Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

by Orrin Grey

  DANA: Did he actually think he could do it? Dig up a body without getting caught? Especially that body?

  Conner is quiet, just the swishing of his shoe on the carpet. Back and forth, back and forth. It calls to mind a pendulum, a metronome, the ticking of a clock, the inevitable passage of time, the grinding approach of death. As if it’s triggered by the association, the ticking of the clock on the wall becomes audible in the silence between the two friends, measuring out every beat of time that passes before Conner replies.

  CONNER: I don’t know what he thought. I talked to him last, what, a week ago? I drove by his place. It was a mess. Old containers of takeout food, the whole bit. Cluttered, like it got when he was working, but different too. Not just junk. He had these books. Library books, some of them, and others books from his collection, pulled down off his shelves and stacked everywhere. Lovecraft, Bierce, Poe, Machen, that lot. Biographies of them, too, collected letters.

  DANA: Not unusual reading for him…

  CONNER: No, but it was different, like I said. He had it all marked up, Post-it notes stuck to everything, highlighters out. All these notes on legal pads. He must’ve used up half a dozen of them, all stacked next to his desk. He was working something out, working something up.

  DANA: Doesn’t sound all that much different than anytime he was working on a story.

  CONNER: I know it doesn’t, but it was somehow. I can’t really explain it. It just felt different. You know in movies when they go into the room of someone who’s been working out a conspiracy theory, and there’s a big board with newspaper clippings and whatever else all connected up with pins and yarn? This felt like that, though not on some big board. Just, kind of all over the room.

  DANA: And whatever it was he was working on, he thought he could work it out by digging up Lovecraft’s body?

  CONNER: He kept talking about how they all died. He had them memorized. Lovecraft dead of cancer. Poe of “congestion of the brain.” Blackwood of cerebral thrombosis. Leiber of some unspecified brain disease of his own. Hodgson killed by an artillery shell in Belgium, Howard by a self-inflicted bullet to the brain, and Bierce unaccounted for somewhere in Mexico. But who knows what would have become of them had nature been left to take its course?

  Dana stops pacing. She’s standing by the air conditioner unit, the blue morgue light from outside catches half her face, throwing the rest into shadow.

  DANA: But Gordon didn’t think that’s what they really died of?

  Conner doesn’t answer right away. He looks down at his foot, going back and forth, and he seems to become aware of the ticking of the clock, and from outside in the night the sound of cicadas, rising up suddenly. He stops moving his foot, leaves it frozen in the air, and looks up at Dana as he answers.

  CONNER: No. He said that something was growing inside them.

  from “The Mimic Rout”

  by Gordon Phillips

  When I venture out of my apartment now, which I do only rarely and by the gravest of necessity, I no longer see the people around me as I once did. They appear to me not as they look to each other, nor as I had always imagined them before, but as they truly are. Maimed mannequins, their crumpled faces merely pallid masks from which vacant sockets gaze.

  They move with the slumping, quivering gait of broken animatronics in some sideshow spookhouse. Mindless brute creatures, their puppet strings extending unbroken into the black abyss of the heavens, toward which they cast their scripted prayers and their rote imaginings.

  I always felt apart from the world, never like I belonged. I always thought that this was a defect in me, that I was a round peg in society’s square hole, but now I know the truth. The other entities that inhabit this world, the others I thought of as peers and friends, coworkers and family, are in fact simple automatons, eking out a pointless existence at the behest of invisible masters they will never know or understand. The only exceptions are myself and those like me. Finally, I see us as we truly are, as well. Not the plastic flesh that we wear to blend in with the puppets, but our true forms, bulbous and many eyed, squirming and creeping and flying, sending out our own ghostly light. Each of us different, each of us truly unique, as the staggering mannequins only imagine themselves to be, but we are bound together, siblings in our difference from that mimic rout.

  And when the day comes that the marionette throng sees us for what we truly are, we will seem as monstrous to them as they now seem to me. And though they are mindless things, they unconsciously abhor that which reminds them of their sameness, and so when they know us they will turn on us like the maenads who tore apart Orpheus, and, like that ancient poet, we will be rent asunder and destroyed, though even the rocks and trees refuse to strike us.

  I know that this is the fate which awaits me. I see it each time I venture out of my apartment. I see the hatred there, in their blank faces on the bus and at the grocers. They hate me for my difference, even though they don’t yet know it, and one day soon they will unmake me.

  Curtains. Applause.

  Dana’s apartment, a month before that. A nice enough place, but small. The apartment of a student, maybe someone working her way through medical school, or law school. Light blue walls, white trim. It’s dark. The only sources of illumination are the cold morgue light that comes in through the blinds, and the cone of yellow made by a small bedside lamp. A digital clock on the same bedside table says that it’s three in the morning.

  Dana is in bed, the phone pressed to her ear. Her glasses are off, lying on the table next to some change and her keys. It looks like maybe she got in late. There’s a jacket draped over a chair at her desk, a pair of jeans in a pile on the floor next to it, though the room is otherwise neat. The dimly lit spines of the books that line her headboard aren’t the kinds of things that Gordon writes. Not even a Stephen King novel to be found. Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, James Bond.

  We can hear Gordon’s voice from the other side of the line.

  GORDON: Dana, listen, I’m sorry I woke you.

  DANA: You said that already.

  GORDON: Yeah. Look, it’s just, I need someone to talk to. Need to talk to someone.

  DANA: Isn’t Conner around?

  GORDON: He’s out of town. He didn’t answer. Look, I know you don’t care about this stuff, but, please, Dana, just let me talk, okay?

  Dana flops back onto the bed, switching the phone so that it’s pressed to her other ear. She pulls the blanket up to her shoulders, closes her eyes.

  DANA: Sure, bro. Go ahead and talk. I’ll mumble now and then, so that you know I’m only half-asleep.

  GORDON: Okay, so you’re familiar with the concept of the muse, right?

  DANA: “In spite of Virtue and the Muse…”

  GORDON: Right, sure. But what if we’ve had it backward all this time? What if there’s no external muse, what if instead it works the other way around?

  DANA: Conner really is the better person for you to bounce story ideas off of, kid.

  GORDON: This isn’t a story idea. I mean, it’s also that, kind of, it’s been in all my stories lately, but it’s just… just an idea idea. Just hear me out, okay?

  DANA: Mmkay.

  GORDON: Okay, so, what if instead of something else making us write, we’re making something by writing. Not just making up fictional characters and worlds and whatever, but actually making something real. I mean, imagination, that’s a kind of energy, right? And energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

  DANA: That’s matter…

  GORDON: Whatever. Anyway, energy doesn’t just dissipate. It goes somewhere, does something. It changes things, makes things happen, right? Imagination is a kind of radioactivity. It throws off sparks, hurls out bits of itself that get into everything around it, causes mutations. Or hell, maybe it isn’t anything like science at all. Maybe it’s an evocation, a magic spell. Maybe you put the right words down in the right order, and you call something up from somewhere, conjure something. Or maybe there’s no differenc
e, really, magic spell or radiation. Black mewling god at the center of the universe or the spark of creativity in the human brain. Maybe it’s all one and the same.

  DANA: Look, Gordy, I can’t understand this kinda stuff when it isn’t three in the morning, okay?

  GORDON: I know, Dana. I just… I’m scared there’s something wrong with me.

  Dana smiles, though her eyes stay closed, and, when she speaks, she sounds a little more awake, a little more herself.

  DANA: There’s always been something wrong with you, bro. Have you talked to Dr. Sherman about this stuff?

  GORDON: Yeah, a little. But it usually works better when I write it down, channel it into the work, y’know?

  DANA: Or call me in the middle of the night?

  GORDON: Or that, yeah.

  There’s a moment of silence and the sound of the connection becomes audible, a distant crackling, like tinfoil being crumpled at the bottom of a mine. Dana starts to sit up in bed again, opens her eyes. Outside, the cicadas are singing.

  GORDON: Dana, I’m sorry.

  DANA: Don’t worry about it, kid.

  But the connection has already been broken, and the phone that Dana holds in her hand is now dead.

  from “The Congregation”

  by Gordon Phillips

  Comes now the Congregation, into this great space. They are of every shape and description, and they shine with their own inner light, like creatures of the deepest sea, like the algae that makes glowing waves upon the ocean at night, like fungus and fox fire and will-o’-the-wisps, like corpse candles and the flames of St. Elmo. They move in every way that a creature of the earth can move. They creep and scuttle, float and fly and drift and slither. Here the carapace of a crab, there the legs of a spider. Fins decorate backs, tails drag along the cold stone floors. Eye stalks waver in the darkness, and vestigial limbs grope at the air like antennae. Some are heavy and segmented, as many-legged and compound-eyed as insects. Others ooze like the cephalopod. Still others touch the ground not at all, but drift through the benighted atmosphere like jellyfish in a tidal pool. Each is different, no two the same, though they carry with them a similarity that is not of genus or of species but something else. A kinship of spirit, in the way that couples long married may come to resemble one another, or a pet grow to echo its master. They are alike only in their strangeness.

  As each one crosses in front of the altar, a momentary flicker can be discerned, a glimpse of some other body, some other place. Boxes buried in the ground, caged up in the dark. Not broken open, because the creatures can pass as wraiths when needed, for they are made of sterner stuff than the merely material world. One, a squat thing, crab-like and knurled with knobby eyes, brings with it an image of a cave somewhere in Mexico, and in that cave a body that is no longer truly a body, but an empty cocoon, like the husk that a cicada leaves behind on the bark of a tree.

  They gather in a great circle, this eldritch congregation. Though their speech is not the speech of men, their words not those of any earthly language, they make themselves understood to one another. Their ranks part open to admit another member to their gathering. Its form is as strange as any, and its inner light glows as bright. As it passes the altar, an image is shown of a box being lowered into the earth, and then it creeps forward among them and is made welcome.

  The graveyard again. The lantern is sitting on Gordon’s headstone near where Conner’s jacket hangs, throwing its light into the hole that Dana and Conner are digging. It is getting deep now. Conner stands in the hole up to his shoulders, the shovel in his hands rising and falling like the head of a pump jack as he throws dirt onto the growing mound at the side of the grave.

  Dana sits on the edge of the pit, leaning against the headstone. The rain has stopped, and she’s smoking one of Conner’s cigarettes, even though she quit smoking six months ago. When she draws on the cigarette, the molten orange glow illuminates the lenses of her glasses, makes them opaque.

  DANA: How long do you think he knew?

  CONNER: That he had cancer?

  Dana nods, draws on the cigarette, holds the smoke in her mouth so long that she coughs a bit when she finally blows it out, taking the cigarette from her lips and offering it to Conner, who wipes his wet mouth on his shirtsleeves. He takes it from her, pulls on it, and hands it back.

  CONNER: He didn’t think he had cancer, you know that.

  DANA: So you think he really believed all that shit? That stuff in his stories, that stuff that he told us?

  CONNER: You think so, too. If we didn’t wonder, at least a little, we wouldn’t be out here in the asshole of midnight, digging up your brother’s grave.

  DANA: Touché.

  She stands up, brushing off the backs of her pants and taking another pull on the cigarette as she does so.

  DANA: Okay, Herbert West, I think it’s my turn to dig.

  But before she can begin to climb down into the hole, Conner’s shovel drops again, and, instead of sinking into the dirt with its usual quiet shunk, it raps like the fist of a midnight caller on the front door of Gordon’s coffin. The two share a glance, Conner standing in the sucking mud at the bottom of the grave, Dana looming above him, cast in chiaroscuro by the lantern’s light. In that look is the knowledge that this is the last opportunity for turning back. Dana puts her hand on the other shovel, and drops down into the damp earth at the side of the coffin. The smell is stronger now than it seemed before. Not a rotting smell, just the loamy scent of turned earth.

  They work in silence, and once the lid of the casket is clear, they both stand on either side, looking down at what they’ve uncovered.

  CONNER: This is it. Do you want to do the honors?

  Dana nods mutely. She grips a shovel in both hands, opens her fingers one at a time, then closes them again the same way, like a batter stepping up to the plate.

  DANA: So it’s just going to be his body in here, right? He won’t even be rotted much yet. He’ll probably smell like an old folks’ home, or something. That’s all we’re going to find, right?

  She looks at Conner, but it’s obvious that he doesn’t have anything to reassure her with. He reaches up, and, from the pocket of his leather jacket, he pulls out his father’s pistol.

  DANA: Okay, I’m going to do it. Are you ready?

  Conner nods, and Dana takes a deep breath. The casket comes open with a wrenching sound, like the lid of a crate being pried up. Conner and Dana are both breathing heavily now, almost panting. The rain has stopped. Their feet make squelching sounds as they shift in the dirt. In the trees around the graveyard, the cicadas have begun to call.

  DANA: Oh shit.

  The lantern tumbles from its perch above them, and the bulb shatters with a flash on the base of the headstone. Darkness rushes in behind it, and it’s hard to say if there’s a dim glow from the grave, or if it’s just the lingering image of the light on the rods and cones of your eyes. In the dark there’s a crack of thunder, maybe, or maybe it’s the sound of the pistol going off. The cicadas are screaming now.

  Curtains. Applause.

  Author’s Notes:

  Speaking of Lovecraft, this was probably as close as I’ve ever come to writing a story about the Old Gent himself. I put it together for my good friend Jesse Bullington’s Letters to Lovecraft, an anthology with a particularly unusual logline. We were asked to read over H. P. Lovecraft’s seminal essay on the genre Supernatural Horror in Literature, choose a passage, and write a story in response.

  As I was rereading Supernatural Horror in Literature, what stuck out to me the most was this odd streak of proto-geek pride that ran through the whole thing, with Lovecraft’s continued insistence that there was something unique and special about people who could appreciate a good supernatural tale. The seed of this story, which had already been germinating in thematically appropriate ways in my head, came to full flower from there.

  With its combination of film treatment-style narration and excerpts from imaginary weird tales (sometimes
with intentionally incorrect uses of obscure words), it turned out to be the strangest thing I’ve ever written, at least structurally, which also seems kind of appropriate.

  Persistence of Vision

  I want you to act like this is all a movie. That’ll make it easier.

  If it was a movie, it would open with darkness. No credits, no titles, just a black screen that you stare into waiting for something to appear, waiting for the darkness to resolve into a picture. Instead, there’s a voice reciting familiar words: “911, what is your emergency?”

  Then another voice; a woman, crying, terrified: “There’s a man in my house. He’s in my bedroom.”

  “Are you in a safe place?”

  “Now he’s in the living room. He’s in whatever room I go into. He’s standing in the corner, pointing at me. He’s talking, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.”

  At this point, you’d get the titles.

  ***

  It wasn’t the first 911 call. No one knows what the first one was. There’s no way to separate it out from the others, even if anyone had wanted to. There’s no way to draw the line and say, “This is the first real one. All the ones before this were just hoaxes, crazy people, misunderstandings.” And then there’s the question, of course, about how many of the ones before were crazy people, hoaxes? How long had it been going on, before we even knew?

  And once it started, it took everyone so long to figure it out, because how do you figure something like that out? What do you do with that call, the one that played there in the dark, when the police and the EMTs arrive and find the woman crammed under her couch somehow, huddled up there like a frightened cat, dead from shock, the phone still gripped to her ear, the house otherwise deserted? What do you do with the call from a college kid who says that his fiancée went into the closet and never came out? When you look in the closet and find that it’s maybe two feet square, just enough room for some clothes and the vacuum cleaner and no place for a person to go? You dismiss them, at first, of course. You take the kid into custody, notify the woman’s next of kin. But after a while, there are too many. After a while, people are no longer calling 911. After a while, the phones don’t work anymore, and when you pick them up all you hear is voices, hundreds of them piled atop one another, all whispering your name.