The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated)

by Ainslie Hogarth

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Copyright Information

  The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated) © 2015 by Ainslie Hogarth.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

  First e-book edition © 2015

  E-book ISBN: 9780738746012

  Book design by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Ellen Lawson

  Cover image: iStockphoto.com/22094427/©sorendls

  iStockphoto.com/34933692/©Miroslav Boskov

  Flux is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hogarth, Ainslie.

  The Boy Meets Girl massacre (annotated) / Ainslie Hogarth. -- First edition.

  1 online resource.

  Summary: “When sixteen-year old Noelle takes a summer nightshift job at the Boy Meets Girl Inn, the site of a decades-old murder, she keeps a diary to document evidence of hauntings, until another ghoulish murder lands her diary in the hands of investigators”-- Provided by publisher.

  Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  ISBN 978-0-7387-4601-2 -- ISBN 978-0-7387-4472-8 [1. Haunted places--Fiction. 2. Diaries--Fiction. 3. Murder--Fiction. 4. Summer employment--Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H68319

  [Fic]--dc23

  2015025008

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  For Deb and Tom,

  the best parents a weirdo could ask for.

  I love you guys.

  Dear Detective Umbridge,

  I first met Trevor Donald at a coffee shop a few months ago. He was one of those men who looked just thoroughly exhausted. Like a rag used too long to wipe tables at a diner, loose and greasy and frayed at the edges so the only solution is to throw it out and get a new one. We got our coffees to go and sat outside while he smoked cigarettes and told me a little about himself.

  I often find myself in situations like this, occupying sticky tables in dim bars or too-bright coffee shops with eager storytellers, mostly full of shit. I do this to feel superior to other creative execs, even though these meetings rarely result in an actual movie. But Trevor was different. He didn’t try to sell it to me. Instead he was just very upfront about needing the money and wanting me to read it for myself. Of course this non-pitch intrigued me more than any pitch I’d ever heard in my life.

  Sorry, what he had wasn’t actually a script. Rather, a diary. What we call “source material.” This diary was a piece of evidence he’d found at a grisly crime scene back in the ’90s. A piece of evidence that he’d become more or less obsessed with. His words. He admitted the diary was part of the reason he lost his job as a detective. Part of the reason he didn’t leave the house much these days and his ex-wife hadn’t spoken to him in over a decade.

  Since I was looking at this project to cut my teeth as a director, I asked if getting so involved with the diary would ruin me too, and he laughed and shrugged and said he couldn’t make any guarantees, then handed me a large yellow envelope.

  What the envelope contained wasn’t the actual diary, of course. He didn’t have it. What he gave me was a copy. A printout, transcribed and annotated by Trevor himself for expert analysis back in 1999; child psychologists, handwriting specialists, even a paranormal investigator looked at it. He told me the original diary was probably still sitting in a plastic bag, isolated, tucked away in some cold evidence room in King City. That’s exactly how he put it. Like it was a shame or something, that it was sitting all alone in that small room.

  Anyway, I read the diary and loved it. My boss read the diary and loved it. In fact, he loved it so much he immediately approved a generous finder’s fee for Trevor and agreed to give him an associate producer credit if he wanted it. He was that sure this thing would be a success. I wrote Trevor a few production notes on the printout, mailed it back to him, and called him right away to tell him we wanted it, pending the notes he’d find in the manuscript, of course—things we wanted to change, you know, things we had to nail down to guarantee it’d be a moneymaker. I didn’t know who else he’d shown it to, if there was some other company in the loop that had a vision more in sync with Trevor’s, though I don’t think he really had a vision at all. I asked him to look at my notes and let me know what he thought. Call me or write me if he had any ideas of his own, that kind of thing. Anyway, he was thrilled, I was thrilled.

  He called me a few days later and left a message that said, “I found the kid.” And that was all. You’ll see what that means in the diary.

  Then I guess after that he disappeared.

  I was sad, you know? I’d only met him once, of course, and we’d spoken just a few times on the phone, but he seemed like a good man. And a good detective, based on his old annotations in the diary. I liked the guy. I really did. Is a detective always a detective, even after they retire? Like a doctor is always a doctor, or a judge is always a judge? If not, I think they should be.

  Anyway, I’m ashamed to admit that we were moving on to development without him when you contacted our office. We’ve selected a screenwriter, acquired financing, my boss has approved me to direct. We even have a few Noelles in mind.

  I’m happy to cooperate and put a hold on production for the time being. I am. Trevor brought us this idea, so it’s the least we can do. However, I want to make it very clear that we’re not legally bound to do this and therefore can only justify it for a short period of time. We’ll stop, effective immediately, out of respect for Trevor and your department, but you’ve got to understand, and I hope you don’t find this insensitive, we couldn’t even invent better publicity at this stage—the lead detective on the case has gone missing, for god’s sake—so we’ll be moving forward into pre-production in a month’s time.

  That’s pretty much all the information I have on Trevor, but feel free to contact me again if you’ve got any more questions. Like I said, we’re happy to cooperate. And as per your request, I’ve mailed you a recording of that last me
ssage Trevor left on my machine, a photocopy of the annotated source material he originally gave me, including my notes (sorry, it was the cleanest copy we had), and also a cover letter Trevor had enclosed in that yellow envelope way back when. This letter will be the first thing you see when you open the package.

  I hope you find what you’re looking for in there.

  The very best of luck,

  Roger Dalrymple

  Hello Mr. Dalrymple,

  The author of the following diary never willed it to anyone, nor did she have any close relatives interested in collecting her personal items, so it effectively became “public” as soon as it was admitted to evidence at the trial. Of course the actual “public” has to jump through about a dozen hoops to see these kinds of “public” documents, complete a mountain of forms, gather endless signatures, that kind of thing. But that’s a different conversation altogether.

  As the lead detective, I worked very closely with this document. This diary. In fact, since I first pulled it blood-soaked from an evidence bag and began reading, not a day goes by that I don’t think about the girl who wrote it. Noelle Dixon. Maybe a murderer. Maybe not. Even after all these years I still don’t know.

  As you see, the diary you’ve got here isn’t the original, or even a photocopy of the original. I typed up this copy back in 1999, and added a bunch of footnotes——information I’d picked up from locals, handwriting experts, etc. The footnotes were intended to aid the child psychologists who lent their expertise to our department. I’ve left them in for you, in case you get confused or have questions. Or you can just ignore them if you want.

  I don’t want to come off as desperate or unhinged——I assure you I’m no more desperate or unhinged than the next retired cop——but I need you to take this project. I need this diary to be out of my hands. I need it gone. Dead. Killed by a movie. So please, no offence, but feel free to butcher it any way you want to. And I’ll do anything I can to help.

  I’d moved with my wife to King City just three months before the murders occurred. Promoted to detective if I could relocate, so I did. Then on September 1st, 1999, at 8:48 a.m., an employee from The Boy Meets Girl Inn phoned the King City Police Department and reported a scene so ghoulish that Linda, our dispatcher, initially took it for a prank. Some kid putting on a voice and calling on a dare. I’d been warned about the day after the Anniversary. Linda told me there’d be calls like that all day. You’ll see why when you read.

  So anyway, as per procedure, she sent an officer over anyway, warning him that there was a good chance he’d be mooned. She told us she’d chuckled at her own joke as his car pulled out of the lot.

  When the officer arrived, Jessica West, our caller, sat on the front steps. Eyes wide, fingers twisted together tight as rope. She’d phoned inn manager Olivia Grieves too, who sat next to her, rubbing her back, her head dropped into a sun-shielding hand, the first two fingers occupied with a cigarette steadily burning, the smoke catching the light, dancing to some slow, strange tune. That was exactly how the officer put it to me, about her cigarette smoke. He didn’t last too long on the force.

  Anyway, he said he knew right away that it wasn’t a prank; both women looked too pale for such a warm, sunny day, sitting before the inn’s gaping double-doors. It was a mansion really. Over a hundred and fifty years old, with big, flat, rectangular expanses of red brick and what seemed like hundreds of white-shuttered windows. For your movie, though, it probably doesn’t matter how it really looked.

  But it’s important to know it was warm out. A sunny day. The wrong kind of day to find what he found just inside those double doors.

  In the lobby, twin girls lay side-by-side on a blood-soaked carpet, face up, arms tucked in, torsos resembling salsa: piles of coarsely chopped flesh and fat and blood and bone.

  The officer said he’d initially thought they’d been killed with, he shuddered as he recounted, “a chain saw.”

  A bloody trail led up the stairs, but, he recalled noticing, “no footprints.”

  Two more bodies were found in a bed. A boy and a girl. Fewer perforations than the bodies downstairs. Less concentrated. The officer could see distinct though irregularly shaped holes in the bodies; wide, unclean gouges. “An axe,” he now theorized.

  But not quite.

  More blood, leading to another room where one of the nightshift kids, Alfred Gustafson, had been impaled with the same instrument, so many times in the throat that he’d been nearly decapitated, his jaw torn from his head in the process, blended into the mess separating his body from his still face.

  The officer, coming back down to call the station, noticed a door beneath the stairs, a closet, from which swelled a pool of blood that reached all the way to other side of the hall.

  Bracing himself, he opened it and found the other nightshift kid, Noelle Dixon. Sitting on a stool. A pickaxe lodged into her skull and propping her body up like a picture frame.

  A pickaxe.

  What had made those wide, unclean gouges, those irregularly shaped holes in the five other bodies: this pickaxe.

  At her feet lay a diary, splayed open on its front, the covers protecting its pages from the blood that glazed half of Noelle’s head and dripped heavy from her chin. The diary almost appeared to be in its own little pool of blood, as though it too had been killed in the night.

  That diary’s contents are what follow.

  Yours sincerely,

  Detective Trevor Donald

  First Entry 1

  You’re new to me, diary. I’ve never had anything like you before.

  Alf and I both went out and bought something like you before starting our nightshift jobs at the inn, to document all the weird stuff that might happen. Like, you know, doors slamming, cupboards creaking open all slow and creepy, the piano playing itself, all the usual haunted house stuff.

  We didn’t buy them together either, since we didn’t even know each other yet. Not really, anyway. Just each other’s names from going to the same school. The diary thing came up on our first day. Except Alf called his a JOURNAL, because boys don’t have DIARIES, and sometimes Alf could be lame like that. But not often.

  Anyway, it feels weird to just pick up and start doing something like this when you’ve never ever done it before.

  That’s why I avoided using you for the first month or so of working here.

  You’re green and very smooth and embossed in gold on your spine is the word “DIARY,” I guess just in case someone tried to use you for any other reason. And you’re not hard, either. You’re bendy and you’re small so I can fit you in my hoodie pocket all the time.

  You’re very beautiful actually.

  Anyway, I had to pick you up today because last night, for the first time, something seriously, actually crazy happened.

  I mean, there’s been a few sort of weird things already. One spot in the hallway is freezing cold for no reason, Alf thought he lost his favorite hat and then it reappeared, sitting on top of his bag one morning. There was this weird smell coming out of one of the kitchen cupboards, Alf swore up and down it smelled like rotting flesh even though he has no idea what that would smell like. The smell went away after a few hours and hasn’t been back since.

  But last night was different. I was lying in bed, kind of drifting off to sleep, when suddenly my room got very cold. Too cold. It kind of takes a while to realize that a room is just way, way too cold, a lot of feet kicking and hoisting up the blankets and curling up in a ball, thinking that’s all it’s gonna take to be warm. But then I could see my breath, full clouds at first, then scared, shallow puffs, because I knew something was about to happen. And suddenly my bathroom light turned on. And it stayed on. And it was aggressive. Almost daring me to go turn it off.

  From my bed the open bathroom door shows the whole sink and part of the toilet. Hidden behind the open door is the shower. After a few seconds of wh
at felt like a staring contest with the lit-up bathroom, the door slowly began to move, creaking loud to a close, all the way, so I heard the latch catch. As though something standing in the shower had pushed it all the way shut.

  I yanked my blanket up over my nose and stared at the closed door without blinking until my eyes just about dried up and I had to shut them. I kept them shut, more wide awake than I’d ever been beneath, and I thought I could hear whispering. But it was so faint, too faint, I couldn’t be sure. Probably I was just terrified. Probably I was hearing things.

  Somehow I eventually fell asleep because there was nothing else to do under those blankets and those closed eyelids.

  The next morning I told Alf about the bathroom door and he was jealous and he said, “Write it down, write it down!”

  I said, “You write stuff down too. You write about your hat.”

  But he said that he feels “like a girl” writing in his diary. I said, “I thought yours was a JOURNAL,” and then we laughed because usually Alf is pretty good at laughing at himself and I’m pretty good at making fun of him.

  It kind of sucks that something like that happened right in my room, though, because actually I spend a lot of time in there. More time than Olivia, our boss, realizes. I shouldn’t have written that down. Now if she ever finds this diary she’ll know how much I slack off. But actually Olivia would never read this. She’s an honorable old bat. I just called her an old bat. There’s another reason I really hope she doesn’t open this thing up.

  We’ll use voiceover narration for some of this early stuff.

  See, I have to spend a lot of time in my room because I’ve got this sore spot in my brain.2 And sometimes it hurts so bad I can barely stand it. Not like a headache really. More like the way a canker sore hurts and can hijack your whole mouth. Every other part of my brain won’t stop tonguing and probing and prodding it. And it can kind of feel good, the way tonguing a canker sore can sometimes feel good, white hot pain almost savory. But also terrible like a canker sore. And distracting like a canker sore.