The Dead Box And Other Stories To Scare You Shitless

SECRETS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW

April 2 1939

In this journal, which is entirely private to myself alone, I will admit – since Martha's passing I have had dark thoughts – sometimes of taking my own life. I listen to the wind whistle around the eaves, banging the shutters against the window-frames, and my thoughts have sometimes turned to a length of rope with a noose fashioned in one end ...

I prayed each night that God give me some surcease from sorrow. At first I was not answered. But now I have been. Like the patriarchs of old I have been granted a vision from on high. God be praised and His will be done.

I will begin work on what He has shown to me tonight.

I will work at night, when Thomas and the boy are sleeping. God will give me the strength I need. I know it. I believe I will be done before Joseph returns from visiting Martha's sister in the city. That would be best, then Joseph would never even need to grieve his mother, as Jacob and I have.

Martha will be with us again soon, God be praised.

D.A. MADIGAN

the

dead

box

a

nd other stories to scare you shitless

A Bentley Book

copyright 2020 D.A. Madigan

all rights reserved

All characters are fictitious. This is an original work and all original characters, settings, and proper nouns are copyright 2020 D.A. Madigan. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments to Brian M. Sammons and Nathon Alan Balka, editors who have purchased my work at pro rates, and to all the writers who have ever shared a Table of Contents with me

This anthology is dedicated to Scott Shepherd, who read my story Clowns and said How am I supposed to SLEEP after reading that, which is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about something I've written

T

ABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Adventure Into Fear 1

There Are 600,000 Stories In The Naked City

And Most Of Them Are Dead 13

Without Objection 82

Clowns 107

House Cat 151

The People On The Bus 158

The Dead Box 189

Grease Trap 215

A Place of Screams 239

Copycat 250

Getting You 272

Pop Up 297

Here In Status Symbol Land 317

When The Devil Drives 339

The Creepies 354

In The Service of the Queen 390

Timmy, Down The Well 404

The Hole In The Ground Gang 418

Bang Bang Bang 453

Afterword 497

ADVENTURE INTO FEAR

an introduction by D.A. Madigan

So here are some more stories, if you want them.

That's how Stephen King opened his SKELETON CREW introduction, and while I'm certainly no Stephen King, still, I like to think I've learned a lot from the man, so...

Here are some more stories, if you want them.

Hell, they're here whether you want them or not. And barring the corona (or something else) getting me like some terrible Universal Studios monster, there will almost certainly be more coming at some point in the future. Good, bad, or indifferent, the stories just seem to keep flowing out of me.

Anyway.

Before Marvel Comics called itself Marvel Comics, it was Atlas Comics, and it published fairly shitty monster stories. This was bottom of the barrel stuff without a shred of originality to it, just Stanley Lieber (later, Stan Lee) and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and a few others hacking the crap out for pennies a page to keep the lights turned on.

Then DC brought back superheroes from the oblivion they'd been consigned to post WWII, when gory crime comics and gorier horror comics supplanted nearly all of them, and then the Comics Code wiped out both of those, leaving DC with their pallidly inoffensive Superman, Batman, Martian Manhunter, and Roy Raymond, TV Detective features, and Atlas with a bunch of watered down Creature From Dimension Z strips.

Atlas published this stuff in anthology titles with names like TALES OF SUSPENSE and JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY and TALES TO ASTONISH and, yes... my favorite of all those coinages, ADVENTURE INTO FEAR.

By the time I saw my first ADVENTURE INTO FEAR comic, the title featured the ongoing adventures of the Man-Thing, by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik. At the time I came across the very first issue I ever saw of this comic, my family was living in an old farmhouse that had been split into an upstairs apartment and a downstairs apartment. We had the downstairs. The dad of the family that lived upstairs loved monster and horror comics but they had two young kids and the mom wouldn't let him keep them after he read them. So at first he was throwing them out but when he found out I liked comic books, he started handing them off to me. Most of them were garbage, but Gerber's MAN-THING was not. I enjoyed it a lot (and still do) and so the phrase Adventure Into Fear came to be stuck in my memory, with positive associations.

My first anthology, ZOMBIE RAY, was about pulp fiction. My second, DAMNATION STATION, had a 'gods & monsters' theme. My third, THIS SLAUGHTERHOUSE EARTH, features 'Other Savage Sci Fi Stories'. My most recent, ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER, was a collection of my Lovecraft themed/inspired material.

This collection you're reading right now has 18 discrete pieces of fiction in them. Ten are entirely original, never seen before by anyone, All New, All Different stories that you, Fortunate Reader, will be seeing for the first time ever within these pages.

The other eight – well, one is an excerpt from a novel I'm very fond of, and the other seven have all appeared in one or another of my previous anthologies. But if you haven't read any of my previous anthologies, well, as NBC used to say, if you haven't seen it yet, it's new to you!

This collection's theme is the simplest of all my collections – all these stories were written with the intention of scaring the living shit out of you.

Which is to say, this collection of short stories is intended to allow you to... ahem... Adventure Into Fear.

This is, I guess, what all horror stories are meant to do – shock you and rock you, thrill you and chill you! We are all constantly starved for stimulus, it's the way evolution has hardwired us. But a lot of horror stories, it seems to me, are like those turgid old Atlas monster comics – there's not really much rock or shock, hardly any thrills and chills.

I hope you'll find these stories to be different. I want these stories to scare you so bad that when you finally get to the end of the tale and slide back down into your own skin again and find yourself returned to the real, at least allegedly sane, world, you'll be grateful to be back. You'll blink. You'll pat yourself all over to make sure everything is still attached where it's supposed to be and nothing is wet that shouldn't be. You'll peer cautiously about you, darting quick glances into the shadows behind your chair or underneath your desk, if you're sitting at one.

Because that's what you do after you re-emerge from a really scary story. You reassess your local reality tunnel. You reassure syourself that there is nothing there that shouldn't be there. No vampires. No werewolves. No unnatural colors out of space. Nothing crawling with an unsettlingly moist sucking sound across the floor towards you.

Not all horror stories that fail to to force this kind of frantic re-examination of one's surroundings after one emerges from them are bad stories. Some so called horror stories just end up being sort of supernatural fantasy stories with ghosts or goblins in them, and, sure, they're scary, but actually more interesting than scary. There's a story in an anthology called DAVY JONES HAUNTED LOCKER about the ghost of a drowning victim who haunts the owner of a particular house, showing up once a year on the anniversary of her death. The thing is, she's soaking wet and she gets her surroundings soaking wet and it's a terrible ordeal for this poor schmuck who just inherited the house from his uncle and had nothing to do with this crazed woman's death. Every year, wherever he is on this particular date, she shows up and drenches his surroundings, ruining his clothes and furniture and all his expensive curios and it's just a bummer.

Until one year, he comes up with this cool scheme to resolve the issue, once and for all.

This was technically a horror story, and obviously I remember it forty five years after reading it, and I honestly think it's a cool story, but not because it's scary. It's a horror story by courtesy, because it has a ghost in it.

The stories in this book are not that kind of horror story.

I have honestly read very few stories or novels over the course of my life that have scared me so bad I was checking behind furniture when I walked through the house, turning lights on in every room, pulling the shower curtain back before I sat down on the bottomless throne, to make good and goddam sure there wasn't anything lurking in the tub. In fact, I can only think of two books that have had that effect on me – 'SALEM''S LOT, by Stephen King, and THEY THIRST, by Robert R. McCammon. Both are about vampires encroaching out of the mythological shadows where they belong into what seems to be the real world – in the first, into a ridiculously, agonizingly brilliantly painted small town called 'salem's Lot, and in the second, into the seamy, sweaty, sizzling streets of Los Angeles.

The first time I read 'SALEM'S LOT, when I was 14 or so, I flatly refused to go outside after dark for two weeks after I finished it. I wouldn't even look out the windows when it was dark. I knew I wasn't going to see Danny Glick or his housecoat clad mom staring back in at me with red eyes, licking their doglike canines and murmuring 'let us in, Darren'... I knew that, but I didn't know it, you dig? It took fifteen days or so for that dark spell to finally wear off.

THEY THIRST is, I think, a bigger, broader, blunter work than 'SALEM'S LOT and it managed to shock and awe me even more than 'SALEM'S LOT had. I grew up in small towns, I could easily see Barlow's vampire legions crawling by sunless darkness across the uneasily sleeping, shingled facades of Montour Falls, Watkins Glen, and Holland, New York, cajoling the people within into issuing foolish invitations. I've never been to L.A. (and will die just as happy if I never go) but somehow McCammon's oddly similar, yet twisted, take on the same source material terrified me even more. His vampires were more bestially cunning than King's were, for one thing – having vampires take over ambulances and drive them up to crash sites so the drivers could feast on the accident victims was viciously, brilliantly horrific. Vampire deejays broadcasting instructions to ravening vampire swarms as to where groups of still living survivors were holing up, praying for daylight – that was just chilling, too. And where King gave us a dog with 'angel eyes' carefully murdered by the vampire villain's human familiar, McCammon had his vampires controlling all the canine pets of Los Angeles and turning them into daytime guardians of their undead masters' resting places.

I scuttled through doorways and slept with lights blazing for a month after my first reading of THEY THIRST. And cringed whenever I heard a dog bark.

I've had stories hit me hard, emotionally. I defy anyone with a soul to read Tom Godwin's The Cold Equations or Jerome Bixby's It's a GOOD Life and not be made to feel some kinda way. And I want to say that these aren't horror stories but in different ways, they are. Equations fills you with horror and anguish about how harsh and unfeeling the universe can be. Life just makes your flesh crawl. But neither of them freeze your blood the way King and McCammon's vampire tales, or Lovecraft's The Color Out of Space, froze mine on first reading.

Which brings up another principle of horror – it's often random. Stories that leave little impression on one reader will trigger utter terror in another. It just depends on how our experiences have shaped our own particular nightmares.

So while not all horror stories manage to scare their readers so bad as to induce nightmares (or, even better, sleepless nights), well, that's what I wanted THESE stories to do. And I hope, to at least some extent, for at least a single shuddering moment in each of them, I accomplished that.

I've borrowed a few stories from previous anthos for this one, as will be noted in the individual introductions to each of those. There's at least one vampire story in this volume, possibly two or even three – as cliché and hoary and, well, not scary as vampires have become in pop culture now, I still find the basic idea of the monster that turns your friends and family into bloodsucking ghouls and that doesn't just kill you, but makes you evil, too, to be utterly terrifying. Joss Whedon has done a lot of damage to the basic scariness of that particular myth-monster, but still, I think there's untapped potential for scaring the living shit out of people left there.

But other themes that recur in this book are the things that really terrify me – the sense that reality is not what we think it is, most of the time. That, perhaps, what we see is not what actually is, and worse, what we remember may have been manipulated for the purposes of others.

That the voices that whisper to us in the darkness may be real... and may well have their own agendas, and mean us ill.

Or, far worse, not care a good goddam about us at all.

So, if I'ved written a story that I feel at any point in its narrative absolutely scares the living shit out of the reader, that story is probably here. If you've encountered some of the contents here before, I hope you enjoy renewing your acquaintance. If this is all new to you, well, I hope the first impression my writing makes on you is a completely terrifying one.

-D.A. Madigan

Spring of the Plague, 2020

There Are 600,000 Stories In The Naked City And Most Of Them Are Dead is a slightly re-edited version of the opening of my zombie apocalypse novel DERBY CITY DEAD. I'm placing it here because I think it does a very good job of showing the steadily increasing, rather nightmare-like sense of failing structure and crumbling sanity that would almost certainly accompany the opening hours of a real life zombie apocalypse, as people in their homes, or at their jobs, started to realize just what was happening outside. At first they'd be incredulous... this is something that only happens on TV or in the movies! But with rapidly accumulating momentum the inexorable reality of the situation would arrive. Many would simply be overwhelmed, at a loss, unable to accept it or formulate a strategy, however silly or foolish, to deal with the completely unprecedented situation. Those people would be lost, doomed, dragged down in the first moments of actual contact with the ravening hordes of newly risen dead.

Those capable of getting their heads out of their asses, accepting what's actually happening, and responding to it in a rational, intelligent way (and those words would mean very different things in the new reality context people would suddenly find themselves in) might survive... for a while... if they were competent, and courageous, and resourceful... and very very lucky.

But when I think about the zombie apocalypse actually happening, knowing full well that the last thing in the world I am is a Brad Pitt-looking international troubleshooter for the United Nations, or a SWAT team commando, or a State Trooper, or any of those alpha male types who seem to so easily adapt to the gruesome exigencies of a world mostly populated by hordes of screaming, ravenous undead... well, what I feel is absolute terror. I'm an ordinary guy... well past the middle of midd

As my nurturing support network of laws and civility crashed and burned all around me, I'd be basically shitting my pants. And I've tried to convey those emotions here... with, I think, at least some success, although I grant you, Sheila and Dan behave in considerably more courageous fashion than I think I would.

If 600,000 Stories entertains you and you find you want more, my novel DERBY CITY DEAD is available at Amazon dot com.

THERE A

RE 600,000 THOUSAND STORIES IN THE NAKED CITY AND MOST OF THEM ARE DEAD

i.

Sheila nearly didn't go into the call center that day. Vicki was sick that morning, not just cranky -- she was always cranky when they woke her up at 6 am to get her ready for another day fighting the good fight in fourth grade -- but actually running a degree of fever, too. So Sheila had nearly called in sick to stay home with her -- but Dan had volunteered to do it instead. He didn't have a job where he got dinged with an occurrence every time he called in; his employers down at the garage were much more adult about such things.

Still, she'd gotten off to a late start getting everyone settled before she left (Vicki on the couch more or less contentedly watching something incomprehensibly awful on the Disney Channel, Dan with Sheila's quickly penned Post It notes stuck all over the various medicines he might have to dispense, distributed around his recliner on the coffee table and TV tray like an orbital array). So she didn't dare dawdle on the way in, as being late was nearly as bad as not coming in at all, and she wasn't in her team leader's good books this month by any means.

So instead of hitting the Wendy's drive thru on Bardstown Road as she usually would have for coffee and a panini, she'd driven straight in, praying there were no cops laying in wait anywhere along the way to hail her down as she blew by them on Old Shep fifteen miles over the speed limit.

As she crossed Fern Valley, luckily hitting the green light at a flat out sixty in a 45 mph speed zone, she'd caught a glimpse out of the corner of her eye of something strange happening in the parking lot of the bowling alley on the corner there. Some kind of fight, or brawl... for all the sense she could make of it as she flashed by, it looked like two or three homeless people struggling over a blanket, or something. A red blanket... full of sausages?

But then it was behind her and she was halfway to Outer Loop and had to watch the road closely, as this was a spot where school buses tended to pull onto Old Shep from neighborhood side streets without warning. Getting caught behind a school bus when you were already running ten minutes behind was just doom.

At Outer Loop itself she got stuck behind a long red light watching as four fire trucks and two police cars went screaming by in front of her towards Moore High School. As soon as the light went green again, though, she gunned on through and forgot about it.

On Preston Highway, turning off onto Commerce Crossing, she saw a bad wreck on the other side of the intersection -- someone had apparently gone off the road and into the ditch over there at enough speed to spring their hood up and cause the engine to pour out oily black smoke. The door was open on the driver's side but no one had gotten out of the car. Apparently it had just happened, as there were no emergency vehicles at the scene yet.

Sheila had to fight the urge to pull through the intersection, turn around, park behind the wreck on the shoulder, and see if there was anything she could do... but if she was late for work, she'd get written up. So she pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911 and reported the wreck as she was driving up Commerce Crossing. The operator sounded much more stressed than usual; it made Sheila realize, for the first time, that there had seemed to be a lot of emergency vehicles out this morning. In addition to the ones she'd actually seen on Outer Loop, she'd also heard several sirens over the sounds of Bruno Mars, Robin Thicke, Maroon 5, and countless yammering commercials as she'd driven in -- she'd just blocked them out.

Now, as she cruised the Galaxy parking lot at four minutes before 8 looking for an open space, she wondered if something weird was going on in Louisville today.

Then, in the rush to secure car keys, get her ID badge out, toss a blip back over her shoulder with the key-remote to lock the car behind her, run up the front walk to badge in to the building, near-sprint across the floor to her cubicle and frantically hammer her log in in to her phone -- she forgot it all again.

ii.

Vicki was the first one who noticed something was going on. When the iCarly rerun she was listlessly watching was abruptly replaced by a screen showing BREAKING NEWS, she yelled for her dad. DADDY! ICARLY'S BROKEN!!!

Dan, who had been making something to nosh on in the kitchen and wondering idly why he kept hearing so many sirens today, put the two PB and J sandwiches on a plate, cut them both into triangles simultaneously with the big butcher knife from the wooden block next to the sink, and carried the plate along with a glass of milk back into the living room.

I'm sure iCarly is fine, he said, as he sat in his recliner again. It's just...

His eyes fastened on the pictures scrolling across the TV screen. What?

A harried looking fellow Dan had never seen before was sitting behind what looked like someone's office desk. The man himself was light skinned; maybe mixed, maybe Latino, Dan couldn't tell. He was wearing a light green short sleeved polo shirt and looked more like he should be working a control board than in front of a camera. Papers were scattered haphazardly all over the desk's surface; even as Dan watched, a flustered looking young woman in jeans and a vintage Def Leppard t-shirt came running in from the left and handed him yet another piece of paper.

Someone else yelled from off camera Hey, Chuck, you're green! You're green! and the guy behind the desk straightened up and ran his hand across his greying hair, smoothing it down.

Ah, he said, sounding light years away from the urbane smoothness of even a local news reporter, much less one of the senior correspondent/deities who stood up in front of national audiences at 6:30 pm every evening. Um... sorry to break in like this. We... okay. This is important. My name is Charles Serta, I'm a technician here at Galaxy Cable, and we're trying to get some important news out on all of our broadcast channels, even the ones that wouldn't normally break into a broadcast to do so. So we apologize for interrupting your program, but we think this is important news. Ah...

He seemed to remember the piece of paper he was holding in his hand, that the girl had just handed him. He smoothed it out on the desk and, making no effort at all to hold eye contact with the audience, started to read:

If you have been watching some of your local channels, or one of the news channels, you may have seen reports of unusual outbreaks of strange and even violent behavior today, especially at hospitals and funeral homes. The purpose of this broadcast is to advise viewers in our coverage area that this is not a local or regional phenomenon. We have been monitoring this situation and there have been reports of similar outbreaks of extreme and deadly violence from all over the country... even some from outside our borders. Whatever is happening, it appears to be happening everywhere.

Someone from off screen yelled then It's the zombie apocalypse! Tell 'em it's the zombie apocalypse! It's real! It's really happening!

The man on screen half stood up and screamed SHUT THE FUCK UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP! YOU DON'T KNOW SHIT!!! SHUT THE FUCK UP!

There were sounds of scuffling coming from off camera. The announcer sat back down, ran his hand over his hair again, and resumed reading. These outbreaks of violence appear to be spreading. If you are watching this from the safety of your home, we urge you to stay inside. You may want to barricade your doors and windows if feasible or retreat to a safe area... some place you can fortify and defend. These violent outbreaks are extremely dangerous and spreading unpredictably.

Vicki burst into tears. I want Mom! she screamed. I want Mom right now!

Dan sat in his recliner, fingers digging hard into the padded arms of the chair. Yeah, babe, he thought, almost idly, me, too. I want your Mom, too.

The zombie apocalypse. How the Christ could the zombie apocalypse actually be happening?

Dan was something of a zombie flick aficionado, so he was very well aware of how fictional zombie apocalypses had evolved and changed over the last thirty years of film making.

So he absolutely knew what the crucial question really was, if indeed the zombie apocalypse was actually kicking off right this very minute --

Fast zombies, or slow?

iii.

Sheila's team leader Fred was glaring at her over the cubicle tops. Then he pointedly went back to putting the top three sales leaders from his team on the whiteboard outside his own cubicle -- pointedly because Sheila's name was nowhere to be found on that short list.

And hadn't been, for the last six weeks.

He finished, and hesitated, as if torn between coming over to give her a 'pep talk' about her own dismal sales figures, or going back into his cubicle (where, Sheila knew, he would sip coffee, idly move folders around on his desk, make personal calls on his work phone, and play Facebook games most of the morning, always alert to minimize the browser window and display something work related at any moment, should HIS supervisor wander by).

Sheila wasn't sure she could take one more 'pep talk' -- actually, a passive-aggressive barrage of thinly veiled and futile threats about firing her (futile because the only good thing about their union, as far as Sheila could see, was that they kept people like Fred from actually firing anyone for poor sales stats, since this was supposed to be a customer service job, not a sales position).

But she could easily get fired for standing up and kicking Fred really hard in the balls -- which she was likely to do, if he walked her way and started bitching at her.

At that point her first call of the day beeped in her headset, and she forgot about Fred, and wrecks on Preston Highway, and homeless men fighting over blankets full of sausages, and emergency vehicles, and even Vicki and Dan, as she started trying to bring up the customer's account on her screen and went into her spiel. Thank you for calling Galaxy Telecommunications, my name is Sheila, how can I help you today? Remembering to smile into the little mirror that was affixed to the top of her monitor -- everyone had one -- because the customers can hear that smile in your voice, Sheila, yes they can!

Naturally, her first call of the day was a horror -- the phone number on her caller ID did not autopop up any account, meaning Sheila would have to search for it. But before she could even ask for a phone number, the caller was screaming in her ear -- Our internet is out AGAIN!!!! And our phones!!! And the cable TV is just showing 'please wait one moment'! This is a BUSINESS HERE, you idiots! We can't operate like this!

Sheila rolled her eyes and said I'm very sorry, sir, did you say this was a business?

YES!!!!! the caller - a man, whose tone and general unpleasantness made Sheila wonder if he and Fred had been separated at birth or something -- screamed. THIS IS A BUSINESS! This is the Highland Walgreen's on Bardstown Road and ALL OUR SERVICES ARE OUT!!! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU MORONS????

Although Sheila was careful to keep such opinions to herself, she felt very strongly that customers had a great deal of control over and input into the kind of experience they had when they called customer service. Her managers would have been scandalized to hear any CSR voice such a heretical viewpoint, but Sheila was pretty sure every other CSR in the building, and anyone anywhere in the world who actually had to speak with customers for a living, would agree -- customers were primarily responsible for just how good an experience they had when they called in with a complaint.

The customers who somehow managed to remember that they were speaking with an actual human being on the other end of the phone, and who remained professional and respectful... well, they got a lot more help, and a much nicer attitude from the CSR they were speaking with, than the customers who called up screaming and swearing and calling names.

Managers did not like that particular theory, and customers certainly didn't -- both sorts preferred to believe that the way a particular call went was entirely the responsibility of the CSR. But Sheila knew better.

In this world, what goes around comes around, and you get what you get.

So it was that Sheila was extremely happy to say, in her very sweetest tone, I'm sorry, sir, you have reached the residential customer service line by mistake. Please hold while I transfer you to business. She gleefully popped the 'hold' button, even as she could hear the asshole on her phone drawing a breath to scream something even more loudly (probably DO NOT PUT ME ON HOLD!!!! or DO NOT TRANSFER ME!!!!) and, very deliberately, pulled up the Internal Phone Numbers list on her soft phone, scrolled down to Biz Louisville -- and then, 'accidentally' clicked on 'Biz Columbus', on the line above.

If the call got reviewed, all a supervisor would see was an honest mistake... mouses were finicky things, sometimes. Meantime, the asshole could experience another