Shock Totem: Holiday Tales of the Macabre and Twisted 2011

by Jennifer Pelland

  He began the long process of filling baggies with warm water from the tap. It had been a long week—the longest he would ever endure—and he was dog-tired, but it needed to be done. The window over the sink steamed up as he did so. He turned each baggie upside down to ensure the seal wouldn’t leak, and then one by one placed them gently into the storage tote by his feet.

  The Christmas decorations Marie had wanted him to put up last weekend were now sitting in a pile beside the dining-room table. He had only managed to get a single strand of sliver tinsel looped along the bannister. The light reflected on it like tears.

  The tote weighed heavy on his old bones—his cross to bear—as he carried it upstairs.

  Aside from a few days here and there when he was away on business, or Marie was visiting her sister, Avery had not slept alone in all the time they’d been married. He wasn’t sure he could do it now.

  He pulled back the covers and stared at Marie’s indentation in the mattress. She always slept in the same position, curled up like a question mark. His arthritic fingers touched the spot where her shape remained, and he sobbed quietly. He slowly removed the baggies from the tote, and placed them into the impression of her. From the hook on the bathroom door, he took her bathrobe and covered the baggies, tucking it under each one.

  In the dim light of the bedroom, Avery removed his clothing and turned off the bedside lamp. He draped an arm over the warm shape where Marie had once slept, where he felt her now sleeping. He breathed in the smell of soap and sweat and familiarity.

  Just before sleep pulled him down, something lightly brushed his tear-streaked cheek. Avery imagined one of Marie’s silver strands of hair, decorated in his tears, like tinsel.

  —//—

  John Boden resides in the shadow of Three Mile Island, with his wonderful wife and sons. He works as a baker by day and writes when he can. His work has appeared in print and online at Everyday Weirdness, Weirdyear, Twisted Dreams Magazine and 52 Stitches, Vol. 2, and is forthcoming in Black Ink Horror #7. He has bad-ass sideburns.

  What is your best, funniest, or darkest holiday-season memory?

  The Central Texas Christmas flood killed twelve people and ruined 43 million dollars’ worth of property. Lake Travis rose 33 feet over the space of four days. My family lived out in the area around Driftwood, Texas, with the only way to or from our house and the houses of our neighbors being a low water crossing over a creek that runs about half the year and dries away to isolated deep puddles in most summers.

  Before it started raining there was a railing that ran between three limestone-and-concrete pillars on either side of the little bridge over the creek, and each pillar was topped with a lantern that came on at dusk with an automatic timer. It had a kind of fairy bridge look to it.

  I was eleven and I had the kind of fever where a parent plows through stop signs to get their kid to the hospital faster. My mother had been home with us when it started raining, but my father worked at an office in Austin. I never saw it, but I always envision him driving to the edge of the creek and prowling back and forth in the rain like some kind of animal behind the bars of a cage, with my mother on the other side shouting to him. He drove back into town and managed to find our family doctor—after hours, I believe—in the middle of a flood.

  However he did it, he managed to bring back antibiotics, put them in a bag with a rock for extra weight, and throw them across what had transformed from a half-dry creek bed into twenty-five foot wide rush of white water that covered our little bridge entirely.

  I don't remember much of Christmas that year. Mostly I remember the big tub in my parents' bathroom, falling asleep and waking again up to my chest in tepid water for what seemed like hours while my mother tried to break the fever, light from candles on the counter and lightning when the power was out, and the gray sky like a monochrome photograph of egg-crates the way the thunderstorms get around here.

  It's only now that I'm grown up that I can appreciate how terrifying it all must have been for my mother. And for my father, pacing the other side of the water.

  I was told then, though I've never seen information to back it up, that our little crossing was one where people died in the flood. The other children reported that two young women had tried to drive a sedan across it and had been swept, car and all, downstream.

  Neither survived. There were gory details about tree branches and ripped metal that were very likely just us children trying to scare each other. To this day I couldn't tell you what I got that Christmas, or what we did, but I do distinctly remember the bridge. All six pillars were gone, but the three upriver still had the electrical wires that had lit the lanterns, strung out and stretched in the direction of the current, with bits of concrete and stone still attached to them like some giant had been flossing its teeth.

  In the years that followed we spent a lot of time swimming in that creek, once it had returned to its proper, non-murderous size.

  Sometimes I would dive down in the deepest bits with my eyes open to look for bits of the car.

  They never restored the bridge.

  —Leslianne Wilder

  www.lesliannewilder.blogspot.com

  ONE GOOD TURN

  by Robert J. Duperre

  For Dorian Prior, the anticipation was paramount. The rush he felt while standing in the open air, the breeze rushing past his ears, the scent of smoldering wood filling his nostrils, his fingers clenching and unclenching in his pockets. His heart beat incessantly, pounding against his chest like a caged beast.

  Yes, the anticipation ruled over all else.

  He hid in the shadows behind a line of low-standing shrubs, staring at the house, waiting as the lights brightening each window went out, one by one. He pressed the button on the side of his watch, illuminating its face, and checked the time. Eleven seventeen. In nine minutes, all would be dark save the glow of the television from the picture window in the front of the house. Thirty-five minutes after that and it would officially be Christmas Day. The second phase was about to begin.

  This moment had been eleven months in the making. Eleven months since Dorian fled Elk City, Oklahoma, after spending a month locked away in his hotel room, scouring the news channels, watching the public outcry against his Purge. The Purge was what he lived for. For the last twenty years he crisscrossed the country, searching for acceptable subjects for his annual cleanse. From California to Massachusetts to Washington to Georgia, each Christmas morning he offered one lucky family the chance to see innocence in a new light. Now it was Mercy Hills, Connecticut who would receive his gift, the residents of 87 Sumner Avenue to be specific.

  The first time he Purged, he’d been twenty-two years old. He’d grown up in Brownington, Vermont, a land of dirt roads, farms, and giant lakes. While most of the townsfolk lived in run-down trailers—which clashed with the expensive cars parked in their gravel driveways—his parents owned a large white farmhouse, set up on a hill with a clear view of Mount Pisca out the northern windows. He hated his home because other people hated him for living in it—his father had made a fortune granting high interest, sure-to-be-defaulted loans to poor farmers, and even more from confiscating their lands after they failed to pay their debts and selling it to real-estate developers. In Brownington and neighboring towns, the Priors were hated, considered worse than parasites, though neither his mother nor father seemed bothered by that while they looked down on the common folk from their castle on the hill.

  Dorian was a neglected child. His mother was distant, spending her life fastened to the couch in the living room, staring at the blaring television with empty eyes, while tranquilizers infested her bloodstream. No matter how much Dorian tried to connect with her, the most he received was a shrug in reply.

  His father, on the other hand, paid a little too much attention to him. Most of that attention came from cracks of his belt as he lashed his young son for the slightest of misdeeds. As Dorian came to learn, Beauregard Prior had never wanted a boy. It was young girls th
at captured his fancy, who lured him in with their large eyes, their rosebud lips, the promise of their coming womanhood.

  Dorian was eight when he first saw his father with one of them. It was Christmas morning, presents were stacked beneath the tree, his mother was passed out in bed, and he found his father in the basement, dressed in a bright red Santa suit, groveling at the feet of a naked schoolgirl two years Dorian’s senior. She had blonde hair tied into twin braids, and her hairless flesh glimmered in the faint basement light. He recognized her as Fabian Rogers, one of the stars of the youth softball team his father coached. She’d been staying in their spare room on the ground floor as a favor to her mother, a single parent, who worked the overnight shift at the hospital in Newport. Dorian watched as Fabian skittered to the side, covering herself, taunting his father with her tear-filled eyes, her quivering lips, her little girl scents. He watched his father take her, heard her screaming, listened to Beauregard tell her afterward that he would evict her mother and put them on the street if she ever told.

  In that moment Dorian understood the grand lie; the secret, dark flower every young girl hid under the disguise of their innocence.

  Yet he knew it wasn’t their fault. They’d simply been born that way, much as he’d been born with the ability to see through the lie to the monster lurking beneath. They needed help. They needed their innocence restored. They needed to be purged.

  When his parents died in a car accident when Dorian was twenty, he inherited everything. He hired a childhood acquaintance, Jason Betts, to watch the estate, and funded his travels with his substantial trust fund. Then he traveled to nearby Lowell, where he knew Fabian lived, now twenty-something, with a young daughter of her own.

  On Christmas Eve of that year, the very first Purge took place.

  The wind howled, bringing him back to the present. He checked his watch again. Two minutes to midnight. The sound of the television inside the house lowered. Almost time.

  He’d been watching the residence of Paul and Margaret Baker since February. It was unusual for him to pursue a married couple, but fate had been kind to him this time around. Just like all recipients of the Purge, they worked the graveyard shift at a hospital—the emergency room to be specific. Five days a week, they left their house at 9:25 in the evening and returned at 10:45 in the morning, rushing into the house, covering their eyes from the day’s brightness, appearing beaten and tired. Emergency room employees were Dorian’s preferred targets, as tragedy never took a holiday, which meant their schedules would never change.

  Paul and Margaret had two daughters—sixteen-year-old Grace and seven-year-old Bethany. Grace was the built-in babysitter, watching her sister while her parents were at work. Dorian felt blessed; if he had traveled to this town only a few years earlier, it was possible either one of the parents wouldn’t be working. That or he’d have to deal with a childcare professional, which meant he most likely would’ve had to find a less ideal recipient of his gift than the adorable and deceitful Bethany Baker.

  Two minutes ticked by, and Dorian crept from his hiding spot. He tiptoed over the frost-covered lawn, tracing a line around the side of the house. He slung his bag over his shoulder, noticing its emptiness, and approached the window on the side of the garage. He knew the lock on that window had been broken—he’d done so himself three days earlier, while the family was out shopping—and he also knew the door inside that garage was kept unlocked. Reaching up with his hands, swathed in white cotton gloves, he pushed the window open, stepped up on the stool he’d brought, and slithered through the opening.

  The heavy suit he wore always made climbing through windows harder than it needed to be, but the effect his outfit had on the children outweighed the negatives.

  His booted feet landed on concrete with a soft thud. He reached behind him, slid the window closed, and snuck through the garage, moving cautiously, not wanting to bump into a stray tricycle or knock over a stack of empty cans.

  The door to the inside creaked slightly as he pushed it open. He paused, listening for signs of movement, but heard only the muffled backbeat of music. Closing the door, he advanced down the hall, heading for the living room, which was surrounded by the azure glow of the television set. His foot discovered a loose board, and it groaned. He paused once more, heard nothing, and kept on his way.

  In the living room he discovered Grace, eyes closed, slouching on the couch, remote control dangling from her limp hand. The television opposite her, nestled into an old, beat-up entertainment center, flashed images of long-haired, tattooed men screaming. The oddly quiet sound of crunching guitars drifted across the open space, assaulting his ears with its stifled aggression.

  Dorian skulked around the couch, making sure to keep his feet on the area rug instead of the hardwood floor, and crouched down in front of the sleeping girl. With one hand he removed the serrated blade from his thick black belt; with the other, he covered the girl’s mouth. Her eyes snapped open and she stared at him, bleary and confused, as if she thought she was still in the grips of a dream.

  Dorian straightened up, threw one leg over the girl, and dragged the blade across the smooth flesh of her neck. The skin parted and blood poured out, spraying a little, glazing his red coat in an even darker shade. His knees pinned down her arms as her eyes widened. She thrashed, the strength of her movements remarkably vital, almost throwing him off her. He kept his hand over her mouth the whole time, smothering her cries, even after her body fell still. Then he climbed off the corpse, took a rag from his sack, and wiped the blood from his blade.

  It had been too late for Grace. She was too old for the Purge, and he refused to soil little Bethany with the blood of the tainted.

  He stepped away from the body, letting it bleed out on the throw rug. On the way out of the room he walked with less care. There was no one left to avoid, after all, not with older sister dead. He passed the family Christmas tree, a cheap store-purchased fake, and stared at it, feeling a moment of sadness. It was all lit up with white lights, but no ornaments hung from its aluminum branches, no tinsel rested on the green vinyl needles. Perhaps they were waiting for the next afternoon to decorate it.

  No matter. Too late now.

  Up the stairs he went, listening to the swooshing of his thick pants with each swing of his legs. At the top he veered to the left, down a hallway lit by a single nightlight. He gazed at the walls as he passed, looking for the telltale family portraits, pictures that showed Grace and Bethany on their march through time, but there were none to be seen. Shrugging, he stopped at a door festooned with a child’s drawings. One of the sketches seemed to show a happy unicorn feeding a carrot to an impoverished teddy bear; another presented a school of fish circling a chest of gold. He pushed open the door.

  Moonlight streamed in through gaps in the curtains, casting the bed in the center of the room in an eerie cobalt radiance. Little Bethany sat up in bed, very much awake, dark hair dandling in front of her face, holding the blankets to her chest. Her eyes were wide, twinkling in the moonlight. Dorian strode into the room and slung the empty sack from over his shoulder. He smiled, and the fake beard itched against his cheek, making him twitch.

  “Santa Claus?” said Bethany.

  “Yes, dear,” replied Dorian. “It is me.”

  The little girl visibly relaxed. “You bring presents?”

  His tools jangled in his pockets. “I have. Many presents.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “Have you been a good little girl?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Dorian shook his head. “I am not so sure of that, Bethany Baker.”

  “Why not?”

  He sauntered along the side of the bed and sat down on the edge. Bethany retreated the tiniest bit, but not as much as a little girl should when a stranger entered their room. Dorian silently praised himself for the idea of donning the Santa suit. That decision had come about almost twenty years ago, and it
was the smartest one he’d ever made.

  His hand drifted to Bethany’s knee. Once more she recoiled, but again the curiosity showing in her eyes won out. She actually inched closer to him, and allowed her tiny fingers to touch the soft fabric of his gloves. Her mouth dropped into a frown.

  “Santa, your suit’s wet.”

  Dorian nodded. “That happens.”

  “Did you see my sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she good?”

  “No.”

  “Did you give her a present anyway?”

  “Of course.”

  Her eyes drifted to his empty sack. “Was it the last one?”

  “Not at all, my child,” he replied. “Not at all.”

  With his free hand, Dorian shoved the little girl flat on the bed. A puff of surprised air escaped her rosebud lips, and she grabbed hold of his wrist, trying to free herself. Just like her sister, she seemed strong for her age, but Dorian was a large man. He held her down easily, and then climbed on top of her. She whimpered and cried. He took his spool of gaffer tape from his pocket, ripped off a piece, and fastened it over her mouth. With another piece he bound her thrashing wrists together over her head. He wrapped a third around her ankles.

  Bethany flogged about on the bed like a snake on hot concrete. Dorian leaned over her, staring into those wide, panicky eyes. They seemed so shocked, so betrayed. He almost felt sorry for her.

  Almost.

  He sat beside her until she calmed down, though her chest continued to rise and fall like a revving engine. When she stilled he lifted her nightshirt, festooned with images of dancing princesses, and traced his fingertips around her bellybutton. Her flesh was smooth and warm.

  “You have been a bad girl, Bethany,” said Dorian. “Do you know why?”

  Her head shook violently from side to side.

  “You have evil inside you, princess. Just like all little girls. You taunt men with your virtue, place dirty images in their heads. You turn men into monsters, because you are a monster yourself. But all is not lost. I can save you. I can purge the demon from your flesh. I can make you good.”