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The MacGroon Curse
Copyright C 2010, Jerry Nichols
Chapter 1
Plunge Into Future-Past
Raucous sound, smoky amber light, a crowded shuffling barroom-floor battle, furiously shifting shadows magnified on far walls. As Lee fought she felt the angry joyous fracas run through her like pure brilliance--a dare-not-to-fail fear, a hell-bent-to-win exhilaration. She fought hard, skillfully, but was barely holding back hilarious laughter. Even though her opponent was hateful, despicable. Even while her sharp punches and karate kicks connected and her mind shouted:
‘Take it, Stan, you murderous S.O.B! You’ve brought my new but dear friend Agnes to near death, and threatened tiny precious Marlette--now take it you fu--"
The floor opened beneath her.
She fell through to sudden cold dark, half-somersaulting, falling head first into cavernous black as breath and heartbeat seemingly stopped even while she strove to right her body. Falling while improbable awareness brought the brilliance of the shut-away battle above and related events to a dazzling point of tangled flashing images and a cacophonous mix of sounds recent and distant past but now all immediate.
Falling…
She slammed against a surface, hitting shoulder first an instant before her skull struck. Pain shot from there all through her while the frenetic images and sounds exploded into bits of light within and without.
Then lights out.
Non-experienced dark.
Seemingly mere seconds passed before consciousness brought more darkness, hollow, chilled and dank, and with that came a splitting headache. Christ, she thought, where the hell am I this time? Oh yeah, 1998, Maclardy’s Roadhouse, where I should be--sort of should be.
Sharp pain in her right shoulder made her realize her arm was pushed up behind her back. Slowly she moved the arm down, her fingers feeling the uneven material she lay on, identifying broken up and flattened cardboard boxes. It had no doubt saved her from getting totally messed up. She had fallen for what seemed like a week! So she could’ve really—
Something moved not far away in the pitch dark. Lee froze. The something grunted, sighed, laughed low, guttural.
Oh no, that bastard fell with me! I doubt I’m hurt badly, but this time I don’t think I can…I mean it’s not like it was up there! I’m not like I was up there.
No, cold black space now hid the enemy…who was certain to close in on her. In the darkness crazed biker Stan Garza had become nightmarish. But wait, why let the childhood nightmare crap weird herself out? No, she would picture Stan in his actual form. She tried, but failed--only his biker chieftain jacket showed up clearly, the bloodstained bone-white skull and crossbones and the red-tinged yellow logo stark against black:
“You shaved-skull, bible-quoting biker bastard,” she suddenly shouted, surprising herself. “Keep away--I’m warning you, Stan!”
She knew the warning was no longer much of a warning. Probably the biblical biker bastard knew it, too. There was another echoed grunt, another low arrogant laugh as unseen he moved again. It was certain he was closer now, way too close to the pile of cardboard where she lay motionless, barely breathing. Her heart was pounding like mad, doubtlessly faster than normal and loud. And nausea was stirring again in her stomach.
If he gets too close I’m afraid I’ll puke, hurl all over myself! If I did it all over him of course that wouldn’t be so—
Christ, will you breath, Lee? No wonder you feel you’re about to puke. Or about to suffocate! Breathe, stupid, keep breathing.
The enemy moved again slightly. She could even smell his tobacco-and-boozy breath. That was real enough, so why in the absence of light had he attained such power? Or why had she lost so much? Why in the cold damp blackness of Maclardy’s cellar was she certain the purely terrifying nightmare of her childhood had returned from twenty-odd years ago to at last claim her?
On no, I think I’m going to sneeze! Fight it back. He'll really get his jollies if I do something so nearly comical.
Keep breathing…
She did, and the urge to sneeze passed, her breathing deepened. The rest of her stayed rigid, her eyes stayed active. For the moment there were no more sounds, no increase in the faint odor. Only black hollow stillness. She used the pause to think beyond terror and nausea. She thought defense. Even a nightmare attacker might be vulnerable to a solid slug in the mug. She slowly doubled up her fists. Then she re-thought, realizing she had little idea how or where attack would come from—instant counter attack and viscous nail gouging might out trump punching. She loosened her fingers, felt the edges of her nails against her palms.
And listened hard.
It remained quiet.
If I could just un-freeze myself, she thought, move, stand, or at least come to my knees. Anything would be better than just fucking laying here.
She couldn’t though.
She just fucking lay there.
And this time she clearly pictured the enemy in his pre-cellar incarnation. Ohmygod, what a fanatical slime-bucket! How could a quality person like Agnes have hooked herself to a cruel and actually evil bastard like him? But Agnes had. And I sucked myself right into their situation. Already up to my eyeballs in strangeness, I just kept pressing. Ignored Scott—who before that fated night in September I’d been so in love with—or at least in love with loving to love him. And he’d tried so hard to reel me back to normal, to safety. But I was obsessive. Yeah, so I could get snared not only in Agnes’s situation but in the MacGroons entanglement, in their stupid 'curse'…and in all the insanity, including maybe my own, that came attached.
Yeah, she could still barely grasp how one freaking strange thing had followed the other--with her neurotic obsession leading her into it! Maybe worse than obsession, maybe as fiancé Scott had feared, she was nearly psychotic, like, totally ripe to indulge herself in the strangeness that had pulled her back to rural Chubone in Michigan’s northern-central Thumb. If she hadn’t let the weirdness into her brain’s receptive spaces she’d never have been swept into the crazy sphere of the crazy MacGroon dwarfs. She’d never have ended up on Halloween night at Maclardy’s Roadhouse, never would have plunged in mid-combat through the trap door in Maclardy’s dance floor.
Goddamn it, she thought, if it all had to happen, why at least didn’t that creep fall on his ugly shaved skull? Obviously he didn’t. And was it pure accident that something caused the trap door to slide open at the precise moment she and the biblical biker were atop it—with her probably just seconds from putting him away? And why couldn’t she hear at least some of the banging and shuffling she assumed was still going on above her. And what about the tight clothes she’d been loaned and that weirdly seemed to keep getting tighter? What was up with that?
Again the nightmare moved. He was now even closer, his heavy biker’s boot crunching something beneath it. Booze-and-biblical cocaine-crazy Stan laughed low, his echoed voice not more than a few feet from her. At any second his iron grasp would drag her from the safety of her bed of cardboard.
Ohmygod, how could everything have shifted so fast? It was unreal! Speed-thinking she thought how a bare second before she and the sleaze bucket fell through the floor she’d been on the very brink of triumph, on the edge of some type of justice! Down and depressed earlier, on had come that incredible exhilaration carrying her higher than her highest chemical high, higher than any sexual experience-- even the one following the love-wine at the MacGroon’s outback cottage—so high it had wiped away her lousy cold-virus symptoms and had carried her into battle.
And what a rollicking battle it was! Well beyond midnight on All Hallows Eve--with dueling jukebox’s blaring country-western and rock-and-roll and the Celt musicians drumming and piping ‘Loch Lomond'--Lee and the dwarf-dominant defenders of Maclardy’s roadhouse battled the biker gang. A foot-and-a-half taller than most of her co-combatants, raven-haired Lee fought furiously at sound-and-fury’s center. Next to her, the shining oversized garage wrench wielded by dark and cantankerous dwarf mechanic Web MacGroon flashed repeatedly and slammed any black leathered 'God's Vengeance Rider' within range. And throughout the smoky roadhouse the other Halloween-celebrator warriors, men and women alike, all sky-high rowdy, most drunk to varying degrees, most costumed--dwarf ape, dwarf Superman, dwarf Madonna, dwarf Elvis, the ‘Mighty Midgets’ in their basketball uniforms but wearing ghoulish masks, over a hundred others dwarfed and not--wielded chairs and bottles and rural-tough fists, hurled pumpkin decorated basketballs and Maclardy’s haggis pies and candlelit jack-o-lanterns, shouted old Scotland war cries and battled with joyous ferocity. Even the Greek-American stranger of full-height had stored his Orpheus love-harp and joined the allied defenders of Halloween at Maclardy’s. In disjointed unity they battled the twenty-odd armed and intimidating skull and crossbones bikers across the beer and blood slick wood floor, were on the verge of shocking victory, saw growing panic in the eyes of the invaders.
Lee saw this in the reddened eyes of Stan the biker chief. She fought him one-on-one, quickly gaining the advantage with ferocity surprising to him and maybe her, with karate punches and kicks that jolted him and drew blood and drew into his eyes that light of near-panicked disbelief. And her mind hurled vengeance at him for having brought her friend Agnes to the brink of death. Just before the trap door slid away beneath them and Lee fell through to sudden cellar darkness.
Just before she slammed onto the cardboard pile.
Which was just before pitch black claimed her consciousness.
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Not so unlike the boot scraped against the concrete, a voice emerged, meaner and more despicable than Lee remembered it:
“Bitch. Perverted bitch, hooking up with them dwarf perverts. Just like that uppity black bitch Agnes. Well, you can get set for a real man, now—a righteous man. Yeah, I’m behind you. Or am I over here? Can’t see me, can you? I can see you, though—pretty-but-ugly, sexy-but-unrepentant-whore. Watch out!”
The warning wasn’t a warning at all. It seemed to come from directly in front of Lee while she was grabbed from behind. And just as she feared, the grips on her arms were powerful beyond the power of the thug she’d beaten once and had been on the brink of beating again. Now a demon of the dark held her, the long ago nightmare-come alive. The grips brought pain, particularly to her injured shoulder, brought paralyzing terror... The unseen enemy pressed closer, seemingly stole her breath. She fought back a scream she knew would be the scream of a child.
The voice was directly in her ear but unexpectedly without harshness: “See, it’s useless. Don’t struggle. Be a good little girl.”
Ohmygod, she did want to stop struggling! She was at this moment so goddamn sick and tired of struggling. Why not just give in? So what if it means triumph for the somnambulistic monster you lectured about? Whatever’s holding me is way too powerful.
And she was now way too young and small and weak.
Her thoughts went suddenly, desperately to her lost raggedy childhood doll. If she could just hold it closely then maybe…Christ, you are nuts, Lee! Like that doll could somehow help you!
This time nobody real or imagined was coming to help.
She should’ve known better.
Just give in.
Contrasting the close odor of the biblical biker a threatening comforting smell of burning pipe tobacco drifted to her out of the dark long ago. Almost instantly tears were streaming down her cheeks.
From her own mind, though she wasn’t sure--she was no longer sure of anything--she heard music. Again it was the harp music that seemed to emerge from the damnedest places at the damnedest times. And with the sound, shining images floated in to stand in a row against the dark. Lee stared with watery eyes at these immense painted pictures as they took form within huge ornate frames--and in doing that she felt her mind and body filling with the same openness she'd experienced before, and with it the freedom of full breath as her brain in rapid-fire mode switched from surrender to resistance…
Close around her, she felt cold darkness dissolve.
And she stood in warm light.
Chapter 2
Minor League Deity
I myself am light and dark. One or the other completely. If you look directly at me, the current me, the guy relating this, I’ll present no substance of form or image. It’s like I aint there. Or here.
This is even weirder than you might think, because I might now be more substantive than usual. Maybe. For certain, I’m occasionally in more than one place at once--both here and there.
And still you can’t see me anywhere.
This is fairly new to me, understand. But I’m already nearly used to it.
You might wonder what this has to do with Lee, who we just left. Well, as far as I can tell, without my current physically nonexistent state, Lee Stewart’s current state of her entire existence might well go kaput. She might become nothingness.
That’s because, by weird accident and goofy chance, my ordinary late middle age self and I—a retiree, a grandpa--have become Lee’s chronicler, the storyteller of her recent perils and adventures. So I too am down there in Maclardy’s cellar. Unlike Lee my essence is comfortably mixed into the cold damp dark. And even though I’ve become a minor league deity of sorts, even though I am and have been for the past two months Lee’s very life and breath--from shortly before the art museum strangeness she’s about to encounter to the Halloween night danger that’s snared her--I’m completely helpless to help her out.
And fate be damned, I would if I could.
I can’t, though. And right now my minor league deity non-substance changes from dark to light.
To read on, download The MacGroon Curse PART 1.