by Tim Curran
Kitty sighed, soaking it all in and beginning to wonder—and not for the first time—just exactly what she was getting herself into here. This wasn’t just some crazy ventriloquist and his dummy, this was something more. Something that had a history, something that was black and tangled at its roots.
“Is the mother still living?” she asked.
“No.” Bascomb stopped there, hesitated, maybe wondering if he should go any further. He looked decidedly older than he had when he began talking. “What I’m going to tell you here is just…well, it’s second-hand stuff. I can’t really corroborate any of it.” He paused again, licked his lips with a tongue dry as a strop. “Apparently, the mother was murdered…well, at least, she died violently. That’s how the story goes. They found her in bed a few years before I took the act on. She lived alone, no cats or dogs, yet they found her all mauled and mangled. Bitten up. Something had torn her throat out and from what I hear, whatever it was, it took its time.”
Kitty wanted to know more, grisly as it all was. What had been at the old woman? What had been chewing on her? But she could see from the look on Bascomb’s face that he was playing it straight with her; he was telling all he knew. When he was done, he dismissed it all with a wave of his hand, but there was something in his eyes…something very frightened.
He went on to tell her that while he managed Ronny and Piggy, he got word that they were having problems with some caretaker out at Harvest Hill Cemetery. No, Ronny had not admitted it to him, but Bascomb had heard, all right. When you manage an act, when you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into something like that, you find out things. Apparently this caretaker was having problems with Ronny and the dummy. They would go into the family crypt at night to visit dear old dead mom. Far into the wee hours of the morning they could be heard in there—Ronny and Piggy—shouting and singing and shrieking out things to the dead woman. The caretaker described what went on in there as being “profane.” Which, Bascomb fully admitted, was a pretty arbitrary term when you came down to it. It depended entirely on the user.
“Did you find out what that was?” Kitty asked.
“No and yes. Ronny wasn’t defiling her or her coffin if that’s what you were thinking, but the conversations in there…well, that combined with the racket of them fighting and screaming, it was just bad. The caretaker said he found blood in the crypt after they left…Ronny’s, I suppose.”
He told her about Eddie Bose.
“Eddie was a good kid, a real perfectionist, you know? He was one of the best vent artists on the circuit,” Bascomb explained. “Well, he took a real interest in Ronny and Piggy. He knew what he was seeing and what that dummy was capable of was, well, not right. And he was an expert, he knew all the tricks. As you can imagine, Ronny being the way he is, he did not want another ventriloquist around. But Eddie wasn’t about to give up that easy…”
Eddie Bose was among the best.
He was expected to go to the top of the business and maybe he would have if he’d left things lie. But it wasn’t his way. Ronny’s dummy was like no other and Eddie planned on finding out how and why. If there was a secret there, a revolutionary mechanism that made Piggy do the things he did, then Eddie had to know what it was. What ventriloquist wouldn’t? Bascomb said that Eddie began following Ronny and the dummy around. Ronny didn’t let Piggy out of his sight, but sooner or later, he would have to. He would have to sleep. And when that happened, Eddie planned on borrowing Piggy and finding out what made him tick.
And it was the worst thing he’d ever done.
“He trailed them back to an old, rotting house up in Edgewater,” Bascomb said, his voice worn now. “That’s what Eddie did. It was Ronny’s mother’s house…some big old mausoleum they should have torn down years before. The perfect sort of place, I guess, for true madness to have free reign. Well, make a long story short, one night Eddie forced a window and went in there. He wasn’t in that godawful place long, but what he saw there, Miss Seevers, what Eddie looked upon in there…well, it ruined him.”
Kitty tensed. “What do you mean?”
Bascomb studied his hands, exhaled through his nostrils. “Eddie just dropped out of the scene. No more gigs, nothing. Well, shit, the kid had real talent and he also had a lot of friends working the vent racket. People had a lot of questions. So, well, I tracked him down. It took weeks, but I found him in a dive downtown…oh, Jesus, I barely recognized him. He was a good-looking kid, I tell you. But what I found in that bar…well, it scared me. Scared me bad. He was thin and spindly, shaking so badly he could barely suck down the whiskey there. Eddie had jet-black hair last time I saw him and at that bar? Well, there were white streaks in it. He wasn’t even thirty and he looked sixty, face full of lines, the left side paralyzed or something. It was hanging loose as a hound dog’s jowls…except down at the corner of his mouth, it was pulled up into this horrible grin like something a corpse might wear. This toothy, sardonic grin that made my guts go to sauce. I asked him if he was all right, if he needed a doctor or something, but he told me flat out that he’d never be all right again…”
Bascomb was thinking he’d suffered a stroke and maybe a nervous breakdown to boot. And he was right on both counts. For Eddie Bose had seen something in the McBane house…something so gruesome, so harrowing, that the very shock of it had physically and mentally deranged him.
Bascomb was deadly pale now and his lips were thick, rubbery like they were numb. He seemed to be having trouble getting them to form the words his brain told them needed to be said: “So there I was in that dirty, stinking place with Eddie Bose…or something that had once been Eddie Bose…and dear God, the look in his eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it—those eyes were like bullet holes in plaster. Just staring and bloodshot. And insane, completely insane like the way a guy’s eyes get after they’ve been in a war. Those eyes had seen things, Miss Seevers, shown Eddie things that had shattered his mind.
“I asked him what in the hell happened. And he told me. He told me pretty much what I’ve just told you…that he was obsessed with learning the secret of Piggy, that he’d broke into that house. I asked him what he’d seen there and I knew right then that whatever it was it had stripped the cogs of his brain, stripped them smooth. He looked over at me and those eyes were like holes burned straight through into hell and he asked me, straight out asked me, if I thought it was possible that dummies, ventriloquist dummies, could be possessed. That was the word he used. Possessed, you know, like that kid in that movie. Possessed, Eddie said, by things nameless, things dead, things inhuman. His words. Was that possible? Could some evil intelligence make a vent dummy that was kept in a coffin filled with black, wormy grave earth sit up and smile, start talking to you in the tormented voices of your mother and father…both of whom were long dead.”
Bascomb didn’t say anything after that for a time.
He slouched in his chair, looking gray and old and milked dry. He smoked and stared at the wall and Kitty said nothing herself, maybe afraid of what she would have said if she opened her mouth. She’d been raised Catholic and she understood the politics of spirit possession as well as the next. But what Bascomb was saying…what Eddie Bose had told him…well, it all took it to a different level, now didn’t it? It made something beyond the boundaries of belief into a cackling, infectious lunacy. Kitty was practical in all things, but she could not laugh this off. What was rotting inside of Bascomb was rotting in her now, too.
“What happened to him…to Eddie?” she finally asked, knowing it was a mistake.
“What happened?” Bascomb chuckled mirthlessly. “He died. He died hard, Miss Seevers, he died horribly.”
“What…what happened to him?”
Bascomb just shook his head slowly from side to side, looking at his hands again. “I was worried about him. We were all worried about him. One night, I went up to the cold water flat he was living in. The door was open. I was the first one to see his body. There was blood…Christ in Heaven, there was bloo
d everywhere. I’ve never seen that much. Eddie…Eddie was all broken-up and twisted-looking, like a doll some kid got tired of and stomped under foot. That’s how he looked. And his face…oh, Jesus, hitched into this pathetic grimace like a great, jagged rip in vinyl. Looking like that, well, I figured he’d been so scared of something he’d screamed himself to death. But you know what was even worse than that? You wanna know what I see when I close my eyes at night? His eyes. I see his eyes looking out at me, wide-open, glassy like marbles, black and empty and filled with a dread, an insane horror that’s beyond pain, beyond agony, beyond anything you can imagine…yes, that’s what I saw in Eddie’s flat.”
Kitty felt something bunch in her stomach. Bascomb’s fright was real and glaring and she felt it, too, felt it moving through her, scarring her in places that would never properly heal. And the crazy, impossible thing was that she could see those eyes of Eddie Bose in her mind, too, hysterical and neurotic, filled with an absolute mindless terror.
Bascomb explained that the coroner said that Eddie had died of heart failure and had been gnawed on by rats, post mortem. But Bascomb didn’t believe it, didn’t believe a word of it. For he saw some of the bite marks on Eddie and no rat born ever had a set of teeth like that. So, he came up with his own cause of death…Eddie Bose died of heart failure, yes, but it was brought upon by something biting him relentlessly until his mind—what there was left of it—was drawn into some sucking gray pit of dementia.
“What did you do?” Kitty put to him.
“What in the hell could I do? The authorities closed the book, but I was far from done. I loved Eddie. Before that obsession slit his mind open, he was a really good guy.” Bascomb brushed cigarette ashes off his pants. “Well, first thing I did was the stupidest thing I could think of. And that’s why where Eddie’s troubles left off, mine began.”
Kitty waited for it, wondering when this daisy chain of mania would end. And what, when all was confessed, she would think of it.
“After we buried Eddie, I guess it was my turn to go fucking nuts,” Bascomb said, clenching his left fist in his right, maybe remembering something he’d done with it or should have done. “My old man never said I was the brightest light on the tree, so true to form, my belly full of hate, I went after Ronny. Yes, that’s what I did. He’d come up to my office to sign some papers. Piggy was with him, but packed away in his trunk out in the hallway. I went up one side of Ronny and down the other. What in the name of fuck, I said to him, did you do to Eddie Bose? You and that half-ass goddamn puppet of yours?”
Bascomb fully admitted he was more than a little wound-up from grief and rage and the still-simmering horror of what had become of Eddie Bose. He probably had no right to jump all over Ronny McBane like that. Sure, Ronny was flakier than a box of instant potatoes, wasn’t playing with a full deck—shit, he was missing more than one major suit—but he was only dangerous to himself, ultimately. Well, Ronny, that poor, pitiful bastard, looked like he was going to start crying on the spot. He started yammering on in this pathetic little voice that belonged to a scolded schoolboy, said it wasn’t his fault, God knew he’d tried to keep Eddie away, tried to talk him out of his damnable curiosity…but what happened at the house, there was nothing he could do. Eddie came to see things and he had seen them, all right.
Bascomb shook his head. “He was ranting and raving, saying it wasn’t his fault and that I better keep my mouth shut, to leave well enough alone, because if Piggy found out…well, there were things the dummy could do, awful things. And about that time, Piggy woke up…I mean, Ronny started throwing his voice, saying muffled things from inside that box. I didn’t hear what they were, but I could hear the tone of his voice…and I knew I had just stepped into some shit I’d never be able to rub off my shoe. And I was right. Regardless, I told Ronny I was done with him and I was done with goddamn ventriloquists in general and that he could take his fucked-up act and that ugly, little freak he called a dummy and shove him up his ass sideways.”
Down deep, Bascomb was more than a little afraid of Ronny’s madness and Piggy in general by that point. And he knew he had woken a dragon by pissing all over the Gruesome Twosome (as he called them). Something was going to happen, he knew, and then it did.
Bascomb butted his cigarette and stared at Kitty with eyes smoldering with hopelessness. “It started when my dog got killed. He was a little cocker spaniel and Meg and I, we couldn’t have kids, so we put all our love in that little mutt.” He paused, eyes misting. He brushed them dry with the back of his fist. “I came home one night and that little dog—Homer, we called him—was on the porch, his little head nearly twisted off. His eyes were gone…I…I could see by the marks there that they’d been bitten out or carved out. Jesus. About that time, the phone started ringing in the dead of night. I’d answer it and there’d be no one there…but I knew there was someone. Someone or something. After a second or two, I’d hear someone breathing…but not any normal kind of obscene phone-caller breathing, but a horrible hollow sound like air sucked through a reed. Then the laughter would start…that scratching, scraping laughter of Piggy’s. Night after night it would be like that.
“Maybe, maybe I should have went to the police. I don’t know. If it wasn’t Piggy laughing, it was just the sound of chattering teeth. Chattering, snapping…believe me, you cannot imagine anything as scary as that: answering the phone at three in the morning and hearing that breathing, those chattering teeth.”
Bascomb said he was terrified.
Not just for himself, but for his wife, Meg. She was a sweet kid, he said, the sort of patient, loving, devoted wife a bum like him had no business having. Bascomb moved them into another house out in the suburbs, had the phone number unlisted. It worked, at least for a month or so, but soon enough, it began again. The phone calls. The chattering teeth. The laughter. It was building into something just as it had with the dog and he damn well knew it, he just didn’t know what to do about it. At night, sometimes there were faint tapping or clawing sounds at the doors…scratching sounds at the windows. But there was never anything there when he looked. One morning, his car—brand new customized Buick Regal—had been vandalized. There were deep scratches running from the front quarter panel to the back, on the trunk and hood, the doors. Deep ruts that had peeled the paint down to metal like a garden trowel had been dragged across it. The cops said it was kids. Kids out looking for kicks. That he should keep his car in the garage, damn kids these days.
But it wasn’t kids and Bascomb knew it.
Just like he knew the claw marks on the front door weren’t from dogs and the sounds he heard at night were not mice. He would wake up, hear the sound of footsteps, light but audible footsteps coming up the stairs, tapping sounds on the walls and more than once, the chattering of teeth out in the corridor. But he never had the balls to open the bedroom door and see what it was. The stress of it all was taking a toll on him, and Meg and he were fighting something awful—he wanted to move again, but she adamantly refused. It got so bad Meg started sleeping in the spare bedroom.
Bascomb paused, dredging up all the cold filth of his soul now, then went on in a broken, delirious voice: “One night I woke up and I just knew the worst had happened, I knew it. I could feel it in the air, that my world had just gone stark raving mad. I rushed down the hallway and I saw Meg on the spare bed, sprawled out like she’d been dropped from fifty feet up. And I saw, I saw…” Bascomb’s breath was coming in short, sharp gasps now and his eyes were rolling madly. “…I…oh Jesus…oh God in Heaven, I saw, I saw someone bending over her. Except it wasn’t someone, but Piggy…his eyes lit up like full moons, that terrible black grin on his narrow dummy face. He was doing something to Meg, those skinny hands pressed over her mouth and nose…he was suffocating her. I made to rush him, to tear him into kindling, but then he started speaking…speaking in the voice of Eddie Bose, a shrieking voice telling me how Eddie was in Hell, how he was trapped in Hell…”
Kitty tried everything sh
e could to calm Bascomb down, for his face was hooked in a leering mask, his eyes wide and dark and wet, but he shrugged her off. “Maybe…maybe I passed out…I don’t know, I don’t fucking now…fainted or something. When I woke up the dummy was gone and Meg…oh my poor baby, my goddamn wife…her face was twisted up in a sneer, all blue and black and bloated, her tongue hanging from her mouth and her eyes bulging from her head…” Bascomb broke into tears and shuddered, crying into his hands. When he recovered, he lit a cigarette, looking pinched and bloodless and wan like somebody who’d just battled a deadly disease. “The police said she asphyxiated, that she simply stopped breathing probably due to some undiagnosed involuntary motor defect. That was that. But I’ll tell you in all honesty, Miss Seavers, I died that day, too. I was broken by what I saw, by having my life destroyed before my very eyes. Yes, Piggy pulled out my soul, spit on it, fouled it, then put it back inside me and told me to go and live with myself.”
Kitty was stunned, breathless, her brain full of shadows and shapes and crawling things. She wasn’t honestly sure who was more crazy—Bascomb and his tales of vengeful living dummies or herself for believing every word of it. Somebody was screwy here and she was pretty sure it was both of them.
Bascomb blew out a column of smoke. “But that was years ago and I probably hallucinated it all, don’t you think?” He laughed at the idea, as if trying to convey to Kitty that you could talk yourself into just about anything after a time. “And now you come to me and say your sister is missing and maybe Ronny McBane has something to do with it. I’d say you’re probably right. I feel for you and I feel for your sister and that’s why I’m telling you now not to turn a tragedy into a catastrophe. Ronny McBane told me to leave well enough alone and I should have. God help me, but I should have. And now I’m asking you to do the same thing.”