by Shock Totem
“I still want to talk, you know? I’ll be okay this time. We’ll just talk.”
“Not now, Gavin, I’m late.” She picked up the pace, and so did he.
“Look, I said I was sorry.” He was working to keep it cool, God help him he was. “It’s been rough. I lost my job.”
Something crossed her face. It was fast, but he saw it. Sympathy? He went for the kill. “And now the landlord wants me gone because I can’t pay.”
A sideways glance. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, it’s okay. I’m sleeping on Jeff’s floor. As long as...” Something clicked. “What do you mean, you’re late?” He grabbed her arm, stopping her cold. “Are you going to him?”
“Let me go.” Fear. She was afraid of him? How dare she be afraid of him!
“You’re going to him right now, aren’t you?” She yanked her arm but he held firm. “God damn you, you slut.” How could she be so cold? “I’ve waited all fucking week to see you and now—”
“Is he bothering you?”
Gavin turned to the drongo who was walking over. “What are you looking at? Piss off.”
Others were looking now. A couple of big guys were crossing the street. Gavin looked to Cindy, waited for her to tell them to mind their own, but she just looked down at the pavement. He dropped her arm and stormed off.
• • •
The driver played his harmonica and the passengers sang along. They all knew the words, and Gavin wondered how. It was all gibberish, and something about it irritated him, set him on edge. Maybe the tiredness was getting to him. His mind was cloudy, thoughts were hard to hold onto. He tried to focus. Cindy. The irritation flashed again. He was annoyed with her, he remembered that, but he couldn’t remember why. The little old lady stopped singing long enough to call out to him over the noise.
“The words don’t matter, dear. Just sing with your heart!”
A calm descended. Yeah, he supposed so. Gavin tried to sing.
And yeah, soon he got a feel for the music. It wasn’t just one song, it was a whole bunch of songs, and it didn’t matter that he didn’t know the words, because nobody knew the words. He just sang along with everyone else, and there were a lot of them in the bus now, hundreds. The song ended, harmonica warbling, and he clapped hard.
He noticed with detachment that his fingernails had fallen off.
• • •
People were clever. They knew Rainbow Serpent, they knew his story. When he sang to them they saw his form and would not come close.
So Rainbow Serpent swallowed the sun, bringing darkness to the land and hiding his true form. When he sang they came willingly, he grew fat again, and everything was good.
• • •
Gavin was swimming. It was a blissful, lazy feeling, suspended in the warm indoor pool. The roof was closed, the lights turned off. He floated in the dark, confined but content, like a baby in the womb.
When he woke his cheek was pressed to the back of the vinyl headrest. His face felt wet and sticky, trickles of liquid running down his neck. He must have dribbled in his sleep. He sat up, his cheek sticking to the vinyl, skin peeling free from the teeth and bone beneath.
• • •
He knew the words now. And though there were many songs, sung in many languages, they all said the same thing.
In the time of Gavin’s grandfather’s grandfather, the rainbow serpent moved across the face of the world. It drank when it was thirsty, it ate when it was hungry. It called the people with its song. And when they didn’t listen, the rainbow serpent turned to the sky. He swallowed the sun, bringing darkness to the world and shadowing his true form. And then...
“Kulyum,” said Driver.
Yes, Kulyum, a brave young hunter on a quest. A quest to...
“To free the sun from my belly.”
Yeah. He was Kulyum the hunter. One day he left his people and followed the creek beds. Wherever he went he heard the stories and met those left behind.
Wait, no. “Gavin. I’m Gavin Thompson.”
“That’s right, brave young Gavin Thompson, on an adventure to free the sun from the rainbow serpent.”
Yes, that sounded right.
One day he came to an old man in a bark shelter who invited him to rest and listen to his music. But Gavin was clever, he knew the old man was the rainbow serpent, the shelter was his open mouth, and if he stepped inside he would be swallowed.
But he still did.
• • •
His shirt was sagging, a paunch that hung past his belt as if he had a beer gut. He watched the threadbare fabric start to give, a tear opening up from one side of his belly to the other. From the slit his insides escaped, ropes of intestines slithering past his knees, landing in a wet pile at his feet. The bus jerked as they pulled into Dapto. A girl with a U2 badge on her backpack got on, stepping over his guts as they swished up and down the aisle.
“I’m sorry,” he gurgled.
U2 Girl smiled back. “Not to worry.”
• • •
The old man played his didgeridoo, and Kulyum became tired, forgetful. Soon he would die, and his spirit would be trapped forever. But from deep within the hunter found his strength. Kulyum saw he was inside the belly of Rainbow Serpent. He found the sun, picked it up, and with his knife cut open Rainbow Serpent’s belly. They spilled out and light came back to the world.
• • •
Through the fog, the numbness, something of Gavin held on. It was only a tiny, far away thing, and the more he struggled to reach for it, to understand it, the further off it seemed.
U2 Girl stopped singing to turn to him, smiling wide. “Come on, Gavin, don’t lose the tune!”
He looked at the sun, just sitting there on the escarpment, almost close enough to touch. He watched it, and thought of Cindy.
Cindy.
He found that thing now, and it was anger. It grew, coursing through his limbs, warming him, and as the numbness ebbed away in came a tingling that turned into an itching, then a burning.
Oh, Gavin was awake now, and he was pissed. He looked around. Soupy water sloshed over the seat, and the walls looked...wrong. But there was his jacket. He reached for it, and his body screamed with pain. He screamed as well—or tried to, but all that came out was a wet whistle. He gritted his teeth. He pushed through the pain, unfolding his jacket with unwilling fingers. It took time, but there it was. His blistered hand closed around the gun.
The thousands of others stopped singing. “Oh come dear, put that nasty thing down,” said Little Old Lady.
Gavin raised the gun with a shaky hand. He couldn’t stand, he wouldn’t even try, but he could still point. Driver twisted in his seat. “I’m afraid you can’t have that on board, son,” he said, pointing to a sign above him that read No Food, No Drinks, No Guns. “Just put it down, we’re almost there.”
Did he look worried? Yeah, they all looked worried. Gavin would have smiled, if he still had lips. He pointed the gun at the pulsing roof of the bus. Their eyes opened wide.
“Fuck you,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. The gun fell with a splash.
Little Old Lady clucked her tongue. “They just don’t make things to last anymore, do they, dear?”
• • •
Rainbow Serpent went back to his creeks, his billabongs. For a long time he survived on the little kangaroos, the little birds. Of the people, he took only the stupid and the outcasts.
Then new people came.
They cut down the forests, they drained the creeks. They killed and they burned and they spread across the land. They pulled down the hills and made their own hard, black riverbeds. But Rainbow Serpent welcomed these people, because so many of them were stupid, so many were outcasts. They didn’t know his songs, they didn’t tell his story. He traveled the new black rivers and grew fat again. Everything was good.
• • •
Fluid lapped against his chest. It was dark. His eyes had long since diss
olved. There wasn’t much left of Gavin at all, really. His skin was gone, his muscles turned to jelly. But still those muscles twitched, those veins pulsed. He felt one in his neck burst, blood running down his chest to hiss as it hit the digestive juices.
Very close by, Driver played his harmonica. The music had a cheerful twang, a jump in its step.
It hurt. Just thinking it made it worse. It was like an itch all over his body, the worst itch he’d ever had. He needed to scratch at it, dig his fingers in, but his arms wouldn’t move. He wanted to cry out, to scream. But that wasn’t working, either.
“Nonsense,” Driver whispered into his ear. “It doesn’t hurt at all. That’s all in your mind.”
Gavin tried to tell him no, it did, it hurt. He would have cried if he still could.
“Shhh. It will pass.” The driver played some more.
And, yes, it did pass. The itching eased, until Gavin felt nothing at all. The fog was coming back. He tried to fight it, to hold onto what he had left. He wanted to know.
“Just a little while longer. I’m almost done.”
Too late. He was too late. Cindy would be pissed. He was supposed to be meeting her for something.
“You’ll be there in plenty of time. We’re well on schedule. Look, we’re just pulling into Dapto now.”
Dapto. Good. Already half way home. Maybe he could sleep a while. Just ten minutes. He was so tired.
• • •
Gavin turned the gun over in his hands. It was silver, sleek, cool to his skin. Heavier than it looked.
“How much?”
“You know how much,” the man with the permanent scowl said. They sat around a plastic table in his kitchen. In the next room little kids screamed as they fought over a toy, the man oblivious to the ruckus.
Gavin took out his wallet. He withdrew the notes, every dollar he’d been able to beg and borrow from his mates. But now, when it came to it, he hesitated.
The man misread him. “It works good. That’s a thirty-eight Smith and Wesson, the real thing, better than that auto rubbish everyone has now. This’ll never jam on ya.”
“It’s for hunting,” Gavin said. Felt compelled to say.
“Right. You’re a hunter.” The man squashed his cigarette on the table. “Well, that’ll do you. Bring a bull down with that, you could.” He squinted. “So pay me or piss off.”
He handed over the cash, and felt a flash of irritation as the man counted each note. He glanced at his watch. “When does the Wollongong bus head out?”
The man didn’t look up from his counting. “Right ‘bout now.”
Vincent Pendergast lives beside the industrial wonderland that is the Port Kembla steelworks in Australia. He has tried his hand at a number of genres—science fiction, fantasy, and horror included—and his stories have appeared in Nossa Morte and Shimmer Magazine.
STRANGE GOODS
& OTHER ODDITIES
Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance, by D. Harlan Wilson; Shroud Publishing, 2009; 105 pgs.
To say that D. Harlan Wilson’s brilliant eighth book, Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance, is not for everyone would be an understatement...a huge glaring understatement. Some folks like their fiction a bit more linear (boring) and a bit more conventional. I do not. I like bizarre scenarios...open endings and great green gobs of greasy grimy goofiness. I like characters and situations that are so out there it makes my mind literally itch. I fucking loved this novella.
The plot, in as much as it is, regards the epically screwball escapades of Samson Thataway, an Elvis-esque cowboy thug with a penchant for killing and computer cleaner. He, along with his gang of “Fuming Garcias,” arrives in Dreamfield, Indiana and commence with the shit stirring...escalating to a full-blown duel with Felix SoandSo.
Add to this a few oddball characters and shenanigans—a farmer who dresses his prized pig and has it walk upright, a lake made of acid, a man so strong he can literally tear anything in half—arrange it all neatly on a plate and sprinkle liberally with lots of blood and violence, pigshit and computer cleaner—and you have a nasty little razor-edged read.
You know the scene in A Clockwork Orange where they have Alex strapped down for “treatment” and he’s forced, unblinking, to witness a barrage of horror and violence that is projected before him...while the music of Beethoven blares in the background? This book is like that...in a good way.
As I said before, I love the Bizarro movement...from the old-guard masters like William Burroughs and JG Ballard....to the newer cats like Carlton Mellick III. These artists and this style hold my interest far more than the current volume of whatever teen goth vampire killer series is being bandied about these days. So if the safe harbors of horror and fantasy literature have grown too still and stagnant for your tastes...wade out into the darker and rougher waters. There are strange wonders in the maelstrom...this is one of them.
–John Boden
Fear Itself: The Complete First Season, by Brad Anderson, Stuart Gordon, John Landis, and others (directors); starring Brandon Routh, Shiri Appleby, Cynthia Wartos; 2009; Not Rated; 4 discs, 13 episodes; 593 min.
Once upon a time there was a television show on Showtime called The Masters of Horror. It was an anthology show written and directed by some of the biggest names in horror. John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Lucky McKee, and many others took part. Each season had thirteen one-hour episodes, and while the series was amazing, it was nevertheless canceled after only two seasons. But just when fans of fright TV thought things were darkest, series creator Mick Garris changed the name of the show to Fear Itself and moved it—with many of the Masters still attached—to NBC. Could what was once a very adult horror series survive the network censors and keep the fear intact? Well, the fact that the show was canceled after only a handful of its thirteen episodes were aired should give you some idea. But now the entire series is out on DVD, including the unaired episodes, and the question is: Is it worth getting?
There are more than a few episodes that fall flat, but why do those episodes fail? Not all of the show’s failings can be blamed on the milder terror tone that the TV networks demand. There’s plenty of boring, bland stories and poor, unconvincing acting to also point accusing fingers at. These episodes, which are just plain bad, will not be called out by me, you’ll know them if you see them. However, there are quite a few good episodes in the mix and these hidden gems do deserve a shout out.
“Skin and Bones,” directed by Larry Fessenden, is the best episode of the series—by far. It is a chilling tale of a hunter, lost for days in the wilderness, that returns to his family a changed man with a wicked appetite.
In the vein of despicable diets is Stuart Gordon’s “Eater,” about a cannibal serial killer locked in a jail cell but far from contained or controlled.
John Landis brings us “In Sickness and in Health,” a twisty-turny nuptial nightmare that is clever and fun but does fall slightly apart at its conclusion.
“New Year’s Day,” directed by Darren Lynn Bousman and written by 30 Days of Night creator Steve Niles, is a zombie-filled apocalypse with some good twists and turns along the way.
These DVDs are unfortunately pretty light on the special features. For each episode there’s a short interview with the director—and that’s pretty much about it. However, there are a few episodes offered as “director’s cuts,” which means they are presented without the cuts from the overly zealous network censors’ blades.
Okay, so with all that said, the question remains: Are these DVDs worth getting? Well, with a very reasonable price tag (thirty bucks or less at most places) for thirteen episodes, with at least half of those being very good and others being at least enjoyable, I would say they are, but only just.
–Brian M. Sammons
The Unborn, by David S. Goyer (director, writer); starring Odette Yustman, Gary Oldman, Can Gigandet, Meagan Good; 2009; PG-13; 88min.
In The Unborn, we get the story of Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman), a young woman having disturbing
dreams that she cannot account for. Her best friend Romy (Meagan Good) helpfully consults a dream interpretation book right away so we won’t miss any of the “deep symbolism” that is laced throughout this tedious film.
This is a good example of all that is wrong with the film industry. Instead of placing clues in random spots for us to pick up on and make connections with, we are led around by the hand like a child, with each “creepy” occurrence fully explained, so all the dullards among us don’t overlook them.
We have the standard young child staring menacingly, a dog with its head flipped with CGI to scare us, and a young heroine in just the right state of undress to be threatened by both. Then add in a lot of clunky foreshadowing about twins and Nazi experimentation and voila! Horror Film 101!
Not that The Unborn is a really bad film—it’s not. In fact, a bad film might have been more enjoyable. I’m a sucker for an unintentional comedy. But how many times can these cookie-cutter plots be watched? I’m not the most perceptive person in the world, I can be fooled by movies, but they have to at least make an effort. Bashing us on the skulls with overused plot devices and heavy-handed clues doesn’t cut it.
The one element in The Unborn that is a bit uncommon is the idea that since the demon harassing Casey is a dybbuk—in Jewish folklore, “a wandering soul of a dead person that enters the body of a living person and controls his or her behavior”—a Jewish exorcism is required. But even here, the exorcism is rather silly and the angle is not really played any differently from a Christian exorcism. Gary Oldman must have had some contractual obligation to fulfill, as he plays a Rabbi that apparently reads Hebrew from left to right. A little more research would have helped here.