by Scott Hale
And, oh Jesus, there was a picture of his nephew on the wall. It was the two of them at the beach, not an adult in sight. Both of their shirts were off.
“She’s never liked you. Anyone who knows anything will see right through this. I promise you.”
Ansel moved into the living room, past the ukulele propped up against the side of the couch; there were burn marks on the arm of it, from where he’d gotten drunk and fallen asleep holding his cigarette. The carpet made a squishing sound as he walked across it. He didn’t bother glancing down; he figured it must’ve been from all the blood pouring out of the phone.
“Are you a pedophile?” Annette blurted out.
Ansel stopped, halfway into the kitchen. “Fuck no,” he said, while glaring at the linoleum floor. There was a trail of a sticky, translucent substance running across it; it had no definite beginning, nor a definite end. Whatever had caused it existed for that moment, and that moment only.
“No, you’re not. If you geek out and act guilty, it’s only going to make it worse.”
There it was again, that wet sound. It was in the kitchen with him, but where? Ansel went to the sink and fished a steak knife out of the mountain of dirty dishes. It still had last night’s supper on it—Chinese take-out—because he couldn’t be bothered to learn how to use chopsticks, even though he had a small collection of them in a drawer. That’s something else they would find, when they did a moratorium of his life. Leftovers and dirty dishes, and recycling bin filled to the brim with beer bottles. Too much beer for one man, they’d say. Lures, Lux might write, for fish to ensnare in his net.
“What’s that sound?” Annette asked.
Ansel turned towards the basement door. “The voices or…?”
“Voices? What voices?”
“Nothing.”
Ansel went to the basement door, the knife shaking in his hand.
“Ansel, what voices?”
A loud crash exploded out of the guest bedroom. Ansel jumped and stumbled backwards, catching himself against the kitchen island.
Annette cried, “What the hell was that? Is there someone else there with you?”
The voices inside Ansel’s head were getting louder and louder. It was a constant barrage, one after the other, accompanied by tiny, ringing noises, like messages coming in by the tens and twenties in a chat room. They told him it would probably be best for him to kill himself. They told him they were coming for his mom and dad. They recited his address, his phone number. They were talking about his face, and the mask of lies he hid behind.
“Ansel, fucking talk to me.”
He whispered, “I think someone has broken in.”
“Call the police! I’ll call the police. I’m coming—”
“There’s so much blood coming out,” Ansel said, holding the phone in his hand, which was gushing blood, like a severed artery.
“Blood? What the fuck—”
The cell phone died in Ansel’s hand, and when it died, the blood stopped, too. He dropped it, and when it hit the ground, it melted into a crimson puddle.
Another crash, this time from the living room. Turning to the living room, he saw the picture of his nephew and himself at the beach swaying on its hook, recently disturbed.
Heavy thudding—Ansel spun around, slicing the air behind him. There was more sticky, translucent liquid on the floor, and on the cupboards. It smelled salty, and of the ocean.
“Get out!” Ansel hollered. “I’m calling the police.”
He backpedaled through the kitchen, into the living room. Someone was in the house. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there. He could feel them, right ahead, around the corner, near the front door or the guest room; a shape, a shadow; a shade standing in the dark, biding its time, clinging to every corner, stalking his image as it was held in every reflective surface; he could smell their breath, that salty, oceanic spew; and he could hear it, the weapon they had brought—the wet, thick, leathered tails of a whip; they were caressing it, lubricating it; letting it drag across the ground, as if they were marking their territory.
Ansel had his computer in his room and a window he’d “boarded” up with pillows. He could lock the door, contact the police through the Internet, or fit his doughy body through the window. He could do something, anything, other than stand here.
He ran towards his room, flicked the light switch on the wall. As the dying bulb buzzed to life, he threw his body into the door, slammed it shut, and locked it. Turning around to go to his computer, the air caught in his throat, and he dropped the knife.
The monitor, the tower, keyboard, and mouse were weeping blood, like infected sores. Ansel went to one knee, fumbled for the knife. A force from behind pushed him into the desk. His hands skated through the blood, until they gave out, and his elbows cracked against the floor.
“Women… and children,” someone whispered behind him.
Ansel reared up, but his attacker was on him again. It took him by the back of the head with hands larger than his head and pressed his face into the blood. It tore Ansel’s shirt off, split his pants in half. It grabbed the elastic of his underwear and bunched it up in its slimy fist, wedging the fabric painfully into his ass.
“Please,” Ansel cried, unable to hear his own voice over the voices of the Internet inside his head. “Don’t do that.”
It started to carve into the small of Ansel’s back, not with any blade, but its long, stinging fingers. Ansel bucked in the blood, but it pressed down harder on his head, so that he couldn’t move.
“Stop, stop!”
It kept carving into his body, one letter or symbol at a time, and when it was finished, it moved onto his sides. The pain was nauseating. He was being branded. He could smell his skin splitting to an impossibly cold heat, wilting into the seething ravines scored there.
When it was finished with Ansel’s sides, it grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head and twisted his neck until he could see what had been written into his flesh. The tattoo read ‘women’ and on each of his sides, the word ‘and.’
It bashed Ansel’s face into the ground, over and over, until he was about to lose consciousness. When he could barely see, it turned him over and drove its fingers into his stomach, above his pelvis. Both its hands worked together, stirring his skin and muscle into the shapes of letters.
“It hurts!” Ansel cried. Unable to see who or what was doing this to him, he sealed his eyes shut with his tears and disappeared into his mind. As the attacker worked at his stomach, he could see the letters it was cutting into him. A ‘c’ and then, with the other hand, an ‘n.’ He was counting on the numbness of shock to save him from this, but in seconds, the message was complete.
Children. It had carved ‘Children’ above his cock. ‘And’ into his sides. ‘Women’ above his ass. Women and children. A place for each of them, when they were his to have.
Ansel felt his eyes being pried open. It was on top of him, pressing its weight into him. It peeled his lids back, and when his eyes were open, it leaned in and kissed his irises.
“It’s time for the world to see you for what you truly are,” it whispered, a voice that was both male and female.
Ansel begged for his life, but his life had been forfeited the moment Lux had put him up for bounty on her blog.
The attacker closed its hands over his face, slipped its fingers into his jaws, and slowly, carefully, as if to make sure Ansel didn’t miss a moment of agony, it began to peel away his face in one complete, glistening sheet of skin.
Ansel didn’t die until his face was no more than raw muscle, and his attacker was staring back at him, wearing it.
It was all over the news: the non-binary kindergartner, Zoe/Zeke Crampton, was found dead in the bathroom of their home last night. The word ‘Liar’ had been burned into their throat; and like Salinger Stevens, their face had been degloved. Ansel Adams had also been found dead in his bedroom with the phrase ‘women and children’ carved into his torso—his face als
o having been degloved. Due to recent allegations regarding Ansel’s latent pedophilia, social media was already beginning to make connections between the cases, suggesting that Ansel had killed Zoe/Zeke. Some proponents of non-sexual, but intimate relationships between adults and children claimed Ansel and Zoe/Zeke had been lovers, and that they had been targeted for their counter-culture beliefs. The police were still looking for a murderer at large, while everyone else stayed focused on the victims, and what they had done, or not done, to have deserved such a cruel fate.
Fenton liked facts. They never let him down. It was true that facts could be distorted, but they had an almost brittle malleability. If one knew where to look, and if they looked hard enough, they could see the stress fractures in what others wanted everyone else to consider true, and know they had been manipulated. He was naïve, and he approached the world like a child, but only because as a child, he could play his peers’ childish games. They were children, too, but they didn’t know it. They thought the clothes they wore, the jobs they held, and the sex they had, somehow elevated them above the playground antics they’d never graduated from. He wasn’t better than them, but he knew them better than they knew themselves, and that was why he was Lux’s principle augur.
But after three murders that could be linked to Lux or Lux’s blog, Fenton found himself reconsidering the company he kept. It wasn’t because of the others—he’d seen the fractures in their facades since day one—but because of himself. Their “work” as Lux called it, had always been meaningful to him, but unlike Lux and to a lesser extent, Echo, it wasn’t the reason he woke up in the morning, or the explanation for why he could sleep so soundly at night. Social justice had been the carriage to carry him to the group, but it was the group itself that carried him. They were his friends, his best friends; and to them, he was a stranger. Because he was an impostor. He had twisted the truth of himself to fit the shape of their claws, and gladly went where they flew. But he could feel Lux’s claws tightening, and he could bend no more. If he broke, he would be bare.
Fenton’s favorite place in Bitter Springs was the cemetery, where he now stood; the dead didn’t bother him, and the living kept to themselves. Also, it didn’t hurt that there was a fairly strong Wi-Fi connection being broadcast from the house by the cemetery. The wireless connection had been not-all-that-cleverly named “AshestoAshes.” Surprisingly, Fenton hadn’t cracked it as quickly as he thought he would’ve. After trying “DustoDust,” he went back and forth between “zombie” and things related to zombies, until he remembered what the owner of the house looked like. He was a thirty-five-year-old white male that lived with his grandmother; he worked out in the basement, and wore expensive jewelry and tracksuits. If the wind hit him hard enough, everything near him would be given a light dusting of protein powder and cheap cologne. His name was David Goldstein. The password had been “Dust2Dust.”
Taking out his tablet, Fenton made his way to his favorite spot—a grove near the Goldsteins’ house. He sat down, wedged his back into the giant Weeping Willow that had overtaken the other trees in the grove, as if it had pulled them in with its leaves for a huddle, to talk about what should be done about all these meddling corpses in their backyard. Fenton liked to think nature cared about trivial things, the way humans did. It was the same way how two people felt when they came together to share in their bickering over a sub-par waiter, or how complete strangers could find common ground in the aneurism-inducing stress of their favorite show ending on a “to be continued,” teasing them until next year’s next season. Fenton found most things he did in life to be inconsequential, like someone planting trees to bring beauty to a cemetery. For all the fleeting moments of reprieve the act might offer, reality still waited swathed in the trueness of rot. Being an augur was not much different. They could break down a person’s traits and qualities, but in the end, like the caretaker who’d cultivated this grove, it wasn’t for anyone but themselves. If anything, it amplified what it wasn’t, what it couldn’t be.
Augurs of the past used the behavior of birds as ways by which to measure the approval or disapproval of the divine. Who the hell were Fenton and the others trying to understand? Not god, and certainly not the sad specimens they judged on this decaying orb.
The sunlight left the tablet’s screen. While it was booting up, he caught his reflection in the glass and quickly looked away. A stinging sensation drilled his leg at the place where his phone in his pocket was pressed against it. Focused on the tablet, he scratched the stinging until it graduated to burning. Pain was easier to manage when it was of your own making.
The tablet rang like an old rotary phone, and a message overcame the home screen. Fenton thought he’d heard something rustling behind the willow, but he couldn’t be bothered to check. This was more important.
The message was from a mutual contact of his and Asher’s. The contact’s name was Gulliver, and he was, as Asher put it, “gayer than gay… a new species of gay; a color we’d never seen but always knew was there.” The augurs had a file on him that expanded with every encounter, like most tabs they kept on their community. It had the usual details—twenty-five-year-old, white (middle-eastern), gay male with the body of a dad, a mildly unhealthy drinking habit, and a free pass to the patriarchy (on account of his wealth, not his skin)—as well as some newer ones, which included reports he had been spotted with chewed-up knuckles, possibly from a roofie-gone-wrong (whether he had been the victim or the perpetrator remained to be discovered). Asher liked him, because Asher liked everything that was bad for him, but Fenton was lukewarm on the worm. And yet he couldn’t deny Gulliver made one hell of a snitch.
His message read thusly:
Someone has been seen fleeing each crime scene. Cops are keeping it out of the papers. Reports are all the same. A slender figure dressed in somewhat transparent clothes, except their clothes looked wet, like they’d been standing in the rain for an hour, even though it’d been clear skies after every murder.
What do you think that means? What in gay hell is going on?
Did Asher break his fingers? Tell him to call me. It’s been an hour, and I’m growing moss sitting here waiting by the phone.
Whatever. I couldn’t care less. I saw Echo storming away from Lux just a minute ago. Know anything about that?
Don’t hold out on me, robo-boy!
Love,
Gulliver
More rustling in the trees surrounding him. Fenton glanced up. His heart seized in his chest. There, beyond the grove, a shape stood amongst the headstones. Spindly, vitreous, its body wasn’t separate from the cemetery, but a part of it, raised from it, like a crack in the paint on a canvas.
Fenton jammed his thumb into the tablet’s screen. The pressure of his fear warped the LCD. He told himself what he was seeing wasn’t real, and then it wasn’t. The white sunlight sliced through the clouds, like a hammer nailing to the Earth a holy decree. The shape vanished, disappeared into the dull grays and dying greens of the cemetery’s tarnished palette.
There was blood on his pantleg; two large drops, and one small, and another, a fourth, that hadn’t finished bleeding through the fabric. Fenton took his phone out of his pocket. He almost dropped it because it was so slick, like it’d been covered in jelly. But there was a cluster of notifications vying for attention, and so he ignored it. Because amongst the spam mail, automatic bill payments, and texts from his constantly worried, recently separated mother and father, there was a reminder that Lux had, minutes ago, posted something new on her blog. He tracked her every movement as best as he could, because he didn’t trust Echo to do it right when she did. She was too involved. She did it out of infatuation. He did it out of survival.
Except, there was no post. The last thing she had written had been her proposition on impostors. And yet, there had been something. Remnants of a post. A larger gap than was normal between the header and the body of the front page. Something had been there, and now it was—
Fenton blinked as he
saw it, the same way someone blinks instinctively, almost pre-meditatively, to keep something out of their eyes. It had been on the site, but it wasn’t. Like the languid shape that’d spread itself across the graves, it disappeared into the light. But, damn it, he had seen it. It had been a picture of himself. Where the hell did it go?
Digging his heels into the corpse-fed dirt, Fenton closed out of the browser and sent a text message to Echo that said, “Everything okay?” Not expecting a response, because Lux had a monopoly on Echo’s fingers and what she did with them, he slipped the phone into his other pocket. And then, experiencing a rare moment of uncertainty, he fell back on his palms and, for the first time in a very long time, actually considered the world around him—not the one they’d built for themselves, inside themselves.
The cemetery was like all cemeteries: quiet, reserved; a place where shadows bred and the sunlight never seemed to last for long. It was row after row of plot after plot—a stone timeline of friends, families, and strangers dating back to the days of Bitter Springs’ founding. The property was small, but the woods that checked it gave the cemetery an infinite quality, as if to promise those that passed that there would always be enough room, even for them. It was these woods, which eventually fed into the larger forest, Maidenwood, that gave the cemetery its sinister atmosphere. You could see it in the air, a slight discoloration of slate gray and muted white. A constant fog, regardless of the temperature or time of day, that crept and crawled, like fingers feeling out the presence of trespassers.
Fenton squeezed the bridge of his nose. Facts were safe, even when they weren’t. His imagination was another matter entirely. It got away from him, and when it came back, it came back with worry and shame hitching a ride on its hunched back. The last time he let it have its way with him was the first time he’d come to the cemetery, and the last time he’d been his true self around Lux.
That day had been a day like any other day of that year when he was in sixth grade. A day where he drifted through the sea of students, never uttering anything to anyone, unless called on in class. Up until this point, he hadn’t paid much attention to Lux and Ramona (Asher had yet to join the fold, and Echo was in another school altogether), except when he stole glances at them, because they always seemed more attractive than the last time he’d seen them. Up until this point, they had been cute, and somewhat intimidating. And then they gave their presentation in History class, and then they were both those things, and more.