Twiggy, RHAPSODY GROVE
...Mary Christianson could not move. Even
when the light through the window in the loft over the bed hit directly on her,
Mary never moved a muscle, and was only dimly aware of consciousness itself,
the one image playing like a mantra over and over in what was left of her mind
being that of Twiggy. All memory of the night before was gone. No memory of
family. No memory of self. Certainly no memory of the otherworldly rock her husband
dug up from the lake, no awareness of her body condensing into hardened aspect,
limbs lengthening and firming, no awareness of the tough and knobby solidness,
only the one thought, the omnipresent mantra image, Twiggy, Twiggy, Twiggy.
The
thing that was Mary rose from the bed and flopped on the floor around noon. In
the mass of lashing tendrils might barely be discerned the vaguest semblance of
a torso. Two of the thicker branches moved like legs, while two more resembled
arms. There was no head, merely a misshapen knot. Clacking sounds of rubbing
branches accompanied the thing’s attempts to extricate itself from what was
left of clothing, and it trashed much of the room with its hard limbs flailing
in the process, but finally freed itself, and stood still awhile as if in
meditation, gently swaying in the middle of the mess. Then the thing that was
Mary, which had become Twiggy, moved nimble as a spider out of the room and
down the stairs. Splintering the front door, it scuttled outside and headed
into the woods . . .
TV Man, LOST COASTER
I was pretty sure it was only Tumik, and not the real Billy Connolly. I did make sure to ask, though.
"Look at that now," the mental manifestation of the ancient alien exclaimed. "Would you look at what you've done? My goodness. Look at you, the hero! You're a great man! You chased it down and bloody well bashed its brains in!"
"What the hell was it?"
"I've no idea! I told you, fabric of reality unraveling."
The TV, looking decayed, began to disintegrate in the flow of the river. Even the remote, which I'd knocked away in the tussle, and which I could see wedged against a rock, had begun to dissolve. In moments all that remained was a smooth glistening lump about the size of a fist….
Will Todd, THE MESMERIZER:
You haven’t lived till you’ve died.
The
wheels of what I will call my mind spun the gears of my giant revenge machine
all that night sitting upright in my grave. As dawn neared I decided to creep
around the crypts in hopes of forcing a door. I would have stayed in my own
grave if I could, but the pile from the freshly upturned mound would call
attention to a mindful eye that something was amiss. So I patted down the dirt
as best I could, sort of sad at seeing my dead limbs doing this. Somehow images
of Mother and the horrified expression she would have to know this would one
day happen to her baby appeared before me. I would have cried, if I could, but
for fear of merely excreting maggots....
HIS NAME IS WILL TODD! HE'S A REANIMATED CORPSE ON A MISSION OF REVENGE...with the aid of a Deadhead Sancho Panza.
...The Ferris Wheel operator, having
joined in the attempt to intercept, lay sprawled among rigged milk bottles and
softballs, unable to stop the wheel as Randy managed to pull himself into the
seat just past the top of the ride in time to see the dark figure, black cape
fluttering, ascend the summit with sword in hand two buckets behind and coming
down like a nightmare distilled into corporeal form....
...The animated form of Will Todd,
obscured in black–black as a black hole, black as a barrel of crude oil–strode
across the stage to a bare-chested Randy Manson in bell bottoms and buckskin,
grabbed him from behind by the hair in one hand, produced from a fold a large
knife in the other, and slammed it into the shocked actor’s chest in front of
the audience, creating a single simultaneous gasp of horror which quickly
turned to earsplitting screams as the knife sank into the chest four more
times.
Red
blade drenched in dripping blood, deftly the knife-hand removed a black pair of
shades from a face wrapped in black bandages. Upon removal of the twin thin
lenses, beneath the dark hat’s wide brim, green gleamed.
The
corpse spun a circuit, bathing the eyes of all those on the stage and in the
audience with the grim unspoken command to remain still, and quietly watch.....
...The corpse’s grip on Mary Annette
crushed her pinioned arms. With barely any room to breathe, she felt
perpetually on the verge of fainting, and what little breath she could catch
reeked horribly of decay.
In this manner the corpse carried Mary Annette bodily
away, still in full costume, out the back of the theater and down the manhole
cover around the corner–which the corpse took the time to carefully replace. In
utter absence of light he carried her down the tunnels, shuffling through the
muck....Giant Spider, REDWOODLAND:
...What appeared was a gigantic spider, and it rushed up
the ladder like a guard dog at a gate and hung there in the hole beneath the
raised lid, filling the aperture with a few dark and massive legs bristling
with long matted hair. It bothered Dag to see this. But from long habit he had
learned to control the nearly overwhelming urge to flee the scene screaming.
That’s odd, he thought, noticing that the monster seemed to be looking right at
him. He noticed a peculiar smell as well. The giant spider stank. He’d never
had one do that before.
Unknown to Dag, forty-two years earlier a common
trapdoor spider was exposed to a substance which produced an effect on the eggs
she laid. The mutated creatures differed in varied and unsettling respects
beyond physical size from their ordinary counterparts. Most of the phenomenally
long-lived creatures’ existences were spent underground, doggedly burrowing
through the soil into imperfections in the network of tunnels which linked the
monitor sites together. Undetected in the tubes, the creatures still retained
the instinct to spin trapdoor webs. Rarely needing to feed, all of the spiders
were cannibals. And there were not so many of them now. Perhaps only fifty.
This one had listened to Lou and Dag bitch from the first moment they ever set
foot inside.
Dag
tried to close the hatch. The lid hit a couple of hard hairy legs....Tumik, LOST COASTER:
...I staggered around the underground,
aiming for the tunnel, going with the messages, going with the flow. Lagoons
were lit. Stars shone bright in the stalactite sky. In the tunnel I followed a
creek all the way back to the lake, where I saw the Tripper Room, heart leaping
like a cave-painting, and I got on board, and I climbed inside, and I stood
there watching the water-line lap, maybe for minutes, maybe for hours, I
couldn't tell. Eventually my dead cell phone buzzed in my pocket again. I
took it out and looked at the screen.
I'M RIGHT OUTSIDE THE ROOM, the message said.
I felt a slight jostling of the Room bobbing in the water, heard something
moving around outside on top. A new message appeared.
I'VE CLIMBED ABOARD.
I looked up. There was a fumbling sound at the hatch.
Ears straining, I barely dared to breathe. Suddenly, the hatch flew up, and I
gazed in horror at the aperture. For a moment there was only blackness. Then
the face appeared, quick as a spider in a web. It looked down into the Room, a
great white bulbous head with a tiny, emotionless mouth and shiny, hairless
skin, black almond eyes dark as as the furthest depths of space....
Reckon I could share a couple dozen others, for that matter. Junyer the half-Bigfoot, Grimor the dragon, giant ticks that feed on grave soil, a doll that twitches in proximity to corpses, fascist heads in governing in jars...oh, we got gobs of monsters in the redwoods!
Here we see the author performing arcane rites to pick up sales.
The voice that speaks from the fire guides the author.
The voice tells the author what to say in all his redwood tales.
Helps the author come up with songs for CrowMag, too.
Songs like
"We Went to Town (On a Bigfoot We Found)"
Actually, there isn't any song like that one.
You'll find out. Keep it tuned right here!
( ( ( ( ( ( (((THANKYOU))) ) ) ) ) ) )
