by Brian Keene
After, he’d called Tony, frantic and almost speechless from exertion and shock.
“Don’t sweat it,” Tony had told him again. “We’ve got a guy down on Roosevelt Avenue that can take care of these things. But it’ll cost you. From now on, when Mr. Marano wants a new piece of equipment, we’ll expect it for more than the standard manager’s discount. And we’ll want to help ourselves to your warehouse from time to time.”
Now the dream shifted from memory to the surreal, because as the gangsters were rolling the trash bags over her, Cecelia opened her eyes and spoke to him.
“I’ll be back, lover.”
Harold screamed, and was still screaming when the phone awoke him. He sat up, bolts of pain going off behind his eyes. He felt funny. Weighted. He fumbled for the phone in the dark.
“Hello?”
“Harold? It’s Will.”
“What time is it?”
“Umm...nine o’clock. Did I wake you?”
“It’s okay. What’s up?”
“Well, there’re two guys down here. I’ve seen them in the store before—customers of yours. They say they want a fifty-six inch Magnavox and to put it on the Marano account, but I can’t find any record of financing or—”
Harold cut him off. “Give them what they want. Set up delivery. I’ll take care of it when I come back.”
Will said something in reply, but Harold didn’t hear it, because the words were drowned out by a voice in his ear.
“Horsy ride, Daddy. Give me a horsy ride.”
Harold gasped.
“Harold, what’s wrong?”
“I’m alright, Will. Sorry. A spider ran across the bed.”
Another voice whispered in the dark. “I have your heart, Harold. Isn’t that what you used to tell me?”
“Is there someone else there, Harold? I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Will, I’ve gotta go.”
He hung up, cutting Will off in mid-sentence, and turned on the light.
His wife’s face stared back at him from his chest.
“I have your heart,” the face on the tumor repeated. The voice was squeaky, but undeniably Marcy’s. The tumor had grown to the size of an apple, and now protruded from the area directly above his heart.
Harold grabbed the sheets, noticing again how heavy his hand felt. He glanced down, and his son smiled back at him. The tumor on his hand wore his son’s face, and a second one, the size of a toothpick, had begun to sprout from between his fingers. It looked remarkably like a miniature arm. It’s tiny fingers waved at him.
“Want to toss the ball around in the backyard, Dad?”
Harold swung his feet to the floor and tried to get out of bed. The pressing weight on his back almost bore him to the floor, and he heard Danielle’s voice again, pleading insistently in his ear “Horsy ride, Daddy. Giddy up!”
He crawled on all fours, while his family chattered at him in their cartoon voices. His wife shook her head back and forth, and seemed to stretch. The tumor grew bigger, now covering his breast.
With a sudden terrible clarity, Harold paused, and with his good hand, lifted the waistband of his boxer shorts and peeked inside.
Cecelia grinned back at him from the head of his penis.
• • •
“How may I help you?”
The man on the other end of the line was shouting above the clamoring voices in the background.
“My name is Harold Newton! I need to speak to Doctor Rahn!”
“I’m sorry sir, this is Doctor Rahn’s answering service. He’s unavailable for the evening. Is this an emergency?”
In the background, a child laughed, and the caller screamed in pain.
“Yes, this is a fucking emergency! Tell him we have to cut the tumors out! We’ve got to remove them!”
“Please calm down, Mr. Newton. What seems to be the trouble?”
The only answer was a long, anguished howl, and more laughter.
“Please hold the line, Mr. Newton. I’ll get an emergency operator on the line for you and send help to your location.”
“No time! I’ll have to do it myself! Please hurry! Tell them—”
The line went dead.
• • •
When the paramedics and police arrived, they found Marcy Newton and her children watching television in the living room, along with a woman they identified as a friend of the family, a woman named Cecelia Ramirez. There was no sign of Harold, and when the police returned the next day for further questioning, the family and the Ramirez woman had vanished as well.
STORY NOTE: I wrote this for an anthology about murderous families. The editor requested a story in which one family member killed another. The characters of Tony and Vince, their mysterious boss Mr. Marano, and the “guy down on Roosevelt Avenue” have only a small walk-on roll in this tale, but they’ve had much bigger parts in several of my other works, particularly the novels Clickers 2, Clickers 3, and Clickers vs. Zombies (all co-written with J.F. Gonzalez), and the short stories “The Siqqusim Who Stole Christmas” and “Crazy For You” (the latter of which was co-written with Mike Oliveri).
GOLDEN BOY
I shit gold.
It started around the time I hit puberty. I thought there was something wrong with me. Cancer or parasites or something like that, because when I looked down into the bowl, a golden turd was sitting on the bottom. When I wiped, there were gold stains on the toilet paper. Then I flushed and went back to watching cartoons. Ten minutes later, I’d forgotten all about it.
You know how kids are.
But it wasn’t just my shit. I pissed gold. (No golden showers jokes, please. I’ve heard them all before). I started sweating gold. It oozed out of my pores in little droplets, drying on my skin in flakes. It peeled off easily enough. Just like dead skin after a bad case of sunburn. Then my spit and mucous started turning into gold. I’d hock gold nuggets onto the sidewalk. One day, I was picking mulberries from a tree in a pasture. There was a barbed-wire fence beneath the tree, and to reach the higher branches, I stood on the fence. I lost my balance and the barbed-wire took three big chunks out of the back of my thigh. My blood was liquid gold. And like I said, this was around puberty, so you can only imagine what my wet dreams were like. Many nights, instead of waking up wet and sticky, I woke up with a hard, metallic mess on my sheets and in my pajamas.
Understand, my bodily fluids weren’t just gold colored. If they had been, things might have turned out differently. But they were actual gold—that precious metal coveted all over the world. Gold—the source of wars and peace, the rise of empires and their eventual collapse, murders and robberies, wealth and poverty, love and hate.
My parents figured it out soon enough. So did the first doctor they took me to. Oh, yeah. That doctor was very interested. He wanted to keep me for observation. Wanted to conduct some more tests. He said all this with his doctor voice but you could see the greed in his eyes.
And he was just the first.
Mom and Dad weren’t having any of that. They took me home and told me this was going to be our little secret. I was special. I had a gift from God. A wonderful, magnificent talent—but one that might be misunderstood by others. They wanted to help me avoid that, they said. Didn’t want me to be made fun of or taken advantage of. Even now, I honestly think they meant it at the time. They believed that their intentions were for the best. But you know what they say about good intentions. The road to hell is paved with them. That’s bullshit, of course.
The road to hell is paved with fucking gold.
My parents started skimming my residue. Mom scraped gold dust from my clothes and the sheets when she did laundry and from the rim of my glass after dinner. One night, they told me I couldn’t watch my favorite TV show because I wouldn’t eat my broccoli. I cried gold tears. After that, it seemed like they made me cry a lot.
Everywhere I went, I left a trail of gold behind me. My parents collected it, invested it, and soon, we moved to a bigger house in
a nicer neighborhood with a better school. Our family of three grew. We had a maid and a cook and groundskeepers.
I hated it, at first. The new house was too big. We’d been a blue-collar family. Now, Mom and Dad didn’t work anymore and I suddenly found myself thrown into classrooms with a bunch of snobby rich kids—all because of my gift. I had nothing in common with my classmates. They talked about books and music that I’d never heard of, and argued politics and civic responsibilities and French Impressionism. They idolized Che Guevara and Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. I read comic books and listened to hip-hop and liked Spider-Man.
So I tried to fit in. Nobody wants to be hated. It’s human nature—wanting to be liked by your peers. Soon enough, I found a way. I let them in on my little secret. Within a week, I was the most popular kid in school. I had more friends than I knew what to do with. Everybody wanted to be friends with the golden boy. But here’s the thing. They didn’t want to be friends with me because of who I was. They wanted to be friends with me because of who I was. There’s a big difference between those two things.
So I had friends. Girlfriends, too.
I remember the first girl I ever loved. She was beautiful. There’s nothing as powerful or pure or unstable as first love. I thought about her constantly. Stared at her in class. Dreamed of her at night. And when she returned my interest, my body felt like a coiled spring. It was the happiest day of my life. But she didn’t love me for who I was. Like everyone else, she loved me for who I was.
So have all the rest. Both ex-wives and the string of long-term girlfriends between them. My happiest relationships are one night stands. The only women I’m truly comfortable with are the ones I only know for a few brief hours. I never tell them who I am or what I can do. And before you ask, yes, I always wear a condom and no, I can’t have children. There are no little golden boys in my future. I don’t shoot blanks. I shoot bullets.
I’ve no shortage of job opportunities. Banks, financial groups, precious metals dealers, jewelers, even several governments. Of course, I don’t need to work. I can live off my talent for the rest of my life. So can everyone else around me. But that doesn’t stop the employment offers from coming. And they’re so insincere and patronizing. So very fucking patronizing. They want to invest in my future. Just like my parents and my friends and my wives, they only want what’s best for me. Or so they claim.
But I know what they really want.
And I can’t take it anymore.
I’m spent. My gold is tarnished. It’s lost its gleam. Its shine. I can see it, and I wonder if others are noticing, too.
Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to put this gun to my head and blow my brains out all over the room, leaving a golden spray pattern on the wall. The medical examiner will pick skull fragments and gold nuggets out of the plaster. The mortician can line his pockets before embalming me. You can sell my remains on eBay, and invest in them, and fight over what’s left.
I want to fade away, but gold never fades. This is my gift. This is my legacy. This is my curse.
I have only one thing to leave behind.
You can spend me when I’m gone.
STORY NOTES: The first and last sentences of this story came to me one day, and I liked them so much that I wrote a story to tie them together. Author Kelli Owen read this story prior to its publication, and said it was a metaphor for my current place in the horror genre. But Kelli is quite possibly mentally ill, and she says that about all of my work. Plus, I’m fairly certain she was drunk when she read it. Take from “Golden Boy” what you will, but I just think it’s a quirky and kind of fun fable. Not a metaphor, and (hopefully) not a prediction of the future.
BRIAN KEENE is the author of over twenty-five books, including Darkness on the Edge of Town, Take The Long Way Home, Urban Gothic, Castaways, Kill Whitey, Dark Hollow, Dead Sea, and The Rising. He’s also written comic books such as The Last Zombie, Doom Patrol and Dead of Night: Devil Slayer. His work has been translated into German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, French and Taiwanese. Several of his novels and stories have been developed for film, including Ghoul and The Ties That Bind. In addition to writing, Keene also oversees Maelstrom, his own small press publishing imprint specializing in collectible limited editions, via Thunderstorm Books. Keene’s work has been praised in such diverse places as The New York Times, The History Channel, The Howard Stern Show, CNN.com, Publisher’s Weekly, Media Bistro, Fangoria Magazine, and Rue Morgue Magazine. Keene lives in Pennsylvania. You can communicate with him online at www.briankeene.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
Also by Brian Keene
The Rising
City of the Dead
Earthworm Gods
Ghoul
Dead Sea
Kill Whitey
Dark Hollow
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Castaways
Urban Gothic
A Gathering of Crows
Take the Long Way Home
Jack’s Magic Beans
Tequila’s Sunrise
Entombed
The Cage
Alone
Scratch
An Occurrence in Crazy Bear Valley
Shades (with Geoff Cooper)
Clickers II: The Next Wave (with J.F. Gonzalez)
Clickers III: Dagon Rising (with J.F. Gonzalez)
Clickers vs Zombies (with J.F. Gonzalez)
The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham (with Nick Mamatas)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Brian Keene.
Blood on the Page © 2013 by Brian Keene
Layout and design by Robert Swartwood
Cover illustration © 2013 Elderlemon Design
Introduction © 2013 by Dave Thomas
Foreword is original to this collection
Portrait of the Magus as a Writer (Interpolating Magic Realism) is original to this collection
Captive Hearts first published in Hungry For Your Love, St. Martins Press, 2009
Johnstown first published in Portents, Flying Fox Publishers, 2011
Waiting For Darkness first published by Cemetery Dance Publications, 2007
Dust first published in The Fear Within, 3F Publications, 2003
Burying Betsy first published on Dread Central.com, 2006
Fast Zombies Suck first published by Camelot Books, 2011
I Sing A New Psalm first published in Dark Faith, Apex Publications, 2010
Caught In A Mosh first published on Feo Amante.com, 1998
I Am An Exit first published in Fear of Gravity, Delirium Books, 2004
This Is Not An Exit first published in A Little Silver Book of Streetwise Stories, Borderlands Press, 2008
That Which Lingers first published in Frightmares #5, 1995
Halves first published by White Noise Press, 2008
Without You first published in Sackcloth and Ashes #6, 1997
Couch Potato first published in 21st Century Dead, St. Martins Press, 2012
Fade to Null first published in Unhappy Endings, Delirium Books, 2009
Babylon Falling first published in The Rise and Fall of Babylon, Earthling Publications, 2003
A Revolution of One first published in Blood Splattered and Politically Incorrect, Cemetery Dance Publications, 2010
Full of It first published in Excitable Boys, Freak Press, 1999
Two-Headed Alien Love Child first published in Thingamajig #2, 1995
Bunnies In August first published on Horror World.com, 2005
The Wind Cries Mary first published in The New Dead, St. Martins Press, 2010
The Resurrection and The Life first published by Biting Dog Press, 2007
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Stone Tears first published by Infernal House, 2008
Red Wood first published in Tooth and Claw, Biting Dog Publications, 2002
The Ghosts Of Monsters first published in Ghost Walk (lettered edition), Delirium Books, 2008
Slouching in Bethlehem first published in Shivers II, Cemetery Dance Publications, 2003
Marriage Causes Cancer In Rats first published in Fear of Gravity, Delirium Books, 2004
Golden Boy first published in A Little Silver Book of Streetwise Stories, Borderlands Press, 2008
www.briankeene.com
Table of Contents
Introduction
Foreword
Portrait Of The Magus As A Writer (Interpolating Magic Realism)
Captive Hearts
Johnstown
Waiting For Darkness
Dust
Burying Betsy
Fast Zombies Suck
I Sing A New Psalm
Caught In A Mosh
I Am An Exit
This Is Not An Exit
That Which Lingers
Halves
Without You
Couch Potato
Fade To Null
Babylon Falling
A Revolution Of One
Full Of It
Two-Headed Alien Love Child
Bunnies In August
The Wind Cries Mary
The Resurrection And The Life
Stone Tears
Red Wood
The Ghosts Of Monsters
Slouching In Bethlehem
Marriage Causes Cancer In Rats
Golden Boy
About the Author
Also by Brian Keene
Copyright