Doa Ii

by David C. Hayes

  What did we learn from all this?

  We learned that happiness can’t be forced. It’s not something that yields to a desperate scheme and a crosscut saw. It’s not something you can construct. We tried to piece it together bit by bit and we failed. Those of you out there whose minds may be starting to warp the same way ours did, take my advice and forget it. If kind words and gentle persuasion don’t get you what you want, then cheese graters and electric drills and large knives with serrated edges aren’t going to do it either. We tried. We failed. And we’re going to pay for it. Next time, whoever’s body we end up in, we’re not even going to think about doing anything like this again.

  At least I won’t.

  Dad tells me he’s planning to major in pre-med.

  TELESCOPIC

  Harper Hull

  It had been another rough week in a decade of rough weeks for William Sopher.

  He pulled slowly into his driveway contemplating the evening that awaited him. At some point that night he’d reach a stage of solitary alcoholic abuse down in his basement den and finally his mind would snap shut; a man-trap wetly triggered to kill reality, or at least break its ankle for a few hours until he woke up covered in his own drool with an ax-in-the-head hangover to ignore. It was the getting to that state which had William sighing in dread. Some shitty food in a plastic tub from the fridge reheated in the microwave would start the evening’s proceedings. Stilted attempts at banal conversation with the wife that would end with her silently slinking off to bed, sighing and shaking her head like all cop’s wives eventually did, would be the crushing finale. They were a living cliché and he didn't even really care; that was the saddest part of the whole thing.

  All this time and she still didn’t get it; revisiting the hideous tableaus of desperation, cruelty and hate that were created in apartment buildings, warehouses and desolate parking lots across the city made it hard for William to feign outrage at the latest power bill hikes or what the President had said on the news about the middle class. Safely down in his basement, away from her disappointment, a twelve-pack of beer and several fingers of bourbon would follow. A pack and a half of Marlboro Reds would create a town of scorched little watch towers in the dirty glass ashtray. He’d drink and smoke until his mind detuned itself to an electric backdrop of grey-speckled black noise. Anything to be done with that ghastly cavalcade of white, blue and red faces that haunted his weary brain, all swinging in his subconscious with their dead j’accuse expressions and pointy, bony fingers as if he himself was creeping up behind them with a screwdriver, a tie or a bread knife gripped in each hand. William sighed heavily and stepped out of his car. Megan wasn’t home yet, her Jeep wasn’t taking up the driveway; maybe he could sneak a quick drink before she got back and rolled out the welcome mat for the inevitable Friday lack of communication fest. He caught his own reflection in the driver’s window of the car; grey suit, striped shirt, red tie. Still a good head of hair, bit fluffy around the waist. Whatever.

  Fumbling with his keys he spotted a small piece of white paper taped to the front door. It read BACK GARDEN in large, curved black letters. He pulled the paper from the door, flipped it over, turned it back, read it again and headed around the side of the house. Strange, he thought, looks familiar but it’s not Megan’s writing. Rounding the corner of the house he spotted it straight away, but it took a second to register in his storm clouded mind exactly what he was looking at.

  It was a telescope, just sitting in the middle of his back garden on a tripod pointing toward the city like it was the most normal thing in the world. William approached it, confused, and saw another piece of paper taped to the stand below the eyepiece. It read STOP HIM in the same familiar big bold letters that the first note had displayed. William looked around his garden and saw nothing else out of the ordinary; same old ill-tended scrap of grass and sad looking bushes. Placing his hands against his upper legs he bent forward and put his eye gently to the telescope sight without moving it. It was zoomed in on a window far off in the city, the top floor of a large office building. Sitting in the window was what seemed to be another telescope. William carefully adjusted the focus and got the sharpest view he could. Nothing else was visible, just the telescope and a triangle of white ceiling hanging behind it. He slowly scanned along the building, counting how many windows in from the edge the telescope was. The building was one he knew, a distinctive banking office tower, and he figured he could be there within fifteen minutes. Something long-gone yet familiar shouted out from the dungeons of William’s mind, the place he kept all the bad thoughts—it didn’t hit and he rubbed his temple, urging the flash of recollection back. It didn’t reverb or repeat.

  Thirteen minutes later William entered the Chi-Trust Bank offices and flashed his badge to the receptionist, explaining there’d been a complaint from the top floor. The receptionist looked startled and even perhaps a little scared but told William the top floor was being renovated and no one should be up there at this time. William thanked her and made for the elevators. As he walked away the receptionist stared wide-eyed at the back of his head and suddenly found herself engrossed in the objects on her desk. William pressed the button for floor 45 and ascended, one hand instinctively moving to the butt of his department issued Glock 9mm pistol, the other scratching at his throat. Something smelled real funny about this and—oh yeah—the Crossword Killer. He’d loved his games. The man had traveled the country slicing up young women and letting the cops know where the body was through crossword clues in various regional papers that he’d mail in. Jessica Alves had been the first, pretty brunette studying dance, wild animals in the apple was her clue and NYPD had found her body scattered around the Bronx Zoo. Crossword had eventually made his way through Chicago, some dozen murders later, and by now he had become cocky and was sending out the clues before the killing. After the fire, still standing tall, William. Sopher was on the task force that had been dispatched to the Chicago Water Tower, built by architect William Boyington and mistakenly referred to by non-Chicagoans as the only building to survive the great fire of 1871. The clue had seemed personal to Sopher, mentioning his first name like it did, and when they saw a small man with a large suitcase acting suspiciously outside the tower Sopher suffered a moment of panic and shot him in the shoulder. He survived—Jacob Reed was his name, a risk management consultant based out of Houston—and they found almost all of a girl named Andrea Kelly inside the suitcase. Surprisingly, her head was missing. It was as if Reed knew he was going to be apprehended this time and dropped the head off somewhere else as some sick insurance policy he felt he could cash in later. In the end it didn’t matter; Reed was shivved in prison when the guards looked the other way and died slowly in his own cell after several prisoners pulled his intestines through the small, ragged hole in his stomach.

  ~

  It was silent on the top floor; William padded along the corridor looking into doors and counting windows until he reached the room he wanted. The smell of paint and drywall mud was strong and stilts leaned against the wall. He opened the door with one swift motion and looked around the room. Andrea Kelly’s head was not sitting on a pedestal waiting for him. Nothing except the telescope, the exact same model as the one in his garden. It was aimed downward. After scanning the room for other exits and large cupboards William placed his right eye next to the telescope eyepiece and, groaning, saw another window, another telescope waiting for him. Turning the focuser a little and gently moving the scope he sharpened the image and tried to work out where this next building was. It was a house, three stories with a tin roof that gleamed with a distinctive green tint. The siding was off-white and there were black shutters fanning the windows. In the front garden he could see a children’s swing set, a tarnished silver frame with faded red seats. By looking around for a few moments, scanning in and out from the house, William recognized the neighborhood as one not too far from his own. He had lived there before getting married and knew it well. Some of his best memories were
made in that part of town, back when he was a single man and his career hadn’t crushed him yet. It was probably about twenty minutes away, if he made haste. He sprinted back to the elevators, strangely trepidatious but now full of adrenaline for this mysterious event. Jacob Reed was dead, he reminded himself, found laying in his own congealed blood and gore with an expression on his face like a dead cat. Still, the perma-cop in his brain wondered if he should call this in, but the regular, stupider William took charge and decided that there wasn’t anything criminal going on, apart from a trespass in his back garden, and for all he knew it was the shitty local kids playing an admittedly elaborate prank. Maybe even a work colleague. He laughed for the first time that day, imagining the joke he was hurrying to be the butt of. Were his buddies from the precinct waiting in that house? Heya, Bill! they’d yell. We got you good! William hoped this evening ended in a session at the bar and a bit of laughter, he’d take that. He also realized he didn’t have his cell phone on him. Something else to piss him off.

  ~

  Twenty-four minutes later William pulled up in front of the green-roofed house. His head was throbbing and his face felt hot. An annoying pressure ran across his hairline and a sticky wetness caked his flesh beneath his shirt. The wave of excitement and bubbling anticipation had seriously receded during the short drive. Jacob Reed may be dead but what about the other evil bastards Sopher had crossed paths with that fit this thing in some obscure way? He’d been speaking them out loud on the way over, panicking suddenly, a fast, high-pitched vocal scramble through a catalog of names and methods.

  Pickett Boozer, tortured and killed farm animals, carved what we later learned was a self portrait of his own smiling face into their flesh. Jason Floyd, recorded women through the windows of their homes and left packages on their doorsteps containing his own bodily fluids and pig hearts. Dieter Schwartz, killed his entire family with a hammer and turned himself in immediately at the local station with his dead daughter wrapped up in his arms. Matty Waterhouse who raped old women in nursing homes, Derry Reardon the Midway ax man, Kris Allen the kiddy poisoner, shit, there were so many crazies, so many.

  Approaching the front door he again let his hand move to his pistol. He rapped on the wood and called out “Police!”

  No answer. William pushed on the handle and the door clicked open. He immediately saw the mess inside and unbuttoned his pistol, drew it to chest height. Stepping inside he closed the front door and shouted out again; still no answer. Picking his way through the boxes, broken furniture and debris on the floor, William headed toward the staircase and started to move up to the third floor without clearing the rooms. He knew that the house was deserted and abandoned, looking around would be a waste of time and he wanted to get to that telescope. It went against all his training and experience but that fucking thing was calling to him like a siren.

  The second floor was like the first. Still no sign of life, as he had anticipated. Upon reaching the third floor William’s heart started to beat faster. He stepped briskly down the hall to the front-facing room he had clocked from the bank building, walked in and saw the third telescope. The rest of the room was bare.

  Placing his eye against the viewer, William let out a startled grunt and fell backwards on his heels. He shook his head and looked into the telescope again. There was someone looking back at him through their own telescope. They were wearing some kind of mask, animal looking. He saw a dark suit, white shirt and a flash of scarlet tie before the mask wearer waved and moved out of view.

  William felt his knees give slightly. He was looking into his own bedroom window, the wallpaper was distinctive as was the painting above the bed, and lying on his bed—their bed—he could see his wife, naked and red and weird-faced. Her legs were bent apart at a horrible angle. Blood covered her from throat to crotch. Beside her on the bed it looked like a telephone, the screen lit up in a strangely familiar orange glow. His heart beating out of his chest William moved his hands to the telescope, realized they were slick and shaking too much and pulled them away again, not wanting to lose the viewpoint. The masked person jumped back into shot, obscuring his wife’s body, and William realized he was staring at a plastic pig face, caught in a permanent cartoonish smile, splattered in what he assumed was Megan’s blood. The pig-person raised hands to face and made crying gestures for a moment before wiping fingers down over their white shirt leaving wet, red trails that gave the appearance of stripes. He pushed the mask back over his head leaving the elastic string taut across his forehead and the revealed face of the killer stared down the body of the telescope.

  SEXY

  Wrath James White

  My life was a model of moderation until I saw her that day. There was almost nothing sexy about her to my tastes, yet almost everything about her was dripping with raw, carnal, sexuality. She was riding a motorcycle in a red latex mini-skirt. The skirt was hiked up so high on her thick thighs, I could see the wonderful results of a recent Brazilian wax. Almost immediately, the self discipline I’d worked so hard to cultivate began to slip.

  Some might have called my myriad paranoias a fear of the unknown, of new experiences. Many would have just called me a pussy. In truth, I was terrified of losing control, afraid to find myself carried away by passions I could not bend to my will and master with reason. It was one of the main reasons I had remained a bachelor for so long. Women found me boring. I didn’t drink or use drugs or play videogames or hang out in nightclubs. I wasn’t very experimental in the bedroom. My last girlfriend jokingly referred to me as “The Missionary Man” because of my reluctance to try new sexual positions.

  I didn’t even drink coffee or smoke cigarettes because of my overwhelming fear of addictions. I panicked if I had an energy drink two days in a row, afraid that I was growing addicted to fructose and guarana. I had never even watched a pornographic movie, having heard of people succumbing to the lure of internet porn and wasting hours in front of the computer screen, jacking off until their cocks bled. Addictions led to dangerous excesses. People lost jobs, stole, and got themselves incarcerated, shunned and scorned by polite society because of excesses. But, from the moment I spotted the girl in the mini-skirt, I knew I would follow her down the road to excess. Everything about her screamed wantonness and overindulgence.

  She straddled the custom motorcycle like a lover. A coy smile teased the corners of her lips as she throttled the engine and the bike roared between her thighs. It was a Harley Davidson, wide and low with tall handlebars like a chopper and a large seat. It was painted black, purple, and red with skulls and flames and chrome pipes that looked like bones. I only glanced at the bike briefly. My attention was quickly torn away by the voluptuous woman who rode it.

  My underwear felt uncomfortably tight as I stared into my side mirror and straight up her skirt. She seemed to spread her legs wider, inviting my eyes into the dark place between them. I was so transfixed by that hairless cleft, I didn’t see the light change until the cars behind me began to honk and she cruised past me and winked.

  I couldn’t tell you what it was about her I found so attractive, besides her obvious lack of shame. She was large everywhere. Not just fat, though she was obviously carrying quite a bit of excess adipose tissue. She was over six feet tall and had wide shoulders and muscular arms like a body builder. Her triceps flexed and rippled as she worked the throttle. Her legs were titanic. Her calves bulged like biceps and her quadriceps like the rest of her, were an intimidating combination of fat and muscle. She had breasts that stuck out two feet off her chests, but barely jiggled thanks to a brazier reinforced with steel mesh. She had a large stomach but her breasts stuck out twice as far as her gut, which effectively hid it unless you were obsessed with such things, which I usually was.

  I had never been into large women. Fat people actually disgusted me a little. Obesity had always seemed to me like the living epitome of excess, greed, lack of willpower and control, laziness. I preferred thin or athletic women. But her thick muscular frame ch
allenged all my prejudices. The muscles in her arms and legs made it clear that she was not lazy. You didn’t get triceps like that sitting on a couch eating ice cream. It took willpower and discipline. Still, she definitely was not missing any meals.

  Looking at the large woman’s sexually extravagant proportions, I felt the most powerful, overwhelming lust I’d felt since puberty. It startled and frightened me more than a little. I squirmed uncomfortably in my chair. My erection jabbed at my stomach, bent backwards by my tighty-whities.

  The woman had beautiful red hair that hung down her back and blew in the wind as she rode. Her eyes were a fiery emerald green and her lips were full and plump, painted a brazen red, and I knew her. I was certain of it. I had gone to high school with her back in Philadelphia. Her name was Katrina.

  What the hell was she doing in San Francisco?

  In high school she had been one of those tragically pretty fat girls that skinny girls teased mercilessly who either became a slut, a fag-hag, or a suicidal introvert. As I recalled, she had been the latter. She used to wear dark clothes and white makeup with black lipstick, eye shadow, and nail polish, and would sit in the hallways reading Anne Rice, Henry Miller, and Anais Nin, quoting Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, and listening to The Cure and Depeche Mode. I barely noticed her then. I had my own problems. She was a social outcast, and though I was not exactly part of the “In crowd,” I could have been. If my interests did not tend toward the nerdy. Chess club, Dungeons and Dragons, Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, and Douglass Adams novels were my life then. I worked out incessantly and had the hard body and chiseled good looks that girls went for, but I was too conservative and introverted even then. Girls found me weird. There were rumors that I was a homosexual. The rumors were how I met Jason, who quickly became my best friend. He was gay and had tried to pick me up one day after school. I was too embarrassed to tell him I wasn’t gay and I let him kiss me. The next day he came up to me in the hallway between classes.