Futile Efforts

by Piccirilli, Tom

  A short, middle-aged woman with hair the color of a four-day old bruise is shoving cash at him, and he notices he's got an open gym bag in his left hand and a sawed-off shotgun under his arm. There's a haze he can't shake.

  Malone is running around in cute puppy circles. He's got a satchel tied around his back, stuffed with wads of fifties. "The cops! Let's go!"

  Church thinks, Oh fuck.

  Twin androgynous lovelies wheel towards him with new headgear on—ram's horns, a real wild spirit feel to them. Mova and Asriel are out of their robes and into some kind of ancient Celtic outfits now, looking half-fey, half-Cormac mac Airt. Their cheeks are rouged to a high varnish waxiness.

  On the floor between them is a security guard with most of his face blown away. They eye Church with expressions of distrust and doubt.

  Church goes, "God damn it," and turns into a tear gas shell smacking him in the chest, wisps of the smoke catching him full in the face. He shrieks but the scream is as muted as his words. He realizes he's got on goggles, his own breathing apparatus, a tank of oxygen strapped to his back. The murdered scuba diver's rig has come in handy.

  He grabs the canister before it spills too much gas and hurls it back out the broken front window.

  Children float around the ceiling of the bank. Their parents leap and try to catch hold of their ankles, bring them back down. A moan works free from Church's chest.

  He's really got to stop handing out his pills.

  He tries to make a run for it, but only now understands that he's leaking all over the place—blood and black fluid spurt from his ragged stomach. He sees that he had a burger and fries for lunch. The security guard has clipped him, that's the reason for this shoot-out.

  Shaking his head, Church feels the last chance for redemption drifting from him. A murderer, he's done the final deed. Man, this is what happens when you watch too many movies.

  Always blame the movies.

  He doesn't even know what he would use the money for. There's nothing he's ever wanted badly enough to pull this kind of moronic stunt. Nothing, other than his sanity.

  Sure, all right.

  An eight-year-old girl in a ponytail, standing up against the wall, breaks from the other hostages and begins to walk towards him. She extends a hand and he hopes she's going to help him and not suddenly go shit-screaming maniacal on his ass. He weakly struggles forward and then falls to his knees.

  He'd given her a pink candy pill, and now she's passing it back to him, the little sweetheart.

  Church yanks the goggles off and eyes his medication. He holds out his palm and she drops the capsule in. He wants to tell her thank you but his mouth is filling with wet copper.

  Bullhorns and walkie-talkies squawk and cackle. The cops are giving orders out in the street, about to bust in.

  Laughing kids float higher, their parents wail.

  Pugsy Malone, with his corkscrew tail loosening and straightening for a second, scowls at him and snarls, "Think it through. You certain you want to do that?"

  Oh yeah, Church thinks.

  He feels his intestines begin to slide too far forward until they dangle against the tile floor. He should've just jumped in the lake and let the glowing babe drown him in all her welcoming love. At least then he would've gotten laid before he walked off the big edge.

  Mama, mama, when you're dying you always call for Mama, that's the way of it. The hovering children glare down at him. Church tries not to laugh but a chortle clambers loose anyhow. How crazy do you got to be before it no longer hurts? Mova and Asriel are running for the back door with their Celtic togs flapping and showing off their naked hairy asses. Jesus, he really could've died happily without ever seeing that. Mama. He spits out the air hose and a mouthful of bile and blood, unfurls his tongue and flings the pill towards it, wishing for just a momentary taste of atonement before the end of everything he's known and feared and hated, as the cops burst in firing. Okay, so—

  Introduction to "Shadder"

  by Tim Lebbon

  "You can never go home again," an old saying goes. "Home is where the heart is," says another. The two seem to contradict each other and yet both hold truths that no one can deny. Returning home can never be the same as never leaving in the first place, and yet there's something that links us to the place of our birth and upbringing, an invisible bind that, with some people, will inevitably spring them back. It may take days, it may take years, it may take most of a lifetime. One thing guaranteed if Tom Piccirilli is involved; when his characters go home, they're in for a Bad Time.

  Take Parks, for instance. Hollywood hotshot turned failure overnight, you can't help liking him, and liking hating him. He thinks that returning to where he was born and stealing his brother's farm out from under him, his wife and seemingly dozens of kids will solve all of his money problems. He barely takes time to consider the moral implications of what he is doing, and even when he does it's in a selfish fashion. So back he goes … and for a while he seems to have forgotten the nightmares that plagued him when he used to live in the house. The crows outside, talking to him. Telling him to do things with scissors. Nasty things. With his mind softened by Hollywood and the green-tinged stink of success, Parks thinks that they're no threat to him anymore, because this is no longer his home. But some things can't be denied.

  Home is where the heart is, and Parks has been made heartless.

  Piccirilli has an uncanny touch for creating believable families that grow beyond belief. There's a grotesquerie about his writing that tinges this whole story with a wonderfully surreal atmosphere, and his descriptions of the children are horribly spooky. He draws a picture of them in your mind's eye, and you wish you could look away. But try as you might, wherever else you look there's something else to disturb; the grandfather who can see ghosts, the pale fleshy wife, the house itself with the stench of unpleasant histories. All real, all believable, and yet you've got to pray that they're no part of the real world.

  There are no incidental characters in a Piccirilli story. They all have a part to play, and they're all beautifully drawn, right down to the weird kids that have no names, so alike that they're almost one being. Damn, even typing this now makes me shudder! And there's the triumph in Piccirilli's writing; he's a horror writer who can truly disturb and frighten his readers. He gets in your head. And some things can't be denied.

  Every day, a flock of crows flies over my house to its roosting ground. My son claps his hands at them, my daughter draws their picture. Me … I'm off to find some scissors.

  By the Author of "Echo City" & "The Chamber of Ten"

  Shadder

  Parks got off the bus at the stop around back of Louie's Suds'n'Slop, where the whores and the moonshine runners rattled the trailers on the other side of the parking lot. Louie's jukebox twanged and mewled about motherless kids, dying dogs, and broken hearts. The yeehaws, boot-stompin', and the sharp crack of the cue ball busting up the rack made Parks' teeth ache.

  So, after a pretty wild run of luck, he was already burned up. You could swear ten thousand times that you'd never return to where you'd come from, but when you had no place else to go, you went right back. Jesus, look at the place--he thought he'd never even come within a thousand miles of the whole damn state, and now he was home again.

  The edges of his vision had been lit with swirling streaks of red over the last fifty miles of state highway, and now his hands were cold and aching. For the last three days, it had felt as if a steel band had been tightening around his chest, another around his head.

  Parks had been gone six years, married and divorced, and had written and directed two films. The first had been a sleeper hit which garnered feel-good reviews and a fair amount of cash. There'd been talk of an Academy Award nod. Though it hadn't happened, the very buzz about the possibility was nearly as good as if it had short-listed. He'd been prepped as a director to keep an eye on, and the studio had shined his ass and given in on some pretty stupid demands on his part. When you can get
away with it, you push. So he did.

  The second film had gotten him kicked completely out of the biz. His wife had taken half of what he'd owned and the lawyers had chopped the rest down to a hole in the ground. He learned quickly who his real friends were. He didn't have any.

  Now Parks was twenty-seven, bankrupt, and on his way back to see his older brother Floyd, who hated him, just so he could steal Floyd's land.

  The ride wasn't over yet, and in some ways it was only starting. It'd make a good story for cable three-four years down the line. Rebuilding a career from the rubble, tragic figure rises to face new challenges. He could sell it down on Wilshire Boulevard so long as it had the right packaging. He could play himself once he got back into the game, so long as he had enough for the ante.

  The farm was just under five miles from the Suds'n'Slop but Parks walked it. He had no luggage besides a small satchel with a change of clothes and his latest script. He didn't intend to stay long. He already had a new attorney going through the paperwork back in Beverly Hills, but he owed it to Floyd to put in a visit face to face. It was going to be hell.

  Already Parks had lost all the calm and slickness he'd nurtured in L.A., and could feel it bleeding out from him as he moved from the highway onto the dark dirt roads. There was enough moonlight that he could still see, but he didn't even need it. He knew the way home and could find it blind.

  It took about an hour. By the time he saw the broad expanse of the farmhouse opening up through the starlit stalks, he was covered in sweat and smelled like his brother, his grandfather and father and all his many cousins who worked the earth. He trudged up the trail of flattened grass past the rusted hulks of pickup trucks and tractors that spotted the terrain like lost battlements of the ancients.

  Parks had just hit the first stair of the porch when Floyd flung open the broken screen door, said, "Come on in, if you must," and receded into the house. The mousetrap hinges on the screen had squealed their last, with the screws pulled completely free from the rotting wood.

  Parks stepped inside, feeling his mother somewhere behind him, out in the dark fields. It got to him so much that he actually turned around and had to take a quick look.

  Floyd was across the room drinking a can of beer, foam flecking his chin and collar. He had a farmer's muscular arms and a trucker's gut. His wife, Myrtle, had paled and softened into a doughy plumpness, and she now wore only a vacuous bovine expression of complacency. Her vacant eyes skittered over Parks' face but she couldn't seem to place him.

  They'd had four kids when Parks left for the west coast, but he didn't remember any of their names. Now six children were spread out on the first floor, and there was all kinds of thumping going on upstairs. Sounded like at least three more. They looked so similar–-shaggy blonde heads, sexless placid faces, plain overalls–that he thought of them almost as a single child. Seeing only the one kid at various stages of life rather than several running around. Somebody dropped a plate of cinnamon rolls on the floor and called out, "Broom!"

  Père Hull sat in a wheelchair in the middle of the room with a little TV tray in front of him, facing away from the television, which had a truck show on, guys screaming and engines roaring, crashing into shit. The old man was crocheting a teal scarf that looked about twenty feet long already. Even though the knuckles of his huge fists bulged with arthritis, the needles quietly clicked together at an incredible speed. Parks was impressed. His grandfather gave a grin and said, "You must be hungry. Long trip you've been on. Go eat something. Come talk later, if you got a mind to."

  "We're about to have dinner," Floyd said. "Come sit. We set a place for you."

  So Parks went into the kitchen and stood at the foot of the table where he'd taken his meals for the first twenty years of his life. He felt an odd tension as his head slowly crowded with mixed memories. Not of the house or his family, but instead all the reviews, the pitches, starlets, agents, and executive meetings. This life could swallow your entire future, all your ambitions and expectations, if you let it. You had to hold on to whatever gave any kind of definition and meaning to your existence. It's what got him writing screenplays and fooling around with a video camera in the first place.

  The Brooms carefully seated themselves around the table. Parks thought if he blinked too fast they might all converge into the one kid. He kept waiting for chatter but there wasn't any. Floyd made no introductions and Parks took the last remaining empty chair. Of course, his brother had set his place in the same seat where he'd eaten all those years before. Telling Parks, in a sly way, welcome back. You thought you were out but you can never really leave.

  They poured gallons of fresh milk, straight out of the cow. The Brooms gave him the occasional glance but nothing more. They ate in silence and Parks decided to do the same. He kept clenching and unclenching his hands. It felt like he had a touch of arthritis himself.

  Despite the trouble he knew was coming, he still had an appetite. In other circumstances, the meal would've been wonderful. He hadn't eaten like this since he moved out to the west coast, where everybody was a vegan or bulimic or counting their carbs or getting their gastric bypass surgery.

  Mounds of steak, mashed potatoes, fresh bread, and a number of vegetable dishes passed into his hands. You had to pay four hundred bucks at Spago's to eat a third as well. The American heartland. He hated everything about it except the food.

  They worked the plates across the table with the well-practiced actions of a fire bucket brigade. As they were finally winding down, Floyd asked him, "Hey, you think you can help me with my pickup tomorrow? I got to overhaul the engine. Got my tools out on the porch, we can give it a crack before lunch."

  "I don't know much about cars, Floyd," Parks said. Christ, this could get out of hand very soon.

  "You don't need to in order to help somebody out."

  "That's true enough. Give me a minute here, okay? I'll be right back."

  "Seein' the man about a mule, eh?"

  Something like that. Parks headed down the hall and past the bathroom to the gun rack on the wall. Père Hull watched him but said nothing, the needles little more than a blur. Parks drew the bolts from the two rifles and stuck them in his back pocket.

  He did a quick search of the house, checking all the usual spots. A loaded double-barrel shotgun rested upright in back of the hall closet. Parks broke it open and emptied it, scrounged around on the shelf until he found a box with only six shells it. He pocketed them all. He didn't think Floyd would have any handguns around, but it would be best to check.

  Père began to laugh quietly, the sound coming from deep in his chest, and whispered, "Figured you came home for somethin' that'd drive your brother out of his skull."

  "Quiet, Gramp."

  "He could still pick up a butcher knife. Whatever you tell him, make sure you're on the far side of the room."

  Parks eased into the master bedroom and riffled the dressers, closet, and night stands. He was wrong. Floyd still owned their father's old Colt revolver, hidden off to the side of the bottom drawer, behind the family bible. The pistol hadn't been cleaned in years and had no bullets.

  The eleven year old Broom came over and stared at him with sorrowful eyes. "Ma and Pa thought you was sick. Maybe 'cause you ate so much. I'm supposed to look in on you."

  Even after hearing the voice, he couldn't tell if the kid was a boy or a girl. "No, I'm fine."

  "You're my uncle?"

  "Yes."

  "You used to live here?" Broom asked.

  "In this very house. In the far bedroom upstairs at the end of the hall."

  "That's mine now." Gauging Parks' expression, Broom seemed to struggle for something else to say, and decided to take a chance. "I don't like that room."

  "Why?"

  "'Cause'a the trees outside the window."

  Parks sucked air through his teeth and fought back a groan. "So what?"

  "The crows. They always in the tree. They talk to me."

  A couple of the bad ch
ildhood memories slid through and prodded him in the soft places. Man, he really had given up all his cool, everything about this place was beginning to unsettle him all over again.

  Broom was waiting expectantly, all wide eyes and pink cheeks and pouting lips. The tremendous weight of daily anxiety and foreboding had already begun to take its toll. He could see it now in the folds of the kid's face.

  So, nothing really had changed after he'd left. Sometimes the insanity you leave behind just settles in and waits for a new ear to crawl into. He looked down and said, "They used to talk to me too."

  "Really, that so?" Startled, but kind of happy to hear it.

  "Yeah."

  "They tell me to do things. Wrong things."

  "With scissors?"

  Broom's features twisted into an expression of adorable surprise. "They did talk to you. You heard them."

  "Yes," Parks said, and realized his scalp was crawling with sweat. His hackles were up. That hadn't happened since the test screening of his second movie, when people were yelling back at the picture and walking out.

  "Pa don't believe us."

  "Your father never believed me either, when I told him about it back when we were children. I couldn't sleep most nights and could hardly do my chores. He always thought I was lying and used to whip the hell out of me because it meant he had more work some days. Père Hull knows the truth though."

  "He don't like to listen. Says he's too old. Says if you cut him open at the wrist, his blood is dried up into powder. He won't hear nothing we say."

  "It reminds him of bad things that happened a long time ago."

  "To his baby sis?"

  "Yes," Parks admitted, surprised the kid knew about that. "And others."

  "They want me to take the scissors out of the drawer and–"

  He took Broom by the shoulders, gave a little shake. "Don't listen to them. You don't do anything they tell you. You're stronger than they are."