The Alligator Man regarded him quietly, and Kirby held the child out to him.
“It’s my fault,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
The Alligator Man took the baby gently in his large and taloned hands. The baby opened his mouth and cooed at the giant, and the Alligator Man smiled his terrible smile.
Except, thought Kirby, it’s not so terrible… He’s happy.
Still, he knew the Alligator Man would then pass the baby to the guard or some other carny and tear him apart, maybe feed strips of him to the baby.
Kirby’s eyes welled with tears. He prayed fervently that his own mother or father would appear magically and take him away.
The Alligator Man cradled the baby in his left arm and knelt before Kirby. Kirby wiped his eyes and tried to be brave. The Alligator Man reached out slowly, then gently patted his head. Kirby could smell him, the scent of rainwashed jungle and, oddly enough, some kind of aftershave. It smelled… nice.
The Alligator Man motioned to the exit, and Kirby looked at it, then back at the Alligator Man.
The Alligator Man gestured.
Go.
Kirby nodded, then reached out tentatively and patted Lucien’s arm.
Lucien cooed.
Outside, Kirby ditched his shirt, which stank of formaldehyde. The balmy summer air felt good on his feverish skin.
He found his bike where he’d left it, along with those of Ty and Randy. He went home and found his parents, sisters and the local police waiting for him.
- - -
Ty and Randy never returned. The police recovered their bicycles at the edge of Adlai Meadows, but the carnival had packed up and moved on. An investigation continued for six months, but the boys and the carnival had vanished without a trace.
Kirby went on to study journalism and communications at UC Berkeley, finally landing a plum assignment for the Travel Channel reporting on various strange and inexplicable roadside attractions and amusements to be found in the U.S., making a point to visit carnivals, circuses, fairs and curiosity shops wherever he could find them.
In five years of traveling he never found Ty or Randy, never again saw the Alligator Man or his strange child.
Then one day, when he was married with children of his own, he happened upon an ad on the internet:
FOR SALE: “FREAKS” & “ODDITIES”
I have been collecting memorabilia and props from
carnivals and other traveling shows for thirty years.
Must see to appreciate, many rare and special items.
Contact: Neil G., box 4556-ST-8889
- - -
Neil G’s collection had indeed been amazing, and it had cost him well over two hundred thousand dollars to acquire all of it.
Some of it he had donated to museums, some of it he had destroyed, and some things he had buried with the help of a friend from the local church.
In the end, all that remained in his care were five jars.
Five pickled punks.
Each one was real, and each was poignant and forlorn, forever aswim in liquid amber, each one trapped in a prison of warped and twisted flesh.
When his family is asleep, he goes downstairs and sings to them, in a voice still high and sweet despite his middle age.
He sings to them to let them know they are home, and that they are loved...
Especially the one with the faded heart tattoo that reads “Mary Jo.”
The Last Nephew
by Elizabeth Twist
There was a routine to my days at Uncle’s house. I waited at the dining room table all morning and most of the afternoon, until the sun slanted in through the windows, lighting the dust motes on fire. I held very still and breathed very slowly so I would not inhale them. When Uncle came downstairs, that’s when the long slow hours were over and the short fast hours came in, until we tumbled into night, when my mouth and nose were filled with the camphor and cinnamon smell of Uncle and I choked on more than dust.
Often, when Uncle rose from the bed to go downstairs and work on his project, he left his pocket watch behind. I held it up to my ear and listened past the ticking sounds to the whispering voice of the first nephew. That was when we worked on our plan.
On the last day, things were different. I heard Uncle coming down, his slippered feet muffled on the carpeted stairs. I closed my eyes and sat up straight in the hard backed chair, arranging my hands on the pointer on the Ouija board in front of me.
He ruffled my hair. The smell of camphor and cinnamon surrounded me in a cloud.
“What’s this, my boy?”
I cracked one eyelid open. He stood to my right, one hand on my shoulder, the other fumbling deep in the pocket of his robe.
“I’m holding a séance,” I said.
“A séance! Interested in spirits, now, are we?”
I nodded and smiled up at him.
The Ouija and the smile together made a key to a hidden desire, deep inside him. He didn’t know it was there but we knew, me and the first nephew. We’d been working on unlocking it for quite a while.
He frowned. I looked back at the board, placed my hands on the pointer, and took a deep breath. I was doing it wrong but that was just for show. I knew well enough how to do it right.
He crouched down beside my chair so his head was level with mine.
“Did you know – I want to tell you something very important now – did you know that spirits are real? And you can catch them?”
The black circles around his eyes were darker and larger than three months before, when he took me off the street. What he did made him ill, but I guess he didn’t care.
“You’re joking.” I put on my best I-know-you’re-fooling smile.
“No,” he said, in his best fairy-tales-are-true voice, the one he used when we first met and he told me he would take me to a safe place. “You can call them and harness their power.”
“I knew it,” I said, letting my voice fill with delight. “That’s what I’m doing now.” I began to move the pointer around, from YES to NO to GOODBYE.
Uncle laughed. “You won’t get anywhere with that, my boy.” He grasped my arm and lifted me from the chair. I’d grown a little taller and a lot fatter since I’d come to live with him, but he was still much bigger and stronger than me. “Come.”
He separated a key from the half dozen around his neck and unlocked the door to the solarium, where he worked. I’d never been in there before, but the first nephew had told me all about Uncle’s machine. In the bright light of the afternoon, it looked like a dull, dirty, empty glass orb. The artificial river that ran around the perimeter of the room sat still, its waters scummy and unmoving, unstirred by a gold-painted paddle wheel.
“I know it doesn’t look like much, but just wait until you see it at midnight.”
“I’ll be able to see? You’ll let me?”
“This very night, since you wish to learn.”
He pulled a large leather bound book off the shelf above his desk. We returned to the dining room and opened it on the table. He turned pages until he came to a diagram of the machine, which pictured the large globe painted purple and surrounded with lightning.
“The principle is electromagnetic.” He tapped the lightning with his finger, then pointed to another part of the diagram. “The speaking tube magnifies the invocation. When the spirits enter here – ” he pointed to the globe – “they are trapped. Thus I harness their energies.”
Until I met Uncle, I’d never heard anyone say “thus.”
We continued our talk as Cook brought us dinner. Once, when I first came to live with Uncle, he left the room during dinner, and Cook told me to run away in a hissing whisper, her round red face thrust next to mine.
I couldn’t imagine where I would go, then. Uncle would find me. He told me so. For a long time I was just stuck. I was like a dead thing, until I held Uncle’s watch up to my ear and the first nephew whispered hello and let me know that I was far from alone.
Uncle pulled hi
s watch out of his pocket. “You never have to wind it,” he said. “A spirit inside drives the mechanism.”
I nodded, wide-eyed, like I had never seen it before. I had to work not to laugh.
He continued his lecture. “The spirits are restless. They move and generate force. There is just one in this watch. If we gathered thousands, we could power the entire city.”
“But what keeps it in there? Why doesn’t it just escape?”
“Ah.” Uncle’s eyes shifted to the left and right. He leaned toward me like a conspirator, although Cook was long gone and we were alone. “A special incantation of my own devising.”
“You made it up?”
“I researched forbidden texts. I ran experiments. The theory is ancient, but the execution is quite modern.” He puffed himself up in his chair.
From his pocket he took a small locked box, and from around his neck he selected a small key. He unlocked the box and removed a folded slip of paper. He handed it to me. I held it for a long moment. I tried not to shake because I knew this was what I needed.
He nodded at me. I unfolded the paper. A word was on it: a long word. As I read it I memorized it, not just the sound of it but each letter. My head buzzed and I felt faint.
Uncle looked at me like a back alley dog that wants your scrap of bread. His eyebrows waggled.
“Oh,” I said. “I feel it, Uncle.”
“A word of power. That’s what you feel: the power. Now, would you like to see how the machine works?”
“Oh yes.” Everything depended on the next part. “But I must use the loo. I haven’t been since before dinner and I’m so excited.” I made myself small, like I was when he found me.
“Of course!” He grinned and nodded indulgently.
In the toilet I took out a piece of charcoal that I always kept in my pocket. I scratched out the letters of the word on a floorboard. Letter by letter, I copied it backwards. One word for trapping, one for releasing, the first nephew had whispered in my ear many a night. I memorized the new word. It was a word of power too, and it made me sick to my stomach. I didn’t mind, though. I knew the nephews were counting on me.
I wiped the words away as best I could, although I was pretty sure it didn’t matter.
Back in the dining room, Uncle was on his feet, grinning, shifting from side to side. Times like those I saw straight into him and I knew he was nothing but a large dirty boy.
He ushered me into the solarium. “Hurry now! It’s the witching hour!” he said.
The room had transformed itself. The globe glowed with a purple and silver light that circulated like quicksilver. A piston drove the golden wheel, which moved water through the artificial river, which in turn rushed and tinkled around the room.
I felt the other nephews like a wall of pins and needles. Their rage poured out from the purple globe. Uncle didn’t seem to notice. I wasn’t surprised. If he could have felt it, he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did to us nephews all those years.
“I’ve drawn them in.” He tapped the glass of the globe, and the purple and silver swirled thickly around the place he touched. “Here they are, stored.”
“Why weren’t they there earlier?”
“Oh, they were there. They are sluggish in the day, and at night, they awaken.”
I knew the truth that Uncle didn’t know. It wasn’t the night that stirred them. It was outrage at the things Uncle did in the evening, to me. Our rage was a bridge, from all the dead nephews to me, the last living one. Because of it, we had a contract: me, the first nephew, and them. I would give them their freedom and their chance at revenge. In return, they would free me.
On that last night, it was anticipation that made them move.
“How many are there?”
“Three or four dozen at least.”
“So many,” I said. Fifty-five was the real number. The first nephew had kept track of every one of the boys that passed through Uncle’s bed.
He stood up straight and put his hands deep in his pockets. “I’ll need dozens more before I can take my invention to the public.” He looked at me in a new way that night, a soft way. “I’ve never shown anyone this before,” he said. “Perhaps you could help me. Be my assistant.”
I looked at the glass. I felt the swirling purple and silver of my soul inside me, raging with those trapped ones.
“Well, what do you think?” He grinned. He was greedy for my admiration. He was greedy for everything.
I spoke the word.
The Cornfield
by Mike Trier
The door clicked shut behind him, leaving Jack alone on the frozen porch and feeling like an astronaut on a space-walk. Slowly, he worked his way down the icy steps, watching his silhouette grow in the porch light. At the bottom he heard a tapping sound and turned. Pete was in the window, grinning his gap toothed grin and flipping him the bird. Jack smiled and returned the favor, like he always did leaving his friend’s house.
Pete disappeared inside and Jack walked out into the gently falling snow. The crisp, still air carried the faint roar of traffic from the interstate, and he could see car lights traveling back and forth on a distant ridge like UFOs. Jack shoved his hands deep in his pockets and rounded the back corner of the house. The outline of a metal swing set and a covered pool loomed in front of him, reminders of an all too brief and distant summer. When he reached the chain link fence at back of the yard he stopped. No matter how many times he had to cross it, it never got any easier.
The cornfield.
Winter had transformed it into a vast lake of snow littered with thousands of broken stalks that looked like huge, dead spiders. The moon was bright and low in the sky, painting the snow an electric blue. A few hundred yards across the field, the lights of his home burned like a distant lighthouse.
Why do you always do this, he thought. Why don’t you ever leave when it’s still daylight?
Fifty yards to his left, the field disappeared into a ragged line of black trees, the edge of a deep forest. It was harmless enough in the day, but at night became an endless void that could spit out any number of horrors. Jack would always start across the field slowly, forcing himself to stay calm, but by the end would be at full sprint, bursting through his front door and slamming it behind him.
He looked back at Pete’s house. The glow from the windows was tempting. Just go back in and ask for a ride. No, they were just sitting down to dinner and he could be home by the time Pete’s dad was ready to take him. Besides, his friend would give him a week’s worth of crap about it at school.
Jack closed his eyes and pictured himself at the table with his own family. His father telling dumb jokes he’d heard at work, his mother shaking her head. Brad, his older brother, sitting next to him and talking about basketball practice, even though a nasty dog-bite had sidelined him for a few days.
He opened his eyes, focused on his house and set out across the cornfield.
Crunch…crunch…crunch. Each footstep cracked like a dry twig as it broke through the thin crust of ice on top of the snow. He watched the remnants of corn stalks pass by his boots and thought about the summer, when the stalks rose high above his head and he could disappear in them for hours.
Halfway across the field, Jack cast a nervous glance into the inky black of the woods. He looked away before realizing he’d seen something unusual. When he tried to find it again, he couldn’t. It had come from within the woods, a quick pinprick of light inside the black tree line.
It came again, two small points of light maybe fifty yards away, shining like new coins. They flashed once, held steady, then flashed again. This happened two more times before he realized what they were.
Eyes. Blinking.
Jack felt the hair tingling on his arms and tensed up to bolt, but stopped. Whatever the eyes belonged to was small, no more than two feet off the ground, probably a raccoon or a fox.
This is just a cornfield, he told himself. The same place you play in all summer long. There’s n
othing here that can hurt you.
He turned and kept walking.
Crunch…crunch…crunch...
He looked back. The eyes were gone. He sighed, shook his head and picked up his pace. After a few more steps curiosity forced him to look one more time.
The eyes were back.
Jack stopped. The eyes stopped as well. Were they a little bigger than before? Was it closer?
Squatting, he dug under the snow and fished out a baseball-sized rock. He smiled at the weight of it in his hand and hurled it into the woods, putting his whole body into it like Brad had shown him.
“Get outta here!” he screamed.
The rock cracked off a tree somewhere, but it must have been close, because the eyes darted sideways and blinked again. Satisfied, Jack turned away. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
After a few steps, he chanced another look.
The eyes were rising, floating up into the air like two lightning bugs moving in unison.
Jack felt any bravery within him blow away on the winter wind.
The eyes were now higher than his head. Whatever they belonged to was taller than his father, a lot taller. A guttural roar rolled across the field like a gunshot, and he saw a shadow burst from the woods.
The snow around Jack’s feet felt like concrete. He watched the eyes grow as they closed in on him. Gradually a form took shape, the moonlight separating it from the black woods. It was shaped like a man, but running on all fours. Loping.
The icy snow broke beneath its feet in a rapid-fire staccato. Crunch-crunch. Crunch-crunch. Crunch-crunch.
Jack couldn’t move.
Crunch-crunch. Crunch-crunch.
Heat bloomed on his left thigh as he pissed himself. The thing was less than a hundred feet from him when he finally broke his trance and ran. His house seemed further away than when he started.
Behind him, the thing’s labored breath mixed with its fast, heavy footfalls. Images pumped into Jack’s head: fangs dripping saliva, wild, bloodshot eyes, black claws ready to rend the skin from his back. He ran harder, faster than he ever thought he could. The sounds behind him grew louder. Closer. He heard something else as well, a high-pitched wheezing, and realized it was his own cries of panic.
One Buck Horror: Volume One Page 2