by Ed Kurtz
The blood drained from Theodora’s face, leaving her pallid and trembling like a kitten. “Oh my God,” she rasped.
“Hell, I’m sorry,” he said. “Me and my dirty mouth. I’ve gotten unaccustomed to being around nice ladies.”
“It can’t be. . . .”
“It can’t—wait, are we still talking about my profanity?”
“Go back.”
“Say, what’s going on here?”
“Please, Mr. Walker—turn around and go back to my house!”
“But why?”
“Mr. Walker,” she said, her eyes half-shut and her face slick with new sweat, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“I’ll stop the truck, then.”
“And I think I need to show you something,” she added. “At my house.”
Jojo creased his brow at her even as he slowed the truck to turn back down the way they came.
Everything behind the glass went dark and a bank of grey-black clouds swarmed in the early evening sky.
Someone croaked, “There’s a storm a’comin’,” and Shannon saw that it was Emma Hutchins, whose green face bubbled with boils and warts.
“Say, why ain’t you singin’ no more, rev?” she roared at him. She punctuated the question with a wet belch. One of her huge yellow eyes bulged. “You got to sing. We come to sing, and you got to do what you told.”
Jim Shannon could not understand why the typically prim woman was suddenly speaking in the strange patois, but it occurred to him that this creature was not Mrs. Hutchins at all. Whoever or whatever she was, he could only presume that the staring, pockmarked man on the sidewalk had everything to do with the sudden transformation. He watched the unfolding proceedings with detached gravity, an impartial observer with genuine interest in where it would all lead.
“Sing, Jimmy,” croaked froggy Mrs. Hutchins. “Jimmy, sing.”
Her flabby jowls quivered and expanded; her throat blew up like a greasy green-white balloon. And she sang:
“I an’ Satan had a race—
Hal-le-lu! Hal-le-lu!
I an’ Satan had a race—
Hal-le-lu! Hal-le-lu!”
Here Alice Maxwell joined in, throwing her spindly arms into the air and convulsing as a woman possessed. “Hal-le-lu! Hal-le-lu!” she cried. In contrast to Mrs. Hutchins’ green marbled countenance, Alice’s flesh was turning a sickly, jaundiced yellow.
The frog-thing that was Mrs. Hutchins—but wasn’t—continued:
“Win de race agin’ de course—
Hal-le-lu! Hal-le-lu!
Win de race agin’ de course—
Hal-le-lu! Hal-le-lu!”
“Hal-le-lu!” Alice screeched. “Hal-le-loooo!” John Martin abruptly repeated.
Now the whole of the congregation joined the wild song, all of them jerking and taking on a different verse each, though all at the same time.
Sue Casey bellowed, “Satan tell me to my face!” even as Rory Allmond warbled, “He will break my kingdom down,” and Rose McKendrick cried, “Satan mount de iron grey.” Alice Maxwell, the colour of pus, could hardly catch a breath between desperate screams of “Hal-le-lu, Hal-le-lu!”
“Hal-le-loooooooo!” John Martin shrieked as tears spilled from his bursting red eyes.
Why do you not sing, Jimmy Shannon? the pockmarked man asked somewhere in the reverend’s muddled mind. Unburden yourself—it is good for the soul.
He glanced down at Shannon from the sidewalk, indifferent, his arms still dangling lifelessly at his sides.
“It isn’t funny anymore,” the reverend squeaked.
The comedy portion of our program is finished. Now: the time for song.
Shannon scooted back on the rough pavement and moaned as he hoisted himself up to his knees. His elbow was pitted with chunks of gravel and hard bits of tar. He felt like a penitent kneeling before some high priest and his chorus of madmen and madwomen, the twelve of which continued to screech and hiccup their way through the eerie, unfamiliar tune.
Hal-le-lee, hal-le-la, hal-le-lu!
“And then?” Shannon dared to ask, fighting against the tremors that rocked his weary frame. “What comes after the time for song?”
You did not read the program for tonight’s performance, Jimmy Shannon. Every performance must have a program, and every member of the audience is expected to study the program to prevent inane questions such as you ask.
The man jerked his head to one side, ruffling the bowtie at his throat that now seemed several times larger than it should have been.
First comes the time for comedy. You laugh. Then comes the time for song. You sing. Next is the time for dreams, peppered with the time for terror. You float, you scream. Then you bleed, and then you die, but only until the denouement. There is, of course, an encore—the audience always demands one—and it is a real corker, believe you me.
Have you come for the special midnight show? Can you stand its secrets, its delights? Do you know the power of magic, true magic, the law of things as they really are?
In that instant, the man’s face leapt through the rapidly darkening space between him and Shannon until the tips of their noses were but an inch apart. Shannon gasped.
The man roared: “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”
The sky cracked open and the thunder roared. The jumbled chorus of hal-le-lus devolved into wordless grunting. Shannon’s eyes darted to the congregation despite his terror of the man looming over him; his twelve congregants convulsed and contorted impossibly on the sidewalk and in the street. Mrs. Hutchin’s flouncy summer dress fell away from her twisted, leathery body, revealing a wholly devastated landscape of swampy green pustules. When the clouds opened up and the oily, black rain began falling in greasy dollops, the insane congregants became aggravated and screamed at the heavens.
Reverend Jim Shannon watched them and wept.
“Things as they really are, Jimmy Shannon,” the man with the pitted face hissed in his ear.
“No,” he protested lamely. “A trick.”
“If you like.”
Shannon fell back and scrambled away from the man, slipping in the pooling puddles of slippery black rain.
“Mount your milk-white horse and go home, preacher man,” said the pockmarked man. “You are not invited to partake of my peculiar amusements.”
The reverend rose to his feet and shielded his eyes from the noxious rain with his hand. The congregants were gone. There was nothing but the man, the awful black rain, and himself.
He turned in a pool of the thick, viscous stuff, up to his ankles in it, and slogged away from the focus of his terror as fast as he could.
The murmuring deafened him; every chin wagging.
Nervous glances, wide eyes.
The nurse worked the room, gliding up and down the aisles; her delicate, high-heeled feet barely touched the carpet. He watched her like an ornithologist watches some bird he’s waited all his life to see in the wild. She caught his hungry eyes and threw a look right back at him. He smiled, she nodded.
It was time to begin.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: IF YOU PLEASE.”
His heart sang—he was better at this than the other guy was. He had not wondered what happened to him.
“I am Dr. Elliot Freeman,” Jake announced. “I am a licenced sexologist.”
“It’s here, somewhere.”
She was rooting through the garbage bin, tossing bits of food and chicken bones on the floor to get at whatever mysterious treasure lay within.
Jojo watched, incredulous.
“I’m not crazy,” she said, picking up a wad of newspaper dripping with something pink. “You’ll see. Just give me a minute.”
“Sure,” he said. “Take all the time you want.”
She went on digging in the trash, and he wandered from the kitchen to the sitting room, wo
ndering if she really was crazy. The place fairly reeked of cigarette smoke, so he scanned the room until he saw the cherrywood box on the bar. He went to it, opened it up—sure enough, it was full of cigarettes. Jojo breathed a sigh of relief and helped himself to one. As he lit it, he glanced over the ample supply of half- and quarter-full bottles on and behind the bar: rye, whisky, rum, brandy. There was even a bottle of mezcal back there, with the worm in it and everything. Jojo sucked at the cigarette and reached for a glass.
He selected the rye.
She really wasn’t a bad looking broad, as far as married women with a propensity for falling in ditches went. He kept his eyes to himself for the most part, but though Jojo lived a more or less ascetic life since the death of his wife, he was not dead himself. He had to admit it: the woman was a looker. He had absolutely no intention of doing anything about it—hell, if he wanted a roll in the hay Georgia wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers—but there it was.
“It’s gone!” Theodora suddenly shouted from the kitchen. “I don’t know how, but it’s gone!”
Jojo exhaled a stream of smoke and asked, “What’s gone?”
“The . . . the bones!”
“Bones?”
He downed the rye, thinking he’d need it. When he returned to the kitchen and saw Theodora’s wide, haunted eyes, he decided he was right—he did need it. And how.
“Maybe you’d best start at the beginning,” he suggested.
She staggered backward, nearly toppling over. Jojo lunged to steady her, but she found a kitchen chair on her own and collapsed into it. Jojo wanted another drink.
“Last night,” she began, her gaze vague and unfocused, “I found something in my husband’s coat pocket. A doll . . .”
Deputy Mortimer was so bored he had to fight to keep awake. The speaker—a phony doctor with a young face he dimly recognized—was dynamic, but everything he said was pure bunkum, and the guy had a queer look in his eyes that would freeze water. After that, a hot twist in a snug nurse outfit sashayed around the joint, passing out dumb hygiene books to whoever was sucker enough to part with his jack just to see her smile—Mortimer was not among them. He watched her smile for free, and though she was something else, she was cooler than the cool character on the stage. No thanks.
Of course, she spent a little extra time with the real suckers, the ones who ponied up for both booklets and then fumbled blindly in their wallets while keeping their wet eyes on her bursting cleavage. Jackasses. Mortimer recognized a few of them: married guys, mostly. What did they expect to happen? Or was a quick gawk and a whiff of her pungent perfume really worth it for them? The deputy shook his head, failing to understand them.
When she arrived in front of him, he only smirked and drew the edge of his hand across his neck. She smirked back, twice as hard.
“Not interested?” she asked, her voice low and breathy.
“No, ma’am. Actually, I’m here in an official capacity.” He emphasized the O in official, drawling it out long and importantly.
“Is that right? Are you a married man, officer?”
“Deputy, ma’am. And I don’t reckon that’s none of your business.”
The nurse laughed, exposed big, bright teeth that were framed perfectly by her blood red lips.
“My apologies. Deputy.”
She dipped a slender hand into a tight pocket at her hip and came back with a small orange square of pasteboard. She regarded it for a moment like it was really something worth looking at, then flipped it between two fingers at Mortimer like a magician performing a card trick.
“What’s this? I said I didn’t want . . .”
“Why, it’s an invitation, handsome. Not everybody gets one. But you do.”
He creased the skin at the bridge of his nose and snorted. The nurse did not relent; she remained in position, extending the pasteboard invitation between her paper white fingers. The deputy could not help but notice the shiny, lacquered fingernails and how remarkably smooth the skin at her knuckles was. His, he knew, looked like cracked leather.
Evidence, he told himself as he took the card. It was a ticket. On its face, in simple bold typeface, it read: special midnight show—admit one.
It did not say what the show was. Mortimer frowned at it.
“See you then,” the nurse said. She went on her way to the next rube, a fat man who grinned stupidly like he was in love.
Deputy Mortimer slipped the ticket in his shirt pocket and laced his fingers together as the auditorium lights began to dim.
Jojo killed the bottle. It was rude as hell, finishing off another man’s hooch like that, but under the circumstances he didn’t feel guilty about it. Theodora had finished her story, including enough details about her failed marriage to make her eyes well up and her cheeks burn hot. Jojo got the picture, and he pitied this put-upon woman with a bum for a husband. He’d been a bum, too, but he’d never gone around collecting creepy fetishes with baby’s bones in them. It was hearsay, of course—as a sheriff’s deputy, his first thought would have been to question her veracity and, necessarily, her sanity. After all, there was no proof. The bones, if indeed there ever had been any, were gone with the rest of the doll. It was a hell of a story he’d told himself, a shocker if ever there’d been one with all the blood and nastiness of it. Maybe the lady was the victim of a fragile psyche, just waiting for something to put her over the edge and his nightmarish tale of death and dismemberment at the Litchfield Valley Hotel was the proverbial straw that broke the nutjob’s back. The idea wasn’t exactly far-fetched. He’d seen it before.
He could not remember her name, which was unusual. What he did remember was that she called the sheriff’s department complaining that her old man was wailing on her, that she thought she might have a broken rib, and that if they didn’t send somebody over to pick him up soon they were going to have to carry him out in pieces. She had a butcher knife, she calmly explained over the phone, and had no qualms carving the man up if it came down to it. So Jojo drove out to the sticks—well past the silo on the old farm road—and discovered to his horror a haggard, wild-eyed woman holding a terrified man at knifepoint in her bedroom. The man was not her husband; he was selling brooms. The woman’s husband, it turned out, ran out on her six months earlier, whereabouts unknown. No one knew about it because she’d acted as though everything was perfectly normal up until that afternoon when she nearly murdered a stranger. Last Jojo ever heard of it, she was sent up to St. Louis and juiced with enough electroshock therapy to keep the raving to a bare minimum.
People under pressure snapped sometimes. Probably it happened every day.
What did not happen every day was voodoo fetish dolls deciding the gruesome fate of a guy four miles away in a closed hotel room, as Theodora was suggesting to him. That was plain crazy. That was fodder for the juice in St. Louis.
It was bullshit. It was batshit crazy.
Theodora goes wild, he thought.
But then there was the matter of the telephone call. Somebody had rung her up to warn her about the strange people at the Palace, or at least so she claimed. It could very well have been all part and parcel of the same harebrained delusion that led her to believe she accidentally dismembered a man with a magic doll, but Jojo had to admit that there was plenty about those damned roadshow people to make him more than just uncomfortable. They rubbed him wrong from the start, well before one of them got ripped apart by force or forces unknown and seemingly unknowable. The whole damn thing was fishy, and the theatre owner’s beleaguered wife only made it fishier.
“I think I’d like to talk to your husband,” he said at some length. The words tasted astringent from the booze.
“He’s at the theatre,” she said. “He almost always is.”
“Funny thing. That’s where I was heading when I ran into you.”
She arched an eyebrow. Jojo studied her face: sh
e didn’t look a thing like Irene Dunne. She looked more like Ann Southern.
“Let me get a glass of water,” she said, rising from her chair. “I’ll go with you.”
She crossed the kitchen to the sink and Jojo made the beginning sound of protest when something crunched noisily beneath her shoe. She leapt away from it, startled, and they both peered attentively at the small, broken bone on the tiles.
The chair under him toppled over when he jumped up from it. He paid it no mind, lunging for the bone on the floor. He picked it up gingerly and gawped open mouthed for a full minute before whispering, “That ain’t no chicken bone.”
Theodora said, “I’ll get my hat.”
Neither Margie nor Scooter received an invitation. They were not aware of anyone who did. They had only the word of Margie’s friend that the special show even existed, in addition to the earnest hope that it was true. If it wasn’t, they each privately feared their risk would be for nothing—the film they were watching was boring as hell.
Scooter waited for the screen to brighten enough to check his wristwatch, and when he did he saw it was a quarter to ten. Two hours to the fabled midnight show, which was much longer than Motherhood Too Soon could possibly run. He worried about what they could do to kill that much time and remain inside the Palace. It was an eternity to hide out in the men’s room, but he couldn’t think of anything else. He puzzled over the quandary as the film meandered on, minute by uninteresting minute.
Margie let her mind drift, thinking about other, better pictures she had seen on that same screen over the years. The Laurel and Hardy pictures and Our Gang shorts she grew up with stood out, and she tried to replay the best of them in her memory. Alfalfa’s antics were immensely more entertaining than the stuttering and moralizing amateur actors flickering ahead of her, even if they were all only half-remembered.
Scooter nudged her in the ribs with his elbow, leaned in close and whispered, “What do we do when it’s over?”
