Lurk

by Adam Vine

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Bea… did you put this in the bag yourself?” Carter said.

  The disgust that appeared on her face made me nervous. “Yeah. I used a pair of hookah tongs.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmmm.” Carter nodded.

  “Guys, what’s going on?” I said.

  Carter took a deep breath, made a pyramid with his fingers, which he pointed at me. “Drew. Thunder. Buddy. No one throws a dirty gym sock on a girl’s car. That’s a fap sock.”

  “A what?”

  Carter pinched his chin, trying hard not to chuckle at my naivete. “A fap sock. Somebody jerked off in that.”

  I wanted to vomit. I wasn’t sure if it was the hangover, or the weed, or the idea of someone jerking off into a sock and throwing it on Bea’s car – my Bea’s car – but suddenly, I had the overpowering urge to sit down.

  “God. What sort of sick asshole would do this shit?” Bea growled, kicking an empty bottle off the side of the deck.

  Could it have been Jay and his friends? Was he even capable of something that vile? I admitted to myself that I didn’t know Rob and Ry that well. But I knew Jay wasn’t.

  “I’ll call Jay and sort this out,” I said. “But I'm telling you, there's no way it was them."

  “Better hope it wasn’t, for your sake,” Bea said.

  She pointed at the joint cindering in Carter’s hand. “Are you going to give me a hit of that, or what?”

  ***

  I know she doesn’t love him. But she fucks him like she does. It hurts so much, watching them fuck. She kisses him passionately and tells him how much she wants him. But I know she doesn’t, not really. They do it just to do it, like everyone else. It doesn’t change the fact that it should have been me.

  It should have been me.

  ***

  “Jay, my man. How’s the drive home treating you?”

  “Drew Mayhem!” Jay’s voice came crisply through my iPhone speaker. “How you feelin'? Like a million bucks?”

  “Like a one dollar bill that just went through the wash.”

  “You're all fresh and clean for another big night.”

  I did my best to laugh, but it didn’t sound very convincing. “No, not yet. How’s Popeye?”

  Jay put the phone up to the pug’s mouth. I heard heavy panting. Jay came back on, and said, “He keeps farting. I think someone at the party gave him pizza.”

  “Oh.”

  “Somethin' wrong, man?”

  “Eh…” my voice trailed. I was still on the deck. The others had gone inside to watch more Game of Thrones, but I wanted to stay outside and enjoy the cool winter sun. It was eerily quiet, even though it was the middle of the day. I could hear my own breathing, and the distant whipping of the leaves on the fruit trees down in the yard.

  “Actually, yes,” I said.

  “Bro, what’s going on?” Jay said.

  “You remember my friend Bea?”

  “Bumble! Of course I remember her. The cutie from the down the street. You two hook up?”

  “No,” I said. “She… uh… she crashed in my room, but nothing happened.”

  “Attaboy.”

  “That’s not what I want to talk about,” I said. “I know it wasn’t you, but she’s my neighbor, and I have to ask. Did you see anybody leave a sock on her windshield?”

  “A sock?” Jay’s voice lingered on the word. “Uh… like, a sock, sock?”

  “The kind that goes on your feet.”

  “Uh, no. Can’t say I know anything about a sock.”

  “You didn’t see anyone… y’know… messing with the cars in front of the co-op? The big Victorian down the street? Blue Honda Accord in the driveway?”

  “I didn’t even notice a car like that, man. So no. I didn’t see anyone messing with it.”

  “It wasn’t Ry or Rob?”

  “Jesus Christ, man. No. If one of us were interested in your neighbor, we would have acted on it, not done some weirdo shit like leave a sock on her car. Besides, we’re all pretty hung over right now. We haven’t even left town yet. All our shit is accounted for.”

  Accounted for. Jay wouldn’t put on his lawyer voice unless he meant it. I knew he wasn’t lying.

  “Damn. All right. I knew you wouldn't do something like that, but I was hoping maybe one of you might have seen something,” I said.

  “Good. You said someone left it on her windshield?” Jay said.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Was it dirty?”

  “Yup.”

  “Was it…?”

  “Yup.”

  “Oh, shit. Gross.” He leaned away from the phone, but I could still hear what he said. “Hey, you guys know anything about Drew’s neighbor getting sock-bombed??”

  “Whup?”

  “Whup.”

  “C’mon. Someone put a jizz sock on his neighbor’s car this morning.”

  “Jizz socks are for faggots,” Rob said.

  “Which neighbor? The cute one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nope. Sorry, dude.”

  “Damn. That’s gross.”

  “Whup.”

  The side conversation ended, and Jay came back on the phone. “Sorry pal, I don’t know what to tell you. None of us saw anything. I feel bad for her, though. Y’know, sometimes guys get drunk, and they just do stupid shit to pretty girls. Maybe someone who was at the party had a crush on her, and he got pissed when he found out she stayed in your room.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But no one else was awake…”

  Jay sighed. “Off-topic – you ever been to Chilled Out café? That place has amazing breakfast burritos.”

  I laughed. “I go there all the time. So, you guys have only gone four miles in three hours. How hung over are you?”

  “We blazed, like, six bowls to try to kill this hangover before we left your house, but ended up deciding to just stick around and chow on some breakfast until it passes. It hasn’t passed yet.”

  “You wanna get drunk tonight?” I said.

  “Do I want to get drunk tonight?” He said it like it was the punch line of a bad joke. I could hear Rob and Ry groan in the background. “Yes, Drew,” Jay said at last. “Yes, I want to get drunk tonight.”

  Popeye yipped.

  “Come back over. We’ve got all this weed here, and no one’s smoking it,” I said.

  “I’ll stop by the store and pick up a few handles. You need anything?”

  A few handles. My stomach dove into the wave.

  “Are you still at Chilled Out?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Get me a number eighteen. The Seandawg.”

  Jay paused to read the menu. “With four eggs, hash browns, artichokes, bacon, and salsa?”

  “Best breakfast burrito on Planet Earth.”

  “You’re a beast.”

  ***

  I decided to kill some time by sitting in the living room and going over the pictures again. I had been pretty drunk when we looked at them the night before.

  I sat down on the brown L-shaped couch with an unused blue exam book and a pencil. I wanted to figure out who the people in the pictures were. From what I could tell sorting through the first five or ten Polaroids in the stack and reading the captions scrawled on their edges, the cast members of the house in 1993 were:

  Andy – a tall, strong white guy with red cheeks and a mop of blonde surfer hair, who found the unmarked grave in our basement…

  Martin, A.K.A. Marty – a curly-haired black guy who had arms even bigger than Andy’s, six-pack abs, and a penchant for wearing over-sized basketball jerseys…

  Gloria – a pretty Mexican girl, who despite having huge, waterfall-style bangs, was the best dressed of the bunch…

  Apple – a slender, redheaded tomboy hippie with bright blue eyes, who wore baggy t-shirts and a perpetual golden tan…

  Rebecca – a pale, voluptuous brunette, whose wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of low-cut tops and short, ple
ated skirts…

  It felt strange touching those Polaroids, like touching pieces of discarded time. I felt like I should've been handling them with plastic gloves. When I lined them up edge-to-edge the way Carter had done, I noticed something else.

  I was wrong the night before, that there were only five housemates. There was a sixth, unnamed, who only appeared in one group picture, and one more by himself: a skinny, nerdy white kid with a Flock of Seagulls haircut, who the captions identified simply as “Piano Man.”

  Indeed, Piano Man lived up to his nickname. The photo was of him playing a piano in a pair of huge Sebastian the Crab Disneyland sunglasses, his mouth hanging open, his fingers dancing on the keys, but all of it felt staged, like he’d waited in that pose for minutes to get the right take. Most of all, this Piano Man character struck me as a socially awkward outcast trying too hard to be cool.

  Like me, I thought. I recognize it, because that’s what I do.

  It took me a few seconds to realize the picture was taken in our garage, and that the piano was resting against the far-back wall, hiding the basement door.

  I didn’t think much of it at the time. I wasn’t good at detective stuff the way Bea was. My mind started to wander, and I abandoned my project before making it to the eleventh picture.

  I’ve always had a bad case of ADD. I was heavily medicated for it when I was a kid, all the way up until I moved away for college. I didn’t really see the pictures I was sifting through and placing in neat rows on the floor.

  If I had, I would have been much more interested (or perhaps terrified is a better word), because I would have realized that some of them had already started to change.

  ***

  Was Piano Man the photographer?

  He had to be. He was only in one picture with the other roommates from 1993, but in it, Andy and Marty’s arms were around him and Rebecca was kneeling in front of him, pretending to fondle his junk, while Apple looked on from the distance, raising her beer to the camera.

  Piano Man lived at Sunny Hill. He was there for all the important household events and parties, documenting them. But he wasn’t in the other 95% of the photos, because he took them.

  If whoever buried that box under our house had been willing to leave their precious college pictures behind (and Piano Man was the leading candidate), had they left the Polaroid camera, too?

  I had a powerful urge to return to the basement and look. I put the box of pictures aside with the lid off and went downstairs. The garage door stood ajar. I vaguely remembered locking it. There were muddy footprints leading inside. The basement door sat ajar. Hadn’t I latched it shut?

  Probably just some drunk asshole looking for a place to sleep, I thought.

  I turned on my Maglite and cautiously made my way under the house. It was silent, and the smell of damp earth filled the air. I limped across the dirt floor to the hole, surveying the nearest junk piles for anything that might be related to a Polaroid camera. My tiny halo of light spilled through motes of dust and antique cobwebs. But there was nothing, only a ratty sleeping bag, a Coleman lantern, and a few loose piles of moth-eaten clothes.

  Wait. There it was. Right there in that pile, next to the old Coleman lantern. No wonder Bea and I had missed it the night before.

  The brown-and-tan, 1970’s era Polaroid camera was almost completely buried by a large, dirty blue sleeping bag.

  I dug it out and held it in my hands, examining the faded plastic and the dust-mottled lens. It was the same model of Polaroid camera I’d had when I was a little kid, a hand-me-down I got from my cousin, who got it from my aunt, who herself had it when she was in college. That would make this camera at least forty years old. It was already a throwback when the ’93 Crew had it. Now, it was bona fide retro.

  “Hipsters,” I said aloud, jumping a little at the sound of my own voice.

  There was a still a film pack with ten or so blank slides stuck in the camera’s front end.

  As my flashlight continued to scour the abandoned piles next to the hole, I noticed something funny about the sleeping bag I’d seen earlier. My breath caught in my throat. My flashlight beam hovered on the torn blue nylon. I knelt down to get a closer look.

  The sleeping bag wasn’t coated in dust.

  Bile rose in my throat, and it wasn’t the hangover this time. I ran my fingers up and down the smooth surface of the sleeping bag. It was dirty, but recently slept in – same with the Coleman lantern, and the loose piles of men’s clothes. They were carefully arranged to appear like any other pile of basement junk, but they weren’t.

  Somebody was still using them.

  I flicked my flashlight beam over the nearby ground, stopping on a smooth patch of dirt not five feet from where I was standing, next to the edge of the hole. My hands started shaking. A cold vice tightened in my stomach. I cast my light over it from a different angle, hoping my mind was playing tricks on me. But it wasn't.

  There was a man-sized patch of dirt next to the hole where someone had been sleeping. Recently.

  Someone has been sleeping in our basement.

  Bea and I had been too drunk and distracted to see it the night before.

  Someone. Has been sleeping. In. Our. Basement.

  Camping out. Staying in. Sleeping over. Hunkering down. Shacking up.

  Sleeping. In our Basement.

  Beneath our house.

  They see you.

  I did puke then, into the gaping hole in the earth that had birthed those hideous pictures into our world, the void under our house where, two decades ago, human bones had been dug up by a group of college students too inebriated and ignorant to understand what they were, what that meant-

  Splat. Hggggh. Splatter.

  The sound of my vomit echoed through the darkness, awakening it. I held my eyes shut tight, but it didn’t help. I was falling. No, not falling – I was being pulled towards something at the bottom of the hole, something far beneath, and long forgotten.

  I tucked the Polaroid camera under my arm and sprinted back upstairs.

  ***

  The bike lock was a brick in my hands. Sam used it to lock his fixed gear bike when he rode to the beach. But Sam was still in Southern California, and there had been someone trespassing under our house.

  Part of my brain screamed that none of it was real, that it was just my imagination; that I would return to find no hole, no recently used sleeping bag, no smoothed patch of dirt.

  And yet, I knew what I’d seen. So I listened to my intuition and locked the basement door with Sam’s bike lock.

  In slasher films, the killer is always someone the victim knows. Ghostface from Scream is a good example. But all of our friends at Sunny Hill knew our door was open to them any time, and that they’d have a place to crash inside the house if they asked. I ruled out anyone in our immediate social circle as being the basement sleeper.

  I half-expected to hear a disembodied voice softly protesting from the other side of the Hobbit door as I slid the key out of the lock and back into my pocket, or… I don’t know, crying? Hadn’t I heard someone crying last night?

  But I was alone in the silence with the smell of dust, piss, spilled booze, and wet earth.

  There was no deadbolt on the outer garage door, only a flimsy knob that could easily be bypassed with a good kick. I carefully set a few empty glass beer bottles behind the door to act as an alarm. If anyone tried to force their way in, or just opened the door without knowing about the bottles, we would be able to hear it upstairs. Then, we could... what? Call the cops? Chase the guy off with a baseball bat? Lock him up with Carter and Talia’s fuzzy handcuffs?

  I pictured the intruder as a scruffy, homeless man, prowling the streets of our rich, hilltop neighborhood after dark, searching for a place to sleep. Or maybe it was Piano Man, twenty years older but still scrawny and awkward, his motives and face unclear in my mind’s eye. Whoever he was, it looked as though he’d been sleeping down there for a long time.

  I had a feelin
g that any answers I would find would be in the shoebox of pictures. The sleeping bag had been within arms’ reach of it. They had to be related.

  ***

  I sat down again on the living room floor to scour every single Polaroid for a possible clue. That was when I realized the pictures had changed.

  The pictures on the floor were different than the ones I’d laid out before going downstairs. And they weren’t other photos from inside the box. They were new.

  The room suddenly grew colder, and I smelled wet soil. The taste of the vomit I’d launched in the basement resurfaced with a sour bite. I knelt down for a better look. My hands weren’t just shaking, now. They were numb.

  These ten pictures, carefully laid edge-to-edge on the carpet, hadn’t existed in 1993. The photo's borders were fresh, new, and white, rather than grimy and yellow. They didn't look like they'd been buried underground for twenty years, but like someone had just snapped them. The photo chemicals still retained their colorful pop.

  The subjects, too, were not the ’93 Crew with their big hair and bad style, but things distinctly more modern: people with current clothes and hairstyles, iPhones and laptops, cars that would have been science fiction back in 1993.

  The pictures from the box were updating.

  ***

  There were ten new Polaroids arranged on the carpet next to the shoebox, the same number I’d taken out of the box before going downstairs. Three of those pictures had people as their subjects. The other seven were of indoor or outdoor scenery.

  The first picture showed a man, fit and balding, wearing an expensive-looking suit, and standing with his hand raised to hail a taxi on the sidewalk of a busy city street, in front of the unmistakable white marble columns of a courthouse. The view was from the rear oblique, so I couldn't see his face, but I guessed he was about forty years old.

  The caption, also updated, but still written in the same blue ink as the old photos, read, Mr. Hard Ass Catches a Cab.

  I moved on to the next picture.

  The woman in the second Polaroid was also about forty. She had short black hair and was a good fifty pounds overweight. You could tell she used to be beautiful, but the only things still attractive about her were her huge breasts, immodestly half-hidden under a black shawl. She was sitting on a plain metal chair smoking a cigarette, in the middle of a circle of other people who were also sitting on metal chairs smoking cigarettes. The caption read: Narcotics Anonymous, Relapse Nine.