Atomic City Terror: Curse of the Murderous Dummy

Jim Higgins Must Die!

Jim Higgins scanned the flashlight beam around his pitch dark six-car garage. The miniature Maglite was clenched tightly between his front teeth. His hands were busy pointing his pistol-grip shotgun. He was trying to spot the damnable dummy. The murderous marionette who’d come to stave his skull in with a few blunt pummels from a ball-peen hammer.

Truth be told, more than just a few whomps were probably on the docket. This crummy dummy was demented, and was as likely as not to go full ape-turds on Jim, like an unhinged chimp with anger management issues and screwball tendencies.

Watchful Jim ran the glowing shaft of light over boxes, shelves, and machinery before sharply aiming it up, down, and in the general direction of any creak, squeak, or snap from within the shadows crisscrossing the carport.

This parking structure was not quite cavernous, but close. One could more accurately have called it a small warehouse, if that’s how one got their jollies. To each their own.

A woman’s voice inside Jim’s head gently scolded him, as it often did these days.

Now Jim, don’t go fretting over this daffy dummy. You don’t know to a certainty he’s come tonight. Nor even that he still wants to smash your skull in. Even dummies can have a change of heart.

“Maybe,” Jim muttered in agreement. “This dummy is devilish erratic, and lousy with unknowns. But he’s likewise got knowns that cling to him. And we know he’s an unholy bastard of a beast, at best. Pure evil at worst. Even if we admit he’s fickle, his favor has always been toward whatever’s most wicked.”

The voice in Jim’s head was a familiar ghost. Its tone and cadence plucked sad chords of yearning from his belly and sternum. And it wasn’t so much a voice as voices, in the plural. They belonged to the three central women of his life, each now estranged from him in their own unique way. When their words bubbled up inside his skull, it was the only time or place he ever spoke with any one of them.

One voice belonged to his mother, going bat-blind all by her lonesome in the grubby Pennsylvania farmhouse she refused to abandon. The roof was caving, and wind blew strong through the rotted caulk seal around the windows.

The second voice belonged to Jim’s daughter, a notable young physicist. She spent her days sending photons crashing against one another, somewhere in deepest, darkest Europe. She worked at a large hadron collider at a top secret facility in Romania.

Lastly, there was the slightly reprimanding voice of his wife, dead and gone these many years. She’d been blown up pretty thoroughly, and quite literally. It was Jim who’d done the exploding. Accidentally, of course. But just because we shrug and comfort ourselves that accidents happen, it doesn’t always mean we can put the pieces back together. Not when that person has been exploded, and not figuratively so.

Sometimes Jim’s women spoke solo, sometimes all three in chorus, or in alternating combinations of two. It could be comforting, but sometimes their interjections jarred him and were annoying. The three harpies, he called them, because they were always nagging, niggling, and nitpicking. Even when speaking in a spirit of love, there was always some reproachful accent adding bum notes to their tone.

It was chiefly this chastising attitude that drove Jim to keep the two women still living—his mother and daughter—at some impersonal distance from his life, though each had cause for feeling likewise toward him.

The third woman, his wife, had her own reasons for estrangement; mostly concerning her having been exploded, as mentioned. The woman was vaporized. And though no body was ever found, nor even itty-bitty little bits of body, she was considered deceased by most reasonable people.

Jim thought the voice inside his head misguided on the subject of the dummy. That damned puppet had not only swore he’d come for Jim, but even disclosed the means with which he’d brutally dispatch him. A steel hammer, hurled countless times against Jim’s skull. He’d even pointed to the spot on Jim’s head where he meant to focus his rage. It was specific, and oddly so.

The dummy had tapped that place repeatedly with the tip of his finger. “Right here, Jim. Just above the brow. That’s where I’m going to smash your skull in. You want to know, yes? I’d want to if I were you. There shouldn’t be any secrets between us, buddy. Never any secrets between a man and his moppet.”

Jim worked his fingers through thinning white hair to the spot on his scalp where the dummy had fingered. Just to the right side of the frontal crown. It still felt tender, like the dummy’s otherwise faint and gentle tapping had been done in the spirit of such meanness that it left a permanent bruise.

People say things in anger they don’t really mean, all the time. Sometimes they even say they’re going to bash your brains in, when what they’re really trying to tell you is, You’ve hurt my feelings, so now I’m going to lash out by pretending I’m going to crush your skull.

Jim laughed aloud at this one. “Sometimes people do,” he chuckled. “But that dummy didn’t make his threat in a fit of rage. Passion had no part in it. It was a clear-minded statement of intent, made by a homicidal puppet, cooler than a cucumber in wintertime.”

Tsk, tsk. The glass is always half empty with you, Jim. You’re probably right, though. The dummy is hiding in here somewhere, and he’s going to jump from the rafters and pulverize your head with a hammer. Didn’t he promise he would? He’s going to kill you good, that’s what he said.

Jim shuddered. Now the voice was agreeing with him. “Let’s not get carried away. I’m just being realistic. No use thinking seventh heaven thoughts and ice cream sundae speculations.”

Maybe it won’t be painful at least. Quick, quiet, untroubled. There have been moments when the dummy was a true gentleman and peacemaker.

“A gentleman? I don’t recall a single such moment. He’s always been a jerk. What vulgar name do the kids call bullies these days?”

A bag of dicks? He does have a temper.

“Yes, a temper. Grumpy and homicidal. Maybe there’s a rush of endorphins after the first hammer blow that numbs you to the following strikes. It’s pretty to think so, anyway.”

If he does murder you, he should temper the savagery with mercy. Make it as quick as possible. That would be kind of him.

“He has no kindness in him. The act will be extreme. Loud, turbulent, and twitchy. The dummy is a violent man, seething hatred.”

Don’t call that dummy a violent MAN. It’s a villainous DOLL. A cursed THING.

Jim didn’t disagree. That damn dummy was all those foul things and more. But it wasn’t worth pondering on or sussing out. The dummy was what it was, whether he, she, or it. Whatever the damn thing was, it was nothing wholesome. Not on the ugly surface, nor in the grisly through and through.

Jim’s garage was massive, but he didn’t park cars inside. He was an obsessive woodworking enthusiast and master craftsman. The spacious space was a fully outfitted woodshop and working studio. Even professional artisans envied how well-equipped and masterfully designed it was. Jim confidently proclaimed it as the finest shop in the entire Southwest, private or professional. He’d built it himself, and it was his pride and joy.

The walls were crisscrossed with what seemed like miles of airline tubing for pneumatic machinery, industrial duty power cords, and flexible steel conduit. Lumber racks and shelving rose as high as the ceiling. Every available patch of ground on the sealed concrete floor was furnished with jigsaws, jointers, grinders, lathes, planes, sanders, and more.

In addition to power tools, Jim had enough hand tools to outfit a peasant army. Files, chisels, screwdrivers, utility knives, razor blades, mallets, awls, and wrenches up to the eyebrows. Whether you wanted to whittle a mahogany salad bowl, chisel out a bamboo rocking chair, or simply chip your own homemade toothpicks off a block of knotty pine, Jim had the tool for the job.

A guy could even build his own wooden dummy, were he into that sort of thing.

Any one of these tools could be used to bludgeon some poor slob to death, or gore him in any or all of his soft organs and meaty parts. It was practically the perfect place to be slaughtered by a sentient puppet.

Lot of dangerous stuff in here, the voice sad. Things to puncture, slice, and maim.

“No arguing with that,” Jim agreed.

Whether your intention was to cut off a head, hand, or foot, Jim had easy means to the right device. But those were grim hypotheticals. He mostly liked to craft handmade chess sets, furniture, sculpture, and other one-of-a-kind treasures. Woodworking was only a hobby, but his pieces were so expertly rendered a good portion of his income came from their sales. He had very successful gallery representation for his woodworks just a few miles down the road, in the lucrative art market of Santa Fe.

All that extra dough you socked away from your hobby won’t be much use if the dummy lops your head off.

“Nope.”

And you were saving up to retire in Mexico. Travel the world. Can’t do that if the dummy plunges a screwdriver into your forehead.

“Think I don’t know? But I’ve got fight in me. I think I can take on a ten-pound puppet.”

But the dummy has savagery. He’s killing mean. That’ll take you to the moon and back, when it comes to fisticuffs. He won’t pull his punches, so you don’t hold back either. He bites off your fingers, you bite off his nose. He kicks you in the groin, you knock his block off with a crowbar. When you punch, punch through. That’ll spin his head like Howdy Doody.

“Note to self,” Jim croaked. “Punch through with a vengeance.”

Jim considered grabbing his safety goggles. They weren’t much in the way of armor, but could probably deflect a screwdriver swung into the shiny black bullseye of his pupil, or a handful of blinding sawdust rudely tossed into his eyes.

He ran his flashlight beam over the pegboard wall where he hung his most commonly used tools. There was one thing out of place.

Goosebumps erupted across his flesh. His claw hammer was missing from its hanging hook. So this would indeed be the tool for his gruesome murder. A hammer hurled handily at his head.

Not a ball-peen, as the dummy first said, but a claw. That was hardly kinder.

Jim was considered by coworkers to be manic about organization. He thought of himself as merely a devotee of tidiness. Or perhaps a high priest.

An ordered mind needs orderly surroundings. That’s how Jim, a senior scientist at Atomic City National Laboratory, managed his own research lab. A place for everything and everything in its place. It’s what kept his lab accident-free these many years, and breaches of protocol by young scientists in his employ pushed him towards the edge of fury.

He took great pride in his perfect safety record. Not one postdoc had ever shot his eyeballs out with a laser, sprayed acid all over her face, or dropped a beaker full of liquid nitrogen on their feet and froze their little pink toes off. These were good things. If he was called a clutter Nazi behind his back, so be it. For hallelujah, it was so.

Jim ran his woodshop like he ran his lab. Tools were returned to their rightful place, no exceptions. It was only because he literally never failed in this regard that he knew beyond a doubt he’d hung the hammer up after its last use.

But Jim, everyone slips up now and again. You’re getting a little long in the tooth. It’s time you welcome this new world of geriatric forgetfulness and disarray.

“Not me,” Jim said. “Not ever.” And he was a thousand percent right.

The evil dummy’s words from a few weeks back ran sharply through Jim’s mind, as if the infernal puppet were standing beside him: “I’m going to take your own hammer and bash your brains in. Bash ’em right the heck in. I hope you have health insurance, Jim. I hope it covers massive head wounds.”

Jim did have health insurance, but thought it was a strange line for the dummy to pin onto the tail end of a threat. Jim chuckled bleakly. Here he was thinking about a sentient puppet, a demoniac one at that, and what stood out as most irreconcilable was the puppet’s taunts about his health coverage.

Maybe health insurance was a matter of concern to everyone. Even to evil, wooden dummies and the persons they planned to brain. Life is strange. Perhaps it really was a dummy’s world, and Jim just happened to live in it.