The Tale Of Johnny Nowhere

I was inspired by the poignant and straight forward style short stories of Stephen King's "Skeleton Crew" to write this.

Johnny - eight year old sweet-hearted little Johnny - slept dreamless. Johnny hardly ever dreamed despite his wildly fantastic imagination. He drew pictures of human/animal hybrids conversing on planets made of pink cheese. He drew pictures of wildly disproportionate houses in truly bizarre terrain of fire, clouds, and purple bricks. Sleeping though he was, supernatural forces beyond human comprehension, were not. They were stirring their odd web of perplexity in Johnny's bedroom closet. Johnny had recently discovered the charm of classic movies as well, and he was especially taken by the ever lovely Marilyn Monroe. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot was by far his favourite Marilyn Monroe picture. His favourite of all time as a matter of fact. He spent many hours of day-dream thinking of her character Sugar Kane, and how jumpin' pretty she looked in white. His parents bought him a life-sized cardboard cut-out of the star for his eighth birthday just four days ago. The supernatural force, born of another world, a vicious and confusing world, pulsing a dim, shadowy green in his closet, possess it's force upon Marilyn.
The green had eyes. It saw clearly through a tube-like tunnel of vision. It slunked and slithered like a slick garden snake. It slipped its invisible, impossible force up the thick black cords leading from an electrical outlet to the back of his television set.
David Letterman was just about to bring Willie Nelson out for an interview before a performance of one of his new singles. The television which was off, flicked on. The volume was set at 26 notches, and it was a bit too loud for two o' clock in the morning. Loud enough to wake little Johnny out of his placid slumber. His eyes flickered quickly and softly, his vision was a little blurred from the gummy substance that forms under your eyes while in rest. The gummy substance he called "sleep." He wiped the back of his eyelids with palm of his hands and turned from his side to face the t.v. He turned and fumbled sleepily, with his eyes half open and his mind half in the real world and half in the dream world, for the t.v flicker on the bedside table to his right. He finds nothing but his glasses, a pack of Trident, and some Tylenol. But while fumbling and fussing with these things, the ghost-television turned itself down to a reasonable level of volume. He stared in complete bewilderment at David Letterman in his creaseless shining gray suit that to Johnny resembled a chain-mail suit of armor and an exquisite gold tie to go along. He always liked Letterman... but not at two o' clock in the morning.
His hand finally grasped the long thin television remote. He tilted it in his hands so the light from the t.v would shine on it, and he pressed the red power button... and as he somehow half expected - nothing happened. He pressed it again and again. Still nothing. Now Willie Nelson was coming out, looking just as ancient as the Pyramids, and everyone in the audience just cheering their asses off at the sight of him. He's a relic of a lost time.
Johnny pushes himself up so he's in a sitting position with his back propped against the wall. He might as well watch this. Now that it was on and the t.v remote was on the fritz, or whatever, he just might as well.
Nelson was talking to Letterman about a new film he's in. A remake of some of John Wayne movie Johnny thinks. He heard the geezer say the title but couldn't recall it. His mind was still a trifle hazy. That was when something happened which really should not have. Not within the normal parameters of perception. Willie Nelson stopped dead in the middle of a sentence, and turned his head slowly to face the camera. But it wasn't the camera he meant to face. Johnny knew he meant to face him. He could feel Nelson's wet, slimy gaze crawl over his skin like a battalion of tarantulas. He sat staring into Johnny. He kind of...looked mad.
"You... what are you lookin at?!" he howled. It was strange to see a man of such calm and peaceful personality lash out in such a baleful way. He looked possessed! He looked like he's gone mad! "Lookin at me, you skinny little s**t?! Look at me again and see what happens. I dare ya. Ya f**k!"
Willie Nelson now dug deeper into the unthinkable. Convincing Johnny more and more that either Willie Nelson had gone mad... or he himself had. For at that moment Nelson began to bark like a wild dog and thick gobs of drool flung from his mouth and onto the floor and onto David Letterman's unseeing, smiling face. Either Letterman didn't see what insanity was happening in front of him, or was neglecting to believe it. I think the latter is more possible.
This was enough to scare the shittin wits out of the boy, who had never seen Willie Nelson before except on some old country music videos on CMT, but now he wished he'd never heard the name or seen the face to go along with it in all his years.
Nelson slowly stood up out of his chair and walked closer to the camera. Staring with wild eyes into Johnny's fear stricken heart, he jerks his head violently and awkwardly to the right and Johnny's head moves uncontrollably with his, and he sees the twisted, contorted face of Marilyn Monroe staring at him from beneath a queer shadow lurking in the corner of his room, near the closet. Her face, to him, looks like a cross between the incomparably beautiful Marilyn he knows, and a repulsive, bulging hippopotamus with fearful horny fangs. Her face was so goddam... CONTORTED!
She stepped ghost liked towards him in jerky uncontrolled movements. She was moving like a poorly articulated puppet. He tried to draw in breath but only came out with short stunted gasps that did not satisfy his small lungs' thirst for oxygen. Marilyn was finally standing right beside Johnny. Right up to his bed. Her face was narrow and jagged now. All resemblance of a hippo with gargantuan tusks was gone. What was there now was his beautiful Norma Jean mixed with a horrid pale dragon. Maybe not a dragon exactly... but definitely something reptilian. As Johnny's sane mind slipped away as quietly and slyly as a well trained thief, he had time to think that. Why or how, he didn't know.
He looked up at this... shape... and couldn't think or breathe or speak. He barely even knew he was in his own bed in his own house.
Suddenly she was gone. He couldn't remember if he'd closed his eyes and then opened them to find the Marilyn monster gone, or if she had dissolved into nothing infront of him, He couldn't remember the last 5 seconds if his life depended on it.
He pushed the sheets off of himself in a zombie-like trance and put his feet on the carpet of his bedroom floor. His eyes were closed, and his brain was vacant... save for a squirmy little voice like nails on a chalkboard with echoed through the deep canals of his subconscious mind. 
"Jooohhhhnny"
Pause.
"JOOOHHHNNY"
He felt his little brain being picked at. Almost tugged at, by some force inside his closet. He dragged his feet over to the front of the closet door on the opposite side of the room from his bed. A green glow like the densest green of an amazon jungle pulsated out of the thin crack beneath the door. It swung open slowly without any help from Johnny, who's mind was still steadfastly gripped with the enchantment of the dream world. He dreamt now of a man with no face. The deep green spilled over Johnny's dull, listless face. He stepped forth, not of his own volition, and into the green hole that has formed out of the unknown in his closet.
Johnny was instantly sent to a place of nowhere. A place where time and meaning are not known and hold no bearings. A place where nothing is everything and darkness is all that ever was.  

          

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

This piece exhibits very good imagination and story-telling ability. I spotted many small errors, though, so it needs some cleaning up. One example is this: It's Billy Wilder, not Gene. Fix a few things, and you'll have a dandy little Steven King-ish tale.