The Hostess

By Seamus Cooper

ScaryCon 2024 was in the books. Colleen wheeled her suitcase full of unsold DVDs, posters, stickers, and bobbleheads toward her Kia Forte. She’d nearly sold enough to break even, which made this her best con this year.

            If she had her way, she’d stop doing cons altogether. Posing for photos as horror hostess The Blood Countess was fine, but then there were the conversations she had to have as Colleen. Prove your horror bonafides by answering this dumb trivia question I’m framing as a conversational salvo. I have a raft of suggestions for the show. Would you ever do nude scenes/you should do OnlyFans. What are you doing after the con. It was exhausting.

            But everyone said this was the kind of thing you needed to do to maintain and grow a character. Smile, have the conversations so the fans would feel a connection with the show and hit those like and subscribe buttons.  So several times a year, she did it.

            She was tired. Her feet hurt from standing in ridiculous heels for eight hours, and she couldn’t wait to get home and ease into a nice warm bath. But she had a solid two-hour drive ahead of her.

             She hit the button on the key fob, and her trunk slowly slid open. She hefted the suitcase into the trunk and slammed it closed, only to find a guy in a Ghostface mask and robe standing right there.

            She had seen countless horror movies and introduced over 100 indie horror shorts on her YouTube channel, and she prided herself on being hard to scare. But it’s always startling when someone pops out at you unexpectedly, which explained her gasp of surprise.

            “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Ghostface said. She knew she had to maintain the character and grow the channel, but there was a limit as to what she was willing to put up with. She looked around the parking lot, assessing her options. She saw no one. Not even the reassuring blink of a night vision camera on the light poles. Just her and a weirdo cosplaying a slasher, alone at night. She decided on a strategy.

            “Well,” Colleen said with a little nervous chuckle, “I’ve seen so many and I love them all for different reasons.  I can see you like the Scream franchise. I think Wes Craven’s New Nightmare doesn’t get enough credit for starting the meta-horror trend, though. Scream was just Kevin Williamson being inspired by Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and then getting Wes Craven himself to direct!  Don’t you think?”

            There. Horror bonafides established. Hopefully he’ll tire of this momentarily.

            “Would you ever do OnlyFans?”

            “Oh, I don’t think Ghostface asked Drew Barrymore that. Well, in any case, no, it’s not in my plans. No disrespect to anyone who goes that route—it’s just not what I do. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s late and I’ve been on my feet all day and—”

            “Which are you really? Colleen or The Blood Countess?”

            “Oh, well, just because I play a character certainly doesn’t mean that’s who I am.”

            Ghostface drew a step closer. He smelled of b.o. and energy drinks. “Did you know Elizabeth Bathory, the real Blood Countess, bathed in the blood of virgins to stay eternally young?”

            “Yep. Familiar with the story of Báthori Erzsébet. Anyway, thanks again, but I have to get going. I’ve got a long drive ahead of me. Remember to like and subscribe. My new season drops in two weeks!”

            She moved toward the driver’s door, not turning her back on Ghostface, who matched her step for step. “Am I..scaring you?” Ghostface said.

            And that was finally what broke her. Not the fact that he asked invasive questions in a lonely parking lot, not that he was keeping her from her car and therefore her bath and her bed, but the fact that he had the audacity, the temerity to think he could frighten her.

            The blades were in her hands before she even realized it. Hello, old friends. With lightning speed, she sliced through Ghostface’s black robe and several layers of fat and muscle in a single, bloody stroke. Blood began to pour from the wound. She thought she saw a little bit of intestine peeking out of the black robe. Ghostface clutched at it frantically, staggering away from her.

            “No, darling, you were not scaring me. Annoying me? Yes. Boring me? Oh, most certainly. But scaring me? With a Spirit Halloween costume and a bad impersonation of a second-rate movie villain? Yes, I said it. Second rate. Now. Kneel before The Blood Countess.” This last bit was superfluous, since Ghostface had dropped to his knees and was keening in pain and surprise.

            “I thought...you said this was just a character,” Ghostface burbled through a mouthful of what she assumed was blood but might have been vomit.

            “No no, fool. I said ‘just because I play a character doesn’t mean that’s who I am.’ Which of course doesn’t mean what you assumed it did. A pity no one ever taught you to listen to women. And now it’s too late.” The Blood Countess’s blades flashed again, sliding under the ghostface mask and severing both the carotid artery and the jugular vein, judging by the amount of blood now pulsing out from under the mask.

            “Shame to waste all this virgin blood,” The Blood Countess said. She reached her finger down into the puddle on the pavement and dipped it in Ghostface’s blood. She licked her finger, then spat. “Ugh, it tastes of self-loathing and Mountain Dew. You’d be useless for a rejuvenating bath anyway.”

            The Blood Countess pulled out her phone and made a call. “Yes, it’s me, fool,” she said. “Look at the fucking caller ID!” She took a deep breath. “There there. I’m sorry. Your Countess isn’t angry with you. That’s right. Now listen. I’m in the parking lot at the Midstate Convention Center. Call the ghouls. Tell them dinner’s on me.”

#horror #shortstory

So nothing I’ve written in the last ten years is now part of the publishing industrial complex, and I’m honestly quite relieved. I had no idea what a toll the constant cycle of submission and rejection was taking on me until I stopped.

Anyway, this is a nice little story that’s free of bloodshed and gore. It’s really about a friendship. I wrote it in part because I missed my friend Liz who died in 2009. We aren’t the characters in this story, and this friendship isn’t our friendship, so I can’t really explain how writing this helped me with missing her. But it did.

The only content warnings this time out are for addiction. Both main characters are struggling with sobriety.

Enjoy!

Cookie Heist

Out of rehab, the text said. Wanna hang out?

It was a humid summer Friday night and I was sitting on my porch watching cars drive by, listening to people’s arguments and conversations as they made their way to the bar, and wishing I had an air conditioner. I was starting to get pretty depressed about my situation, which is to say, 40, divorced, trapped in a low-paying job I hated, and only able to see my kids twice a month. So I texted back. Totally. Come on over. I’ve got seltzer and pretzels.

I got back a string of emojis that I guess signaled agreement. Beth was coming over. Just to be clear, this wasn’t a booty call situation. Beth and I had been friends since high school. We both got too deep into booze, and then she got into hard drugs and I got even deeper into booze. I had been sober for five years at this point. I didn’t get sober soon enough to save my marriage. Beth had, apparently, just gotten out of her fourth stint in rehab.

We liked hanging out because when you hang out with someone else whose addiction has blown up their lives, there’s a lot that doesn’t need to be said.  Also when someone knew you when you were 14 and still likes you at 40 anyway? That’s a rare treasure you should hang on to.

Beth arrived 20 minutes later. We hugged, and I said, “Seltzer? Pretzel rod?”

“You know it, brother,” she said. She cracked open the seltzer, took a long pull, and put the pretzel rod in her mouth like a cigar, which is obviously the right way to do it.

“So,” I said.

“Gramma died,” Beth said.

“Fuck,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know how much she meant to you.” Beth’s gramma was the one person in her family who never gave up on her, who never judged her for her addiction, and who took her in when no one else would.

“Makes me wanna use, I gotta tell you,” Beth said. “I mean, I knew she wasn’t gonna live forever, but this is...it’s tough.”

“Yeah. You need to stay up all night watching shitty Hallmark movies or something so you don’t use?”

“Maybe? You know I love a Hallmark movie.”

“I have no idea why.”

“It’s comforting, okay? Nobody has problems like mine, and you can escape into the fantasy that if you can just meet the right hot widowed carpenter with adorable toddler, your life will be sorted out.”

“Yeah, that’s less appealing to me.”

“There are women carpenters!”

“Straight ones?”

“I dunno, maybe? Bi or pan, probably. You’ve got a shot, is what I’m saying.”

We watched Hallmark movies all night. I pounded coffee to stay awake because I got pretty deep into caffeine after I left alcohol behind. Beth didn’t need any artificial stimulants. Just stared at the screen until dawn, tears in her eyes the whole time.

When Christmas in the Heartland 3 ended, Beth said to me, “Okay. I’m good. I mean, once the sun is up, it’s easier for me to believe I’m not gonna use. Darkness is hard.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It sure is.”

“Hey, so the visitation is today. For my gramma. This afternoon. If you’re not doing anything?”

“Well, let me check my calendar,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Hmm. This isn’t my weekend to see the kids, so I’ve got self-pity at ten, and then self-loathing starting at 2. I think I can squeeze you in after that.”

“Cool,” she said. “Visitation starts at four. Get some sleep, will you? You look like shit.”

“I love you too,” I said, and Beth smiled and flashed me the sign language I love you.

The visitation was at the Nickerson Funeral Home. I went in and signed the book, and Beth immediately made a beeline for me. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. “I don’t know if I could have made it through the whole thing alone.”

“I hear you,” I said. I always used to bring a flask to events like this to make them bearable. We stood around for a while. Most people avoided Beth, though you could tell by the looks on their faces that they knew who she was. I guessed the people around our age were mostly her sister Christie’s friends who therefore had Christie’s opinions of Beth.

After a priest who didn’t know her said a few banal words about Beth’s gramma, we all went back to Christie’s house, which was also now Beth’s house, or, anyway, the house in which Beth was staying, for heavy hors d’oeuvres. Beth wept all the way from the funeral home to Christie’s house. “Christie told me it’s a one-strike and you’re out situation,” Beth said. “She doesn’t believe I can stop. I think she doesn’t want me to stop, just so she can be right. It’s really hard to even try to be a good version of myself in an environment like that.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. When we got to the house, I headed straight for the cookies and brownies. Refined sugar hits some of the same levers in my brain as booze, and it doesn’t get me fired or cause me to alienate people I care about.

Beth went into the kitchen to talk to Christie. She came out about five minutes later and grabbed my arm. “I need to leave right now or I’m going to say things to Christie that will cause me to be homeless,” she said.  She looked at her phone, “The Uber will be here in 2 minutes.” I grabbed two cookies and a brownie and followed her to the door. We went back to my apartment, mostly because neither of us had any other place to go.

She was too upset to talk on the ride over, but once we were in the apartment and I had opened us bottles of Topo Chico (I rationalize my purchase of expensive water by reminding myself of how much money I am not spending on booze.), she started talking.

“I asked her about the cookie recipe. Whenever I got kicked out of the house and went to Gramma’s, she and I would bake chocolate chip cookies, and she would tell me stories of her misspent youth. Stuff like—” here she slipped into an old lady voice, “—I used to sneak into jazz clubs and smoke reefer cigarettes!”

I laughed. “She sounds cool as hell.”

“She was. And she always told me that the cookie recipe was her only family treasure, and that it would be mine when she died. And, I mean, it’s not urgent or anything, but I just said to Christie that I wanted it, and she laid into me. Where were you when she was sick, you’ve got some nerve asking for anything, you use people like you use drugs, blah blah blah. She’s trying to break me. I really think she’s trying to break me. I have to get out of there.”

“I mean, you can always stay here,” I said.

Beth laughed. “I mean, look. It’s not that your full-sized bed in a basement studio isn’t appealing, but, like, it’s still your space. You know? What happens if we have a fight? I get kicked out.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t—”

“I know, I know, I just mean, it still wouldn’t be my space. I need my own space to figure out my own life. Also you’ve only got one bed, and while that particular complication is not off the table for me, it is of the table at least until I get my feet straight and see if I can make a go of it in the real world without drugs. You know?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

We sipped our Topo Chicos. “Well, you wanna break in to your gramma’s house and steal the recipe?” I said. I don’t know why I said this. I hadn’t broken into anything, much less a house, since I picked the lock on my folks’ liquor cabinet when I was sixteen. And look what that led to.

Beth’s face lit up. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s do it. Right now.”

I backpedaled. “But, did she have an alarm, or—”

Beth laughed. “I snuck into that house drunk and/or high in the middle of the night more times than I can count. I know three different ways in.”

She was going to do this. I had planted the idea, and now it was going to happen, which made it my responsibility. Which meant I was going to have to do it alone. Because Beth’s last stint in rehab had been court-ordered.  My drug of choice was legal and widely available, and because I used to always have enough money to take cabs and Ubers, I had no criminal record. Beth, on the other hand, could really not afford to get caught breaking and entering. She’d almost certainly go directly to jail, and, according to what she’d told me in the past, it’s even easier to get drugs in jail than out of jail.

And so, thirty minutes later, I found myself climbing up on a garbage can and then through a tiny second-floor bathroom window that was probably much easier for a 16-year-old girl with a meth problem to sneak through than for a 40-year-old man with a brownie problem to sneak through.

“I am going to get stuck in here like Winnie the Pooh,” I said. Beth was on the phone with me via my earbuds. She was sitting on a park bench a block away.

“No you’re not,” she said. “Grab the edge of the bathtub and pull yourself in.”

I followed her advice and scraped my stomach on the window frame and bruised my hips and just barely managed to not hit my head on the tile floor when I finally came tumbling in. “If they do any DNA testing, they’re gonna find my flesh all over the place,” I said.

“Don’t say flesh,” Beth said. “It’s gross.”

“You know what’s gross?” I said, looking around the bathroom, “A carpeted toilet seat. Why is the toilet seat carpeted?”

“It’s squishy, too,” Beth said. “If you want to take a poop in comfort.”

“I’m good, thanks. Just tell me where to get the recipe. It’s creeping me out in here.” Any abandoned place is inherently creepy, and an abandoned place that hasn’t had the décor or furniture updated since probably 1990 is even creepier.

“Kitchen,” she said. “Downstairs. There’s a cabinet above the sink, and in that cabinet is a little box that says “recipes” on it, and filed under C is the cookie recipe.”

“All of which would be much more helpful information if I could actually see anything,” I said, feeling my way down the stairs in the dark. Someone had put the shades down on every window in the house, so there wasn’t any light leaking in from the street or anything, so I felt like tripping over something was nearly inevitable. Until I realized I could probably use my phone flashlight without being seen from the street. At least I hoped so. I clicked it on, found my way to the kitchen, and easily found the recipe file in the cabinet over the sink. I opened it up, flipped through, and found, behind the “C” tab, an index card that read:

Sorry, Beth. Gram said you can have the recipe when you’re ready. If you’re reading this, you’ve clearly broken in to Gram’s house, which pretty much proves you’re not ready. Don’t steal any of Gram’s stuff.

I read this aloud to Beth on the phone and was rewarded with a string of epithets directed at Christie, followed by some cursing not specifically aimed at Christie, followed by some rather inventive ideas on what Christie could do and with whom and/or what.

“Okay, well, I’m gonna go ahead and crawl out the bathroom window and try not to die landing on the garbage can,” I said. I did not die, but the hang drop from the bathroom window onto the garbage can did not go smoothly, and after flopping to the ground and then climbing up to close the window and then replacing the garbage can in its rightful place, I limped back to the park as fast as I could, convinced the sirens were going to start at any moment.

They did not. I sat on the bench next to Beth, by which time she was able to form a coherent sentence. “I called an Uber. Let’s go to your depressing little cave and work out plan B,” she said.

Beth was convinced that the recipe was in the safe in Christie and Mike’s bedroom. Which meant she could easily get it when she was the only one home, as long as she could guess the code to punch in the keypad. “Which shouldn’t be too hard because she’s so freaking basic. It’s gotta be Mike’s birthday or one of the kids’ birthdays or their anniversary,” Beth said.

“Except…” she said, gesturing at me with a pretzel rod cigar, “any time I’m in the house alone, she immediately checks to see if I’ve stolen anything when she gets back. So I could get the cookie recipe and lose the roof over my head.”

“What kind of security system do they have?” I asked, “Maybe I could sneak in when you’re all out.” Now, I knew the second this was out of my mouth that it was a horrible idea. That’s not true. I knew it was a horrible idea even before I said it. But I said it anyway.

I don’t know if I can explain it to you if you haven’t spent about a decade realizing that you have an illness that has made you absolute shit at every job you’ve ever attempted including spouse and parent.

The self-loathing brought on by addiction really helps it sink its claws deep into you. Fuck up because you were using, hate yourself for being a fuckup, use some more to quiet the self-loathing, fuck up again.

Breaking into Beth’s gramma’s house was the first time I hadn’t totally hated myself in years. Yes, I was technically committing a crime, but I was helping a friend instead of disappointing a friend. I did something passably well—okay, competently, just barely—instead of terribly. Dopamine and serotonin I didn’t know I still had flooded my brain. And I wanted more.

Which is how I wound up on the side of Christie and Mike’s house a week later with a backpack holding cable cutters, a rare earth magnet, painter’s tape, some glazer’s points, and window putty. The plan was simple:

1.     Cut the house’s internet connection with the cable cutters. One of the jobs I’d been fired from on my long way down the corporate ladder was selling home security systems. So I knew that the one Christie and Mike had was very fancy and expensive and also completely useless without an internet connection. It doesn’t matter how many cameras you have if they stream video to the cloud without a local backup.

2.     Tape and break out a basement window, and then, once inside, immediately install a replacement pane of glass that Beth had smuggled into the basement. This was the most time-consuming part of the job, but they were all going out for a family dinner, and ice cream afterward, so it should be easy. Even a halfassed job wouldn’t be detected in a corner of the basement for months or years.

3.     Find the safe and use the rare earth magnet to force it open. (I learned how to do this on YouTube!).

4.     Grab the recipe, exit out the self-locking back door, and disappear into the night undetected.

Cutting the internet cable was quick and easy, but I spent an extra two minutes scraping at it to make it look like something had gnawed through it rather than cut through it so that when it was inevitably repaired, the cable guy would go, “Yep, looks like you got raccoons” or something.

I taped an X over the basement window, then whacked the glass with the cable cutter. I paused after each hit, looking around at the neighbors’ houses. I didn’t see anybody. No rear deck lights switched on, and hopefully no 911 calls were made. I bent down and removed most of the glass quickly and quietly, thinking that it would be incredibly embarrassing to be arrested while carefully removing shards of glass from a broken window pane, but then consoling myself with the thought that I had broken, but not technically entered yet, so I might still be in misdemeanor territory.

Hoping that I’d done a good enough job in the darkness, I wriggled through the window and landed on the basement floor uncut and ready to do some quick glass repair.

I was digging in my backpack for the putty when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out and looked. ELEANOR JUST BOOTED ALL OVER THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY. WE’RE COMING HOME. BE THERE IN 10 MINUTES.

I stood on the basement floor, stunned.  Beth’s niece projectile vomiting in a family dining establishment was not a contingency we’d planned for.  I had ten minutes to get out of and away from the house.  I could, and probably should, just cut my losses and flee right away, but then I wouldn’t have the recipe and Christie would still probably blame Beth. And, of course, I’d be a failure. Again.

The hell with that. I was getting that goddamn cookie recipe. Of course now I needed to actually steal some other stuff in order to cover my real purpose for being here. I also didn’t need to sneak around or be quiet or careful, since the cops probably wouldn’t be here before Christie and Beth and Mike and Brady and Eleanor.

I ran up the stairs and into the living room. There was a Playstation 5 under the TV. I grabbed it. It was surprisingly heavy. I ran up the stairs and, after ruling out the bedroom with the football posters and the one with the princess bed, I found Mike and Christie’s bedroom. I checked my phone. Two minutes since Beth had called.

“Don’t panic, don’t panic,” I chanted as I looked around the room for the safe. I didn’t see anything. Must be in the closet. Seven minutes remaining, and that was Beth’s estimate, which might or might not be accurate. I needed to be out of here in three.

I found the safe in the closet and slapped the rare earth magnet on it and jiggled the handle just like the guy did in the video.

Nothing. I tried it again. Six minutes left. Again. Nothing.

It occurred to me that I never looked at the date on the YouTube video I watched, and that it was entirely possible that the safe manufacturer had corrected the huge defect in their product since TheLockPickKing had shown millions of people how to break into it. This was definitely something I should have looked into before breaking into the house.

Well, fortunately for me, the safe was not bolted down, so I was able to lift it.

Just barely. It was heavy as hell. No way was I getting this and the PS5 out of here, so I dropped the console on the closet floor and hobbled my way down the stairs with a 40-pound safe in my arms. As I got halfway down the steps, I saw lights in the driveway. Beth’s estimate had been off by at least three minutes.

I ran to the back door and tried to open it with my right hand without putting the safe down. I had to contort my body quite severely to the right side, and my lower back announced its displeasure with me. Running was now going to be out of the question. Not that I was in shape to run very far carrying 40 pounds in my arms anyway, but but now I’d be lucky to manage a zesty limp.

Finally I got the door open as I heard the front door open. I heard Eleanor crying, which was good. It might take them a few extra minutes to figure out they’d been robbed. I limped through the dark backyard. I’d made it to the swingset, halfway to the six-foot-high wooden fence, when I heard Mike: “HON! MY PLAYSTATION IS GONE!”

Stealing Mike’s video game console seemed like a great idea because it’s something you could sell quickly for drug money, something anybody would steal. It was also, apparently, Mike’s prize possession, and he was far more concerned with its absence than with his daughter’s illness.

“Terrible dad,” I wheezed out as I reached the back fence. This one was going to be tough because I had to, despite my back, lift the safe over my head and chuck it over the fence before following it. And then bending over to pick up a heavy object from the ground. If I got away from this, I’d probably be in bed for a week and be extremely tempted to treat my back pain with whisky. “Dumbass,” I said to myself.

I heaved the safe over the fence and felt a muscle I didn’t even know I had—something on my right side between my chest and my back—tear, or at least just scream in pain. I grabbed the top of the fence and realized I was going to need that muscle to pull myself over.

And that’s when Mike turned on the backyard floodlight. I was wearing a hoodie and jeans, could be anybody really, definitely not identifiable, I told myself. I held the top of the fence, and, with my right side screaming and my left lower back screaming and me screaming too, I scrabbled my feet up the fence and managed to flop over to the other side. I wanted very much to lie there and just feel my pain and curse my idiocy, but I didn’t want to get arrested tonight.

“Chris! Get the gun!” Mike yelled.

I also did not want to get killed tonight. I got to my feet, bent deep at the knees and picked up the safe again and started shuffling away from the fence. “The safe is gone!” Christie yelled, and I realized that I was technically holding the gun and wondered if that would make this armed robbery in the eyes of the law.

Mike did not have a gun, but he yelled out, “I’ll get you, you son of a bitch!”

I moved as fast as I could. The problem was that this wasn’t actually very fast and that Mike, who had not abused his body for decades and was not currently holding a safe, was running toward me. Also I was in the backyard of another house, and they had just turned their own back yard floodlight on.

I got to the side of the neighbor’s house and heard the door open. “Get him!” Mike screamed. “He robbed my house!”

The smart thing here would have been to drop the safe. But I hadn’t done the smart thing all night—hell, ever—so why start now?

I fantasized about Beth roaring up in the family SUV and driving me to safety, but if Christie knew for a fact that she’d participated, she’d definitely press charges and Beth would be going back to jail where I’d have to bring her cookies made from her gramma’s recipe on visiting days. Assuming I was out of jail, which was looking pretty unlikely.

And then, for the first time that evening, I caught a break. Mike and his neighbor crashed into each other in their race to be the first to capture me, which gave me time to get into the park across the street and onto my bike.

I dropped the safe into the basket, turned the key, and started pedaling. I had bought the ebike last year  because it removed the complication, and, more importantly, expense of car ownership from my life. What I wasn’t thinking at the time was that it also made a great getaway vehicle. No license plates, and the freedom to maneuver through, for example, the winding paths of a city park at 20 miles an hour once it got up to speed.

Which took longer than usual because I was hauling a safe in addition to my own body. I could hear Mike’s footsteps slap-slap-slapping on the path behind me, but eventually they got quiet. I  exited the park of the far side and took a long and very roundabout way home, sticking to side streets as much as possible so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about why I was transporting a safe on the back of my bike.

I got home and got the safe inside, and seconds later there was a knock on my door. I threw a blanket over the safe and reminded myself not to answer any questions. “Come back with a warrant!” I yelled at the door.

This was answered with a peal of laughter. Beth. “Fantastic! It’s nice to know you listen to me sometimes!” she said. I opened the door and saw her face—she’d definitely been crying. She had a duffel bag in her right hand.

“Well, Christie didn’t believe I had nothing to do with the robbery, so she kicked me out,” Beth said. “Can I crash here?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll get the air mattress and—”

“Well, let’s get the safe open first,” Beth said. “I assume it’s that cube subtly covered with a blanket on the table.”

It turned out that Beth’s prediction about Christie’s basic combination choices was right. “Of course it’s Brady’s birthday. She hates Eleanor,” Beth said. “When that kid is a teenager, all hell’s gonna break loose.”

“And you can be the cool aunt who takes her in and bakes her cookies,” I said to Beth.

She looked at me, tears in her eyes, and gave me a hug. “That’s, like, the nicest vision,” she said. “I never...I haven’t had a nice thought about my future since I was 14.” We stayed like that for so long it started to get awkward. She dropped her arms and said, “Well, you took most of the risk. You wanna do the honors?”

“Sure,” I said.

I reached into the safe and pulled out a pistol and a box of ammunition. “Jesus Christ,” Beth said. “Guns and ammo in a safe with an obvious combination and two kids in the house. Christie should thank you for getting this out of there.”

There was also an envelope with passports, birth certificates, and social security cards. “You wanna get into identity theft?” Beth said. “There’s way less running involved.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to think I may not be cut out for a life of crime,” I said. I pulled out another manila envelope. For Beth, when she’s ready, it said.

“And Christie thought she got to decide when I was ready,” Beth said. I opened the envelope and pulled out an index card.

Alison-Davey chocolate chip cookie recipe, it said. It wasn’t handwritten—it had been printed. Alison-Davey had been the big, fancy department store downtown. It had closed when our parents were kids.

“Jesus, it wasn’t even her recipe,” Beth said. “This recipe must be all over the internet. Christ, I’m so sorry,” She said. “I made you—” she started to cry, and I recognized the signs of a self-loathing meltdown, and those always bring the risk of using. I reached into the envelope.

“There’s something else here,” I said. I pulled out a stack of pieces of paper. US Savings bonds. 100 dollars each. One bought on Beth’s birthday every year until she turned eighteen.

And suddenly Beth’s tears were happy. “Eighteen hundred dollars!” she said. “Oh my God! Gramma! This is going to change my life! Do you know what this means?” she said to me. “I’m on my way to saving enough for first and last and security! She gave me such a head start!”

I was busy looking at the website I’d just pulled up on my phone. “Beth, she gave you more than a head start. These bonds have all matured. That’s not eighteen hundred dollars. It’s almost ten thousand.”

“Oh my God!” she said. “It’s a new start! She gave me a new start! I’m getting my own space!” She jumped up and down with glee.  “I don’t have to crash in this hellhole, no offense!”

“None taken,” I said.

“You,” she said. “You know you changed my life, right? There’s no telling how long Christie would have held onto this. She wanted to see me fall again. And I probably would have, if it wasn’t for you and your completely inept burglary skills.”

“Well,” I say, “you know, it was my first burglary.”

“Second,” she corrected. “And the second one was way worse than the first. You risked your freedom for me, and you were just...so bad at it,” she was now laughing and crying at the same time.

And for the first time since I was 14, I felt good about myself.

END

#shortstory #fiction

Kid with strict parents who gets to college and can’t handle a little freedom. Parties too hard and suffers as a result. Luckily for Calvin, classes hadn’t started yet, and he’d gone so hard so fast that the allure of getting blackout drunk was already fading after a full week of overindulgence.

Once he felt human enough to move (this was at 12:22 PM), he showered and ambled down to the cafeteria. Though he felt vaguely nauseated, he found the little paper trays of waffle fries sitting under the heatlamps irresistible. While eating the fries slowly and deliberately so as not to anger his stomach, he listened to the conversation at the next table.

A group of five students were talking about the cushy work study jobs they had. “I have to sit in the lounge and make sure nobody breaks the big screen TV,” one guy said. “I am literally getting paid to watch TV.”

“I’m sorting mail,” a girl said.

“What’s mail?” another girl asked, and the table laughed.

“Exactly,” the mail sorter said. “I’m gonna get paid to do homework.”

Calvin cursed himself again. He hadn’t done anything about getting a work-study job. He was going to miss out on all the good jobs if he didn’t get busy looking for a job today. Disregarding his stomach’s reservations, he got a cup of coffee and decided to go find a job.

*

As it turned out, he was too late to get any of the good jobs. At four thirty-five p.m., he found himself at the Bursar’s office, the first place he wasn’t laughed out of. A very kind receptionist took his name, gave him a schedule, and told him she’d see him the next day.

By the time Calvin got there the next day, he’d had his first two classes and had a knot in his stomach from being intimidated by the syllabi and by the prospect of working a non-retail, non-food-service job for the first time in his life. “What do you even do in a job like that?” he’d asked his roommate the previous night. “No shelves to stock, no fries to make…what the hell do you actually do?”

He learned the displeasing answer to this after meeting his immediate supervisor, whose name was Cash Pendleton. Cash Pendleton was a tall, broad-shouldered middle-aged white man whose hobbies clearly included weight lifting. When Maria, the receptionist, introduced Calvin, Cash Pendleton did not shake his hand or smile. He just said, “great,” and turned to his computer.

Calvin thought it was funny that a guy named Cash worked in the Bursar’s office, but he did not say this for fear Cash Pendleton would crush him like a bug.

Cash Pendleton turned to his computer, and Calvin, at the next desk, sat awkwardly awaiting instruction. He thought it might be a bad look to take his phone out, so he logged into the computer in front of him and checked his university email. He cleared his inbox in five minutes and then looked around. Cash Pendleton was typing, clicking, typing, and clicking, looking annoyed. Calvin glanced at the clock on the computer screen. 2:30 PM. He had two more hours in his shift.

“So,” Calvin said. “Uh, is there something you’d like me to do, or…”

Cash Pendleton rolled his eyes and sighed. “You know Excel?”

“I…I know what it is,” Calvin said.

“You’re no use to me if you don’t know Excel. Watch some YouTube videos or enroll in a free training course, or something. You’ll actually thank me for it later. Much better skill to have when you’re job hunting than whatever liberal arts bullshit they’re gonna teach you here.”

Just as Cash Pendleton’s size and manner had discouraged Calvin from remarking on how he’d chosen the right profession to fit his name, so did it discourage him from defending the liberal arts in general, and the study of history in particular, in this case.

He popped his earbuds in. He looked up “teach yourself Excel,” clicked on the first link he found, and started watching a video. And, over the next several weeks, he spent about half his time at work watching videos about Excel. (The rest of the time he spent wasting time in all the ways people in such jobs typically waste time: checking email, going on social media, and texting friends.)

And a strange thing happened. After sitting through a few hours of how-to videos just to appear to be doing something work-related, he began to actually get interested in it. Because, as he was learning in his history classes, the way you present information has the power to shape how people understand it. And so the person who creates the charts, who decides which columns get hidden and which make it into the pivot table, becomes incredibly powerful.

By no means did Calvin begin to harbor any ambitions of working full-time in an office like the bursar’s office, or of any accounting department at all, but he did begin to understand the appeal of being the Emperor of Excel, or at least the Prince of Pivot Tables.

He needed data, though. So he went onto his bank website and downloaded a .csv file of all his transactions, then created categories and a nice chart to demonstrate what he spent money on. This was ultimately unsatisfying because he didn’t have that many transactions and he didn’t really need to use Excel to know that his biggest expenses apart from his education were snacks and video games.

So when he went home for a weekend in October, he asked his mother if he might have access to her financials so as to practice his Excel skills. Access was granted, and this was a more satisfying task with more categories and some surprising insights, namely that his mother’s work lunches were a close to three hundred dollar per month expense. “I don’t even buy anything that good!” she exclaimed. “I’m packing my lunch from now on!”

And so, though he was not called upon to do any actual work, he began to enjoy his job somewhat, as he felt he was getting paid (albeit not very much) to learn a useful skill, which he recognized as a good deal.

He also felt virtuous tracking every cent in and out of his bank account with the help of Microsoft’s greatest creation.

Ultimately, though, Calvin grew tired of working with the relatively small data sets that were available to him. So he gathered his courage and approached Cash Pendleton. “Um, I’m learning a lot about Excel, and I’m just wondering if I can get a big data set to practice with.”

Cash Pendleton looked at him with an arched eyebrow, clearly skeptical. Then he smiled, pulled out a flash drive, and inserted it into a USB port in his computer. Several dozen keystrokes and three minutes later, he handed the flash drive to Calvin. “That’s this week’s check run. Have fun.”

The University had over eight thousand regular employees and another three thousand work study employees, and if Cash Pendleton had intended this to intimidate Calvin, he had sorely miscalculated. Within a week Calvin had a colossal Excel Workbook with salaries broken out by occupation. And by years of service. And by department. This was how he discovered that far more of his tuition was going to administration than to things he would actually notice, namely instruction and maintenance.

He shared this information with the people who lived on the same hall in his dorm. They were less impressed with his discovery than with the level of nerdiness he displayed; they consequently called him “Pivot,” short for “Pivot Table,” the Excel feature whose virtues he enthusiastically touted at every opportunity.

Bored with his data set, Calvin set out to find his own paycheck on the check run. He pulled up his banking app, found the deposit amount, and ran a query in Excel.

And he found nothing.

So he watched another video on the VLOOKUP command and checked again. And again. He sliced and diced the anonymized data several ways and could not find his check. So he logged into the payroll portal for the first time since entering his direct deposit information in the first week of school and, after several clicks, saw the problem. One dollar and fifty cents of his latest paycheck—and, indeed, as he looked at all his paystubs, every paycheck—had been deposited into an account that was not his own. He took screenshots and stored them in several locations, and the next time he went to work in the bursar’s office, he marched straight up to Cash Pendleton and said, “I found something in the data that I think you might find interesting.”

Cash Pendleton looked intrigued as Calvin detailed how he had, up to this point, lost seven dollars and fifty cents from his paychecks.

“Seven dollars and fifty cents,” Cash Pendleton said. “That’s almost enough for someone to buy a large latte!” He laughed at his own joke.

“The point isn’t the amount,” Calvin said. “It’s that my money was being deposited in someone else’s bank account!”

Cash Pendleton stopped smiling, with some difficulty. “Okay, okay, I’ll look into it,” he said.

Calvin was puzzled. His image of people who worked with numbers was that they were punctilious, that any irregularity would bother them like a rock in their shoe until they found it and got rid of it.

But such, clearly, was not the case with Cash Pendleton. For over the next few weeks, Calvin talked to all of his friends and acquaintances with work-study jobs and urged them to  log into the portal and check for the presence of a mysterious bank account. To a one, they found the account, siphoning a dollar fifty from every biweekly check.

So Calvin eventually worked up the courage to confront Cash Pendleton. He brought a folder full of documentation and a flash drive to match. “I’m wondering why these unauthorized withdrawals are still happening,” Calvin said. “And, I mean, since you don’t seem to be able to stop it, I’m wondering if I should go to the bursar or what.”

Cash Pendleton looked away from his computer monitor. Calvin couldn’t read his expression. “Let’s take a walk,” Cash Pendleton said.

It was a blustery November afternoon with gray skies and a light but very cold rain falling. It was not a nice day for a walk. But Calvin walked next to Cash Pendleton, getting wet because Cash Pendleton’s umbrella was not big enough for two, and also sharing an umbrella with Cash Pendleton would have felt weird.

“I’m impressed,” Cash Pendleton said. “You really have learned a lot since you started. But I’m going to teach you another lesson right now.” Given that they were in the middle of campus, Calvin did not fear that Cash Pendleton was going to administer a physical beating, but that is what Cash Pendleton’s tone conveyed.

“What happens if you go to the bursar with this information?  Well, I’ll tell you. She’ll find out who’s responsible. And that person, whoever they may be, will, in turn, present some of the information they’ve amassed since they started working at the University. NCAA recruiting violations funneled through the bursar’s office, sure, that’s the biggy because football and basketball bring a ton of money in, but also hush money paid to harassment and assault victims of star professors and star athletes. Man, would that be a can of worms. This place is rotten to the core. Funded by thieves and slavers too, but nobody really cares about that. But they do care about sports. And, to a much lesser degree, sexual impropriety. You see what I’m saying here? She’ll have to weigh your seven dollars and fifty cents against the reputation and financial stability of the university. Well, it’s not going to be a tough decision, now is it?”

Calvin, stunned, did not respond.

“But then she’ll have to deal with you. Because you know too much. So what’s the best way to do that? Discredit you. So your accusations can be dismissed as the words of a bad actor. A thug, if you will. You see where I’m going with this? You’ve been downloading information you shouldn’t have access to for the last two weeks. A lot of personal information. About female students only. Huge FERPA violation, but also? Looks creepy as hell.”

“But I haven’t done that!”

“Mmmm, that’s not what the computer records say. So the lesson for today is this: only chumps try to do the right thing in a corrupt environment. Don’t stand there trying to blow the whistle; find a way to cut yourself in on the action. Like the person who initiated those dollar fifty withdrawals. It’s the only smart play.”

“But you—sorry, ‘this person’ isn’t stealing from the University. They’re stealing from students. And not even the rich ones! The ones who have to work to afford this joint!”

“Well, yeah, because those are the ones this person has the opportunity to steal from. And, in the end, it’s practically a victimless crime. Tell the truth—did you notice seven-fifty was missing from your bank account before you went digging?”

“No, but—“

“See, there you have it. It’s a minor inconvenience at best. And you’d better get used to it. Because that buck fifty is coming out of your next check. And the one after that and the one after that.”

“So this person, the thief, is pocketing an extra eight thousand bucks a month. So like an extra 72 thousand dollars every school year. When will it be enough? When will..this person have stolen enough money from students that they’ll be satisfied?”

“Enough? What the hell does that even mean? You know you live in the United States of America, right?” Cash Pendleton laughed. “Enough. No such thing, my friend! So, there’s your lesson. Oh, and here’s another one. You’re fired. I won’t mention your creepy data mining, but you’re done. Yet another lesson—keep your mouth shut. Because if you don’t, there are always consequences. You’re welcome!”

Calvin stood in the middle of the quad, light rain falling on his head, people with raincoats and umbrellas scurrying around him, and Cash Pendleton walking back to the bursar’s office, whistling.

*

One week later, Cash Pendleton arrived at campus. He slapped his ID against the reader that opened the gate in Lot B. Nothing happened. He did it again. Still nothing. He then tried lots C, D, and E. No luck. He wound up parking on the street seven blocks from campus. He walked in late to the Maxwell Administration Building and sat down to log in at his computer, only to find his login credentials didn’t work.

He called the IT team. After ten minutes on hold and profuse apologies from the idiotic student on the phone who had no idea how this happened, he was so sorry for the inconvenience, he got his login information working again.

He got down to work, but then he was getting incessant pings from Microsoft Teams for calls that, when he picked up, had no one on the other end. Again he called IT. Again he dealt with an idiot who took way too long to fix a problem. In this case it was a half hour.

He worked for forty-five minutes, then went across the quad to the coffee shop for his daily skim latte. Somehow it took the idiot student barista ten minutes to make it, and, on taking a sip, Cash Pendleton found she had used whole milk and put a pump of hazelnut syrup in it. She apologized profusely and offered to remake it, but he’d already been late this morning and couldn’t afford to be absent from his desk for a half hour. His image as a conscientious worker was essential.

Lunch at the cafeteria brought more student stupidity. God, it was a wonder these idiots got into college at all. He asked the girl at the stir-fry station to put chicken in his, but she used disgusting tofu instead, and light oil apparently meant “only a half cup” in her mind. His CougarCash card wouldn’t work at the register, so he had to pay cash. So after a very annoying morning, he was facing an afternoon in which he had to prepare for this week’s check run and somehow work in a conversation with dining services (they assured him his CougarCash account was fully funded—apparently a hold had been put on it in error) and then a walk over to public safety who were in charge of parking, because they never answered their phones or emails. They too told him a block had been placed on his ID card in error and apologized for the mistake.

He returned to his desk. Another call to IT when his jobs wouldn’t release from the print queue. Sorry, they said, just a mistake on our part, we’ll get right on it. And another hour elapsed before he could print.

At four o’clock, some kids from dining services appeared with trays full of cookies and cut up fruit. “Where’s the catering order going?” they asked. “Conference room, or?”

“I didn’t order any goddamn catering!” Cash Pendleton barked.

Unfortunately Melanie, the bursar, was passing by at this moment, and once the students had been dismissed with their trays, Cash Pendleton was subjected to a lecture on professionalism and the necessity of not swearing at students.

“Those students fund your position,” the bursar said, and Cash Pendleton did not reply that at least part of his position was funded by the generous donations of a certain billionaire pedophile. He bit his tongue and endured the humiliation of being lectured by a woman and returned to his desk.

Finally, Cash Pendleton’s day from hell ended. He logged out of his computer and walked the seven blocks to his car, which was sitting on four flat tires. He yelled a string of especially colorful expletives, and, after calming down, called his platinum card’s roadside assistance number. “Somebody will be out within the hour,” the woman on the phone told him. “But, you know, rush hour traffic, so give ‘em 90 minutes just to be safe.”

Cash Pendleton hung up the phone and pounded his fist on the roof of his Lexus. Then he looked up and saw, across the street, that Black kid who’d learned enough Excel to figure out about the seven fifty. Which he could have figured out immediately by just logging into the payroll portal. Kelvin. And the Black kid was laughing. Cash Pendleton wanted nothing more than to run over and smash his fist into the kid’s uppity face.

“Looks like you’ve suffered a minor inconvenience,” the Black kid said. Cash Pendleton said nothing. “In fact, I heard you suffered a number of minor inconveniences today.” The kid smiled broadly, and Cash Pendleton got it. The kid. The goddamn kid. Every person who had screwed up and screwed him over today was a goddamn work study student. And somehow this kid was behind it all.

“I have,” he said. “And I’ve gotta give it to you. You’ve made your point. I’ll stop the deductions from your account. Enough is enough.”

“Enough?” the kid said. “What the hell does that even mean? You know you’re in the United States of America, right? Enough,” he said, turning away and shaking his head.

Cash Pendleton stood next to his disabled car and the Black kid walked away, whistling.

#shortstory #crime #fiction

*

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the case of the spurious sorcerer

By Seamus Cooper

“Well, this is awkward,” Quince said, his hand deep into the chest cavity of the body that had, until recently, belonged to Sotworth, the town drunk. He had been so absorbed in his work that he hadn’t noticed the angry villagers breaching his walls and making their way into his laboratory.

He’d been unperturbed by the “death to the Necromancer” chants—they were a daily affair. He had initially addressed the angry mob, insisting that he was not, in fact, a necromancer, just a scholar of natural philosophy, but they had been understandably skeptical, given that he got regular deliveries of corpses he’d purchased in advance from their owners or from shady characters who showed up at his gates. And now those same gates had been breached by the torch-wielding idiots who daily called for his death.

“Now before you do anything rash,” Quince said, pulling out Sotworth’s shriveled liver, “take a look at this.”

There was a gasp from the mob. “Now this is a structure I call ‘the liv-er’ because you need it to live!—an organ we all have, but I’ve come to believe it plays a part in turning wine to urine. For look at the shriveled state of Sotworth’s!” The crowd did not react as Quince expected, but he quickly realized how to remedy the situation.

“Of course, you’ve never seen a healthy live-er before! Now compare, if you will, with the healthy liv-er of the specimen I acquired last week. You’ll find it on the third shelf, eighth jar from the right.”

A woman with long brown hair and a meat cleaver in the hand not holding a torch said, “Specimen, necromancer? That ‘specimen’ was my father!”

Quince’s knowledge of the inner workings of the human body was without peer, but his knowledge of how to best interact with people who were still alive, especially those who wanted him dead, was sorely lacking. “And by the looks of his liver, your father never touched a drink!”

The woman lunged at Quince with the cleaver, and even as he ducked, he was sure he could yet convince the crowd with logic. “Now the liver secretes a substance I call ‘Green Goo,” which—” he began, but his anatomy lecture was cut short by the application of a torch to his tunic.

The crowd roared, and Quince fell to the floor and rolled, extinguishing the flames on his tunic. The flames that had subsequently been set in the rest of his laboratory, however, raged on. “My notes!” he cried. “You clowns! Your idiocy has set back knowledge of the human body—” with this he began to cough as thick smoke began to envelop the lab.

Which was when Quince realized that he should probably worry less about his notes on the human body and more about the body that had made the notes. Fortunately, though he’d been too absent-minded to check the solidity of his gates, he knew his system of trapdoors and tunnels was intact. He unlatched the nearest trapdoor, poured himself through it, and ran for his life.

One month later, Quince awoke in a forest glen before the dawn, sick with worry. He was spectacularly unsuited to life on the road. With no money, he could not buy food or shelter, and with no wilderness skills, he could not hunt or construct his own shelter. He had been subsisting on kitchen scraps he “borrowed” from pigs, but while pigs could extract nutrition from stalks and peels and eggshells and bones, it was much harder for Quince to do the same. He hadn’t eaten in two days and feared he might die of starvation.

He had begun his studies in sorcery before deciding that the mysteries of the human body were far more intriguing than those in his now-burned magickal tomes, but he did remember a handful of tricks, both magical and not, from the beginning of his training many years ago. Perhaps he could do sleight-of-hand tricks for children at their birthday parties. But Quince was a scholar, unfamiliar with and mildly disapproving of both children and…entertainment. He’d rather steal and take his chances, though, as a hoarder of information, tomes, and body parts, he disdained the act of theft. But was it worse to be a thief than to starve? He supposed his stomach would let him know, for hunger is a great cure for the curse of conscience.

Once the dawn broke, he packed his meager belongings and walked back to the road. After only a few hours, he arrived at a medium-sized village that had clearly seen better days. The nicer buildings had mold covering their thatched roofs, while the meaner ones sported visible holes. The road was chockablock with holes and protrusions that would surely challenge even the sturdiest of wagon wheels, and the growth of vegetation in the market square showed that it had been quite some time since a market of any size had taken place there. As Quince walked toward the market square, he did notice something odd: temples to two competing gods of commerce on either side of the square next to two taverns, both of which had customers already a-stagger with drink coming out of the front doors when it was not yet lunchtime. Or perhaps said customers had begun drinking last night and only just concluded their revels. Though, again, the state of the town suggested that few residents indeed possessed the coin for such an epic drinking session.

Quince suspected he would not be able to find much prestidigitation work at children’s parties here, for joy seemed like it would be mightily out of place in such a setting, and as for thieving…well, it seemed extraordinarily unlikely that the denizens of this particular town would have anything worth stealing. Well, perhaps he could do some sort of work in the kitchen of one of the inns in exchange for a bed for the night. He could still peel a potato and chop a carrot, after all. What a change it would make for him to sleep in a bed. His back nearly sighed with delight at the prospect.

But which inn should he choose? Time and penury had worn them really about the same. He suspected that either one brought an equal risk of food poisoning, bedbug infestation, and violence at the hand of a drunkard, but then a high-pitched scream emanated from the one nearer him.

This, of course, should have firmly decided Quince to choose the other inn, but he had a brief moment of inspiration: if someone was in distress, perhaps he could help, or at least pretend or promise to help, and this might allow him to eat a real meal and sleep in a real bed without doing any peeling at all.

In the years to come, he would curse himself and this moment many times, for it set him on a path both unexpected and frequently annoying.

But at this moment, Quince ran headlong into the tavern where the scream had originated. When he entered the tavern, he noticed the darkness and smell of long-since spilled beer that he expected, along with the smell of long-since-expelled urine that he hadn’t expected but that wasn’t fundamentally surprising; a handful of patrons so drunk and/or surly that they were not even looking in the direction of the commotion; and the commotion, which was a woman Quince assumed was the landlady screaming and crying, “he’s dead! He’s dead!” while a handful of men apparently not that drunk but still surly, surrounded her, muttering and mumbling.

Quince ran toward the screaming woman. “Madam. Who is dead?” Quince said in a voice that he hoped conveyed calm, compassion, and command.

“My husband! Upstairs!” she cried. At that moment, a man dressed so well he could only be the mayor of this stain on the map burst through the front door accompanied by an old man and a teenage boy, both with rusty swords drawn. The town watch, no doubt.

“No one move!” the elder watchman said as though he were stopping a mad rush to the exits rather than a woman recounting her distress while dipsomaniacs struggled mightily to sit upright.

“Morag,” the mayor said. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Button! He’s dead!” she said.

Button, Quince thought. Imagine being named for a common household object rather than a noble fruit. Perhaps he ultimately was crushed under the weight of his very stupid name.

“Let us see,” the elder watchman said. He went behind the bar and through the door Morag gestured at. The mayor, the younger watchman, and Quince followed, feeling that his expertise as an anatomist qualified him to assist in this investigation.

Button was dead at his rustic wooden desk, the inn’s book of accounts open before him. His face was gaunt, his dead eyes sunken in dark-circled sockets. His hands appeared to be devoid of all flesh, merely papery skin stretched thin over bones. A drop of green liquid dribbled from the edge of his mouth. “Poison!” the elder watchman cried, though given the state of the inn, Quince did not believe the tavern’s own food and drink could be ruled out as causes of death.

“Search the tavern!” the watchman said. The junior watchman quickly ran into the hall and the senior watchman turned around and saw Quince as if for the first time. “Who are you!?” he said.

“I am a traveling anatomist,” Quince said. “I heard a scream and thought I might be of assistance.”

“Anatomist?” the watchman said. “What does that mean? By the looks of you, it’s a fancy word for beggar!” he laughed uproariously.

“I have long attended to my studies rather than my vanity,” Quince muttered, stung by the entirely justified criticism of his filthy, reeking, partially-rent garments, “and now I have the greatest knowledge of the human body in all the Seven Realms!” Never having reached the part of his magickal studies that would have allowed him to glimpse any of the other realms, Quince had no idea if this boast was even remotely true. “Now if you’ll just allow me to examine the bod—”

“We’ll have none of your necromancy here, beggar!” the watchman cried. “Much as Morag loved poor Button, I’m sure she doesn’t want to see him returned a staggering, mindless corpse in thrall to the likes of you!”

Quince sighed. “I am not a necromancer. Have you ever seen a necromancer? They resemble nothing so much as walking corpses! Sallow skin, sunken eyes, patchy hair…no necromancer could maintain this kind of lush beard growth!” He stroked his eight-inch beard, thus revealing that his vanity, though secondary to his studies, had never been fully vanquished.

“Quiet, toad,” the watchman said. “My so—er, deputy approaches.” As there were but three upstairs rooms in the tavern, it had not taken the young man long to accomplish the task. He brought forth from one of the rooms short-haired young woman who greeted the watchman’s intrusion into her rented bedchamber with a string of obscenities and speculations about the watchman’s parentage so colorful that Quince could not suppress a chuckle.

Unfortunately for her, one of the junior watchman’s parents was, in fact, present in the form of the senior watchman. He evidently did not take kindly to the lodger’s suggestion that he had been cuckolded by an outhouse imp whose diet consisted of runny fecal matter. So he had his son, who, if truth be told, did bear a certain resemblance to an outhouse imp, now that it had been pointed out, rifle through all of the lodger’s possessions. Which led to the discovery of a dagger (not surprising. Anyone traveling alone usually brought a weapon of some sort, though Quince, having fled his home in a hurry, had none) and a vial of poison, which was much more incriminating.

“Poison? Confess, murderer!” the elder watchman said.

The young lodger looked baffled. “Murder? I haven’t murdered anyone!”

“What of the landlord of this inn, dead at his desk of poison not ten steps from here?” the watchman said.

“What motive would I have for killing him? I mean, this inn is a disgusting shithole, but so is the entire town. I’m certainly not going to murder anyone for it. And if I were to poison someone, why would I return to my bed not ten steps away instead of stealing away under cover of darkness?”

Quince found he liked the young woman, if only because she a) was correct about both the inn and the town and b) was clearly the second-smartest person in the room.

“Insolence!” the senior watchman cried. “You shall hang o’the morrow!”

“O the morrow?” the lodger said. “Who talks like that?”

“Deputy!” the watchman barked at his son/assistant. “Confine her to her room!”

“Yes sir,” the deputy said, clearly energized by the prospect of having something, anything at all, useful to do at long last. “Uh. Missmadam? Can you kindly return to your room?”

“Well,” the accused said, “since you asked so nicely, I will. But tell me, who shall empty my chamber pot? Or shall I just let it overflow and pour into the hallway?”

“We’ll send the chambermaid,” the deputy said. If this place has a chambermaid, Quince thought, I’ll eat my entirely-theoretical-at this-point hat.

“Well, that’s that,” the watchman said as the deputy closed the door and stood beside it, staff in hand. “One murder solved. Just have to get the executioner here o’ the morrow!” Smiling and whistling, he went down the stairs.

The landlady appeared at Quince’s side. “Fool,” she whispered after the departing watchman, before looking at the deputy. “Sorry, Jer—but you know it’s true.”

“I am focusing on my sacred duty to the town and am ignoring all distractions,” The deputy said. Apparently he was smarter than he looked, or at least not quite so foolish as to think his father not a fool.

“He cares more for keeping what little peace we have in this village than for the truth. Everyone knows who killed Button, and it wasn’t this…poor idiot child,” she said, gesturing at the door behind Jer’s back.

“I can hear you!” the lodger shouted from behind the door.

“Who, then, did the deed?” Quince asked.

“His brother Candle,” the landlady said.

“Is everyone in this town just named after random objects?” the lodger yelled.

The landlady addressed the door. “If this stalwart lieutenant of the watch were not on duty, I assure you there would be a second murder in my inn this morning. Hold your tongue, girl!”

“Ooo Thuck!” the lodger returned, apparently literally holding her tongue. Quince stifled a laugh with great difficulty.

“You, bedraggled stranger,” the landlady said. “No one in this town knows you or indeed knows you’ve been here. Go over to Candle’s tavern and see if you can find evidence. He’s the killer.”

“Madam, why would he kill his own brother?”

The landlady sighed as if Quince were the biggest idiot on earth. “They’ve been estranged for decades. I can’t possibly run this dilapidated money pit by myself. I’ll have no choice but to sell out to Candle, and then he’ll own the entire town!”

“Such as it is!” the lodger screamed.

The landlady looked at the closed door with pure hatred in her eyes. “Jer. Give me five minutes in there, and I’ll teach that street rat some manners.”

Jer, visibly uncomfortable, shifted his weight against his rusty, never-wielded-in-anger halberd. “Uh, I…”

“Forget it,” the landlady spat. “I’m going to be alone with my grief. Stranger, I’ll give you food and lodging for a month if you can prove Candle killed Button,” she said, and disappeared up the stairs to her room.

Quince pondered his surroundings and thought if he were not flirting with starvation, a month in this place would be more punishment than reward. But he was flirting with starvation, and even such fare as a bankrupt tavern in a shithole town was able to serve would be preferable to pig slop. Probably.

“Yo!” the lodger/prisoner’s voice came from behind the door. “Bedraggled stranger! You find the real killer and I’ll do even better—I’ll get you out of this town!”

Quince sincerely doubted that anyone who was voluntarily staying in this place had the wherewithal to improve his situation, but, then again, the young lodger had paid for her room rather than exchanging it for dubious amateur espionage work.

“I, Quince, shall find the true murderer!” he pronounced, trying to forget that the last time he had displayed such confidence was when he thought an impromptu explanation of live-er function would forestall the destruction of his home.

He wandered across the scrubby market square, wondering as he walked how anyone, especially a tavern owner, procured food in a town with a disused market square. Shrugging, he continued to walk toward Candle’s tavern. Though it looked to be the twin of the tavern now owned by Button’s widow Morag, it sounded remarkably different. For this tavern had music playing and the loud, raucous sounds of a drunken crowd enjoying itself.

Quince pushed the door open and peeked his head in. Behind the bar, a large man with a bald head and carefully-coiffed handlebar mustache locked eyes with him and bellowed, “Stranger!”

The entire tavern fell silent, and Quince felt dozens of eyes upon him. “Humblest apologies,” he said, not at all eager to see if he could escape a homicidal mob twice in the space of a month. He started to back out of the door.

“Button is dead!” the barkeep, whom Quince assumed to be Candle, said. “Drinks on the house! Welcome!” With that, the music and conversation resumed, and Quince approached the bar. Having studied the effect of strong drink on the live-er, Quince was reluctant to partake, but he decided that refusing a free drink would be socially awkward and that a place like this certainly watered down its ale thus making the danger to his live-er negligable.

He accepted a mug of ale and said to the bartender, “Who is Button? And why such joy at his demise?”

“Button was my good-for-nothing brother! He’s been a boil on my ass since we were born! And now I’m free! Free!” With that, he ran to the other end of the bar to serve another customer thirsty for free ale.

Well, Quince thought, the widow Button was not wrong in her assertion that Candle had motive. But did he possess the poison needed?

With Candle overwhelmed by tending bar at the celebration of his brother’s death, Quince felt this was an ideal time to snoop around. As Candle poured out another mug of ale to a patron who had clearly had too many already, Quince slipped behind the bar and into the kitchen, where he was immediately confronted by a woman holding a wooden spoon in a most threatening fashion.

“Yes, I do have work for an itinerant beggar! The drunken masses will soon be demanding to be fed. Grab a knife and peel potatoes with all due haste! I’m Spark, but you can call me boss.”

Quince, affronted, thought about asserting that he was no beggar, but rather the foremost anatomist in all the Seven Realms, but he realized that a) though he had not explicitly begged, it was really only a matter of time and b)this would be a good way to get information from the woman he assumed to be Candle’s wife. So he grabbed a knife and set to work peeling potatoes while his new employer, who had notably not set his wage for this task, set about chopping some very sad-looking carrots and onions.

“Your husband seems thrilled at his brother’s death,” Quince ventured.

“Yes, but he’ll be weeping in my arms tonight, sure enough. Hating Button gave his life meaning and brought some excitement to the drudgery of running a dying tavern in a dying town. What will he have to look forward to now? Nothing but his own slow march to the grave.”

Button peeled in silence for a moment while he thought of his next conversational salvo. He wished he had a corpse in front of him—even that of an animal—because that would make him feel comfortable, in his element. But even animal corpses seemed to be absent from this kitchen. “So, uh, begging your pardon but the rumor about town is that Candle hired that girl to kill Button.” He assumed that the news of the young traveler’s detainment would have traveled as quickly as that of Button’s death.

“Hah!” Spark laughed. “Hired her! With what? The promise of a room in poor repair? Mind you, that’s what I’m hiring you for, but by the looks and, frankly, smell of you, any room at all would be a marked improvement for you. But it would be poor wages for murder, surely.”

“Indeed,” Quince said.

“Less talking, more peeling!” Spark barked, and that marked the end of Quince’s investigation, though not of his potato peeling. Two hours later, he ventured out the back door of the kitchen to relieve himself and saw, to his surprise, the town burial ground abutted the tavern’s rear door. He wondered if this was the basis of the feud—one brother forced to operate a tavern next to the foul miasmas of the burial ground while the other’s inn sat in a corpse-free (until this morning, anyway) zone.

Walking back to The Tavern Formerly Known as Button’s, Quince was dejected. He had discovered nothing of use, though at least he had a place to sleep tonight. But the idea of the young woman dying for a crime she didn’t commit rankled him most severely. Having had his own life upended (and nearly ended) by a false accusation, he found that the idea of someone else dying for a crime they didn’t commit awoke a previously unknown passion for justice in his bosom. He cursed himself for his weakness—he would simply never survive as an itinerant by showing empathy for his fellow creatures. “We’ll all be corpses one day,” he said aloud. “For some that day comes sooner than for others.” Still, it galled him to see the most interesting person in this miserable town converted to corpsedom before others who deserved it more.

He decided to say his goodbyes to the woman, and to apologize for his failure to save her, and so, when he reached Morag’s inn, he ascended the stairs, asked the drowsy young watchman for entry to the room, and walked through the door. He found the woman fast asleep on her bed. “You’ll sleep soon enough,” he whispered. “Awaken, and savor your last few hours of life!”

Without opening her eyes, the woman said, “Savor life? In this town?”

Quince cracked a smile. “I bring you my apologies, Ms….”

“Call me Sam,” she said.

“Sam. I have been unable to find Button’s killer and thereby save you from the axe.”

Now she sat up, opened her eyes, and laughed. “You insult me, sir! Do you think I couldn’t escape from this room? There’s a window right there! I can drop the ten feet to the ground and be out of this town in seconds! Who’s gonna stop me? That clown who runs the town watch? His outhouse imp son?”

“I can hear you!” the junior watchman said through the door.

Quince conceded the point. Now that it had been pointed out, he had to admit that escape from this “prison” would be trivially easy, even for one as old and slow as himself. “But then why ask me to help?” he said.

“I felt sorry for you. You’re clearly unsuited to life on the road. I mean, look at you.”

“Sorry? For me! I will have you know I am the foremost anatomist in the Seven Realms!”

“Which doesn’t seem to be doing you much good in the food, shelter, and clothing departments,” Sam replied.

Quince, defeated, sighed. “Yes, well, you can’t investigate the mysteries of the human body without people thinking you’re a necromancer, and so it is true that my expertise is not in high demand. Or, to be frank, any demand at all. And clearly I am not good at finding murderers.”

Sam got out of bed and stretched. “Speaking of which, I gotta start getting ready to leave. Hate to lose my dagger and poison here, but oh well. But your problem, murder solving wise, is that you clearly don’t know much about how people’s minds work.”

“Well, I have spent decades in isolated study.”

“Right, so you didn’t absorb this one nearly-universal truth. When a married person is murdered, their spouse did it.”

Quince was stunned. “Morag? But you heard her! His death has left her destitute!”

Sam gathered her possessions into a sack and slung the sack over her shoulder. “It left her free. Shackled to Button and this shitstain of a town and this turd of a tavern for life, and now, suddenly, she can go wherever she wants, do whatever she wants.”

“But with no coin, one’s options are limited, as well I know!” Quince remonstrated.

“Well, it’s the only explanation that makes sense. Unless your expertise suggests a better explanation.”

Quince thought out loud. “If only I could have access to Button’s corpse, I might be able to get a fuller idea of what killed him. Knowing the action of the poison would help narrow down what kind of poison it might be…as it is, his emaciated, sallow corpse will just be taken to the burial ground behind his brother’s ta…hang on. I think my expertise may actually be suggesting a better explanation!” He pounded on the closed door.

“Fetch your idiot father! Wake the mistress of the house! I know who really killed Button!”

Sam looked at him. “So who was it?” but Quince was already on his way out the door.

“No time, no time! There’s one more piece to the puzzle, and I know just where to look!” Quince said as he bounded from the room with the energy of a much younger person. Indeed, with more energy than the young person charged with guarding the door. Morag shuffled down the stairs, and Quince nearly bowled her over as he headed up the stairs. “Your husband’s study holds the key!” he said.

“I have the key around my neck!” she said. “What in the Seven Realms are you talking about?”

*

Five minutes later, Morag, the watch captain and lieutenant and Sam were all crammed into Sam’s tiny room. “If they don’t believe you, I’ll be going out the window,” Sam whispered to Quince, who nodded in assent and hoped he might be of some use in the caper.

“Inside every human body is a structure I call the live-er. Because you need it to live!” he began.

“Don’t you need everything inside you to live?” Sam asked.

“Shh!” Quince said. “Now, this structure helps us turn our food and drink into shit and piss,” he said. “It does this by secreting a substance I call green goo. It was this goo, and not poison at all, that was dribbling from Button’s lips when he died.

“Now—why would this be? Well, you all know what a Necromancer looks like—sunken eyes, sallow complexion, skeletal frame. Indeed, the very description of Button.” He glanced nervously at Morag, but she nodded at the truth of his explanation. “The practice of Necromancy takes its toll on the live-er, thus giving its practitioners such an appearance.”

“Are you suggesting that Button…was a necromancer?” Morag said. “I find it hard to believe. That man was never competent at anything in his life!”

“Ah, but I did not suggest that he was a competent necromancer. I believe that he attempted necromancy. Because, obsessed with his feud with his brother, he sought to end it once and for all by reanimating the corpses buried behind his brother’s tavern!”

The watch captain nodded his head, thoughtful. “The presence of shambling corpses would make it difficult to attract custom,” he said.

“But fortunately for all but himself,” Quince continued, “Button’s apparently lifelong incompetence extended to his practice of necromancy. He performed a spell incorrectly and, I believe, caused his live-er to explode, killing him instantly and sending a jet of green goo up through his mouth. I believe you’ll find the same leaking from his anus if you care to examine it.”

A moment of silence followed.

“That idiot,” Morag finally whispered. “I told him! I told him that his hatred of his brother would be his undoing!”

“So you, madam, believe that your husband dabbled in…necromancy?” the watch captain’s last word emerged as a horrified whisper.

“And was so bad at it that it killed him? Absolutely,” Morag said. “Completely in character.”

“I found this among the accounting papers,” Quince said, producing a torn scrap of parchment covered in runes written in what appeared to be blood. “It appears to be a portion of a spell.”

“Burn it!” The watch captain cried. “Burn it now!”

There followed some arguing between the watch captain and the watch lieutenant as to which of them would be tasked with burning the evil magick (it fell to the son), and some perfunctory apologies to Sam and the return of her dagger and poison.

“I’ll prepare your room,” Morag said to Quince, “though I doubt we’ll actually stay open for a full month. Thank you for solving this mystery,” she said, leaving the room.

“Well, I must admit,” Sam said, when only two of them remained, “Your knowledge of the human body did wind up solving the case.”

“Maybe,” Quince said.

“What do you mean, maybe?”

“Well, it’s as plausible an explanation as any, but I did not find a spell among his papers. Now it’s entirely possible that he found a scroll and it self-immolated upon use, but perhaps the wife did it after all. I tore the back of a receipt and hastily scribbled something that looked like magickal runes on the back. My explanation certainly fits the evidence, but, without further investigation, I cannot rule out Morag.”

Sam laughed. “Then why…you knew I was in no danger! Why fabricate evidence?”

“Well, I knew you were innocent. And I find I’m far more concerned with ensuring that an innocent person doesn’t suffer than I am with ensuring that a guilty one does. But, on a more pragmatic level, you promised to get me out of here,” Quince said. “You are right that I have no talent for life on the road. If I were to stay here, I would be no better off in a month than I am now, excepting perhaps that I might get my body and clothes cleaned.”

“I was just…I was pretending! I can’t get you out of here!”

“You can take care of yourself in a hostile world, which is more than I have been able to do. So—you made a sham offer, I created a sham solution. Let us now depart!”

Sam shook her head. “All right. But the first thing we’re going to do is steal everything in this place that isn’t nailed down.”

“Ha ha!” Quince said. “Your jests are most—”

“No, I’m serious. Go to the storehouse and grab anything that looks like it’ll travel. I’ll loot Button’s study.”

Five minutes later, the two comrades, laden with purloined food and knickknacks, took to the road.

End

Author Seamus Cooper adds, “If people like this, tell them to send it to someone else! If readers enjoy this, I’ll write more adventures for Quince and Sam instead of poring over mouldering grimoires!”

#shortstory #fiction #seamuscooper

Everything changed the day she found the hand.

She was on her hands and knees in the loose dirt under the porch, the afternoon sunlight shooting through the lattice boards in waffle-cut patterns. She was looking for a rat. Or a mouse. Possibly a raccoon. In any case, something was dead under here, and she liked to sit on the porch with Bethany after Bethany’s nap, and it was becoming increasingly unpleasant because of the smell of something dead.

She’d asked Alex to investigate. “Babe, this is the country. There are animals around. Sometimes they die,” he’d said

“But they don’t usually die under our porch! And it stinks! Bethany and I can’t sit on the porch, and now the front hall is starting to stink.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry we’re not living up to Candace’s standards,” Alex had spat out, slamming the door behind him and driving off to work. Candace was Emma’s mother, and while it was true that they weren’t living up to her standards and that her standards were impossibly high, this really had nothing to do with the rotting animal smell.

So Emma decided she had two choices: wait until Alex got home and have another fight about it, or find and dispose of the dead thing herself. She had some latex gloves she used on those rare occasions when she had time and energy to do a deep clean. And of course a bunch of N95 masks she’d stocked up on during the worst of the pandemic. So she donned her gloves and mask and grabbed a dustpan and a garbage bag and prepared to scoop a dead animal into the garbage bag and solve her own problem. Descending into the basement, she opened the window that led to the space under the porch and crawled through.

And then she saw the hand. It was a left hand, skin grey from decay, maggots eating patches of the flesh away. And it was large. Palm a basketball large. That was all her memory could reconstruct because she screamed in surprise and horror, and her scream woke Bethany up from her nap, so she had to scoot back into the basement, close the window, remove the gloves and mask so as not to alarm Bethany, go and wash her hands thoroughly because she did not want to touch her beautiful child with hands that hand been contaminated by proximity to their severed cousin. Finally she made it to Bethany’s crib, picked her up, held her, and cried.

She’d found a hand. This was not the life she had imagined for herself. Then again, she thought,  very few people probably imagine they will one day find a severed hand. Soldiers, maybe.  But not Emma.

When Alex had said, “let’s buy a farm and move to the country,” she’d pictured a charming old house amid rolling hills, a sumptuous garden, some chickens and maybe goats, maybe alpacas, friendly, low-maintenance animals, and she and Alex tired at the end of the day, not tired like they’d been after a day on Wall Street—an honest, clean fatigue brought on by the hard work of bringing life from the soil.

The reality, though, was that the house was old, and would perhaps have been charming if Alex had done all the repairs and improvements he’d pitched when they looked at the house. But it was more dingy than charming. And Emma was alone with Bethany here in upstate New York, carless all day and a mile from her nearest neighbors and hundreds of miles from her mother’s support.

“You two are codependent,” Alex had said. “You need to cut the apron strings and start living like an adult.” Which apparently meant alone with a baby in the middle of nowhere.

Once she’d collected herself, Emma realized she should call 911. But first Alex. She needed to hear the sound of his voice, to be reminded that she was not completely untethered from reality just because something bizarre had happened.

“Babe, I can’t talk” Alex said.

“It’s an emergency,” Emma said.

“Is Bethany hurt?”

“No”

“Are you hurt?”

“No”

“Is the house on fire?”

“No”

“Then it’s not an emergency, honey. I’ve gotta go. We’ll talk when I get home,” he said.

Well, that phone call was certainly a reminder of her reality, though maybe not exactly the kind of reminder she’d wanted. She used to dash off a Slack message and get five people to do things.  People had listened to her, taken her seriously, even if she was only pretending to be competent.

Maybe Alex was right. Nobody was in immediate danger. Of course it was concerning to find a human hand under your porch, but an emergency? Was the hand going to come to life and kill her and Bethany? Extremely unlikely. So not an emergency then. Alex was right. She would not call 911 because it was stupid to tie up an emergency line for something that was not an emergency, and anyway, Alex would probably be upset if she took a step like that without consulting him. And then what would she do if they asked to search the house? Alex would definitely be angry at that. Best not to call. Best to wait until Alex got home.

Still, there was the smell. The pungent, sweet smell of decay had been gross when she thought it was a raccoon. Now that she knew that a hand that had once called the end of a real person’s arm home was rotting under her porch, it was intolerable. It would nauseate her just to smell it.

She knew she was irrational, as Alex often reminded her, but she felt that Bethany’s purity and innocence would somehow be tainted by inhaling the foul stench of the rotting hand. That Bethany’s entire future would turn dark when she inhaled the hand’s corruption. (of course Bethany had already inhaled the corruption, but that was when Emma hadn’t known. Everything was different now).

She went out the back porch. The grass was high, of course, but there was no need to nag Alex about it, he could see high grass as well as she could. She would just have to be vigilant about ticks. So, though the temperature was in the 80’s, she dressed Bethany in a onesie, pajamas, and socks, and herself in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt she’d gotten at her old firm’s offsite meeting at Mohonk Mountain House three years ago, when she’d sat in a rocking chair on the wraparound porch and fantasized about escaping Manhattan for the beauty of upstate New York.

She had no wraparound porch here, nor a rocking chair, but there was an old wooden bench left by the previous owners under an elm tree about fifty feet from the back door. It was in the shade now, so it would be cooler, but not exactly cool. She and Bethany sat, and she sang songs and read board books and nursed and it was actually quite a pleasant afternoon. Mostly. Because every now and again, Emma would remember why they were out here, would see the hand again in her mind, and would begin to worry.

How had the hand gotten under the porch in the first place? Was it placed there by an animal? Some sort of animal that would snatch Bethany from the yard the second Emma turned her back? How would she ever be able to let Bethany enjoy the country if she had to fear that something out there saw her as prey?

She scanned the yard, looked at the tree line, mentally preparing to fight…Wolf? Mountain lion? Bear?—to save Bethany. She didn’t see anything and realized that jumping at every movement on a day when the wind was causing tree branches to sway and shadows to jump was a quick way to lose her mind.

She realized there was a darker possibility. That The Hand was put here as a warning. That some In Cold Blood killers were trying to terrorize her before they came back in the night to kill them. As Bethany settled into a post-nursing snooze, Emma took out her phone, just barely within the reach of the house’s wifi signal, and searched for murders in the area, for news of people with their hands cut off, for examples of entire families found murdered in their beds.

The fact that she found nothing was not reassuring. Maybe the killers had dismembered someone who hadn’t been missed yet. Maybe Emma and Alex and Bethany would be their first victims.

There was a third, even darker possibility, but Emma would not let her mind go down that path. If she did, she’d be sure to say something to Alex, and he’d be sure to get angry.

Finally, Emma heard the crunch of the BMW’s tires on the driveway. Scooping up Bethany, she went running around the house to the front, meeting Alex before he got to the front door. At the sight of him, all of Emma’s pent up fear and worry and trauma came spilling out her eyes. She wanted to say things, to tell him about The Hand, to seek reassurance, but all she could do was sob.

Alex enfolded her and Bethany in his arms. “Whoa, whoa whoa,” he said. “Babe. What is it? What’s wrong?”

Emma tried again to get words out, and again she failed.

Alex pulled away from her. “I can’t deal with you when you’re hysterical,” he said, walking toward the house.

This threw the switch in Emma’s mind to “anger,” and the anger made her feel strong, strong enough to yell at Alex without thinking of the consequences. “It was a hand, Alex!” she yelled. “The smell. Under the porch. It’s a human hand! A rotting hand! Do you understand? Do you understand why I’m upset? Why I felt like being trapped in the house with the stench of rotting human flesh was an emergency even though the fucking house wasn’t on fire?”

Alex whipped around. “Don’t you swear at me. Don’t you ever swear at me,” he said.

The switch went back to “afraid,” and in a quiet, meek voice, Emma said, “I’m sorry. I just got so frightened, and so disgusted. I wanted to call the police, but—”

“Whoa,” Alex said. “But you didn’t, though, right?”

“No, I wanted to wait for you!” Emma said.

“Good girl,” Alex said, smiling. “We don’t want cops around here.”

“You mean you’re not going to call them?” Emma said.

Alex walked back to her and patted her on the head. “Hon. How’s that gonna look? If we tell them we found a body part. You know who the prime suspect is going to be? Me, that’s who. Because it’s at my house. They’ll start hounding me day and night, trying to prove that I cut off somebody’s hand and hid it under my own porch, and the fact that that would be an incredibly stupid move doesn’t mean they’ll stop. And you know how gossip spreads around here.”

She didn’t. She never left the house.

“Once word gets out that I’m being investigated for something like that, watch my business dry up. Watch Bethany’s life be a living hell when she starts school. You think people here will ever forget that? You think they’ll care that there’s not enough evidence to charge me? We’ll be pariahs, Emma. Think.”

She did. And she saw the wisdom of what he was saying. But still. Somewhere a body was missing a hand. Surely the hand was an important clue to bring someone to justice. Emma had seen cop shows. There might be DNA under the fingernails. Maybe that’s why the hand was cut off in the first place!

“But why? Why do you think it’s here?” Emma said. Put my fears to rest.

“How the hell do I know?” Alex said. “Maybe a vulture or a crow picked it up. Or a cat or something. I don’t know. Some kind of animal was going to eat it, probably got scared off by the sound of us walking on the porch.”

That was a good explanation. It was as nonthreatening an explanation as there could possibly be for having a severed hand under your porch. “Can you…can you please get rid of it?” Emma said. “I can’t stand the smell. And the…just the way it looked. It’s so gross, Alex,” she said, crying again.

He patted her on the head. “Of course, Babe. You and Bethany go out back and I’ll grab it and take it down to the lake and throw it in. And then we never have to think about it again.”

Except they did have to think about it again. Because Alex wouldn’t stop making jokes about it. First, on his way to remove the hand,  he’d come out of the basement with a garbage bag singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” And then, after dinner, he asked if she wanted to play a HAND of Uno.

And he kept this up all night. Singing songs about hands. Asking her after dinner if she wanted to watch a movie. “Here’s one—Michael Caine in The Hand,” he said, laughing.

“Alex, this isn’t funny to me. Please,” she said. “It was really upsetting to me, and I know it’s a joke to you, but it’s not to me. Will you please stop making jokes about it?             He rolled his eyes. “Lighten up, babe. You’ve got no sense of humor, that’s your problem. How are you gonna get through life if you take everything so damn seriously?”

She wanted to yell at him, scream at him, make him understand how much this hurt her, but she knew he wouldn’t understand. He’d just get angry with her for ruining a perfectly good joke.

She put Bethany down for the night and did the dishes, and then had a seat on the couch next to Alex. She hoped he’d had his fun, but she decided to try and steer the conversation in a serious direction just in case. “Thank you for getting rid of it,” she said.

“Well, I am pretty handy around the house,” Alex said, grinning.

“Honey,” she said. “Please. It’s upsetting to me. I mean, it’s gross and horrible to find a human hand, but also it just makes me worry. What did this?”

“I told you,” Alex said. “An animal. Did you see the gap under the lattice? Solid six inches. A lot of things could make their way in under that.”

“Do you think they could...do we need to worry about something grabbing Bethany?”

He laughed. “See, this is why I was making jokes. You worry way too much! Bethany’s bigger than a hand, okay?”

“It was a pretty big hand,” Emma said.

Alex sighed, exasperated. “It was a big hand, but it did not weigh as much as Bethany. And it’s not...things that scavenge are not predators. You don’t have to worry about an animal.”

“What if it’s not an animal? What if it’s like...a threat or something?”

“What kind of threat? Like, it’s a pretty obscure message, if you ask me. It’s not like there was a note. Just a hand. Look. Honey. I know it was gross and I know it upset you, but you have to grow up a little bit and just get past it.”

Emma used to make six figures on Wall Street. She’d had her own apartment, a rigorous exercise schedule, bills that she paid on time. She was not a child. She stood from the couch. “I’m going to sleep in the guest room,” she said.

Alex sighed theatrically. “Great. I’ll expect an apology when you wake up in the morning.”

Emma lay in the guest bed, not sleeping. Was she overreacting? Was it childish to get upset over finding a severed body part? According to Alex, it was childish to get upset about anything, ever, unless you were him. And how was he so sure it was an animal?

What if it had something to do with the attic?

She didn’t know what was in the attic because Alex had told her in no uncertain terms that she was never to go up there. He’d also padlocked the door just to reinforce the idea. When she’d asked why, Alex had gotten very angry, but it had just seemed like a weird thing for a husband to do to his wife. “I paid the down payment,” she said. “It’s not fair that there’s a whole part of the house you don’t want me to go in.”

“God, I knew you were gonna throw that in my face,” Alex had said. His mouth moved like he was about to say something else, but then he’d taken a deep breath and calmed himself. “It’s just...not for you. Okay? It’s my attic. It’s private. Just because we’re married doesn’t mean you get to snoop around in my entire life.”

And that had been that. She’d pushed thoughts of the attic aside because who really wants to go in the attic anyway? But now, in the darkness, with the wind blowing outside and the old house creaking, scaring her each time till she reminded herself that the house always did this, that it wasn’t a serial killer, she couldn’t stop thinking of the attic.

What kind of warning was it, Alex had asked. But maybe he was running a drug business out of the attic. Maybe he was into things, sexually, that he didn’t want Emma to know about. Maybe that’s what the warning was about. Keep your hands off. Watch where you put your hands. That kind of thing.

It really was the only explanation that made any sense at all. Why would an animal drag a hand under the porch and not eat it? Why would someone want to terrorize them? People didn’t really do that for no reason except in the movies. In real life, there was a reason. And Alex knew what the reason was. Emma was sure of it. And, tomorrow, so would she.

Bethany got her up at 5 AM, and Alex yelled groggily from the bedroom that she needed to keep the baby quiet. The baby. That’s what he always called Bethany. Like she wasn’t a small person carrying half his DNA. Just a thing. Just like me, she realized, suddenly sure that he always referred to her as “the wife” when he was out of the house.

When he came down at 7, he said, “Are you ready to apologize yet?”

Emma just stared at him.

“I said, are you ready to apologize?” Emma didn’t dare refuse to answer a second time.

“I’m still upset,” she said. “And I didn’t sleep well. I kept closing my eyes and seeing—”

“Yeah, you need some medication, babe. Get the baby onto a bottle and start taking something. Because I gotta tell you, the sleep deprivation is making you a real bitch.”

She couldn’t storm off. She didn’t want to upset Bethany, and she certainly couldn’t leave her with Alex. So she just sat there. “I’ll see you at dinner,” she said.

“See? That’s what I’m talking about. I have to go out and work hard all day to support this family, and you send me out the door with that. You will start getting the baby weaned and onto a bottle today because I can’t live with you when you’re like this.”

Maybe you won’t have to, Emma thought but dared not say.

Alex left that house, and shortly after that, it was time for Bethany’s morning nap.

And Emma stood there, watching Bethany sleeping, and wondered if she was ready. She had looked at the lock many times. The screws on the hasp were superglued. The only way in to the attic was to break the hasp off the door frame, probably with a crowbar. And once she did that...well, she was confident that she and Alex couldn’t live in the same house anymore.

She played out the scene in her mind and found that, once she imagined Alex telling her he had just one simple rule for her to follow, just one thing he asked of her in return for all he did for her (but this wasn’t true. There were so many rules. So many things he asked of her), he would, at last, step over the line into violence. Emma didn’t know where this would stop, or even if it would stop. So breaking the hasp wasn’t just about finding out why the hand was in their house. It was a decision to leave. To escape.

Of course she could leave without breaking the hasp (and what if he had a surveillance camera up there that would ping his phone and bring him speeding home?), but she had to know what the hell was up there and why it had brought a severed hand into her life. Into Bethany’s life.

She ordered a grocery delivery. Alex would get the notification from the credit card app, but he wouldn’t think anything of it. She ordered groceries all the time. And then she just had to pray that a bedraggled young mother in tears could manipulate the delivery driver into giving her a ride somewhere where she could wait for mom to pick her up.

She packed a bag for Bethany. For herself, nothing. She didn’t want anything from this house.

“Your delivery driver is five minutes away!” the phone told her.

“This is it,” she said aloud. She went to the basement and grabbed a crowbar off the pegboard. She walked upstairs. Her phone beeped, the notification for a text from Alex. What the hell do you think you’re doing with a crowbar, it said. So he did have cameras here, watching her. If she’d ever voiced the suspicion, he would certainly have called her crazy.

She stomped up the steps. In her crib, Bethany began to cry. “Just a minute, sweetie, Mommy will be right there,” she called out. She walked to the attic door and looked around for cameras. She didn’t see any, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any there. “Watch this, you son of a bitch,” She said. She pried the hasp out of the door frame with a loud crack, splinters of the door frame flying. One of them got stuck in her cheek.

Opening the door, she marched up the attic stairs. She looked around. Her phone beeped twice. WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING???? YOU ARE A CRAZY PERSON and YOUR DELIVERY DRIVER HAS ARRIVED.

Emma descended the stairs, grabbed Bethany from her crib, grabbed Bethany’s bag, and went outside to throw herself on the mercy of the delivery driver.

Seven hours later, she put Bethany down in the portacrib next to her childhood bed and went to the living room to join her mother. Her mother had tall glasses of lemonade for them both, and Emma took a sip.

“Are you ready to talk about it now?” Candace asked.

“I guess so,” Emma answered.

“So what was it? After all this time,” Candace said, “What the hell was in the attic?”

Emma took a sip of her lemonade and looked out the window, seeing only the moths swarming in the beam of the outdoor floodlight.

“Dust, mostly” Emma said at last. “It was empty. It always had been.”

#ShortStory #fiction

Foreword

I fully expect questions. How did you come across these manuscripts? Are we but meaningless specks of dust adrift in an uncaring universe? Can a dog really talk?

Unfortunately I have no answers, or at least no satisfactory ones. One day, the first manuscript appeared, quite literally, on my doorstep, typed on an actual typewriter and wrapped in twine. Curiosity compelled me to begin reading, and the writer’s skill compelled me to finish.

I should reveal, in the spirit of  honesty, but also as a warning, that I did not sleep for three nights after reading the first manuscript. Months later, a second appeared, and, the process—read, shudder, lie awake for three nights in feverish contemplation of the horrors I had just read—repeated. Manuscripts continued to arrive on my doorstep at irregular intervals afterwards.  Have the deliveries ceased?

O God! I pray that they have.

I share these with you now for purely selfish motives. For one of the things that has been most difficult about being the recipient, caretaker, and only reader of these tales is the terrible weight of being the only person alive, outside of the four (or, depending on your definition of person, five) who are the subjects of these tales, who knows the terrible truth about the world in which we live.

I warn you, therefore, that the secrets contained in these tales, once they have settled into your brain, can never be un-known. I’m sure some of you will say, “Very well, then! Let the scales fall from my eyes!” I encourage you to reconsider. For the scales that obscure the true nature of our world provide comfort enough that you can go about your mundane routines and fall into the sweet embrace of Morpheus at days’ end, and after you read this, these simple pleasures may be denied you.

So—enjoy!

--Seamus Cooper

Providence, RI, September 2018

Early afternoon sunlight streamed in the leaded glass windows of the Miskatonic University Library. I was, as the poet would have it, pondering over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. Not the storied Necronomicon, mind you, for when I had requested access to the notorious tome, the librarian, a middle-aged white man with a supercilious attitude and the fusty reek of mildewing paper, had snickered, rolled his eyes, and asserted that the volume I sought was entirely mythical, and that neither Miskatonic nor any other university on earth therefore had a copy.

Enraged at his condescension and mendacity, I replied, (keeping my voice to a whisper, of course, for I am nothing if not respectful of these cathedrals of knowledge we call libraries and the work that occurs therein) “I am not some teeny-bopper in a Hex Girls shirt from Hot Topic! I, sir, am a student of natural philosophy!”In the spirit of full disclosure, I should add that I was, in fact, wearing a Hex Girls T-shirt at the time, but a) it had been given to me by Thorn personally, not purchased at some retail outlet in a dying mall, and b) it was not visible to the librarian, as I wore it beneath my orange turtleneck sweater. This I wore above a pleated miniskirt and mary janes, an ensemble that communicates both my studiousness and my sassy, fun side.

But I digress. Denied the Necronomicon, I requested instead a volume on ancient Sumerian sacrificial rites, and it was this that I was immersed in, sitting at a table in the Randolph Carter Reading Room, when a tap on my shoulder brought me back to myself.

“There you are!” a bright, if perhaps too loud for the surroundings, voice said. It was my associate, Fredward Jones. “Come on, Velma! We have to get moving if Shaggy and Scooby are going to get their money’s worth at the Marshmallow Fluff Festival!”

He spoke, of course, of our companions, Norville Rogers, a disheveled, loveable simpleton who goes by Shaggy, in tribute either to his mop-esque hair style or the sparse, lonely whiskers on his chin, and Scoobert Doobert, a talking Great Dane. (There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, etc.) Both were possessed of preternaturally prodigious appetites and would need only a few minutes to get their money’s worth as well as the money’s worth of half a dozen others, at any food-related event.

Nevertheless, the drive from Arkham to Somerville would have an unpredictable duration, thanks in large part to the insistence of Fred, our driver and self-styled leader, on taking only secondary roads and eschewing the assistance of a Global Positioning System.

Reluctantly, I gathered up my notes, and with one last scowl at my antagonist behind the desk, accompanied Fred to his van, where Shaggy and Scooby already occupied the back seat. I squeezed into the front seat next to the final member of our merry band, Daphne Blake, our financeuse and fashion expert. (How, you might ask, does a deep knowledge of fashion aid in our work solving mysteries both normal and paranormal? Reader, full often have I wondered the same thing.)

The ride down the Massachusetts coast was lovely, if the beauty of the scenery was undercut somewhat by Shaggy and Scooby describing in lascivious detail all of the Marshmallow Fluff-based delicacies they planned to enjoy at the annual festival.

A sudden BANG! stopped their food fantasies cold, and the Mystery Machine (for so Fred had long ago christened this vehicle) shuddered and swerved along the twisting, two-lane road, with trees on our right and a rocky stretch of coastline at our left. Fred fought the unruly machine for control, ultimately bringing it to a stop just next to the pavement. I looked from rocks to trees, and from trees to rocks and concluded that only Fred’s superior skill had saved us from grave injury or worse.

There we stood, alone on a deserted road with clouds gathering above and the sea growing unruly just a few feet from us. It was a scene of terrible beauty, marred only by our solitude and the unfortunate condition of the Mystery Machine.

“Four flat tires!” Daphne exclaimed. “Some scenic detour!”

“I don’t understand!” Fred said. “I’ve only got ten thousand miles on those tires! They should be fine!”

I bent down to examine the tire nearest me and found it punctured. Strolling around the Mystery Machine, I saw the same was true of all four tires. Either the Massachusetts Department of Transportation had been criminally negligent in maintaining a safe right of way here, or someone had intentionally sabotaged our vehicle.

I said nothing so as not to alarm my friends, for Shaggy and Scooby have delicate constitutions, and I would not cause them undue worry, or, in this case, due worry.

“Like, how many miles to the fluff festival?” Shaggy asked, desperation showing on his face.

Fred had not, of course, been following any electronic map, but I pulled out my smartphone and  opened the maps application. Unfortunately, I was greeted not with a map, but with a white screen bearing the words “no network connection. Try again later!”

“No signal,” I said. “But we left Arkham thirty-one minutes ago, and we’ve been traveling at a speed of approximately thirty-eight miles per hour on these back roads,  so we’ve traveled approximately nineteen and a half miles. Only nineteen more miles to go!”

“Like, that’s too far to walk!” Shaggy squeaked.

“We’ll have to thumb a ride!” Scooby interjected, raising a paw. I always make an effort to be patient with these, my only friends in the world, but my patience does have its limits.

“You can’t thumb a ride with no thumbs, Scoob!” I said. Scooby gazed at his paw, apparently befuddled by this revelation.

“Besides,” Daphne said, “Hitchhiking is dangerous!”

“We don’t need to hitch a ride,” Fred said. “I’m sure there’s a town up ahead where we can get these tires fixed in no time flat! Get it?”

At that moment, the heavens opened as if in critique of Fred’s “joke.”

“Come on, gang!” Fred said. “Let’s walk!” He offered this as though it were the most entertaining prospect in the world, which, for him, at that moment, it was. Heedless of what the rain might do to his ascot, he began strutting southward along the road.

I had a bad feeling about this. With rain falling, we should have huddled in the dry confines of the Mystery Machine and hoped for a kind stranger to pass by. But given that our tires had been sabotaged, it was probably safer for us to get away from the van and towards other people as quickly as possible.

Twenty-two very damp minutes later, we arrived in what seemed to have once been a bustling fishing community.  Decrepit hulks of fishing vessels rocked at their moorings at the town pier, and the town itself seemed to be only a collection of boarded-up storefronts punctuated by the occasional neglected-looking building that the county inspector had apparently not gotten around to condemning yet.

Fred was undeterred. “Come on, gang, there’s got to be a mechanic here somewhere!”

“You know what’s definitely not here?” Shaggy complained. “A fluff festival. Like, Fred, we do nothing but travel the country in a van. Have you ever even thought about getting triple-A?”

“Rit would only be prudent!” Scooby said.

If Fred had heard a thing his friends had said, it was not apparent in his demeanor. Bright-eyed smile on his countenance, he marched into town to find a mechanic that only he believed actually existed.

“Well, I don’t know about you boys,” Daphne said, putting a hand on my shoulder, “But we gals need to get out of the rain before our hair is completely ruined!” Human hair is, of course, equipped to withstand moisture, but I did not want to point this out to Daphne, as I too was eager to get out of the rain simply for the sake of my physical comfort.

“Look!” Daphne said, pointing past the far edge of the town green. “A hotel! And it’s open!” Even with my glasses on, I could not make out such detail, but I trusted Daphne—her instinct for finding creature comforts rivals Shaggy and Scooby’s instinct for finding foodstuffs.

“Great! You girls go to the hotel, and the guys and I will find a mechanic!” Fred said.

“Ruh-uh!” Scooby remonstrated.

“Yeah, like where there’s a hotel, there’s a kitchen!” Shaggy said. “You find the axle grease, we’ll find the fryolator grease!”

“Reah!” Scooby exclaimed.

“Freddy, just come to the hotel,” Daphne said. “I’m sure they can call us a tow truck.”

Fred stared at the hotel, pensive. “I’ve got an idea!” he exclaimed. “We’ll all go to the hotel! I’m sure they can call us a towtruck!”

“Brilliant,” Daphne said, her voice dripping with sarcasm that Fred was blissfully oblivious to. She started walking toward the hotel, and the rest of us followed.

“That’s odd,” I said.

“What’s odd?” Fred asked.

“Well,” I said, gesturing at the town green, “These old New England towns were built around a town green and a church. But look around the green—there’s not a single church in sight!”

“Rerhaps rhis towns robvious reconomic difficulties were a test of faith rhe church couldn’t pass,” Scoopy opined.

“Like, what?” Shaggy exclaimed, casting a quizzical eye on his bosom friend.

“Good point, Scoob,” I said. “But the building should still be there, even if it’s been abandoned or repurposed. The only building on this green that’s not a business or a house is that crumbling meeting hall! What’s it say over the door, Daph?”

“The Esoteric Order of...Dagon?” Dapne said.

“Rat redifice ras a malevolent raspect!” Scooby exclaimed, and I silently agreed. Something about the building bespoke evil.

“Scoob, you’re getting delirious, buddy! We gotta get some food in you so you can start making sense!” Shaggy cried.

Scooby and I looked at each other, shrugged, and soldiered on through the rain. Shortly thereafter, we reached the hotel, such as it was.

The once-grand structure had three stories, and the wooden latticework that had once adorned the facade had all but rotted away. Several windows bore visible cracks, and the front gutter hung at a precarious angle and was currently pouring a stream of strangely filthy rainwater onto the street with a loud splattering sound.

“OK, gang!” Fred said with his typical enthusiasm, “I’ll talk to the concierge, and you guys can wait for a table in the restaurant!”

“Like, I suspect there won’t be much of a wait for a table,” Shaggy said. Despite his notable intellectual deficiencies, he did have a talent for seeing things as they were rather than as he wanted them to be. Would that more people possessed this quality!

“And if this place has a concierge,” Daphne said, “I’ll wear white shoes in November!”

Unfortunately, Fred had already entered the building, thereby missing both of these excellent ripostes.

The rest of us followed suit and soon found ourselves standing in the lobby of the Gilman Hotel. A fine layer of dust clung to every surface. Moth-eaten drapes did a poor job of covering the windows, and threadbare rugs provided similarly shoddy coverage of the floor. And, strangely, the air held not the expected odors of mold and mildew, bur, rather, the distinctive reek of a fishmonger’s stall on a hot day.

“Whoa! Somebody’s making fish and chips!” Shaggy shouted. “Come on, Scoob!” He and Scooby ambled through the lobby and disappeared behind the door marked “Restaur nt.”

Fred banged on the bell on the front desk. It gave a dull clank in response and sent up a plume of dust which sent Fred into a brief sneezing fit. Following the sneezing, Fred waited only a few seconds before he was moved to speech. “Hello?” he yelled. “I’d like to speak to the concierge, please!”

“Fred, I told you, there’s no way this place has a—”

“Concierge, at your service!” an elderly white man who had materialized behind the desk said. “And desk clerk, bellhop, housekeeper—”

“What about room service chef?” Shaggy exclaimed from the far end of the lobby. “Cause, like, no offense, but only mice and spiders are eating in that restaurant!”

The elderly gentleman smiled, “And room service chef as well. Horace Gilman, at your service!” His kindly smile appeared genuine, but I found something profoundly unnerving about the man. His eyes protruded from their sockets, and his flabby lips hung lazily from his slack jaw, while his pallid, nearly gray complexion bespoke a life lived entirely out of the sun’s nourishing rays.

“Great!” Shaggy replied. “Like, we’ll have two marshmallow fluff omelettes, please, with extra homefries, an order of marshmallow fluff pancakes with extra fluff, a couple of fluffernutters, and some truffle fluff fries. Like, for an appetizer.”

“Reah!” Scooby assented.

“Now just hold on there, young fella,” Mr. Gilman said. He possessed a high, reedy voice not unlike Shaggy’s own tenor squeal. “We haven’t had guests here for quite some time, so we’re a bit low on supplies. I think I have some canned asparagus on the shelf...”

“Like, no thanks,” Shaggy said. “Canned asparagus isn’t really our thing.”

“Rhe canning process restroys rhe delicate flavor!” Scooby protested.

“Mr. Gilman,” Fred interrupted. “Can we use your phone to call a mechanic? We can’t seem to get cell service, and—”

“Closest mechanic is the next town over,” Mr. Gilman said. “And he doesn’t work on Saturday. You can call, but you’ll probably just have to leave a voicemail.”

“But...” Fred was suddenly unmanned. “The Mystery Machine! It’s all alone...by the side of the road with four flat tires...no one to care for it...” With her customary quick thinking, Daphne passed Fred a tissue lest his incipient tears stain his ascot.

“Okay, then, I guess we’ll need two rooms for the night,” Daphne said, flashing her platinum card.

A flush of excitement came to Mr. Gilman’s cheeks, the contrast especially stark against his bone-deep pallor. I looked closely. He reminded me of someone. But who?

“Oh! Wonderful!” Mr. Gilman cried. “I’ll just get the rooms ready!” And with that, he scurried away.

Daphne turned to us and said, “You guys know I hate to judge people by their appearance—”Fred, Shaggy, Scooby and I looked at each other quizzically, for in fact this was one of Daphne’s favorite pastimes. “—but does Mr. Gilman look kind of—I don’t know...fishy to you?”

Suddenly, I remembered. “I knew it! Mr. Gilman reminded me of someone, and now I know who! It’s Don Knotts!”

The gang responded with blank looks.

“Like, who?” Shaggy asked.

“Don Knotts! He starred in The Incredible Mr. Limpet, a live action/animated hybrid film in which the titular character is transformed into a fish during World War II and subsequently aids the Allied war effort while pursuing a female fish he creatively dubs ‘Ladyfish!’”

More blank stares.

“He co-starred on The Andy Griffith Show? Played Mr. Furley on Three’s Company? We solved not one, but two mysteries with him?” And still they looked at me as though I were speaking Ancient Sumerian. I had known, of course, that this would be the outcome before I spoke. Cursed are we all to wander the earth, ageless, solving mysteries, but I alone bear the curse of memory. The others swim through time like goldfish in a bowl, surprised at the presence of a castle on every circuit.

Fortunately, Mr. Gilman returned before I could spiral into a depressive state over my terrible loneliness at being the only one who remembers 50 years of adolescence. “All right!” he chirped. “Follow me!”

We climbed the creaking stairs, plumes of dust flying at our every step. “Right this way, kids!” Mr. Gilman said. He gestured at a door marked 101.

“The fellahs’ll take this one!” Fred asserted.

“You’re welcome to it!” I said. “Remember what Orwell said about what’s inside of room 101!”

“Like, I must have slept through that English class,” Shaggy said. “What did he say was in room 101?”

“The worst thing in the world,” I said with a grin, turning the key and entering room 102 with Daphne close behind.

I could hear Shaggy’s panicked exclamations through the paper-thin walls, and I reflected that my little jape might have been needlessly cruel. Was this the kind of thing one said to a friend? In my anger and loneliness, I had lashed out at one of my few friends—indeed, the only family I have at this point.

Daphne made a disgusted sound that brought me back from my shame. I examined our surroundings. A thick layer of dust coated the sagging beds, the rickety chair, and the desk that looked to be on the verge of collapse. Atop the dresser sat an ancient tube television festooned with a rabbit-ear antenna. When Daphne turned it on, it revealed a buffet of entertainment options that consisted of static on every channel.

“Well,” Daphne said with unexpected good cheer, “It’s not the worst place we’ve ever stayed.”

I couldn’t help but agree. “I prefer this to the bone-chilling cold and damp of an old castle!” I said.

Daphne made a noncommittal noise. She had no memory of the hassles we’d faced in a variety of castles, but I continue to batter against the walls of my friends’ amnesia in the vain hope that they might one day collapse, and I will no longer be fundamentally alone.

Daphne’s amnesia remained completely intact. She wandered to the window and held her phone next to the glass. “Still no signal!” she said. “How will I update my Instagram? I might lose followers! And I just broke 300 thousand!  And what are we going to do here for two days?”

I, of course, wanted nothing more than some quiet time to pursue my studies, but I knew this would not suffice for the rest of the gang. “Well, we can explore the town,” I said. “These old New England towns are full of historic sights!”

Judging from the look on Daphne’s face, this prospect did not appeal to her. “And you can take some pictures that you can post on your Instagram later,” I suggested. “I guarantee there are few, if any, people on Instagram posting photos taken in Innsmouth, Massachusetts.”

The prospect of becoming an Instagram pioneer brightened Daphne’s mood somewhat, and she spent a few moments performing various poses for her phone camera.

The impromptu photo shoot was interrupted by a knock at the door. I opened the door to find Scooby, Shaggy, and Fred, each coated in dust, standing in the hallway.

“We’re starving,” Shaggy said. “We’re gonna go walk around town and see if we can find a clam shack. Or a pizza parlor. Or, like, pretty much anywhere that sells food.” This last comment was punctuated by a rumble I initially thought was thunder but which turned out to be only Scooby-Doo’s gastric fluids shifting in his empty stomach.

“Why are you all dusty?” Daphne asked.

“Because someone, or, rather, someones, decided to jump on the beds the second we got in the room,” Fred said. He held out his dusty ascot. “I sure hope there’s a dry cleaner in this town! Two thousand silkworms worked hard to make this, and I have to honor their effort!”

Unfortunately for both Fred and the industrious silkworms, Fred flapping the ascot sent a cloud of dust into the air. This occasioned a sneezing fit from Scooby-Doo, who reached out blindly for something with which to blow his nose. Daphne expertly sidestepped Scooby’s paws, but Fred’s ascot was not so lucky.

Fred gamely decided to continue wearing the ascot. The habits of fifty years, remembered consciously or not, are hard to break.

Though the situation was not as urgent for the rest of us as it was for Shaggy and Scooby, we decided to accompany them on their quest for nourishment.

“Let’s ask the concierge about the local hotspots!” Fred said as we reached the lobby.

“I guarantee the spots in this town are not hot,” Daphne sniffed. I couldn’t help but agree—Fred’s relentless optimism did occasionally seem to cross the border into lunacy, and this seemed to be just such an occasion.

Fred rang the bell, but Mr. Gilman did not emerge. “That’s odd,” Fred said. “I hope he’s okay!”

“No offense, but, like, if he was okay, I don’t think he’d be living here,” Shaggy offered, once again displying his surprising sagacity.

With no advice from Mr. Gilman and no way to access Yelp or any other source of restaurant-related data, we left the hotel in a blind search for food.

When we emerged from the hotel, I immediately, noticed something different about the town green. “Look, gang!” I cried. “There’s a person sitting on that bench!” This, assuming it was not Mr. Gilman (a detail I was unable to discern at this distance) would make only the second person we had encountered in Innsmouth. As much as I strive to pursue the path of logic and reason, I must admit that Innsmouth’s apparent lack of inhabitants had given me, for lack of a better word, the willies.

We proceeded with all speed to the park bench, where we found a man, reeking of alcohol and assorted bodily secretions, singing softly to himself. If he noticed us, he gave no sign.

“Excuse me, sir,” Fred said. “Can you direct us to a local pizzeria, burger stand, taco truck, trattoria, osteria, cafe, brasserie, bistro—”

“Like, enough already, Fred!” Shaggy shouted. “My stomach’s been howling since taco truck!”

The vagrant roused himself from his alcoholic stupor and wheezed out a laugh. “Won’t find no restaurants in this town, young fella! And you kids had better get off the street before you turn into dinner yourselves!”

“What do you mean?” Shaggy squealed as he leapt into Scooby’s waiting arms. Or possibly legs. His knocking knees made a marimba-like clamor.

“Don’t you kids know anything about Innsmouth? Why do you think this town’s deserted?”

“Ra confluence rof complex reconomic rand social factors?” Scooby asked.

The vagrant paused in his speech; stared, open-mouthed at Scooby; removed a half-pint of no-name vodka from his pocket; and poured the contents to the ground. He then returned to his narrative.

“The Devil’s Reef!” he cried, pointing seaward. “Just a few hundred yards from the beach! Years back, things started coming out of the surf. Like fish...but also like people!”

“So these creatures were humanoids?” I asked.

“From the deep!” he yelled in response. “Loathsome, icthyd creatures who walk on two legs! Weren’t long before they started...replacin’ folks.”

“Replacing? What do you mean?” Daphne asked.

“What I mean is that the smart people left right away. The rest— well, they either got consumed by the fish creatures, or they started to become them.”

“Became them? How?” Fred asked.

“I’m not some epidemiologist!” the vagrant remonstrated, drops of spittle flying from his chapped lips and landing in his unkempt beard. “All I know is that some creatures came out of the Devil’s Reef. Then some people started turning into creatures and going into the sea. At the Devil’s Reef!”

“That’s impossible!” I said. “Humans and fish are completely different branches of the evolutionary tree, and such a change would imply a massive shift at the genetic level. It simply can’t happen!” I paused, pleased with myself for demolishing yet another yokel’s superstition.

“Like, somebody forgot to tell him that!” Shaggy cried. He pointed at a loathsome creature much as the vagrant had described: it walked on two legs, but its naked frame bore scales rather than skin, and its head resembled a pallid Koi more than any human. It was rushing toward us, groaning as it came.

“Jinkies!” I cried. “Run!”

What followed was a chase I might have described as merry, had we not all been in fear for our lives. The fish/human hybrid pursued Shaggy and Scooby, as the adversaries we encounter so frequently do. Fred, Daphne and I ran to the shelter of the disused bandstand, whose shadows conferred much-needed darkness on us and whose height allowed us a clear view of the events transpiring around us.

Scooby and Shaggy ran into one building and somehow emerged from another, with the creature in hot pursuit the entire time. This physics- and logic-defying series of events repeated itself several times, through what seemed nearly all the buildings in town, until Scooby and Shaggy found themselves on the town pier, where Shaggy had unaccountably dressed in sea captain’s habiliments, whilst Scooby, clad in pea coat and longshoreman’s hat, fussed with a rope securing a boat to the pier.

“Like, step right up, sir! Are you here for the whale watch?”

“Uhnnnnn?” the creature replied.

“Very good, sir! Welcome aboard! We’ll be passing by the Devil’s Reef if you’d like to stop by and say hello to Mister and Mrs. Fishface and all the small fry!” Shaggy gestured ceremoniously toward a small, barely-seaworthy dinghy, and the koi-faced abomination, perhaps caught up in Shaggy’s enthusiasm, climbed aboard.

“Like, cast off, matey!” Shaggy said.

“Raye-raye!” Scooby returned, throwing the rope into the water and giving the dinghy a hearty shove.

Too late our pursuer realized his error. He groaned angrily and reached for Scooby, but the dinghy was already floating away from the dock. “Ron Voyage!” Scooby said, and then he and Shaggy threw off their costumes instantaneously and fled in our direction.

“Shaggy! Scooby! Over here!” Fred cried.

Our human and canine friends approached quickly, and, with our quintet reunited once again, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

The dinghy floated out of view into the darkness of the harbor, the fish creature shaking his fists and yelling in incohate rage.

“Hmmm…” I said aloud, my thoughts racing.

“What is it, Velma?” Daphne asked.

“I—” but before I could give voice to my incipient suspicions, Fred interrupted me.

“Well gang,” he said, “Looks like we’ve got a mystery on our hands!”

Half a century. Fifty long years. And never once has he tired of saying it. Not once has it occurred to him that we always have a mystery on our hands. Nor has it occurred to him to wonder why we always have a mystery on our hands, why our every search for a respite ends only with more labor.

“Yes,” I said, and if my annoyance was clear in my tone of voice, Fred gave no sign.

“Here’s what we’ll do! First we’ll split up—Shaggy and Scooby, you’ll—”

“Get chased by old Fish Face? Like, no thanks.”

“But we have to help—well, someone, surely!” Fred said.

“Freddy, nobody cares about what happens in this town. Nobody’s asked for our help. Let’s just walk back to the Mystery Machine and hope someone happens by,” Daphne said.

And another tumbler in my mind fell into place. The mystery was nearly unlocked.

“Reah! Rat least we have snacks there!” Scooby cried.

“I’m sure Mr. Gilman would appreciate knowing what’s happening in this town,” Fred said.

Daphne, Shaggy, Scooby and I looked at one another. Though telepathy is not among my gifts, decades of proximity have given me insight into what every member of our cursed quintet was thinking based on their facial expressions, and they, like, I, were clearly resigned to doing as Fred wished because thwarting his desire to hunt the Innsmouth Fish Man would ultimately prove even more annoying even than hunting (or, more accurately, being hunted by) the Innsmouth Fish Man.

“Okay, Gang, here’s what we’ll do!” Fred said, spontaneously planning out a Rube Goldbergian trap for our scaled adversary. We scurried about town and were able to find firecrackers, a bowling ball, two hundred feet of climbing rope, a longboard, and a seven-foot-tall wrought-iron cage within the space of about five minutes.

We stood at the town bandstand, planning out how to deploy all of our accoutrements, when a terrible, unearthly music—like the unholy union of a theremin and a pipe organ, played by an animal thrashing in its death throes—began to fill the air. Scooby and Shaggy’s knocking knees soon provided percussive accompaniment.

“Where’s that music coming from?” Daphne asked

“Sounds to me like it’s coming from the hotel!” Fred exclaimed.

“I think you’ll find it’s coming from the obscure order of what’s-his-name!” Shaggy yelped, pointing in the direction of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, where the front doors were thrown open and a horrific procession was taking place.

At the head of the procession was our fishy friend, or perhaps a close relative thereof. He bore a  bejeweled crown on his head and moaned menacingly. Ichor dripped from the ends of his hands, whose fingers appeared to be fusing into fins.  Behind him were at least a score of other fish-faced congregants, all moaning and shuffling in our direction.

Fred, suddenly struck by the knowledge that he would be unable to properly prepare, much less spring his elaborate trap, looked as defeated as I have ever seen him. Which is to say mildly discouraged.

“Look!” Daphne said. “That man who warned us—they’ve gotten him!”

Sure enough, the man who had spoken to us, still clad in shabby clothing and sporting a wild, unkempt beard, moaned and shuffled. His eyes seemed to be further apart than before, and his mouth had definitely widened.

And, just like that, the entire mystery unlocked in my brain.

“Run!” Shaggy said.

“No!” I cried. “Don’t run!”

“Wait—why?” Fred said.

“Because we don’t need to run,” I exclaimed. “These creatures would never harm us.”

“No offense, Velma, but, like, how do you know that?” Shaggy asked.

“Reah!” Scooby added.

“Because they need us,” I said, marching right up to the head of the procession and standing opposite the fish king, who raised his arms threateningly but made no effort to grab me.

“Isn’t that right—-Mr. Gilman!” I said, seizing the expertly-crafted fish mask from the fish king’s head and revealing beneath the face of our hotelier.

“Hey,” Fred said, deflated. “I get to yank the mask.”

“I don’t understand!” Daphne said. The rest of the fishy mob began abashedly removing their masks, complaining about how hot and sweaty they were, how they knew this was a stupid idea all along, and cursing Gilman’s name.

“What happened to the Mystery Machine was no accident,” I said. “Those tires were sabotaged, which, by the way, Mr. Gilman, is the only part of your scheme that could have really gotten us hurt. Shame on you!”

“Where are the police?” Fred said. “Aren’t there supposed to be police here for this part?”

A hand went up in the crowd.  “Chief West,” a middle-aged white man cried.

“I...I’m sorry,” Mr. Gilman croaked out.

“But, like, why bring us here?” Shaggy said.

“And rhy keep us from our fluff?” Scooby added.

“Because Daphne is an Instgram influencer,” I said. Daphne shrugged in false humility.

“I mean, I try,” she said.

“Daphne posted our destination yesterday when she took that selfie in Arkham,” I said. “And the town’s plan took shape. They intercepted us on the road, knowing we’d have to come here. Once we were here, they staged the fish man and told us that ridiculous story about the Devil’s Reef in hopes that Daphne would post about it once she got cell service. ”

“I’ve got a whole Innsmouth story queued up already!” Daphne said.

“I got suspicious when Scooby and Shaggy lured the fish-man onto the boat and he floated off into the harbor. Why didn’t he swim? And then when I saw the man who told us the whole tall tale about the Devil’s Reef among the congregation, I knew this whole thing had been a show put on for our benefit!”

“But...why?” Fred asked.

“Ignore rhe economic factors at your peril!” Scooby said.

“That’s right, Scoob,” I said. “The part of this whole day that wasn’t staged just for us is the economic misery of this town. The fishing industry has been decimated, and with climate change causing terrible coastal storms and threatening rising sea levels, the real estate in this town is practically worthless. Mr. Gilman and the rest of the townspeople figured they could get Daphne to post all about the unnamed horrors from the deep, and weirdos and curiosity seekers would flood the place, pumping much-needed money back into the local economy!” I said.

“And we would have gotten away with it too,” Mr. Gilman said. “If it weren’t for you meddling—-well,actually we were counting on you to help us get away with it. So I suppose we would have gotten away with it...”

“If Scooby weren’t such a keen scholar of economic determinism!” I said.

“Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue,” Mr. Gilman complained. “But, in any case, I’m sorry we scared you, and I am sorry about the Mystery Machine. We did have it towed and repaired. It’s ready to go, in fact. I’d offer to buy you dinner, but your dog is right—money is very tight here.”

Shaggy looked at his phone. “The fluff festival is over, but Somerville has one of only two all-night diners in the Greater Boston area!” he said.

“Great!” Fred said. “Let’s roll!”

“Rut… ris town!” Scooby said, mournfully. The fact that Scooby was willing to delay gratification of his appetite out of compassion for these townspeople brought the rest of us up short.

“He’s right,” Fred said, abashed. “Isn’t there some way we can help?”

“We can’t perpetuate a fraud,” I said. “It would be contrary to our mission!” Given by whom? And when will it end? I can only wonder.

“We don’t have to lie,” Daphne said. “Shag, Scoob, come get in this selfie with me. Look terrified.”

They did as Daphne requested, and she captioned the photo, “I was terrified in Innsmouth, MA!  Definitely the scariest place I’ve been in Massachusetts! #MysteryInc #spooky #horror.”

“Now, if I could just get a signal...” She said.

“Katie! Take that Faraday cage off the cell tower, willya?” Mr. Gilman called out.

Katie, a sturdy young woman in her 20’s, yanked on a rope connected to a pulley and the faraday cage atop the cell transmitter on the roof of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. While we waited fifteen minutes for all of Daphne’s notifications to roll in, another townsperson pulled the Mystery Machine into the center of town and unhooked it, gleaming and sporting four new tires, from the tow truck.  Finally, Daphne was able to post the photo, and it was time for us to go.

“Well,” Fred said as we climbed into the Mystery Machine, “Good luck, Mr. Gilman, and everybody else.”

“Reah!” Scooby said. “Rapitalism ris a cruel mistress!”

“Like, it does allow for restauranteurs to stay open all night, though,” Shaggy said. “Step on it, Fred, before I faint dead away!”

“Thanks, ki—” Mr. Gilman said, then looked quizzically at his pocket. He withdrew a phone and answered. “Hello? Er, I mean, Gilman hotel, how may I help you? Well...why yes we do have a vacancy that weekend. Goth wedding, you say?”

We left Mr. Gilman to sort out the details of running a hotel where people actually might want to stay and headed for the all-night diner.

As we rolled out of town, I gazed out to sea. And under the moonlight, out at Devil’s Reef, I saw something—a man? A fish? A Great Dane? Emerge from the water and stand erect upon the Devil’s Reef. I removed my glasses and rubbed my eyes. When I looked back, it was gone.

#fiction

#ShortStory

I don’t think anybody really wants to work third shift, but that was the job that was open, so that was the job I took. Doing security for minimum wage plus a buck twenty-five an hour shift bonus at a warehouse in Somerville. It was boring as shit.

That’s inaccurate. Because even shit varies. Whereas security at the Krebs Envelope warehouse was exactly the fuckin same every single night. Walkthrough at 12:30 PM after the last of the second shift workers were out, just to make sure nobody was hiding in the machinery or, I don’t know, fucking in the break room or whatever. Another walkthrough at 3 AM, and a final one at 6:30 before anybody from first shift was in the building. Every walkthrough exactly the same: me walking around, shining a flashlight, not seeing shit. But I had to do it because if I didn’t show up on the security camera footage walking through the warehouse at the appointed times, I would be summarily fired. Or so my boss at Gravitas Security told me.

So: same shit every night. I read a lot of books, played a lot of games, watched a lot of TV. Easy money, and I should have been happy. I was even saving because I never got to go out. But it sucked. One night I got off the T at 11 o’clock and was seriously thinking about just bailing on the whole thing. Stop going to work, get evicted I guess, and then what? Move back in with Mom?

Might as well be dead. I knew I had to find a way to get through the night. The Store 24 two blocks away was open, so I went in. There was a young woman behind the counter. Short, black hair, sleeve tats—I’m not gonna say she made the Store 24 uniform shirt look good because that’s impossible, but she looked good despite it. I was browsing for a while, and she was behind the counter on her phone. I couldn’t find anything exciting enough to get me out of my seat for the 3AM walkthrough.

And then I realized I knew somebody else who worked the late shift who might be able to give me some advice. I got a can of Red Bull, I guess because they didn’t sell caffeinated piss and this was the closest thing. And it was also good to have another purchase in my hand when I asked her about snacks so she wouldn’t think I was just there to perv on her. So I went up with my Red Bull and said, “Hey, so I work all night at the warehouse down the street and it’s boring as fuck and I need a snack I can like, look forward to at 3 AM so I don’t just run screaming into the night from being bored out of my skull. Got any recommendations?”

She smiled. “Get those wasabi almonds,” she said, pointing at an endcap that had a lot of skinny plastic bags of nuts. “Wake your ass right up. If you take a handful, it feels like your nostrils are on fire. Not, like, completely pleasant, but if you’re gonna fall asleep and then get fired, those’ll do the trick.”

I bought two bags. “Thanks” I said. “If I don’t get fired tonight, I’ll owe you.”

“Does that mean I get a cut of your paycheck?” she asked, and at that moment I had this stray thought like I would totally give you anything you asked for, but that sounded both dorky and creepy in my mind, so let it go.

But I was back the next night. I brought a flower. I was like, “Hey, I wanted to thank you for the tip about the wasabi almonds, and I was gonna like, bring some food in, but I don’t know if you’ve got food allergies or whatever, so I went with a rose.”

She looked at me for like ten seconds, then said, “You bought me a rose. Because you were afraid I had food allergies.”

“I mean, I guess it...I mean, you were nice to me on a shitty day, and I wanted to say thank you.”

“Well,” she said, looking at the rose and smiling, “You’re welcome.”

And so that’s how I wound up going back there the next night and the one after that and pretty much every night before work. I started taking an earlier train so I would have a few more minutes to shoot the shit with her. Her name was Candace, and if you called her Candy she would put a Doc Martens so far up your ass she’d knock your teeth out from the inside. Or so she told me. I did not want to test it.

After a couple of days we exchanged numbers and then we would text each other while we were working. I probably should have asked her out sooner, but, and I know this is going to sound dumb, but she was the only thing making my job bearable, and so the only thing keeping me anchored to a stable life. Or a life that was on the way to stability, anyway. If we went out and it was weird, or she decided she hated me or whatever, I’d have to go and be alone in the warehouse again with no texting and no wasabi nuts, and I honestly didn’t think I’d last a week.

But then I decided I was going to do it because it was dumb not to. It had been a month and she was going to think I wasn’t interested if I didn’t pull the trigger. So I walked in and walked straight up to the counter and said, “Hey, so I’ve got my day off in a couple days, and I don’t know if you—” and that was as far as I got because at that moment I swear to God David Fucking Chapman walked into the Store 24.

In order to understand what came next, you have to know a little bit about David Fucking Chapman. He was a Latin teacher at Boston Classical when I was in seventh grade there. Teacher of the year like three times. Everybody loved him—one of those teachers who has a little cult around him all the time because he’s mister inspirational Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society or whatever.

I always found him creepy, but my sister Bridget liked him. Until he raped her. But she was just townie trash with a drunk for a dad and a mom who was never home, and he was teacher of the year and worked at Boston Classical where the mayor and half the city council went, and if you thought anybody was gonna stand up for a girl like my sister against that kind of power, well, you’re obviously rich or stupid or both.

After the rape came the drugs and…well, I don’t wanna get into it, but my big sister Bridget was dead four years later. And our whole fuckin family blew up. I stopped going to school because why go to school when they just protect rapists there, Dad left and never came back (this part wasn’t actually that bad), and Mom just decided she was gonna do nothing but sit in front of the TV 16 hours a day for the rest of her life.

So imagine my surprise when David Chapman walks into a Store 24 in Somerville at 11:30 on a Tuesday night.  “Hey, Mr. Chapman!!” I said when he walked in. He looked at me, confused.

“Did I have you in class?” he said.

“No, but you had my sister. Bridget Connolly?” I watched his face to see if he would flinch or have any kind of tell that he felt guilty or afraid. He didn’t.

“Mmm. Sorry, I don’t remember, but I have a lot of students, you know.”

I got up real close to him. “Yeah, but how many of those do you rape? I mean, I bet it’s a lot, motherfuckers like you always do it a lot, but it can’t be so many that you actually forget them. Can it? Bridget Connolly? Nothing?”

Now he looked uncomfortable, but I figured this was more because I was in his face than because he remembered my sister. I grabbed him by the collar and slammed his face on the counter. I heard his nose break, and blood went everywhere.

“Bridget Connolly,” I said. “Remember her now, you piece of shit?”

“I…I have no idea what you’re...” BANG. I slammed his head down again. He started crying “Please,” he said. “You’ve got the wrong—”

I brought a knee into his nuts before he could finish his lie.  He crumpled to the ground, and I got on top of him and started slamming his head on the linoleum. “Bridget! Connolly! Bridget! Connolly!” I said, over and over again. He was crying and I didn’t care because I missed my sister and she deserved better than she got, and she might have had a chance if it weren’t for this fuck.

I guess I kept slamming him for a while, because I felt Candace’s hand on my shoulder. “Hey,” she said. “I think he’s had enough.”

I looked at the bloody mess underneath me and at my bloody knuckles. Looked like maybe I punched him in the mouth a few times too. There was a tooth on the floor next to his head. Candace reached down and felt at his neck. Then she kicked him in the ribs. He didn’t react. “Yeah, I think he’s dead,” she said.

I immediately came off my anger high and just stared into space, feeling like I had just been dropped into someone else’s life. Candace put her arms around me for five seconds. “Hey,” she said. “I need you here. You can fall apart later,” she said. “But right now we’ve got some work to do.”             “What do you mean?” I said. I was just starting to realize that I had killed a guy in a Store 24 and was maybe going to spend the rest of my life in jail.

“I mean, you wanna go to jail for killing that asshole, or you wanna do a little work?” She dug into the guy’s pocket and pulled out the key to his Prius. “Take this,” she said.  She locked the front door and turned out the store lights. She went to the little machine where the hot dogs and taquitos rotated on hot rollers and grabbed two pairs of gloves.

“Help me move him to the back door,” she said, so I did.

“Great. Now I’m gonna disable the security cameras. You—pour some bleach in that bucket and mop the shit out of the floor, then wipe down the counter and anywhere you see blood.” She looked at me. “And you’re eventually gonna have to bleach the uniform and probably throw the shoes away somewhere far from where you usually go. I don’t suppose you’ve got any extra clothes?”

“Um. No.”

“Okay, well, for now, wash the blood out of that shirt. Just don’t forget to bleach everything later. And then maybe burn it. Except the shoes. The soles stink like hell and make a lot of black smoke.”

I washed the blood out of the shirt in the bathroom sink, then got to work mopping.

Even though there was light from the streetlights spilling into the store, it was still a little challenging to mop in the dark, and a couple of times people came to the door and I had to duck behind the chips and stuff, but it only took me ten minutes or so to get the floor mopped and the counter wiped down.

I smelled something horrible and started to cough. I looked over at the counter, where Candace was pulling something off the hot dog roller with a pair of tongs. “Sorry about the smell,” she said. “Had to cook the security camera DVR’s hard drive. Now I’m gonna go reinstall it.”

I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but I trusted her.

I dumped out the mop bucket and put the paper towels in a garbage bag which I threw in the dumpster.

“Great. Now here’s the plan. You’re gonna pull his car around—oh, I guess you better call in sick, by the way, this is gonna take a while.”

“Shit. I am totally getting fired.”

“Yeah, I know this is gonna be a big loss for you because your job is really something special. Kind of like mine! But maybe one day, if you’re really lucky, you can find another job that sucks your soul out.”

“Okay, okay, touch ,” I said.

“Also it’s better than going to jail.”

I pulled the Prius around back and we wrestled the body that once belonged to David Fucking Chapman into the passenger seat. “I kind of wish I’d let him live and just cut his dick off,” I said.

“Yeah, well,” Candace answered, “Maybe you can do that to the next rapist. Now, turn your phone off. Then drive the car to Everett, by the casino. Send a text from his phone to anybody in his contacts when you get there. Doesn’t matter what—you just have to make sure his phone pings a tower there. But stay out of the Casino lot—they’re bound to have cameras. Wipe the phone down and stomp it till you’re sure it’s broken and leave it on the ground. Then drive to the rear parking lot of the Wellington Orange Line station. If you drive to the far end of the station you can back right up to the tree line. Pull him out of the back of the car and drag him to the water—it’s only about fifty feet to the Malden River.”

She had very specific knowledge of how and where and how to dump a body. I did not ask why.

“Don’t take the T because there are cameras in the station. You’re gonna have to walk back. Oh yeah, and keep those gloves on until you’re out of the car. Then ditch ‘em.”

“Got it,” I said. I followed her directions. When I saw the sign for the casino, I pressed Chapman’s dead finger on the phone and then sent a text to the number one person in his frequent contacts: Marjorie. “Going to the casino,” I said, then turned the phone off. It turned out to be very hard to text using a dead guy’s fingers. Stomping the phone to death was much easier.

After this, it took me about fifteen minutes to find my way to the rear parking lot at Wellington Station because of course I couldn’t turn my phone on to navigate there. But I did eventually find it, and it was exactly as Candace had said. I pulled Chapman out of the back of the Prius and dumped him into the Malden River, which was more of a creek here, but whatever. There was enough water for his corpse to start floating away. “Good riddance, you fuck,” I said.

Then I started the long walk back to Somerville. Maybe I should have gone home instead of back to the scene of the crime, but I felt like I was just about to fall apart, and I needed to see Candace again.

It took a little over an hour to get back, but I didn’t have anything else to do. I walked in and looked around at the immaculate store. You’d never know a guy was murdered here a couple hours ago. From behind the counter, Candace said, “Welcome to Store 24!”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’m off at 6:30,” she said. “And you’re taking me to breakfast. Least you can do.”

She was right about that. The morning shift guy came in, and she sloughed off her Store 24 shirt, revealing the Misfits T-shirt underneath.

We walked away from the store, arm in arm, not talking. And after a block or so, I started to cry. I just had a lot of feelings all the sudden, and it got kind of overwhelming. We stopped, and she gently wiped the tears from my cheeks. “Hey,” she said. “You did a good thing. You don’t have to feel bad.”

“I don’t feel bad about that guy,” I said. “I just…it didn’t bring my sister back. You know? She’s still dead, my old man’s still a drunk piece of shit, and my Mom is still catatonic in front of the TV. Nothing’s better.”             “Well,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be better when we get the next one.”

“What next one?” I said.

“I’ll tell you over breakfast,” she said.

END

#ShortStory #fiction

If you liked this story, you might well enjoy my novel The Long Detention. Pay what you want!