FriendlyHorrorandOtherWeirdTales

by Burke, Jessica

  ‘I just don’t know,’ Mrs. Swanson told Marie while shifting the baby from one side of her hip to the other. ‘I mean what the fuck?’ Without allowing room for reply, she shrieked, ‘Gawd! Ya don’t believe me, Marie?’ Loudly clacking her gum, she pulled off one of the purple and white socks from the girl’s right foot. ‘Look yourself, don’t ya see?’

  “Trying to dispense the final treat for this round of customers, none of which had the gill marks that the morning’s group had, I had tried getting a closer look at the revealed baby toes without alerting either coiffed women that I had been paying attention. As Marie bent closer, examining the foot, I saw her eyes widen. Between each toe was a pale bubble of skin. The women looked back at one another silently.

  ‘Now spread them toes!’ Swanson insisted, far more loudly than her prior expletives, catching the attention of other customers. Many of whom had been in their mindless consumptive reverie of Maxfield’s ice cream were slowly turning their attention to Marie and Mrs. Swanson, much as the blond muppet child from this morning had smiled while continuing to devour her treat. I was again reminded of the drug fiend, and between that and what I saw next, it took all of my ability to stifle even the slightest of emotions. The expression on Marie’s face tightened as she took hold of the big toe and pinky toe carefully fanned them out to reveal a yellow and pink, opaque, webbing between each toe. The eyes on a fleet of nearby, less meretriciously dressed women widened simultaneously.

  “I turned away from Marie’s examination to assist a very familiar portly tyke Patrick, in his Bob the Builder overalls and his parents standing behind him. While I assembled their selections, the pirana-like platinum blonde and a rather large, almost walrus-like, red-faced man— I can only assume was her husband although he looked nothing like his children— with a massive, beetling brow and bald head, both heavily patched with scaling, grey skin, both sidled closer to Marie. I couldn’t help but note how the walrus shuffled, his thick-set legs moving in a strange, uniform, almost rubbery movement. I then noticed his left hand, held stiffly at his side, the ends of the fingers seemed oddly fused. All I could think of was How much do these people eat? Really? How much Maxfield’s did Mrs. Swanson feed her baby? But, then I remembered that last year, all that woman ate seemed to be our ice cream. I recall her asking me pointedly last season what time I would be where so she could make sure she met the truck, since her schedule was far too busy for her to head to one of our shops. Mrs. Swanson had been pregnant at the time. So, I knew Grandfather’s presumptions had been true, and that the changes would take place in- utero as well.

  “As I served young Patrick and his parents, shoving their payments into the money box, I noticed one of the pirana children pointing toward the family’s home, a three-storied blue, purple and yellow Victorian monstrosity— the only truly beautiful stately home from bygone days now completely ruined by a poorly conceived hodge-podge of colors— on the corner just across the street from where the truck was parked. That house, no doubt, from the position where it faced Raritan Bay beyond the small park may have once been home to some of my people. I can bet for damned sure we wouldn’t have painted it such a yellow. It hurt my eyes to look, but I followed to the upper windows, where the boy had been pointing. The walrus-like man turned his attention toward the house as well, but not before flashing me with a strange, rubbery smile.

  “At the window, in the upper corner of the window, was the ancient crone of the family, in a green paisley robe, staring blankly outward. Neither did she have the look of walrus nor pirana, but she had the complete Innsmouth look. Gazing straight ahead toward the glistening waters, over the tree line of the park, she watched, her mouth hanging open, incoherently moving while banging her arms, fingers clearly fused into flipper-like appendages, on the window panes.

  ‘I’ll check on gramma,’ said the boy who had been munching his Black Lagoon treat, and looking not unlike the creature himself, though the last time I remember meeting The Creature, it had been more of a turquoise than the grey-green this child had begun to turn a light shade of. They boy’s parents cocked their head to the side in a decidedly animal fashion, and turned to continue listening to Marie.

  ‘So it’s a birth defect? Is that what yoa peediatrishan told ya?’ Marie asked.

  “A slender, grizzled man with a mangy beard and not the remotest look about him anywhere had sauntered down from the adjacent Patten Street, to see what the commotion was about. I couldn’t recall his name because, cheap bastard that he was, he never ever bought Maxfield’s, and deranged bastard that he was, he never even accepted a freebie. He had littered the entire length of street with his myriad vehicles, internally piled high with cardboard boxes, old clothes, and no doubt the desiccated corpses of his gaggle of missing felines. Brandishing a pair of hedge trimmers, he spoke softly. ‘It’s related. I tell you, all those kids missing.’

  ‘And Paul how could these be related?’ Asked Marie.

  “Apparently ignoring, Paul’s comment, Mrs. Swanson continued bouncing her soon-to-be finned child while snapping her gum. ‘Damned doctor said, and I quote, there is rare cases like this, it’s no big deal, since dey can be whachamacallum? Surgeried. Den he says, that Teresa wouldn’t become eetha a frog or a fish! Ya believe that bastad? Jokin bout this. It wouldn’t be funny, his kid had fuckin webs.’

  “I had no choice but to turn my back, open the freezer, and rummage around to hide my guffaws of laughter. How truly precious!

  “Paul interjected, waving his hedge clippers, ‘They’re all the same. I mean I do believe these issues are connected, Marie. We’ve all read about the many strange things in the paper, the Community Board even raised issues about something more going on as more cases like this rise on the island. Some called it another kind of autism, others thought it was from the debris from the Towers being buried in Fresh Kills, but I don’t know what to think of this all....’ His voice trailed off as the squelchy bellow of the Pappinjyn sounded from inside the woods to the right of my truck, which caught the attention of half the crowd, including the bewebbed hip-hugger.

  “While I turned back to the counter, after performing a quick clean up, I saw my least favorite child, Tommy the Terror for the second time that day. This time, Ms. Tilden, his mother, walked just behind the horrifying boy. Pushing a baby carriage, she wore hemp sandals, tie-dyed pants, and a tank top with the sanskrit symbol Om emblazoned in the center. As the boy ran ahead of his mother, she stopped just beyond my window, crinkling her nose, she looked at me directly: ‘What is that hideous odor?’

  “She looked accusatorially at the assortment of men, women, and children just on the sidewalk a stone’s throw from my truck. ‘Don’t you people at all smell it? It’s like oily rotten fish.’ She turned back to glare at me. The last time I had seen the diminutive but no less powerful brunette was across a courtroom after her son’s tirade last year. While she gazed at me, her reprehensible son darted at one of the pirana-children, a girl who had been enjoying a Barnacle Blast in her cool, ravening way. Tommy knocked the ice out of the girl’s hands, shouting ‘Mommy says this stuff is no good, it’s against veggin!’ At this, the girl growled, causing the dimpled terror to back up a pace.

  “I couldn’t help but smile. Ooh the Patten street clan would be a tough batch. Perhaps they’d do as part of the defense team at some point.

  ‘No Thomas,’ Ms. Tilden said in her overly articulated accent, desperately trying to remove all vestiges of Staten Island from her voice. ‘It’s Vegan, not Veggin, but your were close enough.’ However, as she smiled primly but no less acidly at me, she turned to the parents who were surrounding their still growling daughter and I saw my another favorite sight for the day. Under the woman’s short sparse brown hair scaly protrusions along the back of her neck rose toward the crown of her head. Vegan or not, at some point even holier-than-thou Ms. Tilden had been at Maxfield’s. The pirana girl stopped her growling only after her walrus-like father purchased another Barnacle Blast to appease her
fiendish appetite.

  “The crowd grew larger as Paul continued his theories about government experimentation, not entirely incorrect but a scant few decades off in terms of timing. Distracted while selling more treats, I thought the crowd seemed to close around another mother and child. I couldn’t crane my neck to get a clear look at the mother; she was standing behind the Pirana mother and Walrus father, but I could see the infant in her carriage when the crowd audibly gasped and stepped several paces back. A moment later I realized the woman was Ms. Tilden herself.

  “She lifted the blanket off her barely 2-month-old child of indeterminate gender, save for the pink blanket, after rolling back the carriage canopy. The small pink baby had tufts of dark hair upon her head, and wore nothing but a diaper. The infant also, unfortunately had a tentacle emanating from her left nostril, which undulated and squelched with mucous. As the woman began shrieking something barely comprehensible beneath the arrival of the illegal air-force with their leaf-blowers and weed whackers to manicure the Pirana’s neighbor’s lawn, I saw the tentacle begin to extend further. It slowly, crept blindly along the child’s chest to navel, where I noticed a strange membranous flap of purple-grey skin emanate. In the center of her jutting belly button, I recognized a glossy, black wedge-like object that was clearly, at least to me, not the remnants of the child’s umbilical chord. It looked to me from my view from the the truck as if the tentacle had a life of its own separate from the life force of the child. It was writhing, attempting escape, but was held back by its attachment to the child. Wherever Ms. Tilden had gotten her supply, she evidently must have consumed more than even Mrs. Swanson during the child’s incubation period.

  “But, just then, as I was tingling with a spreading warmth from the joyous changes I saw happening, I heard the Pappinjyn’s cries again, warning me of another wave of coughing. I managed to sit on the bucket behind the counter and brace myself for another round of heaving, wracking coughs. Yet, they didn’t come. Instead, a searing, tearing, shifting sort of pain laced up my legs, groin, belly and chest. Gripping myself about the waist, I doubled over.

  ‘Buddy, hey— you okay?’ It was the grizzled Paul, hanging his shaggy head and his hedge clippers into the window. I managed to wave at him, a gesture I hoped signaled I was indeed ok, but he called over some other adults, who all began congregating at the open window. The Pappinjyn began crying louder and, if you can say it, larger. The sound was humming and strumming and careening through every tree in the little wooded park. I could only imagine because I couldn’t see above the counter to the sidewalk, but every child and every adult in transformation stopped to listen to the thrumming sounds. And then the thunder began rolling through the sky.

  “Paul jumped back as though electrocuted as the a light drizzle began. ‘My car! The windows are open. Got to run. Feel better buddy.’ He scampered off as the others began dissolving away, each to their own homes apparently unaware that they had been discussing a child with tentacles. I couldn’t have been more pleased. It was more than evident that the necessary transformation was happening for us all. I could only hope that Ms. Tilden and her tentacled child would become fodder for the Old Ones. I couldn’t conceive of so irksome a creature being a cohabitant of sacred Y’ha-nthlei. At that point, as the thunder rolled in and the storm began lighting the distant clouds, I put the truck into gear and started for the expressway off Arthur Kill Road. Instead of return the truck to our garage on Richmond Terrace, I drove it straight home, contacted our team, and alerted them to the advance stage. The moon would be full in barely two days time. Our agents would then transport me to The Nest.”

  *********

  Silas yawned, finishing the last dregs of his final cup of tea, which he had managed to prepare more than an hour since, without stopping the recorder or his tale-telling. The moon shone dimly through the clouds just through the trees in his line of sight. Winking at him as the clouds scuttled across Her, She told him it was time to sleep. The tea had not only made him relive so many moments of his life and his family’s history, but it made his appetite disappear. He glanced around his second floor room for what would be the final time, taking in all of his worldly possessions— clothing, DVDs, a small stack of sheet music, his six-string guitar (from the days he fancied himself a fish-frog version of Willie Nelson), and TV were packed and ready for storage. When next on land for a visit, Silas would stay in one of the houseboats along Lemon Creek for easier access to the sea. He didn’t have much in the way of material goods, and the symbolic items of his people and his faith, the altar, idols, incenses, and accoutrement from the Esoteric Order as it now existed, had already been sent with his sister to the Nest. The one thing Silas did succumb to in terms of the primate world— the one thing he would miss on his undersea journey— were books.

  The works of Howard Phillips, those of the shaggy headed Gaiman and shaggy bearded Martin, the sweeping vistas from the stoic Tolkien, the creeping chaos in Byron and Poe all were simply impossible to bring with him; they were not waterproof. One thing Silas would have to get Father and Grandfather Fern to invest seriously in, once he himself took his seat in Y’hai-nthlei, was to demand that Mr. Jobs create the ultimate in electronic reading devices. To hell with the Apple Cloud, what about the Apple Reef? It should be sleek, completely waterproof and able to resist pressures of several thousand feet. Why else did they take Jobs along with them but to find a way to allow Silas’ people to retain knowledge that it was near impossible to remember in their oral tradition? Silas had been trying to teach his siblings “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “I, Cthulhu,” “Dreams of the Witch House,” and not to mention “Leaf by Niggle” to near complete failure. They had confounded the stories, creating some monstrous cross-breed where Niggle was an Elder God, fond of overly large torture devices while living in a house that gained him access to dream world realities. Oral traditions did have their drawbacks.

  Silas nodded slowly, shuffling into the bedroom after depositing his mug in the kitchen sink, and the recorder into an envelope by the front door. The envelope had his sister’s name written on the front in Silas’ clumsy, block text. As he waddled into the bedroom, he found himself longing more to be with his parents and looking forward to seeing them again, than any sense of loss of his childhood or belongings. As he passed his dresser, he turned toward the enormous, Victorian-style free-standing mirror caddy-cornered between the dresser and the nightstand. Looking one final time in the mirror, Silas observed the scintilla of humanity left in his appearance yesterday had almost completely vanished.

  His head had swelled to match his even larger girth, any remaining wisps of patchy hair that had been there the day before, had completely fallen away, leaving a clear glistening brown green, oblong head. Alongside his temples were yellowish green bony ridges that supported his bony sockets and blue-black eyes, which had now fully protruded. He was reminded, in size, shape, and color, of plums— his favorite land fruit. Between them, the bridge of his nose had seemingly melted into his head, revealing nostrils that had constricted to less than a quarter of the size they had been even the day before. Disturbing though it was to see two, near reptilian slits in the center of his face instead of a nose, had that change happened earlier, perhaps he wouldn’t have had such a problem with the pollen or his sinuses as he had in the last week. Flexing his nostrils slightly, he saw the slits completely sealed— a rather useful thing when swimming at over 500 feet. Now, his body could breathe air, but only when he wanted to. Flexing again, his gills ruffled beneath what had been his jawline, several inches below his mouth and thick blue-green lips covering the lower half of his face. His ears, like his nose, had fused with the shape of his head, and were now holes the size of quarters with similar whitish flaps of skin that allowed him to flex them closed during deep sea expeditions. Observing his fingers, Silas saw that they had grown twice their length from barely 24 hours earlier, each knuckle now a thick bony bulb, most of his fingernails had fallen away, and between each finger e
thereal, yellow-pink webs had almost fully formed.

  Satisfied and exhausted, Silas cumbersomely slipped into bed. By this time tomorrow, he would be floating in a bed lined with the softest of sponges and the most delicate of sea weeds. There was a fine material, very like silk, that his people made from living sea weed, that they used to line their sleeping pods when indeed his people wished to sleep in a fashion similar to what they had been accustomed to on dry land. Most often, after several generations in primate time, his people dispensed with the ‘beds’ and rested in a way more akin to the shark or octopus.

  By 11 the next morning, Silas was woken to the sound of wet, throaty clicks and whistles in his top floor apartment. The remaining family members who shared the large old house weren’t accustomed to invading his living quarters, and he knew that even though his younger cousins would be inheriting his rooms, they would have the decency to wait until after tonight’s ceremony before claiming their rights.

  Opening his eyes, and swinging his now, nearly completely flippered feet onto the floor, he heard his Grandfather’s cool tones from the next room, along with snippets of conversation with what Silas assumed were the agents. He sat on the edge of the bed listening while trying to come to full consciousness. He heard the throaty, dry clicks, whispery rattles, high squeals, and deep wet gollums of his people’s various tribal dialects. Much of it Silas didn’t grasp as they were speaking very fast and Silas hadn’t yet mastered the deeper, older speech of his people. He knew there would be an insurmountable space of time to learn them all, but the words he could make out were “protection,” “incubator”, “procession,” “prince,” “crown,” and “tunnels.” Of course, they were discussing what was to happen to him once he was transported to the Nest. Silas also was able to comprehend more from his Grandfather’s side of the conversation. Grandfather Fern expressed his positive glee that Silas’ growth rate would coincide with the height of the full moon— a true omen of enlightenment for their people.