“Pfft!” Mr. Brown spat before letting out a sardonic chuckle. He pushed the door open wider, leaned out into the night. “Hey, I got better idea, you dirty hippy. How about you all turn your ugly, freak asses around and march the hell off my property before I call the fucking cops, eh?”
Mr. Brown was about to slam the door shut when Aw-Yeah stepped out from behind a tree on the front lawn and approached the house with the ventriloquist dummy’s free hand held out before it, reaching for the Browns. The moment Mr. and Mrs. Brown saw the thing, they both froze in place in the doorway, paralyzed, eyes bulging with horror.
“Bring them out onto the stoop,” Chillington said.
The dummy folded its wooden fingers into its palm, beckoning the Browns forward, who waddled stiffly out from their front doorway, husband followed by wife, both no longer in control of their bodies. They halted at the middle of the stoop, frozen and silent in terror.
“Now what?” Glont asked as he stood on the grass behind Chillington and Aw-Yeah.
“Now it’s payback time,” Chillington said. He turned to Tom Two and The Membrane. “This is personal for you two. If either of you would like to go first, be my guest.”
Tom Two glanced from the frozen, silent, terror-stricken Browns to Chillington, a confused look on his face. Go first? he signed. Go first at what?
“At teaching these folks a lesson, my tiny little chilltastic son.”
What should I do to them? Tom Two signed.
“Do whatever you want. Maybe start off with a punch to the stomach? Perhaps a stomp to the foot.”
Tom Two turned to Glont, the look in his eyes asking his uncle if all of this was okay.
“Go ahead,” Glont said, though halfheartedly. “I mean, that’s why we came back here.”
Tom Two shrugged his shoulders. He took a hesitant step forward, climbed the steps to the stoop. As the idea of inflicting physical harm on anyone was completely foreign to him, he stepped on Mr. Brown’s feet, one at a time, but with barely enough force for him to feel anything. Next, he lightly slapped one of Mrs. Brown’s hands, though it was more like a pat.
Nevertheless, he pointed up at her face and signed, That’s for all the times you said you would slap my little hand! He marched back down the steps to the others, proud he had finally gotten sweet, sick, brutal revenge on those two fuckers.
“That’s all you want to do to them, Tom Two?” the Chillmaster asked.
Tom Two nodded.
“Suit yourself,” Chillington said before addressing The Membrane. “How about you, my slithery, slimy friend? You wanna go next?”
The Membrane formed a limb, used it to grab a stick off the lawn, and slid up the steps to the Browns. Like Tom Two, the thing was unaccustomed to hurting people. It smarted Mr. Brown’s knee with the stick and whacked Mrs. Brown across the ass, barely causing either one much discomfort, before it slid back down the steps.
“Glont, my dude,” Chillington said. “How about you? You want to get in on the action?”
“Eh, I think I’ll pass. Hey, ya know what? Maybe we’ve gone far enough. I mean, look at them. They’re, like, scared shitless from being supernaturally paralyzed. I don’t think they’ll be disrespecting Tom Two or The Membrane again anytime soon, not with the possibility of Aw-Yeah ever coming back here to pay them another visit.”
“That may very well be true,” Chillington said, “but I’d like to take a turn, too, before we leave.” He paused, regarding the Browns as he stroked his beard contemplatively with one hand. “Hey, guys,” he said, turning to his companions. “Why didn’t the skeleton dance at the Halloween party?”
Glont did a quick shoulder shrug, thinking it an odd time to crack jokes. The Membrane sprouted two temporary shoulders and did the same thing.
Tom Two, however, signed a response: Because he had no body to dance with.
Chillington clapped his hands together loudly. “Ha! Tom Two wins the prize.” The Chillmaster gestured at the Browns, still frozen on their front stoop like statues. “Hey, speaking of dancing skeletons: Aw-Yeah, yank these assholes’ skeletons out of their bodies and make them dance, but keep their brains and eyes intact inside their skulls so they stay alive for a few moments—so that their skeleton dance is the last fucking thing they experience on this mortal plane.”
“What the?” Glont mumbled.
“Ready, Aw-Yeah? On one. Five…four…three…”
The dummy clenched its hand into a trembling fist, knuckles facing up, the Chicken McNugget head bobbing up and down in approval.
“…two…ONE!”
On one, the dummy quickly pulled its arm back close to its body, its fist tucking into its side as if in a martial arts stance. At the same time, Mr. and Mrs. Brown’s skeletons tore through the flesh, fat, and hides of their bodies to step out into the chilly night. Bloody, wet, and steaming, the backs of their ribcages momentarily opened like swinging doors, leaving their internal organs behind with the rest of their ruptured husks. Their rent, limp, boneless bodies remained standing for a split second before collapsing into two piles of gore and shredded nightclothes.
The skeletonized Mr. and Mrs. Brown, their jawbones hanging loosely in silent screams, locked their bony hands and descended the steps while their still-seeing eyes gleamed wetly with something far beyond mere mortal terror. The group parted to let them pass onto the lawn, where Mr. Brown took one of Mrs. Brown’ skeletal hands in his own and placed his other hand on the back of her ribcage, at which point the pair launched into a clumsy box step waltz. All the while, the dummy’s free hand and fingers waved in the air—a puppet master pulling invisible, telekinetic strings that led to the glistening crimson skeletons.
While Glont, Tom Two, and The Membrane looked on in shock, disgust, and terror, Chillington laughed and clapped to the broken rhythm of the skeletons’ dance. “Yee-haw!” he cried. “Hey, make them do-si-do, Aw-Yeah!”
Glont noticed a change in the Chillmaster’s voice: his chill baritone pitch had shifted to a higher register, a shrill inflection that made Glont think he was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
The skeletons broke contact, circled around each other, and returned to their original positions. The life started to abandon their horrified eyes as their oxygen-deprived brains continued to rapidly starve to death.
Chillington kept laughing and clapping. “Swing your partner round and round. C’mon, now! That’s it. Now do the running man. There ya go! Now, twerk that little tailbone, Mrs. Brown. Atta’ girl! Grind that coccyx into your hubby’s pelvis! Now spank that, er, nonexistent ass, Mr. Brown. Heh-heh. Okay, okay, that’s enough.”
The skeletons froze. Mr. Brown’s was upright with Mrs. Brown’s bent over in front of it, caught mid-twerk as Aw-Yeah’s unholy power prevented them from collapsing.
Over by the tree that Aw-Yeah had hidden behind, Chillington picked a thick stick off the ground and approached the skeletons. Gripping the makeshift club with two hands, he cocked back and knocked Mr. Brown’s skull off with one hard swing, sending it flying toward the street.
“Homerun out to centerfield!” he said. “Haha!”
He proceeded to beat both skeletons down to a pile of wet red bones on the lawn. When he was finished, he dropped the stick and turned to the others.
“Alright then. So where to next?” he said very casually.
Tom Two stood with his hands covering his eyes while The Membrane quivered in a scrunched-up ball at his side. Glont stood aghast. He lowered the hand he had cupped over his mouth.
“You said you weren’t going to kill anyone. You said you were just going to rough them up a bit, bust some lips, and maybe break some bones at the worst, remember?”
Chillington eyed the pile of bloody bones, his face suddenly paling. “Wow. I…I don’t know what came over me. Oh, dear. What have I done? I went way too far. I…I’m so sorry. I, too, am absolutely horrified by what just happened.”
You didn’t seem so horrified two seconds ago, Glont thought.
Chillington inhaled and exhaled deeply, as if smelling the night air for the first time. “But what’s done cannot be undone. And it appears to be working: I already feel better. My brain is now slightly less cluttered with unchill thoughts than before we came here. But, yes, unfortunately these murders weren’t necessary. I’m now certain I can derive the same benefits by just scaring people and roughing them up a bit. I know I could never ever kill again.”
Tom Two removed his hands from his eyes and signed at Chillington: You promise?
“I promise, little chillster.”
And Aw-Yeah was all, Awwwwwwwwwwwww yeah!”
Chapter 22
“W hat in the blue fuck?” a bleary-eyed Russ Robinson, the town’s alcoholic dogcatcher, asked as he stood framed in his front doorway. Not fifteen minutes ago, he’d fallen into a fitful, drunken sleep on his recliner while watching TV, then the doorbell had awakened him.
“I am Chillington, the Chillmaster of Chillville. I’ve come here tonight to help right a wrong. And if it is possible for me to do so without violence, then I shall…”
Russ’s bottom lip trembled in mounting anger, eyes bulging, as Chillington explained the reason for their late-night visit. When the Chillmaster finished, Russ said, “You talkin’ to me, fucker?”
“I am.”
“Listen, turdmaster. Or fagmaster. Or whatever the fuck you said yer name was. No one comes onto my property, tells me what to do, and then threatens me! You and these freaks have about three seconds to get the hell outta here, or I’m-a come out there and knock yer goddamn teeth out, ya dirty hippy!”
Chillington lowered and shook his head in mock disappointment. “I’m sorry you feel that way, sir.” He glanced back at Glont, then at Tom Two and The Membrane before regarding Russ again. “Hey, asshole. You ever wonder what it would be like to dance with your own alimentary canal?”
“Now wait a minute,” Glont said, taking a step forward. “You promised, man. No more killing. Nothing worse than a few broken bones, remember?”
Ignoring him, Chillington snapped his fingers and called, “Aw-Yeah!” prompting the cree-craw to step out from the dark shrubs that flanked the end of the porch.
“That does it,” Russ said as he stepped outside, nearly tripping over the doorsill. He hadn’t noticed Aw-Yeah yet. He thrust his fists out before him like a stumblebum boxer. “I’m about to knock you into the middle of next week, fucker.”
“Aw-Yeah, make this asshole dance with his alimentary canal.”
Before Glont could protest further, Russ doubled over and vomited his entire digestive tract into his arms in less than twenty seconds, his wide-open jaw dislocating with a sickening pop to accommodate the girth of his stomach. After his inside-out anus slipped out of his gaping mouth, Russ straightened his posture, held the drooping, blubbery red mess out before him, and commenced dancing on the porch, coils of intestines falling to the floorboards with a wet thud as he did so.
“C’mon now, boy!” Chillington cried, clapping his hands with insane glee. “Swing your partner round and round! Heh-heh! Faster, ya old drunk! Haha. That’s better. Now, do the cabbage patch. Wow, you’re white as hell, man! Haha. Now do the moonwalk! Hey, not bad, whitey. Heh. Whoa, you know what? It looks like you have a big-ass tumor growing on your stomach. Might want to get that checked out, hoss. Haha! Alright, alright, that’s enough.”
Russ’s carcass ceased its horrific dance, toppled down the porch steps, and landed near Chillington’s feet tangled in its own viscera. Chillington knelt down, inserted his hand into the gore, raised his bloody fingers close to his face, and examined them for a moment in open-mouthed awe before gingerly inserting them into his mouth. He then glanced over his shoulder at the horror-stricken faces of Glont and Tom Two, as if he’d forgotten they were there, his bloody fingertips still in his mouth. He yanked them out as if he’d just been caught red-handed doing something bad, which of course he had—quite literally.
“Oh, dear,” Chillington said. He rose to his feet, wiping the blood onto his jacket. “What have I done? I…I’m afraid I went too far again.”
“You broke your promise,” Glont said.
“I…I did. I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, man. Ya know what? This shit’s getting a little too fucked up for us. I think it’s time for me to take Tom Two and The Membrane home. It’s been a long night.”
“Please, my friends. Give me another chance. I promise this won’t ever happen again. No more killing. From here on out, I’m just gonna have Aw-Yeah make people punch themselves in the face. Black eyes and busted lips. Nothing worse than that.”
“I don’t know, man. That’s two times now you went back on your word.” Glont turned to Tom Two. “Whaddaya think, Double T? Should we give him another chance?”
Tom Two nodded and turned to Chillington. You promise to keep your promise this time? he signed.
“I promise to keep my promise, Tom Two. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
Chapter 23
W earing pajamas and scowling something fierce, Selohssa Clerk of Courts Laura Higgins opened her front door a crack. She saw Chillington first, then opened the door a little wider when she spotted Glont and the boys hanging a little farther back on her front walk. “My Tiny Little Weak Bitch? What the hell are you doing here?” She regarded Chillington. “And who the hell are you?”
“I am Chillington, the Chillmaster of Chillville. I’ve come here tonight to help right a wrong. And if it is possible for me to do so without violence, then I shall. For he who is truly chill always pursues—”
“Fuck you, ya old coot. Get the hell outta my yard before I call the cops!”
“It’s rude to interrupt people!” Chillington said. “As I was saying, miss, he who is truly chill always pursues the most peaceful resolution first. Tonight, I’m offering you a chance to…”
After Chillington finished his spiel, Laura said, “Treat them with common decency? These freaks—these abominations in the sight of both God and nature? Yeah, right. Now, get the fuck outta here, or I’m gonna call the fucking cops!”
“Aw-Yeah!” Chillington said as he snapped his fingers, causing the cree-craw to step out of the shadows into the pool of light that spilled from the wall lantern beside the door. The ventriloquist dummy pointed at the woman, freezing her in the doorway.
Glont stepped up to Chillington’s side, tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, don’t forget about your promise.”
“I have not forgotten. Aw-Yeah, make her come outside.”
Wide-eyed with primitive fear, Laura opened the door, stepped out onto the stoop.
“Make her punch herself in the face,” Chillington said. “Repeatedly.”
“Not too hard though,” Glont said.
“Not too hard,” Chillington echoed him perfunctorily.
The woman balled her hands into fists and commenced punching herself in the face, the dummy deftly working those invisible puppet strings with its fingers. After about twenty seconds, her face was puffy and red, and a light trickle of blood had sprung from her busted lower lip.
“Yeah, take that you wicked bitch!” Glont said. “Serves ya right. Ha. Hey, I think she’s had enough though.”
Arms folded across his chest, eyes still hidden behind his shades, the Chillmaster did not respond. The woman continued to use her own face as a punching bag. Blood started to leak from nose.
“Hey, man!” Glont said. “I said that’s enough already!”
Shaking his lowered head in mounting fury, his lips pulling away from his gnashing teeth, Chillington cried, “Aw-Yeah, make this bitch punch herself so hard in the head that it explodes. Like motherfucking Scanners, yo!”
“No!” Glont yelled.
But it was too late.
Laura lifted her arms out to her sides while raising her fists into the air, as if she were flexing her biceps. She then lowered her elbows toward her flanks and drove her fists into the sides of her head in a powerful double impact that
caused it to explode like motherfucking Scanners. Blood, brains, and skull chunks rained down on the group. The woman’s bloody-brainy fists rested knuckle to knuckle in the space where her head had just been.
“Look!” Chillington said. “It’s like she just gave herself a fist bump! But her big, fat, idiot head got in the way! Hahaha…”
“Jesus, fuck!” Glont yelled while flinging a pinkish-gray gob of brains out of his hair. “Why the hell did you do that? You broke your fucking promise again!”
Chillington plucked a bit of brain out of his beard. Regarding it intently for a moment, he placed it into his mouth and began to slowly chew.
“Dude!” Glont said. He turned away from the Chillmaster, grabbed a stunned, aghast Tom Two by the shoulder, and said, “C’mon, guys. Let’s get the hell outta here.”
“No! Wait!” Chillington cried, dropping to his knees, wringing his hands in supplication. “Please don’t go! I know—I fucked up again. I’m fucking sorry. I promise I won’t kill anybody else! Please, just give me one more fucking chance!”
Glont halted, turned around to face him. “Yeah, right. You’ve said that three times now! At this point, we’d have to be some dumbass motherfuckers to believe anything you say.”
“I know, I know. Listen, I’ve certainly given you no reason to trust me. But this time is different, I swear it! I finally feel like I’m in control of my impulses. I promise—with the next person we visit, it’ll only be to give them a good scare!”
“Man, there’s no way we’re falling for this shit again,” Glont said. “So long, Chillington. It was nice meeting you. And thanks again for saving my life. But, yeah, it’s time for us to part ways.”
“But I really mean it this time! I promise I won’t kill anyone else. I swear I won’t. Why, I’ll swear on the Holy Bible! That’s right. Go get me a Bible, and I’ll swear on it right now!”
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