American Nightmare Read online

  AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

  2014

  EDITED BY GEORGE COTRONIS

  Copyright 2014 by George Cotronis

  Cover art by George Cotronis

  Assistant editor: Gordon White

  ISBN: 978-91-979725-0-5

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors and are used here with their permission.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

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  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  GRANDMA ELSPETH’S CULINARY ENCHIRIDION FOR DOMESTIC HARMONY | RACHEL ANDIG

  CHIAROSCURO | DINO PARENTI

  BOW CREEK | RAYMOND LITTLE

  GLOW | ADREAN MESSMER

  LUCY’S LIPS | MADELEINE SWANN

  PEAR PEOPLE FROM PLANET 13 | M.P. JOHNSON

  GHOST GIRL, ZOMBIE BOY AND THE COUNT | CHRIS THORNDYCROFT

  THE TWO MONSTERS OF LEVITTOWN | T. FOX DUNHAM

  DOUBLE FEATURE | NEAL F. LITHERLAND

  IN THE BLOOD | MARK W. COULTER

  THE BLACK PHARAOH OF HOLLYWOOD | IAN WELKE

  THE KING | W.P. JOHNSON

  A NIGHT TO REMEMBER | TIM MARQUITZ

  ALL THE BEAUTIFUL MARILYNS | MAX BOOTH III

  GRANDMA ELSPETH’S CULINARY ENCHIRIDION FOR DOMESTIC HARMONY

  RACHEL ANDIG

  I will always remember 1956 as a watershed year in my life. It started out with golden-hued hours of baseball practice, biking along the Mississippi, and painting my best friend’s tree house. But, as with all illumination, the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows cast beneath and between, at the edges of things.

  I was in the living room sorting baseball cards, woolen nubs of carpet boring into my bare legs. I was looking at my favorite, the 1952 Mickey Mantle that became so iconic later, when father asked, “Helen, what’s for dinner?”

  Mother waited a single beat to finish the stitch she was putting into an old flour sack, then laid the project across her knees. “I don’t know, Howard. What would you like?”

  “Scotch and soda to start,” he replied.

  I looked up at our garish cuckoo clock. The time was 2:38.

  Mother quietly gave him the it’s a bit early for that, dear look but he didn’t see her. She wanted to finish her towels for the charity auction, but now her afternoon had been claimed and I could see the disappointment in her eyes.

  The rhythm of these events got more familiar by the day. It was like hearing the opening measure of a popular song playing softly into your subconscious. Pretty soon you were humming along before you even registered that it was on the radio.

  It would go something like this: an interlude of silence when the bus dropped me off after summer school. The melodic clink as mother poured us twin glasses of lemonade, the pigeon-like coo of my brother Timmy in his playpen. Suddenly the percussive chaos of my father coming home, slamming the door shut, throwing his briefcase on the table. Then an interlude of silence, an étude of father’s reactions to the headlining news, the staccato of back-and-forth trivialities, and the crescendo as he exploded. Sometimes the orchestra took a break, but more often than not it would end in a grand finale; a broken lamp or the sound of father’s fist colliding with the wall or sometimes with my mother’s face. On these occasions I would take my brother and go play outside in the sandbox where we could be pirates or cowboys or superheroes. Later I would find my mother sobbing silently into her apron, shuddering, her back looking child-like in the pantry doorway. I would bring her ice from the ice box for her blackened eye or just give her a hug. But we never talked about it. She’d soon be in the kitchen preparing a meatloaf or ambrosia salad and things would go back to “normal”.

  During these years I thought of my father as completely faceless. In my mind’s eye he is a strange creature with the body of a man and the head of an opened newspaper; an odd mythological figure masked in The Sun Times and bellowing like an elephant.

  Mother set the flour sack on the sofa, uncrossed her ankles, and went to the wet bar behind my father’s armchair to pour his drink. Her body was eclipsed by the paper and all I saw was her severed head, hair curled perfectly, cleaved by a corner of a black and white headline.

  He grabbed the tumbler from her hand before it was completely extended and drank it faster than I drank my bottle of Coca-Cola after Little League.

  “Another!” he hollered. “With ice this time. Scotch’s warm as piss!” He chucked the tumbler at her. She spun, fast like a cat, and caught it. She must have grabbed it at a bad angle, or perhaps all her tension was coiled up in her fingers, because the moment she grabbed the glass it splintered in her hand. There was a small sound like a light bulb bursting and the tumbler fell to the floor.

  Mother stared at the jagged half-moon buried in her palm. Blood welled up around it. She was staring intently like she did when reading a particularly absorbing passage in the poetry book she kept beneath the mattress.

  “What, are you writing a book? Clean that up, you stupid cow!”

  Shaken from her reverie, Mother plucked the crescent of glass from her palm. I looked away. She rinsed it in the kitchen sink and wrapped it with a piece of gauze. Mother smoothed her dress, sat primly back down on the sofa, and resumed her stitching. The act produced a wince that only I noticed.

  Father snapped, “I asked you what’s for dinner. Didn’t the Good Lord in all his wisdom give you ears?” Father was about as big on bringing The Good Lord into things as he was on slamming stuff.

  “I asked you what you’d like, Harold.” There was an uncharacteristic chill in her voice like frost creeping up the edges of a windowpane. Father pulled the paper taught, momentarily erasing the crease, but his face never appeared. I started to feel a knot forming in my stomach. This was also part of the symphony.

  “Seafood,” Father barked, “I don’t care what. Cod, shrimp, the crabs your sister’s got in her cooch.” Sometimes Father liked to bring Aunt Martha into things when The Good Lord did not serve as an appropriate example.

  Whether mother was more prickled by the dig on her sister or simply fretting over how to finish the towels for the charity sale with an injured hand, I couldn’t say. A sigh of resignation passed her lips as she forced another stitch through the fabric.

  “I said I’m in the mood for seafood. I. Don’t. Care. What.” He was talking to her the way he talked to me when I fouled a ball. Like I was slow.

  “I don’t think we have any seafood, Harold,” she responded in her most diplomatic tone, usually reserved for special occasions when she needed dress allowance or permission to extend my bedtime so we could finish listening to The Mysterious Traveler on the radio together.

  “I don’t give a Good Goddamn!” Father shouted, lowering the Times enough to display the vein popping angrily from his beet-red forehead.

  A shadow fell across Mother’s face. It was strange to see her, a tiny blond thing with perfect ringlets and a small dimple like a comma on her cheek, looking so entirely grim. I imagined it was the way the surface of a calm ocean appeared just before something huge and sinister burst through it from its depths.

  I waited for all hell to break loose. We’d done the grocery shopping together that morning (a nickel every time I carried a bag inside) and therefore I was privy to the knowledge that we had no seafood. The fish had not been delivered—a fact that my father would undoubtedly blame on the Jewish grocer—and so to avoid a tirade of bigotry, Mother didn’t tell him. I was shocked when she said:

  “Very well.”

&n
bsp; I looked up for clarification but her darkened gaze was directed at the cover of the Times.

  “Very well,” she repeated. I did not like the sound of her tone. “I’ll try one of Grandma Elspeth’s recipes.” And in one graceful motion she was off the couch and disappearing into the kitchen.

  Now, Grandma Elspeth was not my grandmother. Nor was she my mother’s grandmother as far as I knew. Just an obscure, long-dead relative who couldn’t cook worth a damn, in my opinion. In the brief time I’d spent on this earth I had only sampled something concocted from this archaic book of culinary delights once or twice and all of them had made me profoundly ill. It was Grandma Elspeth’s aspic beet tower that caused me to vomit gelatinous purple splatters on the sidewalk till I fainted from fear, heartily believing that I was expelling my own organs. I heard mother refer to the cook book occasionally, yet never set eyes on the thing itself.

  I watched Mother drag the footstool to the cupboard where her recipe books were kept. All of them looked cheery: mustard yellow, candy pink, and mint green bindings. But the one she withdrew came from top shelf way in back. It was a squat, asymmetrical volume, stovepipe black, with a brass latch like a diary or my Aunt’s coffee table book of Apocryphal paintings.

  She took it over to the counter and opened it with an audible click. Then a funny thing happened: the book coughed. It was a weird feral sound that expelled dust from between the pages. Slowly, I army-crawled closer to the door, the better to watch my mother. She seemed to know right where the recipe was, even though the book could not have been less than 300 pages. Her delicate finger underlined words as she read, a trait very particular to my mother. She must have scanned at least six pages this way before withdrawing her finger. Then she started talking to herself, but I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying.

  I watched her go to the fridge, remove an egg, and walk it back over to the sink. She took a pin and pricked one end the way she would if she was going to hard boil it. She didn’t fill a pot with water, though. Instead, she whispered something into the hole then rotated the egg and repeated this little ritual on the other side. She picked up a length of chalk and drew something on the shell, white on white, then cracked it on the edge of the counter. As she broke it the breath caught in my lungs. Black albumen dripped out in oily clots. It barely registered that she was pouring it not into a mixing bowl, but directly into the kitchen sink.

  The moment felt suspended. Sunlight made dull shimmers in the Formica and the black-and-white linoleum tiles sparkled. Mother had her back to me now, facing the sink and rubbing her bandaged hand. She was not hunched or trembling.

  I heard a wet squelching. I looked first to my father, who was obviously caught up in the business section. I hurried into the kitchen and Mother said, “Shut the door, please, darling.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Take a seat.” She was completely composed.

  I didn’t sit. I was much too interested in seeing what was happening down in the drain.

  Again, a wet thwap. And then I saw it.

  Crawling up the inside of the sink, glistening in the sunlight from the ruffle-curtained window above, was a thick black tentacle. I don’t mean black the way coal is black or a piano key is black. This was the sort of shiny black only found on a patent leather shoe or a chunk of onyx. It quivered with humming vibrations as it groped its way up the porcelain. Flecks of my mother’s blood were visible in the sink and the tentacle smeared them like finger paint, growing inch by inch, pulsating, reaching toward the counter.

  I blinked, trying to clear the image from my eyes. It was like something out of one of my EC Comics. Discs like black licorice buttons quavered on its stalk. I forced myself to look away, to look at my mother’s face so we could share this horror together, but she was staring at it impassively. Her fingers weren’t impassive, though. I saw them fan out over the handle of the butcher knife where it rested in its wooden block.

  The tentacle seemed to sense this, for it gave pause and with a sound like a dolphin giving birth in a vat of aspic, it launched a length of nearly five feet out of the drain straight toward my mother’s face.

  The butcher knife was already making a silver arc in the air, pinning the tentacle to the counter before hacking through its corded muscular bulk with a sickening ka-chuck. Thick treacle-brown fluid spurted from the bifurcated arm, spraying across the counter and my mother’s apron. Wet, ripping noises came from the sink as bony hooks split through each of the licorice-button suction cups. They looked like talons, or maybe teeth, and screeed inside the sink as they scraped at the porcelain.

  Mother was there again, brushing a lock of errant hair from her eyes, resuming a rhythmic chopping motion. The tentacle, oil-slick and slippery-evasive writhed and pulsed fountains of foul juice.

  She stabbed it repeatedly. Only once did a thorny protrusion catch her, encircling her small wrist and drawing a thin line dotted with blood. It was nothing compared to the cut in her palm, and this fresh wound only served to feed her rage.

  “You bastard!” Mother spat. I’d never heard her swear before and for some reason, in that telepathic language we sometimes develop with loved ones, I sensed that she was talking to my father as much as renouncing whatever evil had burst forth from the sink.

  “Quick!” she said to me, wielding the knife in one hand and a rolling pin in the other, “Read from the book!”

  I grabbed Grandma Elspeth’s formidable tome and immediately felt something like low current running through my hands. I almost dropped it but Mother squeaked with alarm and I began to stumble through the text as best I could.

  To this day I cannot remember one blessed word written on those pages. It was no recipe, though. At least not in the way one would think.

  The words were strange and jumbled like how my toddler brother sounded when he was asking for his blanket. There were strange symbols hashing the margins and the words were written in skinny, serpentine letters.

  I read without ceasing, stringing one nonsense syllable against the next and the next like a necklace of talismans. The words, though they had no meaning, began to take shape. I can’t explain it any better than that. Only that when I said them it was like spitting something tangible into the air, and the tentacle would recoil as if from a physical blow. When the final vowel echoed across our kitchen, from the chrome toaster to the daffodil yellow wallpaper, the tentacle withdrew hastily into the drain with a sound like ten thousand spaghetti noodles being sucked out of a hole in the earth’s mantle.

  And there mother stood, a vision in blood and squid ink, her apron looking like the most gruesome Rorschach card in the history of abstract psychology.

  “You can’t make a cake without Kraken eggs!” Mother exclaimed with an uncharacteristic marriage of maniacal glee and bad pun, shedding her prim housewife visage and giving ground to something as primal as the Amazon women in my adventure comics. She plunged the carving knife into the severed bit of tentacle. It flopped, subdued, and continued to leak foul-smelling ink upon the counter.

  She passed me a carrot peeler and dabbed her moist temples with the dish towel, finding composure again, “Keep reading, dearest. I honestly don’t know how many times I have to tell you a thing before you obey.”

  I looked back down at the cookbook and saw it was not nonsense at all. The very last sentence said peel and slice into fine coins.

  Mother sighed, gripping the butcher knife. Her nails were lacquered red and I saw a quivering chunk of squid jelly suspended from the end of her index finger. It fell to the counter with a splat.

  We continued cooking together in awkward silence. The recipe seemed to be for pastry puffs with escargot. Since the tentacle was pretty much just one gigantic snail, we improvised. We sprinkled it with herbs and wrapped it in dough, all the time Mother holding it down with a fork to keep it from moving.

  Once, it hopped across the baking sheet but Mother placed it in the oven all the same and when I whispered, “Is it—?” she put one
neatly manicured finger to her lips to shush me. By the end we had a golden-brown dumpling, brushed with egg white, amputated demon squid arm tucked inside.

  I swear I saw it move when she pulled it from the oven, and as I arranged the bed of carrot coins and potato wedges, it twitched again. She gave me a grave nod and then completed the afternoon of surprises by presenting me with a silver dollar from her apron pocket. It was clean and shiny, having missed the culinary apocalypse.

  “Why don’t you take your bike down to the park and buy yourself a hot dog and some ice cream? I’m going to put dinner on for your father.”

  A knowing look passed between us and then she kissed me gently on the forehead and I did as she said.

  ~ ~ ~

  I bought the hot dog but wasn’t very hungry so I sat on the bleachers and watched some kids play catch with their dads while I fed bits of bun and frank to the pigeons. I remember there was a nice sunset which outlined everything in gold and as I walked home I had the prevalent and inexplicable sense that everything was going to be okay.

  When I got in, nearly two hours later, my mother did not reprimand me.

  “Funny thing,” she said. She had taken a shower and had curlers in her hair, “Your father up and left for a pack of Pall Malls and hasn’t come home yet.” She turned with a swish of her pink fluffy bathrobe and walked to the bedroom to check on Timmy.

  “I’m taking you out of summer school,” she said over her shoulder, “We’re going to visit your Aunt Martha in Milwaukee next week.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Turns out my father never did come back. Mother and I never spoke of it again, but sometimes I have nightmares. In them my father is wearing his Sunday suit and has a newspaper for a head. He is sitting at the table, reaching absentmindedly to stab a fork into the twitching butter-flaked skin of the pastry. In the dream I try to warn him— I don’t know why—but when he drops the paper, mouth opening wide in a silent scream, I can see the onyx tip of a tentacle tapping blindly at the back of his throat, darting across the threshold of his tongue towards my face and in that moment I wake up screaming.