by David Reuben
Forcing his children behind him, the dad held a defensive arm up to the attacking mob.
Alice bit a huge chunk from it.
The family screamed.
Wilfred and John crashed into the lift.
The family were silenced.
They were all in the lift when the man said, “Close the doors.”
Hot bile rushed up Frank’s throat, and he vomited on the floor. After wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, he quickly typed and pressed ‘enter.’ The doors closed.
“Now send them to the foyer. Once you’ve done that, we’re getting out of here. Both of us can make it out.” The whistle of a launched object culminated in keys landing on the desk next to Frank. “We’ll both have time to escape. You’ll have time to get to your family.”
Frank pulled the keys close. Looking up at the sky, he drew a deep breath. Twisting towards the door, he typed his final command.
‘Enter.’
Jumping from his seat, the chair scooting out behind him, he looked at the door to see the man with the gun had already gone. The door was closing.
Grabbing the handle, he yanked it open and headed for the car park.
The car keys were his own. How did the man get them? It didn’t matter. He knew where he was parked.
Imagining the lift descending to the foyer, he pushed as hard as his weak legs would carry him.
His lungs burned.
The taste of sick and blood lined his mouth.
He kicked the external door open.
The car park was on the other side of the road. It was something that had always bothered him; negotiating the traffic each morning and evening was a pain. Today it was a blessing.
His shaking hands made hard work of finding his car key. Weaving in and out of traffic, he crossed to the sound of beeping horns.
He pressed the button on the key, and the hazard lights on his black estate lit up.
Jumping into the driver’s seat, he slid the key into the ignition.
The screeching of tyres distracted him, and a tinted Mercedes destroyed the exit barrier fifty metres away.
Frank turned the key.
Then he saw the wire hooked into his ignition.
“Fuck!”
The flash was blinding.
The roar was deafening.
The heat was searing.
JARS
By Dean H. Wild
David Jaeckel’s nagging inner question as he stepped through the open flap of the tent was one of pure reluctance: why in the blue blazes was he doing this? The answer immediately followed, even as the reek of the midway—a whirling blend of cotton candy and diesel exhaust—was cut off and replaced by fragrant sawdust and canvas. He was doing this because if he kept himself occupied and out of sight, he didn’t have to spend as much time with Trey. Let Monica have Trey. It was her damn brother’s kid, after all. The whole relation and relatives thing could be a big pain in the ass sometimes, plain and simple.
He straightened up in the dim light and squinted at the four shelves on the opposite side of the tent. Each shelf was lined with glass cylinders. He moved up to the rope barrier that kept observers at a safe distance from the display and tried to get a better look, but details were obscured by the gloom. And to top it all off, he was alone, just him and the jars. Apparently, not many passers-by were intrigued by what the banner outside proclaimed to be the “Insults to Nature.”
He wondered what Monica was doing with that little snot-nosed nephew of hers, what attraction he had whined to see, what ride he had demanded to climb into, and he felt a little bit of guilt—a very little. It was Monica, after all, who insisted on these tiresome family bonding flings (it’s just for a little while-his wife would plead with him. Yeah, and sometimes, good God, didn’t a little while seemed like an eternity?) and they always had to hold his pudgy, cruel hand and pat his curly head and make the day with Uncle David and Aunt Monica into the greatest thing since the snowcone. Jesus. How guilty was he supposed to feel?
The sound of the midway was muffled by the tent walls, but occasional shouts still bled through. In fact, someone in the distance called out his name, first and last, he was almost sure of it. Maybe something was wrong. Maybe Monica was looking for him. He turned back to the entrance, deciding he didn’t really need to see the Insults to Nature anyway, and collided full force with the man standing next to him in the gloom. He leapt back, startled.
“Sorry. I was just leaving.”
The man was tall and he looked down at David with a calm, almost bashful expression. “The show is about to start,” the man said in an inviting tone. His eyes glittered like bits of blue ice. “And there are no refunds, I’m afraid.”
“I think I’m being paged or something,” David said searching for a polite way to step around the man, “Somebody was calling for me. David Jaeckel. You must have heard them out there.”
“No,” the man turned to the tent flap and closed it with gentle hands. He wore a black suit, clean shirt, silk tie. His moves were graceful and intimate like those of a magician. Or a mortician. “No one was calling for that name. I would have heard them. I was right outside. Listen for yourself.”
David strained to pick apart the layers of voices, music and machinery outside. “You sure?”
“I’m sure, Mr. Jaeckel. Now step up to the rope so you can get a good view. Get your money’s worth.” The man moved across the sawdust seeming almost to float. An odor traveled with him, something flowery and chemical. Liquor, David thought. This guy probably gets tooted up between shows with the gang that greases the Tilt-a-Whirl. But there was something else about him. The expression of forlorn shyness was not due to the shape of the man’s face. It was because his eyebrows had been traced over in thick arcs, drawn in black grease paint. David watched him bend over a wooden box near the entrance and pull a length of heavy chain from inside. He smiled as he did this, and his smile showed yellow nubs of teeth, one of them broken and rounded like a sickle.
“I used to have seating in here,” the man said checking the oversized grommets mounted in the tent flap. “but people never wanted a chair for very long. This isn’t a lingering type of show, I guess.”
David smiled, eying the dark jars, “Well, one-eyed mummy kids don’t exactly sing and dance, I suppose.”
The man laughed as he began looping his chain through the grommets in the tent flap. “No sir. If they did, I’d be a millionaire.”
“Am I it, for this show?” David asked, watching the man close up. It made him think of a spider spinning prey into a soft silk bag. “I mean, if you want to wait a few minutes…”
The man shook his head and tipped David a wink beneath one of his black crescent eyebrows. “It’s just that I have such trouble with peep-holers,” he said patting the spill of chain with a lithe hand. There were tiny tattoos on the joints of his fingers, David noticed, spirals and intersecting slashes, hexes was the term that popped into his head although he wasn’t sure where it came from.
“I need you to direct your attention to the front now.” the man said. “To the jars. The jars are, after all, what you came for.”
“I guess,” David looked up at the man. There were dashes of dark paint at the corners of the man’s mouth, he noticed, giving his lips a sad, downturned look. And again that smell—acrid, sweet liquor.
“Fix your eyes forward, please.” he took David’s shoulders and gave them a rude shove, turning him like a wooden toy that needed positioning. “You won’t want to miss a moment.”
The man clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together. They made a rhythmic hissing sound above the clash and jabber of the midway outside. The light in the tent became dazzling. With it came the man’s voice, no longer the voice of a shy man. It became an almost musical rant punctuated by harsh puffs of breath.
“Behold. Ghastly, unimaginable spawns of twisted nature housed in these jars, a small sample of exquisite imperfection. Creatures made to suckle at the underbelly of exist
ence. Creatures of light and life, so much like you. Like me.”
David searched the shelves hungrily, trying to see all the jars at once. Something about the man’s words was doing it to him, he supposed. He was instantly hyped and caught up in the whole scene. The jars were large, much larger than he’d expected, and the shriveled, curled forms inside were a variety of shapes.
“Some of them with hungers as twisted as their bodies,” the man belted out, “some with talents as bizarre as their shapes. And they await your inspection. Man or animal—who can tell?”
David was grinning, he could feel it, although he didn’t want to be. The creatures suspended in front of him looked back at the world with clouded eyes. Spiny tails and extra limbs dangled in golden fluids. Each form was misery pickled and preserved and put on display—exactly what he’d expected but there was a meanness to this exhibit, as if a malevolence had been stirred into the brine around each form. He wanted to stop grinning but found that he couldn’t. “Ghastly,” he heard himself say.
The man remained at the back of the tent, arms raised. “Rare creatures is what you are seeing, Mr. Jaeckel. Can you feel them reaching out to you? Can you hear their small voices, their barks, their squeals. Their lonely screams?”
“What?” David blinked and meant to look away but something drew him back to the shelves. A thready arm had fluttered inside one of the jars, he was sure of it.
“You’re a good mark, Mr. Jaeckel,” the man told him, moving forward quietly.
David drew a long, fortifying breath and spun around still grinning, “Is this where you chop me up and put me in one of your jars?”
The man stood near the sealed entrance, sweat glistening on his face. His painted eyebrows began to run, covering his cheeks with dark slashes. “Hardly,” he smiled, his eyes bright pinpoints, his grease mouth accents turning outward into dark hooks.
David heard a sound beneath the garble of the midway, the delicate slow drag of a metal lid pivoting against glass. He turned back to the shelves and then froze. The Insults to Nature all met him with their clouded eyes. Each withered form in each jar was facing full front with dreamy attention, each twisted shape doing their best to address him straight on. The man was chuckling behind him, something that was more pleasure than amusement.
David felt the air struggling inside his lungs. He was drowning in what he was seeing. Images rolled into his brain relentless and unforgiving, stealing the clear sweetness of his thoughts. The smell was back, syrupy and acrid and somewhat flowery, something that would rush up at him with equal power, he knew, if he were to take the lid off one of the jars before him. His gaze swept across the display, stopping at the top shelf on the far left. One jar stood full of amber liquid but no shape bobbed inside. The lid was missing.
The man moved up close behind him, his long fingers pressing on David’s shoulders. “I believe that you, Mr. Jaeckel, have something for us.”
David opened his mouth to reply.
The gray thing that sprang from the sawdust connected with his face making a rubbery slap. He saw a cruel slash of mouth descend over him, four ivory nubs of teeth poking through slag colored gums. Those teeth sank into his cheek just below the left eye. Then a cold tongue began to work against his skin, worming into the gashes made by the invading teeth. The tiny body heaved, pushing fluids up from its gullet. He stumbled backward, still drowning in images and noises, trying to cry out but finding no air.
Then, blackness.
***
David was leaning against a utility pole. The midway lights hurt his eyes. The music and the diesel motors seemed thunderous and too harsh.
“There you are,” the voice was Monica’s.
She was coming toward him, keeping Trey in front of her with a firm grip at the back of his neck. The kid had a small fishing pole in his hand and the creature at the end of the fish line appeared to be a plastic frog.
“Been looking for me long?” he managed to smile at them.
“Long enough. Are you all right? You look pukey.”
Pukey. Now that was a Monica word if he’d ever heard one. “Ate a bad hot dog or something, I guess.”
“Look, Uncle Davey,” Trey shot forward from Monica’s grasp, his hard eyes alight. He shoved the plastic frog on his line into David’s face.
“Goddamn it, cut that out.”
“Language,” Monica admonished.
Trey was staring up at him, obviously pleased he’d made good ole’ Uncle Davey flinch. David made a cursory swipe at his left cheek realizing there should be bite marks there, or slime, or scratches at least. He found none of those. “You’ll hear a lot more language if we don’t get out of here, now.”
“Awww,” Trey made one of his famous whining sounds as a small foot stamped the midway. “I wanna go on the Rascally Roundup again.”
Monica forced a smile. “Honey, you’ve been on it five times already, and Uncle Davey isn’t feeling well.”
“This place sucks.”
“Hey,” David shot out on impulse. “Language, mister.”
“I have a stomach ache, too,” the boy sat down hard on the ground and planted his plump cheeks in the palms of his hands.
David looked at his wife, “For God’s sake pick him up. If I have to put my hands on him I’ll break his neck.”
“David,” she gasped, and he thought he saw the hint of a smile behind her shocked expression.
He gave her an almost-smile right back, aware of the attention they were getting from the passing crowd. “We’re just another sideshow, aren’t we? Come on.”
His hand went to his left cheek again, explored, found nothing. Trey was bawling about wanting to go on the Rascally Roundup, but his battle was lost. Monica had gotten him to his feet and was leading him slowly down the midway. “All right,” she said, “Let’s just get everybody home in one piece.”
“Yeah,” he told her as he began walking again.
***
Trey’s complaining quieted by degrees on the ride home and by the time David pulled into the garage the boy had fallen asleep. Monica had not spoken during the entire trip—not a good sign but not unusual these days. He watched his wife collect the boy and his fishing toy out of the back seat. “You want help with him?” He asked her.
“No, but our jackets are still in the car. Bring them in.”
Once he was alone, thoughts of jars on musty shelves flashed at him like distant camera bulbs. The sensation of filmy eyes seeking him out from behind veils of thin glass came back. And hanging over all of it like newly formed shadows were thoughts of the block of time he’d lost: Seconds, minutes, an hour? However long it had been between leaving the tent and being found by his wife. That black-suited freak had hyped him all right. Hypnotized him maybe.
The jackets were in a pile on the back seat of the car and he picked them up one by one, realizing as he took hold of Trey’s Oakland Raiders jacket that there was something underneath. Something so large the kid’s jacket barely covered it. He drew the jacket away scowling over what he was uncovering.
The jar that sat in his car was l full of yellowish liquid. Suspended in the brine was a grayish shape with a broad flat head and a curled, seahorse-like tail. And the mouth, he knew, would be unformed and filled with four ivory nubs of teeth.
“How in the hell…?” he said setting the jackets aside. He brushed at his cheek again.
The jar was heavier than he imagined and he grunted loudly as he lifted it out and set it on the car roof. The figure inside bobbed with a strange slow-motion grace, its shriveled and useless legs wiggling, its flattened face pushing close to the glass as if to kiss it.
Insults to Nature, he thought and he found himself studying the small gray face-chimpanzee perhaps, although it also hinted at amphibian with its broad, round-lidded eyes. “Man or animal” he heard the black-suited man clearly in his head. “who can tell?”
The forelegs moved.
David drew back, unsure if what he’d seen had been an
actual flutter of tissue inside the fluid or something more innocuous, something on the other side of the glass. He had been so close, after all.
“This is nuts,” he said, knowing with hard certainty that the jar was going back to the fairgrounds first thing in the morning and a certain gentleman in a certain black suit was going to get a piece of David Jaeckel’s mind. Until then, he’d keep this little insult to nature out of sight. The trunk should do. Putting such things in someone’s car was some kind of harassment, wasn’t it?
His cheek throbbed as if tapped by an unseen finger and his hand went up to inspect it again. No bump. No bruises. He took out his keys and moved around to the back of the car, again wondering about the lost block of time. For all he knew he’d put the jar in the backseat himself during that time. He popped the trunk lid and looked down at what was there: blanket, ice scraper, a snarl of jumper cables and the jars—two large ones with screw-on lids. They were dry and empty.
Whatever the game was, he didn’t like it and wanted it over with. He walked around and took the full jar down from the car top, holding it close to his chest so he wouldn’t drop it. He nestled it between the two empty containers, glad to have it out of his hands. The shape inside drifted in its fluid bath, rotating with deliberate slowness until it faced him. One eyelid rolled up showing the large, black eye beneath. He stared at it, disbelieving.
“David?”
Monica stood in the open door that led into the house.
He instinctively brought the trunk lid down. “Sorry, I got sidetracked. I’ll come right in. The kid probably needs a bath.”
“Trey’s already in bed. He’s got a tummy ache so I’ll probably sit up with him tonight.”
“You’re too nice to that kid, you know it?”
She gave him a look, something trapped, something that said yes, the kid’s a little bastard but I can’t help being nice to him, I just can’t help it. It was the first meaningful look she’d given him in a long time.