Shock Totem 3: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by John Haggerty

  The strawberry blonde walks up to the counter with two DVDs and quietly queues behind you. You’re trying to think of a clever opening line when Matilda asks why you haven’t called. You knew this was coming. You’re just about to tell her to forget it and go back to the bar when the strawberry blonde asks what film you’re looking for. You turn to answer with a smile. The smile quickly fades. You notice that the televisions hanging from the ceiling are no longer playing Ghost World—they’re playing live video of you, standing at the checkout desk in Chi-Town Video. The metallic taste returns to your mouth. The video on the televisions simultaneously cuts to close-ups of your trembling hands, your eyebrow ring, the red socks peeking out between your jeans and Sambas. The video changes to a wider shot, but the strawberry blonde isn’t standing next to you, and Matilda is not rummaging through the bin of DVDs behind the counter. The video shows only you, standing alone in Chi-Town Video.

  You scream and run out of the store.

  A bewildered Matilda returns to the counter, a copy of Chasing Amy in her hand. The strawberry blonde shrugs and says she’ll take it.

  * video disruption *

  You burst into your apartment and slam the door, locking and chaining it. You’re breathless, but sober now. You stumble to the sofa and sit down, resting your head in your hands. After your breathing slows you hear a gauzy hum coming from the bedroom. You didn’t shut down the computer before you left.

  You walk into the bedroom. You stare at the millions of stars coming towards you on the screensaver. Even as you wonder what’s on the other side, what a nudge of the mouse will reveal, your hand is already there, the star field evaporates and there you are—a wide shot of you in the room cuts to close-ups of the damp strands of hair on your forehead, then the tiny cleft in your chin.

  You close your eyes, hard, and have an idea. You walk into the closet, dig around for a few moments and emerge with your cricket bat. You casually walk back to the desk and make short work of the computer, which explodes in a shower of sparks. You move on to the keyboard, mouse, and speakers. Mission accomplished. You sit on the floor among the debris and take off your Sambas. They laughed at you when you joined the cricket team at UIC. Who’s laughing now? You’d like to Tweet about your vindication, but Oskar’s got your phone. You get up and walk out of the bedroom.

  * video disruption *

  You are in the living room of your dimly-lit apartment, lying on the Tylösand sofa from Ikea that your parents bought you when you first moved in. Your iBook is propped open on your stomach. Your battery is charged, your Wi-Fi signal is strong—you are wired.

  You launch Internet Explorer, but forget about that Tweet because you need to update your Facebook page with the details about your night out with Oskar. You also need to add the Georgie Whorewells to your list of likes, join the I Love Guinness group and check out what Harmony has posted on your Wall, maybe even pick up where you left off with her in that web cam session. You select Facebook from your bookmarks and wait for the page to load. It takes a bit longer than usual, but when it finally does you giggle. You check the URL. You refresh the page a couple of times but it still shows the same live video—you, lying on your sofa, watching yourself. You smile as the video cycles through episodes of your past. You see yourself newly born and in your mother’s arms; at seven in the boat with your father on Lake Michigan; at fifteen telling your parents that you are gay; at eighteen running through the vineyards of Bordeaux with Daphne; at twenty-two in your cap and gown; skiing in New Zealand with Mandy last September; two weeks ago in the bedroom of Libby’s apartment, kissing her neck, whispering that no one will ever know; writing code in your cubicle on Friday afternoon; drinking with Oskar at Pythagoras; staring at the strawberry blonde in Chi-Town Video; lying on your sofa, watching yourself watch yourself. Ah, memories, you think. You shake your head and giggle.

  You get up and walk into the bedroom, leaving the open laptop on the Markör pine coffee table you bought to match the sofa. The live video on the laptop screen shows you rummaging in the closet. You emerge with the bungee cord that tied your skis together. You grab the desk chair and position it beneath the A-frame in the ceiling. There are close-ups of the mascara streaking down your face, the mood ring—a gift from Libby—on your middle finger, the sweat stain under the collar of your Jesus Cthulhu Superstar t-shirt. You climb onto the chair and wrap one end of the bungee cord around the oak cross beam, the other around your neck.

  You step off the chair. There’s a shot of your legs kicking in the air, then swinging, then twirling. And then all movement abruptly stops. Your red socks halt at the edge of the screen and remain frozen.

  Your cat is playing with the power cord of the Wi-Fi modem—you have been unwired.

  Joseph Morgado lives in Cornwall in the United Kingdom, where he teaches literature, surfs, and grows raspberries and pumpkins. He is working on his first book of short fiction.

  BLOODSTAINS

  & BLUE SUEDE SHOES

  by John Boden and Simon Marshall-Jones

  PART I: THE AIM

  Horror and music have had a tight relationship for centuries, as far back as medieval times, when minstrels would sing of witches and evil kings and murderous things. Childhood staples like “Ring Around the Rosie,” so sweet and innocent from the mouths of babes, but in fact a song about the horrors of the Black Plague. There are numerous grisly operas and quite a few classical works based on dark themes. And then we have all manner of murder ballads and dark blues, and that track runs on to the current offending styles of death metal, grindcore, gothic, darkwave, industrial, and countless other genres and splinter groups. All are the slobbering mutant progeny of music and horror—monstrous parents who pinch their young and pull scary faces at them in the dark before bedtime.

  In this series, we hope to explore as many of these offspring as we can. We will try by genre and artist to enlighten, educate, and expose you to musicians and their hymns to the darker side of existence; artists both well-known and obscure. As well, we’ll be exploring what we feel tethers them to the starless abyss.

  We will no doubt cover most of the more high-profile offenders: Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie, Nick Cave (with and without the Bad Seeds), Blue Oyster Cult, Wednesday 13, Misfits, and Ghoultown, to name just a few. We also plan to cover a lot of unfamiliar ground, those artists and songs that don’t always spring to mind when you think of a horror-themed song. Take, for example, Josh Ritter’s “The Curse,” a hauntingly beautiful ballad about a Mummy and his ill-fated affair with the archaeologist who discovers him. Or take the fad for teen-death/tragedy pop songs of the ghoulish ‘50s and ‘60s, like “Tell Laura I Love Her,” a chart-topper for Ray Peterson in 1958, or the Shangri-La hit from 1964, “Leader of the Pack.” It’s a long, dark, and bumpy road we’ll be traveling, one snaking with curves and blind spots.

  From Robert Johnson and his supposed satanic connections to Led Zeppelin’s and the Rolling Stones’s apparent witchery. From the Buddy Holly curse of 23 and the murderous evils of black metal—which is still causing our moral guardians to froth rabidly at the mouth—to the more recent rumblings of dark ambient, neo-folk, and the bludgeoning noise and power electronics of death industrial. We shall journey thence to the gothic strains of Bauhaus, to the classicism of Hector Berlioz and the howling psychobilly of The Cramps, to the oddball novelty of Barnes & Barnes and The Residents, and on to corpse-paint and glitter rock. We will eventually haul it all in, across the bloodstained carpet and onto the ceremonial slab, slice it open, spread its ribs, and have a good poke around to see what hides in the dark depths of its insides.

  YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST

  For me—John, that is—the initial example of the unholy union between music and horror begins and ends with Alice Cooper. There were theatrics in music before he came along—Jerry Lee Lewis had set his piano on fire; “Screaming” Jay Hawkins worked the voodoo angle—but no one did it with the bloodcurdling gusto of The Coop. His albums were concept work
s, built around themes of giant spiders, necrophilia, murder and madness. Even something like a trip to the dentist was nightmarish when rendered by Cooper and his band. I was, maybe, five years old when I first became aware of Alice. My parents were fans and played Welcome to My Nightmare quite often. According to them, I was very fond of the song “Steven.”

  Cooper used to appear on television, and I recall sort of mini-movie versions of his songs. I seem to remember a disturbingly creepy video for “Dead Babies,” which ends with Cooper being lynched. Though this may be something I made up, I can’t be sure. Hell, he was on The Muppet Show!

  Anyway, it started with him. I was already into all manner of horror films by the time I could walk, and as I began to become conscious of music and “older” tastes, I sought out things that were dark and horror-related. I liked looking through my parents’ stacks of albums. The cover for Steppenwolf’s Monster sticks out as one I went to often. After Cooper, I got into Kiss. Not quite as dark musically, but that look—goddamn! I wanted to be Gene Simmons! And there were others, including Blue Oyster Cult, a fantastic band we will no doubt devote some more space to in the future.

  By the time I hit my teens, I was in love with music, rabidly so. I was obsessed with it. I was into things my mother listened to—Tom Petty, John Stewart, Meat Loaf, The Eagles, Jackson Browne—and was getting into the heavy-metal scene with acts like Iron Maiden, Lizzy Borden, Dio and The Plasmatics. By my short-lived college days, I had broadened my tastes to include alternative styles and artists like The Smiths, Bauhaus, Pixies, The Cure, and 45 Grave. I was also delving into much heavier bands, like Slayer, Formicide, Exodus, Celtic Frost. This pattern of style-whoring continued through the ‘90s. Some standouts from that period, would be Tad, Aphex Twin, Tricky, Marilyn Manson, Far, Deftones, Handsome Family, and Deadsy. Yet, like some giant monstrosity from a B-movie, I found that I retained pieces and facts about all of these musicians and bands I listened to, their work almost becoming a part of my very personality.

  Now, here I am approaching 40, and I still love music and horror. The list of artists that walk the line between those two things I love so dearly is long...and stylistically all over the place. But it isn’t all about killers and monsters and creepy crawlies...some of those bands just write some seriously dark shit. Thought Industry, Paper Chase, Swans, Godflesh—c’mon!

  What say you, Simon?

  IN THE TEETH OF THE WOLF

  Where the hell do I even begin? I’m going to have to take a slight detour, so bear with me please.

  According to my mom, I was a slightly odd child, apparently visiting the local cemetery on a regular basis at age three with my Dad and then building, at age six, miniature headstones and grave-markers out of kids’ plastic building-blocks and laying them out in the garden. Given that, I was into really dark, terrifying music from an early age, right? Well, no.

  My first encounter with “morbid music,” all the way back in 1973, was the British re-release of Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers’s 1962 novelty song “Monster Mash.” It was indeed a Graveyard Smash with this ten-year-old boy. I got into so-called krautrock around the same time or, more specifically, the Berlin School of Rock, listening to artists like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and others of that ilk. Despite their kosmische musik stylings and noodlings, I always felt there was something darker waiting in the wings, something I would now describe as Lovecraftian, just waiting for when the stars came right and they would emerge in all their multi-tentacled, squamous and eldritchly hideous glory.

  I had to wait another two decades before I discovered the bastard offspring of those early ‘70s electronic instrumental groups, in the form of the first wave of industrial projects, like Throbbing Gristle, Nurse with Wound, Current 93, Coil, and the dark folkways of Sol Invictus. That was after the phase where I got into the obligatory heavy-metal scene (Judas Priest, anyone?), then thrash and speed metal—by way of bands like Agnostic Front, English Dogs and Billy Milano’s S.O.D—and finally landing on the shores of the lands inhabited by Slayer (south of Heaven, apparently), Megadeth, Metallica, Venom, and tons of obscure, one-album-wonder bands whose names I have, mercifully, forgotten.

  After a time I wandered into the quieter cathedrals of the goth scene, throwing arms and confetti waiflike into the air to The Cult, The Mission, and The Fields of the Nephilim, before breaking out and streaking into bloody Skinny Puppy, Frontline Assembly, and KMFDM territory. Only to circle back and find myself in a place where my industrial roots were showing once again—except now we’re talking Kerovnian, TenHornedBeast, Nordvargr, MZ412, Archon Satani, and the magnificent Deadwood, in addition to the ones who had gone before. And how I loved Godflesh and Ministry. I even went and formed my own record label, FracturedSpacesRecords, in the wake of my renewed interest in dark ambient and noise rock, but that’s a story for another time...

  A MIND OF FLESH AND BONES

  So, there you have it—a brief résumé of our collective musical credentials. No doubt about it, we are both stuck steadfast in the darkness of the sonic abyss, residing at markedly different depths yet sharing the same sense that somehow these particular genres speak to our souls and resonate with our experiences of the wider world and life itself.

  So come and join us on our walk along that rocky road, as we shed light into the shadowed corners and dig up the coal-encrusted gems that are scattered throughout the darker seams of music. Explore with us the idea that herein lie, perhaps, greater truths than in any of the lightweight pap that gets thrust upon us by the media barons of MTV, the “music press” and the hundreds of other media outlets now extant. It’s either that, or it could just be that we’re a pair of old grumpy, morbid buggers...

  Yeah, it’s probably that.

  John Boden resides in the shadow of Three Mile Island with his wonderful wife and children. Aside from his work with Shock Totem, his stories can be found in 52 Stitches, Everyday Weirdness, Black Ink Horror #7; and Psychos: Serial Killers, Depraved Madmen, and the Criminally Insane, edited by John Skipp.

  Simon Marshall-Jones is a UK-based writer, artist, editor, publisher and blogger: also wine and cheese lover, music freak and covered in too many tattoos.

  STITCHED

  by Christopher Green

  Jacob’s Mother would have told him not to pick at it. But he’d done as he’d been told too often, and now she, too, was gone.

  She’d taken him to the doctor once a week, and once she’d vanished he continued to go. It was what she would have wanted.

  He sat in the doctors’ waiting room, next to a coffee table scattered with old magazines.

  The receptionist smiled at him when he met her eyes, and he looked away, at each of the three doors to her left. The doctors had introduced themselves to him at the start of every visit for sixteen years, but Jacob still liked his own names for them better.

  Doctor Poke’s door was in the middle. He always had something in his hands, something cold and metallic and designed to pull something out of you or push something into you. His office smelled like dead air, and everything in it was slick. When Jacob was younger, he’d needed help to climb onto the table, and even when he got there he knew if he leaned forward too much, if he kicked or squirmed, he’d slip right off the table and onto the floor, and no one would bother to catch him.

  He and Doctor Poke did not get along, and Doctor Poke had run Jacob through his gauntlet and passed him on to Doctor Listen.

  Doctor Listen’s door was farthest from the receptionist, tucked back in the corner near the cramped toilet where Doctor Poke used to send him for samples.

  He’d spent years with Doctor Listen, and he liked him the best, by far. The lights weren’t often on, and the windows were usually open a crack, which let tram noise and the buzz of the street below drift wherever it liked. The room was warm, Doctor Listen’s desk was full of interesting gadgets that quietly whirred or ticked or spun, and Doctor Listen didn’t try to do anything beyond understand him.

>   After many lengthy one-sided conversations, Doctor Listen had referred him to Doctor Tell, whom he waited for now.

  Jacob’s watch beeped at him to tell him it was one o’clock and time for his appointment, and the receptionist glanced up and shrugged. Dr. Tell would be late again. Jacob resisted the urge to slide the razor from its place in the pocket of his polo shirt and stood up instead. He folded his hands in front of him, like a preacher just before the big silver plate gets passed around, and walked over to her.

  “Excuse me,” he said. She’d already stopped writing, but she waited a beat longer than he would have liked to set down her pen and tilt her face up at him.

  “Yes, Mr. Mevra?”

  “Do you know how much longer Dr. Tell will be with his other patient?”

  She blinked, and he could see her put an answer together from the pile of words she was allowed to use with him. “Dr. Gillespie will be with you as soon as he can, Mr. Mevra. It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

  “My appointment is for one o’clock,” Jacob said, tapping his watch gently with a manicured fingernail and nodding at the clock behind her. “I can only wait an hour, and then I’ll have to reschedule.” He knew as soon as the words left his mouth that he shouldn’t have said anything.

  The receptionist nodded. “Of course, Mr. Mevra. Would you like to take a seat?”

  It was Jacob’s turn to nod, and for a moment their heads bobbed at each other like birds in the middle of some ritual. He turned back toward the leather chairs and the coffee table and the magazines, then paused and faced her once again. “I wonder, miss, if I might be able to borrow a piece of paper?”