by Robert Essig
Austin stood there shadowed beneath an old and long forgotten canopy gazing upon an act of madness but far too wary of the danger to attempt to step in as he had several times in the past. When someone lives their life as a wealthy vagabond they come across people in distress frequently. Previously, he had stumbled upon a woman being abused by what could have been a pimp or a disgruntled boyfriend. He grabbed the “tough guy” by the throat and smashed his head into a wall. The son-of-a-bitch went for his piece, but Austin thought quick and hit the man in the temple knocking him out cold. It’s not that Austin was a violent man. He wasn’t. But when he saw someone in a bit of trouble he always welcomed himself to help.
Well, almost always. The scene in the alleyway was one of many situations where he decided to keep a low profile. Thing about this situation was that Austin had lost his cell phone at the club (something he has done time and again) so he couldn’t phone the police. And he wasn’t about to make his presence known as the carnage took place. When the bald Mexican guy came along, Austin thought things would pan out in a different direction, but the strange woman treated the tattooed, muscle-laden man as if he were a rag doll, which sent a jolt of fear through Austin like he hadn’t felt in some time. He would have taken several steps deeper into the darkness, but he was too fearful that he would make a noise.
The woman communicated with the guy that watched from the head of the alley and then she began devouring the man she had initially attacked like some wide beast, disregarding the Latino man. Austin swore she looked like some kind of demon, though he figured it had to be a trick of light and his mind playing games. The guy standing just outside the alley watched as if caught in a trance as the woman ate the dead man with uncanny speed and appetite. When she was finished, she sauntered off, passing the onlooker as if he couldn’t see her. The poor sod didn’t even turn for several minutes before he snapped out of whatever trance he was in, at which point he examined the mayhem before taking to the streets as if violent mutilation was as natural as urination first thing in the morning.
In the aftermath, Austin crossed the desolate street. He looked both ways the way his nanny had taught him when he grew up. Old habits died even older, it appeared. There was a homeless man pushing a massively overfilled cart up ahead, very slowly, which struck Austin as odd for this time of night, or morning as it were. Perhaps he couldn’t find a decent overpass or alley to call home for the night. He certainly wouldn’t call this alley home, for it was littered with murder and stank of death, and in no time it would be swarming with police, CSI, and news crews.
Austin was no fool, and it wasn’t his first time witnessing a dead body, but he had to make it quick so he wasn’t tied to the scene in any way. The best thing to do would be to find a payphone, if he could in this day and age, and call the police. He shouldn’t even enter the alley, but he had to see the woman’s handiwork and the severity of her brutality.
Standing over the body, Austin recoiled and drew his hand to cover his nose from the mingling odor of blood, shit, piss, and garbage. He had never seen anything so savage in his life.
As he stared at the carnage, something within the bloodied mess began moving like tiny ants. At first Austin thought it was indeed degenerative insects, but it was far too soon for their intrusion. Against his better judgment, he knelt down before the mutilated body, one hand palming the grimy floor of the ally (careful not to touch the victim’s blood), and the other covering his nose and mouth. At closer inspection he could see that something was indeed moving on the surface of the indistinguishable mess, swimming through the blood as if riding the now calm rivers of red that had flowed out of the man’s body.
As Austin examined the strange movement closely, something tiny and nearly transparent leapt from the blood onto his arm. He leapt backward as if it were a bit of contamination, which it was considering the tiny speck of blood that was now on his arm. That blood could very well be laden with disease for all Austin knew.
He searched the alley for something to wipe off the blood spot, but before he had a chance the spot moved along the hairy landscape of his arm leaving a very slight red trail behind it. Austin prepared his pointer finger and thumb to flick the insect—it had to be an insect, right? —off his arm, but it was like no bug he had ever seen.
It reminded him of the time he came upon a beached whale on the Gulf of Mexico. It had been there for several days. The smell was horrendous and as Austin came close to the whale carcass for a better look, it came alive with millions of tiny flies that looked like the fuzz on an old television set. Several of those flies had transferred onto Austin’s body. They were transparent and disgusting considering that they had been feasting on dead flesh.
But the thing on his arm wasn’t a fly. As he examined it closer, he wasn’t even sure it was of this world. The more he eyed the tiny beast, the more he didn’t like it. Just as with the flies from the dead whale, he wasn’t fond of something that had been eating the dead climbing his arm. Though he wasn’t even sure it had been eating the flesh of the man at Austin’s feet. In fact, the crawling on the corpse seemed like something else altogether.
A shiver climbed his back sending chills down his arms creating a path of goose bumps for the odd little beast as it climbed higher as if scaling a fleshy mountain. Time caught up with Austin. He had become so entranced with the thing on his arm that he’d forgot where he was, that he was standing in a crime scene.
Looking to the floor of the alley Austin eyed a small jar, perhaps a pickle jar, with an aluminum lid on it. He carefully unscrewed the lid, poured the juice out of it, whatever it was, and scooped up the miniature beast that had made its way up his arm. After twisting the lid on tight, he placed it in the pocket of his jacket and returned his gaze to the corpse one final time before leaving the alley.
Several blocks away Austin anonymously called the police and reported the bodies.
***
Now, one would think Austin a monster for what he did, but that’s not true at all. He was quite a compassionate man in his own right, though he often found it difficult to show, and due to his rough exterior, people probably saw him as a tough guy. He was lean and muscular, sleeves of tattoos on his arms from the most respected and talented artists from all over the world. His hair was light brown and short, his face chiseled and often sprinkled with several days worth of stubble, not because it drove the women crazy (and it did), but because he was reluctant to shave any more than once a week. He wasn’t a dirty man, just a bit absentminded when it came to the fine art of shaving. The stubble didn’t bother him and he wasn’t the type of person to worry too much about his physical appearance.
As for his acts at the alley on D Street, there was nothing he could do. Yes, he had watched as the woman killed two men, but he was smart enough to know not to get involved. Whatever she was, he had the feeling that she wasn’t a woman at all—perhaps a man—or perhaps something else.
Austin held the glass jar in his hand and stared at the little creature he captured within. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, and he had traveled all over the world in his days, seen hundreds of cultures and lands which introduced him to a plethora of fruits and vegetables that the average westerner would live their entire lives never knowing of. That went for species of animals and insects as well, and the thing in the bottle was foreign to all things that were known to Austin.
He really wasn’t sure why he decided to take a sample from the scene of the crime—it wasn’t like him—but he couldn’t bear to leave without the thing that had crawled upon his arm. It was built so strangely for an insect. It didn’t have an abdomen, no antennae, only four legs . . . well, at least two legs and what looked like two arms. That was what shocked Austin into taking a sample of the things swarming the mutilated body. The insect-like figure bore a striking resemblance to a human figure. It had certain properties that were very alien, but the arms legs and torso of its tiny frame were uncanny.
He set the jar on the dres
ser in his hotel room and replayed the night’s events in his mind. He often wondered about his motives because even he wasn’t sure at times of what he was getting himself into. Was it wrong not to tell the police what he knew? Yes. But what did it matter? Austin has been in jail more times than he would like to admit, and several of those visits were on account of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes being a Good Samaritan meant being the only suspect in a crime, and he’d been there far too many times for his own good. It came with a life of travel. These days Austin chose to call police anonymously when he had witnessed something like what happened in the alley on D Street. On top of that, D Street was in a shit-hole town and the men who were savaged by the woman-thing looked like real bad apples. Austin was a man of morals—though Godless—and in his book the bad should suffer. He wouldn’t have tried to help the likes of those men had he the chance.
Austin sighed. He wondered what the hell he was getting himself into the way his mind was thinking. He was in possession of something that may be from out of this world, something that that could defy logic and break theories of life itself, something that should be studied by great minds.
Something tied to a double homicide.
Or was it just a strange species of insect that Austin had never seen? He didn’t think so. There were several reasons why he captured the humanoid insect. One was the obvious, that it was the size of an insect with the form of a human, but the other was that when he first looked upon the body, he had seen it festering with the strange things. And when he looked at the body just before leaving, it was free of its tiny invaders, as if they hadn’t been there in the first place. Austin thought about the woman and what he thought he saw in the dimness of the alley. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t be certain it was a woman. He had seen something in there tearing the man apart, that was for sure.
Austin shifted his eyes to the jar once again. He had spent a lot of time looking at the jar as the sun rose creating a warm San Diego morning. Sleep was a must, but he was anything but tired.
Deep inside he knew the thing in the jar and the murderess were connected.
3
Rich was fortunate to catch a cab down the road a bit. He took it to the shit-ass motel where a dope fiend was crouched on the staircase outside clutching a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. The guy looked dead but was probably just passed out cold.
Rich took the steps thinking the man would reach a bony hand out and grasp his ankle as he passed, but the man was out of it. He smelt of piss and grime and old malt liquor.
Once in his room, rich locked the door and flopped his tired ass on the stained sheets of the stiff bed. Following his favorite band through the western United States was tiring, and now he had something else altogether on his mind, swirling through the gray matter like a teenage boy’s fantasies of the girls he eyes at school. All Rich could think about was the tramp from the alley and what she did to the junkie she had picked up from the concert. Rich had seen some shit in his day, but this took the cake.
He should have been frightened, scared for his life, but he had just stood there staring as she devoured the man. He watched and she knew he was watching. She had enjoyed him watching her. Even now he should be shaken by what he had witnessed, but something strange happened in that alley. There was a connection between him and the woman, if that’s what she was. More like a demon.
Images swam in Rich’s mind as he drifted into sleep with the lights on in his dingy motel room. The lights almost kept the roaches away but the rats still scratched on the walls filling his mind with treats to linger within his dreams of demons, murder and mutilation.
The following day Rich headed for Anaheim where Death Fraud was to perform at the House of Blues. His car was running good, and that was blessing considering the ridiculously high mileage and the oil leak that seemed to be getting worse. The idea to follow Death Fraud for the American wing of their world tour was spontaneous at best, but Rich had hoarded a great deal of money from his drywall job and from selling pot on the side. He was smart with the weed and managed to sell more than he smoked, which wielded quite a nice profit. By the time he was finished with the tour he would be flat broke and would have to drag his sorry ass back home to slather joint compound on sheets of drywall, if he was fortunate enough to find work in this struggling economy. Spending all his money following Death Fraud wasn’t the greatest idea, but then again Rich wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack.
The weather was great, as it often was in southern California. He felt the beaming sun and the wind in his hair through a window that was stuck in the downward position (which had been a pain in the ass in the rainy states!). He cranked some tunes—Blue Oyster Cult rather than more Death Fraud—and smiled as he peeled rubber down the freeway. They were singing about how this wasn’t the summer of love and Rich couldn’t agree more. He was happy on the road. He didn’t have to think about girls and deal with all the pressure real life presented as far as couples and marriage went. He wasn’t a romantic guy, never had been. Truth was Rich Wompler had been a bit of a loner throughout high school, which created a stigma that seemed to follow him wherever he went as if he was wearing female repellant. It was a drag back in Ohio where his mother lived, she always bitching at him about settling down with a nice woman and having children. She created enough pressure to cause him to want to take a semi-automatic rifle and go postal, only in his case it would have been called “going drywaller.”
The road cleared his mind, made him feel carefree, and that was something he couldn’t achieve in Ohio. On top of that, rock shows attracted loose women, and those kind of girls were more than willing to go all the way after some booze and a fat spliff. Or for fifty bucks if it came to that.
On this northbound ride from San Diego the music couldn’t get loud enough and his smile couldn’t have been false enough to stop his mind from thinking about what happened last night. He couldn’t get the freaky tramp out of his mind. She was a total hag, yet there was something that attracted him about her, something he felt after she mutilated that junkie in the alley. Something had happened to him last night, something that he couldn’t explain—an epiphany.
What bothered him the most—why he put a Sepultura CD on and cranked it as loud as he could—was that part of him was attracted to her. That was what his mind kept thinking about obsessively. It wasn’t the burnt out whore that he thought of with such admiration, but the evil he had seen beneath the veneer. He was attracted to the demon he had glimpsed, if for only a moment, and he wanted to see the demon again.
4
Austin woke from nightmares that fled as soon as his bleary eyes took in the brightness of a Southern California summer morning. For a moment, it felt like any other day. Another Wheeler Hotel room in another town with another bad taste to be washed down with another bottle of beer. Austin wasn’t a drunk, but he did like a beer first thing in the morning with some toast. Strange breakfast, but it was his ritual, and being a man who has never truly worked a day in his life, he could easily wake with a cold brew and have nothing to worry about. But that wasn’t entirely true. Austin had plenty to worry about. In many ways, his life was filled with worry. No, not the type of worry most people are consumed with regarding family welfare and income, but a day-to-day worry about discovering who he was. Austin was obsessed with that aspect of his life, and being the heir of a world-renowned hotel chain literally gave him limitless opportunity to search for himself.
And that he did.
Being an heir to the Wheeler Hotel chain wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Austin grew up in money, enough for him to always have the coolest toys, the nicest bicycle, the best clothes, the newest video games, a brand new Mercedes at sixteen—everything. That seemed well enough for happiness, right? Not so. That life was plagued with enough emotional wreckage to last several lifetimes. For there was little to no repair for the damage of being raised by a nanny and a butler while his parents were jet setting their wa
y across the world making business deals and schmoozing with barons and aristocrats. It wasn’t that his nanny, Denise, wasn’t loving like a mother, she was, but she wasn’t his mother, and that left Austin with a hole in his heart. Gary the butler served as a sort of father figure, but his mood was ominous much of the time during the months Austin’s parents weren’t in the house. When his parents were home they tried their damnedest to be parents, but he had stopped calling them Mommy and Daddy by the time he could properly speak, and by the age of seven he was calling them by their first names, much to their discontent. They were outsiders to him rather than parents, and that confused him more than anything. Confused him to this day.
After graduating high school, Austin negotiated a deal with his father who wanted nothing more than for his only son to take over the family hotel chain once he decided to retire. Austin had no desire to run a hotel chain, so he told his father that he would gladly take the reins as long as he was given an account that he could use, as well as the guarantee that he could stay in their hotels anywhere he traveled. His father was reluctant to agree to those terms, however he knew the strain and confusion his son bore and decided that it was the least he could do.
Fifteen years ago, at eighteen years of age, Austin left his parent’s mansion and stayed in the local Wheeler Hotel for a week before setting off on his everlasting journey that oftentimes led to nowhere and everywhere.
Austin palmed the glass jar. The thing within moved as its tiny world was jolted. It looked like a ghost shrimp crossed with a human. At closer inspection, he could see the detailed insides of the little beast. It looked very human in so many ways, yet there were parts of its miniature anatomy that defied everything that was man. The bone structure that could be seen beneath the translucent flesh was more like cartilage with bendable joints rather than sockets.
