Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror

by et al. Ramsey Campbell

  “Don’t,” she said before I could touch her.

  I looked her over and saw a couple shards of mirror from her closet door— shattered closet door, now—one lodged in Joon’s right arm, another up into her mouth. Tears leaked from her one deformed eye. They were thick, like pus, and slightly yellow.

  “Are you alright?” I asked.

  Jessica said, “I’m okay.” But she was crying. “Don’t touch me yet, okay?”

  I didn’t know what was going on, so I had to trust she knew what she was talking about and I knelt there beside her and waited.

  Joon looked up at me, her eye rolling lazily in its slitted socket. There was hatred in that glare, and I couldn’t figure out why. All I could imagine was putting myself in her place and realizing just how badly you’d been fucked over by life even before you were born. What kind of hate must that fill a person with? Before tonight I would have questioned whether she was even aware enough to feel something like hatred, but I didn’t doubt it for a second now. Joon knew exactly what was going on, she knew what she was, and she knew how unfair it was.

  I stayed there, watching, waiting. I watched Jessica cry and waited for Joon to reach out and scamper up my chest and latch onto my face before filling my mouth and eyes with webs shot from her mouth. Or something like that. But that didn’t happen. She died slowly, bleeding and moving her pathetic limbs, trying to do something, anything, to show she still existed.

  I pulled the glass from her and bandaged the wounds as best I could. Joon never twitched. Jessica said she was dead and I believed her.

  Jessica spent a week in mourning, not eating much, not even wanting to watch television. I took those first few days off my bus route to stay with her, but went back before I lost my job. And a week later, to the day, she stopped. From there it was only a matter of time, no more than a month, and Joon was gone for real. The deformed limbs dried up, shriveled, finally scabbed over and kind of just … fell off. Jessica and I were both disgusted by it, but we kept quiet and I scooped them up as they fell away and threw them in the garbage. Joon’s eye closed and grew over, as did her mouth. Soon Jessica was just Jessica. She turned eleven and we began the weekend tradition of driving around and enjoying time alone together out of the house. She was a smart girl, beautiful and funny.

  Soon we stopped wondering about her parents and took it as a matter of course that they were just gone, and neither of us, I don’t think, ever truly missed them after that.

  I tried to talk her into going into regular school. I showed her a school for special needs kids in the next town over. She shot that down.

  “It’d do you good,” I told her, “to make some friends, get a real education. There’s more to life than your dirty old cousin.”

  But she wasn’t having it. Eventually, I learned why she was so adamant.

  On Jessica’s twelfth birthday I came into her room with cupcakes for breakfast, bite-sized chocolate ones, and a present. A book of Mensa puzzles. But she wasn’t there.

  I thought she’d maybe tossed and turned to the foot of the bed, but she was just gone. Maybe she’d fallen out, hurt herself, and was underneath it. But she wasn’t there, either.

  I tore that bedroom apart looking for her, and it was almost fifteen minutes before I found her, and even then I didn’t realize it at first. In her closet, stuck up into one corner, Jessica, asleep, hidden inside a giant, translucent cocoon. I could just make out her peaceful face through the silk. I don’t know how long she’ll be in there, nor what she’ll be when she gets out, but I can’t stop thinking about Joon, and my first reaction to Jessica, and I’m not ashamed to admit, I’m terrified at the sounds I hear coming out of that thing.

  “Poor Brother Ed” or The Man Who Visited

  Ralph Greco, Jr.

  * * *

  AS IF A SLIGHTLY DRUNK ballerina had entered the shed, The Wizard’s two-inch heel boots kicked up dust off the wood floor as he stepped from one shaft of light to the next. Here the taste of the Pacific mixed with the smells of thick musty curtains and creosote from the boardwalk only a block away. The ancient carnie lived and loved the fantasies and submerged disappointments in the boxes of this room; stuffed canvas bags of memories spilling over the bowing shelves above his head; casks and bottles of various perverted potions leaning up against the crinkly sepia stained walls. In this grimy rollaway shed were the reminders, remainders and reenactments of all the years that The Wizard had lived among the ruins of ‘the show’.

  But when the man shook his hands free of his pockets the crane of his eighty-years lifted off him as if he was shaking arthritic crumbs from his limbs. He stood fully then, all five feet seven of him and decades flittered up and away through the muted sunlight spilling through the pair of crusty windows over his head. Like delicate birds alighting from a tree around him, The Wizard poked the air with his still nimble digits, reaching for the formidable casket standing upright at the eastern corner of the shed. His usually quiet penis engorged to erection, his high brow burned with a quick sweat, his tiny blue eyes opened wide, the old man opened the lid of the coffin to himself.

  “Brother Ed,” the Wizard said to the 105 year-old petrified corpse, a mummy really, he revealed.

  The Wizard reached in and rolled out his star attraction, very much like— and with the requisite same sound—unraveling wrapping-paper from a soft cardboard tube.

  “Full moon once again,” The Wizard said as he lean the reed thin, papermache’ like body of the man once known as Joshua McKinney out and to the side of his coffin.

  In life, Joshua ‘Ed’ McKinney had been a drunkard, semi-outlaw who had lived his final days on a cattle ranch in southern Oklahoma at the end of the nineteenth century. With Joshua’s pappy not near in attendance any of the boy’s formative years; his mother a drunk, blind in-one-eye and spit-evil with the other; a sister who had begun taking money for her ample worn favors at the age of thirteen and a sadistic spinster aunt who visited her brother’s brood every year or so, only to engage and investigate her young nephew’s rumored unusually-sized appendage, there wasn’t much else for poor Joshua to do except get out as far and as fast as he could and make the best of this days … short though they would be.

  Joshua learned to rustle some, cheat at cards and to use his obvious street wit and his cold blue eyes (and that rumored ample body part) on as many and as young a woman as he could entice. That last year of his life though, while he was actually working a real job on a kind cattle-rancher’s farm, the thirty year-old man began to ‘court’ the only daughter of a half gypsy woman named Mama Lee.

  ‘Dating’ Mama Lee’s daughter would prove to be Joshua McKinney’s undoing.

  Mama’s only daughter Beb, only fourteen at the time, began seeing Joshua as often as she could sneak. The man was as unwelcome around the young girl as Mama Lee could sternly warn, but the older woman realized there would be no stopping such a willful beauty as Beb. Knowing he was dancing in a fire pit, Joshua still took his opportunities with the dark-haired woman/child as often as he could; in backyards, farmyards and in sheds, the girl was continually rent in vagina, anus and mouth by the crude, yet filling ‘love-making’ of the man she fantasized would one day be her husband. Of course all Joshua (or Ed, as his aunt had nick-named that part of him) wanted was to continue his prodding and poking of such nubile willing beauties. When Beb began making overtones of a more lasting arrangement, the man ‘pulled out’ … literally and figuratively.

  Glad for the halting of their romance but hurt by her daughter’s rejection, Mama Bell decided to get back at Joshua, ‘Ed’ the only way she knew how. Relying on her Creole lineage and the magic supposedly still surging through her veins, Mama Bell met up with the unlucky Mr. McKinney one fine spring day, confronting him on the town’s main street, of all places!

  “Know for the rest of your days …” the stout woman shouted down the dusty busy street as Joshua faced her wide-eyed, smirking … and drunk “… whether dead or alive, Joshua McKinney
, you will always a’wander for the touch of feminine flesh.”

  The town people who reported witnessing the incident that day told of Mama Bell turning on her ample heels while Joshua called after her—a choice few phrases no church-going woman could repeat—then stumbled back to the local tavern. This drinking soon killed Joshua though, for not a full year later the man died from an imploded liver. His age notwithstanding, the pure rot gut potato whiskey the man could only ever afford, his less then nutritious eating habits and the constant barrage of hard labor (when he did labor) killed young Joshua but quick.

  Buried in a potters’ field a week later, it was then that the true infamy of ‘Brother Ed’ began.

  To the horror of a pair of gravediggers, Joshua McKinney actually split open the top of his coffin as it was being lowered! Puking the most horrific cry ever heard by the two shocked men, the suffering corpse sauntered off flaying into the night, following well the old Creole curse coursing through him. As most of the townsfolk remembered well that fateful day Mama Bell had confronted Joshua, it was simply assumed the dead man was up and walking to quench his never-to-be-satiated, cursed lust.

  It was decided that Joshua McKinney should be found and his body burned to avoid any further wandering by the unfortunate dead man.

  A posse was assembled but there was an enterprising duo, Hap Seasons and his only son Brady who lit out a day before the search party. Hap and his son were about done with their time in this not-good-for-even-one-horse town and were looking for an opportunity to light out for pastures west. The older man had seen his time in circuses when he was younger and now his wife dead, the motherless boy and widowed dad were aching to put dad’s old carnie know-how to work; what could an honest-to-goodness zombie fetch on the tent-show circuit, Hap wondered?! Hap had a cousin who could probably help set-up the show and …

  But first the men had to find the suffering cursed corpse of Joshua Ed McKinney and do so in a day’s time.

  Although The Wizard was the age he was he still managed to shimmy Ed’s brittle light body to the door of the shed. Just beyond, in the carnie’s home trailer, the permanent one he kept here in California, not the one he used to drag behind his truck when his carnival was traveling the byways of America, a bright-eyed seventeen year-old girl squirmed on The Wizard’s immaculate bedspread. As The Wizard opened the single thin metal door of the shed he didn’t smell it, but he knew Brother Ed certainly could; the pheromone rush from that squirming scared girl wafting clear across the backyard lot to them.

  “First one’s on me ol’ friend,” The Wizard said holding both the single door wide and Brother Ed’s left stretched bicep. If not for the red flannel shirt it might have been impossible for the old carnie to hold to, let alone find any muscle in the desiccated, leathery covering that was Brother Ed’s skin.

  “Go ‘head,” the man said and smiled across to the grimacing sunken face of the dead man in his arms.

  “Go ‘head,” he repeated releasing his hold on his ancient charge.

  For a fleeting few seconds The Wizard feared his old friend was going to teeter back into him, but then the slightest shimmer passed through that rail thin reed-of-a-corpse and Brother Ed was standing on his own, all in for the game.

  The Seasons men made Willard’s Eve that very night. Although there were two towns on a direct path from the potter’s field, Willard’s had the distinction of being the only one to house a whorehouse. In fact, father Seasons had recently brought his son Brady to the red brick building only two doors down from the bank, to deflower the sixteen year-old boy. It was possible that Joshua had simply fallen out, and was rotting someplace in the hilly and dry country between Willard’s and that lonely potters field, or he could be laying down with a sow, not being able to distinguish species only gender, but the Seasons men, like the posse behind them, believed Mama Lee’s old curse was working well. If Joshua Ed McKinney was destined to seek female company he would have to be led right to the “Purple Parrot” and the fine ladies within.

  As Brady would explain years after they had made their fortunes and sold ‘Brother Ed’: “My daddy said the man was being led by his johnson, more then most. Those ugly old whores had him if anybody did!”

  No sooner had the men arrived in town then they heard the screams from the house of ill repute. Luckily the local sheriff was none too hurried to visit the local eye-sore and the minutes it took for him to finally get his large self into his shirt sleeves and suspenders, Brady and his dad barged in, bid helloes to the Madame they had only just visited a month before and walked right down the hallway to room number four.

  “Damndest thing I’d ever seen …” Brady continued his account. “… there was Blue-Eyed Molly, nice and big boned as she was, half dressed with Joshua pawing at her. She didn’t seem as frightened—those ladies of the P.P. had seen their share—as she was simply humored! She screamed that the ‘man’ had snuck in through a window to simply lie down beside her as she was resting for what Molly assumed would be a busy Saturday night. Damn, she was busy a’right with that dead man rolling and huffin’ next to her, the dirt from his grave staining her sheets more then what big Molly was used to them being stained with!”

  The Seasons’ men managed to spirit the zombie to their wagon, tying him tight in the back. It was a hell-ride Brady would later recall with unabashed horror mixed with glee; Joshua moaning and flapping as they drove west the entire night. Neither son nor father spoke about their prize until they were well over the state line and hiding out waiting for Hap’s cousin to find them.

  “She’s the prettiest little thing,” The Wizard was saying as he and Brother Ed executed the slow walk to the trailer.

  The Wizard knew that as a man ages he needs more then just the sight and smell of a woman, he needs to consider her, pine for her a bit, anticipate her being there in a myriad of possible poses. Now no man was as old as old’ Brother Ed so he needed this attention more then most, The Wizard reasoned. True, his old boss Preeson and those men who had kept Ed before him had probably not taken the time like this, but The Wizard had been Brother Ed’s keeper longer then any of those men and he had made a quiet fortune with the man: he owed him pure and simple, let the man have this walk now. The Wizard didn’t even especially mind disposing of the bodies as he had all these long years. Like giving Ed his ‘walk’, The Wizard had come to see his part in all of this and was proud of what he provided.

  “I think she’s Mexican, if I’m not mistaken,” the old carnie whispered. “You know how much fire they have.”

  It was at times like these, heat finally waning under the full midnight moon of a July night, that The Wizard felt, sensed even, telepathy from the ‘man’ plodding next to him. He had never, nor would he ever expect a reply, that was simply too much to ask—Brother Ed was dead after all—but the old carnie knew his words were getting through, knew he was understood and somehow felt silent acknowledgment. Let’s face it, there were very few folks left in ‘the show’ anymore and certainly none as old as The Wizard or as odd as Brother Ed!

  If these two men couldn’t have a kinship, and unspoken communication, who could, The Wizard wondered?

  ‘The Wizard’ was Arny Ullman when he first saw ‘Brother Ed’ enter the carnival he was working the summer of 1922. Ed had just come under the care of Arny’s boss, an enterprising amateur magician and professional con artist named Robert Preeson. While not exactly sure what Ed was, the lanky Preeson did know a potential money making opportunity when he saw one, ‘buying’ Ed from Hap and his cousin when their battered and broke tent-show carnival passed through the orange groves of a pre-Hollywood L.A. Robert had seen plenty gimmicks in his time—quite a few he perpetrated himself in his rusty stage act—so the weathered body was an oddity but not so much to dissuade the budding entrepreneur. But when he was told there was indeed no gimmick, that Ed was an honest-to-goodness animated dead man, Robert couldn’t have been happier with his purchase! Further more, much to Robert’s amaze and amusemen
t, Ed’s priaprismic pride still seemed intact as he rolled, moaned, and walked to every pretty woman who passed by him to the horror of onlookers and delight to the man who owned him!

  Dead men do not make the best of lovers but they can grope, slobber and shuck themselves at legions of paying ladies and their titillated mates. Brother Ed would spend his days quiet, dead as he was, until nighttime when his coffin was opened to the full view of a tent-show audience who had paid well to view him. With the whiff of perfume on the air, or the sound of light tittering laughter, Ed would begin to stutter and shake in his coffin and in no time would be lunging forward to the lip of the stage for the women in the audience he had been cursed to hunger for.

  Robert had learned from the Seasons’ men and his own time with him that all Ed really needed was to take a little ‘taste’ from time to time. If the poor man’s lusts were satiated Brother Ed could be counted on to never venture far even on his nights off. All that was ever needed, as Hap and his son had told an entranced Mr. Preeson, was for a willing lady to be procured from time to time. Nothing as perverse as copulation had to be even attempted, ol’ Ed was content to just lie down next to a lady for a few minutes, maybe have a friction if possible.

  It was a simple thing to ask, really.

  Robert Preeson, as had the Season men before him, began to scour the local whorehouses wherever his carnival happened to stop, buying Ed local prostitutes or any woman really who could be convinced for a few pieces of silver to spend time with the man in the box. It was a creepy request to be sure, but as the Season men had, Preeson merely convinced the women that this was his particular fetish (which in a way it was); he had a dummy for his show that he liked to see bedded down with a real live lady. Most women agreed, especially for the handsome Preeson, but found they had allowed more then they could have ever bargained for when the dummy they lay next to began to rub himself against them! One lady even stayed long enough to have Brother Ed reveal his now withered, yet still considerable cock to the side of her leg and begin humping her thigh like a Border collie!