Bill Ectric

Tamper II, Chapter 2

Tamper II: Dark Evening Wings

Chapter Two: Evie the Librarian Copyright by Bill Ectric

Evie the librarian told Heavy Turner about the axe murder, and he told me. Evie was a recent high school graduate. She wore those Harlequin eyeglasses with little rhinestones lining the frames, and the corners pointed up like horns. She worked at the Hansbury Public Library, a two-story wood frame house, on the corner of Main and Poplar, converted into a library in 1957. The building was painted white with blue trim. It had a porch with an overhanging roof supported by two white columns. Inside, beyond the front desk and white oak card catalog were several interconnected rooms full of books on shelves. Books labeled “mature” were on the second floor, and the stairs creaked.

In 1969, Evie hung an egg-shaped wicker chair from the porch roof. She sat in the egg every day, reading magazines and books, eating apples, and drinking Fresca. Sometimes she folded her legs comfortably inside the egg; other times, she swung them out and down, primly together, until her black & white saddle shoes almost touched porch floor. People walked in and out of the library on the honor system. When somebody rang the call bell, Evie sprang nimbly from the wicker egg chair and click-clacked inside to serve the patron.

Heavy’s flat black ’67 Camaro rolled past the library, went around the block, rolled by again more slowly, turned left onto Poplar Avenue, and into the parking lot behind the library.

Heavy and I got out of the Camaro. Heavy always wore a red nylon windbreaker, which he called a racing jacket, with an STP patch over the breast. We walked around to the front and climbed the three steps up from the sidewalk onto the porch.

“Those shoes are perfect,” said Heavy.

“Beg your pardon?” she said.

“My sister had to wear those at the school she went to,” Heavy said, “and now she hates them, calls them square. But you wear them well.”

“Ironic,” she said, stretching her whole body until her feet made contact with the floor.

“After you, gentlemen,” she gestured with her hand.

Evie followed us inside.

We followed her into a back room.

Eight musty stacks of old newspapers covered most of the surface of a wooden table.

“We’re having all these microfilmed,” she said. “It’s called microfiche. Our little library is getting modern. The 1949 stack is right here.”

“You haven’t looked at it?” said Heavy.

“I’ve already seen it.”

I like the smell of old books and magazines but unfolding the aged newspapers made me sneeze.

“God bless you,” said the librarian. “Please don’t sneeze on the papers.” And then she told Heavy, “Not so rough, you’ll tear them.”

“Here it is!” said Hev.

He spread the newspaper on another table and carefully turned the pages.

Evie and I leaned in. A black & white photo of a smiling cop, made pale by the flashbulb, and a single column of newsprint. The article, “Police Find No Murder at the Gregg House,” told about a drunken homeless man who claimed to see a beheading. He had stumbled into the police station, scared out of his wits. But the policeman on the scene looked like he was enjoying himself. “Just another night on the beat,” he was quoted, joking, “I would call it the graveyard shift but we got no bodies.”

“There was nothing to it,” I said, disappointed.

“But look,” said Evie. “Look behind him.”

The corner of the house was visible in the left of the photo, lit by the residual light of the camera flash. The trees in the background were dark. Directly behind the officer we could clearly see a vehicle with a police logo. It was a black van with high walls and smooth corners, but silvery in the camera flash.

“That is a 1948 Ford Mobile Crime Lab,” said Evie. “One of the first evidence vans.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I read and I listen,” she said. “But the real question is, why was forensics there if they didn’t find something?”

“Maybe they drove it, just in case,” I said.

“No,” she said. “They didn’t have an evidence van here in Hansburg. Somebody drove that thing all the way from Roanoke, fourteen miles away. Roanoke was the only city in the county that had a mobile crime unit.”

“Then the evidence van must not have found anything,” I said.

“But why were they there?” asked Heavy. “It’s like Evie says. Why were they there?”

“You know,” said Evie. “the guy who saw the murder it is still alive.”

“The drunk guy?” I asked.

“Well, he says he wasn’t that drunk, but yeah. His name is Wallace Breen. I know his aunt, sort of.”

“She told you about it?” asked Heavy.

“The beheading story is not such a big secret to the older folks in town. They just don’t care. Nobody knows for sure what really happened, and the whole thing just faded away, like everything, with time.”

“It hasn’t even been that much time,” I said.

“I told Evie about your paper,” said Heavy.

“Your newspaper sounds neat,” said Evie. “The Astral Beat? I want to read it. Would you like to meet Wallace Breen’s aunt?”

Tamper II: Dark Evening Wings

Chapter 1: Owl, 1969

I’ll never forget the sight of that big brown owl in the black of night, perched on a limb over a dirt road, illuminated by the headlights of Heavy Turner’s flat-black ’67 Camaro. It was the night Heavy told me about the man who jumped up and ran into the woods after someone cut off his head.

I was fifteen years old. Heavy Turner was sixteen. He showed off his driving skill and his extensive familiarity with back roads winding through the woods late at night in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The dashboard lights glowed like a spaceship console. Loud swamp rock, Green River by Credence Clearwater Revival, surged from the crooked 8-track tape deck designed to fit a different dashboard. My exhilaration bordered on fright as we peeled through barely visible woods, no moon, no streetlights, and tree branches whipping against the windshield.

The road carried us up a steep hill until our headlights beamed upward onto the owl, perched on a limb, brown feathers mottled with white, yellow eyes set in great fanning discs and sternly arched forehead, watching us intrude into its dark territory.

“Did you see that?” shouted Heavy, turning down the music with his right hand.

“That was a big owl!” I said.

“It was a great horned owl, I’m pretty sure,” said Heavy, dashboard lights reflecting from his glasses when he glanced at me. “There’s one in the barn on my dad’s farm. He says it chased away the barn owls.”

The road levelled out. We drove past a row of rickety mailboxes and Hev jerked the Camaro into a hard right turn. No matter how sharp the turn, Hev’s considerable bulk kept him unmovable and unflappable in his bucket seat, while my boney frame struggled to keep from tilting and sliding with every twist of the road. I thought we were running into a ditch, but no, we were now bouncing along on a dirt road that had been virtually hidden. Hev hit the brakes and steered into a sideways skid, flinging dirt and gravel. The car stopped sideways in the road, facing an old house set back in a clearing. It was a modest, unadorned wood-frame two-story house. A wide gable served as the roof of a boxy second-floor balcony. Heavy killed his headlights, but not the engine. He was always ready for a fast getaway. The house was completely dark except for a single light shining through yellow curtains like a Van Gogh sunflower. The light in the window suddenly went dark.

“That’s the opposite of what usually happens when I drive up to a house in the middle of the night,” said Hev. “I’m surprised. I didn’t think anybody lived here. This will be a great story for your paper.”

“What’s the story?” I asked.

“Back in the 1940s, a man was beheaded in the back yard by a broad-axe.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, and it gets better,” he said. “There was a bet. A wager on whether or not a body could run after the head was cut off. Not a chicken. A human person. These two guys invited a homeless guy to this house. That night, one of the men pulled a gun on the homeless guy, took him to the back yard and forced him down, head on a tree stump.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, and one of the men said, this broad-axe might not be sharp enough to cut through your neck. I’m only going to swing this heavy ass thing one time. If it only wounds you, you’re free to run away if you can. But you better run fast, they said, or we’ll start shooting.”

“The axe was dull?”

“No! The thing was sharp as hell! They just told him it was dull to prepare him for running! They wanted to know if, when the blade hit the back of his neck, a fraction of a second before it severed his spinal cord, the last nerve impulse rushing from his brain to his body was a command to run!”

“Did he run?”

“Hell, yes. As soon as that blade came down, his head rolled onto the ground and his body jumped over the stump and ran into the woods!”

“Who says? That can’t be.”

“They never found the head, but they found the headless body a mile away.”

“The body couldn’t have run that far,” I said. “It should have fallen down in a heap, just a little way into the woods.”

“Exactly.”

“Who are the people who supposedly saw this? Are they still alive?”

“That’s what we look into next,” said Hev. “Miss Evie has the newspaper archives and city records.”

The Camaro’s engine was still rumbling quietly.

“Why are we still sitting here?” I said, glancing around. “It’s a wonder someone hasn’t come out here with a shotgun.”

“Yeah,” said Heavy. “It’s time to go.”

He turned the wheel, hit the gas, and flicked on his headlights. Driving back over the hill, something fell with a thud onto the windshield. It was the severed head of a rabbit, oozing blood from the neck. Great wings flapped away in the dark sky.

“Ahhhh!” we both shouted.

The rabbit’s dead eyes were open, like it was looking at us through the windshield.

“Holy shit,” said Heavy. He hit the brakes on the downhill slope, so the head rolled and slid off the front of the hood. “That was freaky!”

“Did somebody throw that at us?” I asked.

“The owl dropped it. They do that sometimes.”

“Drop bloody heads on cars?!”

“Sometimes they decapitate their prey.”

“I never knew that.”

“Evie the Librarian says so. It’s a fact.”

What is a Weem? Find out!

Click on a pic.

Tamper Illustrated Cut & Paste

Get the whole story in Tamper Illustrated

Doug Skinner’s Latest

WHERE’S PAPA? PAPA IS HERE!

Doug Skinner has contributed to The Fortean Times, Fate, Weirdo, Nickelodeon, Cabinet, Typo, and other fine publications. His many books include Music From Elsewhere (Strange Attractor Books), The Potato Farm, and Nominata (both from Black Scat Books). Black Scat has also published his translations of Alphonse Allais, Alfred Jarry, Luigi Russolo, Isidore Isou, Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet, Caroline Crépiat, and Corinne Taunay.

Doug zez:

Perhaps you lie awake at night, your mind racing with questions. Why did Yolanda hang a flotation device from the ceiling? What happened to the Butler Bullion? Can a duck teach a dog to fly? Will Dover and Larson explore that mysterious door? What typos are most prized by collectors? Will Thyrsis and Gallus escape the wolf? And what will Bach’s 37 children do when they’re kicked out of the house?

These, and many other questions not mentioned here, will be answered by the stories in Papa Bach. You might be too amused and stimulated to go back to sleep, but your life will be richer, and, above all, more enjoyable. And you’ll never know what these stories are about unless you read them. Dig in!

PAPA BACH & OTHER STORIES
Doug Skinner
Trade paperback; 146 pp., $12.95
ISBN 979-8-9932444-7-1

Symbolic Play Chapbook Preview

Lover’s Night Drive

Down from a hammock in a socket wire attic,
he sped through the waterfall shower, both faucets.
Clean behind the bulkhead of the outside world,
for a lovers’ night drive under satellite magic.

He lifted the garage door open to a vision
of her standing in the rising frame of light to her expression
and they kissed when they hugged feeling words inside, 
for a lovers’ night drive under satellite magic.

The Flying Saucer Church

I’m driving, John is rolling, when the Interstate highway sign says gas and coffee next exit.

My lead foot swings us around and through the off the ramp and John trying to hand me a hot missile.

“I said roll it, not light it.”

So we drive past three gas stations, further into this little a town, you dig, a hidden hamlet of houses and I hand it back.

We slow to a crawl beside this round church, dig, retro-future design lines and out-of-this world-stained glass window cascade geometry.

“You know that Sister Rosetta Tharpe?” asked John.

“Black lady, plays Gospel and Blues on a white Gibson SG electric guitar. Man, her riffs would lift this church like a flying saucer!”

The Flying Saucer Church takes off and we follow it through a wooded area to a lodge or clubhouse. But we must get gas, coffee, and use the restroom so we turn back and continue our trip.

This has been a preview of The Symbolic Play Chapbook, available at Amazon.com

Amazing Stories Magazine

One of my favorite blogs is Wormwoodiana. They recently hosted a wonderful two-part guest post by John Howard on Amazing Stories magazine.

Mr. Howard begins:

For me 1977 was a great time to up my game as a serious reader of science fiction. I was 16 that year and in the summer left school for my first job. I considered myself rich at £96 per month. I was living at home and had few expenses after I had paid my father for ‘board and lodging’. The remainder of the money I earned was my own to spend. And because in those days saving towards a pension never entered my mind, most of my free cash went on science fiction.

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War Over Lemuria

Book Review by Bill Ectric

Richard Toronto is tuned in to what makes the “Shaver Mystery” so enthralling. It’s not the “mystery” itself; it’s the people behind it. What a movie War Over Lemuria would make! Imagine the figment-laced A Beautiful Mind (2001), in which Russell Crow portrayed the brilliant but schizophrenic mathematician, John Nash. Add some inner-circle editorial and publishing industry intrigue reminiscent of The Last Days of the New Yorker by Gigi Mahon or George Clooney’s biopic on Edward R. Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck. Now project this mosaic of media messaging through a prism of Ed Wood enthusiasm in the face of austerity, because this is not The New Yorker or CBS news – this is the story of a weird, almost forgotten episode in the history of pulp magazines, science fiction fans, public and private controversy, and, some would say, betrayal.

As early as 1797, when Bedlam patient James Tilly Matthews described the mental torments inflicted on him by the so-called “Air Loom,” doctors have studied victims of paranoid delusions, but post-World War II advances in science and communication galvanized the lunatic fringe with the widespread awareness of atomic energy, orbiting satellites, New Age harmonic convergence, and conspiracy theories. It was the perfect time for Shaver’s pseudoscience and Palmer’s mind-over-matter mysticism to collide.

Richard Toronto is the first to point out that Palmer embellished his life story almost compulsively; and that Shaver sometimes described things that probably weren’t there at all, even if he thought they were. All the better. What makes War Over Lemuria so fun to read are the complex personalities, the secretly interconnected publishing ventures, run-ins with the FBI, the boisterous controversy among science fiction fans, and, finally, the fact that it happened at all.

Toronto has researched the Palmer/Shaver collaboration for years. He corresponded with Richard Shaver himself, and has interviewed family members, friends, coworkers, and associates of both Shaver and Palmer. War Over Lemuria is everything I had hoped for and more.

Bill Ectric

An overlooked H. G. Wells novel

At Wormwoodiana, John Howard writes, “It was during [a] fraught period for Wells that he wrote what Adam Roberts, in H.G. Wells: A Literary Life (2019), refers to as ‘one of his oddest, most striking and most unjustly overlooked novels’ (321). This is Christina Alberta’s Father, first published one hundred years ago in September 1925.”

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Dead Men Naked

Dead Men Naked is the best novel I’ve read in while, satisfying to the end. All too often, books with supernatural overtones veer into preposterous territory, but not this one. Author Dario Cannizzaro achieves a near-perfect balance of realism and phantasm, humor and melancholy, the familiar and the uncanny. It is an incredibly fun read about soul mates, tequila, occult incantations, death, and visions of a giant crow. The somewhat flippant title derives from a poem by Dylan Thomas called “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” and, indeed, there are people in Dead Men Naked who seek passage beyond death’s veil. Cannizzaro says on his website that while writing this book, he “pestered people with talks about religion, philosophy, death for an incredible amount of time.”

To get an idea of his background, consider this quote from an article Cannizzaro wrote for The Galway Review in 2016. The author talks about skipping school with his friends at age 15 while living in in Italy:

“We would go in the city center of Pozzuoli, and hide into a dark alley. In the alley there was a tattoo joint, a hearing aid shop, and a very small library, called Il Nome della Rosa, after Umberto Eco’s book (The Name of the Rose). The owner, Gino, would entertain his guests with delicious comments about books, poetry, literature. It wasn’t long before we started spending our mornings there, talking with Gino and drinking Espresso, while watching the whirlwind of customers – lost souls on the lookout for human connection – writers, poets, mothers, sons; fishermen, shop-owners, unemployed hippies – the whole humanity passed in that library, 20 to 30 square meters of enlightened soil, much like the sacred ground of a secret church.”

Dead Men Naked reflects that mixture of ancient mystery and youthful curiosity. The main characters, Lou and Mallory, seem like people I would hang out with for pizza and beer, or in Louis’ case, Tequila. He only sees his friend’s ghost while drinking tequila. Tequila has a mystique unlike any of the other major alcoholic beverages. A Huffington Post article presented by Patrón says, “In the mid-20th century, tequila sales spiked after California residents thought it was a psychedelic. They were just confusing mezcal with mescaline (the psychoactive alkaloid of peyote” (Huffington Post, Oct 06, 2014). Over the years, Jose Quervo has placed magazine ads that depict deeply surreal colorful sunsets over small gatherings of men and women, smiling as though in states of altered consciousness, with various taglines, including “It’s all true” and “Anything can happen.” Special limited edition bottles display gold and silver mustachioed skulls. One might argue that tequila’s mystique is a fabrication, but after all, most magic is about what one believes to be true. “The universe is what you observe,” the Grim Reaper tells Lou. “Whatever you experience in your life, you experience through your senses.” It’s all real.

We get a hint that maybe Mallory has seen beyond the veil, too. She has a collection of books on the occult and she knows how to use them. Something weird happens, resulting in Mallory’s disappearance. Hoping to find Mal at her sister’s house, Lou goes on a road trip with the Grim Reaper in the passenger seat to keep him company and call the shots. They drive through a noir world of seedy bars until they find Mal’s twin sister, Angie. Death takes either a holiday or a back seat when Angie joins Lou on a ride through the desert to an out-of-the way abandoned house where the girls once lived with their mother. It is on this trip that Lou quotes the Dylan Thomas poem, forming an emotional connection between the two, in which “there was no car, no time, no road…no faith, no evil, no sun, no sea… nothing but the nakedness of the word, sliding from me to her and bouncing back from her eyes.”

At the mother’s house, in the basement, they find the books and notebooks evincing an in-depth study of dreams, mythology, religion, and “Old Latin spells mixed up with Caribbean voodoo and African juju.” It gets weirder and better.

There are so many good moments in Dead Men Naked, it’s impossible to discuss them all. Worth mentioning are the beguiling passages about crows in chapter twenty-two. Around the world, crows represent, variously, a trickster, a harbinger of death, a sign of transformation, and depending on what direction they are flying, the imminent approach of either your enemy or your true love. The crows in this chapter punctuate Lou’s action as they gather, squawk, and seemingly mock his angst with gawking, open beaks. It’s a great image and better than I can describe it.

I would like to mention one more thing. Perhaps you’ve heard about writers who don’t use quotation marks. Cormac McCarthy comes to mind. When interviewed in 2008 by Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy warns other writers that if they plan to leave out quotation marks, they really need to “write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking.” I’m here to tell you that Dario Cannizzaro pulls off this feat like an expert. Trust me on this: You will have no trouble understanding who is talking to whom in Dead Men Naked.

I highly recommend this book.