Flypaper: Dark Psychological Thriller - Book 1

by C. K. Vile

  “Down here is the room I stayed in. I asked to stay in it specifically.”

  Danielle whispered back. “What happened in it?”

  “This married couple stayed there in the 70's. They'd been on the road all night, and were already fighting when they checked in. They carried on and on all through the place. Everyone heard them.”

  They reached the last door on the left and Nick placed his hand on the knob. “Old-timey doors. They don't bother to lock them when no one is in the room.” Nick turned the knob, achingly slow. The door opened, creaking as it inched its way in.

  The room looked more like a bedroom than a hotel room. A single mirror. No television. Empty bed with an elaborate metal frame, its white sheets turned back for an eventual guest.

  “So this couple fight and fight, and according to the people down the hall, there's this loud crash, then outright screaming.”

  Nick pulled the chain on the desk lamp sitting next to the bed. A dull yellow light tried to fill the room but fell short.

  “A guest calls the cops, and when they get here, someone inside is still screaming their lungs out. The police bust in of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Nick pointed at the large oval mirror on the wall. “During the fight they'd broken one of these mirrors.”

  Danielle's eagerness to see where this went was transparent. Her hands twitched at her sides. Nick relished that look. It was the look he imagined on his readers' faces when he wrote.

  “The woman had jammed a shard of glass into her husband's face. He was still on the floor, screaming his lungs out.”

  “Jesus.”

  Nick crossed the room to its sole window, the burgundy curtains pulled closed. “She was standing here at the window and had another shard of glass in her hand. The police tell her to put her hands up. And she does, but she-”

  Nick motioned his finger across his Adam's apple. “She cuts her own throat, standing right here, looking out this window.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Nick had her. She stood directly behind him, hanging on his every word. He stepped to the side of the window.

  “The stories about this room say if you look out this window, sometimes you'll see the reflection of the woman in it, slicing her jugular.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Nick tugged at the curtains. “You think so?”

  Danielle stood up straight, steeling herself. “Do it.”

  “You sure?”

  Danielle nodded.

  Nick yanked the curtains back, and the darkness outside framed a pale figure with long black hair and eyes like pitch.

  Danielle jumped off the floor. “Fuck!”

  Nick howled with laughter. Danielle did a double-take at her own reflection in the window.

  “Fuck!” She yelled again, but her grin betrayed her indignation. “You fucker.”

  She shoved him in the shoulder, but he didn’t fault her. He deserved it.

  “Oh my god, so worth it,” Nick gasped. He saw spots. “I’m sorry.”

  Danielle snorted and waved a hand at him. “It’s fine. Best night ever.”

  They killed the light, shut the door, and wandered back down the hallway toward the stairs. The descent downwards was quiet, the silence broken only by the occasional giggle.

  A noise on the second floor caught Nick’s ear. He looked around the corner of the stairwell and down the hall. A sliver of faint light cut across the floor.

  One of the doorways was cracked open.

  An unearthly moan ricocheted along the walls.

  Nick looked back at Danielle. Her expression was alight with excitement.

  He couldn’t say no to that.

  Nick held his breath. Every step down the hall of The Shady Thicket Inn’s second floor made the cheap boards creak and groan. The hairs of the back of his neck raved.

  The unearthly moans emanating from the cracked door persisted. A quick glance back at Danielle confirmed her resolve. She wanted to know what was in that room as badly as Nick did.

  A click sounded down the hallway. Nick froze. He looked back at his partner-in-trespassing.

  Danielle clutched a small black device. Nick squinted in the dark. It was a damn Taser.

  Nick whispered, “Is that a Taser?”

  Danielle nodded.

  “Why do you have a Taser?”

  “I’m a single woman, shit happens.” She spoke so softly Nick had to crane his ear next to her mouth.

  “Are you going to Taser the ghost?”

  Danielle stuck her tongue out.

  Nick shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

  Another moan brought their attention back to the mystery at hand. Nick stepped closer to the door and peered through the crack and into the dim room, but his field of vision was near non-existent.

  A figure moved across the room. Nick jumped back and tottered, maintaining his balance. Barely.

  Danielle was undeterred: she snuck past Nick and nudged the door slightly.

  The beam of light that poured from the room widened and enveloped Danielle, making her pale face even paler. Her jaw dropped and she moved her hand to her open mouth. Whatever it was, it must have been horrifying.

  Nick leaned closer. He was woefully unprepared for the sight that greeted him.

  The night clerk sat on the end of the bed, stark naked aside from the peanut butter that covered nearly every inch of him. The parts not slathered in the stuff indicated he was more liverspot than man.

  Danielle turned back to Nick and hissed, “Are you seeing this?”

  The clerk rubbed peanut butter on his right arm. It completed the oily suit. Almost completed it, anyway.

  Nick and Danielle stared in collective shock as the desk clerk stood and took another glob of peanut butter from the jar in his hand. The old guy hummed and gave his genitalia the extraordinary focus he thought it deserved.

  This was a train wreck; the kind of horror that made your soul die a little, but demanded your full attention all the same. Nick feared his retinas were scarred.

  The time had passed for Nick and Danielle to abandon ship. The situation had crossed from Scooby-Doo shenanigans into the realm of the sublimely disturbing.

  Nick tapped Danielle on the shoulder and stepped back toward the stairs. The trip back to the parking lot was silent, but frantic.

  “What the flipping fuck?” Danielle summed the previous five minutes up perfectly.

  Nick ran his fingers through his hair. A strangely familiar feeling overwhelmed him.

  “Right?” He laughed aloud. The sound was relief given a voice. “You have to know. That wasn’t what I had in mind when I said I’d show you something scary.”

  “It’s okay.” Danielle held her chest and caught her breath. “That’s something we’ll tell those two kids of ours someday. Later, when they’re older.”

  ***

  Nick pulled up outside Bonnie and Chuck’s. He was full of nervous energy and his palms were slick with sweat. He looked at Danielle and inhaled. Was this the bit where he kissed her? Was that still how it worked? Times had changed.

  Whether she sensed his hesitation or not, Danielle removed uncertainty from the equation and leaned in. The kiss took his breath away.

  “Hit me up tomorrow, yeah?”

  Nick had no argument against that request. “Sure, I’ll do that.”

  “Promise?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Danielle pulled her smart-phone out of her purse and unlocked it. “First date! I need a picture.”

  The concept of the ‘selfie’ perplexed him, but to hell with it. Everyone else in the world seemed to do it, and he was in no position to cast stones. He leaned in close.

  A flash threw spots into Nick’s vision. His sight gradually returned as Danielle tapped at her phone.

  “A little post for my friends.”

  Nick rubbed his eyes. “I was under the impression you didn’t have any friends.”

  “Oh, they’re online frie
nds. Other reclusive artist-types. People I’ve met on message boards, that sort of thing. Better than no one.”

  “Social media. You’d think I’d be more into that sort of thing, I’m not.”

  Danielle studied him, as though she were fascinated by this strange new creature she’d discovered. He looked human, but couldn’t be. He didn’t blog, post, and tweet every stray thought that ran through his head?

  “Why is that?” she asked curiously.

  Nick tapped at his steering-wheel nervously. “I could try to explain it, but it’ll make me sound old. Older I guess I should say.”

  Danielle put her hand under her chin, ready to listen. “Try me.”

  He tried to organize his thoughts. This had only come up in conversation with his agent and his webmaster, and both times he’d sounded like someone trying to expound on why he wanted the damn kids to stay off his lawn.

  “It’s not real. I mean, it is, but it isn’t. Okay, for example. You’re ‘friends’ with someone on the internet, right? And this person posts, you know, ‘Gettin’ ready for the weekend’ or whatever. And they post pictures of their food. Because you give a shit about the strawberry shortcake they’re eating, right?”

  Danielle snorted and covered her face.

  Nick pulled her hand away. “Stop that, it’s cute when you snort. But anyway, your ‘friend’ is posting all this stuff that gives you a glimpse of their life, but that’s all it is. It’s the tiniest of glimpses. It’s not them, it’s not who they are. It’s the bits they allow you to see.”

  He grabs her hand with both of his.

  “This. This is real. This is human connection. Talking face to face. The rest is smoke and mirrors. It seems to be all you get from people now.”

  A sadness crept over him.

  “Then again, I don’t get much human connection these days, fake or otherwise. So I dunno.”

  Danielle put her other hand on his.

  “That’s okay, you have me now.”

  She kissed Nick on the cheek and climbed out of the car.

  He drove home on a cloud.

  His heart kept a steady pace long after he’d arrived home. He stood on his balcony and smoked in an effort to calm himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt like this. Pumped. Jazzed to be alive. Had it been so long since he felt genuine excitement that it was such a foreign concept?

  He looked through the balcony door at the clock on the wall of his living room.

  Almost a quarter past two.

  He waited. Any second now.

  A train whistled in the distance.

  “Hello train.”

  The train whistled again.

  “And a good evening to you as well.”

  It was the damnedest thing. Every single night of the week, every week of the year, at 2:15 a.m., this train rolled through on the way from Wherever-the-Hell to Who-the-Fuck-Knows. Every night. The 2:15 Express.

  There had been one night, the previous year when the train didn’t come by as expected. Nick had spent over an hour concocting scenarios in which the world had ended by zombie plague or Rapture or a predominantly urban-based alien invasion. He could’ve looked at his phone at any time and seen people live-tweeting a broadcast of The Shawshank Redemption, but that would’ve ruined the fun.

  The train whistled sporadically, passing in the night. Nick exhaled the last of his cigarette and ground it into his mouth ashtray.

  The urge to write took him by surprise.

  Nick’s early years as a writer were dominated by late nights and energy drinks, but when he was consumed by the West Coast beast of brunches, he became accustomed to a more traditional schedule.

  He poured himself a drink, but truth-be-told, he was already drunk on the potential of a new connection with an honest-to-god human being, and the nostalgia of a keyboard beneath his fingers during the witching hour.

  The stereo button clicked beneath his fingers and music filled his house. He looked at the blank word document on his laptop and cracked his knuckles.

  The words flowed from him like honey.

  The clack-clack-clack of the keystrokes coalesced into a short story. Simple. Elegant. Perfect.

  The story told of a haunted inn on the edge of a quiet mountain town. It told of the night clerk who worked there and did perverse things when no one paid attention. The clerk was forever alone, yet never alone. The inn’s supernatural inhabitants never gave him a moment of true peace.

  The story’s protagonist was a girl. She was odd, but in a good way. New in town, she needed a place to stay the night. Mind-boggling horror and hilarity ensued.

  Blood and peanut-butter. Shards of glass. The story wrote itself.

  Chapter 5

  The final words of the tale fell into place effortlessly.

  The sheer beauty of what he’d accomplished both mystified and terrified him. He’d forgotten what he was capable of; what he could do when his head was in the right place and the stars of inspiration were perfectly aligned.

  Jesus, how long had he been asleep at the wheel?

  Nick pushed himself away from the kitchen table, sending the chair behind him clattering to the floor. He leaned over the laptop and scrolled through the first short story he’d completed in recent memory. He skimmed over the entire thing, savoring each and every one of his favorite parts.

  The salty culmination of months of frustration rolled down his cheeks.

  A long moment passed, and Nick bounded excitedly over to his stereo and tapped several buttons. The mechanism inside clicked and whirred.

  Silence.

  The long, loud note marked the beginning of the song, Nobody But Me.

  On a night similar to this one, a lifetime ago, Nick had written one of his first pieces of short fiction. That earlier piece had poured out as though he’d been the vessel for a divine muse with a grotesque sense of humor. In much the same manner, this Danielle-inspired work had poured from him, a work of serendipitous brilliance.

  The short story was called Pet Project, about a young boy who found his path in the slaughter of small animals. The boy played God by bringing death. Not content with the destruction of life, he sought to create. He stitched the animals together into a brand new amalgamation. An animalgamation.

  It was a variation of Frankenstein. Nick drew inspiration from the Mary Shelley classic over the years. It was full of killer themes. A man who wanted to play God? Check. A monster who wanted to know love and find his place in the world? Check. What was there not to love about it?

  And on that night long ago, Nick had completed one of his first works, his own modern-day Frankenstein, as Nobody But Me had cued up on his playlist.

  Nick’s immense satisfaction for the animal-stitching story fused with the song’s lyrics in his mind. The combination spoke to Nick on a level he’d rarely experienced before or since. It instantly became his personal anthem.

  Since then, no project was complete until the moment when everything clicked into place in that perfect way and Nick got-the-fuck-down to that song. His ‘braindance’, he called it. Only then was a work complete. Sometimes it came easily and swiftly. Other times, it took weeks or months of rewrites and revisions.

  This particular braindance had been a long time coming.

  The bass on Nick’s stereo shook the walls. His Screaming Mimi award for Best Long Fiction 2007 danced precariously near the edge of its shelf.

  Forest Down had never before seen such rampant booty-shaking. Most of its residents would’ve found it appalling.

  Most, but not all. Not her.

  Nick smiled and performed ‘the robot’ on his balcony, badly.

  ***

  Danielle was in love.

  Nick Dawkins was the one for her. She knew it through-and-through, from her head to her toes. The moment she’d bumped into him in Bonnie and Chuck’s store had been the culmination of her entire life.

  The meet-cute. The misunderstanding. The apology. The date.

  It came toget
her how it was supposed to; better than she’d ever dreamed possible.

  And the best part? Nick felt the same. She could tell by the way he nailed ‘the robot’ on his balcony.

  He was so adorable, holding her hand, looking nervous about kissing her good night. When they’d said goodbye, she didn’t want the night to be over. She couldn’t help but follow him home.

  She hopped into her car, her 1994 Shitbox, and drove out to his place. Fourteen minutes precisely, the same as it’d taken a dozen times before. She could map every mile of road, every pothole, like the back of her hand.

  She’d parked a few dozen yards down the road so she wouldn’t spook him. She’d wandered down to her favorite spot in the woods below Nick’s balcony. She’d found him writing. Not writing like she’d seen a multitude of other times, fidgety with frequent smoke breaks. This had been different. He never moved from his chair. And when he did, he put on this song. The “No no” song. She didn’t recognize it off-hand, but that’s why Google was invented.

  Nick danced under the starry sky. ‘Nobody But Me’ echoed off the trees, nature’s own Dolby surround.

  Her heart beat along with the song. Nick danced in time with her blood.

  This was her effect on him. She brought out the best in him. Made him a better person. Just as he’d made her a better person when she discovered his writing so long ago.

  Danielle lost herself in the music. Nick’s joy washed over her like a river of love, and she allowed the current to move through her. She swayed in the moonlight that pierced the dense trees, scattering rays on the dirt and dead leaves beneath them. She played in them like a child in the rain and glanced up at Nick’s house and froze.

  Nick had stopped dancing. Instead, he stood at the railing and gazed into the darkness, staring intently in her direction.

  Danielle backed behind a tree, without making a sound. She was fairly certain he hadn’t seen her. That was good; she didn’t want to come on too strong. He had plenty of crazies to deal with and she certainly didn’t want to give the impression she was another.

  She peeked from behind the tree, careful not to draw attention to herself. The last thing she wanted was to scare him.