by A. J. Mayall
“Hey, that happens. Something randomly pop up?”
“Yeah, I’m just taking care of a client who’s going through some changes in his life right now.”
“Is it a cartoon?”
Pamela took a step back, “No, human…I’m thinking of dropping him as a client, though.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Oh, I doubt you’ve heard of them. He plays competitive gaming…”
That’s when I leaned in and squinted at the back room.
“Wait, you represent Brandon Butler?”
Pamela went pale and hissed at me, “What do you know?”
“Nothing. I’ve played a few games here and there, but I saw a news report about him.”
“Really?”
“You guys should call the news teams; people think he was kidnapped.”
“Don’t let this get out. He’s—been going through a lot of stress with this team, and he spiraled last night. He’s being talked to by a psychologist friend of mine. We didn’t want it to make news that he actually had a breakdown and may quit the competitive circuit. I mean, he’s got enough to retire on as it is. Poor guy.”
I nodded but looked a little leery at the whole thing. “If you say so, but seriously, they said the police were getting involved this point.”
She sighed and walked to the back room for a moment. I saw her talking with who I assumed was the psychologist and the faint outline of Brandon Butler, who appeared to be drunk and half-passed out on a chair.
She walked back, phone in hand and went, “I’ll get in touch with the Oakland PD. I’ll let them know where he is and that he’s okay. I’ll even put him on the phone with them if need be, but he’s kind of out of it right now. So, if this could just stay our little secret?”
I nodded. “Okay. Like I said, I don’t know the guy, but I saw him on a newscast.”
“Thanks for letting me know, Tyler. You’re a good man.”
She closed the door before I could say anything else. I shrugged and walked away, hands in my pockets. I pulled out my keys, walked around to the front of the building, and got in my car.
CHAPTER 6
I was pulling out Snappy’s estate, taking a left onto the main road when suddenly, I heard a terrible thump off my passenger side. I found a man rolling off the hood of my car and onto the sidewalk. I slammed the brakes and came around. Jeans, boots, black leather jacket, dark hair…his face was obscured.
I ran over to him, careful not to move him. “Hey, man, are you okay? I didn’t see you there! What the heck were you doing? You just jumped out in front of me!”
And that’s when I realized there was no good reason for anyone to have been there. The rest of the maintenance crew, anyone else who worked on the estate, had left hours ago, yet this guy was hanging around.
As he turned over with a groan, I immediately recognized him. “You’re the fuckin’ paparazzi guy! The hell are you doing?” I paused. “I need to call an ambulance for you.”
He slowly got up and shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been hit by worse.”
“How do you know that? You could have internal—”
“Because I jumped in front of your car, you idiot.”
That’s when I got mad. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You did that on purpose?”
“We need to talk. Whatever you’ve been told, there’s something going on in there and I need a pair of eyes on the inside.”
“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, I am not ruining this gig over—”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “All I have to do is call the cops and say you hit and run on me.”
I was cornered. “Hey, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here, I’m just trying to do my job, okay, man? What sort of story are you doing?”
He grinned and leaned back against the wall. “Simple. People have been disappearing and I’ve come to believe that it has something to do with what’s going on here, on these grounds.”
“I get that Snappy’s house is a bit of a maze, but disappearing people?”
“You can’t tell me you haven’t seen something; you’ve been here at least a week.”
“Dude, I just do odd jobs, okay? You know how bad life has to be where you willingly stand in a room and let a dude throw pies at you all day? I do not have the time for this bullshit, so, you know what? You wanna call the cops on me? Go right the fuck ahead; I don’t have the patience or the energy to give a shit. I have to leave now because I’d like to spend at least one quiet evening with my boyfriend before I come back here tomorrow morning and probably have to help Snappy juggle anvils or some shit, okay?”
I don’t know if he had never had a bluff called on him before, or if my situation actually struck a chord, but he put the phone away. “Jesus, really? Pies?”
“He pays well, though.”
“Well enough to cover up some wrongdoing?”
“There’s no wrongdoing. He lives in this place alone. He makes iced tea for the gardeners, and his agent lives in the house in the back. What more do you need to know? It’s like—I don’t even know why you’re following him. There’s no story here, and a paparazzi—”
“Paparazzi is plural. I’m not a paparazzo.”
“What? But Snappy said—”
“Yeah, I’m sure he said a lot of things. I’m sure he assumed a lot of things. I’m a private eye,” he said, reaching into his pocket and flashing a license that looked official enough to me.
“For fuck’s sake…okay, fine. What’s going on?”
“I’m here looking for a missing kid. The last known place where he was seen was in town here and it was believed that he’d worked for Snappy for some time. You’ve got to admit, something’s going on here.”
I’d had enough. “If you’re here for a missing person, you know, I really can’t help you.” My mind returned to Brandon Butler. “Oh! I know what this is about!”
The private eye perked up. “Oh?”
“I’ve been sworn to secrecy on this, but the person you’re looking for, like, they just wanted a new life, okay? They’re dealing with some stuff right now and they really need some time. Leave them be. Trust me, they’ll pop back up in a couple of days. Let this stuff blow over, okay? Go tell your clients or whoever that the person is just looking for a new life, all right?”
He grimaced and shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, fine, you got me, but—”
“And on top of that, what about the damage to my car?” I said, noticing a small but obvious dent in the hood.
“You got any evidence that was me?” he asked, giving a wry smile.
I looked at him with a deadpan expression. “Do you think anyone would notice the difference if I got into my car and ran you down good and proper?”
He stopped and looked at me again. “Are you seriously threatening me?” he asked, turning his neck and cracking it.
“I’m not threatening anything. I have had a really weird day, and an even stranger week. I’m just trying to hold onto normalcy, and you tried to blackmail me. Frankly, if you want to call the police about a hit and run, I can give you a fucking hit and run. So, are you going to be paying for the repairs to my car or not?”
“Fine,” he said, gritting his teeth. He reached into his wallet and unloaded a stack of hundred-dollar bills. “You think $500 will cover that? I mean, it’s a simple popping of the dent.”
I shrugged and held out my hand for the money, pocketing it soon after. “One second, I gotta take a photo of this and give to my insurance.”
I reached into my pocket and found it was empty. Fuck.
“Buddy,” I said, “I don’t know what you want or what you’re planning to do, but leave me out of it. If you have a problem with Snappy, take it up with him; I’m just a glorified pool boy, all right? If you’ll excuse me, I have to go back in there and grab my damn phone.”
I muttered to myself as I got back into the car and pulled back inside the ga
tes. When I checked the front door, I found Snappy must’ve locked it.
I huffed and peeked in through the window. My phone was sitting on the fast charger. Apparently, in the time spent at Miss Blake’s and dealing with the private eye, it had fully charged.
I walked around to the back and tried the patio door. It was locked too.
“Fuck me, man! I really need to call Kyle and tell him I’m running late.”
One of the windows had been left open, but I knew what that would look like. I thought it would be best if I at least let Miss Blake know, if someone noticed something, that it was just me.
I walked toward the house and that’s when I heard the screaming, louder now.
This wasn’t someone practicing for a horror movie; this was the sound of someone in a horror movie.
I tried her door, worried that maybe Butler had lost it and might’ve been a danger to himself or others. It opened at my touch; apparently, she had forgotten to lock it after I’d stopped by. One of the back doors was open a crack, and there was a faint light near the bottom. I figured it was the basement, but then that inhuman scream happened again.
I hurried back to the main house and shuffled in through the window into the study. “Snappy!” I yelled. “Snappy, are you there?” But there was no response, and frankly, if something was going down, I needed to get over there first before I played nice.
I ran to the main study, grabbed my phone off the fast charger, powered it on, and brought up the video. I hurried back, unlocking the patio door and rushed to Pamela’s house, slipping back in through the front door.
I sidled my way to the basement entrance and peeked down, recording the entire time. No one was to be seen as I descended into what had to be the largest basement I’d ever been in.
At the foot of the stairs, I came to a hallway with several rooms on either side. The screams were louder now, and I could hear a strange sound like television static and the echoes of cutting meat.
I got in next to the door and I heard voices calling out, “Hold him down!” They were male voices I didn’t recognize.
Then I heard Pamela: “He’s as secure as he’s going to get. Not to mention, after this process is over…”
I slipped my phone through a crack in the door and watched on my screen.
Brandon Butler was nude and spread-eagle on an examination table in the far corner of the room. His body faced a sliver of light that pulsed with an odd static crackle. It bathed the room in that same glow that a lone television late at night does: somehow welcoming, but also sinister.
What was happening to him, I will never forget.
They stood over him with a huge device that almost looked like a knitting needle connected to a tube. On the other end of the tube was a large vat filled with ink. They stabbed him in the neck with it and slid it in his carotid artery—or his jugular, I wasn’t sure which—and turned the machine on.
Now, I’ve done my fair share of morbid video searches on the net and I knew what this was: this was embalming.
Brandon seized as the ink got flushed into his bloodstream. The wound on his neck gushed crimson.
Pamela looked at one of the men who had held Brandon down. “Listen, you’re paying good money for this, but people are going to ask questions. You can’t just have the star player of your rival team go missing.”
The man in a black business suit, who appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s, shrugged. “I couldn’t give a shit about them. I just want our boys to take home the wins for the next few seasons of Legends of War.”
“But what you’re doing to him—”
And that’s when I saw it. Brandon screamed louder and louder, and then his body twisted of its own accord. The glow of that crack seemed to focus on him.
He seized, lips pulling back, teeth clenched to where two cracked in half, before ejecting themselves from his mouth.
Pamela pointed at him. “This is why we don’t usually secure them this much. It’s not going to mean anything in a couple of minutes.”
From the wound of his bleeding gums, large buck teeth erupted in a spray of red.
His body began to distort. I could hear muscle tearing inside of him. His rib cage and his pelvis drew in closer together. His back arched sickeningly as his spine twisted around itself, making him shorter.
All the while, Brandon Butler screamed. His fingers swelled, his pinky twisting in unnatural ways until his pointer finger exploded and showed a single white animated finger.
The rest of his hand produced similar digits, while his pinky, blackened, fell to the floor.
His eyes melted in their sockets and his skull deformed as his body crunched in on itself more. With his body so much smaller now, what had made him who he was had to come out somewhere, but to say he was vomiting himself up doesn’t do what I saw justice.
His jaw unhinged and he kicked his feet as they lengthened and turned dark. Brandon blindly looked between the two in an absolute panic, and then his head—or I should say, his mouth—opened up wider, lips splitting up to the ears before he vomited out his own skull, topping the pile of muscle, blood, and viscera.
Every bit of his flesh was bruised and broken. You couldn’t even tell what ethnicity he was. That’s when I noticed that the bruises were turning to brown.
His sockets blinked one last time, almost looking like they had deflated, but when they opened back up, nervous cartoon eyes had taken their place. His nose swelled out, and little whiskers erupted from his upper lip.
Half of his body was some Cronenberg nightmare or orgasm, I couldn’t tell which. What I knew for sure was that a rodent-like look was overtaking his presence.
He coughed a few more times, drooling out pounds of meat and broken and shattered bone and organs. His belly swelled as if it were full of bloat. He gripped the sides of the examination table with mismatched hands, turned his head, and released a festering pile of human offal onto the floor.
The change in skin tone continued to creep over him, mostly browns and tans. His spine had broken through over the tailbone, and where blood had first signaled the eruption, now ink flowed free and formed a large tail, like a paddle.
Pamela walked up and saw where the piece of the spinal cord was still hanging out of the body. She gripped it and pulled it like a ripcord.
Brandon shook and spasmed, passing out. After everything was said and done, it was no longer Brandon Butler lying on the table, but a cartoon beaver.
CHAPTER 7
I couldn’t believe the horrific sight before my eyes, and I had only just decided to risk tipping my phone down a little.
The floor had been covered with thick sheets of vinyl. Pamela grabbed a huge floor squeegee and pushed all the viscera into a pile stained with ink. Brandon Butler, or the beaver in his place, just groaned under his breath. As I sat watching on my phone screen, I saw the tissue decompose rapidly; whatever this process was, it left nothing of the human behind.
“Okay, that’s phase 1 done. I’ll let you do the honors for phase 2, Mr. Markson.”
The professional-looking young man cocked an eyebrow. I tried my best to keep all people in frame for this.
“I thought it was already done. I mean, look at him.”
“Yeah, his body’s been converted, but his mind hasn’t.”
“What are you talking about, ‘his mind hasn’t?’ I see the brain matter on the floor right there! Dude puked up his own skull.”
“That’s the thing; he’s still in there. If you want a toon to run around, you need to trick his new instincts to come into play.”
“And how do we do that?”
“The fastest way I’ve found is torture.”
She walked to the far wall. I couldn’t see much, but from the sound of things, it had a bunch of industrial equipment.
She came back in a frame carrying an enormous sledgehammer and handed it to Markson.
“So, how does this work?”
“You kick the shit out of him until his bo
dy takes over.”
“What do you mean?”
“Toons can shrug off any damage. They’re practically indestructible. He doesn’t know that yet.”
She growled and grabbed the hammer. bringing it down on one of the gloved hands. There was a sickening crunch and I watched as the fingers curled up backward.
The beaver screamed in a voice somewhat like Brandon Butler’s had been, but a little bit more nasal and higher-pitched. There was also a whistle to it.
“Like that.”
“But toons can just shake that off.”
“He’s a new toon. His body doesn’t know that yet. Right now, he’s feeling everything.”
Markson’s eyes lit up as he took the hammer back and raised it over his head.
Pamela fished through a pile of paperwork that had been set aside. She filled a piece out quickly, to get his copyright in order. “I’ll have Snappy come down and give the stamp of approval, once you’re done doing what you need to do to him.”
“Does Snappy know?”
“He might suspect something, but honestly? He’s a toon. The idea of torturing someone to a place beyond where human death would occur and giving them a slice of apple pie are just two different actions to him.” She sighed. “I need to get more of these copyright pages printed out. If I hadn’t found this one, I’d have had to dip into Snappy’s collection and he doesn’t take too kindly to out of time copyrights. He’s a stickler for the old ways.”
There was a sickening crunch and the beaver hollered; his kneecaps had been crushed. “Please, just let me go! Why are you doing this, man? Is it because I said your team was boosted? Dude, please just let me go!”
“Boost? Hey, I think I got a name for him! Boost Beaver. Come on, Boost! Come out and play!
“My name’s not Boost…Markson, what the hell? We just play video games against each other!”
“And you’ve personally cost my team at least three championships. You know what? Taking you off Los Lobos Locos and getting a new mascot that does whatever the fuck I tell him to seems like more than a win-win.”
“Please, just—please, put it down! I—”