“It’s a little more than that. I don’t want the thought of where my next meal is coming from to occupy my entire brain. Plus I have insurance and child support payments to make.”
“Yeah, but what if your day job goes under and people stop buying your books?”
“I try not to think about any of that.”
“I’m just saying we’re probably ten years away from being a third world country. We’ve let the rich siphon off all the excess that was supposed to be distributed amongst the people and it’s thrown things out of balance. There’s no way this country can sustain itself.”
They were approaching the house.
“Man, I could really use a drink. You guys still drink, don’t you?” Maybe now he would find out if Jessica was pregnant or not.
“Fuck yeah,” Dustin said. “As long as we don’t have to pay for it.”
Thurston wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.
4.
It took about midway through the second growler before Dustin knocked off the adolescent political rhetoric and started to relax a little. Thurston actually agreed with most of what he said but found it overly idealistic and a horribly boring topic for party conversation. He’d always felt more than three people constituted a party and while Jessica was technically a fourth person the beer had taken what little contribution she had made out of her. She seemed almost zombified. Thurston relaxed a little. If she drank she probably wasn’t pregnant. Maybe the rounded belly had something to do with malnourishment, like those starving African kids they showed on tv.
The conversation shifted to writing and publishing, as it usually did with them. Jessica lost the last shred of interest she had in the conversation, shed her clothes, and wandered out in the yard to dance. It was dark and the light didn’t reach that far and Thurston was glad because it would have made him nervous to look at her. When they began talking about some of their writer friends and the people they knew in publishing, Thurston was alarmed by the vitriolic hatred that came from Dustin. He used to be the type of person to find people’s quirks funny. There were plenty of negative things to be said – it wasn’t a perfect world – but everyone was pretty much there by choice and doing something they presumably enjoyed doing so Dustin’s complete eviscerations of people seemed a bit much. Kara, already pretty drunk, laughed at much of what Dustin said but Thurston thought, with the way he was saying it, it wasn’t really a laughing matter.
A dog howled in the distance. A June bug dive bombed the candle in the middle of the patio table and jerked convulsively in the wax, giving everyone a start. Jessica was nowhere to be seen, although Thurston was pretty sure he could hear her moving and panting.
Kara scrolled through her phone and read some Facebook posts from people they knew. Most of them were idiotic. Thurston was pretty sure the act of saying you did something cool on Facebook completely sucked the cool from it.
When they exhausted that, Thurston asked Dustin what he was working on.
“Nothing, man.”
“Nothing?”
“What’s the point?”
“I thought you liked doing it.”
“Nah. It was stupid and childish. I said everything I had to say. I guess I’ll write another one if I feel like I have something else to say.”
Thurston liked Dustin’s writing a lot, but he’d never thought of it as being particularly philosophical.
“The publishing business is just modern day slavery, anyway. You have a hundred slaves working for pennies so the publishers can get rich by, what? Uploading a couple of files?”
Thurston thought comparing a group of what was mostly middle age, middle-to-upper-middle class white guys to slavery was nearly offensive but, that aside, Thurston couldn’t really disagree with him. It was one of the reasons he and Kara self-published most of their stuff these days. He was still pretty sure no one in the small press world was getting rich.
Kara tapped out sometime during the third growler. Jessica still had not joined them. The woods were alive with insect sounds. Heat lightning strobed the sky.
Kara told Dustin where the extra blankets and pillows were.
“Thanks but we’ll probably just sleep out here.”
Her hospitality thwarted, Kara disappeared into the house without saying anything else.
“You don’t have to sleep outside.”
“No. I know, man. Thanks for the offer. We just like it better outside. Indoors is too confining. Jessica’s really sensitive to mold and mildew. She says she can smell it every time she’s inside.”
“There’s probably more mold and mildew outside than in.”
“I know, but it belongs there.”
This seemed somewhat irrational to Thurston but he let it drop.
He was finally drunk enough to let his curiosity force him to ask what had happened.
“So what the hell happened, man? What have you guys been doing since we saw you the last time?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. I’m not the only one who’s asked you about this, am I? Didn’t you move out here to be closer to your parents? What do they think?” Thurston almost hoped this was where Dustin would come clean and tell him they’d moved back in with his parents. That would have made some things make a little more sense.
“We don’t speak to my parents anymore.”
“I thought you were close.”
“They’re government workers. I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to them until they quit their jobs.”
“But they’re both teachers. Most people see teachers as saints.”
“Well we see them as tools in the government brainwashing conspiracy.”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Of course I’m serious.”
Thurston wanted to ask him to go back to being the old Dustin, a fun person to be around. Crazy, perhaps, but crazy in a good way.
“So that’s what you’ve been doing? Working on some kind of . . . manifesto that will gradually eliminate everyone you know from your life?”
“It’s not really like that. Once you reaffirm your personal beliefs it just makes hypocrisy impossible.”
“So would continuing to talk to your parents be hypocrisy?”
“Are you kidding? I know what it is they stand for. I know where their money comes from. And I know they’re unwilling to change.”
“So just spending time with them because they’re your parents and forgetting about all the other stuff is hypocritical?”
“Yes.”
“I guess I just don’t understand the rigidity of your thinking.”
“That’s because you want a comfortable life so you keep your morals and personal philosophy liquid and amorphous.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s not for me.”
“So how can you talk to me knowing that I pay taxes, thus supporting the system you hate so much?”
“Because you have to do that. You have a job.”
Thurston lit a cigarette and took a big gulp of beer. “We need to stop talking about this shit. Did Jessica ever come back?”
“I’m right here.” She stood less than a foot behind Thurston and he jumped when she spoke.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, immediately standing up. “And with that, I think I’m going to call it a night. Help yourself to what’s left of the beer. I’ll leave the door unlocked. There’s a bed inside if you decide you don’t want to sleep in the yard.”
5.
Thurston lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. If he were as drunk as he’d hoped to be, he would have passed right out. But the last few minutes of talking with Dustin had made him almost inexplicably angry and Jessica finally sneaking up on him had scared him completely sober. Now he was just mostly tired and wanted to go to sleep.
That was hard because Jessica and Dustin were still on the patio and that wasn’t very far from his open bedroom window. It sounded like they were arguing. He wondered what Jessica c
ould have been doing in her time away from them. There was no way she’d been dancing around in the yard for something close to three hours. And all that shit Dustin was talking about? He almost hoped it was some kind of elaborate put on.
He heard them move around to the front of the house, their voices escalating into near hysterical violence.
Kara was still dead to the world.
Thurston decided to get up and see what was wrong before someone down the street called the cops.
A dim light glowed from the van.
The screaming and yelling continued from the inside. Thurston wasn’t exactly sure how you approached people living in a van. He knocked on the window of the sliding door, realizing again how old the van was.
The door slid back and Dustin said excitedly, “She’s crowning!”
“Huh?”
Thurston felt dazed. He thought, somewhere deep inside his memory, he should know what that meant.
“Jessica’s having the baby.”
“Shouldn’t . . . we call someone?”
Dustin hopped out of the van and wrapped his hands around Thurston’s arms.
“You don’t understand. This is the sacrifice we’ve been waiting for. Once the child is born we must take it to the place in the woods where Jessica’s water broke and bathe in its blood. I have the ceremonial knife right here.” Dustin held it up as proof. “If we do this, no one in attendance will ever have to do anything they don’t want. Do what thou wilt!”
“I don’t think I can let you do that.” Thurston was already sliding his phone out of his pocket. It was dead. He wasn’t completely surprised. It seemed like there were a hundred apps he couldn’t figure out how to keep from running.
Kara stumbled out of the house just as the first volley of the baby’s cries came from the van.
“I need the knife to cut this fucking cord!” Jessica shouted.
A dog howled in the distance. Insects hummed around him. A shadow or possibly the clouds moved across the moon.
“What the fuck is going on?” Kara still looked half-asleep.
“Do you have your phone on you?”
“No. It’s in the house. Why?”
How to tell her . . . Thurston wondered if he should bother explaining or just start shouting for help.
“Thurse, what the fuck is going on?”
“We need to call the cops or an ambulance or something. Jessica just delivered her baby. They want to take it into the woods and sacrifice it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“It’s not our place to stop them.”
This journalistic approach was expected with most things, but he didn’t see how this didn’t get more of a reaction from her.
“I can’t let them go through with this. Kill a baby?”
She shrugged. “Are we allowed to watch?”
Jessica must have drugged and brainwashed Kara. That was the only excuse Thurston could think of. Maybe Jessica had sneaked into her room after she’d gone to bed. Maybe she’d slipped her something at dinner and had been working on her subliminally ever since.
Dustin and Jessica came around from the back of the van, Dustin holding the baby swaddled in Jessica’s robe. Dustin beamed. Jessica looked weak, her thighs splashed with blood.
What if there is no baby? Thurston wondered.
Since he was the only one not going along with this, he thought maybe they were all playing a trick on him. Deep down, he knew that couldn’t be the case. He found himself following them around to the back of the house. Jessica had definitely given birth. He’d seen her naked earlier and there was no way she hadn’t been pregnant. And now she was definitely not pregnant. When he’d seen her come around from the back of the van the firm baby bump had been replaced with what looked like two feet of stretch marked, saggy skin. And this was the first time they’d all been together in nearly a year. Why would the three of them want to spend all night acting just for some kind of ridiculous payoff?
Thurston thought he would almost rather believe anything than what was actually happening around him.
“Dustin, man, I can’t let you do this.” He felt like he had to say something, but felt powerless to stop it.
Dustin was suddenly in front of him, brandishing the knife with the hand that wasn’t holding the sacrificial infant in a bloody robe.
“We’re going through with this!” There was a look in his eyes Thurston had never seen before. “You can get the fuck away, but you’re not stopping us. If you try to stop us, I’ll cut your fucking throat.”
Thurston thought about how this would look on a police report, maybe even in front of a jury, and wondered if it would let him off the hook as an accomplice. He put up his hands in a gesture of defeat.
Kara placed a hand on Thurston’s arm. “Just calm down.”
“Yeah,” Jessica smiled. “That’s my pussy fruit.”
The moon was nearly if not completely full and the backyard was fairly well lit. Maybe someone would see them and do something. But who would see? The strange man Kara sometimes swore she saw lurking around the house? He really felt like he should turn and run for help. There were probably only a few minutes left.
As they stepped into the dark wood, he felt the last vestiges of protest leave his body. He felt like he was on acid or some other, more euphoric drug. The woods were dark but seemed to almost glow and pulse. He imagined an umbilical cord running from the woods to the house and briefly wondered which way the nutrients were going. Which was feeding which. Jessica and Dustin and Kara all seemed to be panting as they headed deeper into the woods and Thurston heard the dog howl again. This time it was almost deafeningly close and he saw that the dog, a huge black thing, was right in front of them. It lowered its head from the unobservable moon and began lapping at the ground. Thurston thought that must be where Jessica’s water broke. And now Jessica stood in front of the dog and the dog began licking the afterbirth from her thighs and in between her legs. She lay on her back and spread her legs. The beast’s member was huge and pink and dripping as it moved on top of her and began thrusting. Dustin slashed at the swaddle he held in his left arm. His eyes were huge and he smiled crazily. He held the baby aloft above the dog fucking his wife, the blood raining down and coating all of them.
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!” he shouted over and over, dancing around the scene of bestiality being played out on the floor of the woods.
Thurston felt assaulted by the night and the woods. He felt the moon and the leaves and the dirt and every droplet of water on his skin. He smelled blood and sex and dog and something spicy and exotic and not entirely unpleasant. Everything spun and throbbed around him and the last thing he remembered was collapsing onto his hands and knees and vomiting onto the ground, Kara’s cool hand on the back of his neck.
6.
He woke up very late the next afternoon.
His body felt stiff and abused but, thankfully, there was no trace of the nausea he’d felt last night.
Kara had already made coffee. Recently, it smelled like. She probably hadn’t gotten out of bed long before him.
Last night came back to him in vivid, nightmarish detail.
He poured a cup of coffee and looked out at the driveway. There was no sign of Dustin and Jessica’s hideous van.
He took his coffee out to the back patio and sat down next to Kara. He reached for the cigarettes and lit one.
He wondered if they would talk about it.
He didn’t really want to.
Talking about it seemed like it would make it real.
But it was real.
He denied that thought. He felt like it was something that needed the shape of words to make it more complete.
“Sleep well?” Kara looked toward the dark woods.
“Like a baby,” he said.
KING CREEP
1.
He found it best if he thought of himself as his stage persona – Slade Kontrol. Only there wasn’
t really a stage. Just a couch in the middle of his mostly bare living room, a girl who was barely of legal age (he had a photocopy of her driver’s license and social security card) sitting in the middle of the couch, one huge black guy to her left massaging himself through his tight jeans, a large white guy to her right massaging himself through his basketball shorts, and himself, standing behind a camera on a tripod. Currently the only thing in the frame of the camera was the girl – Sierra Leone. He wondered if she knew where Sierra Leone was. He wondered if she even knew it was a country. Young, natural, pretty, wearing a pair of black yoga pants and a sleeveless t-shirt. She didn’t look like a porn star. Really, at his level, there were no porn stars. This amounted to, essentially, filmed prostitution. Some girls he’d filmed had taken the leap out to California and made something of a name for themselves, but most of them were lazy and poor or they wouldn’t need the money in the first place and most of them had a laundry list of things they wouldn’t do, although that often relaxed depending on how high or drunk they were. This one had specifically said no anal, no choking, and they could come anywhere but inside of her. In Slade’s experience, this usually meant they had a boyfriend who would want to fuck them later and didn’t know how they made their money. It was an interesting moral code. The girl had no problems with him and his two actors fucking her senseless for an hour or so but the thought of her boyfriend fucking through another man’s come would just be too humiliating for him.
“What’s your name?” he started the only thing close to a script. He had it dedicated to memory, pretty much.
“Sierra Leone.” She smiled but still looked nervous.
“How old are you, Sierra?”
“I just turned eighteen.”
“Great. Now you can buy cigarettes, pornography, and join the army. How many guys have you had sex with?”
She held up two fingers.
“How old were you when you had sex for the first time?”
Creep House: Horror Stories Page 8