Comedy and Tragedy

An Amelia City Story

Author’s Note: The following tale first appeared in the short story collection “Roads Through Amelia”, published in October of 2008. Now, fifteen years on, I present it to you fine folks here, as the Halloween season comes upon us in full. It has not been altered from its originally published format.

Tragedy and Comedy

            Jake sprawled in the dirt when Tommy Worl pushed him in the chest.  “Come on, Dobbs, whatcha gonna do, huh,” Tommy asked.  He was a large boy for fourteen years of age, with sledge-like arms and the beginnings of the sort of gut drunken frat boys get around junior year.

            “Fuck off, Tommy,” Jake replied.  He scrabbled to his feet, a spindly boy of thirteen who was often called ‘Scarecrow’ by the kids in his class.  His straw-blond hair ang gangly frame helped this along, but unlike Dorothy’s traveling companion, he had quite the brain.

            And why were these two boys glaring at one another alongside the road bordered by a dirt shoulder and grassy fields to east and west?  What was the focus of this David and Goliath showdown?  Likely it was the eleven-year old girl behind Tommy, being held by each arm by Tommy’s current lackeys.  The girl had a soft, rounded face in stark contrast to Jakes’ narrow, angular one.  Where Jake was short and too thin for his age, at eleven, the girl was already only half an inch shorter than he.  Where he had shoulder-length blond locks, she had a short crop of raven black.  But they shared the same sleet gray eyes and oblong ears.  They shared a certain bearing in their general behavior.  They shared parents, too.

            She was Emily Dobbs, Jake’s kid sister.  The two of them had been at the Marsten Mall in the northwestern part of North Perry, just mooning around, really.  They had time to kill during the spring break, and they both liked to just sort of window shop at the mall together, and poke fun about how ridiculous some of their fellow consumers looked and behaved in public.  

            But they weren’t the only kids who hung out at the mall during the break.  Tommy Worl and his constant goons had been there too.  When Jake began catching glimpses of the three lunkheads following him and Emily, he had suggested to her that they get to their bikes and get gone. Of course, Tommy and company had followed after them then, too.  They rode a bit behind Jake and Emily at first, hanging back along Town Road #1. Not long after passing the Saffron Street intersection, however, Tommy put on a burst of speed and shot out ahead of Jake.  Jake slowed down, but his sister didn’t.  Instead, she tried to maneuver around her brother, but she was too late in turning, and succeeded in nothing less than tangling them both up and spilling them to the concrete.

            The moment that happened, Tommy’s goons scooped up little Emily and dragged her away from Jake, who had yet to recover from the collision and fall.  When he did get up, he saw Tommy spitting in his sister’s face and screamed, charging heedlessly at the larger boy.  That’s where we came in, friends and neighbors.  

            “Let Emmy go,” Jake said.  He still felt banged up from the crash and the shove, but his voice came out firm and true.  His resolve wavered not a bit, despite the disadvantage of size and numbers.  “Just let her ride home.”

            “No, I don’t think so,” said Tommy, planting his hands on his wide hips.  Tommy had a knack for finding what drove twerps like Dobbs up a wall, and the little sister obviously stood as a shining sore spot for the boy.  Though he had no real intention of doing anything crude, he said, “I think we should play a round of ‘Tommy’s New Girlfriend’ first.”  

            “Let go of me you assholes,” Emily fairly shrieked.  It wouldn’t do much good.  On a Wednesday evening like this in North Perry, few folks would be traveling this stretch of Town Road #1.  “Kenneth Bowler, I’ll tell your dad about this,” she threatened the boy holding her left arm.  Bowler flinched, and when he did, she took the momentary opportunity to break free of them both and run toward Jake.  

            Tommy heard a grunt behind him, but was too cumbersome and slow of wit yet in his own large frame to do more than reach for her hair when Emily streaked past him.  She crouched guardedly behind Jake, who kept his eyes locked on Tommy’s face.  Emily bunched her hands in the back of Jake’s light blue denim jacket.  “Come on, Jake, let’s get out of here,” she said, her voice low and weak, a whimper.

            “I know where you live, Dobbs,” Tommy warned.  His face flushed red, and his forehead furrowed, as it would if one were deep in thought.  “I’m not gonna chase you again, not tonight.  I don’t even have to.”  His hefty frame relaxed as he crossed his arms over his chest.  His henchmen were in the process of picking up their bikes.  

            “What do you want,” Jake asked.  Tommy stood patiently, grinning, his eyes playing across the sky as if in thought.  Jake Dobbs, nobody’s idiot, knew already what the henchmen didn’t appear to have come to terms with yet.  Tommy wasn’t going for the twelve-speed mountain bike he’d dumped off to the side of the road.  He was just waiting, wearing a wolfish grin, and occasionally taking his eyes off of the sky and his mind off of his ruminations to consider the Dobbs children.  The look he gave them sent shivers up Emily and Jake’s spines, but for Jake at least, it was little more than the shiver of expectation.  “What do we have to do to send you and your goons away,” Jake asked.  

            “I’m thinking about that,” Tommy said.  Ken Bowler and the other boy with Tommy, young Stanley Moore, had brought themselves forward to flank their fearless leader.  Like Vader’s red-cloaks, Jake thought.  

            “Jake, let’s just go,” Emily pleaded.  She tugged at him now, but her brother would not budge.  “He’s just a toad,” she said loudly enough to be heard by Tommy and company.  “A slimy, perverted toad!”  Bowler and Moore snickered at the jibe until Tommy gave them each a withering stare.  

            “I got an idea,” Tommy said.  “You two know the old play theater back up the road, over on Libra Street?”

            “Darin’s Theater House,” Jake asked, eyebrow raised.  Emily let out a little gasp right behind him.  Darin’s, unused and abandoned since the mid-70’s, was said by many to be a haunted place.  Then again, the entire Amelia City area and its suburbs seemed to have fostered a lot of such stories.  “Yeah, what of it?”

            “Here’s the deal,” Tommy said, planting his hands on his hips.  “You two go in there, stay inside for like an hour or something, if you can.  Grab something to bring back for me, too.  Do that,” Tommy said, spreading his arms in a show of peace.  “And we’ll leave you alone.  No questions asked.”

            “How long,” asked Jake.

            “He said an hour,” Moore said in a ‘what are you, deaf?’ tone of voice.

            “He means how long do you leave us alone,” Emily spat.  She rolled her eyes and huffed, exasperated with these three.  “Duh!”

            “That’ll depend on what you bring me back,” said Tommy.  Now he chose to retrieve his bike, being quite slow and deliberate about it.  “So, what’ll it be?  Dobbs the Brave, or Dobbs my punching bags?  S’up to you.  I couldn’t care less either way.”  He straddled the twelve-speed.  Jake held up five fingers, and drew Emily a few yards farther away, toward their bikes. 

            “Jake, we can’t,” Emily said before he could even face her straight on.  “Mom’s gonna pitch a fit if we get home too late!”

            “I know that,” Jake replied.  His voice was calm and level, but his heart raced staccato notes through his chest.  “We either go home and get more of the same from those troglodytes, or we go with them and get grounded.  Not the best options around.”

            “If we start to go with them, we can always cut back and lose them,” Emily offered.

            “No, we can’t, because he’ll lead the group and have Twiddledee and Twiddledum riding drogue.”

            “Riding what?”

            “You know, at the back,” Jake said.  “Rearguard,” he added.  Emily nodded then, because she understood that term much better.  She was a fan of traditional fantasy books, whereas Jake read every genre, but with a heavy focus on Westerns.  They often took advantage of their expanding vocabularies in moments of stress, and sometimes Jake had to do a quick translation for many of the terms he used with her.  “Besides, it doesn’t matter.  We’re going.”

            “Jaaaaake,” she whined.

            “Grab your bike, Emmy,” Jake said.  He walked toward Tommy then, his hands at his sides.  He stopped a few feet short, staying out of grabbing range.  “We’ll go the theater, but I need to do something first,” he said to the larger boy.

            “Whassat,” Tommy asked.  Jake grunted a couple of times, and a thick green wad of phlegm sprayed from his pursed lips, splatting against Tommy’s cheek.  

            “That’s for spitting on my sister, dickhead.”

            “Fair enough,” Tommy said, using his jacket sleeve to wipe away the offensive fluid.  “You two, you ride in the back,” he said to Bowler and Moore.  Jake went back and mounted his bike, and the five of them rode north along Town Road #1.

            The five youths stood across the street from the ruins of the theater, staring at it with the awe that some five and six-year-olds hold for the Santa at their local mall.  Tommy shook off the effect first, clearing his throat purposefully to get the attention of the others.  “Okay.  Stan, you got your watch?”

            “Yup,” said Stan.  Jake noticed that the watch Stan Moore wore on his right wrist looked a lot like the Timex his friend Rich Stark had reported stolen from him gym locker.  

            “Good.  Now remember Dobbs, you have to stay in there an hour.  Stan and me will be out here, out front,” he said.

            “I,” said Jake, not looking at Tommy but at the old building.

            “What?”

            “Stan and I, not Stan and me,” Jake said.  He rolled his eyes at the confused countenance of Tommy Worl.  “Stan and me isn’t proper English,” he explained.  This habit of correcting grammar was heavily ingrained in Jake, because he’d been doing it to Emily since she started school.  The three other boys looked to one another, perplexed.  “Go on,” he said with a sigh.

            “Stan and I will be here,” Tommy resumed.  “Kenny’ll keep posted at the back of the place.”

            “I will,” asked Kenny Bowler.

            “Yes, half-wit.  You want ‘em to just walk through the back, wait out where it’s safe and then walk back through when the hour’s up?”  Jake clenched his jaw tightly.  He’d been thinking about doing just that.  Apparently Tommy wasn’t quite as stupid as his grades and usual demeanor let on.  “I don’t think so.  So go on, both of you,” he said, flapping a hand toward the decrepit theater.  “And remember to grab something for me.”

            Jake took Emily’s hand, and like Hansel and Gretel, two children entered a building which, for all they knew, could hold their doom.  As soon as they squeezed between two of the time-loosened boards over one of the absent windows fronting the building, Kenny took off along one side of the structure for the back entrance.  Stan Moore looked up from his watch at his leader.  “You think they’ll be okay, Tommy?  I mean, what if the place is, you know, like they say it is?  Full of spooks and shit.”

            “Stan, ghosts are for kids and nimrods.  Which one are you?”  Stan didn’t answer, just looked down at his watch.  Tommy let out a sigh and sat on the sidewalk in front of what used to be a CVS pharmacy, but was now just another empty hole in North Perry’s small business region.  A sign had been put up over where he sat, announcing the coming of a new Tim Horton’s coffee shop.

            Ghosts are for kids, he thought.  So why am I worried about those two?

            The lobby of the old play theater smelled to Jake like dust and mold, a funky mix he immediately associated with his grandmother’s house.  The guest rooms, which used to be his father’s and Aunt Cecilia’s bedrooms back in the day, seldom saw use, and had thus developed much the same odor.  “Jake, I don’t want to be here,” Emily whispered.  He looked over his shoulder at her, and saw that she had gone pale as death.  “Let’s just get out of here.  We can deal with Tommy some other way.”

            “No,” Jake said.  “We do this, we’re rid of him.  Maybe not for too long, but anything’s better than nothing.  Come on.”  The lobby rested in darkness and silence, dimly lit by street lamps that filtered through the windows that weren’t perfectly boarded over and jagged holes a couple of feet across in the high ceiling overhead.  Shrouded, oblong shapes sat about on the rust-red carpeting, forlorn objects shoe fates seemed sealed.  Yet despite the hue of the carpet, Jake couldn’t help but think that the room had a somehow cerulean tint to it, like calm ocean waters.  

            “What are those,” Emily asked, pointing to one of the covered objects.  

            “Lounge benches,” Jake said, eyeballing the furniture.  “People would relax out here and have a cigarette during intermission, or talk about the play there were watching.  I read about this place in the school library.”

            “Was this place famous or something,” Emily asked.  She relaxed by minor degrees, hearing her brother’s voice and taking courage from its lack of any obvious hint of fear.  The pair of them were shuffling slowly across the lobby, navigating between the aged benches, chairs, and tables.  Emily spotted something on the floor and stooped to investigate.

            “No, it isn’t famous.  There’s a book on local history in the reference section,” Jake said.  He took a few more shuffling steps toward an open entryway arch marked ‘Wardrobe’, and stopped.  Emily’s footsteps didn’t follow him.  He turned around saw her turning something over in her hands.  “Emily?”

            “What’re these,” she asked.  She held the dusty, bent object up for his scrutiny.  “Binoculars?”  They could have passed for such, but Jake saw the broken length of handle on the underside and took into consideration the location they rested in.  

            “Opera glasses,” he said.  “This place has a balcony for some of the folks who had money and liked to show off,” he said, snarling.  He stepped over to Emily and plucked the glasses from her hands.  He saw that only one tube had lenses when he inspected it.  He shrugged and handed them back.  “Put them in your jacket for the toad,” he said.  That got a giggle out of his sister, for which he was quite grateful.  Unfortunately, the way it echoed down the hallway he’d been approaching did his nerves little good.  

            Emily pocketed the glasses and followed him down the hall to the first door on the left.  It was old and splintered, but still set in the jam.  A grimy bronze plaque set high on the door proclaimed this room was ‘Lords’.  Emily looked at the sign, and then at her brother.  “The door across the hall there probably says ‘Ladies’,” she said.

            “Quite likely.  Come on.”  He grasped the doorknob, amazed by the sense of heat coming from the metal.  With a rapid twist and push, he revealed for them a men’s costume chamber that appeared to have been heavily frequented and vandalized over the years since the building’s abandonment.  Jake and Emily stepped into the smells of old beer stains, marijuana smoke, and general decay.

            “Oh, gross,” Emily groaned, scraping her shoe off on a vanity desk’s edge.  An old condom rubbed off of her shoe, clinging to the desk.  “That’s just wrong,” she said with a grimace.  Jake moved toward the back of the room, his eyes now well adjusted to the gloom of the building’s interior.  He thought he’d spotted something, and as he moved around a rack of cloaks, he found a wooden box labeled ‘Masks’.  

            “Emmy!  Emmy, come here and check this out,” he called, unmindful of his volume.  

            “Keep it down,” she admonished.  She made her way quickly over to him, careful of what she stepped on or near.  “If they think we’re having a good time in here, I think the deal’s off.”

            “Sorry.”  Jake lifted the heavy wooden lid off of the box.  A number of other props aside from masks filled much of the trunk, but underneath these lay plenty of masks.  He sifted through a number of them, finally putting his fingers on one that felt somehow warmer than the others around it.  He pulled the mask out, and the Dobbs kids stared at it in frank wonder.  It was an old fashioned tragedy mask, the sort often used for ads in the paper.  At least, that was what they first thought, but a few differences made them curious about the precise nature of this mask.

            Firstly, there was no nose in the middle of the face.  Rather, there appeared to be a sort of shelf that divided the mask’s upper portion from the area over the mouth.  The mouth itself was also different.  It wasn’t open and lamenting like a proper tragedy mask.  Rather, there were fang-like teeth clamped perfectly together, predatory canines filling the length o the lips, which were molded around them in a bitter growl.  Lastly, there was a thin black line running from the top of its forehead to the shelf just over the upper lip.  From their perspective, three thicker, curved black lines branched off of this central line to the right, further dividing that half of the face.  

            The overall effect was slightly tribal, Jake thought.  “We’ll take this,” he said, grabbing the black cloth strap on the back of the mask and standing up.  

            “Okay.  We’ve still got time to kill. You wanna check ‘Ladies’,” Emily asked.  

            “Sure thing,” Jake said.  He followed behind his little sister, the mask dangling from his hand feeling suddenly very heavy.  He found himself wondering if it would be so heavy if he put it on.

            Thirty-five minutes had passed, and Tommy’s nerves danced like ants.  There hadn’t been a single noise from across the street, and twice now Kenny had come back to say much the same.  The Dobbs kids should have come out of there weeping in terror by now.  Tommy had it on good authority that plenty of older kids had lasted a good deal less time than this in the old theater.  But, he thought, this gives them more time to get me some good swag.  It’ll turn out just fine.

            The ladies’ dressing room did not appear to have been used for parties anytime recently, like the men’s had.  The funk of dust and old moth balls gripped the air like a behemoth, and Emily, not one to be outdone twice in a row, immediately searched out the crate of masks that would be in this chamber.  She opened it as Jake poked around in one of the vanity desks, rummaging through a smaller collection of masks.  

            As she felt about, her fingers brushed against something rather warm.  She grabbed onto the source of the heat, and pulled out a white comedy mask.  It appeared to be a perfect match to Jake’s tragedy mask, with the lips turned up in a rictus and the thick black lines on the opposing half of the face.  “Jake, look,” she breathed, turning around.  Jake looked at her find and smiled crookedly.  

            “They’re a set,” he said.  “Maybe we should get ready to get back outside.”

            “Tommy’s gonna want to take these from us,” Emily said, frowning as she fingered the strap of her mask. It felt very heavy in her hand.  “Why don’t we try them on before we leave?  Just for fun?”  Jake looked down at his own mask.  His stomach rolled over once, and his ushered up a tiny squeak of protest at the idea.  That’s just silly, said the tiny voice.  That’s childish!  But truth be told, he wanted to put the mask on.  He shrugged nonchalantly.  

            “Sure,” he said, lifting the mask and strapping it over his face.  “Why not?”

            “Okay man, they’ve been in there twelve minutes over.  Maybe we should go in there and see if they’re okay,” said Stan.  Kenny stood just behind and to one side of Tommy, ready to bolt if the larger boy got furious enough to swing at something.  But Tommy shocked them both.

            “No,” he said.  “We wait ten more minutes, then go in.  I’m thinkin’ they’ve found something really cool,, you know, just checking it out before they gotta hand it over.  And besides,” he said, dropping his volume.  “Dobbs has stones, staying in there so long.  His sister, too.”  The three boys waited, but ten minutes later, neither Dobbs child had come out.  

            Tommy led the way inside, through the boarded windows and into the lobby.  Christ, he thought, it’s muggy as hell in here.  The three boys cast looks around the lobby, trying to see a clue as to where the Dobbs kids had gone.  “Hey, Tommy, Stan,” said Kenny.  He was pointing to the twin doors leading to the main spectators’ area.  The doors stood slightly ajar, fresh drag tracks on the carpeting.  

            The three boys entered the stage area and froze in place.  Up on the stage were two figures clad in slightly outlandish garb.  The figure on the left was dressed like a Victorian gentleman, complete with ruffled collar and cuffs on his white poet’s shirt.  He wore one of the strangest masks Tommy had ever seen.  The eye slits must be tinted, he thought.  The Dobbs boy’s eyes (for all of them were certain now it was them up there) were jet black with shining golden irises.  

            The girl wore a risqué French maid’s outfit, which made Tommy a bit uncomfortable.  She was, after all, only eleven.  He’d only done the ‘Tommy’s New Girlfriend’ gag to get a rise out of Jake.  But what, he thought, is this shit?  “Dobbs,” he called to Jake.  “Come on, man.  Hour’s up.  You can go home.”

            “But leave the masks,” said Stan with a grin and an undertone of greed that Tommy didn’t care for.  “They’re pretty fuckin’ cool.”

            “Yeah, leave them with me,” said Tommy.

            “Not yet,” said the Dobbs’s in eerie harmony.  Their voices sounded a bit queer in this large space, as though four had spoken instead of two.  “We’ve prepared a little show for you gentlemen!  Please, be seated,” said Jake.  Again, Tommy thought he heard two voices coming from one source, but mentally he wrote it off as the acoustics of the theater.  

            The boys slowly seated themselves in the front row, Tommy in the middle, Stan on his left and Kenny on his right.  The show began a minute later with the Dobbs kids juggling bowling pins between the two of them, switching on and off between doing solos and then working with each other.  Not bad, Tommy thought as they sped up the routine.  Do they do this stuff at home?  When they stopped, the boys applauded, and each Dobbs took a bow.  

            Next came juggling billiard balls, once again switching from solo to duo seamlessly.  Tommy felt his muscles actually start to unbind a little, and his nerves no longer stood on edge.  Maybe these two ain’t so bad as I always thought.  When they ceased juggling, Emily stepped off-stage for a moment, and came back wheeling a tri-sectional standing booth of some kind.  She opened three small doors down the front of it with a flourish, and Jake produced three metal blade-shelves from its backside.  

            “We’ll need a volunteer for this act,” the Dobbs’s said in unison.  

            “Hey, I know this one,” said Stan.  He raised his hand like a giddy kid at the circus.  Jake waved him up, and Stan clambered up onto the stage and into the box, smiling at his chums the whole while.  Tommy felt a bead of sweat running down his back, and his muscles began to pinch up again.  

            “Is he gonna be okay,” he asked Kenny.  

            “Oh yeah,” said Kenny in a low whisper.  “It’s all mirrors and a trapdoor.  I seen it once on the Discovery Channel, man.  Don’t worry.  They’ll be telling him about the trapdoor now,” he said.  Jake and Emily appeared to be saying something to Stan, and then Emily shut the three doors on the boy.  Jake held up the first blade, turning it this way and that in the dim theater hall.  Moonlight glinted menacingly off of the shelf blade’s surface, but Tommy thought the edge looked a bit on the dull side.  He relaxed once again as Jake slid the shelf home, repeating the performance twice more.  He then spun the box around three times and brought the doors to a stop facing the audience once again.

            Emily opened the bottom drawer, revealing Stan’s nervously smiling face.  Jake kicked the door shut, spun the box around again, and opened all three doors, revealing an empty box.  Tommy and Kenny clapped, looking around for Stan.  “He’ll be with you momentarily,” said Emily in a very grownup voice.  “The crawlspace is a bit tight.  Shall we continue, or do you wish to wait for him?”

            “Go ahead,” said Tommy with a smile.  “He’ll be back.”  The Dobbs’s rolled the box just off stage, and brought out a large wheel with straps attached to it.  “Hey, knife throwing,” he said, recognizing the setup from his own circus visits.  But Kenny beat him to the punch, already up out of his seat and heading for the stage.  He got up next to the wheel, which was placed at stage right, opposite Jake and the box, just out of sight.  Emily walked over and helped Kenny up onto the wheel, strapping him into place.  Tommy settled in for the show, not worried in the least about the time it was taking Stan to get back.  The girl had said the crawlspace was tight, and by now Stan was probably freaking out in the closed quarters.  He’d be back soon enough.

            Jake walked over toward the wheel, and Emily took up the spot where he’d been standing, picking up several throwing knives that had been tucked discreetly under a black drop cloth.  Jake set the wheel spinning, and Kenny whooped and laughed as he went round and round.  Good spin, thought Tommy.  Kid never struck me as being that strong, but I’m learning a lot of things about these two tonight.  Jake returned to Emily’s side, and Emily began her throwing.  

            The first knife thunked home right next to Kenny’s face on the far side.  “Whoa,” said Tommy, clapping.  Her next throw pegged the spot just below Kenny’s crotch.  “Jesus!  Nice,” Tommy exclaimed, standing from his seat to get a better view of the entertainment.  “You guys are really good at this!”

            “We should be,” said Jake, looking down at Tommy.  The golden irises flashed brilliantly at him, surrounded by wispy black smoke.  Tommy’s grin faltered, and his blood ran cold.  A depthless river of cold rushed through the theater around him.  “We’ve been at it a while now.”  Jake pulled the tri-sectional closet back into view, and looked toward Kenny.  Tommy’s eyes settled on his friend on the wheel just as Emily’s third throw landed squarely in the other boy’s throat, spraying crimson onto the stage.  Jake threw open the three doors on the box, and the neatly cleaved sections of Stanley Moore’s corpse splashed out in a soup of blood and innards.  

            Tommy screamed and pissed his pants, just in time for the final act.

            Jake and Emily awoke the next morning in their separate rooms, feeling refreshed and strangely uneasy.  Their dreams had been oddities, they thought at the same time, passing one another in the hallway of their home.  Something horrible had happened in their dreams, they each knew that, but neither could say precisely what.  Meanwhile, along Town Road #1, a pair of strange ceramic masks were picked up by men in orange coats performing roadside cleanup for community service.  Both were deposited into black plastic garbage bags, and sent on the truck to the town dump.                 -End