Shock Totem 4: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted Read online

  But you don’t want its secrets. You only want to crawl back in bed and close your eyes because your bones are heavy and your muscles ache dully, as if you’ve spent all night swimming in the ocean.

  Shivering, you tear your gaze from the pane and the night, slinking upstairs as quietly as you can manage on your tired legs, hoping to slide into bed without Jacob coming into your room again.

  —

  Down the hall, light spills from the bottom of Jacob’s closed door. You creep by his room, holding your breath, nerves on edge, and what feels like fire eating at your guts. The bedsprings squeak as you slide beneath the covers and settle in on your side, placing one arm under the pillow. The house seems too quiet. You watch the open door for a while, for Jacob’s silhouette to break from the darkened hallway and enter your room, until exhaustion tugs at your eyelids. Sinking into the mattress, you wish Mom would come up and sit on the floor next to the bed until morning. The thought—the wish—shifts from what you had wanted to a dreamscape where there is no roof on the house, and stars shine brightly like God has a million eyes with which to watch the world from heaven.

  The willow’s branches clack as it rips its roots from the ground and tips forward—the way your dad does to tie your shoes—and drinks from the pond. Standing at your window, unsure if you’re asleep or awake, or trapped somewhere in between, you and God are the only ones to witness it.

  —

  The bus tires screech the next morning and Jacob glares at you from the door, yelling, “Hurry up, stupid! You’re going to make us late!” And behind you, in the kitchen, your mother still sobs and Dad is gone somewhere but he left a little money behind because he said she’d need it.

  You shrug your backpack on and run to the door and Jacob slaps the back of your head, practically growling as he shoves you forward. You cry out, almost tripping over your feet and plunging off the concrete steps. Catching your balance, you want to spin around and scream in his face, but Jacob has already run past, headed for the bus as the horn blares and all the children inside squirm in their seats. It looks like a giant yellow worm full of parasites. You try to step forward but your mom is calling from the porch. You turn slowly, but everything seems so loud, as if everything on Earth is grinding together at once, and you squeeze your eyelids shut against the chaos, praying it will all quiet, until something jabs your arm and you jump back and trip and land on your butt.

  The kids laugh, and above their noise, sharpest of all, cutting deepest, Jacob yells, “Good job, retard!”

  You glance behind you, toward the house, and for a moment an angel hovers there, just a few feet away. Dark locks cover her shoulders, and her face is full of a thousand mysteries. She waves the bus away as if to save you from their laughter and offers her other hand, which you take, surprised by the warmth of it, the tenderness of her touch. The angel says, “I need you to stay home with me today.” You blink, tears of embarrassment drying on your cheeks, as clouds move over the sun and the world dulls, and the angel dulls, and only your mother is there helping you up. But you love her just as much as you could any creature made by God, and you hold her hand as the two of you walk back inside, your pack heavy across your shoulders, as if someone has filled it with sand when you weren’t looking. You pull it off and set it on the chair in the dining room and rub your elbow because it hurts from falling down and aches from moving it. A word bounces around inside your head—autistic—and you stumble into the kitchen, stomach grumbling and hurting like there’s an animal gnawing at your skin. Mom says, her voice reminding you of glass shattering last night in the living room, “Jacob didn’t feed you breakfast, did he?”

  Your eyes tear up at hearing his name, feeling his fingers tighten around your arms as if his ghost is there, as if part of him stayed behind even though he’s probably laughing and bouncing in his seat on the bus.

  Mom drops her hands to her side and looks away from you as if you’ve said something wrong, as if she’s Dad and she’s afraid of breaking you too, and the looking away reminds you of your dream—or the not-dream—and how the towering willow uprooted itself to drink from the pond to gather energy for its charge on the house.

  Wind blasts the window and you jump, nervous. You’re sitting still but time seems to be rushing by so fast and you can see the leaves changing in the trees outside, blazing to a bright yellow. Mom turns to the cabinet above the sink and pulls down a box of cereal and a black bowl. She grabs a gallon of milk from the fridge and brings all of them to you, sitting across the table, her mouth opening and closing and opening again before she says, “I know you don’t understand what’s happening, but you’re not a burden, honey.” She reaches out and touches your hand lightly. Your instinct is to jerk back because her nails seem so long and sharp, but her fingertips are warm and you kind of like it. She says, “I don’t know how we’ll survive without him...” looking away again, “but we’ll manage. I just have to find some work.” She squeezes too hard and you squeal a little because her face is bunching up and she looks like someone else.

  “Davey, you are not a burden,” she says.

  After you eat, after she lays down, you walk to the steps and peek out the window. The willow’s drooping branches sway in the wind, but the dark place beneath the lowest branch doesn’t move that you can tell. You rub your eyes and back away, afraid the tree will turn toward you and you’ll see its eyes, find that the dark place is only its gaping mouth, that it will speak and tell you in Jacob’s voice, “Burden.”

  —

  Jacob slides the needle into the callous on his palm. You cringe when you hear it pierce the flesh and your stomach twists as you wait for blood to dot his palm. You’re sitting on the roof outside your window, just a four-foot section and a drop to the ground, able to see the shack, the willow, and the pond it drinks from when no one is looking. You want to tell him about it but he’s grinning and his teeth are huge in his mouth, lips plastered back, voice like car tires shedding black smoke.

  “Let me see your hand.”

  You shake your head. You don’t want to hurt. Standing up, you scoot along the wall toward the window, planning to escape back into your room, but he stops you, right at your side, the needle held close to your eyeball. Your brother says, “Dad left because of one of us, and we both know it wasn’t because of me!”

  The needle looks like a steel beam, filling your vision. You yell, “No!” and to your surprise Jacob lowers his hand. You stare at the willow. He looks with you, and for a moment everything is okay—everything even seems a little quieter, the soft breeze doesn’t sting your skin, and you can hear your mother humming, her voice carrying through the open kitchen window. Jacob says, “I want Dad to come back.”

  “He’ll come back after work,” you tell him, believing this because it is what always happens. He leaves. He works. He returns.

  Jacob smiles and the sky grows darker. You tremble and reach for the window casing as he says, “If you’re hurt, he’ll have to come back.” Your hand is only inches from the white sill when his fingers close over your wrist, pain searing your arm, shooting straight into your head as he jerks you forward and the sky shrinks and everything is green and you scream until you bounce off the lawn. Your teeth ache, blood in your mouth and hot across your neck, and you can’t move your limbs, numb for a moment. But slowly, agony and fire dance, throwing each other back and forth inside your skull. And Jacob screams, “Mom! Mom! Davey fell off the roof!”

  You cry for what feels like years, hating the way you landed, facing the willow, until Mom is crying next to you, dialing the phone, angelic again. But behind her, with his back to the willow and the dark patch among its lower branches outlining his body, Jacob smiles.

  —

  You open your eyes but the room is so white it hurts your head and sends you spinning, as if you’re tumbling into a hole just a bit larger than your body. And you’re falling, unsure where you are, crying in this too-deep darkness, and frightened because the sound of the pl
ummet roars in your ears. You cry for Mom because you don’t feel right—you ache, a deep constant monster clawing away inside you the more conscious you become. You open your eyes again and stare at the ceiling, hearing music far off, as something inflates inside your chest like someone had carved your heart free and replaced it with a balloon. It chokes your screams to muffled groans, and you feel alone, trapped by this utter hopelessness, this heavy helplessness, because something is wrong and the music is just the life of a machine, a beeping that won’t stop.

  Crying for her again, you look down and see her there at the foot of the bed, and she’s touching your foot—only it’s not your foot, this foot is large and hard and white like a giant mummy has swapped legs with you while you were sleeping. You’re afraid to look at the rest of your body because staring at the alien foot reminds you of the alien willow and the games it plays late at night when everyone else is in bed.

  Shoes squeak across the floor, approaching, and Dad stops next to Mom. He has his hands on his hips and doesn’t touch her, just frowns and then looks at you with such confusion it sends you rifling toward vertigo again. The look says I’ll never understand you, and I’m afraid I don’t have the strength to try anymore.

  He says, “Is he okay?”

  Who? you think. Because he’s looking right at you, but Mom answers—and you realize both their voices seem so far away. “They have him drugged up. He freaks out when he’s not sedated.”

  “When can you take him home?”

  Mom flinches like he slapped her.

  A shadow drifts between their shoulders and you glimpse Jacob’s face. He asks if Dad is bringing you back soon, says that he thinks Dad should.

  Home, you think.

  Everyone is quiet for a long time. The room feels like it’ll explode any second now. And when Jacob opens his mouth you can see that he’s been drinking that yummy red pop, and his face bunches up, and he’s crying as he talks and spittle flecks Dad’s face. “You’ve let us down! You always let us down!” And Jacob runs away, crying still, and you’ve never seen him falling apart like this. Mom says to Dad, “Go talk to him, please,” but even the please has an edge to it, desperation, everyone at wits’ end, and you think—this is all my fault because I couldn’t fly. If I could have I wouldn’t be here, they wouldn’t fight. The sky grows a little darker and your parents’ shadows stretch through the door and out into the hall. A woman you don’t know enters the room and your parents step away from the bed while she checks a clipboard and asks how you’re feeling, her voice gentle and her eyes like robin eggs, and you think that maybe she is an alien, maybe they’re watching everyone, maybe they’ve been looking for you all this time, and now they have you. The balloon starts inflating in your chest again. Your body tenses. The lady in white says, “I’ll have to medicate him to keep him calm. I’m sorry.” And she does sound sorry, but your heart freezes as you wonder if the medication really helps or only makes things worse.

  Your parents step away, putting distance between them and you, everyone in their own little world. You want to yell and tell them, “Don’t leave me alone!” But the darkness outside has caught behind your eyes and slowly it creeps in until your vision is nothing but a pinhole, you can only see the nurse’s right elbow, then you see nothing.

  —

  Rush, rush, rush—that’s what the weeping willow says as it moves toward you through the darkness, its canopy creating the illusion of a shimmering tunnel rushing at you. Your back is to the shack where your parents nursed a wounded deer back to health only for it to get hit by a car because it had no idea anything could hurt it again. Branches clack and they remind you of Jacob and the little bird he’d knocked from a nest a few summers ago, how he crushed it under his foot as it made pitiful cries, your brother saying, “It’s better this way. If it grows up it might suffer.” And the hard glint filled his eyes until they seemed black with glossy wetness, and it felt like he was talking to the dead baby bird about you...

  The willow stops only feet from you, its massive trunk like a wall blocking the pond where another summer Jacob had drowned Garfield, your kitten—sent it to heaven, he’d said, because God loves kittens. But you didn’t understand why the limp wet corpse in his hand made you hurt so badly if being with God was supposed to be a good thing.

  The willow leans forward and you can’t even cower with the shed behind you; this tree could gobble you up and no one would ever find you. Only...you’re not frightened anymore. Because a branch strokes your cheek and the leaves tickle the corner of your lips, and the dark patch dangling from the lowest branch pulses and kicks like Garfield had, until the darkness stills and the willow shivers.

  I will protect you. You hear its voice, soft, filled with the rustle of leaves.

  You want to believe that, you want to trust, but this short life has been full of promises and confusion, full of pain, and your head aches and you blink and wake. The bed is soft. Outside, someone is mowing the lawn. Jacob? You push yourself up against the pain, realizing the rest of the house is quiet and still, but far off, as the mower dies out, you hear branches scraping, a muffled choking sound. Your foot is bound up, and you remember Mom saying, “It’s your ankle, you broke it when you slipped off the roof. They had to put it in a cast, honey, so the bones would set right.” None of it made much sense because you didn’t slip off the roof. Jacob pushed you because he missed Dad. And now you do too. Just the sound of his voice was soothing. You think that if his voice was there and you didn’t have to look at his strange face, everything would be okay. Jacob would love you more, then. Maybe.

  —

  The sun is bright as you step through the back door and you squint as you thump down the steps, careful now, because you don’t know what you’d do if you hurt your other ankle and both of them were damaged. You know your Mom couldn’t carry you around on her back, and you wouldn’t ask her because when you first came home she said she had enough weight on her shoulders.

  You lumber across the lawn, over the driveway, past the shed. The willow is quiet but for the soft screech of its drooping branches. And the dark patch is there, beneath the lowest one, and as you move closer you see that it is Jacob hanging there with a rope around his neck and one of his shoelaces is untied. He seems quiet too, and you don’t get whatever game he’s playing, so you pause, not wanting to make him so angry that he’ll come down and hit you.

  His eyes are large and bloodshot. Mom always said that happens when you don’t get enough sleep, but you know it also comes from crying a lot. You whisper, “Have you cried lately?”

  But Jacob doesn’t answer.

  You step forward as the willow sings softly.

  You inch toward your dangling brother and his pale blue hands, and when he doesn’t scream, you tie his shoe for him because you don’t want him to trip over it. Tripping hurts.

  You smile and say, “You can come down.” Because he has never been this nice to you, and you hope it can be like this always. Still and quiet, both of you sharing a moment together without any pain. The rope squeaks as his body sways and a sudden gust of wind blows your hair in your eyes. The willow moans and the pond water ripples. “Come down,” you say.

  But Jacob doesn’t come down.

  He just stares straight ahead.

  And you think, He’s watching for Dad’s return.

  So you sit at the base of the tree and watch with him.

  —//—

  Lee Thompson started selling work in early 2010. Delirium Books bought his novel Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children (May 2011), and his novella Iron Butterflies Rust (August 2011). His short stories populate Dark Discoveries, Darkside Digital, Sideshow Press, The Zombie Feed, Vol. 1, Tasmaniac Publications, and other neat places.

  He's worked a lot, sweated a lot, and continues to take up space the best he can at www.leethompsonfiction.com.

  FULL DENTAL

  by Tom Bordonaro

  “McCarthy, McCarthy, McCarthy & Liebowitz has a long standing pol
icy of diversity in our hiring practices, Tom. You’ve been here long enough to know that.”

  “I’ve been to the seminars,” Tom Nolte said, “but...”

  Mr. Ostermeyer, Tom’s boss, held up a hand. “I know, Tom. I know. Which is one of the reasons that your animosity towards Joe Pennington surprises me. Quite frankly, I didn’t think you had it in you to be so intolerant.”

  “Intolerant? Intolerant!” Tom rubbed his jaw and looked away for a moment. “Joe Pennington ate Sally Hanson from Accounts Receivable. What about that do you not understand? Actually, he ate her left leg and then raped her in the eye sockets before she died. As she was dying, actually...”

  Mr. Ostermeyer steepled his fingers and furrowed his brow. When he did so in his office, behind his large mahogany desk, in front of his potted Australian tree fern, it conveyed measured consternation. In the fluorescent lighting of the break room, it just made him look a little constipated.

  Ostermeyer sighed. “Tom, I know that you’ve not been happy here for quite some time. I think maybe that condition has been exacerbated by the presence of our new employees. Am I right, Tom?”

  Tom, shirtsleeves rolled up and tie yanked down, leaned on the break room table. Leaned in so that Ostermeyer could see his bloodshot eyes.

  He said, “It ate Sally Hanson. Ate her. Ate her and fucked her head. In that order.”

  “Well. I certainly can’t be sure that’s exactly what happened, Tom, now can I? You’re very upset and sometimes people who are overly emotional don’t make the most reliable narrators, do they? I don’t mean to impugn your integrity. I value you as a person, Tom, and I would never seek to invalidate your emotional state. I hope you know that, by the way.”