Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant (29 page)

Michael looked away and when his face returned to her, he was smiling pleasantly.

“Adults shouldn’t hurt children like that, no matter what they do wrong,” he said. “And you didn’t do anything wrong by using your imagination.” He pointed a translucent finger toward the arm where her teacher had grabbed her, and she could see a dark mark across her skin.

“Mom and Dad said not to let anyone hurt me, or I should tell them. But Mr. Beakman’s a teacher, he’s supposed to be my friend, too.”

The boy nodded his head, his jovial expression becoming sad. “Yes, Annie, but sometimes adults can be bad, even if they’re supposed to be our friends. Your teacher is a bad man, and he’s hurt other children, too.” He moved the same finger upward, and though his form was barely visible, Annie saw a dark blue mark circling the boy’s pale neck.

“Should I tell on him?” Annie asked, cautiously. Her parents have told her about strangers and other adults that might want to harm her, but a teacher?

“I know, it’s confusing, but telling on him didn’t work before. No one believes a child over an adult.”

“But what if he hurts me again?”

He smiled, and from below his feet slid out her picture of the white ghost with the autumn background.

Annie picked up the paper. “I did this wrong.”

“No, you did it exactly the way you wanted to do it, and because of that it’s beautiful. That’s why I’m here. You wished for a ghost to haunt your teacher this Halloween, and I was sent here to make your wish come true.”

Annie wasn’t sure about scaring an adult, even if he was a bad man. But if he was a bad man, he deserved to be scared. If he was hurting children, he deserved to be scared.

“That’s right, Annie. You need to stop him from hurting other children.”

“How do I do that?” Annie asked, a little uneasy.

A box of crayons slid forward from beneath the boy.

“Turn the paper around and complete the assignment exactly as your teacher asked. Make Mr. Beakman something scary.”

Annie finally understood! Mr. Beakman didn’t want her to make the paper into something scary, he wanted her to make
him
something scary.

She plucked a red crayon out of the box and made an outline of her teacher’s body. She drew the body like a box, like a normal person’s body, but then twisted the legs and arms into strange angles, like he was a giant spider, bent into a non-human form. She then drew one curly line from the body and to the left, ending it with a circle making his head and neck a balloon blowing in the wind. On the head-balloon she drew two x’s as eyes and a jagged line for a mouth. Mr. Beakman looked creepy, no, scary, and she knew she had done it right this time. She finished the picture by coloring the scenery behind the scary teacher with red crayon, making the adult man look even more menacing.

“How is this?” Annie asked, pleading for approval.

“It’s perfect, Annie. You did it exactly right.” Michael smiled at her, and it warmed her heart. “Now, I need you to take two of these warm jackets and push them up against your ears. Your teacher is about to come in, and he’s going to get in trouble for hurting you.”

“Is someone going to yell at him?” Annie asked, thinking that maybe the boy would alert the principal or her mother and told them what Mr. Beakman had done.

“Yes. There will be screaming.”

Annie did what she was told, because she always tried to be a good listener. After a long while, a gust of wind brushed across her body, so she looked up from the jackets she had been pushing against her ears.

The closet doors were open and every student stood gathered around the middle of the classroom, staring down at the floor with a confused expression on each of their faces. Annie pushed to her feet and patted her wrinkled and dusty dress down with the palm of her hands. She picked up her drawing and moved forward, pushing through the group of children until she made her way to the front.

On the floor lay Mr. Beakman. His arms and legs were twisted and broken and his head hanging to the side, held on only by one thick line of skin, and the color of red surrounded the body, just as she had created. 

Annie was shocked and confused at the sight, but then realized something wonderful as she compared what she was seeing to the picture in her hand.

She had finally completed the assignment!

Annie made Mr. Beakman something scary.

Though there was something incomplete about the scene, Annie thought, and she lifted the paper up so that she could look over both images side-by-side. What was wrong?

Oh! She discovered what was missing, but she wasn’t worried, it was a quick fix. On the paper she never colored in Mr. Beakman’s skin, so now his new form was completely white to match how she had drawn him.

If there was anything that her teacher had taught her, it was that ghosts weren’t always white, and he must be a ghost, because he was surely dead. She couldn’t just leave his skin blank as she had done with the ghost.

Annie moved toward the new form on the floor. She knelt and studied her teacher’s face. She needed to complete the assignment exactly how she was told to, however, she didn’t have a big enough pink or brown crayon to color in her teacher’s skin. She hadn’t colored the ghost, and Mr. Beakman got mad, so how mad would he get if she left him blank?

He would get so mad he would turn red again –

Red! Mr. Beakman was always turning red! Annie grabbed the color from of the background and began to fill in the colorless space.

THE DAY LLOYD CAMPBELL’S MAMA CAME TO TOWN

Scott Colbert

“I’ll take a steaming shit in your mother’s cuntsack!”

Trickles of foam bubbled from the corners of his girlish mouth, making the greasy goatee shine even more. Alby stamped his hairy, clubbed-looking feet for emphasis, as his tiny fists flitted through the air as if he were swatting flies (though in reality it was what passed for punches). He’d just read the email his now-ex-boyfriend had sent breaking up with him.

“Alby,

It’s not me, it’s you. Your greasy hair, lack of hygiene, temper tantrums aside, it’s your lack of respect for my mother that forces my hand. The names you called her - I can’t bear to think of them - and threatening to piss on her fresh grave, it was the last straw. It was fun for awhile, but no one insults a son’s love for their mother and gets away with it.

Lloyd”

Alby stepped back from his nicotine-stained laptop, with the non-working track pad. He tripped on an empty energy drink can and went careening on his ass. As he fell back, he hit his head on the edge of a particle board book case, sending a dozen of his self-published books (the only ones that had ever been purchased), crashing down on him.

His vision blurred while blood began flowing from the gash in his head, matting the clumped hair even further. His consciousness waxed and waned to the incessant bleat of a smoke alarm until Alby passed out.

“… Albert, can you hear me? Albert?” It was a sweet voice in spite of a noticeable Brooklyn accent. He could smell the sachet that contained a flowery potpourri with an underlying hint of something … darker. When he was able to focus a bit, Alby opened his eyes and confusion washed over him.

“Where am I?” he asked.

The woman smiled at him. “Why, Lake Fossil Diner of course. It’s your favorite place.”

“I’ve never been here! And who the fuck are you? Some fandom wank trying to scare me? It ain’t gonna work! I scared a preacher’s wife once!” Alby said.

In spite of his bravado, the quivering tone in his high pitched, whiny voice gave his pants-shitting fear away. He looked around, his too-small mouth opening and closing like a suffocating fish. Human heads were mounted on the wall, all in various states of decomposition. Underneath were tarnished brass nameplates; the closest to him that he could read was A.J. Poe.

“But this is the same diner you write about in all of your stories, isn’t it?” The old woman continued gazing at Alby’s unkempt appearance. The concert t-shirt of some obscure metal band was stained with beer, and ketchup. A thin crust of grime encircled his neck, and she couldn’t help but notice the copious amounts of dirt beneath his fingernails.

“No it’s not! I don’t have the heads of my characters mounted on the walls!”

“But they aren’t your characters, sweetie.” She took a sip of her tea that she’d been letting cool. All the while her smile didn’t leave her face. For others, her grin would have been reassuring. For Alby it offered nothing but discomfort and fuel for his anger. “You never created a character; they are all based on real people.” She looked down, swallowed hard and brushed away a tear with one arthritic finger. “Sadly, they all committed suicide rather than be associated with you.”

“Stupid horse fuckers!”

“Such language!”

“Fuck you, lady! I don’t even know you!” He tried to pound the table with a pudgy fist, yet it contained all the force of a fly fart.

She held her hand out, and introduced herself. “I’m Lloyd Campbell’s Mama.”

Alby shrank back in the booth, getting as far away from the hand as possible. “You’re dead!”

Mama Campbell shrugged. “You say tomato, I say tomahto. Dead is a relative term. I mean what is death, really? Do you know Alby? You write about it, but you don’t comprehend it.”

Alby tried to speak, but his throat began to constrict, choking off anything he could possibly say to defend himself. Mama Campbell meanwhile, reached into her blouse and pulled out the sachet. It was a flowery leather pouch on a necklace of fine gold. With a bit of effort she opened the pouch, and Alby’s own voice poured out of it.

“I’ll take a steaming shit in your mother’s cuntsack!”

Mama Campbell gave Alby a look of disappointment, and tsked-tsked at him. “Is that what you want? Is that really what you desire? To shit in my cuntsack?” Her jovial blue eyes dimmed while veins began to pop from her forehead. Slowly, and with the effort only a geriatric with arthritic hips can muster, Mama slid out of the booth, and stood by Alby’s side, blocking him in.

She slowly began to push down her slacks, her eyes now a black void which seemed to swirl ever so slightly. The throbbing veins began moving, snakelike across her forehead and temple. Tendrils of smoke issued from her nostrils, and when she opened her mouth to speak, a long forked tongue whipped out and smacked Alby between the legs.

Alby screamed and promptly wet himself. Mama Campbell stepped out of her slacks, and started to pull down her peach colored panties. “No! Stop!” he pleaded.

“Not until you…SHIT IN MY CUNTSACK!” The voice was not that of the old lady, but an old God. It sounded of sawing wood and breaking rock.

Those twisting veins began to erupt from her face, revealing themselves as tentacles. They whipped themselves around her head, Medusa-like as they reached out and gripped Alby by the ankles. The heads on the wall became a Greek chorus, chanting “cunt-sack! cunt-sack!” in unison.

With a deftness and agility that was more shocking than her transformation, Mama Campbell leaped up on the table, legs spread and facing Alby. One of the tentacles that had grabbed his ankles now slithered up his pants and invaded his rectum, forcing him up until his face was level with her crotch.

Her vagina opened, revealing a maw of glistening teeth. Row upon row of sharp, porcelain daggers greeted Alby. The tentacles pushed him forward into the fleshy morass.

Alby’s scream was cut short as the teeth ripped at his face and neck. It continued eating and gnawing at his flaccid body, until there was nothing left. Not even his dirty clothes.

Six weeks later, Alby’s Uncle Ronny ventured into the basement and found it empty.

Alby’s body was never found, and he was never missed.