“Oh,” Lloyd says, considering this. “Yeah … I guess you’re right.”
Before he can describe whatever it was they’d seen, however, Poppy peers out the window. “What’s going on down by the mini-mart? Who’s yelling?”
“We’re too late!” cries Lloyd, dashing for the door again. “Ranger, you’ve got weapons? Guns and stuff? Hurry!”
He’s gone without waiting for an answer. Poppy and Kane exchange a glance, then follow, Kane pausing only long enough to unlock a tall metal cabinet and grab a dart rifle to supplement the bear spray and taser on his belt.
Curious tourists and locals have already gathered by the time they get close to the disturbance. Among them are Angelina from the library, Ramsey and his boys looking over from the kayak rental place, a group of little Chalkliners on a park outing supervised by a teacher, the Black Skull Death Vines band members who’ve been having a cookout on the beach before their evening’s gig, Ray from GAME OVER, others.
“I think,” Kane says, “that Uncle Sticky’s been trying to convince Mel to carry his crappy excuses for books.”
Mel, in her smock, has chased the stumbling, disheveled figure most of the way to the lake shore. A trail of shoddy-looking paperbacks and stapled manuscripts leave a trail leading back to the mini-mart, creased pages fluttering limply in the breeze.
“–and stay the hell out of my store from now on, loser!” Mel finishes, hurling the last tattered sheaf of pages at him. It flaps through the air and smacks onto the rocks. Though it’s about fifteen feet short, he ducks, flinches, retreats to the water’s edge and cowers there, bleating that weird gibbering giggle of his.
“Loser? Who are you calling loser, skank?” He points at February Ashton-Smith. “Ask her! Her father took my books as a donation! Losers don’t get books in museums! He said I was like a hybrid of a bunch of really famous scary writers so nyah!”
“Excuse me?” February raises her eyebrows. “Are you kidding? Your books aren’t in the museum. Never have been.”
“That’s because he decided to keep them for himself instead of put them on display where all the rest of these rape-babies could pirate them, then piss on the ashes of my career like some fucking faggot terrorists who shoot up schools and give their kids X-Boxes!”
“What?” say five or six bewildered tourists.
“What does that even mean?” Poppy asks Kane.
Kane shrugs.
“Whatever my father told you,” February says, “it was to humor you, to be polite, and get you to go away.”
“That’s a fucking lie! You say that when he liked them enough to –”
“He threw them out. He told me it was like trying to read someone doing a bad impression of a wanna-be Lovecraft ripoff. He said calling it fan-fiction would be an insult to fan-fiction.”
“The fuck you know, bitchdyke cunt! Why don’t you go dump a load of cum in your dead mother with your shemale cock!”
“He said bad words!” gasps a Chalkliner in a Spider-Man shirt.
“Just ignore him,” the teacher says.
“But he’s being mean to the nice lady!”
“Hush. It’s none of your business.”
“Like to see any of you write creative nonfiction true stories from your own nightmares of darkness!” Uncle Sticky rants on. “I get publicity, I put copies right in the hands of people in the goth metal scene to promote my books and they say I’m hardcore, they do devil horns at me when I meet them outside concerts!”
“Which they also throw away as soon as you’re gone, like anybody with an ounce of brains in their head,” says A.J., who’s just arrived with camera in hand, only to find more of a spectacle than whatever he and Lloyd had expected.
“They do not do not do not!” Uncle Sticky jumps up and down, stamping his feet and shaking his dirty little fists. To either side of his ridiculously pubic patch of mangy facial hair, stubbly jowls wobble. “So shut the fuck up and let me have my readership! I have fans! I have supporters!”
“Anybody who tells you that,” says Angelina, “is either trying to be nice and let you down easy, or hoping to get rid of you without you making a scene.”
“Face it,” says one of Ramsey’s boys. “You can’t write worth a damn.”
“I was good enough to be in PsychoWeenie Magazine ten years ago, you fucking cuntfucks, how can you say I can’t write? I sent a story to Stiff Sock too only they couldn’t use it because it was too transgressive with cannibalism and other really extreme subjects too dark and gross for them to touch!”
“The only thing around here too gross to touch is you, princess,” the Black Skull Death Vines drummer says, to a general round of agreement.
Uncle Sticky juts his chin. Or, tries to. It might have worked better if he actually had one. “Nuh-unh!”
“Yeah-huh!” chorus several of the Chalkliners.
“Right, that’s enough,” says the teacher. “Come on, children. Since you can’t be polite, we’re leaving. I don’t want to hear any more. We’ll forget all about it and pretend none of this ever happened.” And, with that, they’re marched off, their protests of unfairness and injustice falling on deaf ears.
Uncle Sticky, meanwhile, is all warmed up and raring to go.
“You just hate me for being the outspoken Christian conservative who won’t write to the God-abominations or publish gay erotica pandering to a homo knob jockeys who want to read about men rubbing their big hard cocks together and being on their knees getting spit-roasted by sweaty slapping man-meat and swallowing gallons of each others’ creamy loads while getting ass-pounded up the ass with giant cocks pounding in their asses yeah pumping their asses full of hot thick spunkjuice!”
Everyone only stares.
A.J. nudges Lloyd and murmurs, “This is him not liking gay porn?”
“For someone who claims that, he sure knows a lot about it.”
He rounds on them. “Shut the fuck up you cockgobblers, I’d like to see your balls on video! I mean, see you have the balls to expose yourself on video, why don’t you do that with your real name A.J. not hiding behind faceless initials like some faggot with your trash piece of shit tabloid-purpose newspaper! Why can’t you show your dick I mean why do you have to be a dick and not give it to me?”
“Someone’s got a crush,” Lloyd lilts in a singsong.
“Ohhh-mygawd.” A.J. holds up both hands with palms out. “Eew.”
“Go molest a goat wrapped in a flaming rainbow pride flag! I am not gay, I like the ladies, natural-born ladies not fake tranny fag hags, so quit making me out to be some cum-gulper and sabotaging me getting a girlfriend!”
“Yeah, the women are lining up for the chance,” says the Black Skull Death Vines lead singer. “Who wouldn’t want a piece of that?” She turns aside and mimes poking a finger down her throat.
“Raging cunt, I wish someone should rape you and get you pregnant –”
Kane heaves a sigh. “Yeah, okay, we’ve had enough of this.” In a single smooth motion, he unshoulders the dart rifle and fires.
“Hurk!” Uncle Sticky staggers back, heels splashing into the shallows. Clutching at his leg where the needle of the ballistic syringe has pierced his filth-encrusted jeans, he sputters, “Cocksucker! You … fuck you … fucking fucker …”
He totters another few steps, sways, reels, and takes the full-on Nestea plunge. An oilslick of grime, grease and scum forms, spreading around him as he lolls like a bloated, floating corpse. His eyelids twitch. Foamy drool dribbles from the corner of his mouth.
When the applause and cheering die down, a somber thoughtfulness descends over the assembled crowd.
“I suppose we ought to dredge him out before he drowns,” February says.
“Or pollutes the lake,” says A.J. “He’s leaving a bathtub ring already.”
“Glurrrr …” mumbles Uncle Sticky, struggling toward semi-sentience.
Then the surface of the water surges up in a sudden bulge beneath him, as Lloyd’s indescribable unknown horror
rises from the depths.
It’s just like a scene from a movie, like that scene in Aliens where the alien queen impales that guy and rips him in half. Just like that, only more graphic and surreal with extreme horror!
Uncle Sticky screeches, blowing bubbles of blood and curds of spit, gaping goggle-eyed at the barbed point sticking through the metal band logo on his grubby shirt. His limbs thrash in a wild, useless flailing. What comes next isn’t a ripping in half so much as a cutting, a chopping … as an enormous claw with serrated edges comes up, seizes the flabby torso, and closes with a single hard snap of powerful tendons.
KLAK!
His lower portion, legs kicking in spasmodic reflex, plop down amid a shower of bilious bodily fluids. The monstrous scorpionoid tail flexes, waving Uncle Sticky’s upper half in a triumphant flourish. Unraveling gut-loops swing in slippery sausage ropes from the ragged bisection. A knobbly length of spine sticks out.
Moderate pandemonium erupts. People stand stunned, or rush screaming toward town. The thing in the lake submerges again, taking its grisly trophy with it. Water churns and seethes in its wake. The other chunks of Uncle Sticky slowly sink.
“See?” Lloyd says after a while. “I told you.”
A.J. belatedly remembers the camera he holds, and swears.
“Well.” One of Ramsey’s boys hooks his thumbs in his belt loops. “That made a hell of an impression on the tourists.”
“Made a hell of an impression on me,” says Mel. She wedges her toe under a manuscript and kicks it into the lake.
“This is going to complicate the rest of the season, isn’t it?” Poppy asks.
Kane removes his hat, wipes his brow and puts it on again. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it is.”
There they stay, watching until the last of the frothy scum and greasy hair tangles melt away, and Fossil Lake is calm once more.
MAKE ME SOMETHING SCARY
Patrick Tumblety
Ghosts are always white. Sometimes on the cartoons they are see-through, or their clothes are colored, like the green jackets on the three brothers that chase Mickey, but their bodies are still white. Sometimes ghosts wear sheets, but the sheets are white, too.
Should she have used the white crayon? That didn’t make much sense to her, but maybe that’s what she should have done…
The door to the teacher’s office clicked open, and Annie snapped to attention, standing up from the hallway linoleum and brushing her wrinkled dress down with the palms of her hands.
“Annie,” Mr. Beakman called from inside the office, “You can come in, now.”
Annie deflated when she saw that her mother’s lips were pursed and her arms and legs were crossed. She lifted herself into an empty chair and kept her head lowered. The picture of the ghost lay on the desk in front of them, its top corner fluttering from the chilly breeze through the open window.
Mr. Beakman set a finger down on the paper. “Annie, can you tell me why you didn’t complete the assignment?” he asked.
Annie didn’t understand how to answer the question, because she thought she had completed the assignment.
“Annie, please answer me,” Mr. Beakman said, more forcefully, almost angrily, “Why didn’t you color in the ghost?”
The teacher’s skin was turning a shade of red, the same color her father turned when she had done something wrong. Her mother’s silence was terrible enough, but Mr. Beakman had scared her since the first day of school. He was very loud, very forceful, and never particularly nice to any of his kids.
When she was coloring the picture and thinking about ghosts and monsters and things that were scary on Halloween, she thought that nothing could scare her more than Mr. Beakman. As Annie concentrated on coloring, she wished that a ghost would haunt Mr. Beakman and scare him this Halloween.
“Ghosts are white,” she whispered, almost inaudibly.
Mr. Beakman breathed in deeply and the color in his face darkened. “Are you mad at me, Annie?”
Why would she be mad at him? What did he do wrong?
“You colored everything but the ghost, Annie. I can’t help but think that you did this on purpose.”
Annie had taken the brown, orange, red, and yellow crayons and applied each color one after the other to fill the empty space. Then, with her thumb, she rubbed across the lines where each color met in order to blend them together. When she was finished, the ghost was floating in the autumn dusk that Annie had seen above her house the night before.
“I colored the outside, because the ghost is white, and the paper would be blank if I didn’t add color to the outside. So I colored it like the outside. Like a Halloween sky.”
“Are you happy now?” Her mother’s loud scolding voice made Annie flinch. But when she looked up, she found her mother’s punishment face staring at the teacher. Was she not in trouble?
“Your daughter failed the assignment, Mrs. Reese, and this isn’t the first time she took liberties with assignments.”
“Took liberties? She’s in Kindergarten.”
“And is showing early signs of behavioral inconsistencies. I think it would be beneficial to everyone if you allowed the guidance counselor to evaluate her for potential withholding from graduating to the first grade.”
“All because she thought outside of the box? Aren’t you supposed to encourage that kind of thinking?”
“The project wasn’t about artistic ingenuity, Mrs. Reese, it was about following instruction. Your daughter failed.”
“I’ll be talking to Principal Anders about this.” Annie’s mother picked up her purse from the floor and stood. She took the ghost off of the desk and handed the paper to Annie. “And I’ll be putting this on the fridge when she gets home. I don’t know how your previous school nurtured children, but here we expand their minds, not force them to color inside the lines.”
Annie didn’t want the picture to go on the fridge. Only good work went on the fridge, and that paper had a big, ugly red F stabbing through the ghost she thought was supposed to be white.
She tried to avoid eye contact with her teacher as he escorted her back to the classroom. As she navigated through the rows of wooden desks he grabbed a stack of papers from the work closet. He began to place a single sheet in front of each student, moving slowly from row to row. When he reached her, he slapped the paper down so hard that she almost tipped her chair back when her body jumped involuntarily.
He must have been waiting for her to meet his gaze because he paused and hovered above her before moving to Jimmy’s desk. The students noticed the hostility, and they all exchanged glances and smirks at the possible trouble Annie had caused.
“I want you to make me something scary to hang in the gymnasium for the Halloween party on Friday. You have one hour.” Mr. Beakman sat down at his desk and flipped open a notebook as the students slid open their drawers and took out their crayons and colored pencils.
Annie was still upset, and she couldn’t take her eyes off of Mr. Beakman. It was like he was a big dog she had to watch just in case he decided to pounce. The teacher looked up from his notebook as though he could feel her stare. His face turned red, and he looked like he was about to shout. Instead, he looked back down at his notebook and stared at it as his hands clenched into fists. Annie didn’t take her eyes off of the man until the red drained from his face and he began scribbling in his notebook.
She slid out her desk drawer slowly, carefully, silently, and placed her coloring tools on top of her desk. She plucked her orange crayon from its box. On the bus ride to school she saw a lot of houses had Jack O’ Lanterns on their porches. The smiles carved into them were creepy, but not too scary, so drawing one was safe. She started by scrawling a big orange circle in the center of the paper. She was about to outline the placement of the eyes and mouth inside the surrounding orange line, but the image of the white circle cautioned her to think about what she was making.
She had colored the ghost wrong the day before, and her teacher was furious. If she
failed again, what would he do?
Annie’s hands trembled; what was she expected to do? She could feel her eyes welling with water and her fear threatening to collapse her body onto the desk and weep. If she showed how afraid she was of doing the assignment wrong, then surely Mr. Beakman would be even more mad. Mr. Beakman had once refused Christopher from going to the bathroom in the middle of class. Annie had never seen an adult yell that loudly. Mr. Beakman had been her teacher only for a month and a half, but he got upset more often than any adult she had ever known.
So what would happen to her if she failed or cried again?
Annie’s mother taught her to learn from her mistakes, so she concentrated on discovering what she had done wrong the first time. Mr. Beakman said to “color the ghost,” and he was mad because she “colored everything but the ghost.”
This time, Mr. Beakman said to make something scary – that’s it! Mr. Beakman never said to draw anything, but to “make” something. It was a test just for her, to make up for not following directions the first time. Her fear was pushed away by excitement; while the other kids wrongly scribbled and colored on the paper, she would complete the assignment exactly how her teacher wanted. He would like her so much for being a good listener that it would make up for her previous failure.
She peeled off the crayon’s covering and frantically filled all of the white space with orange. She slid open her drawer once again and pulled out a pair of scissors. She used the scissors to round out the edges of the paper and poked holes for the eyes and mouth, then carefully snipped until she created triangle eyes and rectangle teeth. When she was satisfied, she proudly lifted the paper Jack O’ Lantern up to the ceiling to let the light shine through the face she had created …
Mr. Beakman’s eyes filled the Jack O’ Lanterns’, and the paper fell from Annie’s fingertips and fluttered toward the desk like fall leaves from a tree.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Mr. Beakman asked, his face again the color of apples.
“I made you something scary out of the paper,” Annie said proudly, and managed a smile despite her nervousness.
Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant Page 25