Hadron Colliderscope

This is a short story I wrote in late ’09, before I started this website. It’s a retelling of a famous old classic, re-imagined as a horror story. I’d had the idea ricocheting around my head for about ten years, but every time I tried to write it down, it just hadn’t worked. Something was always missing. This time, with Carver, I think I hit the notes I had always intended to.

I considered making it into a comic, but every time I’ve adapted the script, it just doesn’t work as well as I think it did as a short story. So, if you’re a bit bored and have the attention span for this sort of thing, give it a shot and let me know what you think!

-MVB

CARVER by Michael Vincent Bramley

I lost my hair when I was young. Sometimes I think that’s the first curse I ever had put on me. I think it was my dad. The big burly bastardo he was, he always resented me for my mother’s death and I wouldn’t have put it past him to do such a thing to spite me.

Maybe it’s not all his fault; maybe I was bad from the start. In the womb, I tore up my mother’s insides and shitting me out was the last blasted thing she ever did in this Godforsaken world before shuffling off her mortal coil.

And now, hovering over the remains of my own wife, as the result of… well our son, I suppose, I find myself even empathizing with my old man a little myself.

My wife… God the last thing she said to me was a curse, half coughed out of her collapsed lung… the words brought blood with them, through those full rosy lips I’d kissed on our wedding day those years ago; ‘Giuseppe,’ she’d said, ‘you did this… you cavorted with the devil, and now you will never feel God’s embrace… curse you, you basta-’

She died without understanding that I did it all for her. This whole madness, my descent into such darkness and misery, it’d all been for her. I didn’t even want a child! I hate children! I’ve hated them since I myself was a child! They’d make fun of my baldness and make my life a misery, and still, to this day it continues!

But my dear wife, she wanted a child so very much, but she… or we… or perhaps I… could not have children. And though this came as a relief to me, it weighed heavily on her – and it didn’t help that she worked in my store, selling the wooden toys I carved to the children of our village. Seeing them every day – the thing she wanted most dearly…

I wish I’d never found that confounded leather-bound book. It’d belonged to my father, whom I’m sure right now is rotting in the very depths of hell for even glancing at such a twisted abortion of the written word.

I blew the dust from the cover myself, within my workshop (that’d once been my father’s) and scanned the pages silently in a drunken stupor. At first I thought it fanciful rubbish, nonsense of the highest order, blasphemous and to be dismissed…

But then… then I saw her.

Her picture in the crude engraving did her looks no justice, but something of her beauty must have been trapped in those thick dark lines, as they captivated me so. She was Black Magic… a burning flame of ice, something that God had never intended, by all rights she shouldn’t have existed, but she did. She was new, exciting and she was alluring…

The book told me how to meet her, and it took more drunken sessions of staring at that page and trying to talk myself out of it before I finally stumbled out into the woods and chanted the words over a stack of old puppets I couldn’t sell. An offering, I suppose… or maybe raw material…

The woman in the book, she was meant to bring life… I was doing this for my wife you see… making her the child she so desperately wanted.

When the woman came, she wore no clothes. Her hair was as long as her body was tall and blue-green in colour – something not mentioned in the book, she reminded me of water… of life. Her eyes, though beautiful, were not human – they were all one colour, the colour of her hair… and those lips, they were black, pitch black and full and pouting, like the rest of her, alluring, but somehow unnatural and wrong. Her whole body moved like leaves drifting down a stream, like she was moving to the rhythm of a slow and sweet song, but ambivalently she also had the air of a stalking animal, ready to pounce at any second.

We made love… or something; I’m not sure what you’d call the violent and lustful act that we partook of in that woodland clearing. Maybe we made hate.

Her kisses burned my flesh and her blue-green nails tore my skin as she cursed me a hundred times over… her touch stung, but I lapped it up, I’m ashamed to say that I loved every minute of that painful cacophony, and gave myself entirely to her lightning grace.

I can’t pinpoint when I fell asleep, but I fell hard into a slumber so peaceful that I might never have awoken from it.

I’ve seen some terrible things in my life, but none more than what I saw in the woods as I awoke that next morning to the scent of roasted pork. The pain in my head lead me to believe that perhaps the night before hadn’t been real, that it had all just been a dream, or some side-effect of the absinthe I’d been chugging back over the past week…

But I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and cast them upon the stack of burning skeletons before me. Then I realized that it had been all too real. The skeletons belonged to children. This was the smoked grave of six or seven young children.

As if that weren’t mind-bending enough, shreds of the charred clothing scattered bared an odd familiarity to the clothes my wife had sewn together from my old shirts for the unwanted puppets I had brought here the night before, somehow impossibly implying that these children were born of those self-same puppets I had laid before the demone lady.

I thought to myself; is this it? I may have sold my soul and this is all she’s given me? This disturbing, stinking heap of wretched, scorched bones?

At first I supposed I hadn’t done it right. I thought – maybe I’d misread the passages from my father’s book.

That’s when I heard a little child’s voice call me ‘Papa’, from within the ashes. Somehow, a child had survived this mess I’d created. I dug into the pile of the bones with my bare hands until I saw the puppet. It was the ugliest of the unsold puppets lying at the very bottom of the remnants of this unholy bonfire.

The others had become real children, if the bones were anything to go by, but he, the one remaining living one, he was still made of wood… and though grubby, he was remarkably unscathed by the fire. Although the puppet strings had burned away, the puppet seemed to squirm quite independently of convention.

My first instinct was to bash him with a rock, and kill him there and then, but then I remembered how fierce the monstro woman had been the night before. I remembered how close I felt to death throughout our carnal act – and how it seemed as though her merest gesture might have snapped me in two. I feared that she, being his true mother, might seek retribution. So instead, I shakily picked him up in my hands.

He was merely a foot and a half tall. I designed him to look like a little boy, but the nose was always too pointy and long, and there was an unpleasant mottled knot in the wood to one side. Also – his painted grin was somewhat haunting and mischievous – and those beady painted eyes pierced my soul as they now moved impossibly one way or the other, searching for something.

‘H-hello son?’ I ventured, trembling.

‘Take me home, Papa,’ he said, ‘I’m cold…’

On my way home, ashamed, I carried the creature in my bundled coat and tried to avoid eye contact with the neighbours. Occasionally it… my ‘son’ would whisper to me, or call out, but I would stroke it and hush it… ‘him’ to silence. I began to think that my wife, bless her soul, might even warm to the… thing inside my coat…

I breathed a sigh of relief when I got home and found that she was nowhere to be seen. I unravelled my coat and sat the little puppet on the table. It wasn’t moving.

For a fleeting, wonderful second, I wondered if the whole thing had been a dream, until the puppet slowly closed its painted eyes in a freakish, impossible blink. He sat silently, though… still… just watching me.

I poured myself a stiff drink and rubbed my temples. I sat in silence for hours, until the bell over the door tinkled as my wife entered the storefront. ‘My love,’ I called out, ‘I’m back here in the workroom.’

‘Thank God!’ she said, rushing through, ‘I worried so much when you didn’t come home, and Antonio told me he’d seen you wandering around in torn clothes… are you okay?’

My wife hugged me close and I brushed her cheek with my hand for the very last time and whispered, ‘I… have something to tell you.’

She stepped back, regarding me with a quizzical look and crossed her arms as all concern for my well-being left her, ‘another woman? Is that where you were all night?’

‘No,’ I said, too quickly to realize that this was in fact a lie, ‘I just… I need to introduce you to our son…’

I motioned to the puppet, directly in front of me. Slowly he swivelled his head around to lock eyes on her. Something in the way he moved reminded me of a cockroach or a beetle, jaunty, scuttling motions.

‘Hello, Mamma,’ he said.

Immediately my wife’s expression bent into that of disgust as she gripped the cruciform around her neck and began reciting biblical passages. I stepped towards her trying to reason with her… ‘I did this for you,’ I told her, ‘this is our child! For you!’

She hit me upside the head and yelled ‘you did this! ‘YE SHALT NOT SUFFER A WITCH TO LIVE!’’

The puppet moved.

There was a blur, a terrible scuttle and leap; the puppet had my carving knife before I even knew it and he began meticulously perforating my wife’s ribcage. I screamed and tried to pull the puppet away, but he ignored me as he disassembled the woman I had pledged my life to. The only real woman I had ever loved.

When it finally gave up, its awful task completed, it stepped back and my poor, dear wife had time to spit out her curse to me. In all this time, she’d squeezed her cruciform and I pray (not that He’ll hear my prayers again) that it was enough to save her.

Tears streamed down my face as I stood, shaking, not knowing what to do or how to even move. Finally I picked up the poker from the fireplace, weighing it in my hand as I weighed the concept of destroying that little pine bastardo in my mind… would that monstro lady really kill me for it? Would God forgive me if I destroyed the abomination I had created? Would he protect me? I turned to face my bloodied ‘son’.

‘I did it because I love you, Papa’, said the puppet, turning towards me with its terrible painted grin. He slowly blinked his horrible painted eyes once again.

Maybe it was shock, but all I could think about at that point was how the pointy wooden nose looked longer, sharper and more terrible than I remembered it being before.

‘Am I a real boy now?’

END