Madness & Mayhem: 23 Tales of Horror and Humor

by James Aquilone

  I looked at my watch. Goddammit! The day was over.

  I had failed.

  As per our agreement, I vacated Peter Palumbo’s body.

  The plump geek stood before me. He beamed. It sickened me.

  “I thought you’d try to pull a fast one and destroy my life or something,” he said. “But this is great. I got so much more than I bargained for. Usually you hear that deals with demons go the other way, but you really came through.”

  I lowered my boney, black head, retracted my wings.

  “Confession time,” I said. “This whole renting a soul’ business is a scam. Supposed to be a scam, anyway.”

  “But you said you guys no longer bought souls. You only rent them for a day now, and then you’d grant me a wish: get me published. You did exactly that.”

  “Don’t be so fucking naïve, Peter. Once I took possession of your soul, I was supposed to destroy your life within the allotted twenty-four hours, which subsequently would have plunged you into an all-consuming madness, and, in the end, we’d get your soul forever. It’s pretty simple. When it works, of course. Which it didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t it work?”

  “It’s me. I am a guardian angel. Was a guardian angel. I became a demon after some crap with those vindictive cherubs; it’s not important. This was my first job. But the guardian angel mojo in me is too strong, apparently. Every time I tried to hurt you, I ended up helping you. You wouldn’t want to make another bargain, would you? Double or nothing? They’re going to crucify me when I get back. And I’m not talking figuratively.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  I began pacing. My wings fluttered like a spastic housefly. “Do you have any cigarettes? Booze?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I know that. I know everything that was in your sad head. I was just hoping I was wrong. Everything else has gone wrong today.”

  “Look, you seem to be a great guardian angel. Why don’t you just go back to that?”

  “You know the forgiveness crap in the Bible?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s just that. Crap. Once you’re out of Heaven, you’re done. I can’t be a guardian angel again, and I suck as a demon. I’m screwed.”

  Peter’s face scrunched up like a puckered anus. The blob was thinking. “You want my soul for eternity, right?” he said.

  “Yes, yes! Are you offering it?” A glimmer of hope.

  “No. But you made all my dreams come true, and I don’t want to see you get punished. Now that I have a book deal I’m not going to need my old job. Hell, I don’t need my apartment either. You can have it all. Take my old life. It’s all yours.”

  Live as a frustrated writer in a basement apartment in Staten Island? I thought about it for all of a second. “I’d rather take my chances in Hell,” I said, and descended to the Underworld. If I was lucky, they’d only tear out my entrails for ten thousand years.

  Circle of Power

  With a finger stained and dripping with blood, George Norton drew the final circle on the rough wooden floor. He struggled to his feet, lightheaded from seven days of fasting, and stood in the middle of the loft.

  Naked and gleaming with sweat, he looked over the six hundred and sixty-six pentagrams, each inscribed with the words of power—Alpha, Omega, Agla, Tetragrammaton. They covered every inch of the cavernous room, except for a small space in which George stood.

  He had worked non-stop for a week, the entire time convinced he wouldn’t have the strength to finish, that it wouldn’t work, that he was as crazy as a monkey on fire. But fueled by hatred, rage, and two cartons of Red Bulls, he managed to shove the doubts to a dark corner of his mind and work with an intensity he never thought possible. He would never underestimate himself again.

  George had dabbled in black magic ever since a fellow burnout and book lover introduced him to the works of Aleister Crowley in high school. The dark poetry and promise of power hooked him instantly. Yet he had never attempted anything more than simple love or money spells, none of which ever worked. But that was the old, weak George. This was the new, motivated George, the George who didn’t give a bloody damn. There would be no more what-ifs or almosts. There was only the work now. What did he have to lose?

  He inhaled three times, closed his eyes, and began the incantation:

  “I conjure and command thee, O infernal legions, princes of the abyss, lords of perdition...”

  As he spoke, George focused on the dark energy flowing through his mind like a snake through oil. He dredged up every humiliation, every slight, every jab of pain he had ever endured. He recalled the names of his abusers: Gregory DeVito, Thomas Kearns, Douglas Hetchel, John McManus. The schoolyard bullies. The office gossips. The demeaning bosses. The powerful, privileged pricks of his tortured past.

  “Come peaceably, O fallen ones, visibly and without delay.”

  He remembered Hetchel screwing his wife, and her laugh when he discovered them. In their own bed! Their goddamned marital bed!

  He lost his wife and his job in the same instant. He tried cheating on his wife, but he couldn’t get it up. Humiliated and impotent! It was the manifestation of his worst fears, the culmination of a lifetime of getting sand kicked in his face.

  Never again.

  His skin tightened and tingled as the rotten-egg smell of sulfur filled the room.

  George opened his eyes.

  Demons filled each circle. Black, misshapen things with slavering jaws and leathery wings and jagged, sharp claws. Eyes that burned pus-yellow and syphilitic-red. Every demonic legion of hell was impossibly jammed inside the loft. Each circle a black pit, six-point-sixty-six feet in diameter and infinitely deep, reaching down to the pits of damnation.

  “Why have you summoned us, master?” a chorus of voices asked and the sound was like the chittering of a billion insects.

  The air rushed out of the room. George could barely breathe, yet he thrilled at the utterance of the word “master.” For the first time in his life, George Norton was in control. Unlike bullies, demons had to follow the rules.

  His manhood stiffened.

  He said, “I have summoned you to destroy the powerful. Those who use their position and privilege to do others harm. Who care only for themselves and their own self-aggrandizement. Who trample the weak and the poor. Today, O forsaken ones, is a day of reckoning!”

  The demons howled and shook with berserker ecstasy. Yet they obediently remained in their circles.

  Another thrill spasmed through George’s body.

  He inhaled, savoring the moment. “O denizens of the darkest depths, I unbind you. Rage and tear and destroy!”

  The infernal creatures swept out of their magic circles and wasted no time beginning the carnage.

  Immediately they descended upon the most powerful man on earth. Each of the 133,316,666 demons took a turn tearing the flesh from the mighty George Norton’s bones. They kept his manhood for last. It somehow remained erect to the very last.

  Insectivoracious

  (Originally published in Cosmic Vegetable: Anthology of Humorous SF/F)

  Carl Evermore left his life in the city (which wasn’t much of a life once he began to think on it) and took up residence in the woods. He wasn’t a hermit or a wild man or an environmentalist. In fact, he wasn’t even fond of the outdoors. Why then did Carl give up civilization? Because he was an insectivore (or, in more colloquial speech, a bug-eater).

  He found bugs so satisfying he could no longer stand “normal” food. Steak turned his insides into jelly. Pizza made him puke. The mere sight of apples or bananas or broccoli had him running from the room. But creepy-crawling things, squirmy, slimy little creatures made him salivate. He loved the way they crunched when he bit into them, and the soft, gooey insides that oozed out like warm butter. He loved them cooked, but he loved them even more raw. And if anyone asked—though no one ever did, since he lived in the woods—he never ate worms and he never ate spiders. Worms and spiders, as you must kno
w, are not bugs at all. No, Carl was a by-the-book bug-eater. They were the only things that could quell his hunger.

  Now, you are probably thinking that a bug-only diet is a strange and disgusting thing. (Why so judgmental?) Well, that is exactly why Carl went off to live in the wild. Bug-eating is common in many areas of the world, but Carl did not live in one of those areas. He lived in a drab, non-descript town. You now the type: full of unsmiling people and barking dogs, identical houses, car-lined streets, narrow strip malls, a forgotten park, a lonely library—one of those places where nothing happened. Ever. Nothing good, anyway. Oh, sure, Carl tried dating (but the kissing part gave him palpitations); he tried playing video games (no hand-eye coordination), reading (too dull), taking baths (the water never stayed warm long enough). Nothing satisfied him. Mainly he slept and avoided anything that required him to expend energy. Then one day, bored into a stupor, just for the heck of it, he gulped down a nutty cricket. He was hooked for life.

  And though he had few friends, and even fewer once he changed his diet, he could no longer tolerate the dirty looks, the gasps, the questions: “Are you really going to eat that fricasseed dragonfly?” So off he went to live in the woods, where, of course, the best bugs are anyway. (It was a win-win.)

  Carl lived like a king, feasting to his heart’s content. But one day as he lay in the shade of his favorite oak tree, a colossal hunger overcame him—a hunger that grew more colossal every day. (Funny thing about satisfaction: it doesn’t want to stay satisfied.) He groped in the dirt for an ant. One was almost always within reach. But this time his hands found nothing but grass and pebbles. At that point Carl would have settled for a fly or mosquito, but neither buzzed in the air.

  Strange, Carl thought as he stomped off to his usual hunting grounds. There, he found plenty of worms and spiders, but where were the bugs? Had he eaten them all?

  The farther Carl ventured into the woods the more his hunger grew. He was so hungry he almost—almost—ate a worm.

  He was about to give up and take a nap against the nearest tree when he came upon a towering anthill. Boy, did his belly growl at the sight. What a treat, he thought. What luck! Carl had dreamed about finding such a feast, and now here it was. He quickly fashioned a straw from some nearby bamboo stalks, hiked up the hill, inserted the straw into the hole, and slurped up the ants. And well after his hunger ceased, he continued sucking them up. (Remember what was said about satisfaction earlier?) There must have been millions of them, because it took almost an hour for Carl to eat them all.

  With a stuffed belly, he trudged back to the oak tree, where he promptly collapsed from exhaustion and fell asleep.

  Soon he was awoken by a tickling on his upper lip. And what did Carl see when he opened his eyes? An ant. Though full, he couldn’t pass up such an opportunity. With a flick of his tongue, he snatched up the bug and swallowed it. He returned to sleep, but no sooner had he begun to snore than another ant was tickling his lip. Carl gobbled him up, too. But this time he stayed awake, and watched as a third ant slid out of his nose and took a seat. He seemed to be waiting. Carl noticed something else. Strange that he should only see it now. The ant was bright red, like a tiny ember. As he thought on this, another ant passed through his nose and joined the other on his lip. This was strange indeed! Never before had an ant ever come out of his nose. And now four had done just that!

  Carl felt a dark rumbling in his belly. His insides felt alive, and terribly angry. Then, what seemed like a million hair-thin feet danced up his throat—and that’s when he realized what was happening. He tried to scream, but the ants that poured out of his mouth choked off the sound. They streamed out of his nose and mouth and ears like clouds of smoke. They squeezed out from behind his eyeballs (and through other orifices he wouldn’t care to mention). They spread over his body like a second, living skin.

  What a sight that must have been, if anyone were there to see it: millions of ants in the shape of a man, its red body undulating like a giant caterpillar. Carl feared the ants would bite him if he moved, so he lay still as a corpse. The bugs weren’t fooled.

  What a sound you would have heard, had you been in the woods at that moment, when Carl Evermore discovered that the ants were just as colossally hungry as he’d been.

  The Great Work

  (Originally published in Spark: A Creative Anthology, Volume VIII)

  “Sweets,” I say. “Sweets and a warm bed.”

  My offer is a fair and generous one, despite what I ask in return. For an orphan of the City, the filthy ground is his bed, vermin his meat.

  The urchin stares at me with an expression as hard as the stony ruins of the Wasteland. A young one he is. Young and small and delicate. A little birdie, yes. They corrupt so quickly in Rats Nest, the City’s most squalid quarter, but this one is not covered in the violent red lesions of the other street children. He does not look at me with mad, searching eyes. There is a hint of fear in his eyes, and that is how I know the City has not consumed him yet. There is life inside him still! That is what I plan to snatch and suck up like meat from an oyster.

  “Come,” I say, extending my hand from the sleeve of my robe.

  He does not move. He does not speak. I am not surprised. Many of the street children are mute, their tongues excised for meat to be sold at the beggars market. Good. The children with tongues only ask infuriating questions.

  I shrug. Sorry, child. Back to the gutter. Back to the hunger and black despair of the City. I turn and walk out of the boy’s hovel. I barely take three breaths before he is following behind me like a starving mongrel.

  I am a wretched and ugly thing. The puckered hole that has replaced my right eye is inflamed a dark red and puss runs from it like sap from a tree. Raised, mottled scars tattoo my bent and stooped structure. Yet I have little trouble luring the children to my burrow.

  They do not cringe or look away when I step out of the shadows that gather like ravenous wolves throughout Rats Nest. The bastards are inured to the grotesque. They are no one’s children and no one misses them when they vanish.

  We steal through the City on silent burglars feet, dressed in darkness, through the narrow streets and alleyways, over the soggy graveyard lots, past the squatters tenements. A bloated corpse in the gutter, a whore, his throat slit from ear to ear. Children play with a severed hand just yards away. We move on.

  The City is a disease. It has grown black as cancer. The bloated streets run with bile and blood. The stench of death fills the air. It cries out, Save me. But I do not want to cure the City. I want to be rid of it.

  And I will. All I have to do is wait.

  The City has not always existed. Once, there was a golden land here. I remember. Sometimes even now, I can see it. Like the ripples of heat, it shimmers before my eyes, blotting out this pestilent place, and then it is gone.

  No, I cannot defeat the City—I know my limitations—but I can outlast it. All cities fall. All diseases run their course. With the boy, I will have an eternity to wait. I will wait, hidden inside my burrow, and when the last brick has decayed to dust, I will arise and I will piss on the ashes of the City. Then I will preside over the last golden age, forever alone.

  As we enter the Wasteland, I freeze in terror. A voice in the silvered dark. It takes me an agonized moment to realize it is the boy. He can speak!

  “They say you steal souls,” he utters, as we continue over the blackened earth.

  I laugh at this. Steal. The City devours souls, and for no other purpose than to watch its people suffer. The City has no need for souls. It is only a hungry mouth.

  I do not want to alarm the child. I need him calm for the Great Work. I need him docile. Yet I must address the slander. “I steal nothing, boy. We made a bargain. Before the night is through, you will understand the Greater Purpose, yes.” I smile with avuncular warmth. Nothing to fear, child.

  His face remains as blank as my conscience. Perhaps he is teasing me. I toss him another sweet, and he eats it lustfully. We
continue on in silence.

  My haven is a burrow I dug and sculpted with my own claws. Most of it lies beneath the ruins of an ancient church. The gods long ago abandoned the City; thus the area is mine to do with as I please. Still, I must be careful, for I have many enemies who would like nothing more than to invade my hidey-hole and destroy my Life’s Work. To that end, I have created many false openings. The true one is covered only with a shattered tombstone. Who would suspect such a simple ruse?

  I do not bother to blindfold the boy as we wend our way through the labyrinthine passages leading to my laboratory. What need would there be for that? He will not be telling anyone my secrets.

  In the lab, I give the boy his promised warm bed and more sweets. I am no liar.

  I secure him with leather straps. I need him immobile but awake for the Work, I explain to him. This I learned after many years, after many failures. I had much trouble locating the souls. For a long time I believed the life force resided in the right thumb. I have a chest full of the digits to attest to my ignorance. Then—eureka!—it came to me in a dream: It coursed through the body like an electrical current.

  I remove the obsidian blade and begin to run the magnet over the boy’s body. Once I locate the soul I must be swift.

  “Does it hurt?” he asks.

  I could answer him had I ever successfully harvested a soul. The others screamed and wailed during the Great Work, but the soul cleaving? I imagine it is akin to tearing existence itself from the specimen and dropping his husk, fully aware, into a sea of nothingness. “Not at all,” I say.

  “Do not the soulless go to hell?”

  “The City is hell, is it not? Have no fear.”

  The boy seems to accept this and continues to suck on the last of his sweets. I think how his soul will taste. I imagine it tasting like morning dew and starlight.