Darkness Creeping: Twenty Twisted Tales

by Neal Shusterman

  As for this particular story, it’s true. Sort of. It was inspired by my son Jarrod’s root canal—a process that was more painful for him than it should have been because the tag-team pair of endodontists couldn’t get him numb, but they kept drilling anyway. They were eeeeeeevil. I promised Jarrod that I would write a story about his root canal, and who better to tell that story than Ralphy Sherman?

  RALPHY SHERMAN’S ROOT CANAL

  You probably won’t believe this, but I swear it’s true. It all started with a toothache. It was the kind of toothache you get after eating too much candy on Halloween night, not brushing your teeth for like a million years, and then going to sleep with entire chunks of taffy wedged in the valleys of your molars like snow in the Alps.

  Okay, I’ll admit that dental hygiene is not my personal strength. For a while last year, I did actually enjoy brushing my teeth when we had a nanny who bought licorice-flavored toothpaste—but unfortunately my sister, Roxy, and I scared her off. The replacement nanny refused to spring for the licorice stuff, because it was so expensive. Instead she bought this industrial dental solvent that tasted like toilet-bowl cleaner (don’t ask me how I know what toilet-bowl cleaner tastes like—it’s a memory best forgotten). Anyway, one taste of the new stuff and my brushing days were over.

  Then came the toothache.

  It was just small at first. A little irritation. It wasn’t until a few days later that I noticed the hole. I didn’t see it—I felt it. I mean, your tongue knows the feel of your own teeth the way your eyes know the look of your room. If there’s a single thing out of place, you know it.

  From my tongue’s perspective, this wasn’t just a cavity, it was a sinkhole of epic proportions, and my tongue kept poking and exploring it of its own free will, with no orders from me. After a few weeks, the ache became a throb, and my tongue could no longer find the bottom of the hole.

  Then I bit into a Now-R-Never.

  Now-R-Nevers are these little square, almost-but-not-quite-chewable candies, imported from England. I believe they were invented by a secret society of British dentists back in the murky 1800s, when people were dying in the streets, and Charles Dickens was writing about dirty malnourished children with bad teeth. The bad teeth were because of the Now-R-Nevers, and for more than a hundred years, the dental industry has thrived thanks in no small part to this evil—but amazingly good-tasting—candy.

  I knew from the moment I sank my teeth into the vicious little chew that there was a problem. It molded itself around my tooth, and pushed into the cavity until it hit something. Something deep. Something painful. Shock waves of agony pulsated through every inch of my body, radiating out of my fingertips. I reached into my mouth and attempted to dislodge the chew. It took a good ten minutes picking at it until it finally began to release its grip on my tooth. All the while, the pain rebounded through me like a Super Ball bouncing over all the synapses of my nervous system. Fortunately my father, who is often forced to endure pain on his many top secret missions, taught Roxy and me the fine Himalayan art of Kuri-Na—which is the mental control over pain. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at it, and was screaming my guts out.

  Roxy came downstairs with Püshpa, our current nanny, and they both watched with mild interest as I writhed on the floor like a demon child in the midst of an exorcism. Finally I pulled the Now-R-Never off, with a deep popping noise. As I lay there catching my breath, Püshpa leaned over me and gave me her cold eye of examination.

  “Please to open your mouth,” she said. Püshpa did not speak English all that well. She was from a small Eastern European country that no longer existed, but might exist again in a month or so, she hoped.

  I opened my mouth, and Püshpa backed away, crossed herself, and made some gestures to ward off evil spirits. “You have bad hemorrhoid ache,” Püshpa said. “You brush like good Jell-O-mold, your hemorrhoids be all clean and healthy.”

  To the untrained ear, this might make no sense, but it does to us. You see, Roxy and I decided that we would teach Püshpa English, but decided to teach it to her wrong. Roxy keeps an entire “Püshpeese” database in her computer so we can be consistent.

  “Ha! It serves you left!” Püshpa said.

  “Don’t be infective to Ralphy,” Roxy told her. “He’s in a lot of champagne.”

  Roxy took a glance in my mouth, too, and raised her eyebrows in thought. “Ooh! Can I do my science-fair project on your tooth?”

  I wasn’t too thrilled about the idea, as it would require me to sit at the science fair for three hours with my mouth open, but I owed Roxy big, from the time I crossbred her ChiaPet with a Venus flytrap, and it ate all the neighborhood cats.

  Püshpa picked up the yellow pages, and tried to find me a fishmonger (which was Püshpeese for “dentist”). I proceeded to take elephant doses of Tylenol, and Roxy happily prepared her science project. She labeled her experiment “A Fistful of Molars” and made up a whole bunch of impressive but confusing graphs on the correlation between tooth decay and birth order in Western civilization.

  The music may have started before the night of the science fair, but I had never noticed it before, since I had never held my mouth open long enough to hear it.

  It was actually some little kid who heard it first. As I sat there with my mouth hanging open, next to Roxy’s graphs and PowerPoint presentation, a six-year-old holding an I-heart-science balloon in one hand, and picking his nose with the other, turned to his mother and said, “Mommy, why is that boy singing?”

  I wasn’t singing, of course, and I looked at him like he was nuts.

  His mother glanced at me with the resigned indifference of a parent forced to endure a child with an overactive but uninteresting imagination. “I’m sure it’s coming from somewhere else, Jimmy.”

  “No!” Little Jimmy pointed his nose-finger dangerously close to my open mouth. “It’s coming from there!”

  I heard it now, too. It was a distant tinny voice. I thought it was from one of the other projects, but now I could feel the vibration in my jaw. The kid was right! The singing was coming from my cavity. I closed my mouth and the voice went away. I opened my mouth and the voice came back. It was kind of like opening and closing a music box.

  The kid laughed. “Do it again! Do it again!”

  By now a couple of other people had stopped to observe the “Fistful of Molars” exhibit.

  “I know that song!” said one of the passing fathers. “That’s ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ by Patsy Cline. It was my ex-wife’s favorite song!” He leaned closer to listen.

  Roxy was in heaven. “This is great!” She grabbed a piece of paper and a Sharpie, and relabeled her science project “The Amazing Human Radio.”

  I should point out here that it’s not all that uncommon for dental work to pick up radio signals, and act as a receiver. In fact, on America’s Lamest Criminals,there was this guy whose retainer picked up the police frequency, so he always knew how close the police were to the convenience store he was robbing. He got arrested the day he forgot his retainer at home.

  A crowd began to gather around me. “Do you take requests?” one woman asked, and everyone laughed.

  “My science project is in advanced biotechnology,” Roxy told everyone, making it up as she went along. “Soon things like iPods and earphones will be obsolete, because this new technology will deliver music right inside your skull.”

  She talked on and on about it, but I couldn’t focus on her anymore, because the throbbing in my mouth was becoming sharper and sharper with the beat of every song.

  When we got home, Dad was there. He had just returned from some top secret something or other, and was home long enough to change clothes and shower before his next assignment. He took one look in my mouth, declared it a federal disaster area, and demanded Püshpa take me to see a dentist, which confused her since to the best of her knowledge, a dentist had something to do with auto repair.

  Dentists and I never got along. In fact, they usually requested that I ne
ver come back after the first appointment. I think this has something to do with my reflexes. See, I have this natural reflex that causes me to bite down with amazing force when someone puts something in my mouth, like, oh, say, a finger. Even though fingers can be surgically reattached these days, dentists did not appreciate the inconvenience, and I was listed on the American Dental Association Web site as Public Enemy number two. (You don’t want to know what Public Enemy number one did.)

  “Is because you are bad little Jell-O-mold, Ralphy” Püshpa told me, after the tenth dentist hung up on her. “If I were a fishmonger, I wouldn’t help you either.”

  “Never mind, Püshpa. Just pick up the eggplant and call another.”

  It took days for us to find a dentist that would have anything to do with me. We finally found one willing to give me a phone consultation—but even then he sounded worried as he spoke to me, as if my voice might leap over the phone and gnaw off his ear.

  “Tell me what you are experiencing,” he asked.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” I told him.

  “Yes. Well. Sounds like it’s beyond my field of expertise. What you need is an endodontist.”

  Throughout the conversation, he kept telling me to turn down the radio, and I couldn’t get him to understand that the music in my mouth was part of the problem. He hung up in frustration, but not before giving us the phone number of an endodontist who specialized in difficult cases.

  As I understood, an endodontist was like a superdentist who ended the tireless march of oral bacteria like a can of Raid killed ants. Hence the title “End-o-dontist.”

  “Open up, let’s see how bad it’s gotten,” Roxy said as soon as I got off the phone. I opened my mouth, and she peered inside. “Hmm,” she said. “Smells like teen spirit.”

  I took a whiff of my underarms. I’m more of an Old Spice man myself.

  “No, the song,” she said. “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’—you know? Nirvana? Kurt Cobain?”

  “Oh. Oh, right.”

  “Here we are now, entertain us,” sang Kurt.

  “It sounds like an acoustic version,” said Roxy—which was fine with me, because songs with lots of bass were more painful.

  Roxy listened for a few moments more. “I didn’t know they recorded an acoustic version,” she said. “Interesting . . . ”

  The endodontic office was at the edge of the community beyond which were barren hills where only coyotes dared to roam. The small office complex had only two other tenants: a psychiatrist who specialized in Primal Scream Therapy and a school for the deaf.

  The waiting room was empty and the whole place was decorated with some very odd pictures and artifacts. There was a little electric fountain that featured the Titanic, half submerged. There was a glass-encased thigh-bone that supposedly came from someone who died in the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. There were matching posters of the atomic bombs going off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in the center of it all was a sign that read REMEMBER THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN A ROOTCANAL.

  Püshpa nodded her approval. “Is very comforting,” she said. “It puts things in persp . . . in persp . . . what is word?”

  “Perspiration,” Roxie and I said in unison.

  “Yes, yes. Puts things in perspiration.”

  From behind a door that said NO ADMITTANCE! came two large women with dark braided pigtails and shoulders like football players, which seemed even broader beneath their white dentists coats.

  One of them smiled broadly. “Hello, we’re the Von Suffrin sisters. We’ll be working on your tooth today.”

  “Tag-team dentistry!” said Roxy, flipping the page of her magazine. “This should be good.”

  The smiling sister smiled a bit wider. The other one didn’t smile at all. It’s possible that the second sister was actually a man, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “Why don’t I go get the room ready,” said the sister with the Adam’s apple. Then she disappeared behind the “No Admittance” door. The smiling sister sat down beside me, picked up a clipboard, and pulled out a pen from a pen holder shaped like Mount Vesuvius. She then proceeded to take down pertinent information, like name, birthday, and what I might like on my tombstone.

  “Are you the next of kin?” she asked Püshpa.

  “No,” answered Püshpa, “I am the Jell-O-mold’s nanny. Their schnauzer is out of town. Would you like to call him? I have eggplant in purse.”

  Dr. Von Suffrin, to her credit, didn’t even blink. “I see. No, thanks. If I need to call, we have plenty of vegetables of our own.” She turned to me. “Are you ready, Ralphy?”

  Just then a scream came through the walls, a sound raw and bloodcurdling. It rattled the window and made the thighbone vibrate in its case.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that—it’s just from the therapist’s office next door. He has people scream to release their anxiety. You should try it sometime.”

  She took my hand firmly and led me through the door into the dark recesses of the Von Suffrin inner sanctum.

  The room they led me to had state-of-the-art dental equipment, all done in shiny black plastic and black leather. It looked like Darth Vader’s dental chair. I sat down, staring face-to-face with an X-ray machine that looked like the head of a giant praying mantis.

  As for the chair, it was comfortable. Toocomfortable. It was clearly designed to lull a person into a false sense of security. There was a TV suspended from the ceiling that played the director’s cut of Jaws. Beside the chair there was a whole host of chrome dental equipment that made my eyeballs begin to ache. In addition to the usual drills, mirrors, and poky things, there were some oddly shaped devices that didn’t seem designed for human anatomy at all.

  “Uh . . . what are those for?” I asked.

  “Oh, those?” said the sister with the beard stubble. “Those are just in case.”

  The other sister held up a gas mask that looked large enough to swallow my entire head. “You can either remain conscious, or we can put you out. Which would you prefer?”

  Well, I would rather have been unconscious, but I didn’t trust the Von Suffrins. If they put me under, my organs might end up being auctioned on eBay.

  “I think I’ll stay awake.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “Now let’s have a look at that tooth.”

  I opened my mouth and presented her with the voice of Elvis Presley as he crooned “Hunk-a-hunk-a-burning love . . .”

  She frowned, and turned to her sister. “Lucretia, could you come over here and have a look at this?”

  “Certainly, Lizzy.”

  They both peered into my mouth, and looked at each other shaking their heads and alternately raising their eyebrows like they were communicating telepathically.

  “What? What is it?” I asked.

  “We’ve only seen this once before,” said Lizzy. “You’ve got yourself an abscessed abyssal bacterial nexus.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “That depends on your definition of ‘bad,’” she said, pointing to a poster of Atlantis being swallowed by the sea. Lizzy smiled even more widely than before, then attached a metallic device to my head which she called “an appliance.” It looked like a bear trap, and had teeth as sharp as Bruce the Shark, who was currently chewing Captain Quint in half on the plasma TV screen. Then she produced a hypodermic syringe about the size of an antiaircraft gun and injected a massive dose of novocaine into various points in my gums.

  “Lucretia,” she said, “we’re going to need the big drill for this one.” Lucretia nodded, put down her cigar, and went over to a padlocked cabinet.

  I have had some painful experiences in my life. There was the “ice-pick incident” for instance, for which one of our former nannies was still serving prison time. Then there was the time I learned how unwise it is to dirt-bike through a cactus garden. But nothing in the known world could compare with the agony I endured at the hands of Lizzy and Lucretia Von Suffrin.

/>   First off, all that novocaine numbed every nerve in my body, except for the nerve in my tooth. “How strange,” said Lizzy, her smile growing ever wider. “Well, maybe if we keep drilling, we’ll get past the pain. Eventually.”

  But there was nothing past the pain but more pain. I screamed long and loud—but it didn’t matter—and now I knew why they chose to locate their offices here. My screams were camouflaged by the screams coming from the therapist’s office—and for obvious reasons, no one at the school for the deaf was very concerned.

  All the while, the music in my mouth kept getting louder and louder until it rivaled the grating drone of the drill—and when Jimmy Hendrix began wailing on his electric guitar, I was ready to be put out of my misery.

  “I’ll take that gas now,” I told them, but it was no use. With my jaw locked in the “appliance,” all that came out of my mouth was “I—AAH—YA—YA—OWWW.”

  “Patience, kid,” said Lucretia. “It’ll all be over soon.” Then she pulled out a fresh drill bit that looked like it was meant for drilling for oil. It flexed like a plumbing snake.

  Now the music was blasting louder than the drill, but Lizzy and Lucretia were too involved to care. “Almost there,” Lucretia said. The long drill bit had completely disappeared into my mouth, and was in so deep, I thought it ought to be coming out of my . . . uh . . . toes. And as if to mock my pain, “La Bamba” blasted its joyful salsa rhythm into the room.