The Crawling Abattoir by Martin Mundt

Author:Martin Mundt [Mundt, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Dark Arts Books
Published: 2013-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Maniac Worm

triple-locked the front door of my store and set the alarm. I left the sunshades down, even though it was after six. I left the lights off. I made sure my sign was hung in the window: AREA 51 COMICS IS CLOSED!

I learned the word “paranoid” from Arno Spivey. I’ve loved and lived Spivey comics since I was a kid, comics like Maniac Worm, Atomic Kids’ Life, and The Crawling Abattoir! They were like textbooks for my hormones, before my mother threw them all out. I also learned “abattoir” from Arno. My mother had to look that one up before she could punish me for saying it.

And now I’ve finally reassembled my Spivey collection, every issue of my favorite heroes, plus all the original Spivey collectibles, like Arno’s Official Alien-Detecting X-ray Glasses, the scale model of Maniac Worm’s Vermiculan Wormship, a pink corkscrew with hundreds of antennae along its length, and of course an original, foot-long serving of Pink Menace bubble gum, which had at least one super-special, super-secret prize in every yard, guaranteed.

I sat behind the register and made a fan out of the comic books on the glass counter. Atomic Kids’ Life, Maniac Worm, Mordred Darque, The Walking Grave, The Crawling Abattoir!, Sergeant Warmonger–USMC, all safely taped in plastic bags, all in chronological order.

I love these comics.

I never went in for Cowboys and Indians or Davey Crockett or Howdy Doody as a kid, just space, spaceships, spacesuits, spaceguns and especially space creatures. And Spivey was the tip of the tentacle when it came to all things space.

I pulled on a white glove and slid my first-edition Worm #1 out of its bag, opening it to the inside cover, “Arno’s Editorial.”

“Beware, kids,” Arno wrote back in ’53, before Wertham, before the Senate hearings and the parents’ paranoia, before he was bankrupted and run out of publishing altogether. “You can never be too afraid, kiddoes. The Worms are loose. Next door, next street, next town, down any road to anywhere, US of A. Worms slither unwatched into unguarded and unwary brains, and I mean our pristine, holy, human brains, friends. They bore through skulls, worming through cerebral cortexes, squirming between left and right lobes, curling around each thalamus like leashes of pain, controlling minds.

“Any neighbor or friend could be a worm-slave, any cop or father. The Worms are among us, my young friends. Gray-suited, humorless Worms, or goose-stepping, master-race Worms, they’re all the same. This is what Ike’s Progress and Prosperity and the Space Frontier and the Bright Future mean, pals, slavery to Worms: Worms in your skulls, Worms in your thoughts, Worms in your actions.

“And they try to call ME paranoid! Me! Just for pointing out the plain and simple D-Day beachhead of the final Worm Invasion. Worm-doctors buckle their leashes tighter around me every day, chums, with their Worm-police and their Worm-courts. But do true paranoids have proof, pals? Do they have ABSOLUTE, INCONTROVERTIBLE, PHOTOGRAPHIC, DOCUMENTED, BONA FIDE PROOF? Well, it’s last laugh time, buddies, because the

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