The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

Damned uncomfortable, but it sure keeps the snot vampires away. Great stuff,
elegant, tasteful—”
“But he never grew up, and it was a childish obsession that killed him.”
“I never knew exactly how he died.”
Jim went back to the bar for another drink. I had a hunch I was going to need
an excuse to linger for some time yet, so I called a waitress over and ordered a
Brown Cow and a Wangadangburger.
My friend came back, sat down again, and drank in silence for several minutes,
then finally said, “I suppose I’ve set myself up for this. I might as well tell you
the whole story. You don’t have to believe a word of it, but you can listen.
Maybe you can use some of it in a book.”
“Jimbo, I may have called you a lot of things, but never a liar.”
“Just listen.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Well the first thing you have to remember,” Jim began, “is that Joe Eisenberg
was like one of the characters in his own cartoons. Mock-pedantry was definitely
his shtick. You couldn’t tell when he was serious and when he wasn’t. He’d
explain something like the Spooch Theory in the driest professorial tone, like an
arcane point of real linguistics.”
“The what theory?”
“The idea was that spooch is an inherently funny word on the phonetic level.
The double-o sound is inherently funny. The sp sort of slides you in there, and
the hard ch traps you inside the word, so the oo can resonate until it reaches the
humor threshold. A soft sound at the end, and you’d escape. That’s why ‘spoon’
isn’t funny; but spooch is.”
I snickered. Jim took another sip of his drink and said, “You see? That proves
it. Or that’s what Joe used to say. And he had lots more where that came from.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah, but creative people are allowed to be weird. The same secret committee
that issues the bifocals assigns weirdness quotas, and underground comic book
artists get more than most people. And Joe was fun that way. We used to call
him. Spoocho Marx. The other Marx Brothers had locked him in the refrigerator
and forgotten about him, sometime back in the ’30s, so here he was. He looked
the part too, like a dark-haired version of Harpo.
“But somewhere he went too far, and the silliness turned into craziness of a
less pleasant sort. I think it began about a year after he’d started working for me,
one evening in December. I was still prosperous then, and lived in the suburbs,