by Shock Totem
“Fine.” John ran his fingers through what remained of his hair. He took a deep breath. “This family came in to see the show. This was around nine o’clock. The midway had been dead all night. Deserted. The place looked like a ghost town.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Not anymore. Used to be that the carnival coming to town was like a visit from the president. Everybody came out to see it. We had to beat them off with a stick.”
“I remember going with my dad when I was a kid.”
“See what I mean. And I bet you loved it.”
The detective nodded, almost allowing himself to smile.
John went on. “Nowadays, nobody thinks of the carnival. We’re an afterthought. We have to beg small towns like yours for a permit. Everybody wants to go to the big amusement parks. Six Flags or Kings Island. Overpriced and overcrowded, but everybody wants to go there. Either there or the movie theatre. All these special effects and computer animation, all the bells and whistles. There’s nothing we can do here that would top that. We don’t have any car crashes or roller coasters that go upside down. That’s what was so great about Jesse. I thought he could be the ticket to draw people in, make us some money again.” John rubbed his left hand over the knuckles of his right. “I was kind of counting on him setting me up to retire. With my hands the way they are…it was kind of a last chance for me. You know?”
The detective nodded, encouraging John to continue.
“Like I said, this family comes in around nine. Typical-looking people. Two parents, two kids. A boy and a girl about eight and ten. They pay their money and say they want to see the show. I’m happier than a fly in shit because we need the money, and word of mouth still means something in a little town like this. We still have a few days left here, so I figure maybe we can make it worth our while if Jesse gives them one good show. You know, really wows them.”
“Makes sense.”
“He starts out doing his usual routine. Water into wine. The flower blooming. I’m watching from the wings the whole time, and I can tell the family isn’t impressed. The dad’s kind of rolling his eyes and muttering, and the boy starts saying that he thinks the show is boring. Back in my day, we knew something about manners. So Jesse does a few more tricks, but they keep getting more restless, and finally the dad looks at me and says, ‘Is this all you got?’ I was about to tell him what I thought of him and his family. I may need the money, but that doesn’t mean somebody can talk to me like I’m a slave. But Jesse spoke up and said, ‘I’ve got something for you that’s worth the price of admission.’”
“Did you know what he meant by that?”
“No, sir. But we made eye contact, he and I, and he gave me this look that kind of said, ‘Trust me.’ So I just nodded back, letting him know that it was okay to go on. See, this is really as much my fault as it is anybody else’s. I encouraged him to do it. I should have thrown those people out on their ear.”
“Anyway, Mr. Bryant. The facts.”
“Jesse asks the kid, the little boy, if he’d like to be in a trick. The boy tells him no in a real snotty voice. But the little girl, the sister, she speaks up and says she’d like to be in a trick. So Jesse says ‘Okay’ and brings her up onto the little stage with him. He gets her to lay down on this little wooden bench and tells her to close her eyes. ‘Just relax,’ he says. ‘This won’t hurt at all.’”
“Had you seen this trick before?”
“Never. I had no idea what he was doing. But Jesse is real gentle so I figured it was just something new he was working up. He turns to the family, to the little boy, and asks him to count to three. First the little brat acts like he doesn’t want to count, but Jesse asks him to do it again, and finally the kid counts. When he gets to three, Jesse waves his hand over the little girl’s face and steps back.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. At least not that I could tell right away. The little girl was just laying there with her eyes closed, and the family’s sitting there looking, waiting for something to happen. Finally the little boy, the little shit, gets up and gets real close to his sister. He sticks his face right up to her, almost like he wanted to sniff her or something. ‘She’s dead,’ he finally says. ‘Look Mommy, Sissy’s dead. She’s not breathing.’ I figured the kid was just messing around, being obnoxious, but the parents get up and look, and so I went in for a closer look, and sure enough, it looks like the girl isn’t breathing. Her chest is still, her nose silent. Right away, the mother starts panicking. ‘What have you done to my baby?’ she screams, and the father grabs the girl up and puts his ear against her chest. The little boy starts crying, so I look to Jesse, but he’s just standing there with a sort of smug, satisfied look on his face. He looked like a guy with a secret.”
“Do you think the girl really was dead?”
“Looked like it to me. I’m sure you’ve seen a dead person before. No matter how natural they look, there’s that sense of absence, a feeling that something really has departed that body and left just the shell behind.”
“And that’s what you felt about the girl?”
“Absolutely. I really thought she was dead.”
“What did you do?”
“There was a lot of screaming and crying. The father told me to call 911, but we don’t have a phone out there on the midway. I turned to Jesse and told him he better damn well do something and fast. First, he just looked at me like he wasn’t going to move. But then he nodded. ‘She’s not dead, she’s just asleep,’ he says. Then he holds out his hand again, above the girl’s head, and he says, ‘Little girl, wake up!’ He used that same commanding voice, the one he used on those hayseeds that night, and sure enough, the little girl opened her eyes like she was just waking up from a nap.”
“And she was fine?”
“Right as rain.”
“And then what?”
“Well, the family took off, the dad still carrying the little girl in his arms. They were saying they were going to take the girl to the hospital and call the police, and we’d all be sorry we ever met them. I knew we were in deep this time, and I knew I couldn’t protect Jesse. I know what small towns are like and small town cops. No offense.”
The detective didn’t respond, so John went on.
“I told Jesse he had to go, that if he started right then he might make it out of town before trouble came down on him. I don’t know what he could be charged with, but I knew nothing good would come of it. A long-haired, bearded carnival worker doesn’t stand a chance against a respectable all-American family with a couple of scared kids. So he packed his gear and took off in just a few minutes.”
“Do you know where he was heading?”
“He didn’t say. He just walked toward the highway.”
“We’ve got his description out all over the county. There’s a good chance we’ll bring him in.”
“If you do, can I see him?”
“I doubt it. He’s in a lot of trouble.” The detective closed his notebook and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket. “Is there anything else, Mr. Bryant? Anything else that comes to mind?”
John cleared his throat.
“Jesse did say something pretty strange once. He said a lot of strange stuff, but this one just didn’t make sense. I couldn’t make it fit with everything else he said.”
“What’s that?”
“We were talking about the state of the world. The real world, not the carny world. He was going on about the poor and the downtrodden, the rich getting richer and the poor always getting left behind. He said he was put on this earth to help those kinds of people. Not he thought he was put on this earth to help them, like some people might say. Jesse said he was put on this earth to help them. I made a joke out of it, told him if he wanted to help the poor and the downtrodden he came to the right place. He was surrounded by them, working the carnival circuit. He didn’t laugh, though. He looked real serious.”
“And that’s the strange thing he said?
” The detective sounded impatient.
“No, no. I want to get this right.” John bit his lip, concentrating. “I know. He said, ‘All of these earthly problems will pass upon my return to my father’s house.’ Isn’t that strange?”
“You said his parents were dead.”
“I know. And who talks that way anyway? ‘Upon my return to my father’s house.’ My old man was a drunk. He did the world a favor when he died.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“He just shook his head and clammed up. He did that sometimes, acted like there were places inside him he didn’t want to talk about. I can understand that. A guy’s got to have some privacy.”
“Maybe he meant his biological father. You said he was adopted.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” John nodded. “But what if all this stuff, all these things Jesse can do, what if it means something else? What if he’s somebody really special, somebody we should pay attention to?”
The detective stood up. He crumpled the Styrofoam cup and tossed it toward the garbage can. He missed.
“He’s probably just another nut job,” the detective said. “The world’s full of them. My advice would be to get back to work and forget about this guy. He’s bad news.”
John stood up. He walked to the door, and the detective held it open for him.
“You’re probably right,” John said.
“I usually am.”
John walked out and the detective followed him, letting the door close behind them.
David Jack Bell is the author of two novels—The Condemned and The Girl in the Woods—and his short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Cemetery Dance, Western Humanities Review, and Backwards City Review. He is an assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University and can be reached through his website www.davidjackbell.com.
HOWLING THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
The stories behind the stories.
“The Rat Burner”
Unlike a natural spring, “The Rat Burner” arose as a churn of several different sources, which makes it more like a sewer, I suppose.
The first was a full-blown conversation—which eventually became the conversation behind the Black Door—that jumped into my head while on a long road trip. The second was the image of the rat burner himself. One day, I pictured a guy shoveling heaps of rat corpses into a furnace, which led me to think about why this guy would need to do a thing like that, and what kind of city that guy would live in, which then led to the next source of inspiration...
Where I live people drive around with Keep Austin Weird bumper stickers. I thought What if Austin really was weird? What if it was the kind of place that had things like Rat Burners, Incantronic Witches, and Guides that lead you into alleys that end in Black Doors?
More Weird Austin tales are in the works.
–Ricardo Bare
“Sole Survivor”
The key to any flash fiction is surprise. What can I say? With "Sole Survivor" I simply put my protagonist in a very tight situation and wondered how he would get out. Then I wondered how he got in there in the first place. The story quickly developed from there. A short explanation for a very short story. Any more would be telling.
–Kurt Newton
“Sweepers”
I wrote “Sweepers” for a flash contest in my writing group with the theme “Flash Flood.” But the genesis of the idea was something I’d had in my head for a long time before that: a postcard-beautiful picture of a man leaning over the edge of a skyscraper roof, looking into water he could almost touch and seeing a brightly-colored mermaid. Obviously that’s not how the story turned out. It wouldn’t have been right for the tone up to that point.
Aside from that, I guess I’ve always loved the idea of what kind of ruins modern society would leave when we’re stripped down to nothing but our steel bones and trash, either from abandonment like the Anasazi, or conquest and war like the Mayans, or outright catastrophic disaster like Pompeii. It’s also fascinating to me how people seem to react—callously, absently, inconsistently, and unexpectedly—to try to comprehend tragedy on a massive scale.
–Leslianne Wilder
“The Rainbow Serpent”
The events depicted in “The Rainbow Serpent” are more or less all true, and happened to me a few years back. Except that there was no gun, no girl, and no serpent. But the stuff about stepping aboard a bus full of deliriously cheerful singing and clapping passengers, driven by a harmonica-playing bus driver with a grin like a Cheshire cat? Yeah, that did happen, and the memory stuck with me.
Sometime later I was taking a six-hour train trip with nothing to occupy me but a few unread tales in a secondhand anthology of horror stories. I flew through the book and, still in the mood for the macabre and the grisly, pulled out my notebook and penned my own.
Now, that first draft was rough, and it was lacking a lot—my protagonist was weak, and the mythic aspects were underdeveloped—but the story skeleton, and the guts, and the stomach acids, they were all there. A stack of redrafts, some pain, and some personal growth as a writer later, and here we are.
–Vincent Pendergast
“Pretty Little Ghouls”
The inspiration for “Pretty Little Ghouls” was a photograph I found online of a daisy poking proudly from between grey paving slabs. The image actually inspired two stories—the other will be appearing later this year in the Triangulation anthology. As a consequence, I believe I shall put my feet up and allow the daisies to grow wild in my garden this summer.
–Cate Gardner
“Messages from Valerie Polichar”
“Messages from Valerie Polichar” wasn’t an intended collaboration. It wasn’t even an intended story. Valerie Polichar is a real person, the editor of The Grasslimb Journal in San Diego. Grá came across the opening line from her status message on Facebook (where else?). He challenged himself and Sarah to each write a story from the prompt.
The two flash pieces meshed together surprisingly well. They took the best bits from each, jumbled them up and somehow found a plot in there.
One person wrote the next scene, sent it to the other, who revised and wrote the scene after that, and after that...
The whole story was completed—plus several rounds of revisions—in one night. Valerie gave her blessing on the project, enjoying the Charlie Kaufman-like juxtaposition of just a little reality and a whole lot of fantasy.
They’re looking forward to our next collaboration.
–Grá Linnaea & Sarah Dunn
“Return from Dust”
As a technologist and software architect, I spend a lot of time working with technology. I spend even more time, however, thinking about technology and the way it interacts with our lives, and the ways we can use it to make our lives easier, more comfortable, better.
I have been a longtime fan of William Gibson and the cyberpunk movement and have always been quite fascinated by the ideas expressed in them. Some of what was once pure science fiction, particularly in the realm of cybernetics and mind-computer integration, is now becoming possible, slowly but surely.
“Return from Dust” germinated from the idea of the transition point. Transition points are always fascinating, both in life and in fiction, but most cyberpunk work treated cybernetics matter-of-factly. They were stable, well-known technologies by the time the stories start. In my day job I have had front row seats to many examples of how technology can go awry, despite our best efforts and intentions. How horrific, then, could those early experiments with cyberpunk-style human enhancement efforts be?
–Nick Bronson
“Leave Me the Way I was Found”
“Leave Me the Way I was Found” is one of those stories that came together fairly quickly. Before it was accepted by Shock Totem, the story was written to be included in Cover Stories: A Euphictional Anthology, a book I’ve been putting together with nine other writers for a 2010 release. Euphiction is when you take a song, use the song title or a song lyric as th
e title of your story, and then create a fictional “cover” in less than a thousand words. For the project, I chose ten (now eleven) songs from the Walkmen’s You & Me, and “Leave Me the Way I was Found” is a lyric from the song “Long Time Ahead of Us.”
I’ve always had a fascination with H.P. Lovecraft, especially his more unnamable creations; the things the brain is simply unable to process without jeopardizing its very sanity. With that in mind, I considered the possibility of a Lovecraftian horror and how if such a thing existed today, it would inevitably go viral. And “Leave Me the Way I was Found” considers what happens next.
Writing the story as if it were an academic article was just another way to keep the reader distant from the horror, because as Lovecraft understood so clearly, there’s no way to do it justice unless you keep it just out of sight. This is one of those details I love about Lovecraft, where he’ll spend paragraphs describing walls and bookshelves, but when it comes to the creatures, he dismisses them with words like indescribable. Anyway, this is my attempt at telling a Lovecraft story by way of being inspired by a song lyric, a piece I’m extremely proud of.
This story is dedicated to my father, who was wonderful enough to read me Lovecraft stories for bedtime when I was a child.
–Christian A. Dumais
“Upon My Return”
Like a lot of horror writers, I’m fascinated by carnivals. When I was a kid, I went to the annual Harvest Home Fair on the west side of Cincinnati, Ohio. There was nothing fancy there, nothing that could measure up to the huge rides at amusement parks or the CGI in the movies. But I loved the atmosphere—the sights, the sounds, the smells. The low-tech rides and simple games and cheap prizes. I’m as addicted to technology as anyone else, but haven’t we lost something with our dependence on it? And would we recognize something wonderful if it happened right before our eyes?
