Shock Totem 6: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  They rape him anyway, but it gives him time to think.

  • • •

  Vincent is curled up in a small closet. As far as he can tell, his bleeding has stopped. Outside, they’re singing “The Piña Colada Song.”

  The door opens, and the music gets louder. “In ya go,” says a callow voice. A body lands across his legs. There is a cry of surprise and pain—a female cry.

  “Marsha?” Vincent asks. He scoots to one side, giving her space. She smells strongly of excrement. “Marsha, is that you?”

  “Yes.” But she says it quietly, and it’s all she says.

  “Listen, I think I’ve got it figured out. I think I know why I’m here.”

  He explains. He’s been dating a socialite named Fiona Gittes, but not exclusively. Davis Appledorn, the defense contractor, may have been seeing her, too. He has a big ranch in Texas, but also (if memory serves) a house in Monaco. Fiona was in Texas not long ago. Now she’s in Monaco. Whenever he would ask her about the others, she’d say he’s the one she really likes, the rest are just bank accounts. Appledorn is richer than God, but he’s old. So maybe he’s insecure? Maybe while the Pentagon is using tonight to eliminate policy rivals, Davis Appledorn is eliminating a romantic one?

  When Vincent gets to the end of his spiel, he waits for Marsha to respond, but all he hears is the sound of her quietly weeping.

  • • •

  Fiona stands by the window, wrapped in a sheet. Vincent approaches her and kisses the nape of her neck. Cairo twinkles beneath them.

  “Where are we going to meet next?” she asks.

  “I’ll spin a globe, you point.” She squeals with delight as he lifts her up and carries her back to bed.

  A door creaks open. The image flickers out. Vincent feels the itchy carpet and the hard closet wall. The whole world sinking around him, he remembers where he is.

  “Life’s a game, amigos. And you lose.” It’s that callow voice again. A surfer’s voice.

  Vincent is dragged out of the closet by his feet. They roll him over. Cuffs snap closed around his ankles, then his hands are cuffed behind him. From the sound of it, the same thing is happening to Marsha.

  He is lifted to his feet, given a shove from behind, and nearly trips. “Ándale, ándale,” says that stupid fucking surfer as they bounce Vincent off the corridor walls.

  His right foot catches something and then he’s falling, twisting, and landing on his side across a row of hard, painful edges. He cries out.

  “What’s the matter, didn’t see the stairs?” Surfer Boy pops off a hideous staccato laugh.

  Vincent wants to launch himself off of these steps, aim for that obnoxious laugh, bite off his fucking nose or one of his goddamned ears. Maim the son of a bitch. Make him ugly. But cuffed at the hands and feet, all he can manage is an impotent jerk of his body. He goes nowhere.

  “Get the fuck up,” says a gravelly voice, and he is lifted to his feet by the collar. He’s pushed up the stairs at arm’s length.

  Outside, the air is bracing. Somewhere in the distance, a foghorn.

  “Here they are, padre,” says Surfer Boy.

  Another voice, gruffer, saltier: “All right, let’s get this over with.”

  The sound of rustling, struggling. A dull thud. Then Marsha screams.

  “Marsha!” Vincent calls. “Marsha!”

  A heavy, metallic scraping. Like a lid closing. Vincent fights against his chains until someone kicks him in the head and laughs.

  Whirrrrr, stop. Whirrrrr, stop. An electric drill. Marsha is screaming. What are they sealing her inside of?

  A female voice, maybe twenty feet away to his left: “Oh, fiddle, we can’t see the sunrise.”

  Another: “Thick as pea soup out here.” He recognizes this one. It’s Marilyn Monroe.

  To his right, he can hear the muffled sound of Marsha praying: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil...”

  Whirrrrr, stop.

  And to his left: “Are you going to meet Fiona in Rome?”

  Fiona. Rome. “Hey!” Vincent turns and yells toward the speaker.

  Another thud. Then: “One, two, three!” Grunting, then heavy footsteps, quick across the deck. Then again, slower this time: “One...two...three!”

  A second later there is a sickening splash. The glug glug glug of air escaping from holes in whatever-it-is. He can still hear Marsha screaming, but it sounds miles away. He tries to push it out of his mind.

  “Hey! Marilyn Monroe!” he calls, and the two women giggle. He tries again. “Hey!”

  After a long moment, Marilyn says, “Does the zombie purport to address me directly?”

  “Please, no time for that. Tell me—do you know Fiona Gittes?”

  More giggles, and another interminable pause. Vincent hears footsteps approaching. Must be Salty Voice coming for him. Then Marilyn finally replies, “Time is a very different thing for me than it is for you.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “So what if I do.”

  “Is she having an affair with Davis Appledorn?”

  Now the giggles become howls of delighted laughter. “Wait a second,” Marilyn says. Footsteps clicking toward him—high heels. Cold fingers grasp his chin. “Poor zombie. Do you want to know why you’re here?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  The engine kicks on and the boat starts to move. Vermouthy breath, just inches from Vincent’s face, says, “In retaliation for being fired, Ben Mayo contacts some people he knew back in Russia, then his old friend Marsha, who’s now an embittered hallwalker. There’s enough potential Rosenbergs at Foggy Bottom that she has no trouble finding you. The three of you conspire to sell loose Russian nukes to Iran, but then you all disappear somewhere in the Middle East. Did the sale go through? Did Ahmadinejad get his nukes? No one knows. But don’t you see? Now we have to invade.”

  She laughs and pushes his head down, knocking it against the deck. “Dump him,” she says.

  The boat comes to a gradual stop. The engine sputters off. Vincent can hear the water lapping against the hull. He can feel its iciness, though not a drop has touched him.

  The women, walking away, laugh hysterically. Marilyn says, “What time does Starbucks open?”

  One pair of rough hands grabs Vincent’s ankles, and another gets him under the arms. Before he can react, he’s lifted into the air and lowered down, feet-first. A hard blow to the back of the head stuns him. Hands on his shoulders push him down, folding him over inside some sort of compartment, his chin touching his knees.

  He tries to wiggle around. There is no room to move. Just cold, rounded metal against his back. Oh, Jesus, he thinks. This is an oil drum.

  The heavy lid, sliding into place above him. His breaths are fast and deep; his hands bound and useless. He tries to yell for help, but it comes out surprisingly weak.

  Last night. Last night I went to bed like any other night. In my own soft bed. Please, if I could just get back to last night...

  Whirrrrr, stop. Whirrrrr, stop. Whirrrrr, stop. Vincent wills his booming heart to explode. It won’t.

  Whirrrrr, stop.

  He has to say something. But what? He makes an attempt: “W-wait, I...”

  “Sorry, buddy, I don’t make the rules,” Salty replies from the other end of a rapidly closing tunnel.

  The drum is kicked over. He’s lifted off the ground. Only seconds to go.

  “One.”

  Fiona. Cairo.

  “Two.”

  Bar hopping in Tel Aviv. Palm trees, beautiful women.

  “Three!”

  Falling...

  Sandy Point. Sand castles. Sunshine, long ago.

  Then the drum hits the water and Vincent’s head smacks against the wall, stunning him again. After a few seconds he becomes aware of the cold and brackish Chesapeake rushing in all around him.

  As his steel coffin plummets toward the bottom, he keeps his thoughts on those sunny days of his boyhood, wading out pa
st his swim trunks in the same heavenly water that is now filling his lungs.

  • • •

  Over 500 miles away, at CNN Center in Atlanta, a man stands before a mirror, brushing the lint off his best Burberry suit. He goes over his talking points in his head, then looks at the clock.

  It’s almost time.

  Addison Clift has live all over the place, including Chicago, Pittsburgh, and now Vermont. He’s had a number of jobs, such as projectionist, bartender, and mail carrier. His fiction can also be found at Defenestration.

  BLOODSTAINS

  & BLUE SUEDE SHOES

  by John Boden and Simon Marshall-Jones

  PART IV: THE SIXTIES

  The 60s. Peace, free love, hugging and drugs. Happy, happy everywhere, right? Wrong.

  The 60s were a turbulent time, what with the civil rights movement being born amidst turmoil, the tragedy that was Vietnam, the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, peaceful student protests turning not so peaceful and the authorities coming down hard on them. It was not all smiles. But out of chaos often emerges something creative and unexpected.

  So many notable acts shambled forward in this decade, acts that would remain in the forefront of musical history for the next few decades, with some still rocking today. While 50s-style rock and roll was still quite popular at the dawn of the 60s, by 1964 another change was brewing. It was bubbling up across the pond and about to blow. The UK was about to give us a gift we would never be able to repay. A rock and roll invasion!

  It began with the Beatles exploding onto the scene, playing revitalized R&B ditties and concise pop gems to squealing girlies on both sides of the ocean. Formed in 1960, they initially learned their craft in the clubs of Hamburg and Liverpool (The Cavern is probably the most famous club of all), but they only really metamorphosed into the band we know through the combined efforts of their manager, Brian Epstein, and producer George Martin.

  While the Beatles represented the acceptable (albeit barely) squeaky clean, suited and booted image of the early 60s British pop stars, there was another band standing alongside them who were probably the antithesis of the Liverpudlian foursome—the Rolling Stones.

  DON’T GIVE A HOOT OF A WARNING

  While it’s true that both bands had the same influences, such as the blues greats and early R&B, the Stones stripped it down and grimed it up, dragging it through all kinds of shit and muck in the alleys and gutters, finally beating the hell out of it with blunt instruments and leaving it for dead in a dented trashcan. The Beatles kept it short, sharp and simple, giving the masses what they craved. In later years, when the Beatles were all Sgt. Pepper, Maharishi Yoga, and sitar-laden love rock, the Stones were “Dancing with Mr. D,” high on smack and showing “Sympathy for the Devil.”

  Amongst other bands bursting into the popular music consciousness of the era were The Who, probably most famous for the manic antics of drummer Keith Moon and the guitar-smashing Pete Townsend. This four-piece roared into onstage action playing an energetic and ferocious brand of rock and roll, which some would later argue was a form of proto-punk, a precursor to the punk movement that eventually reared its mohawked head in the latter part of the 70s. The Who were an extremely versatile band, musically speaking, being able to wow crowds with anthemic ditties like “My Generation” and “I Can See for Miles” and simultaneously churn out horrific and sinister songs like “I’m a Boy,” “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” and “Boris the Spider.” The band would eventually delve into rock operas, Tommy being the obvious example here, musical extravaganzas which were rife with dark themes and imagery along with real-life monstrosities.

  Weaving between the chart dominance of these bands were countless others, bands who went on to become pioneers in their own right, each pushing boundaries in ways both musical and thematic. Donovan sang about the “Season of the Witch,” while King Crimson blew minds with intricate progressive epics, and even Creedence Clearwater Revival got in on the act with their best-known song, “Bad Moon Rising.” However, by the close of the decade the real heavy hitters stepped onto the stage, ready to lay waste to their forefathers: Black Sabbath mined a vein of music gold, rich in dark occult and so-called “satanic” imagery, their electric funeral dirge helping to launch a thousand sound-alike bands. To this day, I (John) have never heard a song as frightening as the title cut from Black Sabbath’s self-titled album.

  Digging in the same ground but with decidedly more pagan leanings, Led Zeppelin’s fantasy-tinged, heavy arena rock took music to new heights as well as to new excesses. It is well-known that lead guitarist Jimmy Page had leanings towards the occult, hinted at in the film The Song Remains the Same. The Doors, meanwhile, led by the brooding genius and smoldering looks of Jim Morrison, were handing us darkly surreal songs about the underbelly—and reality—of the human condition: This heralded a new slant to rock, versifying the unspoken horrors of real life and giving voice to those lost within its labyrinthine maze. This was in direct contrast to the Beach Boys, who were doing their damnedest to keep us all happy and smiling, although I (John again) always found their layered harmonies to be quite unsettling and somewhat creepy. Around the same time, a young David Bowie gave us a haunting allegory to addiction with his hit, “Space Oddity”—a facet of life which has become all too much a modern-day horror.

  Jimi Hendrix and his Experience were building their own monster. Stitching together blues and jazz with something heavy as hell and just as hot. Songs about voodoo and astral planes, all coupled with an uncanny, almost supernatural prowess for his instrument, beg his inclusion in this article.

  The 60s was the era where widespread social conscience matured, and this came out in music in the form of the protest song. Although folk and blues had been protesting injustices and inequalities for as long as they’d been around, the apotheosis of the evolution of the protest song could be said to be the 60s itself. With the mounting casualties of the Vietnam war and the realization that America was effectively unprepared for the type of guerilla warfare being exercised by the communist-backed enemy, plus the ongoing frostiness of the Cold War, with its inherent threat of nuclear catastrophe (and emergent globalism), is it any wonder that the protest song took hold on popular culture. Perhaps the most famous protest song, certainly to my (Simon’s) ears, is “Eve of Destruction,” about what was seen as the inevitability of the horror of atomic apocalypse. The song has been recorded many times, and was originally offered to the Byrds, who rejected it. It was eventually recorded by the Turtles. Its most famous interpretation is by Barry MacGuire, sung with his unique gravelly voice, and it’s this version most people are familiar with.

  There were others plowing the same furrows, including the oddity that was Screaming Lord Sutch, whose songs harvested their themes from the classic horror genre. He would often dress as Jack the Ripper, and performed onstage with his backing band the Savages, utilizing such stereotypical horror props as skulls, “cadavers” and knives as part of the show. Much of it appears to have been merely a kind of gimmick on which to hang the music and, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn, as a means of shocking his “elders,” as the young generation is always wont to do. He released a number of albums in the 70s, but eventually became a politician, heading up the Monster Raving Loony Party, which is still active today and which is still sending up the British political system.

  The very sound of rock and roll was mutating faster than anything. When the 60s began rock music had a standard sound and had become just another subgenre of pop music. However, by the time the decade had closed it had become a monstrous thing, with a life of its own and proudly waving tentacles of varying sound and substance.

  One of those tentacles was psychedelia, which had evolved in partnership with the burgeoning hippie and drug scene of the mid to late 60s, bringing to the musical masses a fusion of rock and experimentation. Whereas the Beatles took their incarnation of the new sound in a brightly surreal direction (the film Yellow Submarine being the ep
itome of this “popular” style, exemplified by their 1967 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album), other bands took it in the opposite direction. A good example is perhaps Chicago’s H.P. Lovecraft who, as their name helpfully suggests, took their inspiration from the works of the eponymous Providence writer of cosmic horror. Their music attempted to capture, and often succeeded in doing so, the haunting atmosphere and ambience of Lovecraft’s stories, many of which were set in his native New England. During the same period, a young man in Texas by the name of Roky Erickson was dropping out of high school to form a band. By the end of the decade, he, along with his band The 13th Floor Elevators, would begin delivering albums full of dark psychedelia, which would grow darker and stranger as his trajectory went on.

  The connection between horror and music was, up until the end of the 60s, still more of a novelty than anything serious, but from behind the grinning façade, talons and tendrils were beginning to sprawl...

  But we would have to wait until the following decade for that connection to be irrevocably forged into an unbreakable bond and seared into the public’s consciousness.

  And things would never be the same.

  John Boden resides in the shadow of Three Mile Island with his wonderful wife and children. Aside from his work with Shock Totem, his stories can be found in 52 Stitches, Everyday Weirdness, Black Ink Horror #7, and Psychos: Serial Killers, Depraved Madmen, and the Criminally Insane, edited by John Skipp.

  Simon Marshall-Jones is a UK-based writer, artist, editor, publisher and blogger: also wine and cheese lover, music freak and covered in too many tattoos.

  LIGHTEN UP

  by Jack Ketchum

  It was about 11:30 and Adoni was messing with the lighting again.