“No,” Julian says. He sets the phone down and picks it up again quickly. He looks through every conceivable folder inside the phone’s data system. Nothing to suggest that he had made those calls at those timestamped times. He had his phone with him at all times. There was no chance of accidental dialing. Could there have been a duplicate number? Unheard of.
He checks his email. A few people have sent his new phone numbers. He allows the computer illiterate to email questions to him, if they can’t figure out how to post them. He replies with his boilerplate:
“Hi there. Here’s the link you can use to fill out the form. Be sure to search and see if your harassing number is already included on a list. Thank you!
P.S. This site is an all–volunteer effort. If you would like to donate to keep this site operational — no matter how small the amount — it would be greatly appreciated!”
Then he logs into his site’s admin panel, and doublechecks the IP addresses of the people who have logged complaints about his number. He does a geographic search. The calls were logged all over the map: Fresno, Grand Rapids, Orlando. No one single person pretending to register multiple complaints. Julian feels a chill on the back of his neck. He hears a pounding on the basement door, which startles him. But it’s just the people upstairs having sex.
Julian decides, maybe it’s a fluke. He emails his best friend, Harry, who works third shift in a call center in South Dakota, and forwards the call reports to him. He is the most frequent commenter on the site, and the only person he has really gotten to know from his efforts. “???” is Julian’s subject line. Then he plays a few rounds of Minesweeper and goes to bed.
§
The next morning, it’s worse. Much worse. He is late for his shift because he spent an extra hour in panic in front of his computer, looking at the call reports that his patrons have posted.
“WTF, srsly? It’s someone making monkey sounds & then saying they are from the Texas Department of Corrections and that I have a bill for my prison stay.”
“Someone in a robot voice starts shouting at me to stop prank calling him.”
“Can someone help me? I am scared. Looks like this creep has struck lots of times. Just heavy breathing and a sawing noise. Wish I could find out where this CREEP LIVES.”
There are about ten more reports. Already, his own number is #12 on the “Most Frequently Calling Numbers.”
By the middle of his day and his third package run, he’s wondering if his shift supervisor Chester is somehow the one who is prank calling with his phone number. He wouldn’t put it past him. During his lunch break — Wendy’s, which he eats inside his parked car — he checks his email and Harry has replied to his.
“Julian!” he has written. “This is bad. But you know that ppl can spoof your number or any number they want?? There’re sites where they can sign up for it and enter, say, your number so it looks like you’re the evil prank caller?? You don’t know this? Well, what would you do without Harry, lol. Anyway, I think someone’s out to get you. Got to run but let me know if you need anything else. — Harry.”
He looks out the window, at the people going in and out of Wendy’s, people driving into the strip mall. Who would hurt him?
There’s a knock on his car window. He screams and his value fries go flying into the passenger seat. He’s embarrassed by the high pitch of his voice. It’s a man wearing a Goodwill suit that’s one size too small. His hair is newly shorn. He’s holding a sheath of newspapers. Slowly, Julian rolls down the window.
“Free paper,” the man says. “Free paper. Written by the homeless. All money goes to the homeless.”
“I don’t have any money,” he says. His phone rings. It’s a number he doesn’t recognize. He ignores it.
“Fair enough,” he says. “Fair enough, sir.” Then he keeps walking. Julian quickly rolls up the window. Julian lived out of his car for a few weeks, a few years ago, before he moved in with his sister for a year, letting him get back on his feet before he could find a job. The homeless man makes the rounds in the parking lot, until an assistant manager comes out of the store and has a few words with him. He shakes the papers at the manager but he moves on.
It could be someone using a used phone and a public internet connection, Julian wonders as he watches this scene.
Back at home, he looks at his site. His number is now #9.
“Will the owner of this site PLEASE report this SOB to the BBB?”
He checks the voicemail he received while in the parking lot. “Whoever you are, just stop calling,” a woman says. “Just shut the fuck up, you sick fuck.” Julian sets down the phone. He doesn’t list his name on his voicemail. “Hi, this is [THE NUMBER]. I’m not here right now please leave a message.” He is his number. He erases the message and then cleans his apartment from top to bottom in order to try to calm down.
It doesn’t work.
He gives a report to Harry of recent developments. “What should I do?” he writes. As he writes, his throat constricts.
Harry writes back ten minutes later. “Uh, difficult to say. I would either switch your number, call the police, or can you figure this out on your own? I don’t know, have you Googled your own number?”
Julian hasn’t. He says goodbye to Harry and Googles his own number. He never felt the need for that before. The effort unsettles him. There are about seven pages of entries. Most are junk, pages of number strings from Vietnam or China, or requisition numbers for industrial parts for sterilizers or optical scanners. Nothing suspicious at all. Only one site catches his eye, five or six pages down: griefgraveyard.com.
He takes a deep breath and goes there, going to the main site first, taking out the string of numbers and letters in the address bar. The site isn’t like anything he’s been on before, a site for other people with different types of lives than his. The background is black and the font is white and gothic. There are lots of blurry photos of men and women much younger than him, with all sorts of different hair colors than his brown–gray — purple, blue, bleached yellow — and with lots of piercings on the lip, nose, and next to the eye. It’s not clear what the purpose of the site is, except for these various people to gain “ascension points.”
“PROJECT: SYBERIAN CANDOR, sponsored by Fun–Co” is the title of the exact page where his number resides; there’s a long list of other numbers there. There is a large and blurry profile picture pic, although it couldn’t have been an actual unadulterated photo, of a woman with blue spiky hair and sunglasses and wide wings tucked behind her. The wings are leathery and brown, with tiny feathers along the edges. The expression on her face is one of knowing a secret that’s horrible and also kind of funny. The screen flickers, like it’s getting an electrical surge. Julian stares at the woman with wings for a couple of seconds, and starts to feel woozy.
The furnished basement spins and grows dark in stop–motion.
When his head clears, and the light comes again, he finds himself without a body. He is floating in the middle of a dim, windowless room, with light coming from faint halogens set in the ceiling. There are dozens of people dancing. There is sludgy music with a cavernous beat; even though he hears it distantly, like a train approaching from miles away, he senses that the music must be thunderous for the dancers. They are the same people Julian saw on the griefgraveyard website, and they are in a frenzy to the music — arms and legs intertwining, tearing at each other’s clothes, revealing tattoos of insectoid larvae hatching and werewolves feasting on throats and slinking dragons burrowing into gaping mouths. The women and men kiss, the men and men kiss, the women and women kiss. A DJ high on a stone dais in the far corner has his turntables on an alabaster altar with dark green fluid staining the surface. Julian takes a second look at the DJ and, though he is wearing only a pair of shorts and thigh–high boots and has a reptilian tail, Julian recognizes the man who was selling newspapers in front of the Wendy’s. He worries that he might be recognized, but no one pays any attention to him.
&n
bsp; The woman with wings in the center of the room unfurls them, and everyone else takes a step back. He floats toward her; he is both horrified and thrilled by her presence. Someone hands her a silver chalice and a black–bladed knife. Tipping her head back, she cuts a vein in her wrist and catches blood that looks like motor oil in the chalice. Julian expects them to pass around the chalice and drink the blood, but instead everyone circling around her pulls out their cell phone and dips their cell phone in the blood when it’s their turn. When everyone had done so, they all start dancing again with their cell phones held aloft, screens lit. He had seen people do that on television before, on Ryan Seacrest’s Rocking New Year’s Eve, where a band wearing jumpsuits he didn’t know was performing. Drifting closer to the throne, he sees that the number on each of their screens is his own. And while each phone was dialing, the plastic of the phone had absorbed the blood.
Without thinking, he tries to shout at them to stop. No voice comes out, but the winged woman cocks her head and looks in his direction. In the mirroring of her sunglasses, he sees that, here, he is a gray cloud, vaguely human shaped and glimmering with pinkish traces.
She points at him and shouts in a language he can’t decipher.
But her face surprises him. Because she looks frightened. She looks frightened of Julian. The room begins to pulsate and the light whisks away again and he wakes up on the floor of his basement apartment, blood streaming out of his nose. His computer had rebooted. It’s hard for him to breathe. When he’s able to calm down again, and stuff his nostril full of tissue, he wants nothing more than to stumble to bed, and he does.
He doesn’t want to think about what had happened to him. But rather than feeling confused and scared, a peace falls over him as he sleeps. The peace doesn’t dissipate in the morning when his boss wakes him with a call, wondering where the hell he was, did he know he’s two hours late —
Julian mutters something and hangs up. When he goes into the warehouse to pick up his packages, his boss’s voice is shrill yet distant, like the “grief graveyard” people (if they were people) had been for him. He doesn’t spend much time in the warehouse, and lets his boss’s voice drift away as he walks back to his car. He delivers his packages in a daze, trying in the abyss of his mind to consider what really did happen to him, like attempting to solve a complicated chess puzzle without a board in front of him.
During his lunch in the Wendy’s parking lot — no sign of the DJ — he emails Harry. He doesn’t give all the details but tells him to check out griefgraveyard.com and see what he thinks.
An hour later Harry gets back to him with an email flagged “urgent.”
“Um Jules,” it begins, “that site wouldn’t load for me. I mean, there’s a website THERE, it just kicked me out. Does this have to do with the prank calls?? I checked the domain registry for you. They use GoDaddy. No help. But, uh, I hate to say this but your number is Number ONE on the call chart. If it gets this bad the police might investigate? Be careful okay?”
Julian guesses that they are escalating. When he gets home that night, he eats his Hungry Man dinner and sits down in front of his computer. Taking a deep breath, he goes to griefgraveyard.com.
The site is there — he has no trouble accessing it — but he keeps expecting something to happen, and nothing does. He blinks several times, focusing on the picture of the winged woman, but nothing happens. After an hour of this he grows frustrated and stalks away from the computer, and decides to take a drive in the moonlight to clear his head. There’s a chill in the air but he rolls down his windows anyway. His skin tingles. Soon he’s on the outskirts of town: empty office parks, scrub woods, and drainage ditches. He stops his car in a ride–share parking lot on the edge of a small forest and in the middle of nowhere, and gets out. The moon is full above him. He looks at his hands. Is there anything inside of him that could cause him to transport to the place of “SYBERIAN CANDOR”? He doesn’t know. He walks to the edge of the woods, which actually looks like a tree farm, the plantings of the pines angular and even. But there are mushrooms on the edge of the woods, with colors like angelfish. He is taken back to his time as a kid with his mother, when they lived in the trailer, before even that was taken from them. They used to take walks in the woods by the railroad tracks, and she would point out all the mushrooms, good and bad. He was embarrassed by her most times. She smelled. She could barely dress and feed herself, much less Julian. But in the woods she was lucid, strong.
Then when he was fourteen, she disappeared. When Child Protective Services came to pick him up, he heard the case workers mumble between themselves phrases like “psychotic break” and “hallucinogenic divorce from reality,” which he wasn’t supposed to hear.
He picks the angelfish mushrooms at the stem and cradles them on the walk back to his car, where he wraps them in newspaper. There is a white car that has entered the park and ride when he was in the woods, still running. Driving it is a woman with blonde hair whom he has never seen before. He can’t get a good look at her face, but he sees that she is smiling at him. He feels like he should be unsettled, but he isn’t. He’s about to go over and see what she wants, but she backs up her car and guns it back on the state highway.
Back home, it’s two in the morning. He makes a tea with the mushrooms, his memories of his mother’s actions in their tiny kitchenette taking over. Sitting back down at his computer, he waits for the tea to cool a bit and then drinks the entire cup in a few gulps. It’s bitter and sour.
“Something’s going to happen,” he says to himself.
And it does. He blinks. The darkness of the computer monitor widens and elongates in all directions and swallows him up. He begins laughing. When he can see again, he’s back in the cavernous dance space, though there’s no music or movement. All of the people are naked and sleeping, huddled together in the center of the room, bodies slick and intertwined. Everything is dim. Julian doesn’t waste any time. Hovering close to the ground, he moves close to one of the men on the edge of the throng, and then sinks down. He enters the body. He feels warmth and light and color. The man gasps and trembles but Julian quickly puts a stop to that. Quietly, Julian stands up and stretches the body, lean and taut and unlike his own in all ways. No one else stirs, and Julian begins walking to the dais and the altar. The room is warm. It smells like the mushroom tea he had just drank. The turntables are empty and there aren’t any power cords. He touches the smooth marble of the altar, and the green stains. The stone pulsates and he flinches.
He looks down and sees something stuck on his thigh. No, stuck inside his thigh. A slit in his skin; he reaches down to touch it and then pushes his hand inside. It doesn’t hurt. He pulls out the man’s phone. The screen shows icons for a browser, an air hockey game, a weather app, and a “Manual” doc. Opening the manual, he sees it’s in a swirling, hieroglyphic script, but he is able to read it:
“Zukaratharakghnakhawgrynath d/b/a Fun–Co
ORIENTATION MANUAL
Position of Employ: Ectophage Transmission Technician/Dancer
Version 62.41.7 (Brass Scarab Clearance)
Welcome, invaluable team member! This manual will guide you through everything you need to know to perform your tasks ably and efficiently in service of the Unspeakable Leviathan. Yours is an especially important link in the chain that leads to the completion of the following Fun–Co team goals:
• Worship of our Dark and Merciless overlord through impeccable work ethic in our efforts to satiate Its eternal hunger.
• Be the extra–planar leader in trans–life recapture hacking.
• Fun! (It’s in our name!). You will be dancing. A lot.”
A list of procedures and protocols that he doesn’t understand follows.
Then he calls Harry. Harry had told him to never call him at that number, except if it was the direst emergency. Julian figures that if this doesn’t qualify, nothing would.
“Hello?” Harry says. There’s the rush and thrum of call center activity behin
d him.
“Harry. This is Julian.” His voice is coming out all wrong though. Like he is a hyena trying to speak.
“Oh God, it’s happening to me. Fuck. Fuck. Look, whoever you are — leave Julian alone.”
“No, Harry…”
But Harry hangs up.
The pile of bodies begins to stir. The winged woman crouches and stands. She growls. Julian looks for an exit, even though he has no idea where he can possibly escape to. The winged woman is handed her black knife and she begins a running leap toward Julian, stepping on the other confused sleepers that haven’t quite woken up yet. Julian dives off the altar before the winged woman can reach him. But he realizes: why is he afraid? He waits for the winged woman to center herself again, his arms outstretched, and when she’s standing only a few feet away from him, he takes the knife from her hand. She is too surprised to resist. He slits his own throat.
As he collapses and his vision darkens, he is happy. He has never been happier.
He wakes up on his knees, straddling his hogtied and gagged boss. He looks wildly around; he’s not home. He’s in someone else’s living room. His boss’s living room — smaller than he thought it would be, a condo with cheap wood paneling and high ceilings. The blood comes out of his nostrils in rivulets and he swears.
His boss is shrieking.
Standing up, wobbling, Julian goes to the kitchen and washes his face in the sink. He has no idea why he is in his boss’s house. He doesn’t even know whether anyone else is in the house, whether there’s a family upstairs cowering in terror. The sky is just beginning to brighten with dawn.
There is a honking on the street in front of the house, and he startles. Julian wants to ignore it, but he goes to the front window and peeks out. It’s the woman in the white Corolla, whose face he could barely see in the gray morning light. She rolls down the window. She looks to be his age — maybe a bit older — with streaks of gray in her blonde hair, and wide violet eyes. She’s wearing rings on each finger, each with a different gemstone.
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