David Maloney
Death And Candy
First published by David Maloney 2018
Copyright © 2018 by David Maloney
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
First edition
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To my friend Ha-Yong Bak. Without his constant friendship and encouragement, this book never would have happened.
Contents
Foreword
Frank the Monster
How the Scarecrow Died
The Drowning
Voices
My Girlfriend the Brain-Eating Alen
She Says the Smell of Death Turns her On
God is a Waitress in Vegas
The Door in the Woods
Mr. Crow
The Blue-Eyed Painting
Parasitic
Fight Me, Fuck Me, BURN ME
Death's Advice
Satan Offered me a Job. I Took It
Fargo
The Empty Body
Sexual Predators
Daniel
The Tokyo Subway Demon
Birthing a Monster
Dreams of Death
Demon Possession for Beginners
The First Thing to Die
I'm a Demon. Help Me Out?
Sleeping with the Corpses Next Door
Slaughter in the Park
The Box
Handles
A is for Addiction
The Abandoned Diary
Scream in a Box
The Yu Jia Lake Monster
When Stuffed Animals Start Talking, Dont Talk Back
My Neighbor was a Vampire
Thinking too Much? You’re Drinking too LIttle
Donnie the Skeleton
The Hitchhiker from Hell
The Strands of Fate
Desert Cults and Mescaline
Welcome to Hell, Please Take a Number
About the Author
Also by David Maloney
Foreword
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1
Frank the Monster
I was lying alone in my room when I heard the voice, deep and crackly, coming from beneath my bed.
“Hey,” the voice called out.
I told myself I was just imagining it.
“Hey kid,” the voice repeated.
I drew my knees up to my chest and ducked my head under the blanket, trying to shut out both the voice and the cold winter wind that drifted in through the window, ruffling the curtains.
“Who are you?” I asked in a whisper.
“I’m the monster underneath your bed,” the voice replied.
“You mean you’re real?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” the monster said. “Of course I’m real.”
“Do you have a name?” I asked.
“Of course I have a name.”
“Oh… well what is it?”
“Frank.”
“Frank?”
“Yeah,” the monster said. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just not very monster-ly.”
“Well my parents didn’t want me to be a monster.”
“Really? What did they want you to be?”
“A dentist.”
“That’s funny,” I said. I felt myself begin to smile.
“What do your parents want you to be?” it asked.
“I don’t know…. Hey Frank?”
“Yeah?”
“Aren’t you gonna… like… scare me or something?”
“What? Why would I do that?”
“Well, you’re a monster, aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah, of course I am, but that doesn’t mean that I scare little kids.”
“But I thought that was your job.”
“It is my job to scare people,” he replied. “But only bad people.”
“Am I a bad person?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “but you’re not the one I’m here to scare.”
“Who are you here to scare?” I asked.
There was a brief moment of silence, and then Frank said, “The man inside your closet.”
2
How the Scarecrow Died
Josh was just one of those kids. He was built more like a gorilla than a human teenager, and he had the disposition of a Rottweiler someone had just unsuccessfully tried to neuter.
There are a lot of different ways to bully people, and Josh was an expert in all of them. He stole lunch money, shoved heads in toilets, beat kids up and even pinched girls’ asses in the hallways. But the thing that really made Josh such a natural bully was his dad.
The man looked like an even bigger, uglier version of Josh, with a thicker neck, beadier eyes, and more knuckle hair. He basically owned the small town we all lived in, and he seemed to think that he owned the people too.
If a teacher pointed out that Josh shouldn’t smack girls’ asses in the hallway, you can bet a few phone calls later that that person would be out of a job thanks to Josh’s dear old dad.
To this day I sometimes wonder if the horrible events that would transpire in our town could have been avoided if somebody—anybody—had just held him accountable. But nobody ever did, so I guess I’ll never know.
The thing that started it was something simple: Josh took a special interest in making one particular kid’s life miserable. Little Billy Wilkinson was just too easy of a target. He was skinny, pale, and other kids called him “the scarecrow” because of the patches in his clothes.
Of course, it wasn’t Billy’s fault that his mom was too poor to afford new clothes, but you know how cruel kids can be when they think they smell weakness.
Myself, I always just called him Billy.
Every day Josh would call out to Billy in the halls: “Hey scarecrow! Come over here so I can beat the stuffing out of you!” He thought this joke was so clever that he repeated it every single day, and if Billy didn’t laugh, then he’d end up with his head stuck in a toilet.
Things went on like that for a while.
Nobody seemed to bother with sticking up for Billy, and his overly large clothes hid the knife scars that had begun to grow like tree roots down his arms. I never understood why the people this world spits on always end up punishing themselves more, but I guess that’s just how it goes.
Eventually, Billy shut down entirely.
He wouldn’t talk to anyone, wouldn’t look you in the eye; would flinch at any sudden movement. We all thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse, but I guess fate didn’t really care too much for our ideas, because that week Billy’s mom died, and within a few days the whole town knew that she’d been found by the police with a needle in her arm.
If that was a cause for a reprieve then Josh didn’t see it. Rather, he thought the opposite. To his mind, his prey was wounded, and now was the time to move in for the kill.
“I heard about how your mom died,” he’d hiss under his breath when there were no teachers around, “wish I’d have found her first. Even for a smackhead you
r mom was a nice piece of ass.”
“You’re living with your grandma now, aren’t you? Maybe I’ll pay her a visit tonight, I don’t think she’d put up much of a fight.”
Nobody seemed to notice as the gashes on Billy’s arms spread to his chest and his legs, or how his face would twitch whenever Josh’s insults echoed behind his hollow eyes.
Nobody noticed that he’d started writing in his diary about how much he’d like to steal his dead grandpa’s gun and put an end to things his way.
Sometimes, you’ll see a story about a kid like Billy on the news and wonder how nobody stepped in, how nobody saw what was going on in their head. The answer to that is simple; it’s just easier to look away.
The uglier the truth is, the less people want to face it, because then they’ll have to ask themselves why they did nothing for so long.
The last day before it happened Josh had cornered Billy after school and beat him to within an inch of his life. When he got home that day his face looked like a pound of raw ground beef, and as he stared at himself in the mirror, he decided tomorrow was the day he’d end it.
He snuck into his grandpa’s gun safe that night and grabbed the old .357 revolver from inside. He knew the combination—his birthday. He didn’t know where to find more ammo, but he knew it was kept loaded in case of a break-in.
The next morning he tucked the revolver in his waistband and slid a long shirt over it. He didn’t verify that it was loaded; he didn’t even want to look at it.
And yet he clenched his jaw with determination as he walked outside to catch the bus. When he got to school he noticed there was a crowd outside by the football field. Thankful for the delay, he slid his way in between the shoulders and elbows to the front, and that’s when he saw Josh.
His former bully was naked and strapped to the field goal post. He had been gutted from head to toe, his organs replaced with straw. His eyes were hollow pits, pecked out by birds before anyone had found him. And on top of his head, someone had placed an old scarecrow’s hat.
Billy left right then and came home. He barely glanced at me as he passed like a ghost. Rather, he headed straight to his room and collapsed on the bed. It was the first time he slept easy in a long while.
It was only a few days before the news had spread around the town that the boy had been murdered, and that when the police went to notify his dad, well, they found him dead too.
To this day they still don’t know who did it.
The police suspected Billy at first, and they must have asked me a dozen times if I’d seen my grandson leave the house that night, but I told them the same thing each time.
I’d been awake all night watching TV in the den and I would have seen him if he had left. I could tell they all thought I was senile, but none of them dared say it to my face.
Well, I’m older now, and I don’t think I have much time left, so now I suppose is the time for truth: I don’t know what Billy was up to that night because I wasn’t there.
I was at Josh’s house. And I was making damn sure that nobody ever called my grandson ‘scarecrow’ ever again.
And no one ever did.
3
The Drowning
I didn’t always want to be a lifeguard. When I was young I wasn’t even a good swimmer; my physique had been chiseled into shape by fast food and video games rather than athletics. But one summer something terrible happened that changed the course of my life forever: my little brother drowned.
We had all been having fun at the beach, and he had only wandered out of my parents’ sight for a few minutes. But those few minutes were enough for him to disappear forever.
The first stage of grief I went through, and the longest, was anger. I couldn’t understand why nobody had intervened, how had no one seen him. But I soon learned that when people drown it’s not like how it looks in the movies. They don’t thrash around and scream for help. If you’re looking closely you might see a head bobbing up and down for a few minutes before it sinks down for the last time. You might not see anything at all.
That was the catalyst for my decision to become a lifeguard. I wanted to prevent other people from going through what had torn my family apart. I practiced for hours every day, stealing every free minute that I could for my passion, until I was good enough to be hired on at the local beach my brother had drowned at.
I was never the Baywatch sort of lifeguard; I was skinny, pale and completely incapable of tanning, and by the end of my first week my body was covered in so many freckles I looked like I had a skin disease. But despite the fact that I didn’t look the part, I took my job damn seriously.
I heard the rumor about the beach being haunted from the other lifeguards on the first day. They told me that the ghosts of drowning victims stayed there to drag others down to the same fate. I didn’t think there was anything to the rumor—I figured they were just messing with the new guy who wasn’t a part of their clique.
But before long I would find out that I was wrong.
The beach was closed that night, and I was sleeping in the lifeguard stand. I didn’t have a girl up there or anything, it’s just that being a lifeguard full-time didn’t really pay the bills, and I needed a place to sleep. I was just nodding off, head on the salt-soaked wood, when I heard the scream.
“HELP!”
I sat bolt upright, my heart nearly pounding out of my chest. Nobody was supposed to be here this late. But the scream came again, and louder.
“HELP!”
I heard it more clearly this time. It didn’t sound right. Something about it sent rippling waves of gooseflesh down my arms and legs. Rather than inspire heroics, the call frightened me to my core.
But I knew I didn’t have a choice. If there was even the slightest chance that someone was in danger, I needed to help them.
I slid down the ladder and scanned the beach around me. It was completely deserted. Where the hell was the scream coming from? I scanned the horizon of water, and that’s when I saw it; a head bobbing up and down.
I sprinted through the sand and leapt headfirst into the icy water. I powered through towards the person with all my might, my nose and eyes burning as the saltwater splashed into them. The head was staying underwater for longer each time it went down. I knew I didn’t have much time left.
Just before I reached them, their head went down and didn’t come back up.
I dove.
The water was murky black. My head spun in all directions but I couldn’t see a damn thing.
I resurfaced and spit out saltwater. My mind was racing through a million half-formed plans of how to find the person before it was too late.
That’s when I felt icy fingers close around my ankle. My head whipped around; but no one was there. Yet the grip was strong, and its intention was clear as it began pulling me out to sea.
For a flash of a second I wondered if this was what had happened to my brother. If he’d felt icy hands on him pulling him under as his lungs filled with saltwater.
I felt my other leg bump into something under the surface. I reached down and grabbed hold, and my hand closed around a human arm. I yanked as hard as I could, and a woman came up. It must have been the woman I’d seen drowning, but she’d been under too long. We needed to get back to shore as soon as possible. I kicked as hard as I could and I felt the icy fingers slip off my ankle. But I realized with horror that I’d been caught in the undercurrent, and it was now pulling me even farther away from shore.
I knew there was no way I’d get us both back alive as I watched the shore shrink in the distance. I felt the iron grip of the icy fingers again. They grabbed beneath each one of my shoulders and pulled hard. But this time they weren’t pulling me out to sea, they were pulling me towards the shore, and out of the undercurrent. I kicked my feet as hard as I could, pulling the woman’s lifeless body along with me as I raced to the beach where I could perform CPR. With the pulling hands and my kicking combined we hit the shore hard fast and hard. I stumbled ou
t of the water and laid the woman down on her back.
It must have only been thirty seconds of CPR, but it felt like an eternity before she coughed up the water and sucked in a large, groaning gasp.
I sighed in relief and collapsed on the wet sand beside her.
“Th-thank you,” the girl stammered out.
“It’s my job,” I said between heaving breaths. “I can’t believe you managed to call for help like that.”
“Wh-what? I didn’t call for help,” she replied.
I sat back up. Was there someone still out there?
I scanned the horizon. My heart stopped.
Standing at the water’s edge was a mirage, a hallucination, a memory of something long since gone—the evanescent ghost of my little brother. He looked just as he did the day he died, still in his powder blue swimming trunks. He smiled at me and waved. I started towards him, but he shimmered like a mist and vanished into thin air.
After that night the legend of the beach changed. Now there is no talk of drowned victims, dragging others out to sea. Instead, they say there’s a ghost of a little boy who pulls struggling swimmers back to shore.
And they say he’s got powder blue swimming trunks.
4
Voices
Until last week, I thought my schizophrenia was hereditary.
I was having one of those days where I have no choice but to stay indoors. I had been stressed at work lately, and as a result I was having a particularly bad bout of paranoia, and my auditory hallucinations were far stronger than usual.
I tried tuning him out with music, but Sammy, the voice in my head, wouldn’t leave me alone.
You know they’re watching you, he said.
“Shut up, Sammy, I’m not listening.”
Of course you are. I’m inside your head, remember? How can you ignore something that lives inside your head? Besides, I’m only trying to warn you. They’ll be coming to get you soon.
“You’ve been saying that for five years,” I said, trying to shut down that mounting paranoia that this time he could be right.
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