Terror Mannequin

by Douglas Hackle

  The Membrane formed two arm-like appendages and signed at Glont: But we also can’t be sure that TERROR MANNEQUIN isn’t real.

  “You’re right. We don’t know for sure that TERROR MANNEQUIN is not real, and that TERROR MANNEQUIN is not skulking around Fallingwater right now as we speak, waiting to kill again. That’s why I want to leave the decision to go there to you guys. If you don’t go, you know the townspeople will kill you or drive you out of town. So we can do one of two things. We can take our chances and go reverse trick-or-treating at Fallingwater and just hope for the best. Or you guys can skip town. We can hop in the car and drive far, far away from Selohssa. I can take you guys to a new city, maybe some place where the people are friendlier, a place where you can both make a fresh start. There’s a little town in southern Ohio called Chillville where everyone is chill as hell. Assholes aren’t even allowed to live in Chillville. Maybe we could go there. Or maybe I can take you out into the wilderness, somewhere safe and secluded, and we could build a cabin for you guys to live in, set you up with a generator. I couldn’t live there with you—I have to stay here and take care of Ma Ruth, but I’d drive out to visit as often as I could, bring you fuel and supplies and whatnot—SpaghettiOs with meatballs, Totino’s Party Pizzas, horror movies, games, and whatever else you needed. Whaddya think?”

  Tom Two signed back, indicating he wanted to take his chances and go reverse trick-or-treating at Fallingwater. He said he didn’t want to live anywhere in the world except in the Lamont family ancestral home—that he didn’t want to go anywhere else if Glont, Ma Ruth, and The Membrane didn’t go with him.

  “How about you?” Glont asked The Membrane. “You feel the same way?”

  The Membrane signed back, indicating that it wished it was a tall, handsome, musclebound, big-dicked man so it could get mad amounts of ass and geyser-gush gallons of trouser gravy all over hot sluts’ faces.

  “Hey, I know you want to get mad amounts of ass and geyser-gush gallons of trouser gravy all over hot sluts’ faces, but that’s not what we’re fucking talking about right now, is it? Stay on topic. So, are you cool with going out to Fallingwater tomorrow night or not?”

  The Membrane sprouted a fat, balloon-like thumb at the end of one of its limbs and made a thumbs up.

  Chapter 9

  L ate in the morning the following day found Glont seated in a chair before the clerk of courts, one Laura Higgins, a prim-looking, full-figured, thirtyish woman who sat opposite him at her desk in the Selohssa district courthouse, her blonde and copper-highlighted hair sculpted in a sweeping “I’d Like To Speak to Your Manager” hairdo.

  She flipped through the thick packet of forms he’d just filled out and handed to her, making sure each was complete. When she came to the line where he’d neatly printed his new name, she furrowed her brow in puzzlement.

  “My Tiny Little Weak Bitch,” she read slowly, crinkling her nose. “Is that really what you want to change your name to, Mr. Lamont?”

  “No, of course I don’t want to. But if I don’t, I’ll be fired from my job.”

  The clerk smirked, shook her head in amazement. “Well, okay. Let’s get this taken care of then.” She proceeded to notarize the forms by stamping, dating, and adding her signature to each one. She talked while she worked.

  “I know who you are, ya know. You’re the Glont Lamont who lives with those two fucking freaks.”

  Glont was not impressed. He sat with his arms folded across his chest, head slightly tipped to the side, staring right through the woman’s face as if she wasn’t there while waiting for her to finish.

  Speaking through clenched teeth, the clerk said, “God, how I hate Tom Two and The Membrane! God, how I wish they’d both just fucking die already and burn in hell for eternity!”

  Unfazed, Glont didn’t so much as blink in response.

  “Well, considering that you take care of those two monsters, I suppose you kinda deserve your new name. I mean, it just sorta serves you right.”

  After the clerk stamped the last form in the packet, she rose from her chair to make copies in the machine behind her. “Now it’s official,” she said while handing him his copies. “That’ll be one-hundred and fifty dollars, Mr. Lamont—oops!—I mean, My Tiny Little Weak Bitch. Tee-hee-hee!”

  Glont—oops, I mean My Tiny Little Weak Bitch—handed over the cash, and the clerk gave him a receipt.

  “Bye-bye, My Tiny Little Weak Bitch!” the clerk said, bursting into a fit of hysterical laughter.

  Papers in hand, Glont trudged to the open doorway, where he halted and stood still for a moment before turning back around to face the clerk. “Ya know what?” he asked.

  “What, My Tiny Little Weak Bitch?” the woman asked, laughing again.

  “Even if you were to lose fifty pounds and get a nosejob, you’d still only be about a 5.5.”

  Shocked into silence, the clerk’s eyes bulged in their sockets. “Why, I never! You…you…your dick’s a 5.5!” That was the best comeback she could come up with.

  “Yeah, 5.5 inches of motherfuckin’ limp dick,” Glont lied as he turned to leave.

  Chapter 10

  A fter he left the courthouse, My Tiny Little Weak Bitch—let’s just call him “Weak Bitch” for short, shall we?—decided he didn’t want to go to work. He was sure news of his new name had already spread around the office, and he wasn’t quite ready to be taunted about it there. Instead, he drove to the grocery store to buy reverse trick-or-treating candy and treats for the Halloween afterparty he, Tom Two, and The Membrane would have later that night. He filled a shopping cart with bags of Snickers, Twix, Kit Kats, Skittles, Nestle’s Nursing Homes, Hershey’s Hospices, and Cadbury Crème-atoriums, as well as cookies, caramel apples, and apple cider for the party.

  A smirking, zit-faced teenage boy named Pete Perkins rang up and bagged his groceries. Just as Weak Bitch walked away from the checkout counter with a plastic grocery bag dangling from each hand, Pete said, “Happy Halloween, My Tiny Little Weak Bitch!” He punctuated the gibe with a snicker.

  Weak Bitch stopped, stared straight ahead for a beat, did an about-face. “Wow. Word about my new name is spreading faster than I thought. Well, whatever. It is what it is, I guess. Happy Halloween to you, too, pizza face. I hope you get horrible, permanent acne scars that turn into skin cancer.”

  The kid’s smirk deflated into a frown.

  “Oh, and by the way,” Weak Bitch added. “I know who you are, Pete. Your mom is Sally Perkins. I briefly dated her in high school. Well, I guess we never technically dated, but I did fuck her in the ass once and blow a big, goopy gob of trouser gravy all over her long-ass, ugly, zit-covered horseface. Well, I gotta get going. I hope you and everyone you hold dear get aggressive forms of cancer, leprosy, bubonic plague, and early-onset Alzheimer’s.”

  ***

  When Weak Bitch arrived back home, Ma Ruth was in her rocker knitting herself a green and red striped Freddy Krueger sweater. An old, dusty fedora that she’d found somewhere in the house sat atop her toasted head.

  “Seven or eight people called this mornin’ lookin’ fer someone named My Tiny Little Weak Bitch,” she said. “I kept tellin’ ’em they had the wrong number, but they’d jus’ laugh at me.”

  “They were calling for me, Ma. I went down to the courthouse today to get my name changed to My Tiny Little Weak Bitch this morning.”

  “Well, whaddya go and do a fool thing like that for, boy?”

  “I had to. Lance Montgomery said he’d fire me from Fun 4-Life if I didn’t.”

  “Oh, that Lance Montgomery. Still givin’ ya a hard time after all these years. He sure is a handsome one, though! Big n’ strong. And that dandy bulge in his trousers is somethin’ else! Tee-hee-hee!”

  “Jesus Christ,” Weak Bitch muttered, shaking his head. He left her to put away the groceries.

  “Hey, don’t forget to hitch Tom Two’s wagon to the back of my scooter today. Ya hear me, My Tiny Little Weak Bitch? Tee-hee-hee!”


  Chapter 11

  A group of costumed children dashed up the driveway of the house directly across the street from the Lamont residence while Mr. and Mrs. Brown, the owners of the house, sat in patio chairs placed near an iron fire pit where a few split birch logs burned low and orange, spicing the crisp, cool, autumnal air—air that already smelled of dry leaves—with redolent woodsmoke, while a gaggle of glowing jack-o’-lanterns grinned behind them on the front steps.

  “Trick-or-treat!” the children called out in chorus.

  “Oh, look at you all! A ninja, a T-Rex, a skeleton, a football player, and a princess!” Mrs. Brown said. She was dressed in a long black dress and a pointy black witch’s hat.

  “I’m Belle from Beauty and the Beast,” the little girl corrected her.

  “Ah, Belle! Well, of course you are! How precious!”

  Mrs. Brown reached into a plastic cauldron filled with fun-sized Snickers, Milky Ways, Milk Duds, Nestle’s Crunch, Nestle’s Nursing Homes, Hershey’s Hospices, and Cadbury Crème-atoriums. She dropped candy into the children’s bags.

  Each child dutifully said, “Thank you,” after she gave them their candy, except for the little four-year-old skeleton, who turned to run back down the driveway, forgetting his manners and overeager to get to the next house. He only made it a few steps before his father’s large hand intercepted him.

  “Did you forget to say something, Bobby?” his dad said as he grasped the boy gently by the shoulders and turned him back toward the Browns.

  “Thank you!” the boy’s peanut voice shrilled.

  Mr. and Mrs. Brown both laughed. “You’re very welcome!” Mrs. Brown said. “Happy Halloween, kids!”

  Back on the sidewalk, the adults steered their kids away from the next small group waiting to walk up the Brown’s driveway: Tom Two, The Membrane, and Weak Bitch. Tom Two led the way with The Membrane creeping along right behind him. The two-year-old bore a candy-stuffed pillowcase over his shoulder, making him look like some tiny, disfigured Santa Claus while The Membrane conveyed its bag of candy atop its flat, pancake-like body. Weak Bitch followed several steps behind them.

  Grinning ear to ear only seconds ago, Mr. and Mrs. Brown’s faces contorted into haughty sneers as soon as the couple saw the town’s only reverse trick-or-treaters coming up their driveway. Tom Two halted before the cauldron of candy, plopped his pillowcase on the concrete in front of him, and gave the Brown’s a friendly wave, a gesture that was not reciprocated. He reached into the sack, extracted a Milky Way and a roll of Smarties, dropped them into the cauldron.

  “Fuck you, Tom Two,” Mr. Brown hissed. “God, how I fucking hate you!”

  “Why, I’ll smack your little face, Tom Two!” Mrs. Brown said, the woman’s bottom lip trembling with atavistic rage.

  She would do no such thing, of course, and everyone there knew it. They could talk all they wanted, but so long as Tom Two and The Membrane carried out their civic duty of reverse trick-or-treating once a year, no one was allowed to lay a finger on them.

  The Browns watched with disgust as The Membrane edged forward, formed a crude limb from its body, reached into its bag, and dropped a few Tootsie Rolls into their cauldron.

  “Fuck you, The Membrane,” Mr. Brown said, spitting contemptuously on the ground in front of the thing. “You make me fucking sick!”

  “You freaks!” Mrs. Brown hissed. “I wish you two abominations—you monsters!—would just die already!”

  “Yeah, fuck you too, bitch,” Weak Bitch said. “People like you are the real monsters. Let’s go, guys.”

  The forgiving little bastard that he was, Tom Two waved bye-bye to the couple before he slung his candy sack over his shoulder and turned to leave, the back of his sombrero dragging on the ground behind him. Far less polite, The Membrane formed a balloon-like middle finger at the end of a limb and thrust it forward for the couple to feast their eyes on, before following Tom Two and Weak Bitch back to the sidewalk and to the next house.

  Nobody was home next door, but the front porchlight was on and a bowl had been placed on the doormat to receive the boys’ reverse trick-or-treat offerings. That’s what people in Selohssa did when they weren’t going to be home on Halloween night. Also, such absentees usually left messages for Tom Two and The Membrane. Taped to the door of this particular house was a piece of paper with the words “FUCK YOU, TOM TWO AND THE MEMBRANE! DIE! DIE! DIE!” written on it with a marker.

  These were the easy houses—the houses where no one was home. And every year, Weak Bitch wished there were more of them—houses where his ’phews didn’t have to listen to people’s cruel bullshit. But there were never enough of those.

  The next house they stopped at was the home of Russ Robinson, the town’s miserable alcoholic dogcatcher. After Tom Two rang the doorbell, the gaunt, drunken, mid-fiftyish man appeared at the screen door, a can of Natty Daddy gripped in one hand, a lit Marlboro in the other, his jowly, grizzled, five-o’-clock-shadowed face glowering down at them. “Well, look at you two fuckers.”

  Tom Two gave the man a friendly wave, to which Russ responded, “Boy, you two are some of the ugliest-lookin’ sumbitches I ever seen. And you’se not even wearing costumes! Heh.” Grinning smugly, the man sipped at his beer as he swayed drunkenly in place, not moving to open the door. “Hey, I bet you two are fags, too. Heh-heh.” He took another gulp of ND, followed by a pull on his cigarette.

  “You want your candy or not, Russ?” Weak Bitch asked from the bottom of the stoop.

  Russ chuckled. “Why don’tcha mind yer own damn business, My Tiny Little Weak Bitch.”

  “This is my damn business. These boys don’t have to wait here any longer than a minute for you to accept their offering. That’s the rule.”

  “I knows the goddamn rules! But my minute’s not up yet. Heh! Hey, Tom Two—you do know that TERROR MANNEQUIN’s gonna git ya tonight out at Fallingwater, right? Heh-heh!”

  Tom Two, who held out a fun-sized Twix for the man, dropped his eyes fearfully to the ground.

  Weak Bitch quickly ascended the steps. “Go ahead and drop the candy right there on the porch, Tom Two. You too, The Membrane. This scumbag’s taking too damn long.”

  They did as their uncle told them.

  “I’ll take as long as I goddamn want, ya pole smokers!”

  “Yeah, that hurts a lot comin’ from somebody whose job it is to drive around drunk all day long searching for stray puppies to murder. Let’s roll, fellas.”

  “Hey, you can’t talk to me like that!” the man said as he finally opened the door, stumbling out onto the stoop. “Why, I was elected dogcatcher by the goddamn townspeople! I’m a goddamn vet, ya faggots! Why, I fought the A-rabs in the Gulf War, ya yellow-bellied pansies! I…”

  “Ignore that TERROR MANNEQUIN talk, Tom Two,” Weak Bitch said as he walked beside Tom Two down the driveway. “That asshole doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. We’ll be just fine.”

  “And one more thing,” the tottering dogcatcher called out into the night as the trio crossed the street, leaving him behind:

  “Fuuuuuuuuuck yoooooooooouuuuu, Tom Twoooooooooooo!!!

  ***

  While trick-or-treating in Selohssa lasted from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM, reverse trick-or-treating usually lasted from 6:00 PM to about 10:00 PM. That’s because it took Tom Two and company about four hours to work their way through the working-class south side of town and then hit all the houses in the more well-to-do north side. As far as the sort of treatment they encountered each and every year, their stops at Russ Robinson’s and the Browns’ were par for the course: the cruel jeering, taunting laughter, finger pointing, the faces pinched in mixed expressions of varying degrees of revulsion, hatred, anger, and fear. On the sidewalks, trick-or-treaters invariably gave the trio a wide berth as if they were lepers. And although some people leered silently at the trio as they passed them by on the sidewalk, most folks felt compelled to get in at least a dig or two.

  Many of the insults directed a
t them were recited and repeated word-for-word throughout the town. Over the decades, the townspeople developed several favorite taunts and invectives that they passed down from generation to generation so that certain regular iterations of cruelty and abuse became part of the reverse trick-or-treating tradition.

  Of course, “Fuck you, Tom Two!” and “I hate you, Tom Two!” had always been in wide use, but so had “Why, I’ll smack your little hand, Tom Two!” and “Why, I’ll pinch your little arm, Tom Two!” Other phrases that had gained popularity in the past decade were “I just want to light you on fucking fire, The Membrane, then shove you straight up Tom Two’s little ass!” and “Why, I’ll rip your fucking face off, Tom Two, and stretch The Membrane over your screaming, bloody skull to make you a new face!”

  On the other hand, young children were taught slurs of a less violent and more G-rated nature, such as “Why, I’ll step on your shoe, Tom Two!” and “Tom Two is a bad boy!” and “You be quiet, Tom Two!” and “The Membrane is nothing but a big, stinky pancake!”

  It all sounds pretty awful, but Tom Two and The Membrane had been doing this for so long now that they no longer cared what people said about them. The last time anyone had managed to make Tom Two cry had been three generations ago, back when the task of escorting them around town on Halloween night had belonged to Weak Bitch’s great grandfather. But this year was different because comments about TERROR MANNEQUIN were now mixed in with all those tired, old chestnuts. Also, intermingled here and there among all those faces expressing the usual feelings of anger, disgust, and hatred were looks of quasi-sympathetic solemnity—the type of facial expressions people normally reserved for those condemned to death.