several times, but couldn't find the exit. The big top was poorly illuminated by randomly angled work lights, the tripods the same as Maddie used when working in the corners of her room. Heavy extension cords snaked away into the thick shadows that lurked on all sides.

  There wasn't much of interest of what he could see, the canopied space in disarray. Benches faced different directions waiting to be arranged. Boards and wooden legs lay loose on the ground, some seats still in the process of being put together. Stained drop cloths were draped over crates, tools were scattered, and half-filled paint cans sat open.

  From above, the unseen calliope wavered, its melody falling apart. The whistle jumped two octaves melting into an unbroken high-pitched note.

  Harry scanned the rafters for the offending instrument, but only saw darkness and dread. Dizzied by an unspecific menace in the swinging shadows above, he collapsed on a bench.

  Amongst the clutter, the painful ringing, and the stench of wet fur and shit, Harry struggled to remember the day he arrived in Dover, the last memory he had of his kids. He started from the beginning, reliving that day ten years ago.

  ***

  The station wagon reeked of fast food and pine air freshener. Colin and Brynn shrieked, suddenly excited. Across a field beside a river, silhouettes of abandoned amusement park rides were etched into the twilight. Although they were less than a mile from their new home, he pulled the car into a roadside ditch. The move had been difficult on the kids and he was happy to see them excited.

  The rides were farther out in the field than they appeared. It was a long walk,
but the children didn't seem to mind. The rides were old; he would have believed they were remnants of a long ago World's Fair. The Ferris wheel tilted badly, its axles and gears rusted out, no amount of oil able to revive them.

  However, Brynn was more interested in the roller coaster. She approached its skeletal remains cautiously as if she had seen something in its tangle. Collin, who usually would be rushing ahead without care, hung back reading his older sister's body language.

  The coaster's wooden base had rotted away, leaving a snarl of rails weaving patterns in the charging darkness above. Some parts had collapsed, while others twisted down, digging into the ground. The bent and gnarled metal above and below wrapped around itself like a cage.

  Under the steel enclosure, he skated over the suddenly slick field. Maddie grabbed his shoulder to keep her balance. Colin slipped and fell twice. The ground wasn't wet, but the proliferation of droppings nestled in the bushy grass and rogue dandelion made it slippery. The odor of excrement filled the air, the stink released when the crust around the slimy dung broke underfoot.

  A metallic ping sounded from above, and then another. Suddenly, a song made of nail on steel broke out. Shadows swung between the old rails and bars. While it had become too dark to make out the grey shapes, the aerial acrobatics and long rubbery limbs were unmistakably familiar.

  Something heavy thudded to the ground on his left. Another sounded from behind. The timing and location were purposeful: they were being flanked.

  Colin and Brynn instinctively wrapped themselves around his legs. A deafening guttural roar made his ears ring and sent his heart into his throat. Accompanied by a violent helicopter-like rush of air, something massive crashed to the earth shaking the ground and throwing him backwards off his feet.

  He braced for impact, and it would hurt, but exactly when he expected to land, everything went dark.

  ***

  Harry opened his eyes with a harsh ringing in his ears. Struggling to catch his breath as the wind had been knocked out of him, he didn't know how long he had been out. Looking up, he couldn't tell if he was under a tent or an open night sky.

  A pungent cocktail of animal feces and ragweed sharpened his senses. His glassy eyes focused on the creature that loomed not twenty feet away. Over two stories tall, the grey primate crouched in some modified lotus position.

  Harry slowly scissored his legs, feeling for the children, but they weren’t there. Maybe they had run away, or maybe they weren't ever there at all. He wondered again exactly where and when he was.

  But his concerns of place and time were dwarfed by the enormous monkey sitting before him. The meditating primate was the only important thing here, the gravity around which everything revolved. Its terrible blank eyes were like two lifeless white moons. Never blinking, it stared into the formless, eerie void that only the blind truly know.

  A familiar layered bob haircut stole Harry's attention. Maddie slumped like a ragdoll in one of the monkey's great paws, two hairy fingers wrapped around her back the only thing holding her upright.

  Slowly regaining consciousness, her body went rigid in the clutch of the beast.

  Don't fight, Maddie...

  But despite his hope, Harry knew what she would do. It was what she always did. She wouldn't stay calm; she wouldn't accept the danger and work around it.

  Her frantic eyes found his. She pleaded with him for help, for him to do something—anything—and fix this. But what was he to do? Fight or flight were both death sentences here. No, there was only one tenable option.

  Play dead.

  However, she didn't understand. Succumbing to her rising panic, she squirmed trying to free herself. Against its might, she was hardly strong enough, and only succeeded in alerting it to her presence.

  And there was nothing for him to do except to stay still and silent in the foully fragrant field. Harry could only helplessly watch as the sightless monkey brought his wife to its gore stained lunatic lips and bit her head off.

  The headless body didn't convulse, quiver, or bleed much. Arms and legs hanging down naturally, her body appeared calm as if in its ideal state, free of the complications and corruptions of a busy mind.

  Harry closed his eyes keeping his own limbs perfectly still. He had no other recourse than to outlast the danger by waiting for the safety that would come with the morning light.

  ***

  Jolted awake, Harry's first impulse was to reach for the bottle. Fumbling, he tipped the whisky over. It made a hollow ping on the unvarnished hardwood, it as empty as the rest of the house.

  Sunday was almost over. Late afternoon light spilled through the bay window, which had no curtain or shade, the room a work-in-progress. Of course, it would never be finished—the drop cloths, saw horses, and primed, but not painted walls untouched in years. Severed from the world this way, the purposeless limbo was an effective hiding place. Harry preferred to drink away the weekends here, looking forward to Monday where it would be back to work and the predictable rut.

  Adolescent cheers rose from next door. The Trall boys were bouncing on the trampoline again. In spite of the privacy fence he had built, Harry could see the top of their heads appear and disappear. Boys will be boys, he supposed. At least their dad had stopped coming around, bringing over food his wife baked in a transparent attempt to engage him. The elder Trall once even hinted at setting him up on a date. Harry set Peter Trall straight after that, reminding his middle aged neighbor that he was a kindergarten teacher and not a therapist.

  Maybe he didn't use those exact words, but Trall got the message and stopped coming around. And as long as he was being exact, it was Trall who had built the fence shortly afterwards.

  All for the best.

  Harry watched the sun set, the night driving the town indoors. The fence wasn't high enough to hide the moonlight brushed trees behind his neighbor's yard, and it certainly wasn't high enough to hide the soulless smoke plume rising from the raging fire circle that jumped around the forest at night. There would be no one to extinguish the angry blaze. The genie-like funnel of black smoke against the midnight blue sky was impossible to see unless specifically looking for it. And the monkey allowed precious few in on this secret.

  But Harry was protected in his unfinished room; the monkey and its vulgar legion couldn't get him here. It could only suggest its terrible primate delights in the soft corners of drunken dreams—remind him of what it took, even embellish and twist the stories to make it hurt. However, as long as he was agreeable, hunkered down in his unfinished nowhere place, the monkey couldn't harm him. Not really.

  On Monday, he would be safe as long as he stuck to the roads and schedule. To work and back, no diversions along the way, and always be home before nightfall. Stay out of the woods and unfamiliar places, keep away from the butchers, the library, and any other places the monkey marked as its territory. And no matter how inviting, never be tempted by the twilight carnival and its sinister thrills, if that's what they could be called.

  He would love to reach out to Maddie, tell her he kept the room as it was, ready for her return to turn it into whatever she wanted. So too, he thought of his kids. Harry calculated how old Brynn and Colin would be today although he already knew the answer. He wouldn't see any of them again, the monkey's devious traps the thickest around the things he loved most. And it would wait for him forever in these baited snares.

  Best to resign himself that he would never see them again. They were better off without him anyway.

  It hurt, and the monkey would never let him forget that it did, but he would be alright, as long as he stuck to the routine and was agreeable. Harry knew how to play dead to survive. After all, in a way, he'd been doing it his whole life.

  About the author:

  Not long after celebrating his twenty years of service in a Boston accounting firm, S.E. Casey began to write. As an attempt to quell an unspecific desperation and stave off a growing resentment of everything, he found stories wedged in the unlikely spaces
of the crush of numbers, balances, and accounting formula. On a whim, he began to write these paranoid liminal tales. His expanding collection of existential horror has been published in many magazines and online publications, the listing of which can found at www.secaseyauthor.wordpress.com.

  Lake Monster

  Mr. Deadman

  The 1965 Ford F100’s headlights pierced the darkness along Texas Highway 199. Bright as the beams were, the shroud of night was too thick, struggling to illuminate the way down Shoreline Road.

  Gary scanned the half-lit asphalt with a degree of caution, one hand on the wheel and a tall-boy of Shlitz in the other. His eyes strayed long enough to get a quick taste of the ice-cold brew, and why not? This time of night no one would be the wiser.

  His arm hanging out the passenger window, Willie sat shotgun. He tapped along as Conway Twitty’s “I Love You More Today” played on an 8-track.

  “Man, remember the last time we came down here?” Willie adjusted his tattered trucker cap.

  “Shit, man.” Gary grinned. “You got so drunk, your fat ass almost drowned in the lake.”

  The two partook in a mutual laugh concluding with a synchronized chug of beer. Willie wiped his lips on a hairy forearm, some dripping onto thick chest hair. “I'm surprised you weren't too shit-faced to save my ass.”

  “Let me tell you something," Gary said. "I come from a long line of functional alcoholics. My mother was a drunk, and my mother's mother was drunk. Which makes me one. But you see, I was born a drunk. You get what I'm saying?”

  After guzzling the rest of his beer and crunching the can, Gary tossed it out the window.

  “Yeah, my momma wasn't no drunk.” Willie took another swig.

  “Hell, man, your momma is as sweet as apple pie,” said Gary, staring directly at Willie's face.

  The two shared the sort of tender moment only two dudes could share. But it ended when something darted out in front of them. When Gary was quick to turn the wheel, the old pickup swerved off the road. He slammed hard on the breaks, a loud pop on the driver's side, stopping the truck just before it collided head-on with a tree.