Gleefully Macabre Tales

by Jeff Strand

  "Does the same thing work with toes?" the man inquired.

  "Absolutely. What’s so cool about toes is that you can play the ‘This Little Piggy’ game with each one before you cut it off, which makes you sound really sadistic."

  "And when the little piggy has roast beef, you could feed her that toe!"

  I shook my head. "No, no, no, you haven’t been paying attention."

  "I’m sorry, sir."

  "It’s okay."

  "Is there something we can do about that screaming?"

  "Sure. Get rid of the tongue. But tongues are slippery creatures, so you’ll have to be quick."

  "Should I cut it out or rip it out by the root?"

  "Try to rip it out. See what happens."

  "I can’t hold on to it."

  "Yep, that ties into what I said earlier about it being slippery. You’ll have to cut it out."

  "Maybe I should give her a forked tongue first."

  "That would be cool."

  "She’s squirming too much!"

  "So make her less squirmy. No, not that hard, you don’t want to kill her. Good. Okay, now try the tongue again."

  "Oh yeah, this is much better."

  "Quit playing with it. Just cut it out."

  "I got most of it."

  "Good job."

  "She’s still screaming."

  "Yes, she is. So what lesson have we learned?"

  "Uh…that screaming comes from the lungs and not the tongue?"

  "Lungs? Or vocal cords?"

  "I don’t know! You’re the fucking mentor!"

  "Now, now, take your frustration out on her, not me. Wait, too much frustration. Look what you did."

  "Sorry."

  "You don’t sound sorry."

  "Well, I’m not. I don’t think you know what you’re doing. I’m leaving."

  "No…don’t go!" I followed the man out of the van. "You were doing fine! Really you were! I give you an A+! That’s the best grade there is! C’mon, you can’t just—"

  Something hit me in the face very, very hard. As I fell to the ground I realized that it was a fist. The fist was followed by several shoes belonging to several different people. Another guy climbed into the van, and when he came out he didn’t look happy.

  "You son of a bitch!" he screamed, with tears in his eyes.

  I tried to explain that I hadn’t done anything, that I’d merely been instructing the man, but it was difficult to speak coherently with his fist smashing into my jaw over and over. I quickly lost consciousness and slept well.

  I woke up in a small, barren room. My whole body hurt, especially the parts that had been punched and kicked. I’m not completely sure how long I was in there. I’m guessing about two days, but it might have been two hours instead. Hard to say.

  Finally the door opened and the gentleman who’d called me a son of a bitch entered. He said a lot of things to me, but he wasn’t enunciating clearly and I couldn’t understand most of it, although I figured out that the teenage girl the man had killed was his sister, and that he’d decided not to involve the police. I thought that was remarkably generous of him and offered my gratitude. Then I realized that he planned to punish me himself. To give me what he called "a sneak preview," he removed my shoe and sock, and cut off the little toe on my right foot with a butcher knife. (He didn’t play the "This Little Piggy" game.)

  He told me he’d be back soon and then left.

  He came back with a glass of water, explaining that he didn’t want me to die of anything as painless as dehydration. I have to admit that I did a lot of begging at this point. He did a lot of laughing and said he’d be back with his friends.

  And so I’m waiting. I have been for a long time.

  I’m scared.

  This wait is almost driving me insane.

  But not quite.

  I wish to God that the wait had driven me insane, because now I can hear footsteps outside the door. Bad things are going to happen to me, and if I’m out of my mind, maybe they won’t hurt as much.

  High Stakes

  After losing his entire gambling, hotel room, nudie show, and food budget in just under three hours, Jeremy was down to his last quarter. He stood in front of the heartless slot machine, silently cursing Margaret for making him leave the credit cards at home with her.

  He wiped his sweaty palms off on his jeans and breathed deeply, in and out, in and out, preparing himself for the crucial mission ahead. He had to win. It didn’t have to be a big payoff—two quarters could turn into four, four could turn into eight, eight could turn into sixteen, and then he’d be well on his way to not having to sleep outside amidst the pornography distributors for the next three nights.

  Jeremy inserted the quarter into the slot and cracked his knuckles. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to become one with the machine. Jackpot…jackpot…jackpot…he thought, hoping that sheer force of will or some previously unlocked psychic abilities would encourage the machine to give up its bounty.

  He pulled down the arm.

  Cherry. Bar. Bar.

  Meaning he just got his quarter back.

  He reached into the coin return and frowned. Instead of his quarter there was a red token, with "One Free Try at High Stakes" engraved upon it. The address was on the back. Great. Just great. Now he had to go and find this stupid place, and probably just lose the token for his efforts. Next vacation he was going someplace where he could shoot animals and relax.

  ««—»»

  High Stakes was off the main Vegas strip, a comparatively tiny, non-descript place without all the flashing lights and gimmicks of the other casinos. Jeremy walked into the main entrance and found himself surrounded by a fairly typical display of slot machines, though there couldn’t be more than twenty or so. There were no other patrons, just an elderly man in a tuxedo who sprung to attention as he entered.

  "Good evening, sir," said the man. "Welcome to High Stakes. First I must ask if you have one of our special tokens."

  Jeremy nodded and held it up for him to see.

  "Ah, excellent. Then feel free to use it in any machine you wish, and good luck to you."

  Jeremy strolled around, checking out the machines. They all looked about the same to him, though he noticed that all of the displays read bar, bar, bar. Maybe that was a good sign. He stopped at one on the far end, inserted the coin, sucked in a deep breath, and pulled down the arm.

  Bar. Bar. Bar.

  A soft bell rang as dozens of dollar coins fell into the coin return. "Nice place you’ve got here," Jeremy told the man, smiling.

  The man smiled back. "Definitely."

  Jeremy dropped one of the coins into the slot and pulled the arm. Bar. Bar. Bar. Another big payoff. "Yes!" This was what gambling was all about!

  He cracked his knuckles, kissed the coin for luck, and tried again.

  Bar. Bar.

  And a picture of a finger.

  He leaned forward to look at the display more closely. Finger? What was that supposed to mean?

  An iron claw swung out from a hidden panel on the side of the machine, latching firmly onto his left wrist. "What the hell—?"

  He tugged as hard as he could, but his wrist wasn’t going anywhere. Another claw swung out of the machine, attached itself to his little finger, and neatly pinched it off. Jeremy shrieked as the claws swung back into the hidden panels, taking his finger along with them.

  The man stepped over to him, balancing a tray. "Would you care for a drink before you try again?"

  "Are you crazy?" Jeremy demanded, almost in tears, falling to his knees in pain. "That thing ripped my finger off!"

  "Well, sir, perhaps some white wine would dull the pain. We have a splendid Zinfandel."

  "You sick freak!" Jeremy wailed. "Why would you possibly think I’d ever want to play again?"

  "Why, to win your finger back, of course. We’re living in the age of laser surgery, my friend. It can be reattached."

  Jeremy stood up shakily, his right hand clenched
over the stump where his finger had been. "No way."

  "The stakes are high, but the odds are in your favor. You don’t want to walk out of here having lost a finger for good, do you?"

  No, he didn’t.

  But this was absolutely insane.

  Still, in the time it would take to call the police and have them raid the place, it might be too late to reattach his finger. He’d be permanently disfigured.

  Jeremy thought for a long moment, then dropped another coin into the slot and pulled down the arm.

  Bar. Bar. Finger.

  He turned and sprinted down the aisle, but the claw telescoped forward and snatched his wrist. As it pulled him back to the machine, the second claw pinched off his index finger. Jeremy screamed.

  "You can still win them back," said the man. "The odds remain in your favor. Your life will be much harder with two missing fingers, don’t you think?"

  Jeremy gritted his teeth, forced the pain out of his mind, and tried again.

  Bar. Bar. Hand.

  He almost quit after that.

  Special Features

  "Hi, this is Dale Marshall, director of Draining."

  "And I’m Craig Marshall, producer of Draining."

  "I guess the first thing we should talk about is the opening credits, or, more specifically, the lack of them."

  "Right. Actually, it’s pretty common these days to save all the credits for the end of the movie and just open with the title and nothing else, but we didn’t even want to have the title at the beginning, we just wanted to jump right into the story."

  "If I remember correctly, we sort of bounced back and forth about that idea, but really, when you see a title on the screen it screams ‘This is only a movie!’ and we were going for total realism."

  "Yeah."

  "Anyway, the title Draining is on the DVD itself, so people aren’t going to sit there thinking that they’re watching, y’know, Josie and the Pussycats."

  "I actually liked that movie."

  "Well, maybe you should take a good, hard look at yourself in the mirror and figure out if there are personal changes that need to be made." [Laughter.]

  "Here we are in the garage where we shot most of the film. Again, we were going for total believability, so we didn’t want to do a lot of set design. We added a couple of things, but what you’re seeing here is pretty much the real-life garage."

  "And we couldn’t afford a set designer."

  "Yeah, that too."

  "Great pan here by our director of photography, Gary Lawson. We didn’t have access to a Steadicam—"

  "We didn’t even have a dolly track."

  "Right, no dolly track or anything like that, so it was just Gary scooting along on his knees to get the shot."

  "Although we did sweep up the floor so he wouldn’t get any nails in his legs."

  "Because we care about our crew, damn it!" [Laughter.]

  "And there’s our lead!"

  "The amazing Lee Newman! He was great to work with."

  "Oh, definitely. A real trooper."

  "He wasn’t getting paid and he was in almost every scene, but you never once heard the guy complain."

  "I heard him complain a few times."

  "He didn’t like the food we served, that’s for sure. But if you’re on a Hollywood set, it’s just one egomaniac after another, and we didn’t have anything like that here."

  "Hard to be an egomaniac when you’re working eighteen-hour days and getting paid in Ramen Noodles."

  "That is true."

  "But he was really awesome to work with. We couldn’t have found a more talented lead."

  "Should we talk about how this project started?"

  "We came up with the idea, what, five years ago?"

  "Five years, yeah."

  "We’d been doing little movies since we were kids. Nothing major, just filming bugs and frogs and neighborhood dogs and stuff like that."

  "We should probably mention that we’re brothers."

  "I think they got that from the last names."

  "Yeah, because ‘Marshall’ is so obscure!"

  "No relation to the other sibling team of Garry and Penny Marshall, of course."

  "Of course."

  "And, hey, the first shot of Trish!"

  "Patricia Damon."

  "She really looked great in this film."

  "Yeah, she did, and she was so wonderful to work with."

  "She was one of the easiest casting choices. We basically just happened to see her shopping for groceries, and we looked at each other and said ‘That’s the one!’"

  "She had this innocence about her that made her perfect for the part. And amazing talent for somebody who’d never been in a film before."

  "Yeah, absolutely. Now, because she had no on-camera experience, we wanted to make sure we got the most authentic reaction possible. So we didn’t tell her what she was going to see. I don’t think we told her anything, did we?"

  "Uh…no, we did tell her that it was going to be frightening."

  "That’s right, we did. We wanted to get that build-up of terror before we even started shooting. We pretty much forced our cast to become method actors." [Laughter.]

  "Now what you’re seeing here is actually a mix of two different takes, because when she was struggling she hit Lee a lot harder than we’d anticipated. She didn’t hurt him too badly, but his reaction was out of character. If you watch carefully, you can see that there’s extra tape around her wrists in a couple of the shots."

  "Freeze frame geeks, have at it!"

  "We did have quite a few continuity problems during the editing process, but I think we covered most of them pretty well. Nobody never really said anything. If we were smart we’d shut up about it and not give away all of our failings as filmmakers!"

  "Oh, I love this shot."

  "Great shot. How many takes of that one?"

  "Jeez, I don’t even remember. At least ten."

  "Essentially, Gary was lying on his back with the camera, while Lee and Trish stood over him. But of course Trish was kicking and struggling and she kept kicking Gary and wrecking the shot."

  "We’re lucky she didn’t break the camera."

  "Yeah, we would’ve been screwed. But look at that. We move back, we pan up (and this is just Gary standing up) and see that she’s chained to the wall. Fantastic."

  "But it took us all night to get that damn shot. We weren’t quite as ambitious as we got further into the shooting schedule." [Laughter.]

  [Long silence.]

  "I think we’re supposed to be saying something." [Laughter.]

  "I haven’t watched this in over a year. I forgot how gripping some of this early stuff is."

  "Okay, we’ve got to talk about that moment!"

  "The blood in the mouth shot! That, ladies and gentlemen, is the genius of Lee Newman. So he slices her arm with the straight razor, and we get this unexpected arterial spray that goes right in his mouth! We knew that once we got into the actual cutting scenes, it was going to be tough to do more than one take, so I’m watching thinking ‘Oh, crap, he’s gonna vomit and ruin the shot.’ But, no, he turns to the camera and wiggles his bloody tongue! Those moments can never be scripted."

  "It’s all in the casting."

  "He was pissed, though. Look at the way he’s cutting her leg. When he carves Whore, that wasn’t in the script, either."

  "That part was. It was in the shooting script."

  "Are you sure? I thought it was Bitch."

  "Oh, right, I just meant that cutting a word in her leg was in the script."

  "I think Whore works better."

  "I remember Lee explaining it afterwards. Because when you look at Trish, obviously you can tell that she wasn’t a whore. I wouldn’t necessarily say that she looks virginal, but she’s at least not whorish."

  "I think she looks virginal."

  "Do you?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay, I can see that, I guess. Lee’s point, though, was that she�
��s definitely not a whore, so when he carves that on her leg we can really see how disturbed the character is."

  "And when you trust your cast, you get these wonderful moments."

  "The hand part. That wasn’t originally going to be a saw; it was just going to be a knife. But Lee couldn’t get through the bone."

  "That’ll be one of the outtakes. He’s just sitting there cutting and cutting and cutting and the goddamn hand won’t come off!"

  "So the part where the saw starts cutting her wrist, that’s actually an insert shot we did later of him cutting her other wrist. And the sawing we’re seeing now is actually him sawing in the groove made by the knife."