Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  His father’s hobby had been strange, but his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s had been stranger still. When Archibald Patton had the house built, he had already owned a rather significant collection of implements of torture, many of them dating back several hundred years, and his son Reginald had continued the collection and expanded it during his lifetime. Now, the room was filled with racks and stocks, iron maidens and strappados and witch’s chairs, some of which had seen use by no less august a company of torturers than the Spanish Inquisition itself.

  Donald stood, staring down the long room, his heart thudding heavily in his chest, just as it had when he had come here as a child, though now there was no one left who could punish him for his trespasses. This macabre museum was his now, to use or dispose of as he saw fit. He’d already given orders for all of it to be sold off at auction to collectors or museums or whoever might want it. Just as he hadn’t inherited his family’s feelings of duty toward the business or the house, he hadn’t inherited their attractions to torture dungeons and dolls.

  He walked down the length of the room, letting his fingers run over the cold, rough iron of the implements, and only then did he notice that the two collections had begun to develop an odd sort of overlap. Several of his father’s puppets were in this room now, placed to mime undergoing the rigors of one device or another. Here the arms and legs of a puppet in jester’s attire were wrenched out of place by chains, there a wooden head was slowly crushed to splinters in a vise.

  Obviously, his father had gotten a little unstable in his old age. Was this what Elaine had called him about? It seemed sinister, certainly, but nothing that she couldn’t have handled on her own.

  Thinking of her, Donald reached into his pocket to try calling once more. Maybe the attic would get better reception than the rest of the house. If she didn’t answer this time, he resolved to just go back down to his car and drive away. He’d leave her a voice mail saying that he didn’t care what she’d found, she should just dispose of it according to her best judgment and not trouble him any further. He should never have let her talk him into coming back to this house, and he was just composing his angry retort to her in his mind as he pressed the button to make the call and heard a tinny song start up at the far side of the long room.

  His stomach dropped, sudden and heavy. He stood frozen as his mind scrabbled for some logical explanation, but he could find none. The room had been dark when he came up, the attic door locked. If she’d been here already and departed, why would she have left her phone?

  Slowly, ever so slowly, he walked down the aisle between the infernal devices. He imagined a hundred dreadful scenarios waiting for him at the other end of the room. Elaine’s body broken on one of the machines, dissected into bloody bits straight out of some horror film. Elaine waiting for him in the shadows with a rag of ether and him awakening in one of the devices himself, the culmination of some unknown vendetta against his family; her brother put out of work, her father humiliated, something.

  The bright ceiling lights were clustered mainly near the door, and the far end of the gallery was lost to murky shadow. Through a tiny, round window set high in the wall he could see just a corner of the night sky, the undersides of the clouds painted with what little light the town still produced. Below the window, shoved away from the rest of the collection into a place of either pride or distaste, sat a final implement of torture, one for which he didn’t know the name. A thing almost akin to an electric chair in size and shape, but differentiated from that more merciful cousin by the terrible array that sprouted from it. A do-it-yourself dentist kit, he might have called the dizzying assembly of blood-stained blades and hooks and screws, had he been in a more jocular frame of mind.

  Elaine’s phone lay on the floor next to the chair, glowing and buzzing across the floorboards, still emitting its feeble song. And in the chair itself: a manikin, a tiny, perfect puppet. Letting the phone fall from his ear, he used its light to inspect the puppet, his growing unease temporarily pushed aside by his confusion. It had been more than a month since he last saw Elaine in person, but he remembered her features well enough, and he recognized them now in the face that stared back at him with a frozen expression of unmistakable horror.

  He ran. There was a bad moment when he pushed into his father’s workshop and the dummies seemed to crowd suddenly round him, their wooden hands pulling at his clothes, their eyes accusing. Then he broke through the attic door and stumbled down the steps and away from the gallery of horrors.

  His phone was no longer in his hand. He must have dropped it somewhere upstairs, but that didn’t matter, because he was too terrified to dial it now anyway. Too afraid that, instead of the police dispatcher, some other voice might speak to him from the other end of the line.

  The dash through the house was a blur of dark rooms and sheeted furniture. He didn’t stop until he was standing in the living room just off the main entryway. The front door was only a few paces distant, and beyond it his car and the highway and freedom, but he stood frozen in his tracks, alerted by an animal’s instinct that something in the room was wrong. His eyes traveled slowly across the sheeted forms that dotted the room—any one of which, he suddenly realized, could be anything, a corpse or a murderer or worse—and finally came to rest on the fireplace.

  His family crest—which Archibald Patton had brought with him when he came over from the old country—was inlaid into the stone above the hearth. Standing on the mantel before it were two puppets, like the ones in his father’s workshop. They hadn’t been there when he passed through before, he was sure of it. One of them looked exactly like his father, the other exactly like his grandfather. They turned their wooden heads toward him, their painted eyes burned into him. Upstairs, the chair waited, with its bloody hooks and screws, and he knew exactly who it waited for.

  Author’s Notes: I guess I’ve developed something of a reputation for writing stories that are inspired by unlikely sources, and this one definitely counts. The genesis of “Guignol” comes from one particular scene in Stuart Gordon’s delightful (and delightfully out-of-its-time) old dark house flick Dolls. In it, one of the film’s very British punk rocker girls is being transformed into a doll via a process that is gruesome in ways that the rest of the movie never quite matches. Combine that with my affection for marionettes and, especially, Mike Mignola’s drawings of same, and you pretty much arrive at “Guignol,” which found its title when I learned that the phrase “Grand Guignol,” the name of an early French theatre known for its grisly and horrific plays, roughly translated to “giant puppet.”

  This is actually one of the oldest stories in this collection, in spite of not seeing print until December of 2015, when it appeared in The Burning Maiden 2 edited by Greg Kishbaugh.

  Shadders

  The life of a chimneysweep is hard and dirty and often terrifying and brutally short. One boy I knew surprised a flock of bats in a chimney. Bats like chimneys, for what is a chimney but a cave turned up on its side? I imagine it must have seemed to him as if the darkness suddenly came to life, all beating wings and needle teeth. He fell three stories, and when they pulled him out his bones were all broken and his limbs were like India rubber and he was stone dead.

  So it may seem odd that any would choose this life, but for some of us there is no better work to be had, and not all of us have the same choices as others do. My elder brother chose to run off and join the fighting in the desert and never come back, leaving my Gram and me to fend for ourselves. But my Gram didn’t choose to develop the cough that more and more often kept her abed and stained her kerchiefs with blood. So my choices were limited accordingly, and one day I cut my hair short and dressed myself in the clothes my brother had left behind so I could pass as a boy, and I apprenticed myself to a chimneysweep. There were worse ways to pay for the food we ate and the laudanum for Gram’s cough, and I had never been afraid of the dark, or of small spaces.

  These are the traits you need to excel as a chimneysw
eep: Strong arms and legs. Small stature. Good lungs. No fear of darkness or closeness or great heights. All these things I had, and I found a master in the form of Mr. Stefan.

  Mr. Stefan had been a chimneysweep when he was a boy, before he went off to fight in the war in the desert. A different war from the one my brother was fighting, but the same desert. Mr. Stefan had lost his left leg to a cannon, and in its place was a wood and metal contraption that let you always hear him coming: CLANK-step, CLANK-step. And so the boys who stopped to smoke coffin nails instead of sweeping knew to stub them out in time to get back to work.

  Mr. Stefan’s leg also prevented him from going in the chimneys himself, even the biggest ones. The leg was fine enough to get around on, or so he proclaimed proudly, thumping it with his fist, but it was no good for maneuvering inside a chimney. Still, Mr. Stefan knew his old trade backward and front, and he passed his knowledge on to those of us who served under him.

  He was a gruff and hardened man with leathery skin and a big bulbous nose and whiskers as thick and stiff as any chimney brush. A terse master, though sometimes when the work was done he would take pulls from a bottle of watery liquor which he shared with the oldest of the boys and tell us wild stories about the war that were probably only half true. I can’t say whether he was better or worse than most masters, for he was the only one I ever served under, but I can say that on those rare occasions when he clapped you on the shoulder and said simply, “Good work,” it meant more than a commendation from the Queen herself.

  Of the boys who worked under Mr. Stefan, Conner was the biggest, though he was younger than at least two of the others. He liked to push the big boys around, but he was always kind to the smallest ones, and he once gave me a toffee candy rather than eating it himself, so I liked him.

  Conner died in one of the chimneys of the old munitions plant, the one we all called the “Cannon Factory.” With the war gearing back up, we all had to chip in to what the politicians called the “war effort,” which included getting the Cannon Factory back up and running, though it was a task none of us were keen on. The Cannon Factory was what Mr. Stefan called a “bad ’un.”

  Bad ’uns were places where—for no good reason that you could think of—everything always went wrong. You misplaced your brushes, you lost your footing. Ropes frayed. The chimneys in bad ’uns were always tight, always filled with the hardest soot. After a while, you developed a sixth sense for them, and when you walked into one, you could just tell, a feeling, like someone had walked over your grave, as my Gram would say.

  Of all the bad ’uns we ever worked, the Cannon Factory was the worst. Not only was it big and dark and lonesome, but the chimneys were particularly tall and strangely narrow, and they bent at odd angles inside. Toby said that they must have been designed by sadists who hated chimneysweeps. And the soot that collected in them was of the worst kind; enameled black, as hard and shiny and slick as ice.

  Devon said that it was because the factory made implements of war. He said it was the sins of war and killing that polluted the air and made the soot so maleficent. Devon was a religiously minded lad, with a silver cross that he wore around his neck and worried at constantly with his thumb, and he talked a lot about things like sin and maleficence.

  Conner had another theory. He said that the reason the factory had closed down was because the owner’s own son had been killed in the war when one of the cannons made in his father’s factory blew up in his face. The father, distraught, hanged himself right there on the factory floor—and Conner would point up at the rafters, as if he knew just which one the man had chosen for the deed. “That’s not the worst part, though,” Conner would say. “The worst part is, when the workers came the next day, they found his body with its jaw broken, dislocated, his mouth frozen open in a silent scream directed up at Heaven.”

  As much as Devon liked to talk about sin, Conner liked to tell stories like that—stories about ghosts and murder and bloody bones—but when I asked Mr. Stefan if it was true that a man had killed himself in the Cannon Factory, he just replied, “Best not to think on it.”

  We all knew that the Cannon Factory had been a bad ’un even before it closed down this most recent time, for whatever reason. Home to an unusual number of accidents and injuries. Young workmen losing fingers, hands, sometimes even their lives to the machines.

  My Gram liked ghost stories, too, though she didn’t take Conner’s macabre glee in them. She was a believer, thought that the dead could come back to right wrongs that had been done to them in life, contact loved ones, avenge murders. She had gone to séances and heard table-rappings, listened to the dead speak through someone else’s mouth. I remember when I was very little I asked her what a ghost was. I’d learned about the soul by then, from the sermons that Gram took me to on Sunday, but I didn’t really understand it.

  She had pointed to the fireplace and said, “When a log burns, what becomes of it? It goes away, but where has it gone? Does the fire eat it, or does it become the fire? You want to know what a ghost is? A ghost is to a body what the fire is to a log.”

  I’ll admit that it didn’t clear the matter up much when I was little, but I had cause to think back on it later.

  Conner died on our first day in the Cannon Factory. Normally we worked in pairs, but Conner was a confident boy, and the Cannon Factory had a lot of chimneys. They bristled up out of it like artillery pointed Heavenward, and to make the job go quicker he volunteered to tackle one of the chimneys on his own. When the other boys finished, they banged on the metal door of the furnace. When Conner didn’t bang back they assumed that he’d simply finished up early and nipped out.

  When he didn’t show up for work the next day, Mr. Stefan was visibly concerned, but everyone knew Conner’s father was a mean drunk, and we thought maybe Conner was simply lying low someplace. There was a brewery that needed urgent attention that morning, so no one returned to resume work on the Cannon Factory until the next day, when they found Conner’s body wedged into one of the turns in the chimney. He must have screamed and screamed to no avail. By the time they dragged his body into the light, his jaw was broken, his mouth stretched open in an unending wail of mute horror.

  Though it wasn’t the first time one of us had died on the job, it made the Cannon Factory an object of even greater loathsomeness, so that we all trudged back to work even more subdued than we had been previously. I even saw Devon cross himself as he passed into the shadow of the place. We worked through the morning hours uneventfully, and after our first break Nicolas headed up to finish the chimney where Conner had died. Unlucky or not, it had to be cleaned, and as Mr. Stefan always said, “Bad ’uns pay just as good as good ’uns do.”

  I don’t know how long Nicolas was in there before we heard the shout, followed by a dry thump and a resounding clang. We found Nicolas huddled in a corner of the factory floor, as far as he could crawl from the door to the furnace, which he had first shut and latched behind him, though his hands were scraped bloody. His leg was broken and already swelling purple, and Mr. Stefan, who had stayed to oversee the work that day, sent Toby running to fetch a doctor.

  “What happened?” Mr. Stefan asked him. “What was it?”

  “Shadders,” Nicolas said, his way of pronouncing ‘shadows,’ and “shadders” is all he would say until the doctor arrived and carried him off and, as far as I know, all he has ever said since.

  After that, work stopped for a time, and we apprentices sat in the bright sunshine outside the factory and watched while Mr. Stefan had harsh words with a man in a fancy suit who Toby figured must have been the owner of the factory. In the end, Mr. Stefan returned shaking his head. “A job’s a job,” is all he said, “and we still have ours to do.” He told us that no one would be punished for not continuing the work, but that it had to be done, and any of us who stayed on would be paid triple our usual wage.

  Most of the boys stayed, though they went to far corners of the factory to work, as far as they could from the chimney
where Conner had died. Devon, myself, and a quiet boy named Samuel all volunteered to tackle that chimney together, and we drew matchsticks for who would have to go up inside. Samuel pulled the shortest one, and so he and I climbed up to the roof of the factory while Devon waited at the bottom in case anything went wrong. Samuel tied the rope around his waist and strapped his brushes to his back, and I stood on the ladder leaned against the side of the chimney and let the rope play out as he lowered himself in.

  He hadn’t gotten far when I heard a strangled noise from inside the chimney, something between a cough and a shout, and the rope pulled tight in my hands. I looked down into the dark mouth of the chimney and called out Samuel’s name. In response, the tightness of the rope went slack for a moment, and then it was jerked out of my grip so quickly that it burned my palms.

  I nearly fell as the ladder tumbled out from under me, but I was able to save myself by hooking my elbows onto the rim of the chimney. From below I heard sounds like a scuffle, and then I saw something rising up out of the darkness toward me.

  The thing was black, blacker than soot, blacker than the inside of the chimney. I thought it was covered in some sort of rough fur, but it was hard to say, since it was just a darker shape in the darkness below. Its head seemed hollow, like a skull, and the only light which let me see it at all spilled out from the round saucers of its eyes and its gaping mouth, which glowed like a carved turnip on All Hallow’s, but bright blue. I’d once seen weird sea creatures that glowed in the dark at an exhibition that Gram had taken me to when I was little. They had been a similar color. I couldn’t make out the shape of the thing, but it had wings that ended in long fingers with sucking pads that helped it to grip the soot-slicked walls.

  It stopped at the edge of the sliver of light which the late afternoon sun cast on the rim of the chimney, and then it turned somehow, its body boneless and rubbery, and it disappeared into the depths of the chimney. Hanging there, I looked around, but couldn’t see anybody else up on the parts of the roof that were within my view. I started to shout, when below me, echoing up from somewhere far away, I heard Devon calling out, first Samuel’s name, then mine. Then I heard a scream that choked off in a gurgling sound, and I knew I didn’t have time to wait for someone to come rescue me. I was too high on the chimney to drop down to the roof safely. I’d turn an ankle or break my legs, then go tumbling off the side into a fall I’d never survive. So instead, I pulled myself up and over, and dropped down into the chimney itself.