What Price Gory?

by West, Terry M.

  As if in response to Tommy’s thoughts, Stan said, “I’ll go down in the history books for this. Hell, they might even name it after me.” This was Stan’s bid at a little immortality. It was something that a writer, even a novice, could understand.

  And in that instant, while Stan’s eyes were still fixed on Tommy, the creature bent down, gripped the bear trap, and pulled the jaws open, freeing its wounded leg. Tommy saw it. He had no idea whether the creature had just figured it out or if it had planted a trap for them all along. He pointed silently, his eyes filled with fright. Stan spun around. The creature ate up the distance between it and Stan, tackling the old man before he could get a shot off. The lame leg did not slow the creature down. The shotgun flipped out of Stan’s hands and landed several feet away on the ground. It pointed at Tommy when it hit the dirt and he ducked, afraid that it might go off.

  The creature drove its talons into Stan’s midsection, opening him up. It bent and wet its muzzle again inside Stan this time. It bit and ripped at the old man’s soft flesh and bone. Stan shrieked in supreme horror and torture. Tommy watched helplessly as the creature thrashed around inside Stan and split him in two. The creature stood up slowly, staring at the near dead halves of Stan on the ground. Stan’s severed spine twitched in the air. The thing looked satisfied with the job it had done on the old man. It grunted and it turned slowly toward Tommy. The fresh blood and flesh of Stan marked its fur like war paint. It cocked its head and stared at the frightened, would-be author for a moment. It seemed to be contemplating its next violent move. It thought on this as it licked at its bloody talons with a serpentine tongue. Tommy felt like he was being teased in some fashion. But he had no doubt that the monster’s intentions were gruesome and bad.

  He knew he couldn’t outrun it. He looked at the shotgun on the ground, ten or so feet in front of him, and the creature maybe triple that distance. He scrambled for it. The creature hissed a warning, as if it knew the ramifications of Tommy having the weapon. It came for Tommy, swiftly and on all fours. Tommy scooped the shotgun off of the ground. He quickly leveled the weapon at the approaching creature. He wasn’t that great of a shot, so he waited until it was almost on top of him. Tommy pulled the trigger. The force of the shot punished his shoulder and almost sent the shotgun flying out of his hands.

  The blast caught the thing in the chest, driving it back several feet. The creature wheezed for a second, surprised. It had been a killing shot, but the thing still stood. It looked to its chest, torn open by the shotgun. Tommy realized it had the capacity for vengeance when its face rose back up and knotted angrily.

  Tommy dug the souvenir Stan had given him out of his pocket and he reloaded that God damn gun but quickly. The old man would have been proud.

  The monster charged once more, and it was bringing unholy retribution with it.

  Tommy didn’t have much time, but he took what he had to better brace himself.

  The second frantic shot found the creature’s throat. It was completely by accident; Tommy had been aiming for its chest again, remembering Stan’s lesson.

  It fell to the earth, legs thrashing. It gargled with blood and pissed itself. The creature died quickly and as a thing of flesh and blood; not a demon or other agent of the supernatural. Tommy had never been a fan of death, but he didn’t mind this. The thing didn’t belong here, anyway. It was a blood-thirsty and dark creature of nightmares. And it had killed Stan.

  Tommy looked toward the old man. He rushed over and bent down to Stan’s upper half. Tommy had been incorrect about one thing; Stan was still alive. By some sick and demented miracle, there was still a spark in him.

  The old man stared at Tommy, a pool of blood giving off steam between the space of upper and lower body. His spine still twitched, like the tail of an ornery cat. Tommy was sad, horrified and sickened all together at the same time. Stan had been wrong earlier. This was the freak show.

  Stan couldn’t speak. His mouth moved and stirred blood around, but his voice was gone. He looked like some kind of grotesque hand puppet. Tommy took Stan’s weak hand, and then the old hermit shuddered and what little life was in him quit, and Tommy was alone.

  He looked around, waiting to see if someone would come charging into the woods. He listened for sirens in the distance. No one came. He heard nothing; the winter was as quiet as death. After several minutes, he decided that gunshots on Stan Whitley’s land didn’t necessarily warrant a call to the authorities. And though not a hunter himself, he was also reasonably sure that it was deer season.

  ‘Besides, the neighbors are all gone. Remember?’ he thought.

  Tommy edged closer to the dead creature, empty shotgun still aimed at it. He wondered just what in the hell it was. Most likely a bastard of some kind; be it from science or nature.

  Knowledge was a powerful thing and he had a little taste of it in his mouth now. Tommy suddenly understood the heavy brow of shadowy men. He tried to decide what to do with all of this. There were options, as no witnesses had presented themselves. This was his chronicle, but the media would just take it away from him and someone else’s ink would be spilled on it. And what if it had been an escaped experiment powerful people were tracking? He thought of Roswell and he could imagine hard-jawed military men threatening him and his family to keep this secreted. It was unlikely, though; because really, no one gave a shit about anything, anymore. Newly discovered wonders were ignored all of the time in favor of gossip, reality television and fashion. This secret of his wouldn’t even stretch the fifteen minutes it was promised. Tommy could throw a million more reasonable arguments at it, but he knew deep down why he really didn’t want to share this.

  So, he made up his mind. This was a thing best covered and not held up to the light. But it shouldn’t go to waste and it didn’t have to it. He would see it delivered to the land of make-believe. And he would escort it there personally.

  He got a sudden perverse satisfaction from the thought of making this a scary tale. It would be a story with an actual skeleton under its skin. He had never pictured himself a writer of horror. Tommy found inspiration in authors like Hemingway and Faulkner. But this was too good to get all snobby on. And it would serve no one any better. Yes, he would be selfish. No one would ever know about this, he concluded. Not the authenticity of it, anyway.

  Tommy walked carefully back to Stan’s front yard. He borrowed one of the shovels leaning on the house and found his way back to Stan and the creature. He dug a grave. The earth was hard and uncooperative, but he managed, after an hour or so, to dig a hole big enough to accommodate them both.

  Tommy manhandled both pieces of Stan and the creature into the hole. Stan and the creature both looked at peace with one another, face to face, their corpses intertwined, but not on purpose. It was how they had landed in the gap. They were buried together along with the shotgun, after Tommy had wiped it down with a scrap of Stan’s shirt to rid it of fingerprints.

  Tommy flattened the grave the best he could. He found his way back around to Beau and buried what was left of the dog as well.

  It was freezing, but Tommy hardly felt the cold.

  Snow started to come. He wondered how long it would be before someone noticed Stan was missing. Hell, it could be months. Years, even. Stan had little family left, and the little he had never came around; they were treated no better than trespassers.

  The old man had gotten his juice from generators and water from a well on his property. He had lived as off of the grid as he could. The IRS might sniff around, eventually. But by the time they did, the top soil of the graves would have healed and taken on brush.

  Tommy worked his way back out of the woods, passing Stan’s unfriendly home and walking down the slant of the road. The street was silent still.

  His jacket and jeans were filthy. He would have to wash his clothes and he could stand a hot shower. There was time, but not a whole lot. He would have to pick his pen back up tomorrow, he realized.

  Write what you know was a rule
he had run across time and time again in books on writing. He would obviously have to change the locale and names. He walked slowly, the ideas swimming in his head. He didn’t know if he would have the patience to wait until tomorrow.

  Tommy considered the alterations it needed. He would need to put a little more crazy on Stan and a little extra muscle on himself. Tommy thought a retired police officer would fit in this better than a substitute teacher. And the hero’s wife should be a tad shapelier than Molly; with a more generous bosom. Maybe the dog should live. People loved animals and the poor bastards seldom survived horror tales.

  Tommy walked in the cold and kept composing it. He absent-mindedly strolled past his house. This stuff was practically writing itself.

  PUT ON A HAPPY FACE

  The red stain was juice. Not blood. Susie eyed the Mother Goose book that she had pulled from the treasure box. Something red had spilled onto the cover and it had dried and hardened there. But it was just silly strawberry juice. She knew this because Billy had said so and he was her big brother and big brothers didn’t lie.

  Susie looked around the small room that she slept in. It had been another child’s room a long time ago. The furnishings were old and brittle. Her bed was sturdy enough, but she seldom played with the toys that had been left behind anymore; because the room had belonged to a boy and boyish things lived there. She had played with an item or two, here and there, out of boredom. But she had broken a few things. Most notably, an aged wooden rocking horse had collapsed under her, skinning her knee and embarrassing her in front of Billy.

  Susie hated to break things; even if they were boy things. She had played with the more durable wind up tin toys quite a bit. But she quickly tired of them. They squawked and vibrated, but again, they were masculine things that were eventually lost on her.

  She liked soft toys that were light blue and pink; stuffed animals and baby dolls. These were the things she enjoyed, because that’s what her programming had told her to like. And Billy brought these things around, sometimes.

  Her seventh birthday, which had come recently, had been a lonely affair celebrated by Susie and her brother, with no other guests her age to share in cake and games. But Billy had brightened it up by giving her a pink princess dress, construction paper and fresh crayons, because Susie loved to write and draw. Billy had even worn a clown mask and performed magic tricks. He had done what he could to make it a special day for her.

  There was evidence of her existence in this little boy room. There were pretty dresses hanging in the closet and a shelf on the blue wall-papered bedroom wall that bore her teddy and a few porcelain dolls that she was afraid to take into her clumsy hands.

  Her favorite possession, though, in this entire old and huge house that she lived in, was the record player on her dresser. She loved to play music and had quickly gone through the stack of vinyl records that someone had left behind. Noticing her fondness for the records, Billy had posed a scenario to her once; if there was a fire, and she could only rescue one of those records, which one would be saved? She had known right away.

  It was a live album that had been made by a man named Oscar Peterson. She had read the album cover, and it had been made in 1962. It was a very old thing to Susie; that, in and of itself, should have put her off of it. But she loved the title song, Put on a Happy Face. It was the first track on the album and she had never played past it. It was performed over and over, and she always sang along with it, loudly and happily.

  Thinking about it, she wanted to play the song right now. But it was getting late, and Billy wasn’t doing well today. He had stayed in his shadowy room all day. He had left her to the chores she was capable of; the lesson books she had to read daily (except weekends), a little cleaning in her bedroom and preparing a meal for herself that could be made by what she could reach in the kitchen and didn’t require cooking. She had settled on peanut butter and jelly with some sun tea and chips. Billy hadn’t given her instructions. He didn’t need to. Susie knew what was expected of her. She also knew that if she collected three gold stars on the paper chart Billy had tacked to her peeling bedroom wall, she would earn a trip to the treasure box. This week’s column was empty, and the surest way to get a gold star up there was by following the rules of the house, and by doing her chores.

  The old box Billy put the treasures in didn’t look like a treasure box, but Billy explained that if it did, pirates would just take it and then she and Billy would have no where to hide their treasure. She thought that was very smart of Billy, to hide things that way.

  Susie walked over to her record collection and took Put on a Happy Face from the top of the pile. The song reminded her of Billy and the way he was now.

  He had to put on many faces. But none of them were his. Not really. They were rubber masks that Billy had gotten from a novelty shop, which Susie had thought was a book store, by the sound of it. Billy had explained that a novelty shop was a place where you paid for joke items and masks. So Billy had gotten some masks, but there wasn’t any joke about it. Billy wore these masks because he had to.

  He had several, but the ones he wore the most were a group that must have been in the same series. They had all been made by molds of the same male face, but they expressed different moods. The masks were flesh-colored and bald and each one conveyed an exaggerated expression. They were facades that covered his entire head and nothing of Billy was visible through them. The disguises had very small eye and mouth holes. Susie was surprised Billy could see and breathe through them, but he didn’t seem to have any difficulty with them, at all. They fit him like skin.

  Billy had a sad face, which he wore when it was raining outside or Susie was sick. This face frowned and blue tears were painted on the cheeks.

  He had a mad face, which he wore when chores hadn’t been done for a while or Susie had misplaced something of importance. This face had a wrinkled forehead and slanted eyebrows. The lips puckered, sourly. He didn’t wear this one often, but it always made Susie feel bad when he did. She hated to upset her brother.

  There was a confused face, with lips pushed up and eyebrows raised. This face came out when Billy helped Susie with her home-schooled lessons or puzzles and on game night. For a smart man, Billy wasn’t very good at games.

  He had a panic mask; wide eyes and opened mouth. Susie only saw this once as a practice face, but was instructed by Billy that it meant they had to move, now, if she ever did see it for real. It was also called the emergency face. It was a signal that they had to flee. She kept a little purple suitcase, filled with clothes and paper and crayons, by her bed, in case that panic face ever poked into her bedroom.

  But her favorite face was his happy face. It was a bright smile, high cheeks and eyes with happy accents at the corners of them. This meant that every thing was okay, and the bad people hadn’t found them yet.

  The face she dreaded the most was the scary face. She had only seen it once on Billy, and from a dark distance. Billy had told her he never wanted her to see it any closer. It was a blue face that glowed with red eyes. If she ever saw it, she was to run from him as fast and far as she could and never look back. Susie was to find the road and people and never think of Billy again. And she would do this, as even a faraway glance of this mask scared her more than anything she could remember.

  Susie put the record down and went back to her bed. She picked her Mother Goose book back up, and looked at that stain again. The stain brought back memories of the accident. She didn’t know why it was a trigger, but it was.

  Susie had lived in River Oaks. It was a very nice place in Houston where important people lived. It was a shiny and expensive place. She had lived there with her mother and brother. They were a small family in a big house who deserved what they had, and Mommy had told her to never be ashamed of having things.

  It always amazed Susie, having a brother so much older than her. When she asked her mother about the gap in ages, Mommy simply explained that she had Billy too early in life and Susie
too late. Mommy wasn’t that old, but people did mistake her for a grandmother sometimes, and this offended Susie’s mother to no end.

  Susie was Mommy’s happy accident, Susie’s mother liked to say; a miracle no one had expected.

  There had never been a daddy around; for her or Billy. Susie had found out they were different men, because she was smart and listened to the adults when they talked. No daddies around was something that made Mommy sad, so it wasn’t brought up much. And when it was, Mommy had assured her that she would tell Susie about it, someday, when she was wise enough to understand it. It really didn’t matter, though. Susie had Billy, and he was better than any father could have been to her.

  Susie was proud of her brother, but Mommy was even prouder. Mommy called Billy a science prodigy, and she managed to always mention that to friends and strangers alike. It made Susie a little jealous, sometimes. It made her feel small and unimportant, but Billy could always take those feelings away from her with a playful smile.