by Wilson, Jay
[Several more damaged pages. The writing becomes almost entirely illegible, but some of it has been translated.]
The ocean...it knows me...I've been watching it. I still…
…the boy, but I think he's been here a long time. Not a boy. Not a boy but a...
...and there’s a giant creature just below the ocean’s surface...slightly pink, and it gestures to me with his tentacles. It speaks to me... but not directly.
Annabelle keeps evading, but she…
...tomorrow I will find her. I’m so hungry…
[Recovered from the page containing his final words.]
I'm no longer hungry...my mouth tastes odd. Like copper or iron...she mostly won't wash off my skin after she dried, either. No other survivors but me.
...and the rash around my eyes and mouth don't hurt anymore. I've been talking to...and he tells me this place can be mine, too. He likes to share. The boy seems nice...he isn't scary anymore.
Marbol is the name of the water-thing...which gave birth to the boy. I can't...but not worried. The ocean...it brings food to us, says the boy. I'll not starve...and I'm welcome to stay forever, says the thing. I think I will.
The Demons Among Man
Three weeks ago, the monster came through her window. Three weeks later, his toothy and sharp grin still haunted her. Three weeks passed and she still felt him, still felt the aftermath. She could smell him, the sour and ripe body odor with a sharp flavor of peppermint on his breath.
She typically had a shitty memory, but those things stuck hard like a knife to the belly. She barely remembered her mother’s face, but him? She recalled every inch of his grinning stubble. Trauma seemed to take sick pleasure in reminding you of the darkest moments in your life, and apparently, it had taken special interest in Laura.
That night, she smelled him again. The stink of his sweaty, sticky body mixed with cheap cologne. She could feel him, too. She ran her hand through his oddly soft hair, which she expected to be rough. She expected his warm skin to be cold and scaly. His face was still dark, but this time shadowed with fear. Soon it would show the face of pain, the kind of pain she hoped he would remember for the rest of his days. His own Goddamn trauma monster.
He only wore two things in that garage. The duct tape over his mouth, wrists, and ankles that was so tight it pressed his skin white, and the chair to which she’d bound him. Other than that, she’d stripped him of all his clothes, which she hoped made him feel the same kind of humiliation she felt in her bedroom as she screamed for help.
She wished she hadn’t started all this in his house because she felt out of place, but it seemed like a fitting location. Like him, she had even busted into his home through his bedroom window, though he was gone at the time—unlike her. She needed to get things just right, and that required time. Where he was impulsive with his desires, she fed hers, savoring every meticulous moment of planning to see it come to fruition.
She circled him, and he followed her with his eyes. When she could see only the back of his head, she placed her foot on the backrest of the chair and kicked. The seat tipped forward, teetered for a moment, and then fell the rest of the way. His face slammed against the concrete floor, and he let out a grunt. No doubt, he could smell and feel the motor oil between his face and the floor, but that would soon be the least of his concerns.
The chair she brought into his home was special. She removed the seat panel, which revealed parts of him she never wanted to see again. Hell, she never wanted to see them in the first place, but this time she pushed through it. The determination for revenge was strong in this one. She'd dreamed many nights about how she might bring the man to justice. Tell the police? No, because she didn't want to be a victim. Didn't want her story leaked and broadcast to the world. She wanted to feel empowered, isn't that what women are supposed to do after someone rapes them? She didn’t know. She only cared about how she felt, and she wanted to feel better no matter the cost.
An eye for an eye, she figured, was the only way. Her only resolve was to make him feel as she felt, make him pay as she paid. Make that violation of human decency, that violation of her, something he could understand.
She walked to a small table next to him and picked up a small but thick silver ribbed rod. It gleamed from the fluorescent light, and his eyes widened as he shook his head, pleading for her to stop whatever she might do with it. After positioning herself behind the chair again, she made him hurt. She educated him on the things that turned her heart black and her feelings numb.
Good didn't quiet describe how she felt as she listened to his cries for her to stop. When she first entered that house, she hated him. Now, as she left, she maybe pitied him a little. She certainly felt better, and in a way didn't feel as much of a victim as she had before. The control she took over her attacker, making him understand how she felt, satiated a deep hunger she knew she had, but didn't fully recognize until it had gone. Maybe it would come back; maybe it would stay gone forever. She didn't know, and couldn't. All that really mattered at that moment, however, was that she finally felt some semblance of inner peace, and that was all right with her.
A Dark Day
Lunch wasn't exactly what I had in mind that day. I mean, who really wants to find out their good friend is just an impulse away from a sudden concrete death. Not me, I can tell you. However, that wasn't even the worst part about that day. You might think I'm callous, but my friend’s death was the best thing that could have happened to him.
The old hotel from which Bryan intended to jump had the stench of sixty-year-old tobacco and cleaning agents tainting the air. The dingy cream walls and water-stained ceiling weren’t exactly appealing, but neither was the idea that I had to talk my friend out of committing suicide.
I know I had originally said he decided, but that was hugely inaccurate. When I walked into that cold and rotting hotel room, I thought maybe he was secretly depressed and I had no idea. If I had known the real cause of his insane need to leap from a building, well, I don't really know what I would've done, but I do know that his sacrifice was the reason for the world ending as we knew it.
"Bryan, look at me, dude. This is crazy." I said, though I wasn't sure how well he would respond to me alluding that he'd lost his shit.
He continued to look out into the sky. He didn’t acknowledge me. He didn’t move or grunt. He only stood there, a stone gargoyle with the visage of a man.
I said, "Come on, brother. Come back inside and let’s do this right. We’ll talk about it and figure out what’s wrong."
He slowly turned his head toward me; the rest of his body remained frozen. He probably turned just an inch short of snapping his own neck, and when he stopped, he stared. A frigid chill crawled up my spine, cut through my warm skin, and caressed my soul with its steely fingers. Those weren’t his eyes.
The man who stood before me was nothing more than a shell. For most people, you can see some semblance of life in their eyes, but in his, there was nothing. He acknowledged me, true, but it was as though he was nothing more than a puppet. Something controlled him. Something dark.
He cracked a broken smile, and abruptly leapt from the ledge. Impulse drove me to the window, and I watched as he hit the ground with a grizzly result.
“Oh, shit.” I whimpered with shock, though I spoke sooner than I should’ve.
The sky suddenly darkened with black clouds as if a thick inky smoke permeated the clear skies. A flash of amber cracked my view of the city, and a deep rumble howled forth as if emanating from the cinder-scorched throat of an ethereal creature.
“Oh, shit.” I said again, but this time in the face of the day that marked the beginning of our end.
Bullies
Finish it, I thought. Finish it and it will be over. No one else will have to put up with his shit anymore.
Time seemed to slow. My breathing, though labored at first, became shallow and calm. The knuckles of my right hand burned white while gripping a handful of his plaid shirt. Sweat
slipped down my face, retreating from the violent thoughts in my head as a soft moan of surrender escaped the teen’s lips.
I slowly looked at the wet splotches of blood that mottled and darkened the knuckles of my left hand. The stark contrast of both my left and right hand was obvious, but the congruency was also undeniable. They both sought violence at the behest of a teenager that wasn't old enough by society’s standards to make the correct decisions. Yet, there I was, arguing through the split second decision of whether I should continue or forsake my morals and allow him write his inevitable future.
I'd often heard that everything was black and white with bits of grey sprinkled throughout. The reality was that everything was grey because everything had thousands of actions and equally as many consequences. Every bit of our lives are a culmination of millions of occurrences of black and white smashed and mixed making everything become exactly as we know it. A dark gray world.
I thought that if I didn't teach him a lesson, he'd continue down a path of darkness. Did I know that for sure? No, I didn't. Could I say with certainty that he'd find a future full of good? No, I didn't know that either. All I knew was that there would be good and bad consequences to both actions. Either I do what I need to do and risk everything or do nothing risking everything else. What do I choose?
What do I choose!
Like a soft sledgehammer made of flesh and bone, my fist slammed into his face. One after another after another. He cried and moaned, begging me to stop, but I thought about all the times he abused people and I couldn't let it happen again. I wouldn't let it happen.
To be honest, I really should have stopped that day. The result of my tenacity was the death of another, my subsequent expulsion from school, the alienation from my family, and my eventual life of resorting to crime for survival.
I often asked myself if I regret doing what I did, but I'm never sure how to answer it. On one hand, the crimes I committed before finding a permanent concrete home didn't exactly hurt anyone. On the other, if he'd lived, his future might've turned out far more violent than mine did. Again, I can't be certain of that, but I made the decision I made, and now I have to live with it every second for the rest of my life.
The Deranged Author
"Do you think writers are as dangerous as the characters in the stories they write?" I asked, wondering if he would find it funny. Not long before he happened, someone asked me the same question. It was a lie when I told her that they aren’t.
Kevin sat tied to a chair in front of me with tape across his mouth. I found it hilarious that he would be the one sitting there since he was the reason she asked me the question. The little bitch was terrified I would do something if she left me. She thought I might snap if I found out all the things she’d been doing while we were together. What she didn’t know was that I already had a screw loose, and I waited patiently for her to marry him, which finally knocked the screw out entirely.
“Don’t you find that funny?” I asked, and smiled at him with amusement. "Don’t you find it just a little funny that she would ask that and now here you are?”
Of course, I didn't expect an answer because I wasn’t crazy. I knew he couldn’t say anything. It’s called being psychotic; there’s a difference. One terrified me, but the other I embraced with all my heart.
The blood from his nose left dried striations on the tape's surface, and his sweat beaded on his face from terror. Well, that and it was hot as hell in the room. I felt like I could barely breathe that thick humid air. Despite the broken air conditioner, though, I could not think of a better place than the bedroom where he fucked her good and hard all those times I worked late.
"Do you find it funny?" I asked again, but this time I expected an answer. I wanted him to tell me that he knew the exact reason I tied him to the chair. I wanted him to prove that he knew now that it was stupid for him to have ever messed with me. Too many people make decisions without thinking about the consequences. They never take a minute to consider how their actions affect everyone around them, including themselves.
“Well?”
No answer.
I raised my left hand over my right shoulder, balled it into a fist, and then knuckled him in the face. He let out a soft tortured grunt, and a fresh trickle of blood painted the tape with the color of his betrayal. He chuffed with anger, the false audacity of a man who believed he'd done nothing wrong. That fool.
When I sat on the chair in front of him, the metal let out a stressed moan, obviously exaggerating its agony over my weight. I was five-foot-seven and weighed one-fifty, which was mostly muscle, so the drama queen under my posterior had no right to complain. I immediately stood, grabbed the back of the chair, and threw it across the room. It clattered from a wall that had pictures of him and his new wife hanging from it. One of them swung back and forth until it fell to the ground next to the chair.
I looked at Kevin, and I could feel the soft tissue at the sides of my head pulsate with each hammer of my darkened heart. He had his head ducked low, his shoulders hunched, and his body quaked.
"You pussy. What did you expect? You did this. You made me do this, you little bitch."
He shook his head in disagreement, and I disagreed with his divergence from the truth. So, I knuckled him again. The pain in my hand was fierce and the bones in his face probably fractured a bit more, but it was well worth it.
“You know, if you’d not slept with her… if you’d not taken the last thing I loved away from me, you wouldn’t be here.” I said as I picked up a blade.
His eyes widened.
“Do you find it funny that I’m just as batshit crazy as my characters?” I said, and pushed the blade into his neck. He coughed, wheezed, and gargled as he fought for air. He made a yuck, yuck, yuck sound, and I thought it somewhat funny as if he was trying to answer my question with a blood-covered yes. It made me a little sick to my stomach, but as I watched him suffer in the last moments of his pathetic life, my heart fluttered with an unmatched satisfaction knowing his wife would soon fall upon the same fate.
Whodunit: Killer Bee
8:13
“What? No, I’m not going to cheat.” Alex said, “If we get caught, we’re both screwed out of this competition.”
“We don’t have to get caught as long as you keep your mouth shut. Besides, he’s cheating, too. I know it.”
“Really? We won’t get caught? I’m pretty sure that almost every criminal in history used those exact words. It’s not really slim pickings at the prisons, you know.”
“Look, I don’t care what you do. I’m gonna do something, though. Bitch has got, like, a dictionary in his head or something. Besides, isn’t he the announcer’s son? ”
“Yeah, I guess so, but that doesn’t matter.” Alex sighed, “If I get screwed out of winning this—”
“Oh, please.” Byron said as he walked away. “Like you had a chance to win against me, anyway.”
“Hey!” Alex called. “I thought we were gonna go get water from the corner store?”
“Nah, we’ll do it later.”
8:45
The announcer took a few careful steps away from the contestants and said, “Your word is cantaloupe.”
Alex placed his hand around the microphone and pressed the button to activate it. “Cantaloupe, C-A-N-T-A-L-O-U-P-E, cantaloupe.”
The announcer’s eyes widened and he hesitantly said, “Okay, that’s correct. Victor, your word is pauciloquent.”
Victor reached down and put his hand around the microphone. He slid his thumb over the red button as it glistened in the spotlight’s searing beam. He placed his lips near the microphone, and when he pressed the button, the head of the mic exploded. The blast obliterated Victor’s head, leaving bits and pieces of him to splatter upon Alex and Bryon.
9:37
When the detective finished asking Alex questions, she walked away to confer with her partner. Alex walked across the parking lot and sat next to Byron, who looked pale. His best guess was that
seeing someone explode into paste didn’t exactly sit well with him, but he appeared to be taking it better than many of the people in the audience.
Alex said, “I told you not to screw up my win.”
“I didn’t do it, man.” He said, and retched. He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and trembled, “I thought you did it.”
Alex said, “I didn’t fucking do it. You know what scares me? If you and I didn’t do it, then who the hell did?”
9:55
Alex and Byron sat quietly, still trying to figure out what had happened. Near them, two administrators of the spelling competition talked about the murder.
The one wearing a blue blouse said, “I heard the police have a suspect in mind, but they didn’t say anything about his name.”
Alex grew cold, wondering if they knew anything about their plan. He rubbed his face as if that would rub the guilt off it, but he probably only made it worse.
The other with an obvious toupee said, “Do they? Yeah, I found out that they moved the podiums around just before the match started. So I think that Victor kid wasn’t even supposed to be the one to get hurt.”
“Do they know who the podium was meant for?”
“Nope, only that it backfired.”
“Wow, those poor boys.”
“Tell me about it. I’m just glad my girl wasn’t up there.” He said, and his face seemed saddened by a bit of shame. “Good thing she can’t spell for shit.”
Alex took a deep breath, and let it out. If the police suspected anything, he knew he would be in deep water. As long as Byron kept his mouth shut, he figured, they certainly wouldn’t think to ask them about it or dig deeper than they needed to. After all, they were just contestants.
