by Brett Savory
He hadn’t settled down until they’d started him on the drugs, always needing to be sedated and accompanied by several officers in case the drugs began to wear off. His will, his aggression seeming to shrug off everything administered into his system.
No one knew what to do about the boy.
Rossman roused himself from his meandering thoughts and noticed Danny was staring intently at his feet, moving his slippers back and forth slowly in the air, as if they were a curiosity of some sort, like he’d never seen them before. Brow furrowed, little beads of sweat forming on his upper lip and forehead, he was whispering under his breath again. It sounded like more snatches of “Danny Boy.”
“Danny,” Rossman said gently, “was it your daddy that sang that song to you, then?”
Danny ignored him, riveted by his blue and white sneakers. He giggled a little.
Rossman fiddled with his watch and waited.
Growing impatient, he finally asked again, “Danny, was it your—”
The boy’s head snapped up and he locked eyes with the psychologist. “You already asked me about this, Mr. Joel, and I told you it was my daddy’s song.”
Rossman swallowed, ready for a repeat performance of Danny’s earlier tantrum. But it didn’t happen. Danny’s face softened and his eyes glazed over in memory.
Rossman said something else, but Danny couldn’t hear him now, could only see his lips moving. Danny chuckled. It looked funny to see him like that, probably saying important things that Danny should be listening to so he could get better, because he knew he’d been a bad boy. He shouldn’t have hurt that psychologist and those police officers and those orderlies and his own—
No, can’t think of that. What Daddy did was wrong and he didn’t like to remember that stuff because it made him think bad things about his daddy when he only wanted to think good things. ’Cause Daddy was a good man. He used to sing to Danny and read him stories and tickle his feet to make him laugh. All those things were better than the few bad things he’d done to his family. Danny knew that Daddy would be in Heaven because he knew that only really bad people went to Hell, and his daddy wasn’t a bad person. Not really, anyway. Maybe a little confused sometimes, but certainly not bad.
Danny didn’t care, though, right now, ’cause Daddy was tickling his feet again and that was all that mattered. That was all that ever mattered.
Every night when Danny was getting ready for bed, Daddy would come into his room, sit on the edge of the bed and—
—tickle my feet, he’s ticklingticklingtickling! “Hahaaah!”
Such a nice voice, my daddy, so sweet. I love it when he looks at me like this and sings. I’m his Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling . . . He loves me so, does my daddy, and I love him, too.
Most of the time he’s like this. Why can’t he stay like this? Why does he have to get so mad sometimes?
(Oh Danny Boy . . . )
I know he doesn’t mean it when he gets angry and hurts someone. He always apologizes, so it’s okay, and it’s good because—
“Hahahahaaaah! Quit tickling, Daddy!! I can’t breathe!
Keep singing, though, it’s so nice . . . ”
Quiet in the house, everyone else is asleep already. I wonder if Mommy will buy more Count Chocula tomorrow. I sure hope so . . . I ’specially like the marshmallows. They’re crunchy, but I thought marshmallows were supposed to be soft. Oh, well, don’t matter, they’re still good, and Mommy lets me eat them as much as I want, and she looks so . . . (yawn!) . . . happy when . . .
“Mmm, so tired, Daddy . . . So . . . tired. Keep singing, okay?
I love you, Daddy.”
(“I love you, too, Danny Boy.”)
. . .
Rossman couldn’t get Danny to snap out of it. He tried shaking him by the shoulders, but the boy’s head just lolled about on his shoulders like an infant’s. The doctor banged heavily on the steel door, opened the little slot and bellowed for the orderly.
. . .
So tired . . .
Daddy’s blue eyes were changing. Danny blinked twice to try to clear his vision. Daddy wasn’t tickling his feet or singing anymore. But he wasn’t changing into Angry Daddy yet, or at least it didn’t look like it. What was going on?
The blue of Daddy’s eyes swirled in a circular motion, like something was stirring them up. Sort of like a milkshake or something.
The bed changed into a metal chair and Daddy floated a few feet away on it. Danny looked down and his racing car bed was now a big, wooden chair, and he was strapped into it.
He started struggling, looking at his daddy, wondering what was happening. The blue swirling out from his eyes was painting the room, washing it in its subdued hues, dulling down noises, dulling down reactions, sensory input, everything.
Daddy started singing.
. . .
Two orderlies burst through the door and rushed over to Danny. He was staring straight at Dr. Rossman, terror in his eyes, sweat cascading down his face. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. His eyes widened even more.
Rossman was locked by the boy’s gaze. Unable to move, he drained himself into the terror, into the look on Danny’s face.
What is he seeing? Rossman thought. My God, what is he SEEING?
Danny started to convulse.
. . .
Daddy finished his song.
“Oh, keep going, that was great!” I said, but I noticed Daddy had his gun again. He never sang when he had his gun.
He was pointing it straight at me. The one I found in the drawer in his office. That was the same day I found his magazines in the couch. I can see ma in the barrel, and grampy, too. My sisters and brother are deeper inside the gun, but I can see everyone.
“Ma would have given me, would have given me, would have given me . . . ” I’m sayin’, and Dad’s wonderin’ what I’m talkin’ about. Like he doesn’t know. It feels funny to say things over and over again. It starts to sound like nothing. Like the words never meant anything to begin with.
He killed my mother.
Haven’t I done all this before? What’s the point in doing it all again?
“I love you, Danny Boy, and everyone’s happy you did what you did. It was the best thing for everyone.”
Dad’s freaking me out. What’s he talking about? I’m scared, Dad, I’m really, really scared . . .
“I . . . ” Dad’s crying, the barrel of the gun wavering, family members screaming and falling out of the barrel onto the floor. I wish there were floorboards so they could squeeze through them and escape. Escape Dad. Escape his fucking—
“I never meant to hurt any of you,” he says, bringing the gun back up, level with my face. I think it’s time to scream. Dad’s going to kill me.
“Only one bullet left. Either you or me. Who’s it gonna be, son? Who do you think should die this fine day?”
I remember everything Dad ever did to us in that instant. I remember our fear and loathing. I remember words, phrases from different times in our lives, spoken by all of us, thought by all of us: “We’d be better off dead.”
The images and thoughts form into a solid emotion, and it shoots outta my eyes like a laser bolt. Yeah, like a badass laser bolt from Han Solo’s blaster or somethin’. I’m not sure if it hits Dad or someone else, but somebody picked it up, I know that.
“You did the best thing for everyone, Danny Boy . . . I’m proud of you, son.”
Dad’s singing again. I love it when he sings. He has such a beautiful voice . . .
“And I shall hear tho’ soft you tread above me. And all my grave will warmer sweeter be. And you will call and tell me that you love me. And I shall sleep in peace ’til you come to me.”
Daddy’s smiling, and I can feel myself dying. Dead. Trapped now in the barrel of his gun with my family and Count Chocula. And I suddenly remember him telling me one night after tickling my feet that a boy becomes a man when the tic
kling stops being fun and instead becomes an annoyance. But I love Daddy so much that I know that will never happen with him.
I love Daddy so much.
I love Daddy—
(BANG!) so much.
SLIPKNOT
Slipknot spoke: You can’t kill me, ’cause I’m already inside you.
Shadows dripped. Silhouettes of emotions stretched themselves languidly against the pitch background of Edward Curtis’ dreamscape. They wrapped themselves in his psyche, dispelled myth, eschewed logic, creating a template for their work.
Once the canvas was created, the medium was selected. It was always the same: guilt. It sucked the black from the darkest part of his heart and vomited its core between his flashing synapses. Guilt.
You can’t fucking kill me. . . .
“I do not want to kill you,” Edward whispered in his sleep.
Like ink from the tip of a quill, the shadows dribbled through his thoughts, blanketing them, suffusing them with their intent. Then the deep recesses of shadowforms pulled away from Edward’s mind en masse. He inhaled sharply. The cloaking pools of black left him exposed, shivering, cold sweat beading on his forehead, an image behind his eyelids of a half-drunk bottle of red wine sitting on an old oak table, the crimson liquid swimming in and out of focus, making him nauseous.
Edward opened his eyes and the bottle continued to float in his vision for a few seconds before dissipating, droplets splashing across his ceiling, dripping onto his bed.
Like shadows.
“Aw, Grampa!” the boy wailed, “ya can’t stop there!”
The bottle between the boy and his grandfather shimmered in the flickering shadows thrown by the fireplace behind the old man. The boy slammed his little fist on the oak table in frustration. “Come on! Tell the rest! No fair!”
Grampa chuckled, jowls jiggling, bright red cheeks plumping with the motion, like a Butterball on Thanksgiving Day. “No more, my boy. You’re getting scared, and besides, it’s bedtime for wee little chumblies like you.”
Chumbly.
That’s what Gramps always called little Eddie. The old man had made up the story many years ago about a bear that wore fuzzy pants and had a wobbly oven and a farting toaster. Pretty bizarre, Eddie thought. He didn’t much care for the story of Chumbly Bear, but he liked the name for some reason. It had a nice ring when Grandpa said it.
“But you stopped at the best paaart!” Eddie whined, stretching out the last word like toffee.
Grampa chuckled again, shaking the table ever-soslightly with his big belly as it rubbed up against the old oak. “There is no best part of a Chumbly story, Eddie.” He leaned forward slowly, chair creaking beneath his weight, eyes dancing. “It’s all the best part.”
Something in the wine bottle moved.
Eyes flying wide open, an electric bolt shot up Eddie’s spine. “What was that!?” The boy jumped out of his chair and stood behind it, staring, jaw agape, at the bottle.
Grampa sat back in his chair, and looked at the bottle. His eyes glazed over a little, scaring young Eddie. “Gramps? Gramps, are you okay?”
Grampa snapped out of it, his eyes lighting on Eddies’, dancing again. “Yes, boy, yes, just fine, just . . . fine,” he said, studying the bottle as though it were some curiosity he’d found at an antique shop. “It’s just that . . . ” He trailed off again, this time grinning a little as if remembering the punch line of a favorite joke. Eddie came around the chair and sat back down, slowly, never taking his eyes off the bottle.
“What, Grampa? What is it? What’s . . . ” He raised an arm and pointed at the bottle. “. . . inside?”
Grampa’s grin widened. He cleared his throat. “Why, it’s the bear, son.”
Achill crept up Eddie’s spine. He mouthed the words along with Grampa as he spoke them:
“Chumbly Bear,” Gramps said, the smile failing to touch his eyes now, a haunted look replacing it as he remembered the events of over forty years past. “But I thought he was long gone, the old bugger.” He tried to laugh a little then, but the sound caught in his throat.
Eddie frowned. “But Chumbly’s just a dumb old story bear. How can . . . that be him?”
The thing in the bottle spun around slowly at the boy’s words, the glint from the firelight dancing into the crimson waves, washing vague drafts of fear through the boy, stabs of memory through the old man. The indiscernible shape bobbed in sync with the rise and fall of the tips of the flames from the fire, hypnotically, mesmerizing.
“Don’t know, Eddie,” Gramps whispered, barely opening his mouth. “I hoped by telling stories about him, it’d keep him away for good.”
Gramps fell back into silence.
Eddie wanted to ask Gramps what he was talking about. When had he seen the bear before? It didn’t even look like a bear, so how did he know it was Chumbly? Why did he not want the bear to come back? What had happened?
The thing inside the bottle spun around a few more times, then disappeared in a glint of firelight and a ripple of wine.
Edward brushed his teeth in the bathroom mirror and thought about his dream.
You can’t kill me, ’cause I’m already inside you.
Memories of Gramps and his childhood, listening to the old man tell his Chumbly Bear stories by the fireplace, flitted through his mind like a broken, too-bright strobe light, the images uneven, unnatural.
Wine and shadows, he thought. Something dancing in the bottle. Something I can’t kill. But I do not want to kill it. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.
Slipknot hunkered down in Edward’s mind and listened. Just . . . listened. Being the bear had been fun, sure. But being Slipknot was oh so much better. In every way. It did not want to lose that. Not now. Not after all this time.
Edward leaned over, spit into the sink, rinsed, stood back up . . . and caught a flicker in the upper right-hand corner of the mirror. Something black. Churning. Twisting. Mulching.
Dancing.
Slipknot could not resist a titter.
More memories surfaced—these ones like old, forgotten pictures in a photo album, like the dregs of a longcold cup of coffee sliding down the throat.
Edward grimaced.
Gramps had shot himself in the face with a doublebarrelled shotgun two months after that last Chumbly story when he’d been scared by the return of the bear—or whatever the hell it was—moving around in the wine bottle. Both parents gone before he was old enough to walk—father killed in a car accident, mother run off with another man—he’d been given over to his grandfather, so little Eddie had been the one to find poor Gramps, brains smeared all over the fireplace and oak table, blood splashes streaking across the wine bottle and ceiling, dripping. Dripping like the shadows sometimes dripped in his dreams.
A voice from the bottle, a swirling in the boy’s ears, weaving a tapestry of shadows across thought, whispered gently in his ear as he gazed down at Gramps’ cooling corpse: You can’t kill me . . .
Edward had screamed then, and run out of the house shouting for help.
But that was over twenty years ago.
The flickering thing in the high corner of the mirror spread itself out and pulsed in time with Edward’s heartbeat. Edward stared, transfixed. The toothbrush dropped from his limp fingers. Then he heard the voice again, this time so close to his ear he imagined he could feel the slight rush of air as the sentence formed, each word like a crumbling tombstone half-in, half-out of the shadow of a tree, caught between this world and the next: I’m inside you.
Then the walls dissolved in Edward’s vision, and he was no longer in his bathroom . . .
“Shoot the boy,” the man said.
Philip Curtis flinched. “I can’t, Smithy, he’s my only son.” The gun wavered, came down by the man’s side. “How do you expect me to—”
“Shoot him or I’ll shoot you both.” Cold fact.
“But Smithy, there’s gotta be—”
“No,
there ain’t nothin’ else you can do,” Smithy interrupted, raising both arms, gun in each hand, and pointed them at Philip and his son. “You got yourself into this, now you gotta do what you can to get out. And if you’re thinkin’ you can squeeze off a shot in my direction before I kill you both . . . well, if I was you, I’d stop thinkin’ like that, Phil. It ain’t gonna happen. You know it ain’t. Now FUCKING shoot him. I’m countin’ to five.
“One.”
Sweat popped out on Philip’s forehead. His son, James Curtis—just married, new father—shook his head back and forth, eyes glued to the guns in Smithy’s hands, one part of him praying Smithy would pull the triggers and just end it all, the other part praying his father would raise his own pistol and at least try to save their lives.
“Two.”
“Look, Smithy, I’m sorry, alright!? We gotta be able to work this out. Why are you doing this? Why do you have to—”
“Three.”
Philip Curtis started to cry. James’s insides clenched tight as a drum, heart lurching in his throat. Philip raised the gun to his son’s face.
“Dad, what are you DOING? Shoot HIM! At least TRY, for God’s sake!”
“Four.” Smithy smiled, waited a beat, took a breath, and moved the muscles in his face that would form the word “five.”
Edward, tears glistening in his eyes, fell over in his bathroom, bashing the side of his face against the tub and curling up into a ball. He cupped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, mouthed the word along with James.
“Five.”
Smithy only got half the word out before Philip’s bullet ripped through James’s skull, spraying thick clumps of brain and blood against the nearby trees.
James crumpled.
Philip dropped the gun, fell to his knees, head in hands, sobbing.
Smithy turned around, silent, and made his way through the forest, back to his car.
Edward opened his eyes, the fluorescent light of the bathroom too bright, blinding. He said one word, the sound dropping like stone from between his dry, cracked lips: “Dad.”