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HISTORICAL SAVAGES By: Adrian Ludens and Heidi Dubej

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

The rain spattered the Whitechapel shutters and thunder bellowed.  Lightning illuminated the streets, making it look like the stage in a three-penny opera.

Jack reached out and grabbed Louise by the shoulder.  He spun her around and grinned.  He had time enough to see the fear in her eyes before he felt the hair on his neck standing on end.  Then he felt as if flames were enveloping his body.  He wondered if the next taunting letter he wrote truly would be from Hell.  Jack and Louise jittered together like marionettes under the lightning’s touch.  Then all went dark.

#

A cacophony of sounds made Jack open his eyes. He sat bolt upright. It was still dark and the storm had passed. But where was he?  A few of the buildings seemed the same, but the rest…

Jack scrambled to his feet and noticed Louise lying nearby.  He slapped her face until she began to mumble, then he pulled her into a standing position.  He was glad he’d picked a light one this time.  Being a surgeon by profession, he wasn’t the brawniest fellow.

“Where have you brought me you stupid cow?” he demanded.

The woman only gaped at him.  She shook her head and whimpered.

“Tell me where we are or I’ll make you scream!”  This was a lie; he’d do her in either way.  Louise fainted. Jack dragged her by the ankles deeper into the alley.  Her skirts slid up as he did this, exposing her creamy white thighs.  Jack ground his teeth as lust and disgust battled in his addled brain.  He propped her in a doorway, then knelt and withdrew the knife from an inner pocket.  He slid the blade carefully across her throat twice, then turned his attention to her thighs.  Afterward, he felt dissatisfied with his efforts.  Perhaps if she’d been awake…

Jack hurried back to the street and entered the first door he encountered.  The interior appeared to be a tavern of some kind, populated by the most outlandish and motley assortment of individuals Jack had ever seen.  Harlequins, kings, garishly painted faces, swords and shields; in short, madness prevailing.  Jack was about to turn and flee when he noticed the women.

The cleavage!  The pouting lips and painted faces.  The drunken giggles and shrieks.  Good God; how could showing so much bare leg be legal?

Jack was in Heaven.  And in Hell.

He jostled in the crowd, gaping at the women surrounding him.  He’d unconsciously drawn and brandished his knife.  Strong hands pulled him onto an elevated platform.  He squinted into glaring lights.  He heard laughter and applause from  the crowd.

“Third place goes to ‘Jack the Ripper’!” a metallic voice announced and the revelers cheered again.

A sweating face filled Jack’s field of vision.  “Congratulations mate!” he bellowed. “A bit gruesome for my taste, but that’s to be expected on Halloween, eh?”

“Bloody well done!” a tall woman in silver fabric crowed.  Jack recoiled.  “Get it?  Bloody?”  She shook his arm and laughed.  Jack spun from her grasp and fled the tavern.

#

Jack adjusted. The city he knew so well had changed in ways that Jack could barely fathom.  He secured work in a butcher shop, which suited him.  He never strayed far from the East End however, and this strange new London still afforded him ample opportunity to sate his dark desires.  Beautiful women still walked the streets at night, and as long as he kept his endeavors to a minimum, the authorities paid little attention to his crimes.

Jack lived in his new setting for three years before he had acclimated enough to be offended by the events of that first night.

“Third place?  Third place!?!” Jack fumed one evening while having cocktails with a silicone-enhanced blond escort named Candy.  “I’m the genuine article!  What do they know; the damned savages!”

He tossed back his drink and signaled for the check.  Time to take Candy home and show her just how authentic he really was.

—
©2009 Adrian Ludens and Heidi Dubej

Adrian Ludens has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Morpheus Tales, Crossed Genres, Illumen and many others. Heidi Dubej is mostly known as a photographer, but has contributed to Flashshots. This is their first collaboration.

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JUST LIKE DIFF’RENT STROKES By: Paul Edmonds

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Tears spill down Frankie’s cheeks as the grainy video plays in choppy spurts underneath the thin sheet of dust dressing his computer screen.  A series of links has led him to YouTube and, specifically, the very special episode of Diff’rent Strokes where Arnold and his friend Dudley wander into the sights of a bicycle shop owner with a penchant for young boys and the well-oiled personality of a career seducer of the pubescent.  Frankie’s gut lurches in and out to the rhythm of the laugh track—still roaring as Dudley zombies out of the man’s bathroom, shirtless and rubbing his head—and he puts a hand out in front of him, pleading with the video to stop or else he’s going to piss himself.

The credits finally roll, drawing the curtain on the old sitcom and forcing Frankie’s heartbeat back towards its regular rate of ticking and tocking.  He rises from his chair and uses the wall to ease his exit from the room as his legs spasm from the last ghosts of laughter fizzing inside his body like a burned-up firework.

He walks into the kitchen and lights a cigarette.  The show replays in his mind as fragments of pictures and dialogue.  A stray chuckle darts up his throat and causes him to choke on the long drag he just pulled from his cigarette.  Through the smoke and tears he vaguely remembers that the actor who played the pedophile also played the part of a repairman in old television spots for Maytag washers and dryers.  Frankie smiles at this and tosses his spent butt into the sink.  “Quite a range,” he quips to the empty kitchen.  “Guy deserves an Emmy.”

#

Lloyd drives down the middle of the street grasping a limp, moist piece of paper.  The address that had been carefully transcribed on the top of the page has been smudged into an almost-unrecognizable mess by his thick, yellowing perspiration.  His tiny eyes look bloodshot and nervous.

A ball rolls into the street before him, followed by a pink-faced moppet of a girl sprinting after it.  Lloyd slams on the brakes and has his window rolled down before the screeching tires can finish sending their echo through the tall oaks that line the sidewalk.

“Look where you’re going, you little bitch!” he bellows, his head poking out of the window, his smoldering ferret eyes glossing-over with anger.  The girl abandons her ball and runs through a pricker bush and into her house.

Lloyd shakes his head, pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes and mumbling soft incantations.  Stop stop stop they’ll send you back dummy stop stop stop. He throws open the glove box, downs two aspirin dry, and stares at his paper with simmering frustration.

#

Convenient and questionable conclusions—random, but more often the result of some cosmic calculation—distribute themselves freely among the farcical land of television studios and canned laughter, and the banal, less saccharine places we call reality.  This is evident in the climax to this story, the culprit here being a house number worn faded from sunshine and rain to look more like a six than an eight.  Frankie answers his front door, takes one look at Lloyd in his repairman uniform, and falls to his knees.  His face turns the color of a Fuji apple.  Laughter rumbles in the hollows of his bones.

Lloyd, his delicate self-esteem collapsing into billowing folds of melted wax in the shadow of the young man laughing at him, three years of progress at the hospital popping and sparking into wisps of ash, brings his heavy boot into Frankie’s mouth and sends him sliding across the linoleum floor.

Frankie keeps laughing, his funny bone having hijacked the rest of his body, pushing back the fear and panic struggling to take the helm.  His mind spirals into a whirlwind, and as he chokes on blood and teeth, wet snorts sending sprays into Lloyd’s face, he thinks of Diff’rent Strokes, and how he’ll too be canceled like some old show, dropped from the airwaves summarily, remembered now and again as a relic of nostalgia and good humor.

—
©2009 Paul Edmonds

Paul Edmonds’ recent credits include fiction in Midnight Screaming, Macabre Cadaver, and The Monsters Next Door. He lives in Massachusetts.

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