Bedlam Stories

by Christine Converse

  Praise for Bedlam Stories

  “The best ghost story since Carpenter’s The Ward, and scary enough to frighten Silent Hill Fans”

  - Michael DeFillipo, HORROR SOCIETY

  “It’s a wicked and twisted tale that draws you into it’s wild world. Not only will you want to keep reading, you’ll find yourself unable to stop!”

  - Jude Felton, THE LAIR OF FILTH

  “A dense, absorbing read just bursting with macabre, unsettling images which simply leap off the page. A virtual phantasmagoria!”

  - James Ferace, Author of OCKHAM’S RAZOR

  “It was like a drug, a surreal imaginative and sickening fever dream, and I never want to wake from it... Bedlam is one of the greatest pieces of literature horror fans will read this or any year”

  - Rob DiLauro, DREAD CENTRAL HOST

  “A twisted, surreal, imaginative piece of storytelling.”

  - Phil Wheat, NERDLY

  “Bedlam Stories is the bastard child of David Lynch and Clive Barker. It’s haunting artistry will scar you from the inside out!”

  - Christopher M. Jimenez, SINFUL CELLULOID

  “This is a insanely intense masterpiece! That will make u wanting more! Love it! “

  - Scott Geiter, GRUESOME HERTZOGG

  “A wonderfully twisted spin on a beloved tale. It was sick and gruesome and I absolutely loved it. A breath of fresh air for the horror genre.”

  - Jesse Miller, MORE HORROR

  “One of the most terrifying novels you will ever read”

  -Martyn Wakefield, BLOOD GUTS

  Pearry Teo’s

  The Battle for Oz and wonderland Begins

  Christine Converse

  Bedlam Stories LLC

  A Division of Teo Ward Productions

  Los Angeles, CA

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  © 2013 Pearry Teo, Teo Ward Productions. All rights reserved. Bedlam Stories are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Pearry Teo in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks references herein are the properties of the respective owners.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact creator Pearry Teo, pearry@bedlamstories.com

  Teo Ward Productions also offers licensing for The Bedlam Stories franchise. Please contact the creator for any inquiries.

  Bedlam Stories first printed edition 2011. Dark Häus Press.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1492116564

  ISBN-13: 978-1492116561

  This book is gratefully dedicated to all of the fans of the wonderful world of Oz and the fantastical realm of Wonderland.

  Also, to my amazing husband Kevin and our two littlest storytellers for encouraging me to stop everything, sit down and write them a story.

  KIERAN ERICH CONVERSE, at six;

  CAYDEN ALEXANDER CONVERSE, at four;

  Kids, don’t ever stop telling your “once-upon-a-time”s. With imagination, there are entire universes with their domains, creatures and journeys at your fingertips. To create and share something from your imagination that becomes loved is true magic.

  And to Pearry Teo, the man behind the curtain, without whom Oz and Wonderland would not have made such dark acquaintance.

  “And THEN…” – Cayden

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Chad Michael Ward (as always) for his passion and dedication to his art that makes the style of Bedlam Stories possible. Nicole Jones, P. Emerson Williams and James Curcio for being there for us from day one. And especially to Marsha Eisenberg for all your hard work in taking this to new depths of hell. So big a lore with so many details that this franchise would not be possible without the dedication, passion and emotional support.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  More Bedlam Stories

  Author

  Creator

  Foreword

  I first met Pearry Teo years ago at one of my concerts in Phoenix, Arizona. I was on stage singing when I suddenly noticed there was a big screen next to the stage and while I was performing, they were playing a film. To be honest, my first reaction was one of mild annoyance. I thought, why would they play a film during a live performance? I feared people might decide to watch the film instead of me! And then a strange thing happened. I found myself watching that damn film!

  On that screen, I saw a beautiful Asian woman surrounded by what looked like an undulating burst of black petrol, tendrils swirling and reaching out in different directions. I thought that it looked an awful lot like the living “Biologic” suit that my main character, Chi-chian wears in my first comic book of the same name. Then I realized that the actress on the screen was Bai Ling, who incidentally had voiced the character of Chi-chian when SyFy channel had hired me to make an animated webseries for their website. I thought to myself, wait a minute, did someone go and make a Chi-chian live action film without telling me? I’m pretty sure I forgot the lyrics of whatever song I was supposed to be singing at that moment.

  It turns out that the film was Gene Generation by Pearry Teo and that the comic book company that published his comic books (on which the film is based) rented a booth at my show to promote the film.

  When you experience something like that as an artist, I think it’s a very common knee-jerk reaction to think someone ripped you off. But as time goes by (and as it happens again and again) I think more and more that incidents like these are more accurately explained as ‘great minds thinking alike.” Now I’m not referring to cases where someone sees your work and is directly inspired by it to create something similar (although that’s wonderful!). I am talking about two or more people, growing up in the same world, at the same time, with similar interests, being bombarded by the same cultural stimuli, then being lead by these forces to reach a similar conclusion and create works that are very much alike to each other.

  As a child, drawing monsters on countless pads of paper and later making stop-motion films in my basement, I felt like the world was filled with all manner of amazing, original concepts; monsters and creatures, chimeras, flights of fancy and unbridled fantasies. It seemed to me as a child, like the human imagination was highly unique to the individual and completely limitless. I certainly thought mine was.

  But as of a decade or two ago, I began to have a nagging feeling that everything I saw seemed all too clearly inspired by something else or was filled with references to a dozen concepts that came before. Worse than that, no matter how original a concept I thought I had personally come up with, I would eventually see it pop up somewhere else.

  When the film, Suckerpunk came out, I th
ink I gasped out loud in the movie theater several times and quite possibly even cried at one point. Not only were there a dozen moments that seemed right out of the pages of my Chi-chian comic book, but they had even cast Emily Browning, who was my dream actress for a live action Chi-chian film that was proposed at the time (And naturally, there was a good deal of jealously involved that it was they and not me who were able to bring these visions to the big screen!).

  In the early nineties, I wrote (but never quite finished or published) a novel called The Nothing. In essence, it explores issues of our existence on Earth and the nature of reality. It asks questions like what is God? Is there a God? How does the universe work, etc.

  Recently, while considering finishing it, I Googled “The Nothing” to see what else was out there and found there had been a film made in 2012 by a director named Joshua Childs. The film is described as exploring the answers to the questions, “Is there a God? If so, does he care about us? Does anything truly matter?” Wait! What? REALLY?

  What was happening? I certainly wasn’t delusional enough to think that all of these artists and filmmakers had somehow found my incredibly obscure, Chi-chian comic book or the unpublished scribbles that exist of The Nothing and copied them! No. That would require some seriously deranged thinking. It was then that I began to believe in something like Carl Jung’s collective unconscious… where we as humans inherently think similarly, organizing the information around us into similar conclusions, or… perhaps something even bigger is at work, where all of the thoughts of humankind are actually linked in some way and our collective mind leads a great many of us to create the work that is demanded by the events leading up to the present.

  As an artist, this lead me to a good deal of despair as I pondered the following question; had we reached a point in human history where nothing new could be created?

  It’s no hyperbole when I say that this notion caused me a good deal of discomfort and nearly stymied my ability to create for a while. But eventually, I came to console myself with this rationale; perhaps, all of the ingredients for making art are already in existence. And it is not the creation of these ingredients but rather how they are assembled that leads us to a work of art being “original.”

  The concept of the villain, the hero, the love interest, the comedic side-kick, the fat, mentally ill guy in barbed wire wearing a pig head as a mask (okay, maybe not that last guy so much), these archetypes have existed for centuries. One or more of them appear in practically every story-driven work in existence. And yet, there are hundreds of combinations of these elements creating countless unique works.

  Dozens of plot lines that we’ve seen rehashed and reworked in millions of TV shows, plays and novels have been in used for hundreds or thousands of years and yet when we get to the end of The Sixth Sense, we still gasp at the revelation it holds.

  So perhaps, creating an original work is not about creating the building blocks themselves but about organizing a combination of these established elements in an original way. It’s not unlike… cooking! All of the ingredients already exist… but there are endless recipes in existence and yet to be concocted.

  As it happens, Pearry Teo is one hell of a cook!

  I’ve followed his career as a filmmaker from the Sci-fi noir of his first film, Gene Generation, through the twisted, visceral horror of Necromentia and forward to become a director who knows how to inject his singular vision onto the screen.

  Now, with Bedlam Stories, he’s taken it to a whole new level! He’s not merely assembled a tale using the building blocks of story and elements from our collective unconscious, he’s ripped characters from our universal consciousness, namely the stars of Alice and Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, and mashed them together in a horror epic that will have you reeling. Other artists have put a dark spin on these tales in the past, but never before have I seen someone take these two worlds, drag them into an insane asylum and create a whole new dark and delicious recipe from these beloved ingredients. When I read his Bedlam Stories screenplay a year or two ago, I was completely bowled over at the brilliance of this sinister combination, but now with the wonderful prose of author, Christine Converse, Pearry’s world is richer than ever before. The horrors are darker and more unendurable and the blood is more vibrant on the asylum walls.

  I no longer fear that nothing new can be created when here in my hands are familiar names and familiar faces and yet they have been transformed into something I could never have imagined. So crawl into bed, turn down the lights and prepare to be told the most nightmare-inspiring bed-time story you may ever hear.

  Aurelio Voltaire

  Musician, author, filmmaker

  www.voltaire.net

  Prologue

  Lifeless bodies littered the asylum floor. Papers fluttered through the air on currents of heat whipped to a frenzy by the chaos that filled the nearby hallways. These sheets that once held the prescription for sanity and the hope for a life outside these walls now fell, without reason, to die on the tiled floor, the last breath in this place now replete with death. Small fires provided scant light to penetrate the darkness that threatened to overtake her completely.

  She used her good hand and all of her remaining strength to pull her bruised and battered body slowly across the floor toward the once white coat of a recently former orderly of the madhouse. Every inch forward wracked her body with pain, but it had been sheer will that had brought her through this nightmare, and it would continue to push her through what was to come next.

  Her hand shook as she guided it into the pocket of the orderly’s coat and found the thing she sought: a pen. The ringing in her ears continued as she pulled herself upward into a sitting position to rest against the wall. Her hand trembled, sliding one of the dirty pages from the floor to her side. Through the terror and exhaustion, she put pen to paper: It seems strange that through some miracle I find myself alive, and the first thing I do is to find a piece of paper and write. I am, after all, a reporter at heart.

  The worlds the girls have called Oz and Wonderland clashed together on this day. She took a shuddering breath, closing her eyes for a moment to steel herself. She opened them again and forced a glance past the war zone to the horror at the asylum entrance: a carrion pile of bodies. Nurses, patients, orderlies, staff — they were hung, stapled and held together by iron chains, their dried blood serving as the mortar that sealed the grisly “bricks” to one another.

  They were not fantasy lands or figments of youthful imagination. They were real — and inhabited by demons.

  She now glanced in the opposite direction to the one item which, for its splendor and simplicity, had no place in this chamber of horrors. It alone remained pristine. On the wall, this ornate looking glass hung, reflecting its beauty the image of horror that compelled the woman to put pen to page.

  This war began even before Dorothy and Alice met. And was I lucky or cursed that I was there to witness it all?

  Pulling her hand to the top of the page, she marked the beginning of the account with the date.

  October 23, 1922

  CHAPTER 1

  Positively demented," murmured Dr. Raymond. He leaned back in his seat and stroked his beard. "I consider it a hopeless case. She needs to be put where someone will take good care of her."

  Dr. Ward slowly nodded, following the movements of the shaking young woman before them. Her wispy black hair stood out from her thin pale face as if by electric shock. Her large brown eyes rolled from right to left and left to right, stopping only for a few moments to disappear completely behind fluttering eyelids and reveal the ghastly red-veins and yellowish-white eyeballs of a soul who had not slept in days.

  Only Dr. Carandini remained unfazed, standing motionless in the shadows, arms folded, silently observing the woman hugging her knees to her chest and rocking to and fro.

  "I do not concur."

  Both men looked up, suddenly, to their compatriot. Dr. Raymond snatched his wire rim glasses from his face, quickly p
olished them on his lab coat, and returned them to his squinting eyes as if hoping to perceive some deeper truth about the girl sitting before them. Despite his efforts to gain clarity, the picture remained the same: Dr. Carandini remaining motionless, peering down his long nose to the quivering young woman.

  "But she exhibits all the signs, sir!" Dr. Raymond exclaimed.

  "Indeed," Dr. Carandini replied coolly, "A little too perfectly, would you not say?"

  THUMP!

  All three doctors turned back to the girl whose feet had slammed to the worn wooden floor. She gripped the creaking chair edges with such force that her fingertips turned red and her knuckles white. She leaned forward gradually — staring, bug-eyed, directly at Dr. Carandini, her pale, slender legs tensed against the chair.

  The corner of Dr. Carandini's thin, hard mouth curled into a smirk.

  "But doctor, with respect, sir, we have seen the tremors, the wild eyes...even the boarding house reports that she could not remember her whereabouts or how she arrived at their doorstep."

  Dr. Carandini broke from the woman's gaze and turned his back to her. "Gentlemen, if you wish to sign your names to a false committal into Dr. Braun's brand of quackery, have at. I, for one, shall not be party to it because this girl is clearly playing you both for fools."