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Bobby the Sham

On the flight out of Baltimore, Robert Shamrock suspected that some of his fellow passengers—several extensively tattooed men with shaved heads and gold nose rings, who wore T-shirts emblazoned with satanic messages or images of flaming-eyed skulls, men whose teeth were in some cases filed into points and whose tongues had been surgically divided to resemble the forked tongues of snakes—might not be ideal traveling companions in a crisis. Indeed, he didn’t believe he was unkind to wonder if a few of this colorful contingent might be capable of fomenting a crisis of their own during which everyone aboard would die in a spectacular fashion. Because Bobby the Sham was fair-minded, many women these days disturbed him as much as did any men. He was uneasy about two lovelies dressed in black leather; green hair, painted faces, and contact lenses that transformed their eyes into mirrors might not have been enough to alarm Bobby if they had not been whispering and giggling together continuously.

The world had changed radically since the four amigos gave one another comfort in high school. Bobby found it difficult to believe he, Rebecca, Spencer, and Ernie had been considered such outsiders that they had been ostracized. These days, everyone wanted to be an outsider. Many were willing to endure considerable discomfort and disfigurement to prove their I’m-a-freak bona fides. Two passengers without apparent disabilities were accompanied by what they claimed were service dogs; the first was an enormous, quiet, menacing German shepherd that focused on Bobby with the intensity canines usually reserved for a bowl of food, and the second was a barking wild-eyed Maltese whose fur had been dyed pale blue. The only nuts Bobby could get with a beer were corn nuts, which weren’t really nuts, although the grim flight attendant repeatedly insisted they were no less nuts than were almonds or cashews.

He took solace in the thought that this trip was probably more pleasant than it would have been if he had been a popular author thirty years earlier. Back then, books sold in greater numbers than was currently the case, and some famous novelists had been semi-romantic figures, recognized and approached for autographs nearly as often as movie stars. Now that everyone spent a significant part of their lives binge-watching TV and movies, authors of bestsellers could earn a smaller though still very good living while retaining their anonymity. No one recognized Bobby, which was all right with him.

However, back in the day when allergies weren’t epidemic, he could have enjoyed a bag of Planters and an icy Heineken with no concern that, in mid munch, he would be responsible for the sudden death of another passenger. And in those days, he would have been less fearful about crashing into an immense Chinese spy balloon that carried a surveillance package the size of two Greyhound buses, less worried that the plane would be brought down by a drone flown into one of its engines by a teenage hobbyist infuriated about the carbon footprint of Baltimore-to-Indianapolis air travel, and less concerned that a Maltese faux assistance dog would abruptly attack his ankles, thereby exciting the German shepherd to join the assault and rip out his throat while a flight attendant propagandized him about corn nuts. As all those thoughts compounded one atop the other, Bobby was overcome, almost in spite of himself, by nostalgia for the world as it had been when he was a child.

Arguably, the most serious curse under which most novelists labored was the curse of a robust imagination. The engine of Bobby’s imagination never shut off. It was always at least idling, and often it raced like a pumped-up Ferrari in the French Grand Prix. Drama—from stage to page, in prose or verse, in all forms ever conceived—relied on suspense, on threats ranging from mere marital discord to national catastrophe. Therefore, he tended to imagine malign rather than benign plot developments in the story of his life. Indeed, for every unfortunate turn of events that actually occurred, he worried about numerous other disasters that never came to pass.

The prospect of returning to Maple Grove after all these years inspired a carnival of frightening apparitions to wheel through Bobby’s mind, often complete with the music of a carousel. These were not creatures he’d encountered in real life, but monsters from a hundred movies and television shows about carnivals and circuses, traveling phantasmagories in the whirl and dazzle of which were hidden horrific entities with malevolent intentions, fiends behind the frolic. His picture-postcard hometown had no fairground to which such entertainments were drawn in their illustrated Peterbilts and railroad cars that promised marvels to the world through which they sped.

Instead, locals devised their own celebrations. The weeklong Arts and Crafts Fair in May. Freedom Weekend over the July Fourth holiday. The Apple Festival in late September. Residents of every faith and those of no faith participated in decorating for A Month of Christmas, when the six square blocks of the town center were outlined and garlanded with in excess of one million colored lights and became home to more welcoming elves and angels and carolers and costumed Dickensian characters than you could shake a candy cane at. Thousands of visitors drove from all over the state to experience Maple Grove’s Month of Christmas, when it seemed that the town had been frozen in a better time, a time of peace and fellowship and kindness and plenty.

Nevertheless, as the plane passed over western Pennsylvania, as Bobby decided corn nuts sucked and dropped them one by one into his empty beer can even at the risk of offending the scowling flight attendant, he couldn’t rid himself of a sense of the uncanny. He was troubled by a queasy suspicion that he had forgotten—or been made to forget—events of grave importance, that in spite of its picture-postcard perfection, Maple Grove was a place of unthinkable horror, and that he was flying to his death.

Just then, beyond the windows, the night was seared by a web of lightning so bright and complex that even Robert Shamrock, a writer known for his vivid depictions of scenes, could not have adequately described it. The subsequent hard crashes of thunder were of such frightful volume and shook the plane so insistently that even the most tattooed, pierced, fierce-looking passengers let out cries of alarm so high-pitched and tremulous that they seemed to issue from pale, thin children.

As if the crash of the breaking storm briefly cracked open the door to Bobby’s locked memory, a name from the past came to him—Wayne Louis Hornfly. The name chilled Bobby, elicited a shudder of revulsion, and briefly made him feel as if his bowels had liquefied, a sensation he had experienced only once before when he had eaten some bad guacamole. Those effects were inspired by the name alone, for Bobby could not recall who Wayne Louis Hornfly had been or what outrages the man might have committed or whether he, Bobby, had ever known such a person. Only the name swelled into his conscious mind, while other information about this ominous person continued to be repressed, as though the truth would drive him mad, just like the ill-fated souls in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft were frequently plunged into insanity by forbidden knowledge.

The plane flew on through the storm, and Bobby the Sham had no choice but to go with it.

[Dear Reader, I am acutely aware that at a moment like this in such a story, many of you will become frustrated with a character like Robert Shamrock. You will even shout at him not to return to Maple Grove, as if he can hear you, just as you might shout at the people living in a haunted house, enduring all kinds of terrors when they could simply leave. I ask that you shout at me instead of at Bobby, because he suffered great trauma during his years in Maple Grove; he is currently in a delicate psychological condition and deserves your understanding. I have much thicker skin than he does. Besides, if you think about the reason for your frustration, you’ll see I’m to blame, not Bobby, because I’m compelling him to return to his hometown even though it’s likely that what will happen to him there will not be pretty. Shout at me all you want, but remember that I can’t hear you any more than Bobby can and that there might be lifelong consequences from a ruptured larynx.]