There are whispers in the dark. There is the sound of bodies scooting, the fibers of bluejeans and sleeping bags catching and minutely ripping on rough-hewn boards. The whispers grow, each becoming louder than the one before as the voices compete to be heard. Soon there is shouting, and children can be heard fighting. But even in the fury of their strikes there is restraint, for they must not be seen.
“Who’s got it?” shouts one.
“I asked you to bring it, you effing twerp!” replies another.
There is the sound of slapping.
“Don’t you hit me, Billy Hernshaw! Don’t you dare!” hisses Henry, the boy who has already been struck and now needs to feel brave.
“I’ll hit you if I want. Came all this way and you didn’t even bring the effing flashlight.” Responds Billy.
The click and the light come at once. The light is scary when it arrives, for in the sudden transition of their pupils it seems as if it supported only by itself, that the beam is held up in the air and emitted by the dark itself. The light hits the stone of the walls and reflects off the copper plaques. They see names and dates, all set in the past. They are reminded once again that they are in a cemetery.
They are reminded why they are here.
“If you want to say fuck, just say it. Or are you afraid, Henry?” Says the thing that stands behind the light. It as if nobody is speaking to them.
“I ain’t afraid to say it.” Henry retorts.
“Then why don’t you?”
The pupils adjust. The difference between the light and the dark becomes less mysterious. Less sinister, and in this world of known quantities, when the thing behind the light is not a demon but only an eleven year old boy named Ned Marsdale, it is okay to joke. Here curses are only words. The eyes adjust more and the shadow behind the flashlight is man-shaped.
“Fuck.” Henry says.
Billy laughs. After a while, Henry joins him. The two repeat the profanity, and flip each other the bird. In the matter of a few moments, only Ned and Jason are left quiet. But Ned and Jason are odd, and Billy and Henry do not let this concern them.
“You all ready to play?” Ned asks.
“It’s what we came here for ain’t it?” Billy says at first boldly, but then some of the courage rushes out of him when he notices that Ned is staring at him. They’re all a bit afraid of Ned. Ned’s the smartest boy in school, but he lives across the bridge on the other side of town. The bad side of town. Who really knew what was going on inside of his head. They all know about Ned’s father, and Ned’s bruises, and they can only imagine that such thoughts as he has are wicked.
“I’d turn that light away from the windows if I were you.” Jason says. “They’ve got groundskeepers here. We’d get in big trouble if we get caught.” Billy and Henry groan, Ned says nothing as he turns the light back off.
They all hated Jason, but it was reasons like this they brought him along. For as the children were not animals, but only young men, they knew that if they could not restrain themselves they had to find an external source of law. A law keeper would keep them alive. They had chosen Jason for this very reason, and had never forgiven him for it.
Henry is totally blind and yelps when Ned brushes past him and the cold metal of the flashlight falls into his un-waiting palms. He imagines it is the cold unyielding flesh of a corpse with rigor mortis, and is not shamed by his scream.
“You first.” Ned whispers in his ear. Closer and more intimate than is right.
Henry is afraid then. Afraid of the game. Afraid of all the bodies in all the graves of the cemetery. Aware of his mortality all at once, and so terrified of it his knees want to knock.
“Well Henry, come on.” Billy chides, “What’s the worst thing you can imagine?”
Henry clicks the flashlight back on. His face jumps out of the dark, illuminated oddly so that he looks not like a boy, but the ghost of a boy. He stutters nothing for a moment, only to make sound to fill the emptiness of the room. For a moment, he has no imagination at all.
He doesn’t want to do this. It’s terrible and wrong, and a desecration.
“Okay… so there are these four boys, right?”
And once the words are spoken there is only the excitement of taboo and the glamor of evil.
*****
The jogger is so fat and pitiful that he makes the people who pass him want to lean out of their window and shout “Why the fuck do you even bother!” He has a punchable face, a kickable ass, and a peltable body. Thankfully such cars as there may be are infrequent and their drivers preoccupied with the difficulty of the road.
The jogger doesn’t seem to sweat water so much as it simply appears that by the act of clumsily pumping his legs he is wringing the grease of a thousand fast food burgers out of his system. It glistens on his body. It makes him look like a man made either of plastic or wax. His sweat suit was light gray when he left his home twenty minutes ago, but now is a dark shade that is almost black.
The road is dirt and the trees to either side are tall and leafless. It is the winter, and the branches of the trees lay across the sun like broken fingers reaching for contact. There is a mist back inside the forest that doesn’t quite reach the road. The air is cold and sharp. It slices across his lungs.
He never hears the twigs that snap or the branches that break as the man in the black track suit and hoodie begins to sprint out of the forest. He has his earphones in, and music blaring loudly. A man decades in the past, in a recording studio located probably hundreds of miles away is telling him that he was “Born to Run” and he wishes to test the truth of this.
It turns out the man in the song was a liar, for he has to stop because the air in his lungs is now so sharp it feels like it’s scouring the bottom of his lungs. His tracheal tubes are on fire. The song pauses, and at the last moment he hears the quick footsteps.
The knife that slides through the back of his sweat suit and into his kidneys is more surprising than painful. The jogger is not a bright man, but he feebly tries to reach for his wallet and hand it to the unseen assailant. Maybe a car would drive by and see him bleeding there before he….
The killer throws the wallet away into the woods. He puts the jogger’s hand down on a rock and saws off the tips of the last two fingers on the jogger’s right hand. When the killer is done he slits the jogger’s throat so deeply that the jogger is half-decapitated.
The killer goes back to his car. The killer goes back to his hotel room, and puts a zip lock bag in his refrigerator. He turns on a computer and writes an e-mail.
“I’m sending you something, baby. I want you to see how fucking hardcore I am. I want you to see how fucking bad I want you.”
He sends it and goes to sleep.
*****
When Henry is done, he feels grateful for his own inadequacy. The blood in his story had not had the flavor of real blood. It was all cartoon. The motives of his killers had not been macabre, they had been ludicrous and ignorantly constructed. In this poor approximation of horror, he has undone horror and placed himself apart. In failing to express the terror he can no longer be embraced by in its porcelain firm claws.
With a heavy sigh, he turns the flashlight off and passes it to Billy.
Someone rummages in a bag.
“What the hell is that?” Billy asks.
“It ain’t me.” Henry replies.
A zipper is unzipped.
“Shut the fuck up you two, and get on with the story.” Ned snaps.
As before, there is a click and light. Billy seems almost frantic to obey Ned. When they turn to look at him, Billy is so rail thin that his head looks like a skull.
“Well?” asks Henry. “What is the worst thing you can imagine?”
Before Billy can start, Ned says “Yeah Billy, what’s the worst thing you can imagine?” and snickers.
*****
The accountant is taking a shit, and prides himself on his ability to keep his grunts inaudible. He wonders about many things. Credits and debits left un-calculated, accounts un-acquired, and vacation time unspent. As the first package departs his bowels like a train car, he also wonders at the origin of the word plumber. For while he has on occasion been called upon to act as a plumber he is not certain that he has ever before “plumbed” anything. He also wonders why corn never breaks down like it’s supposed to in his shit, and this time there is an audible grunt.
The black-hooded man in the stall next to him would have been able to tell him that the word plumber was derived from “plumbous” an ancient name for lead. That a “plumber” had once been a worker in lead, and that through the times and the changes in materials those who worked in what was now plumbing had also been workers in lead.
Lead was something of a hobby.
From out of his messenger bag he takes a gun, jams in the clip, and spins the silencer into place. In a strange act of synchronicity, the mind of the killer and the mind of the accountant are as one, for now the killer wondered why assassins had not become plumbers with the invention of the gun.
The killer kicks open the door of the next stall. There is no one else in the building. He had followed his victim closely and knows that he works late nights. One in the chest and one in the head and it was over almost before it had begun. Corpse work is clumsy work, and it takes a few minutes for the killer put the accountant’s head in the toilet without bothering to flush. He spreads the accountant’s legs wide apart, and shoves the gun into the rectum until he can be sure it will stay of its own accord.
He takes several pictures.
When he gets home that night there is an e-mail waiting for him.
“I just came all over your fingertips.”
He sends the pictures as attachments in his reply.
“Baby, no matter how hard I scream don’t you stop until my asshole looks like this.”
The killer looks at the pictures and throws them away. They land atop some old cabbage, right next to a spent cigarette lighter.
“Sorry Billy,” he says before turning out the kitchen light.
*****
Billy’s story was of a school teacher who made her students eat their own shit. It had Henry rolling and giggling. Especially when he started to talk about her walking up and down the aisles pissing on the heads of her students. In Billy’s world even the turtles can’t help but shitting all over each other, and all of the world is covered with a layer of dried brown waste.
“You kill me, Billy. You kill me.” Henry rolls. He’s still laughing when the flashlight is passed to Jason.
Jason only holds it. In the dark, everyone stares at his approximate position.
“I can’t think of anything.” Which pisses off Henry and Billy to no end, because when Henry says “He can’t think of anything” what he really means is “I don’t like this game.” And what “I don’t like this game” really means is “I think I’m better than you.”
“Oh Jesus Christ, Jason! Grow a pair why don’t you?”
“Yeah, come on! It’s a fucking game, or are you too chicken?”
“You a pussy, Jason?”
“Yeah, you a pussy?”
“Nope. I just can’t think of anything.”
Jason will not be moved. No matter how they howl and dance around him, taunting and demanding. He doesn’t even care that they’re doing it.
“I can’t think of anything.”
“Well, fuck you then.”
Billy rips the flashlight from out of Jason’s hands, and gives it to Ned. Suddenly, everyone stops talking. In the remembered dark their breathing is like the panting of animals. Heavy and wet, drawn in and pushed out of lungs through wet columns of flesh and mucus.
“What’s the worst thing you can imagine, Ned?” Billy asks.
“Yeah Ned. What you got?” adds Henry.
The flashlight comes on under Ned’s face, and the red of his flesh is like the glow of a demon’s hell. The shadows in the creases of his cheeks and forehead are like hidden fangs. His teeth are bone white arrows pointing inward to the damnation that comes out of his throat.
When he starts speaking they all really wish he hadn’t.
*****
The writer kisses his wife on the cheek. He tousles the hair of his two small children. He walks them all the way to the minivan, holding the little girl like an anchor tied round his neck while the boy runs around his legs like an airplane, diving in as if to gun up his father’s feet.
The killer sits in his car at the end of the block, smokes a cigarette, and waits.
He has brought no gun… but there is a cell phone in his lap.
****
Ned speaks of parents fucking their children. Of the webbing between fingers being slowly paper-cut open as the torturers howl with mad laughter. He speaks of rape, and cocks, and cunts. He speaks of genitals smashed apart with hammers and women killed and pulled apart with pliers. He uses words the other children have never heard before, save that they know they are awful.
The worst part isn’t the words, but the way Ned uses them. He speaks of a world where nobody really loves anybody at all. Where there is only a sort of howling madness. A world where people fuck but do not make love. A world where there are alliances but never friendship. A world full of people who just sit around and wait to die.
A kingdom of nighttime where even make-believe is pretend.
“Stop!” Jason screams. “Just stop!”
But Ned never stops.
It’s not in his nature when he has a story to tell.
In the darkness someone cocks a gun.
*****
The killer goes back to his hotel room for a bit to masturbate.
Better for the nerves.
Too nervy and you make mistakes.
When he is finished and the product of his labor lays on the mattress like something brought up from polluted waters he goes to the telescope and looks through. He can see the writer at his keyboard. He can see the minute adjustments he makes as he types to accommodate for the missing tips of his fingers.
“It was all just a fucking game to you, wasn’t it?”
He pulls out the cell phone and texts.
“Now.”
As surely as if he had pulled the trigger of a gun, the deed is done.
*****
Ned’s story is gone in a puff of smoke. In its place there’s nothing but a great big empty of a story that has yet to be told.
“It’s all just a fucking game to you, isn’t it!” Jason shouts so that they know it is no question.
“He can’t shoot us if he can’t-” Everyone hears Ned start to scoot off.
“Shut the fuck up!” Jason screams.
Billy starts to cry, and Henry is confused when he feels something warm go down his leg and hears a drip drop sound on the floor by his shoes. No one can see the gun.
That only makes it worse.
*****
It was a strange thing, the internet. You can use it to buy a pair of shoelaces covered in smiley faces, a key-chain that looked like the abdomen of a pregnant women, or shark repellent. Unless you want something that utilizes natural laws yet undiscovered, you could find it on the internet for a price.
While fascinating, the killer found this to be the least interesting thing about the internet.
You could also use the internet to find people. Every kind of person. Nazis, Sinners, Saints, and Psychos all had their own messageboards. Celebrities, Politicians, and CEO’s all had their own blogs. People who got off on fucking animals, people who got off on fucking the dead, and even people who wanted to fuck dead animals.
Any kind of person you needed at all.
What was Gerald’s fetish next to that? So what if he was gay? So what if he had intense rape fantasies?
The killer admits the part with the blood is a bit weird, but he has not chosen Gerald because his fantasies were the most tame. He has trolled the internet for months to find Gerald because Gerald’s fantasies are the most wild, the most violent, and the most unrestrained. Given permission, Gerald will do anything to anybody so long as he knows they really wanted it.
What a strange world we live in, the Killer thinks.
Gerald wasn’t going to rape someone without their consent.
He considered himself too civilized.
The killer turned the telescope to see Gerald walking down the street. Gerald is texting.
“You sure?”
The killer picks up the phone after it buzzes.
“Don’t you fucking ask me that again. We stay in character, remember?”
The killer watches in fascination as Gerald turns from side to side, then upon finding no one, squeezes his cock through the front of his pants.
*****
“Put the gun down, Jason.”
It’s Ned.
Fucking Ned.
Ned doesn’t even have the decency to sound afraid.
Jason’s heart is hammering so hard that the gun shakes in his grip. It’s pounding so hard that he worries his finger will just swell up and that he’ll pull the trigger before the gun has found its target.
“No! I’m sick of you three! Sick of it, do you hear me!”
If Jason strains his ears enough he can almost almost hear Billy crying. He can almost hear Henry standing stock still where he had been standing presumably ever since the lights went out, too afraid to move.
“You don’t want to do this.”
Ned says this so sincerely, that Jason is almost convinced. Then remembers that this convincing quality is why he hates Ned so much. To Ned all the obscenity is a game. The howling terror… something Ned laughed about! He giggled in the face of all the wrong and all the hurt! Well not Jason. No sir.
When Jason played games, he played for keeps.
“Keep talking, Ned. You get to go first.”
Jason really wishes he had remembered to bring a flashlight and promises himself he won’t make mistakes like this in the future.
*****
The killer is very displeased. Gerald has been texting him non-stop.
“Are you sure you’re sure?”
“Just hurry up and get your cock in my asshole.” The killer replies, frowning.
The killer watches Gerald progress through the telescope with all the care of Copernicus tracking the rates of martian epicycles. Before Gerald can reply again, the killer texts:
“Just do it. I left the baseball bat right where I said. Remember: one in the face. Don’t even talk. Just one right in the face.”
*****
Ned is shuffling around Jason. Whispering so that Jason can’t quite get a fix on his location.
“You’re that pissed off by just words, Jason?” Ned asks.
“I’m pissed off by you!” Jason replies.
“Then which of us is the real monster?”
Both Henry and Billy are crying.
*****
It has been more than the months spent building the instrument of revenge. It has been years of a life un-lived. Years of people looking over his records, coming across that one time in his childhood. It has been years of feeling like he was the true monster. Years of waking up in an empty bed to no wife and no future… and… and….
And it all came to a head when he picked up that book in the airport, saw that little shit’s smirking grin on the back cover, writing fucking stories of horror like it was now his joke to tell. Living the a fruitful life as if he never lost a minute of sleep over what he had done.
“Who’s laughing now, eh Jason?”
He is not an especially violent man, but he snarls.
*****
When Jason hears the groundskeeper pulling on the gates he realizes he really ought to have planned this better than he did. It all seemed so logical when he put the gun in his backpack. He was just trying to follow the rules.
Just trying to follow the rules!
“You ain’t any good, Ned. You’re not decent like folks are supposed to be.”
Ned’s father beats him. Everyone knows this. Everyone sees the bruises. And what does Ned do? He shrugs it off. He laughs about it.
In Ned’s world there’s no good or bad. There’s just folks.
Jason knows he cannot allow this idea to propogate. It’s obscene.
The groundskeeper is pounding at the door. Jason can’t hear a word he says.
*****
Gerald knocks politely and waits. The baseball bat is set up against the side of the house, out of view of the peep hole.
There’s a second where Ned worries it’s all going to come crashing down. Where he worries that Gerald will lose his nerve. Then through the telescope he sees Gerald smile. He sees him look at Jason, and he sees Gerald realize that Jason is wearing the exact clothes that Ned had told him Jason would be wearing. He’s starting to really believe in the wonderful idea of Jason.
Gerald grabs the bat and brings it smashing down into Jason’s unprepared face.
But the fun is just beginning.
*****
Ned is fighting with Jason now. Billy and Henry watch. They’re conflicted about who should win, because while they all hate Jason he is one of them. Ned is just the poor boy who reminds them of their privelege.
They will reconcile these feelings by doing the brave thing and saying nothing.
The groundskeeper rushes in. No one can tell how it happens, let alone whether it was on purpose, but the groundskeeper is bleeding from the chest.
Henry and Billy decide to go into shock.
*****
Ned swivels the telescope. To the writing room just as he’d instructed Gerald. Just like he said Jason wanted.
“Great show!” Ned screams.
It is not enough so he repeats it for emphasis.
“Great fucking show!”
*****
Ned and Jason are still fighting for the gun. It goes off.
Some of Jason’s hand goes with it. That is all the advantage Ned needs, and he soon has Jason pinned to the ground with is knee on his chest pummelling. Then wrathful he stands screaming and shaking wondering why no one else can speak.
It is exactly the way the cops find him twenty-five minutes later.
After that, it was all a matter of who had the best lawyer.
*****
It actually got boring after a while.
You could only watch a man beg and plead so much. By the time actual penetration started it was… anticlimactic. There was a bit of shock when it first went in, of course. All the wide-eyed “oh no! oh noes!” you would have expected. But Jason had been fighting it off so long that when it started and the humiliation was there, and no longer out amongst the possible unimaginable things… there was just resignation.
Ned turned back to his computer. To all the billions of diodes that would light or turn dark upon his command.
He sent another e-mail.
“Oh baby, I can’t wait for next month.”
He’d done three years in a mental facility over what Jason had done to him. He could still hear the lawyers telling him how he had been the one who had turned Jason’s albeit stupid decision to bring a gun to the festivities into a murderous spree. They’d told him this so well that by the time he’d come down from the stand he half beleived it himself.
He figured twice more and they’d be even.
