The Forum

by Marie Reyes

  THE FORUM

  MARIE

  REYES

  Copyright © Marie Reyes. 2021

  The moral right of Marie Reyes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copywrite owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 9798725363425

  https://mariereyes1985.wixsite.com/mariereyesauthor

  Cover art images:

  Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

  Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash

  For Kirst, Sam, Sandz, Millsy, and my parents.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  SEATTLE

  Piper pulled her ratty fleece blanket over herself and traced one of the cigarette burns with her finger. The thermostat said it was 12 degrees, but it felt like zero. Maybe the thing was broken, like everything else in her apartment. Pulsating bass from upstairs made the ceiling vibrate and usually she didn't mind, but tonight was different.

  "Shut the fuck up!" She coughed, her voice strained, but that didn't stop her from grabbing another menthol cigarette from the pack. A fog of smoke already enveloped the apartment, but she didn't care. It made her feel warmer somehow. Besides, she had given up the drinking and the prescription painkillers, so smoking was all she had left, and they would have to pry her cigarettes from her cold dead hands. She considered cracking open the window the tiniest bit to help the smoke dissipate, but didn't want to let any more heat escape.

  The claustrophobic darkness made the room feel colder. If she put the main light on, maybe it would trick her body into thinking it was the sun, but she wasn't ready for that level of harsh brightness, favoring the dim glow emanating from the brass lamp she had picked up at the thrift store. There was no room for her laptop on the formica table in front of her, so she swiped the clutter and stray cigarette butts aside.

  Without her laptop, she imagined she would have gone crazy, even crazier than she was now. This little screen was her portal to better things. With this little screen, she could transport herself to anywhere in the world, walking digitally through streets on the other side of the world, or chatting to someone in another country, or browsing luxurious properties she couldn't afford in a million years, imagining what it would be like to sit out on one of those balconies overlooking the ocean. The possibilities that this bundle of metal, wires, and plastic offered, gave her a sliver of hope.

  The colorful images on the screen distracted her from the messiness of her apartment, and she tried not to think about what her ex-husband and children would have made of the state of it if they happened to swing by unannounced, not that they would. Ever. Well, except when he and his new girlfriend were desperate for childcare, and they'd have to be pretty desperate. It was better this way. It's not that she didn't love them, but they were most certainly better off only seeing her every now and then. She didn't want to poison them and taint them with the darkness that lingered around her like cigarette smoke.

  Tonight, was a bad night. There were places she would go when she was like this. First, she would hang around forums where others, as miserable as her, could wallow in self-pity. That was the first step. It would only go downhill from there. She skipped that part of the process and headed straight to the website with the black background, and the migraine inducing bright yellow, green, and white fonts.

  There were certain things that would pique her interest as she scrolled through the images and videos. People jumping from the tops of buildings, hangings, and self-inflicted gunshots to the head — These were the videos that pulled her in like a black hole. Seeing the aftermath made her feel so many things. Disgust was always the first reaction, closely followed by curiosity, then a weird tingle in her stomach.

  She didn't know if she pitied them or wanted to be them. They had the guts to do what she couldn't. Those videos made her feel alive and reminded her that this existence wouldn't last forever. The here and now was real, but it was temporary. The people in those videos weren't on autopilot like her. It made her take stock, and believe that she could do something, that she had to do something, because the other option was so final.

  A head smashed to pieces on the sidewalk from the sheer force. That could have been her, still could be. Didn't she want to do something before then, something worth-while?

  Besides having Clara and Stephen, she had done nothing with her life. All she did now was smoke, watch television, and try to survive on welfare. In the interest of seizing the day, she wondered what she could do, here and now, from the safety of her living room, through a screen and a series of wires. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard as if some great inspiration would course through her from some higher power. After a minute, nothing came. If she made herself a coffee, maybe then it would come to her.

  She lumbered towards the kitchen, glancing to the bathroom on her left. She needed to pee, but the thought of the cold bathroom tiles against her feet put her off, and she couldn't be bothered to put her slippers on. They were either buried under a pile of dirty laundry, or down the side of her bed from where she had kicked them off during the night. Maybe after her hot drink had warmed her up a little, she could function.

  Garbage spilled out over the top of the trash can with the lid balanced on top, but there was no way she was going to empty it tonight, so she avoided looking at it as she put the kettle on, and unceremoniously chucked a spoon of instant coffee powder into a stained white mug. Despite having used the mug over and over without washing it, she couldn't bring herself to use the world's greatest mom mug that sat on the top shelf gathering dust. She shut the kitchen door behind her to keep out the smell from the week-old trash and sat back down at her little desk positioned in front of the window.

  The internet replaced alcohol and Oxy as her new drug of choice, a much more socially acceptable addiction. She shuddered as she glimpsed her reflection in the glass screen. Once upon a time, she had considered herself fairly attractive. It was surprising how quickly things could slide out of control. She tried to recall the last time she had run a brush through her hair, or cleaned her teeth for that matter.

  She briefly considered befriending someone in the alcoholic chatroom, to convince them it is possible to give up, but then she remembered how much she hated it when people did that to her when she wasn't ready to stop. No, tonight was a wallowing night.

  Her cursor drifted across the screen and her brain tried a last-ditch attempt at convincing her to work on the website she had started one night when drunk and thinking above her station. The idea had been to sell her art online, but who was she kidding? There were always better artists out there than her. What was the point in even trying? She'd need to buy materials, which she couldn't really afford anyway.

  The gore website she had left up flashed with a new image which popped up with neon green arrows around it, stark against the black background.

  FATTY MADE TO PAY - VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED.

  It was hard to make anything out at first. That was until the camera was moved to another position and a light source came on from behind the camera. Not much light, but enough that Piper could see a large, unconscious man secured to a chair by his arms, legs, and chest, with copious amounts of duct tape wrapped over itself again and again until it bulged.

&nb
sp; The man's head hung to one side limply, his mouth open so wide she could imagine him drooling any second. His chest rose and fell gently, almost peacefully. A shadow stretched from the left-hand side of the screen as a figure came into view, their outline barely visible at first, until they stepped into the light, towards the restrained man, who was stirring a little now, barely perceptibly.

  For a moment, Piper considered what she might do if she found herself in that position. Pretend to be unconscious still while trying to get free somehow? No, she expected she would scream at the top of her lungs, crying and sniveling.

  The person was dressed in black from head to toe: black balaclava, black hoodie, black pants, black boots. They inched towards the unconscious man and just stood there waiting. Nothing was happening, and Piper thought the video might have frozen until she noticed the man twitch. Her eyes scanned the rest of the room, and from what she could tell, it looked like a pleasant home. Tidy, spacious, everything her apartment was not, with a large television, maybe even 75 inches.

  A swift movement and a flash of metal tore her eyes from what she was looking at, and she watched as one person stabbed another in the gut. She flinched and placed a hand in front of her stomach instinctively, as if it were happening to her. They must have plunged the knife deep, as the blade was no longer visible, just the hilt. The blood escaped fast when the knife slid out. It just looked like a regular kitchen knife but covered in blood that glistened slick-black in the darkness.

  The victim's eyes opened wide, bulging almost. Fear like that was unmistakable. The sound was muted, so thankfully, she couldn't hear his screams, but she could see them in his contorted face. His eyes seared themselves into her brain, even more so than the knife and the blood. Those eyes stirred something in her, and she moved the mouse so the cursor hovered above the pause button, but she couldn't bring herself to press it yet.

  She had to find out if it was real. If it were real, maybe she could do something about it, she told herself, but deep down, she knew that wasn't why she continued watching. It was that fucked up part of her brain that she could hide from others, unlike her addiction. To make herself feel better about her perverse curiosity, she told herself it was natural. How many people slow down at the scene of a crash? It is only natural to want to see behind the curtain, to know what awaits every last one of us.

  The person in the balaclava cut the victim's T-shirt away from his body, which looked ghostly white against the blackness. Then they started carving. She flinched a little, taking her eyes away for no longer than a second before looking again. At first it appeared to be indiscriminate cutting, gouging away at the man's chest with the blade, but the longer they went on, the more the cuts started to look like something, like part of a whole. She stared at it like one of those magic pictures, that if you squint at them long enough, you can see an image emerge. It was like that, but not quite. She did not expect to see a dolphin, or a coffee cup emerge from the blood. The blood was smearing, and it became impossible to see the individual cuts properly. The victim was still alive, sputtering and straining against the duct tape, but not for long when the intruder grabbed a blunt object from the floor.

  Somehow, watching someone smash someone's head in, was more disturbing than the stabbing and the cutting. Piper's heart raced as she watched the man shove a section of his victim's cut-up t-shirt into his mouth. The guy was dead now. It was so obvious, that moment when the person was no longer themselves, and became a hunk of meat, officially just a body. They take on a leaden stillness, and their color changes, and the face. The face was the main tell. They didn't look human anymore. Her obsession with these sites started with looking at celebrity autopsy photographs. Those faces haunted her, yet she couldn't help but seek them out.

  Chapter Two

  LONDON

  Rowdy groups, probably people on their way back from the clubs, passed Aadesh's flat as he crossed the road. He turned back to see his friend dawdling behind him and looked at his wristwatch. 3.15am. Some lads were butchering Wonderwall as they passed by, and Aadesh couldn't help but cringe.

  Some of the other residents hovered in the doorway of his block of flats, the smoke from their cigarettes floating off into the crisp, early morning sky. The adrenaline from his performance had worn off and now he wanted the warm cocoon of his flat. It was tiny, even by London standards, but it was his, and it was cozy, covered with posters of his favorite films and full of random memorabilia.

  His friend had finally caught up with him when he bypassed his neighbors and put his key in the lock. Although the inside of his flat was okay, the rest of the building was gray, dirty, and bleak, reminiscent of some horror film, or post-apocalyptic thriller. Sometimes he would think about how secure his flat would be in the event of a zombie outbreak. These were the kind of things that ran through his head after a gig, when he was drunk.

  Usually he didn't drink, the subtle guilt his parents had instilled in him over time had an effect, but when he had to get up on stage, he needed at least two drinks to take the edge off. The nerves would soon dissipate, and always at the same point. As soon as he heard the first person laugh, he would then relax. He could stand the heckling, as long as he got at least one laugh first.

  The stairwell echoed as his mate ran up the stairs. Aadesh had no idea why he was rushing as he didn't have the keys and would just have to wait for him at the top, unless...he better not knock. Nadia was probably asleep already, and if she had to get out of bed to let his friend in, he wouldn't hear the end of it in the morning. Too late. By the time Aadesh got to the top of the stairs, panting, he could already see Nadia at the door, but not looking as angry as he would have thought. "Thank goodness you guys are home. I was getting well creeped out."

  "What's wrong?" Aadesh ran to greet her at the front door, Steve had already barged inside like he owned the place, walking past Nadia, only giving a grunt of acknowledgment.

  "My dickwad of a friend showed me this horrible video. We watched a horror film, and then she was like, 'have you seen that video of that fat man getting murdered?' "

  "Fat man," he said in disapproval. He didn't like people referring to someone by only one of their characteristics like it defined them. A lot of the other comedians that would go on stage would take pot-shots, overweight people being the easiest victims. He remembered one of his fellow stand ups say, 'It's okay though, because they do it to themselves.' Having a dynamite combination of polycystic ovary syndrome and underactive thyroid, his mother had struggled with her weight no end, and because of her, it was the one line he wouldn't cross.

  "Her words, not mine," Nadia snapped defensively.

  "You know you hate horror. Why do it to yourself?"

  "I thought I could build myself up. You know, like how people eat hotter and hotter chillies. Get a tolerance."

  "Why?" he asked, bemused.

  "So that you don't end up having to go to the cinema with Georgina again."

  "Seriously. We. Are. Just. Friends," he said emphatically, tired of hearing this again.

  "I know. But we need to do more stuff together."

  "Alright lovebirds, stop being boring. I want to see that video. I'm intrigued now." Steve had sprawled out onto the sofa.

  "No way. I'm going to bed." Nadia headed towards Aadesh's room and glanced back. "See you soon." Aadesh couldn't tell if it was a question, a suggestion, or a demand. Steve had already turned the console on and was searching for the video. Aadesh wasn't much into gore. He preferred a more subtle horror.

  Nothing much was happening on screen, so Steve scrolled further into the video. A dark figure loomed over someone bound to a chair, but they didn't move. "This is boring. When does it get to the good bit?" Steve fast-forwarded and stopped the video as shit got real.

  "Oh, crap." Aadesh perched himself on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward, transfixed by the unbelievable sight flashing up on his television screen. "Oh. Eww. No. Can you turn that off?"

  "But it's just getting to the
good part." Steve turned up the volume, and Aadesh wondered why he was still friends with him. Just because they grew up together, didn't seem like a good enough reason these days. "Can you turn it down? Nadia's trying to sleep."

  "God, you're such a buzz kill. I might get a taxi. Pick up a kebab on the way home."

  "Fine, I'll book you an Uber." Aadesh needed some space. Now the adrenaline from his performance had run out, all he wanted was to be alone.

  ~~~

  In the darkness of the bedroom, Aadesh couldn't tell if Nadia was still awake, and it was only when he slipped in between the cool sheets and she turned onto her side that he knew.

  "Sorry about Steve. I know he can be —"

  "It's fine." She rolled onto her back, her outline barely illuminated by the sliver of light emerging between the door and the frame. He hoped Steve would remember to turn the light off before he left. It was probably rude not to wait until he had left before going to bed, but he was too tired to care.

  "Addy?" her voice emanated from the dark. "Do you think we can finally get rid of some of your junk? There's barely room to move in here. It's just collecting dust anyway."

  "I'll get around to it," he said reluctantly. He was a hoarder — she was a minimalist. If she wasn't so gorgeous, he would probably have told her to get lost by now, but the little voice in his head that told him she was way too good for him, and soon, she would realize it, wouldn't let him give up on her. He had carefully curated his stuff since he was a teen and was proud of his little trinkets. There was no way he was getting rid of his remote control R2-D2, and he would never give up his Hellraiser puzzle box, even for a beautiful woman.

  It was quiet now, and he had no idea how Nadia was so silent. He couldn't hear her breath, and she didn't move. She never snored. She always moaned about his 'loud, nasally breathing,' as she described it. One minute he was so tired he thought he would fall straight to sleep, and the minute he had the chance, he was wide awake. Why did this always happen?