A comedy of terrors
Page 19 of 50
Anyway...
Back home at the trailer the sustained abuse of Junior was as bad as I expected and also worse. In his long recounting of Granfather's condition, Spike had not included the fact that poor Junoir was still on that exercycle peddalling furiously as to keep the electric generator sending a voltage charge to the basterd's ball. But they had moved the monster out of the Command Centor in the yard and inside the trailer. Junior remmained in the yard, the big black wires leading from the cycle up into the living room window.
Dr. Ripke met me at the door and led me into the trailer babbling. Ripke is the one who does not talk allot. But the idea of the Risen Beast has rekindolled his interest in disgousting sciences and so fear and revulsion once agian propell Ripke to self-awareness.
Did you ever see on those medicol TV shows about surgery where they show an operation? And how the surgeons get those blue bedsheets and create that hole so only the patient's beating heart is seen on a feild of blue while the rest of the person's body is obscured?
Yes, only his reppulsive face, stairing out, his whole small face, like that of a tiny angry demon child taken to an amusement park, where he was forced by his big devil parents to pose for a photo in one of those cheap sheets of plywood that you stand behind that has a face-sized hole cut out of it with a jigsaw, and that has painted allover its flat surface the scene of a beach, where you are phottographed with your face appearring to be attached to the body of a fake bikini beauty.
I was afraid. I quickly scampored off to the kitchen. In there Uncle Zeke hovered nervously and tried to poke his head in to see what was going on. I asked Zeke if Granfather was back to his own self.
"Yep," said my uncle. "All day he done been catchin up on his mail. A soul sure do git a lot o'mail in all them months."
In adition to mountains of junkmail, there was maggazines and newspappers of all sorts that also littored the floor. Granfather is a real news hound. Aparantly one particulor headline from toword the end of the year 2000 cought his eye, a USA TODAY issue that I actualy remember. It was taped up on the wall across from Granfather, right in the old basterd's line of sight. It was when President Clinton visited Vietnam, and it featurred a photo of him grinning sort of naughtey-looking as he stood directly infront of and slightly beneath a very large head-and-shouldor statue of Ho Chi Minh with the caption of the photo reading:
Madison and Blankenship, the other two criptozoologists were unseen, and both under the sheet working on the old bastard.
"Are you sure you want this pose?" I heard Madison's voice from undor the fabric.
"YES I DO WANT THIS POSE. I WANT TO BE MOLDED INTO THAT THAR POSE, FOR THE NINETY-TENTH TIME, YOU THICK HEADED DUMBASS!" Granfather screamed up at the ceiling. This made Junior whimper from outside, and pedel faster and faster.
The old basterd was still frozon solid. Blankenship cautiousley looked into Granp's reptile eyes. "LIGHT ME A CIGARATE," Granfather mumbled omminously like a murderous, threatening Faulknerian charicature.
Trembling, Blankenship lit it, and somehow gathored up the nerve to ask Granfather a question.
"If'n ye don't mind me askin," his Scottish accent lilted, "Yer very first words after awaking, 'twas about the Hannity and Colmes fellers. Can you ellaborate on it, aye?"
Granfather was silent. His gaze lulled with heavy eyelids, sort of in a dopey way those polor bears on the Nature channels allways pretend to act dumb before they attack. Blankenship, ever currious to the point of foolishness asked another question.
"Did ye dream Grampy: DREAM did ye, since you were asleepin' all those long months?"
Granfather's eyes flashed back to sharpness. The seated old basterd looked back at the Scotsman angrilly. He was still frozen, unmoveabble as a stone statue. He puffed the cigarate, and staired at Blankenship for a long, long time. The scene woud of been as still as a phottograph exept for the tip of the cigarete glowing brighter and redder. It woud of been as silent as a picture exept for the squeaky whine of the exercycole, and Junior's faint gasping sobs from out in the yard.
The pregnent tense pause sudenly ended as the beastly ghoulish monster exhailed two broad sweeping upside-down-mushroom-shaped gusts of greazy smoke from his flexing, waxing nostrills.
He... -- Or should I say, "it" -- did not look real. Granfather looked like a dragon. An evil ugly and carved-to-be-deformed-on-purpose wooden carousel dragon, its splintery surface chipped, its poisonous lead paint crackoled with age, and its remaining gold leaf finish desperately scraiped off by the fingernails of dope-addicted carnival hooligans who'd snuck in at night by scaling with scar-tracked blue bony limbs the rusty chain link fence of the abbandoned amusement park.
At last the cruel evil monstrous old basterd spoke. "YOU HAD A LITTLE ACCIDENT LAST YEAR, DIDN'T YOU?"
Granfather was referring to how he bit off one of the Scotch doctor's glutemi, (one side of his butt) which now was replaced with what coud be best called a prosthetic ass cheek. Actualy, a very large bag of antisepptic plastic filled with saline fluid, surgicaly inserted into the resultant void carved by the basterd's jaws and placed under a flap of skin taken off the Cripto's uppor arm to close the wound.
Blankenship looked shaken to be reminded of it, and nodded painfully.
"Aye," he said softly. "But Grampy, I ask again," he stammored, "Did ye dream in yer coma?"
Madison blurted out in warning, "Your pushing it, Blankenship!"
"YEP. I HAD A DREAM," Granfather finaly answored calmly, "ONE DREAM. ONE RECURRING DREAM IN ALL THEM MONTHS."
Then in a low, growling threattening voice Granfather snarled out in long exhaustive detail about how he dreamed he was in a TV commerciol. Yes, to be exact an Extra Strength Polygrip(TM) comercial, one of those 15-second spots that look as if they were filmed back in the '80s, but are still being on the air, and that usualy showcase honest, homespun folk being interveiwed, like the big elderly auctioneer fellow in the seersuckor suit, who ends off saying, "Thanks to Polygrip, now I can be an auctioneer agian! Gimmetentwentyfivethirtyforty-fivefifity..."
...and the other old guy who loudly bites into a peice of corn, and then into an apple.
Granfather told about how for all those long months he dreammed he was in one of those comercials, hoping, yearning lusting and longing to sink his teeth into the one remaining asscheek of a particulor (and particulorly peculior) highlander criptozoologist scotsman, "JUST, in the words of Granfather, who decided to put on a Dracula-like Scottish brogue, "TO TASTE HIS WEE FLESH, AND FEEL HIM A-THRASHIN' IN THE VEDDY GRIP OF ME RAZORY JAWS, AND TO HEAR HIM A-SCREAMMIN' IN BLUDDY PAIN ACROSS THE MOOR,"
...and then Granfather started bleating out all these hommocidal threats against poor Blankenship as fast as an auctioneer, (the one in the Extra Strength Polygrip(TM) comercial), until, not only Blankenship, not only Ripke, but even Madison of all people, who like I said is the toughest one of the three all shivored and cowered in tearfull Juniorlike spasms of teeth-chattoring petrifying pee-in-your-pants terror.