Individually Wrapped Horrors

by Eric Joel Kleinschmidt, Sr.

  “Well, then, there’s nothing for it. Guess I’ll have a go.” Dr. Dunn was running his thick, stubby fingers through his unruly shock of facial hair. His bushy sideburns were comic exclamation points framing his enormous face and down toward his quadruple chins. “My client made the papers right before my very eyes, I am here to tell you all. This fellow, stringy lad, strolls into my office. He has made no appointment to speak of, but strolls right in anyway. My secretary was somewhat disposed of at that particular moment and he found an open door and used it. I sat at my desk, entering a few notes into my laptop, when this wiry wisp of a young man enters and takes up residency there upon my couch.”Hello,” says I. The young man stares quite blankly at me for a moment, then tears come to his eyes. “I say, fellow, no need for that sort of carrying on now. Appointment or no, we’ll find a way to get you through whatever it is you battle. Do talk to me, son.” He looks up at me and with those same blank voids for eyes, he tells me that his name is Christian and he committed a most heinous series of crimes. He recalls in a most monotone drone that he has committed these heinous acts all over these United States of America and that punishment was being carried out as we spoke. He told me that every day he wakes up as a different person and it is usually a short time before that person meets a most unspeakable demise. The death he experiences, then he moves on to the next body and relives a new and horrible death. Every day, he said. I deflected and asked him what types of heinous acts we were referring to and he told me the most heinous of all—murder! I gasped a bit at that and had I anything at all to defend myself with at that moment, I believe I might have made for the phone to call in the coppers. No such luck, short of a fountain pen. I told him to proceed, that confession was good for the soul. “I’m sorry, Jamie. So, so sorry.” He just kept repeating those 6 words as he walked out of the room. Understanding now that he posed no immediate threat to me, I followed him out into the hallway. He took one last, desperate look back at me and then lunged out the front door—directly into the oncoming path of a speeding taxi. I must report to you all that he quite completely came undone right there in the dirty street. Most unsavory.” Dr. Everett Church spoke up next.

  “If my client’s story has any truth to it, I believe it to outdo yours, old chap, although a fellow meeting his nasty end right before your buggery eyes is a pretty tall order to top. My client, I believe the term the kids use is a Goth. She fancies herself a vampire, minus of course the supernatural abilities. She wears heavy black mascara and lip stick. She wears only black clothing, designed I believe to ward off any type of social interaction with her peers, oh, and most importantly, she swears she saw a boy her age ripped apart before her own eyes by none other than a real-life living werewolf. A she-wolf, at that. Her friends, of sorts, one of whom being the she-wolf’s own daughter, were all sworn to secrecy, creating in them a sort of club, not that much unlike our own. A club sworn to the secrets of a world where monsters do exist. She says that the real monsters though are man, or men to be more specific. Men who take and take and hurt and kill. This she-wolf is a defender of some sort that lives somewhere in the western half of mid-Missouri. She wouldn’t be any more specific on the actual locations, but she swears that near her home town, also to remain undisclosed, she knows of the location of a massive body dumping ground of very bad men, all of whom met their foulest of ends at the claws and teeth of mother-wolf. She never made it through one single session without bursting into a cascade of tears and snot runners.” They all had a good, hearty laugh at this poor girl’s obvious mental delusions. “Each session was the longest hour of my entire life. Also, she’s got a severe meth addiction now, as justified by the night in question’s supposed events. And that, my friends, is my winner.” He concluded by offering up his half full glass in a salute, then downing it all in one uncivilized draft. Dr. Monroe Taylor, who had been unusually quiet that evening, spoke up next. A masculine, muscular and overall fit man with just the thinnest hint of a goatee seemed to mulling his words over carefully before speaking.

  “I hesitate to speak of my client that made the top of my list this year. I know that being here with you all, I am amongst friends and countrymen. Still, mine is rather sordid, possibly more so than all of your contenders combined. Also…” he paused, “mine made a huge mess to have to clean up and a great deal of money was paid to make this situation go away. This was a clusterfuck that the feds wanted to go away and they busted some balls to make that happen. I have to go to upstate New York to visit my client, as he is now in Greenview Asylum and has no hope of ever getting out of there. He is New York state’s darkest secret for the moment, at least the darkest one that I am fully aware of, and bits of his sad, pathetic story still bring up bile in my throat. He was the ultimate momma’s boy. He killed his father, stopped taking his anti-psychotic meds or”vitamins” as he calls them and he lived out a fantasy in which his mother fell head over heels in love with him. They had three to four weeks of this love-in scenario before reality reasserted itself and he found that through a mistake on his part, one which his mind could not cope with properly, he had taken her life days before this love fest began. For three to four weeks, he had sexual relations of many demented and disturbed types with her decomposing corpse. All the time this was happening, he was having lucid dreams of a two headed demon that would tell him it was coming to destroy his life. The two headed blue demon turned out to be the two police officers who were first on the scene. Neither one of the two officers survived. My momma’s boy was taken into immediate custody and has remained therein ever since. He favors himself a “good boy” for the sake of his poor momma, but he is evil, pure and simple. And that gentlemen, is my que to hit the loo. I shall return promptly.” He set his glass down, stood up and stretched and walked out of the room.

  There was a faint murmur of words and polite laughter as he did his business, then he returned and took his seat once more. The stories resumed.

  “My client,” began Dr. Thaddeus York, “is another dream prediction hallucination. He believes that there is a great and vast end coming to our beloved little rock called Earth and that it will happen in 2023, February I believe is the month. In this detailed dream sequence he suffers from each night, he makes note of a number of factors that all culminate together and fall into place like dominos, resulting in the Earth itself becoming a dead moon. The odd bit really is that he ties it together with another dream of his in which a fellow man has a series of two run-ins with meteorites.” Dr. Bennett looked up.

  “You made that last bit up.” Dr. York was rubbing the side of his cheek with his palm and studying a spot on the floor, unblinking. He looked up now.

  “No. I didn’t. I had a good client all picked out. One that really had a nasty summer vacation in Greece, but then you told your story and it clicked with what this gentleman had told me.”First would come the falling of the two stones from space,” he had told me, like it was a goddamned prophecy or something, “then would come the crumbling of the Earth.” I think my story is done for now, gents. Someone else’s turn.” He went back to silently sipping at his drink in a very distracted way. Dr. Garrett Woods went next.

  “OK, so all seriousness aside, these have been some very interesting stories you’ve all come with tonight. Mine is not quite as good as all of that, but it does involve some pretty shady characters. A young lady came to see me. Miss Suzette Higgins. She battled drugs and depression nearly her entire life. I mean she wasn’t that old, but the evidence was there, on her face. She told me she had come into a business opportunity and wanted to talk it over with me. She told me that this rich businessman owned a mansion in the Manhattan area somewhere, a bit outside the city, I believe she had said. She told me that she had been approached on the street, the street she worked that is, by some of this businessman’s associates and that they wanted to film a gang-bang scenario where she would be tied down and a group of masked men would have their way with her. She knew this was not my sort of entertainment by
the look of displeasure I must have been openly exhibiting on my face. I saw her smile, just a small one and then she spent a few minutes looking down at her shoes. Anyway, she told me all about this little venture, not mentioning any names of the elite to me, and where it was supposed to go down. You know that mansion that damn near exploded, sheering off a good quarter of the top floor?” A few men nodded in response. “That was the goddamned place!” he nearly shouted. “That was the place and my client was never seen nor heard from again. I went to the police station in charge of the investigation to get answers to a few questions of my own. I talked to Acting-Chief Obernathy while there, he gave me nothing. But talking to a few of his inferiors, I found a weird thing. They had all types of video evidence of the events that took place that night, all except for the mysterious disappearance of their real Chief, a Chief Duggan. He was never seen again either. How’s that for a little Unsolved Mysteries shit for ya?” He was now leaning forward and on the edge of his seat telling the others his tale. The others nodded and agreed, yes, that was definitely strange. Dr. Luke Lawson mustered up his drunken courage and decided to go next.

  “So, tell me what you all make of this. My client of the year had a very strange tale indeed for me. The deaths included were verified by public records and various internet sources, but there are certain parts that make this fanciful tale a bit hard to swallow. This man, early twenties, tells me that his entire family was killed by an audiobook from hell. His words, not mine. He says that there was a mysterious ghost woman or witch or God knows what that appeared after it was all over and retrieved the audiobook, but not until after it had claimed his entire family.”

  “Where does the human mind go that it can bring back such dark fantasies?” Dr. Kemp asked to the entire room at large. “I mean it’s bad enough we have the Stephen Kings of the world filling already unstable minds full of this horror show shit, but all of that aside…the mind itself must go somewhere to find this darkness. I mean think about it. None of us here believe in vampires, correct?” They all nodded their agreement. “OK, so I know all the history of Vlad the Impaler being the supposed first Dracula and all of that rubbish. But, where does our collective mind go that we can take a real-life monster like that and make him even worse? And further, that other minds out there responds positively to that type of shit? In my humble opinions, all those doctors of the brain and experts of the human psyche just don’t do as much as they think they do. Too many dark corridors of the mind.” He concluded with a confirming sip of his drink and followed that with a lighting of a rather large and pungent cigar.

  “Yes,” Dr. Lawson continued, “well said. I couldn’t agree with you more on that score, Logan. This client stated that just by listening to this supposed audiobook, that one would lose themselves in whatever message the thing wanted you to have, most notably resulting in one’s own suicide. The book talked them into killing themselves. How strange a tale is that?” They all agreed that there were definitely some strange elements and that, if it were actually a true story—the audiobook portion anyway—and if there was indeed an audiobook filled with subliminal messages, then this was a foreign world to them indeed.

  “Geoffrey and myself have been working together as of late,” began Dr. Jane, “and we feel that his client of ours is not quite as far-fetched as some of your clients’ tales, but still noteworthy, nonetheless.” Dr. Potter held up his glass and then drank greedily. They were all well on their way to getting blotto,” Dr. Jane continued. “We began seeing this girl, her name is Jennifer, a few weeks ago.”

  “She stumbled into our office quite openly grieving for the loss of two men, twin brothers, the two of which she had at one time been very close,” said Dr. Potter. He was now in the process of rolling up a little relaxation in a zig-zag. He began licking the paper as Dr. Jane continued again.

  “Yes, do try to not light yourself nor the premises if you must do that horrendous shit. So, there we were in my office, working on a thesis paper that was becoming something of a bore for the both of us. This young lady came in, visibly shaken up. She looked like she had aged horribly in the last few years and that she hadn’t slept in weeks. We welcomed her in and thanked our lucky stars for the break from the paper. She began spouting a lot of nonsense about her Juggalo being dead. Well, neither of us knew what that meant. We asked her very calmly, offering tissues, to try again, that she wasn’t making any sense. The story began to come. He boyfriend of a few years had committed suicide after their disastrous breakup and following shortly on the tails of that, the boyfriend’s twin brother-”

  “-whom she also had feelings and a brief little fling with-” Dr. Potter interjected.

  “-and whom also had been in a coma following a terrible tractor-trailer accident, had also died. This was not an all-of-a-sudden type of thing. It had been a handful of years in the making. The boyfriend died a few years back, but the twin brother just died the day before she came in to see us. She was married herself and had two beautiful daughters, but that sort of thing really gets to some folks. Most folks, I guess. So, the odd part of our tale is that the brothers seemed to share a recurring dream or nightmare of being on an island shore, surrounded by ghosts or wraiths, and something in there about a coin toss. She wasn’t really clear on that aspect. The twin boys had shared some delusional nightmare that there was a dark end coming for both of them. And, in a way, I guess they were right.” Dr. Potter was now lighting up and the richly sweet aroma of marijuana began to fill the room, still thick with the smells of pipe, cigar and the occasional cigarette smoke.

  “Strange cases out there,” said Dr. Church. “Speaking of, we’ve heard from everyone now except you, Toby.” Dr. Tobias Chase was leaned back in his seat with his glass in his right hand and his left arm up on the next chair’s head rest. He seemed to consider his mostly empty glass with distaste. He looked up and around at the sea of faces. He was about to start talking when the resort staff came in. The weather outside had begun to grow fiercer and they began to shut the indoor shutters and slide bolt locks across them.

  “I say, good people, is that really necessary, do you think?” Asked Dr. Church. The head staff member, Nigel something or other, came over to the group.

  “Gentlemen, I assure you that no matter what mother nature can throw at us, we are all perfectly safe nestled in our little nook of the world up here. This old resort has stood for 130 years on this very spot and never so much as a hint of trouble. They built them strong as fortresses back then. More cognac for anyone?” He produced a full bottle and held it in an offering posture. There were nods and head shakes in an almost equal amount. “Very well, gentlemen, I shall leave the bottle. Help yourselves, as always. Is there anything else I can get for anyone?” No, they were all good. Understanding this, Nigel something or other took his leave. They all went back to sipping, smoking and looking at Dr. Chase. His face had grown long and hollow. Shadows gave his cheeks that sunken in look, but the furrowed brow on his face really told the others to buckle up for this tale.

  “To begin with, his name was Harold. Harold Brown…”

  ****

  Harold Brown hurried down Elm Street on foot. He had to park seven blocks away and was running about 15 minutes late for his appointment. He was an old hat at this and knew how tight of schedules these shrinks kept. Traffic whizzed by him and other people were walking both toward him and around him to get by. His fast pace was still a bit slower than the average young person’s normal pace. Too many cheeseburgers, fries and chocolate milk shakes, not enough times to the gym to use his free membership, he told himself as he began huffing and puffing. Pretty soon, he was either going to blow someone’s house in or pass out from exhaustion. The latter more likely. He continued up the street, now physically feeling the sweat trickling down from his arm pits inside his white button-up shirt. He had a tweed sports jacket on and thought, 80 degrees? Why’d I have to wear the jacket on a day when it’s 80 goldarn degrees? He kept walking, faster and faster, pu
ffing more now. At least he wasn’t a smoker. He had that going for him. He rounded the corner at Elm Street and 4th Avenue. Almost there. He checked his watch again. 20 minutes late. Rats. He saw the building and went for the door. As he opened it, a woman in a blue dress and high heels came through it, blowing her nose gently into a tissue. She was crying and he looked down out of respect as she walked obliviously by. Once past, he hurried into the building.

  The secretary looked up at him from a Glamour magazine, blew a bubble gum bubble and then looked over at the wall-mounted clock. The face of it was a black and white cat, its tail swished to the tick-tock of the seconds. She looked back at him disdainfully.

  “May I help you?” She asked in a dry monotone voice.

  “Harold Brown, I’m the 2 o’clock appointment.” She slowly and deliberately pivoted her head around to look at the clock again, but so he could see it, too. 2:25 p.m., it read. She looked back at him, slowly chewing on her gum with an open mouth. He thought just then about how much she resembled a cow in the field, chewing its cud. He stammered, “I-I-I know I’m late. I’m sorry about that.” He palmed sweat off of his flabby cheeks and forehead. She made a nauseated gesture with her mouth and then leaned forward to the intercom.