by Brian Hodge
"That's even scarier than Prince Wakanda."
Bobby looked at the message again, focusing on it.
"Stop obsessing," Maggie warned. "You're thinking in story again. Just erase the darned thing. That's what the delete key is for, isn't it?"
"I can't help it. It's the writer in me. I smell a plot."
"You smell your own bullshit, darling. It's how you work. If reality doesn't suit you, you make something up that fits your vision."
"You've got a point," he admitted. "It's like an itch, sometimes. Like a scab. I just have to pick at it."
"It's an addiction is what it is, and I knew it was there when I married you, and I wouldn't change it if I had a hundred wishing genie jars."
Bobby smiled. "You know what it's like? When a story is germinating I feel this little itch of a tickle, like a black spider scuttling through my brain, stringing a fine strong strand from the hooks of its spinnerets, linking two or three completely disparate ideas together."
What if? So often that's just how it started. From out of the blue Bobbie would think to himself something like - what if a man walked into a diner and asked for an egg and was served a live chicken - and a story would begin to grow. The crazier the idea, the better the story. It was like a connect-the-dots puzzle thrown together by a blind three-armed lunatic orangutan. He'd mosaic the canvas of his writer's mind with a few crazy ideas, and then the story spider that lurked in the basement of his lower brain would begin stringing the connections together.
"That's my job." he'd tell her. "I'm the storyteller. Every tribe needs a good storyteller to make sense out of the nonsense and to assure them that the things in this world that happened to you were built to fit into some kind of plan. Don't go into those woods or god will eat your ass. Don't pick your feet on Sundays. Don't eat oysters until you shuck them from their shell."
But right now the campfire seemed a long way off. Right now, all that Bobbie could do was stare at his computer screen, trying to visualize just who was on the other end of these damn spam messages. "I have to get to the bottom of this, is all."
"Fine. You're a fiction writer. That's what you do. Just don't get hooked by these spams. There's a whole section of the police force that spends its time checking out these sorts of things. They're hooks. Bait, you know? Their only real purpose is to catch you off guard just long enough to assure themselves that there's somebody on the other end of their spam that wants to listen. That wants to believe. It's kind of like a religion. They need to find a little faith."
"I get you," Bobby said. "They're like storytellers. They want to hook an audience and make some money. Evil storytellers, maybe, but I understand their motivation. It's nothing more than a monkey trap."
"I beg your pardon?" Maggie asked.
"A monkey trap," Bobby repeated. "Old time hunters used to put hard candy into the bottom of milk bottles to catch monkeys. The monkey would worm his arm into the bottle and squeeze hold of the candy and then get caught because they wouldn't unsqueeze their fist. Nothing else mattered but the candy."
"Candy will do that to you," Maggie said.
Bobby continued explaining the monkey trap.
"Then, when the monkey tried to remove his arm he wouldn't be able to get his clenched fist out of the bottle without letting go of the candy."
"Which would, of course, be unthinkable," Maggie added with a giggle.
"Unthinkable," Bobby agreed. "Listen, I'm famished."
He thumped his chest again, mustering an impotent Tarzan-yell.
"So are you coming to breakfast monkey-man?" Maggie asked.
"In a minute," he said.
He started typing.
"Got an idea?" Maggie asked.
"A stupid one," he said. "I'm going to answer this spam."
"What ever for? You're only asking for trouble."
"Call it research," he said, with a shrug. "There might be a story in here somewhere. I just want to see where this is supposed to end up."
The truth was he was just plain curious.
"Monkey's got to have his sweet," Maggie said, with a knowing roll of her gray-green eyes.
Bobby kept on typing.
If he'd only known better he would have stopped. He didn't realize he was typing something akin to a death certificate or maybe even a suicide note. He should have stopped and gone and had himself some breakfast. He should have erased the e-mail, or blocked it from my mailbox. He should have explored a thousand different possibilities at that point in time and maybe things would have turned out differently.
But instead he kept on typing.
There's a word for this point in the story.
The word is catalyst and it means something that initiates an important event to happen. The oh-shit moment, when you drop the penny and know that it's going to fall.
Get ready for it.
Bobby read what he'd typed aloud.
"Hello ARdeth, if that is your name. Firstly, I am not your friend. Second, this is a poorly written con. If you really want to get something from somebody you should take the time to learn a little English. Look up grammar and syntax, for a start. You can work on your spelling and your typing following that. Hire a riter, or better yet a roomful of crackhead spider monkeys. Until then, please get off my back."
Then he hit send. He looked at his wife, smiling at her as he hit the button. Damn, she sure looked good. For just an instant he thought about grabbing her and pulling her down on the carpet. You know the kind of thought that a husband ought to feel about his wife, at least a couple of times a minute or so.
As Bobby hit the send button he felt a spark arc from the keyboard to his extended finger, like something had jumped from the keyboard and straight through his arm. The room spun, and his thoughts completely focused on Maggie. It was a kind of a Peter Parker spider-sense. In that brief flash of revelation, he felt that somehow she was in danger.
Did he think of his wife Maggie because she was in danger, or did his thinking of her focus that random dangerous spark that scampered from somewhere deep in cyberspace into my keyboard and through him into Maggie?
That's a very good question.
Why don't you make up yourself an answer to go with it?
Bobby drew his finger back like he'd been bitten. A tingle ran through his arm and his skin crawled with tiny electrical spiders.
There's a word for everything, and there's a word for this sensation as well - formication. It refers to the delusional belief that one's skin is infested with crawling parasites. The key word here is delusional.
This was no delusion.
"Shit," Bobby said.
That's not a particularly original expression of pain for a writer who prided himself on possessing a well rounded vocabulary, but there are certain circumstances in which nothing but the simplest four-letter epithet will do to express one's personal discomfort.
He made a mental note to himself to invest in an anti-static mat.
"My friend," Maggie intoned. "It is with great delight and joy that I have to go shopping."
Bobby turned to look at her. There was something in her voice, as flat as a steamrollered credit card. She didn't look right to him. Her eyes were cold and dull, like a pair of frozen blue-gray poker chips. She barely looked or sounded like his wife, Maggie.
"What about breakfast?" Bobby asked.
Maggie stood there staring into middle space like a strange store mannequin.
"I have to go shopping," she repeated. "You should not be amazed to hear that."
Then she turned away. That's when Bobby saw it, perched on her shoulder like a pirate's parrot. It was a tiny neon blue monkey. At first he thought it was some sort of a stuffed toy, which was odd enough. Maggie had never been much of a stuffed toy person, but that's what it looked like. A stuffed toy, only there was something different about this monkey.
There was something very different.
Bobby had never seen a stuffed animal quite this color before. There was something
in its hue that reminded him of his Welsh grandfather's lips, right after the old man had grabbed his left arm like someone had given it a crack with a six pound post maul, and fell down stone dead across the last Sunday dinner Bobby's grandmother ever prepared.
This blue was a stranger hue than that. It was a blue of ball lightning and broken neon strip joint signs and smothered frozen Smurfs. It was cold and bright and it scared the hell out of Bobby, especially when the little bastard turned and grinned right at him.
"What in the hell is that?" Bobby asked.
The monkey kept grinning. Hard and cold, with teeth so large and competent you could grind corn with them. Bobby thought of wood chippers and gravestones.
Maggie looked back at Bobby over her shoulder, as if she hadn't even heard him. The blue monkey leaned closely to her face, its cheek touching Maggie's, like a cat marking its owner with a quick chin snuzzle; and all the time grinning that nasty what-the-fuck-are-you-going-to-do-about-me grin. Then the blue monkey reached for Maggie's throat. Bobby lurched forward, his legs slowed from the hour he'd spent sitting and writing.
The monkey reached its hand directly into Maggie's throat. The flesh parted and sucked in the monkey's tiny arm. Bobby saw a line of blood, like poorly applied lipstick, sucking into the monkey's crackling blue flesh. The monkey moved its arm inside Maggie's throat and Maggie spoke.
"Monkey got to have its sweet." she said, in a voice that wasn't quite her own.
Bobby grabbed for the monkey. It didn't try to dodge, just perched there letting his hand close about it.
Bobby had the little bastard, but the monkey wouldn't let go.
"Damn," Bobby swore. The monkey crackled in his hand like crumpled cigarette box cellophane, shooting a blast of static electricity that numbed Bobby clear to his elbow. Bobby drew his hand back, involuntarily. The hand appeared unaltered, but the palm stank of burned meat and blue chewy jujubes.
The monkey hissed and grinned even harder. There was a slight charring about Maggie's throat wound, where the monkey's arm had found entrance. The monkey hung there and grinned, running a flaccid blue finger down the neckline of Maggie's shirt, fingering the name brand tag.
"I have to go shopping," Maggie repeated, the monkey working her throat like a concert harpist. "Heartily and in glad astounding joy I tell you this."
Her words made sense, in the same kind of clunky syntactical style that a tongue-tied tourist might use as he parrots untidy sentence fragments from a nearly useless phrase book.
Bobby tried again. He grabbed the monkey with both hands. His fingers sank through the crackling blue stuffed-monkey faux fur into Maggie's shoulders. He could feel her hiding beneath the monkey, but it was as if he were touching her through a shiver of recycled plastic wrap. There was something intangible about the beast, like it was there and not there.
Then the monkey opened its jaws, unhinging them like a snake, and swallowed half of Bobby's face. The azure primate's fangs sank into Bobby's skull encased brain like an injection of high voltage hair plugs.
There was a hiss and a crackle, white snow seethed into the cells of Bobby's skull bones, a mad blur of images, naked children, dead animals, flies buzzing hungrily over a heap of rotted cattle. A monstrous organic B-52 flapped its long black batwings over a sleeping populace and hatched opened a hole in its belly and let an entire bomb bay full of softly humming radio tubes drop into the heart of the innocent city.
And then the monkey let Bobby drop.
Bobby fell to the floor. He lay there staring sideways at Maggie's gray monkey slippers. They grinned back. He didn't know if it was really happening, or just part of his confusion.
Things happened slowly. There was a small ball of dust not more than three inches in front of Bobby's nostrils. It loomed abnormally large from his twisted perspective. He could see tiny dust mites crawling hungrily through the tangle of balled dead skin flakes.
"Shit," Bobby whispered.
As if in answer the stuffed blue monkey reached around with one long dangle of an arm, rooted up into its tiny stuffed anus and then flung an amazingly large handful of blue dung. The dung landed in front of Bobby's mouth, not more than an inch from the dust ball.
Bobby stared, mesmerized by the fistful of blue dung. The dung looked like a wad of toxic plasticine, and it smelled like something that had fallen from out of the wrong end of a prehistoric moose. There were thin blue worms crawling through the dung, either a part of the dung or else eating the dung. Bobby wasn't sure. Tiny segmented wire-like worms with teeth that whirred and chewed like miniscule roto-rooter bear traps that looked to Bobby as if they could strip his flesh down into bone and shit him out into long strings of blue dung alive with a thousand more tiny blue nightmare worms.
A perfect circle.
"I have to go shopping," Maggie repeated, in a calm voice that might as well have been a recorded computer message. Press one for nonexistent customer service, press two for unheard complaints, press star for an alien anal-probing abduction. "Please not to try and stop me."
The blue nightmare worms reached out and began feeding upon the dust mites. Bobby wasn't certain how he could see this happening. It was as if his eyes had been suddenly focused into a pair of microscope-like lenses. It happened just that fast. His eyes zoomed in on the worms feasting upon the dust mites, and the dust mites feeding back, a symbiotic battle raging between ant armies. It was a virtual loop and Bobby was caught fast.
Bobby forced himself to look past the blue dung battlefield and up towards Maggie.
"What are you shopping for?" he called out, trying to catch her before she walked out of the door.
Maggie looked at her husband as if he were a display in a freak show. Clinically, you understand. There was a coldness in her eyes that was so absolutely un-Maggie-like. Bobby looked up at her. He felt as if he were watching her drown into a sea of plastic credit cards, their hard sharpened edges whittling her down into nothing but a pair of cold gazing eyes.
"You are to lie there in wait," she said.
Or maybe it was the monkey talking.
Bobby couldn't be sure.
He felt her gaze laser beam down into his skull. He saw dish sets and Tupperware and crates of ever-sharpening Ginsu knives and truckloads of sex toys fuelled by amphetamines. She would mortgage herself and sell her soul if she had to, all in order to feed that blue monkey on her back.
The blue dung worms kept devouring the dust mites, but the dust mites were fighting back, suckling their spiny snouts into the exposed underbellies of the worms. The two species were feeding off each other, becoming a single symbiotic ouroboros, a daisy chain of endlessly gnawing hunger.
Maggie walked towards the door.
"Wait, honey!" Bobby called out. "You don't have to go. You can shop right here."
She looked back, but Bobby watched the monkey. He watched the way the little beast's eyes seemed to sharpen and focus. He had captured its greed.
"On the internet," Bobby pointed at his computer. "You can reach the shops of the world without ever having to leave the comfort of your home. Ever hear of E-Bay? Here, I'll even give you my credit card."
Bobby reached for his wallet, sitting on the coffee table by his desk. He was desperate, bartering for time. What could he do? The monkey had come from the computer. From the spam he'd answered. It was the only answer. The only way Bobby could fix this mess was to find some way to get the monkey back inside the magic box.
"Come here. Sit down. Let me just get you hooked up."
Bobby crawled for the desk, keeping his back turned towards the monkey, a sort of passive-aggressive lure, hoping that his apparent inattention would hold its attention just long enough for him to think of some sort of a plan. He reached up, placing one hand on the keyboard. He imagined he could feel the hum of the computer, feel the power surging, sucking him inwards. Maybe he was imagining it. He moved his fingers blindly, keypunching at random.
Tar baby sit, don't say nothing.
H
e heard her monkey slippers scuff closer. Her shadow touched his spine like a cold blue tongue.
Bobby shivered and concentrated on his imaginary typing. Ching, ching, ching. Zen typing, with your eyes closed, trying to reach something higher than logic. Bobby moved his fingers in a blind typing mudra-mantra, nothing that made the remotest bit of sense, feeling the coldness inside Maggie breathe in and out behind his back.
Closer.
Closer.
He rolled and tried to grab her but she grabbed faster. The hard tangle of her hand entered his throat. He felt wet wiring yanked out of an ancient talking machine. He tried to speak but his voice drowned in the guzzle of a warm damp silence. She had ripped his throat out. He felt his blood spill down his chin.
It was a scary feeling, feeling all of his life running away from him. Bobby tried to hold his breath, as if will power could somehow save him.
"Bye," Maggie said, in her cold blue monkey voice, but all Bobby heard was "buy".
He lay there trying to breathe through the gargle fountain of his freshly opened throat. A crackling blue dust mite, the size of a fat man's thumb, scuttled past his face. The mite dipped its long sucker snout into a puddle of Bobby's blood and sluiced himself purple.
The mite grinned mouthlessly into Bobby's dying eyes.
Bobby lay there praying for the intervention of a monkey killing SWAT team. He told himself there had to be something out there, listening to him die. Some higher power. God sees the little sparrow, right? Bobby had led a good life. He had petted a dog or two, and hadn't kicked any old women that he could remember. Surely that ought to qualify for a little good karma, or at worst a divine pity-fuck.
He lay there dreaming about angels and cavalry and a young Bruce Willis riding up in shining white armor to save the day as Maggie monkey-slippered out the door.
Then the door opened again. She'd come back. He knew she would. He imagined himself smiling, but the nerves around his mouth weren't talking to his imagination. She bent down and reached his wallet up off of his desk.