Presented for your approval, disapproval,
concern, disturbance, dread, and/or befuddlement, here’s another story for Halloween. I hope it gives you nightmares. It
certainly gave me one, dealing with Microsoft products to get it up here (even
their own programs aren’t compatible with each other, and they all run slower
than a sloth’s digestive system). Yet,
stubborn as I am, I’ll still try to put one, possibly even two more up by
Halloween. Anyway, this is long, but hopefully will be worth your time. As always, feedback is
wonderful and much appreciated.
KickerOfElves:
Profbolt:
My stuff:
Now, let's go someplace dark.
CREAK
1.
Left Arm
When he found a hand sticking up
through the tangle of dusty mason jars, chains, and mailboxes on the junk-shop
table, Jack jumped back a bit. The thing
was hiding behind a battered World War II era first aid kit, like something the
medic had picked up on the battlefield and forgotten to unload. The medical kit was disturbing enough on its
own -- the dark stains freckling it looked more like old blood than rust -- but
the arm was far worse.
Jack's antiquing habit was a
hold-over from his ex-girlfriend, Gwen, who used to drag him to all sorts of
places, combing through the ninety-percent-trash some entrepreneur had
thoughtfully piled up in some shithole-or-other. She'd get a good laugh out of seeing him
still going to places like this, especially during bow season, but after he'd
run into a few things that were up his alley -- vintage guns and tools and
what-not -- Jack's trying-to-be-a-good-boyfriend patience had turned into a
genuine interest that had outlived the relationship and, lately, had been
verging on becoming expertise. He could
even identify most types of wood at a glance now, and could tell you what old
carnival glassware was worth even though he didn't have much use for the stuff
himself.
Yeah, Gwen would be amused to
see what she'd turned him into. But she
wouldn't like that arm at all.
He leaned in, trying to get a
better look at it. It wasn't easy in
this place; the light itself looked
antique here, brownish and worn out, spread over everything like syrup so you
couldn't make out details. The shop even
smelled dim, ghosts of stale potpourri and perfume caught in old dresses. The lighting had been bothering him even
before he happened upon the arm; no place with as many paintings of creepy
big-eyed-children should be so ill-lit.
Making it worse, the lights were placed badly, throwing shadows all over
at crazy tilted angles that made him feel like he was drunk in a funhouse.
There wasn’t a lot to see here,
anyway; it was one of those places full of debris calling itself “antique” just
because it was old -- Coke bottles somebody hoped you’d mistake for something
valuable, stacks of mice-nibbled Richie Rich comics they wanted two bucks
apiece for when a buck for the whole stack would be charity already. Maybe if you wanted a Village of the
Giants lunchbox in poor condition or a depression-era kaiser blade or some
ex-rental VHS you’d have a good day, but mostly this place stocked
disappointment. It wasn't where Jack had
been headed; he’d been trying to follow
a Google map to another store when he spotted this one tucked away on a side
street and decided to pull in and give it a look just as a what-the-hell. You never knew what you’d find in a what-the
hell.
Boy howdy you wouldn’t.
The arm was made of wood --
walnut, Jack thought, from what he could see through the chipped
white-folks-skin-colored paint and mahogany lighting -- and it didn’t seem to
be a piece of a mannequin. Most of those
were plaster, and this looked hand-carved.
Hand-carved hand, he thought, moving aside an old blue glass jar
to get a better look. Medical
prosthetic? Could be. Kind of a sick thing to find selling as an
antique, but you never knew what somebody’d try to move.
Wincing a little, Jack carefully
reached behind the junk to pick it up.
It was jointed, he saw, but the elbow was rigored in place, maybe by
warp, maybe by flaked paint. He
carefully flexed it and it moved with an ugly squeak and a dustfall of pinkish
paint flecks. Well, it was no
prosthesis, that was for sure; the end of the shoulder wasn’t cupped to fit
over a stump, but sported a metal spike.
The spike had little holes drilled into it, maybe for some kind of
connections. Not a prosthesis, for
sure. Jab that into someone it’d not
only hurt like a bastard but probably compromise an artery and they’d bleed to
death. Too high a price just for being
symmetrical. But it still looked
somehow medical.
The arm had good balance to
it. It was a left arm, so Jack had to
use his left to go hand-in-hand with it.
He held it out and gave nobody a handshake. The fingers, too, were cunningly jointed;
they moved like real fingers, but you had to really look to see the seams. Their movements were arthritic but smoother
than the elbow, creaking just a little.
He arranged them so the hand was flipping a bird and laughed to
himself. It made the creepy damn thing
just a little less creepy. He made it do
a metal sign-of-the-horns and then folded it into a thumb’s up and did a Fonz “ayyyy!”
to himself.
Opening the fingers back out, he
carried the arm through the shop, carefully threading his way through the maze
of precarious junk. The building was
just the good side of condemned, and it was saved from feeling like a shed
mostly by the air conditioning --- a window unit that fit right in with the
other antiques, rattling like a lawnmower that had crashed through and wasn’t
giving up just because it was wedged.
The only other person in the
place was a little old lady at the counter.
Jack was on his best behavior with her, because he knew he didn’t look
like an antiquer with his beard and grimy trucker cap and old Pantera tee-shirt. She’d probably be a little scared, being
alone in the place with a guy like him, and he didn’t like to make people
nervous. She didn’t seem afraid,
though, ignoring him and working on a crossword puzzle in the newspaper. Using a pen, Jack noted. He never had that kind of confidence with
crosswords, and wouldn’t try sudoku at all.
An old TV hooked to a VCR next to her flickered out a movie, one of the
Bad News Bears sequels, he wasn’t sure which one but he knew it wasn’t the
original because he had every frame of that one memorized. The tracking was bad, doing a Silly Putty job
on Tanner Boyle’s head.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Jack said,
with the deference of one intruding on something far more important, “can you
tell me what this is?”
She looked up, adjusted her
glasses, and winced. “Awful is what that
is.”
Jack laughed. “Yes ma’am, agree with you there. But what’s the story on it?”
“I don’t really know. It’s just been back there on that shelf
behind the jars ever since the store’s been here. I hardly go back in that corner, gives me
the creeps. My brother owns this place
and he likes all sorts of ick. For a
long time he had a Japanese helmet full of holes from where a hand grenade went
off. Couldn’t abide being near that
knowing a fella must’ve died in it, even if it was the enemy. Somebody icky as my brother bought it
finally. What a happy day that was.” She jabbed her pen toward the arm. “Be another happy day you buy that. My brother’d probably want something silly
but I’ll give it to you for ten just to wave bye-bye to it.”
Jack made the hand wave and the
lady laughed. Her teeth looked antique,
too. Jeez, maybe the dim lighting wasn’t
such a bad idea after all. “What is it,
though?” he asked. “I’d think mannequin,
but it looks hand-carved.”
“I really don’t know. My brother knows the stuff here better than I
do. I’m just filling in for him. He’s usually in on Saturdays but his daughter’s
just had a baby. He don’t open up much
anymore but Saturdays. Can’t work much
anymore. Got emphysema.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
The lady shrugged and waved her
pen dismissively. “Just lucky it ain’t
cancer, really, damnfool way he used to smoke.
It’s bad, but it never stops him from talking your ear off. He’d probably be able to tell you more about
that nasty ol’ thing than you’d even want to know, he was here. He’s so glad to see anybody come in to talk
to, he’ll corner you. Talk the breath
out of himself.”
Jack nodded. A lot of junk-shop staff were like that, starved
to find anyone interested, ready to show off their collections. Even crap like this. Jack looked around and saw pocket knives and
old campaign buttons -- the oldest being for Gerald Ford -- and unraveling
wicker chairs he wasn’t sure were for sale or just for customers who wanted to
sit down and rest. A plastic clock on
the wall, its Plexiglas aged to amber, read 6:30, probably because of
gravity. Against a wall was a 70’s era
Playboy Bally pinball machine. A piece
of paper taped to it bragged the feature, “DOESN’T WORK.” Yet another stack of VHS tapes were piled on
it, and Jack was relieved to see Titanic and Jerry Maguire among
them. He’d never been to a shop that
didn’t have those. If a store had one
VHS tape, it was Titanic. If they
had two, hello Jerry. At some
point copies of each must’ve been mailed to every American, maybe
shrink-wrapped to your phone book.
He looked back down at the arm
and turned it over. The balance was
really amazing, and, disturbing as it was, the craftsmanship was
incredible. He wasn’t sure he really
wanted to own the thing, but it was too strange and unique to just walk away
from it. “You know, I’m interested in
wood carving, especially vintage stuff.”
“I’d say that was pretty old,”
she said. “This store’s been here nearly
forty years and I can’t remember not seeing that thing, and it was old every
time. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was
pre-20th century, even. Just by a hair.”
“Ten bucks, you say.” Jack gnawed his lip.
She nodded. “Flat ten.
But I ain’t gonna give you more than that to haul it out of here.”
He laughed, dug in his pocket,
peeled off a ten, tucked it between the arm’s wooden fingers, and extended it
to her.
She screwed up her face and made
a goat-being-raped noise, picking the bill from the wooden hand like she was
taking it from a tarantula. He laughed
as she tucked it away in the cash register and made a big show of wiping her
hands on her pants and shirt. “Now, get
that thing out of here!” she laughed.
“Yes ma’am!”
“Good luck sleepin’ with that in
your house!” she called as he left the shop, laughing and waving the arm.
When Jack got home he played
with the arm a while, admiring the craftsmanship, and ran a few searches on the
Internet to see what it might be.
Uncovering nothing, he tucked it on a shelf in his woodshop and forgot
about it for almost six months.
2. Right Arm
Jack was never very comfortable
with estate sales. They felt -- hell, were
-- ghoulish, and there seemed to be some kind of bad karma attached to a dead
person’s things. After all, they hadn’t
brought them any luck. And this
house had a weird tang in the air, like maybe the deceased had lain in one of
the back rooms getting soft for a week or so before anyone found them. Fat flies tapped at the windows of the place,
maybe born there. He felt like a
tolerated burglar, prowling through someone’s old life.
There was a lot of nice stuff
here. Whoever-it-was hadn’t died of poor
taste. But it just wasn’t his kind of
stuff. If he were a vase-and-pitcher
guy, or a German-Black-Forest-clocks guy, he’d make quite a haul, but that wasn’t
his thing. He was here now, though, and
had gotten up early for it, so he might as well keep looking. He milled around, thumbing through stacks of
books and getting nothing out of them but the feeling that he and the deceased
would have had a hard time finding much to talk about.
A young blonde woman -- a
relative? -- must’ve intuited that he
felt out of place because she said, “There’s more stuff in the basement you
might find interesting.” Her smile was
timid and sympathetic.
“Oh... sure, thank you,” Jack
said, looking around. “How would I find
it?”
“Through that door, into the
kitchen. Then there’s a sign pointing to
the stairs. You can’t miss it, but if
you do, pop back in and I’ll lead you.”
“Will do. Thank you,” he said, and touched the bill of
his cap, then decided it wasn’t respectful to wear it at all in a house of
bereavement and took it off and tucked it in his pocket, embarrassed. He sucked in his gut and slipped past a very
fat man who was holding up a ball of crystal and frowning into it, like he was
seeing his future and disapproving. Probably
something cardiac and soon, Jack thought, judging by the way the guy huffed
and puffed whenever he had to move.
Which he seemed to have no plans of doing. Jack edged around him and found the basement
door immediately on entering the kitchen, where ladies were going through
silverware and plates and talking too loud.
The basement was cluttered,
though not inappropriately, and the contents were a little more
interesting. There was a toolkit, but
all he found in it were the basics, shit to put your Ikea together. There was a small plastic box of fishing
tackle, but nothing he didn’t already have; in fact, it was almost all lures he’d
had bad luck using.
And there, rising from a
cardboard box of old garden hoses as if drowning beneath them, was an upthrust
arm. He stared at it, blinking.
A man looking over a bread-making
machine on the other side of the room said, “Hey, buddy, need a hand?”
Jack looked up and said, “No, I’m...”
then got it and snorted and shook his head.
“Sorry, dumb joke, but I hadta,”
the man said. “I mean, you know.” He nodded at the arm. “Kinda startling, isn’t it? Don’t worry, there’s nobody under the
hoses. I checked.”
Jack picked up the arm, already
knowing what the other end would look like.
Yep, a metal spike, fluted with holes.
A right arm this time. The paint
was in better shape overall, and it was a little more flexible than the other,
though it still creaked as he moved the joints and pivoted the wrist. “Any idea what this could be part of?”
“Store mannequin, I thought,”
the man said. “Darn old one.”
“Could be, but it’s hand-carved,
from wood. Most store mannequins are,
like, plaster.”
The guy put the bread machine
down and picked up another appliance, something Jack thought might be a
Cuisinart. “Maybe you’re right. Don’t know what else it could be,
though. Thought first it might replace a
limb somebody left in France in World War I, but that spear at the end leaves
that out. Might be off some cigar-store
Indian.”
Not painted like a white man,
Jack thought but didn’t say, not wanting to be argumentative. “Guess so, maybe,” he said, turning it over.
The guy laughed. “You’re not thinking of buying it, are you?”
Jack laughed. “Yeah.
I’ve kind of got to.”
“Got to?”
“Yep,” Jack said, heading up the
basement steps with the arm cocked on his shoulder like a rifle. “I’ve got the left one at home.” That got a laugh.
The blonde woman looked
disturbed that he wanted the thing but decided five dollars was plenty for
it. He asked her for information about
it, explaining that he had another at home, and she was intrigued by the story
but, unfortunately, the only person who’d know where the thing had come from
had been buried last month. She was a
relative but had no idea her late uncle even had such a thing in the
house. The other family members had
been even less close to her uncle than she was, so there was no hope that they’d
know anything about it.
Jack put it in the back of his
truck (he couldn’t bear to have it in the cab with him) and drove home.
It was an exact match for the
other. Same size, same craftsmanship,
undeniably from the same artist... and artist was the word. He’d wrought flesh from wood. The fingers could hold a pencil as well as
his own, the hands interlaced, the thumbs twiddled. It was like sitting at his kitchen table with
someone invisible from the shoulders on.
And he didn’t like it a bit.
But he was more curious than
ever. He hit the Internet again and
tried more searches, everything he could think of. “Antique wooden arm” pulled up parts of
chairs and little else, but he pored over any pertinent results he could scrape
together. He got lots of info, but
nothing that matched what was on his table.
3. Right Leg
A pounding on the door woke Jack
from an unintended nap. He’d been
getting lousy sleep ever since he’d found that other arm and had drifted off on
the couch as soon as he’d made it home from work.
The pounding again, more
obnoxious than knocking, and a voice yelled, “Open up, it’s the piiiigs!”
Dwight. Normally he’d have laughed at Dwight’s way of
announcing himself (even though the fact that he did the same thing every time
he came over had worn some of the funny off of it) but the dream he’d been
awakened from was too horrible to let anything be very humorous. His hands had been stiffening and creaking,
and when he flexed them the skin had split, cracked, and flaked away like old
paint, showing walnut where there should have been bloody meat. When he made fists they creaked like the door
of a haunted house.
“Open up! It’s the piiigs!” Dwight howled, and Jack
rolled off the couch and answered the door.
Dwight really was the pigs, or
Highway Patrol, anyway, close enough. He
was also big into hunting and fishing, which was how Jack had met him. Jack was a sometimes salesman, sometimes
mechanic of outboard motors, and Dwight had started out as a customer. He was a little guy, full of twitchy energy,
and didn’t seem like a Highway Patrolman at all. In all their years of hunting, fishing, and
hanging out, Jack had only seen him in uniform twice. It had been a disorienting sight both times,
like Dwight was playing a prank on the force.
His uniform should have come with a plastic pumpkin full of candy.
Strangely for someone as
rednecky as Dwight, he had a love of British sitcoms. His method of announcing himself at the door was a steal from an episode of The
Young Ones, a series he’d made Jack watch every episode of over beers on a
couple of weekends, just so someone would get his references.
“’ello, Neil,” Jack said,
opening the door and pinching his eyes. “Come
on in, take the tit off your head.”
“’Owdy, Vyv,” Dwight said, doing
a football-hand-off with a six-pack of Coors as he stepped in. “Looks like maybe I woke your ass up, and it’s
only, what?” He glanced at the television. “Andy Griffith’s still on,
dude, it ain’t even seven yet. What the
hell, the motorboatin’ biz running you that ragged?”
“Nah, I’ve been getting crap
sleep,” Jack said, wrenching off a beer and opening it as he sat back on the
couch. The couch felt damp. He felt damp. Damn, that dream had put him in a cold sweat.
Dwight waved the bow-hunting
video he’d borrowed and dropped by to return at Jack, then set it on the coffee
table. “Beer’ll help with that,” Dwight
said, pulling one and dropping into a chair as he cracked it open. “Hell, beer helps with everything. 'Cept the shit it don't, but in sufficient
quantities it helps you not care about that.”
“Thing is, I don’t know if I
want to sleep. I keep having weird
dreams.”
Dwight frowned. “I had one of those last night. Big bull alligator got in my house and I’d
shoot at it but the bullets would just fall out of the gun.”
“Experts’ll tell you that’s a
sign of sexual inadequacy.”
“Them experts, they know their
shit,” Dwight sighed. “I ain’t been
gettin’ laid worth a toot. So, what you
been dreaming?”
“It’s stuff about these things I
bought. I got these wooden arms.”
“Wooden arms?”
“Yeah.” Jack told him about the junkshop six or seven
months ago, and then the estate sale last week.
Dwight frowned and tore through his beer and then took another. He seemed bothered by it, not laughing it off
the way he did most other things.
“Yeesh, man. Not sure I want to, but can I see ‘em?”
“Sure. Yeah.
I boxed them up and put them in the shop.” Jack drained his beer and took another along
as they went out to the shop. He didn’t
like the idea of actually looking at those arms again, but the hope that Dwight
might have some ideas about what they were overrode his fear. If nothing else, maybe he could make fun of
them. He took them out and laid them on
a workbench, then lifted one and held it out to Dwight.
Dwight looked a little pale and
shook his head and said, “I’d just as soon not,” then rubbed his hands on his
pant-legs like he’d touched the damn thing anyway. “You got any idea at all what those things
were used for?”
“I was hoping you’d know,” Jack
said, putting the arm down again. Dwight
wagged his head. “I’ve been looking all
over the Internet. I took pictures of
them and posted them to every antique forum I go to, and even a few weird ones
I don’t, hoping somebody would know something.
I got a few guesses along the obvious lines -- store dummies or what-not
-- and comments on the level of craftsmanship, or just people saying ‘That’s
creepy, I wouldn’t have them in my house.’
But so far nobody knows anything.”
“You’d have to put me down as
one of the ‘that’s creepy I wouldn’t have them in my house’ folks,” Dwight
said, leaning down for a closer look and wincing. “Shit, cuz, them things set spiders crawling
up my behind.”
“Yeah, they’re disturbing,” Jack
said, opening the beer. “They gave me
the creeps from the beginning, but now that I’ve had these dreams about them,
it’s getting worse.” He took a long slug
of beer and stared at the arms. “The
first night I got them home I dreamed I heard something clattering around in
the hall and it was them, marching up and down on their palms.”
“Shit, don’t tell me stuff like
that.” Dwight turned away and did a
repulsed gesture.
Jack snorted. “You seem even more creeped out by them than
me.”
“I think I am,” Dwight
said. “Don’t know if I ought to tell you
how come, though.”
“What do you mean?”
Dwight set his mouth in a hard
line, took a deep breath, and let it out, glaring at the arms. “I got some land, way out,” he said, waving
an arm in the general direction of far-off-somewhere. “I inherited it from my grandpa. Or my daddy did, I guess, although daddy don’t
care nothin’ about it so he says it’s mine, said Grandpa talked about wanting
me to have it. It was really my
Great-Grandpa’s. It’s a bunch of acres,
maybe a hundred, I don’t know. Probably
not worth much because it’s so far off the ass-end of the boonies, just a bunch
of old fields grown up. I never got
interested enough to try to do anything with it other than go deer-hunt on it
sometimes. Haven’t even done that in,
lord, must be three, four years.
“Anyhow, it’s all grown up, old
farmhouse and rotten-ass barn, probably fallen down by now if some tornado or
other ain’t blown it off altogether.
Buncha old-school farming shit in that barn. I’m talking the whole place never even saw
electricity.”
Dwight rubbed his hands on his
pants again and looked at the arms. Jack
wondered where all this was going, and why Dwight looked so rattled. Dwight was a goof and this wasn’t like him at
all. But Jack waited, feeling dread roll
in like a tide, knowing this story was all going somewhere, and somewhere bad.
“Used to scare the shit out of
me as a kid when we’d go out there,” Dwight said. “We only went a few times. I didn’t even remember it clearly until I saw
those motherfuckers.” He gestured toward
the arms, violently enough to slosh his beer out onto the floor. “Sorry,” he said, smearing the foam into the
concrete with a toe. “Even Grandpa didn’t
live at the place, he lived in town. We
just went out there visiting Great-Grandpa once, camping, pretty much. Shit, I’d forgotten all this.” He laughed.
“It’s stupid.”
“What?” Jack prompted.
“Well, out in that barn,” Dwight
said. “Scared the piss out of me when I
was a kid, but out in that barn is a leg I swear to Jesus would match those
arms.”
Jack frowned. “Speaking of legs, you sure you ain’t pulling
mine, now?”
Dwight shook his head and drew a
cross on his heart.
“Because it’d be a real good one
if you were.”
“Yeah it would, but no I ain’t.” He nodded at the arms. “I haven’t seen it since I was maybe eight
years old, and threw some old seed-sacks over it so I wouldn’t have to see it
even then, but I swear to you, I remember it looking just damn like that.”
“Think we could go look for it?”
Dwight sighed. “Yeah, I guess. Don’t know why you’d want it, though. Ain’t those bad enough? Sheez.
I feel eight years old all over again, seeing that.”
“Yeah, I don’t like ‘em,
either. In fact, I’m starting to hate ‘em,
but these things keep showing up and it makes me curious. I gotta know what the deal is. I can’t find out any info on them so all I
can do is collect them and hope something turns up.”
“Well, my Granddaddy’s dead, but
I remember he didn’t have any idea where that leg came from. But it used to give him the jeebies,
too. Don’t know why his daddy kept ahold
to it, other than he was a packrat from hell anyhow. That barn and house were piled up with all
manner of foo-fer-aw. I probably should’ve
taken you out there before now, Mr. Antiques Roadshow. Just didn’t think about it.”
“Well, let’s drive out and look
around this weekend, then.”
Dwight nodded. “I reckon we could. I could swear that leg had to be from the
same guy. What are the odds?”
“I’m thinking maybe these things
are from something more common than they look, if the parts are showing up all
over the place. I mean, all three couldn’t
be parts of the same body. The odds of
me meeting up with three of them? Crazy.”
“What’s crazy is you even
wanting them,” Dwight said. “How ‘bout putting them back in the box?”
Jack did, and shoved the box
back under the workbench, and they went in and finished the beer, neither
really looking forward to Saturday.
* *
*
Dwight’s granddaddy’s farm was
as lonely as any place Jack had ever been, way out in drive-through
country. Most of the dwellings they’d
passed in the past half hour or so had been ominously empty, a few shabby
little houses that some realty company or other tended enough to keep them from
being completely overgrown, and rusty trailers peeking through weeds like the
bones of something that’d crawled out there to die. One Jack particularly got a bad feeling from
was ‘60’s vintage and had a weird sunburst design painted on it. Another rust-bled wreck still sported a
now-absurd “For Sale” sign whose hope had probably died around the same time
Jimi Hendrix did.
Dwight finally took a turn onto
a dirt road off the main highway, and looking down it, Jack almost decided he
didn’t want to go anymore. He didn’t say
so, though, because it probably wouldn’t be too hard to talk Dwight into
bailing on this expedition. He wasn’t
anxious to see that leg again.
Dwight’s 4X4 pickup was getting
a chance to show off, bouncing over washed-out roadway, running down intrusive
saplings, getting lashed by overhanging limbs.
“Shit, I need to come down here more often just to keep the road from
getting reclaimed,” Dwight said. He went
into a Discovery-Channel-announcer’s voice and said, “Man versus nature, the
age old struggle!”
A great boiling of flies swarmed
above something just out of sight in the roadside weeds. “Bet there’s plenty of deer out here,” Jack
said, bracing a hand against the dashboard.
“Oh you betcha, herds of fat
boys! I get lucky most times I come out
here. Don’t know why I don’t come out
more often. Hell, if you’re willing to
close an eye to it, I’m willing to pop one out of season if the opportunity
presents itself today.”
“It’s your land and you’re the
law.”
“I am the law!” Dwight roared in
a movie-trailer voice, bouncing through a puddle that almost amounted to a
small pond. Jack couldn’t remember any
recent rain but it still held water, and the tires spun ominously, zshusking
for a second before catching and driving the truck forward again. He took out his cellphone and checked for a signal,
suddenly thinking how badly it’d suck to get stranded out here. The phone was as flatline as if they were on
Venus. “You ain’t gone get no signal out
here,” Dwight said, noticing the phone. “If
I had a GPS in this thing, it’d be wigging out hard right now. ‘Whar you goin’, city boy?’”
“You ain’t kiddin’,” Jack
said. “Appreciate you still brought your
deer rifle along even if you suddenly get a conscience about the out-of-season
thing.”
“Scared of hearing banjo music?” Dwight laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ve never seen anybody
anywhere near this place. Creepiest
thing we got to worry about is finding that damn leg. And ain’t that enough?”
Jack nodded. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to see
another limb. It’d be too close to
putting together a whole body. And a
body of what? What was he inviting into
his house? Probably just some art some
whittler made. Maybe it was a department
store dummy after all, a do-it-yourself project. That was the best guess he’d gotten online
from some guy who actually specialized in collecting such.
A big black dog ran across the
road far ahead of them. Jack wasn’t sure
Dwight had seen it, but Dwight said, “Isn’t that supposed to be a bad
omen? Black dog?”
“I think that’s for truckers,”
Jack said.
“What you think we’re in,
motherfucker, a Pre-nis?”
Jack laughed. “That’s Prius.”
“I know what the shit’s
called. I’m being witty. And derogatory. I was comparing, like, a little shit car to
the male genital organ.”
“Oh, I got it,” Jack said.
“Didn’t, like, clap or nothin’, but I got it. Anyhow, I think the black dog deal is about
an eighteen-wheeler truck, not four wheeler,” Jack said. “That’s what the Patrick Swayze movie was
about, anyhow.”
“Truck’s a truck, black dog’s a
black dog,” Dwight said. “And Patrick
Swayze ain’t around to ask. He‘s
bouncing at that great roadhouse in the sky.”
“You got a point there.”
“Yep. Keep my hat on, though, maybe nobody’ll
notice.”
“How much further out is this
place?”
“Somewhar’s twixt a f’r-piece
and a lil’-bit,” Dwight drawled, wrestling the truck through another bad spot
that made them slam-dance in the cab for a second. “Whoo!”
“I was just thinking, we gotta
drive back out over this same road.”
Dwight laughed. “You gettin’ old if this ain’t fun, son!”
“Maybe. Too old to walk all the way back to town,
anyhow, if this truck throws a U-joint
or something. It’s getting rattled
awfully hard.”
“Naw, she’s solid. Might lose a fender or two. Get a wheel cockeyed. Pick up nothin’ but rap on the radio. But, we’ll get back a’ight.”
“So you say.”
“I am the law!” Dwight yelled
again.
Suddenly the woods thinned into
an overgrown field and a few hundred yards away was a derelict house and a
calamity of timbers and rust that might’ve been a barn when Taft was a
president. “Looks like we’re here,
anyhow.”
“Yep,” Dwight said. “The time away hasn’t been good to the
house. Look at that. Ain’t that some sadness?”
The house had its back
broken. The line of the roof sagged in
the middle, and a lot of the roof tiles had fallen away, exposing beams like
ribs showing through holes in a carcass’s hide. A big tree was growing into the side of it,
trying to bully it over, or possibly holding it up. The widows were black and empty, the eyes of
the last dog in the pound. It was the
most-haunted-looking haunted house Jack had ever seen, and that counted the
ones painted on the covers of horror novels.
He didn’t really want to get any closer to it.
“You know, we might find the
rest of that wooden dummy up in the attic,” Dwight said. “Feel like going through it?”
“Boy, you better be kidding,”
Jack said.
“Don’t worry, I am, indeed,”
Dwight said. “You dare me I might try
stepping in the living room, but ain’t even a double-dog would make me go
higher than the first floor. In fact, I’m
gonna watch my farting if I got my back to that place. Might blow it over.”
“I don’t think I’ll turn my back
on it anyway.”
“Spookhouse-lookin’, ain’t
it? And yet I played with my Hot Wheels
on the living room floor of that joint.
Wasn’t much else to do. They didn’t
even have a TV. Damn old-school,
Great-Granddaddy was.” Dwight parked
the truck under an old pecan tree and stopped.
“Think we can even get into that
barn?”
“Yeah. It’s all tougher than it looks, or storms
would’ve taken them down. I wouldn’t go
kicking things or whatever, but it should hold up. Just gotta watch for snakes. Hell, that kudzu’s probably holding it
together pretty good.” Thick green
vines covered half the structure like a tidal wave caught in the act of
crashing. Jack could smell them, fresh
and sappy as he opened the door and got out.
A smell so green you could taste it, like well-water.
He’d never liked kudzu
much; they way it covered old dwellings
and took their shape bothered him, like bones sleeping under a morgue
sheet. A bird shits a seed in an
uninhabited place and a couple of years later it’s washed away under a creeping
tsunami, hiding all, covering god-knows-what.
There could be Nazi ovens under the stuff and you’d never know. Dwight gestured toward a lump of it. “If I remember right, there’s a vintage
tractor buried under that stuff, somewhere.
There’s a museum piece for you, if you feel like hacking through. I’ve got a machete behind the seat.”
“Yeah, no thanks.”
Dwight dug out the machete
anyway and hooked it to his belt. “For
snakes,” he said, then took his deer rifle off the gun rack. “I’m remembering a tractor, anyway. Spindly orange thing. But the memory’s old and shaky now. Could be anything under there.”
It was easy enough to imagine an
old tractor buried in that lush green cocoon, probably rusted into a solid unit
now, but Jack wasn’t about to find out.
He felt too old for this now, because it wasn’t fun, son. “Well, let’s go see if there’s a leg.”
Dwight nodded and they parted a
kudzu curtain and entered the barn.
Sunlight built dust-columns through what little was left of the roof and
the smell of wood-rot was strong and somehow pleasant, loamy, a scent you could
plant potatoes in. Buckets, lanterns,
and equipment to be dragged behind tractors were all over the place, rusting in
peace. A snakeskin nearly five feet long
lay tangled in the discs of a harrow like a party streamer. “Don’t want to meet that bad boy,” Dwight
said, beaming his flashlight on it. He
scanned the beam around onto some burlap sacking behind a hay-rake, its spines
arching up like the ribs of a rotten fish.
“Well, shit, there ya go. I’m
pretty sure that leg’s under those sacks. Right where I tossed them more than twenty
years ago so I wouldn’t have to see it.”
Jack stepped up to the hay-rake
and peered over it. “Couldn’t talk you
into getting it for me, could I?”
Dwight snorted. “No sir.
Not unless you suddenly unzip your Jack Wesson suit and a naked Megan
Fox steps out, wanting to fuck the first fella who can provide her with a
wooden haint-leg.”
Jack peeked down his shirt. “Well, shit.
No zipper. And normal thumbs.”
"Shit, dude, lay off the
girl. She's from Tennessee, we're lucky
she's got thumbs at all. I don't care if
she's got toe thumbs, I'd suck them deformed piggies. I'd crawl through broken glass just to wave
at the truck that hauls her used Kotex to the dump."
"You're all class, Dwight. All heart, too." He sighed and looked at the sacking
again. “Okay, I figured I’d have to do
this. Had to ask, though. Let me see your machete.”
Dwight handed it over and Jack
picked through the burlap with the point, peeling back layers, raising a dusty
smell that clawed at the back of his throat and made him cough. He cursed and peeled away a few more sacks.
Then there it was.
It looked gangrenous, the paint
faded completely corpse-white and streaked with algae from rain. Jack didn’t want to touch it, but knew he had
to. He had to take it home and put it
with the arms, because, even in this state, it was clearly part of the same
body. And something was happening here
and he had to play it out to the end.
Sighing, he stabbed the machete into the ground, reached over the tines
of the hay-rake, and grabbed the leg by the ankle. It felt like cold, slimy flesh and he wanted
to drop it and vomit, but that’d only prolong things, so he pried it out of its
burlap grave.
Dwight had his back turned,
still not wanting to see the thing. “Was
it there? You got it?’
“Yeah,” Jack said, standing it
up. It was worse than the arms, mostly
because there was so much more of it. The carving was still masterful,
though; he could see where muscles were
tendoned as if there were bone at the core of that wood. He leaned on it and the ankle gave a little
with an ugly creak.
Dwight glanced back. “Yep, that’s it. Fuck.
I’m eight years old here. Think
it’s the same?”
“It’s got the same workmanship,
the same metal cone joint, with the holes bored in it. Gotta be.”
“Figured that. I was halfway hoping I’d mis-remembered it,
because now the whole situation is just too damn weird.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. They took it out to the truck and dumped it
into the bed. They pretended everything
was still okay and went to the farmhouse and peered through the broken windows
at a lot of old furniture and other items ruined by rain. Something they heard more than saw crept off
into the darkness of the building, possum or raccoon, they supposed. Even with the deer rifle, they didn’t want to
go investigate. A hornet’s nest the
size of a Godzilla egg hung from a light fixture, and even though it looked
dead they used it as yet another excuse not to go in. There may have been a few
small water-proof type items -- utensils, plates, and the like -- that would
still be valuable, but Jack wasn’t really into searching the place. He didn’t even want to go through the tools
in the barn, and Dwight didn’t press the issue.
No deer presented themselves,
either, so the leg was the only dead thing they carried away from the lonely
field.
4. Left Leg
Finding the left leg was the
worst of all, because a dream told him where it would be.
Jack had cleaned up the right
leg -- most of the painted skin had sloughed off -- and he'd taken pictures of
it and added them to his online postings.
Still no one had any solid answers but plenty were getting intrigued. And a few weirdoes were coming (out of the
woodwork, Jack thought, wishing he could laugh) with sick theories about
"Aleister Crowley's robots" and voodoo fetishes and witchcrafty shit
and Bible quotes in which Jack could find no pertinence. Some just seemed to want to scare him with
ghost stories. The pictures seemed to be
stirring up people's imaginations.
Worst, it was stirring up his
own, and in unhealthy directions. His
sleep was full of morbid dreams, things alien to his mind, such as waking up to
find the flesh rotting off his arms like wet moldy bread, cheesy, stinking and
falling away to leave skeleton arms that would need replacing with the spare
parts waiting in his shop. He also
dreamed of finding more arms and realized he wasn't building a person at all. Maybe they were part of some goddess Kali,
and that was as sinister as the Aleister Crowley idea. The level of workmanship did suggest an idol,
and he wasn't comfortable with that idea.
Sometimes he woke up from a
dream and the dry creaks of the house settling were easy to mistake for something
else. He'd lay open-eyed in the dark,
thinking of getting up, going to the back yard, building a fire, seeing if
they'd writhe. But he couldn't. Though the missing parts plagued his mind
with a nagging dread, he knew he had to collect them. And he knew now that he would. It wasn't a coincidence anymore. They were drawn to him.
He'd gone looking for the
antique store where he'd bought the left arm, hoping to catch the emphysemic
brother at work and see if he knew anything... but he’d driven all over the
area and he couldn’t find the store again.
He found where he thought it had been but there was nothing there; not
closed, just no place that ever could have been the store. He was almost certain he’d found the right
street, but he had to be wrong. But how
could he be, in such a little mousehole of a town?
The whole search had made him
feel frustrated and crazy, and he had more than enough of that already. He’d begun to accept the craziness. And that’s why when a dream told him where to
find the other leg, he’d decided to go there, absurd as it was.
He recognized the bridge in the
dream. It was a little thing, spanning a
creek in a neighborhood he’d been in a couple of years ago with Gwen, driving
slowly and noting everything in the early morning hours while they looked for
some yard sale. He decided to go in the
early morning hours this time, too, since poking around under a bridge might be
seen as crazyperson behavior, and the fewer neighbors he encountered, the
better.
He hoped it would just be
crazyperson behavior, because actually finding a leg under an obscure bridge a
dream had led him to would mean something for-real supernatural was going on,
and Jack wasn’t so sure he could handle that.
He wanted to be wrong.
But he had to know. So he woke himself up at 4:30 a.m. on a
workday and drove out about thirty miles to the neighborhood. He remembered the bridge well because it had
been covered in balloons and a “YARD SALE” sign when he’d been there with Gwen.
He missed Gwen. It would have been good to have her with him
on this mission. She’d been a
headstrong, spunky chick, pretty fearless, and she’d probably have made fun of
him for this. But she’d have gone along
with it anyway, and that would have made him feel better.
He’d probably still be dating
her if she hadn’t gotten that other job and moved to Austin. He wondered why they hadn’t kept up
communication the way they’d said they would.
They should still be good friends, at least, but not even a Christmas
card had passed between them. Of course,
half of that was his fault. Staying in
touch wasn’t all her responsibility, and he didn’t make it easy, being
Facebook-resistant. She was probably
busy with some other guy now, maybe even married. Thinking about it gave him a sad ache, like
hunger in his chest. He kept seeing her
eyes, the color of warm honey, changing shape when she smiled. He missed seeing them.
It was depressing to think about
it as he drove, but he welcomed it because it was better than thinking about
what he was doing, the lunacy of it, the greater-than-lunacy if it were
successful. He decided he’d use the
whole thing as an excuse to drop Gwen a line, whatever happened. Maybe even call her. He’d love hearing that voice again. It was warm honey, too. She’d be amused to find him still
antiquing. He wondered how much of it
was a way to cling to an activity he’d shared with her, and decided that might
even be most of it. When he drove to
some odd store somewhere, it was like she was still in the truck with him. He always thought about how she’d react to a
store or the things he saw there. His
hobby helped keep something of her around.
Maybe she’d have some idea what
these wooden limbs were about. She knew
far more about these things, and if she didn’t know she could do a better job
of finding out. Her intelligence had
scared him sometimes, it was like wildfire, devouring information. He wondered why a girl like her had ever been
interested in a guy like him in the first place, and that bummed him out.
“I’m a nice enough guy,” he said
to the truck. And that was true
enough. Maybe it’d been enough for
Gwen. It wasn’t like she was going to
find an equal, anyway. Not around
here. Probably not in Austin, either,
although he hoped she’d come closer there.
She deserved it.
Warm honey. Maybe whiskey. He’d gotten drunk staring into them.
Finding an ache inside and
picking at it was a helluva way to distract him from what he was doing. But it worked. Tormenting himself with something he seldom
dwelled upon whiled away the time, but time still moved, and eventually he
parked by the bridge. The light was dim,
the sky just starting to go from black to grey.
Everything was very still here;
he’d expected insects, maybe frogs from the creek below, but there was
nothing. Tall weeds striped his pants
with dew as he climbed down, flashlight in hand.
The night was still hiding under
the bridge. It was pitch under there,
just as it’d been in his dream, and stank of oil and creosote, like the train
ride at Six Flags. The whole thing was
too much like his dream.
Including the leg. It was laying there, bent at the knee, right
behind one of the tarred pilings.
Yes, it was there. Of course it was. Banged-up and paint-chipped but obviously
part of the same set.
Jack took it, threw it in the
back of his truck. He didn’t know how he
drove home but that’s where he ended up so it must have happened.
5.
Torso
The next week a package came in
the mail. There was no return address,
just a few spidery symbols that looked a little like fraternity names, but
weren’t. He thought return addresses
were required to mail a package in Patriot Act America, but this had been
shipped from someplace in England. If
they required them, then the sender had used invisible ink or engineered a
label that’d flake off early. Dread
told him what was inside so he didn’t even open it, just called Dwight.
Dwight showed up with beer -- a
case this time, and a bottle of Chivas, too, since it was Friday and safe to
make a night of it -- and he’d agreed to open the package for him, admitting
that the under-bridge retrieval had been enough ordeal for Jack to go through.
“I figure somebody left that leg
for me under the bridge. I don’t know
how they made me dream about it, but it was in too good a shape to have been
under there long,” Jack said. The left
leg had been dry, even cobwebbed, like it’d been residing in some attic before
being stashed under the bridge. “And if
this is what I think it is, I’m guessing somebody saw one of my online posts
and mailed it to me. I post under my
real name and e-mail, I’d be easy enough to track down.”
“Probably so,” Dwight said,
grimly slitting the tape on the box. “I’m
still hoping this is gonna be some shit you E-bayed and forgot about. I’d giggle ‘til I shit my pants if this turns
out to be a spice rack.”
“I’d love nothing better, but I’m
pretty sure the only real mystery here is, body or head? Or both?”
Dwight grunted to avoid any
other answer and dug through the packing material -- weird papers covered with
some kind of chickenscratch foreign language -- and lifted out a torso.
It was in the best shape of any
of the parts, but the most horrible. Mostly
because it sported a rubber penis. That
wasn’t in good shape; rubber didn’t hold up nearly as well as wood, and it was
dry-rotted almost off, littering the tabletop with faded pink crumbs. Dwight dropped it back in the box and jumped
back, rubbing his hands on his pants. “Aw,
cripes! Did it really need to have a
dick?”
“That is the nastiest fucking
thing,” Jack said. “Jeez, did they even
make sex toys back in the 20’s or whenever?”
“Humans being humans,” Dwight
said, “I’m pretty sure the dildo and pocket-pussy probably got invented
sometime right after the spear and a way to make fire. It’d surprise me if they didn’t predate the
wheel. People would rather fuck than go
somewhere.” Dwight waved his hands at
the thing. “Hell, ten minutes after some
scientist developed rubber he probably said, ‘Hey, let’s make us a dick!’”
“You're probably right. I don’t want that shit crumbling on my table,
though, shit. I eat there.” Jack went for a paper towel and a garbage can
to sweep the rubber shards into.
"No telling where that thing's been. Up Aleister Crowley's ass for all I
know."
Dwight craned his neck, peering
at the shoulder and hip joints. “I’m
damn sure those arms and legs are gonna socket right in there. Jesus, look at that neck, though.”
Jack swept the rubber flakes
into the trash with a careful-but-repulsed jerk, like he was dealing with a
colony of lice, and then looked at the neck.
A series of metal spikes and sharp-looking tubes sprouted from it,
gleaming like the ends of mortuary equipment.
They looked like serious business, conduits, more than just connections to keep a wooden
head from falling off. “Look at
that. This has to be some kind of early
robot. Android, humanoid,
something. Some woodcarver read too many
issues of Amazing Stories and took them too seriously. Tried to build a fuck buddy.”
“Most likely,” Dwight said. “That dong’s sex doll stuff. It wouldn’t be half as creepy without that
damn thing. I reckon we’re going to have
to hook the arms and legs to it, but I’m sorry as I can be but I’ll need to get
a little drunk before we go about that.
Not work for a sober man.”
“Yeah, I could use a beer or
six. Shit,” Jack said. “I don’t really want that thing in my house. I’m sure there’s all kinds of historical
import to it, but I’d just as soon some museum came and picked it up right now,
and tracked the head part down on their own, too.”
“Yeah, you know the head’s bound
to turn up now,” Dwight said. “Everything
else coming together like this? This
shit scares me, dude, I don’t mind telling you.
And I pull crazy drunks over at 3 a.m. for a living. I ain’t skittish. But this is something different.”
Jack was rooting through the
box, trying to find a note or something, but there was nothing. The packing papers were covered with odd
geometrics that might have been some language, or possibly just a weird
pattern. They looked printed with carved
wood-blocks, like some craft-store wrapping paper. An aged spicy musk rose from them.
It had cost some money to ship
it here, especially at the speed they’d used, almost overnighting it, and
nobody wanted credit for it? Other than
that revolting tacked-on dildo, the thing was a work of art. Disturbing, nightmarish art, yes, but
undeniable art. Someone had carved a bad
dream.
Without that sex organ, though
-- and that could have been added by someone else, as it appeared stuck on, and
the artist could easily have carved one if he’d intended it to have one -- would
it really have to be so disturbing? Just
a mannequin.
But finding that last leg, it
being where a dream had told him it would be... that killed even the most
far-flung notion of coincidence.
Something was at work here beyond happenstance. Leading to what?
Jack and Dwight discussed that
as they drank, and they found no answers.
There were none. And since the
supernatural had been at work in assembling the pieces, the figure itself was
undoubtedly supernatural, too. Jack told
Dwight about some of the crazy responses he’d gotten online -- voodoo, black
magician Aleister Crowley supposedly trying to make robots (Google searches had
turned up nothing on that), Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey’s mannequin
fetish (Google had turned up plenty on that, but LaVey seemed like a goofball,
more of an eccentric performer pranking an uptight society than anyone really
evil). LaVey was a proponent of “android
companions” and kept a fake tavern in his basement stocked with them.
A friend of LaVey’s, Dr. Cecil
Nixon, had carved a sort of robot named Isis, who could play over three
thousand tunes on a zither when given voice commands. Isis was filled with all sorts of fancy
clockwork and only Dr. Nixon knew how to make her work. Jack had found pictures
and printed them out, wondering if that was a possible connection. This figure seemed even older, though, and
Isis had possibly been some sort of magic trick. The craftmanship looked much different.
None of it explained the dreams.
About eight o’clock they had
enough of a buzz to forget the creepy circumstances of the thing’s accumulation
and the possibility of its purpose and started laughing at it. Dwight had dubbed it a “dick puppet,” which
they both found hilarious for some reason, and “Peen-nochio,” which was even
funnier, so they decided to go put it together.
The arms and legs locked into
the torso perfectly and easily. There
was no effort involved, really -- you nosed the joining spikes into their
housing and they practically drew themselves in, SNIK. There had to be some secret spring that’d pop
them out again, but they couldn’t find it.
So, they had a wooden headless
man. It was remarkably well-balanced and
they could pose it and it’d stand on its own.
It was a bit stiff and creaked horribly when moved, but, overall, it was
an amazing piece of craftsmanship. It
wasn’t hard to imagine that it would perhaps come alive, once the head got
here.
6. Head
For a highway patrolman, Dwight
cut himself a lot of slack about drinking and driving. Tonight, though, he’d agreed he’d had too
much, and would crash on Jack’s couch.
That had happened a few times, and Jack didn’t mind. Tonight he was even grateful for it, so he
wouldn’t be alone in the house with that thing.
Jack had a little trouble making
it to bed himself. They’d drunk the
world off its axis and the angles of everything kept shifting and the furniture
kept rearranging itself by inches. They’d
drunk enough that they’d gotten ready to chop the damn thing up and burn it in
the yard, like one of those statues at that hippie festival, “whatever it’s
called,” Dwight had said before Jack had remembered it was called “Burning Man,”
prompting Dwight to propose a toast to the obvious. He’d gotten his machete out of the truck to
hack it up, but then they decided not to, wanting to burn it in one piece, to
see if it’d stand up through the whole process.
They’d moved on from beer to
heavier stuff, which Dwight called “coffin varnish” until Jack had objected to
him bringing up woodworking. They had
enough woodwork for one day, didn’t they?
They posed the thing on one leg like a ballet dancer and it stood there
even when they threw beer cans at it.
The balance was amazing, and the wooden tendons at the joints were
rigored enough to keep it from falling in a heap. A masterpiece, it was. Maybe it was good that they’d be too hungover
to burn it in the morning. Some museum
would take it. And soon, Jack hoped,
because he was intent on getting it out of his house before the head showed up.
The head. That’s what he dreamed about, over and
over. He tangled in sweaty sheets,
starting from sleep after dreams about that head. It was close now, he knew. In his sleep something called to him from the
attic of a deserted house whose walls bore the algae marks of a flood. A box that came in the mail had something
gibbering inside with a voice like nails being wrenched from wood. Dwight brought him a smiling thing he’d
found in the trunk of a car after a crash with multiple fatalities. He dug something up in the crawlspace under
his house, something that had been there all along and had drawn the other
parts to it. In another dream he’d
gotten a package that wasn’t a head, but skin for covering the body. God, would there be skin, too?
The dreams were coming in so
fast they were on top of each other. He’d
think that he’d woken from one only to find that he’d only dreamed about waking
and it was still going. He woke up to
answer a knock at the door and found someone there who smiled with wooden
teeth. He got up to go to the bathroom
and heard something in the shower, creaking.
His penis crumbled and fell into the toilet.
He woke after a dream of
bleating, coughing creaks, thinking I need that fucking thing out of my
house. Morning was a long time coming but when it
got here he’d dump it somewhere. He knew
antique dealers and junk shops, somebody’d buy it from him, or, failing that,
take it for free. He hated presenting
them with the thing since it had that flaking rubber dick on it. It was embarrassingly obscene, but it was
part of the historical integrity of the piece.
Maybe he could put shorts on it for transportation purposes.
Dwight probably wasn’t sleeping
well, either. Jack could hear him moving
around in the next room. Sounded like he
was in the rocking chair, really going for it, trying to rock himself to better
sleep, chase off the bad whiskey dreams.
Can’t put it down to just
whiskey, Jack thought. I’ve been
having lousy dreams for weeks. Damn
thing’s haunted. Sour vibes come off it
like fallout, settling in my sleep.
Now that it was mostly put
together, it was worse. How much worse
would it be when the head showed up?
And it would. That was almost
certain. God, what would it look
like? Some mild, smooth mannequin
face? Some ornately-carved grinning
incubus?
In one dream, Jack had seen his
own face, rendered in walnut. That had
been too much to take.
Since Dwight was already up,
maybe they could dump the damn thing in the bed of his truck for the rest of
the night. Maybe that’d cut down the
dreams, getting it outside the house.
Better than having to think about it, still standing posed in the
kitchen.
“Dwight?” Jack yelled. “Hey, Dwight?”
The rocking chair creaking
paused on the other side of the wall.
Listening.
“Yo, Dwight, c’mere a minute,”
Jack yelled, and it came out slurred.
Yeah, he was still drunk. The bed
was moving on him, little ticks to the left.
No answer. But the creaking started again, moving
around. There was a clatter in the other
room. Dwight still staggering drunk,
too. Then the creaking was coming down
the hall. Christ, was the idiot
dragging the rocking chair with him?
“Dwight, what the hell, man?”
Jack yelled. “What’re you doing?”
The creaking ruckus stopped in
the hall, and there were sharp raps at his bedroom door.
Open up, it’s the piiiigs,
Jack thought. He reached onto his
bedside table for the penlight he kept there and beamed it at the door.
“Come on in, man,” he slurred,
sitting up.
The door opened, very slowly,
drunk-carefulness. The hall was
dark. The penlight was dim, barely
reached.
Dwight stuck his head in the
door, a big grin frozen on his face. He’d
been up to some mischief. Maybe he’d
dismantled the damn thing.
He stood there, grinning in the
dimness, until it made Jack’s skin crawl.
“Well, come on in, damnit,” Jack
said.
Dwight poked his head further
into the room, then stepped in with creaking, crazy jerky movements, and Jack
screamed. It wasn’t Dwight. Dwight’s head, yes, but not his body.
THE END
Copyright 2014 by me.
Posts
Goddamn, man. That's EXCELLENT. Jack's dreams are hella creepy. And I love the Young Ones homage. I will totally be reading this again. Well done!
ReplyDeleteAnother excellent short-story! Well done!
ReplyDelete