Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

It comes back on with a click, and the dull hum returns. Toby’s back arches and his body goes rigid. His eyes are rolled back and white, and lines of tendon and vein appear on his neck as if he’s swallowed a vine plant that is trying to push its way through his skin.

I scream. It does nothing to lessen my dread. I shout my brother’s name but he is paralyzed. I step forward and then back up and then forward again. The light dies, and the humming stops, and I turn toward the bench at the back of the room. When the light comes back on, the apparatus atop the wooden surface comes clear. A plug juts from the wall socket; a white cord runs to a junction box, topped by the black knob of the rheostat; two wires, one black and one blue, run like tentacles from the metal box to the cap on my brother’s head; another cord, this one yellow, snakes to the slide projector. I can only think of the display as a torture device, imagined and built by my father. But what was it meant to accomplish? I spin toward the image projected on the wall of the workshop and my breath lodges against the stone in my throat. A young woman stands naked in a field, holding a flower to her nose. Her hair, the color of corn silk, frames her beautiful face. She smiles softly. Sweetly. My gaze traces down her throat to her small round breasts and then over her belly to the mound of golden blonde hair between her legs, and then back up again. The room goes black. The picture of the young woman is replaced by that of a muscled man with a dense pelt of hair covering his chest. Beneath his thick mustache his mouth is twisted into a smirk. He is also naked and his hand grasps the shaft of his penis like the hilt of a knife.

The hum has returned to the workshop. Toby is again arched and rigid. And my confusion is momentarily erased as if I understand this perverse experiment, though I’m certain I do not. It seems that Toby is relaxed when pictures of women cover my mama’s bed sheet, but voltage and pain accompanies the images of men. I don’t know what this is meant to achieve, but I know it has to stop.

I reach across the workbench. Doing so, I lean over the rheostat and notice the switches and the dial on top. Dashes and numbers run in an arc to accommodate the round black knob. Someone, either Daddy or Toby, has run a strip of black electrical tape like a comic eyebrow, blocking out the lines and numbers on the downside of the arc, and above this, written in red ink, is the word Danger . I yank the plug from the wall. Despite the pitch darkness I find my way to the light switch on the other side of the shop and flick it on, and then I turn to my brother, who has managed to get one of his hands loose. He frees his other hand, reaches for the bit in his mouth and pulls it away all the while glaring at me.

“Y-you c-can’t be in here, Petey,” he says. His voice is dry, and he growls savagely to clear his throat.

Only when I try to answer do I realize that I’m crying, and I can’t find my voice. Toby removes the device from his head and I see the red marks at his temples, and I know they’re the reason he wears his baseball cap in the house, and the sight of them makes me cry harder.

“It’s okay,” he says. With a tremendous effort, he sits up on the cot and swings his legs off the side. “I’m okay.”

“No. No. No.” I blubber.

“You’re too young to understand,” Toby says, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “I wasn’t right, Petey. I felt things and did things …” His voice trails away. A mask of confusion falls over his face like the darkness between the projector’s light. When it passes he says, “Daddy read all about it. He found books in Dallas. He found out what was wrong with me and how to fix it. He had to do something or else he’d have to send me away to an asylum and people would know about me, and they can’t know about me. They just can’t. Do you want me to go to an asylum, Petey?”

“It’s not right,” I say between sobs. “It’s hurting you.”

“It has to,” Toby says. His head dips and he observes the floor for a moment. When he looks back at me, the spark I’ve missed in his eyes has returned, except the light there is hard and cold. A hint of a smile touches the corners of his lips. His expression is hopeful but it’s also frightening, because, to me, Toby looks crazy. And when he speaks again, I feel certain his mind has come loose, because he says, “It’s working, Petey. I’m getting better. Really I am.”

I pulled into the drive of Toby’s house. My car’s headlights swept across the front of the shed like a lighthouse beacon. Black paint still covered the windows. A grey light showed beneath the door and then extinguished. Remaining in the parked car, I peered at the shed with trepidation. I’d thought the machine was gone, dismantled, torn apart, and thrown in the trash. That’s what Toby had told me; he’d said it was the first thing to go when he moved in after our mother’s death. His lie shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Over the years, bits of information came my way. I learned that Toby had made a sexual advance toward his buddy, Duke, which had triggered the fight and the call from Richard Manheim. Of course I’d already figured that out, but Duke himself confirmed it years later. We ran into each other at a bar in Austin, and we got to talking about Toby. He felt bad for my brother. Such a shame, he’d said. Such a waste.

The grey light flashed and I counted to twenty and then it went dark. Leaving the car, I breathed deeply to calm my sparking nerves. The scene inside the shed would be familiar, I knew, but that didn’t make it any more palatable.

In the years before leaving home, Toby had used our father’s device regularly. Some days he was the golden hero of my early youth, and other days he appeared crazy, eyes wild and mouth shimmering with spittle as he recounted one moral outrage or another. On those days, he went to the shed and wired himself to the apparatus, as if it were a meditative aid. He marched through the broiling gut of hell all the while insisting he was fine in the fire. I’m getting better. Really I am . I begged him to stop. My mother never said a word. My father never looked so proud.

It’s easy to blame the old man, but he thought he was helping. In college, I did some research of my own, investigating accepted “cures” of the day, and I found a number of references to electro-shock and aversion therapy. I’m sure this was the kind of information he came across during his trip to Dallas. His life was machines, and each part had to work in a particular way to keep the machine running. It would never occur to him that he didn’t understand a part or its function. Its value. My father wasn’t a villain; he was just a hick who wanted to save his son from a lifetime of sadness and shame — the only future he could imagine for a broken part in the social machine.

At the door to the shed, I lifted my fist and knocked. The gray light poured from beneath the door and then went out. When my second rap went unanswered, I pushed open the door. Toby lay on the cot. He was dead. He’d been gone for a while, maybe since hanging up after leaving me his last message.

The sight of him coiled in my throat along with the odors of urine, burned skin, and singed hair. Deep lines carved in around his mouth and brow; he hadn’t even bothered inserting the bit between his teeth. His eyes had poached in the sockets; blood and viscous tears clotted at this temples. He appeared to be smiling, but I had to believe it was the strained rictus of his final shock.

For a moment, I thought I could see the golden boy beneath the layers of weight and folds of skin, but it was only my mind playing tricks, an evanescent denial with no more weight than projected light. I choked on a sob and fought an urge to race to the cot, but a loud voice in the back of my head, reason or dread, warned me away from the coursing voltage. Instead of running to Toby’s side, I crossed the shed to disconnect the machine.