Shock Totem 9: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  Rather, I needed two things from closing that door a third time: the entire population of the lobby fixing on her, and for her to be fixed in place herself.

  That she no longer had a free finger with which to point me out, well. As I was saying, sometimes the god of serial killers will be smiling on you, yes.

  The people in the lobby—you, you, you—all moved away from her at first, but then collapsed in. The herd, protecting its injured member.

  Except one particular animal.

  Not lifting the toe of my right shoe, I stepped across to the elevator when it dinged open.

  The finger, slight as it was, slipped easily into the crack opening onto the elevator shaft, tumbled down into that dank incubator of a basement, and, if the world is indeed a fair place, then this mother now clutching her injured child to her chest, his blood gouting under her chin, coating her blouse, in a week or two, walking through a haze of pain pills and mood-altering prescriptions...she’s alone in the house for the first time in days. Alone with her grief, and all the casseroles grief draws over itself, as if the sound of foil crinkling can drown out the pain.

  There’s really only one thing left for her to do.

  She has to finish what I started.

  Not with a knife, though there’s always knives, but with the blender, the food processor, the garbage disposal. Something to insure her crushed finger’s irrecoverability.

  In another age, she would have flung a scourge over her shoulder, onto her back. In another place, she might have crawled out to the railroad tracks after her husband was asleep, settled her finger up onto that iron track and looked away, waited however long it took.

  She’s in a modern kitchen, though.

  You work with what you have.

  Call it misplaced guilt if you want, or, as I do, consider it providence: should not a nine-fingered boy be raised by a nine-fingered mother, such that he can take for granted in his childlike way that his stump is an inherited trait, a family resemblance?

  And, who knows—if she did indeed use the garbage disposal, in hopes of framing this as an accident, then perhaps the surges and backups and spillovers of our sewage disposal system, it managed to deliver the gruel her finger was to a leaking pipe under this very hotel, to effect a reunion of sorts. There, nourished with smoldering cigarette butts and sunglass lenses and whispered secrets, another mother would surely bloom from that macerated finger, and learn to hold this baby growing so slowly in the darkness. In her simple way she would learn to hold it, learn to hide it, to scamper with it into this or that corner, the base of her child’s delicate skull cradled in her palm, her eyes stabs of flame glaring from the darkness, her mouth open as if to hiss.

  The news anchors, they would cast me as a monster, heartless and cold.

  They don’t know how I still dwell on that child down there, though.

  They don’t know that, every elevator I’ve stepped into since, I try to drop a crumb of the pumpkin bread I’m eating down into that blackness, or, if it’s a special day, a single pellet of the bag of candy I bought specifically to spill.

  Some acts, you do them for knowledge, or from compulsion.

  There’s love too, though.

  Even the least of us have known it.

  Stephen Graham Jones is the author of twenty-one novels, six collections, and more than two hundred stories. Stephen’s been a Bram Stoker Award finalist, a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, a Colorado Book Award finalist, and has won the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for Fiction, the This is Horror Novel of the Year Award, and an NEA Fellowship in fiction.

  THE BOX WIFE

  by Emma Osborne

  If you run your hands over me you’ll be pulling splinters from your palms for days.

  I am in a room bare and dark.

  ‘Melissa, oh oh,’ it says, thrusting. ‘Kelly, my dear, my love, Kelly.’ Sometimes I am one or both. Three nights ago, it called me little one, though I am bigger than it by half. I have many names. Each of them, I remember. Each of them is an identity that drapes over me like a mask.

  It made me one night from boxes and springs. My joints were screwed in and locked into place with bolts. My boxes were nailed together; each hammer blow like a gunshot. I will always remember the thrill of the drill as it punched through my rough planks to make gaps for the hoses. I have painted toenails, red on the left side and black on the right. My front is covered with a woolly sheepskin. The rest of me is skinned with rubber gloves. I worry that I may crack in the cold.

  My room has a window dressed with lace that restrains any errant snowflake that may fly to me. The walls are the pink of new flesh. There is something bundled up in the corner that has the colour and smell of burned hair.

  ‘Madison,’ it says, choking. ‘Belle, my sweet, my heart.’

  It is heavy and stinks of lust. When it rolls on me I flex and shift. I turn my head but it always moves me into its preferred position. I am slick in patches and moist in others. A hank of hair birthed from a hairdresser’s garbage bag has been slapped atop my pate and fastened with tape. The lock is of many colors and red.

  It built me from flat pillows and rusted clockwork. It painted on eyes so that I may stare at it and glued in teeth so that I may smile. I contain wires that squeal when it lifts my arms. I am voiceless, but for the creak of my parts.

  I am obliging.

  It slows its movement and begins to oil me. I lay exposed as it pushes warmed liquid into my hollows and cranks with insistent fingertips.

  ‘Holly,’ it says, as it maintains me. ‘You can’t go. You are here for me, here to stay.’

  There is someone below us, rattling against bricks and coughing up the water and the bread that it leaves when the pumping is steady. The pumping has to be steady for me to breathe. I am connected by clouded tubes to something below me, far down where I can’t see. My circulatory system is squeezed by anonymous hands and this thing that might be blood flows up through the dangling tubes. My cheeks bloom, sometimes, and other times my whole cavity heaves.

  The pumper grants me breath, minute by minute. I thank the pumper, silently, every time the sun rises to shine in through my window.

  ‘Geraldine.’ It names me anew as it finishes its greasing and begins to thrust once more. It drags its fingers through the wool and grips hard with each push. ‘My sweet, my heart,’ it calls me, quietly, then louder. ‘Geraldine!’

  I wonder who she is; who they all are. Former lovers? Enemies? Sisters? I try to give them all faces, when I am named for them but I do not and will never know them. All I know is that I am them, for a time, until it changes the name and my identity hastens to the next.

  ‘Jessica, I have always known that it would be you. I have waited for you forever and ever. Jessica, lovely one, Jessica!’ It scrapes its cheek against my cheek and I can smell its muggy breath.

  I am allowed to rock along with it, when I am being used. Sometimes I make the smallest of unnecessary movements when I think that it is too caught up to notice. It feels like a minuscule act of rebellion. I dare not even tremble when I am in my room, alone. It tells me that if I move when it isn’t around, it will come to me in the smallest hours and set me on fire—just burn me up into a crisp. It could be lying. But I don’t know anything.

  I am just a box.

  I could tell you a story. I could tell you about the way that it whispered me to this place, telling me how beautiful I was, oh, how perfect; all the while gouging its fingernails into the parts of me that once had feeling. I could spin you a tale of my life before it, before this room. I could tell you of the time I ran after a dragonfly and skidded through mud until I was wet up to my knees in a creek. I could recount for you the months it took me to learn how to play my favourite song, could show you the guitar-string callouses that emerged. I could count for you the number of rooms that I slept in, from the time I was small until the day that I was installed in this place.
r />   I could tell you how it watched me, found me, took me up from the world that didn’t see me for what I was, or what I could become. I could tell you of how I was sung to this room by a poisoned voice, each note another snare to catch me and bind me tight. I could tell you of how I gently resisted, until I didn’t.

  But the stories would be a lie. I have always been here.

  I am a box.

  I am a wife.

  It screams when the pumping dies out and I fade, and its thick boots go smash smash smash on the stairs—and then on body and bones. I know that this means no more food for the pumper, stuck far down below me. No sustenance until the lesson has sunk in. And I lay back, deflated, the sheepskin sagging at the corners.

  I wonder if this is the time when it won’t come back. Maybe today, the pumper will defeat it and we can both leave, together. But no, soon enough it is up and up the stairs and leaning into my corners.

  ‘Jennifer. My sweet Jenny,’ it whispers at me and my lack of ear. ‘Jenny, darling, you’re here.’

  I imagine one up above me, hovering in this place in order to keep me safe. I wish to smile when I think of that one, the watcher. Perhaps the watcher is real and has been, always. I can see a crack in the roof through which the watcher could observe me. I have looked and looked. Listened. I’d only need a scratch to know that the room above is occupied; just one faint drag of a nail.

  Perhaps the watcher has a window, too. I hope that the watcher can see things, everything, all of the world that I do not know and will never visit. I would give anything—even my sheepskin—for the watcher to come down and whisper to me of the sights and the sounds and the taste of the world, even if it was nothing more than stories of dust and mold. Anything.

  I would also like a kiss.

  Just one.

  ‘Brenda. Glenda. Kate!’ it says, hips rolling. It picks up speed, quivering around the throat. Its skin is red and wet. I wonder if this time it will shake me to pieces. If so, I am sure that I will be repaired back into usefulness.

  It wriggles like something freshly caught.

  ‘Charlene! Oh, my love, my little one!’ It is louder and faster. Drips patter onto my rubber skin. One hand grips my shoulders. The other is lower, moving. I am fortunate not to bruise. I notice, idly, that today the room is fresh with morning sunshine. I wonder if it will go out and live a real life today, after it is finished with its wife.

  I do not know what it does when it goes, but it often comes to me smelling of flowers and methanol. Once, it visited me in the smallest hours of the night, near to the dawn. It reeked of cheap perfume and I knew then that it had tried to be somebody else’s. It chastened itself, repeated again and again that this was its life now, that I was its world and that it would never leave me, not for anything.

  It made promises to me, the kind that you should treasure. And then it started and kept going until noon.

  All the while, I stayed perfectly still.

  Now it shivers and shakes. It must have built me to be pretty, but I don’t know what that means.

  I realize that my hair has fallen off. The hank must be huddling on the floor like a lonely spider. It notices, shouting that I have ruined everything, and swings a hard slap. I rock to one side and I know I shouldn’t, but I tilt up my hip as I roll and I know I should have warned it with my lipless mouth, but—

  The point of the spring is sharp and dips into its upper thigh with ease, cutting into its thickest blood-tube. This metallic slip is utterly silent, but it begins to scream immediately. There are no words, but there is terror. It lays about with its arms, as red comes in spurting throbs. My rubber is drenched with warmth.

  It knows that I shifted and it wants to kill me. It screeches with the voice of death and brings both clenched fists down upon my face. My teeth clatter down the back of my throat. The pump of my false-breath sucks them into the dark of my belly. It hits me again, but this time the blow is weaker and I know that I will outlast it.

  ‘Caroline,’ it sobs, ‘I only wanted—I wish that you were...’

  It dies next to me in the bed, the way a faithful lover ought to.

  I lay broken for a time. I am not sure what to do or how to be. My false-breath continues to ease in and out of me, slippery and moist. I count the strands of cobwebs that are high in the corners of my room and when I am finished, I start anew. This continues, perhaps for hours, until I hear whimpering from the pumper. My breath continued, even through all of the noise, because nobody has told the one below to stop. The pumper does not know that we are both alone now, together.

  I hear another cry, a hungry sound.

  I know that, somehow, I must go.

  Firstly, I must sit. My wired arms are extended above my head but as the cries grow louder, I swing them up so that they clatter down on either side of my sheepskin. My wires thrum as I hoist up my torso. I ease myself forward, dizzy with the tilt of the world. My sheepskin falls off and I can see the worn wool sticking up in bloody peaks.

  My displaced teeth rattle in my belly as I stand on sprung legs. The tubes that carry my breath and blood to me pop off the suckers that sit along the ridge of my wooden spine. There is a leak. I lurch toward the door and cogs spill from me like dropped coins.

  I realize that I will never hear its voice again.

  I do not mourn. It didn’t build me to mourn, or to grieve. I was built to be silent and useful.

  I move from my room and carefully turn at the top of the stairs. I know that I must go down and down and down.

  So much of me has fallen off that I am nearly nothing when I reach the middle of the stairs, but every step has shown me a new thing. I go slowly, relying on stiff knees that were never meant to take weight. My painted eyes would widen if they could, even at the zigzagging strips of crackling wallpaper.

  I halt at the window, a full storey lower than my own. I see a yard thick with weeds and broken glass. The sight is glorious. There are machines laying at odd angles, gutted. I wonder if I carry any of their parts within me. I am rapt, until I see the others. They are scattered about the enclosed yard with a carelessness that speaks of their failures.

  Broken wives. Lost wives. My predecessors. I wonder if I hold any of their screws and nails and am all at once sure that I do. I think that I might match at least two of them for paint. My glossy eyes show me ruins and hulks. I trace their frames and feel something that could be horror and something that may be love.

  The only thing that could move me is another cry from the pumper.

  ‘Please,’ comes the call. ‘Please.’

  I go. I go to save the only one left.

  I shuffle down in to the dark and I lose more of myself with every step. I remind myself that they are only fragments and parts. Surely I have a few to spare.

  I hear clanging and sobbing, but when I reach the door the pumper goes quiet, perhaps expecting punishment. My fingers scrape at the latch until the door opens. I stand in the frame, illuminated by the light of a new day. I must look a fright, for the pumper shrieks at the sight of me. With great effort, I hold up my hands.

  Peace, I am here for you, here to take you away from all of this, I think, though I cannot shape the word with my empty mouth. I wonder if the watcher would say the same to me, if I were the one being rescued.

  The pumper runs to me and I grind into a hunch.

  I am enveloped by pale arms. They squeeze me tight and I creak.

  ‘You came,’ says the pumper, breathlessly. ‘I wished and hoped for you to come. I knew that you would. I knew it.’

  My bloody shoulder is dampened with tears. I lean forward, pressing my rubber skin to the stark bones of the one who gave me breath. We turn and my knees pop, but I can see freedom and know that I only need to walk a few steps and then we will be outside. I begin to shake and I do not know if I will ever be able to stop.

  The pumper wraps a hand around mine, whispers a secret to me and kisses me. Just once.

  That is enough.

  Emm
a Osborne is a fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Her short stories can be found in Daily Science Fiction and Aurealis. Her poetry has been featured in Star*Line and has appeared in Apex Magazine. Emma comes from a long line of dance floor starters and was once engaged in a bear hug so epic that both parties fell over. She can be found on Twitter as @redscribe.

  BLOODSTAINS

  & BLUE SUEDE SHOES

  by John Boden and Bracken MacLeod

  PART 7: THE EIGHTIES

  By the time the hindquarters of the seventies was slipping through the door, the music industry was a complete mess. Radio was pushing television celebrities as viable music talent—Shaun and David Cassidy and David Seoul, to name a few—but as always, swimming deeper beneath the radio waves, menacing shapes were lurking. Things with teeth.

  Punk Rock is usually pinned to bands with names like Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, U.K. Subs, and Killing Joke. Like any other genre, it has its sub-genres of Goth, Darkwave, New Wave, and Ska. And many other sub-sub-genres to boot. While Sex Pistols were sneering and spewing the exaggerated insincere snark to the masses, bands like the Damned and the Meteors were showing that horror had a home in their movement. The Meteors were more closely tied to the burgeoning Psychobilly scene, always staying true to their love of B-movie horror and dark humor. While the Pistols whined about the Royals and the rich, the Damned sang about fucking the dead. Bauhaus crooned about darkness and shadow, and in 1982 the Cure, no strangers to dark music, delivered what I feel to be one of the creepiest tunes of all time, “Siamese Twins,” from the album Pornography, an album darker than the devil’s asshole.

  The game literally changed on August 1, 1981. A new cable network called MTV, short for Music Television, made its debut. Promising nothing but music videos 24/7, it gave artists a higher profile and an outlet for creativity unknown until then. Classic bands, like Blue Öyster Cult delivered an unsettling mini-movie for the macabre ditty “Joan Crawford.” While most videos proved a formulaic mess of faked performance or hokey storyline, occasionally an artist went for the throat with something unique. Duran Duran gave us loads of scantily clad women before veering into the weird with the video for “Wild Boys,” a kind of Road Warrior meets William S. Burroughs thing.