The Collected Short Fiction, page 153
“She’s groovy, as ever. Why are you lurking?” The others were still zonked, thank God. I hadn’t an inkling of how to break the news of Dad’s defection to them. I packed more ice onto my ankle. My foot had swollen to the point where it wouldn’t fit into my sneaker. It really and truly hurt. “Ow.”
“Let’s go. Hospital time.” He stood abruptly and went in and woke Doug, told him, “Drop your cock and grab your socks. You’re man of the house for an hour. Orlando needs a walk—for the love of God, keep him on a leash, will ya?” Then he nabbed Dad’s keys and took me straightaway to the Eagle Clinic. Mrs. Cooper, a geriatric hypochondriac, saw the RN, Sally Mackey, ahead of us, and we knew from experience that it would be a hell of a wait. So Uncle Ned and I settled into hard plastic waiting room chairs. He lit a cigarette, and another for me, and said, “Okay, I got a story. Don’t tell your old man I told you, or he’ll kick my ass and then I’ll kick yours. Yeah?”
I figured it would be a story of his hippie escapades or some raunchy bullshit Dad got up to in Vietnam. A tale to cheer me up and take my mind off my troubles. Uh-uh. He surprised me by talking about the Good Friday Earthquake of ’64. “You were, what? Two, three? You guys lived in that trailer park in Anchorage. The quake hits and your dad’s been shipped to ’Nam. My job was to look over you and your mom. Meanwhile, I’m visiting a little honey out in the Valley. Girl had a cabin on a lake. We just came in off the ice for a mug of hot cocoa and boom! Looked like dynamite churned up the bottom muck. Shit flew off the shelves, the earth moved in waves like the sea. Spruce trees bent all the way over and slapped their tops on the ground. Sounded like a train runnin’ through the living room. Tried callin’ your mom, but the phone lines were down.
“I jumped in my truck and headed for Anchorage. Got partway there and had to stop. Highway was too fucked up to drive on. Pavement cracked open, bridges collapsed. I got stuck in a traffic jam on the flats. Some cars were squashed under a collapsed overpass and a half-dozen more kinda piled on. It was nine or ten at night and pitch-black. Accidents everywhere. The temperature dropped into the twenties and mist rolled in from the water. Road flares and headlights and flashing hazards made the scene extra spooky. I could taste hysteria in the air. Me and a couple of Hells Angels from Wasilla got together and made sure people weren’t trapped or hurt too bad. Then we started pushing cars off the road to get ready for the emergency crews.
“We were taking a smoke break when one of the bikers said to shut up a minute. A big, potbellied Viking, at least twice the size of me and his younger pal. Fuckin’ enormous. He cocked his head and asked us if we’d heard it too—somebody moaning for help down on the flats. He didn’t hang around for an answer. Hopped over the guardrail and was gone. Man on a mission. Guy didn’t come back after a few minutes. Me and the younger biker climbed down the embankment and went into the pucker-brush. Shouted ourselves hoarse and not a damned reply. Mist was oozin’ off the water and this weird, low-tide reek hit me. A cross between green gas from inside a blown moose carcass and somethin’ sweet, like fireweed. I heard a noise, reminded me of water and air bubbles gurglin’ through a hose. Grace a God, I happened to shine my light on a boot stickin’ outta the scrub. The skinny biker yelled his buddy’s name and ran over there.”
Uncle Ned had gotten worked up during the narration of his story. He lit another cigarette and paced to the coffee machine and back. Bernice Monson, the receptionist, glared over her glasses. She didn’t say anything. In ’77 most folks kept their mouths shut when confronted by foamy Vietnam vets. Bernice, like everybody else, assumed Uncle Ned did a jungle tour as a government employee. He certainly resembled the part with his haggard expression, his brooding demeanor, and a partialness for camouflage pants. Truth was, while many young men were blasting away at each other in Southeast Asia, he’d backpacked across Canada, Europe, and Mexico. Or went humping foreign broads and scrawling doggerel, as my dad put it.
Uncle Ned’s eyes were red as a cockscomb. He slapped the coffee machine. “I didn’t have a perfect position and my light was weak, but I saw plenty. The Viking lay on top of somebody. This somebody was super skinny and super pale. Lots of wild hair. Their arms and legs were tangled so’s you couldn’t make sense of what was goin’ on. I thought he had him a woman there in the weeds and they were fuckin’. Their faces were stuck together. The young biker leaned over his buddy and then yelped and stumbled backward. The skinny, pale one shot out from under the Viking and into the darkness. Didn’t stand, didn’t crouch, didn’t even flip over—know how a mechanic rolls from under a car on his board? Kinda that way, except jittery. Moved like an insect scuttling for cover, best I can describe it. A couple seconds later, the huge biker shuddered and went belly-crawling after the skinny fellow. What I thought I was seeing him do, anyhow. His arms and legs flopped, although his head never lifted, not completely. He just skidded away, Superman style, his face planted in the dirt.
“Meanwhile, the young biker hauled ass toward the road, shriekin’ the whole way. My flashlight died. I stood there, in the dark, heart poundin’, scared shitless, tryin’ to get my brain outta neutral. I wanted to split, hell yeah. No fuckin’ way I was gonna tramp around on those flats by myself. I’m a hunter, though. Those instincts kicked in and I decided to play it cool. Your dad always pegged me for a peacenik hippie because I didn’t do ’Nam. I’m smarter, is the thing. Got a knife in my pocket and half the time I’m packin’ heat too. Had my skinning knife, and lemme say, I kept it handy as I felt my way through the bushes and the brambles. Got most of the way to where I could see the lights of the cars on the road. Somebody whispered, “Help me.” Real close and on my flank. Scared me, sure. I probably jumped three feet straight up. And yet, it was the saddest voice I can remember. Woeful, like a lost child, or a wounded woman, or a fawn, or some combination of those cries.
“I mighta turned around and walked into the night, except a state trooper hit me with a light. He’d come over the hill lookin’ after the biker went bugshit. I think the cop thought the three of us were involved in a drug deal. He sure as hell didn’t give a lick about a missing Hells Angel. He led me back to the clusterfuck on the highway and I spent the rest of the night shivering in my car while the bulldozers and dump trucks did their work.” He punched the coffee machine.
“Easy, killer!” I said, and gave an apologetic smile to the increasingly agitated Bernice. I patted the seat next to me until he came over and sat. “What happened to the biker? The big guy.”
Uncle Ned had sliced his knuckles. He clenched his fist and watched the blood drip onto the tiles. “Cops found him that summer in the water. Not enough left for an autopsy. The current and the fish had taken him apart. Accidental death, they decided. I saw the younger biker at the Gold Digger. Musta been five or six years after the Good Friday quake. He acted like he’d forgotten what happened to his partner until I bought him the fifth or sixth tequila. He got a real close look at what happened. Said that to him, the gurglin’ was more of a slurpin’. An animal lappin’ up a gory supper. Then he looked me in the eye and said his buddy got snatched into the darkness by his own guts. They were comin’ outta his mouth and whatever it was out there gathered ’em up and reeled him in.”
“Holy shit, Uncle Ned.” Goose pimples covered my arms. “That’s nuts. Who do you think was out there?”
“The boogeyman. Whatever it is that kids think is hidin’ under their bed.”
“You tell Dad? Probably not, huh? He’s a stick-in-the-mud. He’d never buy it.”
“Well, you don’t either. Guess that makes you a stick-in-the-mud too.”
“The apple, the tree, gravity...”
“Maybe you’d be surprised what your old man knows.” Uncle Ned’s expression was shrewd. “I been all over this planet. Between ’66 and ’74, I roamed. Passed the peace pipe with the Lakota, ate peyote with the Mexicans, drank wine with the Italians, and smoked excellent bud with a whole lot of other folks. I get bombed enough, or stoned enough, I ask if anybody else has heard of the Help Me Monster. What I call it. The Help Me Monster.”
The description evoked images of Sesame Street and plush toys dancing on wires. “Grover the Psycho Killer!” I said, hoping he’d at least crack a smile. I also hoped my uncle hadn’t gone around the bend.
He didn’t smile. We sat there in one of those long, awkward silences while Bernice coughed her annoyance and shuffled papers. I was relieved when Sally Mackey finally stuck her head into the room and called my name.
The nurse wanted to send me to Anchorage for X-rays. No way would Dad authorize that expense. No veterinarians and no doctors; those were ironclad rules. When he discovered Uncle Ned took me to the clinic, he’d surely blow his top. I wheedled a bottle of prescription-strength aspirin and a set of cheapo crutches on the house and called it square. A mild ankle sprain meant I’d be on the crutches for days. I added it to the tab of Shaw family dues.
Dad never came home. I cried, the kids cried. Bit by bit, we moved on. Some of us more than others.
I won’t bore you with the nightmares that got worse and worse with time. You can draw your own conclusions. That strange figure in the woods, Dad’s vanishing act, and Uncle Ned’s horrifying tale coalesced into a witch’s brew that beguiled me and became a serious obsession.
Life is messy and it’s mysterious. Had my father walked away from his family or had he been taken? If the latter, then why Dad and not me or Uncle Ned? I didn’t crack the case, didn’t get any sense of closure. No medicine man or antiquarian popped up to give me the scoop on some ancient enemy that dwells in the shadows and dines upon the blood and innards of Good Samaritans and hapless passersby.
Closest I came to solving the enigma was during my courtship with husband number two. He said a friend of a friend was a student biologist on a research expedition in Canada. His team and local authorities responded to a massive train derailment near a small town. Rescuers spent three days clearing out the survivors. On day four, they swept the scattered wreckage for bodies.
This student, who happened to be Spanish, and three fellow countrymen were way out in a field after dark, poking around with sticks. One of them heard a voice moaning for help. Of course, they scrambled to find this wretched soul. Late to the scene, a military search-and-rescue helicopter flew overhead, very low, its searchlight blazing. When the chopper had gone, all fell silent. The cries didn’t repeat. Weird part, according to the Spaniard, was that in the few minutes they’d frantically tried to locate the injured person, his voice kept moving around in some bizarre acoustical illusion. The survivor switched from French to English, and finally to Spanish. The biologist claimed he had nightmares of the incident for years afterward. He dreamed of his buddies separated in a dark field, each crying for help, and he’d stumble across their desiccated corpses, one by one. He attributed it to the guilt of leaving someone to die on the tundra.
My husband-to-be told me that story while high on coke and didn’t mention it again. I wonder if that’s why I married the sorry sonofabitch. Just for that single moment of connectedness, a tiny and inconstant flicker of light in the wilderness.
High noon on a Sunday night.
Going on thirty-eight haunted years, I’ve expected this, or something like this, even though the entity represents, with its very jack-in-the-box manifestation, a deep, dark mystery of the universe. What has drawn it to me is equally inexplicable. I’ve considered the fanciful notion that the Shaws are cursed and Mr. Help Me is the instrument of vengeance. Doesn’t feel right. I’ve also prayed to Mr. Help Me as if he, or it, is a death god watching over us cattle. Perhaps it is. The old gods wanted blood, didn’t they? Blood and offerings of flesh. That feels more on the mark. Or it could be the simplest answer of them all—Mr. Help Me is an exotic animal whose biology and behavior defy scientific classification. The need for sustenance is the least of all possible mysteries. I can fathom that need, at least.
A window must be open in my bedroom. Cool night air dries the sweat on my cheeks as I stand in the darkened hall. The air smells vaguely of spoiled meat and perfume. A black, emaciated shape lies prone on the floor, halfway across the bedroom threshold. Long, skinny arms are extended in a swimmer’s pose. Its face is a smudge of white and tilted slightly upward to regard me. It is possible that these impressions aren’t accurate, that my eyes are interpreting as best they can.
I slap a switch. The light flickers on but doesn’t illuminate the hall or the figure sprawled almost directly beneath the fixture. Instead, the glow bends at a right angle and gathers on the paneled wall in a diffuse cone.
“Help me,” the figure says. The murmur is so soft it might’ve originated in my own head.
I’m made of sterner stuff than my sixteen-year-old self. I resist the powerful compulsion to approach, to lend maternal comfort. My legs go numb. I stagger and slide down the wall into a seated position. Everybody has had the nightmare. The one where you are perfectly aware and paralyzed and an unseen enemy looms over your shoulder. Difference is, I can see my nemesis, or at least its outline, at the opposite end of the hall. I can see it coming for me. It doesn’t visibly move except when I blink, and then it’s magically two or three feet closer. My mind is in overdrive. What keeps going through my mind is that predator insects seldom stir until the killing strike.
“Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’ Clementine. You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.” I hum tunelessly, like Gram used to after her brain softened into mush. I’m reverting to childhood, to a time when Dad or Uncle Ned might burst through the door and save the day with a blast of double-aught buckshot.
It finally dawns upon me that I’m bleeding, am sitting in a puddle of blood. Where the blood is leaking from, I’ve not the foggiest notion. Silly me, that’s why I’m dead from the waist down. My immobility isn’t a function of terror, pheromones, or the occult powers of an evil spirit. I’ve been pricked and poisoned. Nature’s predators carry barbs and stings. Those stings deliver anesthetics and anticoagulants. Have venom, will travel. I chuckle. My lips are cold.
“Help me,” it whispers as it plucks my toes, testing my resistance. Even this close, it’s an indistinct blob of shadowy appendages.
“I have one question.” I enunciate carefully, the way I do after one too many shots of Jäger. “Did you take my dad on August fifteenth, 1977? Or did that bastard skip out? Me and my brother got a steak dinner riding on this.”
“Help me.” The pleading tone descends into a lower timbre. A satisfied purr.
One final trick up my sleeve, or in my pocket. Recently, while browsing a hardware store for a few odds and ends, I came across a relic of my youth—a black light. Cost a ten-spot, on special in the clearance bin. First it made me smile as I recalled how all my childhood friends illuminated their Funkadelic posters, kids as gleeful as if we’d rediscovered alchemy. Later, in college, black light made a comeback on campus and at the parties we attended. It struck a chord, got me thinking, wondering...
Any creature adapted to distort common light sources might be susceptible to uncommon sources. Say, infrared or black light. I hazard a guess that my untutored intuition is on the money and that thousands of years of evolution haven’t accounted for a ten-dollar device used to find cat-piss stains in the carpet.
I raise the box with the black light filter in my left hand and thumb the toggle. For an instant, I behold the intruder in all its malevolent glory. It recoils from my black light, a segmented hunter of soft prey retreating into its burrow. A dresser crashes in the bedroom. The trailer rocks slightly, then is quiet. The moment has passed, except for the fresh hell slowly blooming in my head.
The black light surprised it and nothing more. Surprised and amused it. The creature’s impossibly broad grin imparted a universe of corrupt wisdom that will scar my mind for whatever time I have left. Mr. Help Me’s susurrant chuckle lingers like a psychic stain. Sometimes the spider cuts the fly from its web. Sometimes nature doesn’t sink in those red fangs; sometimes it chooses not to rend with its red claws. A reprieve isn’t necessarily the same weight as a pardon. Inscrutability isn’t mercy.
We Shaws are tough as shoe leather. Doubtless, I’ve enough juice left in me to crawl for the phone and signal the cavalry. A quart or two of type O and I’ll be fighting fit with a story to curl your toes. The conundrum is whether I really want to make that crawl or whether I should close my eyes and fall asleep. Did you take my dad? I’ve spent most of my life waiting to ask that question. Is Dad out there in the dark? What about those hunters and hikers and kids who walk through the door and onto the crime pages every year?
I don’t want to die, truly I don’t. I’m also afraid to go on living. I’ve seen the true, unspeakable face of the universe, a face that reflects my lowly place in its scheme. And the answer is yes. Yes, there are hells, and in some you are burned or boiled or digested in the belly of a monster for eternity. Yes, what’s left of Dad abides with a hideous mystery. He’s far from alone.
What would Clint Eastwood do? Well, he would’ve plugged the fucker with a .44 Magnum, for starters. I shake myself. Midfifties is too late to turn into a mope. I roll onto my belly, suck in a breath, and begin the agonizing journey toward the coffee table, where I left my purse and salvation. Hand over hand, I drag my scrawny self. It isn’t lost on me what I resemble as I slather a red trail across the floor.
Laughing hurts. Hard not to, though. I begin to sing the refrain from “Help!” Over and over and over.
The Blood In My Mouth
First published in The Madness of Cthulhu, October 2015.
“At first, the sight of death makes you want to puke," my dad said when I was eleven. Without looking, he worked the action of his rifle, chambering a bullet. We crouched in a blind near a swamp. We shared a six-pack of Pabst, waiting on a moose to wander into the killing field. Gnats were fierce, crawling into my collar and ears to bite. Our family hadn’t eaten meat in nearly a week.
