What the Hell Did I Just Read

4. A MONSTER’S PICTURES, A GRIEVING WIDOW, SEX

I felt water squish out of my pants when I settled into my Saturn. Through my weeping windshield I watched Ted trudge up to his front door, knowing that inside he was about to be ambushed by the accusatory silence of that empty house. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I just had a feeling this one wasn’t going to end well. Maybe it’s because they pretty much never do.

I pulled away and considered heading straight for Waffle House, since I’m usually much more effective with a big wad of cheap comfort food in me, but instead headed toward the used bookstore downtown. In the basement they had a collection of odd, out-of-print, and “banned” books. I would probably find nothing pertaining to this case, but Amy’s birthday was next weekend and they had a signed copy of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I’d noticed her gaze longingly at when we were there about six months ago. Look, I have a life outside of work, okay?

I dug out my phone and dialed as I turned down Brown Street. The driver’s side windshield wiper had a crack in the rubber blade that left behind an arc of rainwater right in the center of my field of vision—it had failed exactly in the way that would annoy me most.

Amy answered, “Hey! You’re up early.”

“Got a call from John, situation with a missing kid, thinks it might be a thing. Can you get a ride home?”

“A missing kid? Tell me everything.”

“I just did, there’s not much more to it. She just vanished, like she fell through a hole in reality. We followed up on one lead, turned out to be nothing. Not sure there’s much to be done, and I’m really not sure how we’re going to get paid.”

“There’s a missing child and you’re talking to me about payment? I’m going to reach through this phone and slap you. And you know that’s not easy for me. Did you find the muffin?”

“Already eaten. Did you say you could or couldn’t get a ride home?”

“Shawn will do it. Hey, I was thinking about the argument we had yesterday, and having slept on it I’ve decided that you are even more wrong than I thought you were then.”

“Looks like you need to sleep on it some more.”

The argument had been over whether or not Neo should have just left everyone in the Matrix, since their quality of life was clearly better inside it than out. I say no, she says yes. I should note here that Amy has seen The Matrix at least thirty times. When I got her the Blu-ray for Christmas, she became visibly upset when she saw they had done this odd color correction thing that gave the whole movie a weird green tint. She downloaded editing software on her laptop and has been manually correcting it, shot by shot.

“Oh,” I said, “and I just want to let you know that I’ve completely forgotten your birthday next week, because I’m a man and thus care nothing about your feelings.”

“Oh, okay, thanks for letting me know ahead of time.”

I pulled up to the bookstore, the interior still dark. I realized just now that it wouldn’t open for another twenty minutes—I wasn’t used to being up this early. I grabbed the muddy phone we’d picked up at the ice factory and turned it on, the lock screen asking for the four-digit passcode.

“Hey, do you know how to hack into a phone? Like to get past the lock screen? Did you ever have a class on that?”

“Whose phone is it? Do you know their social security number? Lots of times it’s the last four digits.”

“We found it looking for that little girl. I, uh, would be surprised if this guy has a social security card.”

“Wait, does the phone belong to a guy or is this some kind of weird monster situation?”

“Don’t know. It’s an iPhone, if that helps. What code would an unholy predator of the night have on his phone?”

“I was sick the day they taught that.”

I mindlessly punched in the code for my own phone—6669.

It unlocked.

Why did I know that would work?

I said, “Hey, I think I hacked it.”

The home screen looked normal. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. I tapped on the icon for any stored photos and video and braced myself for the worst.

The first photo was of a plate of breakfast food. Looked like eggs benedict.

I swiped it aside.

I sucked in a breath, and Amy heard it.

“What? What are you seeing?”

The second photo was of a little blond girl, bound and bleeding, her mouth gagged with duct tape. I was going to take a wild guess and say this was Margaret “Maggie” Knoll.

I said, “Not sure.”

I swiped to the next photo. A picture of an orange tabby cat, licking the lens. I swiped again.

The little girl again.

Her limbs were a tangled, red mess.

She had been bound and gagged and then … crushed somehow. Like a giant had forgotten she was in his back pocket before sitting down.

I closed my eyes.

I wondered … at age eight, did she know? Was she aware of what kind of universe she had been born into? Did she have even the faintest hint that this was one of the possible outcomes of her life—that she wouldn’t grow up to be a Disney princess, or marry a handsome man at a fancy wedding, or have kids of her own? That she would wind up terrified and alone, in the dark, as some monster’s plaything? At the end, had she still held out hope that her daddy would come rescue her? Or that the crazy man would soften at the sound of her cries?

Or, in her final moment, had she gotten just a glimpse of just how little of a shit the universe gives about her? Did she have the realization that what she had always thought of as a normal human life was just a tightrope walk over an ocean of unfathomable suffering?

I hoped not.

I said, “Well, shit, Amy.”

Amy said, “What?”

“I think we’ve got photos of the victim here. It’s bad.”

“What is it?”

“Bad. You don’t want to know. We’re too late, let’s put it that way.”

“Oh. Oh, god.”

I swiped the picture. The next photo was of John, walking in the doorway of what looked like a church, holding the T-shirt cannon. I furrowed my brow. He was still in court, right?

Remember, Nymph wanted you to see what you’re seeing. This, too, is part of the game.

I swiped.

John again.

Dead.

Eyes open. A cascade of dried vomit running down the side of his black faux-leather sofa. Drug paraphernalia on the glass coffee table in front of him.

“David?”

I thought, no.

This wasn’t denial, this was math. Even if he’d skipped his court date, John hadn’t had time to get home, change clothes (he wasn’t in his suit, in the photo), get out his stash, and dose himself to death. This was bullshit. All of it. More games.

“Yeah, I … these are fake. There’s pictures of us on here, but they’re, uh, not real.”

“Oh, that’s creepy.”

“Yeah, but that’s good. Means the girl may still be okay. He’s taunting us.”

I swiped.

This one was of John and Amy. She was crying, John was comforting her. They were in my apartment.

Ignore it. It’s nothing.

I swiped again.

Amy, crawling, screaming, a pale blurry shape descending on her from behind.

Seriously, why even bother looking at these?

She asked, “Are there any of me in there?”

“No. I’ve got to go. I’ll see you in a bit.”

“Come straight home! Don’t leave me out of this!”

“You need to get some sleep, you’ve been working all night.”

“There’s a missing girl! David!”

“I love you.”

I hung up and swiped to the next pic. Actually, this one was a video.

I braced myself, and hit play.

It was a shot from the passenger seat of the car I was sitting in, being filmed right now. The cameraman was watching me, watching the phone, in real time.

I turned and looked and—

Someone is there.

No one was there.

I looked back down at the phone and saw that I was holding a filthy, pink plastic toy that was only shaped like a phone, a faded and peeled sticker on the front bearing the likeness of a Disney princess. It had a single plastic button at the bottom, and when I pressed it, it played the theme from the movie. That’s all it did.

I closed my eyes and groaned. It was going to be a long goddamned day.

NOTE ABOUT THE FOLLOWING: The accounts of events that occurred while I was not present—particularly those submitted by John—should not be accepted as wholly or even partially true. They are included here only to help fill in some gaps in the timeline of events, but in retrospect I now feel like they only add to the confusion. For this I apologize.

John

After they returned from the ice factory, John had stood in the Knolls’ driveway, facing Dave and Ted. John’s shirt was soaked through. He peeled it off and flexed, the rain splattering off his muscled chest.

“All right,” growled Dave, rubbing a rough hand over his stubbled jaw. “Less than forty hours, that’s what we’ve got to solve this. I’m gonna go search the archives for what I can find on Joy Park, you go see if you can track down this Nymph bastard. But John—you find him, remember we need him alive.”

John lit a cigarette. “I won’t make any fuckin’ promises.”

Dave ran toward his Saturn, slid across the hood, and landed in the driver’s seat. He revved the engine and squealed out of the yard. John mounted the Jeep and unleashed the tiger under its hood, raindrops raking the windshield as he tore through the early morning gloom. He headed for the courthouse.

At least one piece of luck fell in their favor that morning, thought John: the judge in his public indecency case was Roy Heubbel. John and Dave had just six months prior freed his mansion from an entity that presented itself as a giant spider made of the bloody bones of his deceased wife. That meant he owed them one. Sure enough, the judge told the prosecutor to make a deal and John got off with probation and a promise to, in the judge’s words, “Keep that anaconda caged. There are kids around, and you don’t need to go setting them up with false expectations.”

On the way out, John bumped into Herm Bowman, the detective who had bailed on the Maggie Knoll case earlier that morning. John grabbed the passing Bowman by the elbow and said, “Hey, we’re still working this Knoll thing. We’d have already found the girl if I didn’t have to come tend to this bullshit. But I knew if I didn’t show, they’d put out a warrant for my arrest and I know how you guys hate having to get out in the rain. But now, I need your help.”

Bowman shook off John’s hand. “You want sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.”

“Ted didn’t want me talking to the mother, Loretta, but I’m doin’ it anyway. She live in town? What do you know about her?”

“Yeah, in that yellow house next to Taco Bill.” He didn’t misspeak. That’s the name of the restaurant. “But instead of wasting your time, why don’t you just go back home and shoot up with whatever drugs you’re on this week.”

“I will,” said John as he turned toward the door. “But first I have to go do your job.”

Thunder clapped as John tore out of the courthouse parking lot. He flew past the closed drive-thru liquor store, past Curry’s Tire and Body (with its terrifying mascot made of tires standing sentry out front) and Taco Bill—a Taco Bell that was given the order to close by corporate, only to be stubbornly kept open by the owner. He had altered the sign over the entrance (by sawing out an extra “L” from the sign in the parking lot, turning it into an “I” and attaching it with duct tape) and modified the menu to serve a combination of vaguely approximated Taco Bell dishes prepared by his wife, with a full range of hard liquor added to the beverage list. Smoking was allowed, and after 9 P.M. all of the TVs inside were switched to soft-core Cinemax porn. Everyone agreed it was not only an improvement, but was now the best restaurant in town.

Loretta’s house was next door, a run-down 1970s era ranch house with filthy yellow siding that had probably been on there since the Carter administration. No distinct decorations on the outside, probably a rental. John knocked and a tired but handsome thirtysomething woman with mousy brown hair and sad eyes opened the door, clutching closed a bathrobe. She said nothing.

John said, “Ma’am, I’m not going to ask to come in because I’ve already intruded too much just by making you answer your door. But we’re working with your husband on Maggie’s disappearance, as consultants. I have a few questions but if you don’t want to talk, I’ll leave. Just say the word. I’m not the police, but I’m telling you now, they can’t help you. And what’s more, if we can’t find the girl or the man who took her, then I think the cops will turn their eyes toward you and Ted as suspects. I don’t want that to happen.”

“Ted says Maggie was just … gone. Like she just turned into smoke and blew away. Was he telling the truth? He didn’t … do something, to her, did he?”

“No. We have reason to believe it was, well, something else. I know you’ve been through an unthinkable ordeal this morning but I promise you I’m here to help. If you’re worried that I’m armed, let me show you.”

John peeled off his shirt, to show that he had no weapon stashed in his waistband. His naked torso glistened in the rain.

“All right, I’ll give you a few minutes, then I have to get ready for work. Come in.”

Loretta handed John a towel before retreating to the kitchen to make coffee. Hers was another barren home—a place quickly rented after the separation, maybe in hopes it wouldn’t last long.

She came back with the coffee and John said, “Ted says he actually had warning this was about to happen. A strange man, named Nymph, came to the house a week ago, making weird threats. Did he tell you about that?”

“No. But we don’t talk—”

“Did anything like that happen to you?”

“No, Ted asked me the same thing earlier, when he called. Did he tell you about the drawings?”

“The what?”

“He probably wasn’t even listening. Here…”

Loretta shuffled into her bedroom and John followed. She handed him a stack of drawings on dog-eared construction paper. Magic Marker stick figures, flowers, houses, mountains. Fill colors spilling wildly over the lines. No matter who you are or where you’re from, we can all look upon the raw, energetic creations of children and agree that they are very shitty artists.

Loretta said, “Those are all from the last week. We homeschool, I was doing an activity where she was to draw the future. Instead of spaceships and flying cars, she drew this.”

The first drawing featured a crude house shape with a steeple. A cross on the front. So, a church. The next drawing was a crowd of stick figures, but in the background was that church again. The next was a drawing of the family—scribbled strands of yellow around the head of the smallest figure. And there was the church, up on a hill in the background. She’d even drawn a little angel floating in the sky above it, her haphazard scrawls making it look like it had about eight limbs.

John said, “This church? That’s what we’re looking at?”

“The church, and the man without a head.”

John looked back down at the stick figure family portrait. Mommy, Daddy, Maggie with the hair … and next to her, another stick figure, with no circle where the head should be.

“The one with the crowd of people, you’ll find him in there, too. He’s in all of them.”

“Did she ever talk about it? Like maybe it was a dream she had or something?”

“I asked her after the first one, the portrait of us at church. I said, ‘Who’s this guy here without a head?’ and she said, ‘That’s not a guy, it’s a drawing.’” Loretta laughed. “Maggie was like that. I thought she kept including him in the other drawings as a joke, because I had pointed him out. But now … I’ve spent all morning looking back on everything she said and did, picking it apart, trying to find clues. Like in a movie, you know, there’d always be some clue. In real life, nothing makes sense.”

John said, “I’m going to ask you what is going to seem like a very strange question. Was there ever a situation where Maggie acted like she had spoken to you or her father, or otherwise interacted with you, only you have no memory of it? Like she had made up a memory of a conversation or maybe mistook someone else for you? Or Ted, either one?”

All of the color drained from Loretta’s face.

Me

I walked among the shelves in the bookstore’s basement, smelling that old-book scent that would probably mean nothing to future generations. Amy is all about that smell, of old paper and ink and time, pages touched by long-dead hands. I think she just likes that sense of being among ancient knowledge, feeling like the past is something sacred rather than the actions of a bunch of bucket shitters who were even more stupid and superstitious than we are now. To me, it just smells like old sweat and dirt, but it means something to Amy and that’s what matters today. Even though the whole thing is completely pointless since she has access to every book ever written via a device that is never out of arm’s reach.

That reminded me—I brought up my phone and did a quick search for “Joy Park.”

Titties. My screen was full of them.

“Joy Park,” as it turned out, was the name of a very famous, very big-breasted Korean porn star. After the pages (and pages, and pages) of Joy Park titty pics ran out, all I got was a couple of links to a place in Akron, Ohio—just a regular ol’ park with basketball courts and such—and a few more non-porn girls with that name. Nothing related to anything weird, no news articles about missing kids, or occult rituals, or anything else remotely interesting. I tried searching for any mentions whatsoever of people with the last name Nymph and found that wasn’t even a real surname, which I guess shouldn’t have surprised me.

With that, I was out of ideas. Maybe John’s thing would pan out. Or maybe he would destroy half the town again. I was cold and achy and wanted to go back to bed. My wet clothes were sticking to every part of my body. I sighed and made my way over to the shelf of signed editions, some of them in a scuffed Plexiglas case, some sitting out, depending on whether or not the author was still alive. I started to get a sinking feeling when I spotted a signed hardcover copy of Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz for $100. Next to it, a signed Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman for $125.

I stared at the price tags and thought, Why don’t you fucking kill yourself?

I have that thought a lot, actually. Hey, did you know that people making less than $34,000 a year are 50 percent more likely to commit suicide? I looked it up. Did you know that number shoots up to 72 percent for the unemployed? I heard a guy on talk radio go on and on about how people on food stamps are living the good life off the government teat, and all I could think was, Yes, it’s such a party that sometimes we blow our fucking brains out rather than get humiliated by another government aid employee.

A little while back, John and I had gotten drunk on the occasion of our ten-year high school reunion. Oh, we didn’t attend the actual reunion—we had just started drinking after coming to the realization that it had been ten years and that we had made virtually no progress in our lives. “You know what it’s like?” John had said. “The Rapture. Like from the book of Revelation, when all the souls of the righteous get sucked up into Heaven.”

What he had meant was that there had been a point several years ago when everybody we graduated with were all equally poor. College kids, people working shitty customer service, the unemployed ones still living at home—all of us twentysomethings were all doing the same stuff for fun, going to the same parties. We had nothing, but we were young and thin (well, not me) and nobody expected anything from us. But then, one by one, the smart kids, the ambitious kids, the kids with rich parents—they all ascended. They got their degrees and careers and babies. Most moved away, and the ones who didn’t, stopped hanging out. Until it was just us, the rejects. Left behind, the faithless and doomed, the broke and the broken. Ever since he’d said that, I couldn’t stop thinking of it that way—that we had been cast out as heretics to the western world’s one true religion.

My resume is worthless—it turns out that managing a now-defunct video store in your twenties while solving monster crimes qualifies you for absolutely nothing else. Society just doesn’t need me—I’m that extra screw you have left over after you’ve put together an Ikea desk. Maybe you throw it in a drawer, thinking it’ll eventually become obvious what it was for later on. Then, a few years down the road, you come across it while cleaning and just toss it out.

So, now I’m standing here birthday shopping for Amy, who at the moment, is the only one of us with any kind of a stable income. Using our joint account for this is basically taking money out of her purse to buy something for her that she may or may not even want. How do you set your price limit in that scenario? Spending too much isn’t generosity, it’s forcing her to work overtime next month to make up the difference. “Here, baby, for your birthday I stole another autumn Saturday from your life that you’ll never get back!” Oh, and she’s also having to pay for some of her prescriptions out of pocket, due to the cut-rate health insurance at the call center. She has back problems, and spaces out the pills so that a thirty-day prescription will last sixty. So, now I also have that cross to bear: my inability to learn a useful skill equals Amy’s actual, physical agony.

Why don’t you fucking kill yourself?

I mean, I do have a rare skill, but being able to piss a stream of turkey feathers is also a rare skill—“rare” does not equal “lucrative.” Not that there aren’t ways to cash in on being a freak show—we get offers. But charging a fee to do what we do—to free somebody’s home from what they think is an evil spirit, or whatever—automatically puts you in some very shady company and the scammers will always take most of the business. After all, they’re just telling the customers what they want to hear. I’m, uh, not good at doing that.

I browsed the shelves, the titles seemingly arranged in random order. The copy of Hitchhiker’s was still there, in the glass case.

It was $275.

Amy would not be getting this book for her birthday.

And she would be fine with that. She knows the situation, she tells me not to worry about it every chance she gets. We have a roof over our heads, she says, we have food, we have electricity, we have each other. By medieval standards, she points out, we’d have been considered rich. Don’t beat yourself up over an ideal dreamed up by a bunch of marketing jerks on the coasts whose BMWs trigger cocaine-sniffing dogs from six blocks away. It’s fine, she says. You’re doing important work. Remember that I love you.

Why don’t you fucking kill yourself?

John

Loretta said, “About two weeks ago, Maggie spent hours running around the house with a flyswatter. I thought it was some game she had invented, stalking flies, swatting them. Then a few days later, she brings me this shoebox full of dead flies and says, ‘Do I have to eat them all now?’ I ask her what she’s talking about, and she thinks I told her to do that. I thought it was a dream she’d had. I made her throw them away, and she didn’t understand. Is there … something wrong with her? Is that what happened? She became confused and wandered away?”

“I don’t think so, but I don’t want to eliminate any possibilities.” John sipped the woman’s surprisingly good coffee and studied the drawings. “This church she kept drawing, is this your church? Is church a big deal to you guys?”

“She’d never drawn it before. The one Ted took us to is that biker church, they hold services in that old motel. It doesn’t look anything like a traditional church. In her drawings, it always has that steeple and that cross in the same spot.”

“There is a church like this in town, do you know it? It’s next to a pond? And a haunted coal mine?”

“No.”

“Maybe she went there with friends?”

“It’s possible. What do you think it means?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I’ll go check it out either way.” John stood. “I’ll leave you be, you’ve been a big help and I know this has been hard for you.”

She stood, meeting his eyes.

“It has been hard. I’ve just been so lonely here, Ted coming back from the war and breaking things off like he did, now Maggie going missing … do you know what that’s like? To have a hole in your life so big that your life is nothing but hole?”

“I think we all feel like that, at times. Those of us who are lucky, we have someone we can cling to in those times when life feels, as you said, like one big butthole.”

“That’s all I want, sometimes. Someone to cling to, if even just for a moment.”

She dropped her robe. She was naked underneath.

John looked her up and down. “I’m in the middle of a case, miss. Time is of the essence. Your little girl’s life could be at stake.”

She stepped forward, running a finger down his chest. “I promise I won’t be long.”

“I can promise I will be long.”

John let his pants fall. “I’m telling you right now, this won’t cure your loneliness, or replace what your husband took from you when he fled. At best, all I can do is diminish his memory by giving you something far beyond what he ever could.”

“That will have to do.” She lay back on the bed. “But maybe even that is asking too much. You see, my husband was quite the—OH MY FUCKING GOD!”

“Do you want me to stop, Ms. Knoll?”

“IF YOU STOP I WILL KILL YOU.”

And so he did not stop, until her orgasmic cries filled the lonely halls of her modest home. John thrusted his staff into the moist—

Me

“John,” I said into my phone, “it is really, really important that you give me the actual story and not a bunch of bullshit. The truth is enough, you don’t need to sex it up. So, please, back up and just boil it down to the parts that, you know, actually happened. The thing with the drawings of the church, that was real, right?”

“Yeah, a little traditional country style church, like you’d see on a postcard. White, steeple, probably some stained glass.”

“Like the one at Mine’s Eye?” That’s a little wooded area with a pond around what had been a coal mine back in the olden days.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, meet me there. The creepy kid drawing thing is a little cliché but it’s literally the only lead we’ve got.”

John said, “There’s something else, though I don’t know what to make of this, either. Ted’s car got stolen. Old restored Impala. I found out just before I called you, it was missing from his garage when he got back from the ice factory.”

“Huh. Maybe this whole thing was one big ploy to steal his car? Oh, I was able to get into the phone, the one we recovered from the ice factory.”

John paused for a confused moment. “What phone? The pink toy one?”

“I don’t … I mean, is that what it looked like to you the whole time?”

“Yeah, it had a Disney princess or something on it. When you asked about hacking it, I thought you were joking. Were you able to make it work, somehow?”

“Yeah. Maybe?”

“And?”

“It had photos and a video on it. Fake ones. There were pics of the little girl looking mangled and bloody, but I don’t think it means she’s actually been hurt.”

“How do you know they were fake?”

“There were pics of us on there. We were dead in those, too.”

“Hmm.”

“Yeah. I have a question, John. Who’s paying us for this?”

“What?”

“Amy doesn’t get enough hours at the call center and I don’t get any hours at the anything. Who’s paying us?”

“It was never discussed. I don’t think Ted has much money.”

“The cops called us in, shouldn’t they have like a consultant’s fund in the budget?”

“I think that would require us having some kind of license or expertise or something. We’ve had this discussion before. Did you find anything on Joy Park?”

“Well, it’s a porn star. Otherwise no.”

“Yeah I saw that,” said John. “You think those boobs are real?”

I consulted my notes. “I did some digging. If she got a boob job she got it early. She’s about twenty-seven I think, her earliest shoots are from five or six years ago, and she had big boobs then. Looks pretty natural when she’s on her back.”

“You see that set where she’s coming out of the pool? Jesus.”

It felt like we’d gotten off the subject somewhat. Then I suddenly remembered what I should have done when the call started. “Hey, what’s the code word?”

“The what?”

“The, uh, password Ted set up, to make sure you’re you and I’m me.”

John said, “Oh, right. It was … wait, why do I have to say it? If you’re an imposter maybe this call is just a way to find out about the password.”

“How would I have known we have a password at all?”

John considered for a moment. “It was ‘bushmaster.’”

“Yeah.”

“I remember because that was my nickname in high school.”

“Though, if you—”

“Because I got so much bush.”

“Though, if you were an imposter, I think I’d know within seconds. You think one of ‘Them’ could mimic the stupid shit that comes out of your mouth?”

There was a moment of silence before John said, “That’s … actually a good question.”

“What is?”

“If it tried to be one of us, would it know how to say everything we just said? About the boobs and such?”

“I wish we didn’t know how to say it.”

“Serious question.”

“No. I mean … I don’t think so. How could it?”