by David Wong
“John, are we crack dealers now?”
John opened a drawer on a writing desk and pulled out a big manila envelope. He extracted a bundle of papers, newspaper clippings, a couple of folded-up tabloids, a glossy magazine called Strange Days with a picture of a UFO on the front.
He said, “No. Nothing like that. Out in Vegas, we met a guy. He was a pimp. We made quite a bit of money as male whores. They used to call you Rocket Rimjob. You won the gold at the Greater Nevada Sodomy Olympics back in July, landed a bunch of endorsement deals. You own that house you and Jennifer live in. Paid cash, I think.”
He looked dead serious when he said this. I said, “Are you messing with me?”
“No. You really own that house. I made up the whoring thing, though. I like to add a little bit to it each time. Seriously, what happened is Molly won a bunch of money at the casinos.”
“John—”
He pulled out a newspaper, a color “Lifestyles” section from the Las Vegas Sun, headline blaring “Dog Wins Quarter Million Playing Slots!” There was a picture of John with Molly in his arms, struggling to get away from him. He had his right hand out, making the shape of a finger gun and pointing at Molly, his mouth wide open in a drunken “that’s my dog!” expression. Jen and I were visible in the deep background, trying to hide our faces.
“The thing with the Marconi show, the panic, there was a big investigation and everything,” he said. “Cops thought he had slipped acid to everybody, freaked ’em out with a light show or something. Everybody called him a fraud; it was kind of crappy the way they treated him. But he came out okay. The death hasn’t come out as anything but an accident and all of a sudden his book is a bestseller, people desperate to get to his shows. You’ve, uh, tried to contact him a couple of times, but he won’t take the calls.”
It was coming back to me as he told it. Everything was hazy, drunk memories. He handed me the UFO magazine, pointed to a little header in the bottom left:
Legend of Fred Chu:
Is this dead youth haunting his Midwestern hometown?
One local man says “ABSOLUTELY”
There was a noise above me.
I looked up
My heart skipped a beat.
It was hanging off his ceiling on seven little pink hands. The ridiculous thing’s red wig was cockeyed on its head. It looked down at me, then let go and landed a few feet away with a soft thump.
“Uh, John—”
“Oh, now you see it.” He stood, grabbed the Dairy Queen sack, pulled out a sausage-and-egg biscuit and unwrapped it. He set the sandwich on the floor. The thing picked it up with two hands and bit into it.
“When you came in that night, that first night when I called you, it was standing on the wall. You walked in and of course you saw nothin’ at all. And, you know, when I told you not to move or make a sound? The thing was on your back. It had jumped on you and you just stood there like nothin’.”
The wig monster turned about five eyes up to me as it ate. It paused in its chewing, vanished. The sandwich fell softly to the floor.
I said, “Did I spook it? I mean, does it still, like, attack us or anything?”
“No, not since that night. It bit right through my shoe that night, though. I had been kicking it at the time so I call it even.”
The beast reappeared, one arm wrapped around a thirty-two-ounce Coke. It had a wrapped straw in its beak. John pulled out the straw, unwrapped it and poked it into the cup lid for it. The wig monster sucked on the straw and picked up its sandwich again.
“So, can anybody else see it?”
“No. My mom came by last month and it was right in the middle of the floor. She didn’t acknowledge it at all. But get this: a week later she left her cat here because she was going on vacation and the cat could see it. It hissed at the thing the whole time. The monster would pick up wads of paper and stuff and throw it at him. The cat died the next day but it was unrelated.”
I said, “So the paper said we won a quarter-million dollars. What did I do with my share? I bought that house? Did I save any?”
“I dunno. We really don’t see each other that much now. This is actually the first time we’ve talked since, oh, probably August. You and Jennifer, you uh, don’t leave the house a whole lot.”
“Oh. I’m . . . sorry, I guess.”
“No. Trust me, you’re not.” He gestured toward the television. “Wanna play hockey?”
CHAPTER 7
Arnie Thinks David Is Full of Shit
I STOPPED TALKING, only to notice Arnie Blondestone was staring at me in wide-eyed, silent horror. Not the kind of horror you feel when you find out the universe is full of real monsters, but the kind you feel when you realize someone else’s idiocy has just wasted your entire day. I glanced down at the tape recorder, saw that it had stopped long ago. Arnie rubbed his hands over his face like he was washing without water.
“What?”
He looked at me and made a polite effort to hide his deep, pure disdain, but didn’t respond.
“Do you, uh, want something to eat? I’ll buy.”
“No thanks,” he said, twisting his face into a pained fake smile. “Let’s just wrap this up and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Now, just to clear a few things up, if you don’t mind. First of all, let’s confirm that that’s the little pill bottle there?”
“Oh. Yeah. It’s empty now.”
“Because you took the last of the, uh, the soy sauce before you came today.”
“That’s right.”
“So you don’t have any left to show me. Let me see the stuff crawl around on the table and all that.”
“Oh. No. I guess I should have saved some.”
“No problem. I mean, that would have been physical evidence to back up your whole story, but we won’t worry about that sort of thing.”
Asshole. I should cut that smirk off your face with my butter knife.
“And I guess you forgot to tell me that you took the pill bottle with you when you left the trailer? Because you have it now, but in your story you left it behind. You know, when your dog drove by in your car and picked you up. Hey, that would have been something else to show me, the car-driving dog.”
“I went back to Robert’s place afterward, found the pill bottle among the debris. Completely unburnt.”
“Of course.”
“I can show you where the trailer was, by the way. I mean, there’s another trailer there now but if you look at the ground you can sort of see where something might have burned there once. We can drive out there.”
“Uh-huh. And what about the dozens of deaths from the dismembered fans at the Marconi thing? I’m surprised that wasn’t bigger news, a crowd of people disappearing like that.”
“There’s actually a very good reason for—”
“And you told me Jim hauled in a dolly of sound equipment to the Luxor, but later on there were two carts of equipment there.”
“Of everything that I told you, that’s the part you have trouble believing?”
“And in your story you kept losing track of how many people were with you. At some point you said something like, ‘The five of us and the dog piled into the car’ when it was only four of you at that point, by my count. You, your friend John, Big Jim and the girl, Lopez. But you probably got mixed up.”
“It’s hard to exp—”
“You were probably forgetting you had killed Fred already. Meaning Fred Chu, the guy whose head you blew off with a shotgun.”
I didn’t answer.
“So there really is a guy named Fred Chu and he’s really dead? I could look him up?”
“He’s missing. Officially.”
“Okay. So is there more story, or should I pack up? Do you have any documents you’d like to copy me on, like your tax returns from the year your dog won all the money at the casino? Which form does the IRS have you fill out for that?”
I took a deep breath, said, “L
ook, not every little single thing in the story is true, but the meat of it is. I swear it. I admit I get silly when—when the truth is hard to explain. It’s my way. But those people in the Luxor, they did disappear, Arnie. And I mean they totally disappeared. That guy with the beard who lost his wife? He came back later and said he had no wife and, you know what? He didn’t. He didn’t have a wife named ‘Becky’ and there was no ‘Becky’ at the show. They went down the guest list; everybody is accounted for.”
“So she was never there. Okay.”
“Would you please stop doing that? Patronizing me? You saw the wig monster out there in my truck, in the cage. That’s what it was, you saw it.”
“I saw something. I saw what you wanted me to see. Some people are manipulators, I know that much. Oh, hey, you said those monsters, they ooze the soy sauce, right? So you can go out there and get some?”
“You seriously want to go try?”
“No, I don’t. Let me ask you, did they do any psychological testing on you when you had your incident in school? The one that got you sent away? And the report they wrote, did it have the word ‘sociopath’ on it?”
I groaned.
“Don’t make this about me. The people in Vegas, the ones who vanished? They never existed, Arnie. No, listen. This is hard to understand, but the moment they were sucked into that hole, or whatever it was, they didn’t just stop existing in the here and now. They were erased from the past, too. That’s why there’s no report of them being gone. At that moment, they were never born. If I had fallen in there, you’d be able to go back and see that my mom never had a male child and she never named him ‘David’ and we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”
“Assuming this is true, which, incidentally, I’m not drunk enough to do, how can you possibly prove that?”
I took a breath.
Here goes . . .
“I have dreams, Arnie. And in my dreams the whole thing from the Luxor plays out, only we’re with another guy. And I know his name. Todd Brinkmeyer. A year older than me. Long blond hair. In the dream he’s with us, he’s toting the second dolly of sound stuff, he’s with us in the SUV. He’s carrying the second guitar—”
“Okay, okay, back up—”
“I heard her say his name, Arnie. I heard Jennifer shout ‘Todd’ plain as day. I think that was him getting sucked into the hole, the vortex thing. And as of that moment, he was gone, he got sucked in and he was zapped out of the past, present and future, out of our memories. They have that power somehow. But one night, me and John got really drunk and we sat around telling Todd Brinkmeyer stories, real stories, stories that happened but didn’t happen. I think of his face and sometimes I can see it, and it’s like a dream you can’t quite remember the next morning. And I go back and go over the chain of events and there’s places, holes where I know Todd should be. He was there and he helped us, Arnie. He fought with us. And I’m not even allowed to remember him, to mourn his death. At least Jim got a funeral. But Todd, I can’t find his picture in the yearbook. Can you even imagine what that’s like?”
Arnie sighed and for a quick moment looked genuinely sympathetic that someone could dream up something this elaborately sad. He said, “We both got places to go tomorrow. Is there any more?”
You act bored, Arnie, you act like you’re miles above it all. But you’re still sitting here, aren’t you? You’re still listening. I know you got reasons but I don’t know what they are yet. God knows I would have split by now if I were in your shoes.
I said, “You gotta understand . . . Vegas was just the beginning.”
A yellow legal pad was found during an inventory of the items inside the Chevy Tahoe belonging to James “Big Jim” Sullivan after his disappearance. The following was handwritten on the first page. It appears to be part of an unfinished novel titled Jameson and the Invasion from X’all’th’thu’”thuuu. No other pages from this work have been discovered.
* * *
she held the blade before him and in the torchlight Jameson could see it was incredibly sharp and haunted with the ghosts blood of countless slain Terrans. Jameson stared into the wicked beauty of the woman before him, the one blue eye that was not hidden behind an eyepatch shined like a shiny blue jewel.
“Xorox,” said Jameson. “I should have known it was you. I could smell your evil before you came in the door!”
“You should not talk so, when it is I that hold this incredibly sharp blade!” And it is you who are She slid the slender razor-sharp blade lightly up Jameson’s bare thigh. Jameson strained against the chains that bound him to the wall and gritted his teeth in rage.
“The mighty Captain Jameson,” said Xorox, “bound in my dungeon while my mighty army amasses for the invasion of Earth!”
With a flick of her delicate wrist, she cut Jameson’s loincloth, which fell to the floor. Her eyes grew at the sight magnificence of Jameson’s exposed naked body, his exposed manhood a thunderclap of flesh.
“Mighty army?” said Jameson with a sneer. “I have slain larger armies on my way to battle!”
“Insolent dog!” She held the blade at Jameson’s scrot groin. “If I did not require your seed to infiltrate Earth, I would cut off your manhood and mount it like a trophy over my throne!”
“My seed?”
“Ha ha ha! You still do not get it, dog! With the seed of your manhood in my womb, we shall breed a race of Terran and Reptillian hybrids that cannot be detected by even your most sensitive R-Meters! They will walk among the earthlings as my agents, and not even they will know that their true loyalty is to me! Until the day when they strike! Now you will make love to me, or die!”
“No!” “Never!”
Jameson gathered his strength and pulled free of his chains. He seized Xorox’s wrist in the iron grip of his right hand and tore it free of her body as blood spurted like a fountain. He then stabbed Xorox in the belly with her own hand.
[insert Jameson one-liner here]
* * *
CHAPTER 8
The Carpet Stain
MY MEMORY OF the next few months after Vegas is spotty. I know John went to jail for a couple of weeks that winter. It was because of a fight over a girl or something, no big deal. Jennifer moved out of my place and then moved back in because of a fight we had over something or other. My roof started leaking and I learned about the joys of home ownership when a bill for four thousand dollars showed up in my mailbox after I got it repaired. On my birthday I went and visited my adoptive parents and it was a little awkward, as always. But they’re good people. My birthday gift from John was an envelope full of baked beans.
Jen and I didn’t talk about Vegas. We didn’t talk about Big Jim and all the things we saw and did over those two strange days. That’s why she never got along with John, I think, because John loved to talk about it, loved to read about ghosts and dimensions and demonic conspiracies. He was soaking this stuff up from the ’net and telling us all about it over empty beer bottles and greasy pizza boxes. He’d talk and she’d fidget, change the subject. I usually took her side.
But I still made a habit of watching, looking for alien white insects zipping around outdoors, studying the shadows for the dark figures we saw float out from that portal to who-knows-where. I kept a lookout for, well, anything. And I saw things from time to time. Or maybe I didn’t. A dark shape slipping around a corner, a pair of lit eyes like burning coals, floating through the night. Always out the corner of my eye or in the reflection of a window. Or in the paralyzed state between deep sleep and wakefulness in those dim morning hours. Nothing you could trust, nothing you could admit to seeing.
John got me alone one night, I guess it would have been that next spring after Vegas, and asked me straight up if I ever saw anything strange. Because he did, he said. All the time, he said. He got a job working as a janitor in the Undisclosed Courthouse and he said he saw an old man walking around the basement, a ghost, semitransparent but very real and “There, man. Just there, there as a brick wall. I m
ean, he was just, so incredibly there.” John rattled off more stories, told me he watched a baseball game on TV and the announcers made some comment about how the stands were half empty, how the team was having trouble selling tickets. “But man, the stands were full, Dave. I’m tellin’ ya, to my eyes every seat was filled and I think it was the undead, I think I was seeing thousands of walking souls that nobody else could see, watching the game. Isn’t that bizarre?”
I told him the truth, sort of. I said I didn’t see spirits or demons or walking shadows or anything that couldn’t be written off as a trick of the eyes. I told him I thought the soy sauce made us see all that and it had been months since we’d ingested it and no matter what the stuff was or where it was from, surely it had worked itself out of our systems by now. An awkward silence followed, John letting the implication of that statement hang in the air. Without coming out and saying it, I had just told him I thought he was either full of shit or losing his mind.
A week later I was in John’s apartment, flipping through a magazine while he sat on the couch playing some game or another. I glanced at the TV and it looked like one of those first-person shooting games where you wander around hallways looking over the barrel of your gun, tearing bad guys in half with splashes of digital blood. I was never that into them.
“You still got that pill bottle?” John said, trying to sound offhand while he hammered a control pad with his thumbs. “You said you went back and found it at Robert’s old trailer, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And was there still sauce in there?”
“No. It had two—capsules, or whatever they were—in it originally and I had taken them both.”