Shock Totem 8: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  The thing that had tried to come in through the ceiling was gone.

  Dalton heard a faint sound. An odd sound. And it took him nearly a minute to realize what it was. People were cheering in other cars on the train.

  He grinned stupidly and reached over to pat Shore on the leg. “Hey, hey, it’s over.”

  Shore groaned and touched his face. “I need my glasses.”

  “What happened to you?” Dalton asked, levering himself up until he could grab the seat back in front of him.

  “I don’t know,” Shore said. “I think I…”

  Shore’s words faded into a dull, roaring sound as Dalton stood and saw the naked thing lurching blindly in the aisle.

  It was no bigger than a child but obviously male and covered with odd, torn wounds, the worst of which covered the portion of its face from its hairline to the bridge of its nose. The white of its skull was visible through the missing skin and it flailed about uttering odd, feral sounds. Its eye sockets were empty, black holes lined in red.

  “What is it?” Shore said, but Dalton ignored him, picking up a fallen scattergun. He aimed it and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a dry click.

  “Worth, what is it?” Shore said again as Dalton walked carefully up the aisle so as not to stumble from the rocking of the train.

  The thing heard him and turned, hands reaching, fingers grasping.

  Dalton took the Detroit Shooter by the barrel, adjusting both hands to find his grip, then swung it on an angle. The sounds emerging from the thing changed, becoming higher pitched as he kept on swinging the weapon. He imagined he was chopping wood and settled into a rhythm until the Shooter’s stock shattered and the thing lay unmoving and nearly shapeless from the blows. His face was lined with streaks of red by then, his hands and arms coated with blood and whitish bits of bone up to the elbows. When Shore finally located his glasses and saw Dalton, he fainted for the second time that evening.

  • • •

  Celia limped alongside the tracks, holding Miri by the hand. A crowd of women and children and a few old men moved with them, some in shock, some exclaiming at the state of the train.

  The security car was a scorched mess with blackened chunks of organic material fused into the siding. The rest of the train cars, every single one, were dripping. Great rivers of red and flowing gobbets of meat drizzled and plopped onto the tracks.

  “Look over there, honey, are those mountains?” Celia said, trying in vain to distract her daughter.

  “It smells really bad,” Miri said.

  “I know, hon.”

  Windows had been punched in and great sections of roofing on several peeled up as if by a giant’s can-opener. Crews were hurriedly nailing boards and stretching tarps over the injuries sustained by the train.

  “Ten minutes, people,” the big captain said, striding past them. “We mount up in ten minutes, please return to your original seating assignments.”

  They found Dalton sitting beside the tracks, staring vacantly into the distance.

  “Are you hurt? Dalton, are you hurt?”

  Celia rushed to him, taking his red stained hands in hers and looking everywhere for injuries.

  “Your daddy here’s a hero,” the conductor said, walking over to them and patting Miri on the top of her head. “Held onto car number five almost by himself.”

  Dalton pulled Miri into his arms and Celia knelt, embracing them both. Still, he couldn’t resist looking over his daughter’s shoulder at the conductor.

  “Hey,” Dalton said.

  “Yeah?” The conductor said, adjusting a bandage on his forearm.

  “What if that ever comes…ever gets up to…”

  The conductor shook his head and smiled. “Ain’t never gonna happen. Waters rising in the south, and the storms are making the middle something awful, but up north, in Detroit City? We got the electricity going and people filling the sidewalks day and night.”

  “And all you can eat?” Miri said, glancing up with big eyes.

  The conductor laughed. “You got it, honey. All you can eat, any time you want it.”

  • • •

  Oswego stood at the front of the black locomotive, watching as crewmen used long hooks to tug free the mountain of gore stacked up against the cowcatcher.

  “Porfoy,” he said, and the young Pinkerton ran up. “Hook into the telegraph and report contact with the Deformation. Inform them of the location.” He knelt and spread out a map on the crossties, using his Smith & Wesson to hold down one corner. “See here? That was the point of contact.”

  Porfoy knelt and studied the map, noting that the captain’s finger was touching a place outside of the red zone denoting The Barrens.

  “But sir, that’s at least twenty miles north of the general contact zone,” Porfoy said. He looked at past contact points marked on the map and drew a chilling conclusion. “That’s twenty miles closer to Detroit than any other recorded contact.”

  Oswego glanced back at the bloody train and watched the people boarding. “I know, son. I know.”

  John C. Foster was born in Sleepy Hollow, NY, and has been afraid of the dark for as long as he can remember. A writer of horror stories and thrillers, Foster spent many years in the ersatz glow of Los Angeles before relocating to the relative sanity of New York City where he lives with his lady, Linda, and their intrepid dog, Coraline. Foster’s stories can be found in Dark Visions Vol. 2 (Grey Matter Press), Under the Stairs (Wicked East Press) and Big Book of New Short Horror (Pill Hill Press) among other fine collections. He has recently completed his first novel, Dead Men, and is hard at work on his second novel, The Isle.

  WE SHARE THE DARK

  by Carlie St. George

  When the ghost sat beside me, I was sitting on the porch, considering suicide the same idle way people think about where they’d go on vacation if they could afford to. Pills and knives were popular but also prone to failure. Hanging was so old-fashioned as to be almost charming, but if your neck don’t break, it would be one lousy way to go. A shotgun was practical. Already had one, and I didn’t think I could fuck it up any. I was warming to the idea when the ghost put its hands around my wrist and squeezed till I dropped my cigarette.

  “Fine,” I said. “Cancer’s not an option anyway. Takes too damn long.”

  • • •

  The ghost rarely let himself be seen, and he never spoke out loud at all. But I knew his name was Alex because ghosts are better than anyone at nonverbal communication.

  He spoke through gestures, through charades, through temper tantrums. Used to be a theater student, somewhere out west, and clearly he missed putting on a show. I would wake, sometimes, to the clashing of pots and pans, bad renditions of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath songs. Alex usually started up before even God was awake, but I’d put up with worse before, and I knew I’d put up with more after.

  Only sometimes did he touch me. His fingers pushed against my skin, inside it, and I would know things about him, the little things that made up a person. He knew things about me too, only the bits I was willing to give. We didn’t share our secrets or our fears or our childhoods, only pieces folk don’t usually bother putting into words.

  • • •

  A few weeks after Alex arrived, my ex-boyfriend came over to see if I had one of his old Muddy Waters albums. Rob only listened to vinyl—his Daddy hated technology something fierce, and he had once broken a CD by throwing it across the room, slashing the hell out of Rob’s left ear on the way. That was some twenty years gone now, but scars remember, and Rob had a lot of scars.

  Alex and I were watching some dumb comedy on TV—or I was watching, while Alex objected by launching teddy bears round the room. Rob walked in without knocking and eyed the floating bears cautiously as he leaned back against the wall.

  “So,” he said. “Nothing’s changed, I guess.”

  One of the teddy bears—the blue one my daddy had bought me, two weeks before he left town for good—wiggled its blue butt
right in front of Rob’s face. Rob slapped it with the back of his hand, the way you’d slap a woman.

  I watched him watch his hands, curl them into fists and shove them in his pockets. “This one love you too?” Rob asked, staring at the ground

  Beside me, Alex flickered.

  “Doubt it,” I said. “Hasn’t even peeked at me in the shower yet. Frankly, I’m offended.”

  “Right,” Rob said. “Well.”

  I sighed. Rob’s almost total lack of humor had always been his worst selling point. “I’ll look again, but I don’t think it’s here. You only brought that turntable over a couple of times.”

  “Can’t think of where else it’d be.”

  I couldn’t either—Rob didn’t have much of a social life—so I left him by the door to have a look around. Alex hovered over my shoulder, let his fingers melt right through my skin. I saw purple bruises, wide eyes. Commercials for Lifetime movies.

  “No,” I told him. “It wasn’t like that at all.”

  I couldn’t find the record. I came back into the living room, found Rob staring through the screen door at the setting sun, arms folded loosely across his chest. I missed those arms, those shoulders. The dead might touch me, but they were always cold.

  “Sorry,” I told him. “Nothing doing. Might be you could find another copy down at the Salvation Army.”

  Rob shook his head. “You know he’ll leave you. They always do.”

  I pushed past him and kicked open the door.

  “Well,” I said. “The living are pretty good at that, too.”

  • • •

  Alex wasn’t a blues man like Rob. He didn’t like country music either, took the Bible from my bedside and underlined Luke 6:36—Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful—when I started playing Hank Aaron one morning. He didn’t even like Patsy Cline.

  I didn’t ask him what music he did like. I didn’t ask him where he was from, what his last name was, how he died. Figured he’d tell me when he wanted to talk.

  Course, he didn’t want to talk. He wanted me to guess. Alex liked playing games, and I didn’t, but I did like the way that he laughed, loud, like it had never occurred to him that the dead ought to be quiet. So I indulged him by playing Twenty Questions, and he kept score by drawing lipstick tallies on the wall. I didn’t have a lot of lipstick. When I ran out, I drove my truck down to Wal-Mart and bought a Ouija board from the bargain bin. Alex loved it, could spend hours spelling out nothing more than knock-knock and yo momma jokes. He said he was a big kid at heart. Said he was only nineteen.

  I called bullshit on that pretty fast.

  D-O-N-T Y-O-U B-E-L-

  I forced the planchette to NO.

  W-H-Y N-O-T

  “‘Cause you’re a liar, Alex.”

  His hands slipped away from mine, and I shook my head. “Don’t take offense,” I said. “I don’t think you mean nothing by it. Comes second nature to you, I expect, but you’re still a bullshitter, through and through, and I can’t trust anything you tell me if it don’t come straight out of your skin.”

  For a moment, I sensed nothing, and I thought Alex had left me to sulk, the way some men do when a woman has the gall to be honest. I didn’t much care—I wasn’t about to apologize for speaking my mind in my own house, and anyway, it was too hot to get all worked up. The air was damp and suffocating, and every inch of me was beaded with sweat.

  I leaned back against the couch and took a long drink of my beer, and Alex’s fingers wrapped around my wrist, gently squeezing until I set the bottle down. “It’s like you don’t want me to do anything fun,” I complained. “Can’t smoke. Can’t drink. Can’t listen to country.”

  He didn’t respond to that, just guided my hands back to the planchette, his fingers becoming visible between mine. They were long and dark and refreshingly cold. His fingernails were too clean for this part of the country.

  “You don’t usually let me see,” I murmured.

  B-U-R-N S-C-A-R-S D-E-F-O-R-M-E-D H-I-D-E-O-U-S

  I smiled. “Liar,” I said softly.

  Alex moved the planchette to YES. After a moment’s hesitation, his fingers disappeared. The Bible, which had been pushed off the coffee table to make room for my Burger King wrappers and beer, lifted in the air. Pages flipped back and forth until Alex found what he was looking for and set the Good Book in my lap.

  It took me a minute to scan the page and read the line he wanted read. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” I looked up at where I thought he might be sitting. “So...you’re saying you’re not just a pretty face?”

  Alex didn’t laugh like I thought he would. He grabbed at my wrists again, and this time I felt his cold fingers sink inside mine and hold there. I saw the boy he once was, a chubby thing with big eyes and bigger hair, playing in a costume box, performing for an audience of stuffed animals and two hamsters. He always played cops, never robbers. He recited movie lines to himself on the way to school. If he could dress the part, he could play the part, and maybe someday people would believe he was the part—

  I pulled back, blowing warm air into my hands. My fingers had gone so cold they’d started to ache.

  “You don’t gotta be no one special for me,” I told him. “I like you. You should like you too.”

  He kissed me, and I tasted birthday cake, strawberries, and vanilla frosting. I smelled smoke and counted candles, twenty-seven of them, waiting to be blown out.

  I wasn’t so much older, and Alex kissed like he’d been born for it, but his tongue was as cold as his hands, and it was only a matter of time before he left like they all left. “You’re a little dead for me,” I said, stepping away and hugging my arms around my waist. “Might be best to keep things platonic.”

  For a moment, there was nothing. Then the planchette moved across the Ouija board. K-N-O-C-K K-N-O-C-K.

  “Who’s there?”

  Y-O M-O-M-M-A.

  I shook my head. “I need to teach you some actual jokes.”

  • • •

  Rob came by again while I was at the grocery store. I pulled a bag full of peanut butter and booze out of my truck and found him sitting on the porch, staring at his boots like there were stories written on them.

  “You missing another record?” I asked him.

  He didn’t look up. “Grandfather’s watch.”

  I didn’t even remember the watch. “Are you sure Boxer isn’t eating your stuff?”

  “Doubt it. Died a month ago.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and meant it. Boxer was dumb as a bag of bricks, but he was a good dog. Had been.

  “Yeah.” Rob looked up. There were circles under his eyes, and circles under the circles. “Need help with that?”

  I considered my pride, shrugged it away, and handed him the grocery bag so I could fish my keys out of my purse. When I opened the door, I took the bag back. “Come on in,” I said.

  The house was a mess. I wasn’t worried—Rob’s house was always a mess too, although his walls probably had less lipstick on them. I watched him look around as I poured myself a shot of bourbon. “Same ghost?” he asked finally, turning back at me.

  “Same one,” I said. Alex was being quiet, but he was somewhere nearby—the house felt different, heavier, when the dead were in the room. “He hasn’t heard the bells yet.”

  “There was that one girl, the girl in the closet—”

  “Adele.”

  Rob nodded. “She was here—what?—seven months before she heard them?”

  “Six,” I said. Alex had been here almost three. Sometimes they were only here for days, even hours, before they were gone again. “You can look ‘round for the watch, if you want, but I don’t think it’s here.”

  Rob looked. He couldn’t find it. I offered him a shot, to be polite, and he took one but didn’t drink it. He turned the glass round and round in his hands. I glanced out the window and noticed that my truck was the
only one in front of the house.

  “I walked,” he said before I could ask. “Needed the air.”

  It was almost six miles from my house to his. I looked at his face again and was surprised I didn’t see it sooner. “I thought this new home was working out for him.”

  Rob scrubbed his hands over his face. “It was,” he said. “But you know how he is.”

  He was a violent, mean sonofabitch. “Yeah.”

  “I was a fool to think it’d last.” Rob finally took his shot, automatically went to pour himself another, stopped, and looked at me. I nodded, but his fingers hesitated around the bottle just the same. He drew his hand back. “Anyway, I should get on home.”

  I followed him out to the porch. “I could give you a ride.”

  Rob shook his head. “Not in any hurry. A nurse comes a few days a week now, checks up on him when I have to run out. They aren’t expecting me for a few hours.” He started down the driveway, stopped, and turned back to look at me. “Look. I’m sorry for how things turned out between us.”

  I had never heard Rob apologize for anything, not in twenty-five years. I didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s okay you’re still mad. I said some shitty things. You didn’t deserve most of them. But I’m worried about you.”

  I laughed. “Me? Rob, you look like you ain’t slept in a week.”

  Rob shrugged. “I’m fine,” he said. “It’s been busy on the farm, is all.”

  “Rob—”

  “No one’s seen you anywhere. Not at the bowling alley, not at the bar, not even for the fireworks last week. Judi says you been calling out sick—”

  I stared at him incredulously. “You been spying on me?”

  “I ran into her at the gas station,” Rob said calmly. “She was worried. Says it’s like you barely leave the house.”