Kicking up dust stepping from one shaft of light to the next, like a slightly drunk ballerina, The Wizard’s two-inch heel boots played across the wood floor of the supply shed. Here the taste of the Pacific ocean mixed with the smells of thick musty curtains and creosote from the boardwalk only a block away. The ancient carnie lived and loved the fantasies and submerged disappointments in the boxes of this room; stuffed canvas bags of memories spilling over the bowing shelves above his head; casks and bottles of various perverted potions leaning up against the crinkly sepia stained walls. In this grimy rollaway shed were the reminders, remainders and reenactments of all the years that The Wizard had lived among the ruins of ‘the show’.
But when the man shook his hands free of his pockets, the crane of his eighty years lifted off him as if he was shaking arthritic crumbs from his limbs. He stood fully then, all five feet seven of him, and decades flittered up and away in the muted sunlight spilling through the pair of crusty windows over his head. Like delicate birds alighting from a tree around him, The Wizard poked the air with his still nimble digits, reaching for the formidable casket standing upright at the eastern corner of the shed. His usually quiet penis engorged to an erection, his high brow burning with a quick sweat, his tiny blue eyes wide, the old man opened the lid of the coffin.
“Brother Ed,” The Wizard said to the 105-year-old petrified corpse--a mummy really--he revealed.
The Wizard reached in and rolled out his star attraction, very much like--and with the requisite same sound--unraveling wrapping-paper from a soft cardboard tube.
“Full moon once again.” The Wizard continued his one-way conversation and leaned the reed thin, paper-mâché-like body of the man once known as Joshua McKinney out and to the side of his coffin.
In life, Joshua ‘Ed’ McKinney had been a drunkard, semi-outlaw who had lived his final days on a cattle ranch in southern Oklahoma at the end of the nineteenth century. With Joshua’s pappy not near in attendance any of the boy’s formative years; his mother a drunk, blind in one eye and spit evil with the other; a sister who had begun taking money for her ample worn favors at the age of thirteen and a sadistic spinster aunt who visited her brother’s brood every year or so, only to engage and investigate her young nephew’s rumored unusually-sized appendage, there wasn’t much else for poor Joshua to do except get out as far and as fast as he could and make the best of this days... short though they would be.
Joshua learned to rustle some, cheat at cards and to use his obvious street wit and his cold blue eyes (and that rumored ample body part) on as many and as young a woman as he could entice. That last year of his life though, while he was actually working a real job on a kind cattle-rancher’s farm, the thirty-year-old man began to ‘court’ the only daughter of a half-gypsy woman named Mama Lee... this would prove to be his undoing.
Mama’s only daughter Beb, only fourteen at the time, began seeing Joshua as often as she could sneak. The man was as unwelcome around the young girl as Mama Lee could sternly warn, but the older woman realized there would be no stopping such a willful beauty as Beb. Knowing he was dancing in a fire pit, Joshua still took his opportunities with the dark-haired woman/child as often as he could; in backyards, farmyards and in sheds, the girl was continually rent in vagina, anus and mouth by the crude, yet filling ‘love-making’ of the man she fantasized would soon be her husband. Of course all Joshua (or Ed, as his aunt had nick-named that part of him) wanted was to continue his prodding and poking of such nubile willing beauties. When Beb began making overtones of a more lasting arrangement the man ‘pulled out’, literally and figuratively.
Glad for the halting of their romance but hurt by her daughter’s rejection, Mama Bell decided to get back at Joshua--‘Ed'--the only way she knew how. Relying on her Creole lineage and the magic supposedly still surging through her veins, Mama Bell met up with the unlucky Mr McKinney one fine spring day, confronting the man on the town’s main street, of all places!
“Know for the rest of your days...” the stout woman shouted down the dusty, busy street as Joshua faced her wide-eyed, smirking... and drunk, “...whether dead or alive, Joshua McKinney, you will always a’wander for the touch of feminine flesh.”
The town people who reported witnessing the incident that day told of Mama Bell turning on her ample heels while Joshua called after her--a choice few phrases no church-going woman could repeat--then stumbled back to the local tavern. This drinking soon killed Joshua though, for not a full year later the man died from an imploded liver. His age notwithstanding, the pure rot gut potato whiskey the man could only ever afford, his less then nutritious eating habits and the constant barrage of hard labor (when he did labor) killed young Joshua but quick.
Buried in a potters’ field a week later, it was then that the true infamy of ‘Brother Ed’ began.
To the horror of a pair of gravediggers, Joshua McKinney actually split open the top of his coffin as it was being lowered; puking the most horrific cry ever heard by the two shocked men he sauntered off flaying into the night! As most of the townsfolk remembered well that fateful day Mama Bell had confronted Joshua, it was simply assumed the dead man was up and walking to quench his never-to-be-satiated, cursed lust. The people of this Oklahoma community were not simple folk, they had read a story or two and generally welcomed the gypsy tribe Mama Bell had first come into town with. It was decided that Joshua McKinney should be found and his body burned to avoid any further wandering by the unfortunate dead man.
A posse was assembled but there was an enterprising duo, Hap Seasons and his only son Brady, who lit out a day before the search party. Hap and his son were about done with their time in this–not-good-for-even-one-horse town and were looking for an opportunity to light out for pastures west. The older man had seen his time in a circus when he was his son’s age and after his wife had died, the motherless boy and widowed dad were just aching to put dad’s old carnie know-how to work. Imagine what a honest-to-goodness zombie would fetch on the tent-show circuit, Hap reasoned?! Hap had a cousin who could probably help set-up the show and...
But first the men had to find the suffering, cursed corpse of Joshua Ed McKinney--and do so in a day’s time.
Although The Wizard was the age he was, he still managed to shimmy Ed’s brittle, light body to the door of the shed. Just beyond, in the carnie’s home trailer--the permanent one he kept here in California, not the one he used to drag behind his truck when his carnival was traveling the byways of America--a bright-eyed seventeen-year-old squirmed on The Wizard’s immaculate bedspread. As The Wizard opened the single thin metal door of the shed he didn’t smell it, but he knew Brother Ed certainly could: the pheromone rush from that squirming, scared girl wafting clear across the backyard lot to them.
“First one’s on me, ol’ friend,” The Wizard nearly snickered holding both the single door wide and Brother Ed’s left stretched bicep. If not for the red flannel shirt it might have been impossible for the old carnie to hold on to, let alone find any muscle in the desiccated, leathery covering that was Brother Ed’s skin.
“Go ‘head,” the man said and smiled across to the grimacing sunken face of the dead man in his arms.
“Go ‘head,” he prodded and then released his hold on the mummy.
For a fleeting few seconds The Wizard feared his old friend was going to teeter back into him, but then the slightest shimmer passed through that rail-thin reed-of-a-corpse and Brother Ed was standing on his own, all in for the game.
The Seasons men made Willard’s Eve that very night. Although there were two towns on a direct path from the potter’s field, Willard’s had the distinction of being the only one to house a whorehouse. In fact, Father Seasons had recently brought his son Brady to the red brick building only two doors down from the bank, to deflower the sixteen-year-old boy in what the father considered the “best birthday present he would ever get”! It was possible that Joshua had simply fallen out of the wagon, and was rotting someplace in the hilly and dry country between Willard’s and that lonely potter's field, or he could be laying down with a sow, not being able to distinguish species, only gender, but the Seasons men were apt to believe the curse was working well. If Joshua Ed McKinney was destined to seek female company he would have been led right to the “Purple Parrot” and the fine ladies within.
As Brady would explain, years after they had made their fortunes and sold ‘Brother Ed’: “My daddy said the man was being led by his johnson, more then most. Those ugly old whores had him if anybody did!”
No sooner had the men arrived in town than they heard the screams from the house of ill-repute. Luckily the local sheriff was none too hurried to visit the local eye-sore and in the minutes it took for him to finally get his large self into his shirt sleeves and suspenders, Brady and his dad barged in, bid hellos to the Madame they had only just visited a month before and walked right down the hallway to room number four.
“Damndest thing I’d ever seen...” Brady continued his account. “...there was Blue-Eyed Molly, nice and big-boned as she was, half undressed with Joshua pawing at her. She didn’t seem as frightened--those ladies of the P.P. had seen their share--as she was simply humored! She screamed that the ‘man’ had snuck in through a window to simply lie down beside her as she was resting for what Molly assumed would be a busy Saturday night! Damn, she was busy alright with that dead man rolling and huffin’ next to her, the dirt from his grave staining her sheets more then what big Molly was used to them being stained with!”
The Seasons’ men managed to spirit the zombie away in their wagon, tying him tight in the back. It was a hell-ride Brady would later recall with unabashed horror mixed with glee; Joshua moaning and flapping as they drove west the entire night. Neither son nor father spoke about their prize until they were well over the state line and hiding out waiting for Hap’s cousin to find them.
“She’s the prettiest little thing,” The Wizard was explaining as he and brother Ed made their slow way to the trailer.
The Wizard had courted respect as few others in this day and age and because of this: he always let Brother Ed ‘walk’ to the women he gave to the mummy. As a man ages he needs more then just the sight and smell of a woman, he needs to consider her, pine for her a bit, anticipate her being there in a myriad of possible poses. Now no man was as old as old’ Brother Ed so he needed this attention more than most, The Wizard reasoned. True, his old boss Preeson and those men who had kept Ed before him had probably not taken the time like this, but The Wizard had been Brother Ed’s keeper longer then any of those men and he had made a quiet fortune with the man: he owed him, pure and simple; let the man have this walk. The Wizard didn’t even especially mind disposing of the bodies as he had all these long years. Like giving Ed his ‘walk’, The Wizard had come to see his part in all of this and was proud of what he provided.
“I think she’s Mexican, if I’m not mistaken,” the old carnie whispered in his best friend’s ear. “And you know how much fire they have.”
It was at times like these, heat finally waning under the full midnight moon of a July night, that The Wizard felt--sensed--telepathy from the ‘man’ plodding next to him. He had never, nor would he ever expect a reply, that was simply too much to ask--Brother Ed was dead, after all--but the old carnie sensed his words getting through, knew he was understood and somehow felt he was being silently acknowledged. Let’s face it, there were very few folks left in ‘the show’ anymore and certainly none as old as The Wizard or as odd as Brother Ed!
If these two men couldn’t have a kinship, and unspoken communication, who could, The Wizard wondered?
‘The Wizard’ was simply Arny Ullman when he first saw ‘Brother Ed’ enter the carnival he was working in the summer of 1922. Ed had just come under the care of Arny’s boss, an enterprising amateur magician and professional con artist named Robert Preeson. While not exactly sure what Ed was, the lanky carnie owner/magician knew a potential money-making opportunity when he saw one, ‘buying’ Ed from Hap and his cousin when their battered and broke carnival passed through the orange groves of a pre-Hollywood LA. Robert had seen plenty gimmicks in his time--quite a few he perpetrated himself in his rusty stage act--so the weathered body was an oddity but not so much to dissuade the budding entrepreneur. But when he was told there was indeed no gimmick, that Ed was an honest-to-goodness animated dead man, Robert couldn’t have been happier with his purchase! Furthermore, much to Robert’s amazement and amusement, Ed’s priaprismic pride still seemed intact as he rolled, moaned and walked to every pretty woman who passed by him to the horror of onlookers and delight of the money man who owned him!
Dead men do not make the best of lovers but they can grope, slobber and shuck themselves at legions of paying ladies and their titillated mates. Brother Ed would spend his days quiet, dead as he was, until nighttime when his coffin was opened to the full view of a tent-show audience who had paid well to view him. With the whiff of perfume in the air, or the sound of light high tittering laughter, Ed would begin to stutter and shake in his coffin and in no time would be lunging forward to the lip of the stage for the women in the audience he had been cursed to hunger for.
Robert had learned from the Seasons’ men, and his own time with him, that all Ed really needed was to take a little ‘taste’ from time to time. If his lusts were satiated, Brother Ed could be counted on to never venture far, even on his nights off. All that was ever needed, as Hap and his son had told an entranced Mr Preeson, was for a willing lady to be procured from time to time. Nothing as perverse as copulation had to be even attempted, ol’ Ed was content to just lie down next to a lady for a few minutes, maybe have a friction if possible; it was a simple thing to ask really.
Robert Preeson, as had the Season men before him, began to scour the local whorehouses wherever his carnival happened to stop, buying Ed local prostitutes or any woman really who could be convinced for a few pieces of silver to spend time with the man in the box. It was a creepy request to be sure, but as the Season men had, Preeson merely convinced the women that this was his particular fetish (which in a way it was); that he had a dummy for his show that he liked to see bedded down with a real live lady. Most women agreed, especially for the handsome Preeson, but found they had allowed more then they could have ever bargained for when the dummy they lay next to began to rub himself against them! One lady even stayed long enough to have Brother Ed reveal his now withered, yet still considerable cock to the side of her leg and begin humping her thigh like a Border collie!
The light from the trailer shone down on the ancient friends. To the uninitiated, out here in the wash of high moonlight, it would seem as though two very old men were standing admiring the abundance of stars in the southern California night. It would take a closer inspection to realize the condition of the thinner man, the pallor of his face and his leathery sunken looks, the cobalt dead-fly stare of his open eyes.
Brother Ed had never really gone to rot. Sure, he was an 105 year old corpse, his flagging skin had peeled pretty much to leather and what hair remained on the man’s head, though unusually thick and shiny given the state he was in (dead), grew to the consistency of straw. But his body was so well preserved one would believe the man was just recently deceased. True, Ed had been embalmed but still a body would never keep as well as Ed had if not for some other element in the mix... mainly the mojo of Mama Bell’s spell those many years ago. The old half-gypsy woman truly was determined to have Joshua McKinney wander the backwoods and alleyways searching, so his body had stayed pretty much intact.
“Have a look,” The Wizard said and stood with Brother Ed at his bathroom window.
Through it they could see the bathroom door, left ajar by The Wizard only a half hour before. Beyond the doorway, lying on the bed, tied and gagged, lay a brown-skinned girl, naked save for the red bandana The Wizard had bade her wear after he paid her the requisite hundred dollars for what the waitress assumed would be this old man’s quick fun.
Jeanne was not a working girl, far from it, but she’d let an ancient harmless man have his way if he bought her dinner (which he had), drove her around all night to bars and friend’s houses (which he had) and begged her enough, for one hundred dollars, to “just strip and let an old man feast his eyes on what he used to be able to put his hands on.” Sure, she’d tie the bandana around her neck; fuck, Jimmy had never been this polite or sweet and he had taken a lot more off her, that’s for sure! Maybe this was even a way she could make some extra cash, the guy seemed to have enough of it and truth be told she had always fancied herself pretty enough to be a model... Christ, she had the tits for it and hers were at least real!
What the seventeen-year-old girl did not count on though was the old man’s agility and his damn quick way with ropes!
In the second decade of the new century, a carnival such as Preesons’ never stayed in one place too long. The stories about the odd man in the box and the ladies who met him retreated like so much locomotive steam as the popular carnival jumped from town to town. Business was good, as good as could be expected with movies--an all-too-new and all-too-present-booming entertainment--as Preeson crisscrossed the country.
Counting ragged receipts was one thing for the prematurely graying magician, but it wasn’t long until he tired of procuring lovelies for Ed. Of all things, the carnie owner was jealous, jealous that his once ashen, slightly mysterious looks had gone to seed with the tensions of running his enterprise, and jealous of how quick women took his money for his odd ‘request’. These ladies, some not even prostitutes, would barely ever even bat an eye his way unless more silver was forthcoming.
In his roiling rage, soon Preeson allowed the unthinkable! The very thing the family Seasons warned could never pass; Preeson began to let Brother Ed out on his own!
While no lady was actually hurt during Ed’s midnight wanderings and he’d usually be contented to trawl only once or twice a week, Preeson still turned a mighty blind eye to the idea of a sex-cursed zombie walking into the latest town to steal some time with an underage lass or a budding bride-to-be! Rumors abounded, stories followed, there was even once a reporter who managed to catch up with them in Oregon, but Preeson managed to dissuade actual fact into innuendo so he could spend the few days with his carnival, bilk the marks for as much as possible then be on his way as the story of ‘the man who visited’ became part of the folklore, a ‘maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t’ fright-time story one would tell their children as they walked the midway or made their way back home.
Preeson sold the carnival and all its possessions to Arny “The Little Wizard” as his last bequeathed request to his best worker, in that dusty hellhole season of ’48. Arny took to Brother Ed as he did the acquisition of the rest of his old boss’s carnival, dropped the ‘Little’ from his name and Brother Ed soon had a new owner and friend. The Wizard came to understand and subsequently sympathize with his new, most famous charge more then the men who had owned Brother Ed ever could. The Seasons’s men had brought prostitutes and joked as Brother Ed took his need, Preeson grew resentful, too horny for his own good and let the zombie loose on his own, but The Wizard felt a kinship to Ed. He knew he owed it to this ‘man’, his alter ego, to provide the best he could on the special nights when the moon was full and The Wizard could take his time to find a lady. And while prostitutes would suffice, ‘real’ women, not those ‘in the show’ were what The Wizard wanted for his best friend.
Of course there was simply no way a woman who had been tied down and forced to copulate with a mummy wouldn’t tell her tale. But with his skill with ropes, his still flexible sinewy muscles and carnie wit, The Wizard found he could procure women about as easily as he could dispose of them. Even for those who managed to get out of the bonds from time to time (usually after Brother Ed had had his way) The Wizard was there to dispose of a flying, running girl before she got past his trailer door.
With Brother Ed satiated--at least for that month--Arny could sleep contented knowing he had provided his cursed partner with the very best he could afford and allow. Sure, he would have loved to have done more for Brother Ed but it seemed that as the years slowed The Wizard down they had also slowed the curse in Joshua McKinney; one woman a month seemed enough for him now.
They came to the front door of the trailer, these two old men, one dead, one close enough he smelled of it, and The Wizard opened the door for the zombie shuttering next to him. The single stone step took most of Brother Ed’s brittle strength, but for what lay within, scared and unknowing on The Wizard’s bed, the zombie would muster the strength. He had done so all these decades on the nights of the first full moon and he would continue to do until no one came for him any more, to open his box. The Wizard practically beamed as he stood in the doorway, watching the achingly slow progression of his friend, as he executed tight paper steps down the hallway to the woman-child who lay beyond.
This was truly the very best part of the anticipation, The Wizard knew, as he stood there in the hall, unzipped his fly and released his now raging member. As old as he was, The Wizard would still sport quite the erection as the scene unfolded: the girl began to thrash as she saw the bedroom door open even wider and assumed the ‘game’ was now afoot; then there was that quick squeaky sensation of the bed moving, then muffled squeals, the bed rutting against the wood floor once again and the sensation of utter horror seeping through the walls as the girl tied to that bed saw Brother Ed and realized she would not be indulging The Wizard’s need this night... but something quite a bit more sinister!
What the Wizard would love to know, but would go to his grave not knowing, was whether these women knew they were going to die. Did they think Brother Ed was The Wizard playing dead-man dress-up? Did they even conceive what it was that was actually bending down there to roll next to them? Could they even imagine what the next few minutes would be like?
Did they even ever see the flash of The Wizard’s blade after the zombie got off them?
The Wizard imagined Brother Ed’s movements as he heard his old bed groan with the added weight of the dead man. The living man grabbed his purple stump-of-a-cock and began pumping his fist wildly to what he imagined was happening in that room beyond! But The Wizard wasn’t on himself for more then a minute when he felt a clutch across his chest. His eyes teared, his left arm thumped his side and he heard a soft intake of female breath from his bedroom... then the old carnie fell dead from a massive heart attack.
* * * * *
“And this is where,” Benny said to the wind and his two friends.
“My mom said we ain’t ‘posed to be anywhere near here, Benny,” Timothy announced and his little cousin Jacquelyn just nodded her head.
“Scared?” Benny asked as they all balanced their bikes between their legs and the sound of the bulldozer beyond played in their hair.
“We just ain’t ‘posed to be here,” Timothy defended but Jacquelyn reached down then to touch the dark earth of the large rectangular indentation.
“It’s all crunchy,” the eleven-year-old girl offered.
“Yeah, it’s been burned,” Benny said to her widening green eyes. “That’s what they do when they want to rid a place of evil.”
“Benny!” Timothy exclaimed, sat atop his banana seat and peddled away from them. He parked his bike at the curb ten yards beyond and watched the bulldozer continue its leveling of the sandy lot.
“It is kinda creepy...” Jacquelyn offered, but smiling then at Benny she added “...but kinda cool too.”
“Yeah,” Benny agreed and looked with her down at the charred earth. “My mom said they got rid of everything. This girl came a-runnin’ out of the house that was here, and then the police came and the people said to burn it. What was in it, what that girl showed ‘um, they knew they had no choice.”
“Man,” Jacquelyn said. “You know what was in it? What they saw? Your momma ever say?”
"Nah, too many years ago, she wasn't living here then,” Benny explained. “But it was something alright, musta been.”
“Yeah," Jacquelyn agreed as she mounted her bike with Benny.
As she pumped her legs, the girl's pubescent sweat mixed with the sweet "Oliva Bath Perfume", bubble mix her mother had added to her bath only the night before. And the combination of this woman-to-be scent, this softest of perfumes, the only high bright laughter in this otherwise stale smelling development on this California shore, made its way to the hidden grave not three feet from where Timothy then stood with his bike. Below, eight feet down just to be sure, now covered in concrete and mesh and a new condo water pipe system, lay a man who could smell that scent, even though he was in a the box that had been provided by a shocked yet sympathetic populace.
That sad and cursed ancient man smiled at the possibility of a visit sometime in the future.
