Madnessless || Isaac Night Chapter 13
“Despite my attempts to exsanguinate, you’re not completely bloodless,” muttered Wednesday.
“Sis, what… what’s up?” said Pugsley, dragging a massive black coffin.
“What’s with the vampire coffin?” she asked, hands in her pockets, masked interest on her face. When it came to Pugsley’s little games, she never really cared. He was the obnoxious little brother. To her, he would always be unimpressive, always a harassing presence looming around.
“I used it to smuggle signal flares and gasoline. You know, for the forest fire?” he told her, his usual smirk on his face. Puglsey had always been expressive. Overly. Wednesday’s face was dolent, like a plague. They were an oxymoron, and yet, they both cursed their surroundings.
Puglsey was not a good liar by any means, but she believed him. Indeed, there were signal flares and gasoline inside. He just hadn’t mentioned the zombie boy stored in between.
“You mean campfire?” she corrected him. Or maybe she did not believe him.
“Wh…whaterver. as long as something burns,” he told her. “What are you doing here anyway? Isn’t this supposed to be a Nevermore event? Aren’t Heisenberg’s students supposed to be drowning in work by this time of the year?” he asked, trying to distract her. A growl came out of the coffin, catching both their attention. Pugsley kicked the coffin, not so subtly. Wednesday stopped dead in her tracks. She observed him, glared and analyzed, but right when she was about to call him out on his — obvious — lie, a car horn rang. They both looked at their familial Pontiac pulling into the campsite parking lot.
Worry was clear as the grey daylight on both of the teenagers’ faces. Puglsey put down the coffin. The siblings looked very similar at that instant. Despair obscured their features.
“Hello, my pernicious prodigy,” Gomez chanted, while getting out of the car. He had traded his usual tailored suit for a more — adventurous one. The vertical lines made him look taller. His shades looked, however, too narrow for his head. The steampunk boots were fashionably dreadful. “Don’t you find the smell of fresh air positively nauseating?”
“To what do we owe this ghastly apparition?” asked Wednesday. Pugsley got paler and paler. And the fact that his coffin kept… growling, made it hard to keep his composure.
“The call went out for parent chaperones, and I’ve spent my fair share of time under nature’s canopy,” he bragged.
“You know the concrete jungle doesn’t count?” she sneered back.
That’s when dear Morticia made her appearance, an uncomfortable and elevated outfit on, she drew her family’s attention. A dolorous silence stretched.
“What’s she doing here?” Wednesday bit. “Her idea of ‘communing with nature’ is deadheading roses in the greenhouse.”
“I thought we would make it a family affair,” explained Gomez, taking his wife’s hand lovingly. Pugsley and I can engage in some father-son bonding,” he suggested.
“Uh, no… no thanks, dad,” Puglsey objected, taking a small step back. “I… I think I’m going to stick with Eugene. Lurch, can you give me a hand?” he hurried. The man growled and took the coffin.
Both Addams’ parents looked uncomfortable standing there, rejection sharpening the air like a knife. They should have been used to their attitude, but it was never easy for two overly affectionate people to deal with the deleterious affection of their adolescents.
“Maybe you two could work it out?” Gomez said.
And in response, Wednesday fended off.
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It was Saturday morning, and Mary was ready to combust. The crossover project between Heisenberg and Nevermore was veninous.
She sat in one of Nevermore’s lab classrooms, four teenage boys in front of her. Ishar, Lucius, Maik, and Romero were seniors at Nevermore. They planned to join the science program the following year. The folly in their eyes when they had realized their mentor for the project was indeed a girl had made her recoil.
She had listened to them for the past hour, wanting to slap them out of their hyper-fixation on a TV show Mary did not care about. They had scolded her for not caring enough about ‘geeks’ literacy’ as they called it. She had rolled her eyes so hard it hurt.
Mary had a headache. She was not the most social person, and they were still teenagers with raging hormones. How was she supposed to handle them?
“Okay, boys, why don’t we call it day, uh?” she told them, clapping her hands. “Make sure to have a few ideas for next week. Now is the time to show off, alright?” she told them. They all nodded frantically.
Twenty minutes later, Mary sat next to Ajax in the faculty’s commissary. He had been going on and on about the camping trip he took with Nevermore as part of his teacher-assistant job. He, Enid, and Wednesday apparently had a lot of fun playing hide and seek with a bunch of normies.
Mary was only half listening to him. She had a very long week and felt restless.
“And then, that poor normie guy was found dead in Eugene’s and Pugsley’s tent,” Ajax said. Mary’s head snapped up.
“What do you mean?” she asked, her beverage mid-air.
“Pugsley was hiding a fucking zombie in a casket!” He told her, still astonished by it. “The zombie got free, killed the normie, and tried to kill Mr. Addams! It was insane, Mary. You should have seen everyone’s face when they realized what was going on.”
Mary’s heart was truly about to explode. She looked down at her plate, panicking. They had taken the zombie to the freaking camp? Mary slapped her forehead.
“How could I forget?!” she shouted. Ajax looked at her, surprised.
“Are you okay?” he asked her, but Mary was not listening. “You look a little bit pale, Mary.”
“I’m sorry, Ajax! I need to go. It’s an emergency,” she blurted, grabbing her bookbag and leaving.
She ran all the way off campus, down the main road, to the central quad, and to Nevermore. Once inside, she ran towards the gardens, to the bee sheds.
The main Hummer Shed looked empty. She burst through the door, heavily gasping for air, but the shed was empty. The boys weren’t there. And most importantly, the zombie wasn’t there! Mary took her phone out and dialed Pugsley’s number. His soft voice answered; ‘Mary? They took Slurp. They took away my best friend!” She asked where he was. “I’m at my parents’ cottage,” he weeped back. She told him to stay there and wait for her.
Pugsley did. When Mary rang the doorbell, she was greeted by the pale beauty of Morticia, who smiled nobly at her.
“Mary, my somber cherub. What brings you here at Rottwood Cottage?” She said, hugging her from afar. Mary greeted her, exchanging a French bise. She looked around the living room for the boy.
“I came to visit Pugsley. I heard about what happened at Camp Jericho. I'm truly sorry, Morticia. I should have been more careful. Pugsley had confided in me. I knew about the zombie, but I got sidetracked by a personal matter. I promised to take care of the brains, so the zombie wouldn’t go on a killing spree, but I forgot. I heard he tried to eat Gomez’s brain?” Mary asked, a crimson flush sparring on each cheek. Morticia waved her off, saying it was nothing. “I gave him a week to figure it out, find a solution for the zombie. I guess I should have been more strict.”
“Mary, I’m his mother. I’m the one supposed to take care of our little Pugsy, but even I got distracted by… Other matters. I’m glad Pugsley has someone he feels he can trust. Everything often revolves around his older sister. It’s not easy to be part of Wednesday’s family, you know that.” Mary nodded.
“Where is he?” she asked politely, not wanting to talk about the very obvious issues that lay between mother and daughter. Morticia pointed to the door leading to the veranda. Mary thanked her and left the room.
Pugsley was sitting in a love chair, feeding a carnivorous plant lazily. He did not look up when she entered. Mary sat in the other love chair, silently. She looked patiently at him, wanting him to speak first. After a moment, he looked at her.
“It was torturous, Mary. I tried to stop him. He usually listens to me so well, but when I tracked him down, he looked… Different. Human almost. I zapped him once, twice… Then I had to shock him so badly that he went flying through the wall. Dad looked strange. I think Slurp actually scared him to death, and not in a good way. He looked like he had seen a ghost. Mom too. It felt strange.” He told her, tears running down one cheek. Mary drew closer. She held his hand emphatically. “They took him away to Willow Hill,” he said at last.
“Willow Hill? Why?” Mary had expected him to tell her he had been put down, not taken to the hospital.
“I… I think it has to do with how I brought him back,” he explained, sparks zapping between his fingers. “I’m pretty sure it was possible because his heart isn’t an organ.” Mary’s brow furrowed. “It’s mechanical, you know, like in the story?”
“Wh..what?" Mary stuttered. “What do you mean?” She took a deep breath, not letting her mystification take over. “A mechanical heart?” she asked, voice shaking.
“Yes. The story is true. The urban legend about the clockwork heart boy who attended Nevermore and died? It’s Slurp, Mary! I have seen his clockwork heart! That’s probably how I could jump-start his heart in the first place. I could hear it in the Skull Tree trunk. It was still ticking. You said he couldn’t have been dead for more than a year. What if his heart slowed down the decomposition process? After all, the story has been around for at least th—”
“Thirty years,” she cut him off, breath short, heart hammering in her chest.
Mary felt like falling. Every single detail came back flashing in her mind. Each memory hurt. Each detail she hadn’t put together stabbed her violently.
Professor Orloff’s confession.
The slow ticking in her dreams.
The familiarity in his decayed face.
His growls whenever she was close.
The dirty, jet-black, flattened curls on his corpse-like head.
Mary felt nauseous. Her head was spinning.
“Do you happen to know anything about the story of the Clockwork Heart Boy?”
And at the first complication, she had abandoned him.
“He disappeared thirty years ago. No one ever knew what happened to him. He vanished.”
All the answers had been there, right under her nose.
The love chair felt cold and hard… She had fallen to the ground. Pugsley’s voice rang like a siren’s scream in her head. Cold, chalky hands touched her face. Reminiscence of her dream flooded her mind.
Shadows moved around, in complete harmony with the ticking of a powerful clock. It felt like being in the middle of a ballroom dance floor.
His heart had been opened to her, and she hadn’t noticed the subtle ticking of it.
These words particularly stung now.
Mary felt something hot running down her nose. She touched her lips. Blood stained her pale fingers.
Her vision blurred, and soon, Mary came crashing down, Isaac Night’s voice singing her name.
