Evil Jester Digest, Vol.1 (3 page)

“You know, I’m feeling a little woozy. I think it’s the flu. Do you mind going in there and checking things out? We usually only allow fifteen minute visits and it’s been nearly that long.”

“Sure thing.” He shut off his light and folded up his newspaper.

Sally stayed on the bus for safety and watched for Ernesto to come out screaming. But he didn’t emerge. Her body shook all over. This had to work. It was time for Connie to go whether she liked it or not.

She felt a small warm hand on her shoulder and jumped.

Connie was sitting behind her on the bus. The light from the streetlamp shone around her face: perfect teeth, rosy lips, and piercing haunting eyes.

“You tried to kill me, Mama. That wasn’t very nice.”

“But, you’re in
there
.”

“No, the nurse is in there.”

“I saw her drive away. I talked to her.” Sally tried to get up, but Connie’s death grip pinned her shoulder down.

“That wasn’t real. I made you see that. This is real.” She stopped smiling.

“But you haven’t walked in three years. Your legs couldn’t hold you—”

Connie moved from behind the seat with unnatural fluidity. “I floated.”

Sally looked down and saw Connie hovering a few inches off the ground, her dead bare feet pointed down.

Sally screamed and then felt something explode in her chest. Ripping from the inside out. She looked down but there was no blood.

Then she felt different. Cold. Hungry. More hungry and thirsty than she’d ever been in her life. She could feel her body lying prone on the cold floor of the bus but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t open her eyes.
Help! Help!
But no sound came out.

She heard the beeps of someone dialing a phone. Then she heard her voice scream. But it didn’t come from her. It came from over there, where she had been standing. “My baby! Oh my God, my baby! Father Morrissey, there’s been a terrible accident!” The voice was hysterical, or pretended to be.

“I decided to come home after all because I missed Connie so much. I brought her into bed with me because I wanted her to sleep on a real bed for a change. The nurse was still here and said she’d just spend the night in Connie’s bed.”

Sally lay still. No. This couldn’t be.

“And then we heard the bus pull up. They broke into the house and all the homeless people were jumping all over the nurse, eating her. I think they killed her and the bus driver, too. Thank God, my little girl is okay. It’s another miracle. Call the press and an ambulance and come right over. I snuck Connie out the back and we’re safe in the bus now. We’ll just wait here.”

Sally lay on the floor in Connie’s undead body.

Her daughter had known her plan all along. Had played her. Now Sally would be in the bed unconscious forever, begging for a soul, just one, to keep her alive, to feed her.

“And don’t you worry, Mama, I’ll take good care of the new baby. I might just have to pawn you off on the church or put you in a home. Or a laboratory. Isn’t that what you threatened?” Connie laughed in Sally’s voice.

Help! Help!
she cried again, but her mouth didn’t move. Nothing moved.
I’m cold. Please cover me with something. I’m so cold. Please get me someone, Connie. Please, just one person. Please.

She knew it was useless.

Connie would leave her and take over her life. Sally would very, very slowly starve to death. She couldn’t kill others to survive. Couldn’t—

Mr. Wilkin was sleeping in his bed across the street. Sally could see him as she hovered above her daughter’s body and her own, now inhabited by Connie. She could see through the roofs and right to the warm bodies of all the humans in the neighborhood. So many people out there. All bright points of light with beating hearts and souls filled with life.

If it meant survival, wouldn’t one be all right?

Just one.

Mr. Wilkins was within reach.

Sally dove into his chest and into the light.

*****

Tracy L. Carbone
lives in Massachusetts with her daughter and a house full of pets. She writes in her spare time, mostly late at night or on the train as she commutes to her day job. She is Co-Director of the New England Horror Writers and edited their first anthology
Epitaphs
, which was nominated for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award. Her YA novel,
The Soul Collector
, was released November 2011. Her short stories have appeared in several magazines and anthologies in the  US and Canada. Please visit her website for more details about her writing, or contact the author at www.tracylcarbone.com.

SHARPE IS EXTRAORDINARY

David Dunwoody

Sharpe wakes up
at nine in the morning. He wakes up again at eleven-thirty, then at quarter of one. The last couple hours ain’t worth shit for sleep, but the dreams are decent and they stay with him. He gets up at three-fifteen.

Going straight from the hide-a-bed to the computer always puts a snarl in his spine but he does it anyway. Sits naked in the chair and plays with his balls for a minute while the PC boots up. His balls stick to the faux-leather seat and make a dry peeling noise when he gathers them in his palm. His prick is a sorry-looking character first thing in the afternoon. It slumps dramatically over those balls like Scarlett at Tara’s threshold and something that isn’t quite piss beads in its stupid empty eye socket. He flicks the head with his finger and reaches for the mouse. It’s dark in the room still, besides the monitor, the window covered by ten-pound vampire curtains.

His day doesn’t start until after emails are done. Once emails are done he hobbles to the shower.

He dries himself off in the stall with a towel that just seems to move the water around on his pulp. Dropping it on the floor in lieu of a bath mat, he sits on the toilet with his wet ass. Pushes until he sees fractals.

He decides to go on an adventure today. He will wear his red-orange Hawaiian shirt and gray sweats and a ball cap.

It’s boiling outside. His flip-flops slap the concrete and already he can feel sweat brimming along his hairline and around his balls. He twirls his key on his index finger and descends the steps. In the parking lot of the Hollywood Inn, which sits atop a hill littered with convenience stores, trailer parks, and disused cemeteries, Sharpe drinks deep of the world. He tastes adventure and what could be tacos but is probably B.O., and he squeegees sweat from his moustache with his fingers. The ’stache is bone-white like the rest of him. He looks like a ghost, even in that blaring pineapple-print shirt, and he supposes he likes it that way. His life is his alone to witness. He will not write home to Mama and will not tweet pics to Goatboy667. He has learned to validate his own existence and thereby attained nirvana. Today he is going to carve an asshole into the back of someone’s head and fuck their brain.

Starting down the sidewalk, Sharpe shuffles through his mental jukebox and puts on Bowie’s “Heroes.”

*****

The wash of
Freon through the 7-Eleven’s magic doors is like a high-five from the Holy Ghost. Sharpe stands in the doorway for a moment, the sun still baking his back as he pulls the cap from his damp white head and sighs.

“Life is made of moments,” he tells the slack-faced cashier. Her head bobs in a way that indicates understanding.

“Get that Slurpee machine fixed?” He digs into his back pocket and counts the bills he finds. “The blue one. Blue raspberry. Ooooh-maa.”

She’s not even listening. Her head just bobs like that, like her neck’s made of gelatin. He fixes his pink-eyed gaze on her and clears his throat
. “Blue raspberry.”

Her thousand-yard stare passes through him to worlds beyond. He folds the cash and places it back in his pocket.

“I hate regular raspberry,” he says, nails scritch-scritching through white stubble, “but that blue raspberry is something else. Is it raspberry, even? I don’t suppose you’d know, miss?”

She doesn’t register the question. Heather, her nametag says. He wonders if she even knows that. Combat shock, he thinks to himself. Well, he sees his flavor’s fixed anyway. He gets himself a jumbo size. That first long pull on the straw is always the best.

*****

Sharpe’s been around
a long time, not entirely by choice. Act of God here and there. He’s worn a few different hats in that stretch. Used to fancy himself a cowboy, but there ain’t outlaws in big black dusters and serpent-skin boots anymore. Outlaws nowadays drive SUVs to Jimmy Buffet concerts and smoke bad weed. He doesn’t have an MBA to take the place of his ol’ ten-gallon hat so he just kills people. There’s a simple honesty in it that never goes out of style.

God is waiting in the store parking lot; just standing, to most, loitering maybe, but for Sharpe he’s always waiting. The old man wiggles a couple of fingers at the sweating cup in Sharpe’s hand and asks the flavor.

“Don’t know why you bother asking,” Sharpe replies. “You can’t tell the color, let alone the taste.”

“I suppose I needed to be reminded,” is the response, a salvo of brittle contempt that moves at the speed of drying paint. God has a sarcastic butler’s accent and that only grates more on Sharpe’s nerves. Of all the places to hang out and all the people to gripe on with his Eeyore shit, why does God have to trouble Sharpe while he’s tucking into his Slurpee?

Sometimes, though, Sharpe thinks maybe the old man just likes to watch him do his killin’ thang.

Sharpe swishes the cup’s already-melting contents. “Blue kind.”

“What’s it taste like?”

“Heaven. No offense.”

None taken. Sharpe supposes God looks at Heaven the same way a McDonald’s manager looks at the playland. A place where smelly shoeless runts crap in the ball pit. Sharpe takes an icy gulp. A cold little knot gathers between his eyes. That’s a new pain.

“I see you’ve got yourself a cock and some balls,” Heavenly Father observes. Sharpe glances down, but there’s nothing visible in the drapery of his sweatpants.

“You been watching me at home? I don’t like that.”

“No, no,” God says, “I just know.”

They head down the sidewalk, and God adds, “I also know you’ve been spending more and more time cooped up in that motel room, though no, I don’t look in.”

“I got internet now.”

“Mmm. A new computer and genitals. Are you starting a small business?”

“I ain’t jackin’ off if that’s what you’re asking. Haven’t gotten onto that yet. Don’t see much need for it, frankly. I get mine.”

“I don’t know if I care for these changes, Emil.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Of course. You’re a true artist and a maven at that. You don’t answer to any critic. But,” and God stops and turns to face Sharpe, “now you’re giving me reason to doubt that.”

“How so?”

Sharpe is mid-gulp when God reaches out and taps his scrotum through his sweats. Sharpe hacks up a glob of blue ice.
“The hell!”

“Adam begged for them,” the old man says. “At first he busied himself making men out of clay—and he did, ugly little things, and never allowed one to draw its first breath before crushing it beneath his fist—and then he begged me for
that
and
those
.” God points at Sharpe’s crotch like it’s a condemned lot. “Then he wanted woman.”

Sharpe lowers his eyes and takes another drink. He didn’t ask for the things, they just appeared. Just like the coarse white hairs on his legs and back and like the throbbing ache in his head—his first brain freeze, he figures. Digs a knuckle into his brow and stares at the sun.

“My pulp is turning to flesh. I can feel blood wormin’ through it, carving veins. I can feel hair sprouting behind these balls and so what? So I’ll be a little bit more like the rest of ’em. A little grounded.”

“Grounded.” God spits on the sidewalk. “Buried is the word, Emil.”

*****

They continue to
the Laundromat at the bottom of the hill. It’s cool inside, not like the 7-Eleven but refreshing nonetheless. The dryers rattle and hum like the Slurpee machines. Sharpe sits on a little plastic chair and kicks off his sandals, cooling his alabaster soles on the tile.

God sits beside him and surveys the joint. There’s a girl in the back unloading a washer and that’s it. Sharpe looks her over. She’s got dark brown hair cropped at the neck, thin but dark eyeliner and an aquamarine top about Hello Kitty. Kitty looks like a hydrocephalic over those fake tits. Doesn’t stir Sharpe in the pants any, but she’s nice.

“Pretty girl,” God says.

Sharpe puts the straw in his mouth and scrapes the tip of his tongue back and forth over it. He says, “Why don’t you do her?”

“It isn’t about killing, or watching you kill,” the old man replies. He coughs and hitches up his dungarees to scratch his calf. “I haven’t anything to learn about
that
. I could teach you a thing or two.”

Sharpe doesn’t say anything in reply. God nudges him. “What?”

The girl is in full view now, putting her stuff into a dryer. She’s wearing gray jogging shorts and flip-flops. Laundry day, right. And she doesn’t even know the two of them are there watching her. Her head’s bobbing a little, not in a blank-eyed fugue but in time to some song in her head. In her head. Sharpe wonders what it would feel like, boring into her brain with a screwdriver and watching the music run out. He shifts in the chair.

“You like her,” says God.

“She’ll do.”

Sharpe sets his drink between his legs. He’s getting hard, actually getting hard, and he feels his face go from chalk-white to eggshell in a semblance of embarrassment. This day of all days the old man has to show up with his Catholic guilt. Some G-damn adventure. And Sharpe knows there’s no getting rid of New Best Friend until he’s been allowed to scratch his secret itch.

“I know you want to watch,” Sharpe says. “No sense fibbing. It’s the kill. You’ve never dropped in to watch me do the dishes.”