I know how Captain Kirk would have handled the overflowing toilet

Maybe it was Capt. James Tiberius Kirk, commander of the starship Enterprise, who said: “Into each life a little raw sewage must fall.”

At least now I know Capt. Kirk’s middle name, thanks to the mobs who descended by telephone, mail or on foot to gleefully jab forefingers into my chest with that “How could you be such a moron” tone of jab and shout, “IT’S TIBERIUS!”

OK, OK. It’s Tiberius. You hear that, Charles? Charles left a message on my voice mail: “IT’S THADDEUS.” Thaddeus? No, Charles, you Treknophobe. IT’S TIBERIUS. Consider yourself poked in the chest. And Charlotte called to say she didn’t know squat about “Star Trek” but wanted to discuss it. Well, Charlotte, why don’t you let Charles fill you in on Capt. James Thaddeus Kirk, Dr. Spock, Mr. Checkout, Snotty the chief engineer, etc., etc.

Somebody else said, “It’s Tee.”

TEE?

You’re fired.

At this point you’re wondering, “What does Capt. Kirk’s middle name have to do with falling raw sewage?”

The connection is this: I was home, massaging forefinger stab wounds to my chest, when the upstairs toilet plugged up and overflowed onto the bathroom floor. I won’t go into details except to say it happened at the worst possible moment, and I was so stunned that for 10 seconds I simply stood there, my jaw unhinged, as this catastrophe unfolded before my disbelieving eyes.

Ten seconds. Then I stumbled into action, crashing downstairs for a bucket and sponge. When I returned, the mess had all but disappeared.

Where did it go?

IT WENT UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS, that’s where it went.

Because when I returned to the kitchen I could hear it spattering on the sheetrock, like thousands of tiny Esther Williams rats doing the breaststroke behind the walls, and I thought: Gosh, that could leak through into the kitchen.

Talk about self-fulfilling prophecy. Sewer water began dripping onto the counter, the Christmas presents, the telephone … INTO MY COFFEEMAKER!

I hurled stuff out of the way and hot-footed it to the damp telephone to call the plumber, who ran a snake through the pipes and told me plumbing horror stories (“Hey, you wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve pulled out of these lines. Once, I found Jimmy Hoffa’s head!”).

Hours later, as I cleaned up the sewer spill, I heard a sound emanating from the hallway. It was the sound an inept home repair guy makes when he inserts a screwdriver into a wall outlet and discovers the full power of Mr. Ready Killowatt.

The circuit-breaker box was sizzling like a bag of microwave popcorn. Dad came over to check it for water leakage, but lucky, lucky me. It was an entirely unrelated problem that would necessitate all kinds of unrelated hassles.

About 7:30 that night I finished the cleanup. My joints ached and I was light-headed from breathing poisonous “fresh-scent” cleaner fumes. As I prepared to collapse onto the couch, I heard a sound: GLUK, GLUK, GLUK … GOOOOORK … GAAAAACK!

Oh, God.

The cat had tossed his kitty cookies in about eight different locations.

I looked heavenward and wondered how Capt. James Tiberius Kirk, orbiting way up there, would deal with these hassles. And then it hit me.

“Beam me up, Scotty.”

—

Cover image courtesy of Desilu Productions.

Author’s note: Contact me at [email protected]. To read more of my opinion and humor pieces, visit delstonejr.com . In addition to my humor columns and opinion pieces, I write fiction – horror, science fiction and contemporary fantasy. If you’re a fan of such genres please check out my Amazon author’s page. Print and e-books are both available, and remember: You don’t need a Kindle device to read a Kindle e-book. Simply download the free Kindle app for your smart phone or tablet.

THE BIRTHMARK

A short horror story

By Del Stone Jr.

—

Introduction

I can trace the lineage of “The Birthmark” easily enough.

I wrote it sometime in the early ’90s. It was published in Pat Nielsen’s small press magazine “Crossroads,” which would also publish my short story “Companions.” That story appeared in Karl Edward Wagner’s “The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXI.”

 I can’t remember the genesis of this story, but I know it is about every flytrap hole-in-the-wall bar I have ever been to, and I have been to quite a few. They all have commonalities: They’re dark, the acoustics are muffled, the air is unbreathable with smoke and the odor of beer – in fact, it is this odor of alcohol that permeates everything, from the cheap vinyl upholstery on the chairs to the peeling wallpaper, beer-soaked tabletops and even the flooring, be it fake wood or some kind of cracked, peeling vinyl. Just walking into the joint is enough to give you a hangover.

I wrote this during my bar phase. I worked at a newspaper, and down the road not half a mile was one of those neighborhood bars that were ubiquitous back in “the olden days.” This bar was called The Stardust, and every night, after the paper was put to bed, a small group of us night shift folks would troop down to The Stardust to “dust off a few.” I think every story I’ve written that features a bar was in some way fashioned after The Stardust.

Speaking of which, The Stardust closed sometime in the ’90s and now the building is a bank branch.

Barf.

I preferred it as a bar.

—

THE BIRTHMARK

I’m not sure why I stopped.

It was one of those flytrap beer joints that springs up and shrivels along the surface roads that parallel the interstate, cut off from humanity as surely as the two-horse towns going to rot out there, where nobody who had a plan for his life would go.

I guess I was tired … tired of looking away from headlights and fighting the wheel as tandem rigs blew by me in squalls of howling rubber and diesel fumes. I had a hundred miles to go before I could look for a motel and reasonably expect to be up tomorrow morning for the stretch to Miami Beach, and nothing waited for me there but another useless reconciliation, Patsy’s smile flickering and growing dim as reality settled in, squashing any hope that this time we might find a comfortable compromise.

So I’d stopped. For a quick beer, and some thinking.

It was called the Four Corners Tavern, which was stupid because one of the roads that formed the corners dead-ended against the interstate. A few cars were parked outside, old Fords and a Chrysler as big as a brontosaurus, dim shapes in the grainy dark.

Inside, it wasn’t much brighter. Neon beer signs sputtered and gave off a vague smell of cooked insulation, and the sour odor of spilled beer seemed to rise from the floor, staining and warping the ceiling panels. A battleship of a woman looked up from behind the bar as I came in, and two men parked behind shot glasses and a bottle of Jim Beam turned to see who I was. Another man, slumped over a beer down the bar, away from everybody else, ignored me. A plume of cigarette smoke rose above him and gathered into a mushroom cloud that drifted sluggishly toward a ceiling fan at the other end of the room.

I sat to his right.

He was muttering something and I almost didn’t notice that the woman was asking me what I wanted. I ordered a draft. The man continued to mutter, and from the sidelong glances he was getting from the other two, I guessed he wasn’t a Four Corners Tavern regular, which was OK by me. Maybe they’d watch him and leave me alone.

I heard him say, “Stupid shits,” and then the lady brought me my beer.

“I told them not to waste their time,” the man whispered, and he sniggered, a sound somewhere between a sneeze and a gasp.

I sipped the beer and let the cold feel of it roll down my throat. I needed to think, to make plans … to wait for the alcohol to undo what 12 hours of driving had done. A hundred miles to go. Then Patsy. I took a long pull from the beer.

“It was that bitch, that fucking monster,” the man said, out loud this time, and the others indeed turned to stare at him, as I was staring. He had a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, and he was wearing a jacket – odd, because the night was steamy with the kind of bug-filled humidity that makes you want to take a shower every five minutes. It was then I noticed the mark that encircled his wrist and spread to his fingers, as if he’d dipped his hand in red dye. A birthmark – what did they call those? Port wine stains?

“She did this to me,” he exclaimed, clenching his red fist and shaking it at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. One fellow at the other end of the bar, his face long and narrow like a weasel’s, whispered to the other. I turned back to my beer. I’d heard his story a hundred times before; hell, I’d lived it. Everybody had a problem.

“She said I’d never get rid of her,” the man went on, “and that was the only truthful thing to come out of her mouth. And the warden says, `C’mon, pardner! We’re gonna make a new man outta you. Zap that thing off! Shrink says you’re a socio something-or-other; we get rid of that hot hand of yours, it’ll change your whole attitude. They got this new laser gadget up at the clinic in Farmington they’re just dying to try out. They say they can remove that damn birthmark.’ Bullshit.”

I knocked back the rest of the beer. I nodded at the lady for another round, and she hesitated, as if she didn’t want to walk past the man. I couldn’t blame her, really. He was starting to get on my nerves too.

“Farmington’s where they take the `volunteers’ every time there’s a new drug or a fat sucker the docs want to work the bugs out of,” the man said, almost in a sneer. “That stuff the shrink said about removing this mark – ” again, he shook the fist – “to help me adjust, that was a load of crap. Warden promised he’d take six months off my sentence if I let them zap me with their Star Trek machine. Prison overcrowding; state’s gotta make way for all the new dumb bastards who get themselves in a fix because of some monster bitch – ” He choked off the rest of the words and took a hissing drag from his cigarette, blowing the smoke in great, billowing clouds.

“Man, I loved her,” he continued, and for the first time he looked at me, and caught me watching him. “Really. I did. Until things started going wrong.”

He shook his head and sucked at the thin rind of foam floating on the surface of his beer. He started talking again before he’d finished swallowing, so the words, until he cleared his throat, came out sounding gargly. “At first, it was just piddly shit, you know, the little stuff. Sometimes I’d be out with the boys and forget to call her, or I’d oversleep and show up late for some thing she wanted to do. So she’d keelhaul my ass and I’d toe the line until some other little, fucking thing” – he accented the last three words with fingertaps to the bar – “would happen and she’d get bent out of shape.”

“Then she’d blow this stuff all out of proportion, and suddenly it was: I didn’t love her, I didn’t put her before everything else … all that crap.”

I swallowed half my beer in a single gulp. I glanced at my watch and saw it was going on 10, and I considered getting up and leaving. But what was the rush, anyway? Patsy would still be there tomorrow, and so would the dirty tide that had come between us. A simple technicality of geography hadn’t changed that.

“I loved her, but I was starting not to, what with her being such a bitch and all,” he said, his voice sliding into a mumble. “And that’s when she decided I was some kind of bastard for not treating her the way she wanted to be treated, and she was gonna punish me, make me pay. And by God, she did it. In spades, the bitch.

“She’d get mad and not speak and make me ask her what the hell was wrong, and we’d talk about it until things got smoothed out, and then she’d do it again, and again, until she was more pissed off than nice.

“So after months of this shit I decided to hell with it. I couldn’t please her. So to hell with it.”

The others were watching him intently now, their pale faces reflecting the blue and red light of a neon Michelob sign, like scouts gathered around a campfire at night while the troop leader whispered ghost stories.

“I cut her loose. She said I’d never be rid of her, and I had to slap her around a little bit, you know, just to show her who’s boss, and when I walked out her door that last night she said she’d die before I got off with fucking up her life the way I had.

“I probably should’ve killed her right then. …”

The two men at the other end of the bar glanced at each other, then turned to the woman behind the bar, who closed her eyes wearily and shook her head. I kind of knew what they were thinking; the strange ironies that living long enough allows you to experience, that one man’s passing fancy becomes another’s obsession, and how life can become engraved around a center of gravity that is more illusory than real.

“She’d drive by my place – just slow enough so I’d see her. Or the garage where I worked. She’d buy her gas there. Shoot pool at my pool hall. Eat at the diner where I had my grits and coffee every morning, the goddamned movie theater where I’d take my dates, and that place on old what’s-his-name’s farm where we’d go after the movies – that is if she hadn’t let the air out of my tires, or tipped off the cops that I’d had a tootfull at Jimmy’s, or any of the other rotten, shitty things she did to make my life miserable.

“But – ” he said, his voice jumping in decibels, so suddenly that it spooked a twitch out of me. “When she moved into the place across the street from mine, for Christ’s sake, I knew I had to do something … something drastic.”

“I tried to talk to her, but she – she – ” His expression became confused and angry, as if he were trying to sort out the words and couldn’t make sense of any of them. “She had these letters she was gonna send people. She was gonna tell them everything I’d ever said about them. She was gonna tell the sheriff about that little number I pulled three years ago, down in Harrisburg – Christ! I was drunk. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I knocked over a Circle K. For 33 lousy bucks. Nobody got hurt. No harm came of it. But she was gonna tell ‘em, all the personal stuff I let her in on when we were together, and she was laughing about it, laughing her ass off, her squinty eyes glittering like those marbles the taxidermists use when they stuff a ferret, and then she turned mean and reminded me of how I’d fucked up her life, that I’d turned her into this monster, and wasn’t I proud of myself? Wasn’t this the best piece of hatchet work I’d ever done on another human being?”

His voice began to tremble, and beneath the counter I could see his right knee jumping, as if an electric current had set the muscles to twitching. He lit another cigarette and took a jittery drag, exhaling with an audible pop. Patsy had drifted far from my thoughts.

“I don’t know,” he went on, falling back to a stage whisper. “I just lost it. You know? She’d fucked with me to the point I couldn’t take it anymore.” He paused and shook his head. “I shouldn’t’ve done it, but I did, and that can’t be undone. See, I had this eight-inch locking-blade knife I carried around to scare off the assholes who’ll try to whip up on you in the pool halls and such, and I just took this mother fucker and I just – I just slammed it into her chest – ”

I felt the blood drain from my skull, leaving a socket of emptiness. The bartender’s eyes widened to almost comical proportions.

“I was crazy, I was a fucking lunatic, and I just slammed it into her, hard as I could, and her ribs split like rotten two-by-fours and my hand sank into her chest – I could feel her poisonous heart coiled in there like a goddamned snake … Oh Christ, oh Jesus calamity Christ!”

I could see all this happening in my mind’s eye and I didn’t want to hear any more, but he kept talking.

“Her eyelids flapped and her tongue oozed out of her mouth like a snail, and when she arched her back I could hear bones snapping. I tried to jerk my hand out but it was like her ribs had become teeth – they were biting at me, and I cut the living shit out of my arm getting away, my blood mixing with hers, up to my wrist in blood. …”

Enough of this. I leaned on one buttock to get my wallet. It was time to go.

“They shipped me off to prison for life with parole after 25 years. I didn’t get the electric chair. I thought that was a lucky thing, until this,” He said, turning the burgundy hand this way and that, rotating it in the dim light so that his scrutiny took on overtones of a museum curator appraising some artifact.

“About three months into my term this happened, so I know it ain’t no goddamned birthmark. It’s her, goddamnit. Her poison. Her blood, inside me. And you know what else?”

He took a ferocious hit from the cigarette.

“I can hear her talking to me. From inside me. Telling me the bad things she’s gonna do to me. And sometimes I wake up at night and find my hand doing things I don’t want it to do, and I know I’m never gonna be rid of her. That’s why I said it was a waste of time. Nothing’s gonna get rid of this but me, flat on my back in a casket.”

I dug a five from wallet and flipped it onto the calendar. That simple gesture seemed to break a spell that hung over the tavern. The weasel-faced man coughed and muttered, “Crazy bastard.” The bartender turned and began wiping the counter. The talker, without looking, seemed to sense he was losing his audience and shouted, “They’re all dead now, all those doctors at Farmington. That’s where I just came from, not two hours ago. You can call the law and find out for yourself. They’re all dead.”

The bartender stopped. Her face pinched into a look of thin-blooded astonishment. I was in the middle of standing when he spoke and I simply froze, unsure of whether to collapse back into the chair or run for my life. Everything inside the tavern seemed to pause so that a heavy silence descended over the five of us, tempered only by the buzzing of the neon signs.

“They strapped me down and rigged up their gear,” he went on, his voice warbling between a cry and a shout, “and when they flipped the switch to burn off that sucker, she – ” he thrust the hand into the air – “went berserk and tore off the straps and – and – she found this.” He reached into his jacket and whipped out what appeared to be a very thin-bladed filet knife, except the blade was curved, like a toy scimitar, and angled so as to reach those hard-to-cut places. “And she began cutting at them, swinging the knife like a tennis racket. You could hear it snicking through their bleached white lab coats and the turkey wattles around their throats. Snick, snick, snick.”

A sick numbness settled along my spine and spread across my body, killing any thought of doing anything, even breathing. The two men at the other side of the bar traded glances of sheer terror; the farthest man pushed back his chair, clearing a space for escape. The woman behind the bar was surreptitiously groping beneath the counter.

“She killed them all, and when she got through there was nothing for me to do but run, and that’s what I did. Stole a car and ran like hell.” He wound down to a barely audible whisper. “And now I’m here.”

I knew that I couldn’t move, that he was bug-fuck crazy and if I dared move all that craziness would come boiling out and I would be his focal point. I wouldn’t make it to the door before he was on me with his peculiar knife, hacking and swinging and probably not even looking at me while he did it, his gaze trapped in a faraway, disconnected perspective of self-absorption.

The man snickered. He almost sobbed. His eyes dropped to the cigarette smoldering in his ash tray. The knife blade reflected a tapered C of hot magenta neon light.

“She’s gonna kill you too,” he sing-songed, almost wistfully. “Every damn one of you. She’ll keep doing it until they fry me. Fucking bitch. Fucking monster.”

Something clicked beneath the counter and the barkeep unlimbered a sawed-off shotgun. She aimed it at the man and I swear to God, at that moment I could have kissed her till she died. She announced, “Mister, I’ve heard about all I care to hear for one evening. Now you just sit tight and we won’t have any trouble. Bobby!” she snapped her head at weasel-face. “Get on the horn and call Bill Hutchison; tell him we got a live one and to bring the squad car with the mesh cage.” He slithered out of his chair and hurried toward a pay phone on the opposite wall. “And you, Teddy,” she nodded at the other. “You got your 9 mil in the Chrysler?”

“Yes ma’am,” he answered quickly.

“Well go get the damn thing. I think we can use it.”

He started to get up and then everything happened quickly, so quickly that I’m not sure I remember it the way it actually happened or with the embellishments terror decorates your memory of events. Portions seem compressed into the stop-action narrative of a music video, while everything else runs together in a senseless, expositionless blur.

I remember Teddy standing and I remember the man snarling something, his voice spiraling into an animal wail, and I remember a very bright flash of chromed light as the blade came up and the man’s chair flew back with a crash and he was up, his legs bending and bringing him down to a crouch, and he was about to lunge, to pounce, the knife out in front of him now and his face sucked into a vacuum of undiluted rage. Then the room exploded with a booming crash that seemed to pulverize the bones in my ears. A spray of blood the color of tar arced across the bar, spattering everything, and the man spasmed, as if invisible strings running through his arms and neck had been suddenly jerked taut. An empty shotgun shell spun onto the counter and wobbled on its axis like an off-kilter gyroscope. The man took one step, two steps forward – my stomach did a belly flop and I felt a lump of pure nausea shimmy up my throat, cold spit gathering beneath my tongue, and I looked away as the gun whammed again, and from the edge of vision I saw the knife fall and somebody keeling over – no, I thought I saw two people going down and my impression was that Teddy had been shot or the man had stabbed him or maybe Teddy had simply fainted.

I staggered for the door. My ears were ringing, but I could still hear the bartender moaning, “Oh Jesus! Oh sweet Jesus!” and then I was outside, the soggy night air whistling through the knot in my throat, my shirt unsticking itself from my sweaty ribcage. I dumped myself into the car and fired up the engine. The radio blared to life and I didn’t so much as flinch.

As I drove away, the tavern’s front door opened, revealing a dim rectangle of blue and red luminescence. A figure stood there a moment, then disappeared.

The door swung shut. I looked away.

—

That was two days ago.

I drove a hundred and fifty miles that night – north, away from Miami Beach. I found a Red Roof Inn off the interstate, rented a room, locked the door and hid under the covers. I must’ve slept, but I can’t really be sure.

The next afternoon, I called Patsy and told her goodbye. Was it important anymore? I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ll ever be afraid of things I understand. Not now. We all reach those junctures in life, those four corners, if you will, where hard decisions must be made, and whether we’re dragged there, kicking and screaming, or whether we go there willingly doesn’t seem to matter. I turned off the interstate onto a tiny, lost road, and now I’ll never be the same.

Because it came back to me as I lay in my bed at the Red Roof Inn, stirring in that restless state between sleep and fatigue, my thoughts going back to what I had seen, over and over, like your tongue probing a cold sore at the rim of your lip, despite the pain, or perhaps because of it.

 I hear the gun going off, the thud of concussion. I see in slow-motion the fatal trajectories of individual blood droplets, flying everywhere, and I see falling bodies … the man with the red hand, except the hand is no longer red.

And the other body is not Teddy.

It is something else, something larger than either men, a scorched burgundy in color, with wild hair and a thicket of teeth that resemble curved bones filed to a point.

I can see its teeth because it is laughing. It has the man by his wrist and it is directing his hand like an orchestra conductor waving a baton, and it is laughing with a kind of lunatic glee as the man folds into himself and slumps to the floor.

It is too much to understand what real fear is. I knew this even before I discovered the fleck of dried blood on my left hand.

So I told Patsy goodbye. I hope I’m not too late.

—

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of Flickr user Dennis Church by way of a Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/photos/dfc_pcola/

When I want to experience nature in the flesh NATURE’S flesh, that is, not mine – I don’t hike in the woods. I go to the golf course.

Such was the case the other day when Scott, my golfing accomplice, descended on a local course for “a day at the links.” I say “accomplice” because Scott is one of the few people I can actually beat, provided we both cheat in a consistent manner. Once, Scott hit his ball in a sand trap and took so many strokes trying to get out that the course manager demanded he purchase drilling rights before continuing.

But enough of ridiculing Scott, who owns a 5-iron that would probably wrap nicely around my neck. On the day in question we approached the first tee with all the happy expectations of any golfer who has not actually struck a ball yet. There had been a terrible storm the night before. Trees were down all over the course. We dubbed it “Road Warrior Golf.”

Our playing partners, two guys “from Hurlburt” (I didn’t know if they were here for a little R&R after blowing up bridges in Iraq or bagging groceries at the commissary) told us there was a dead possum in the garbage can on the fourth hole.

Sure enough, when we reached the fourth hole there lay the possum, nestled amid the banana peels and Coke cans. I’d never seen a possum anywhere but beside a major highway, flattened to the thickness of a video rental card, so I was curious. … Actually, I was horrified, because Scott used his putter to poke the thing and it bared its fangs and hissed, which in possum means the same thing as rattlesnake, as in “Climb the nearest tree.”

Well, Scott turned over the garbage can and the possum trotted off in the direction of a nearby four-lane highway, where it was probably flattened by a truck.

Meanwhile, on the fairway we found another creature. Can you guess what it was? A rabbit nibbling on fresh grass blades? A goat? A herd of bison? Oh, you readers are so comically unimaginative. Of course, it was a FISH, dried to the hardness of a space shuttle re-entry tile. Apparently a nearby canal had flooded during the previous night’s storm and when the water retreated the fish was … well, ha ha, it was like a fish out of water!

But even that doesn’t compare to what awaited us on the next green. Let’s just say it was short and fat and had a forked tongue and two venom-filled teeth. No, you cynical readers, it wasn’t Roseanne Barr! It was a water moccasin. (To tell the truth, I don’t know the difference between a water moccasin and a plumber’s snake, but I do know one I’d pick up and the other I’d run over with a golf cart.)

This snake was major-league angry, possibly because I was clubbing it with my putter. When it tried to BITE my putter, I decided to “return to the game,” which in golf parlance means, “Leave the snake alone and putt out, since there are golfers backed up to the parking lot waiting for you to get out of the way so they can club the snake.”

So it was a “Wild Kingdom” kind of day at the golf course, and I’m trading in my spikes for hip-waders.

This column was originally published in the April 4, 1991 Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

The doorbell rang.

He was still young, in his mid-20s now, and taller and heavier than I. She was about the same age, maybe a year or two younger, with wavy blond hair and a million-dollar smile.

I hadn’t seen him in a year. Or was it two? I couldn’t remember. I’d never met her, but I’d read about her in his letters.

They came inside. I offered a prayer to whatever impulse had gotten me out of bed at 8 that morning to clean the house – the laundry was done, the garbage emptied, the dishes washed, the windows cleaned … and that horror of a barbecue grill I hadn’t taken out of the box in four years – the box that was peeling like old paint – was put together and sitting on the patio as if it had always been like that.

Since this was their first visit to my townhouse, I gave them the cook’s tour. There’s the patio – yes, it looks out on the pool. Yes, I have a pair of binoculars. He liked my telephone. He recognized his sister’s writing desk in my office; I’d paid her $150 for it.

We went through my bedroom, and he spotted the tennis racket-clock he and the other kids on my tennis team had given me. What year was that? 1979? Eleven years ago, he observed with an amazed sigh. Where has the time gone? We’re all getting older.

We trooped downstairs and sat around the dining room table. He was drinking beer. He made a comment about her drinking beer and I poured her one, unaware that he was joking. It’s just as well; there was a dead bug in her mug. I drank a Diet Coke.

They’d driven from Illinois, gotten into town last Friday, gone to a wedding Saturday, and apparently shopped for an engagement ring Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. He said they were getting married, but he hadn’t gotten around to asking her yet. She poked him in the arm and smiled. He said he wanted new rims for his BMW but couldn’t afford them now because of her; she punched him in the arm and smiled sweetly. One more errant comment, I thought, and she’ll go for the throat.

He’s a second lieutenant in the Air Force. She manages a clothing store and does some modeling. They were concerned about debts, whether to buy a house or a condo, and if he’d get his master’s and go to work in the private sector.

I told him all this responsibility would be good for him. I told her she’d have to straighten him out. I wasn’t the first to warn her about that, she said apprehensively, and he was astonished anybody would think that he, as an Air Force officer, couldn’t handle responsibility.

He has lots of responsibility, but I couldn’t forget when he was a kid, and I taught him to drive a stick shift, or took him to the county fair, or helped him with that book report on Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.” I remember his youth, when all he could do was look forward to getting married.

They couldn’t stay. They had a last-minute date with the beach, and then they were heading back to Illinois. I liked her sunglasses.

Eleven years. Had it really been 11 years?

This column was originally published in the Nov. 16, 1990 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of pxfuel.

Lately, torch-wielding mobs have been gathering at my front door, demanding to know what I want for Christmas this year.

These mobs are in luck, because after thinking about last year’s very sad Christmas, when I received mere thousands of dollars’ worth of costly and thoughtful gifts, I’ve decided to take the initiative and TELL potential gift-givers what I hope will turn up in my stocking Christmas morning.

Basically, I want a painting.

Not just ANY painting. I want a painting that will transcend the boundaries of convention, a painting that will be to the art world what Tammy Faye Bakker was to Revlon stockholders. I want The Great Emerald Coast Seascape, the kind you see at every local festival and crafts show.

The painting should be a beach scene. We live by the sea, so it’s only natural that I’d want to bring home a little piece of the beach with me and hang it on my wall, rather than tracking in little pieces of the beach all over the carpet, or finding little denizens of the beach writhing inside my swimsuit as I’m cruising at 60 mph down the highway.

But not just ANY beach scene. There should be sand dunes, of course. Huge, Mount Vesuvius-style sand dunes with flags from various nations protruding from the tops where mountain climbers from around the world have scaled these sand dunes and left their marks for the history books.

The sky should be covered with dark, roiling, angry clouds, in a weather pattern reminiscent of Moses parting the Red Sea.

This next part is VERY IMPORTANT. Partly buried in the lee of a sand dune should be a chest of gold doubloons and pearls. The artist could mount little blinking lights to make it seem as if the treasure is glittering.

This treasure is very important because in the background I want to see an intoxicated pirate staggering through the surf, his schooner aground on rocks, and I want a one-legged parrot – well, a peg-legged parrot – perched crookedly on the pirate’s shoulder, with little word balloons featuring parrot curses. This parrot should have its own miniature bottle of rum, and I want the parrot’s eyes to consist of blinking red Christmas tree lights, as if the parrot were suffering from the DTs.

Along the surf line I want the following items: a crab with blinking red lights for eyes, mounted on stalks that wiggle back and forth like antennae when you flick them; a real starfish glued to the canvas; Elvis in crushed velvet; a building permit and survey lines mounted on wooden stakes; the rotted stumps of a demolished pier; one of those knitted ducks that, when squeezed, poops jelly beans; and, lastly, a beach ball featuring the logos of every SEC football team.

This painting should be encased in lucite and mounted on a varnished cypress stump, with a clock and a CB radio in the base, and when you plug in the painting a computer chip should play “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

You should be able to find one of these paintings at any local festival or art show. Prices are not reasonable, but it’s the thought that counts.

This column was previously published in the Nov. 15, 1990 Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

In this photo the author (left) greets a visitor to the Northwest Florida Daily News' booth at a local festival. As you can see, the author is overjoyed by the warm - make that cold - greeting the visitor had to offer, which probably resulted in even more gray hairs appearing in his head. Photo courtesy of the Northwest Florida Daily News

This morning I thought we would take an intimate look at eye crud, but a vastly more important issue has since arisen: Apparently I’ve reached that point in life when, in order to continue looking young, I must give Mother Nature a gentle, helping hand, in the form of bleach and plastic surgery. Either that or buy an expensive sports car.

The sports car is out, as might be the chemicals, depending on how much I’ve got in my wallet and whether anybody in town has beer on sale. But the short of it is: I’m thinking of dying my hair.

 Right now you are laughing and saying to yourself, “If this guy is serious about looking better, he should consider demonic possession.” Well, you just go ahead and laugh. When I’m hired to be Rob Lowe’s stuntman in all those steamy movie sex scenes, we’ll see who’s stampeding down to the drugstore to snarf up the Lady Clairol.

 The decision to dye my hair was prompted by a serious error in judgment: I looked at my hair in the mirror. What I saw were these moss-like streaks of gray – on the left half of my head. The right side was almost moss-free. It was as if I’d decided to become a punk rocker, then halfway through the process changed my mind.

 (Now I want a new) color, which won’t be the first time I’ve humiliated myself in this manner. The first occurred several years ago, when I thought it would be neat to use sun lightener to bring out the true bleached blond in me. Unfortunately, instead of becoming a sun-drenched blond color, my hair turned ORANGE, and to put it politely, my new look became a sure conversation-stopper.

 I’m not contemplating anything so radical this time. Just a simple elimination of the gray, maybe a lighter shade of brown, possibly blue eyes and a pouty mouth and muscles like that guy on the Soloflex commercials. OK, OK, so we’ve strayed into the realm of fantasy here.

 I’m making a federal case out of this because I don’t want to walk into the newsroom and have everybody stare at me as if I’d just stepped off a UFO and was demanding to meet Elvis.

 When it comes to dying hair, society has a double standard. It’s OK for a woman to be blond one day and a redhead the next, but if a man does that, people automatically assume (a) he’s suffering from a glandular disorder, (b) he’s taking part in the federal witness protection program or (c) he’s going through male menopause.

 Women might say they’re the victims of a double standard too, because society disdains gray-haired women while gray-haired men are said to look “distinguished.” That may be true, but if I look “distinguished” at age 33, at 43 I’ll look “withered,” and at 53 I’ll look “dead.”

 But this won’t be a “do-it-yourself” project. I learned from caulking the bathtub that “do-it-yourself” is a synonym for “lower-your-standard-of-living,” and I refuse to look like I was attacked by bleach-wielding terrorists. So I’ll call in the Hair Color Rapid Deployment Force for a surgical strike on those gray interlopers.

 And I’ll tell Rob Lowe you said hello.

This column was published in the Northwest Florida Daily News in 1989 and is used with permission.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of MGM/UA.

“Pumpkinhead” Starring Lance Henriksen, Jeff East, John D’Aquino and Florence Shauffler. Directed by Stan Winston. 86 minutes. Rated R. Amazon Prime.

Del’s take

They had me at the cicadas.

If I remember the South for anything it will be sluggish July afternoons, when the chore of taking a breath is like sucking a wad of steamed broccoli into your lungs, as cicadas hidden within the needles of longleaf pines screech and screech and screech screech screech. According to folklore the infernal bugs “hibernate” underground for 17 years until one night they awaken to scale a nearby slash pine – yes, it’s always at night – squeeze from their shell, pump up their wings and fly away to enjoy a brief yet incandescent third act of noisy fornication.

That rhythmic screeching, like chalk chalk chalk on a blackboard, is stamped onto my brain. So, when I heard it used as an audio effect in “Pumpkinhead” I knew the story was taking place somewhere below the Mason-Dixon, where the ever-increasing heat has baked the brains out of everybody who lives there, transforming them into Trump supporters.

The horror.

I didn’t let that stop me from enjoying “Pumpkinhead’s” other charms. The movie, which was released way back in 1989, has become a cult favorite despite early panned reviews. The directorial debut of special effects wizard Stan Winston, “Pumpkinhead” inspired a straight-to-video sequel, two made-for-TV sequels, a comic book from Dark Horse and even a video game.

Plus, it stars one of my favorite underrated actors, Lance Henriksen, who appeared in several James Cameron movies along with Bill Paxton and Jeanette Goldstein. He brings just the right touch of doom to his role as grieving father Ed, who sets off the horrific chain of events in “Pumpkinhead.”

The story goes like this: As a young boy, Ed witnessed a man being killed by a monster and knows that with the help of the right people, he can summon a demon to avenge the death of his young son Billy, who was accidentally run over by a dirt bike rider who had come to the back woods with his friends to party.

With the guidance of Haggis (Florence Shauffler), a crone who lives in the deep woods, Ed summons the Pumpkinhead demon and sets it loose on the teens, choosing to disregard her warning that Pumpkinhead is as dangerous to those who evoke its presence as those intended to receive its wrath.

The result is well-choreographed and photographed slaughter that follows a predictable path with only a slight deviation there at the end. Lessons will be taught and for some, learned, while for others there may be no moral to this story.

“Pumpkinhead” is one of those fun B movies that works if you can get past the threadbare writing and horror movie clichés. It calls forth an eerily gothic atmosphere you have never seen from Henry James or even V.C. Andrews. Henriksen delivers his patented emotionally wounded performance – you can’t help but sympathize with the guy, even if events leading up to his actions follow a corny, well trodden horror movie trail.

The real star here is the Pumpkinhead demon, which I thought worked very, very well. It’s a movie monster you haven’t seen before and in ways reminded me of the atavistic horror of “Alien.” It produces a similar quality of dread, even if the cornpone story doesn’t.

“Pumpkinhead” has lots of gross and gore, which should forestall whiny lectures from Mladen about R ratings and blood spatter. It’s a necessity for any serious horror movie collector or fan. Watch it in 2021 about mid-October, after the real horror of 2020 has mostly faded from memory.

I give it a B.

Mladen’s take

Del and I have been friends for a long time. And, still, he’s simply unable to judge the depth and breadth of my intolerance for inadequate moviedom mayhem, violence, and cussing.

“Pumpkinhead” is a good movie. I throw it an A- for the superb creature effects, which offset the movie’s quasi-“Deliverance” vibe. However, there are no dismemberments or intestines spilling from sliced abdomens. Shoot, plenty of blood is spilled, but no depictions of arterial pulse squirting. Sure as hell there is very little swearing, if any, that I recall and there is definitely no damned nudity. So, forgive me Del, but I’m whining, anyway, though, really, it’s closer to satisfied grumbling because the “Pumpkinhead” plot is solid.

In fact, I had little trouble overlooking the plot’s trigger, a grieving father mischaracterizing the city slickers’ accidental mistreatment of his geeky son. What unfolds is horror movie commentary on the ruin that engulfs those seeking revenge. For, you see, Ed the father becomes entwined with the monster he unleashes. When Pumpkinhead kills, Ed feels it.

—

Quick, what excellent recent movie uses the same type of symbiotic relationship between man and beast as an integral part of the story? Answer: “Sputnik.”

—

It’s Pumpkinhead who has me enamored by this late 1980s film. This is a lovingly, carefully, patiently, and nicely crafted terror animal. The only non-practical, i.e. without makeup, and non-mechanical visual effect in the movie is blurred and swaying filmography showing Ed sensing that Pumpkinhead is about to strike.

Pumpkinhead, by the way, is a tall guy in a costume. The creature is a decaying pink and skeletal. It has no hair, a tail, claws for hands, pseudo-hooves for feet, and long bony protrusions from the shoulders. Its legs at the knees bend like a heron’s, forward, if I recall accurately. Its teeth are long, crooked, and cracked and eyes white, opaque, and all-seeing. Pumpkinhead is a conjured beast, maybe risen from the fires of hell, making a living in the material world. Pay attention to the shrunken monster’s face when it’s re-buried.

Pumpkinhead’s interaction with reality as we understand it is very nicely executed in its namesake film.

There’s our nightmare walking past a window as though taking a leisurely stroll while the kid killers inside the cottage talk about what to do. When Pumpkinhead prowls through the house, it ducks beneath doorways. It swivels and tilts its head to listen. And, Pumpkinhead has no trouble looking straight at you while contemplating, I imagine, what to do next. It kills your ass and then hangs around for a moment to watch the reaction of your friends. There are no rampages. Just a methodical hunt to pick off the offending, big-hair youths. Wait till you see how the monster decides to handle a rifle. Pumpkinhead is scary as hell because it’s very human.

To me, Pumpkinhead has a subtler charisma than the Xenomorph in “Alien,” more natural finesse than the Predator in “Predator,” and a finer malevolence than Freddy in “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

It’s my hope that no dumbass 21st century producer decides to re-make “Pumpkinhead.” This is a story and a monster that stand on their own. The beast borne of revenge shouldn’t be risked by a crappy re-do.    

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical editor. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.

Del Stone Jr. / Chat GPT

I have amazing news for you homeowners who may not be up on your pest lore.

This amazing information comes to us from the Allentown Morning Call, which is a newspaper with a strange name, almost as strange as Playground. Allentown is in Pennsylvania, where all the pests now hold respectable positions in the state legislature or the Mafia.

Amazing pest fact No. 1: Roaches move at 14.5 mph. This fact is both amazing and helpful, because now I know that I need only move at a speed of 15 mph to escape a roach, which will save me valuable effort because I usually move at a speed of 100 mph when escaping a roach.

Amazing pest fact No. 2: If you squash a yellow jacket, it releases a substance that attracts other yellow jackets, which apparently have signed a death pact with one another because they will sting any living thing within a 15-foot radius. If you stand 16 feet from the scene of the crime, whistle and look around as if you had no idea what was happening, the yellow jackets will only hold you for questioning.

Amazing pest fact No. 3: You can tell the temperature by counting the chirps of a cricket. All you do is count the chirps in 13 seconds, add 40, and you have the temperature. Isn’t that amazing! I must add that to my collection of other sophisticated weather forecasting techniques, such as: You can tell the wind direction by licking your finger and holding it up, or you can tell if it’s going to rain by washing your car;

Amazing pest fact No. 4: Rats can fall 30 feet without being hurt, jump 3 feet straight up, swim half a mile and climb up pipes 1½ to 4 inches in diameter. Sounds like we should scare up some of these rats and enter them in the Olympics. I’ll bet Michael Dukakis couldn’t do those things. And he wants to be president.

Amazing pest fact No. 5: A female mouse gives birth about 19 days after mating and can mate again in two days. Mice have about six young per litter and can produce six to 10 litters per year. The young are ready to reproduce in two months.

Obviously, if this were true, we would all be eating cheese and chewing toilet paper into little nest mounds. But man, due to his superior ability to do dumb things, has solved the mouse problem by inventing the concept of pet mice, which means the surplus mice are given to children to be mauled to death.

Amazing pest fact No. 6: The article says, “Although bats are hated and feared, they are beneficial.” Then it goes on to say how many mosquitoes a bat eats, blah blah blah. On paper, bats are fine. Pickled in a jar, even better. But the minute I see some screeching thing flapping at me out of the dark with leathery wings, beady rat-like eyes and a mouth full of teeth, I will assume it is not a friend of man and shoot it with the nearest large-bore elephant gun.

This column was published on Thursday, Sept. 8, 1988 in the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

I want to relate to you diet-conscious consumers an important health tip about shopping in supermarkets. To put it bluntly, if you value your health, you will stop snooping in my cart to see what kind of food I buy.

I didn’t want to say anything, but the fact is you’re getting awfully snotty about the way you treat those of us who thrive on low-fiber, artificially preserved and colored food clods.

I didn’t notice you at first. I’d go striding into the supermarket like the General MacArthur of consumers and buy these food things that are so dangerous Iraq and Iran have been hurling them at each other for years.

But now I have to watch myself. If there’s nothing in my cart that is (A) green, (B), alive, (C) looks like a road kill or (D) is not usually associated with the act of eating, I get really dirty looks, as if I’d entered the store wearing a University of Libya T-shirt.

I was watching one of you health-conscious consumers the other day. You arrived at the supermarket at 10:30 in the morning wearing a coat and tie, like one of the Stepford Husbands. At 10:30 in the morning I’m still tripping over the bags under my eyes.

You went straight to the produce department, and it is a known fact among us food-clod eaters that nothing edible has ever been found in that section except the time some kid dropped a Sno-Cone.

You chose some ropy green things and some warty yellow things and this gross-looking sac-like thing that resembled The Weed Brain That Crawled Out Of The Mulch Pit  (broccoli), and I can’t believe how you fussed over your choices, as if you should do anything but take them outside and have them shot.

Then you visited the seafood section, where you bought something that, if it had crawled up on the beach, the governor would have called out the National Guard. You bought it for a Halloween prank, right? You bought it to hide in your worst enemy’s mailbox. Surely you weren’t going to eat that.

You passed up the canned Roni food things and bought uncooked pasta. What can you do with uncooked pasta, except maybe pave your driveway, right? Oh, and you can make those cool string necklaces, just like they do in Third World nations, except they usually eat them after wearing them.

On to the beverage section. You bought – what was that? – bottled water? Bottled water is OK if, say, nuclear war breaks out and it’s either that or radioactive sewer runoff, but to actually pay American devalued dollars for a bottle of water when you could have bought good old American cheap beer – which is beneficial to the heart when consumed in quantities that aren’t expressed in the plural form – is a real tragedy of consumerism.

But that’s OK. If you want to eat rabbit chow and never experience the thrill of clogged arteries, that fine by me.

But the safe of your health, don’t sneer at my food clods. I may invite you over for dinner.

This column was published in the Thursday, September 1, 1988 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

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Everybody experiences them: moments when you commit acts so unspeakably embarrassing that you wish you could drop from the face of the planet. Here are some of mine:

1. It is the night of the newspaper’s customer appreciation party. A group of us is going by way of car caravan to a nightspot for dancing. I am riding with reporter Robert Kuntz and Lifestyle writer Debbie Lord. We pull into the parking lot. A woman ahead of us, driving a Datsun pickup truck, stops for no apparent reason. We wait. Finally, I shout from the back seat, “Don’t you just hate it when people driving Datsun pickup trucks stop in parking lots for no apparent reason?”

Kuntz says, “Del, that is MY WIFE.”

Time for Del to die.

2. I’m sitting in the newsroom. It’s a slow night. Tom Conner, who at that time was city editor, is sitting across the room. I decide to harass him by sending messages to his computer terminal. To do that, I must type in his terminal number, the message command and the message itself, then press a key to execute the command. I write, “You are a magpie,” and send it. He doesn’t react, but moments later a reply appears on my computer screen: “What?” I answer, “You are a magpie!” Tom still doesn’t react, but suddenly the managing editor appears at my desk and says, “Del, what do you mean, ‘I’m a magpie?’ ”

I had typed in the wrong terminal number.

Time for Del to be unemployed.

3. I’m in college. I’ve been assigned to conduct my first interview. My victim is a poet. He recently published a collection of poems about the Vietnam War. His book is not one of those vanity press jobs; somebody paid him real money to publish his work. He also was an unwitting participant in a military drug experiment, but he doesn’t want to discuss that in our interview. The subject is poetry.

I meet him in the student lounge. He is a charming man, so charming that I tell him I think he should have given his book a different title. We get to talking about writing, and it so happens I’m an aspiring writer, so I pull out the rough draft of a manuscript and demand a critique. I also manage to yawn.

I’m supposed to get a mug shot of the man. I take him to the college newspaper office. They know nothing about taking this man’s picture and, of course, a photographer is nowhere to be found. One of the editors, who is now a reporter at the Pensacola News Journal, says, “Oh, yeah. You’re the guy who was involved in the military drug experiment.”

Del is batting a thousand on his first interview.

4. I’m doing a videotaped presentation about tennis for a college speech class. I say, “Tennis is a game everybody can enjoy.” I pause, and then I say, “Of course, if you’re handicapped you can’t.”

Time for Del to crawl under a rock.

5. I’m in the ninth grade. I’m mad because my parents won’t let me wear bell-bottomed pants. I stalk to the bus stop, pouting. Somebody tells me my shirt is on backwards.

I give up.

This column was published in the Thursday, Aug. 25, 1988 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .