After that, his summer in Custer had turned into the rest of his life.
Dave fried some eggs and ate them between bread around noon. He cleaned up the inside of his RV and took a nap. When he awoke, the sun was beginning to descend. He was thirsty for wine, but vowed that tonight he’d pass. He decided to brew some coffee instead. It took a while to find the parts to the coffee maker. They’d been stuffed in odd places. By the time he’d assembled the machine, the inside of the RV looked like it had never been cleaned. When the aroma of the coffee filled the small space, he found himself staring in abject horror at the pot. If he was to drink that he’d stay awake all night, alone with nothing but himself and his memories. He couldn’t imagine anything worse.
He poured the coffee out the door and cracked open a bottle of 2001 Cupcake Cabernet. He filled a plastic tumbler with Jabba the Hutt painted on the side and took a small sip. Velvet cake, blackberries with a hint of cherry, and oak filled his mouth. He began to salivate as he gave in to the need. He refilled the tumbler and stepped outside. It was a clear evening. He soon added the bottle to the field of broken glass and got another.
When the moon rose an hour later, he was singing softly to himself in his chair. An hour after that, when the ground began to twinkle like a reverse Milky Way, the first of them popped into existence.
Dave went into the RV and retrieved a book of Mica he’d bought at a tourist shop. With a hopeful determination that kept his hands from shaking, he began to peel sheets free. He laid them on the ground in a path from the field of broken glass to his chair. He uncorked a bottle and drank directly from the neck.
It wasn’t long before a crack appeared in the night. Green light spilled forth and out of it dripped a jumble of Mica People. They laughed as they came, tripping happily along his highway. They came in all shapes and sizes. One-legged hoppers. Two-legged imps. Three-legged creatures that looked like tripedal centaurs. Four, five, six, and ten legs. One had over a hundred legs, each capped with alternating yellow and black shoes. Some had no legs at all as they slid and slithered across the Mica. Finally one came that was larger than all the rest. With the body of a toad and the still, perfect face of a blonde-haired Barbie doll, it hopped straight along, stopping right in front of him. A green velvet tongue dashed out to snag a mosquito, then rolled back into its mouth. It gathered itself up, and as it stared at him, Dave experienced a torrent of knowledge that suffused him. So much of what he’d done that summer had been forgotten, or hidden behind other memories. Now, with the little figure standing imperiously before him, it all came back in a sweeping remembrance.
He’d called them forth.
He’d named himself kin.
They’d done his bidding.
How could he now communicate to them that he’d been wrong?
He was jerked back to when he was nine. Lilliputian laughter filled the night air as a hundred Black Hills Micanese landed on his Mica-studded cloak. They laughed with him, the sound of their hilarity like tiny bells. He’d taught them the sign for good, just as he’d taught them the other that took only a single middle finger to convey.
What had he done? How could he have been so wrong? Now, with the Barbie-headed toad queen standing before him, a feeling of titanic dismay exploded from his soul. He shot to his feet and howled, only falling to his knees when he could howl no more.
The realization of it all. His uncle. His parents. The fourteen kids. A mailman. The cashier at the grocery store. Now Mudo.
He was not a murderer. He refused to be called such. Had he benefited from the deaths? Yes. But he wasn’t a murderer . . . he wasn’t even an accomplice.
He raised his head and beheld the Barbie Toad. He felt his hand tighten around the neck of the bottle. It burped and the Micanese cheered. The sound triggered him. He brought the bottle around in a mad arc, crashing it into the Barbie-toad’s head. It exploded into dust like a mushroom puff and the body slumped to one side. Dave felt a surge of joy and swung at those nearest him. They didn’t even try to move. He swung and swung, bashing, crushing, bludgeoning and smashing his way through the Mica People. Heads and bodies exploded as if they were made of puff balls, until all that was left was air glistening like it was loaded with dandelion cotton.
When he was done, he slumped to his knees. He’d ultimately done it for Cranston. Just as he’d known that the Paha Sapa had killed everyone that had ever stood in his way, he knew that the ranger would be next. The murders of the Mica People seemed small compared to that of a real human. These beings with whom he’d played with as a child had become ritual murderers, serial killer ombudsmen. No, he corrected himself. Not become. They had been all along.
He staggered to his feet and ran back to the RV. He tore off his clothes. He pulled the remaining boxes of wine out the door and threw them to the earth. Some broke, but he didn’t care. He shrugged off his clothes and began to break open the bottles, slamming the neck against the metal stair of the RV. As he broke them open, he poured them over himself. It was a heady baptism and he wailed like a child. When he had but a few bottles left, he drank it down in deep heaving gulps. Glass cracked between his teeth as the red grape waterfalled out the sides of his mouth. When he was done, he threw the bottles into the field, adding their substance to the melancholy he’d been seeding.
He needed peace. He’d come here not knowing exactly what he needed, but now he knew. Somewhere inside he’d always known—some spark of intellectual honesty which had tracked the actions and reactions and the events that had transpired to place him at this galactic juncture.
He downed one more bottle, alternately sobbing and laughing as the wine fell from his lips, down his naked body. He hurled this bottle after the others. Finally ready, he fell to his knees and prostrated himself. He began to recite everyone’s names and crawl. He could feel the glass digging first into his naked torso, then his groin, then his legs. The pain was immediate and exquisite. He crawled as fast as he could, continuing the litany of his dead. If the list finished, he’d start over. When he reached the middle of the field he stopped. He could go no more.
The pain, which had at first been overwhelming, had become an all-encompassing ache. He closed his eyes and sucked air. When he reopened them, sparks flew in his vision. He shook his head. Most of the sparks went away, but one remained. It dove and swooped, finally landing on a lone piece of mica.
It took shape quickly, reforming into something he hadn’t seen for decades. No taller than his thumb, it had the head of an ass, the ears of a bat, and the body of a three-inch tall man.
“Make me like you,” Dave whispered.
Slender and muscular, it held out a hand and touched Dave in the center of his forehead.
And his eyes snapped shut.
The next thing he knew he was free from his body looking down.
The ground rumbled, then rose, forming the shape of a massive animal. The new beast shook itself, flinging dirt and grass free until the sandpaper skin and wooly hair of the buffalo was revealed. Dave felt it all—the flash and bang of creation, the coming together of parts, and the instant evolution of dirt to flesh. Then, like a divine arrow, he shot into the center of the great beast, for he had become it, and it him, and both of them one.
A single moment of joy surged through the beast as it remembered its humanity. It felt the power of its new body and knew that the connection of beast and land and soul were far greater than anything man could define. Then the flash was gone, leaving him all beast. It snorted as the wheat tops tickled its nose then shuffled away, searching for a place where the sun beat down, the grass was greener, and the wind blew forever.
Days, weeks, or months later, unknown because the buffalo measures time by the passing of the seasons, it has become part of a herd. It grazes the plains east of the Paha Sapa where the marigolds are the sweetest, adding a special tang to the constant diet of rye.
They’ve moved farther and farther away from the Black Hills as the weather warms. But the sun is no longer so high and brig
ht in the sky. The heat is lessening. It feels the draw to return. Looking back at the dark hills, the beast feels as if they know they are its master.
It bends its head to take another mouthful and feels no more.
The Earth doesn’t even tremble as it roughly falls.
The herd doesn’t understand what has happened until the sound of the shot reaches them. And then they know. The sound is a promise of the end. They’d heard it before. They’ll hear it again. Over and over until the last one would hear it not at all.
The wind tugs the soul free from the dead buffalo. It slips reluctantly away and becomes one with the wind. It is a forever murmur, the sound beneath the breeze, one that carries with it the guilt of man and the importance of the beast. It is the gravitas of the universe.
And Cranston, walking slowly forward with his rifle, hears a whisper on the edge of the wind—Paha Sapa. He pauses a moment, cranes his head to hear if there will be anything else. When the wind moves on, so does he, slowly ambling toward the universe he just destroyed.
© 2013 Weston Ochse.
Weston Ochse is the Bram Stoker-winning author of Scarecrow Gods. His most recent novel, SEAL Team 666 was called 'required reading' by the NY Post and USA Today. SEAL Team 666: Age of Blood is coming from St. Martin’s Press in the fall of 2013. His short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and been featured in journals, magazines and anthologies, such as The Tampa Literary Review and Cemetery Dance Magazine. Weston was born just south of Devil's Tower in Wyoming and just west of the Black Hills. He currently lives in the Sonoran Desert, where he keeps company with three Great Danes and his wife, and fellow author, Yvonne Navarro.
The H Word: Bringing the Horror Home
Dale Bailey
Forget the blood stains on the floor of the second bedroom—those were just a myth invented by my sadistic uncle to torture my sister and me with sleepless nights. No one had ever died in that bedroom, no matter what he said. No, the real haunting was rooted deeper in its history, a real history that reached back to 1912, the date etched into the elaborate iron knocker on the front door. My parents had bought the house from Mr. Davis—I never knew his first name—and Mr. Davis had bought it from Mr. Armstrong, who had built it, square and brick and strong, with ornate plaster ceilings and glossy oaken woodwork the likes of which you won’t see in a house today. But Davis—in my view—was the problem, in life and in death.
My parents had started as renters when Davis moved into a nursing home. They ended as buyers—of the house and all its contents—so that his daughters could pay to keep him there. And the haunting began not long after his death, when my father, up late into the morning working on his dissertation, felt the temperature plunge to an unearthly cold and something came into the room, an invisible presence, watchful and possessive. Three times that happened, and soon enough my father started going to bed with the rest of us. But that didn’t stop the whispers. Just at the edge of hearing they were, in the quiet hours of the night, faint and faraway, the words indistinguishable, reaching out across vast oceans of infinity (to borrow Lovecraft’s language, if not his meaning) to claim possession of what it had lost. Nothing stopped it, not until years later, when my parents replaced the last of Mr. Davis’s furniture—severing his final connection to the house, or that’s how I always figured it.
For with rare exceptions—Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door being the finest example I can think of (and even it cheats)—the haunted house, like so much gothic fiction, is about the connection of the past and present; the grievous loss that reaches out across the void to reclaim its own. The unexpiated sin that stains the present and exacts its terrible revenge. The canon is rife with such examples, from Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables and Poe’s House of Usher to Henry James’s Bly and Shirley Jackson’s Hill House.
In Danse Macabre, his near-classic treatment of horror in the twentieth century, Stephen King deals us a Tarot hand of three archetypes that he believes the modern genre to be built upon: the Vampire, the Werewolf, and The Thing Without a Name. Yet he shorts us a card, the Haunted House, which he does not “credit . . . as a genuine card in the Tarot hand of the supernatural myth” for reasons that he does not elucidate. But the haunted house of the American gothic—and the haunted castle of its European progenitors—is, I would argue, the most important gothic archetype of all. It is here that Dracula, the seminal vampire, resides with the three ghostly vampire brides that assault the novel’s hero, Jonathan Harker, and here—in the cinematic (and best-known) versions of the myth—that Frankenstein calls down the fire of heaven to animate his nameless horror. And it is here that, as the European gothic tradition of institutional sin (aristocratic and ecclesiastic) gave way to an American tradition more concerned with the personal sin of its Puritan colonists, the castle gave way to the house: they are merely different sides of the same coin. In the werewolf myth alone, setting plays a diminished role, primarily because the trope looks inward, at the divided state of the human soul, rather than outward at the connection between past and present—yet even here, the decaying gothic mansion often makes its appearance, as in the latest cinematic iteration of The Wolf Man. In short, setting—the Bad Place, King ultimately calls it—is at the very heart of what the modern horror writer, and her gothic predecessor, does.
But the archetype of the Bad Place is both less and more than the haunted house. It is broader in that it can be any place from the haunted deeps of Tolkien’s Fangorn Forest to the (seemingly) peaceful cove where swims the eponymous (and amphibious) Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Bad Place, in short, can be any and every place—and often is, which makes it plenty scary. It’s like a bad penny: you never know where it’s going to turn up (or worse, when you’re going to turn up in it).Yet it is narrower in the sense that the depths of its horrors pale beside those of the haunted house, for the secular house we inhabit is our most sacred place. The house is, as the saying goes, a man’s castle. The juxtaposition of the two terms suggests that this is the place where the European and American gothic traditions conjoin, while the adage itself claims that the house is the place, and maybe the only place, where we can assert mastery over any external forces that may threaten us. We lock ourselves in and lock the world, from the perils of office politics to the horrors of Hannibal Lecter, out.
How potent is the house as an image? It is, first of all, something more than a mere structure. It is a home, the center of warmth and safety in the bosom of the family—the place, Robert Frost, tells us, where they have to take you in. “It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,” Edgar Guest asserts, and statistical descriptions of the American Dream (a house, a car, 2.4 kids) give it place of primacy, as does the American tax code. It is our primary class marker and our central symbol of domesticity, wherein resides the homemaker—who is sometimes the victim of a broken home. The Lutz family of The Amityville Horror, in buying the house where Ronald Defeo murdered his entire family (that much is true), was buying a piece of the American Dream. When they can’t make the payments—and the walls start to bleed—they find themselves living out the American nightmare. Perhaps the symbolic weight of the haunted house tale is most evident in its most famous iteration, Stephen King’s The Shining.
The Overlook Hotel, high in the Colorado Rockies, where Jack Torrance and his family take on the task of winter caretakers, is home to two histories. In its capacity as a hotel, it has a public (though not publicized) history that includes mob murders, the financial misdeeds of a Howard Hughes-like figure and the brief residency of four presidents, among them perhaps the most corrupt, Richard Nixon. It is a ghostly brief for the dark underbelly of American history. Yet it also serves, albeit only for a short time, as the home of Jack Torrance and his family, and it is the ghosts that Jack Torrance carries within him, of child abuse and alcoholism, that ultimately render him vulnerable to the supernatural forces that inhabit the hotel. The intersections of two histories—national and personal—re
sult in the destruction of the Torrance family, a destruction that echoes the potential destruction we all face, national, financial, and familial.
Which brings me back to the blight on my family home. One night, when I was a boy (I must have been nine or ten, years before we expunged the last trace of Mr. Davis from the house) I woke in a cold room to find a dark figure standing in my doorway. “Dad,” I said, but the figure didn’t answer, and I lay there in terror, my breath unfurling in the dark until at last sleep claimed me once again. Only years later would I wonder if the figure could have been Mr. Davis—the Mr. Davis who had lived the American Dream as well as its dark underside, who had scrimped and saved to buy his dream house only to lose it in the end—to age, to financial exigency, to death. The same thing seems to be happening to my parents now, as they move deeper into their eighties, and someday, I suppose, the same thing will happen to me.
And to you.
What’s scary about haunted houses is that they bring the horror home.
We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to. Print may be dead, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be old school and have a good, old-fashioned letters page.
Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.). His short fiction, collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories, has won the International Horror Guild Award and has been twice nominated for the Nebula Award.
Artist Gallery: Steven Meyer-Rassow
Artist Spotlight: Steven Meyer-Rassow
Julia Sevin
Born in Munich, Germany, Steven Meyer-Rassow spent his youth living in various parts of the world before settling as a teen in Oxford, England. He then earned a degree in graphic design from Central St. Martins in London. With mastery in both digital photography and photocompositing, it's unsurprising that his works have been featured in Advanced Photography and Digital SLR Photography magazines and appeared as album and book cover art. He was named a Photographer of the Year 2010 by DigitalSLR magazine for his triptych photography. His violently evocative digital photo compositions comprise a litany of destruction and dysfunction, betraying a taste for the macabre (and pork). Steven still calls Oxford home but travels extensively with his wife, Jess, cameras always at the ready. He can be found online at smrphotoart.com.
Nightmare Magazine Issue 7 Page 6