Shock Totem 4: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  MY: Let’s discuss your short-story collection, Evil. The stories mostly center on women who are committing “evil,” yet they are portrayed in such a delicate way that their acts almost make a wicked type of sense. What inspired your work for this collection? What was the creative process like?

  RS: Those stories were all written when I worked as a temp in a lot of offices in downtown Chicago. I felt like a spy in the “normal” world, maybe somewhat evil myself. Being a temp, I found a lot of people told me things that they wouldn’t tell their co-workers because they knew I was leaving soon. There is a terrible sadness and quiet to office work that seemed to me unnerving. I remember one lady I worked for who had sat at the same desk for almost twenty years and she had not a single personal item. She drank hot water at lunchtime. She was a murderous creature always scanning the room for imperfections and disobedience. Luckily, as the temp doing menial office work, it was assumed that I was a moron so she would heartily congratulate me every time I correctly alphabetized a stack of files.

  MY: It seems that music today has been flooded by young girls doing the glittery, pop-tart thing. Lengthening your hair and shortening your skirt seems to be the surest way to “success.” Do you have any ideas or suggestions for thoughtful young women entering the music world today?

  RS: It’s a tough business, but as with everything, trying to be true to your own heart, making art that soothes your own inner sickness is always best. No matter what you feel better making that kind of art even if it’s just you screaming at the top of your lungs and peeing on the floor. I don’t worry about young women today. They seem so much healthier than women of my generation. My biggest goal as a teenager was to find a boyfriend who played guitar. It never even occurred to me to learn to play myself. We’ve come a long way.

  MY: Do you anticipate any other literary offerings?

  RS: Right now I’m working on two books. One is a work of fiction that takes place in the past and the present. The past story line is about a 17th century Atlantic crossing of a group of religious fanatics that find they have witches and demons on board the ship. The present story line is about a Walmart-style store that is haunted. The other book I’m working on is a collection of essays about animals: eels, crows, wildebeests, etc. Hope to finish one or both in the next year or two.

  MY: Do you anticipate writing any accompanying musical pieces to your literary works?

  RS: Yes, I’m working on songs about animals now that are loosely linked with essays on the same subject. Once you learn a little about the octopus or the wildebeest, a song isn’t enough to say it all.

  MY: I can’t wait to hear them. Thank you so much for your time, Rennie. I very much look forward to your future work.

  RS: Thanks, Mercedes, it’s been a pleasure.

  —//—

  WEB OF GOLD

  by Rennie Sparks

  I had a room in a sooty brick building that leaned forward toward the street as if preparing to collapse. Winter came and stayed, shining the sidewalks dark with ice. The dim courtyard, swirling with garbage, filled up late at night. Angry drunks stood around in drifts of grey snow, screaming and smashing bottles and spitting on the frost-covered snow.

  I was happy in that building. I had a pile of blankets, a rickety card table and a Monet print of haystacks I’d found under a bag of rotten onions at the end of a dead-end street.

  I lay awake nights in my narrow room, staring up at my cracked and buckling walls, listening to the stream radiator drip and spit—reveling even in the mad silence of roaches whispering across my face and arms in the darkness.

  There was a retarded girl, Marie, who lived in a cardboard box in the front hallway. Grey-green teeth speared out between her slack lips as she rushed at people crossing from the stairwell to the front door.

  “Gimme ten thousand dollars!” she screamed, grabbing at arms and woolen coats. “Gimme fifty condoms!”

  Some nights Marie got locked out of the building, pushed down in the snow by the last laughing drunks heading inside. She’d stand screaming in the frozen courtyard, howling herself hoarse like a starving dog—the wind whipping up her stained raincoat and swirling through her knotted black hair—as one by one the lights darkened above her and she was forced to curl cat-like on the grating above the boiler room, waiting for daybreak and a chance to rush in again as the first of us stumbled out to work.

  I drifted from job to job—selling light bulbs over the telephone, offering samples of sausage in shopping malls, watering plants in hospital waiting rooms. Eventually, by eavesdropping on the interviewees before me at a temp agency, I figured out what I needed to lie about in order to secure myself a position as a receptionist for a plumbing supplier. Mostly I did less than nothing, dropping staples out the window and feeding unopened mail through the paper shredder. As long as the coffee pot stayed filled and the phone got answered by the fourth ring, my boss was happy. But the days passed slowly and sometimes, standing in the falling elevator surrounded by smiling workers, I found myself shaking with rage—like a wolf cornered in and poked at with sticks.

  At first I consoled myself by stealing people’s lunches from the refrigerator in the breakroom or by flushing felt-tip pens down the toilet. One day after work as I wandered around downtown, an idea took shape.

  I went into Marshall Fields and circled the displays, pretending to shop. I grabbed a pair of leather gloves and a fancy electronic day minder and slid them down the neck of a beaded gown. Inside the fitting room, I pulled the gloves and minder from the gown and shoved them down the front of my pants. I buttoned my jacket and walked out of the store.

  The next day I took the train out to a Marshall Fields in the suburbs and, after convincing the saleswoman that the items I’d shoplifted were a gift from an uncle who had died in a car crash, I had $300 cash.

  I never went back to work. I wandered between the stores downtown and the stores in the suburbs, stealing things, hauling them to another store in the same chain, then bargaining my way into cash. If I had to, I’d exchange for merchandise again and again until finally I found a department that gave cash. Sometimes, to facilitate the proceedings, I wore a neck brace or a stained bandage over one eye.

  I became adept at pickpocketing men on escalators and reading ATM PINs as they were typed in across a crowded room. There was a fancy downtown lounge that served a hot and cold buffet during happy hour—Swedish meatballs, Buffalo wings, make-your-own-tacos. I waited for women to head up to the buffet line, leaving their purses dangling, half-open, from the back of chairs.

  As days passed, I noticed a man slumped at the bar behind the hot and cold buffet, rocking slowly on a corner stool as if barely able to hold himself upright. He was sickly, with the kind of pale, mushroom skin seen in people with inoperable tumors. I watched his pathetic attempts to attract the bartender’s attention—stick arms wavering weakly, voice barely above a whisper. I slid down on the stool next to him and held my whisky to his lips.

  His name was Paul and he made his money betting a high-stakes sports pool run by an old Italian from the back of a card shop. I took Paul home with me like you might take home a shell from the beach. I stared at him, turning him over and over in silence. His watery blue eyes opened something in the pit of me until I was covered in sweat. We had slow, grunting sex on my narrow pile of blankets, kissing with open eyes, tongues dragging jagged against the other’s front teeth.

  Oh, I became too alive! Each night we shared cartons of milk at my wobbling table, white drops running down our necks. We slept twisted—Paul under me, clinging to my neck as I had his waist firmly in my arms. I clung to him hopelessly, like a tree on to the last of its fruit.

  One night the old Italian sent some men to collect a sum of money that Paul owed and did not have. They sat me on the floor against the humming refrigerator and then beat Paul with a pillowcase full of potatoes. They dragged him up in front of the bathroom mirror and held him a moment in front of the wreck of himself, then smashed hi
m face-first into the mirror. They carried him out inside two of my black garbage bags and I never saw him again.

  The absence, the hole in my heart. I lay awake at night watching the moon slowly tracing and sparkling the broken bits of mirror in my bathroom sink. The blood dried to brown, indistinguishable from rust.

  Each morning, instead of heading downtown, I sat at my window, staring down at Marie on the front steps, sunning herself like a lizard in the spring air. She lay drifting in and out of sleep, saliva glistening at the corners of her mouth, fingers tracing the slack weight of her own breasts.

  I chased roaches up my walls, fist slamming down on their black feathery shells.

  When a cloud of small black flies began hovering over my last carton of milk, it came to me—a hole in the heart can be filled with blood.

  I dropped puzzle pieces of my shattered mirror slowly into the milk carton, then mixed in a few tablespoons of sugar and carried it downstairs to Marie. She drank greedily, swallowing in long gulps, then she lay down, drifting into sleep.

  Back upstairs, I waited.

  By nightfall she had begun to scream. TVs blared uninterrupted, doors slammed. Marie’s voice rose higher into the night—like wind through a stand of dead trees.

  Eventually she quieted. I crept down the stairwell. Marie was inside her cardboard box, on her side, panting like a dog preparing to give birth. Her face and neck glistening. Her hands clenching and unclenching—grasping at empty darkness. She stared up at me, unable to speak, heaving and heaving with blood pouring from her mouth.

  The next afternoon, I walked out of Henri Bendel’s with an 18-karat hat pin under my tongue. The dazzling sun stretched out above the tall buildings like a web of gold. A small cockroach crawled up the shaded mouthpiece of a pay telephone and I reached forward, gently taking it up onto my fingertips. I laughed as it crawled tickling up my arm.

  —//—

  Rennie Sparks is the lyricist and banjo/bass player for the creepy country band, The Handsome Family. Their music is Americana in its fullest sense, echoing influences from medieval murder ballad to Appalachian holler, Tin Pan Alley, rhinestoned cowboy and noise rock. Much of her writing takes place in the new wilderness of parking lots, exit ramps and warehouse stores. Her short-story collection, Evil, was published by Black Hole Press in 2000.

  More information about her writing and her band can be found at www.handsomefamily.com.

  2010 CAFÉ DOOM COMPETITION WINNER

  FADE TO BLACK

  by Jaelithe Ingold

  Sasha leans over the freshly dug grave and drops fourteen black tulips into the bronze vase. Behind her, the ghost of Lucy Martin watches. Solemn eyes and milk-glass features twist into a soundless sob.

  “Your mother picked these out for you,” Sasha tells the ghost, who hasn’t figured out how to speak yet. “She said they were your favorite flower. Aren’t they lovely?”

  Lucy drifts closer and crouches in front of her headstone. Coldness breaks against Sasha’s body like waves upon a shore. She rubs her sweater-clad arms and steps away from the grave to give the ghost her privacy.

  One flower for every year of Lucy’s life.

  The newly dead always mourn more than the living.

  —

  “We offer a comprehensive package.” Sasha gives the grieving husband a pleasant and encouraging smile, but not a happy one. That would be thoughtless. “I can go over your basic choices along with some of the extra features we offer.”

  The widower sighs and continues to stare out the office window. In the distance, grey stone markers, crosses and monuments stick up from the green ground in even rows. Ghosts drift among them, though it’s unlikely he can see them.

  “In addition to regular maintenance, landscaping and whatnot, we’re willing to go beyond what others in our line of work can provide.”

  He hasn’t made eye contact during the pitch, but now his gaze meets hers. No doubt this subject is the reason he’s come here in the first place. “How so?”

  Sasha flips through the stack of papers on her desk until she unearths a glossy brochure. She unfolds it and turns the page so it’s facing him. With a fingernail, she taps their company tag line: The Dead still have tales to tell.

  She allows the widower to read some of the blurbs and testimonials regarding their services. Just as the man plucks bifocals from his pocket for a closer look, a ghost slips through the door and into her office.

  Chase.

  Sasha can feel her skin tighten and her patient smile freeze. No matter how many times she’s told him he isn’t welcome, the bastard refuses to listen. To avoid staring at the interloper, she busies herself with stacking papers in perfect order.

  Chase drifts behind her chair. One icy caress lifts her dark hair, and then his frozen lips press against her neck. She shudders and grips the edge of her desk. A variety of names spring to mind, but this isn’t the appropriate time.

  And the asshole knows it.

  A soft chuckle, and the ghost moves elsewhere. Mischief accomplished for now.

  “You can talk to the dead?” The widower’s brow has furrowed into parallel lines. His expression is one Sasha has seen hundreds of times before. Disbelief warring with hope.

  Sasha forces herself to relax. “We do more than that, sir. Think of us more as translators. We help you keep in touch with your loved ones, even from beyond the grave. Death is not the final separation it once was.”

  Get rid of him. I need to speak to you alone, Chase says.

  He has retreated to the corner of her office, apparently having lost what little patience he once had. His hands are poised over a filing cabinet in warning. It wouldn’t be the first time he toppled furniture in front of a potential new client.

  Irritation swells and Sasha grits her teeth. “We offer visitations, of course. A chance for you to talk to your loved one, give each other updates, discuss your children and grandchildren, perhaps. Most people go for a biannual visit, although a more frequent program is available. The rates are listed at the bottom of your pamphlet.”

  While the widower looks it over again, Sasha stands and moves toward the irritating ghost. She pretends to look through her filing cabinet while speaking in a whisper. “For God’s sake. Not now, Chase.”

  I wouldn’t bother you if it weren’t important.

  “Yes, you would.” She stares at him, silently willing him to admit his habit of interruption, his inability to respect personal boundaries the way the others do, his interest in messing with her at every opportunity.

  Instead, all she sees is seriousness. He blinks in slow motion, drags a hand through his dark hair with obvious aggravation. A frustrated ghost, she thinks, not for the first time. No wonder he’s a poltergeist.

  Ezra is missing.

  —

  The western half of the cemetery contains the oldest graves. They were developed more than a century ago, long before Sasha’s ancestors purchased the place. Not many ghosts remain from that time period, and Ezra is oldest of them all.

  Chase stays near as Sasha heads toward the old man’s final resting place. From a distance, she sees a cluster of ghosts keeping vigil in front of the crypt. White bodies drifting around each other, whispering in voices that normal people don’t hear. The scents of dirt, moisture and age press upon her. Familiar scents, but melancholy and reassuring in their way. Sasha has grown up among them.

  They’re afraid.

  “They’re ghosts.” She can barely contain her impatience. Honestly. The dead were the most superstitious creatures on earth. “They have nothing to be afraid of.”

  The Fade comes for us all.

  “Only by choice.” Sasha glances at Chase, searching for telltale signs. The time ghosts spend on the mortal plane varies. Some leave immediately; others take decades to lose interest in existence. Trouble is, the longer the ghost has been around, the more devastating it is when that ghost finally succumbs.

  As for Chase, his ghostly aura shimmers brightly. Indivi
dual features stand out and expressions still flit over his face. He won’t be fading anytime soon.

  “So what are you saying? That Ezra faded?”

  You know he didn’t. He loved it here.

  Sasha frowns because the statement is true. Ezra has never lacked interest in remaining a ghost. A cantankerous man with loads of stories and a constant influx of new listeners have kept him chained to the ghost realm far beyond his contemporaries.

  A few notice her approach and begin to stream around her. Sasha clutches her jacket more tightly against her body. Her breath puffs in the now-wintry air as they surround her.

  Ezra is missing, Sasha.

  Where has he gone?

  Did the Fade take him?

  We know something is wrong.

  You have to help him. Please.

  Sasha hushes them all. “Who saw him last?”

  Georgia Parker steps forward. A matronly teacher with a terrifyingly tight bun and pursed lips. She doesn’t approve of anyone, the single exception being Ezra. The teacher obviously fancies the old fart, although Sasha will never bring that up. To do so would alienate the prim woman, who continues to speak fondly of the husband she left behind.

  More importantly, Georgia’s family still pays a premium amount of money to talk to their mother and grandmother, and Georgia is vindictive enough not to cooperate.

  Two nights ago, he went to the Preacher’s. No one has seen him since.

  —

  Ghosts are tied to their bodies so long as they remain on the mortal plane, which means they are likewise bound to the cemetery grounds. There are only so many places Ezra could have gone.