Fantastic Tales of Terror

by Eugene Johnson

  Always the questions. Never the answers. Always the hopes. Never the fulfillments.

  Elvis clicked off the set and dropped the remote on the dresser just as Jack came into the room. He had a folder under his arm. He looked like he was ready for a briefing at the White House.

  “I had the woman who calls herself my niece come get me,” he said. “She took me downtown to the newspaper morgue. She’s been helping me do some research.”

  “On what?” Elvis said.

  “On our mummy.”

  “You know something about him?” Elvis asked.

  “I know plenty.”

  Jack pulled a chair up next to the bed, and Elvis used the bed’s lift button to raise his back and head so he could see what was in Jack’s folder.

  Jack opened the folder, took out some clippings, and laid them on the bed.

  Elvis looked at them as Jack talked.

  “One of the lesser mummies, on loan from the Egyptian government, was being circulated across the United States. You know, museums, that kind of stuff. It wasn’t a major exhibit, like the King Tut exhibit some years back, but it was of interest. The mummy was flown or carried by train from state to state.

  When it got to Texas, it was stolen.

  “Evidence points to the fact that it was stolen at night by a couple of guys in a silver bus. There was a witness. Some guy walking his dog or something. Anyway, the thieves broke into the museum and stole it, hoping to get a ransom probably. But in came the worst storm in East Texas history. Tornadoes. Rain. Hail. You name it. Creeks and rivers overflowed. Mobile homes were washed away. Livestock drowned. Maybe you remember it . . . No matter. It was one hell of a flood.

  “These guys got away, and nothing was ever heard from them. After you told me what you saw inside the mummy’s head—the silver bus, the storm, the bridge, all that—I came up with a more interesting, and I believe, considerably more accurate scenario.”

  “Let me guess. The bus got washed away. I think I saw it today. Right out back in the creek. It must have washed up there years ago.”

  “That confirms it. The bridge you saw breaking, that’s how the bus got in the water, which would have been as deep then as a raging river. The bus was carried downstream. It lodged somewhere nearby, and the mummy was imprisoned by debris, and recently it worked its way loose.”

  “But how did it come alive?” Elvis asked. “And how did I end up inside its memories?”

  “The speculation is broader here, but from what I’ve read, sometimes mummies were buried without their names, a curse put on their sarcophagus, or coffin, if you will. My guess is our guy was one of those. While he was in the coffin, he was a drying corpse. But when the bus was washed off the road, the coffin was overturned, or broken open, and our boy was freed of coffin and curse. Or more likely, it rotted open in time, and the holding spell was broken. And think about him down there all that time, waiting for freedom, alive, but not alive. Hungry, and no way to feed. I said he was free of his curse, but that’s not entirely true. He’s free of his imprisonment, but he still needs souls.

  “And now, he’s free to have them, and he’ll keep feeding unless he’s finally destroyed . . . You know, I think there’s a part of him, oddly enough, that wants to fit in. To be human again. He doesn’t entirely know what he’s become. He responds to some old desires and the new desires of his condition. That’s why he’s taken on the illusion of clothes, probably copying the dress of one of his victims.

  “The souls give him strength. Increase his spectral powers. One of which was to hypnotize you, kinda, draw you inside his head. He couldn’t steal your soul that way, you have to be unconscious to have that done to you, but he could weaken you, distract you.”

  “And those shadows around him?”

  “His guardians. They warn him. They have some limited powers of their own. I’ve read about them in The Everyday Man or Woman’s Book of the Soul.”

  “What do we do?” Elvis asked.

  “I think changing rest homes would be a good idea,” Jack said. “I can’t think of much else. I will say this. Our mummy is a nighttime kind of guy. Three a.m. actually. So, I’m going to sleep now, and again after lunch. Set my alarm for before dark so I can fix myself a couple cups of coffee. He comes tonight, I don’t want him slapping his lips over my asshole again. I think he heard you coming down the hall about the time he got started on me the other night, and he ran. Not because he was scared, but because he didn’t want anyone to find out he’s around. Consider it. He has the proverbial bird’s nest on the ground here.”

  After Jack left, Elvis decided he should follow Jack’s lead and nap. Of course, at his age, he napped a lot anyway, and could fall asleep at any time, or toss restlessly for hours. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

  He nestled his head into his pillow and tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Instead, he thought about things. Like, what did he really have left in life but this place? It wasn’t much of a home, but it was all he had, and he’d be damned if he’d let a foreign, graffiti-writing, soul-sucking sonofabitch in an oversized hat and cowboy boots (with elf toes) take away his family members’ souls and shit them down the visitors’ toilet.

  In the movies he had always played heroic types. But when the stage lights went out, it was time for drugs and stupidity and the coveting of women. Now it was time to be a little of what he had always fantasized being.

  A hero.

  Elvis leaned over and got hold of his telephone and dialed Jack’s room. “Mr. Kennedy,” Elvis said when Jack answered. “Ask not what your rest home can do for you. Ask what you can do for your rest home.”

  “Hey, you’re copping my best lines,” Jack said.

  “Well then, to paraphrase one of my own, ‘Let’s take care of business.’”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “You know what I’m getting at. We’re gonna kill a mummy.”

  ***

  The sun, like a boil on the bright blue ass of day, rolled gradually forward and spread its legs wide to reveal the pubic thatch of night, a hairy darkness in which stars crawled like lice, and the moon crabbed slowly upward like an albino dog tick striving for the anal gulch.

  During this slow rolling transition, Elvis and Jack discussed their plans, then they slept a little, ate their lunch of boiled cabbage and meatloaf, slept some more, ate a supper of white bread and asparagus and a helping of shit on a shingle without the shingle, slept again, awoke about the time the pubic thatch appeared and those starry lice began to crawl.

  And even then, with night about them, they had to wait until midnight to do what they had to do.

  ***

  Jack squinted through his glasses and examined his list. “Two bottles of rubbing alcohol?” Jack said.

  “Check,” said Elvis. “And we won’t have to toss it. Look here.” Elvis held up a paint sprayer. “I found this in the storage room.”

  “I thought they kept it locked,” Jack said.

  “They do. But I stole a hair pin from Dillinger and picked the lock.”

  “Great!” Jack said. “Matches?”

  “Check. I also scrounged a cigarette lighter.”

  “Good. Uniforms?”

  Elvis held up his white suit, slightly greyed in spots with a chili stain on the front. A white silk scarf and the big gold and silver and ruby-studded belt that went with the outfit lay on the bed. There were zippered boots from K-Mart.

  “Check.”

  Jack held up a grey business suit on a hanger. “I’ve got some nice shoes and a tie to go with it in my room.”

  “Check,” Elvis said.

  “Scissors?”

  “Check.”

  “I’ve got my motorized wheelchair oiled and ready to roll,” Jack said, “and I’ve looked up a few words of power in one of my magic books. I don’t know if they’ll stop a mummy, but they’re supposed to ward off evil. I wrote them down on a piece of paper.”

  “We use what we got,” Elvis said.
“Well then. 2:45 out back of the place.”

  “Considering our rate of travel, better start moving about 2:30,” Jack said.

  “Jack,” Elvis asked. “Do we know what we’re doing?”

  “No, but they say fire cleanses evil. Let’s hope they, whoever they are, are right.”

  “Check on that, too,” said Elvis. “Synchronize watches.”

  They did, and Elvis added: “Remember. The key words for tonight are Caution and Flammable. And Watch Your Ass.”

  ***

  The front door had an alarm system, but it was easily manipulated from the inside. Once Elvis had the wires cut with the scissors, they pushed the compression lever on the door, and Jack shoved his wheelchair outside, and held the door while Elvis worked his walker through. Elvis tossed the scissors into the shrubbery, and Jack jammed a paperback book between the doors to allow them re-entry, should re-entry be an option at a later date.

  Elvis was wearing a large pair of glasses with multi-colored gem-studded chocolate frames and his stained white jumpsuit with scarf and belt and zippered boots. The suit was open at the front and hung loose on him, except at the belly. To make it even tighter there, Elvis had made up an Indian medicine bag of sorts, and stuffed it inside his jumpsuit. The bag contained Kemosabe’s mask, Bull’s Purple Heart, and the newspaper clipping where he had first read of his alleged death.

  Jack had on his grey business suit with a black-and-red-striped tie knotted carefully at the throat, sensible black shoes, and black nylon socks. The suit fit him well. He looked like a former president.

  In the seat of the wheelchair was the paint sprayer, filled with rubbing alcohol, and beside it, a cigarette lighter and a paper folder of matches. Jack handed Elvis the paint sprayer. A strap made of a strip of torn sheet had been added to the device. Elvis hung the sprayer over his shoulder, reached inside his belt and got out a flattened, half-smoked stogie he had been saving for a special occasion. An occasion he had begun to think would never arrive. He clenched the cigar between his teeth, picked the matches from the seat of the wheelchair, and lit his cigar. It tasted like a dog turd, but he puffed it anyway. He tossed the folder of matches back on the chair and looked at Jack, said, “Let’s do it, amigo.”

  Jack put the matches and the lighter in his suit pocket. He sat down in the wheelchair, kicked the foot stanchions into place and rested his feet on them.

  He leaned back slightly and flicked a switch on the arm rest. The electric motor hummed, the chair eased forward.

  “Meet you there,” said Jack. He rolled down the concrete ramp, on out to the circular drive, and disappeared around the edge of the building.

  Elvis looked at his watch. It was nearly 2:45. He had to hump it. He clenched both hands on the walker and started truckin’.

  Fifteen exhaustive minutes later, out back, Elvis settled in against the door, the place where Bubba Ho-Tep had been entering and exiting. The shadows fell over him like an umbrella. He propped the paint gun across the walker and used his scarf to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

  In the old days, after a performance, he’d wipe his face with it and toss it to some woman in the crowd, watch as she creamed on herself. Panties and hotel keys would fly onto the stage at that point, bouquets of roses.

  Tonight, he hoped Bubba Ho-Tep didn’t use the scarf to wipe his ass after shitting him down the crapper.

  Elvis looked where the circular concrete drive rose up slightly to the right, and there, seated in the wheelchair, very patient and still, was Jack. The moonlight spread over Jack and made him look like a concrete yard gnome.

  Apprehension spread over Elvis like a dose of the measles. He thought: Bubba Ho-Tep comes out of that creek bed, he’s going to come out hungry andpissed, and when I try to stop him, he’s going to jam this paint gun up my ass,then jam me and that wheelchair up Jack’s ass.

  He puffed his cigar so fast it made him dizzy. He looked out at the creek bank, and where the trees gaped wide, a figure rose up like a cloud of termites, scrabbled like a crab, flowed like water, chunked and chinked like a mass of oil-field tools tumbling downhill.

  Its eyeless sockets trapped the moonlight and held it momentarily before permitting it to pass through and out the back of its head in irregular gold beams. The figure that simultaneously gave the impression of shambling and gliding, appeared one moment as nothing more than a shadow surrounded by more active shadows, then it was a heap of twisted brown sticks and dried mud molded into the shape of a human being, and in another moment, it was a cowboy-hatted, booted thing taking each step as if it were its last.

  Halfway to the rest home it spotted Elvis, standing in the dark framework of the door. Elvis felt his bowels go loose, but he was determined not to shit his only good stage suit. His knees clacked together like stalks of ribbon cane rattling in a high wind. The dog-turd cigar fell from his lips.

  He picked up the paint gun and made sure it was ready to spray. He pushed the butt of it into his hip and waited.

  Bubba Ho-Tep didn’t move. He had ceased to come forward. Elvis began to sweat more than before. His face and chest and balls were soaked. If Bubba Ho-Tep didn’t come forward, their plan was fucked. They had to get him in range of the paint sprayer. The idea was he’d soak him with the alcohol, and Jack would come wheeling down from behind, flipping matches or the lighter at Bubba, catching him on fire.

  Elvis said softly, “Come and get it, you dead piece of shit.”

  ***

  Jack had nodded off for a moment, but now he came awake. His flesh was tingling. It felt as if tiny ball bearings were being rolled beneath his skin. He looked up and saw Bubba Ho-Tep paused between the creek bank, himself, and Elvis at the door.

  Jack took a deep breath. This was not the way they had planned it. The mummy was supposed to go for Elvis because he was blocking the door. But, no soap.

  Jack got the matches and the cigarette lighter out of his coat pocket and put them between his legs on the seat of the chair. He put his hand on the gear box of the wheelchair, gunned it forward. He had to make things happen; had to get Bubba Ho-Tep to follow him, come within range of Elvis’ spray gun.

  Bubba Ho-Tep stuck out his arm and clotheslined Jack Kennedy. There was a sound like a rifle crack (no question Warren Commission, this blow was from the front), and over went the chair, and out went Jack, flipping and sliding across the driveway, the cement tearing his suit knees open, gnawing into his hide. The chair, minus its rider, tumbled over and came upright, and still rolling, veered downhill toward Elvis in the doorway, leaning on his walker, spray gun in hand.

  The wheelchair hit Elvis’ walker. Elvis bounced against the door, popped forward, grabbed the walker just in time, but dropped his spray gun.

  He glanced up to see Bubba Ho-Tep leaning over the unconscious Jack. Bubba Ho-Tep’s mouth went wide, and wider yet, and became a black toothless vacuum that throbbed pink as a raw wound in the moonlight; then Bubba Ho-Tep turned his head and the pink was not visible. Bubba Ho-Tep’s mouth went down over Jack’s face, and as Bubba Ho-Tep sucked, the shadows about it thrashed and gobbled like turkeys.

  Elvis used the walker to allow him to bend down and get hold of the paint gun. When he came up with it, he tossed the walker aside, eased himself around and into the wheelchair. He found the matches and the lighter there. Jack had done what he had done to distract Bubba Ho-Tep, to try and bring him down closer to the door. But he had failed. Yet by accident, he had provided Elvis with the instruments of mummy destruction, and now it was up to him to do what he and Jack had hoped to do together. Elvis put the matches inside his open-chested outfit, pushed the lighter tight under his ass.

  Elvis let his hand play over the wheelchair switches, as nimbly as he had once played with studio keyboards. He roared the wheelchair up the incline toward Bubba Ho-Tep, terrified, but determined, and as he rolled, in a voice cracking, but certainly reminiscent of him at his best, he began to sing “Don’t Be Cruel,” and within instants, he was on Bubba Ho-Tep a
nd his busy shadows.

  Bubba Ho-Tep looked up as Elvis roared into range, singing. Bubba Ho-Tep’s open mouth irised to normal size, and teeth, formerly non-existent, rose up in his gums like little, black stumps. Electric locusts crackled and hopped in his empty sockets. He yelled something in Egyptian. Elvis saw the words jump out of Bubba Ho-Tep’s mouth in visible hieroglyphics like dark beetles and sticks:

  1

  Elvis bore down on Bubba Ho-Tep. When he was in range, he ceased sing-ing, and gave the paint sprayer trigger a squeeze. Rubbing alcohol squirted from the sprayer and struck Bubba Ho-Tep in the face.

  Elvis swerved, screeched around Bubba Ho-Tep in a sweeping circle, came back, the lighter in his hand. As he neared Bubba, the shadows swarming around the mummy’s head separated and flew high up above him like startled bats.

  The black hat Bubba wore wobbled and sprouted wings and flapped away from his head, becoming what it had always been, a living shadow. The shadows came down in a rush, screeching like harpies. They swarmed over Elvis’ face, giving him the sensation of skinned animal pelts—blood-side in—being dragged over his flesh.

  Bubba bent forward at the waist like a collapsed puppet, and bopped his head against the cement drive. His black bat hat came down out of the dark in a swoop, expanding rapidly and falling over Bubba’s body, splattering it like spilled ink. Bubba blob-flowed rapidly under the wheels of Elvis’ mount and rose up in a dark swell beneath the chair and through the spokes of the wheels and billowed over the front of the chair and loomed upwards, jabbing his ravaged, ever-changing face through the flittering shadows, poking it right at Elvis.

  Elvis, through gaps in the shadows, saw a face like an old jack-o’-lantern gone black and to rot, with jagged eyes, nose and mouth. And that mouth spread tunnel wide, and down that tunnel-mouth Elvis could see the dark and awful forever that was Bubba’s lot, and Elvis clicked the lighter to flame, and the flame jumped, and the alcohol lit Bubba’s face, and Bubba’s head turned baby-eye blue, flowed jet-quick away, splashed upward like a black wave carrying a blazing oil slick. Then Bubba came down in a shuffle of blazing sticks and dark mud, a tar baby on fire, fleeing across the concrete drive toward the creek. The guardian shadows flapped after it, fearful of being abandoned.