Grogo the Goblin Read online

  GROGO THE GOBLIN

  Previously published as "The Demon"

  By Jeffrey Sackett

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2013 / Jeffrey Sackett

  Copy-edited by: Kurt M. Criscione

  Cover design by: David Dodd

  Cover images courtesy of:

  http://madhoshistock.deviantart.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Jeffrey Sackett was born in Brooklyn in 1949, and counts himself fortunate to have made it home from the hospital unscathed. After studying briefly for the ministry, he chose to pursue an academic career—this being preferable at the time to his alternative, which was a year in Vietnam as a guest of the government.

  He obtained master’s degrees in history from Queens College and New York University, a doctorate from St. Andrew’s Seminary, and also studied classical Greek, Latin, German, French, and Mandarin Chinese. Being thus possessed of a vast fund of information, he became a teacher of history and English in both high school and college, which he has remained until this day. He is currently an associate professor in both the History and Philosophy departments of Dowling College and Suffolk Community College.

  He explored other career alternatives at various times. He worked for a while as a bank guard (until he was fired for taking a nap down in the vault when the bank was being robbed), as a security guard (until he was fired for falling asleep on the job), as a cab driver (until he got fired because he didn’t know where anyplace was), and as a finder of missing persons (most of whom had disappeared by choice, and threatened him with all manner of violent reprisals when he found them). He decided that on the whole, teaching was his safest bet.

  He has travelled extensively in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, has spent time secluded in a Trappist monastery, a Hindu ashram and a Buddhist Zendo, and has been five times granted fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Sackett lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife Paulette, an artist; their daughters Simonetta (who is enrolled in a culinary program) and Elizabeth (an actress and singer), and their lizard Horatio, a seven foot long iguana. Theirs is the only house in the neighborhood with a sign saying Beware of Reptile on the fence.

  Book List

  Blood of the Impaler

  Candlemas Eve

  Future History – the 2190 A.D. Edition

  Grogo the Goblin (originally titled The Demon)

  Lycanthropos

  Stolen Souls

  The Mark of the Werewolf

  The Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun

  Audiobooks

  Blood of the Impaler

  Future History – the 2190 A.D. Edition

  Lyncanthropos

  The Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun

  Jeffrey Sackett can be contacted at: [email protected]

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  This book is for those who lived through the 1960's, and for those who did not survive the era; for Mario, Lenny, Tom, Artie, Carl, and Rod; for Carol L., Helen, Scotty, Ted, Dave N., and John; for Nancy K., Nancy S., Barbara, Linda, and Susan; for Ken and Dave B.; for Cindy, Jennifer, and Samantha; for Russell, Peter, Buzzy, Eric, and Freddie; for Rosie, Edie, Ingrid, and Streek; for Bob, Cathy, Jamie, Jim, and Aardvark; for Valerie, Abby, and Mary; and for Dr. Dankner and the Mighty Kronk.

  A special thanks to Indrani Abumusallam, Vishna Puri Chandra, and Eugene McDonald for their research assistance.

  THE DEMON

  Preface

  My name is Arthur Winston. That may or may not mean anything to you, but you've probably seen my face on your television screen a number of times. I am what is usually described as a "character actor," and I am a reasonably successful one. I mention this right up front because the story I'm about to present to you is unbelievable, and I want to make it clear that I am a real person with a real career and a real reputation to protect.

  No, wait. I think perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me introduce my story and my problems a bit differently.

  When I was a child in the late 1950's, I spent a good deal of time watching horror movies. The Saturday matinees back then were wonderful, with twenty-five-cent admissions, two features, five cartoons, Coke for a dime, and popcorn for fifteen cents. The movies made for the horror fans of the age were classics of low-budget nonsense, and my ten-year-old eyes drank in each and every one of them. I was properly terrified, of course, by the giant ants and spiders that atomic radiation had produced, by the absurd special efects (3-D, Smellorama, William Castle's special specter glasses, the skeletons that came floating out over the audience), by the clay and catsup makeup, and by the dozens of enraged prehistoric monsters who periodically destroyed Tokyo. I often wondered why people continued to live in Tokyo, what with all those damned prehistoric monsters lurking about.

  A film was released in 1959 that scared the hell out of me, gave me many sleepless nights, and made me shudder every time I passed a cemetery. The film, Plan 9 from Outer Space, was standard fare for 1950's horror movies. A race of alien superbeings, having decided that mankind's creation of atomic bombs and missiles had made the human race too dangerous to be permitted to exist, decided to wipe us out by resurrecting dead people from our cemeteries as bloodsucking zombie vampires who would wander around on their stiff limbs and kill people at random. The bloodsucking zombie vampires were played by Tor Johnson (who reminded me of Nikita Khrushchev), Vampira (the apparent inspiration for both Morticia Addams and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark), and Bela Lugosi, in what was unfortunately his last role. Lugosi died during filming, and the budget for the film was too low to afford to rewrite or reshoot anything, so he was replaced by a much taller guy, who wandered around with his face obscured by a Dracula cape. I seem to recall that the aliens were ultimately thwarted by a muscular young man with a pompadour and a brunette with tits like torpedoes.

  The whole thing certainly made sense to me.

  What impressed me particularly about this movie was that Criswell, a world-renowned mentalist (remember "Criswell Predicts"?), was the narrator of the film, and he appeared on screen at the beginning to assure the audience that the story he was about to tell was true, that it was derived from sworn testimony, and that each and every incident about to be related was absolutely factual. Of course, I believed him completely. (I mean, he made his statement in public, in a movie, on the screen for all to see and hear. It simply had to be true!)

  Bloodsucking zombie vampires from outer space. The very concept terrified me.

  My older brother Gary, with whom I saw the film at the Drake Theater on Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens, New York, tried to make me understand that the idea of alien superbeings creating bloodsucking zombie vampires was, to say the least, unlikely.

  Years were to pass before I realized that my brother was right and that Criswell was probably fibbing.

  There is a point to this rambling reminiscence. Ever since I realized that Plan 9 from Outer Space was fictional, I have been skeptical of any book or film that assures me that it is based upon fac
t. I do not believe the well-known sentences that preface books and films, "The story (or film) you are about to read (or see) is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."

  Balderdash, say I.

  I assume that you, Mr. or Ms. Reader, share my prejudice. I am an actor who has appeared in numerous horror films, and you, presumably, are a reader of horror stories. I have been in movies dealing with resurrected mummies, witches, vampires, werewolves, and sundry other things that go bump in the night. I do not believe in resurrected mummies, witches, vampires, werewolves, or night bumpers, and I assume that you don't believe in them either.

  But all of that notwithstanding, the story you are about to read is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

  I can almost hear you chuckling, saying to yourself, What an amusing if rather hackneyed literary and cinematic device. Allow me therefore to repeat myself

  The story you are about to read is true.

  There once was a creature, a demon, named Grogo the Goblin. He really lived. I sat in the ramshackle ruins of his house in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains on a cold, dark night in January of 1969. I saw his photograph, read his sideshow handbill.

  I have felt his inhuman presence, and that intuitive feeling sent chills up my spine and made my blood run cold.

  Perhaps I should explain. . . .

  First of all, I did not write this book. Oh, sure, I added a few things, deleted a few things, renamed the characters, and tossed in an adjective here and there, but I am not the author. The author was someone I knew back in the 1960's. The author is dead. The author committed suicide.

  The author would never have sent the manuscript of this book to me were it not for the fact that I am an actor, not a star by any means, but with a face you will probably recognize the next time you happen to see a film I am in. My acting career resulted from my college experience, for two reasons. For one thing, I was in the Drama Club for four years, and did quite a bit of acting on campus, so I wasn't exactly new to the trade when I graduated. The second thing is that, well, that I did indeed graduate, and had to figure out some way to make a living.

  The problem was that like many other people of my generation who went to college in the late sixties, I had been psychologically conditioned to be unemployable. Half of my friends from college had decided to "hang out" until the revolution came (after which no one would have to work), and the other half decided to dedicate themselves to the improvement of the human condition. The latter group are now teachers, social workers, and nurses. The former group are now lawyers, stockbrokers, and chiropractors.

  I never believed in the revolutionary rhetoric of the time, but I didn't really feel like having a conventional career either. I was a pretty decent guitarist and singer back in those days, and for a while I contemplated trying to be a full-time musician. My brother Gary, whose opinions I always have and still do respect, talked me out of it, saying that as good as I was, good singer/guitarists were a dime a dozen. He was right, of course. This was the late sixties, remember, and everyone, absolutely everyone played guitar. Though I was reluctant to face the facts, I eventually abandoned all hopes of being another Arlo Guthrie. But soon after graduating from college with a meaningless degree in sociology, I de-cided upon a career that made even less sense than singing, for much the same reason: I decided that I wanted to be a full-time actor. I will not flatter myself by claiming any high artistic motivation for my decision; it just seemed a nice idea to sit around with my girlfriend, watching TV, drinking beer, smoking pot, and waiting for the residuals checks to arrive in the mail.

  It turned out to be a lot harder than that, needless to say. I spent the customary number of years waiting on tables and unloading trucks, until in 1978 I landed a role in a Sam Peckinpah film. It was a small role, but it was also the kind that gets noticed, and my agent was able to get me increasingly bigger and more lucrative jobs. In short, it probably would have been less laborious for me to go to law school or something like that; but none-the-less, while nowhere near rich or famous, I am today relatively comfortable financially, and a name known and respected in the industry, if not known to the general public.

  My friends are all aware of my films, of course. Even people whom I haven't seen or heard from for years know about me. It was for this reason that I received the following letter in the mail a few months ago:

  Dear Artie:

  I see that you've finally made a name for yourself in cheap, low-budget movies! All those years of effort have not come to naught, and you must be feeling pretty proud of yourself.

  I have written a book, and I am sending you the manuscript. I am not, I repeat, not asking you to send it to any agents or anybody you know in show business or anything like that. I just want you to read it, and then do with it whatever you want. It contains the story of Grogo the Goblin, and Clay and Rebecca and Sean, and that crazy old bartender Alex, and all the misery and tragedy that I am sure you remember so well.

  You'll notice immediately that I've taken a few liberties with the facts and the sequence of events and all that shit, but I think you'll find it tells the story pretty much the way it all happened. Of course, I doubt that you'll believe my presentation of what Grogo actually was . . . or should I say, actually is; but remember, more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, and all that.

  Don't bother to send the manuscript back to me, or even to write or call to let me know how you liked it. By the time you get this in the mail, I'll probably be dead anyway.

  Enjoy the book, you son of a bitch.

  The letter was unsigned, and the handwriting was unfamiliar, but the name and address of the sender was clearly written on the upper-left-hand corner of the large envelope. I recognized the name immediately, and I remember remarking to myself how odd it was that this person would contact me in this manner after more than twenty years. The comment about the writer being dead by the time I received the book seemed so characteristically self-indulgent and melodramatic that I disregarded it. I shouldn't have.

  The book you are about to read reproduces the manuscript pretty much as I received it. I have changed the names of the people and the places only to protect the anonymity of those characters who are still alive.

  I'll return at the very end of the book to let you know how everything ended up, and to distinguish for you between the factual and fictional elements of the story. Perhaps "fictional" is the wrong word. Exaggerated, perhaps, or hyperbolical. Reader, I must ask you to keep an open mind; there is more fact here than you might believe possible. Don't look for the standard type of story line, with clearly defined protagonists and antagonists, linear plot development, neat and clean conflict resolution, and all that. Reality does not fit easily into standard literary packages, after all.

  Here now is a tale of the late 1960's, an era possessed of less idealism and more narcissism than we survivors like to admit. Here now is a tale of tragedy and sorrow, of cruelty and loneliness, of tortured lives and bitter, horrible deaths. Here now is the strange tale of Grogo the Goblin.

  The story you are about to read is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

  ARTHUR WINSTON

  Prologue

  November 9, 1968

  "The MYSSSSSSteries of the Orient, ladies and gentlemen, the dark and terrible SEEEEcrets of the Easssssst, kept here under lock and key and presented for your amusement. Only fifty cents, my friends, one simple half of a siNNNGLE dollar. Step rrrrrright up, ladies and gentlemen. . . ."

  It was a tableau of romantic Americana, a tawdry vignette from an age of squalid innocence long past. The heavy thud of poorly fastened canvas slapping against the tent poles in the coal wind of the late-autumn evening; the wide-eyed children, the gruff, silent men, and the slightly unsettled women listening to the sideshow barker as he invited them into the world of the arcane, the bizarre, the safely perverse that awaited them within the tent; behind the barker, the crudely drawn posters, the
ir once vibrant colors now faded and dull, offering the viewer a glimpse of the unnatural and the abnormal, the subhuman and the deformed, drawn in the absurd hyperbolical manner traditional to the trade. All the atmosphere and imagery that traveling freak shows carry with them and exude almost as miasmic vapors, seemed to intoxicate the crowd, and the intoxication was made all the more potent by the utter anachronism of the scene. It was 1968, not 1868. This was not one of the many traveling freak shows that once wound their ways from town to town across rural America, but rather one of the last of its breed. And the crowd stood on the midway at the south end of the New York State Fairgrounds in Syracuse, not in a clearing in some rustic village in the American hinterland.

  "SEEEEE them all, ladies and gentlemen," the barker cried, tipping his straw hat slightly back upon his balding head and wiping his jowly face with an old gray handkerchief "See them all for only FIFFFFFty cents. See Maharaja the Rubber Man. See him twist his body like a serpent and tie himself into knots which would confound the experTEEEEESE of a sailorrrr. Let Ahmed the Wizard read your minds, ladies and gentlemen, let him discover your innermost secretsssss. See Konga the Gorilla Girl, captured by Jungle Jim himself while on a safari in the heart of DAAAAArkest Africaaaa. See Grogo the Goblin, the ugliest man in the world, the circus geek parrrrr EXCELLeeence." He spoke in his best singsong barker banter, attempting to sweep the crowd along with the lilting cadence of his exhortation.

  He needed the lilt and the sweep, for if left to themselves, no one in the crowd would part with fifty cents to see the tired old commonplace acts he was so melodramatically describing. They knew that the so-called rubber man was nothing but a contortionist, that the wizard was just a mentalist doing an old vaudeville routine. They knew that Konga the Gorilla Girl was just someone wearing monster makeup, with fake fur spirit-glued to her skin. They knew that there was no such person as Jungle Jim, that he was just a character from the adventure movies of the 1940's. They knew that the myth of the "heart of darkest Africa" had been long ago dispelled in a hundred thousand elementary-school classrooms. They knew that Grogo the Goblin was most likely some poor deformed unfortunate, or perhaps even just another product of the makeup case.