Terror Incognita

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “You’re a hypocrite, Mr. Roy. You do things like I saw in your photographs and you act like you disapprove.”

  “I do.” He sipped his coffee grimly.

  “Why?” She gaped at him in disbelief.

  Roy’s eyes were hot in a face that was clean-shaven, somewhat plump and boyish, and devoid of any artistic embellishment. Only now did May notice that. He said, “John Merrick the Elephant Man ached to look like regular men. He dreamed of it...in vain. Never had a wife. Died young, after years of pain. And I have a...ludicrous fool on a table in this other room who wants to look like him exactly! If I could only trade his body with Merrick, but I can’t. Can you see the horror in this?”

  “What horror? He looked happy to me. He chooses to look like that. Merrick didn’t. In our time nobody will make fun of that man or pity him—they’ll admire him and envy him! So what’s so horrible?”

  Now it was Roy’s turn to gape in disbelief, coffee hovering in his hand. “Don’t you see it isn’t natural?”

  “Natural? I don’t believe you, not at all! Look at you. Is it natural for humans to wear clothes, jewelry? Is it natural for you to wear deodorant, cut and comb your hair and shave? What’s natural? You’re the artist—why do you do it? Just for the money after all, after your big speech about ‘artistic gratification’?” She mocked the words.

  Roy set down his coffee. “I didn’t lie to you, Miss Azul. I do achieve a great deal of artistic gratification. More so than when I used to repair people who had been burnt or disfigured, making them beautiful again. I love deforming these fools and blathering, mindless sheep who follow the drunken herdsmen of fashion!”

  “So you’re a poet too, eh?” May hugged her arms, sneering her pouty bee-stung lips at him to hide her nervousness.

  “An unhappy poet, Miss Azul. With a talent for working from the black ink well. The dark end of the pallet. I am only too happy to hack the arm off a buffoon like your friend and give him a tentacle instead and take his money. He’s a horror to me, a monster. I laugh at him.”

  “You’re sick! You know that? You’re sick.”

  “Oh? But he’s happy with his tentacle, isn’t he? You don’t see me with a tentacle. We’re all sick, May.”

  “I didn’t come for a philosophy lecture, Mr. Roy. What do I owe you? I’ll go elsewhere for what I want.”

  “No.” Roy dropped his coffee cup three-quarters full into the trash zapper. “I’ll finish with Rhik and be right with you—it will just be an hour.”

  “I’m not sure I want you now.”

  “You may have to wait elsewhere for weeks for a session. Go read a magazine. One hour.”

  “All right,” May muttered, slipping off the table, gathering up her belongings. “I just want what I want,” she said in a softer tone.

  “I know.” Roy didn’t look at her, and left her to dress although she had lain naked for him to manipulate before...a field of snow inviting the trampling of a herd of mindless sheep.

  While Roy finished up with Rhik’s session he flipped through books from his extensive collection in his mind. Horror movies. Texts on medical anomalies. A half dozen on circus sideshows of old. Bosch. Maybe a little bit of each?

  Mr. Roy was inspired, now.

  He sweated eight hours over May Azul.

  CRIMSON BLUES

  He smelled the top of her head, as he had sniffed her head when she was a wispy-haired newborn. But she was a woman now, and in bending his nose against her scalp he inhaled shampoo and mousse. Shutting his eyes, James tugged the spiked blade of the awl out of the base of his daughter’s neck.

  He was crouched on the floor, Cheri sprawled half in his lap. Her open mouth was still moist against his left palm as if suction-cupped to it. He let her down onto her back, the plastic drop cloth under them rustling. The chair that he had told her he meant to paint, here in the middle of the kitchen, had been knocked on its side in her brief struggle—a few convulsive kicks.

  James stood over her now, looking down, as he had looked down at her in her crib so many times. After his wife had left him, he had sometimes thought to suffocate that sleeping infant as he watched her blissfully dreaming. She would have been better off if he had done it then, he knew now. And so would he. He fought down the rising sob in his throat. It was a sob of self-pity more than of guilt.

  After all, she had meant to leave him. Just as her worthless mother had abandoned him. And hadn’t she become every bit the whore her mother had been? He had seen his daughter chatting so cozily with the mailman on the front step. That was only an example, that was only what he saw. She even flirted with his sister’s husband, his smarmy brother-in-law, Curtis. And when she kissed him goodnight, him, her own father, didn’t she linger just a moment too long? Her lips pressed to his cheek? Wasn’t she trying to seduce even him? Yes, she was better off now, delivered from further temptations of evil. And now James was delivered from his own.

  No one would suspect that he had murdered his own daughter. No one did that. Their wives, girlfriends, certainly, that was practically a fad. But in this, he felt safe. And he had had it all planned. The drop cloth under her, which he had lured her onto like those nets in the movies that gathered people up into the trees. And the awl, its spike so slim, to minimize the splashing of blood.

  Yes, it was pooling now into folds of the drop cloth, but James lifted Cheri’s head to stuff a kitchen towel under her neck, as if tenderly slipping a pillow beneath her, to absorb it. And there had been a little spattering of blood across his sleeve, across the drop cloth. He had, after all, had to stab her several times. But he would burn his clothing in the fireplace, and sweep out the ashes after that. And her body would be wrapped up in blankets, driven out into the woods and set aflame also, then the remains buried. He would tell those who asked that his daughter had run off with some ominous-looking young man whose name he didn’t know. Hell, he’d even call the police and report her missing. Maybe gone to search for her missing mother, he’d speculate.

  James stooped, began to fold the edge of the drop cloth over Cheri like a blanket. Like a shroud. As he did this, a small black shape caught his eye. Something by Cheri’s head.

  It was a large black beetle. No, a cricket. Good-sized, almost an inch. Weren’t crickets an omen of good luck? Cheri must have let it in with her.

  James shooed it. Waved at it to swat it off the drop cloth rather than crush it, feeling in a merciful mood. It jumped. A good jump, too—so good that it jumped right out of his vision. But in that split second before it leaped, before it vanished, James had seen the single spot of red that glistened wetly on the cricket’s back.

  “Damn,” he hissed to himself, and got down on hands and knees to peer under the table.

  Well, he had to find it, didn’t he? Cheri’s disappearance would be noticed sooner or later even if he didn’t call the police himself. A boyfriend, a class mate, his sister Ann and that smug bastard Curtis might come looking for her. Ann and Curtis had acted like Cheri was their daughter rather than his, over these past seventeen years. Always fretting, always meddling. They would come, yes, and he would tell them no, no, he had no idea where Cheri had gone. And then a black shape would leap incriminatingly out into the center of the floor between their feet, or onto the table between their coffees, and then there it would be, the cricket, a spot of red on its back like the hourglass of a black widow. A moving, living piece of evidence. Like a charred black skeleton’s finger, pointing accusingly to him.

  No, he had to find it, but it was trapped in the house with him for the moment, so he took the time to finish rolling Cheri up in the drop cloth. He scooped the bundle into his arms and carried her into the bathroom adjoining the kitchen, deposited her in the bathtub, out of his way. Off came his bloodied shirt, his speckled trousers. He tossed them on top of the bundle in the tub. Atop these he rested the ice-pick like awl. In the sink he washed his hands thoroughly. There. Now, in his underwear, he went hunting for the insect.

  “Oh,”
he whispered, crawling ever so stealthily across the linoleum on hands and knees, “we can’t have any witnesses, can we?” So much for good luck, eh? What was that song the cricket sang in that Disney movie? “Give a little whistle,” and he did, as if he thought it would lure the bug out. Softly, as if singing a lullaby, he added, “And always let your conscience be your guide.”

  From the living room beyond came a chirp, as if to answer his song.

  “Ahh,” James cooed, and like a giant bug himself, scurried through the threshold into the dimly-lit parlor.

  No more chirps. No, it was teasing him, taunting him. Catch me if you can, a game, like those of a child. Hide and go seek. It was as if in dying, Cheri had passed her spirit on to the body of the cricket. Ahh, but he wouldn’t let her get away with that. He had killed her once, he could do it again. He had shown the cricket mercy once. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  He peeked under the sofa, holding his breath now, silent. He peeked around in back of the TV. A peripheral movement. “Yeah!” he cried, springing to his feet. He was sure he had seen it disappear under the arm chair, and he shoved it aside with such force that the legs scratched the wood of the floor. He stomped the dust balls there. Then looked, lifting one foot and then the other to examine their soles. No smashed bodies. Nothing.

  An hour of hunting later, sweat now sheathing James’ entire body and his knees dirty and gritty, he went to his bookcase and pulled out an encyclopedia. CLOISTER-DIGITALIS. “Cricket,” he muttered. “Cricket.” Ha. They had more on the stupid game than on God’s prevalent animal of the same name.

  “Gryllus assimilis,” he murmured. Ah, it was the forewings the bug rubbed together to produce its chirp, not the legs. Hm. “Learn something new every day.” James hoped to learn something about the behavior of crickets that would help him find this one. They fed on book bindings. Well, maybe he could lure it that way, using this very book. Or some other food as a lure? Something he could poison? If nothing else, he could use the encyclopedia to smash the thing.

  A page fell open, and there was a section on CRIME. It showed an FBI forensic expert examining the bottom of a shoe. James thumped the book shut as if the technician might look up from the page and spot him.

  There! There! James saw it, on the floor just under the coffee table. He hurled the book, and it plowed across the top of the table, scattering candy from a dish, knocking a butt-piled ashtray to the floor. The cricket hopped, but came down within view. James scooped up the ashtray, threw it like a baseball. It didn’t shatter, but dented the floor, and the cricket hopped, this time through the dark doorway leading into Cheri’s bedroom.

  “All right, bitch,” he hissed, sweat running down his sides, his heart punching. “All right, bitch,” he said, although it was the male cricket that chirped. “You want to play games? Huh? Huh?” He stomped toward his own bedroom.

  He had to kill it. Tonight. They had wings, they could fly, it would try to escape from the house when he opened the door and it was so small and so fast. He must not leave the house until it was dead. He must not let it escape from him...

  James fed shells to his shotgun until it could hold no more, and racked the slide. The sound made him feel good.

  “All right,” he announced himself, and stormed into the bedroom of his daughter. He felt for a lamp, switched it on. Posters of drippy-looking TV hunks; homogenized James Deans. Smell of perfume. A funny ache rocked James’ heart like a wave swelling under a moored boat but he ignored it, and there it was, the bug by the baseboard and he fired.

  The shotgun boomed his fury. The shell clattered. Plaster dust had raised a cloud, and as the chalky grit settled James saw that the bug was gone. Blown to smithereens? He got down on his belly to look under the bed.

  There! Hiding under the bed like a frightened child! Boom! The sound deafening enclosed under the bed like that. He saw baseboard wood splinter, gouged. But after the blast, he saw no cricket there.

  “Bitch!” he raged, jumping to his feet, shoving the bed out away from the wall.

  There was an urgent female voice calling from the kitchen. He must have left the TV on in there. And a scream, now. A horror movie? He ignored it. Plenty of time for TV later; right now he had a cricket to kill. James pivoted his head slowly from side to side. There! Boom! No—there! Boom! The windows of the bedroom rattled with the thunder. Cheri had been afraid of thunder, as a child had come running to bed with him. Whore! Boom!

  Dust settled, sweat ran from his pores and tears poured from his eyes but he didn’t realize it, and there was the cricket, there in a scattering of plaster chunks. Unmoving. Gray from the plaster on it...but not so gray that he couldn’t see that telling spot of crimson.

  He must not rush it. It might be dead, struck by plaster, or it might only be stunned. Or it might be luring him, tricking him. Approaching it slowly, James gave a questioning little whistle. His shotgun was empty, so he leaned it against the bed so that he could use both hands to scoop the bug up.

  Voices in the kitchen again. Had the TV gone off only to come back on? A woman sobbing, babbling. Sounded like Ann, almost, his sister...

  His sister. And men’s voices this time. Curtis, but others too. The police! They had noticed Cheri missing already! Had James phoned them? No, he hadn’t yet, he remembered. Footfalls nearing. He had no choice now but to lunge for the bug, grab it and stuff it in the waistband of his briefs before they found him in here...before they could see it, and that spot of glowing neon red.

  The authoritative footfalls almost behind him. James made his move, scooped up the bug. He’d got it! Was it dead? He thought he felt a weak tickle of a moving limb against his palm but wasn’t sure, didn’t wait to find out. He popped the cricket into his mouth, and swallowed it down whole in one gulp...accusatory blood stain and all.

  He had done it, without a second to spare! He’d outsmarted them...done away with the witness, the evidence, the vengeful spirit of his daughter all in one swallow. As the policemen stepped into the room, their pistols trained on him, James calmly, confidently turned around to face them, his hands raised. Ha! Idiots! One of the men had fresh blood stains on one hand from somewhere, James noticed, but not he, oh no, not he...

  Grinning through the sweat and plaster on his face, he asked innocently, “Something wrong, officers?”

  EMPATHY

  They would call it a murder-suicide, though it was never fully understood. Perhaps it was one, actually—in its way. Or perhaps it wasn’t just that Marie empathized with the things at Blue Flamingos...but they with her.

  Blue Flamingos Antiques and Collectibles was the name Edwin, Marie’s husband, had given the three-story brick warehouse, and it was a blue-painted lawn flamingo he had placed in the front window beside the blue lava lamp, though he could have as easily called it Pink Elephants or Flying Aardvarks to get his point across.

  There were certainly enough traditional antiques to draw serious collectors, and some of them were willing to part with serious money. The vast ground floor was nearly as neatly laid out as a department store, with tables and counters and shelves, corridors built of merchandise. Clean, well-preserved merchandise; this was no flea market. Edwin had had his name, and the name Blue Flamingos, printed in a magazine article last year in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the jukebox. It was tacked up by the cash register, his brief quote on the restoration of jukeboxes circled.

  But it was the collectibles rather than the antiques for which the place was best known. The article could indicate that. Edwin was a collector of ‘50s paraphernalia. Art Deco furniture. Old radios; a whole tall shelf just of those in the darker, quieter, somewhat less neat second story. Primitive futuristic TVs, the sad unlit shells of arcade games, the colorless translucent bones of neon signs. Items so odd and unique that people were willing to drive here from Boston sometimes for the chic junk of yesterday. Art Deco, old radios and jukeboxes were always popular, but also there had been the resurgence of interest in the �
�60s, and Blue Flamingos had done well for that. College kids in abundance, no doubt feeling very hip when they punched up old Roy Orbison songs on the gorgeously gaudy replica Wurlitzer 1015 by the counter where you first came in, drawn to it moth-like, like kids in the ‘40s, mindlessly lured by the green, orange, yellow plastic colors, the water bubbles tumbling corpuscle-like through lurid veins. Lights, movement, noise; a carnival in a futuristic sarcophagus, now a sacred American icon...the predecessor of TV, and MTV. Today’s mall mentality served Edwin well. The allure of things.

  Marie’s husband knew what they wanted because he loved these things as they did. He might not have been able to part with any of it, jealous collector that he was, if there wasn’t a constant stream of new things coming in to replace those that left. Flea markets, field auctions. He read obituaries, contacted relatives about the possessions of deceased parents and grandparents. College kids and Bostonians didn’t know where to go, and didn’t want the bother of that anyway. They would pay double, triple, more for their cherished junk, while throwing away the stuff they bought in the malls, the treasure of tomorrow’s scavengers.

  “It’s like the ultimate attic!” one woman enthused to him at the counter, paying thirty dollars for a Barbie doll Edwin had acquired for five dollars, along with three others in a box of toys at a yard sale.

  From across the room, gently dusting a stuffed baby alligator that reared on its hind legs like some mummified miniature dinosaur, now extinct, Marie watched as Edwin smiled and offered some obligatory banalities. Edwin wasn’t very good with small talk, just with the large talk of his drinking companions. Basically, Marie’s husband preferred things to the human beings that made them. But then, who didn’t?

  * * *

  Marie also cherished the many things collected in her husband’s shop, and often felt more pained than he to see them leave. But hers was not the love of a collector. Marie had never collected anything in her life. As a deaf child, living in a school for deaf children during the week and with her mother in a two-room apartment on weekends, she hadn’t had the room—the private space—to accomodate the luxury of collection. Marie was fond of malls in the way she was fond of museums. She loved to drink it all in, then went home full. She was not materialistic. She loved the collectibles and old things because they were bits and pieces of lives. She could see and smell the life—the love, often—still in them, soaked deeply in their pores from the hands of their owners. Now discarded, orphaned by unsentimental survivors of those gone before. They were sad things. Lonely things. Of course, she should feel happy to see them adopted...but she became attached to them, liked to see them all here together in her home. She felt as one with them. She felt empathy with these dustily alive things.