Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  All the lights are on in her old house, and the wall nearest the Tower has been torn down. There’s the room that was her bedroom, stripped now of anything that could identify it except geography. Everywhere she sees piles of equipment. Car stereos, TVs, speakers, those small satellite dishes that go on the sides of houses. The zombies are carrying it from the cars to the house, where it’s sorted into piles, and then from the house to the Tower.

  The top of the Tower isn’t where Lenny lives. Kelly knows that now. She had it wrong as a little girl.

  The door of the maintenance hatch at the base of the Tower—the one that her dad used to go down once every few months—stands open now, so that the zombies can carry in their supplies of old transistors and copper wire. She waits for a gap in the procession, and then she follows it down.

  6. Judgment

  When Kelly gets to the bottom, she finds a massive room, like an airplane hangar made of vaulted concrete. Left over from the missile silo days, or something else. Now, it houses a jumble of electronic equipment. Amps and old radios and TV tubes, all cobbled together with a jungle of cables that run everywhere like spilled intestines. And in the center of the chaos, what her dad’s papers called the Resonator, a machine like a tuning fork that emits—or maybe inhabits—a purple glow that Kelly knows she doesn’t see with her eyes.

  Coiled around the Resonator, through it, a part of it, is Lenny. He no longer looks much like a bug or a flower, though still a bit of both. He’s partially transparent, like a special effect in an old movie super-imposed on the film of reality. His tendrils or roots or hyphae extend out, reach through the walls of the chamber into the earth and the Tower above. Claws like the pincers of an enormous crayfish manipulate wires and knobs. Everywhere, luminous eyes turn on truncated stalks. His mouth—if that’s what it is—opens and closes, emitting a light that sets Kelly’s brain on fire.

  No, not her whole brain. The pineal gland, the third eye. She can feel it growing, pressing against her skull, threatening to break through. And she knows that when it does she won’t be Kelly anymore—whatever that means. A transmission is no good without a receiver, after all. But she won’t just be a receiver, either. That’s what the zombies are. She’ll be something else, like a cellphone tower, something for the signal to ping off of and go further. That’s what she’s always been, and she can remember her mother standing in the doorway, telling her dad, “You did this,” and her dad hanging from the beam in his workshop, an extension cord coiled tight round his neck.

  Lenny’s eyes turn toward her, his mouth is open, she remembers his voice, which she knows now she never heard with anything that could be called hearing. She remembers his promises to her when she was a girl, that he would show her where his friends lived. She looks up, and she can no longer see the roof of the hangar. She is in the center of a living darkness, shot through with something that is not light, illuminated by stars that are not stars. They are drawing nearer. Her dad is telling her that the Tower is one of the strongest transmitters this side of the Mississippi, that it can send a signal all the way to outer space. She can make out their shapes now, and her throat is making a sound that she can’t hear over the music of the spheres.

  Lenny reaches out with a pseudopod to embrace her, maybe, lift her up, and she activates the charges that are concealed under her jacket. The moment before the blast stretches out forever, becomes multifaceted, and she can see into the past and the future. A little girl lies in bed and stares up at the Tower, watching as the bomb she’ll set in twenty years rips apart its foundation and brings it tumbling down into fire and smoke.

  Author’s Notes: “From Beyond” has always been one of my favorite H. P. Lovecraft stories, and I’d had this title kicking around in my notebook for years, so when Scott R. Jones put out a call for Resonator, an anthology of new stories inspired by “From Beyond,” that seemed like the time to use it.

  The Tower in the story is inspired by one on the road leading out of one of the towns where I grew up. I think once I started capitalizing Tower, it started to make me think tarot cards, and from there the idea of using tarot imagery to break up the story crept in.

  The Well and the Wheel

  After the divorce, my dad moved into the old house. Mom said that it had been in his family for years, though I’d never seen it, and he’d never talked about it. The first time I laid eyes on the place was a month after the divorce, sitting in Mom’s Suburban in the gravel drive with the engine running while she talked to him on the front porch, the collar of her coat turned up against the cold. A weathered, one-story building the color of unfinished wood left out in the elements, it looked more like a shed than a house, though it already had new windows and a little satellite dish bolted onto the roof.

  The house was outside of town, on a twenty-acre plot of land that had once been part of a farm, and the corpses of old farm buildings still dotted the edges of the big yard. Not even ruins anymore, just jumbles of sunbleached wood. Out behind the house were what was left of some cattle pens, reduced now to splinters and rust. And on the top of the hill, an old stone well with a single dead tree beside it, denuded of branches, the trunk curling toward the well as if the tree was being sucked inside or trying to crawl in.

  While my dad was alive, I never set foot in the house. I only ever saw Mom go in once, but she told me to wait outside, and so that day I explored the yard, poking at the remains of fallen-down buildings with the toe of my boots. It was a few months after the divorce, the weather starting to warm back up, the sky gray and filled with moisture, giving the whole property the air of a Gothic novel. I saw the well then, but I didn’t go near it, because at that moment my mom came outside and called my name. Did she look a little shaken on the drive back into town? That I don’t remember.

  Dad didn’t get any custody rights from the divorce; didn’t, I think, even ask for them, which hurt my feelings at the time, though I pretended that it didn’t, even to myself. Sometimes he would pick me up in his beat-up old truck, the one that smelled of stale dust and seemed to let in as much air as it kept out, so that in the winter months the heater was waging a constant battle against the cold that froze your toes and fingers. He’d take me out to the mall where we’d eat in the food court and look in the shops, or he’d take me to a movie and buy me a giant Icee and a tub of popcorn.

  When I was old enough to drive, I’d go visit him instead, but I still didn’t go into the house. I was never told that I couldn’t, but somehow by then it was just an unspoken rule, something that I accepted without question. I’d pull my Ford Fiesta into the drive and honk the horn, and my dad would come out onto the porch and wave at me, and then we’d go to dinner at Chili’s or Olive Garden or shopping at Sam’s Club, where he’d buy bottled water in enormous quantities. I assumed that the tap water in the house was no good to drink—probably hard as a rock, maybe pulled up from that old well out back—and I asked him why he didn’t get a water filter, but he just shook his head, hefted one of the bottles, and said, “I like this.”

  Neither he nor my mom ever remarried. She had a regular boyfriend for years, and moved in with him after I went to college. Dad lived alone in that house until the day he died.

  The day he died was the week after my twenty-eighth birthday, though he sat in the green metal rocking chair that he kept on the front porch for three days before anyone found his body. A neighbor noticed that she’d seen him sitting out there on her way to and from work every day, and on the third day she stopped, the wheels of her car crunching on the gravel, and got out to see if he was okay. She later told me that it “just looked like he was asleep.”

  The doctor said that it was a heart attack, “but not the bad kind.” I had no idea what that meant. Was there a kind of heart attack worse than the one that kills you?

  My dad had a piece of paper crumpled in his left fist when he died, something torn out of a notebook and written in purple ink that had smudged from the elements. It was addressed to me, and all it
said was, “Sorry, Emmy.” Dad was the only one who ever called me Emmy. To everyone else it was Emma, and Emmanuel no place but on my driver’s license. I didn’t know then what he was sorry for, or why he was holding that note so tight when he died. Had he known, somehow, that it was coming? Does the not-so-bad kind of heart attack give you a nice warning in advance?

  Because my mom and dad had been divorced for more than half my life, and he had no one else left, I inherited everything he had to his name: the house and everything in it, and the land on which it stood. While he was still alive, my dad had hired a lawyer in town, a short, round man named Mr. Beaumont whose office was in a square brick building that looked like a post office.

  Mr. Beaumont handled all the paperwork associated with my dad’s estate, and handed me the ring of keys that my dad had worn on his belt for as long as I could remember. He hadn’t wanted a funeral, and besides, there really wasn’t anybody to come besides me and my mom and her new boyfriend. His body was cremated, and they gave me his ashes in a plastic bag inside a cardboard box. I figured that I would dump them somewhere on the property, thinking that he must have liked it there. My eyes stayed dry until I pulled my car into the drive and sat looking down at the ring of keys in my hand, realizing that I didn’t have any idea which one unlocked the front door.

  I planned to sell the house. Mr. Beaumont had offered to take care of the “disposition of the estate” for me, but I wanted to at least see it all for myself first. Go through my father’s things, see if there was anything I recognized, anything I might want to keep. When I pulled into the drive I already had a duffel bag full of clothes and toiletries in the back seat.

  My roommate and I had fought about something stupid maybe a week before I got the news, and it had been cold silences and little passive aggressive gestures whenever we had to be in the apartment together. Of course, Amanda forgave and forgot the moment I heard about my dad’s death, but I still hadn’t yet, and I wasn’t ready to be around people, not even ones who meant well. Maybe especially not those.

  So I took the opportunity to move into my dad’s old house. I told Amanda that it would just be for a few weeks, while I sorted out his things, and at the time that’s probably what I had in mind. Work had already told me to take as much time as I needed, and I’d already told my boss that I wouldn’t be back for at least two weeks, after which I’d check in. Was cutting myself off from everybody I knew and moving to a new place forty minutes from town a great idea when I’d just lost my dad? Probably not, but it was the only thing that felt right to me then.

  It was raining when I stood on the porch and tried keys until I found the one that unlocked the front door. Someone had removed the green metal rocking chair, and I was grateful for that, but nobody had so much as set foot inside my dad’s house since he’d passed. That’s the pleasant euphemism they always use, right? Passed? Instead of stopped, broke down, died.

  If you’ve never walked into a house where someone once lived but no longer does, then you’re lucky. I recommend avoiding it for as long as you can manage. It’s a different feeling than walking into a house that happens to be empty, say because everyone is at work or out to a movie, or even a house that’s sitting empty because it’s for sale. There’s a vacancy that houses only get when their occupants have vanished in the middle of things, as if you can feel the vacuum left behind by death. That’s what I felt as I stepped through the front door of my dad’s house for the first time.

  It was dark inside. The walls felt close, the ceiling light in the front hall produced only a dull, amber-colored glow, and the sideboard was stacked with mail and papers. Walking slowly through the house, room by room, I could get some sense of the rhythm of my dad’s life. There was a big room near one end of the house—we would have called it a living room in any normal place, though in my dad’s house it seemed to be something else. There was a couch and a recliner there, both old and ratty with stuffing showing through, the former covered in a faded blanket. There was a fireplace that was cold now and dark, though wood was stacked beside it. I recognized the wood immediately as old lumber from the tumble-down buildings that dotted the yard.

  I could tell just by looking that this was the room where my dad had spent most of his time. An electric blanket was plugged into the same outlet as the floor lamp and piled at the foot of the recliner, and I knew, without any more substantial evidence, that he had slept there more often than in the bed, which I hadn’t yet seen. On the floor next to the chair was a stack of books, and there was also a roll-top desk in one corner of the room, and a TV in the other. The desk was locked, and I didn’t bother right then to try any of the keys on Dad’s key ring.

  A trail of clutter led from the living room to the kitchen in an elliptical pattern, as food made its way from the latter to the former, and then dishes, occasionally, made the return trip, though some of them had ended up stacked here and there on the living room floor, or around the brick fireplace. Next to the refrigerator was a stack of bottled water as high as I am tall, the top case opened and several bottles missing. The fridge had also been stocked with dozens of bottles, as well as cans of beer and food in various stages of going bad.

  Walking through the rest of the house, signs of habitation dropped off sharply. None of the windows had blinds or curtains, and instead heavy blankets had been draped or nailed over them to block the light. There was a bathroom just off the kitchen, and at the farthest end of the house from the living room were two bedrooms across the hall from each other. One I recognized as my dad’s—clothes that I had seen him wear hung in the closet—while the other was locked from the outside with a deadbolt and held nothing but a bed with a heavy wooden frame.

  The bed was made, and next to the pillow lay one of my old stuffed animals from when I was a kid, a bunny named Mr. Stuffles who had since turned gray with age and started to pill up. He was the first thing I noticed upon opening the door, and I crossed the room to pick him up before I saw what else was on the bed. Chains attached to the frame at head and foot, ending in thick leather cuffs that looked like they had been homemade from old belts.

  Was that my first indication that something was terribly wrong? I can’t really say anymore. I try to tell myself that something felt off from the first moment I walked through the front door; that a germ of concern, rather than simply too-late-in-coming pity, had started in my mind when I saw the state of my dad’s living room. Maybe I had, after all, seen enough of the titles of the books that lay piled beside his recliner to make me worry. It’s possible that I had even suspected something more sinister for months now, years, as long as he had been living his strange life in this strange house.

  Whatever the truth of it is, I know that I didn’t feel the surprise, the dread or shock or nausea that should have overwhelmed me when I saw those well-worn restraints dangling from the heavy wooden frame of that bed in a room that locked from the outside. Just as I know that I didn’t suspect, not for one moment, that what I had stumbled on was nothing more than the secret of my dad’s interest in some kind of kinky sexual fetish.

  I don’t remember making my way from the bedroom back to the cluttered living room, or sinking down onto the couch there. When I did, I was still holding Mr. Stuffles limply in my left hand, just as my dad had, perhaps unconsciously, clutched his apology. Was this what he was sorry for?

  I can’t say how long I sat there. Minutes? Hours? The blankets over the windows made time impossible to gauge, even if the wet October day outside had given any indication. All I know is that the room grew subtly darker still, until finally I had to stir to turn on the floor lamp. When I did, I noticed once more the pile of books that lay next to my dad’s recliner.

  When he had still lived at home, my dad seldom read anything at all, and on the occasion that he did it was mostly Tom Clancy and John Grisham novels. The closest he had ever come to the supernatural was an occasional dalliance with Dean Koontz.

  The books in the pile next to his chair were, to a
volume, put out by no-name presses, with uninspiring covers featuring blurry photographs or simple line drawings of pentagrams and something that looked sort of like the veins of a leaf. Their titles were filled with words like “occult” and “paranormal” and “Satanic” and “demonology.” They were not the sorts of things that the dad I had thought I’d known would even have been aware of, let alone interested in reading about, and yet the broken spines and curling covers showed that his interest hadn’t been an idle one. These books had been read again and again, paged through, consulted. Post-it notes flagged pages, corners had been turned down, and notes were written in ball-point pen in the margins. Whole sections were underlined, or angrily scribbled through.

  I read enough to make me more confused, rather than less, and tossed books aside one by one, the pile beside my dad’s recliner becoming a sort of avalanche of my frustration. Finally, I walked over to the roll-top desk. The drawers were unlocked, and contained the things you might expect to find in a desk drawer, along with a revolver that I had never seen before, but nothing that shed any light on what was going on. I started trying keys until I found the one that unlocked the top of the desk.

  I don’t know what I expected to find when I rolled it open, but it was tidier inside than I had imagined. There were scraps of paper here and there, covered in my dad’s handwriting, but what drew my attention immediately—as, I think, it was meant to—was a binder, like a photo book or a wedding album, with a faux-leather cover. It was unmarked on the outside, but I could see that it was thick with whatever contents it held.