Ep.84 – The Black Museum - A Collection of Horrors Awaits!

Episode Notes
Antiques are so cute, a fun waste of money with an educational flavor... Unless the history is dark and gruesome... and EVIL.
The Black Museum by John Oak Dalton
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Music by Ray Mattis http://raymattispresents.bandcamp.com
Produced by Daniel Wilder
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Transcript:
They were taping the Halloween special at the visitor center in Ipswich because they couldn’t afford Salem at Halloween but fuck it, Steve thought, the rumor was this was the last season of the show anyway.  He would just say in the cold open they were in Salem and who would know the difference.
There was a guy with a Jim Abbott rookie card which wasn’t worth much, but the guy was telling a good story about seeing him play at the University of Michigan, so they’d probably use it in the episode.  They only had a trickle of people here wanting their junk to be appraised for the show so they would have to take what they had.
Junkin’ Coast to Coast had been broadcast for seventeen years on a second-tier cable channel and had been steadily declining in viewership since the original host had the temerity to kill himself.  It used to be called Junkin’ with Joe but Shit with Steve didn’t have the same ring to it so there you go.
The bitch of it all, in Steve’s mind, was fucking Joe died with a belt hanging around his neck and a bunch of furry porn around his feet, but all of that has been conveniently forgotten and Steve was never going to be considered as good as the original guy.
His videographer Yvonne had the baseball card guy squared up on a head and shoulders shot and was half turned away texting somebody.  She had been his primary shooter on the East Coast, and since the budget of the show kept shrinking year over year they traveled less and less and stayed closer to New York, and Steve’s other videographers in other parts of the country dropped away.  
But even though they spent a lot of time together when they were shooting the show, and stayed at the same hotels and ate together every night, they had never hooked up.  Never even brushed hands.  Yet Steve felt like Yvonne was breaking up with him.
This old lady comes up with another fucking Blenko vase and then after that was a lull, and Yvonne stepped out into the cold fall night and called somebody.  Steve watched through the windows of the visitor center.  When she hung up Steve went outside to confront her.
“Are you looking for another job?”
“It’s the last show of the season, Steve.”
“Yeah, but we’re starting again in Portsmouth in January and people have always cleared out a bunch of shit over the holidays.”
Yvonne shook her head.  “I’m hearing this is it.  Even if it isn’t I gotta keep an eye out for me.”
Steve pointed at her cell phone.
“Who was that?”
Yvonne just shrugged.  “It was Rich, he’s on that dive bar show now where they show people how to fix them up, make a new drink menu, that kind of thing.”
“Where he went when he fucking cut out on Junkin’, yeah.”
“That’s not how he sees it but yeah.”
“The asshole who hosts that?  We were at the upfronts in Boston with the network guys, and he was a douchebag to everybody.”
“Yeah, but Rich says that’s only when he drinks.”
“The whole premise of the show is him fucking drinking!”
“Well, Rich says he needs a second shooter, so…”
“So you’re the first shooter on my show!”
Yvonne just looked at him, then slides her eyes back through the window of the visitor center.  Steve follows her line of sight and sees a guy in coveralls with a little book under his arm, and fuck my life if that isn’t probably a Civil War diary about somebody nobody gives a shit about.
So Steve just set his jaw and Yvonne followed him back into the visitor center.  A blast of warm air and close smells hits them.
“Hey, thanks for coming out to the show, if you’ll sign this release we can sit down and I can check out what you have there.”  
The guy looked pretty nervous up close and only gives a little bird-like nod.  While he is scratching his name on the clipboard Yvonne holds out to him the fake smile dropped from Steve’s face.
“Hey, can I look at this while my videographer sets up real quick?”
“Sure, man, that’s why I brought it.”  the guy said.  “I found it when I was cleaning out my uncle’s attic.  He passed over the summer.”
Steve swallowed hard and takes the small, soft-edged book while Yvonne gets ready to clip a lavalier mic on the guy.
Steve frowned with distaste and puts the book down quickly on a nearby table.  Both Yvonne and the guy look at Steve with surprise.
“Take that mic off, we can’t talk to this dude.”  Steve said with finality.
The guy in the coveralls raised his hands in mock surrender.
“Hey, man, I just want to know what I have there.”
Steve looked at him steadily.  “It looks like you have a diary bound in human skin, and I don’t dick around with shit like that.”
Now the guy looked more surprised than he did before.  He holds his hands open wide.
“I-I didn’t know that.”
“You said you got that from your uncle?  Maybe you should turn that over to the police.”
“The police?  What?  It ain’t like that.”
Steve just shrugged.  “I don’t care what it’s like, I’m not going on camera with a book made out of somebody’s skin.”
Yvonne retreated behind her camera and doesn’t check her cell phone, for once.
The guy in coveralls looked through the window of the visitor center to the darkness beyond, where nobody else is coming to bring their old crap tonight.  Then he looked square at Steve.
“Okay, this is the straight story, man.  I’m a plumber, okay, I work for the city, we get this call there’s water running out of this old abandoned building, way down by Choate Bridge.  We go down there, water running across the street, eventually I gotta break into the place, look for a busted pipe, see?”
“This is the most boring fucking story that involves a diary made of human skin I have ever heard.”
“Okay, okay, so wait a second, I get in there, I shut off the pipe, I start looking around a minute.  This old boarded up place is full of all kinds of shit.  It looks like medieval torture shit and a bunch of other stuff I don’t know what it is, but there’s probably some money in all that, right?  But I can’t haul all that out with my partner just outside so I just grab this book off a shelf and thought I would bring it here tonight, see if this shit was worth anything.  My grandma watches your show, you know?”
Steve is actually able to ignore this comment because his mind is working, working.  
“What’s your name, dude?”
“Why you got to know my name?”
“I’m not calling the cops, I just want to know what to call YOU.”
“Jimmy.  Jimmy Corey.”
“So what other kind of stuff was in this place, Jimmy?”  
Jimmy shrugged.  “Maybe some other weapons, some guns and shit, but I’m not touching somebody else’s guns.”
“I have a feeling that was a good idea.  Just hang loose a second.”
Steve lifted his chin, and Yvonne follows him to the corner, out of earshot.
Yvonne looked at him like he was crazy.
“Yvonne…I think this dude here found a Black Museum.”
Yvonne arched a brow at him.  “A BLACK Museum?!”
“Jesus, not that kind of Black, calm down a minute—“
“Now I have to calm down?!”
“It’s not that kind of Black Museum!!  The original was in London, but now it refers to any place where somebody has collected artifacts from various crimes…on the circuit, you know, the world I live in…sometimes you hear about private collectors…”
“You mean people that want like, a picture a serial killer painted, shit like that?”
“I mean, that’s a mild example, but yeah.”
“We’ve never seen anything like that come through.  You sure that is human skin?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“So what do you want to do?”
Steve looked back at Jimmy.
“We need to get this guy to take us to that place.”
“What?  Why?”
“Just trust me.  And when we get there, don’t stop rolling tape for anything.”
“My contract says I’m done at 7:30.”
Steve shook his head angrily.
“Forget about 7:30!  We’re looking at Season 18!  Believe me.”
“Uh-huh,” Yvonne said flatly.  “Season 18.”
A few minutes later Steven and Yvonne piled into Jimmy’s panel van and headed towards the river.
“You oughta do a whole show on the Choate Bridge,” Jimmy offered as they got closer.  “It’s one of the oldest bridges in the United States, if not THE oldest.”
“Can someone take that bridge down and bring it into the Ipswich Visitor Center?  No?  Then it can’t be on the fucking show.”
Jimmy just shook his head.  “It was just an idea.  And when did you shave your beard?”
“What?”
“He’s talking about Joe,” Yvonne threw in.
Of course he’s fucking talking about Joe, Steve thought.
“Never, Jimmy.  I never shaved it.”
Jimmy blinks owlishly, then steers the panel van into a gravel lot next to a large, dilapidated building with the bridge looming close by, close enough that brackish water seeped up through the gravel all around them when they stepped out.
Steve looked around.  “Somebody could urban renew this shit, put in a boardwalk, turn this into something.”
“ It’s gotta fit in with the history, it’s how we do things around here,” Jimmy answered, as he fiddles the latch where a snapped-off combination lock hangs.
Yvonne crowded in closer to Steve.
“There’s some sort of shape over there.  Looks like a dead raccoon or something.”
Jimmy doesn’t turn around.
“I’m a plumber for the city.  If it ain’t got at least one shoe sticking up we don’t check it out.”
Steve was about to ask Yvonne if she was rolling, get her focus back, when something came out of the darkness ahead with a sound like THWIP THWIP THWIP and suddenly the blackness around Steve w