by J. Thorn
“The vision snapped and I was left staring back at the shit-covered Gaki. I backed out of the cave and turned to face the ridge. The sun nearly blinded me. I felt the metallic object in my palm and realized I had not replaced the pin on the grenade. Without a second thought, I tossed it inside the cave. Ten seconds later, an explosion ripped the air and spread a fine layer of dirt and rock over the entrance. The dust settled so I looked through the smoke for any sign of Gaki. I saw none. I started towards the ridge to find my unit and that’s when I heard that greasy, filthy voice in my head again.
“‘Feed me,’ he said. ‘Sustain the greed.’
“Many years had passed since the end of the war. I convinced myself that my encounter with Gaki was nothing but a casualty of humanity, a way of coping with the atrocities I witnessed and committed. It wasn’t until I married, had my children, and reentered society that his sickly voice returned. He came to me in dreams that were more real than reality.”
***
The key felt loose in the lock, like an old prostitute. The image forced a smile across Ravna’s face as the door to his apartment swung open on creaky hinges. A single floor lamp stood like a lone sentry in the far corner of the one-room efficiency. Male undergarments fouled with yellowing underarm stains clung to the shade, positioned as they were thrown by their owner. Next to the lamp, and lining the adjacent wall from floor to ceiling, stood stacked crates of records. LPs from the fifties, sixties, and seventies filled every space, with some jutting out where the sleeve had become crinkled or folded. Pizza boxes and coffee cups covered the floor, except for an oasis of beige, plush carpet turned gray underneath a recliner. The fifty-two-inch, flat-screen television above the mantle flickered to life as Ravna punched a button on the remote. The local news anchor’s mouth sped along silently until the sound output reached the speakers mounted on each side of the screen. Several horror-movie posters clung to the pitted drywall, frames tilted and Plexiglas bowing outward from decades of gravity’s unrelenting pull.
“. . . until further investigation is complete. Residents are reluctant to consider the recent event the work of a serial killer, although those we spoke to have begun locking their doors at night, a first for this community.”
Ravna shook his head and scrolled through the channel menu until he landed on Arena Rock Rampage, SoundSystem station number 302. The info on the screen identified the artist as Leaf Hound, but Ravna knew from the first chord of that most righteous riff that it had to be them. He fell backwards into the recliner. His thumb fell into the worn depression of the volume button and he pushed the level up as far as he could before Ms. Winkerhausen in 4C would call the police.
Sweet riff rock from the 1970s always made Ravna horny. His encounter with the goth princess at his favorite coffee house added fuel to the fire. She worked him like a stripper, eye contact and personal questions with no interest in an answer. Encourage them to leave their paycheck and then return next week with another.
He reached into his messenger bag and removed the company-issue laptop computer he felt obliged to transport like an undeserving child.
Slasher Dasher was founded by two college kids in 1979. With a love for horror films and a witty way with movie reviews, the pamphlet turned into a full-blown enterprise. With offices in various cities and a network of full-time writers and stringers, Slasher Dasher employed the hippest of the hipsters. They armed their staff with the newest technology and sent them in search of the best horror films, those created by the major studios and those born in the basements of suburbia. Ravna took the job three years ago when he became fed up with life in the cubicle. His divorce was finalized and the house was sold. Needing very little money to live, the staff-writer position at Slasher Dasher was the perfect opportunity. Ravna wrote like a fiend and wrote constantly. Having his reviews done for the magazine left him with hours each day to write and drink coffee.
The laptop came to life as the proto-Plant vocal stylings of Leaf Hound filled the room. Ravna waited for the operating system to load those mystic lines of code that made the modern world possible. His clock widget appeared first, followed by a barrage of sticky notes clinging to every icon on the desktop. They made a virtual mess the same way their paper counterparts made a physical one. Ravna launched his web browser and dismissed his usual page of news feeds, seeing that very few new headlines were added since the last time he glanced at them an hour or two before. He pulled the search box down from the file menu and hesitated.
Ravna set the laptop on the arm of the recliner and walked to the kitchenette area of his efficiency. He pulled the stainless-steel handle of the refrigerator and spied two bottles of beer on the bottom shelf, lodged between a box of baking soda and an unidentified, black lump sealed in a plastic baggie.
“Gotta calm that espresso down,” he said to the first bottle as he tucked the cap underneath his T-shirt and twisted until he heard the familiar sigh. Ravna took a swig and relished the bitter sharpness of the import. He shut the door and tapped the bubble-topped 1959 Frigidaire unit.
“Keep on keepin’ on, my good buddy.”
The refrigerator did not reply.
Ravna returned to his recliner as the album approached “Stray,” one of his favorite songs. He chugged half of the beer and let his body fall deep into the molded cushions. With the click of a few buttons, Ravna dispelled the other applications and their incessantly nagging messages. He returned to the web browser’s search box with no digital procrastinations remaining.
“Preta, Gaki,” he typed in the box.
Without the need for journalistic integrity on his own investigation, Ravna selected the first result on the list. He began to skim the document like a ten-year-old boy discovering his father’s stash of porn under the bed. After a few moments, he hammered his word processor with key observations.
“Preta, or Peta. Name for a ghost of human suffering originating from Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain texts. Known as “hungry ghosts” in English. Pretas were jealous or greedy people, and now their karma gives them an insatiable hunger for repugnant things, such as human corpses or feces.”
Ravna whistled out loud, clicked the scroll-down arrow, and continued taking notes.
“Pretas are invisible, but some can see them in states of distress. They have sunken eyes, mummified skin, narrow limbs, enormously distended bellies and long, thin necks. The metaphor suggests enormous appetites that cannot be fulfilled. In Japan, preta is translated as gaki, and the word is often used to mean a spoiled child. To Hindus, the creatures are very real.”
Ravna shut the lid without bothering to power down the computer. His mouth was dry and the rest of his beer did nothing to quench the thirst. He fumbled for the messenger bag and pulled the old book from inside. With trembling fingers, he revisited the pages he had marked with Post-it notes.
Chapter 7
He threw the razor into the sink and reached for a towel on the rack. Drew held the princess wash cloth to his bleeding chin and sneered into the mirror. “Tough shit, sweetie,” he said. “Daddy’s bleeding and your towel was the closest one.”
He managed to wipe the shaving cream from the rest of his face while the bleeding slowed to a trickle. Drew straightened his tie and pushed his hair over each ear. A sallow, empty face looked back. Drew slammed the medicine cabinet shut and marched down the steps on his way to first the garage, and then the office.
***
Brian sat on the corner of Drew’s desk holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a wry smile. He slid around to face Drew as he sat in his chair. “You look like shit,” he said.
“Not sleeping much,” replied Drew.
“Why not?”
Drew looked up at Brian and shook his head. “I guess I’m sleeping, but the dreams are what’s leaving me exhausted in the morning.”
“Dreams of wild orgies?”
Drew rubbed his forehead and pushed the power button on his PC. The machine came out of hibernation with the whirring of a fan an
d a couple of clicks. “My head’s pounding.”
Brian stood and shrugged his shoulders. He walked toward the break room while draining the last drops of his lukewarm, watery office coffee.
Drew watched him go and turned back to the monitor. He started his e-mail program and waited. Sunken, bloodshot eyes stared back at him through the black spot on the monitor. The extension on his desk rang, jarring him from the contemplative moment.
“Yo.”
Nags like the wife, Drew thought. He paused, knowing Brian would continue whether he acted disinterested or not.
“Johnson ain’t here today.”
Drew sat up in his chair and leaned into the cubicle row until he could see the drawn blinds on the supervisor’s office. Only darkness leaked out between the plastic rows. The coiled phone cord pulled taut and Drew sat back up. He glanced toward Vivian’s empty cubicle, and then put his head in his left hand while cradling the phone in his right.
“He’s never missed. Got, like, the company record for attendance or something. I don’t think he’s called off in seven years.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you when you were acting like a little bitch this morning.”
Drew smiled and rolled his eyes. “Okay. I’m listening. You’re like a girl with a secret that you can’t wait to tell.”
“So here’s what I know,” Brian began. “Folks from upstairs were sniffing around this morning. There was a board meeting and Johnson was a no-show. Not only that, but he didn’t call. Nobody really knows where he is.”
Drew sighed. “And?” he asked Brian.
“And what? You don’t think that’s crazy?”
“Call me when you find the YouTube clip of Johnson in bed with three strippers and a line of cocaine. Until then, I really don’t care if the guy isn’t at work because of his hemorrhoids.”
Drew tossed the receiver into the cradle and went back to his e-mail. The bolded subject lines sat like cattle marching to the killing floor. With every delete, the line disappeared and shifted the others closer to the knife. The bottom right corner of the program read “89 new items,” bringing Drew’s forehead into tightly creased ribbons of skin, the wrinkles looking like windblown dunescapes.
His eye skimmed down the “sender” column, stopping around line forty-six at a message with no sender listed. His arms tightened and his fingers fumbled on the keyboard as if he had spent the last hour in a snowball fight without gloves. Drew scrolled down until the unread subject line without a sender stared back from the middle of the screen.
“you know where he is”
Drew looked at it, a simple sentence without proper capitalization or punctuation, the hallmark of digital communication.
Won’t be long before we go completely phonetic. Fucking idiots. His hand slid the cursor over the subject line and Drew’s pointer finger depressed the left mouse button. The body of the message filled the screen as the attachment crawled from the top of the box toward the bottom. Line by line, pixel by pixel, the image digitally unraveled. Cut the resolution, for fuck’s sake. How long have people been sending digital photos to one another? Ten years, twenty years?
The first few lines of the image rolled down with utter blackness, leaving Drew to wonder if the picture had become corrupted on its travels through the wire, across routers, and finally through the company’s e-mail server. As it continued to load, Drew saw the faint, scraggly lines that transformed into the tops of trees. The dark-brown branches tried hiding in the darkness of the night, their naked, spiny arms twisting toward the sky. Dull flashes of faded color punctured the stark desperation of the image. Shades of blue like the bottom of an abandoned swimming pool clung to the bones of the tree, discarded shopping bags doomed to dance in the branches for all time. Mounds of broken concrete obscured the bottoms of the tree trunks. Jagged lines of piercing, white stone lay toppled on each other. Drew squinted at the monitor as his brain tried to categorize the photo or identify the location of it. The lines of the image picked up speed as it raced toward the bottom with the last of the pixels.
Dump site. One used by demolition companies, or possibly the aftermath of a dead factory brought down by the wrecking ball.
The image finished loading and the number of objects at the bottom of it forced Drew to pause and refocus. Unlike the stark emptiness of the treetops and night sky, the ground lay covered with the bones of dead industry. Wires, steel rebar, cinder blocks, rotted, wooden beams, and plastic casings of all sorts lay jumbled on the ground in heaps. The paltry flash on the camera illuminated the construction refuse, but not the rodents in their nests. Drew stared at the jumble of wire snaking through the image.
He sat back and looked at the ceiling, taking a deep breath and shaking his head, contemplating an instant delete or another look. With Johnson out, Drew could not come up with a reason not to linger on the image for as long as he wanted.
He looked again and immediately found part of the picture that had not revealed itself at first glance. In the bottom, right corner Drew found the soles of two shoes that seemed to be attached to the legs of someone lying on his back. His eyes followed a piece of broken conduit to the right, where they stopped on a rectangular, black object. Drew pulled closer to the monitor and squinted. He moved the cursor to the file menu and clicked until the tiny magnifying glass appeared. He dragged the slider to 250 percent and the gray pixels exploded on the monitor, followed by a readjustment of clarity characteristic of a high-resolution image.
Drew grabbed the horizontal scroll and pushed it to the right until the soles of the shoes nearly filled his monitor. He knocked the zoom back to 200 percent so the rectangular object would fit on the screen. Drew identified the black messenger bag, the nylon type used in cheap promotions, like office apparel. In the middle of the outer flap sat a logo, its intricate design obscured by the low light of the environment, but its shape evident to Drew. The design was his creation, the logo now tattooed throughout the office building on mugs, stationary, messenger bags, and more. It was the design that earned him the promotion, the house in the nice neighborhood, his spin on the “American Dream.” It was the piece of work that earned him accolades in the graphic-design department. It was also the design sewn into the black messenger bags distributed at last year’s holiday party, the one used by only one person in the office.
Johnson.
He deleted the message and emptied the trash of the e-mail program. Drew dug through the folders on his hard drive, deleting any trace of cached e-mail messages. He knew the exercise to be futile from his days in IT. Contrary to the traditional warnings about backing up your data, Drew knew of countless criminals convicted by FBI specialists who had retrieved kiddy porn or cooked books from computers dumped in a landfill, thrown into swimming pools, or trampled by a pickup truck.
The morning oozed into afternoon as the rest of the office continued under the guise of business as usual. Johnson’s dark office was anything but usual, and everyone knew it. Drew pushed the volume slider up with his mouse until the audio from the streaming news clip came alive.
“. . . have officially declared the death a homicide. Police have released the victim’s name. She is thirty-four-year-old Vivian Cabmel, from Oak Park.”
Drew’s eyes widened as a photograph of Vivian zoomed out from the screen with precision. The picture was taken at least ten years ago. Drew caught his breath, forgetting how beautiful Vivian had been in her twenties. Time, stress, and conflict had sapped her. Vivian’s dark hair tumbled about her shoulders, fanned out with a thin strap on each side holding her cocktail dress in place. She had a drink in one hand and her eyes glittered with fun, mischief, and sensuality. Drew realized that Vivian was pretty enough to become the new media-darling mystery, and still young enough for them to exploit her vivacious sexuality.
Drew grabbed the slider and pulled it back a few seconds so he could see the photograph again, this time attempting to listen to what the reporter was saying.
“Fol
ks in Oak Park are saddened by the tragic loss of Vivian. We spoke to residents of Oak Park Towers, the apartment complex Vivian called home.”
The screen paused and hiccupped as the video feed tunneled over the cable to Drew’s computer. An elderly woman appeared with a huge microphone in front of her face. Her blue eyes and blue hair appeared washed out under the hot lights of the mobile recording unit set up in the lobby of the apartment building.
“She was so nice. She never bothered anyone. One time, my dog got loose and she helped me hang missing flyers all over the apartment building.”
The video cut to a balding man in his late forties, crumbs from a microwaveable meal clinging to his beard and stains dotting a white, sleeveless T-shirt, the kind of person the police would be considering a suspect in the investigation.
“Viv smiled for everyone. She was polite and courteous, but she kept to herself. She never bothered no one. I hope they catch this son of a—”
The video cut the blooming obscenity and pulled back to the news desk, where the anchor looked at the camera with a tilted head. He shook it from side to side, careful not to disturb the coiffed, thinning hairs that makeup had positioned to cover his widow’s peak.
“Such a shame. We have Sal Surmen with us today. Sal is an expert on serial killers. He’s helped the FBI track and catch several over the past few years, and has published his memoirs, To Catch a Killer: My Time Hunting Crime. Welcome to Channel 7, Sal. That sure is a catchy title, if you don’t mind the pun. Can you tell us how you came up with it and where the idea for the book came from?”