Deadknobs And Doomsticks

By Joe Pasquale

Deadknobs And Doomsticks is a collection of thirteen illustrated short horror stories. Ranging from the darkly bizarre to the horrifically surreal, many of the stories are laced with a theme of bullying and bullies. 

Dark undertones and malevolent overtones interweave with characters and situations that pull the reader to the edge of their seat. Wit and black humour is prevalent through the stories, each with a delicious payoff for the reader. 

Joe Pasquale shows that where there is laughter there is also a dark and disturbing voice that is drawn to the horror genre to find its release. 

With illustrations by the author, this collection shows a rich depth of talent as an artist and author. Joe shows he has as unique a voice in the world of horror writing, as it is in comedy. 

These are definitely tales of the unexpected....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caffeine Nights Publishing
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781910720929

Joe Pasquale

Joe Pasquale is one of the UK’s most loved and funny entertainers. With a wide variety of work from stand-up comedy, to voice-over work in Hollywood feature films, Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties and Horton Hears A Who! and children’s television – Frankenstein’s Cat and starred in The Muppets’ 25th Anniversary show and delighting the nation when he won I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! His TV special, An Audience with Joe Pasquale, enjoyed ratings of more than 9 million viewers. While DVDs of his live tours have sold over £1m on more than one occasion. Joe has starred in a number of West End shows and touring productions, including Spamalot, The Wizard of Oz and Mel Brooks, The Producers. Having recently qualified as a pilot and taken up boxing and running, Joe has continued to enhance his ‘action man’ credentials by competing in a celebrity edition of Total Wipeout; attempted to smash the ‘most amount of martial arts throws in a minute on Guinness World Records Joe’s versatility extends from theatre and TV to now writing his first collection of horror stories that will surprise and delight his fans and new readers of all ages from 16 up. He has also illustrated the book and proves that he is also a very talented artist with a pencil as well as paint brush. He is far more than the man with the funny voice.

Book preview

Fiction to die for...

Published by Caffeine Nights Publishing 2017

Copyright © Joe Pasquale 2017

Joe Pasquale has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work

CONDITIONS OF SALE

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

This book has been sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental

Published in Great Britain by

Caffeine Nights Publishing

4 Eton Close

Walderslade

Chatham

Kent

ME5 9AT

www.caffeinenights.com

Also available as a paperback and audiobook

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-910720-92-9

Cover design by

Mark (Wills) Williams

Everything else by

Default, Luck and Accident

DEADKNOBS AND DOOMSTICKS

A COLLECTION OF DARK, SURREAL AND BIZARRE HORROR STORIES AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOE PASQUALE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

A CELEBRATION

THE SAPLING

TAKEN...(NOT STARRING LIAM NEESON)

THE SEA MONKEY

A SLEEPLESS NIGHT

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DEAD MAN

OPEN WIDE

GRANNY’S PLACE

UNDEAD AND BURIED

THE UNAWAREWOLF

DEAD AND BREAKFAST

ALL GOOD THINGS

THE 13TH STORY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

––––––––

I am Groot.

Thank you for your belief and patience.

Thank you, Colin Edmonds, Bob Voice, Nicola Hobbs

and all at Caffeine Nights

FOREWORD

MILES FROM ANYWHERE....

I once hitchhiked to Lowestoft from Grays in Essex, it took me 16 hours. I could’ve walked it in that time – and when I got there it was shut. I ended up moving there and staying for 12 years.

I often drive past hitchhikers and understand why hardly anybody picked me up that day. I don’t think I looked scary, I don’t think anyone was worried that I was a character from a horror film and was going to murder them and throw their body out of the car on the A12 near Ipswich. I just looked a bit gormless. Who wants to spend three hours with a village idiot?

I sometimes wonder how illegal immigrants sneak into people’s cars in France and get into the UK without the driver knowing. I sometimes have flies that do that. I’ll open up the car, a fly will get in, I shut the door. He doesn’t ask where we’re going. Imagine going to Cardiff with a stowaway fly. I get there and he says, where are we? Cardiff, I say, and he says, well how am I going to get home? I told my wife I was going out for a walk, I’ve been gone for hours!

So I say, well, I’ll be finished about 6ish, I’ll meet you outside Nandos if you want a lift back. Don’t be late or you’ll have to make your own way!

I imagine that was how life on Earth started a billion years ago. Maybe aliens visited the planet with a stowaway bacteria on board. They opened the door and the microbial lifeform got out. The aliens realised there wasn’t anything to be seen here, so they packed up shop and went home, leaving the microbes behind to start a chain reaction of life on Earth. I bet David Attenborough does a 10-part series on it, using state-of-the-art graphics making the aliens look like Simon Cowell and Sinitta.

You never know, I might’ve hit on the truth there, So far it’s all been speculation anyway. But either way, this is how my mind works, so I’ve tried to apply the stream of consciousness that occurs in my synaptic nerves, put pen to paper, finger to keyboard, and give you an insight into what keeps me awake at night.

Sleep well, Joe x.

A CELEBRATION

All families have their secrets. I can’t tell you ours, well not yet anyway, or it wouldn’t be a secret, would it?

Every male member of our family managed to live to over 100 years old. I didn’t know why until I was nine.

It was August 20th, 1971, bang in the middle of the summer holidays. And I was always having mine interrupted by a visit to Granddad Alice.

I hated going to see my Granddad Alice, his real name was Alessandro, and he was from Naples. He never learnt to speak English properly, just bastardised it with the Italian language until it became something both native tongues could understand. His favourite profanity was ‘biddy shit’.

But he would always place the letter ‘A’ before it, so it then became Italianised into ‘Abiddy shit’. I have no idea what ‘Biddy’ meant, but he said it a lot.

There were two reasons I didn’t like seeing him:

One: His breath. It was a combination of cheap tobacco, garlic and olive oil. I had to hold mine every time he gave me the traditional Italian greeting of being kissed on both cheeks.

Two: His house always smelt of farts.

I’d walk in, forcing myself to breathe through my mouth, until ultimately I would forget why I was breathing that way, then take a breath through my nose, making me gip and nearly throw up whatever undigested food lay in the bottom of my stomach, as the ever-present stench of methane initiated my gag reflex. The stink used to hang in the air like an invisible albatross.

Today was his birthday. One-hundred-and-two years old, and there was to be a party, and Dad said I HAD to go. 

Mum wasn’t coming. How come she didn’t have to go? I didn’t want to hang about in the-house-that-time-forgot! I hated looking at Granddad Alice. It made me feel ill just thinking about him, how he looked, how he moved, how he breathed. 

He always wore an old string vest that had seen better days, with a ladder down the left-hand side under the armpit, turning several little holes into one big hole, and grey elasticated tracksuit bottoms that enveloped his ever-expanding stomach and showed every stain of anything he’d ever spilt on himself. I particularly hated the large yellow piss stain down the inside leg that ironically enough reminded me of the shape of Italy that I’d seen so often in geography lessons. 

He’d recently taken to wearing a catheter, a necessity due to his cancerous prostate. It was strapped to the inside of his left leg. It doesn’t sound nice, but it was a better option to what he had before.

I actually walked into the toilet once and caught him in the act of pulling on a giant disposable nappy. I saw something that I think used to be his willy.

I backed straight out and shut the door behind me, as he whispered abiddy shit. 

He wore flip-flops and he had loads of them. He hadn’t seen a chiropodist in years and any other type of footwear wouldn’t have accommodated his disgusting toenails. They were the colour of mustard, with the texture of a cockleshell, and were so long and curly it appeared as though each toe was wearing a tiny armadillo as a helmet.

I hated his skin, especially on his head. Just wisps of white hair tendrils held in place by giant scabs of dandruff. Veins on his temples pulsated like a bicycle innertube that won’t inflate due to a tiny puncture. 

When I think about him like this, all that comes to mind is the colour yellow – his skin, his eyes, his teeth, his nails, his piss!

I hated him, why did I have to go?

Mum’s excuse was that she had a busy day at the shops.

What did that mean? She was always going down the shops, but not once had she ever come back and said, oooh, I’ve had a busy day at the shops!

I tried not to question it for too long, it was Saturday, my favourite day of the week. 

Mum gave me my toast with the crusts cut off and a cup of tea with Fussell’s condensed milk in my Thunderbirds mug.

I settled down in the living room on the floor in front of the telly and the electric fire. I put two bars on. It was August, but it was the only heating downstairs and the back door was open.

Mum came back in and turned the fire off. You don’t need that on, it’s the middle of the bloody summer! she said.

She left through the back door shouting behave yourself at the party.

Good, she was gone! I turned the fire back on.

It was 9.30am, YES! Banana Splits was just about to start. It was my favourite programme, an American show in which four actors in animal skins dressed as some sort of monkey/human hybrid, and they would lark about in sketches, interspersed with cartoons.

Watching Bingo, Fleagle, Drooper and Snork would take my mind off going to see Granddad Alice.

I only got fifteen minutes into Banana Splits when Dad came downstairs wearing a black suit. I’d never seen him in a suit before, I didn’t even know he owned one!

He turned the fire off and I had my first experience of deja vu. What’s the matter with you.... It’s the middle of bloody Summer! Now get dressed, we have to go to see Granddad Alice, he said. 

I went upstairs and there lying on my bed were a pair trousers, a shirt, tie and socks, laid out in such a way it looked like an invisible boy was wearing my clothes. 

I dressed as slowly as I could and clomped, heavy-footed, down the stairs, demonstrating my disapproval.

Dad was waiting at the front door with Granddad’s birthday card tucked under his arm, car keys in one hand, and what looked like a jam jar filled with grasshoppers in the other hand.

What’s that for? I asked.

Just get in the bloody car, we’re going to be late, he said impatiently.

I couldn’t understand what the rush was. He’d lasted 102 years, surely he could’ve waited fifteen minutes so I could see what Bingo and the rest of the hybrids had in store? 

I jumped into the front passenger seat of dad’s off-white rust-eaten Mini Cooper. He passed me the card and the jam jar and said: Hang on to that... and don’t drop it, they’re for granddad!

I didn’t ask why, as I could see he had the hump. If I’d pushed it, the best I could’ve hoped for would’ve been a sarcastic response along the lines of