The Crawling Abattoir Read online

  Books By

  Martin Mundt

  NOVELS:

  Reanimated Americans

  NOVELETTES:

  The Cranston Gibberer

  SHORT FICTION COLLECTIONS:

  The Crawling Abattoir

  Dark Underbelly of Hymns

  Synchronized Sleepwalking

  For More Information Visit:

  www.martinmundt.com

  www.darkartsbooks.com

  Copyright Information

  The Crawling Abattoir

  All stories by Martin Mundt ©1999 with the exceptions:

  “The Reincarnation of the Dolly Llama” by Martin Mundt, ©1998.

  First published in Twilight Tales Presents… Tales of Strange Creatures.

  “My Love is a Dead, Dead Rose” by Martin Mundt, ©1998.

  First published in Twilight Tales Presents… Tales of Forbidden Passion.

  “Preface: 14 Years Later, The Abattoir Crawls On” by John Everson ©2013.

  “Introduction: A Cookie With Arsenic In It” by Jay Bonansinga, ©1999.

  “Road Rage” by Martin Mundt, ©2004.

  “Autoreaper” by Martin Mundt, ©2004.

  “The Willies” by Martin Mundt, ©2004.

  “Stuck On You” by Martin Mundt, ©2004.

  All stories reprinted or published by permission of the author.

  Expanded edition cover layout, interior design by John Everson.

  Title page photo by MAX Photography ©1999.

  Cover art/design by Chad Savage/Sinister Visions ©2004.

  All Rights Reserved.

  E-Book edition as a whole © 2013 by John Everson.

  Except for fair use for purposes of review, the reproduction of material from within this book for the purposes of personal or corporate profit, by photographic, digital, or other methods of electronic storage and retrieval, is prohibited. This book consists of works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  For more information on this and other Martin Mundt titles, please visit www.martinmundt.com

  First Print Edition, 1999

  Expanded Print Edition, 2004

  First e-Book Edition, March 2013

  www.darkartsbooks.com

  Dedication

  To my Mother and Father

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks and appreciation go to the following people, who have helped with, and endured, the writing of these stories: Dan and Janie Mundt, Barbara Mundt, Mary Beth and David McMorrow, Tina Jens, Andrea Dubnick, Bill Breedlove, Larry Santoro, and Wayne Poteracki.

  And special thanks to Mick and Brenda, of the 99th Floor, for the loan of Lucy the Skeleton.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Information

  PREFACE:

  14 Years Later, The Abattoir Crawls On

  INTRODUCTION:

  A Cookie With Arsenic In It

  STORIES:

  DWF

  Nightfighter

  Bug Mess

  The Worst Clown in the World

  The Reincarnation of the Dolly Llama

  Emptiness, Shaped Like a Man

  Kevin Bacon Killed My Girlfriend

  Maniac Worm

  My Love Is a Dead, Dead Rose

  Road Rage

  Autoreaper

  The Willies

  Stuck On You

  ABOUT:

  About the Author

  Books By Martin Mundt

  PREFACE:

  14 Years Later, The Abattoir Crawls On

  will never forget the first time I heard Martin Mundt read. It was back in the year 2000, in the upstairs of The Red Lion, a venerable (and since demolished) British pub in Chicago. The next day, my stomach still hurt, and not from the food. It was from laughing the night before. Marty had me doubled over almost the entire time he was at the mic.

  That night, Marty read one of his Rex stories, epistolary tales of a lovesick necrophiliac (two of which appear in this volume). It's not often that you hear stories about digging up the one you love. Especially really good stories about digging up the girl of your dreams that also relate in disturbingly logical terms the obvious tribulations of keeping her fresh with freezers and tinfoil for your future affections.

  I was hooked. From that day forward, I made it a point never to miss a chance to enjoy the deceptively deadpan delivery of a Martin Mundt story in a live setting. He has never disappointed, either live, or on the page.

  The Crawling Abattoir was originally released in 1999 as a slim chapbook with an orange paper homespun cover that belied the quality of the tales within. But you only had to look on the cover to see that there was something unique going on here. This unknown guy from Chicago had gotten a blurb for these stories from none other than Peter Straub, and it's still one of the best and most appropriate bits of praise I've ever read: "Martin Mundt is a nasty, warped, zero-temperature so-and-so who can't put two words together without first snickering, then slitting their throats. This guy is far too hip for his own good. No wonder reading him is such a pleasure."

  In 2004, I had the opportunity to do the layout for a five-year anniversary edition of The Crawling Abattoir, this time expanded with more tales in a slicker, more professional trade paperback format, with a glossy cover featuring the creepy imagery of Chad Savage, another Chicago native of macabre mayhem. It was a joy to have anything to do with publishing Marty's work, and a couple years after that, as I was putting together Candy in the Dumpster, the first Dark Arts Books anthology with Bill Breedlove, it was a no-brainer to ask Marty to be a part of that project.

  Now, almost a decade after serving as the layout guy for that trade paperback edition, I'm proud this time around to be the publisher at last bringing The Crawling Abattoir into the digital age, with this long-overdue e-book edition.

  But Martin Mundt hasn't been sitting idle for the past decade waiting for the e-book revolution. Along the way, he has had a serial killers-in-love play, The Jackie Sexknife Show, produced on an "Off Broadway" Chicago stage, has released a novel, Reanimated Americans through Creeping Hemlock Press, a novelette, The Cranston Gibberer through Bad Moon Books and another collection, The Dark Underbelly of Hymns, through Delirium Books (which Dark Arts will also be releasing for the first time in e-book format).

  While Dark Arts Books has never been an imprint intended for single author collections, this year, I decided to break the mold with the guy who has been consistently breaking the mold in short fiction for over a decade.

  I still remember the first time I heard a Martin Mundt story about love gone seriously wrong. I predict that you will long remember the first time you read one.

  Dig in. Tinfoil is recommended.

  Shovels are optional.

  -John Everson

  Naperville, IL

  February 14, 2013

  INTRODUCTION:

  A Cookie With Arsenic In It

  he sun fades on another steelgrey Chicago day. Broken vapor lights wink on. Filthy neon flickers. The steam from a gyros shop wafts across the cracked sidewalk, mingling with the carbon monoxide and clove cigarettes of skulking bohemians.

  This is Chicago’s north side. A haunted place. The ghost of John Dillinger wanders the alley next to the Biograph where the Lady in Red set him up. And across the street, phantoms creep over the loose floorboards of the Red Lion. The only truly British pub in a city full of Polish sausages and deep-dish pizza, the Red Lion is also the site of a reading series that may well be very familiar to readers of this chapbook.

  Tina Jens started Twilight Tales a little whil
e back, and a lot of characters have graced its broken-down stool and its Mister Microphone over the years.

  But none like Martin Mundt.

  He comes from somewhere to the east, or maybe the north, I’m not sure. And he comes striding down Lincoln Avenue every Monday night like a pinstripe avatar. Dressed in smart, sensible, dark attire – the clothes of a fashionplate mortician – his bespectacled face steady and tranquil, Martin looks like a professor of dead languages on his way to deliver a lecture to a class of vampires. Every gesture, every nod, every flick of his whipsmart eyes is calibrated for maximum effect with minimum effort. In fact, at first glance, Martin Mundt comes off like the Paul Birch character in Not of This Earth.

  He’s so pathologically calm, you figure there must be something diabolical going on behind those Foster Grants.

  And it turns out there is!

  You happen to be holding it in your hand. A collection of thirteen sugar-coated grenades. Thirteen trips to hell and back. Thirteen fever dreams from the sickly brilliant noggin of Mr. Mundt. To paraphrase Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success, this guy Mundt is a cookie with arsenic in it.

  Why is this chapbook such a dark revelation?

  Among other things… range. From the incredible fantasy/adventure about dragon dogfights in the wartorn skies of Europe that hearkens back to the pulp masterworks of Dick Lupoff… to a disturbing psychopunk revenge tale that does for body piercing what Hannibal Lecter did for gourmet cooking… to a creepy yarn about superbugs that seems straight out of a classic EC comic… Martin Mundt spans an amazing breadth of styles. His work recalls the dark whimsy of Rod Serling (“The Worst Clown in the World”)… the mythic dark fantasy of T. E. D. Klein and Dan Simmons (“Emptiness, Shaped Like a Man”)… and the creepy whimsy of early Joe Lansdale (“The Reincarnation of the Dolly Llama”).

  And Mundt is even a skilled comic epistler in the tradition of Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft. Check out the hilarious, mordant “Rex” tales “DWF” and “My Love is a Dead, Dead Rose.”

  But perhaps the strangest part of this whole enterprise is the fact that Marty is basically seeing his work published for the first time right here. Good God, what’s going on? Eternal damnation to the editors out there who passed on this guy (and you know who you are). Martin Mundt is going to be a major figure in dark fiction someday, and folks, you can say you heard it first right here.

  But enough of my horrific hyperbole.

  Take a bite out of this creepy confection, and taste a young, green talent about to burst onto the scene. Believe me, friends… this guy’s work is never going to be this inexpensive again.

  And save some for me.

  I love sweets.

  – Jay Bonansinga

  Evanston, 1999

  DWF

  DEAD WHITE FEMALE in search of safe and sane necrophiliac. I enjoy romantic carries along the beach, lying perfectly still for long periods of time and being propped up provocatively. You must be able to lift 130 pounds comfortably. Patience a must. Smokers OK. Drugs OK. Conversation unimportant. My turn-offs include: moving out of my line of sight, embalming needles, and dissection. Come and sweep me off my slab, and we can snuggle to the gentle rattle of dirt falling on my roof.

  BOX #142387.

  March 10

  Dear Dead,

  You are a lovely corpse, judging by the picture accompanying your ad, and crime-scene photographs never do anyone justice. I love how your eyes gaze at the camera with such a steady, relentless innocence, softened by just a touch of surprise at the odd twistings and turnings of the world. The bullet-hole is infinitesimally small, hardly even noticeable.

  I read Thanatophile, the Monthly Mortician’s Journal, fanatically, of course, but I have never answered one of the personals before. I have overheard other people say in their conversations that personals are for losers, and I never had the courage to override their opinions until I saw your ad.

  Chalk outlines are such an aphrodisiac, don’t you think? Yours is virginal, and it attracted me to you instantly. For days I could think of nothing but your stare and your mouth hanging open. I could think of nothing but questions. Who shot you? Your lover? A stranger? Yourself? Was it passion or an accident?

  I want to know all about your death. Tell me every detail. I want to know exactly how you came to be you. Write me long, rambling letters filled with your everyday observations and activities and feelings about being dead. Do not spare the paper. I shall rush to the mailbox every day until I hear from you.

  Yours in perpetuity,

  Rex

  PS I could not bring myself to call you Box #142387, but you gave no name. I hope I am not being presumptuous by simply calling you Dead.

  June 15

  Dear Ms. Dead,

  It has been three months since my first letter, and you have not replied. I have re-read the letter I sent you. Was I overly familiar in my tone? Was I overly intimate in my requests? Was I somehow offensive? I apologize for each of these faults. You must give me another chance.

  I insist that you know something about me. I am not unattractive. (I have included a nude photograph of myself for confirmation of this fact.) I have dated bodies before, when I worked in the morgue, before I was fired. But they were one-night stands and in no way meaningful. Commitment in the morgue was impossible.

  Yes, I admit, I collect medical books, for love of the color photographs of surgeries. I collect embalmer’s textbooks. I even slow down for roadside accidents, and it is sometimes all I can do not to stop and take pictures. And sometimes, I confess, dangerous, kinky thoughts cross my mind, and I linger over images of cremation, but it is only fantasy, I assure you, merely role-playing.

  I have bought shovels in the past and carried them in my trunk or in the front seat, cruising cemeteries at night. Always I threw them away unused, and swore to buy no more, but always I weakened and found myself fondling their handles, displayed wantonly out in the open in the hardware store like sex toys.

  I despised myself, but that is all over now, now that I have found you.

  I want a true relationship with a corpse next door; a woman who is solid, not just stiff.

  I want you. Please write.

  Yours in deepest sympathy,

  Rex

  July 16

  Dear Dead,

  Your silence is maddening. It mocks me. I did not think it possible for one corpse to be so deaf, so mute, so unresponsive to another’s true, deep feelings, to be so… so… cold.

  You are everything I adore in a previously living woman. We must meet soon. You cannot afford to wait forever. Can’t you hear your biodegradable clock ticking?

  Why do you not write?

  I am consumed by desire for you. I do not know what I will do if you do not answer me, what I am capable of. You condemn my soul to eternal isolation. I am utterly alone.

  Sharing your sorrow,

  Rex

  PS I should never have sent the nude picture of myself. The piles of dirt in the background, the tipped headstone, the open grave, the back-hoe. I was not thinking. I apologize. It was insensitive of me to expose you to one of my previous flings.

  What must you think of me? That I am a trifler, a serial excavator. Nothing could be further from the truth. Return the picture and I will tear it to pieces, and then burn the pieces. Forgive me.

  October 4

  Dear Box #142387,

  I have met another woman. I know I have not written in months, and you are rightfully angry with me, but I have been consumed by my Vicki, my little fallen angel.

  She is not like you. She is as warm as a stove. She moves and breathes. She asks questions and expects answers. She has demands. She wrings my soul with her perpetual animation. She is exhausting. It has taken much effort for me to become accustomed to the living.

  She wears black and talks endlessly of vampires, a fellowship she fervently wishes to join. She traveled the world for two years before we met: London, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, New Orleans,
all in search of Nosferatu, to transform her, a change she anticipates will be blissfully in extremis. She says she is a child of the night trapped in a mortal body. She says this is something like being a transsexual, only without the hormones. She has described midnights in a dozen cities, with never a single mention of the sun. I don’t think she would recognize the sun if she saw it. I have never seen her in daylight.

  But I love her.

  And the reason I love her is because she is suffocating, and I mean that literally. Erotic asphyxiation games are the cornerstone of our relationship.

  There is exquisite, luxurious foreplay. She winds a black velvet noose. She places a red satin stool beneath a ceiling beam. She ties off the hanging rope. She draws the noose snug into the skin of her neck, the windings behind her left ear, her head tilted to the right. Her fingertips linger on the rope. Her eyes close and her lips part.

  She is dressed in yards of black lace which billows when she falls.

  And how she falls!

  A hesitant, trembling first and last step into air. A delicate kick to topple the stool. A gasp of tightened velvet. A willowy snap as she drops into gravity’s arms. A spasm of fingers flying to her throat like little airbags with black nailpolish. The sinuous twisting in place, her army boots stretching, rustling her skirt, searching for ground support.

  Then the dropping of hands, the cute girlish gurgles, the slow cessation of kicking, the beatific smile on black lips as she succumbs to the deprivation ecstasy. She is almost too beautiful, like a swinging Madonna.