Gothic Alaskan and Other Stories: Bad Horror from the Dark Subcontinent

Copyright © 2000 by Eugene Forrest Shelby

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Contents

The Haunted Outhouse

Irritec

One of One

The Howl of the Weremoose

Completely Bogus Advertising: Checkmark Wills.

Night Diver

River Sharks

Worst-Case Scenario

The Frankenplant

Stampede

Completely Bogus Advertising: Really Cheap Funerals:

Wolfpoodles

Camp Siberia

Sleeping with the Squirrels

The Antisanta

Snuggles

Completely Bogus Advertisement: MindBelt:

Some Enchanted Evening

Ode to My Behind

Completely Bogus Advertising: Prisoner Uniforms:

Completely Bogus Advertising: Boot Branding:

Completely Bogus Advertising: Hypothermic Weight Loss Clinic:

Completely Bogus Advertising: Discrete Arrest Service:

The Haunted Outhouse

It was minus-30 when a mother moose and her calf trapped my friend Neil in his pink, one-hole outhouse near Funny River Road outside of Sterling. He used the typical Alaskan approach for going from one building to another: wear a t-shirt and levis and run like hell. It usually took him only two or three minutes to get back in the cabin.

When he opened the outhouse door to leave, there was a mommy moose and her calf right in front of him. The calf was leaning against the cabin for heat. Imagine her surprise to hear a door creaking behind her. She jumped and turned, lowering her ears.

The cows angry eyes glittered evilly in the glow of the cheerful, flashing Christmas lights in his cabin window. She had that crazed maternal look that mothers get when something is threatening their cute little 300-lb baby. The hair rose on her back. She hunched her shoulders, lowered her head, and glared at him.

There was no room for him to get outside. He was inches from 800 pounds of ass-stomping motherhood.

Neil was tingling all over. He was already blue in some really important places. He began shivering.

Neil asked himself what Peter Hathaway Capstick, the famous hunting guide and writer, would have done in a predicament like this, and decided this was more of a Patrick McManus situation.

He tried to inch the door open a little. It groaned horrifically.

The moose put her head down even further, like a bull about to charge a matador. There was a kamikaze glint in her eyes. The cold gnawed on Neil’s extremities. Soon he would have to run for it.

Neil recalled a Capstick story about someone who had underestimated Mommy Power and become the black grunge between some beasties toes. Many dark jungles and forests harbored the smashed skeletons of hunters who had wandered between a mother and her offspring.

He could picture the two of them bouncing up and down on his prone posterior, pounding their hooves into him as he twitched and writhed. A steep price for a bowel movement.

His hands and feet ached terribly. His posterior threatened to become too hard to stomp.

Using what little manual dexterity remained, he tossed a roll of toilet paper through a crack in the door.

Here, moosey, moosey. Fetch!

The cow watched the toilet roll fly past. She let out a series of low grunts. Her breath curled up into the cold black night. She narrowed her eyes at the strange sounds and movements coming from the square thing. A magazine flew past. Now it was throwing things at her. It was not acting at all like the other square things she had been around. Maybe it was haunted.

Neil decided he would have to sit there until he froze to death. Only then would the moose wander off. Whoever found him would think he had gotten stuck to the seat. He could see the headline in the Kenai Clarion: Man Dies in Pink Outhouse.

He cursed himself for not putting an escape hatch in the outhouse and resolved to get a can of bear mace or hair spray or something equally repulsive to take to the outhouse in the future.

The back wall of the outhouse was a patchword of fiberboard and nails. He kicked it a few times. The roof creaked loudly, threatening to collapse. "Man Dies in Crumpled Pink Outhouse."

"I’m doomed!" he howled.

He decided to wait it out. He waived his arms and did knee-bends to get warmer. He sang loudly and badly. The cow eventually lost interest and returned to the side of cabin. She leaned against it for warmth, giving Neil enough space to slip out of the outhouse. His joints were stiff as he stumbled around the cabin to the front door.

Thereafter, he never went to the outhouse without a year’s supply of arctic clothing, a flashlight and a book.

THE END

Irritec

An advanced civilization has invaded earth. So advanced, they are virtually invulnerable. The good news is that they don’t believe in killing or maiming. The bad news is they use superior technology to irritate their victims into submission. And they’re in no hurry to win.

The circular playing field was strewn with exhausted, injured players. The crowd stomped and screamed. The Phoenix Mesquites were hosting the Miami Crocodiles. The closest, most intense Mazeball game in history was in triple overtime.

The playing field was covered with hills, mounds, obstacles and tunnels. A Mesquite runner intercepted a kick on the 20 and ran sixty yards toward the goal. He bounced off several blood-crazed Crocs, rolled under a vertical obstacle, jumped off a steep mound, and faked left just as the dwarf bull swept past him.

Colon, the fiendishly clever mini-bull, had been trained to charge into groups and break plays. A heavily padded plank had been mounted on its horns. It roamed the field at will and knocked the players down with vicious glee. It broke up formations and sabotaged strategies.

The bull gleefully flipped a Mesquite player who was running interference. The ball carrier was tackled with extreme prejudice by a boxcar-shaped lineman and the ball bounced into the hands of a Croc guard, who made a brilliant multi-directional 200-yard run to the rolling net that was Arizona’s field goal. The goalies, wearing weighted snowshoes, rolled the heavy-wheeled net around to make scoring harder. The runner was vigorously mashed by two defensive linemen before he could fling the ball into the net.

A shimmering black cloud appeared overhead. Several pieces of junk dropped from the cloud and plopped onto the field in a clattering heap. The table-sized objects resembled plastic bowls that had been half-melted and then half-flattened. They rose from the ground and hovered in sloppy formation.

The ball popped free again. It was grabbed by a Arizonan, who ran for his life for the perimeter. He was knocked sideways by the mini-bull and compacted between four Floridians before he could hit the ground. The resounding crunch later became a collector’s item among recordings of sports injuries.

The ball shot upward and a mob of players fought for possession. It popped into the hands of a Croc, who tore down the field like a hare being chased by rabid hounds. The crowd roared as he weaved and danced down the fifty, charged past the forty, gathered speed on the

thirty and then fell into a deep pit that opened at the twenty yard line.

A deep pit?

He stood in the soft dirt and looked around in amazement as an excited Arizonan leaped into the pit and flattened him.

The spectators gaped at the sudden pit. By now, several UFO’s had blanketed the field. Light from the overhead lamps seemed to bend toward the bizarre craft. Some of the craft positioned themselves directly in front of television cameras, blocking the view of millions of viewers.

The clunky heaps looked like shipwrecks from another world. Their clattering hulks appeared to have been thrown together from junk. They had exposed superstructures, cantilevered platforms, flaring buttresses and twisted beams sticking out at random. They were the very antithesis of sleek and powerful. They seemed to have been designed to offend the senses of even the most backward life forms.

They were.

A chorus of grating voices blared from one of the spaceships, the Sanity Crusher. The sound was somewhere between the tortured screech of a car scraping a concrete wall and the whine of a dentist’s drill. The first words from another world were:

Attention lowlife cretin earthlings. We are the Olty-Vartans. We are here to irritate you. The ever-changing voices screeched and warbled harshly, in a way that seemed designed to make listeners cringe. They were.

The violence-crazed crowd became angry that anyone would interrupt this crucial moment in the history of sports.

Get off the field! they yelled.

The invaders did not move.

Our science is far in advance of your pathetic little civilization, continued the chorus. We have conquered poverty, hunger, disease, ignorance and space travel. We have come here to make war on you, to show you that we are better at irritating and annoying than you are.

An excited player pounded a spaceship with his helmet.

We are a warlike people, but not so over-emotional and over-dramatic as you vapor-brained earthlings. Our wars are composed of many frustrating little actions that irritate the enemy into submission.

The space ships jerked and twitched like a bad home movie. Large hunks of unrecognizable material hung from cables. They clanged and boomed into the hulls as the ships moved. They made a sound as if something from another world was struggling to get out. They seemed to serve no function other than to make grating noise.

For millennia we irritated each other, but it got boring. The same old tactics led to the same old predictable responses. So we conquered space and irritated other planets. We have traveled the universe. And now that we have reached the epitome of civilization, our greatest pleasure is to amuse ourselves by playing with lesser civilizations. You are our new toys.

Several deep trenches dissected the field and made further play impossible. The mob roared in frustration.

In the coming months we will harass and aggravate you beyond measure. We will give you no rest. We will destroy your sanity, your patience, alienate you from your friends, relatives, and pets, and otherwise disrupt your life as much as possible.

At this point beams of light passed over the players and audience, causing them to itch and scratch.

"You have no hope against our superior technology. We will break everything that works and then make it do things you don’t want it to do. We will conquer your cheesy little planet and force you to do things you really hate. The only thing you can look forward to is the day we allow you to surrender to us."

In the meantime, we will amuse ourselves by changing some of your credit devices by one digit.

As a last insult, the Olty-Vartans mangled the goal net, erased the line markers, stole the ball and blew out the night lights. The ships gave off an eerie, demonic caterwauling which might have been alien laughter, and they jiggled off in different directions.

Word traveled throughout the globe: At last the centuries-old dream of scientists was coming to pass. We had made contact with life from another world. Would they tell us about other civilizations? Would they show us how to travel through space? Would they answer our most profound questions about life? Was there a Higher Being? Was there a purpose to our lives? Is there life after death?

The next day, tens of millions of credit cards stopped working.

* * *

Donald Tunney, the President of the United States, looked tired and edgy in his chair in the Cabinet Room. He had been deluged with complaints from all over. He had a stabbing headache.

Around the long rectangular mahogany table were Congress leaders, cabinet members, National Security Council members, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential advisers. There was a fireplace at one end and two chandeliers above the table. The plush leather chairs had bronze nametags on the back.

Tholand Brenton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, took a thick, sealed glass container out of a metal canister and put it on top of the table.

We have a problem, Mr. President.

Brenton slid the container toward him. There were several small balls rolling around the bottom, ranging in size from BB-sized to barely visible. They were perfect little spheres. In each was a tiny little hole with a tentacle sticking out that ended in a claw.

The weapons research people call them Murphyballs. They are self-replicating robots with just enough brains to crawl around until they find something to screw up. The tentacles propelled the balls around the inside of the glass. Some of them tried to grab the surface.

"They’re made of whatever material is available. They pile up around any moving part and jam it. Enough of them can hobble just about anything."

My God, muttered the National Security Director.

They also collect around electrical connections and suck power. Wherever they find a source of energy, they form a chain to ground it out.

What kind of a fiendish mind could conceive of a device that stops other devices from functioning? asked the Director.

It’s contrary to everything civilization stands for, scowled the Secretary of State.

Can they climb things?

Yes.

If the big ones can’t get into something, continued the Chairman, they make little ones. If the little ones can’t get in, they make smaller ones, and so on. They could become a very big monkey wrench.

* * *

Frustration thrived. Murphyballs got into appliances and sucked up electricity. Appliances altered speed. Lights flickered, stereos squawked, radios and televisions hissed and popped. Computers went blank. Nothing was crippled, just hobbled.

* * *

Wherever the spaceships went, everything electric went haywire. Telephone conversations became garbled, screens and lights flickered, microwaves sputtered, radios squawked and hissed and video players became erratic. Computer images bulged until they were too large for the screen, as if the screen were under a magnifying glass that roved around at random. Key operators had to wait until the magnifying glass happened upon the information they were looking for.

The man in front of an automatic teller in Dallas kept getting a slip of paper and swearing. A long line had formed behind him.

Hey, up there, said a snide voice from the back. Do you think you could come back and play with the machine later?

He turned and glared at them.

Look at this, he held up the slips. They’re all different. Every time I check my account, the total is different.

As the line progressed, each account balance was invariably off by a few dollars. Irate customers muttered angrily when they got their cash.

In businesses around the world, cash registers mistotalled, causing frequent arguments between customers and clerks.

Many people became highly agitated when their favorite shows were halted by flickering screens and failing sound.

Children, already grumpy from jammed-up toys, sometimes broke into fits of frustration. They would scream and flop on the ground and pound it in a sort of epileptic fit.

The Olty-Vartans were fascinated by these tantrums. There was a beauty, a strength, a force of character to them. The Olty-Vartans came to revere these fits as works of art. They were inspired by the powerful emotions, the intense drama, and the extreme contortions. They decided that every earthling should perform them.

* * *

And now, our six o’clock news crew reports from the parking lot at Los Angeles International Airport.

Thank you, Sherry. The flying buttresses of the spacey-looking restaurant in the middle of LAX loomed behind the young, athletic-looking newscaster as he spoke into the camera.

The aliens are shifting parked cars around Los Angeles. They move them a few hundred yards and put them down, forcing owners to search for their car every time they want to go somewhere. People have reported finding their cars hidden in alleys, in other people’s garages, and behind bushes.

Street name signs and freeway exit signs have also been moved from their original spots.

Eyewitnesses report hearing an eerie, staccato sound emanating from the spacecraft after the aliens had completed these acts.

Inside the airport, throngs of irate passengers rummaged through open suitcases and called out to one another: I’ve got five size 40 Hawaiian shirts; a pair of white, size 10 air-cushion tennis shoes; two pair of levis and some underwear.

That’s mine, someone would yell, and the next person would announce what they had in their suitcase.

A long line of steaming passengers glared over the counter of the luggage office and clamored for service. Several telephones rang incessantly. Behind the counter, luggage was piled up to the ceiling all the way to the back of the large storage room. The hyperactive clerks had fear in their eyes.

A large, angry woman pulled an insulated hunting jacket from her suitcase and shoved it at a clerk’s sweaty face. It had recoil pads built into the shoulders and loops in front for shotgun shells.

This can’t be my luggage. My things aren’t in it.

Are these your tags? he panted.

Yes. But I don’t wear a hunting jacket or rubber wading pants.

Could this be your husband’s clothing?

This is my husband, she pointed at a smallish man next to her, and he doesn’t hunt.

Oh.

Her husband kept feeling around for a place to put his keys and wallet, but all his pockets had been sealed shut by the Olty-Vartans.

"How could you lose the contents of my luggage and not the luggage?"

The clerk shrugged helplessly. I don’t understand all this. It’s never happened before.

I should have been suspicious when I saw there wasn’t a scratch on the suitcase, she grumbled.

The clerk’s forehead furrowed. "We can’t put a tracer on the contents of your luggage. There’s no tag to match it to."

The husband squinted at him. "Somewhere