by Bryan Smith
Pete poured the rest of the beer from the open can out on his lawn and went inside, closing and locking the door behind him. He was on his way to the kitchen to stow the beer carton in the fridge when something in his peripheral vision made him stop in his tracks. There was something on the coffee table he was sure hadn’t been there moments ago. Another helpless whimper escaped his lips as he turned slowly toward the coffee table.
He frowned.
What the fuck?
In the center of the coffee table rested a large, square-shaped black box. Actually, he realized upon closer inspection, the dominant color was a dark gray, with a single wide vertical black stripe running up the center of each side of the box. A velvety black bow was pinned to the top of the box. It looked like a gift box, albeit one intended for people of the goth persuasion, a description that in no way fit Pete. The presence of the box in and of itself was disturbing. He had no doubt that whatever was inside it would be even more so. The more immediate source of concern was the obvious implication that someone had come into the house and put the box on the table while he’d been out fetching the beer from his car. He’d been gone no more than a minute. The person who’d done this was either still in the house or lurking around in his back yard.
A tingling sensation at the back of his neck set Pete’s teeth to jittering. He imagined someone creeping up on him from behind or watching him from just inside the second bedroom, the door to which was directly to his rear. He whirled around with a panicked gasp, raising the beer carton in preparation of smashing it against the head of an adversary.
There was no one there, though, unless you counted the dead blonde woman on the floor at his feet. Keeping the beer carton raised, he stepped over the corpse and moved lightly across the floor to the open door. His heart started beating faster as he neared that dark rectangle and the shadows beyond. No part of him wanted to do this or get even one inch closer to potential danger, but he made himself keep going. The one beer he’d had was giving him just enough courage to do this without collapsing into a puddle of trembling uselessness. Once he was at the door, he carefully reached around the door frame and felt the wall for the light switch, praying someone wouldn’t grab his wrist in the dark. He didn’t know what he’d do if that happened. A braver person would probably fight for all he was worth. Pete feared he would only scream and beg for mercy.
But no one grabbed his wrist.
After flipping the switch, he poked his head into the room and saw that it was empty, save for the small twin-bed no one ever slept on. Venturing into the room in a slightly less trepidatious way, he peeked under the bed and checked the closet to completely confirm the lack of a nefarious presence. He moved out of the room and pulled the door firmly shut, as if by doing this he could seal off at least that one part of the house from the evil that had invaded his life.
Deciding to stow the beer carton in his fridge and procure a better weapon, he went into the kitchen and again stopped cold in his tracks. The door to his big back yard was standing open. Through the screen door’s window, he saw grass in dire need of mowing. He would normally not be able to see the grass at this hour without flipping on the back stoop light, but something had moved around back there, activating the motion sensor.
As he approached the door, he held the beer carton cradled against his chest, instinctively putting it between himself and any danger lurking outside as a kind of makeshift shield. An utterly useless shield that would provide no meaningful level of protection against a deranged individual with a penchant for strangling scantily clad young women with his bare hands. Upon realizing the absurdity of the gesture, he decided to stow the beer carton in the fridge before checking the back yard for signs of the intruder. There was a wood knife block on the countertop next to the fridge. The big handles of the larger carving knives jutted from the slots at the top of the block. One of those would work far better as a means of defending himself. He’d grab one just as soon as he’d put the beer away.
Pete hauled the refrigerator door open and leaned in to stow the carton on the top shelf, stopping when he saw the transparent Tupperware container. It was in roughly the same place where he’d meant to put the beer carton. He tilted his head and frowned as he tried to make out what was inside the container, which had not been there earlier. It was one of the smaller containers of its type, a size meant for storing the leftover portion of an individual person’s meal. The thing inside it looked like a lump of raw, bloody meat. Even without knowing precisely what it was yet, Pete began to feel queasy. There was no doubt this was yet another “gift” from his tormentors. His instinct at this point was to hurriedly put the beer away on a lower shelf and shut the door without taking a closer look at the thing in the Tupperware container.
But he knew he couldn’t do that.
Turning away from unpleasant things or pretending they didn’t exist was not an option at this point. Choking back the bile rising into his throat, Pete slid the beer carton onto the narrow middle shelf, grabbed the Tupperware container, and took a few steps back from the fridge. A lump formed in his throat as he held the container in his trembling hands and stared at the lid. He was whimpering again as he began to peel back a corner of the lid. The trembling in his hands intensified as the lid came off and fell to the floor. He gasped and slapped a hand over his mouth when he finally understood what he was seeing—a man’s severed penis and balls.
He shrieked in startled terror when someone knocked stridently against the screen door. His head snapped in that direction and he came close to peeing his pants when he saw Shane Watson leering in at him. The big grin splitting the middle of his face had a maniacal aspect to it, an impression heightened by the blood smeared all over his cheeks and forehead. The way Pete’s heart was slamming in his chest made him fear an imminent heart attack. He felt paralyzed and had no idea what he’d do if Shane opened the unlocked screen door and came into the house. A grab for one of those big knives was the obvious move, but in that moment he felt incapable of action. Shane laughed and waggled his eyebrows in a way that suggested he sensed Pete’s shameful impotence. He opened his mouth wider and licked the window, leaving a slimy trail along the glass. Then he retreated from the porch and disappeared from sight.
As soon as Shane was gone, Pete rushed over to the doorway and slammed the inner door shut. He turned the bottom lock and used his key to engage the deadbolt above it. Having this extra barrier between himself and the madman still lurking somewhere in his back yard made him feel slightly better for a few seconds. Then he realized that Shane likely was in possession of a duplicate key and the terror surged inside him again. The man could reenter the house at any time and Pete would be powerless to stop him.
He took another look at the lump of bloody flesh in the Tupperware container, experiencing another moment of intense nausea before setting the container on the stove. Feeling closer than ever to a complete mental collapse, Pete revisited the previously dismissed idea of involving the police. There was an exponentially greater level of incriminating shit present in his house now. Multiple bodies and at least one piece of another body, the bloody genitalia of a recently castrated male. That gift box and whatever horror was inside it. And that was just the stuff he knew about.
His tormentors had probably stashed away more grisly mementos in other places. He imagined opening a random drawer in the kitchen or in his bedroom and finding other bloody organs. This felt not just possible, but likely. If he summoned the cops here, he would be going to jail for sure. And trying to make anyone understand what had really happened here wouldn’t be easy. It would sound like delusional craziness. He could easily see himself taking the rap for all of this and going to jail for the rest of his life. He might even get the death penalty. And yet, even with that direst of prospects on the table, calling the cops might still be his best option. The people he was dealing with tonight weren’t just ruthless and vindictive. They were genuinely unhinged. Crazy. Even the worst of all possible legal conseque
nces might be preferable to facing whatever insanity they still had in store for him.
He nonetheless could not quite bring himself to make the call. Not just yet. Maybe he could work himself up to it given just a few more minutes of trying to think things through. He laughed in a dry, humorless way at the thought, knowing it was willful delusion, a lie he was telling himself. The terrible truth was he was too much of a hopeless pussy to make any kind of decision one way or the other. He wasn’t going to do anything other than hang around and wait for whatever horrible outcome fate had in store for him.
Pete opened the fridge and grabbed a beer from the carton. He opened the can and chugged down its contents in what was for him record time. He tossed the empty can in the sink and grabbed another one from the carton. This one he drank a touch more slowly as he carried it out to the living room and again surveyed the insane tableau in there.
Though he had no concrete verifying information, he thought it likely the dead women had been exotic dancers. Or strippers, as they were more commonly called. Mary had referred to dead woman number one as such, a description he’d unthinkingly repeated multiple times during his most recent conversation with her. It was hard not to infer knowledge of the deceased woman’s occupation from a remark that had at first seemed nothing more than an educated guess, but clearly had been so much more than that.
Also, they just had that stripper look. The tiny, skimpy underthings. The big platform heels. The probable boob enhancements. The women being strippers also made sense in terms of how they’d fallen victim to the people currently making his life a living hell. Shane had either lured the women to a secondary location away from whatever sin den had employed them or he had snatched them from a club’s parking lot. This wouldn’t have been an easy thing to do, at least not for most people, but women liked Shane. They found him charming for some reason that would always be a mystery to Pete. He’d found a way, that was all there was to it.
As far as Pete was concerned, the bigger mystery was the severed penis and balls currently sitting in a plastic container on his stove. He thought about it as he sipped beer and stared at the gift box on the coffee table. A third person had been murdered. A man this time. He had a hunch a bigger clue regarding that part of it lurked inside the goth-y gift box.
He knew he was meant to open the box and take a look inside, but he was reluctant to do so in the aftermath of what he’d found waiting for him in his refrigerator. The beer can felt loose and slippery in his hand, which was shaking again. He tightened his grip on it and brought the can to his mouth, tilting his head back and chugging down the rest of its contents. When it was empty, he tossed the can aside and it skittered across the hardwood floor until hitting a baseboard. He would normally never do such a thing, but keeping his house immaculately clean no longer seemed like a necessity, what with all the corpses and body parts lying around.
Pete stepped closer to the coffee table, pried the velvety top off the gift box, and peered inside, making another grisly discovery. He experienced a twinge of shock when he saw what it was, but this time the feeling was strangely muted, perhaps because by now he was expecting to encounter horrendous things at virtually every turn.
A man’s severed head was inside the box’s plush red interior. Biting back his revulsion, he took hold of a handful of blood-flecked hair at the top of the head and pulled it out of the box. He turned the head so he could examine its features, seeing right away that the severed extremity had belonged to someone he’d known. This was the head of Stan Richardson, his neighbor from across the street. Protruding from Stan’s mouth was a folded piece of paper. Pete removed it and returned the head to the box.
He unfolded the sheet of paper and read the single sentence printed in block letters—CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU SEE THIS.
The note was unsigned, but it could only be from one person.
Pete took out his phone and made the call.
ELEVEN
Mary answered on the first ring.
“Hi, Pete? Do you like your gifts?”
Her tone was an annoyingly chirpy one. Bright and cheery in a way that was grotesque under the circumstances.
“Not especially,” Pete said, scowling. “Not one damn bit, actually, but you already know that, of course.”
“Gosh. You sound pretty hacked off about it.”
A silent moment passed.
Then Mary giggled. “Hacked off. You get it?”
Pete groaned and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I get it. Murder humor. How very macabre of you. Tell me something, Mary. At this point, what’s to stop me from calling the cops and putting an end to this bullshit?”
Mary sighed. “Who are you kidding, Pete? You didn’t do it the last time you made that threat and you won’t do it this time either. And even if you did work up the nerve to bring in the police, it’d be an even bigger mistake than you’re imagining right now.”
Pete frowned. “Oh, really. And why is that?”
“Because I would have no choice but to show them the dozens of graphic and upsetting photos of you being intimate with the first lovely lady who showed up at your house this morning. You must know the ones I mean, Pete. You sent them to me from your phone.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Mary’s only answer this time was hearty laughter.
His heart beating faster now, Pete took the phone away from his ear and turned on the speaker function so he could still talk to Mary. He tapped the “photos” icon on his screen and started scrolling through pictures. Not being a big social media person, Pete rarely used his phone’s camera. Unlike most people he knew, he wasn’t constantly posting pictures of his food on Facebook or Instagram. Before tonight there had been less than ten photos on his camera roll. Now there were nearly forty, the vast majority of which showed him apparently fornicating with a corpse.
That the other person in the photos was deceased was made evident by some direct shots of her slack features and mangled neck. These were all posed pictures, of course. He’d been unconscious the entire time. But Mary and her murderous accomplice had done a good job arranging the bodies and framing the photos in ways that made him appear conscious and willfully engaged in the reprehensible act of necrophilia. He’d suspected she’d taken photos, but not that she’d used his phone to do it. This was bad. Really, really bad. If the police ever saw these photos, he wouldn’t just get arrested on multiple counts of murder. There would be charges of corpse defilement and who knew what else.
The lurid details would get out to the media well ahead of a trial, he was sure of it. Everybody would look at him as something even lower than just a common murderer. He would become infamous, the butt of morbid jokes and the subject of a thousand true crime articles on the internet. If he went to jail, he’d become an instant target. Some other inmate would shiv him in the showers.
Another helpless whimper came out of his mouth as he shook his head in disgust and ran a hand through his hair. “You fucking bitch.”
Mary laughed. “Oh, how I love making you whine. It comes so naturally to you. Doesn’t it ever make you feel pathetic?”
Pete closed the camera roll and tapped his messages icon. Seeing Mary’s name at the top of the list of recent messages, he tapped the preview to open the full message thread. He groaned as he scrolled through the messages, which were mostly outgoing photos sent from his phone to Mary. These were, of course, the staged corpse-fucking photos from his camera roll. Interspersed here and there between the photos were texts meant to appear as if he’d written them. These included grossly lewd comments about the images as well as threats against Mary’s life, warnings that the same thing could happen to her if she didn’t do as he told her.
Pete closed the message thread. “That’s really fucked up, Mary. All of it.”
“Thank you. I’m pretty proud of myself.”
Pete grunted. “I bet you are. Just one thing, though. Who was supposed to have been taking the photos? If the cops ever see them,
that’s something they’ll want to know.”
“I’m sure.” The sound of a lighter flicking came from Pete’s phone. Mary said nothing further for a moment as she sparked up a cigarette and apparently took a long drag. “Good thing I already have a scapegoat in mind if necessary.”
“And who would that be?”
“Who do you think?”
Feeling weary, Pete took a seat in the recliner formerly occupied by dead woman number two, whose head was now inches away from his outstretched feet. His gaze went to her slack features for a moment before moving on to her enormous bosom. He wanted to look away, but found he couldn’t. The sight of them was too compelling.
“Would you really turn on Shane?”
“Of course. I’d hate to lose a fuck toy of that caliber, but I’ll do whatever I have to do.”
Pete shifted in the recliner, sitting up a little straighter. “I wonder what he’d say if I told him you said that. I wonder if he’d get scared enough to go to the cops with me and confess everything.”
Mary took another audible deep drag on her cigarette before laughing. “He won’t believe you. You have no idea how wrapped around my finger that man is. Besides, you know how stupid he is. He’d think you were making it up.” Another soft laugh. “Go ahead, Pete. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Pete said nothing.
“That’s what I thought. Now, Pete, much as I’ve enjoyed our conversation. It’s time for the next step in the game. And that’s all this is to me. I want you to know that. A game. A fun exercise in pushing a sad little excuse for a man to his limits and beyond. Think of it not just as a game, but as a test. A test of how much you can endure before you break. And the test only gets harder as you go along. Like now, for instance. I want you to go out to your back yard. Shane is waiting there for you. You’re to let him have his way with you and then he’ll tell you what to do next.”