“I asked him what in the hell happened. And he told me. He told me pretty much what I’ve just told you… that he was obsessed with learning the secret of Piggy, that he’d broke into that house. I asked him what he’d seen there and I knew right then that whatever it was it had stripped the cogs of his brain, stripped them smooth. He looked over at me and those eyes were like holes burned straight through into hell and he asked me, straight out asked me, if I thought it was possible that dummies, ventriloquist dummies, could be possessed. That was the word he used. Possessed, you know, like that kid in that movie. Possessed, Eddie said, by things nameless, things dead, things inhuman. His words. Was that possible? Could some evil intelligence make a vent dummy that was kept in a coffin filled with black, wormy grave earth sit up and smile, start talking to you in the tormented voices of your mother and father… both of whom were long dead.”
Bascomb didn’t say anything after that for a time.
He slouched in his chair, looking gray and old and milked dry. He smoked and stared at the wall and Kitty said nothing herself, maybe afraid of what she would have said if she opened her mouth. She’d been raised Catholic and she understood the politics of spirit possession as well as the next. But what Bascomb was saying… what Eddie Bose had told him… well, it all took it to a different level, now didn’t it? It made something beyond the boundaries of belief into a cackling, infectious lunacy. Kitty was practical in all things, but she could not laugh this off. What was rotting inside of Bascomb was rotting in her now, too.
“What happened to him… to Eddie?” she finally asked, knowing it was a mistake.
“What happened?” Bascomb chuckled mirthlessly. “He died. He died hard, Miss Seevers, he died horribly.”
“What… what happened to him?”
Bascomb just shook his head slowly from side to side, looking at his hands again. “I was worried about him. We were all worried about him. One night, I went up to the cold water flat he was living in. The door was open. I was the first one to see his body. There was blood… Christ in Heaven, there was blood everywhere. I’ve never seen that much. Eddie… Eddie was all broken-up and twisted-looking, like a doll some kid got tired of and stomped under foot. That’s how he looked. And his face… oh, Jesus, hitched into this pathetic grimace like a great, jagged rip in vinyl. Looking like that, well, I figured he’d been so scared of something he’d screamed himself to death. But you know what was even worse than that? You wanna know what I see when I close my eyes at night? His eyes. I see his eyes looking out at me, wide-open, glassy like marbles, black and empty and filled with a dread, an insane horror that’s beyond pain, beyond agony, beyond anything you can imagine… yes, that’s what I saw in Eddie’s flat.”
Kitty felt something bunch in her stomach. Bascomb’s fright was real and glaring and she felt it, too, felt it moving through her, scarring her in places that would never properly heal. And the crazy, impossible thing was that she could see those eyes of Eddie Bose in her mind, too, hysterical and neurotic, filled with an absolute mindless terror.
Bascomb explained that the coroner said that Eddie had died of heart failure and had been gnawed on by rats, post mortem. But Bascomb didn’t believe it, didn’t believe a word of it. For he saw some of the bite marks on Eddie and no rat born ever had a set of teeth like that. So, he came up with his own cause of death… Eddie Bose died of heart failure, yes, but it was brought upon by something biting him relentlessly until his mind—what there was left of it—was drawn into some sucking gray pit of dementia.
“What did you do?” Kitty put to him.
“What in the hell could I do? The authorities closed the book, but I was far from done. I loved Eddie. Before that obsession slit his mind open, he was a really good guy.” Bascomb brushed cigarette ashes off his pants. “Well, first thing I did was the stupidest thing I could think of. And that’s why where Eddie’s troubles left off, mine began.”
Kitty waited for it, wondering when this daisy chain of mania would end. And what, when all was confessed, she would think of it.
“After we buried Eddie, I guess it was my turn to go fucking nuts,” Bascomb said, clenching his left fist in his right, maybe remembering something he’d done with it or should have done. “My old man never said I was the brightest light on the tree, so true to form, my belly full of hate, I went after Ronny. Yes, that’s what I did. He’d come up to my office to sign some papers. Piggy was with him, but packed away in his trunk out in the hallway. I went up one side of Ronny and down the other. What in the name of fuck, I said to him, did you do to Eddie Bose? You and that half-ass goddamn puppet of yours?”
Bascomb fully admitted he was more than a little wound-up from grief and rage and the still-simmering horror of what had become of Eddie Bose. He probably had no right to jump all over Ronny McBane like that. Sure, Ronny was flakier than a box of instant potatoes, wasn’t playing with a full deck—shit, he was missing more than one major suit—but he was only dangerous to himself, ultimately. Well, Ronny, that poor, pitiful bastard, looked like he was going to start crying on the spot. He started yammering on in this pathetic little voice that belonged to a scolded schoolboy, said it wasn’t his fault, God knew he’d tried to keep Eddie away, tried to talk him out of his damnable curiosity… but what happened at the house, there was nothing he could do. Eddie came to see things and he had seen them, all right.
Bascomb shook his head. “He was ranting and raving, saying it wasn’t his fault and that I better keep my mouth shut, to leave well enough alone, because if Piggy found out… well, there were things the dummy could do, awful things. And about that time, Piggy woke up… I mean, Ronny started throwing his voice, saying muffled things from inside that box. I didn’t hear what they were, but I could hear the tone of his voice… and I knew I had just stepped into some shit I’d never be able to rub off my shoe. And I was right. Regardless, I told Ronny I was done with him and I was done with goddamn ventriloquists in general and that he could take his fucked-up act and that ugly, little freak he called a dummy and shove him up his ass sideways.”
Down deep, Bascomb was more than a little afraid of Ronny’s madness and Piggy in general by that point. And he knew he had woken a dragon by pissing all over the Gruesome Twosome (as he called them). Something was going to happen, he knew, and then it did.
Bascomb butted his cigarette and stared at Kitty with eyes smoldering with hopelessness. “It started when my dog got killed. He was a little cocker spaniel and Meg and I, we couldn’t have kids, so we put all our love in that little mutt.” He paused, eyes misting. He brushed them dry with the back of his fist. “I came home one night and that little dog—Homer, we called him—was on the porch, his little head nearly twisted off. His eyes were gone… I… I could see by the marks there that they’d been bitten out or carved out. Jesus. About that time, the phone started ringing in the dead of night. I’d answer it and there’d be no one there… but I knew there was someone. Someone or something. After a second or two, I’d hear someone breathing… but not any normal kind of obscene phone-caller breathing, but a horrible hollow sound like air sucked through a reed. Then the laughter would start… that scratching, scraping laughter of Piggy’s. Night after night it would be like that.
“Maybe, maybe I should have went to the police. I don’t know. If it wasn’t Piggy laughing, it was just the sound of chattering teeth. Chattering, snapping… believe me, you cannot imagine anything as scary as that: answering the phone at three in the morning and hearing that breathing, those chattering teeth.”