by C. K. Vile
He needed coffee. That’s why he was at Bonnie and Chuck’s. Not because he wanted to see her.
He had a real knack for fiction.
Bonnie put her hand on her chest as though her breath had been stolen. Chuck stood up. Straight up. As it turned out, he wasn’t as short as he appeared at first blush.
“Hey now, buddy boy.”
Bonnie raised a hand. “Chuckie.” She turned her attention back to their customer. “Nick, dear, what’s wrong? I don’t understand, is everything okay with you and Dani?”
Where to begin? He had to tell them something; anything. Everything? She lived in their place.
“Guys, I’m sorry. I can’t apologize enough. I–”
The stairs in the back of the store creaked. Danielle stood there. She clutched at one arm with the other.
“I thought I heard you. Can we talk?”
Yes. No. He wasn’t sure anymore.
The Littleberrys glanced back and forth between Nick and Danielle. The tension between them hung in the air, invisible but all-encompassing.
Danielle fidgeted. “Nick, please. Come upstairs for a minute. I can explain everything.”
He doubted that. But Bonnie and Chuck’s presence made it harder to say no. He didn’t want Danielle to explode in front of them.
“Sure. Sure, yeah, we can talk.”
He followed Danielle up the stairs. His feet were heavy, like he wore sacks of flour for shoes.
Danielle opened the door to her room. A sharp smell knocked him back. Whatever it was, she didn’t flinch. She was probably used to it.
The room was small. There wasn’t a lot in it, but what there was had been scattered around haphazardly. A mattress sat on the floor in the corner. Clothes were strewn about. Bins and tackle-boxes filled with art supplies sat open, their contents overflowing.
The source of the smell was obvious. Containers filled with chemicals littered the place, some open and spilling onto the floor. He didn’t recognize half of them.
Paintings and art-prints lined her walls. Each one depicted a scene more morbid or perverse than the last. Mutilation, murder, mayhem. In another context, Nick would’ve been fascinated. Given that she was a flaming psychopath, he struggled to keep his bladder in check.
One painting in particular jumped out at him. It sat on the easel near the end of her bed. It was a giant fly, bound to human flesh, bloodied and broken. The dark-red paint that created the ample gore was a different texture than the rest. He looked back at Danielle, gaze fixed on the crude bandage wrapped around her arm.
“You uh… you sure do put yourself into your work, don’t you?”
Danielle snorted and played coy. “You heard me snort again.”
Nick was quiet.
Danielle reached out to him. “Remember? Remember our first date?”
He flinched and pulled away.
She stiffened. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I lied to you. It’s true. I knew who you were.”
“Yeah, no shit. I gathered that when I saw my fucking name tattooed on your arm.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Not sure I want to.”
Her eyes implored him to listen. “I grew up with no one, do you get that? My parents forgot my sixteenth birthday because they were loaded. I had nothing.” Danielle scratched at her scalp and continued. “I had nothing and I found you. I found your writing. It spoke to me. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone. Do you know how special that is?”
She said all the right things. The things he wanted to hear. But she was good at that. “I can’t trust you.”
“You can, you can, I promise. Look, I’ll even tell you a secret. I was saving it as a surprise, but I got you a gift.”
Nick prepared to run in case it was an ax. Or butt plug. “What? What is it?”
“It’s not here yet. But it will be soon.”
Nick repeated himself. “What is it?”
“Sweetie, I can’t tell you, it would ruin the surprise.”
More secrets. Nope.
“Whatever it is, take it back. I don’t want it.”
“I can’t ‘take it back’,” she rolled her eyes like he was a child. “Don’t be silly.”
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’m leaving. Don’t contact me again. Don’t contact me, don’t contact my agent. You’re not my girlfriend.”
An ache unhinged his lungs. When he said the words they became real.
“I am. I am your girlfriend, Nick. I am.” Danielle dug violently at her scalp and bit her lip. Blood streamed down her chin. The ache was replaced by a jackhammer.
“Leave me alone. The best thing you can do is leave. There’s nothing for you here. Leave Forest Down. Because if you come near me again, I’ll call the cops. Cops, lawyers, whatever I have to do. Got it?”
Nick turned and left the room. He jumped down the stairs three at a time.
He lowered his head and moved past Bonnie and Chuck, their mouths agape. Bonnie reached for him. “Nick, dear, is everything okay?”
He shook his head and kept moving. He’d explain later. He couldn’t be here.
Danielle screamed on the floor above. It drowned out the bell hanging over the front door.
The light of day blinded him. He squinted and refused to stop. Nick ran directly into a wall and fell back onto his ass. He looked up. Not a wall. A man.
“Watch where you’re going, Dawkins.”
Deputy Kern.
Nick clambered to his feet. Keep moving. Just keep moving.
Kern shoulder-blocked him. “You see that, Roberts? Dawkins checked me.”
Roberts said nothing. Nick tried to move past the two of them, but Kern caught him with his hand.
“Where you going, Dawkins?”
Rage welled up in Nick. He clenched his fist.
“Not today, Kern.”
“Oh, not today, Dawkins? Don’t need us, do you? We’ll remember that the next time we get a call in the middle of the night because your cooze is serenading you.”
Swing. The hell with it, swing. Worth it. Prison might be safer than the real world anyway.
Roberts moved between Kern and Nick. “Okay, okay, move it along, Dawkins.” He looked squarely at Nick. “Not worth it,” the look said.
Nick took a deep breath and unclenched his fist. His nails had dug into his palm, leaving tiny grooves in his skin. He nodded at Roberts, who patted him on the shoulder.
The rest of the day was a blur. Some of it—like how he couldn’t seem to recall the drive home—was simply nerves and a quiet fury. The rest could be attributed to the bottle of whiskey he nursed the second he got home.
Nick wasn’t what anyone would call a drinker. He usually had a nip after completing a good story. A celebratory toast to his new baby.
But that day was different. He was a ball of anxiety and he wanted a minor sedative to calm him. After a drink, he’d be a little numb, if not better. After two, even more so. Three, and he was off to the races.
He spent the night on his couch, staring at the web of black and broken glass of his flat-screen. The sun fell and so did the level of whiskey in the bottle on his coffee table. Texts from Blaire stacked up on his phone. Bits and pieces of them cut through the haze.
Movie rights.
Trumble.
Not so bad.
Nick finally picked the phone up and responded. It leapt out of his hand and onto the floor. He picked it up off the ground and checked the screen. Not broken. The time slapped him in the face.
1:50.
It couldn’t have been that late.
Nick stumbled across the living room and toward the balcony. The 2:15 Express would be on its way directly. He lost his footing along the way and tumbled forward.
Crack
The impact of his head on the glass of the door damn-near knocked him senseless. He collapsed to the floor and was glad no one was around to see it. Then again, who would be? He had no one. Except maybe the Littleberrys. He wondered if t
hey were still up. He could invite them over for… what the hell did people that age do? There was a game they played. What was it called? Bridge? He didn’t even know how to play Bridge.
He picked himself up off the hardwood and looked at the glass door. A huge crack ran through it. He must have a terrifically hard head.
Nick slid the balcony door open and fell onto the deck. He rolled onto his back and stared at the miniscule points of light that hung in the blackness above.
A part of him thought about trying to climb into his chair, but reconsidered. He was fine right there. It was perfect. He shivered.
Nick fished the cigarettes and lighter out of his pocket. On the third try he got one lit. He put it in his mouth and realized he’d lit the wrong end. He stubbed it out on the deck. Lighting another would be an awful lot of effort. Fuck it.
He drifted in and out of consciousness.
The 2:15 Express whistled. Faint and muffled, as though underwater.
The world was still out there. She was still out there.
“Fuck you,” he murmured.
The train responded back.
“Piece-shit train.”
Another whistle.
“Go ‘way.”
And everything did.
Chapter 15
CorpseFlower typed at her keyboard. The energy drinks did their work and fueled her fingers like the chubby little pistons in a combustible engine.
She was on fire. Half-a-hemisphere away, a neck-bearded douche-nozzle was about to regret the day he posted naked pictures of his ex-girlfriend. His computer was now so virused the CDC would be tasked with reclassifying it. Another five-hundred miles east, a Ku Klux Klan member was about to find his supposedly anonymous message-board postings had been e-mailed to the African-American general manager of the shipping company he worked for. And in Washington D.C., a senator’s wife, moments ago, discovered the nude pictures her husband’s mistress had sent him. Corpse did that last one for the sheer shits-and-giggles of it. She had no political affiliation.
A tweet here, a message-board post there. Corpse navigated the internet faster than most people could think.
She closed her eyes to give them a moment’s rest. Her fingers didn’t stop moving.
Flypaper.
She opened her eyes and tabbed through half-a-dozen windows. The name was so familiar. She couldn’t put her finger on it. A movie? A book?
No. No no no. It wasn’t a title.
It was a screen-name.
The archives of Nick’s official website opened up before her. Post-after-post. Years’ worth. They went back to the day she’d set it up for him.
Where was it, where was it..?
Bingo.
“Flypap3r.”
Corpse remembered this; but hadn’t remembered the screen-names involved. Flypap3r was one of a handful. They’d started a thread on Nick’s site that had gone way out into left-field. Pornographic and violent images. Attempts to track down his home address.
It had been an infection, and like any good moderator, she’d cut it out and cauterized the wound. The offensive members were banned at an IP level. There were ways around that, but most of these troglodytes wouldn’t be that savvy.
It seemed one of the banned members, Flypap3r, had found her way to Nick.
What else had she been up to?
Corpse plowed through traditional search engines for mentions of Flypap3r first. She found little. Fairly innocent photos and a handful of blog postings. A couple of the posts made mention of Nick or his books, but nothing too off-the-wall. On the surface of the internet, it appeared she’d stopped the inflammatory or offensive actions that had gotten her banned from Nick’s site.
Corpse was intimately familiar with ‘crazy’ behavior on the web, and given Flypap3r’s real-life activities, it was unlikely the postings had stopped. They’d most likely surface elsewhere.
She dug deeper, into the places on the net where upstanding members of the community didn’t go. Call them whatever you want: the deepweb, the darknet. These places were a Shangri-La for people who didn’t want their activities seen.
Ninety-odd percent of internet users wouldn’t know these places existed. But in the land of the blind, CorpseFlower was Queen.
It took her less than twenty seconds to find where Flypap3r and her ilk had gone to ground.
A site called ‘Myiasis’.
‘Myiasis’, meaning ‘disease resulting from the infestation of living tissue by fly larvae’.
Those banned from Nick’s official site had simply created their own space to congregate. And there on Myiasis, they hadn’t simply thrived... they’d multiplied. The site boasted over three-thousand ‘members’, a significant increase from the couple-dozen miscreants Corpse had originally culled.
Flypap3r was one of the most well-known and prolific, especially in recent days. The steady stream of posts dating back to the site’s infancy had cut off three months ago, for two weeks, and started again.
The tone of the posts had changed. They’d been obsessive before, but now they were certain. The bitch was on a mission.
Corpse clicked through the most recent postings. She came across one that made her abnormally hot blood run cold.
A picture of Flypap3r and Nick, together.
The caption beneath it: He’s all mine now. The happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. The stream of little hearts that followed matched Corpse’s pulse.
She reached for her phone. A half-empty energy drink fell to the floor. The contents fizzed in a puddle.
Corpse scrolled through the torrent of profanity-filled responses as Nick’s phone rang on the other end of the line. Some were supportive of Flypap3r’s efforts. Most were pissed off. None of the freaks pointed out she was bat shit crazy, probably because they were too. It was as if they were pissed she’d claimed the carcass first.
“Pick up, pick up, pick up.”
Corpse sifted through the posts littering Myiasis. Posts about where he lived, what they’d do with his corpse, what he’d taste like grilled.
One poster had a healthy regard for urethral probes.
It was a train wreck of human toxicity and Nick Dawkins was at the center of it all.
Nick’s voicemail picked up. “Do the thing at the thing.”
Beeeeeeep.
Corpse’s brain moved faster than her mouth could follow. The words came out in a salad.
“Nick, fuck’s sake. Flypaper! Remember the crazy-thread? I shut down that crazy-thread a couple years back. She was one of the posters. There’s a whole community of these fuckers. It’s crazy-town U.S.A. and she’s the mayor. Extricate yourself ay-sap!”
There wasn’t much else to say and she ended the call with an odd note of normalcy.
“Call me back, motha fucka.”
***
Nobody But Me. Again.
No. No no no.
Nick sat up. Every inch of him hurt. He was sprawled in an awkward position across the bed. He didn’t remember getting there.
The music pounded through his house and into his skull.
Holy shit, his head.
He moved to get out of bed. His shoulder agonized him.
He stood up and moved to his bedroom door.
That music. It came from his living room. It couldn’t have been her. Surely not. The pit of his stomach was made of lead. It had to be her. It couldn’t be anyone else.
Nobody but her.
Nick trod from his bedroom and across the hardwood floor of his living room. He needed to lie down and let unconsciousness free him from reality.
He didn’t remember the night before, but the state of the living room filled the blanks. Empty bottle of whiskey. A massive crack in his sliding glass door. He’d been damn lucky, despite the knot in his forehead. He could’ve been seriously hurt, or worse.
A sizzle came from the kitchen. The scrape of metal on metal. And humming.
Nick walked into the kitchen. Danielle stood at the stove, scr
ambling eggs in a skillet with a spatula.
“Morning, sunshine,” she trilled, the songbird with the cracked tune.
Not good. Where was his phone? Danielle beat away at the eggs. “It looked like you had fun last night.”
His legs wanted to give. It could’ve been the massive hangover or the vertigo induced by the living, breathing nightmare cooking breakfast in his kitchen.
Danielle seasoned the eggs with gusto. Nausea gripped him. Again, either the hangover or the mental image of his mother ‘seasoning’ his food as a child. It was probably a little of column ‘A’, little of column ‘B’.
“I’m sorry we argued yesterday, but I want to move past it. I made you scramby eggs, just how you like them.”
He turned and almost tipped sideways, and moved toward the living room.
The maniac in his kitchen shouted after him. “They’re almost ready!”
Phone, phone, where was his damn phone?
The balcony. The last thing he remembered was the balcony. He used his couch to prop himself up and lurched toward the balcony door.
He blinked at the cracked glass. First his TV, now this. This was why he couldn’t have nice things.
His head throbbed. He begged it to shut up long enough to evict the lunatic. Then he could sleep, puke, whatever. He’d have a whole day to be incapacitated.
Danielle followed him with a plate of eggs. “Here you go, sweetie.”
Come on, man, don’t vomit again.
He slid open the glass door and waded out onto the balcony. The air felt thick, and he swam through it.
“I found you out here. Poor thing, you were freezing to death.”
He opened his mouth and was thankful only words came out. “How’d you get in here?”
He looked for his phone on the table, no luck. The wooden deck? Nope.
“I climbed up the balcony.” Danielle spoke in a casual tone that unnerved him more than if she’d screamed it. “You left the front door locked, silly, and forgot to give me a key.”
That was it. Whatever he’d felt for this girl was gone, replaced with urge to cause her extreme bodily harm.
Nick spun around. His head, his stomach, and his shoulder rebelled in unison. He ignored them and slapped the plate of eggs out of Danielle’s hand. It smashed to the ground. The broken pieces were metaphorical.