Shock Totem 3: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by John Haggerty

  Luckily, author Churchill handles these events with uncommon sensitivity. He gives us just enough description to get the point across, and allows the reactions of the victims to guide the tale. Yes, there is revenge here—the tortured woman, Marlie Downing, a girl who’s grown up as a servant in the mansion of a rich family in Indiana, ends up slicing and dicing multiple partygoers, and is then dispatched by the man of her dreams, who is also the cause of her brutal and perverse attack—but this is only part of the story.

  After these horrible events, the story jumps thirty years. It is Halloween again, the anniversary of the killings at the Silas estate. The mansion, which has been vacant since the day of the slaughter, is turned into a famous murder house, and the Butcher Bride, as the deceased Marlie is dubbed, becomes a local celebrity. Numerous researchers and other intrigued parties have been killed in freak accidents in the mansion over the last thirty years, helping to grow the house’s—and therefore the town’s—legend.

  Enter Stuart and Evie, a young and adventurous couple who rent out the mansion for the weekend. Evie is the daughter of a famous Hollywood producer with a serious hard-on for serial killers, especially our poor, insane Marlie Downing. Is it a smart move? Not really, considering the mansion’s reputation. But history is overflowing with tales of smart people shirking advice and doing stupid things. Stuart and Evie definitely fall into this category.

  This is where the story takes a turn. It becomes a combination haunted house/‘80s slasher flick. There are numerous deaths, all thanks to the ghosts of Marlie and her depraved victims. The action is fast-paced, gruesome, and charged with disturbing sexual energy, but just as with everything else in the book, Churchill is delicate when handling these situations. Never is violence celebrated, and not once is an individual’s death presented in an off-handed manner.

  Despite being a story that revolves around a mass murderer, the victims aren’t forgotten. As a matter of fact, that point is made abundantly clear in the middle of the novel. It’s an interesting study of how we as a society look at death, how we celebrate the disquieting events in life as long as they don’t “affect us.” I appreciated it wholeheartedly, and wish more horror writers would be as astute.

  I cannot go any further without discussing the relationship that begins the whole mess between Marlie and Michael Silus, heir to the family fortune and object of Marlie’s desire. Michael’s father is dominating and vindictive, traits he passes down to his son. The elder Silas, though married, held Marlie’s mother, the head of the mansion staff, as a mistress for many years. And Marlie carries on with her matriarch’s habits, forming an addicting sexual bond with the son that she thinks will lead to a future as Mrs. Michael Silas. Given the history of the family and the debauchery that occurs within the mansion walls, is at any wonder she would? It isn’t until Michael’s doomed fiancée orders him to cut things off that the plan for the brutal sexual attack—formulated by a most unexpected party—comes to pass.

  I found it interesting that Michael is tainted and commanding sexually, just like his father. Sex, when looked at from a certain point of view, is all about power. It’s about seeing something you want and taking it. It makes sense that the Silas’s, with their life of prosperity, would want to snatch up as much influence as possible. Marlie also falls into line with this thinking. She grew up in the house and wanted nothing more than to have Michael for her own. Yes, she is a victim, but in a way she is a willing victim, just as twisted and damaged as the people she murders.

  In all, I had a blast reading The Butcher Bride. Churchill creates a fun world that we can easily pass off as fantasy, and yet does an amiable job of interspersing an important message into his words. The climax is apropos, and everyone involved gets what’s coming to them. In fact, if I had one complaint about the book, it would be that I knew how it would end in the first fifty pages. But that’s okay. The journey is what matters, and in this particular novel, it’s one hell of a fun ride.

  –Robert J. Duperre

  ABOMINATIONS

  VORACIOUS BLACK

  by Mercedes M. Yardley

  The darkness has teeth.

  As children, we knew it. We were terrified of sleeping in our rooms alone. Afraid of the monsters that lived in our closets with toothy smiles that wrapped most of the way around their heads. Scared of the things that lived under our beds, knowing they would scrape their claws against our skin if our leg slipped out from under the covers. Our mothers and fathers reassured us that nothing lived in the dark that wasn’t in the light, but we knew this wasn’t true. As adults we park our cars under streetlights. We’re attracted to brightly lit neon signs. Pictures from space show that as soon as darkness spreads across the earth, the lights flick on. We’re still frightened.

  When I was in college, my friend, whom I shall call Anne, and I studied mines for a geology project. Anne’s father was a miner, and one day we received special permission to don mining gear and follow him into the Earth for an hour. “Darkness demands respect, girls,” he said. “Don’t move. Stay exactly where you are. Ready?”

  We were ready. We weren’t afraid. We were strong, independent girls and the darkness wasn’t anything to be afraid of. I’d been telling myself this for years. After all, Anne’s father was there, his teeth shining white under his dark mustache. The rest of the team was there, as well. What could a little dark do?

  We nodded. Anne’s father shouted something and the crew shouted something back. Then the lights went off.

  The sheer power of the darkness made me suck in my breath. It was thick and heavy, weighty, like oil or mist. Every childhood fear I thought I’d outgrown came slithering back. Somebody shifted their footing and it echoed eerily throughout the unfamiliar mine. My eyes strained so hard for the tiniest source of light that they physically hurt. But there was nothing to see, just the absolute absence of light. Just the hunger and the possibilities. I reminded myself that I was an adult now, that this wasn’t real terror, that I only had to hold on for another five seconds. Four...three...two...one...

  The lights came back on and suddenly I could breathe again. I turned away, lifted my mask, and discretely wiped at the corners of my eyes with my sleeve.

  Anne’s father looked at us and laughed. He pointed and I realized that Anne and I had both grabbed each other’s gloved hands in the dark. We separated, feeling a little bit silly. But later that night, back in the safety of Anne’s room, she slammed down her pen.

  “I was so scared,” she told me.

  I nodded. “I am never, never going back in another mine.”

  There was something I didn’t tell her, though. There was a reason why I was so heavily affected, why I stood there in the cold darkness begging for the lights to go on. It’s something that we don’t really talk about in my hometown.

  I’m from a blue-collar desert town. There aren’t a lot of us, and we stick together to overcome the harsh conditions. The town is basically divided into two main occupations: coal miners and power-plant workers. My daddy is a plant worker. His daddy was a plant worker. You go where the job is, and if the job leaves you out in the middle of nowhere, so be it. There aren’t many places more rural than my hometown. It still doesn’t have a traffic light. It’s full of charm and dust and grit.

  But when I was five, tragedy struck. There was a massive fire in the Wilberg Mine, and while one miner managed to escape, twenty-seven people were killed when their escape route was cut off. They were daddies, too. Granddaddies. Brothers. One of the victims was the first woman to die in a mine since women were allowed inside.

  Twenty-seven people in such a small town means that everybody was touched. We just shut down for a while after that. Friends couldn’t come over and play because we were being “respectful.” I couldn’t go to some of their houses because their mommies were still crying and couldn’t get out of bed. My mother baked cakes and loaves of fresh bread. She wrapped them up, put them in my red Radio Flyer, and we walked around town, dropping them of
f at certain houses. I remember thinking that homemade bread from a neighbor must be able to heal any wound. I was too young to know any better.

  When I was about eight, I was walking downtown with an ice cream in my hand. I saw a friend curled up next to the mine memorial, crying. I offered her my ice cream, but I didn’t know what to say.

  Years later she mentioned that she had nightmares of her Old Daddy showing up, his skin charred and cracked, just when she was hugging her New Daddy. She wasn’t betraying either of them, both were good, kind men who were wonderful fathers, but you can’t explain these feelings to a child.

  That is what I thought about when Anne and I were in the mine together. That is why I swore I’d never step foot inside one again.

  But Anne did. She started working in a mining control-room. She fell in love with a man there and they were married. They worked together for several years.

  “It isn’t as scary as it used to be,” she told me once. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come inside some day?”

  “Never,” I told her. I was surprised at the venom in my voice. “Never, never, never!”

  Then one August, her husband quit his job. I’m not exactly sure why, because suddenly it seemed unimportant. The very next day the mine collapsed. His team was inside. He wasn’t.

  “I should be in there,” Anne’s husband had said, sitting at home with his head in his hands. “Those are my men. Those are my friends.”

  Six miners were trapped. I knew every one of them or their families. My mother was the one who called with the news. I remember dropping the phone on the floor after she told me.

  Even though I now live several states away, my soul is still tied to that town. The desert runs in my veins. What happens there deeply affects me. Those are my people. They’re my lifeblood.

  I know how dark a mine can be. The horror I had felt on that calm day in college, gripping Anne’s hand in the dark of the mine, her father beside us, was almost more than I could stand. That’s when we were without light for ten seconds. What would it be like to be trapped for days? To be crushed under the rubble? How did those brave men feel when they heard everything come down around them? If I’m thinking of this, and I’m only a friend, how do their families feel? What screams through their minds when they turn their thoughts to their trapped loved ones?

  Signs went up immediately after the collapse. “Pray For Our Miners.” “Don’t Give Up Hope.” “We Love You.” Children tied yellow ribbons to school fences. Friends, families, and reporters gathered at the site of the mine and in living rooms to monitor the desperate rescue efforts. Every little action was reported. I was glued to the news channel, riveted to the Internet, constantly on the phone. My heart hurt. My soul was in anguish. It brought up old wounds I thought were long—I hate to say the word—buried. But these wounds were suddenly ripped open. I wished I was five years old again, when I knew that the Big Bad had happened but I wasn’t fully cognitive of it. Grief is too heavy to handle as an adult.

  It took three days to bore a hole into the mine. They lowered a microphone down, and everyone held their breath.

  The silence was devastating.

  What does this mean? we wondered. It means, we told each other, that the miners retreated to a different part of the mine. It means they were exhausted and conserving their energy. That’s all. It couldn’t possibly be anything else.

  They took samples of the air and declared it livable. That’s what we focused on. We ignored the implications of that chilling silence.

  More samples showed that the earlier conclusion was incorrect. The air was, in fact, fatal. The spine of the entire town seemed to bend and slump.

  But we are not quitters. We don’t just give up. The search rescue continued, although I think we all knew that it had by then turned into a recovery mission. Still, nobody said it aloud. Not people from the town, anyway. The outsiders did that. Reporters. Family that flew in. People who didn’t understand that when things are at their darkest, you have to keep going. If you stop, you fall—and if we fell at that point, I don’t know if we’d have been able to get back up.

  Then there was a second collapse. Three of the rescue workers were killed. I still remember hearing the words: “The rescue has been called off.” I put my hands over my face and cried. We abandoned them. That’s how I feel. Although I realize that you can’t trade the lives of the living for the dead, we still left them to have their marrow sucked out by the dark.

  I think Anne’s husband broke a little that day. He hadn’t been sleeping. He hadn’t been eating, or talking to anybody. He felt that he should have been in there with his team—but he was grateful he wasn’t. That, of course, made him feel worse. He didn’t want to hear things like “It’s all for the best” or “Trust in the Lord” or “Sometimes bad things happen to good people.” He didn’t want to hear that his reactions were normal and he would get through it. The term “survivor’s guilt” sounded small and patronizing to him. He was racked. He was screaming inside. He shut down. Hopelessness is unbearably heavy.

  The “Pray For Our Miners” sign stayed up. It was ripped and faded by the wind, but nobody had the heart to pull it down. The relentless sun blanched the yellow ribbons into the color of bone. They were slowly untied, one by one.

  Eventually they sealed the entrances to that part of the mine. The bodies of my friends are entombed there. I think about it whenever I drive by. Whenever I can, I take a different route in order to avoid it. It’s been three years and it’s still too raw.

  Anne still works for the mine. So does her father. I hope that her husband hasn’t gone back to work there, but sometimes there isn’t a choice in a small town. We lose and we mourn and we rail against our fate, and then all we can do is pick up our gear. Take a deep breath. Head back into the waiting darkness, and try to avoid its teeth.

  Mercedes M. Yardley wears red stilettos and writes whimsical horror. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including John Skipp’s Bram Stoker Award™-winning Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed, and A Cup of Comfort for Parents of Children with Special Needs. Mercedes lives in Sin City.

  Visit her at www.abrokenlaptop.com.

  DAY JOB

  by Merrilee Faber

  LEAVE NO TRACE

  The doorknob was covered in blood, and slipped in my hand as I tried to turn it. I found a towel and wiped the doorknob clean. Now I had a bloody towel, a wrecked flat and a looming disaster on my hands.

  I opened the door to the living room. There was blood on the walls. Blood on the furniture. Artistic red splatters on the cheap acrylic carpet.

  “Leave no trace” was the first thing they told you, when your wings were shiny and new. Make it a clean disappearance. Anything left behind is an anchor to this world that the damned can use to return.

  Well, they never said anything about skinny old paedophiles like Lester, who put up a fight that left us both bleeding. That was something you found out after you’d been on the job for a while, how strongly people cling to life.

  What had he called me? One of God’s whores. But I had done my job and sent him down.

  I stepped back into a patch of sodden carpet that squelched under my boot and winced. There was no way I could clean up this mess. I stripped to my skin, leaving my bloody clothes in a pile with the towel. My boots I took into the kitchen and scrubbed and scrubbed.

  I used matches and a candle, rather than holy fire, to set the flat alight. I placed the candle under the ragged curtains and stepped back. They blazed up, leaving a sooty patch on the wall.

  The fire spread slowly across the carpet, inching forward until it reached the table. It licked at the varnish, dashing up the legs to dance across the top.

  The smoke alarms went off. I walked out into the hall, slipped out of my humanity then stepped through the wall into the next flat.

  An old woman in dressing gown and slippers was shoving things into a shopping
bag. Pictures, knick-knacks, a collection of spoons. An old man hurried into the room, papers clutched to his chest.

  “I’ve got the insurance, Faye, come on!”

  “Wait, my mother’s music box! It’s in the bedroom cupboard!”

  “Leave it!” He hauled her out, shedding paraphernalia and weeping. Smoke rushed into the room when they opened the front door and I could hear her wailing all the way down the steps.

  I went to open the bedroom door to help the fire spread. Glass crunched beneath my boot. I’d stepped on one of the pictures the old woman had dropped; a faded, sepia-toned shot of a fat kid on a rocking horse. A son, I guessed. The walls were covered in photos of him, chronicling the minutiae of his life.

  I followed the story. Baby, toddler, fat kid on a trike, skinny kid in a lifesaver’s togs, pimply teenager. The largest photo hung above a shelf crowded with shells. A young man in uniform. Queensland Police Academy, Class of ‘84.

  There were no more photos after that.

  Something exploded, washing me with flames and curling the pictures in their frames. Sirens wailed in the street outside. I’d done enough.

  I walked home through the suburbs, the afternoon air hot and sticky on my skin. People would brush against me, turn and look, see for a moment something that they could never understand, never comprehend: Beauty that was as far beyond them as the stars.

  And then they would forget.

  Back at my flat, I showered, pulled on jeans, shirt and humanity, and headed for work. The apartment owner was downstairs, rewiring the light over the door, which blew every time it rained. He looked up at me and smiled. Behind his round face, the soft dark stain of a sinner.