STRANGENESS IN THE PROPORTION

by Joshua Alan Doetsch

PROLOGUE

There is no exquisite beauty . . . without some strangeness in the proportion.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia”

Pumpkins left out to rot turn into vampires.

Did you know that, Jane?

The thought tickles my brain like a forked tongue as I sit in my parked car, contemplating murder and waiting for the absinthe to take hold.

Are you there, Jane? It’s cold and dark. But if I think of the pumpkins, I remember, and I’m there . . .

Drip-drop go the echoes of forgotten lore out my ears. Yugoslavian Gypsies believed that a pumpkin kept too long comes alive as a rolling, blood-hungry vampire.

Devil Squash.

And why not? The pumpkin is the ripened ovary of the plant. Something gets inside—a lost ghost, an evil thought, rogue radio waves, a nasty abstract, something you once said to someone but can never take back—and then it fertilizes in the pulp-flesh womb. Maybe the circumstances of propagation are specific, as specialized as the rare tarantula-hunting wasp that is the sole pollinator of an even rarer flower. Maybe it only happens once in a century.

But it happens.

Outside the car, children zigzag, braving the after-dusk streets, the night after Halloween, smashing pumpkins. It is religious. A sacrament.

Squash.

Squash.

Squash.

The scene bends in green waves of dream alchemy. Colors sharpen. Lines blur away. Jack O’Lantern faces animate—chthonic grins all around. The pumpkins move, but I can’t hear them. Not yet. They’re all grins and silent Lon Chaney giggles. I giggle, too. I get the joke. I take another sip of the green poison in my Thermos, wait for the Dead Water to fill my head, to feed the terrible thoughts.

That is what Mr. Knock told me to do. He said, “You have to skew your view, dear boy, to see the shadows in the fog, the skulls beneath the skin.”

The thing I remember about Mr. Knock, Jane, is he talked with his mouth full.

I do see the skulls. Day of the Dead, and I’m parked next to a row of huddled apartments, across the street from a groceria and a burnt-out fast food restaurant. The children suck on little sugar skulls. Bones and rictus grins adorn the homes. They celebrate the holiday of my patients. They’re not sad skulls; they’re happy.

The thing about skulls is, they always smile. Frowning is a fleshy enterprise. Eh, Jane?

The children smash pumpkins. They destroy would-be vampires. The streets run orange with gore as they slay monsters in embryo.

Prevention, they say, is better than a cure. Eh, Jane?

I have my very own monster. His name is Hector. He lives in Apartment 4C. “Do not mess with this guy,” my source pleaded. “He’s King-fucking-Kong mean. They say he ate his twin brother in the womb.” My source liked to cuss.

I look up at my monster’s window. Still dark. My right hand scuttles over to my black briefcase, seeking comfort. I feel bone grate on bone under the hastily wrapped Ace bandage on my left hand. My left eye is blind. The claw marks burn my right leg—crosshatched memories of the graveyard and the teeth, the teeth, the teeth! The fingers of my right hand writhe like skeletons trapped in prophylactics. My nerves turn to angry spiders if I do not keep my hands busy. But I don’t have my coins or my cards, so I make a shiny scalpel appear and disappear, dance between my fingers, up and down in prestidigitation.

Waiting is the worst part.

The breadcrumb trail led me here: clues and leads and the stranger things. The oddities. And the Dead Water. I wonder if what Mr. Knock told me was true, about the things under the bed, between the walls, and past the periphery. “You’ve seen them, haven’t you, Simon—gnawing at your vision that first time mommy took away the nightlight?” His full name is Ichabod Knock. Some people call him Icky. I wonder if he told the truth, as the fur and viscera hung from his mouth in wet, ragged strips. I wonder if children smash pumpkins the day after Halloween because it’s fun or because of some dormant survival instinct—like fear of basements, attics, and the dark—that they grow out of, swollen appendixes and tonsils cut out of the mind.

I wonder and I sip my absinthe: cloudy, mystic-green, one-sixty proof, eighty percent alcohol down the throat. Wormwood slithers from synapse to synapse, hungry-hungry roots of a growing tree.

There is a ghost tree that grows in my head—there is a ghost tree that feeds off the dead. Eh, Jane?

They say if you drink enough, you can go blind. They say Van Gogh was on an absinthe binge when he cut off his ear. I say he was dedicated to his sweetheart.

Inside my black case is my standard scene-of-the-crime kit: swabs, sample containers, magnifying glass, etc. Tonight, I crammed in several post-crime-scene tools: scalpels, bone cutters, cranium chisel, Gigli saw, and all manner of assorted nasties.

Outside, I can now hear the pumpkins laughing like helium hyenas.

Absinthe was popular in the nineteenth century, especially with the bohemian artists. The French curse. The Green Fairy. Bottled madness. It’s popular again. That’s not why I drink it. I don’t drink it proper, with a sugar cube on a slotted spoon placed over the glass, pouring water over the sugar, diluting and sweetening the drink. The ritual attracts people, but rituals get tedious. I drink out of a plastic Looney Tunes Thermos, only interested in the effect.

Drink Me, says the Magic Marker message written on the piece of tape affixed to my Thermos. And I obey.

There are three stages to my absinthe high. I don’t know if it affects other people the same way. I have a chemical imbalance.

I’m in the first stage. Intense colors, blurry lines—Impressionists drank this. Children, pumpkins, and skulls transmute into animated Impressionist paintings. It’s beautiful. The shimmer of Jack O’Lantern guts scorches my eye with a vicious orange burn.

Stage one is social. I’m not social, but absinthe makes me want to talk and create and smoke. I don’t normally smoke, either. I can work unimpaired on the high, a lucid dreamer in my hallucinations.

I look at my monster’s window. Still dark. Wormwood roots stab my eardrums, making music irritable, so I change stations. . . .

“A Logan Square resident claims she found the desiccated remains of her pit bull in a giant web, in the alley behind her house. Neighbors say—”

I turn off the radio.

4C is still dark. Waiting is the worst part.

The wormwood squeezes my brain, becoming root-bound in my head, fed on too much Dead Water. I close my eyes. I see the ghost tree, and on that upside-down tree grow wormwood branches, and perched on those upside-down branches are upside-down crows. The wraith crows. Or maybe they’re ravens or rooks. I call them the Corbies. Each Corbie knows a morbid fact.

“Tell me a story?” I ask the black birds in my head. “Something to pass the time.”

In cawing cacophony, each Corbie sounds off a service performed for humanity by corpses: testing surgical procedures, testing the first guillotine, testing embalming techniques in Lenin’s lab, being crucified in a Parisian laboratory to verify the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.

“Go on,” I say.

More cawing. More macabre trivia.

“The longest execution took forty years,” says a Corbie. “King Gustav of Sweden wanted to see which was worse, coffee or tea. The tea-drinker died first.”

I clutch my scalpel. “I think I will be quicker.”

This excites the Corbies and they bob their heads in the branches. Another Corbie sings an old Mountain Dew slogan: “It’ll tickle your innards!”

A fat philosopher crow, high on an upside-down branch, pontificates to his fellows on whether or not there is an afterlife and what will happen if humanity collectively decided there is none. He eventually speculates that we would end up creating one anyway. Perhaps we would freeze brains, turn personalities into binary code, break down souls into ones and zeroes, and send them to vast, virtual afterlives.

“Could we download the dead into hard drives designated Heaven and Hell?” asks a Corbie.

“Where do the babies download?” asks another.

“Who would judge a soul and what would be the criteria for entry?”

“Would there be angel and demon programs to keep up maintenance and take care of viruses?”

“Could you hold séances with lost family members via email?”

“Will we be spammed by the dead?”

These are absinthe-minded thoughts—a murder in my head.

Colors flow, shadows dance. Outside, the pumpkins turn into severed heads. A human head is roughly the same size and weight as a roaster chicken. I smile at the heads, familiar and comforting. I remember the day I saw row after row of severed human heads in aluminum roaster pans, lined up on plastic sheets of soothing lavender, patiently awaiting the cosmetic surgery students.

“Day after day, head after head—a serial killer’s wet dream—as students play with the dead, jiggety-jig,” croon the Corbies.

4C lights up.

My monster is home. I can see his silhouette in the window, his improbably massive chest, shoulders, and arms. Hector pulls out a bottle and guzzles.

I feel tiny. I am a microbe. He is a mastodon.

Then I think of Jane and her golden eyes. I’m doing this for Jane. And that makes everything all right.

“Cheers, Hector. Be seeing you.”

He drinks from his bottle and I from my Thermos. Supposedly, Napoleon and his soldiers imbibed absinthe. It made them fearless in battle, marching into musket fire—empowered with green god-fire. Conquering.Invincible.

“In 1915, absinthe was outlawed in France,” says an erudite Corbie. “Think about their military history after that point and conjure your own conclusions.”

The wormwood creaks and groans in my head, like cornstalks gossiping in the dark. The children scatter from the moaning streets. A few pumpkins survived. I smile again at the fiendish fruit. Then, everything goes bad.

The air gets angry.

The vibrations turn ominous.

My car window slides halfway down before I’m able to pry my finger off the button, stop myself from yelling at the children, pleading with them to finish the job. A little girl trailing behind catches in my headlights as they cross the street. She turns her head and her jaws fill with shark teeth and her sugar skull is human bone dripping marrow. I clutch my ears at the epileptic grind of tooth on skull.

I wonder where Nyx is. Is she safe? Did she end up like the others?

I remember telling Nyx that I was worried I would not be able to tell the real monsters from the hallucinations. “Doesn’t matter,” she said, “not if you shoot them all.”

Severed pumpkin-heads laugh at me. Graffiti slithers up and down the walls, spelling obscene apocrypha. The alleys hiss and shiver. Across the street, the clown-faced order board of the abandoned fast food restaurant eyes me, lights up; its gargoyle grin cackles in demon-static whispers, murmuring secrets I can’t quite make out—promising something horrible if any of the pumpkins are left at the stroke of midnight. I try to politely ignore it.

I hear Mr. Knock’s words: “Down the rabbit hole, boy! Straight through the plate glass darkly, into the secret room where Alice plays tea with corpses. No deposit, no return. Once you see the Abyss, it sees you.”

Outside, pigeons flutter on batwings. Somewhere, phantasmagoric voices howl in whippoorwill wails. An apartment building sways on blood-taloned chicken legs, ready to run away like an escapee of a Russian fairy tale.

I screw my eyes shut. I think of Jane. I meditate on her pallid cast of beauty. I think about her luminous eyes.

And it stops.

The streets fall back into Impressionist paintings.

My sigh of relief catches in my throat, chokes me, when I notice a figure in my rearview mirror. The shape is a blur, perched on the trunk of my car. I whirl around. Then that sensation hits me. The one you get when you lose your keys even though there’s nowhere they could possibly be but your pocket.

There’s nothing. No figure.

My shadow.

He’s haunted my progress. He’s been there from the beginning—whispered clues to me at Buckingham Fountain and at the playground, on the seesaw. He gave me breadcrumbs.

My shadow, Jane. He said he was my shadow.

It’s time, Hector.

I get out of my car. I freeze up. Doubts drone on like blowflies fornicating, thoughts of Hector’s massive arms and reputed penchant for eating fetal siblings. But there’s more. I’m at a chasm. On the other side is a bloody deed. On this side, I’m a good boy.

I drive the speed limit. I hold doors open for people. I avoid conflict.

I think of Jane—her golden eyes. I think about how Hector and others hurt Jane. I think about the promise I made her, the last time I held and kissed her. I’m doing this for Jane.

And that is enough.

I open a jinni bottle inside my chest, let something nasty crawl out. The Corbies flutter and shriek in the ghost tree. I pull out my scalpel. If I do this right, I just need my scalpel. She’s cold and rigid and sharp. I try and let myself be that sharp, that cold. Her kiss is light and precise.

My reflection stares back at me from a shop window, but I do not recognize him.

Ever do that, Jane—stare at a mirror until your face turns strange? The word said too many times, alien on the tongue. The freedom of losing identity.

This new creature stares me down. He wears my black clothes, but they suit him better. He has my raggedy coat. His dark, messy hair pokes out from under his black bowler hat. He wears my prescription glasses, but the flickering streetlight turns them into white, inhuman eyelets.

In the reflection, standing behind me, the blurred figure again.

My shadow.

I jerk around but before I can even spin my head, the lost keys sensation. And then . . .

Nothing.

I remember, Jane, my shadow came to life. Loki. My shadow said his name was Loki and after we separated, I could not sew him back on.

“Watch this,” I say, challenging the empty air. I turn back to the window and the new creature has a grin. All is dark save the glowing eyelets and gleaming grin, a Cheshire Cat’s face. I turn and slink down leaf-littered pavement toward Hector’s apartment, my head full of green witchery, wicked intentions, and all manner of assorted nasties.

I’m breaking the speed limit.

I’m off the map.

I’m under the bed.

Here there be monsters.

I did it all for you, Jane. What kind of story is this? Noir? Penny dreadful? No. This is a love poem. I wrote it with a scalpel.

I lurk in the doorway to Hector’s apartment building. I flick my wrist and something shiny and sharp appears in my fingers.

But this is not the beginning, Jane. It began with your eyes. Remember the first time we met, the first time I held your hand? You came to Autopsy Room 6 and I looked into your golden eyes, unblinking. We met in Autopsy Room 6.

I clutch my scalpel and stomp a cackling pumpkin before I step inside.

I love you, Jane Doe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.