At the Gates of Madness

by Shaun Meeks

I bypassed my bag, and walked to the creek, sure that I was going to see him standing in there again, that he had returned to the broken man he had been before I left him, but he wasn’t there either. I looked left, then right, and that was when I saw his cloths on the creek’s edge. His shirt, pants, jacket and underwear where lying there, neatly folded beside his discarded socks and boots, but there was no sign of him at all. I called out for him, but only the bugs and birds responded.

  I was full of dread, and fear; I felt lost like when I had been separate from my mom and dad in the big shopping mall downtown, my heart pounding and the threat of tears building up, ready to explode out of me. I walked along the creek, trying to control myself, not wanting to give into to fear, but when I saw the weeping willow only a few feet away, I knew that there was no way to hold on to any sort of control or sanity.

  Even before I saw him, I knew he was going to be there, but I didn’t expect to see him the way I did; hanging high above the ground, a thin rope around his neck, his face cover by his long hair thankful. He swung slightly, as though he was no more than a wind chime, like the little silver men my grandmother had hanging on her porch before it burnt down a few years before.

  I looked up at my dad, the man who held my hand crossing the road, took me to baseball games, read me stories before bed, and I felt darkness falling over me as I started to faint. I looked up at him, trying to will my legs not to give up and read the word “sorry” carved into his chest and I could fight no more and fell into unconsciousness.

  Over the years, I had repressed that memory, not forgetting my father, only the way he died, convincing myself that it had been natural causes. When my wife asked me about him, I would only remember the good things, the silver lining of the sometimes dark cloud of who he was. When I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, she would hold me and tell me that everything was okay, then ask what the dream was about. I could never remember, as hard as I tried, but it was always there, lingering in the back of my mind. Even seeing a shrink didn’t help pull that day out of my head.

  Last night though, it all came back, and it is no wonder.

  My wife left me four years ago because she so desperately wanted kids and I just couldn’t give them to her. It’s not that my body isn’t capable, it’s more that in my mind and in my heart I have never wanted to be a father, never feeling like I had it in me to be a great man that every dad should be.

  When she left, I took in a new lover, whiskey. When I get home from work, I pull out my bottle of Jameson and we dance the night away until she is spent. Last night was just more of the same, drinking well past midnight and passing out in my living room, sitting in my chair while infomercials play mindlessly in the background. I hate them, but I would rather keep them on than the news which is too depressing, or some sitcom that will remind me of how much of a failure I really am. Who wants to live my life and watch happy families, living their happy lives dealing with mundane situations that are solved in a half an hour television show? Not me. I was content with my drinks and background noise to get me through the night.

  I passed out, but don’t think that I stayed asleep for long. As I lay there dreamlessly, a noise woke me up and I sat up, wiping drool from my cheek, the empty bottle hitting the floor and rolling away from me. I went to stop it, getting down on my hands and knees to go after it, but before I did, it hit something. A bare, black skin foot and I threw myself backwards, landing on my ass as I cried out.

  Not wanting to, but knowing I had no choice, I looked up, and standing there, naked as my dad described him, was Charlie, the noose still embedded in his neck, his eyes wide as though they were still full of the pain and terror he had felt when he died. It all came back to me then; everything my father had told me, of how he had killed the boy then seen his ghost, and how he had eventually killed himself. The memory of his words and of his body swinging from the tree came back and I screamed. I slid away from him, until my back hit the chair I had been sleeping in, and saw him step forward, moving towards me.

  I cried out, pleading for him to stop, begging to a God I have never prayed to, to make this all go away, but it was all in vain. Charlie kept coming until he was right in front of me, then leaned forward and took my face in his hand. They were so cold, like ice against your skin on a hot summer day; so cold it almost burns. He leaned in, smelling like an old bag of wet cloths left in the basement, mildew and rot filling my nose and he whispered in my ear.

  “You are your father’s son. You are guilty of being a part of the evil he was.”

  He leaned back, looking deep into my face and smiled in a way that made me feel sick to my stomach. There were no maggots; no blood or puss, just the smile of a boy that I knew was long dead, a smile from a boy that my own father had killed was worse than those cliché images. He let go of my face, then seemed to come apart, disintegrated into the shadows of my living room until I was left alone with my memories and my terror.

  I haven’t gone back to sleep since then. I started writing this all down shortly after he was gone, and have finished the rest of this when I came down here to the creek. I have been filled with so much emotion since I came here, passing by the old swing set and slide I used to use, seeing the mall that now has a new generation of teenagers sitting behind smoking weed instead of drinking beer and finally coming to the weeping willow by the creek where I had last seen my dad, swinging overhead with the word sorry carved into his skin.

  I sat under it when I came, cried for at least an hour and have continued to write this and try to figure out what to do next. Part of me wonders if what happened, with my dad, with Charlie, if that was what kept me from having kids. He had told my dad that I am my father and that his sins are mine, and maybe somewhere deep in my subconscious I worried that those same sins would then fall on to my son, but why should they? Why should they even fall on me? Am I really no more than what my dad was no more than the sum of his sins? Why do I have to pay for what I had no control over? Is it because my dad stole from Charlie, not only his life, but his chance to have a child, a chance to have some sort of legacy?

  I have been asking myself so much and I don’t know if I know the answer to any of it. I am really tired now and thirsty too. Luckily I have a bottle of Jameson with me, maybe to help me decide what to do next.

  I also brought a bit of rope with me, not sure if I’ll use it, but you never know. Guess I’ll have to wait and see what time and my lover suggests.

  Afterward

  So there it is, for better or worse. Most of the stories you have just read are getting published for the first time aside from All Things End Terminal which appeared in Haunted Path issues 7 and 8 and Open Book which appeared in Dark Eclipse issue 7. All the stories were written between 2009 and 2012 aside from You Can’t Always Run Away which was written in 2000 and I Am Fear which was written way back in 1992 and a few others. I want to give you an idea of some of the back stories to some of these; little notes that I always like reading in short story collections. If you don’t want to necessarily know where the ideas come from, I would suggest you stop reading now, but you never know what goodies you may find if you keep reading.

  In the early months of 2009, I sat down and wrote The Edge of the Abyss, which was originally intended for an online magazine dedicated to dark fiction. I wrote and edited in a day and a half and when I was done I was pretty happy with it. The story started off with that simple opening line and spawned all on its own. When it was done I shipped it off and was surprised to get not only a rejection letter, but one that showed the editor had clearly not read the story, saying that they were not interested in typical ghost stories. I re-read the story and wondered how the guy had missed the point, but all in all, it worked out well for me since the online magazine quickly went under and nobody would have seen the story there anyway. The only issue I had with including it here was the fact that the main character is so unlikable. He is far from a hero, a man that won’t even take responsibility for his ow
n actions, but I don’t think you should feel bad for him. In a way if he was a nice guy, someone that you felt bad for, it might ruin the story and make you question how such a nice guy ended up in Hell. So in the end, I kept him unlikable and decided that the story will be enjoyable for enough people to include it here.

  Treats was the other story I sent to that same online magazine, and again the guy seemed to have missed the point of the story, calling it a typical serial killer story. This one actually started off as a different beast altogether. Originally it was only about an old man on Halloween that ends up being terrorized by a group of teens, but it seemed too weak to me, so I took an old story I wrote in 1989 called You Are What You Eat and combined them together. You Are What You Eat was given to a teacher of mine for a homework assignment, and when I came in the next day the teacher pulled me aside and said she needed to talk to me. She told me that she was so disturbed by what she read, that it was disgusting and vial, she wanted to know where I got the idea from. I told her that I had read a pamphlet at the doctor’s office about HPV and thought it was messed up and wanted to use it in a story and decided to combine it with a cannibal story. She told me to write something else, refusing to mark it for any credit, but that didn’t go so well for her either as I ended up writing a story about a talking penis. Years later, when I was transferring stories from hand written to computer, I decided to combine it with the new story I was writing. Some people find it disturbing, but I think there is enough dark humor in there for people to chuckle at.

  As Long As It Ends is one of three revenge stories I wrote in the summer of 2010. I only included this one as filling the pages with three revenge stories is a little overkill, no pun intended. I used this one though because of some of the images that I loved. The idea of the haunted father, seeing his wife and child, was one I loved playing with, as was making the reader wonder whether what he is seeing was real or not. I also like using St. Jamestown as the backdrop, being an area I worked in on and off for nearly ten years. It is such a strange part of Toronto, so full of families as well as drug dealer, users and prostitutes; it is like a powder keg waiting to blow. I think there is a chance I will make a few more stories using the area as a backdrop, possibly even adding some very strange, very real events I have seen or been part of there. I’m sure I could do a memoirs of my time working there and people would think it was all fiction, but trust me, there are stranger things going on there then some of the ideas I have had in this collection.

  When the Darkness Came, was a strange story that defiantly took itself on a journey which I was completely unsure of its final destination. Originally I had no real idea of what I was going to write other that the opening line. It started off as two stoners sitting on their couch, high and bored and watching the cockroach eating the Cheetos. How it went from that to an apocalyptic story that it became, I can’t honestly say, but I did like the way it turned out. I think it is one of those stories where the characters might not be the most likeable, especially if you hate stoners, but we all know these two guys. Whether they are people we went to school with, work with, hide out in the stairwells of buildings we live in or are reflections of ourselves, they are what Cheech and Chong would be like at the end of the world. I also want to get across that no all apocalyptic stories are awesome and full of hope. When I was writing this, I was watching an old classically terrible movie, Night of the Comet, and thought “How the hell is there power and lights everywhere? Most of the world is dead, but everything is still working!” To me it is such a cop out, and I wanted these two to really think of how bad it would all get

  The Great Nothing is a story I wrote for a literary magazine, Toasted-Cheese, for their Dead of Winter contest. The story, like Open Book, is connected to a bigger story that will slowly come out in other stories and in a few novels I have planned. I have four other short stories already written that are connected to these stories about the Anna and this other world, as well as two rough draft novels done. I look forward to writing more, creating a world that I feel people will be able to connect to. I don’t want to give too much away on that, but there will be more to come.

  The Tennessee Top Hat was just me having fun. The origins were really just Mina and I sitting in the living room and trying to make a list of all the different names for a mullet. There was Hockey Hair, Ape Drape, Kentucky Waterfall, The Mississippi Mud Flap, The Georgia Grease Rag and of course The Tennessee Top Hat and The Missouri Compromise. I was laughing so hard at all the different names that I thought it would be amazing to write a story about an evil mullet. I didn’t even come up an actual idea for what it was going to be about, which direction it would take, I just sat down at the computer and started to write. I started off with a flash fiction piece and I entered into a contest, but it ended up getting rejected with a letter to me saying that they loved it, but they wanted more subtle horror. That one was called The Missouri Compromise and it is the same story idea as The Tennessee Top Hat, only shorter and from a different character’s point of view. The idea of having two stories that are about the same subject, but from different viewpoints was something I thought would be great for this collection. So if you decided to keep reading through this afterward, here is the hidden flash fiction piece called The Missouri Compromise: The door to the diner opened, the bell chiming so that some turned to see who it was and there was Teddy, a local boy with the world’s greatest mullet. He moved with the grace of a bulldozer, his stained wife beater tucked deep into his oversized cut-off jogging shorts. Most people turned back to their food and their conversation as he stepped in, sitting in the same old booth, looking at the menu as though he was going to order something other than his usual. When he put it down, he picked up a spoon off the scarred Formica tabletop and looked at his Tennessee Top Hat, making sure every hair was in place as it always was. Just as he would order the same sandwich as he always did, there was one other constant in Teddy’s world; that his Kentucky Waterfall would be as perfectly set as a US Marine’s bed just before inspection.

  “What can I get you today, Teddy?” The waitress, Larissa, asked as she was already writing his regular order down. She had been working at Hal’s Diner for longer than Teddy had been alive, going on twenty seven years and knew that people in town tended to be set in their ways.

  “Chili supreme.” His voice quiet as he sat the spoon back down. Larissa stared at what she had written and gave him a confused look. “Something wrong?”

  “No, but…” She stopped herself, unsure why the whole scene was bothering. Teddy wasn’t her favorite customer, usually sat alone most days, stared at any woman that walked into the diner, never left much of a tip and always smelled a bit like the pig farm he worked on for his old man. She never let those things bug her, so why did she care if he ordered something different? “I’m just so use to you ordering the grilled cheese, fries and cherry.”

  “A man can’t change his mind time to time?”

  “Well yeah, it’s just not all that common. You know what I mean, right?”

  Teddy looked up at her, giving her a half smile, revealing teeth that were not on very good terms with a toothbrush. “I git yer meaning, but times like this, Lar, you need to change things up some.”

  Despite the seriousness of his tone, Larissa chuckled, putting her hands on her hips and giving him a sideways look. “What do you mean, ‘times like this’? You been hanging around old Pastor Charlie? He going on bout revelations and all that hoopla again?”

  Teddy leaned back in the booth, looking up at the old waitress and shook his head. She noticed the darkness in his face and wondered what all this was about; not liking that he was giving him a mild case of the creepin’ willies.

  “This morning I woke up and saw that everything is coming to an end, and I didn’t need that dumb old pastor to tell me about it none either. I had a better source, right here.” Teddy tapped his head.

  “Your brain?”

  “No, my mullet. It told me that today, everything e
nds.”

  Larissa paused a moment, looking deep into Teddy’s very stern and serious face and was unable to hold it back. She burst out in a belly shaking laugh, like she did when she watched re-runs of Hee Haw or Rosanne, dropping her order pad to the floor that was never as clean as it should be. She knew that Teddy was a weird kid, what growing up on that farm with his dad that was two beers short of a six pack and with a family that had a strange history that people always whispered about when one of the family members was around.

  “So, you’re telling me your hair told you that the world will end today? Really Teddy, you’re too much.”

  “You think it’s strange? You never read the bible? Samson was a powerful man cause of his hair, kinda like Superman until that bitch done cut it off. I know some Indian guys over on the reserve; they say that if a man in their tribe cuts his hair, he is no longer a man. Makes sense that my hair has the same kind of power. I take better care of it that I do anything else in my life.”

  Larissa bent down and picked her fallen pad up, still laughing a bit and told Teddy she’d be back with his order. She went into the kitchen where Hal, the owner and the cook was in the midst of making burgers that were almost as black as hockey pucks. He looked up from the griddle and saw Larissa laughing still.

  “What’s got you all tickled?” His voice was harsh like his dark, wrinkled face, years of smoking and inhaling grease were not kind to him that way.

  “Damn Teddy. That boy is turning into his dad and granddaddy every day. You know what he said to me? That his hair, that damn old Ape Drape told him that today the world would end today.” She laughed again as she walked over to the giant pot that had the chili brewing in it.

  “Ain’t that crazy,” Hal told her and she shot him a look of disbelief.

  “What? Maybe you been breathing too many of them fumes. What I said was that his hair, his mullet, that hockey hair mess he walks around with, acting like it’s the greatest thing ever, told him that the world was going to end today. You can’t seriously believe that.”