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  The Badhorn Chronicles 1:

  The Collector

  J. Michael Best

  Published by J. Michael Best at Smashwords

  Copyright 2014 J. Michael Best

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  THE COLLECTOR

  BY J MICHAEL BEST

  Well, this is a scary mess.

  I wish I could say it was the scariest mess I’ve ever seen -that would belong to the Slicer Dicer of ’87- but this is certainly up there. Top five at least. The victim: Karl B. Offerman, born October 30th, 1979. Just turned 34 years old, and apparently someone didn’t want to wish him a very happy birthday.

  We find his legs, what’s left of them, on the floor. It’s like some kind of diseased dog just chewed and chewed and then spit it all back out. There just ain’t a lot left. The upper half is still in the bed. Karl B. doesn’t have the look to me of anyone who was ever handsome, but to be honest I can’t rightly judge. Eyes hang out of their sockets like smashed pumpkins. Someone -or something- decided to use face for a tic-tac-toe board. Karl B. lost. I bring my face in closer, right up next to what’s left of ol’ Karl’s mug. Two small holes in his neck. My eyes scan down. Karl B.’s guts are drying out in the center of the bed, maggots crawling slowly over them.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I have to back away. The stench is the worst. It’s always the worst, but this is especially bad. I pull out my handkerchief and cover my face. How long has he been rotting in here? Even a midwestern October chill can’t cover this funk. You get used to the sights….What do they call it? Desensitized. But the smell. Even after thirty plus years of doing this, it’s all I can do to hold down that spicy chicken I had for lunch. Should have known spicy chicken would be a bad choice.

  “Man, detective. Someone really wanted this guy dead.”

  “Chewed up, spit out, and ripped in half. Yeah, Wally, I’d say someone wanted ol’ Karl B. dead, and they wanted to make sure of it.”

  The lab boys’ll take care of Karl B. I’ll come back later.

  “C’mon Wally. Let’s get outta here.”

  ****

  With Karl B. outta the picture, Wally and I can roll up our sleeves and really get to the nitty nuts. There are no signs of forced entry, the front door is locked. The apartment is on the third floor, but I check the windows anyway. Nothing outta the ordinary. Still, we do find a few nuts to grab.

  The apartment itself is small, not like downtown small, but it’s not big. The pea soup green tiles in the kitchen and the lack of smelly soaps in the bathroom tell me that Karl was living the bachelor’s life. He seems to have kept it clean enough though. Not like neat freak clean, but it’s not dirty. Overall, it reminds me alotta the place I used to have, back before I met Jeannie. With one exception.

  We all got our things. Me? I like to grab a good glass of cheap bourbon and paint them little toy soldiers that take up space on your shelves. Mr. Karl B. Offerman, on the other hand, his thing seems to be -or have been- scary movies. The whole place is a shrine to the spooky and creepy. Not in like a serial killer kind of way - God knows we don’t need another one of those. No, this is more in a fan of every spine-tickling movie you ever seen and then some kind of way.

  Take any psycho killer, evil alien, or cursed ghoul you can think of and it’s in there in at least one way or another. There’s little figurines of creepy clowns, killer kids, and that guy with the saws in his face. The walls aren’t plaster or tile; they’re VHS - really Karl B? No DVD? Eh, who am I to talk? I still got BTO on the 8 track back home. The empty case of Night of the Flesh Eaters lies across the top row. I later find the tape sitting in the VCR. An old TV -even to me, it’s old- is playing us nothing but fuzz, while some ghost stares at us from the rug on the floor. Two evil pumpkins watch me and Wally’s every move from the throw pillows. Frankie the Demented Quarterback from that I Know Who You Killed Last Semester stares at me from the fleece blanket on the back of the couch. I hate how the eyes follow you around. Why do I even know who Frankie is? Oh, because that’s the one that Mikey likes. Jeannie says he‘s too young to be watching those types of things, but what good are grandpas if they can’t spoil their grandkids?

  “This guy sure did like his fright flicks, huh, Detective?”

  “Looks like it Wally.” Now, just because I know who Frankie the Demented Quarterback is, don’t mean I know much about nothing. “Wally, I don’t know half of this stuff, but take a look at this.”

  It seems that the pieces de resistance of Karl B.’s collection are his posters. The whole lot is very well maintained, but these posters just seem a little more, well, a little more maintained. The figures and the tapes, they’re all kind of just thrown together. But these posters, they take up space. Polished wood frames, carefully hanged, these prints really bring the place together.

  “Wow, Perch of the Blood Monkeys,” Wally says. “Classic.”

  “You know this film?”

  “Detective, everybody knows Perch of the Blood Monkeys.” Wally looks at me like I’m from another planet. “It’s a classic. Ya see, the doctor, Dr. Flamefoot, he starts doing these experiments on these monkeys. And the monkeys, they start to develop a thirst for blood! Pretty soon, the monkeys escape the lab and start attacking the city. It gets pretty wild from there.”

  “Ya know what, I think I have heard of that, Wally.” Now, I may not be 100% sure what a blood monkey is, but I know when things don’t add up. “Wally, don’t you think this poster looks a little...peculiar?”

  Wally stands a little closer, taking a hold of his thin glasses. Jeannie tells me that Wally needs to eat more, and she’s right: The boy looks like he’ll keel over if he misses a meal. And I don't know how sees anything but nostrils with those tiny eyes and that big schnoz, but the boy does good work. He’s caught a few things I’ve missed in the past.

  “Well,” Wally pondered. It was a vintage style movie poster. Perch of the Blood Monkeys written at the top, each letter dripping with your typical horror-font blood. A young blond woman in the corner with her shirt ripped just right stood with her hands up, protecting her face from some unseen terror. “Well,” Wally starts again, “They certainly took some liberties with Samantha Terry’s tits. They’re not that big in real life.”

  “No Wally, look with your eyes and not your junk.” I scanned the poster. Other than the title and the blond woman with the big boobs, the poster is largely empty. I get so close to the poster, fog starts to form on the glass. Could be I’m looking too hard, but I swear there is a monkey sized fade in the picture. “Wouldn’t you think that a poster about blood monkeys might have some blood monkeys in it?”

  Wally nodded his head in acknowledgment. “Yeah, maybe so, Detective.”

  I walk over to the next poster: ScareWolf. A full yellow moon sits high in the poster, spotlighting an opening in the poorly drawn forest below, r
ight where you might find a ScareWolf - whatever that is.

  “ScareWolf,” Wally says. “Pretty lame werewolf flick. Really only memorable because it’s where Jenny Lynn Callahan got her start.”

  “Jenny Lynn started off as a scream queen?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Huh.” That’s news to me. “Take a look here Wally. Don’t this look a little empty to you?”

  “Yeah, I definitely think the artist coulda made more use of the space.”

  “Me too, Wally. Me too.”

  I walk around and check out a few more posters. Night of the Yeti. Lots of snow. A woman obviously not prepared for the cold. But no Yeti. The Vampires Curse. No vampires. Shark Apocalypse. Shark free. And finally, The Creature is creature-less, unless the creature is supposed to be invisible. Not so sure about that one.

  “Wally, grab these posters. Let’s head down to the station.”

  ****

  The geeks in the lab tell me the official cause of death for Karl B. was the removal of the inferior part of the body from the superior. So, much as I suspected, he was ripped in half. I wish I could say that I was surprised when they describe the rest of the injuries. Monkey scratches. Wolf bites. The butter on the toast is when he hands me the shark’s tooth.

  “This guy one of those exotic animal collectors?” one of the geeks asks me.

  “He was a collector all right.”

  “How in the hell did he get a shark all the way out here?” the other chimes in.

  “It’s Badhorn,” I say. “They always find a way.”

  Now, in most cities and towns around the country, some poor nobody with a bent for scary movies gets ripped apart by a zoo full of animals, this would be big news. But Badhorn ain’t most cities. This city’s been funny ever since William L. put down his roots here some three hundred odd years ago.

  Nobody really knows -or at least I don’t really know, and that’s good enough for me- why Dr. William L. Badhorn left the hallowed halls of the East Coast to strike out on his own. And nobody really knows why he chose to plant his new roots right here in the middle of nowhere USA either. Couldn’t a been for the weather. But, for whatever reason, he did, and now here we are.

  The ghost story goes that he made a deal with some ungodly types, and in return he got his own university where he could do all his work in peace. The school grew unnaturally quickly in prominence and, to this day, young boys and girls come from all over the world to learn, study, and perhaps get a glimpse of the place’s ...eh, let’s call it strange...history. Now what Badhorn -the man- did exactly I can’t tell you. And what goes on now, well, some of it I still can’t tell you, and, the other parts, I wish I couldn’t tell you.

  So to say that Karl B.’s death was unusual, well, it was and it wasn’t.

  “There’s one more thing.” The geek in the lab coat hands me a small, partially chewed up piece of paper. “Not sure how that thing made it intact.”

  I uncrumple the paper and hold it up to the light. Through the blood, I can barely make out the writing: Dr. Wicked’s Bazaar of the Bizarre (and other Creepy Collectibles).

  I grab Wally and decide to pay Dr. Wicked a visit.

  ****

  On the way over Wally tells me that, much like the shark tooth in my pocket, those posters we found back at Karl B.’s are very real -with one minor anomaly.

  “Not only are they real,” Wally tells me, “they’re originals. Not those cheap prints you can just order anywhere.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s so, Detective,” Wally continues. “The thing is, the originals should have the monster in the poster.”

  “I imagine they should Wally.”

  I pull into the parking lot. Dr. Wicked’s Bazaar of the Bizarre (and other Creepy Collectibles) sits in a strip mall, right off of 46, stuck between a Starbucks and Grandmaster Yu’s Tae-Kwan-Do Academy. A group of 4-6 year olds punch and kick in unison like a tiny little army in training. I must of grabbed a joe at that Starbucks a hundred times, but, in all my years in Badhorn, I don’t remember ever seeing Dr. Wicked, nor his bizarre bazaar.

  The bell rings as Wally and I walk through the door to Dr. Wicked’s. I might have expected a mysterious old man in a cramped room full of incense and monkey skulls. Instead, I get a fat kid with thick glasses behind the counter and room full of anything you can put an undead face on. They got alien egg ice cube trays, sexy witch lighters, even Frankie the Demented Quarterback has got a few action figures to play with. Comic books, games, and of course movie posters line the walls. At a table in the back, a few more fat guys with thick glasses sit around a table, hunched over some dice and cards.

  “I told you, my sparkly zombie with the machete kills your fluffy bunny with the healthy snacks.”

  “No, you forgot to add plus two because my fluffy bunny has the drooling chainsaw.”

  I leave the guys in the back. That’s too weird for me.

  “You Dr. Wicked?” I ask the kid behind the counter, knowing the answer. He’s not old enough to have finished med school, unless he’s some kind of wicked Doogie Howser.

  “Me? No, I’m Steve.” He puts down his book and pushes his glasses back. “What can I do you for?”

  “You familiar with a Karl B. Offerman, Steve?” I hold up a picture of a fully together Karl B. to refresh Steven’s memory.

  “Karl? Oh yeah. Came in here all the time.” Steve looks at me and Wally. “What happened?”

  “Someone decided they got tired of seeing Karl in one piece,” Wally says.

  “Thought he looked better as a two piece,” I add.

  “What? Are you…” Steven looks from Wally to me. Yeah, we are, we nod. “Oh my god.”

  I pull out the receipt. “We found this in his pocket.”

  “Wow, uh yeah,” Steve pulls himself together. “He was just in here a couple days ago. He picked up that Creature poster.”

  “That would be the original 81 x 81 inch The Creature movie poster issued by Phantom Brothers Studio in 1954?”

  “That’s the one. A real beaut,” Steve tells us. “Karl had been looking for that one for a long time.”

  “Karl B,” I ask. “He bought a lot of these posters from you?”

  “Well, a lot of everything really,” Steve informs me. “Comics, collectible figures, lighters, magnets, pillows. Anything that had anything with a horror movie, he wanted it. But ,yeah, he especially loved these posters.”

  “Any reason why he was so in to these flicks?” Wally is really working for his pay today.

  “Why does anyone like anything?” Steve replies. “I guess he just liked being scared. Guy didn’t seem to have a lot of friends or anything. Not that he was like one of those weirdo loner types. I mean, he was kinda strange, but not in a bad way. But then who out here isn’t kinda strange?”

  I have to agree. “You got that right Steve.”

  “I mean, he came in here all the time and we’d chat every once in a while about some new movie or he’d ask me to order something for him.”

  “Like these posters?”

  “Yeah, he was very meticulous about the posters. They had to be original. Like HAD to be. Karl loved to collect his stuff, but most of it, he wasn’t too particular about. Those posters though. He knew what he wanted there.”

  “And you have these posters here?”

  “Well, we have prints,” Steve says. “But not originals. We have a guy for the originals.”

  “A guy?”

  “Indeed, Detective.” A new voice enters the conversation. “A poster guy.”

  I turn to find myself face to chest with an unusually tall man. He goes up as far as I go out. And he is thin. Probably one of those paleo-vegetarian-no-donuts-after-four types. Even though he’s incredibly thin, the suit he wears is about two sizes too small. He keeps it clean though. Impeccable. A watch chain shines from the button on his vest. A pencil thin mustache moves with every syllable he speaks.