by Shock Totem
She bathes in the river. Her skin prickles. She covers her breasts for a moment, stands very still, and scans the rising rocks and the forest. She whispers, “Who’s there?”
A bottle plunks in the water. It drifts slowly her way. She doesn’t see anyone.
A letter inside reads: This is very hard for me.
She touches her growing belly.
She nods to herself, whispers, “This is very hard for me.”
• • •
She tells Jude, “I don’t think I can do it. I think I’ll just hang on long enough to teach this dumb kid how to survive and then kill myself.”
He smiles at her.
“So,” she says, “you agree that’s a good idea?”
When Jude doesn’t answer, she turns to the others. They have a lot of bone showing. She says, “You guys should take better care of yourselves. I can’t do it all you know!”
Everyone laughs at her.
The trees whisper.
The river gurgles.
She stands and backs away, angry, thinking, They can’t do that. Not after all I did for them.
Someone leans against a tree on the highest ridge, just a silhouette stamped against the rising sun. She doubts he’s a knight in shining armor. She squints, trying to discern his features but the sun is too bright and he is too far away. She turns to the others and says, “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back,” putting some real oomph in her voice, hoping they’ll listen if she sounds like the mother they all think she is.
• • •
He is far more handsome than Frank or Jude. But his eyes, though amused, project cruelty. He wears a suit, charcoal with fine pinstripes. His white shirt reflects sunlight and hurts her eyes. He says, very softly, “Are you ever going to leave it all behind?” He points over his shoulder, at a long and low brick building, the words Emerson High stamped in bronze above double doors. She smiles sadly, says, “Are you the ghost of Christmas past?”
“Is it Christmas?” he asks.
She doesn’t know. Has no idea what time of the year it is. She shrugs, moves forward, past him and the crisp breath of high, open places that surround him. Inside, she roams the halls, uncertain what she hunts. Kids bump into each other, laugh, point, scream, cry, hide in corners and wave from tables.
She thinks, Which one am I?
A river runs through the hall. No one looks at it, not even the kids who keep their heads down as they shamble about, but one by one it sweeps them away. Some scream and some whimper but they are all beyond saving. Even they know it; it shines from their eyes, this acceptance, before they disappear beneath the surface.
She glances over her shoulder at the man in suit. She says, “I’m not ready to be a mom. I don’t even know who I am.”
He smiles as he approaches. “That doesn’t matter. In you go.”
She sees his hands moving, knows if she just turns or something, she’ll be okay. But she doesn’t, part of her wanting to see where the river will take her, the mystery a little exciting despite all the bullshit her parents and her friends and she have talked about security and a good life.
She belly flops and screams, more for the baby than herself, and twists and tumbles beneath the water holding her stomach until the river spits her out on a rough city sidewalk speared by the shadow of a Catholic church’s steeple.
A priest who looks too familiar smiles at her. He stands between the church and the world, presenting his best face. She says, “You’re very ugly.”
“May the Lord bless thee,” he says, still smiling, not even hearing her.
“The river runs into the gutter,” she says, looking down the street.
The priest laughs the man in the suit’s laugh. He says, “Most things run into the gutter.”
She turns but he’s gone so she goes inside. Her stomach hurts. Her womb feels swollen. She needs to eat. There, on the shiny altar with words in Latin that pain her to even look at, she finds some wafers and gobbles them down. She crosses herself and says, “Thank you for feeding me, Jesus.” She drinks the wine and grimaces. The baby kicks. Her heart skips a beat, her standing there as hungry as ever and afraid she’s about to give birth, and the first thing her son will see is the bronzed and torn and tortured face of Christ judging him from the wall.
We can’t have that, she thinks.
She stumbles outside.
The priest says, “Watch out for the Devil. He’s about.”
She glances back at him, doesn’t like him, realizing he smiles too much.
She walks faster into the dark city.
• • •
“April?” a woman says, a fat woman in a plaid dress, a woman crowding the doorway of a home too far gone. She stops, turns, her eyes wet. Are you my mom? Have I finally found my way home? She scans the dark shrubbery, the broken concrete, the hidden spaces between homes for Christmas Past, doesn’t see him, so she slides from the road to the sidewalk.
Her mom asks, “What are you doing out in the cold?”
She shrugs, says, “It’s always cold, isn’t it?”
“What’s that you’re carrying?”
She looks down, sees the little boy in her arms, suddenly feels his weight. He’s here, she thinks. Oh God. He needs a name, needs clothing, needs shelter and food and so many things she doesn’t know how to provide. Her mother stares at them a moment longer, her face pale, then she steps into the dark house and shuts the door and leaves them alone on the dark street.
A man approaches. She knows him. He is younger now, younger than when he died, but his eyes are still cruel. His name is Mark. She says, “You’ve ruined us.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “You ruined yourself. You only heard what you wanted to hear. I told you I don’t want kids. Go see my brother. He’ll love both of you, he’ll thank God that you’re part of his life.” He throws money in her face, money for food and clothing and a cheap car to carry her east. He pulls a bottle from behind his back and sets it on the ground. There is a letter inside. He says, “That’s his address. Get out of here. I’m not about to babysit.”
“His name is Ethan,” she says. She burns inside. She squeezes her son too tight and he cries and she wants to loosen her grip but can’t.
Water trickles around her feet. Home isn’t what she’d expected.
Somewhere close by the river roars down an alley.
She thinks, I hope it drowns me if this is the life I had...
• • •
She opens her eyes to a lot of pines, mountains dotted with them, but beneath the trees hard stone, caves and cemeteries. Someone holds her. His name is John and his arms are strong. He smells like Mark, moves like him, but she knows he isn’t. He is Mark’s brother, a stand-in. But he is gentle and his eyes are pure. He kisses her a lot and she dies a little more inside, thinking, I don’t deserve this...because she is lying to him. She doesn’t love him, not yet. But months pass and she settles in.
She loves John. But he changes, like his brother’s son changes, evolving into something that both frightens and excites her. The river returns. Mark visits unexpectedly, and part of her, which she hates, watches him, hoping that he’ll say he’s ready now, to be a father. But the part of her that hopes, the part that is bitter, thinks it will be fun to tell him, “You are too late.”
The sun’s a scorcher. John and Mark are out on the river and only one of them will come back.
• • •
John looks sick, defeated, even after the funeral full of sad and disgusted faces as she stands with them, yet apart, holding the boy who feels nothing because he is little and only knows impulse.
They lower Mark into the ground, throw a shovel of dirt on the casket. Then another. The river keeps cutting a wider track through the mountains as sunlight fades and John holds her and part of her knows that she should be holding him as he tells her, “I killed him.”
And she thinks, It’s my fault, though she can’t know that it had nothing to do with her, and it’s s
o hard to admit that part of herself died with him.
John’s depression grows. The good man he’d been is ruined. He’s like some guy stranded on an island with too much time to think about every bad decision he’s ever made, one who lacks the ability to just let it go.
She finds a motel in the middle of the night, close to the water, hears bullfrogs croaking and sees fireflies flashing. She drives the beat-up car a dead man’s money bought, carries a photo of someone who loved her but doesn’t even love himself anymore, pulls her son toward the room, a bottle of sleeping pills rattling in her purse.
The man in the suit is waiting inside. He doesn’t smile or frown, just sits there silently, studying her, admiring the boy. She says, “You can’t have him. I won’t let the world devour him.”
Ethan squirms against her chest, restless and tired, and she lays him on the bed and opens the bottle, always this same bottle, always the same message in it—Sleep, baby—and pushes a handful of pills in his mouth. He chokes, eyes wide, the man behind them watching. She gives Ethan a sip of her Coke. His eyes are wet, bloodshot. He squirms against her for a while. Then he stills.
“Sleep, baby,” she whispers, running her fingers through his hair, the feel of it breaking her heart. His hair is so soft. It’s Mark’s hair. John’s hair.
The man in the suit says, “It’s always the river.”
“I know,” she says. “It’s never us, right?”
She pulls the blanket up and tucks it beneath her son’s chin. She finds a piece of rope and her neck itches and her eyes won’t stop watering and all she’s felt her entire life is coursing through her and she thinks of a beach, where she can be alone, where she can just be, selfish or not, it doesn’t matter. She can hear the river out there, relentless.
Her neck itches.
Her son sleeps.
She thinks, Nothing matters...
Lee Thompson is a prolific alcoholic. Jack Ketchum has called one of his novellas, “Hard as Nails…” Tom Piccirilli said, “Lee Thompson knows his Horror-Noir…” Brian Hodge claims one of Thompson’s novels is “Taut, tough and terrifying.” Those are three of his heroes so he’s happy as hell. Creator of the Division Mythos and several standalone works, he’ll also be writing under the names Thomas Morgan, James Logan, and Julian Vaughn. You can visit his website at leethompsonfiction.com, but don’t be a stalker.
HOWLING THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
The stories behind the stories.
“Orion”
“Orion” came from a simple place. I wanted to write a story that unfolded in something close to “real time,” in which a vulnerable child experiences terror with limited sensory input. I wanted to tap into that dread of not knowing what is happening nearby. Blindness was the obvious handicap, and considering Miki is tucked away in bed while the grownups play, her ears are thus the stars of the story. Writing about a blind girl was challenging and rewarding; I can only hope my imagination got me somewhere near the reality of lacking sight.
But very quickly it became clear to me that Miki wasn’t exactly the sweet child one would assume she is. She was both more complex and more single-minded than I’d given her credit for. And the real, darker heart of “Orion” began to beat.
–Michael Wehunt
“For Jack”
My mom’s a romance novelist so I grew up with stories of instant attraction, true love, and the idea that there’s someone out there for everyone. Sure, Mom’s stories end happy, most do in this genre, but I can’t help but wonder about the poor saps just off screen.
Eventually you have to run out of Mr. Rights. That’s basic math.
Which leaves us with the killers, the crooks, and the broken. No one wants those people for a soulmate, but according to the very laws of romantic theory, they must also have a match. That makes it all too easy to twist that love-at-first-sight trope and have it end with a stab wound instead of a kiss.
People are always changing themselves for love. I can’t be the only one who finds this disturbing, who hates that the love struck are willing to be so pliable. While Lee and Red run the show in this story, it’s the perceived normal romance of Watson and Sherry that I think is more disquieting. In a very real sense, “For Jack” is a horror story about finding your soulmate and losing yourself.
Sometimes I think Mom despairs of me.
–P.K. Gardner
“Ballad of the Man with the Shark Tooth Bracelet”
“Ballad of the Man with the Shark Tooth Bracelet” came from research I did for another project into The Family International and their flirty fishing, which has been described as evangelical prostitution. It is also an homage to Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, translated by Alex Lykiard, from which the passion of sharks and men comes.
–Lucia Starkey
“No One But Us Monsters”
White Death.
The thing is, “No One But Us Monsters” is a true story.
Well, parts of it, anyway. But I suppose that’s the case with most horror stories. The writer must tell the truth mostly, must recount partial memory, must expose something uncomfortable. Otherwise, as readers, we won’t feel a little bit in danger ourselves.
Sharks terrify me. Not like some people get shivers over cockroaches and rats and the feeling of chalk dust on their fingers, but full-blown mania. Like maybe I ought to consider relocating to Oklahoma. As a boy, I countered this fear by reading voraciously, by memorizing facts, by hanging pictures of the monsters, cut from magazines, on my bedroom wall. My parents used to giggle nervously about my savant-like recall of shark attack statistics and anecdotes. I dreamed of the Red Triangle and imagined the water frothy with white sharks. For most of my young life, I wanted to be a marine biologist.
Tell me there is not something perverse about humans that we will devote our lives to getting close to the thing we fear most.
Anyway, my love of stories eventually eclipsed my fascination with sharks. When I was a younger man, I had a relationship with a woman from Marin County. We used to drive all over the headlands, to Bolinas and Point Reyes. It is a rugged paradise, this place, not the wasteland Curt imagines. This woman had grown up visiting Stinson Beach (white shark attacks: 1998, 2002) with her family. This beach is number three on the top ten for shark encounters. I remember standing in the sandy parking lot by the low, brown stucco bathhouse and reading the sign mostly devoted to warnings about the insidious riptide, and oh, yeah, watch out for the white sharks that feed on the seals swimming just offshore.
Years later, I lived in Santa Barbara (fatal white shark attacks: 1999, 2010, 2012. Miscellaneous non-fatal encounters) and San Diego (fatal attacks: 1959, 2008. Miscellaneous non-fatal attacks). I did not learn to surf.
Ask any Californian. Their nonchalance about swimming with giant man-eating fish is irrational, infuriating.
I read a book called The Devil’s Teeth, from which I got the story about abalone divers working all day with great whites passing behind them. I think this is how the sharks got to be Curt’s cattle. At one moment, sharks have almost bovine passivity, and we move among them peacefully until they suddenly go berserk. What sets them off? Could we avoid that behavior if we knew? I read somewhere that, while swimming, we ungainly humans produce precisely the same vibrations as fish in distress.
There is that other thing about sharks that separates them from grizzly bears and Bengal tigers and everything else delighted to eat you. You look at the ocean, even get in the ocean, and they do not seem to be there. But this, only when you are lucky.
I could tell you other things about this story. How I spent my childhood in a colonial New England farmhouse with one of the creepiest basements in America. How I lived in a house in Iowa that had a basement to rival that of the house in which I grew up. How that Iowa basement was precisely the one described in the story, how I dreamed of flipping on the light in the divided half with the washer and dryer and seeing what had been waiting for me in the dark all this time like the white shark
you suddenly discover to be your swimming companion.
But you know all this. Because you have lived in a house with a basement like mine. Because you have looked out at cold black water and wondered what you might wade out to meet. That is the agreement between writer and reader: I’ll show you mine, if you’ll show me yours.
Even now I cling to this weird fantasy that I will meet my fate at sea with some prehistoric horror. It occurs to me each time I step on an airplane whose flight path crosses ocean, if even only while circling.
Tell me that I’m not crazy for worrying about the shark attack after instead of the plane crash itself.
Here in Massachusetts, we suddenly have celebrity visitors. They have been featured on CNN. A few white sharks started summering off the toney Cape Cod town of Chatham because conservation efforts successfully brought back the gray seal population. Any fool can tell you that white sharks have cruised from here to Montauk and beyond since before the Pilgrims. We hosted Jaws, after all. But now there are signs on the beaches of the Cape like the ones at Stinson. Now the white sharks have come to stay. Now it is only a matter of time.
–Hubert Dade
“The Cocktail Party”
Starting wars on fraudulent terms, holding detainees without trial, torturing them. In those ugly days, I remember thinking that our leaders were people whose every action came from the darkest and most iniquitous place in the human psyche, a place that thrills to the exercise of power for its own sake. These thoughts returned to me as I wrote this story. I hope you enjoyed it, although I’m not sure if “enjoyed” is the right word.
–Addison Clift
“Lighten Up”