Shock Totem 9.5: Holiday Tales of the Macabre and Twisted - Halloween 2014

by Shock Totem

  His green, dewy eyes misted with confusion. Ripples in her skin hardened and tiny blooms ripped from her ovulating pores.

  Her fingernails pierced his skin and limbs curled from his mouth and nostrils. Bark swelled from between her thighs and tore into his navel. Pain radiated in cycles of pleasure, each climax fueling the transformation. Willow sunk her teeth into the flesh of his face and her tongue pollinated the wound. She growled with the voice of a tree snapping during a storm and grinded against him, arching toward the heat that was building around them.

  His green, seedy eyes dilated as he screamed. Warmth consumed both of them as roots ate through her skin and planted in the pollinated soil of his flesh.

  David G. Blake lives in Pennsylvania with his girlfriend and their chocolate lab. When he isn’t trying to convince his girlfriend to let him buy an octopus, he spends his time trying to hack NASA’s control systems so he can take Curiosity for a spin around Mars. In addition to Shock Totem, his work is forthcoming/has appeared in Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, Futures 2, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many other publications.

  HOLIDAY RECOLLECTION

  KORE

  by John Langan

  Annie, my wife, started the Halloween Walk when our son was three. We were renting a house on a quiet street. She’d learned that several of the kids in his preschool didn’t go trick-or-treating because their neighborhoods weren’t safe enough for their parents to take them out in. “We could do something, here,” she said to me. “We could make a haunted walk for the kids behind the house.” I agreed. Every kid should experience Halloween, right? Together, we set up a course for the kids that took them through the passage between the house and its garage, up the hill behind the garage, and along the terrace cut into the hill. We strung the cottony spider-webs we’d bought at Wal-Mart around the back passage, then populated them with our son’s collection of rubber spiders; for a finishing touch, we hung his enormous tarantula puppet in the center of the alley, and told the kids they had to duck under it. We filled yellow dish-gloves with bubble wrap, dabbed streaks of red paint along the fingers, and jammed them into the wire fence that extended beyond the end of the garage. The paint dried pink, but the effect was more surreal than ludicrous. “Don’t get caught by the hands of the dead,” we said to the kids. At the other end of the terrace, on a white plastic chair, we sat the dummy we’d made from filling an old pair of my jeans and one of my old shirts with straw and tying the ends of the arms and legs closed. I had fashioned its head by turning a gallon milk-jug upside down and painting a green-skinned face on it. I’d given it large, baleful eyes. Annie placed half a watermelon that had slid past ripeness on the ground in front of the dummy, and jammed a dozen keys she’d bought at the dollar store into the liquescent fruit. This, we told the kids, was Frankenstein’s monster. He was asleep, but might wake at any moment. His old, used-up brain was lying at his feet. Each of the kids had to poke around in his rotten gray matter until they found a key, which they had to extract without disturbing him. Once everyone had a key, they had to run as fast as they could to the front of the house. There, Annie was waiting on the porch in an old-fashioned witch’s costume (although the pointed hat was bright orange, its brim composed of netting). Each kid presented their key, which she inspected, then instructed them to drop into the plastic kettle before her. In exchange, the child received a brown paper lunch-bag decorated with spiders and skulls, and full of candy. After the last bag had been distributed, we escorted the kids up and down our street, where the trick-or-treating was plentiful and safe.

  So big a hit was our first Halloween Walk that it became an instant tradition. A few years later, when we left that rental house to move to one we’d bought, there was a single question on the lips of our son’s friends: “Are you still going to have Halloween in your new house?” Of course, we said. While smaller than our previous place, this house had a large, dry, mostly-empty basement. It was, Annie declared, the perfect place for the Walk. Once the sun had slid from the sky, I gathered our son and his friends at the back of the house, where the ground sloped steeply down, exposing the northeast corner of the basement and the door set there. Addressing the kids in the big, over-the-top voice of a circus ringmaster, I described what lay in store for them within. One year, it was Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Another, it was the halls in which Dr. Moreau kept his worst experiments confined. A third time, it was the caverns under Count Dracula’s (supposedly) abandoned castle. As with that first Walk, each journey presented a goal for the kids to accomplish. They had to steal the batteries Dr. Frankenstein intended to power his next monstrous creation. They had to rescue the (stuffed) animals slated for Dr. Moreau’s forthcoming round of vivisection. They had to locate and retrieve the magic rings that would permit Dracula to be resurrected. Flashlight in hand, I led them counter-clockwise around the basement, directing the light at mason jars stuffed with rubber eyeballs, at buckets brimming with plastic snakes, at cryptic graffiti on the cement walls. Our destination was always the same: the small room off the southeast corner of the basement. When the real estate agent had shown us the house, she had described the space as a sauna. There was an improvised metal basket full of large, round stones across from the door, so it seemed possible the room had been used for steam. But the open drain in the center of the floor had looked wider than what you would have expected in a sauna. It was deep, too, beyond the range of the flashlight we shone into it. Some kind of drywell, we decided, and covered it with a square of plywood. As I led the kids into the room, I positioned myself at the cover, to keep them clear of it. After the group had fulfilled its annual task, I sent the kids upstairs, where Annie, in some variation of a witch’s costume (but always with that orange hat), was waiting for them with bags of candy.

  This past Halloween was our most elaborate, yet. We had settled on an archaeological theme, Indiana Jones meets the Mummy, so to speak. There was a big bag of sand left over from one of the aquariums; we scattered it over the floor. We placed plastic snakes, rubber spiders and scorpions, around the room. I chalked the most sinister hieroglyphs I could find online onto the basement walls. A friend provided us with a six-foot cardboard box that I spray painted gold then hand painted a pharaoh’s mannered features onto. We propped our handmade sarcophagus against one side of the sauna and strewed plastic human bones about the floor. For the first time, I incorporated the drywell into the night’s events, removing the cover and filling the floor surrounding it with more malevolent sigils. Also for the first time, Annie took a more active role in the actual Walk. About a month before Halloween, we had attended a birthday party for one of our son’s friends. The party had had a classical mythology theme, and had climaxed with the gathered party-goers taking turns smashing a huge piñata in the shape of Medusa’s head. The rubber snakes with which the piñata was adorned flew off during the attempts to open it, but the head itself was largely intact, and Annie, already thinking ahead, had asked our hosts if she could take it home. “What for?” I’d asked. “You’ll see,” she’d answered. By trimming the ragged opening at the base of the neck, she transformed it into an oversized mask. She added a pair of long, gray gloves and a pale green gown she’d picked up at the Salvation Army, and voilà, she was a goddess. “Which goddess?” I said. “That’s not important,” she said. Her plan was to sit in the corner of the sauna opposite the sarcophagus. The kids would see the mask and assume it was just another prop; when she stood, it would scare the bejeezus out of them. “What if we use the drywell?” I said. “What if the kids have to throw something into it in order to propitiate you?” “Not me,” she said, “the goddess.” But we agreed that I would give them each a piece of bite-sized candy that they would have to drop into the well to appease the goddess.

  By and large, the Halloween Walk went well. I was concerned that our son and his friends, all of whom are around eleven, might be too old for another Walk, that our props might be too amateurish for them, but both our son and a couple of his friends b
ought into the scenario with real gusto, which helped to sell it to the rest of the kids. Even the boy who kept insisting that he wasn’t afraid of any of this, it was all so fake, was looking fairly unsettled. And when I had them gathered in the sauna, which I re-christened the Chamber of Souls, and Annie slowly rose from her seat, the kids gave a collective gasp. “It’s Robbie’s mom,” someone whispered. “Is it?” someone else replied. Playing along, our son said, “That doesn’t look like my mom.” “She’s in a costume—duh!” the first kid hissed. “My mom’s upstairs,” our son said, managing to sound genuinely nervous. For all its simplicity, I suppose the costume was effective—maybe because of its simplicity. The face on the oversized head was stylized, more department-store mannequin than classical portrait. Its blank eyes were too large for the other features, the narrow, almost pointed nose, the pouting lips. The left cheek was wrinkled, a memento of its previous existence as a piñata. Annie held her head at such an angle that those empty eyes seemed to stare at a point directly above the kids’ heads. “Oh Ancient Power,” I said, “we bring offerings for your honor. Accept them, and do not drag us down to the darkness where you reign.” Considering it was improvised pretty much on the spot, I thought my supplication sounded pretty good. Two and three at a time, the kids darted forward and flung the pieces of candy I gave them into the drywell. A couple of the girls shrieked as they did. The resident skeptic tossed his Hershey’s Kiss into the hole with a motion that was probably intended to be dismissive but that came across as full of dread. (I’ll admit, I was more pleased by that than I should have been.)

  The only part of the Walk that didn’t go according to plan involved the younger brother of one of son’s friends. He was seven, and a particularly wide-eyed and tremulous seven at that. I wasn’t sure that the Walk would be appropriate for him, but he insisted with all of a younger brother’s desire not to be left out of his older brother’s fun that he wanted to take part in it. His mother offered to accompany us, which I thought would reassure him should he find anything too intense. For most of the Walk, I was right. While I elaborated the terrible history of the latest stop on our tour, I heard the boy’s mother murmuring to him, and while his eyes retained their shocked expression, he appeared to be tolerating the event. However, when it came his turn to step out and add his candy to those already cast into the drywell, he refused. “Come on,” his mother said lightly, “it’s no big deal.” The boy shook his head violently. In fact, his entire body was trembling, as if he were freezing. “Come on,” his mother said, “it’s just Ms. Annie.” That loosened his tongue. Through chattering teeth, he said, “How do you know?” “What do you mean?” his mother said. “How do you know?” he said. “How do you know?” I half-expected Annie to remove her mask, show the boy that his mother was right, it was only her, but she remained still. “How do you know?” the boy said over his mother’s calm insistence that this was all a game, we were just playing, it was Halloween and that was Ms. Annie in her costume. “How do you know?” Finally, I stepped in and announced that it was time for the kids to go upstairs, to receive their bags of candy. I herded my son and his friends to the staircase, cautioning them to watch their steps. As soon as my son opened the door to the kitchen, lighting the stairs, I turned back towards the sauna. But the younger boy and his mom were already on their way out of it, and although his eyes were still wet with tears, he appeared more embarrassed than frightened. Nonetheless, I stopped to talk with his mom, who assured me her son was fine. “Your wife,” she said, “is some actress. She had me creeped out.” “Me too,” I laughed. I ducked my head into the sauna to check for Annie, but she had already left, exiting the basement door to circle around the front of the house and in the front door. By the time I climbed to the kitchen door, she was in the midst of the kids, dressed in her usual witch’s costume, this one consisting of a plain black dress the ends of whose sleeves and skirt had been pre-cut to appear ragged, a heavy necklace, and the orange hat. I wound my way through the kids to where she was pouring cups of apple cider and kissed her on the back of the neck. “You are something,” I said. “You have no idea,” she said, and passed me a cup to hand to one of our son’s friends.

  It’s strange how quickly such an event recedes into your memory. Not until a month later, the weekend after Thanksgiving, did I think about it again in any kind of detail. It was late Saturday night—early Sunday morning, technically. I clawed my way out of the thick folds of a sleep that had wrapped around me like a blanket. I wasn’t certain what had awakened me. To be honest, I had the sense that it was because I’d been so profoundly asleep that I’d woken, as if my body had dragged me back into myself from some other state. There was something different about the house. It was like when the power goes out while you’ve been asleep and you wake to the air colder, the chorus of noises that fills the nighttime hours silent. I glanced to my left, but Annie’s side of the bed was empty. Was that what I’d registered, her rising to visit the bathroom? I listened for the sound of her moving downstairs but didn’t hear anything. Of course, she might have retreated to the guest room futon to escape my snoring. Only when I was rolling over to return to sleep did I register the figure standing in the corner of the room, to the right of the door. Instantly, I was sitting upright, my heart hammering as if I’d been doused with a bucket of freezing water. The shadows were particularly thick where the form was, away from the windows, but I could make out the oversized head, the dress. I opened my mouth to say, “Honey?” but stopped, overwhelmed by the certainty that, whoever was in the room with me, it was not Annie. For what couldn’t have been as long as it seemed, the figure stood in place, its head tilted towards me, while I sat where I was, that little boy’s question looping in my mind (“How do you know?”). The darkness seemed grainier in that part of the room, as if the air were different, somehow; I had the impression of tremendous distance and age. At last, the figure turned to its right and walked out the door. I waited for the stairs to the living room to utter their creaks and groans, but they remained mute. There was nothing I wanted to do less than leave the bed to see what had become of the intruder. But my son was asleep in his room, and my wife was somewhere else in the house. With as much stealth as I could muster, I slid out from between the sheets and padded to the door, regretting that I’d never gotten around to hiding that baseball bat under the bed. The landing outside the room was empty. My son’s door was shut. I opened it, anyway, to check on him, but he was soundly asleep, unaccompanied by any weird visitors. Could the figure have descended the staircase in silence? It seemed unlikely, yet appeared the only possibility. I followed it down, my heavy footsteps announcing my passage. The first floor was empty of both the intruder and Annie. At this, I felt a momentary surge of panic, and, sliding one of the long knives from the butcher block beside the coffee maker, headed for the basement stairs.

  I found Annie in the sauna, crouched over the drywell. She was naked, her hair hanging down around her face. She’d preserved the hieroglyphs I’d drawn on the floor around the hole, and added a few of her own. In her right hand, she held an assortment of candies. With her left, she was picking them up one at a time and casting them into the well. I set the knife on the floor beside the door and walked toward her. I didn’t know what to say. Without looking up, without speaking, she held out a candy to me. I took it. It was a bite-sized Charleston Chew. I’d lost a tooth to one of these when I was a kid. The tooth had been loose but not that loose, and had torn free of the gum with a sweet, sharp pain that had flooded my mouth with the taste of blood and sugar. I gazed at the drywell, at the circle of blackness that dropped who knew how far to who knew what destination. “You have no idea,” Annie had said to me Halloween night. I didn’t. I tossed my offering into the darkness, and reached to my wife for the next one.

  For Fiona

  OUT OF FIELD THEORY

  by Kevin Lucia

  Brian Palmer shivered despite the noonday sun warming his shoulders. “This is it,” he muttered, st
aring at the picture he’d just taken. “Holy shit...I think this is it. This picture is going to change my fucking life. This. Is. It.”

  About time. He’d flipped through all the pictures he’d taken so far with his Nikon 351 Digital Camera and not one of them had been worth a damn. The first one had been fuzzy, out of focus. Couldn’t see that barn on Bassler Road for shit. Another had been framed wrong, cutting the top off the old gazebo in the abandoned koi garden down the road. The brilliant yellow and orange koi swimming in the old pond next to the gazebo? Red and yellow blobs.

  And some of the other shots he’d taken? Of Bassler Road curving into the wooded distance at sunset? Of an abandoned old truck sitting by the railroad tracks? He liked them okay, but he knew what Professor Spinella would say: they looked like stock photos in Adirondack guidebooks found in tourist-trap novelty stores everywhere.

  That wouldn’t cut it if he wanted his final project for Photography Philosophy to pass. He needed something unique that he could examine through a philosophy they’d studied this semester, philosophies he’d had a hard enough time understanding from the start.

  But as he’d flipped through more of the pictures he’d taken that morning; of the water flowing under Black Creek Bridge. The abandoned factory on Black River along Route 28 toward Whitelake. Several angles of the unused bandstand next to Raedeker Park Zoo, he’d realized glumly that every. single. picture. sucked.

  Except this one.

  Brian’s frustrated thoughts had screeched to a halt at the sight of it, something in the photo catching his eye. He’d taken the picture only a few minutes ago, of an old Victorian farmhouse out in the middle of a fallow cornfield off Bassler Road. On a whim, he’d zoomed in on the front door and the window next to it, then snapped the shot, not thinking much about it.