Red Circus: A Dark Collection

by John L. Campbell

  Bullshit, thought Neil. When he first thought up the idea of the Beechcraft and the shootout, Dingo had practically blown him on the spot.

  Where was the gator? The gator was supposed to come out and eat the pilot. You said so!” Spittle flew from the club owner’s lips.

  “Like I said,” Neil spoke quietly in hopes of calming his boss, “the program has a small snag. The gator would have come in right after the shootout.”

  “A snag!” Dingo screamed the word and stood up. “I’ll snag you, motherfucker!” You’re out!”

  “What the hell do you mean?” demanded Neil.

  “Just what I said. You’re history, baby. Gone. Give me the keys and take a walk.”

  Neil stood up, enraged. “Godammit, Dingo, you can’t do this! I am this fucking club!”

  Over at the couch, all six-foot-three of Carlo rose to his feet, clenching his massive fists. Neil ignored him and took a step towards the desk. “I designed this place, came up with the whole idea. You won’t be able to do shit without me, you greasy little fuck!”

  Dingo tried a brave grin which failed miserably, and took a step back, bumping into his chair. “Wrong, baby,” he managed after a few seconds. “I can get another holo-whiz like that,” he snapped his fingers, “and for half the money.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Neil growled, and started around the desk. Dingo backed off, stumbling over his swivel chair, eyes wide. “Carlo!”

  Carlo advanced on Neil, his stupid eyes dark and without emotion. Neil turned to face him, his anger momentarily forgotten at the sight of the approaching monster. Dingo giggled, his voice high. “Carlo, if he makes another move, break his fucking arms.”

  A slow smile lifted Carlo’s broad lips as he eyed the hologram technician. Neil looked at the bouncer, saw that he wasn’t coming any closer, and turned to Dingo once more. “You can’t do this, man,” he said softly, trying unsuccessfully to keep the note of pleading from his voice. “It was just one little mistake. I can fix it.”

  Dingo wiped a hand across his lips, confident and superior once more now that Neil was beaten. “You’re out. Now get out.”

  Neil stared at him for a moment, then turned and left. He didn’t bother to drop off the keys, and Dingo didn’t notice. The technician walked through the club toward the exit. He didn’t notice any visible drop in the number of customers. He paused at the railing to look out at the swamp he had created. An immense alligator drifted lazily past, stirring the water with soft splashes.

  “Where were you when I needed you?” Neil asked the hologram, then walked down the path, through the front doors and out into the Los Angeles night.

  Getting another hologram technician to replace Neil was almost as easy as Dingo had thought it would be. There were plenty of hungry whiz kids out there who would work for a fraction of what Neil’s skills demanded. So what if they weren’t quite as good? After all, Neil had come to work for Dingo straight from Disney World, where he had been some kind of special projects director. It had been the money, though, that had lured him from the rat kingdom to the west coast. No money anymore, Neil baby, Dingo thought.

  The weekend at The Glades was beyond imagining. In two days, Dingo almost paid for half the hologram and sound equipment, and he promptly forgot his own claims that the “drug deal” glitch would ruin business. He also pretty much forgot about Neil entirely.

  But Neil hadn’t forgotten about him.

  It was a Sunday night two weeks later, actually early Monday morning, and the last bartender clocked out and departed. Carlo locked the doors and switched off the neon signs on the front of the building. The bouncer walked back through the silent club, ignoring one of the cypress trees that appeared a little out of focus. He didn’t understand much about holograms, and figured the new techie would fix it tomorrow. He stepped off the platform and headed for the office.

  Dingo was relaxed in his chair, head thrown back, eyes closed with a small smile on his face. Toni knelt in front of him, her head bobbing up and down in his lap. He lazily reached out to the desk, found a vial and did another quick toot of coke. He orgasmed before he even knew he was ready, and then sat there with his pants around his ankles. He watched Toni re-button her blouse and rise to get her bag off the leather couch.

  She hung the bag over her shoulder. “Want me to come by the house later?”

  Dingo snorted laughter, still slumped in the chair. “What for? I’m finished.” Toni glared at him, then stormed out of the office, Dingo giggling behind her. She passed the main club without entering the still-running hologram, heading for the front door, when she realized Carlo would have already locked it. Not wanting to find the big moron, and pissed at the asshole in the office, she pushed out a fire exit. The Detex alarm didn’t sound, and the door clanked shut.

  Dingo picked himself up out of his chair and bent over to pull up his slacks. He was just fastening the top button when he heard a loud crash outside his office. He yanked the door open and yelled, “Carlo?”

  There was no reply.

  Suddenly afraid that a customer might have hidden in the club after closing in order to trash the place or rip it off, Dingo ran back to his desk, jerked open a drawer and grabbed the revolver he kept there. “This’ll teach that fuck something,” he mumbled as he strode out into the barn-like area where the hologram machines stood. He couldn’t see the club area from outside the phantom images, but he knew exactly where to walk in order to reach the stairs.

  He walked up the low steps and onto the platform, and it took a few seconds to realize that he should be out of the hologram by now. He wasn’t. The swamp was all around him. In fact it looked as if he was standing shin-deep in swamp water, and for an instant he was enraged that his Gucci shoes would be ruined. He reached out a hand and touched a table, hidden beneath the image of a large, wet fern. He had never truly appreciated just how realistic the hologram was until now, and knowing it was all a fake didn’t help his nervousness when he saw a huge turtle go paddling past where the bandstand should have been. Anger swelled within him. Another screw-up, it had to be the new techie. Fuck it, he would just fire him too. Plenty more where he came from. Dingo turned in the direction that would lead him to the bar, intending to switch off the faulty program. What he saw ahead of him was a small clearing in the trees, with a mound of peat and willows rising out of the water. Carlo was laying there, his massive body spread over seemingly wet earth.

  Or at least what was left of Carlo.

  Dingo’s mouth opened at the sight of his dead bouncer; blood-soaked clothes, one arm missing, and his torso mauled and almost severed. A look of shock was on the bouncer’s face. How had Dingo not heard the chainsaw?

  “Welcome to my hologram, dickhead.”

  Dingo whirled at the familiar voice, and saw Neil standing ten feet away, hands behind his back and smiling.

  “Hope you’re ready to party,” Neil said, laughing softly.

  Dingo looked back at the butchered bouncer and lost control of his bowels, soiling his expensive slacks. Neil laughed harder and started towards him, revealing the big knife he’d hidden behind his back.

  “Fuck you!” Dingo screamed, lifting the revolver and emptying the six round chamber into Neil’s chest. Neil didn’t stop or hesitate, just walked closer, waving the knife and laughing. The bullets had gone right through him.

  Dingo’s eyes bulged for a second, and then he started to laugh too. A hologram. Only a fucking hologram! He brayed laughter into the empty club, dropping the gun and hearing it thud on the dance floor beneath the phantom water. He laughed until his eyes watered, cackling harder as an immense alligator moved slowly past him.

  “Fuck you, Neil!” he shouted, and kicked at the gator image in contempt.

  The image snarled, whipped its head around and bit Dingo’s leg off at the knee. Dingo screamed and dropped to the floor, the ghostly water seeming to rise to his chin. The gator made a wet, choking sound as the leg dropped from its mouth, and it walked over to the
howling club owner. Blood jetted across its snout as Dingo tried to crawl away, dragging his stump behind him. The gator roared and chomped down on a flailing arm, tugging until it came away from the man’s shoulder.

  Dingo’s screams quickly faded to gurgles, and as the last of the tranquilizers – administered prior to its same-day air delivery from Louisiana – flushed out of the animal’s system, the gator settled itself down to a nice feed.

  TERRITORIAL

  It was 2:15 am, and The Thing Under the Stairs was hungry and tired of waiting. No more lurking, it decided. Time to hunt.

  In the darkness behind the open plank risers, a deeper blackness shifted, and emerged into the basement. The pilot light from the nearby furnace revealed a form two feet tall, and hinted at greasy black fur and overly long arms ending in nimble claws. A leathery tail followed behind it.

  The Thing at the Bottom of the Stairs crept towards it in the dark. “What are you doing?” Its voice was a gravelly hiss.

  “Hungry,” was the whispered reply.

  From deeper in the gloom of the basement, The Thing in the Cellar rasped, “Get back under there. This is not allowed.”

  The Terror – for that’s what they all were, each a related but slightly different species – ignored its cousin and started up the steps, tail dragging with light thumps over each riser. Its leathery feet and claws made only the barest of sounds as it climbed. From behind it came low, angry warning growls. When it reached the top it pushed open the door with a creak, and peered into the kitchen.

  A pale, blue-green light from the microwave clock illuminated its pointed ears and mouthful of needle-like teeth, and its close-set red eyes glimmered as it looked around the room. Then there was a quick slapping of feet as it skittered from the doorway, past the refrigerator and under the kitchen table. It crouched, still and unmoving for a long moment, and listened.

  The house slept.

  “Come back,” hissed the tandem voices of its cellar cousins, the sound faint behind him. The Thing Under the Stairs moved again, quickly through a doorway and into the living room, where it concealed itself behind a sofa. Nothing called to it in here. For some reason, few Terrors occupied the main floor of any home, with a few rare exceptions, such as The Thing in the Little Room Down the Hall, or The Thing in the Study. Such was not the case here.

  Every house had them, though, some more heavily populated than others, but no dwelling where humans lived and slept was immune. Some homes, big sprawling farmhouses or vast mansions or drafty castles, had dozens. The Vanderbilt Mansion in Rhode Island was rumored to have over a hundred.

  Adults had vague memories of them from childhood, and even joked about them as part of a shared experience of growing up, but none really believed. That belief was lost during the slide into the stresses and rituals of mundane, daily life. By the time adulthood set in, fears of Terrors in the Night held no more power over them, for they had been exchanged for new fears; social acceptance, relationships, jobs, aging, mortgages. Adults were no longer of any use to the Terrors they unknowingly lived with.

  But children knew they were real. Children could see them, and were afraid. It was that fear upon which the Terrors fed.

  The Thing Under the Stairs padded across the carpeted room and slipped under a long entry table near the front door.

  How they came into being was something Terrors never thought about. They just were. In houses without children, they were forced to go dormant, suppressing their hunger until a time when a child would visit or move in. It was a state which could last for decades.

  But not tonight. The Thing Under the Stairs was done waiting.

  This house had been occupied for a very long time by a retired couple, followed by a childless couple who never received young visitors, and it had been more than thirty years since there had been a source of sustenance. The Terrors had gone silent, starving and slipping into a motionless, brooding dream state. A year ago the house had been sold to another pair of childless adults. But shortly thereafter, something changed.

  The couple had a baby.

  It awoke the Terrors, and they began to shift and whisper to one another in the dark, anticipating. But it would be another two years before the child was old enough and perceptive enough to see and understand them, and begin exuding the fear which would satiate their hunger.

  The Thing Under the Stairs wanted it now, and it wanted more than that. It wanted to put these capable claws and fangs to use. It wanted flesh. Succulent, young flesh.

  It left the darkness beneath the table and climbed to the second floor, talons rustling over the carpet as it climbed. At the top it paused, sniffed at the air and licked its sharp teeth with a small black tongue. Mid way down the upstairs hall, the ceiling trap to the attic creaked open a few inches, and red eyes glared out of the blackness.

  “Get out of here!” The Thing in the Attic growled. “Go back where you belong!”

  The Thing Under the Stairs ignored it and slipped up the hall, sniffing at doors, then stopping at one which was open a crack. It pressed its palm against the wood and pushed it open slowly, immediately overcome with the strong scent of humankind and baby powder. A Disney nightlight cast the room in muted yellow, showing a pair of figures sleeping in the bed. Its red eyes moved past them and fixed on the crib against the wall.

  To its right, a narrow door creaked open, and The Thing in the Closet gripped the doorframe with curving black nails and peeked around the edge. Three feet tall and glossy black, it bared its fangs, eyes glowing.

  “This is forbidden,” it hissed, its voice full of rage and hatred. “Get back to your hole!”

  “Get out!” snarled The Thing in the Attic, its voice coming from the hallway.

  Throughout the house came a distant, muffled chorus of angry warnings and threats, soft enough that only the Terror could hear them.

  The Thing Under the Stairs glanced at the closet and smiled cruelly. What could it do? What could any of them do? It was the fear of what they might do that was the source of their power, and then only among children. The clawed hand that lunged out between the stairs to grab an ankle, the evil face peering up a stairway from below before dragging its victim into the darkness, the thump in the attic and the slithering sound as something horrible descended. But no Terror had actually done these things, had never actually snatched up and fed on a child. A brush of a touch in the dark, a name whispered, a half-glimpsed movement in the shadows, this was what they did, and nothing more. Fear them? It was fear.

  And The Thing Under the Stairs realized it was also unique, exceptional. It alone could break free of the restrictions enslaving its kind. It would kill, and it would feed.

  The Terror moved slowly towards the crib, flexing its claws. Through the slats, a smooth, sleepy round face was lit by the nightlight. The baby blinked uncomprehendingly at the approaching nightmare while its parents slept nearby. The Thing Under the Stairs gasped in delight as it reached out, already tasting the soft, innocent meat. It wondered if the baby would squeal when it was eaten.

  And then a long arm covered in coarse, black hair shot out from the darkness under the hem of the comforter, sinking its talons deeply into the intruder’s back. The Thing Under the Stairs shrieked as it was dragged back from the crib.

  “Mine,” croaked The Thing Under the Bed, wrestling the smaller, squirming Terror into its own dark place. There was a snapping of jaws and the crunch of teeth, and as the devouring began, there was indeed some squealing.

  The adults shifted, dreaming.

  The baby crawled to its belly and drifted off.

  And the house was still once more.

  ALLIGATOR MAGNETS & NUCLEAR WAR

  The trees are burning. I guess the squirrels are too, because I hear shrieking.

  My hair is gone, along with the kitchen, the lovely granite countertops so much gravel around me, the appliances molten slag that still bubbles. It’s difficult to breathe, and I know the heat has finished my throat and lungs.
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  The fridge is still standing, though, the big double-wide, stainless steel monstrosity that took two years to pay off. It’s leaning back against what’s left of a wall, one of the doors hanging open, steaming liquid dribbling from within. Was that a carton of eggs? Pear yogurt? A bottle of salsa?

  A withering breeze sends hot ash spiraling through the air and coals tumbling across the ruined floor, stinging my remaining eye. The left side of my face is stuck to the blackened, curling linoleum, and if I pull away, I know my face will stay.

  Shrieking, endless, rising and falling.

  C’mon, squirrels, just let it go.

  Don’t have the energy to wonder how or why, can’t sum up the need to care. Fires rage throughout the neighborhood, I can hear their ravenous grumble. Bet the Toyota didn’t bear up as well as this Kenmore, and the thought makes me smile.

  A handful of teeth tumble out of their blistered sockets.

  Candace loved alligators, had to pick one up every place we went. A few still cling to the charred steel of the door that stayed closed. The one from Miami wearing sunglasses. The silly pink one she got in the Keys. The dark green one from Tampa with the chipped tail, still holding a photo, now black and curled and meaningless. That’s the one of Candace holding Aaron at his baptism.

  I raise my hand, feeling like I’m pulling it out of a wet glove, and it’s a skeleton’s fingers, wet and white, that paw at the picture. I was wrong, not squirrels screaming at all. It’s Candace, out of view behind jumbled bricks and twisted plumbing, over where the nursery was.

  The fires finally reach us. Mercy and quiet.

  CAIN ROSE UP

  Heat rose off the desert, distorting the air into wavering, liquid sheets. Rattlers basked on the flay surfaces of hundred degree rocks, and even the sand seemed to sizzle. The landscape was broken only by an occasional cactus, and red smudges on the horizon gave the impression of distant mountains.