by Stacey Longo
Instead, he kicked open Scott and Rich’s cooler to see if they’d brought anything to drink other than beer. They hadn’t. The melting ice, however, was good enough for him. He plunged his head inside and drank until his lips went numb. Sitting there with water dripping from his face, he thought about the marlin. And then he thought about what he’d do if another bit on one of the lines. He surely wouldn’t be able to pull it in on his own. Deciding it best to end his anxiety before it turned into another problem he wasn’t prepared to deal with, Teddy started reeling in the first of the four fishing poles.
He reeled and reeled, winding in what seemed to be miles of line, until the baited hook rose out of the water. But what was hanging on the hook wasn’t the squid Teddy had seen Sharp put on. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at. It was pruned and pale and rather large. Teddy leaned forward to get a better look. There was something familiar about the bait: sun-bleached hair and a matching mustache.
“Holy shit!” Teddy screamed, propelling himself backward. It was Sharp. Sharp’s head was on the hook.
Shaking all over, not wanting to do it, but unable to stop himself because he had to see if what he feared was true, he reeled in the next line and the next one after that.
“No,” he cried at the sight of Uncle Jimmy’s and Scott’s heads hanging at the ends of the monstrous hooks. “No, no, no.”
He knew that if he brought in the fourth line he’d find Rich. He reached for the reel, but let his hands fall away when the blast of an air horn made him jump backward. He turned to see a fishing boat slightly smaller than the Scarlet Rose in the distance.
“Hey! Help!” Teddy screamed, waving his arms in the air. “I need help over here!”
The boat approached. Teddy paced in order to keep himself from jumping overboard in order to escape his horror.
“Please!” Teddy cried when the boat was in reach. As far as he could tell, the only one on board was the man at the helm.
The man pulled his boat right along the Scarlet Rose and tied the two boats together. He pushed Teddy back when Teddy tried to climb over the edge onto the smaller boat.
“Please,” Teddy said again. “Everyone’s dead.”
The man didn’t say a word. To Teddy’s surprise he hopped off his boat and stepped onto the Scarlet Rose. He eyed Teddy oddly, and then frowned at the three heads dangling over the side of the boat.
“You have to help me,” Teddy begged. He let the tears that had been building up inside of him fall freely now.
“You reeled ‘em in?” the man asked.
Teddy nodded through his sobs.
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Help me,” Teddy whined. “Won’t you take me on your boat? Why’d you sail over here if you weren’t going to help?”
“I came to check the lines,” he answered. A crazed look glinted in his eyes.
Teddy whimpered. The man’s words echoed in his head for a moment before he realized what the man was telling him. “You did this?” he gasped.
The man crossed the deck and grabbed a fistful of Sharp’s hair. He turned the head around as though examining it, then let it go with an irritated huff.
“You were here the whole time?” the man asked.
“I was asleep,” Teddy said, his eyes darting toward the cabin. His knees felt like rubber once again. “Why’d you do it?”
The man’s lips went tight and his eyebrows dipped. “I’m not fishing for marlin,” he answered with a growl. “I’m fishing for something else. Something that only feeds on that.” He pointed to the heads.
“What?” Teddy couldn’t help but ask.
“It don’t got a name. But there’s lots of things swimming in these waters that don’t got names.”
As spine-tingling as it sounded, Teddy knew that it was true. He’d learned in school that there were millions of undiscovered and evolving species occupying the oceans.
“What are you going to do with me?” Teddy squeaked.
The man didn’t get a chance to answer before the fourth line went tight and the reel started to squeal.
“Well what do you know,” the man said. A grin spread across his face as he donned the same vest Rich had worn hours earlier.
Teddy stood as far from the man as he could, internally hoping that whatever was on the line would pull the man in the water with it. But whatever it was, it wasn’t nearly as strong as the marlin had been. The man worked for quite some time, the grin never fading from his face, and in the end he pulled something so ghastly from the water that Teddy’s whole body went limp.
The seven-foot thing thrashing at the end of the hook with part of Rich’s cranium crushed between its crooked jaws looked vaguely human, mostly in its eyes. Its skin was brown with black spots. Dozens of jagged flippers and fins jutted off its body, the foremost pair looking like freakish fingers. Its jaws were what made it fearsome. Countless teeth, some needle-thin, others flat and wide like chisels, protruded from its mouth in all directions.
“Like a nightmare, isn’t she?” the man said.
To Teddy a nightmare was exactly what it was - all of it.
The man clubbed the creature in the head six or seven times until it stopped moving.
“What…I don’t…I need…” Teddy stammered. His head wouldn’t stop spinning. He felt the blood drain from his face. His senses were fading. He was starting to faint.
“I’m all out of fresh bait,” were the last muddled words Teddy heard the man say. The last thing he saw were the man’s fingers working to withdraw a blade from his waistband.
With a few simple swipes the man had what he needed to re-cast the line. And just like that, the deck of the Scarlet Rose was as colorful as its name.
About the author:
Unlike most people, Nick Medina goes to sleep each night hoping for bad dreams; they’re the inspiration for most of his work. Nick is a young author from Chicago, Illinois. Since seeking publication in 2009, he has been published in print, online and audio formats by magazines, journals and short story anthologies in the United States and the United Kingdom. To read more of Nick’s work, or to contact him with questions and comments, visit http://sites.google.com/site/nickjmedina/.
The Dollhouse
by Douglas Hackle
Though it was late in the morning, Ben fell back asleep in his bed, his cell phone gripped tightly in one hand. His light sleep was filled with a lucid dream of his best friend Dylan, a lively and jocular Dylan, Dylan the way Dylan had been before his mother died last year.
They were in their clubhouse in their woods. Dylan was undressing at one end of the shed-like room, pulling off his skintight wife beater, smiling at Ben as he did so. Ben stood at the other end, caught between two desires. He wanted to watch Dylan undress, but in his peripheral vision he could see the outline of a face looking in at them through the small window of the clubhouse. Ben wanted to train his eyes on the window and behold that dark, blurry face for what it was, but he was too afraid to look.
Sounding above the din of his parents fighting in the kitchen downstairs, Dylan’s loud banging on the front door jerked Ben awake. He suddenly recalled that Dylan had called him not fifteen minutes ago, said he’d be right over, said it was important.
Didn’t really matter if it was important or not. Anything for Dylan.
Ben groggily rolled out of bed and pulled on yesterday’s pair of skinny jeans, which lay crumpled up on the floor next to his bed smelling richly of his own summer sweat and other people’s cigarette smoke. Trying to shake off the residual uneasiness left over from his dream, Ben left his room, jogged down the steps, opened the front door, stepped out onto the porch barefoot and shirtless. The noise of his parents screaming at each other was blessedly cut off as he slammed the door shut behind him causing the old door to rattle in its warped frame. It was the sound of a door that had been slammed too many times.
“Hey,” Ben said sleepily, squinting against the gray morning.
“Read th
is,” Dylan said. He handed Ben two sheets of paper.
Ben read.
He thought it was a joke at first, something Dylan had typed up himself or at least modified in a lame effort to try and freak him out. It worked. Ben’s blood ran cold when he read the last line, gooseflesh flicking down the nape of his neck. But it would be a frigid day in Hell when he would admit as much.
“Nice try, dick,” Ben said, raising his gaze to meet Dylan’s. But Dylan wasn’t laughing. No smiles either. A tousle of jet-black hair nearly veiled his keen, gray eyes; this morning those fierce eyes shone doubly gray as they reflected the roiling darkness of the thunderstorm that was just moving in across the valley.
It had been stupid for him to think Dylan was goofing around, Ben realized. Dylan didn’t goof around anymore.
Printed from an internet forum, the papers contained a set of instructions on how to make and use voodoo dolls. The instructions were anonymously posted, brief, and fraught with misspellings. Much of the information in the instructions—the use of Spanish moss as stuffing, employing pins of varying colors to achieve different effects, etc.—was the same information that could be found in any number of similar posts on the subject. How-to voodoo doll guidelines were as numerous as anything else on the internet; Ben had looked at many of them himself when he had helped Dylan with his research. But he certainly had not come across this one.
The instructions would have been entirely unremarkable had they not mentioned that for the voodoo doll to work, its maker had to recite the words Hail Papa Gid as part of an incantation ceremony to instill the voodoo doll with energy.
Papa Gid.
As he began to fully realize it was not a practical joke, Ben felt a mounting anger edged with fear. He wasn’t sure if he was angry at Dylan for printing the thing or at the anonymous writer for writing it. But for the moment Ben didn’t care that Dylan was all seriousness, that Dylan was obsessed with anything that was beyond the scope of normal understanding, that Dylan was grieving and dark and morose and needed to be treated tenderly.
And for just a second, he even forgot he was in love with Dylan.
“Bullshit,” Ben said defiantly as he pushed the papers back at his friend, not wanting to touch them anymore.
***
As far back as Ben Hirsch could remember, they had referred to their clubhouse simply as “The Fort.” He, Dylan Rhodes, and Ryan Gilmore had stumbled upon it six summers ago while traipsing through the woodlot that extended for about a quarter mile between the rear parking lot of the local First United Methodist Church and the faded blacktop of Ohio State Route 59. That had been the summer after fifth grade.
The building was pretty damn sturdy if a little tumbledown. Capped with a slightly pitched roof sheathed in a patchwork of weathered shingles and scraps of tarpaper, the Fort was constructed from plywood nailed around a frame of two-by-fours driven deep into the earth. Sitting out there in the middle of the woods without any apparent purpose, the structure had been empty when they found it, planted there just for them it seemed. A gift from the woods itself. And as time slipped by and no one returned to reclaim the place, this fanciful idea seemed more and more like the truth. Even later, when puberty arrived like some strange uninvited ghost, complicating life and squelching innocence, even then the Fort remained a place that was slightly magical.
When they first discovered the building, an imperfect rectangular doorway had already been cut into the west-facing wall. They added a hinged door to the entrance later on. Another aperture of about ten inches square was carved into the structure’s east-facing wall—the Fort’s only window.
Ben was the first to spot the writing on the inside of the wall just below the solitary window: the words “PAPA GID” carved in sharp uppercase slashes. A similarly carved arrow pointed up from the cryptic graffito to the window as if to indicate a framed portrait of Papa Gid hung on the wall in place of the crude window hole, whoever the hell Papa Gid might be.
They had made up stories, of course. Papa Gid—the pig-headed god whose followers had erected a small church dedicated to his worship smack-dab in the middle of the boys’ own stomping grounds, a god who could be summoned to appear at the window of the Fort only through a human sacrifice. Ryan came up with that one. Then there was Papa Gid the warlock, who liked to poke his hideously disfigured face through the window and vomit acid on anyone who would dare invade his house, especially after sundown. Ben made that one up.
Ben had been scared shitless the first time they camped out there. Didn’t matter that he had helped make up those stories himself. He had tossed and turned in his sleeping bag nearly half the night, unable to stop thinking about that damned window. Nevertheless, he had succeeded in resisting the urge to look up at it.
But as the years rolled by, the boys more or less forgot about Papa Gid. Ryan and his family moved away in the eighth grade, and Ben and Dylan gradually outgrew their own ghost stories and games of pretend. The enigmatic name on the wall ended up getting covered up by an X-Men poster first, then later by a Penthouse centerfold. Prior to Dylan showing up at his place a week ago with the voodoo doll instructions, Ben had not even thought of the name Papa Gid in at least a year. Maybe two.
The two now sat opposite one another at the foldout card table that was the centerpiece of the Fort, each sitting in one of the patio chairs they had stolen a few years back. Earlier that afternoon, Dylan had removed the centerfold from the wall so that the etched name and arrow were no longer hidden. Golden, late-afternoon sunlight spilled in through the open door and window, providing the teenagers ample illumination for their task. They didn’t talk much as they worked. Too hot for talking. From the heights of the tall maples and oaks outside, the buzzing chorus of cicadas descended in rising and falling waves of sound that rippled through the sweltering air of the Fort.
His head raised from his work, Ben watched Dylan clumsily wrap strips of cloth around an unfinished voodoo doll. The strips had been cut from one of Ben’s own T-shirts. Dylan was a little ungainly of hand. He had tied two sticks together with the hemp twine well enough, formed a wood cross to function as the skeleton of the Ben-doll. But when it came time to wrap Spanish moss (purchased online for $.99 a bag) around the skeleton to form the bulk of the body, his handiwork went to shit. In his haste, Dylan had made one of the arms freakishly thicker than the other. And the head was too big. Ben watched as Dylan quickly twined the cloth around the doll’s midriff, leaving sloppy tufts of Spanish moss protruding from random spots where he had not bothered to overlap the strips. Elmer’s glue oozed from these wounds like sticky puss.
Ben’s nearly finished voodoo doll, on the other hand, was perfect in its form, in the neat, taut, unbroken continuity of the fabric that enveloped the doll almost like real skin. And not one drop of glue spilled. A likeness of Dylan, this doll’s skin came from one of Dylan’s wife beaters. Using some of the leftover fabric, Ben had employed his natural skill with scissors, needle, and thread to fashion a perfect-fitting jacket for the little effigy, a jacket intended to resemble the dog-eared leather bomber that Dylan wore in the fall and winter. Ben had used a Sharpie to turn the thin, white fabric black.
He wanted to offer to help Dylan with his doll, but he couldn’t. The instructions specified that a person could not physically assist in making a voodoo doll of himself or herself, or else the magic would not work.
Ben made a sidelong glance at the letters carved below the window. He wasn’t scared anymore. During the week, Ben had been unable to find any other references to Papa Gid on the internet outside of those instructions. But he had to assume that the name was associated with voodoo lore since someone had included it in their voodoo doll lesson. Strange to find the name carved on the wall of their clubhouse, sure, but not that strange considering that there was now something from the external world, the world outside of the Fort, to associate with the name. It was not so different that someone writing “Satan Rules!” or some similar phrase on the wall, he reasoned.
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Not that Ben believed any of this twenty-foot-deep horseshit anyway. The whole voodoo doll thing was Dylan’s idea, as were the recent unsuccessful attempts to contact spirits with a Ouija board, the failed séance, the daemon summoning ritual that had resulted in the summoning of nothing but air and bullshit.
The only other place in the universe where that name is written is in your clubhouse, taunted the bleak, self-punishing voice that sometimes popped in his head. For the fiftieth time that week, Ben quickly dismissed the thought before it had time to disturb him.
Dylan looked up from his disheveled voodoo doll, a smoldering Camel Light dangling from the corner of his mouth. Grimacing, Dylan peered down at Ben’s careful, impressive craft-work for a moment, looked at his own shoddy voodoo doll, and then looked up at Ben’s face.
Ben swallowed nervously, waiting for Dylan to say something or look away.
“Dude, you’re such a fag,” Dylan said finally, shaking his head in mock disappointment. “Nice friggin’ jacket, Heidi.”
Dylan resumed laboring over his voodoo doll. Ben exhaled in relief. How many times had Dylan said things like you’re such a fag, dude or don’t be such a pickle kisser to him without Dylan being aware of the great irony he created?
“The directions said we could dress ’em up,” Ben countered, careful not to sound too defensive. “I’m just killin’ time. Waiting for your slow, punk ass to catch up.”
Ben wiped sweat from his forehead. The motion of his hand pushed the hair away from his left eye momentarily, an eye that was always fashionably hidden behind the swoop of his dyed-black angled bangs. Ben wore his standard issue skinny jeans, studded belt, chucks, and slim-fitting black tee. Big mistake—he was being roasted alive in the oven that was the Fort. At the moment, Ben envied Dylan’s signature functionally fashionless attire—sandals, board shorts, sleeveless red athletic tee.
Despite the heat, Ben was secretly enjoying himself, more so than he would ever admit to anyone, especially Dylan. When he was a child he had wanted to play with dolls, but his guardedly conservative parents had forbidden him to do so. Now, in crafting a voodoo doll of his best friend, he realized he still harbored that old desire to play with dolls, even at his sixteen years of age. He believed he still possessed the desire probably because, like his homosexuality itself, the urge had been denied any practice in the world.
