John Dies at the End

by David Wong

  “You didn’t tell me to bring a—”

  He held a hand out to shush me and ducked into a side door. We both stepped into a large room that, in the dim glow from the window, looked like a library of shelves mostly filled with odd shadowy shapes that were not books. I saw what looked like a bundle of cobweb hanging from the ceiling and reached out to brush it aside—

  POP!

  A shower of blue sparks flashlit the room. A bone-rattling electric sting flared up my elbow.

  The fixture on the ceiling blinked once, twice and then bathed the room in light. About a foot in front of me was what looked like a bundle of wet string, suspended in the air by nothing at all. It didn’t look so much like a jellyfish as a man-o’-war, the slimy things that float lazily on the ocean surface and let their stringy tentacles hang down in the water. The creature drifted slowly up to the ceiling, toward the light. It wrapped its tentacles around the fixture and, to our utter astonishment, began frantically humping it like a puppy on a bunny slipper.

  The lights dimmed, finally flickering out to darkness again. The room was silent except for the soft rattling of glass vibrating against metal with each of the creature’s spastic thrusts.

  “You ever seen one of those before?” John whispered, somewhere in the darkness. Above us, a little blue spark jumped from one noodly tentacle to another with a soft FZZZZT sound.

  “I like to think I would have mentioned it if I had.”

  “Uncle Drake shot it, didn’t seem to bother it much.”

  “He could see it?”

  “Yeah. It’s real.”

  So that put it in the category of the mutants at the mall, and not the wig monsters and shadow people. I’d have to make a spreadsheet somewhere to keep track.

  And don’t forget, just because Drake can see it, doesn’t mean another stranger from around town would. Lots of chances for a cop to get infected in this town. Ask Morgan Freeman.

  Now there was another train of thought badly in need of derailing.

  I said, “You got your lighter?”

  John flicked his Zippo and cast a pool of weak yellowy light around us. I glanced around, saw that only a couple of the shelves contained books, worn paper backs with white fold lines. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, somebody named Terry Pratchett. Babylon 5 novelizations. The first, third and fourth Harry Potter novels. Jim must have figured three was the most he could allow without risking turning Amy to witchcraft.

  The rest of the shelves were crammed with stuffed animals and junk. I saw a row of plates on little wire stands painted with the faces of Star Trek characters.

  The creature on the ceiling didn’t react.

  “Well,” I said, letting out a tired breath, “I was hoping it would attack your hand. I guess it’s the electricity it likes and not the light.”

  John slapped the lighter off and said, “I thought about opening a window and just shooing it outside.”

  “Uh, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.” I thought for a moment, wondering vaguely if I had remembered to turn on the porch light back home. “Can it, like, pass through walls?”

  “It hasn’t yet.”

  “Follow me.”

  We stepped out into the hall and I closed the door behind us.

  “Okay,” I said. “As long as nobody ever opens that door . . .”

  “Right. We’ll put a sign on it or something,” John said, the first problem solved. “The weird thing is down here. Check this shit.”

  We went across the hall and he gestured into an ancient bathroom, complete with enormous cast-iron tub and a yellowing vanity with a cracked mirror. A steady stream of drips plunked from the faucet. A pair of scissors were wedged under one of the knobs, presumably to keep the valve from running freely. He punched the switch and the light flickered on, this one apparently unmolested.

  On the floor was what looked like a clear plastic bag, filled with a marbled pink-and-yellow substance, about the size of one of those giant bags of dog food. There was writing on the side in an odd, angular font.

  John said, “That lock was bolted from inside. We had to jimmy it to get in here. Water was running in the sink, toothbrush laying on the counter with dried toothpaste on it. That window is painted shut, so there was no way out of the room. So she was in here and then she wasn’t. And she never left the room. Right?”

  The lock was one of those little slide bolts like you’d see on old public toilet stalls. The “jimmy” of the lock had been accomplished by smacking the door, probably with their shoulders, until the little metal loop on the door frame popped out of its screw holes. I leaned over and inspected the window. It looked to have been sealed long before I was born. Not that it made a difference; even if Amy had locked the door and crawled out of the window for some reason, dropping fifteen feet or so to the ice below, how would she have gotten the window shut behind her?

  “Can you think of a way that somebody could get that door locked from the other side? Like if they snatched her and then slid the bolt closed behind them?”

  What you’re asking, said the irritating voice in my head, is whether or not you could have done it, Dave.

  Bullshit. Forget that. I was sure my bout of missing time, during which a bullet had left my gun, had nothing to do with this person who suddenly went missing on the same day. Two completely separate events. In fact, the event I was repressing was probably Amy coming to my house to borrow a bullet, and me calmly handing it to her.

  “Sure,” said John, “you could probably get the bolt slid in there with the door closed. Give a guy twenty minutes, a bent wire coat hanger. Let him try it about forty times. What would be the point, though? Just to mess with us?”

  I nudged the bag on the floor with my foot. Dense liquid, a bag of sludge. He said, “The writing on the bag, that’s a weight, right?”

  “I guess.” I leaned down. “Forty-four-point-four-two kilograms.” I scratched my head. “I give up.”

  “You, uh, think that’s her? In the bag?”

  “Ew. No, let’s assume not for now. That’s just gross.”

  “You think the jellyfish ate her?”

  “Bones and all?”

  “We’re talking about a tentacled flying lamp fucker, Dave. What are you prepared to call unlikely?”

  I stepped out of the bathroom and wandered down the hall, passing a room stacked with cardboard boxes and some broken chairs. There was another door that had been nailed shut, that seemed to lead out into midair.

  John said, “You know what that is? They used to build these old houses with doors that just led to a big drop, to fool burglars. They’d label that door TREASURY or something like that. The guy busts through the door and finds himself falling straight down. They’d put spikes or something down there. They used to call it an ‘Irish Elevator.’ ”

  “Or, John, they tore a balcony off here years ago and just never bothered to take out the door.”

  We passed a bare guest room that smelled of dust and old varnish, then at the end of the hall came to a door standing open with a band poster stuck to the inside, a group called VNV Nation.

  I leaned into a chaotic bedroom, crammed with furniture and carpeted with wrinkled clothes. Posters on every wall, bands I’d never heard of and one of a shiny Angelina Jolie as the Tomb Raider. There was a very nice laptop computer, a Mac, propped up on a pillow on an unmade bed.

  “The computer,” I asked, “it was like that when you got here?”

  “Yeah. We didn’t touch a thing.”

  On a nightstand off the bed there were four empty plastic bottles with orange juice labels and half a dozen brown prescription bottles. There was a box of Froot Loops on the floor, open.

  I saw all this from the doorway but didn’t step inside. I felt dirty just for peeking my head in, invading this person’s space. John pushed past me, though, and I realized we probably didn’t have a choice if we were serious about this. Cops do this every day, rifling closets and digging through your dildo drawer. I noticed the
bed laptop was on, ironically in sleep mode, a single power light glowing along one side. I tapped the space bar, the screen fading up from black to reveal a white screen with blue text scrolling down.

  “Check it out.” John nodded his head toward a dresser, one drawer half open, a couple of bras trying to escape. Atop the dresser sat a little black object, round and not much bigger than a roll of film. A lens in the center.

  “A camera,” I noted.

  “It’s one of those wireless camera deals,” he said. “For the computer.”

  “What, like a webcam?”

  “Yeah, or something.”

  “Was this Jim’s old room?” I asked, for some reason having trouble picturing Amy “Cucumber” Sullivan knowing how to shop for and use computer gadgetry. Before I encountered her while trying to return Molly a few years before, my only memory of Amy was from the Life Skills class at the Pine View Alternative School for Mentally Fucked Students where I had spent my senior year. She always had her head down on her desk, asleep, to me just a mop of red hair spilling over bony forearms.

  I think I only heard her say a dozen words my whole time there and most of them were “please move or I’m going to puke on you.”

  John muttered, “dunno,” in the way that people do when you ask a useless question that deserves nothing more. I glanced around and saw a second camera, a square one, sitting atop a shelf on a department store sortawood computer desk across the room. It wasn’t aimed at the chair in front of it like you’d think a webcam would be, but sideways, toward the hall.

  “This camera is aimed over at the door,” I deduced. I looked up and saw a ceiling fan with a set of four little canister lights aimed around the room. Taped to one canister was another of the wireless cameras. “And another one,” I said. “Aimed right at the window. All the entryways covered, like a security system.”

  A little tingle of ner vous ness rose in my gut for reasons I couldn’t wrap my sluggish brain around.

  “Okay . . .” John said, moving toward the laptop. “You know, I just thought about something. Why would she lock her bathroom at all if she lived here alone? You’d just poop with the door open, right?”

  I nodded and said, “So maybe she was already scared. If this were an episode of Law and Order we’d have a nice shot of her getting abducted right on camera. And yes, before you give me that look of yours, I do realize whatever happened, happened in the bathroom and not in here. She didn’t have a webcam in her bathroom, did she?”

  “I want you to think about what you just asked.”

  John picked up the laptop and sat down with it in the computer chair.

  “Well,” I said, “she could have caught somebody in the hall.”

  That feeling again. It was like a faint alarm in the back of my skull, like the creeping sense that you’ve left something important at the house just as you’re leaving for vacation.

  He’s going to look for the webcam stills on there.

  So? I shoved my hands in my pockets and wandered around the room, wondering how our getting first-look at the evidence would fuck up a prosecution should this turn out to be a run-of-the-mill kidnapping and murder, flying jellyfish notwithstanding. Welcome to Undisclosed.

  I fingered a loose key in my pocket that had apparently fallen off the key ring. I ran my other hand through my hair, which was drying in a mushrooming Carrot Top spray. I said, “Is there any place open in town that sells that red Mountain Dew? I had some today, it’s like somebody melted a box of cherry Jolly Ranchers and stirred in some crack cocaine. Is that one convenience store on Lexington a twenty-four-hour deal?”

  John wasn’t listening. He was studying the flat monitor on the laptop.

  FOR THE WEBCAM STILLS. TO SEE WHO TOOK AMY.

  My mouth was going dry, my heart thumping just a little too fast. The caffeine, probably. I leaned over John’s shoulder and saw the phrase MY CAT PEED ON MY BED at the top of the screen. It was a series of broken lines, each beginning with a name in brackets. I knew the format.

  That’s a chat log. She was on there when she got up to brush her teeth. Then somebody took her, maybe somebody or maybe some thing. But the key is she knew they were coming, somehow. She knew because she set up cameras so she would have evid—

  OH, SHIT.

  I stood bolt upright.

  WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO SAY IF THAT’S YOU ON THE CAMERA, ASSHOLE?

  That thought—like a hammer to the balls. John actually glanced over at me and I suddenly felt naked. I tried to remember what my body language looked like when I was at my most casual and innocent, then the whole effect was ruined when I pulled my other hand from my pocket and saw what I was holding.

  It was the key to the toolshed in my backyard.

  I normally keep it on a nail near my back door. I do not normally keep it in my pocket.

  Oh, what did you put in your toolshed, Dave?

  I held up a declaratory, “I’ve got an idea” finger and said, “Wait.”

  John turned to me, his sudden attention like a heat lamp on my face. I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say next.

  “We shouldn’t, uh, we shouldn’t do that yet.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Because, uh, I think it would be better if—look, we have one witness to this thing, right?”

  “We do?”

  “Yeah, the thing. The jellyfish thing. I mean, we’re up here dicking around with computers and that thing could take off in the meantime, go back to wherever it goes. The computer isn’t going anywhere.”

  John glanced into the hallway and said, “You think it talks?”

  I looked him straight in the eye and said, “I think you can make it talk. Whether it wants to or not.”

  He scratched his chin thoughtfully, then said, “I’ll need a toaster.”

  “I saw one in the kitchen. Here, hand me the laptop, you go beat some information out of that slimy bastard.”

  John strode out of the room with newfound purpose. I took his seat. The desktop wallpaper on the laptop was a photo of Orlando Bloom, in full Lord of the Rings costume. I waited until I heard John’s footsteps clomping down the stairs before I started clicking through folders, as fast as my fingers would go. Sweating a little now, my heart thumping against bone, my knee bouncing.

  I eventually stumbled across a folder full of little icons that came up as grainy camera stills. I clicked on one, saw a dim image of a lump sleeping soundly under the covers of the bed. Another, same thing. A third, a shot of an empty bed. A fourth, the lump again. There were hundreds.

  I heard John stomp back up the stairs and I glanced toward the hall, not returning to my task until I heard him open the library door.

  I was stuck. Deleting the pictures was out of the question. I was not covering up a crime here and at that point I fully intended to tell John if it somehow turned out I was the culprit we were after. But I wanted him to find out my way. I needed time to figure it out, to pro cess it, to have some control over the revelation. I needed options.

  I cut the whole folder of pics and moved them to the most obscure location on the hard drive I could find, inside a subfolder of a subfolder of a subfolder of a subfolder of printer drivers. I closed up the computer and leapt out of the chair, suddenly a bundle of nervous energy.

  You’ve got to get home. You’ve got to see what’s in that toolshed.

  Yes. That was right. I plunged a hand into my pocket and clutched my car keys so tightly they etched marks in my palm. I strode out and down the hall, feeling a cloud of guilt around me like a stench. I passed the library just as John came flying out, slamming the door behind him.

  He said, “That dangly bastard knows something. I can read it in his body language.”

  I said, “I have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “I just have to run home. I’ll be back.”

  “Yeah, you probably gotta check on the brownies. Can you get me some rubber gloves while you’re at it?”

&n
bsp; “Okay.”

  He opened the library door again and said, “Where’d you go, asshole?” then once more closed himself inside the room.

  I fled.

  DRIVING AGAIN. DEFROST heat blowing on the windshield, ice crystals melting on contact with the glass, swept aside by the wiper blade a second later. Wheels floating under me, no traction in the ice. The roads all to myself.

  If there’s a body in your toolshed, say, of a skinny, retarded redheaded girl, just come clean. To John first. Tell him exactly what happened. No need to plan beyond that. Gotta see what’s there first. Gotta see . . .

  I turned on the radio, looking for something to blast the thoughts out of my head, hoping the moist nighttime air would blow in a rare non-country station. I ground through static and static and static, then recoiled at the shrill, choking sound of a man apparently squealing through a crushed larynx. After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and the group Limp Bizkit—Shitload’s favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy metal guitar.

  This was the song “Rollin’,” judging by the fact that the chorus was Fred saying that word several dozen times. Perfect. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ . . .

  Just tell the truth, that’s all I had to do. Just tell the truth. If I did it, I did it. I blanked and found a dead girl. No cover-up, no hiding the body or any of that. Just face the consequences.

  Sure. Your “dad” will fly up and he’ll tell you not to talk to anybody and he’ll make noise about your record of mental illness and use lots of big words. You’ll get off, because he’s damned good at getting people off, and instead of jail you’ll get a stay in an institution smelling of ammonia and spoiled food, surrounded by people mumbling to themselves and smearing feces on the walls. It will work. It worked for the Hitchcock thing. No, don’t think about that. Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ . . .

  From the darkness behind me, a very cold and very bony hand reached up and closed around my mouth.