The Crawling Abattoir Read online

  I ran chains through the rest of the rings, kind of Christmas-wrapping them in a Hell’s Angels sort of way, until they had this real cool, glittery look when I finished, like they were in a chain-mail cocoon. I kind of kicked myself for not bringing a camera, know what I mean, because I probably could have used that picture to sell Roger Ebert on the whole idea for my boutique, kind of like coming attractions, you know?

  Then I ran the ends of the chains around the refrigerator behind Dave, and around a closet door behind Pammy, so they didn’t roll around too much.

  Then I just waited for them to wake up.

  And when they did, I set the place on fire.

  I let them get a handle on their situation first, though, because I wanted Pammy to understand that she shouldn’t have cheated on me, and I wanted Dave to understand that he shouldn’t have used his resemblance to David Hasselhoff, a fine, all-American actor, to score with women, especially a woman like Pammy, who was spoken for.

  They started to struggle right away when they woke up, of course, which was predictable, both of them being very highly predictable people. A couple a dozen pale cones of flesh pulled away from each of their bodies, and it took them about a minute of wiggling to teach each other to stay nice and calm and quiet.

  Pammy moaned and squealed a little, you know, still trying to play her little games to get me to let her go, but I was way past sympathy by then. I finally knew what she was really like.

  They couldn’t really see me, you know, because of the rings and the padlocks in their eyelids and eyebrows, so I waited, and when they were quiet except for their breathing, and I had their attention, I showed them what was what.

  I let them smell the gasoline first, before I poured it all over the house, except in the room Pammy and Dave were in, of course, because if they turned into crispy critters right away, it wouldn’t be any fun at all.

  I struck the match right next to their ears, so they would know what was coming, which started them struggling again, rings or not, but that was OK, you know?

  They made some real good sounds when the fire started, but I didn’t feel any empathy or anything like that, like I could with people, me being a people-person and all, because the sounds they made were really animal sounds, know what I mean? And that’s how I knew I was doing the right thing, because Pammy and Dave weren’t really people after all, just cheating, lying, rutting animals.

  Then I left.

  All they had to do to escape was tear all the rings out of their bodies, OK? No problem. If they pulled hard enough, then the rings would just rip right out of their skin, and then the chains wouldn’t’ve held them anymore either.

  Sure, they would have been kind of bloody and mutilated afterwards, and maybe they would’ve gotten burned a little bit anyways, but they could have gotten out, you know? I gave them a clear choice: survival or vanity.

  They could have gotten away. They just weren’t going to look like Pammy and Dave anymore, that’s all.

  You can’t blame me for the choice they made, staying inside the house until it burned to the ground. I waited across the street, because I wanted to see what they decided to do, and they chose to go out looking like a perfect couple, perfect Pammy and perfect Dave.

  The police showed up at my place the next day, but they had nothing, just a couple of old arson arrests, not even convictions, and an assault-and-battery arrest with dropped charges that was so old I’d forgotten about it, and that bullshit restraining order that Pammy got for herself when she was on the rag a couple of months ago.

  These two cops had nothing but bullshit, but they were going to play out the scene like good little worker-drones, asking me questions, waiting for me to make a mistake, but they didn’t know who they were dealing with, you know?

  I told them, you don’t want me. I mean, why would I be burning down my girlfriend’s house while she’s inside with some David-Hasselhoff-clone she’s been cheating on me with, right? Pammy was my sweetie, now and forever. Yeah, I mean Lisa, I said. Pammy was my nickname for her, like Pammy Anderson, right? I’m not your perpetrator, I said.

  They like it when you speak their language. It establishes a bond. I’m good at things like that, you know, people-skills, interpersonal stuff. That’s why I have confidence that my pet-piercing boutique is going to be such a big winner, because a good idea plus a good personality plus money equals a big winner, so, like I said, all I need is the money.

  But these cops, they weren’t having any of it. Hell, the chief-honcho cop probably sent these two Neanderthals over to talk to me precisely because they had no personalities to begin with. Brain-dead clones. Imagination-free zones between their ears.

  They were just-the-facts, just-the-facts kind of guys, know what I mean? There was like no human connection between us at all, like I was watching a rerun, and I knew just what was coming next.

  These cops were just sweating suspicion, you know, and they weren’t believing me for a second, because I just have that kind of face for people with no imaginations, suspicious people mostly, what with the rings in my nose and lips, and the one over my eyebrow and a half-dozen in each ear, you know, like Kevin if he was seriously into body modification.

  Some people just can’t get past the rings and the tattoos, you know, and see the inner me. But I’ve come to terms with that kind of ignorance, and I just let it roll right off my back, you know, because that’s their problem, not my problem.

  I’m sincere. I’m honest about my feelings. I’m just a nice guy, too nice, really, know what I mean? People find that out about me. I’ve got personality coming out of my ears.

  But personality just didn’t cut any ice with Joe Friday and Bill Gannon. They just saw my rings and smelled the gasoline on my clothes and jumped straight to conclusions, like good trained police dogs. Personality didn’t mean jack-shit to them.

  I saw them sniffing at the gasoline, with this little nose-twitching thing, because they thought they had probable cause or something from smelling gasoline, you know, and they thought they were real smart, putting all the pieces together, as if I didn’t have a legitimate reason to keep gasoline in my place, like I maybe didn’t have a lawn-mower or a chainsaw like everybody else just because I live in a studio apartment.

  So they arrested me. I couldn’t believe it. It was nothing but bullshit, but they arrested me anyway. But I’m not worried. My lawyer’s going to shred these fascist police thugs and their cheap, half-assed false arrest in no time. He’s a great lawyer, sharp as a razor, piles of connections with Very Important People, never loses. If you saw him on the street, you’d swear he was Matlock.

  Maniac Worm

  triple-locked the front door of my store and set the alarm. I left the sunshades down, even though it was after six. I left the lights off. I made sure my sign was hung in the window: AREA 51 COMICS IS CLOSED!

  I learned the word “paranoid” from Arno Spivey. I’ve loved and lived Spivey comics since I was a kid, comics like Maniac Worm, Atomic Kids’ Life, and The Crawling Abattoir! They were like textbooks for my hormones, before my mother threw them all out. I also learned “abattoir” from Arno. My mother had to look that one up before she could punish me for saying it.

  And now I’ve finally reassembled my Spivey collection, every issue of my favorite heroes, plus all the original Spivey collectibles, like Arno’s Official Alien-Detecting X-ray Glasses, the scale model of Maniac Worm’s Vermiculan Wormship, a pink corkscrew with hundreds of antennae along its length, and of course an original, foot-long serving of Pink Menace bubble gum, which had at least one super-special, super-secret prize in every yard, guaranteed.

  I sat behind the register and made a fan out of the comic books on the glass counter. Atomic Kids’ Life, Maniac Worm, Mordred Darque, The Walking Grave, The Crawling Abattoir!, Sergeant Warmonger–USMC, all safely taped in plastic bags, all in chronological order.

  I love these comics.

  I never went in for Cowboys and Indians or Davey Crockett o
r Howdy Doody as a kid, just space, spaceships, spacesuits, spaceguns and especially space creatures. And Spivey was the tip of the tentacle when it came to all things space.

  I pulled on a white glove and slid my first-edition Worm #1 out of its bag, opening it to the inside cover, “Arno’s Editorial.”

  “Beware, kids,” Arno wrote back in ’53, before Wertham, before the Senate hearings and the parents’ paranoia, before he was bankrupted and run out of publishing altogether. “You can never be too afraid, kiddoes. The Worms are loose. Next door, next street, next town, down any road to anywhere, US of A. Worms slither unwatched into unguarded and unwary brains, and I mean our pristine, holy, human brains, friends. They bore through skulls, worming through cerebral cortexes, squirming between left and right lobes, curling around each thalamus like leashes of pain, controlling minds.

  “Any neighbor or friend could be a worm-slave, any cop or father. The Worms are among us, my young friends. Gray-suited, humorless Worms, or goose-stepping, master-race Worms, they’re all the same. This is what Ike’s Progress and Prosperity and the Space Frontier and the Bright Future mean, pals, slavery to Worms: Worms in your skulls, Worms in your thoughts, Worms in your actions.

  “And they try to call ME paranoid! Me! Just for pointing out the plain and simple D-Day beachhead of the final Worm Invasion. Worm-doctors buckle their leashes tighter around me every day, chums, with their Worm-police and their Worm-courts. But do true paranoids have proof, pals? Do they have ABSOLUTE, INCONTROVERTIBLE, PHOTOGRAPHIC, DOCUMENTED, BONA FIDE PROOF? Well, it’s last laugh time, buddies, because the proof is in your hands, so turn the pages if you dare and read the gruesome future history of Worm-humanity. This isn’t fiction. This isn’t a comic book. This is MANIAC WORM!”

  I shivered reading it right here in the soft nostalgic womb of my store, like the wall behind me was turning to worms, creeping close enough to strike.

  So you can understand that the first time I read it, I believed it too, positively, one hundred looking-over-my-shoulder percent. It gave me chills on a sunny, Saturday afternoon in my bedroom with nothing around but open windows and blowing curtains and fresh air and the clatter of push-mower blades in the yard outside.

  But I love chills.

  And I love Spivey’s drawings.

  Shadowy borders bled panel into panel, shaded figure into figure, like everyone and everything was sewn together, sutured into one gooey, rubbery web of darkness, webbed shapes coalescing briefly out of a black fever, hallucinations chasing each other’s ratlike tails in a fast swirl down the rusty drain of insanity, as if each character had been abandoned while only half-created, and they were all pissed about it, seeking some kind of frothing, spitting, half-formed revenge.

  Well, I guess it’s true that pure Spivey was never very popular. He published Unheard-Of Stories and MC Squared Man and Biblical Yarns for all the bite-sized, lemon-scented, vanilla readers in the world. I don’t have any of those magazines. I don’t think anyone does anymore. It’d be like collecting used manila envelopes.

  Spivey was just too much of a dark, weird, inescapable, marijuana nightmare for most people, but of course that was back when marijuana meant something. He was just too much of a jazzy, un-American, commie corrupter of fifteen-year-old, extra-virgin girls for 1953, a real head-under-plaid-skirts kind of guy, back before you could see every conceivable deviance yawning on the TV every night, all night.

  God, I really do love reading Spivey. Just thinking about him takes me back to a time when corruption was really corruption.

  I untwisted the wrapper around the Pink Menace like the discovery of the first strands of DNA, and the gum was still pink and soft. Thank Ike they knew the proper preservatives to give their junk food a half-life of forever back in the Bomb Shelter Age. I left a perfect fingerprint in the gum.

  I smiled.

  Spivey, you see, drew without fail to the deep, primal, super-circadian rhythm of chewing, with page-breaks for blowing bubbles and chapter headings for stuffing more and more Pink Menace into already overstuffed cheeks. It was good for young teeth, healthy exercise for developing jaw muscles.

  Reading comics is always as intense as the first few radiant bites of fresh gum to me, the same as theater darkness always makes the taste of candy corn more vivid.

  I bit into the 44-year-old gum, and I knew right away I’d found a super-secret, super-special prize.

  Then the gum squirmed in my hand like a worm and expanded in my face like a gooey, slow-motion airbag. It slopped over my hand and my jaw and my nose.

  My cheeks puffed out with the mouthful of gum like I was holding a huge, sticky, sweet breath, ready to blow a truly American-sized, atomic-powered bubble. Except that I couldn’t exhale, and I couldn’t inhale either. I couldn’t move my tongue to push the gum out of my mouth.

  It struggled like a mouthful of living pink gristle. It sealed itself over my face as tight as a nitrous-oxide mask, and my skin began to go numb.

  I panicked after just a couple of lost breaths. I clawed at the gum, but it just kept unfolding more and more bright pink layers and clumps out of itself, like some Big Bang of Confectioneries going off in my face.

  It fizzed and bubbled and grew and got a stronger grip on my skin. I pulled with both hands, with everything I had, and got the stuff out of my nose, two tentacles like fingers finally letting me go, plop, plop, and then wiggling and waving in front of my nose, trying to pick their way back into my nostrils.

  I slipped backwards off my chair away from them, knocking over a rack of comics, pages fluttering and colors flying everywhere like monarchs and imperials migrating to more nostalgic, more peaceful stores.

  The Menace lay on the floor where I’d dropped it, dragging after me like a nitrous-oxide bottle still hosed to my mouth. It formed tentacles and fingers and tongues along its length like generations of mutant, irradiated genetics experiments in full fast-forward. I didn’t want to know what final, mature shape it was approaching.

  I kicked it away from me, but it just stuck to my shoes, and I tripped again. We crashed along a wall and onto the floor, shoving more comics and toys and flexible action figures and collectible cards and plastic, glow-in-the-dark Roswell alien heads and space guns (regrettably only non-functioning replicas) and models and games with lots of small pieces that little kids could swallow all tumbling and toppling on the floor and on top of us, like some sort of Christmas avalanche.

  I yanked at the tentacle in my mouth, and more tendrils slithered over my wrists toward my forehead. I shook my head, but it stabbed barbs into the skin between my eyes, and I felt like the sun was being injected into my brain.

  I needed more hands.

  I ripped the pink plug out of my mouth, blue spots of pain in my eyes. My blood slurped over the Pink Menace, and half my teeth were ripped out, roots-up in the pink goo, like my mouth had been pulled inside out.

  I grabbed a Sergeant Warmonger space-rifle from the pile of vintage junk on the floor and used its sharp edges to stab and scrape the pink drek from my chin and cheek. I bled, and for a moment I forgot the pain between my eyes, but the barbed tendril began to thicken as the Pink Menace redirected more and more of itself to flow into my forehead like a pink current. I felt it boring into my head, and I smelled burning bone from my skull.

  It began to slither into my brain, searching for my cerebral cortex, getting ready to shoulder between my lobes, my thalamus cringing at its approach.

  I pulled harder, and the glop hardened into spikes and stingers along the insides of my fists, ripping my skin. It tried teaching me with pain, but I just screamed and kicked left-right, left-right at the Menace and hauled on the cord plugging itself into my mind before it could splice itself into me forever.

  The tendril slipped. The end popped out of my head and bits of bone and brain and hair came out stuck to it. I don’t think any pieces broke off in my brain; I don’t think it left any seeds or fetuses or sperm inside me.

  I don’t think. />
  The tendril whipped out of my bloody grasp and snapped back into the Menace. The pink had slopped up over my kicking feet to my knees, but we both paused for a moment.

  I panted. It pulsed.

  I bled. It absorbed my blood and dissolved my extracted teeth. It sucked in a few of my long gray hairs like spaghetti strands, finishing them off with a final, happy slurp.

  I felt disgust squirm inside me, deeply worthy of Spivey’s darkest sewers and most shadowy morgues and clammiest midnight horrors.

  I sat, exhausted, whistling through the space left by my missing two front teeth, watching the Worm pulse. It had to be Maniac Worm. What else could it be?

  I clutched my space-rifle to my chest, ready to defend against the next cranial assault, and all I could think of was how, after all these years, against anything I ever believed was true, it finally became clear.

  Mom had been right all along.

  “They’ll rot your brain,” she said.

  Mom swept into my room, grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me right off my bed. The springs creaked, and the pages of twenty magazines I had spread across the covers flapped in the breeze I stirred up by flying past.

  She stood me in the doorway behind her waiting washbucket and mop, both smelling of Pinesol.

  She snapped on yellow rubber gloves. I rubbed my wrist, which was cold and sore from the grip of her bare fingers. She surveyed my room and then me.

  “Don’t move one inch, young man,” she said, pointing an ominous yellow finger in my face.

  She sat a huge garbage bag in the middle of the room. And then she cleaned. She scrubbed and wiped and mopped and scoured and picked up and sorted and sifted and weighed and lifted and disinfected and judged and finally either thumbs-upped or thumbs-downed every comic, toy, game, book and picture in the room. Stuffed animals, board games for ages 4-8, ring toss, baseball, the Hardy Boys and other such artificial, fat-free vanilla pap survived Mom’s invisible, inscrutable measuring stick, but not much else.