Shock Totem 6: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted Read online

  PUBLISHER/EDITOR

  K. Allen Wood

  CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

  John Boden

  Mercedes M. Yardley

  COPY EDITOR

  Sarah Gomes

  LAYOUT/DESIGN

  K. Allen Wood

  COVER DESIGN

  Mikio Murakami

  Established in 2009

  www.shocktotem.com

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2013 by Shock Totem Publications, LLC.

  “Lighten Up”

  Copyright © 2007 by Jack Ketchum.

  Originally published in Closing Time and Other Stories, Gauntlet Press, 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of Shock Totem Publications, LLC, except where permitted by law.

  The short stories in this publication are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The views expressed in the nonfiction writing herein are solely those of the authors.

  ISSN 1944-110X

  Printed in the United States of America.

  NOTES FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

  Welcome to issue #6!

  I usually use this space as a way to bridge the gap between issues, to tell you, fellow reader, a tale or two from the road. Well, it was a short trip. Our fifth issue was late to the party and not a hell of a lot has gone on between then and now. Nothing worth wasting your time on, anyway.

  So let’s jump right into things, shall we? As always, please skip on ahead if you can’t wait to sink your teeth into the meaty parts...

  Our sixth issue—and it’s a great one. Four-time Stoker Award™-winner and Grandmaster of Horror Jack Ketchum gives us “Lighten Up,” a dose of dark humor that still manages to be righteously menacing. This one smokes! (Ba-doom tsssh.) Rising star Lee Thompson spins yet another devastating yarn of emotional psychedelia in “The River,” a Division Mythos tale.

  Once again we did not shy away from publishing up-and-comers, and “For Jack,” a grim tale of murder, love and revenge, by P.K. Gardner, illustrates why. Hubert Dade raises the bar high with the unsettlingly heavy “No One But Us Monsters.” His story note is a tale unto itself. Lucia Starkey’s “Ballad of the Man with the Shark Tooth Bracelet” is as surreal and sharp as its title suggests.

  John Guzman celebrates his very first sale with “Magnolia’s Prayer.” This disquieting tale won our flash fiction contest for May 2012, which required participants to write a story based on the concept of mail-hoarding. It was eventually chosen as the overall winner for 2012 by guest judge Adam Cesare, author of the cinematic splatter platters Tribesmen and Video Night.

  And we’ve got more great fiction from Michael Wehunt and Addison Clift.

  Also included: Conversations with Lee Thompson and seven-time British Fantasy Award nominee Gary McMahon, as well as narrative nonfiction—a tale of true horror—by Ryan Bridger. An editorial about inspiration; the latest installment of “Bloodstains & Blue Suede Shoes,” which examines the dark links between music and horror; plus reviews and much more...

  A quick note about the cover art: Though it appears so, it is not intended as companion art to Ketchum’s “Lighten Up.” Mikio Murakami once again provided the artwork for this issue. He first offered it to us for consideration for our fourth issue, back in 2011, but the color scheme was too similar to our previous issue. We liked it, though, and are quite pleased that it finally adorns one of our issues.

  Then again, maybe it was meant for Jack’s story after all. I can dig that. Kismet.

  And that’s all I have. Thanks for coming along for the ride. I hope you’ll join us for many more adventures in the future.

  K. Allen Wood

  January 1, 2013

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Notes from the Editor’s Desk

  The Spectacular Inspiration Suit

  An Editorial

  by John Boden

  For Jack

  by P.K. Gardner

  Orion

  by Michael Wehunt

  The Hard Way

  A Conversation with Gary McMahon

  by John Boden

  Ballad of the Man with the Shark Tooth Bracelet

  by Lucia Starkey

  She Disappeared

  Narrative Nonfiction

  by Ryan Bridger

  Strange Goods and Other Oddities

  No One But Us Monsters

  by Hubert Dade

  The Cocktail Party

  by Addison Clift

  Bloodstains & Blue Suede Shoes, Part 4

  by John Boden and Simon Marshall-Jones

  Lighten Up

  by Jack Ketchum

  Magnolia’s Prayer

  2012 Shock Totem Flash Fiction Contest Winner

  by John Guzman

  When We Crash Against Reality

  A Conversation with Lee Thompson

  by K. Allen Wood

  The River

  by Lee Thompson

  Howling Through the Keyhole

  THE SPECTACULAR INSPIRATION SUIT

  An Editorial

  by John Boden

  I’ve got a suit coat on the back of my bedroom door. It’s black and too big, but sometimes too small. I don’t wear it every day. In fact, there are weeks and months that sadly pass where I never slide my arms into its slippery sleeves. It is a splendid garment: Bradbury lapels embroidered with the finest King threads. Lined with Lovecraft and Karloff and Cushing and Alice Cooper. Shining buttons of Skipp, Spector and Ellison...

  On a wooden hanger on the back of my bedroom door hangs my inspiration coat, waiting for the day when I need it.

  That’s not true, not really. However, it is a decent analogy. Most writers tend to boldly wear their influences on their sleeves. Their mentors. I know I do and proudly so. Emulation is the sincerest form of flattery, or something like that. We all recycle one another. We are all cannibals, in a sense. I believe it was a passage in the Bible, a source I do not often quote, that said, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

  Well, you know they say about truer words.

  We all walk the path that has been trod upon countless times before. Our job is to pimp strut along that sonofabitch to the best of our ability. Take what others have done and use that as a starting point, then shade it with our voices, our characters, and before long it will be ours. I think it’s safe to say we all have done and will do this.

  Now, for each of us, inspiration can be either a multi-faceted gem or the hideous creature from The Thing. Starting sometimes with our parents or siblings and then absorbing and assimilating those traits we admire and making them a part of us. We learn to read and begin to add scales of Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstein, which we will one day shed to make room for bigger, darker scales of Straub or Poe or Burroughs. We also draw from television and movies and music...other people we come in contact with. Teachers. Friends. The list is usually a long one, and it’s written on the inside of our skin.

  Inspiration is the act of making someone feel like they can actually accomplish something, make it happen, and be okay. Like a pep rally with hot cheerleaders inside your soul. Sometimes it
plays out like a connect-the-dots puzzle; other times like a huge sizzling mess that we’re left standing over, thinking, What the hell is this about?

  Sit and think about what you do, how you got there or here or wherever you are...

  I’ll use myself as an example.

  Some of my earliest memories are tied to horror. Me and my father staying up to watch horror movies on late-night TV. I loved those movies and remember Black Sabbath scaring the piss out of me. My mother liked those films, too, and we’d watch weekend creature features and stuff like Attack of the Mushroom People or Reptilicus. When I was older and began reading, I plundered her bookshelf and read Stephen King. I borrowed books from my step-aunt Nancy. She had the best books, lots of those cheese-tastical pulp horror paperbacks. I read all the time and watched as many scary films as I could.

  By the time I was in high school, I began trying to write. These were usually putrid rehashes of the things I was taking in. One of the earliest travesties I ever committed to paper was a terrible retelling of Salem’s Lot I was calling Dusk. In fact, when I was around eleven or twelve, I had the nards to send one of my stories to the man himself. It was a funky little page-and-a-half typed masterpiece titled “Hoover from Hell,” about a woman who is killed and sucked dry by her vampire vacuum cleaner. Swear to God, I wrote that and thought it genius enough to send to Stephen King, my biggest inspiration at the time. I mailed it off and forgot all about it.

  Later that year, I received a response from Mr. King’s compound. I opened the envelope to find a small standardized reply card—I think it was yellow; just a positive pre-printed note—but I was happy with it. Then I turned it over. Written in red ink was a little note that said something like, “Cool story, nice idea...keep at it.” I always hoped in my heart that King wrote that, but as I think back I realize it was most likely an assistant or someone else. But the point is, someone read it and liked it—at least a little. Liked it enough to send a small note to a kid that helped light an encouraging flame. I saved that card for a long time, or at least until I went away to college, and it went missing when my mom moved.

  But mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery, right? I bet a lot of us have cut our teeth that way. I think they call it fan fiction now and there is actually a market for it.

  We write because we love it. Because we have to. It’s a nice thing to have your work published and to have others read and love it as much as we do. But that isn’t why we do it, is it? I like to tell people I write because the voices get too loud when I ignore them. That isn’t too far off the mark. Lots of people refer to their inspiration as their muse. I don’t bother. Mine is a big green-haired ogre that waits for the most inopportune moments to grunt his ideas to me.

  Example: Driving to work at 4 a.m., dark as pitch, rain pissing down, and my mind pipes up with something like: “What if a guy has the ability to bring dead things back to life...but with size restrictions?”

  “What?” I mutter out loud, because I’m in the car, alone, at 4 a.m. so no one cares that I’m insane. That bastard ogre clams up and jumps out the window, leaving me with that stupid idea in my head, where it begins to fester. This is one hundred percent true. I ended up writing a story called “The Drawer” because of that encounter. Another time the old ogre simply whispered, “What if a guy had a huge telepathic tapeworm that sounded like Paul Lynde?” I wrote that story for a contest. I didn’t win—but I wrote a story about a man with a giant tapeworm in his butt that talked like Paul Lynde. That’s benchmark!

  The meat of the matter is the fact that we all must be inspired. In some way. Sure, you can just switch on the autopilot and churn out pages of hollow story and go that route. But the good stuff—the really good stuff that makes us giddy when we read it, the stories that we hope some young kid will read one day and say, “I want to do this!”—that is the stuff we hope to inspire.

  We want to inspire because we were inspired, and then we get to become links in the endless chain of inspiration. And maybe, just maybe, we get to rattle around the halls of this mansion for a very long time.

  FOR JACK

  by P.K. Gardner

  The first time I see my soulmate, she’s covered in blood. It’s smeared over her face, obscuring the details of her features. But even if she’d been wearing a mask, I would have recognized her.

  It’s a heady-feeling, that first meeting. There’s eye contact, and almost instantly you feel the thread start to form, that moment where two people are pulled into one.

  My best friend, Watson, told me once, while very drunk, that it felt like a noose slipping around his neck. He’d been seven when he met Sherry.

  I’m twenty-two and it’s not so much a noose as it is a few rounds of machine gun fire slamming into my chest as my heart skips a beat to catch time with hers. Not the sort of thing I expected to happen in the mailroom of my apartment building.

  “Fuck,” she says, backpedaling. “Now? Why’d it have to be now?”

  I reach for her. There are protocols for this. Drilled into children from the first time they can understand. Touch cements the connection. An unfinished bond is dangerous. “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Get the hell back.” She steps into shadows. “I wasn’t here. Forget my face.”

  I nearly laugh. Forgetting is impossible in matters of biology. “You know I can’t.”

  “I don’t want you,” she says. “And you sure as hell don’t want me.”

  One of us moves. For the life of me, I’ll never be sure whom. All of a sudden, there’s a mouth against mine, the taste of blood on my tongue, and I understand why this is supposed to be the greatest day in a person’s life. The proverbial noose tightens and a gloved hand trails from my hair down to my neck. Pain shoots through my side.

  The girl pulls back and flashes a smile. Her teeth stand out against the blood stained face. “Don’t follow me,” she says.

  I look down at my stomach to see the hilt of a knife protruding out of a steadily growing dark stain. My vision blurs as I move to follow her. But I trip over something large and soft. The landing nudges the knife farther into my side. I maintain consciousness just long enough to see I’d fallen over the left leg of a corpse. There are words carved into his chest, but I can’t focus enough to read them.

  In distance, police sirens howl.

  • • •

  Everyone in the world has a soulmate, someone so essential that they’re sewn into your DNA. They’re your perfect balance, a reflection of everything you need in your life. The human race is not meant to walk alone. By age thirteen, fifty percent of the world has met their match. By twenty, ninety-eight percent.

  My mother never found hers. She looked her entire life and then she died alone.

  • • •

  When I come to, Watson’s next to me, head buried in his hands. Above him looms an IV stand, pumping me full of borrowed B negative. I wonder if the person who donated has any idea who they saved. “Dante?” I ask.

  “Lee?” He shifts. “That had better be you. They told us you might not make it.”

  Watson always talks in plural now. Sherry might not be in the room, but she’s still here in that same indefinable way the girl tickles at the edge of my consciousness. “What happened?”

  “They found you in the mailroom with two corpses. You were about an hour away from being the third.”

  The number on my bed says 504. There’s an empty one next to me with the same number. People get sick in pairs. Always have. Even dying of cancer is not a solo venture. I let my gaze drift to the window, sliding out of focus as I strain to see the ground.

  A hand presses against my shoulder. “Stay with me, Lee. I can get a real doctor, but your vitals look good.”

  Watson is due to start his internship at the hospital in two weeks. All jokes about a Dr. Watson had been spent well before he got to med school. “I got stabbed.”

  “Yes, you did, you idiot. Police are camped outside. As soon as you get the all clear, the
y’re going to be in to talk to you.”

  “Why did they let you in?”

  “Sherry works here. She pulled some strings.” He stands up, moving for the door. “We thought we’d lost you, Lee. And since you’re still here, we need to nail the bastard who did this to you.”

  Bastard. The word makes me flinch. Too personal. Watson doesn’t notice. Sherry will apologize for him later and it will mean the same thing. I poke at the foreign spot in my mind. That connection tying me to the girl I don’t want. The other side remains stubbornly silent.

  When the police come in, they spend an hour going over the details of my story. I tell them the truth. Mostly. They ask if I could identify my attacker should I ever see her again.

  I tell them no and when they leave I watch the news.

  Two bodies found in an apartment building, one survivor, stabilized in the hospital. Both corpses had two words carved into their chests. For Jill.

  • • •

  Sherry is worried because Watson is worried.

  She hovers just outside my periphery as she always has. Sherry isn’t pretty. She has a long face, thick glasses and crooked teeth. Her dark mess of curls twists off into fly-aways and puffs out in humidity. She’s solidly built and broad shouldered, exuding a steady presence every place she goes.

  I’ve never liked her. She tumbled into Dante’s life and changed him into Watson. As long as Watson has Sherry, there’s no room for another person.

  Sherry likes me. She likes me because Watson does.

  She also resents me, just a little. Sherry may be the center of Watson’s world, but I’m his best friend.