Shock Totem 3: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by John Haggerty

  She smiled and tore one from the pad she’d been writing on, one page below the one she’d been using. He thanked her and returned to his seat.

  He passed the next twenty minutes by simply running the pads of his fingers along the edge of the paper, but it wasn’t enough. The room was getting darker. Every once in a while he would look over at the receptionist and she wouldn’t be there.

  Jacob could make out words on the paper, words that had pressed through to it from the paper above. Words the receptionist had been writing, ones not in the pile she was allowed to use with him in casual conversation. Like crazy, or cutter, or compulsive. “C” words. His father would have had another “C” word for her, and probably the “A” one and the “F” one and the “MF” one, too, but his father had vanished long ago. He was one of the few Jacob didn’t feel guilty about.

  When Jacob started letting the paper bite a bit deeper, the receptionist was gone less often. She was biting her lip and eyeing the blood on the edge of Jacob’s borrowed piece of paper. Jacob didn’t care what she thought. If he stopped she’d be gone for good, like his mother, like his father, like countless others. The receptionist was nice to look at and smelled like vanilla and, when he was younger, had taken his temperature or his blood with her soft, cool hands.

  He dragged the edge of the paper along the cuts in his fingers. When the paper became too soaked in blood he turned it to another edge. By a quarter to two, he’d had to resort to neatly tearing his own edges into the paper, holding it against the edge of the coffee table and being as quiet as he could during the ripping part. The receptionist watched him openly, now, but he was careful, and wiped his fingers with his handkerchief, and used the hand that wasn’t cut to pick things up or set them down. She was always there, now, whenever he looked up, and that was enough.

  Dr. Tell finally opened his office door at two o’clock, and Jacob knew he’d been correct. Let Dr. Tell know you were willing to wait an hour, and you were certain to be waiting an hour.

  The receptionist opened her mouth, but Jacob was already on his feet. He brushed past Dr. Tell and went to his usual spot inside the office, in the wooden chair with the wooden rungs with the wooden knobs that stuck into his back when he shifted position, across from the Doctor’s long, empty desk.

  Dr. Tell closed the door and sat on his side of the desk.

  The little slashes on Jacob’s fingertips had stopped bleeding. He steepled his fingers and watched the doctor. The old scars along his hands were pale in the tiny office lights that shone down on them like stars.

  “Thank you for your patience, Jacob. I had some other business to attend to.”

  “What kind of business?”

  Dr. Tell’s Adam’s apple bobbed in and out of his collar when he swallowed, like a buoy in rough seas. “Pardon me?”

  “What kind of business is so important that you leave me sitting out there for an hour? You say I’m a sick man, Dr. Tell, but you don’t treat me like I’m sick. You treat me like I’m stupid.”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid, Jacob, I think you need help.”

  Jacob nodded. “I believe that. But you say I need the kind of help that only you can give me. Dr. Poke thought that for a few years. Dr. Listen thought that for a decade. How long before you change your mind, too?”

  Dr. Tell sighed. “I won’t change my mind, Jacob.”

  “Because the only explanation left will be mine? One day, then, that’ll be the only thing left. You can tell and tell and tell, or poke and poke, or listen and listen, and you won’t change the truth of it.”

  Dr. Tell sat back in his chair and ran his thumbs over his eyebrows, for a moment, and then tried again. “Let us use logic, then, shall we? Yes? To dissect the problem before us.”

  “All right.”

  “You, Jacob Mevra, are convinced the world will end if you don’t cut yourself and stitch yourself back up. Correct?”

  “Well, it won’t end, I guess. The world will keep right on spinning, if that’s what you mean, but there won’t be anyone left to enjoy it.”

  Dr. Tell nodded emphatically. “Understood. Yet, here we are, and you aren’t cutting yourself right this moment, are you?”

  “No,” Jacob said, “because I did it in the waiting room. I had to, before your receptionist slid away. We should be okay for a little while, but it wasn’t much, so it won’t last for very long.”

  “But you’ve gone for long periods without cutting yourself, haven’t you? I know you have. I know Dr. “Poke” prescribed sedatives and your mother assured us that you didn’t so much as get out of bed for two weeks.”

  Jacob shifted in his chair and, sure enough, the wooden knobs ground against his spine. “I did what I could, then. I remember biting my tongue, or the insides of my mouth. But it wasn’t enough. That was when the boy across the street slid away, and the man who used to run the dry cleaner, and the woman who used to bag our groceries.”

  “But these people, can you be sure they existed?”

  Jacob shifted position again. He hated this part of his conversations with Dr. Tell. “I can be sure, I guess, but I don’t know how to make you sure of it. Or of me. Someone else bagged our groceries, a different guy took my Mom’s dresses at the dry cleaner, and the house across the street never had a little boy, after that, and the parents didn’t miss him.”

  “You mean they didn’t care, that they looked for him for a little while and then stopped?”

  Jacob’s fingertip itched, and he knew that soon he’d have to start again. “No. I mean that the boy just never was, and his parents didn’t know it. They didn’t know of him, and so they couldn’t miss him.”

  Dr. Tell smiled so widely that Jacob could see the teeth at the sides of his mouth. “Exactly. Do you know what the word manifestation means, Jacob. As in, this cutting, of yours, is a physical manifestation of an otherwise mental disorder?”

  “It means you think it’s a clue, that I cut my skin and stitch it back together and that means that, inside, where you can’t poke or listen or tell, something else is wrong with me.”

  “Correct. That’s exactly right.” Dr. Tell looked very pleased with himself.

  Jacob shook his head and smiled his own little smile. “Well, how about this? I think you are incapable of belief. Not once, in the years and years of consultations, have any of you even once considered that maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe I’m right. I think that’s a manifestation of your own pigheadedness. When you’re a hammer, all the world’s a nail, am I right?” Jacob stood.

  Dr. Tell did, too. “Jacob, don’t go, yet.”

  “I have to. I have things to do.”

  “Cuts to make? Wounds to stitch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please, Jacob, don’t.”

  “Answer me this, Doctor. If I see you fading next time, if it isn’t some little boy or some old lady or your receptionist, then do you want me to stop? Is that when I should decide that I’m wrong and you’re right and tuck my hands quietly into my pockets and watch you vanish and come into a waiting room where there are two doors instead of three, or maybe three doors and this one’s used by someone else, a Doctor who swears he’s been seeing me for years and that there never was a Dr. Tell. Is that when you want me to stop? Or is that the one time when I should make a few little cuts, just to be certain?”

  Dr. Tell flinched, and opened his mouth a few times, and said nothing.

  Jacob got to the door and yanked it open. There was a mother and her child in the waiting room, anxiously checking her watch and looking at Dr. Poke’s door.

  “You know what, Doctor,” Jacob said, and stepped back into the office, closing the door behind him. It wasn’t anything a child needed to know. “You asked me, way back when, if I did all this because God asked me to.”

  “I remember that, yes. You said he didn’t”

  “God didn’t come in to it at all. The Devil, he’s the one. Sat next to me, one day, a little after I’d worked it out, after I k
new how to make things not slide away, sat right down next to me, that Devil, and asked me not to. I couldn’t tell my mother that she’d picked the Devil’s side.”

  Jacob left.

  The pads of Dr. Tell’s fingertips itched so badly he wanted to scratch at them until they bled.

  Christopher Green was born in the United States and moved to Australia at the age of 20, after meeting his wife on the Internet (she wasn’t his wife at the time). He attended Clarion South in 2007 and therein found the crucible he needed, like-minded authors who didn’t flinch at talk of autopsies, alien implants, and the evolutionary purpose of elf ears. His fiction has been published in Dreaming Again, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Abyss & Apex. He lives in Geelong with his wife and their two perpetually muddy Labradors.

  Visit him on his blog at www.christophergreen.wordpress.com.

  2010 FLASH FICTION CONTEST WINNER

  RUTH ACROSS THE SEA

  by Steven Pirie

  Ruth coughs: this close, she thinks she can taste the Executioner’s breath. He’s a small man down here in his dark lair, unmasked and away from the height and fear of the gallows’ stage. He stinks of stale urine and semen. There’s the hint of an erection under his stained gown.

  “This is the rope?” says Ruth. It’s heavy, and the noose is more rigid than she imagined. She wonders how so stiff a knot can be tightened to fit a victim’s neck. Surely a rope this tight would jerk the head clean off.

  The Executioner grins. His teeth are blackened and broken. “Best ropes as can be found, lady,” he says. “As sure as sure to snap the bones first time.”

  “Is that your aim, to kill by breaking the neck?”

  “No, lady.” The Executioner breathes heavily. He fumbles briefly under his gowns. His face is flushed. “Not if I can help it. I like them to die on the drawing. I like their eyes bulging when I show them their innards.”

  Ruth looks away. A fire burns in a great hearth. The flames cast a Hellish hue to the Executioner’s den. Its dull light flickers upon the ornate handle of a razor.

  “They tell me your victims dance before dying, that they fling themselves upon the noose to be sure to break the neck. A cleaner, quicker death than drawing, I’m told.”

  “Ah, but these are my ropes,” says the Executioner. “No one knows these ropes like me, and only I can say who dances and who breaks on the end of them.”

  Ruth reaches for the razor. Its blade is blue sharp; its handle encrusted with diamonds and gems. She marvels at how balanced it is in her grasp. Ruth draws breath.

  “I want you to slice part way through the rope. When we dance tomorrow, I want the rope to snap, do you understand?”

  The Executioner grins once more. “It can be arranged, Lady, for a certain payment.”

  “Oh?”

  The Executioner pulls open his gowns. Ruth thinks she might swoon with the stench. She reaches down and grips the Executioner’s penis. He grunts and grins up at her.

  “Arrange it,” says Ruth. With her other hand, she presses the razor against the Executioner’s scrotum. His grin wavers for an instant, but he loses none of his erection. “Arrange it, or the price will be all yours.”

  “That’s tough talk, lady.” The Executioner reaches down also, so both now hold the razor against his skin. He draws Ruth’s hand slowly to the side, and Ruth feels blood on her palm. “Maybe I like it tough. But you have a plan, no? You have thoughts of rescue and escape, perhaps?”

  Ruth shivers. The Executioner places both palms upon Ruth’s shoulders and presses her downward to her knees. His penis stares out at her with its one good eye. She knows what he wants, though she’s never done such a thing.

  “There are those who are hanged themselves for such thoughts,” he says. He draws Ruth’s head forwards. “But be nice to me, lady, and perhaps tomorrow’s dance really will be brief.”

  • • •

  Later, as the sun sets beyond the castle ramparts, Ruth stands alone upon the west turret. Beyond the paddock and the woods, the sun is golden on the sea. The masts of a galleon are black against the sky. In her mind, Ruth hears the creaking of its timbers. Gulls wheel as the bow wave tumbles. With the snapping of the sails, she tastes the salt spray of the open sea.

  She licks her lips, but it’s a different salt that lingers. In the courtyard, Ruth sees the Executioner upon his scaffold. He has buckets for the guts, and guttering for the blood. As he attaches the ropes he glances up at her and grins.

  Ruth sighs. What price is freedom in the promise of a dawn so terrible?

  • • •

  The drumbeats begin before the sun rises. They start slowly, steady like the day’s heartbeat. An early mist has fallen, and it seems to Ruth the world beyond the town gates no longer exists.

  At the gallows, Ruth stands to the side, away from the bustle of the crowd. The cart, stacked with blankets, cost her five guineas. The horse cost her all the money she’d saved. The sailors who would fight for the diversion, and then see her safely across the sea, cost Ruth her virginity. Ruth shudders remembering how she’d lain back and closed her eyes as one by one they’d loved her. They were not gentle lovers—they had a sea farer’s urgency—and she was dry and virgin-tight. And then there came the pain of gin and scalding baths to kill the seeds inside her. She’d say cleansing baths, though she doubts she’ll feel clean again.

  A herald sounds, and the prisoners are led to the gallows. They’re gaunt and beaten, too spent to do anything but trudge to their fate. The drums are silent as the ropes are placed about their necks. The crowd is still. The Executioner’s hood billows with his rapid breathing. He pulls the lever and the crowd roars. The sailors shove and push. A shout is heard. A punch is thrown. The prisoners dance on their ropes. But not for long; the executioner has his razor to wield. There are live guts to be spilled.

  And in the roar and confusion, a rope snaps. A prisoner thuds to the ground and is rolled to the side. The cart is waiting, the blankets pulled back. Ruth climbs in also. A whip raps against horse flesh. The cart rocks forward toward the sea.

  “You see,” says Ruth, “I said I’ll be here for you.”

  Ruth nuzzles in to her lover; feels the softness of her breast against her face. Mary can barely speak.

  “Hush. Today we go across the sea,” says Ruth, “To where a woman can love a woman without fear of death.”

  Steven Pirie lives in Liverpool, England with his wife Ann and their son James.

  His fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies around the world. His comic fantasy novel, Digging up Donald, published by Immanion Press, has attracted excellent reviews. A new novel, Burying Brian, will be published by Immanion Press in December, 2010.

  Details of all this and more may be found at www.stevenpirie.com.

  DUVAL STREET

  by Mekenzie Larsen

  I walk down Whitehead Street with eight bucks and a cigarette lighter in the right pocket of my overcoat and a travel-size can of hairspray in the left. Not out of fear or necessity. Old habit is all, and what habit could be harder to break than the desire to protect oneself? Drugs, I suppose, or sex; but I’m not fit to make a proper comparison as I’ve had neither. So I continue to carry my means of defense. You can never be too careful, as my Nana used to say, with so many creeps in the world.

  I squint against the light that finds its way through the cracks in my veil. Aside from the God-awful sun, it’s a charming day. The squawking of parrots and the squealing of the children feeding them against all posted requests drifts to my ears on wind that smells of booze and sweat masked by cheap floral perfume. Lilac or violet? I can never tell the difference. It smells purple, either way. I stroll past tourist shops and million-dollar houses. The Audubon gardens look especially green today, the leaves and stems of yellow blossoms almost too crisp for my eyes to take in under this bastard sun. The house coming up on my right appears empty, though the yard is cropped and the porch recently waxed. Sandra Bullock’s, you know. The trolley g
uide told us as much. I pass Hemingway’s old home, which, I’ve been told, is overrun with six-toed cats named after fallen movie stars. I like to tell people I have six toes. “Really?” they will ask. “On which foot?” No, no, no, I say. I have six toes altogether. They stare back at me until I begin to laugh and soon they’re laughing, too, but I know they’re curling their toes uncomfortably inside their expensive, polished shoes.

  I stand at the corner of Whitehead and Truman, my head down and my hands in my pockets. A dark-skinned woman in a hot pink mesh top and cutoff denim shorts steps up beside me, humming along to Jimmy Buffet whose voice drones on and on from all directions. Which song she’s attempting to keep the beat to, I can’t tell. I fidget with the lighter inside my coat and contemplate setting myself on fire right there on the corner, another attraction, another freak. I would blend right in with the other flamers. Ha! I let the lighter drop further into my pocket and curl my hand into a ball which takes some effort due to the garish length of my nails. Smile, for chrissakes, and don’t make it look so forced. Show some teeth.

  The dark-skinned woman takes one look at me and makes a mad dash for an open door across the street. She nearly gets clipped by a speeding scooter and I shout after her, “Better luck next time, sweetie!” I doubt she could see my face through all this crackled rayon but the possibility still makes me tingle. I’m grinning like a clown who’s tangled with a Chelsea gang.

  Too many creeps in the world, by God; one too many to count.

  The sidewalk disappears under my skirt a foot at a time, swallowed then spit from the heels of my boots. A pirate brushes past me in a cloud of smoke too sweet and too pungent to be anything but hash. “’Scuse me, ma’am.” I don’t have anything to gain by correcting him so I glare after him instead, knowing he feels me watching him, hoping he looks back. He doesn’t.