Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  ACTOR FOUND DEAD

  Bill Wilson, the actor who gained critical acclaim for his role in the indie hit Gorilla Girl, was discovered dead yesterday in the smoking wreckage of his home outside of Hollywood. Widely acknowledged as the leader of that strange breed whose profession is portraying primitive primates, at the time of his death Wilson was preparing production of an all-star ape production to be called The Gorilla Gang. His previous films include The Jungle Juggernaut, Human Sacrifice, The Sinister Scientist, and The Saint at the Circus. Apparently his final act was to throw his monkey suit, considered the best in the business, to safety just outside his burning house. The cause of his death is under investigation.

  Also dead at the scene was John ‘Jack’ Jackson, a small-timer whose only notable screen appearance came in Universal’s musical Campus Cuties of 1938. He was seen cavorting behind bandleader Paul Whiteman in the novelty number ‘Monkey Man’. Jackson is said to have been the only Negro in Hollywood who made his living acting in an ape-skin.

  Les Daniels has been a freelance writer, composer, film buff and musician. He has performed with such groups as Soop, Snake and The Snatch, The Swamp Steppers and The Local Yokels. A CD of his 1960s group with actor Martin Mull, The Double Standard String Band, was recently released. His first book was Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, since when he has written the non-fiction studies Living in Fear: A History of Horror, Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics and DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. More recently, he is the author of The Complete History volumes of Superman: The Life and Times of The Man of Steel, Batman: The Life and Times of the Dark Knight and Wonder Woman: The Life and Times of the Amazon Princess. His 1978 novel The Black Castle introduced his enigmatic vampire-hero Don Sebastian de Villanueva, whose exploits he continued in The Silver Skull, Citizen Vampire, Yellow Fog, No Blood Spilled and White Detnon. His occasional short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies and he has edited Thirteen Tales of Terror (with Diane Thompson) and Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre. About the preceding story, Daniels explains: ‘Several of the minor characters are real people, actors who eked out a living decades ago by impersonating apes. I read an anecdote about one of them whose costume was stolen, reducing him to penury, homelessness and eventual death, and thought it might make a good background for a story of supernatural revenge. However the tale took an entirely different turn from what I had first intended, and in fact no theft occurs. Such departures from the original plot don’t happen often in my work, but I was pleasantly surprised by the result.’

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  Sweetness and Light

  JOE MURPHY

  Jo Jo grinned big for the officers. His cheeks tightened, drawing back until his teeth showed clearly, and his eyes squinted in the harsh jail-cell fluorescence.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Officer Ben, who was really Officer Benjamin Clark and new to the force. In dumbing down his name, Jo Jo knew, Clark was trying to be kind to a poor little retard. Jo Jo wasn’t retarded. He simply knew how to use his looks.

  ‘What’d I tell you?’ Officer Dayton nodded, staring from Jo Jo’s mouth to his fellow officer. Dayton, a fat, bottom-feeding rube, dumbed things down for no one. ‘Ever see a mouth like that? Fifty says he can do it.’

  ‘You got a bet.’ Officer Ben reached for his wallet.

  Dayton glanced down the row of cells to be sure no one was watching. After a broad smile, he nodded encouragingly. ‘Go on, Jo

  Jo-’

  Jo Jo held out his hand.

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ Dayton pulled out his wallet, took a bill and slipped it between the bars.

  A lousy ten. But Jo Jo smiled and tucked the bill into his worn jeans.

  To command the rube you had to obey the rube; that was the rule Sweetness had taught him. The payment demanded their respect.

  Unimportant as these two were, he needed their goodwill. He was in enough trouble already; Sweetness would be here soon.

  Jo Jo walked over to the cell toilet, a stump of dirty porcelain set against the cinder block wall. He stopped to study the yellow and brown-stained rim, then got down on his knees.

  Dayton chuckled; Officer Ben did not, but the dark-skinned man’s eyes met Jo Jo’s. Jo Jo turned back to the toilet. He opened his mouth as wide as he possibly could, pausing when his jaws began to ache, in the true spirit of showmanship.

  Jo Jo lowered his head and bit down. His teeth ground against the thick stains of the toilet rim. He tasted urine, bleach, and just a hint of faeces. His jaws tightened. The porcelain cracked.

  He clamped down harder. A grinding sound filled his ears, magnified through the bone conduction of his massive jaws.

  The porcelain crumbled, filling his mouth like a bunch of stones as Jo Jo’s teeth came together. He looked up at the officers; his cheeks bulged.

  ‘Shit!’ Officer Ben gasped.

  Dayton grinned at his buddy and held out a hand. Officer Ben dropped a crumpled fifty into it without ever taking his eyes off Jo Jo. The guy had turned pale.

  ‘Here comes the good part.’ Dayton winked at Jo Jo.

  Jo Jo tilted his head back to open his throat. Keeping his lips closed, he munched the porcelain into smaller chunks that slid down easily. When his mouth was empty he stood and grinned.

  He turned his back on the officers. The sound as he unzipped his jeans seemed like a shriek in the quiet. Jo Jo urinated into the toilet, zipped, flushed, and ambled over to the bars.

  ‘Never seen anything like that,’ Officer Ben breathed.

  ‘Carnies. At least they used to be. I saw their act three times!’ Dayton laughed. ‘Got a nice little place over on Fifth. His mom tells me they’re retired now. Wait’ll you get a load of her.’

  Jo Jo grinned big. Not showmanship this time, but anger, though they’d never know. Sweetness was anything but his mother. Dayton, like most rubes, assumed it from appearances.

  Jo Jo’s spindly little body looked more like a child’s than a thirty-seven-year-old man’s. When he was two the doctors had diagnosed him as microcephalic, but that was only because the rest of his head seemed tiny next to his jaws.

  By the time Jo Jo realised that he really wasn’t retarded, it was too late to change things. He’d ducked school to hide in the public library. He’d given up Tolkien and Dunsany for the more realistic Charles Fort and Kafka.

  When a teacher who actually seemed to care, if only for a year, almost discovered the truth, Jo Jo fled deeper into the inner city, his last refuge a nameless bookstore.

  There, an old man eager for the touch of anyone, no matter how deformed, had traded favours. Magazines of glossy nymphs mounting magnificently endowed men gave way to yellowed, pictureless volumes of Sacher-Masoch, and then de Sade.

  Finally, the old man’s gnarled arthritic hands had done things even Jo Jo’s body couldn’t forgive. Street life was hell until he’d found the carnival.

  The cellblock door buzzed and clanked; the officers turned.

  ‘Dayton!’ a voice called. ‘The boy’s been cleared.’

  ‘No shit?’ Dayton shook his head.

  ‘Yeah, the old lady found her ring under the counter. His mother’s here now. Bring him up.’

  Officer Dayton shrugged and pulled out some keys. He unlocked the cell. ‘Let’s go, little man.’

  Jo Jo nodded eagerly although this wasn’t entirely the case. Officer Ben, the idiot, offered his hand. Smiling, Jo Jo took it and let them lead him from the cell. Finally, he was through with these worthless rubes. Sweetness would take him home.

  They pulled into the spotless driveway of the little bungalow: a white frame house with a dark mansard roof, as unremarkable as any of its neighbours, but the best Jo Jo had ever lived in.

  Oleanders lining the front yard scented the air, and small, neatly cut grass squares extended from them to meet the well-washed sidewalk. Jo Jo kept the shrubs carefully pruned, the grass perfectly clipped, but saved his real effor
ts for the back yard.

  Sweetness killed the engine of their battered Volkswagen. Jo Jo climbed out. He hurried around the car and opened her door.

  Sweetness neither looked at him nor spoke as she stepped into a twilight still heavy with summer heat. Her large sunglasses turned towards the front door. The low hem of her blue long-sleeved smock swished against leather boots when she limped directly towards him.

  He got out of her way by trotting to the front door, had it open by the time she arrived. Cool air brushed his face. The hum of the central air unit flowed around the click of Sweetness’s right boot, and the thunk of the left with its built-up heel.

  She said nothing. Deep in Jo Jo’s throat an ache began. He closed the door that kept out the rubes and came to her in the plainly furnished living room.

  Sweetness reached with blue-gloved fingers to remove her shades. A curl of long black hair that framed her face tangled and clung to one earpiece, releasing only at the last moment. Eyes dark as the brown mansard roof stared down at him.

  Her head shook slightly, a tremble of disapproval in her soft voice. ‘Jo Jo, what did you take?’

  He trotted across the room and retrieved a beige wastebasket lined with a black plastic bag. Getting down on his knees, Jo Jo looked up at her and tried to plead with his smile.

  His voice box had long since been scraped, worn and cut away; he could not speak except in the scratchiest of whispers. With Sweetness this angry, he dared not speak at all.

  Opening his throat, Jo Jo retched into the wastebasket. Pain spasmed up his stomach, through his throat and into his jaws. Up came the porcelain.

  As the last chunk dropped past his lips, Jo Jo retched again. It hurt more this time; it always did. His hand moved below his mouth. A diamond ring, wet with bile, dropped into his palm. He held it up for her.

  ‘You were careful?’ Sweetness asked casually. She reached down, took the ring and studied it. ‘You replaced it with one of the good cubic zirconiums? No one saw?’

  Jo Jo nodded and rasped, ‘For you. Not for the house. Just this once?’

  Tiny, almost imperceptible scars around Sweetness’s thin lips softened into a smile. Her eyes turned from the ring to gaze down at him. Dropping the ring into a pocket, she opened her arms. ‘That’s so sweet, baby. Come here.’

  Jo Jo hurried to her embrace. His cheek nuzzled the soft cotton of her smock over the knot of scar tissue where her breast had once been. Her arms closed around him.

  ‘What am I going to do with you, baby?’ Sweetness whispered and held him fast. ‘We’re close enough to losing the house as it is. Insurance money doesn’t last for ever. And how many times have I told you: we don’t bait and switch where we live. We go into Detroit now, or someone will catch on.’

  Tears leaked from Jo Jo’s eyes, blotted by Sweetness’s smock as her arms tightened. He whimpered softly.

  ‘You know what has to happen.’ Her arms fell away.

  He clung to her, holding this last moment. Her hands took his shoulders, then tightened, increasingly, until he wanted to howl. Finally, he could stand no more and let go.

  ‘Bring me a can,’ Sweetness told him.

  Jo Jo looked up at her and tried to hold back a sob. His head shook.

  ‘You have to bring it, Jo Jo.’ Her voice grew harsh and then softened. ‘You have to.’

  By her cold caring eyes, he knew this was true. Jo Jo slumped into the yellow-tiled kitchen, to the paper sack by the fridge. Hands trembling, he took out a single tin can, the label gone, leaving only scabs of glue and paper. When he returned she sat upon the armless velvet divan before the big sliding-glass doors that looked out into his back yard.

  Because of his quick obedience, she allowed him to gaze into the darkening twilight. He dared not look too long; but when he turned back to her, she too stared into that same evening dusk.

  ‘Come here, baby.’

  Jo Jo came to her, bowed his head and offered the can. Her arm slipped around his neck, squeezing him into a headlock. With her other hand, Sweetness snatched the can from his fingers.

  Jo Jo gasped, prelude to a sob. Sweetness used that moment, as he’d known she would, to ram the can between his teeth. His jaws closed upon the metal, gnashing through it, until the sharp edges of each rending cut into his gums.

  The can twisted in her grip, ripping apart. Jagged edges lacerated his tongue and the insides of his cheeks. A sharp prong slashed down his throat and there was nothing he could do to keep from choking -except swallow.

  Mewling, bubbling up blood, Jo Jo doubled over, falling to the floor. Agony tore through his throat and twisted his gut. He lay there, coughing, wheezing and fighting to breathe around the pain.

  Sweetness waited until he looked up, her face blurred through his tears.

  ‘You don’t learn any other way, baby.’ Sweetness shook her head and rose. ‘You know the rule. Do my will or eat a can.’ She stooped and a blue-fingered glove, spotted now with blood, stroked his cheek.

  ‘Take the wastebasket and go to your room. But because you did what you did out of love … I forgive you.’

  She didn’t wait to see if he obeyed: there was no need. He listened to the swish of her smock as she crossed the carpet, then to the clack and thud of her boots on kitchen tile. The door to her room squeaked closed.

  Anything but tin. In his career Jo Jo had eaten almost everything: wood, iron, bricks, cinder blocks, anything Sweetness had used in their act, or that the rubes could carry into the tent with their callused, sweaty paws. Just not tin.

  Jo Jo lay on the thick red carpet until the worst of the pain subsided. He managed to turn his head and gazed out at the back yard. The evening darkness reminded him of the last fading glimmer of a spotlight just before things turned black.

  He wanted to shudder, knowing Sweetness had yet to discover the real evil he’d begun here in their home. That would hurt too much. Instead, grimacing, he climbed to his feet, fetched the wastebasket and crept into his room, closing the door.

  Jo Jo remembered little of the night. A small mercy, because of the terrible struggle to work the can out of him. Only part of it would come up his throat again. The rest, of course, he would gradually push out the other end.

  The worst was over; but he wasn’t done. His body would not forgive him until it began to heal. Curled upon his sleeping-bag, he didn’t really mind so much. He had everything that mattered.

  In the quiet of their bungalow, he listened to the sounds of her morning. The thud and thump of bare feet as she entered their adjoining bathroom made him smile until he looked at the bathroom door and remembered the evil.

  She hadn’t noticed last night when she’d showered. Jo Jo prayed she wouldn’t now. He held his breath, listening to the toilet flush, and followed her with his mind, sighing when her footsteps took her to the kitchen. He was safe.

  From the kitchen, he heard her enter the hall. It hurt, but he grinned at the clink of the tray she set outside his door.

  Sweetness was bound by her own rules; she would not enter his room.

  When she finally left for physical therapy, he crawled to the door, reached up, grunting, to turn the knob. He pulled the black plastic tray inside and dragged it with him back to his sleeping-bag. A folded paper square lay next to a green pitcher.

  I love you.

  She was magnificent! Jo Jo shivered with painful pleasure at her spidery print. He settled down on his sleeping-bag, curling happily around the tray and the note. He tilted the pitcher to his lips and warm sugary water filled his mouth. Now he had all day to rest, to heal, and to look at their poster.

  The two-feet-by-three rectangle shimmered in its glass frame, catching the early sunlight from the window. Centred on the wall before him, the poster was the only other object in the room.

  Tarkinton’s Grand Carnival Presents

  Sweetness Barnette, The World’s Strongest Woman

  With Jo Jo Light, The Human Vacuum Cleaner.

  See Them And Be Amazed!


  Truly, Sweetness was amazing. In those days, she would stride out at the beginning of their act in her chain-mail bikini. Her six feet, six inches of size, her rippling, weightlifter’s muscles, put all the rubes to shame.

  Bricks crumbled in her slender fingers. She ripped phone books in half. She even lifted the Volkswagen Beetle, their road car, completely off the ground. The stupid rubes never caught on to that trick.

  The day wore into darkness as he gazed at the poster.

  When he could see it no more, Jo Jo turned to the window, to his wonderful back yard.

  Putting down the Volkswagen, Sweetness would pull him from the back seat. Stiff, encased in his silver lamé costume, hands and feet bound, Jo Jo really did look like a human vacuum cleaner.

  Sweetness would stride around the ring, holding him by the silver handle centred in the small of his back. He sucked in the crumbled bricks, pieces of iron bars, halves of telephone books, and whatever the rubes would throw - everything except tin cans.

  When their act ended to the applause, whistles and jeers of the idiots, the stagehands killed the spotlight. In that split second of privacy, the light too dim for the rubes to see, too black for the stagehands to rush out, she would pull him against her.

  The soft skin of her wondrous breast upon his cheek, bound and helpless in her arms, he would nuzzle her, grinning. And always she would say, ‘Great job, baby.’

  Jo Jo sighed and gazed at his marvellous yard. Perhaps it was the way the high charcoal fence blended with the emerald-lustred lawn; maybe it was caused by the distant merging shadows of houses and evergreens. Not since the carnival had he found such a darkness.

  ‘I could have saved you,’ he whispered.

  If only he had been with her in place of that idiot rube, with his big bankroll and horny hands. Or in a car behind them when the accident happened. Jo Jo would have dashed down the embankment to rip through metal and flames, to pull her from the car. Instead, the fire had destroyed her superb flesh, her divine muscles, and killed, for all time, their amazing act.