“Zappa was a rock star, back in the day. I don’t think you would like him though.” Stephanie had just graduated from her Hannah Montana phase into an iPod filled with the Beatles, Bob Marley, and newer bands like the White Stripes and Avenged Sevenfold. Darlene was following her sister’s lead, just as Tommy had once copied Russell’s interests. Not anymore: Tommy lived in Illinois now; was knocking down six figures in corporate sales. Their roads had diverged.
As Russ wound his mother’s Merc up the mountain road, surprised at how smoothly it cornered for a big black box with upholstery, he remembered when his father brought them here back in the ‘80s, him and Tommy. At first they only visited the stream, which to them was always “The Stream,” even though the locals knew it as “Thunder Bridge” after the sound the plank bridge made for anyone standing beneath it when a car passed over.
After several trips to “The Stream,” during which they caught half a dozen bullfrogs, two small painted turtles, a water snake, and various salamanders from under rocks along the trails, their dad announced that he had a surprise. He’d been looking for an old trailhead, and on their last trip he thought he’d found it. On all their visits thus far, their main equipment had been dip nets, but on this next trip, Carl added two cheap plastic fishing poles from Korvette’s. After parking as usual in one of the turnouts near the bridge, he led them upstream to where a vague path cut off over the ridge above. A 10 minute hike along this trail took them over the saddle and out to the Upper Stavros Quarry Pit. Prior to their arrival at the pit, Dad issued a series of warnings: “Stay away from the edge,” “Don’t wander,” “Stay off any platforms or scaffolding that are still up until I check them.”
Russ remembered the Pit as he saw it that first time: immense, gaping; the still, flat surface far below, coated with a scrim of duckweed. On that first hike out their father explained how his biology prof at Montclair State showed the class an enormous white salamander coiled in a jar of formaldehyde, bleached and flabby, eyeless but equipped with feathery gills, and described how he was all but certain it was an unknown species. Some kind of axolotl. And it had come from the Upper Stavros Pit. Supposedly. Before the professor’s tenure though, donated by an old quarryman from the time of the original breach and flood. No one ever found another, at least not so far as the prof knew, and he had even gone out there himself. No luck. Maybe someday, he told the class, someone would find a second specimen?
This was the scientific opportunity Carl Fenster pitched to his boys as they perched near the edge of an old steel platform that still stood out from the rim of the Pit: the chance to be in on the ID of a new species, perhaps even have it named for them: Axolotlus fenestra. Axolotlus russellia. And thus with their arms over the rusty rails, they fished, or salamandered, with compacted bread balls, wiggly worms, salmon eggs from a jar. Never a nibble. Their father paced, smoking his Benson & Hedges Multifilters one after the other and flicking the butts into the foul-smelling lake far below.
It didn’t take long before the two boys tired of all this nothing, but they continued for three whole visits until Russ first had the dream. Then Dolores drew a line, and they never even went back to The Stream. After that it was the Poconos, Hacklebarney, or Ken Lockwood Gorge until Russ outgrew his interest in salamanders, snakes and frogs, and focused on girls instead.
Russ returned only once to Thunder Bridge, a tipsy June night near the end of his senior year when his friends wanted suggestions on a place to park and finish the bottle of Southern Comfort they’d begun along Rt. 22. He led them to his childhood haunt only to find all the turnouts banked up with berms and blocked by No Trespassing signs, likely the work of the Underbridge Sewer Utility Division.
Now he was back not with drunken friends, but with his daughters. He discovered the old berms plowed right through in two places. They parked on the north side. As Russ stepped out of the Merc his foot caught something stiff that clattered over the gravel. A rusted sign on a rusted chain, the words still legible only because they were embossed: “Keep Out: Underbridge Township Property.” He said nothing to the girls, who both got out on the right side of the Merc. He led them over the bridge--surfaced with asphalt now and no longer thundering--and onto the trail up the north bank.
The air was dense in the shallow gorge, intensely humid, and long stalks of green fuzz overhung the path and slapped Russ and his daughters with dew so that they were half-soaked by the time they came to the side route up the ridge. The distances were shorter than Russell remembered, but still the girls complained that their legs were tired almost as soon as they began the climb.
The path up the ridge to the Pit was even more overgrown, lush clumps of brambles and the branches of scrubby pin oaks pressing in from both sides. Russ found a sturdy limb and wielded it like a machete to hack a way through. No way either the wise guys or some Satanist Cult were using this trail regularly. They hadn’t gone far before both girls started in with, “Daddy, I don’t like this place. Take me back!”
“C’mon,” he said. “I’m going to show you something really cool. It’ll be worth it!”
Just then they came to a towering tulip tree on the left side of the path. Russell had forgotten this monster, but he immediately recognized it as the halfway marker. He was tempted to distract the girls with Poe’s story of “The Gold-Bug” before he realized he barely remembered the plot, other than dropping a beetle on a string through the socket of a skull nailed in a tree. How had he gone from teaching high school English to serving as a counselor? He was no longer certain he understood the transition himself. He decided not to mention the story: best not to frighten the girls with talk of weird bugs and skulls.
Darlene spoke to him from behind in a matter of fact voice, “Daddy, the monkey wants you to carry her.” Monkey. She’d entered this devolutionary phase over a year ago, and one symptom was demanding to ride on his shoulders, a request he obliged whenever he could, knowing he wouldn’t be able to lift her much longer. Stephanie trudged silently on behind, her eyes down. Her flattened affect had begun to worry him, but this was not the time to address it. Wendy didn’t seem concerned: “It’s a phase. It’s normal. Calling attention to it will just make it worse, so leave her alone.”
Once they passed the tulip tree, it took only a few more minutes before they crested the ridge and emerged in a small clearing floored with trampled dirt and a dense litter of broken glass, brown and green and transparent. Scattered amidst these shards were the exhausted stubs of dozens, maybe hundreds, of black candles.
The Pit yawned before them. It was not as wide as Russ remembered, perhaps only 200 feet across. The water table had fallen and the film of duckweed he knew from his youth was gone. Where the afternoon sun did not strike the surface, he saw through to a lumpy rock floor fuzzed with dead brown algae and silt. But not everywhere. A long stretch of pure blackness reached from somewhere out near the center toward the wall directly below them. The breach, no doubt.
At last he had the girls’ attention. Darlene began to squirm, so he set her down, and they all three peered over the edge, the girls holding his hands.
“Do people swim here?” asked Darlene. She gripped his left hand more tightly than she’d gripped his neck moments earlier.
“I don’t think anyone ever has. There’s no way down or up again. And the water stinks.”
The smell struck them full on now; a blend of rancid grease and ammonia with other elements less easy to identify. It was far worse than Russ recalled, thick and slimy in his nostrils and on his skin. He realized now the smell was probably why his dad had chainsmoked whenever they were there.
“Gross,” said Stephanie, wrinkling her nose. “Why did you bring us here anyway?”
“Daddy, I don’t like this place. Can we go now?” Darlene tugged at his hand. She was staring at the trees that bordered the clearing, all of which had block-lettered words sprayed vertically down their trunks in bright red or white: “NATAS,” “MORTUUS,” “FEED ME.”
&n
bsp; Across the Pit he could see the phrase from the Weird NJ photo. The “T” in “MEAT” had faded some, and now resembled an “L.” The quarry walls were mostly pinkish, but nearer the top, rainwater had darkened long streaks to a muddy rose. Stretches stained by the black surface soil had the look of deep crusted burns or wounds. Faded boreholes marked the exposed rock surface at intervals. Nearer the water these scars were fresher and closer together. In some places, they looked very fresh.
Below and to the right of the graffiti, sections of rusted and crumpled scaffolding protruded from the surface, dragonflies buzzing about their lower rungs. Then something beneath the scaffolding caught his attention, something white and bulbous that drifted against the wall. Russ thought it looked like a man’s dress shirt. With the man still inside. Or at least his torso.
The platform from which they’d hung their lines as children was still there, though badly rusted. “Wait here,” he told the girls, and took one step onto it. He had to get closer, had to confirm. Mob hit or Satanic sacrifice, if he could return to Cassie with a story like this, it would have to be worth something.
“Daddy, I don’t think that’s safe.” The voice came from behind him. This time it was Stephanie. Emerging from her shell now: that was good. He gripped the right rail and took a little hop on the corroded surface. It felt sturdy. He took another step and stamped in place with both feet. The platform gave a muffled clang, but it barely shook. For a few seconds, he heard the soft patter of rust flakes showering the support structure beneath him.
Russ shuffled forward, careful to keep his grip on the rough, rusty rail. The air was so thick and foul he felt as if he were pushing his way through it. Behind him now both daughters pleaded for his return. He ignored them; did not look back. If what he saw was a floater--or a partial floater--this story would make them all celebrities back at the school. Then the girls would thank him.
Russ advanced cautiously, his shoes scraping over the corroded surface. When he was only a few feet from the end of the platform and almost within sight of the floating white whatever, the whole structure buckled under him with a raw metallic screech and his end collapsed at least 60 degrees in a second. He fought to keep his hold on the railing, but his own weight threw him forward and spun him around. His palm tore on the rust-flaked bar, then ripped free. The end rail snapped into bits the moment he struck it, and he flailed into space.
In that long, frozen second as he pinwheeled to fall head downward, no scenes from his life flashed before his eyes. Instead, he saw with utter clarity the still, stagnant plane below--and just before he pierced it, the great gnarled length of darkness on the other side as it stirred from the muck and gaped to meet him, the dead gray interior of the maw, the ancient yellow teeth so much longer and so many, many more than an alligator’s. There were no alligators in New Jersey.
Over half a century back a child was born amidst the toxic waste dumps and devil haunted swamps of New Jersey...26 years later that child packed all he could fit in a '72 Dodge Challenger and lit out for the high desert of northwest New Mexico and the Navajo Nation, where if the dogs bark at night it is only the skinwalkers...along the way he had three children and held jobs including dishwasher, restaurant and hotel cook, factory worker, camera salesman, DJ, security guard, teacher, and sheepherder...as a teacher he and his students cofounded the New Mexico Youth Poetry Slam and the National Youth Poetry Slam...as a caver and archaeologist he studied and explored the caves and lava tubes of Belize, Easter Island, and the U.S. Southwest...several years ago he tailed Jack Spicer’s Martian to the uncertain boundary between our reality and the cobbly worlds...now he spends his nights there peering through a grimy window and reports what he sees. Fedogan & Bremer published Ana Kai Tangata, his first book of weird horror tales in 2014.
Story illustrations by Nick Gucker
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Pick's Ghoul
by Ross E. Lockhart
I don't know shit about art, but I know what I like. I didn't like Pick's art in the least. I'm not talking about his day-to-day photography—man could shoot a soup can or naked girl as well as any New York pro—I'm talking about his digital "fine" art… and, yeah, the Ghoul Girl. I'll get to her.
Pick's stuff made my skin crawl, and I'm as much a horror head as you can get. But fans of the sick stuff dug it, so I'd buy it, use it for cover art.
Pick's style falls somewhere between Michael Garlington and Joel-Peter Witkin. Twisted portraits with the intimacy of Arbus and Cameron, and freaky people too, but Photoshopped to a monstrous degree. He was way creepier than Alfrey or Potter, and something in his unflinching eye just made your guts churn. Really played up his family name, Pickman, affecting a Lovecraftian demeanor, though at close to three hundred pounds and bearded, Pick looked more like a leather bear than the Old Man of Providence. Personally, I never much cared for Lovecraft—though I could watch Re-Animator over and over—between his purple prose, his racism, and his utter terror of tuna fish sandwiches, the Old Man leaves me cold, but there's always an audience for tentacles and terror. Pick was willing to exploit that. And, as you can tell from the stuff I publish, so was I.
Smilin' Necrophile Press was doing okay, not Stephen King numbers, mind you, but decent enough sales to keep me in cigarettes and bourbon. Bill Roth's Doctor Tallow had gone three printings—Cripes! The cover on that one gives me the willies—and the Mathis collection had grabbed a star in PW. But then the big book crash happened. Boom! Man cannot drink himself into a stupor on direct sales alone, so I decided to diversify and produce something unabashedly commercial: smut. With a horror twist. I put together Organ Grinder, a glossy spank book for gorehounds. Pick and I planned out the first three issues over fried pickles, sliders, and beer at the local Hooters, where he was a regular. I ran the numbers as he ogled and flirted with the waitress, a cute little dark-haired thing named Aimee he always encouraged me to overtip. A month or so later, when it came time to shoot the pictorials, I brought in a bunch of Porn Valley girls, Vivianne Vid regulars, to dress up as victims and final girls, corpse-kissers and necro witches, and I hired Pick—and a couple other photographers—to shoot them.
The first three issues sold out in preorders, and I felt like I'd come up with a license to print money, but the third issue stalled for three months because the printer freaked out over a shoot Pick did with the Siamese twins—Cass and Hell—and Big Bobby Blaque wearing a Baphomet goat-head mask. Racist prick. I pulled the files and found a different place to print the book, but while I was wheel-spinning and tearing out my hair over that, the yawning Rue Murder review of the second issue hit. Which got me thinking. I needed something new for the fourth issue. Something completely different. So I hit up Pick one night when I was out at his warehouse studio by the old cemetery.
And that's when Pick showed me the Ghoul Girl.
She was…. Where do I start? She was emaciated, like one of those Jewish girls in that book of war atrocities Benny Finkman used to charge the neighborhood kids a quarter to peek at. Ashen, with long, broken fingernails. Her mouth was…. You've seen the pictures. Pulled-back, cleft-palate lips exposing sharp and canine teeth. Breck Girl black hair, throwing it all into contrast. And those eyes, looking accusingly into the camera lens like she was looking into your soul. She was chained, spiked dog collar around her neck, to a bare-mattressed metal bedframe. A yellow plastic bucket sat nearby on the floor.
I felt like throwing up as Pick flipped through the high-definition pictures on his tablet. The Ghoul Girl sprawled spread-eagle on the bed, the Ghoul Girl gnawing gristle on a bone, the Ghoul Girl working the barren bone between her legs…
"Jesus, fuck," I remember choking. "This is some serious serial killer shit."
Pick grinned. "Photoshop and magic dust. She's CG. Totally virtual. Designed her with the help of a couple of freaks I know in Croatia. Gives you the kind of hard-on you want to hit with a hammer, right?"
I nodded at this, a little numb, the taste of bi
le in my mouth. Pick quickly flipped through the pictures, fingering his way through one abhorrent image after another. He turned the tablet back to me. The picture was of the Ghoul Girl straddling a giant inflatable pickle, a cowboy hat in her raised hand. "This one's my favorite," said Pick.
I felt like laughing. And retching. Then nearly jumped put of my skin as a scurrying, scratching sound moved across the room.
"Rats. In the walls," chuckled Pick. He handed me the tablet, clambered out of his chair. "Excuse me a sec."
I looked through the pictures until Pick came back, maybe ten minutes later. There was a distant crash and some thumping, then Pick stepped back into the room. He had a dishrag wrapped around his left hand. "Little bitch bit me," he said, miming a strangulation with his right. "But I showed her. Fucking rats."
"Jesus! You need me to run you to the hospital? Damn thing might have had rabies."
"Naw. I put some hydrogen peroxide on it. I'll be fine. What do you think of my Ghoul Girl? I can make her do whatever I want. Will the gorehounds like her?"
They did. They fucking loved the Ghoul Girl. The next three issues—the last three issues—all featured the Ghoul Girl prominently. Issue four featured the best of the pics Pick showed me in the warehouse—the bed and bucket photos, what Pick called the "Rape Room" set. Issue five was a girl/girl set with the Ghoul Girl going down on—and ultimately eating—Brittany Blaze. I watched Pick shoot Brittany's session; her partner had been Carlotta Cream in a green Morphsuit. Standard Karo Syrup and food coloring special effects. The rest was, as Pick put it, Photoshop and magic dust.
I put the Ghoul Girl on the cover of issue six. The pictorial was a cemetery scene, the Ghoul Girl unearthing a grave, gnawing the flesh off some young stud's face. It's the issue that just came out, the one that got the cops involved, because of the kid's resemblance to that college basketball player who'd croaked on the court a few weeks back. The cops started threatening lawsuits and exhumations, so I called Pick—this was last Wednesday—and told him we needed to hold a press conference, reveal that the Ghoul Girl and her victim were just visual trickery, virtual puppets. He agreed with me, said I should come over in the morning.
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