Haunted Legends (43 page)

The pickets were still chanting and thumping their sticks. He would have told them there was no longer any need, but however necessary his actions had been, suppose he was misunderstood? He sprinted behind another apartment block while fireworks in the sky celebrated his success. The top deck of a bus from the stop beyond the multiplex gave him a view of people streaming out of all the exits, and just a few signs sprouting from the crowd. A placard sank out of sight as he watched, and he thought it was acknowledging him.

He had to shut a smell of melted plastic out of the house. He felt hollow, but in the best way—emptied of the need to intervene. He drowsed in bed until he heard his mother come home, and then he fell asleep. He didn’t dream or waken, even when a church started ringing its bells. Perhaps they were for Chucky’s funeral, but there must have been a phone as well, because Robbie opened his eyes at last to see his mother in the doorway of his
room. “You had a long one,” she said. “My nan used to say you only sleep well if you’ve been good.”

Could he tell her how good he’d been? As he tested the mechanism of his lips she said “You missed it all.”

His lips parted, but she headed off whatever he might have said. “It’s a good job you weren’t there, though.”

“Why?”

“There was a fire at the cinema. The police think it was deliberate. They want to talk to us.”

Would they understand? She ought to hear before they did, and Robbie was about to tell his secret when she said “One of the staff was in the fire. Midge just called to say he died. We’re all going over to hers for a while. I’ve left your breakfast.”

So she hadn’t meant the police were after him. He should have seen how normal she wanted life to be. She looked sad for the projectionist, and perhaps he hadn’t deserved to be burned, but he’d had to be. All at once she looked sadder. “I forgot your juice again.”

“I can get some.”

“You’re a good boy really. Stay like that,” she said and hurried downstairs.

As soon as the bicycle trundled out of the house Robbie headed for the bathroom. He still had work to do. Perhaps he could be sad about it, if you needed to be sad about people who’d turned into dolls. He didn’t look sad in the mirror; he could see no expression at all—his ordinary face was the only mask he needed. He was contemplating it when his phone struck up its slogan.

There wouldn’t be peace yet, but there might be soon. “You should of been there last night,” Duncan told him.

“What happened?”

“My mam and yours nearly got in a fight with the cinema. And somebody started a fire and half of it’s burned down, and a feller was in it. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. I’ve got some stuff that’ll do your head in.”

Watching so much Chucky had done that to Duncan, Robbie thought. “Where?” he said.

“In the park. I found somewhere nobody’ll know we’re there. Are you coming now?”

“I’ve got to go to the shop first.”

“Being your mam’s good boy again, are you?”

“You’ll see.” Robbie knew Duncan was grinning, and imagined how they both would when they met. His grin wouldn’t be the same as Duncan’s; it was a mask, because he was the opposite of Chucky. “I won’t be long,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

Afterword

Chucky and his films have indeed become Liverpool legends of the darkest kind. The media ascribed the murder of James Bulger in 1991 by two Merseyside ten-year-olds to the influence of
Child’s Play 3,
although the film had been seen by neither of them and was never mentioned in evidence. (In fact the film that the murder resembles is the PG-rated
Home Alone,
in which the ten-year-old Macauley Culkin amuses the audience by submitting burglars to some of the violence James Bulger was to suffer three years later.) Subsequent Chucky films were never shown in Liverpool, and the newspaper reports quoted in my story are real. Footage of the abduction of James Bulger can be seen on YouTube accompanied by a pop song.

Joe R. Lansdale has been a freelance writer since 1973, and a full-time writer since 1981. He is the author of thirty novels and eighteen short story collections and has received The Edgar Award, seven Bram Stoker Awards, The British Fantasy Award, and Italy’s Grinzani Prize for Literature, among others.

“Bubba Hotep,” his award-nominated novella, was filmed by Don Cos-carelli and is now considered a cult classic, and his story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” was filmed for Showtime’s
Masters of Horror.

He has written for film, television, comics, and is the author of numerous essays and columns. His most recent work is the collection from the University of Texas Press,
Sanctified and Chicken Fried, The Portable Lansdale, The Best of Joe R. Lansdale,
and
Vanilla Ride,
his latest in the Hap Collins, Leonard Pine series. All of the series have recently been released in paperback from Vintage Books.

They had come from a Halloween party, having long shed the masks they’d worn. No one but Harold had been drinking, and he wasn’t driving, and he wasn’t so drunk he was blind. Just drunk enough he couldn’t sit up straight and was lying on the backseat, trying, for some unknown reason, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which he didn’t accurately recall. He was mixing in verses from the “Star-Spangled Banner” and the Boy Scout oath, which he vaguely remembered from his time in the organization before they drove him out for setting fires.

Even though William, who was driving, and Jim who was riding shotgun, were sober as Baptists claimed to be, they were fired up and happy and yelling and hooting, and Jim pulled down his pants and literally mooned a black bug of a car carrying a load of nuns.

The car wasn’t something that looked as if it had come off the lot. Didn’t have the look of any carmaker Jim could identify. It had a cobbled look. It reminded him of something in old movies, the ones with gangsters who were always squealing their tires around corners. Only it seemed bigger, with broader windows through which he could see the nuns, or at least glimpse them in their habits; it was a regular penguin convention inside that car.

Way it happened was, when they came up on the nuns, Jim said to William at the wheel, “Man, move over close, I’m gonna show them some butt.”

“They’re nuns, man.”

“That’s what makes it funny,” Jim said.

William eased the wheel to the right, and Harold in the back said, “Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon. Show them the Grand Canyon . . . Oh, say can you see . . .”

Jim got his pants down, swiveled on his knees in the seat, twisted so that his ass was against the glass, and just as they passed the nuns, William hit the electric window switch and slid the glass down. Jim’s ass jumped out at the night, like a vibrating moon.

“They lookin’?” Jim asked.

“Oh, yeah,” William said, “and they are not amused.”

Jim jerked his pants up, shifted in the seat, and turned for a look, and sure enough, they were not amused. Then a funny thing happened, one of the nuns shot him the finger, and then others followed. Jim said, “Man, those nuns are rowdy.”

And now he got a good look at them, because there was enough light from the headlights as they passed for him to see faces hard as wardens and ugly as death warmed over. The driver was especially homely, face like that could stop a clock and run it backwards or make shit crawl uphill.

“Did you see that, they shot me the finger?” Jim said.

“I did see it,” William said.

Harold had finally gotten the “Star-Spangled Banner” straight, and he kept singing it over and over.

“For Christ sake,” William said. “Shut up, Harold.”

“You know what,” Jim said, studying the rearview mirror, “I think they’re speeding up. They’re trying to catch us. Oh hell. What if they got the license plate? Maybe they already have. They call the law, my dad will have my mooning ass.”

“Well, if they haven’t got the plate,” William said, “they won’t. This baby can get on up and get on out.”

He put his foot on the gas. The car hummed as if it had just had an orgasm, and seemed to leap. Harold was flung off the backseat, onto the floorboard. “Hey, goddamnit,” he said.

“Put on your seat belt, jackass,” Jim said.

William’s car was eating up the road. It jumped over a hill and dove down the other side like a porpoise negotiating a wave, and Jim thought: Good-bye, penguins, and then he looked back. At the top of the hill were the
lights from the nun’s car, and the car was gaining speed and it moved in a jerky manner, as if it were stealing space between blinks of the eye.

“Damn,” William said. “They got some juice in that thing, and the driver has her foot down.”

“What kind of car is that?” Jim said.

“Black,” William said.

“Ha! Mr. Detroit.”

“Then you name it.”

Jim couldn’t. He turned to look back. The nun’s car had already caught up; the big automotive beast was cruising in tight as a coat of varnish, the headlights making the interior of William’s machine bright as a Vegas act.

“What the hell they got under the hood?” William said. “Hyperdrive?”

“These nuns,” Jim said, “they mean business.”

“I can’t believe it, they’re riding my bumper.”

“Slam on your brakes. That’ll show them.”

“Not this close,” William said. “Do that, what it’ll show them is the inside of our butts.”

“Do nuns do this?”

“These do.”

“Oh,” Jim said. “I get it. Halloween. They aren’t real nuns.”

“Then we give them hell,” Harold said, and just as the nuns were passing on the right, he crawled out of the floorboard and onto his seat and rolled the window down. The back window of the nun’s car went down and Jim turned to get a look, and the nun, well, she was ugly all right, but uglier than he had first imagined. She looked like something dead, and the nun’s outfit she wore was not actually black and white, but purple and white, or so it appeared in the light from high beams and moonlight. The nun’s lips pulled back from her teeth and the teeth were long and brown, as if tobacco-stained. One of her eyes looked like a spoiled meatball, and her nostrils flared like a pig’s.

Jim said, “That ain’t no mask.”

Harold leaned way out of the window and flailed his hands and said, “You are so goddamn ugly you have to creep up on your underwear.”

Harold kept on with this kind of thing, some of it almost making sense, and then one of the nuns in the back, one closest to the window, bent over in
the seat and came up and leaned out of the window, a two-by-four in her hands. Jim noted that her arms, where the nun outfit had fallen back to the elbows, were as thin as sticks and white as the underbelly of a fish and the elbows were knotty, and bent in the wrong direction.

“Get back in,” Jim said to Harold.

Harold waved his arms and made another crack, and then the nun swung the two-by-four, the oddness of her elbows causing it to arrive at a weird angle, and the board made a crack of its own, or rather Harold’s skull did, and he fell forward, the lower half of his body hanging from the window, bouncing against the door, his knuckles losing meat on the highway, his ass hanging inside, one foot on the floorboard, the other waggling in the air.

“The nun hit him,” Jim said. “With a board.”

“What?” William said.

“You deaf, she hit him.”

Jim snapped loose his seat belt and leaned over and grabbed Harold by the back of the shirt and yanked him inside. Harold’s head looked like it had been in a vice. There was blood everywhere. Jim said, “Oh, man, I think he’s dead.”

BLAM!

The noise made Jim jump. He slid back in his seat and looked toward the nuns. They were riding close enough to slam the two-by-four into William’s car; the driver was pressing that black monster toward them.

Another swing of the board and the side mirror shattered.

William tried to gun forward, but the nun’s car was even with him, pushing him to the left. They went across the highway and into a ditch and the car did an acrobatic twist and tumbled down an embankment and rolled into the woods tossing up mud and leaves and pine straw.