by Adam Vine
lurk
by Adam Vine
Copyright 2016 adam christopher kennedy
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Cover Design by George Cotronis and Adam Vine
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
PRINT ISBN 978-1539805328
For my sister, who loves a good scare.
Special thanks to Hannah and Dean,
without whom this book would not exist.
They see you, the note said.
Three simple words, scribbled in blue ink on the back of a Polaroid picture we found in a shoe box buried under our house.
Three old words, written decades before I ever saw them, penned in a sloppy, drunken hand, the ink as faded as the picture they were printed on. The grime was so thick it wiped off on my fingertips.
Three little words that should have meant nothing, but as soon as I read them, I knew they were meant for me.
Part 1:
The Pictures under Sunny Hill
Jay’s headlights bounced over the lip of the driveway as he pulled in. The bottom of his rebuilt 1950s ice cream truck scraped on the gravel, drawing cheers from the people smoking and drinking on the sun deck above our garage.
It was our last year of college, and my roommates and I were throwing a New Year’s Eve party. Most of the other guests had already arrived, and the house had been fortified with all the handles of cheap liquor, cases of beer, and weed we could afford. Three of my friends from home, including my best childhood friend, Jay, were in the truck that had just pulled in. The night was young, and the open bottle of our youth was decanting.
The ice cream truck’s engine died a whimpering little death, wheezing and sputtering as Jay jumped from the driver’s side door, wearing that same infectious grin I’d known since we'd first met, two goofy kids bonding over our mutual love of X-men cards on the playground in the 4th grade.
“Drew Mayhem!” Jay said, dragging me in for a hug.
I pulled back to admire his outfit. “Looking dapper tonight, buddy.” He was wearing a newsboy hat, wrinkled corduroys, and a shiny new pair of leather shoes. His beard and hair had both gone the Jesus route, long and fashionably unkempt. His right front tooth was chipped from a brawl he’d gotten into at a party during high school. The gap whistled when he spoke.
At his heels bounded the most googly-eyed pug I’d ever seen.
“Who’s this?” I said, giving the puppy a scratch behind his ears.
“This is Popeye.”
“Where’s Princess?”
Jay sighed. “We had to put her down. She was old, man.”
My heart sank. Princess had been Jay’s dog since we were kids, a big, shaggy golden retriever who used to lay her head on my lap when we played video games. But my sadness vanished to see Jay again. He was my oldest friend, and the only person I had ever been able to really trust.
“I knew this was going to be another one of your epic ragers. Yo, check out all these honeys!” Jay craned his neck to admire the girls chatting on the wrap-around deck, then raised his arms up over his head and howled, “You bastard! It’s good to be back at Sunny Hill. I missed this place.”
Popeye panted.
I didn’t want to gloat, but Jay was right. Our place was one of the best party houses in town. Jell-O wrestling, birthday bashes, masked Halloween balls, New Year’s Eve get-togethers for friends in town who hadn’t gone home for the holidays; if it could be celebrated with alcohol, it happened at Sunny Hill.
I put on my humblest smile. “Tonight’s gonna be insane.”
Jay put his hand on my shoulder. “Been too long, man. Haven’t seen you since the last time I was down here. What was that, a year ago?”
“A year and some change.”
Jay pulled a joint out of his hair and lit it with a zippo shaped like a Star Trek phaser. “What’s the plan? We gonna start with some shots? Reminisce about old times and whatnot?”
“And whatnot,” I said.
The other two guys who rode with Jay walked up to us. I knew Rob and Ry from high school, but not well. They were townies, Real Bad Dudes with invisible steel collars and tattooed sleeves; tall, corn-fed white boys, the kind you didn’t see too often in our liberal college surf town. After two hours crammed in the front cabin of Jay’s truck, they looked like they needed a drink.
“Whup whup!” Rob said, giving me a fist bump so hard it stung. I tried not to flinch. I didn’t want to look like a little bitch in front of tough guys like Rob and Ry.
“What up, Rob? Oh shit, is that Ryan Garcia? Welcome to my pad, brother! Wassup wassup?”
“Just chillin', Drew,” Ry said, shaking my hand. He was smaller than Rob, but his grip was strong. “You look good. Lose some weight since the last time I saw you?”
Nope. I’m about forty pounds heavier, actually. Pushing 280 right now, I thought, glancing at the huge bulge of my gut protruding through my vintage horror movie t-shirt, the original 1980 teaser poster for The Shining, black block letters over a faded yellow background.
“It’s possible,” I said.
“Oh. Cool. Keep that shit up,” Ry said.
I adjusted my glasses. I’d gone with my dad’s old bifocals for the night, which were big, brown, and hipster, mainly because they made my face look less fat. “Anyway, the booze is down in the garage.” I pointed at the well-lit door at the bottom of the driveway underneath the sun deck, where the music was coming from. “We built a bar down there.”
“Damn! We gettin' fancy tonight!” Jay said.
“You roll out a red carpet for us, too, Drew?” Ry chided.
“You know you always get the star treatment at my house, guys,” I said. “Now, go get shit-faced. And happy New Year! I’ll be down there in a minute.”
Popeye scampered after them.
I saw another car pulling in the driveway. It was the guys from the band.
I had a feeling they weren't going to play for long, if they got the chance to set up at all. Black clouds had devoured most of the starlight, threatening rain. I knew Carl, the vocalist, from one of my film studies classes. He waved to me through the open window of the car and asked if I really thought they had time. I said “probably,” but he wasn’t convinced.
My feeling was right. After about ten minutes of standing around, the band said it wasn't going to happen and drove off, leaving our New Year’s Eve bash without the live music I’d promised so many of our guests. A few didn’t take it so well and abruptly decided they were only “stopping by.”
But for the most part, we had a good turnout. I stuck with my three hometown friends and my roommates, Carter and Natalia, for most of the night. Our fourth roommate, Sam, was back home in L.A. for the holidays, and wasn’t due back until the second week of January. Jay had already called dibs on his bed.
We drank in the garage next to the makeshift bar Carter and I had built from three spare bedroom doors we'd found in the storage space under our house. I’d hung Christmas lights and cleaned all four couches. I lit incense over the bar to help cover the musty smell of damp earth that seeped in from t
he basement when the weather got bad.
By the time it started to rain, we were all too hammered to notice.
***
Sunny Hill was a local legend long before the four of us lived there. We called it Sunny Hill because it was at the top of Sunny Hill Drive, an upscale cul-de-sac in the Santa Cruz hills close to our university; the four of us, naturally, were the Sunny Hill Crew.
Sunny Hill was a huge, four-bedroom house, where we spent our final college years smoking and day-drinking ourselves into inebriated oblivion. It was the only student house on the block, run-down and peeling on the outside, smoke-stained and messy from the constant chaos and partying inside. Our neighbors were retirees or dot-commers with canyons in their backyards and gated, landscaped driveways, who we mostly never saw.
Sunny Hill had seen better days, most of them in the seventies. It was two stories, with a wrap-around deck that opened to a wide patio above the garage, and ocean views from every room. Your first impression walking in through the gaudy crystal glass front door, once you had shaken the image of the rotting shake roof and faded blue stucco exterior from your mind, was that it could have been a house used to film porn back in the age of big bush and young Ron Jeremy. Cracked yellow floor tiles clicked and whispered under your feet as you entered. Hanging domed lampshades bathed each room in a pleasant tawny light, but never the corners. The kitchen was all oiled, ornate wooden cabinets, and the patched-up hallways were a graveyard of stories and good times. The living room looked like an upturned boat, with its twenty-foot ceiling and huge wooden eaves. There were panoramic windows where you could watch the lights of the Boardwalk come on just after sunset from our giant, L-shaped brown velour couch.
Your car was guaranteed to bottom out if you drove down our suicide-steep driveway too fast, and there was enough room underneath the house to hold not only a full two car garage, but an earth-floor basement that ran back all the way under Sunny Hill which we, and many previous generations of tenants before us, had used as storage.
It was in that storage space – in the vast darkness underneath Sunny Hill – where I found the pictures, and the note.
It was our own private castle on the California Coast. Sometimes we’d sit on the roof and drink forties or smoke fat, nasty blunts, just watching the ocean, or the little lines of cars moving through town, world-renowned for its pristine beaches and perfect barrels, its century-old Boardwalk complete with an imposing turn-of-the-century wooden Ferris wheel, its ancient redwood groves, its eccentric hippies and student protests that grew violent over the most trivial of causes.
And you couldn’t find a better view of any of it than from atop our Sunny Hill.
God, I miss those days.
They see you, the note said.
***
We drank, played darts, drank, talked shit over beer pong, drank, stepped out for cigarettes or upstairs to the living room to take a rip of someone’s bong, drank and argued over the constant gangster rap and 70s funk blasting out of our roommate Sam’s vintage speakers, drank, drank, and drank some more, drank until the liquor was gone.
At some point, Jay and his buddies noticed the tiny door behind the bar, which led to the basement. We were taking shots of vodka when Jay asked me about it.
“You never told me you had a basement,” Jay said.
“That’s our storage space,” I said, grimacing as the cheap vodka scorched my throat. “Basement. Whatever. It’s huge. Goes all the way back under the hill.”
“Looks like a Hobbit door, man.”
“That’s what we call it,” I said.
“Lord of the Rings is for faggots,” Rob said.
Ry said, “I thought you loved Lord of the Rings.”
“I do, Frodo Faggins.”
“Whup,” Ry said.
They weren't homophobes, as much as they were high school dropouts from a very white small town; homophobic and racist slurs were, unfortunately, just part of their everyday vocabulary. I don't think either of them had ever met an actual gay person other than my roommate Sam.
Bea, my neighbor from the co-op down the street, overheard them and cut in, “What’s wrong with Lord of the Rings, huh?”
Bea was five-foot-five, half-Brazilian and half-Japanese. Her eyes held the light like diamonds when she smiled, and her skin was olive-tan and deeply freckled from the sun. She had a fresh pink streak dyed in her curly, strawberry blonde hair, and a silver stud in the Marilyn Monroe piercing on her upper lip. She was wearing a low cut black dress with lace frills that looked like it came from the early 90s. She probably found it at the Goodwill – Bea was the best-dressed girl I knew, but she only bought clothes from second-hand stores. The dress showed off her strong, slender legs, legs that had brought home countless medals for our university track team, legs that had every guy at the party trying to stare and not get caught.
Rob and Ry both stared at their shoes. “Nothin',” they said in unison.
“Omigod, is that your dog?” Bea asked Jay, her hand already deep behind Popeye’s ears. “What’s his name?”
Popeye panted, casting an uncertain look at Jay.
Jay feigned offense. “What, you don’t want to know mine?”
Bea smirked. “Never mind. His collar says Popeye. Popeye, that’s so cute! How old is she?” Bea said.
“He’s one.”
Bea rubbed Popeye’s jowls vigorously. “You’re just the cutest, ugliest little thing I’ve ever seen! Aw. I want him.”
Popeye rolled his head and squirmed for Jay to put him down.
Bea threw me a shaded eyebrow and winked. “I overheard you guys talking about the basement door. That, gentlemen, leads to the Sunny Hill Thrift Emporium. You see, it’s like a magic hat: you ask the little door for what you want, and it gives it to you.”
“Is that where you got your dress?” Jay asked her.
Bea gave him her Kiss my ass face.
Jay stuck out his hand. “Sorry. That was rude. I’m the guy with the weed. What’s your name?”
“That’s Neighbor Bea,” I interrupted. “A.K.A. Bumble.”
My roommate Carter leaned over my shoulder, dribbling his vodka cran all over his black muscle shirt and my shoes. “The Humble Bumble, Queen Bee of the Pollination Nation,” Carter said.
Jay raised an eyebrow. “What?”
Bea put her fists on her hips. “Carter here is insinuating, and not very cleverly, that I am a raging whore. This is a running joke for him. Ha, ha. But everyone knows you’re the slut here, Carter. What was your Tinder notch count before you met Talia? Like, five thousand? And how many of them, statistically, do you think had herpes?”
Carter sipped his drink and replied, “No one said it was a race, bae. Why would I run a race I couldn’t win?”
“I don’t care if you do Jiu Jitsu, I’m gonna kick that grin off your stupid face,” Bea said. She cocked back to punch Carter in the arm, but Carter slid back and Bea’s playful strike glanced off his bicep.
“Why you tryna spill this drink, girl? Ain’t there enough sticky fluid on that dress already?”
“Oh, burn,” I said into my drink, pounding Carter’s fist behind her back.
“We the storm,” Carter said in my ear.
“We the mothafuckin' storm.”
“Dark clouds be rollin'.” Carter wandered off.
Bea offered Jay her hand. “I’m Beatriz. Don’t listen to these assholes. They’re twenty-two going on thirteen.”
“Why do they call you Bumble?” Jay said. “Too lazy to roll their Rs?” Then it clicked. Jay palmed his forehead. “Oh, I get it. That’s bad.”
Bea raised her eyebrows. “You’re fast.”
“You have no idea,” Jay said.
He gave Bea’s glass a clink. “Well, Happy New Year, Miss Bumble Bea. So, about this weird looking door… you’ve been back there, huh?”
“A bunch of times. Where do you think Drew got those couches? And the ones upstairs. And the kitchen table. And the chairs.”
I added, “And Sam’s speakers. And the doors we made the bar with. And Carter’s laundry detergent.”
“Well, shit. Let’s take a look back there,” Jay said. “Maybe Drew can find a new shirt. He’s been wearing that one for as long as I’ve known him.”
Rob and Ry laughed. Bea smiled at me sympathetically. “Hey, The Shining’s his favorite movie,” she said.
“So nice to know you care.”
Jay slapped me on the back. “So? We goin' in?”
I unlatched the knob and the basement door swung open.
“Wait one second. I want a picture,” Bea said.
She lifted her vintage film camera from where it was looped around her wrist on a hand-woven band made of brightly colored hemp. Everyone Bea knew got one. Girls gave the bracelets as a tradition in her mother’s village in Brazil. Bea made and sold them as a hobby.
She shooed us into frame with her hands. “Okay, everyone get in close. Smile!”
Snapshots #1-19
Captions: (Various Christmases)
I always hated having my picture taken. I’ve never been a photogenic guy.
When I was a kid, I hated pictures because they made me face the fact I was a fat fuck, my greasy cow-licked hair and glasses, the perpetual pimples on the corners of my mouth that never went away even if I picked until they bled.
No, it’s safe to say the only pictures that exist of me from when I was little, up until around the time of high school graduation, were the ones my mom took of me posing with the video game consoles my parents got me every year for Christmas.
Christmas 1998 – Me holding my PlayStation One, still in its original box, the first console I owned. I was four.
Christmas 1999 – My N64. I was five.
Christmas 2000 – My Sega Saturn. The big bad six.
Christmas 2001 – My PlayStation 2. Seven was heaven.