FriendlyHorrorandOtherWeirdTales

by Burke, Jessica

  “I’ll never forget how oddly quiet Grandfather had gotten the first time he told me about those experiments. Four remaining? He had said he wanted nothing more than to shout, scream, break things, smash open the door at the top of the stairs, storm the Governor’s office, and tear out the man’s innards, eyeballs, and tongue. Snug Harbor’s Governor, the chief operating officer, the man heading up the entire institution not only knew of the secret camp, of the Electro Convulsive Therapy, the surgeries, and the interrogation— but had more than likely arranged the whole thing AND was getting paid for his trouble by the US Government. The Snug Harbor Governors had one thing in common: corruption and the ability to bleed that campus dry. During the lean years after the Civil War, the Governor used to steal food from the sailors to disperse to his friends, while the Governor during the Depression was used to hosting splendid feasts, while the ‘inmates,’ as he called the sailors in residence, had their food rationed. Grandfather Fern had known about the Harbor’s disreputable Governors, so he donated a special 12 gallons for the Governor’s use only. Learning about the camp at Snug Harbor, Grandfather desperately wished he had had the forethought to pack a special quart or two of Golden Kraken for the Governor himself.

  “Swallowing his anger, Grandfather returned his attention to the remaining contents of the packet— a much folded map and a ring of 14 different keys of varying shapes and sizes. As Grandfather pulled out the keys, a small scrap of paper fell onto the floor. Picking it up, he noted the same spidery handwriting from the map which read: ‘Use key 12 in door at junction, your family will be there. No one on duty tonight.’ The same sigil from the sailor’s ring and the sealing wax was crudely drawn beneath the words.

  “Grandfather didn’t know what junction the note referred to until he opened the second map, which revealed the intricate web of tunnels that existed beneath the entire grounds of Snug Harbor. At varying points on the map, sometimes where two or more tunnels came together— the junction— there were numbers in the same handwriting. Those numbers made sense when Grandfather investigated the ring of keys, some brass, some iron, some steel, some skeleton, some modern: all with a neat little tag of round paper edged in metal. Each tag bore a number that corresponded to a junction or place on the map. Sometimes, usually with an older skeleton key, the number was repeated several times on the map in several places often clustered together.

  “More than grateful for the sailor’s help, Grandfather Fern started folding up the maps, which he had placed open on the bottom steps in front of him, in order to put back into the packet, when he saw a flash of color from inside the packet. Putting the folded maps and ring of keys in his jacket pocket, he realized the packet itself was something folded many times on itself. Opening the paper up, Grandfather discovered it was itself a large map of Staten Island. At the north shore, marked with a large red star, was Sailor’s Snug Harbor. Beneath each building carefully drawn, but in small scale, was a thin red line signifying the tunnels connecting each building. Beneath the Governor’s mansion, the Hospital, and another building Grandfather later learned was the Randall Memorial Church, were red lines connecting back to the campus, but also blue lines that led away from the campus. Some of the blue lines meandered a bizarre distance away from the campus, but wound back, almost on themselves, to spread south. Grandfather followed the lines over folds in the map, until they met another network of buildings with a tangle of lines running beneath them. This second cluster of buildings had a blue star drawn beside the words ‘Seaview Hospital.’ A small distance away was a second star with the simple word ‘Farm’ written beneath it. The blue lines created a bizarre, almost more knotted, web beneath these buildings. Even though there were far fewer buildings than on the grounds of Snug Harbor, Grandfather learned that the knotted appearance was because many of the tunnels ran above or below each other in labyrinthine fashion.

  “From two points on the Seaview facility were brown lines, along-side the blue, and these lines themselves wound away, a small distance southwest again, and again found their way beneath another cluster of buildings. There was no star here, but a red question mark with the words ‘Army Hospital: to be opened.’ There weren’t as many brown lines beneath this area because there were less buildings. A singular green line appeared beneath the main building of the campus, itself heading southwest, to the middle of the island, but then it stopped abruptly, just at a point where it began to section off in two directions, east and west. A black line had been drawn over this junction with the words ‘Cave in? Filled in.’ Grandfather eagerly noted that his own lands, reaching up the coast almost to Mount Loretto, a large orphanage on the South end of Staten Island, was less than a hand’s span away from where the green junction ended.

  “Grandfather then spawned the notion of continuing those tunnels and retrieving our people from Seaview. He had made several attempts, after learning about the labor camp there only a scant year or two prior, to gain his family’s freedom, without success. After his siblings and cousins escaped the camps in the years before the War, security had been intensified. The public was warned not to venture into the woods around Seaview, for fear of contamination, seeing how the residents of the Farm Colony were all highly contagious tuberculosis patients. But, after three distinct failed attempts at releasing his the nearly 100 Innsmouth survivors from the camp, Grandfather learned that the woods were patrolled by armed soldiers, dogs, and even signs that noted ‘explosives’ were being used in the area. At the time, Grandfather doubted that the US Government would mine a small forest on an island in New York City, but he didn’t want to take the chance. Now, glad he hadn’t risked the lives of his kin in the attempt to rescue the rest of the clan, Grandfather believed having a U.S. Army facility barely a mile south of Seaview meant that the warning signs were most likely true: the woods around Seaview were mined with explosives. But even that would turn to our advantage before the end.

  “A tunnel beneath the facility would not only allow him direct access to the buildings where his people were being held, but a safe, covert means to remove them from the grounds— beneath any explosives while leaving the mines intact for the future. At least that was the plan, initially. That soon changed to something more, shall we say, adventurous?

  “What Grandfather Fern did not know was that the entire facility of Seaview and the nearby military hospital had been inundated with our people. The Farm Colony did hold fatally ill tuberculosis patients, alongside our own people, who themselves fell ill to the disease, no doubt. But the hospital itself was an asylum for the mentally ill, the criminally insane, the physically disabled, and the unwanted. Human garbage is what I remember someone calling the patients there. What many primates in New York and in America didn’t and don’t know, they had their very own version of Bedlam and Bergen Belsen right here in the Big Apple. For all I or Grandfather Fern, Jyssamin or Aunt Julia knew, when Mengele escaped Nuremberg, he never went to Argentina— but came to Staten Island! After all, with the opening of that military hospital a handful of weeks prior to Maxfield’s ice cream gift to the sailors, who else but military doctors headed up the operation? The primates undoubtedly had their own budding Mengeles right here. The experiments— both on our people and on the human patients— that were being conducted at Snug Harbor were nothing compared to what was happening at Seaview, the Farm Colony, and the military hospital later named the Willowbrook State School when, just after the war, it became the home for mentally ill children. In 1947, when the military pulled away from the Mengele scene to experiment on atoms and race with the Russians for military and cultural superiority, the patients at Seaview and Willowbrook were divided. The criminally insane went to the Seaview Hospital, the surviving tuberculosis patients went to the Farm Colony, and the children went to Willowbrook.

  “Grandfather knew what he had to do at that moment.

  “After he folded up the map to join the others in his inner coat pocket, he resolved to stay on the grounds in order to retrieve those ‘Fou
r remaining.’ With the last of the ice cream delivered, he announced to a full hall of sailors and Staten Island dignitaries, that if the Governor granted permission, Maxfield’s would throw an ice cream extravaganza right there in the main Sea Hall. The Governor granted it, but not indoors. He did not wish the sleeping sailors whose quarters were above the Hall, to be disturbed. So the impromptu ice cream party was held a short distance away in the gardens between a stately green house and gazebo.

  “Nearby was a building that housed the female nurses and many of the grounds laundresses, affectionately called the Matron’s Cottage. Grandfather would later access the tunnels just off the cellars of Matron’s and find his way to the junction where key number 12 would open the door leading to a dismal, underground containment room which held four, naked, emaciated, hairless, sore laden creatures that at one point had been men of our kind. One, covered in scars—from burns, surgery, and from other unidentifiable means—had had his male organs partially removed. Each of the men had been strapped onto hospital beds, and three were gagged. The one that wasn’t had had his tongue removed. Grandfather’s son, Mikah, himself only a boy of 14, had been the first to turn into the corner, retching and choking. Mikah had helped unload the ice cream, as well as dish it up for the sailors, nurses, and even handed a second helping of Salt Water Taffy to Snug Harbor’s Governor himself. Neither Grandfather Fern nor uncle Mikah had any notion of how hideously our people had been treated. Grandfather hadn’t yet shared the notes scrawled on the map, but they had been mere words on the page....

  “Here was the evidence of the kind of surgeries our men had been subjected to. All of them bore the signs that areas of flesh, no doubt grayed and scaly areas that had exhibited signs of the change, had been carved away, leaving awful, pocked sections on their bodies. One of the men had had his left hand removed just above the wrist. Grandfather assumed the hand had begun to web. It looked as though none of the men had been washed, fed, or moved in days. The smell was overwhelming and the only man conscious began to weep at the site of Grandfather. He was barely recognizable as Grandfather’s own brother, Cotton.

  “While Maxfield’s three remaining men continued to serve iced treats above ground, Grandfather Fern and his sons, my uncles Mikah and his older brother Eddard, singly took those decrepit creatures that were our kin out through the tunnels, directly to the docks, and below the deck of our still waiting ship. While Mikah stayed with the men, Eddard and Grandfather used a sheet as a kind of crude sling to carry their charge in. With the exception of Cotton, all of the men remained oblivious to their escape. By far the worst, Grandfather’s gelded cousin Evard never did wake. His body was given to the sea some six days after he was brought home. The others slowly regained strength, and had much to tell about how they were treated, and it was Cotton’s idea to start tunneling from our base at Seguine north to meet up with the abandoned or demolished remnants of the tunnels, colored green on the map. When fully recovered, Cotton became our Chief Tunnel Builder.

  “Soon enough, our family began combining ice cream delivery, world domination, and the simple art of building a tunnel. We worked long into the night after delivering ice cream to expand the tunnels all across and underneath Staten Island. We went far beyond the tunnels under Seaview, the Farm Colony, and even Willowbrook, and within 5 years, we managed to connect Seguine to our kin at the Farm Colony. At the same time, we began intensifying our expansion above ground. Donations of Maxfield’s were common to places like Seaview, Willowbrook, the north shore Fort Wadsworth, and even the orphanage at Mount Loretto. Grandfather Fern targeted key individuals in each facility we wished to overcome, making sure our trucks were fixtures in the neighborhoods where those people lived, where their children went to school, where their own parents lived. When those people didn’t directly buy from our trucks, they soon found themselves winners of ice cream celebrations— birthday parties for their children being high on the list— and were brought to Maxfield’s directly, or had Maxfield’s come to their homes to host the celebrations. When they were brought into the fold, the experiments took on another twist. Our people were no longer those experimented on. We began looking into other, more direct ways of transforming the ape descendants into our kind than the mere ingestion of ice cream. But, I have to say, the ice cream was still the best, sweetest option.

  “By the late 1970’s Staten Island took on a reputation for being the place where history went to die. The island’s forests became dumping grounds for organized crime or groves where dark occult groups cavorted and maimed small animals. Children began disappearing as early as 1972, mere months before a mustachioed television journalist of questionable ancestry exposed the horrors at Willowbrook. The man’s eyes had a hint of our look, but his olive skin wasn’t from our New England folk, perhaps his roots came from the Nests off Brazil or Portugal? He was a renegade and was censured from our kind. The last we saw, he had become frozen in a semi-evolved state and had become a commentator on some propaganda channel masquerading as a fair and balanced news organization.

  “He was a spoke in our wheel, but his exposé did augment our cover stories of dumped mafia hits and dark woods rituals. Newspapers for the times were too concentrated on the energy crisis, the bad economy, the uptick in occult themed graffiti, and questions about Jimmy Hoffa that it never saw how expansive we had become. Our tunnels became not only points of connection, but an underground city.

  “Rumors flooded the area that Staten Island had become a haven for Satanic activity. We encouraged that view. Yes, of course, many lost primate teens would and did turn to the worship of the Abrahamic Dark Lord, but most of these teens had already become part of our cover story. Some stories, were pure confabulation. We all knew Mr. Hoffa had taken to the sea after the U.S. retreated from the Vietnam conflict. And, many of those supposedly Satanic teenagers had merely come to the Nest that we established just beneath those intricate tunnels at the Farm Colony— which itself had already been abandoned by the primates. An informant even told the news the name of the Satanic group that operated in the area of the Farm Colony, The Church of the Process: a kind of inside joke for my people, a kind of play on words— process, transformation, hmmm.... However, the cover story lasted ’til the early 1990’s long enough for our underground community to further hide our true purpose.

  “The Nest as we now call the area, became our zone for breeding, transformation and quickly, secretly transporting our people and our customers who showed advanced signs of change. Uncle Cotton, Grandfather Fern and his sons, with the intermittent help of my own father alongside his less Other Worldly brothers, fully developed our defense teams to secure that our people would never again fall prey to either the human instinct to destroy what it does not know, or the desire to dominate which had spawned from the likes of Obed Marsh.

  “Fast forward through my childhood to yesterday afternoon.

  “After the pain began in earnest, after doubling over, wasting my beautiful fishes for lunch, I decided after so many years I could only finish what our family had started. After observing so many accelerated changes that very morning throughout Tottenville, I was eager to see the remainder of the neighborhood. And, no sooner had the truck been at a full stop near the corner of Patten Street, adjacent to a demure little wooded area known as Tottenville Shore Park— a place from which my people, of old, took to the sea— was there a swell of children and parents from the surrounding streets. They seemed to course more aggressively toward the truck, and despite some of the new faces pointing, giggling, and whispering at names of popsicles and treats, the more familiar, repeat customers had a deranged glint to their bulbous, bulging eyes.

  “Some, smiled with a rapaciousness which caused no small amount of alarm. I could swear that one family, a slender mother sporting a platinum blonde bob, along with her three equally blond children, reminded me of a school of our pirana brethren from the Nest off Brazil. Predictably, they ordered the Amazonian Serpent’s Delight— one of the newer flavors
. A fourth child in their clan, significantly darker haired, much rounder, less predatory and more dim-witted ordered our Black Lagoon Creature Crunch, which spoke volumes.

  “The day was hellishly bright with the sounds of a mini air-force of no-doubt primate illegals manicuring lawns around the corner. Teenagers zipped by on small electric scooters, and my sea-bell sounded atop the lively atmosphere. As I took orders for one family, the conversation between Mrs. Swanson and her neighbor Marie caught my attention. The two women, angled a few feet to the right of my window, resembled a cross between characters from various train-wreck reality shows these ape descendants so adored. I was surprised that the women were able to stand upright from all the weight placing their bizarrely proportioned frames off kilter, between their breast implants, enormous gold hoop earrings, heaps of diamonds at wrist and throat, and their sable coifs in full bouffant, teased into place with enormous amounts of hairspray. Mrs. Swanson, the shorter, slightly rounder of the two wore a white Gucci half t-shirt and white shorts, the word ‘PINK’ splayed across her rear end, while Marie whose last name I was unfamiliar with wore a banana yellow body suit with the large, irritating word ‘JUICY’ labeling her bony, nearly flat ass. Both ridiculous women rounded off their costumes with flip flops. Mrs. Swanson held her 6-month-old girl on her hip like a fleshy fashion accessory. The child wore the same Gucci half shirt as her mother, a diaper and purple socks with white polka dots. As Mrs. Swanson animatedly spoke to Marie pointing at the child’s feet, I served several Barnacle Blast Snow Cones, Shrimp Tease Sundaes, and a Salt Water Taffy popsicle to the menagerie on my left as I strained to hear the women’s conversation to my right.