by Tim Curran
And I took it, I sank my teeth into it, God help me, but I did.
Yes, the bait was offered and I bit. I never thought it would bite back.
Okay, board the crazy train with me because here we go. I was so obsessed that I broke into the McBane house. It was one of those tall, rambling old Victorian nightmares up in Edgewater. You lived here long enough, you’ve seen them, no doubt. Big, ass-ugly monstrosities, busy and confusing with towers and gingerbread and wrought-iron fences, all that crazy 19th century shit that makes you think the architects wandered out of a Lewis Carroll book. Popular on Halloween, but just goddamn odd the rest of the year. Anyway, you don’t want to hear about that. Point is, I broke into the McBane house. I jimmied a window in the back and went in. I’m not going to tell you what I saw because I don’t trust myself. I could not have seen what I thought I saw. All I know is that whatever I looked at, it burned my soul to cinders, filled my brain full of ashes that are still blowing around up there. I’m hoping this makes sense, because most days I have a pig of a time stringing together two or three coherent sentences. Well, like I said, I saw things there that turned my brain to jelly. Drove me right over the edge. Not only that, but gave me something of a stroke that paralyzed my left side to the point that I have no feeling there.
Onwards and upwards.
Ronny found me laying there in the upstairs hallway and he got me out of there. I was a wreck. I had pissed myself and my hair was streaked with white. I could not speak. I could barely think. But Ronny carried me out and got me into his old car, took me home. It was a pretty valiant, selfless act on his part, because that act of kindness must have cost him dearly. I’m sure he paid a terrible price for it.
From who? Well, I’m not ready to go there just yet.
The McBanes. Quite a bunch. Just as I researched Ronny and his dummy, I researched the McBane clan. Why? Because something told me his family history was pertinent. At least, I like to tell myself that. The truth is, people, yours truly is what is known as a compulsive-obsessive. I’ve always been that way. When I get into something, I just don’t get my feet wet, I dive right in and touch bottom. And this time, well I touched bottom, all right.
Here goes. The McBanes. Well, you know how some people say a house has a history if there has been some dark events in its past? Well, the McBanes are a family with a history. You can trace them right back to Medieval Scotland where they were hell on wheels and, yes, I do mean that literally. The McBane’s closet is full of skeletons and the problem is, unless you slam that door real quick, they keep rattling out. You see, the McBanes have a rich and colorful history replete with pirates and bootleggers, slavers and murderers, executed criminals and more than a few 18th century graverobbers of the Burke and Hare ilk. But, to balance things out, branches of the McBanes have also produced clergymen, politicians, and decorated soldiers. There was even a 20th century McBane who became something of a soda pop baron in the UK.
But we’re not interested in those people.
We’re interested here in the McBanes as witches.
Yes, you heard me right: witches. As in black cats and broomsticks. For some of the earliest references to the clan involve accusations of sorcery, necromancy, and the conjuring of poltergeists. Most of it is pretty sketchy, but during the infamous North Berwick witch trials of 1590, the McBanes became very popular. The entire clan was indicted by the state for a bevy of unbelievable, awful crimes against “God and man.” Some of the charges are as follows: calling plagues of rats into the city; causing fields to go fallow; having commerce with demonic familiars; calling up the spirits of the dead and putting them to nefarious uses; the making of waxen conjure dolls; the selling of “ungodly, profane” charms and philters; the defiling of graves to obtain bones and corpse flesh from which they supposedly constructed awful little puppets or dolls which they sold to locals for the uses of revenge and murder. Well, you get the picture. They were accused of calling up storms and spreading disease and pestilence, all kinds of things. And not just the adults, either. For the McBane children were named as well.
Now, it is well-known historically that Scotland is second only in barbarity to Germany for the sadism of its witch trials. Most of this was accomplished under the auspices of the Presbyterian clergy and was considered savage even for that savage time. Well, back to the McBanes. The children were apparently shuttled off to monasteries and the like, but the adults were tortured viciously. The Spanish Boot and Witch’s Bridle, Caspie claws and thumbscrews, the ordeal of the pins and pincers. The entire family was “put to the question” as they said back then. In the end, some eight members of the clan were burned alive, two others strangled and then burned, and a few more simply sent to prison.
What the hell does this have to do with anything?
I’m getting there. Just understand that the McBanes have been mixed up in this business for centuries, whether real or imagined. A 17th century source claimed that the family was “cursed of God” and “contaminated by a degenerate heredity” and so forth. Earlier references mention that the McBane children, at birth, were of a “most loathsome appearance, displeasing to the eye.” Was this some possible hint to their origins? This “look” was known as the “McBane taint.” By their first birthday, the children had outgrown that unwholesome appearance…but it makes you wonder if there was some sort of unspeakable interbreeding in the family’s past.
Now, let’s jump to the present. Let’s imagine this “foul seed” being carried from generation to generation. Now, that night Ronny brought me home, a drooling wreck, he told me many things and I think he told me them as sort of a warning of what was to come. He told me that his father was not a necromancer like his father and his father’s father. He had no interest in such arcane matters as harvesting the spirits of the dead, which had been a family tradition for too long to remember. When Ronny’s grandfather died (Ronny surmised) his father burned all of his old books and diaries, to cleanse the family once and for all of that morbid stain.
But he didn’t get everything.
Sometime later, he took his own life. And that, I think, was the catalyst for Ronny’s domineering, demented mother to go on her rampage. You can check the criminal records on that. Suffice to say, the three McBane children, without their father’s protection, were brutalized and abused by their mother. They were whipped, locked in closets for days on end, burned with crosses (this after their mother found Jesus), put on starvation rations, beaten, lashed…well, you can full imagine the rest. And the point? Because, yes, in their mother’s violent dementia there certainly was a point. And that was because the children were McBanes and carried what she called “the filthy, godless stigma” of their cursed blood within them. They were filled with devils and said devils had to be purged, forever and Amen. The end result was that Ronny was the only survivor. His sister suffocated (supposedly) when she was three. His brother was strangled (accidentally) with a light cord.
And this left only distraught, alienated, unbalanced Ronny who liked to talk to dolls, to create personalities for them. When he was a teenager, Ronny discovered some family heirlooms up in the attic (as he was not allowed to leave the house) his father had not burned. One of them was a notebook kept by his grandfather. I will not say the rest of what he told me. Maybe I can’t say it. Now, who wouldn’t want their dead loved ones returned to them? What kid of Ronny’s age and mental aberration wouldn’t consider following extreme paths when a notebook showed him the way? Dear Christ, who wouldn’t have done what he did? Torn up by grief, alone and frightened and out of his mind? Who wouldn’t have? And especially a disturbed boy like Ronny.
When Ronny carried me up to my apartment that night, he said something to me. He told me there were blasphemies in that notebook, horrible, diabolical methods for doing things unthinkable to a sane mind. That to practice necromancy was to rip asunder a barrier that was not meant to be crossed. For your loved ones (their souls) were unreachable, but that there were other things out there, h
ideous things, malign and decayed intelligences waiting to be born, to be called down from the black spaces beyond. And these things…they were hollow and wicked, unborn and evil…yes, things, shades, shadows that were never meant by the Creator to inhabit flesh and blood, things that were never meant to be born.
Crazy? Yes, you think it, too, and I don’t blame you. Then again, I don’t care and why should I? You haven’t seen what I’ve seen and you haven’t felt what I’ve felt. Your mind, your soul has not been defiled by these malignant intellects. My number is almost up and I welcome death, it’s better than what I live with day in and day out, this madness. You are not haunted by a dummy possessed of infinite diabolic darkness. You do not wake to find that it has chewed the flesh from your numb leg. You do not feel it biting you in the dead of night. You do not see that grotesque, macabre corpse-puppet drifting outside your fourth story window, tapping at the glass, scratching it with those bony fingers. You don’t have to hear it creeping beneath your bed or calling your name from the closet. And you don’t know what it’s like when it comes, not alone, but with another…a cackling, squeaking pestilent thing with sharp teeth and a lurid baby-doll face.
I hope you never have to find out.
But if you do, if you are named as I have been named by that horrible dummy, then do what I should have done right from the first: burn the McBanes out. Burn that house and let the fire destroy everything inside. It will be a cleansing and a welcome relief for Ronny McBane who has suffered for his sins again and again. A purging. But whatever you do, stay out of the attic. Don’t go up there like I did. Don’t make that fatal mistake.
The letter ended there.
It was enough. What more did Kitty really need now for her charter membership in the Lunatics of the Month Club? It was all there. A perfect and oddly seamless madness like a glittering garment tossed aside, just waiting to be picked up and worn.
The temptation to feel it against her skin, leeching her mind of life and light, was almost too much. And still, that slightly mangled and mutilated voice called reason was calling out to her from some dung heap at the bottom of her psyche and it was telling her to go slow, for other than a few very impressive parlor tricks with a ventriloquist dummy, she had utterly no evidence to go on here. Nothing but hearsay, wild tales, unconfirmed facts gathered by a somewhat shady private detective, and a letter from a madman.
And was that enough?
I have one more thing, she thought in her desperation. I have a dream I had last night that I feel was not a dream at all but something else. Maybe not an actual physical rape, but definitely a psychic and spiritual rape. I have that. And I can’t dismiss it or get past it.
Still, she wasn’t 100% convinced, but she was so close to that yawning ebon gulf of overwhelming, irresistible superstitious acceptance that a good breeze could have knocked her ass over the brink.
I think, she thought then, I think that, yes, I believe. It’s crazy, but I really do.
And maybe it wasn’t the evidence she had, but something indefinable. Some esoteric, almost mystical sense of acceptance. Some race memory perhaps that recognized the signs, the smells, the sights, and recalled them, told her in no uncertain terms that, yes, this is real, and you’d better watch your step, girl, for here be dragons. Here be things you cannot fathom nor hold in the palm of your hand, but things that can hold you, crush you, kill you quicker than a knife across the jugular. For there was certainly an undercurrent here and whatever it was, it had already made up her mind for her.
Ronny McBane was not just a ventriloquist.
And Piggy? He was a dummy like an Egyptian mummy is a hand-puppet.
So, with all that in mind, there really was no way to avoid what came next.
13
She had barely finished reading the letter and absorbing all it had to say when her cell phone rang. She answered it, almost hesitantly, grateful to be able to talk with another sane, reasonable person, but terrified that she might hear the sound of teeth chattering when she answered it.
But it was Danny Paul Regis. “Charlie Bascomb’s dead,” he said.
Kitty sat there on the edge of the bed, staring numbly at a print on the wall of some peasant boy balancing a bowl of fruit atop his head. She felt panic seize her, squeezing her throat to a pinhole, her heart galloping in her chest like it was trying to burst free and run. Her hand shook so violently she could barely hang onto the phone.
“Kitty?” Regis said. “Kitty? Are you all right?”
She breathed in and out, forcing herself to mellow incrementally. If she got this wigged out over some bad news, how the hell did she think she’d be able to handle the McBane clan when the time came for—
“Kitty?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “A bit of a shock, that’s all. What happened?”
“Suicide.”
She almost started laughing. She did not think suicide was in the least bit amusing, but suicide? Really? Really? Is that what the police had come up with? Well, of course they did. They knew nothing of the McBanes and the foul seed of evil they carried within them. They knew nothing of what Ronny had done out of desperation and madness. They didn’t know what he had called back from beyond the pale of the grave.
“He jumped out of his apartment window, apparently. Eight stories. Not much left when he hit, if you know what I mean.”
“He jumped, eh?”
“Yes.”
“I guess the question is,” she said, “did he really jump or was he thrown out the window or compelled to take a swan dive?”
“Kitty…what the hell are you talking about? You’re not making sense.”
“Oh, I think for the first time in these many weeks I’m finally making perfect sense.”
Regis was no fool. There was no need to spell things out for him. He understood what she was thinking because he had thought many of the same things himself and he knew exactly what sort of dark paths it would lead you down. “You think Ronny did it. Or, better, you think Piggy did.”
“Don’t you.”
“That’s not rational.”
She chuckled. “I have a feeling there are things in this world that are not strictly rational by our definition, Mr. Regis. I think they’re rare, but they do exist. And now and again some very unlucky idiot like yours truly gets a glimpse of them.” She paused a second, trying to catch her breath which was coming a little fast, she realized, making her sound just a bit less than rational. “And you know what happens to these idiots? They either become agoraphobic nutbags that are so terrified of the world that they’re afraid to leave their houses or they end up in intensive therapy or in padded rooms where they’re fed a steady diet of lithium and thorazine for the rest of their tortured, pathetic lives. Then there’s the other variety. The types that are not about to bow under. Their own fear and anxiety pisses them off to the extent that they fight, they track their fear to its source and destroy it before it destroys them.”
Regis sighed. “And I guess you’re in the latter category?”
“Yes. And that’s why I’m going to the McBane house.”
“Kitty, listen to me. That’s dangerous as hell. If even half of this shit is true then you’re walking into a snake pit. Even if this witchcraft shit is total B.S., Ronny McBane might be psychotic.”
“And I’m going to find out.”
“Let me go with you.”
“No. You’ve done enough. Now it’s up to me. I’m the one who’s been wronged and that means I’m the one who has to put things to right.”
14
Bathed in the glow of the full moon above, Kitty knocked for some time before the door opened.
She stood on the sagging, expansive porch of the McBane house and knocked and knocked. The place was pretty much as she envisioned: very old and decrepit, shingles blown loose and siding flapping, windows boarded-up and doorways warped.
She stood looking up at the ramshackle monstrosity, feeling the poison bleeding from the foundation. This
was not a house, this was a casket, something yanked from moldering gums like a rotten tooth. It was too tall and too narrow, a leaning oblong rectangle cut from night. There were windows up there, shadow-riven cavities that refused moonlight and starlight and anything bright or revealing. A house of mystery and dank secret and no light dared reveal the dark glory of this high standing tomb.
In one pocket of her leather jacket was a flashlight, in the other her little .32 automatic. She knew how to use it. She’d been through a defensive firearms course and she had complete conviction that she would not hesitate pulling the trigger if it came down to it.
The door finally opened a crack…and just when Kitty was thinking—gratefully—that maybe nobody was home. The door opened an inch, two, no more than that and she saw a sliver of Ronny McBane’s face, one wide, unblinking eye.
“You,” he said, as if she were some ancestor that had wandered from its crypt to stand threadbare at the threshold. “What do you want here…you can’t be here. Just go away…you don’t belong here.”
And she knew that, but she said, “We need to talk, Mr. McBane. It won’t take long.”
He looked behind him. “Just go away…please just go away.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, her steadfast resolve still holding even though her guts were beginning to feel warm and soft.
