The Doom that Came to Mellonville

By Madison McSweeney

Magician Isaac Plank owned a collection of oddities from around the world. Only he could control their sinister powers.

But Isaac is dead now, and his father - respectable accountant Lawrence Plank - has put his estate up for auction.

After a local hoarder buys his spellbook, she brings Isaac back from beyond

• Language: English
• Publisher: Filthy Loot
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087975948

Book preview

1

Arrangements

When Isaac Plank died, his father put his personal effects up for auction.

Their neighbours gossiped widely about this decision, thinking it strange; but then again, they concluded, the boy’s father was strange.

Strange perhaps wasn’t the word. After all, Lawrence Plank had no discernable quirks – and that was the thing. Lawrence had lived in Mellonville for most of his life and had never made much of an impression on anyone. He worked as an accountant at a medium-sized firm just out of town, arriving at work just before 8:30 each day and leaving at 5:01. He voted every year, always for the same party, but didn’t talk politics. He went to church every Sunday, seemingly out of habit, but expressed no strongly held religious beliefs. He subscribed to the National Review and the Globe and Mail; he listened to folk singers Gordon Lightfoot and Bruce Cockburn, whose eighties output he found a little too rollicking, and had once told his son that k.d. lang had the most beautiful voice ever to be put to record. He had what was most charitably described as a dry personality, and no detectable sense of humour. He avoided small talk, quietly abhorred gossip, rarely attended community events, and almost never had people in. No one in Mellonville knew much about the man, and although this greatly frustrated the small-town busybodies, his general reputation was one of an unobjectionable (if unremarkable) family man.

How Lawrence had ended up with a son like Isaac was a mystery.

Isaac bore almost no resemblance to Lawrence, distorting what little there was with unsightly facial piercings and sinister snakelike tattoos. As a teen, he’d dyed his short hair a rainbow of unnatural colours before settling on a deep midnight black. He’d been in trouble since his earliest years of socialization, being sent home from kindergarten multiple times for infractions ranging from foul language (the Plank boy had a habit of blurting out words that no one could imagine coming out of Lawrence’s mouth) to bringing in roadkill for show-and-tell. His juvenile delinquency persisted into his teen years, where he was kicked out of two local schools, fired from countless minimum wage jobs, and arrested for a number of crimes that even the most loose-lipped of local police were discreet about. Some more charitable commentators speculated that Isaac was still suffering from the untimely death of his mother, who’d passed when he was a toddler; others noted that the boy, at his most destructive, seemed to be having a grand time of life.

In any case, the locals remarked, he must have been a great shame to his respectable father. If he was, Lawrence Plank never gave any indication. The few people who knew Lawrence more intimately – and even then, this was an arms-length intimacy – sensed a quiet pride in his wayward son, whose photo always sat framed on the man’s desk.

After exhausting all the local public options, Lawrence enrolled the boy in a strict private school that seemed to keep control over him, at least between the hours of 9 am and 4 pm. Isaac graduated an honours student, right on time at the age of eighteen. He disappeared for a time after high school, before reappearing fast asleep on his father’s lawn.

Isaac spent the next year living quietly at home, working contentedly at a deli down the street from Lawrence’s downtown office and picking at correspondence courses in the evenings. To some, it seemed the boy had been tamed; one local saw the men eating smoked meat sandwiches in the corner of the deli, Issac’s dyed-green locks confined to a hairnet. Others, however, claimed to have seen him wandering the streets in the middle of the night, or reported strange noises from the woods near the Plank family bungalow. He went away again the day after his twentieth birthday, leaving no clue as to his whereabouts or the date of his return. Lawrence, when asked, would simply shrug.

On Isaac’s twenty-second birthday, a vacant shack on the outskirts was purchased from the township by an unknown bidder. The townspeople wondered aloud who would go to such lengths to rehabilitate such a derelict property as they watched various workmen come and go, hooking up septic and water and electricity. Two weeks after the sale, Isaac Plank pulled in, towing a rented U-Haul from the back of a rusted Chevy.

Isaac’s pattern over the next five years was fairly consistent – long, unexplained absences followed by brief returns to town, almost always with several boxes of souvenirs. Those who’d happened to pass by on his unloading days claimed to have seen massive trunks full of intricately woven Persian rugs, luxurious pelts from unidentified animals, unrecognizable taxidermy and strange things in jars, show-stopping sculptures from all cultures and eras, and other tightly wrapped priceless objects. No one knew where he found space to store these curiosities, as his entire house was barely the size of a bedroom. Nor did they know how he managed to finance his extensive travels; hypotheses ranged from international drug trafficking to soaking his old man for cash.

If Lawrence Plank had any thoughts as to his son’s occupation, he never let on. Lawrence was generally hard to read. Even as the paramedics wheeled away the boy’s wasted body, he kept his composure. The morning after Isaac’s death, Lawrence called the funeral parlour and planned the service as calmly as if he were ordering a sandwich platter. Later that afternoon, he called the auction house.

It was strange, wasn’t it? whispered the gossips. Yes, one had to make arrangements – but usually there was some display of emotion? It wasn’t as if Lawrence, being now a childless widower, had anyone left to be strong for. And what kind of grieving father would want every trace of his only son scattered to the winds?

Best not to speculate, they reminded each other, almost reluctantly. The man was grieving – and, in his way, he’d always been a little odd.

* * *

Paul! You’ll never believe this!

Karen Wellett,