“Thirteen.”
“How old was your boyfriend?”
“Well, he wasn’t my boyfriend. Just some guy. He was probably sixteen or seventeen.”
“Do you have a boyfriend now?”
She nodded slowly.
“Does he know you’re doing this?”
She shook her head.
“Do you think you’ll fuck him later?”
“I’m going to tell him I don’t feel like it, but he’ll probably want to anyway.”
“So why are you here?”
She’d been told not to say anything about money or drugs. Some of them did, but he just edited that out.
“It seemed like fun.”
“Have you ever had more than one guy at a time before?”
She shook her head. “I’ve always wanted to but doing it with guys I knew seemed strange, you know? Like I’m pretty sure it would change things or they’d talk about me or something, you know?”
“Some people might see this.”
She shrugged.
He told most of the girls he didn’t advertise in their home state and a surprising amount of them believed him. Like he could even really control that. He felt like they probably knew what the internet was and were just in some kind of denial. In actuality, phase one of the advertising campaign (besides uploading a two minute clip to every free service on the web) was to send emails to accounts registered in the closest proximities to this zip code with: OMG! DO YOU KNOW THIS GIRL! in the subject line and a very clear picture of the actress’ face in the body with a link to the two minute clip.
Slade continued to walk through the script. He didn’t feel bad about what he did. It was legal, these girls were adults, and he never forced them to make this decision. He placed an ad as a modeling agency, they responded via email with some usually very deceptive photos attached. He wasn’t that into fat girls so he just never responded to those emails. If he responded it was to make an appointment for them to come to the house. He didn’t live here. He lived in a much nicer house in town. If they showed up and they were too fat or ugly to film, he asked them a few questions about their modeling experience and told them they weren’t what he was looking for or, if they seemed especially delicate, that they just didn’t have enough experience. If they were someone he wanted to film, he explained to them what they would be doing and, if possible, began filming within the next few minutes. A lot of girls said they needed time to think about it and left even after he offered to pay them a lot more and tried his best coercion tactics. A few of those girls got back with him but most did not. If they were up to it, they had either come in expecting what they were “auditioning” for or were up for just about anything all the time. Usually because they needed money. Probably because they had a drug habit. They were the party girls. He wasn’t really sure about Sierra. Probably just bored.
“Okay, Sierra, stand up and let’s get a good look at you.”
She stood up. The camera ran up and down her body.
“Turn around.”
She turned around. The camera focused on her ass.
“Okay. Now do you mind getting down on your knees and sucking my cock?”
She stared into the camera before looking away.
Someone was knocking on the door. It was typically Slade’s policy not to answer it. He was always afraid of opening the door to find some murderously jealous redneck boyfriend standing there with a shotgun.
This girl paid more attention to it than most. Maybe she was afraid it was her boyfriend.
Slade rarely shut the camera off. There had been a couple of girls who’d freaked out during filming. One had complained that the guy was too big and had started, literally, crying “Rape!” Slade turned off the camera, calmed her down, let her smoke some heroin, and finished the scene with about a half a tube of lube. Thank god that shit was a write off. The other girl he’d suspected was crazy and kept yelling lies about how he’d gotten her here. But, with the rise of YouTube and some non-pornographic clips going viral in a mainstream sort of way and gaining sponsorship, Slade always thought it best to keep the camera running. As long as there wasn’t anything legally damning to him.
“Do you know who that might be?”
She shook her head.
“Are you sure you didn’t tell your boyfriend you were here?”
“No. Why would I do that? Everyone knows what you do in this house.”
This was, actually, somewhat of a shock to Slade. He supposed it was inevitable that people in a small town would talk, but he assumed the nature of what he did would be too embarrassing for anyone to substantiate with firsthand knowledge.
“Do you want to answer the door, Sierra?”
“Were you just going to let them keep knocking?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“I can get it, I guess.”
“Dude, I gotta split in, like, an hour,” Black Brian said.
That was actually his two actors’ “thing”. Most of the time they were billed as “The Brothers Brian.” They clearly were not brothers. They were, respectively, Black Brian and White Brian. They even had matching tattoos – the yin and yang symbol except, yes, with a black penis and a white penis. The adult film industry was not known for political correctness.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Slade said.
Sierra was already headed for the door off the carport. It was not, technically, the front door but since it was the one that usually had the outside light on beside it, it was the one people usually came to.
“You care if we step out and smoke?” White Brian asked.
“Just a cigarette?” Slade said.
“Yeah, man.”
“Whatever.”
Slade found that when some guys smoked pot it made them soft and he usually had to edit out fifteen minutes of them viciously jerking off before launching the money shot. The Brothers Brian were both so huge it looked like they rarely achieved full erections anyway. Slade didn’t want to play with fire.
The Brians went out to the wonky back patio through the door in the living room.
The door to the carport was mostly glass so there wasn’t any need for a peephole.
Before Sierra could open the door, Slade said, “Wait a minute.”
This guy looked weird. He was bald but a lot of guys were. Maybe the harsh fluorescent from the porch light made him look paler than he actually was. But it wasn’t just the washed out, almost bleached pallor of his skin. He had no eyebrows. And Slade thought that if he were to be standing closer to him, he probably wouldn’t find any eyelashes either.
He stood there, dressed like a middle-age dad or a guy on vacation, staring blankly at the door. He methodically raised his right hand and knocked.
“Can I help you?” Slade called through the door.
The man quit knocking and stared intently at the door. Slade wasn’t sure how well he could see inside. Slade checked the camera and made sure everything was still focused and in frame.
“I need . . . help. There’s been an accident.”
“Have you called someone?” Slade asked. He was getting some kind of weird, bad vibe coming off this guy.
The man continued to stand in that odd way and stare at the door. Slade looked through the camera and zoomed it forward a little to see if he could maybe get a better look at this guy without actually opening the door. The man stared straight into the camera.
“Please. I need . . . help. There’s been an accident.”
“Go ahead and open the door,” he told Sierra.
It took him only a couple of seconds to process the reasons for doing this. First, there was always a need to catch something interesting on camera. Now that he had the chance to do that, he wasn’t going to send the guy away because he didn’t want to deal with him. And the man didn’t look dangerous. He wasn’t holding a gun or any other type of weapon. He was fairly slight of build and seemed genuinely dazed. Also, this guy was only one man while Slade was surrounded by th
ree people, two of which were about the size of small cars.
The man stumbled past them, into the kitchen, on his way to the living room, almost like he knew where he was going.
“I just . . . I really need to sit down.”
The man headed for the couch.
“Call 911,” Slade said to Sierra.
She walked over to the couch, Slade focusing the camera on her ass as she reached down and fished her phone from her purse. He noticed she wore black underwear. He was already lamenting the fact that he might not get to see her out of those underwear.
There was a bright flash from outside. Like really bright.
It didn’t help that the wall facing the backyard was almost all glass. There was a second where everything in the room was almost like an x-ray. He put the camera down and tried to blink away the black spots.
“What the fuck was that?” Sierra said.
“I don’t know.”
The man on the couch stared forward and blinked.
“You guys see that?” Slade called to the Brians through the screen door.
“Fuck yeah, man!” Black Brian called.
“You hear anything?” Slade asked.
“Nah, dude. Just that light.”
Sierra scowled down at her phone.
“The battery’s dead,” she said.
Slade was momentarily excited. He thought maybe they had just witnessed something special and wondered if he’d managed to capture it on his camera. But his hopes sank before he could even focus on the viewfinder. The camera was dead.
“Fuck,” he mumbled.
He sat the camera on the tv stand behind him and pulled out his phone.
It was dead too.
“Hey!” he called through the screen door. “Either of your phones work!”
“Nah, man!” Black Brian said.
“Fuck!” White Brian called. Slade assumed that meant his wasn’t working either.
“Shit,” he said.
Sierra stood there looking nervous.
“I don’t think I wanna do this anymore,” she said.
“We need to get help, I think,” Slade said. “Can you go knock on a neighbor’s door or drive to the police station or something?”
“I think I just want to go home.”
She bent to grab her bag and began walking to the front door. Slade didn’t really want her to leave but he didn’t really know what to say and he was too distracted by the guy on the couch to think of anything. He guessed he could tell her not to bother contacting him the next time she needed money but, for what he was paying her and for what she would be doing, that didn’t really make a lot of sense. He found himself staring at her very nice ass as she walked into the dining room, saying nothing. She left in that silent way and it seemed to plunge the house into a vacuum.
The Brothers Brian were still outside.
How long had it been since they’d opened the door for this man?
Probably only a couple of minutes but it felt much longer.
“I . . . I really need help,” the man said.
He wasn’t bleeding and it didn’t look like there was anything outwardly wrong with him. Slade wondered if he’d been sent here strictly to fuck up his night.
“Hold on,” he said. “We’ll get you some help.”
Just when he thought about running to the neighbor’s house – a fairly good jaunt – it occurred to him that he could try plugging his phone in. He didn’t know what would suck the life from every battery in the house, but it might have affected the neighbors too. He went into the bedroom and grabbed the charging cable for his phone. If this didn’t work, it would probably be easier to get in the car and drive to the police station. That would only take around five minutes. Whatever was wrong with this guy, he didn’t want him dying in the house.
2.
Alopecia universalis was the diagnosis Dr. Benway had given Alexander Lords’ mother. Complete loss of body hair. It had happened overnight. He was twelve at the time. Now while most boys were talking wonderingly about their burgeoning pubic hair, Alexander was left to inspect himself from head to toe, hoping it would come back. It felt like some kind of outward stigma to what had happened that night, not that he felt it was anything to be ashamed of. So maybe stigma wasn’t the right word. Maybe it was more of a trade off.
He wouldn’t have kept it a secret if his mother hadn’t told him to.
He’d finished watching Blossom and gone to bed. To him, and especially in retrospect, it seemed like one of the strangest shows on television. Something that had to be some kind of vehicle for a particularly nepotistic Hollywood family. He appreciated the character of Blossom. She was ugly by Hollywood standards, he guessed, but it was never really mentioned. Anything else and she would have been cast specifically as the ugly friend. Her friend on the show, Six, Alexander found oddly alluring. When he thought about her in later years, he remembered her as almost a midget and wasn’t really sure why. Despite his curiosity, he could never bring himself to go back and watch it. It was probably her forehead, which had become enormous in his memory. There was Blossom’s brother, Joey Lawrence. Alexander couldn’t recall what his name had been on the show. He thought it was Joey but that didn’t seem right. He wore a lot of clothes and was really cool. He had a lot of floppy, feathered hair that Alexander aspired to. This would later leave him feeling much animosity. Enough to where he’d apparently blocked out almost every scene Joey Lawrence was in. The most intriguing character for Alexander was the father of the family, played by Ted Wass. The supposed premise of the show was a bedraggled middle-aged dad was forced to raise his tough guy loose cannon son and ugly daughter by himself, while his daughter’s big headed midget friend came to hang out. Alexander couldn’t remember if the mother had run off or died. He was pretty sure she had died. The intriguing thing to Alexander was that Ted Wass seemed supremely miscast as a tv dad. He looked sinister, evil. Like he should be playing a crime boss in a daytime soap opera. Or even a thug in a horror or crime movie. Almost anything except a single dad. But maybe it was the Cosby effect. The theory that you could soften anyone by throwing a sweater on him. This inevitably led Alexander to think that Ted Wass was not a good father and the real story, Blossom’s real narrative, was what happened when the camera wasn’t running. This was what Alexander thought about as he lay in bed the night he was abducted by aliens and lost all his hair.
It was exactly as dramatic as the few abduction stories he’d heard up to that point and all the ones he would hear afterward. This was at least a couple of years before The X Files, but he would later watch that show with the intensity most adolescent boys reserved for sports and pornography.
He lay in bed thinking of Ted Wass as an abusive father and suddenly his room was filled with a white-bluish light. His mother rented the house from an old college friend and loved the town. The only thing Alexander really liked was the bookstore. He was more of an indoor kid.
He felt the odd sensation of leaving his body. He’d had a spinal tap once and there had been a queasy type of pressure that had felt almost like it came from inside his body. This was a lot like that, except it was all over rather than concentrated in one area of his lower back. He tried to scream but it felt muffled or . . . or like he lacked the physical ability to scream. Like that ability was left with his physical body that he was sucked out of and raced increasingly far from. He was a relatively anxious, panicky kid, but found that as he drew farther from his body a great sense of peace and calm began to envelop him. Where he went was mostly indescribable. He was aware of shapes around him and, maybe, they were roughly what the general descriptions of aliens were. But there was no real concrete sense of place. He couldn’t remember any rooms or buildings or trees or landmarks or structures of any kind. It was like visiting a feeling. There were some colors he could recall – pinks and blues and glowing soft whites – but they were all fuzzy and throbbing, gaining and lessening in intensity almost like those cheap fiber optic things that
had once been all the rage. It was like being surrounded by calm and peacefulness and tranquility with a deep eroticism humming just below the surface. This was the first time Alexander had felt this particular sensation. Of course he was as aware of his penis as most adolescent boys but he had not yet masturbated and was not aware of the feelings his sexual organs could produce. So this was all new. His penis was so hard it was nearly painful. It was like every surface of his skin was being touched sensuously at the same time. He was even aware of something moving into his anus, which he knew he wasn’t supposed to like but kind of did. Of course all of this was an abstraction. He knew his eyes were open because he could see the shapes and colors but when he tried to train them on his body he was only aware that there was something that lacked specificity in its place. This was what he would later think of as his spirit body. After being there for what couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, he didn’t want to be anywhere else. And it continued for what felt like a very long time. That feeling in his groin would reach some pinnacle of pleasure – what he later learned was called an orgasm – and remain at that heightened level the entire time.
There wasn’t an abrupt departure. He gradually became aware of leaving that place. It was like his spirit body, his alien body, had been almost large enough to encompass the whole earth and gradually shrunk into the little boy lying in his bed in Twin Springs.
He stared at his ceiling.
It felt like the life had been sucked out of the room.
He expected his mother to come rushing in or for there to be a whole fleet of emergency vehicles waiting for him. How long had he been away? It felt like he’d aged years or like he’d gained years of experience.
He looked at his clock. It was a wind-up alarm clock that read 10:04.
Later it would occur to him that, were it digital, it would have probably just flashed 12:00 at him and if it had run off a battery it probably would have been completely dead.
When he woke up the next morning, all of his body hair was gone. His mother was the first to discover this and began screaming hysterically. Alexander told her about the aliens and the only time she almost believed him was as she marveled over the absence of shed hairs in his bed.
Creep House: Horror Stories Page 9