Other terrors, p.32
Other Terrors, page 32
I found it staring right back at me: a framed movie poster against the far wall. My grandmother’s name was in large red type: Mazelle Washington. From the size of the type, bigger than anyone else’s, she could have been as big as Barbra Streisand. A true movie star!
I shifted the light to see the faces: not photos like the modern movie posters I saw at the theater, but realistic drawings. The only Black face on the poster was a young woman encircled by a white man and two white women who were laughing against the backdrop of the Empire State Building. But the Black woman wasn’t laughing—her mouth was in a wide-open O, her hands clapped to her ears in exaggerated shock.
It took me a long while to realize that the woman in the sketch was Grandmother. She was Mama’s age, and she wasn’t in a ball gown like I’d seen her in every other photo. She was wearing a frumpy black dress and white apron, a maid’s uniform. Her hair was in short, thick braids in bows flying out in every direction, a crown of spikes on her head. If it weren’t for the way the artist had captured her eyes and sharp chin, I’d never have recognized her.
The movie title was just above her hair: Lazy Mazy Goes to New York.
My surge of pride upon seeing her name wilted when I saw the whole poster, then sank to a dull throb in my stomach. I didn’t understand everything then, but I knew that Grandmother wouldn’t have hidden the poster in the darkest cubby in her darkest room if she ever wanted to see it again. She would have hung it on her wall.
I’d found a true secret. And it felt like power.
I scooted out of the crawl space as fast as I could and jammed the door closed again, hoping she would never notice that I had opened it. Between the mysteries in the snow and the treasure in my own room—which I planned to dig into more late at night, when everyone in the house was sleeping—I was starting to think the visit to Grandmother’s house wasn’t so bad.
Then I turned back my blankets.
My cassette player was gone.
“Excuse me,” I said, and the card game came to a halt. Uncle Ricky looked at me with one eyebrow raised, on alert.
“We’ve got a game goin’, Johnny,” Uncle Ricky said with a note of caution.
“Can I please talk to you alone, Grandmother?”
She took her time turning her head to acknowledge me, and this time she didn’t disguise her simmering eyes. I’d embarrassed her, and she was enraged. I might have been more afraid of her if I hadn’t found her secret.
“Have you ever heard the saying that children should be seen and not heard?” Her voice was still sweet, a show for her friends. “You can see the adults here are busy.”
“It’s all right, M . . .” the opera singer said, but it didn’t soften Grandmother’s eyes.
Uncle Ricky tapped on my foot so hard with his boot that it hurt.
“Some stuff is missing from my room,” I told Grandmother, accusation in my voice. “My tape player my mom gave me for Christmas. And most of my tapes. Can you give them back, please?” After frantic searching, I had learned that my Sly and the Family Stone and Ohio Players were gone too, along with the Jackson Five tape still in my player.
“Did your mother buy you those?” Grandmother said. “Has she listened to those lyrics? Those lyrics aren’t for children. Half those band members are out of their minds on drugs. Did she tell you that? None of that so-called music you like is worth a damn. I’ll teach you better. You need to learn about Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Louis Armstrong. That’s music.”
I don’t know what Uncle Ricky saw in my face to make him jump up from the table to grab me by the arm, but I couldn’t remember ever being so mad. A stranger had stolen from me, was lecturing me. Was saying I had a bad mother.
“I’ll talk to ’im,” Uncle Ricky said, and he pulled me toward the kitchen.
“You’d better,” Grandmother said with bland menace. “Marching in here like . . .”
“Just hush,” Uncle Ricky said when I complained about his tight grip. He steered me past the kitchen and out of the door, to the steps. He closed the door carefully behind us, his breath hanging in clouds. “What are you doing? You don’t talk to my mother like that. Ever. No one does.”
“Somebody should,” I said, defiant. “She doesn’t have any right to—”
“She has the right to make up whatever rules she wants in her house, and never forget that. When you go back in, you apologize.”
“Why are y’all so scared of her?”
Uncle Ricky looked away from me, out toward the gate. He and Mom had that in common, at least. Neither of them wanted to talk about Grandmother.
“Look . . .” he said, sighing a fog of breath. “We’ll stop at a record store on the way to the airport. I’ll grab you a new player, whatever you want. Cool? Just . . . smile. Get along.”
“You mean pretend.”
“What the hell you think?” he said. “You’re gonna’ spend every goddamn day of your life pretending. Get good at it. She’s doing you a favor. Shit. What do you think this world is?”
He went back toward the kitchen door. I thought he might slam it, but he didn’t. He slipped back inside, leaving me to my anger.
I glanced back down toward the bloody spot I’d uncovered, or where I thought it had been. My own circling footprints were there, and my stick, but the purplish blood ring was gone.
Buried again.
That night, Grandmother brought out her film projector to show off for her friends. I thought we might see one of her movies, but instead she showed interviews of famous people talking about her. Someone must have collected every nice thing anyone had said about her, as if we were at her funeral. A tall white actor in a tuxedo who was in that movie about a flying car I’d seen with Mom said, “I’ll tell ya . . . if you want to learn about comedic timing, find the work of the greats like Mazy Washington.” A white woman with short orange hair was on The Tonight Show and said to Johnny Carson, “I grew up loving Mazy and those terrific pratfalls, so it never occurred to me that a woman couldn’t be funny.” I noticed that everyone praising her was white, until at the end Muhammad Ali was ringside in boxing trunks saying to Howard Cosell, “Get in the ring with me, you must be crazy. I’ll dance and I’ll jab and I’ll dodge you like Mazy.”
Everyone laughed and applauded, Joe Louis loudest of all. “That boy still talks smack.”
“He can back it up,” Uncle Ricky said. Everyone laughed again. Uncle Ricky looked back at me: “Uncle Joe helps train Ali, you know.” He winked at the way my mouth fell open.
“But we’re not here to talk about me,” the retired boxer said. He raised his glass in a toast. “To Mazelle Washington—one of the greats.”
“And fuck anyone, Negro or white, who doesn’t think so,” the opera singer muttered, but I don’t think anyone else heard her except me.
Everyone toasted Grandmother with champagne flutes while I drank apple juice. When Grandmother put on her old-timey Duke Ellington, I let the opera singer lead me in a dance. I was smiling so much that I fooled myself into thinking I was having a good time. I was blood kin to one of the greats, after all. Grandmother’s seizure of my music didn’t seem as upsetting as it had been at first. Maybe any grandmother would have done it.
Besides, I wouldn’t need my music that night. I had the cubbyhole to explore.
Once again, I excused myself early to be alone. Grandmother stepped in front of me just when I was almost clear of the room. Her approach felt like a performance.
“We need to know each other better,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll walk in the yard.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She patted my arm, the most affection she had shown me. I missed the way Mom hugged me like she didn’t want to let go. Maybe that was another way Mom made sure she wasn’t anything like her mother.
“Sadie says he does well in school . . .” Grandmother bragged to her friends, which sounded like another performance. I thought about asking if I could sleep in the cabin with Uncle Ricky while she had an audience. But I wanted to see what was in her files.
I read my comics until all of the noises in the house were gone: the footsteps from guests trudging upstairs, the shower running in Grandmother’s bathroom, her toilet flushing for the last time. When the house was still, I climbed back into the cubbyhole and pulled out the first case of files to scour with my flashlight. Most of them were notices about Lazy Mazy, and photos of her with that same hairdo and oh-shit expression, or some with a grin so wide that it seemed too big for her face. One headline from 1935 said: what has lazy mazy gone and done now? Beneath the stack of articles, I found reels of film. The true treasure. Since she’d already set up her projector in the living room, it felt like fate instead of prying.
I had to see for myself.
I moved quietly and made sure the projector volume was turned all the way down before I flicked it on. At first, I threaded the film wrong and it spun with a flapping racket I was sure would wake the whole house, but nobody came out while I fixed it.
Lazy Mazy Goes to New York began to play.
The film opened with Lazy Mazy dead asleep at a kitchen table, slowly stirring a mixing bowl while she dozed. A white man in too much makeup walked in wearing his work clothes, and I didn’t need the sound on to know he was mad to find her sleeping. Lazy Mazy fell back in her chair and rolled to her feet like a gymnast. The bowl she’d been stirring had ended up on her head somehow, dripping batter on her face. That only made the white man madder, and he spanked her butt while she ran away.
I tried to be quiet, but I laughed. Her eyes were so big, nothing like Grandmother’s. The expressions on her face! The way she could contort her body in unexpected ways. Every moment on the big living room screen was a revelation. This was Mom’s mother? My grandmother?
I’d been watching the film for maybe ten minutes, laughing louder than I should have, when I realized someone was standing behind me. I felt a presence before I turned around, the same way I had in the snow. I hoped it was the opera singer, or Uncle Ricky.
But it was Grandmother, framed in the living room entryway’s blue light from the projector in a fancy robe with her straight hair loose, fanned across her shoulders. She’d been pressing her hair; she was holding a hot comb. Instead of looking at me, she was staring at herself on the screen.
“Grandma!” I blurted. “You’re Lazy Mazy! Is that what ‘The Lazy M’ means—”
That was all I had time to say before her robe’s sleeves fanned out like a night creature’s wings as she swooped toward me.
“How dare you,” she hissed in my ear before she grabbed my arm with shocking strength.
And then I was in the worst pain of my life. I had to look down to realize she’d pressed the hot comb into my upper arm hard, applying more pressure the more I tried to pull away. It wasn’t orange-hot, but it was hot enough to stick to my skin and make me yowl. Hot enough to leave a scar I would carry into adulthood.
“Stop! It hurts!” I yelled, and wrenched my arm away.
She was standing in front of the screen now, the film playing across her face, the ghost of her forty-year-old grin mocking from her forehead while she stared at me with tearful loathing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. To this day, I don’t know what I was apologizing for. She was the one who’d hurt me, yes, but I’d hurt her too. Scarred her, too. It was as if I’d dug up a dead body and dragged it in her living room the way our cat brought us dead mice. I saw it in her eyes.
I ran as fast as I could to the kitchen door and outside, to the snow.
“It’ll be fine,” Uncle Ricky said after he’d dressed my burn with a cold, damp cloth from his cabin’s tiny sink. “Stay out here tonight.”
The burn had turned an ugly red, with a rising bubble on my skin I’d never had before.
“I wanna go home.” I’d stopped crying, but the tears were still in my voice.
Uncle Ricky sighed, but then he nodded. “Okay. We’ll figure it out tomorrow. But I don’t drive out on these roads in the dark.”
“Did she ever do that to you?”
“Not that, exactly.” I thought he would leave the story unspoken, but after a moment he went on. “One time I was about fourteen and I gave her some lip at the store. When we got home, she pulled a tire iron out of the trunk and whacked my leg good a couple times. I had to stop playing football after that . . . but it kept Uncle Sam off me.”
His story was so much worse that I almost felt better. Almost.
“What about Mom?”
“I tried to protect her. But when you get home . . . ask.”
“How can you not hate your mom?” I asked. “She’s the worst person I’ve ever met.”
Uncle Ricky sucked in a long breath. “I used to,” he said. “I guess your mom still does. But nobody’s born like that, Johnny. One day I realized . . . everything has a price. A burden. So I just started feeling sorry instead. There but for the grace of God. You know?”
I didn’t know. And I hoped I never would. As I nursed my arm, I was mad at all of them.
Uncle Ricky went right to sleep on the bottom bunk of the cabin’s bunk bed, but I stared through the curtains toward the house, the kitchen door. I expected her to come after me.
About an hour after Uncle Ricky went to sleep, as I’d feared, the kitchen light went on and the door opened with a shaft of light. Instinct made me crouch low in the cabin window.
Grandmother was still in her robe, carrying an aluminum tray of food. She looked like she was taking out the trash. But instead, she sat on the frigid steps with the tray on her lap. She looked so sad and alone that I almost felt sorry for her too. Her sob was a barely muffled wail. She could catch her death out there.
Grandmother opened the tray and tossed a chicken leg on to the snow. And another.
The snow near the meat moved . . . and something popped out, showing itself as it shook off a layer of frost.
It wasn’t a fox. It wasn’t a dog or a cat. It was white but didn’t seem to have fur, just pale skin cleaved to a frame that looked more like an insect’s than a mammal’s despite a bony tail lashing from side to side. Long, too-sharp teeth chomped at the offered meal, grinding meat and bone alike. I gasped with each snatch of its powerful jaws.
The terrible, nameless thing slid closer to Grandmother, ready to keep feeding. But she didn’t run. She didn’t even flinch. As the hideous creature burrowed its snout in the tray in her lap, she let out childish laughter, her cheeks puffed wide with Lazy Mazy’s mindless grin.
Acknowledgments
The editors wish to thank the following for their support, commitment, and contributions to this project:
Lisa Morton and John Palisano at the Horror Writers Association; Alec Shane at Writer’s House; Jaime Levine and the editorial, creative, and marketing teams at William Morrow Books/HarperCollins Publishers; Antonio D’Intino and the fine folks at Circle of Confusion; graphic designer Pablo Gerardo Camacho for the fantastic cover; the two dozen contributors whose works of literary darkness shed light on the other; and all of the HWA members who submitted their tantalizing tales of otherness.
About the Editors
Vince A. Liaguno
VINCE A. LIAGUNO is the Bram Stoker Award–winning editor of Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (Dark Scribe Press, 2008), an anthology of queer horror fiction, which he co-edited with Chad Helder; Butcher Knives & Body Counts (Dark Scribe Press, 2011), a collection of essays on the formula, frights, and fun of the slasher film; and the second volume in the Unspeakable Horror series, subtitled Abominations of Desire (Evil Jester Press, 2017). His debut novel, 2006’s The Literary Six, was a tribute to the slasher films of the eighties and won an Independent Publisher Award (IPPY) for Horror and was named a finalist in Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards in the Gay/Lesbian Fiction category.
He currently resides in the mitten-shaped state of Michigan, where he is a licensed nursing home administrator by day and a writer, anthologist, and pop culture enthusiast by night. He is a member (and former secretary) of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC).
www.VinceLiaguno.com
Rena Mason
RENA MASON is an American author of Thai-Chinese descent and a multiple Bram Stoker Award recipient for The Evolutionist and “The Devil’s Throat,” as well as a 2014 Stage 32 / The Blood List Search for New Blood Screenwriting Contest quarter finalist. She has published fiction and nonfiction in various anthologies, magazines, and books on writing, and she writes a monthly column. She is currently working on a Thai ghost screenplay and two novels.
She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, the International Screenwriters’ Association, and the Public Safety Writers Association.
She’s a retired registered nurse and an avid scuba diver who resides in the great Pacific Northwest.
www.RenaMason.Ink
About the Contributors
Linda D. Addison is an award-winning author of five collections, including The Place of Broken Things written with Alessandro Manzetti, and How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend. The first African American recipient of the HWA Bram Stoker Award, she is also a recipient of the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award, HWA Mentor of the Year, and SFPA Grand Master. Addison has published over 380 poems, stories, and articles and is a member of CITH, HWA, SFWA, and SFPA. Catch her work in Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Under Twin Suns, and Southwest Review magazine.
