Hub - Issue 12 Read online

  The canvas flap explodes outward and Otto, sweaty and blowing, reels drunkenly at the threshold. Thomas shrinks back into the shadows as the Prussian blinks at the darkness. “Monsters! Ich töte beide!” he bellows. He paws blindly at his loosely hanging belt, grasping at the sheath knife that has slipped behind his back.

  “Ich schneide ihr schlechten Herzen aus,” he mumbles. “Cut out their black hearts both!” Tearing violently at his belt, he staggers into the side of the tent. His huge bulk sagging into the taut canvas nearly rips the pegs from the ground. Through the parted tent flaps, Thomas sees Miriam, bloody, lying face down on the floor, one arm twisted at an impossible angle across her naked back. Her face is turned toward him, and as her eyes meet his, her bruised and swollen lips mouth a plea. “Mein Mann, helfen Sie mir.”

  Mein Mann? The words linger in Thomas’ mouth, almost spoken, half-formed. Helfen Sie mir. Help me. Ich töte beide. Kill them both. Cut out their evil hearts.

  Thomas springs from the shadows even as Otto’s fist closes around the handle of the knife. Though drunk and enraged, the Prussian still has his lion-tamer’s instincts. He turns in time to see Thomas hurtling toward him. He dives aside and rolls unsteadily to his feet, knife drawn, before Thomas can recover from his leap.

  “You!” Otto spits in surprise.

  The words come, slurred, spilling out beyond Thomas’ control from a mouth not yet ready to speak them. “Ich war, aber nicht mehr. Ich bin ein Mann noch einmal.”

  “Not yet a man, mein Kapitän,” Otto says as he shifts the knife to his left hand. “Nor will you ever be again.”

  He rushes, head down, chin tucked to his chest. Thomas leaps back to avoid him. Otto bulls through the tent flap and grabs a pistol from the table just inside the entrance. Thomas slips up beside the tent and crouches.

  Otto exits, pistol foremost and Thomas strikes, a vicious downward chop across the lion-tamer’s wrist. Otto’s forearms are like cordwood, hardened and muscular from whipcracking in the center ring, but Thomas’ blow is delivered with the vestigial strength of his leopard form. The pistol fires as it jumps from Otto’s hand, the bullet thumps in a puff of dust against the granite-hard, elephant-trampled ground.

  The two men embrace. Grunting, feet scuffling, fingers clawing at throats, they pirouette in violent circles before the door of the tent. The Prussian’s fingers tighten relentlessly around Thomas’ windpipe, and he realizes that he is about to die. He has only been a man for a moment and he feels weak as though newly born. His memories of the leopard remain fresh in his mind, memories of another life that are more real to him than the realization of what he has become.

  He thinks, if I were a leopard still, I could kill Otto.

  But for Miriam, for the love of whom he became a leopard in the first place, he wants to remain a man. What has she gone through to remain near him, and for how long, he wonders suddenly.

  “You think you can save her, Herr Kapitän?” Otto grunts, speaking Thomas’ thoughts. “Nein! Die Dirne gehört mir. I stole her from you once and traded her favors to the witch doctor in exchange for the magic to make you an animal. I should have killed you, but the same mistake I will not make again. She will take your place in the circus. No one will know the difference once she is a leopard.”

  Thomas struggles weakly against the Prussian’s vice-like hold on his throat. Otto laughs as he forces Thomas to the ground. “Perhaps I will let the lions play with her, first. Eh? What say you? Does the cat possess your tongue?” Darkness closes upon Thomas, drowning the last vestiges of his humanity. As he dies, his human mind clings to one thought – to save her, to save Miriam, from Otto, from the lions, from life as an animal, the only life he can remember.

  Thomas’ throat thickens with muscles, prying open Otto’s grasp. Otto gasps as claws sink into his neck. Thomas’ face elongates into a fur-covered snout, his forehead recedes into ears flattened in fury, as he opens his mouth and pulls the Prussian’s face toward his fangs. Otto screams, high and quavering like a woman, and tries to pull away, but Thomas shifts his grip to the back of Otto’s head, needle-sharp claws digging into bone, tearing, peeling back Otto’s naked scalp.

  Lying on his back with Otto above him, Thomas lashes out. His hind claws rip through Otto’s khaki lion-tamer’s costume, then through his belly flesh and his loins, opening his bulging stomach and spilling his guts and his testicles out and then ripping through his guts until hot gin gushes out.

  At the sound of Otto’s inhuman screams, doors open and circus people stumble outside, blinking sleepily. But Thomas is gone like a cloud shadow, leaving his victim alive but destined to die after many hours of agony, his wife half-dead but destined to live. He flees into the night, no longer fleeing his fate but simply fleeing the sounds and the lights that he naturally abhors, and already thinking ahead to his next meal.

  Behind him, Otto sags at the door of his tent, shrieking and blind with his bald and bloody scalp pulled over his face like a stocking, his intestines smoking in the chill morning air. The circus people recoil at the freakish sight of him, at the man turned inside out before their eyes.

  About the Author

  Jeff Crook is the author of four fabulous novels. His short fiction appeared last year in Nature, Eclectica, Pindeldyboz, Bewildering Stories, and Nanobison, and is scheduled for publication this year in the Triquorum and Stalking Shadows anthologies, as well as an as-yet-untitled Cutting Block Press anthology. He is the editor of Southern Gothic (www.southerngothic.org). If you would like to learn more about his work, you can find it all at jeffcrook.blogspot.com, along with other things of interest.

  Reviews

  Hellboy: Blood and Iron reviewed by Paul Kane

  Grudge 2, The Return, Bernice Summerfield: Freedom of Information reviewed by Alasdair Stuart

  HELLBOY: Blood and Iron

  Directed by VictorCrook and Tad Stones

  Starring the voices of: Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, John Hurt, Doug Jones

  Stars Home Entertainment DVD.

  RRP: £18.99

  Blood and Iron marks the second in the lucrative Hellboy animated spin-offs from Anchor Bay, and it marks something of a turning point in the evolution of the animated adventures. This instalment takes the European Hammer-style movies as its inspiration and is all the better than the previous episode Sword of Storms because of it. Cherry picking supernatural legends from these films, as well as from his own comic book back catalogue (specifically Hellboy: Wake the Devil), writer and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola comes up with something richer, darker and downright scarier than before. So much so it would make a decent live action film in its own right, or at least a feature-length episode of any potential live action Hellboy TV series.

  The film pitches us straight into the action, with Hellboy (Perlman, who else?) tackling a big bad with the help of long-time helper Abe Sapien (Doug Jones). After the usual round of Hellboy getting slammed against things and muttering “Crap” a lot, it’s defeated and they prepare themselves for the next mission. Ostensibly it looks like just another haunted house investigation, but it coincides with nightmares Professor Broom (John Hurt) has been having about one of his early cases from 1939. This one involved an ancient vampiric witch who made a deal with an ancient Goddess to give her immortality. In fact Erzsebet Ondrushko (Kath Soucie) was so obsessed with her appearance that she bathed in the blood of her victims, Baroness Bathory style.

  It’s little wonder that the Prof is reliving his past encounter – when he thought he’d vanquished her evil forever – because the owner of the upstate New York house is in possession of all of her effects, taken from her castle (including a nifty Iron Maiden). His hopes to turn it into a tour and bring in punters backfires spectacularly when the ghosts of Ondrushko’s victims begin to appear in the building. As Broom’s flashbacks tell the story from 1939, Ondrushko gathers her strength and returns thanks to the attentions of her two loyal hag-witch aides. But that’s not the worst of it: not only do Hellboy, Liz (Selma
Blair), Abe, Broom and nerdy agent Sydney Leach (Rob Paulsen) have to deal with this, Hellboy also accidentally stumbles upon the Goddess herself, Hecate, which opens a whole other can of worms…er, snakes.

  The world of Hellboy Animated lies somewhere between del Toro’s movie and Mignola’s exceedingly dark strip, straddling both with consummate ease. No doubt there are fans of the former who will be lost here – mainly because Broom is still alive and Liz appears to have no problem at all with Big Red’s attention (she even holds hands with him at one point), and fans of the latter will inevitably scream ‘watered down’, even though there are some moments of genuine creepiness (when the wrinkly Ondrushko changes in the bath full of blood and then rises to confront Broom, or the ghosts which eventually turn out to have skulls for faces). But, taken for what it is, a new and different version of the mythos, it’s quite easy to settle down and have a good time watching it.

  No one can dispute the vocal talents of the cast, either, seeing as the main ones are the actors from the film. Perlman is bang on the money once more as the world-weary demon and his exchanges with Broom are the highlight of the show (“You got too old to spank,” says Broom. “And the tail got in the way,” Hellboy replies). Plus the use of animation allows the makers to go nuts in the monster department without having to worry quite so much about budget as they’d have to with a Hollywood movie. Instead of just one or two beasties, we get not just Ondrushko, but the hags, the wolves with glowing eyes, the ghosts and, of course, Hecate. It means that there’s never many slow moments without some kind of action happening. The script is also incredibly sophisticated for a cartoon, with Hecate imploring Hellboy to join her because they are not like the mortals. Guess what his answer is.

  All right, there are some flaws with the design I could mention – like the fact Hellboy’s legs look just too damned weedy to support his bulk – and a couple of bits that make no sense – why is Liz wandering around with a pistol when she can just blow things up with fire? But these really are minor quibbles. Add to this a nice package of extras, which include Mignola taking you through Broom’s story in chronological order, a ‘making of’ featurette telling you all about the source material, and a bonus interactive comic, and you have a product no Hellboy or genre fan could possibly resist. It’s a Hell of a fine ‘toon.

  Bernice Summerfield: Freedom of information

  Written by Eddie Robson

  Directed by Edward Salt

  Starring: Lisa Bowerman, Stephen Fewell, Michael Fenner, Harry Myers, Miles Richardson, Sam Stevens, Steven Wickham and Paul Wolfe Big Finish Productions

  RRP: £10.99

  The war between the Draconians and the Mim has struck at the heart of Benny’s world. She’s lost friends, been imprisoned and her home, the Braxiatel Collection is under Draconian martial law. But if she’s under guard, how come no one has seen her? How come she seems to be everywhere at once and how come the Draconian Consulate, Kothar, is acting so strangely? And why has the Collection’s gardener Hass been dispatched to the Mim homeworld, the Mim Sphere, when everyone else is effectively under arrest?The creation of Paul Cornell, Bernice is one part Indiana Jones one part Ford Prefect, her passion for knowledge matched only by her sense of justice and astoundingly dirty laugh. Now into their eighth season (To say nothing of the countless books she features in), Big Finish’s single disc plays have placed her at the centre of an extended family and world that’s richly detailed, well realised and just ‘to the left’ of Doctor Who.And that, oddly enough, is the problem. Bernice’s world is so richly detailed and well realised that Freedom of Information is actually generated completely from the consequences of the previous stories. It’s a testament to how strong Bernice’s world is, after all some of Buffy’s finest episodes were constructed the same way, but for the new listener it’s not exactly user friendly. The overall effect is somewhat like starting to watch Babylon 5 in the middle of the third season; it’s really good and you can tell there’s a huge back story to the world that you’ll have great fun exploring but at first you have absolutely no idea what’s going on.That being said, there’s a lot to enjoy here. Lisa Bowerman is actually rather magnificent as Benny, her cut-glass accent and willingness to swear like a docker doing a great job of showing the many sides of the good Professor Summerfield. In fact, it’s the different perceptions of Benny that provide much of the enjoyment here, As Kothar continues his investigation into Benny’s disappearance we see how the other inhabitants of the collection view her. This in turn gives both Bowerman and the other cast members a chance to shine. Particularly good are Paul Wolfe as the fatalistic Hass whose role in the story is far darker than it initially appears and Miles Richardson as Irving Braxiatel. An exiled Time Lord who has dedicated his lives to the study of history and, in particular dead species, Brax is Benny’s intellectual equal and, it seems, her moral inferior. Ambiguous at best and always with one eye on the big picture Brax is always a pleasure to listen to and I encourage interested listeners to seek out the Gallifrey collection of discs to find out more about him. This ultimately becomes Brax’s story as much as Benny’s and his actions here look set to provide the foundation of the next phase of Benny’s adventures. Equallly impressive are Michael Fenner as Kothar and Sam Stevens as Doggles. Kothar’s sparring sessions with Benny are huge fun, and show him as an oddly avuncular, friendly figure for all the terrible things he’s done. Crucially, he’s never painted as a cartoon villain, never posturing or preening and is all the more impressive, and dangerous, for that. Doggles, at first, appears to be the exact opposite, a perpetually sozzled, cheerfully amoral academic who is gifted with many of the story’s best lines, all delivered in a resolutely deadpan, somewhat inebriated manner. It’s easy to write Doggles off as a Captain Jack Sparrow-alike but Stevens gives him an edge and authority that stays so well hidden that when he finally shows it, it becomes clear that Doggles is clearly not a man to cross. Or to get drunk with.In the end though, what really impresses here is the story. The hapless staff of the Braxiatel Collection find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place and there are no easy answers for any of them. Some, touched by tragedy, advocate violence, others seek compromise and still others, Benny in particular, attempt to solve the problem in a suitably Gordian and oddly affecting manner. The fact that no one is right, and that Brax in particular makes hard choices that look set to reverberate down the next few discs only makes it more impressive.Freedom of Information then sees the Bernice Summerfield series at its best. Huge ideas are debated, heroic action is taken and Benny herself manages to bounce through the whole thing with her usual combination of humour, compassion and righteous anger. If you feel brave, dive in here and immerse yourself in one of the best, and least recognised, elements of the Doctor Who universe.

  Grudge 2

  Directed by Takashi Shimizu

  Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Amber Tamblyn, Arielle Kebbel

  Aubrey (Tamblyn) is sent to retrieve her sister Karen (Gellar) the only survivor of the previous film whilst three school girls visit the most haunted house in Japan and discover the true meaning of the curse. Meanwhile, back in the US, a family move into their new home only for ther son Jake (Knight) to realise that something awful is going on next door…The Grudge was neither one thing nor the other, never coming close to the heights achieved by the American version of The Ring but never quite plumbing the depths that the American version of The Ring 2 sunk to. It wasn’t great by any stretch of the imagination but a top flight cast and some genuinely interesting plotting meant it was a cut above most of the increasing tired J-Horror remakes that had begun to flood the market.Now, a couple of years on and with at least one legitimately awful remake on the books (Pulse. If you’ve been fortunate enough to avoid it, keep it that way), the bloom may have gone off the J-Horror rose. To make matters worse, the original sequel that this is based on (Still with me?) was widely panned and the director promised some major changes for this version. By and large, it’s worked. Eschewing
the remarkably dour tone of the original for something faster paced, the sequel’s three plot lines are all populated with some genuinely interesting characters. Tamblyn, laden down with exactly the same role as Gellar in the original, does a lot more with it and brings a fragility to her scenes that works remarkably well. Where Karen tried to beat the curse by researching it, Aubrey is swept along in events, nicely tying into the favouritism shown to Karen by their mother. She’s not as good at life as her sister was and given that Karen barely lasts fifteen minutes into the sequel, that doesn’t bode well for our heroine. For her part, which is barely a cameo to be honest, Gellar does a passable job but she’s little more than scenery here and it shows.Oddly enough though, the real dramatic heavy lifting is donee by Arielle Kebbel as Allisson and Matthew Knight as Jake, Superficially, Allison’s plot line looks like the least promising, one part the original Grudge to one part Friday the 13th but Kebbel sells every single scene she’s in, her Allison an awkward, shy girl uncomfortable in her own skin and yet somehow together enough to realise how much trouble she’s in. In the hands of a lesser actress, Allison would be a screeching stereotype but Kebbel gives her far more depth. She’s a convincingly uncomfortable, normal teenager in a desperately abnormal situation and that only heightens the danger she’s in.Likewise, Knight does fantastic work as Jake in the US plot,. It would be all too easy to play Jake as the typical stroppy child, angry at having to move and get used to his dad’s girlfriend but Knight plays him with an authority past his years. Jake’s a very together little boy and that strength is what’s sorely tested by the growing mystery surrounding his neighbours. Also worthy of note is Edison Chen as Eason, the journalist covering Karen’s story whose matter of fact, pragmatic approach to the curse helps both Aubrey and the viewer deal with it. However, just like the original, the cast can only do so much with the material they’ve been given. The balletic viewpoint changes of the original have been replaced by simple fade outs and whilst the plots do all converge, they lack the impact of the original’s closing sequence. Crucially as well, both Kayako and Toshio are clearly visible over and over again and with one notable exception in Karen’s final scene, not even remotely frightening. There’s a sense of trying to cut new clothes from old cloth here and for all the best efforts of the cast, and the occasional striking image (A hooded figure being led down a hallway, three pairs of feet walking past Jake when there’s only one person there) the film never really connects. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, it’s just unremarkable and given the amount of effort that’s been expended, that’s a real shame.