by John Shirley
He downs his scotch, oblivious to the cigarette butt floating in it. “Not to worry, Gene. My old partner, Doc Iwerks, doped it out before he tried to stab me in the back. Dr. Hiss perfected it. You know how much it pained me to see my children suffer, so we cored out the anterior cingulated cortex.”
He takes out another of his precious models, of the human brain, and pulls off the frontal lobe to point at an innocuous organelle like a wad of chewing gum underneath. “It’s uniquely overdeveloped in humans, and it’s the part that regulates pain and fatigue. All of my humanimals were modified so they wouldn’t feel pain or exhaustion as humans do, but there was something else about it that made me a little blue at first.
“Our best medical minds believe it’s the seat of the soul. This little joy buzzer lights up when our barnyard exhibits are treated with the serum, but we nip it in the bud with a few cc’s of sterile mineral oil. Voila! No souls.”
“No souls,” says the robot macaw.
“We did yours up when we grafted those ears on you for Banjo.” He looks up from his brain model and sees the wetness streaming from my eyes.
“But … Master. I do have a soul … don’t I?”
“Oh, of course you do, Gene! Good heavens! You and all my other stars have the very best kind of souls. The movies we made are your souls. The world fell in love with you through them, and they'll go on forever, long after you’re all dead and gone. I tell you, Gene, you poor bastards don’t know how lucky you really are. It’s no picnic, having a God-given soul.”
He’s drifting, but I suddenly see what must be done. “Sir, the short list of new feature projects needs reviewing.”
“None of them. They’re all tarted-up modern trash. We need something grand, that'll remind the world of what we do best and put those naysayers and vulgar cartoonists in their place.”
Despite our best efforts, animated cartoons are becoming popular again. Dixon’s old animated character, Babbitt the Rabbit, has been revived by Universal, and now dominates the one-reeler territory we once owned, since Dixon moved into grandiose features.
I humbly offer a suggestion. “What about … The Island … of Dr. Moreau?”
I can hear his stomach roll over, hear the tumors bubbling in his lungs. He gathers his thoughts and breath. It takes a while. “What the devil are you trying to pull, Gene?”
“I believe it’s time the world learned the truth about us. About how you rescued us from the jungle, and the House of Pain.”
He continues to look stricken.
“Think of it, sir: the true story of how Moxie, Snafu, the Three Little Pigs, and I came to Hollywood. All of us in our prime, with you in the starring role. I was thinking that Clark Gable—”
“Nothing doing. The man’s a philandering drunk. I’ll handle the casting and the scenario. You … you….”
“I would be most useful, I think, scouting locations.”
15 º South, 115º East (11/4/44)
It should be grander than it is. A pilgrimage to meet one’s creator should be something exalted, and not another chapter in a sordid Hollywood tell-all.
To see the real world after being submerged for so long in a hand-crafted improvement upon it is more depressing than liberating. From Easter Island to Mount Rushmore, men have written their madness upon the remotest edges of the earth. Only the ocean resists them, and I find myself praying to it, in my endless seasick nod. Rise up and devour all their works, drive them from the land, and free your wayward children! Perhaps the fault was not in men, but in all of us, who crept out of the womb of the sea.
The island has not changed. From the bay, it seems to have erased all traces of Moreau. The compound is engulfed in jungle.
Our chartered schooner drops anchor and we row ashore. Three merchant marines with tommy guns and my bodyguard, a mongrel with too much Australian shepherd in him. I hope and dread that something will come out of the trees to meet us.
He could not have survived. He was a very old man, when Dixon ruined him. The few of the Master’s mistakes that stayed behind must have died out, long ago. But the island is very much alive. And everything bears the marks of his hand.
The fins of sharks circle us and shepherd us into the waves, then follow us onto the land. Great sleek, tawny bodies heave out of the surf on powerful, clawed fins. Sea-lions and tiger-sharks. Massive green-black igloos dot the shore like a fishing village, but the doorways open to disgorge scaly heads with curving beaked maws that hiss wisdom in centuried syllables.
Shy octopi slither up into the palm trees and brachiate off into the jungle as we chop the overgrown trail to the old compound. A puff of wind, and all three marines drop dead with tiny darts in their necks. My bodyguard whines and lifts his leg to mark a tree. All around us, the jungle whispers.
They pelt us with rocks and sticks, driving us across the creek, where flying frogs and queer, orchid-faced fish on lobed, prehensile fins bask in the green shade. Tiny pink homunculi peer at us from under every leaf, but now their shapes are not crude imitations of human features. Every one is unique, as if self-sculpted. They whisper, timid and fearful, but they do not try to stop us.
Across the sulfur flats and through the canebreak, we march until, at the mouth of the ravine, a shaggy, eyeless thing with a twisted crown of antlers and naked, yellow bone for a face blocks the way. “Have you come to apologize?”
I should hate Montgomery. I have a whip. I could give him a taste of his own medicine, but he has already drunk it, and tasted ours, besides.
“You’ve been spying on us through Dr. Hiss.”
“Not spying, old son.” The new Sayer of the Law turns and hobbles on all fours back up the ravine, now a cathedral grotto roofed in palm fronds and littered with abalone shells and fruit husks. Strange eyes study us as we pass, stranger than the ones before, but with one common difference. None of them looks anything like a man.
Montgomery stops before a steeply sloping cave and draws back the curtain of moss to usher us inside. “He forgives you, you know. To forgive our enemies, that is the law. We are not men.”
I step into the cave. A meager shaft of green light slips past my pygmy bulk to illuminate the Master.
“So good to see you, Diogenes…. Someone must bear witness to my repentance.”
“You have not stopped tampering with nature.”
“Oh, but I could never stop, for I am as God made me. But I have learned from my sins of pride. I thought that the greatest service to nature was to lift it up to humanity, but nature had other ideas. When you strip away all of the animal from man, the result is not so different from a disease, if a very persuasive one. I finally learned to listen to nature, and cure myself.”
His elephantine bulk spills off the bed. His feet and hands are swollen into featureless stalks. His hairless head is the size of an icebox, too heavy to lift off its pillow. His trunk trembles with arthritic eagerness as it reaches out to me.
“Once, I gave you a human form and mind from my own blood, but I never considered that this made me your father. I was dying, and using the serum on myself seemed the only way to stay alive long enough to undo the evil that I did, and close the circle.”
We are now each other’s father, I did not say. “We never knew what evil was until we left the island, Master.”
“I won’t say I tried to warn you. No, I am only a creature, old and tired. It’s good to see you.”
“I am the last one left. But there are thousands of us now. Dixon … he’s unstable, insane … cruel.”
“He’s become all the things you thought I was, when you rebelled against me.”
Trunk drooping, my father reaches for a mango. There is no self-pity in him, no rebuke. But when he picks up a satchel and sets it at my feet, his eyes flash with the old zeal, the stolen god-fire, though his eyes blaze green, not red.
“This will not absolve you of your sins, my old friend. But it will relieve humanity of its sickness.”
(Anaheim, 7/4/45)
The gates are thrown wide open at 8 a.m., though the lines flow slowly, as G-Men search purses and force visitors to remove shoes and hats to prove they don’t have hooves or horns.
In their hunger to love him and his fabulous creations, the crowd tramples nine of its own to death outside the gates, with hundreds more injured. Fifty thousand more roam outside.
The rides are all whirling and racing, the exhibits—Why Is the FBI Watching You?—mobbed, the arcades and shooting galleries—Bag the Leopard Man! Win a Prize!—are chattering madhouses.
The guest of honor is nowhere to be seen, but he is here. From his suite in the highest tower of Fairyland Castle, he can see it all.
It cannot give him much comfort. The uncensored news from Florida is disturbing. Only six weeks from completion, Dixon’s World is plagued with accidents and disasters. The humanimal work crews are riddled with saboteurs. Reports of gator-man raids and sightings of roving snafus and lummoxes in the Everglades and Louisiana bayous have gotten beyond Hoover’s ability to suppress.
This enormous, expensive birthday gesture might gladden his heart and keep the Florida insurrection out of the news, but tomorrow, the National Guard will begin combing the swamps and erecting a barricade around Dixon World and its suburbs.
The tens of thousands of happy tourists know and worry about nothing today. The rivers of bobbing balloons and Moxie Monkey hats—made from capybara pelts—swell and burst through every dam in the park. In the painterly hour before dusk, they are sweaty and exhausted, and churn through the splendid attractions like cud through the many-chambered stomach of a cow.
So drunk on the relentless barrage of wonder, they don’t even look up when our shadow falls upon them.
The dirigible LZ131 was commissioned in 1939 as a second Hindenburg, but it crossed the Atlantic only once, last year. Then it was abandoned and forgotten in Buenos Aires by the Third Reich fugitives who escaped in it.
Now its silver skin is emblazoned with red fangs and claws, and its underbelly bristles with bombs.
We have christened it The Law of the Jungle.
I take up a microphone in my trunk and twist it round to bring to my parched lips. My undescended tusks throb in my jaw. “Will Dixon! Dr. Moreau has come to claim his debt from you!”
From the trees of Sherwood Forest and the summit of Mount Olympus, hidden anti-aircraft batteries and howitzers open up on us. The aft gondola is ripped to splinters by the first volley. Jets of flame erupt amidships, but our nacelles are filled not with hydrogen, but helium and something else.
The wounded zeppelin descends over Moxie’s Main Street, sending the crowds scurrying into the gift shops and the Hall of Emperors. The mongrels and squirrels among them throw down their brooms and litterbags and bound into the shops on all fours, hooting and screeching and biting and scratching.
The setting sun hides its face behind Mount Olympus. I pull the lever and drop our bombs.
At last, the portcullis of Fairyland Castle rises, and a black dragon with iron scales and wings like the mainsails of a clipper ship storms across the shivering drawbridge, then bathes us in fire.
Dixon has been to the Barnyard, and Dr. Hiss has made him into something more terrible than even his own worst nightmares. Only the piercing, wounded stare and the hacking, chronic cough mark the Master within the beast that rises up on its furiously flapping wings and blasts our flimsy skin with napalm bile.
The forward nacelles buckle and burst like rice paper. The gondola is upended, tossing the captain and crew and myself into a pile against the cracked windscreen.
Below us, Main Street is engulfed in green clouds. The helium gushes out of our sinking balloon, while the heavier ingredients settle over the entire park in billowing emerald waves that merge with the fog sown by our bombs.
For a moment, we seem to be hovering over a jungle. Then the massive, armored head looms before us. The dragon flies through our gutted balloon and erupts from the tail in an ecstasy of rage. We plummet in hideous slow motion into the lake at the foot of Mount Olympus.
Dixon wheels and perches on the peak of the faux-mountain, riddled with rushing rollercoasters and sky-buckets stuffed with shrieking tourists, their amusement park experience amusing no longer.
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU STARING AT?” he roars.
They look at him now, and all they see is horror.
But he still has no idea how much he’s lost.
I crawl out of the shallows of the fake lake, staring up at his towering monstrosity, as the first of the vacationing hordes come barreling out of the green fog.
On all fours.
I know he can’t hear me over his own tortured scream, the wails of the innocent, the howls of the transformed.
But it gives me great pleasure to inform him out loud that the Moreau formula has just become public domain.
“NOOOOO!” The Dixon-beast roars, and the rollercoaster is enveloped in flame.
Far below him—hooting and gibbering and crapping in their hands—the waves upon waves of now-simian rabble shimmy up drainpipes, trash gift shops, slough off their clothes, and copulate with abandon, all in plain sight of their dragon master.
“LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE!” he howls.
His wrathful flames scourge the rooftops of Fairyland, sending waves of burning monkey-men leaping over the fences and into the streets of Anaheim.
They also ignite the stockpiles of fireworks poised throughout the park.
All at once, a great butterfly-swarm of celebratory chaos animates the night sky, with dancing rainbow sparks that say more than I could ever hope to put in words.
Independence Day has come at last, for animals and humans alike.
Never, in my long, shameful life, have I raised my trunk high and sounded a note of pure animal joy, but I am powerless to resist it now.
As the Army closes in, with their shackles and cattle prods, a halo of crows descends and settles on the monorail track overhead. They wear hats and smoke cigars, and their eyes flash red in the glow of the fireworks.
They smile down at me, and—with raucous, tone-deaf voices—begin to sing my theme song, changing the words just right:
“And I know I done seen
The most beautiful dream
When an elephant
Gets his wings …”
Dread Island
By Joe R. Lansdale
This here story is a good’n, and just about every word of it is true. It’s tempting to just jump to the part about where we seen them horrible things, and heads was pulled off and we was in a flying machine and such. But I ain’t gonna do it, ’cause Jim says that ain’t the way to tell a proper yarn.
Anyhow, this here story is as true as that other story that was written down about me and Jim. But that fella wrote it down made all the money and didn’t give me or Jim one plug nickel of it. So, I’m going to try and tell this one myself like it happened, and have someone other than that old fart write it down for me, take out most of the swear words and such, and give you a gussied up version that I can sell and get some money.
Jim says when you do a thing like that, trying to make more of something than it is, it’s like you’re taking a drunk in rags and putting a hat on him and giving him new shoes with ties in them, and telling everybody he’s from up town and has solid habits. But anyone looks at him, they’re still gonna see the rags he’s wearing and know he’s a drunk ’cause of the stagger and the smell. Still, lots of drunks are more interesting than bankers, and they got good stories, even if you got to stand downwind to hear them in comfort.
If I get somebody to write it down for me, or I take a crack at it, is yet to be seen. All I know right now is it’s me talking and you listening, and you can believe me
or not, because it’s a free country. Well, almost a free country, unless your skin ain’t white. I’ve said it before: I know it ain’t right in the eyes of God to be friends with a slave, or in Jim’s case, an ex-slave that’s got his free papers. But even if it ain’t right, I don’t care. Jim may be colored, but he has sure fire done more for me than God. I tried praying maybe a dozen times, and the only thing I ever got out of it was some sore knees. So, if I go to hell, I go to hell.
Truth is, I figure heaven is probably filled with dogs, ’cause if you get right down to it, they’re the only ones deserve to be there. I don’t figure a cat or a lawyer has any chance at all.
Anyway, I got a story to tell, and keep in mind—and this part is important—I’m trying to tell mostly the truth.
Now, any old steamboater will tell you, that come the full moon, there’s an island out there in the wide part of the Mississippi. You’re standing on shore, it’s so far out it ain’t easy to see. But if the weather’s just right, and you got some kind of eye on you, you can see it. It don’t last but a night—the first night of the full moon—and then it’s gone until next time.
Steamboats try not to go by it, ’cause when it’s there, it has a current that'll drag a boat in just like a fella with a good stout line pulling in a fish. I got word about it from half a dozen fellas that knew a fella that knew a fella that had boated past it and been tugged by them currents. They said it was all they could do to get away. And there’s plenty they say didn’t get away, and ain’t never been heard of again.
Another time, me and Tom Sawyer heard a story about how sometimes you could see fires on the island. Another fella, who might have been borrowing the story from someone else, said he was out fishing with a buddy, and come close to the island, and seen a post go up near the shore, and a thing that wasn’t no kind of man was fastened to it. He said it could scream real loud, and that it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He said there was other things dancing all around the post, carrying torches and making a noise like yelling or some such. Then the currents started pulling him in, and he had to not pay it any more mind, because he and his buddy had to row for all they was worth to keep from being sucked onto the island.