FriendlyHorrorandOtherWeirdTales

by Burke, Jessica

  The man in the cheap black suit got up and fiddled with his hat, notebook, and pen as though he didn’t know what to do with any of his accoutrements. Finally, he decided to take off his fedora, place his pen and notebook inside it, and put it all on the seat of his chair. Cassie wondered if he knew his damned suit had pockets.

  “Such formality, Mr. Pink. I should be honored, but I’m not.”

  He looked around the room, again at a total loss about what he should do. Cassie noticed he moved strangely. Stiffly. Sort of like Senator John McCain, but this guy didn’t have the excuse of being an ex-POW who had been hideously tortured for his broken, robotic movements.

  “There’s a pitcher on the cabinet over there and a fucking sink in the bathroom. If you turn on the tap, water should come out. You are a fucking moron, Mr. Pink. Never doubt that.”

  With his strange staccato gait, he followed her direction, found a pitcher, filled it, and brought it to her minus a glass.

  “There’s a fucking straw on that little table thing by the window. Just put it in there please.” Cassie knew if she didn’t have the concern that half her body was either missing or paralyzed, the knowledge that her husband and most likely herself were in the final phase of their lives, and the understanding that something beyond the scope of her mind had happened to her, she would have been upset by the man in the cheap black suit. But she was just very very thirsty.

  He found the straw after she kept repeating, “There. There!” while feebly pointing at the straw on the bedside table pushed between the window and the end of her hospital bed. Said straw was successfully placed inside the pitcher and he jangled himself up to the side of the bed— the right side.

  “Mr. Moron is what I’m going to call you now. I can’t move to my right. You have to come around. Seriously, man? You’ve never helped anyone before? Ever have any kid sisters or brothers or parents or fucking goldfish that needed a little TLC from you?”

  “T-L-C? Ha, no. Sisters and brothers, yes. I have... several? Being the elder, the eldest of the lot, no. I had no responsibility to help anyone actually.” He cocked his head again, but she still couldn’t see him as clearly as she would have liked. She could see he was taller than she had expected. Standing at the beside, even though her bed was raised up, he seemed to stretch most of the way toward the ceiling. It seemed as though he was stooping to offer her the water.

  Which was strange since when he stood up from the chair and walked into the bathroom, he seemed of average height, perhaps a little under. The man standing beside her bed surely would have had to stoop going through the doorway to the bathroom. Cassie chalked her perspective up to the meds, the massive bandage swathing her face, the pain, and the fact that she was looking at him out of the corner of a single eye.

  “What a ball of sunshine you are, Mr. Pink.”

  He jostled and juggled himself around the bed and seemed to shrink as he moved. By the time he came up on her left side, he had shrunk down to no taller than Danny had been with both his legs. Maybe a few inches shy of six feet? She was able to see him somewhat clearly, for the first time. His face had an awkward pointed look to it. His eyes were pale. At first she thought they were green, but when he moved she saw they were a sickly yellow. Combined with his hair, a dull, flat orange that looked more like a melted crayon than a proper hair color, she was reminded of a cross between Scut Farkus and Mr. Croup (or was it Mr. Vandemar, she never could tell the two apart; this would be the foxy one who didn’t eat kittens).

  He offered the straw to her and stood remarkably still while she sipped. Trying not to over-reach her head, trying to slow down and not dribble too badly or choke too much as her throat spasmed while swallowing, Cassie watched him. His hair and eyes were strange, but his skin tone was disturbing. It wasn’t white, but he was pale. He had a translucent jaundiced look to him that made her think someone dipped him in a vat of betadine and then, seeing their mistake, tried rubbing him raw. It was too even a coloring to be a skin condition, but his skin tone wasn’t the honey gold of someone with Latino or Mediterranean roots. He moved wrong. He looked wrong. She also saw that his cheap black suit was also wrong. He had struggled with the notebook and pen earlier because his suit didn’t look like it had pockets. It was like Mr. Vandemar’s, someone’s impression of a 20th century man’s suit, someone who had never seen a suit but had one described to him, or her. The stitching was coarse. The lines were wrong. The material looked like part of it had once belonged to the inside of a teen’s prom dress. It was shiny in places, dull in others. And the collar was wrong. It didn’t sit right and underneath it he wore one of the highest turtle necks Cassie ever saw a man wear. It made his face look like a buoy bobbing on the dark, open water. It was fucking creepy as hell.

  Who the fuck was this guy? If Cassie had control over herself, she would not be sticking around to find out.

  Interrupting her thoughts, Mr. Pink retreated a step with the water pitcher. “Should you continue in this vein you will no doubt need to relieve yourself and I can not assist you in that situation.”

  “I’m sure, if you wanted to check, they’ve decked me out in one of those piss bag thingies. No worries on your part. Thanks for the assistance nonetheless. How’s about you bobble yourself back over there and I’ll finish up? I’m sure Nurse Whatsherface wants to come in and sedate me before I get too uppity, right?”

  “I suppose, Mrs. Sinclair, but you needn’t worry about that. After a time, you won’t have much in the way of worry, I am certain.”

  “That doesn’t bode well, Mr Sunshine.”

  “As I said, no worries.” He reclaimed his fedora after placing the pitcher on the table by the window, reopened his notebook, sat back down, and went back to tap tap tapping his pen on his kneecap. “Pray continue, Mrs. Sinclair.”

  “It happened in a single burst. One minute, I was standing in the bathroom. It was funny, both me and my cat had pissed ourselves— and that was before we properly saw it. I don’t know what the fuck it was. But, as the water was draining from the tub, the house shook. The wind was going the whole time, so at first I thought that’s what it was. Like in Sandy, the house started shimmying and shaking. In the kitchen, I have shelves and shelves of glass bottles. I make my own vinegars. Danny makes beer and we both have tried brewing everything we could from soda to kombucha, so we have tons of bottles. They all started rattling and crashing down. Not all at once, but you could hear them clanking and dancing and one by one they started falling off the shelves. I was frozen there. Dan was in the bedroom and I heard him shouting, ‘What the fuck? What the fuck? Cassie, what the fuck?’ And I couldn’t move. At first. I heard glass shattering and I heard a deep growl, from outside the house, from the wind and the snow. And then everything went to shit, quite literally.

  “I heard a high pitched wailing, like a banshee from fairy stories, coming up from the stairs, from downstairs. I’m guessing before it came up to us, it got the old farts downstairs. I heard him yelling to her. It sounded like Run. But, I don’t know. It was garbled. She kept screaming and Danny was still yelling what the fuck. But I was frozen by what was looking in at me, from outside the window. It had to be the biggest motherfucking eyeball I have ever seen... it took up almost the whole width of the window and maybe three quarters the height. It was purple and a phosphorescent gold and red and looked like dinner plates or hubcaps. It was like a huge red hubcap with a huge gold one over that and a purple one in the middle. I’ve never seen anything like it. And while it stared at me, I couldn’t move. It didn’t have an eyelid and just stared. While it stared, the back walls of the house shuddered, the wall of the bathroom and the kitchen and the bedroom where Danny was screaming. The room beneath the kitchen was the downstairs old lady’s bedroom. That’s why she was screaming. As the dinner plates stared at me, she stopped screaming. I heard the old man yell again and then there was nothing after that. Just Danny and a slithering sound as the dinner plate moved past the window. I was able to move then and
I ran, ran out of the room and in about two steps I was in the bedroom as the wall came crashing in, in splinters and shatters and screams from Daniel. Out of the corner of one eye, I saw my beautiful kitty Irian skittering down and out, toward the chaos. I started screaming then.

  “Just so you know, Mr. Pink, when down pillows and down comforters are torn open, yes feathers do fly around. They melted into the snow. It was funny. The power didn’t go out. I wish it had. The fading light and the streetlights from outside made it hard to see details. I just remember those eyes, a massive head like an elephant only bigger and with no ears, and instead of one trunk, there were so fucking many coming out. There were shapes behind it that blocked out the neighbor’s house and soon they blocked out the streetlights as those trunk things came in alongside two massive clawed hands. I ran toward Danny, trying to pull him back, but he was looking at those eyes and couldn’t move. I wasn’t making that same mistake again and I looked at the claws, at the ruin of our bedroom, at those tentacled things coming out of its face... and it grabbed him up in them and like one of those fucking squids from 10,000 Leagues Under the fucking Sea it grabbed him into its mouth, its maw, beak whatever the fuck and it bit him in two....”

  Cassie made a sound that was part laugh, part sob, part cough. Mr. Pink noticed it was the first time Cassie seemed to cry. He imagined it was rather difficult to do with only one eye. He still hadn’t had the heart to tell her her other eye wasn’t just bandaged. It had been gobbled up with her husband’s legs, most likely. Oh well. He click click clicked his pen.

  These things do happen. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand being in this room, watching her, listening to her, smelling her, and the light hurt his eyes ever so much. It was so bloody bright in these places. Not like back home where the light filtered down to barely a whisper and a shimmer and then it was gone. He much preferred the phosphorescent glow of his Father’s eyes and his Mother’s smile, if you could call it a smile.

  He scribbled a bit more as she made more murbling mumbling soggy noises. He cracked his neck and sighed. There wasn’t much need to further this. Nurse Jones would administer the injection and disconnect the machines. The lump of flesh that was this Cassie’s husband had expired several hours earlier. His carcass and the lights were just for show. Mr. Pink needed a bit of concrete information to pass along to the Elders before he took the ride home.

  It was a pity that Father couldn’t finish the job. Mother was ever so upset, especially since She worked so hard chipping away at the coast, taking down houses and amusement parks and those damnable casinos where there should have rightfully been the open ocean. The damned monkey men, halfwits and hybrids the lot of them, rose up and spewed themselves everywhere, even in the sea. Mother worked Her magic though and took back what was Hers. She was resting after the last storm. She was full and needed to properly digest. Father decided it was time. He came back into His own, but too soon! And before moonrise too? Mr. Pink so loved his Father, but He was so much smaller than Mother. She came in like the tide, with the tide, but He was more like a little eddy. He still walked, for one thing and He had come up across land. It wasn’t very far, but He had lost a little steam. He had left the house still standing.

  Before coming to the holding room, where this pathetic woman with her ruined head and her carcass of a husband lay rotting, Mr. Pink had visited the spot. He knew Nurse Jones was dressing up the monkeys, preparing them for later. It was a formality really. They had to clean up Father’s mess. It was unfortunate. He hoped that after this incident Father wouldn’t choose to go back to sleep. Mr. Pink hated it when Father was sleeping.

  When Mr. Pink inspected the house, it was clear that Father would need to be talked to— not by him, of course. It was up to Mother and the Elders. Father’s suckers had etched patterns across the bits of the house that were still standing. It was a shame it all had to be burned. Mr. Pink did love the way those chased lines and circles reminded him of the hide of a great whale. But, as Mr. Pink did tell Cassie, it was a gas explosion. There had been a horrible storm. Accidents do happen.

  The Friendly Horror

  “Posterity is what Grandfather might call it. The desire to record for those who come after. In memoriam, in perpetuity—it’s all nonsense. No one will listen to this record. It’s just my voice in an empty well echoing back at me. Words on the page. Comfort to an old man—or at least a man who feels old. Truth be told, I’m barely 40, yet I feel as though I’ve lived three-score years in addition. It’s the change that has me maudlin, and the desire for comfort is there, especially now, even with all that I know about where I am going.

  “I won’t be alone.

  “My family is there, generations that I’ve only heard tell of in story. Aunt Julia is there, Grandfather Fern, Mother—who I knew so very little of before she left—and Father, who I knew even less of. He was just a story of a story. He came to Mother as she bathed in the sun on the sand, rose up from the depths, took her, planted me and my score of siblings, and returned to his brethren. She whispered his name to me once on the thirteenth anniversary of her spawning, but it was so garbled because of how her tongue stuck in her widening mouth, that I couldn’t bare to repeat it for fear of butchering it beyond recognition.

  “I’m sure he’ll be there, with the rest of them. Waiting. Watching. Welcoming.

  “The time is almost here and I should get used to it all. It’s what I’ve been bred for, so to speak. But, it never ceases to amaze me, even though I’ve seen so many others go before me, make the change, and helped so many more... but as my own features change—as the nose broadens and the lips go slack—there is an odd distance I feel that perhaps, in actually the telling of the tale, I can somehow preserve what came before. Once I go, nothing else will matter.

  “Perhaps my sister, Jyssamin, who fancies herself our family historian, can use this. Since she spent much of her youth in school in London and Oslo, helping our Nests there thrive, she didn’t grow up as I did, being schooled, groomed, shaped by our family’s living stories, our true history and how we began. Of course she knows what our younglings are taught in our family schools, but there’s a lot more that isn’t taught, even in our clan.

  “I suppose I should begin with my Aunt since she was, by all accounts, the beginning of my branch of the family. While the family itself has long roots in New England, with links to the Marshes, Ornes, Gilmans, and even the Phillipses, the individual branches of family spoke little, had their own secret traditions, and what little communication or records we did have was lost during the Innsmouth raids that started in the winter of 1927. We went back to a spoken tradition, but still the branches of the family didn’t communicate for many years, not until more recently.

  “Aunt Julia was born a Maxfield in Warren Rhode Island two years shy of the turn of the 20th century. Her forebears were related to the Tafts and the Warrens, who built Bosworth Mansion in Warren. Most of the Tafts and Warrens went to sea before Julia was born.

  “Born in the front parlor of old Bosworth mansion, it wasn’t an easy birth. Her mother had been going through the change too early and it affected the pregnancy. Some said the blood that spilled and splashed in that delicate room, decorated in the Greek style, had a slight grayish, greenish cast to it, and Aunt Julia’s toes bore some of the signs that she might follow her mother to the sea much earlier than anyone expected. Being a Maxfield and carrying on the tradition of her family, she proved them all wrong and went much later than predicted. Yet, she did have some abnormalities from birth that made having children of her own an impossibility. Unable to offer up her own offspring for the good of the clan, she was left to other means to expand the family so their children would never die.

  “Unlike their kin north, the Maxfields didn’t hide from public life. They mingled with common folk and small folk, even with Christians. They kept their changes small and gradual, and only when the final change came before returning to the sea did they retreat from view. Her father,
Louis Warren Maxfield, was a wealthy landowner, a shipbuilder, and businessman around New England. In his youth, he lived with his Great Grand Uncle Obed Marsh, but didn’t care for the secrecy and outright dictatorial control old Obed had over the entire town. Louis was lucky to gain space on a seagoing vessel when he was 14, and never himself came back to Innsmouth. It was unusual in our family, but Julia was his only child remaining, and knowing the importance of children, Louis gave her anything he could to ease the fact that she could never hope to give birth herself. I don’t think, because Grandfather never did himself, that Louis knew Julia’s plans. Had he known, would he have stopped her? I can’t rightly say. But, Aunt Julia was grand niece to Old Obed Marsh after all, and we all know how he turned out.

  “Louis helped his daughter open what would become the backbone of my family, Maxfield’s Ice Cream Parlor. It was a healthy walk from where Aunt Julia resided, with her father and mother—who never properly recovered after Julia’s birth. Maybe it was because it was a single birth, and one of the last wholly human births in our clan, I’m not entirely sure, but Isadora took so very long to heal. Louis relied on others, his sisters and nieces, to help raise Julia. Unlike the Marshes and the Gilmans, the Maxfields and their distant cousins the Phillipses depended first and foremost on their women. The women were the link to the Mother, and through their children, they all would never see death. Yet, with Aunt Julia’s mother, Isadora, an invalid awaiting her last journey to sea, Julia became the head of the family when she was barely a girl. Her aunts helped her, I’m certain, but by the time she was 16, she was firmly steering the Maxfield ship. Louis was the smiling, laughing, lucrative public face, but it was Aunt Julia who made the decisions regarding the family propagation and their spiritual life. Ultimately her aunts returned to their own homes. Even though handfuls of older cousins lingered, Julia was the driving force in Bosworth—and in Maxfield’s itself.