What the Hell Did I Just Read

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  For all of the old gang back home: Big Joe, Fat Steve, Hoss, Chunk, Moose, and Tank. May they all rest in peace.

  “You want to hear a story? Well, buckle the fuck up.”

  PROLOGUE

  It rained like we were a splatter of bird shit God was trying to hose off his deck. The three of us ripped through the downpour in a beige 1996 Saturn Coupe, me at the wheel.

  I squinted drunkenly into the rearview mirror and tried in vain to find the headlights of the black truck that was chasing us, but I actually wasn’t sure if its drivers needed headlights to see or if they even had eyes. I also wasn’t sure it was a truck, or if it was black, or if we were being pursued at all. It was definitely raining, though.

  My friend, John, was in the passenger seat and the only reason he wasn’t driving was because, in addition to also being drunk, he was wounded—both of his hands were wrapped in the T-shirt he’d torn off to use as gauze. His wounds had not been inflicted by our pursuers, at least not directly—he had burned himself grabbing a fondue pot full of melted chocolate that we had been dipping fried chicken strips into (try it sometime, seriously). My girlfriend, Amy, was in the back seat. She wasn’t driving because she didn’t know how, but she apparently did have enough expertise to judge my performance, screaming warnings at me to keep my eyes on the road and to watch out for that curve and oh god we’re all gonna die.

  In Amy’s right hand—her only hand—was a little gray metal container about the size of a shot glass. That container was what the occupants of the truck were after, and I had known this the moment they had burst into John’s living room ten minutes ago.

  We had just been minding our own business, eating our chocolate chicken and making our way through a theme movie night (we’d picked out four films in which the ending is probably the main character’s dying hallucination: Taxi Driver, Minority Report, The Shawshank Redemption, and Mrs. Doubtfire). In through the front door came this whirlwind of a half-dozen men(?) in black cloaks, all wearing what looked like rubber Halloween masks—drooping, expressionless faces with lifeless, skewed eyeballs. The lead cloak was wearing the mask of a puffy-cheeked infant and brandished a weapon that looked like a huge, electrified Toblerone bar—a series of black pyramids in a row, fed by cables that ran inside his robe. John’s little Yorkshire terrier was yapping its head off, probably asking the intruders to take him away to a better home.

  The “man” with the Toblerone gun had screamed, “WHERE IS IT?” in a voice like a spider that had learned to imitate human speech via some online courses it had taken. We hadn’t had to ask what “it” was. John’s house is my favorite place in the world, but there’s nothing else in there you couldn’t replace with a trip to Target or a garage sale held at a meth dealer’s house. No, they had come for that little brushed steel vial Amy now held in her hand.

  They weren’t getting it.

  So, John had grabbed the fondue pot and slung the molten contents at the thing with the spidery voice, inflicting hot brown splash damage on everyone in the room. Amy grabbed the vial from its hiding place (sitting in plain view on John’s kitchen counter, next to a novelty bong shaped like a triathlon trophy) and we sprinted out the back door into a raging thunderstorm. We piled into my car, I floored it, and that’s where we are now.

  The rain was blasting directly into the windshield, the drops whipping toward me like hyperdrive stars. Visibility was slightly worse than what you get inside a car wash after they spray on that multicolored foam. Amy was yelling turn-by-turn directions at me and I was obeying, even though none of us had discussed where we were going. She ordered me to stop just as we arrived at a rusty bridge suspended over a roiling, swollen river. She threw open the rear door, sprinted out into the storm, and chucked the vial downstream as hard as she could. The angry, rumbling current swallowed it without so much as a plop.

  John and I ran up to the rail and exchanged frantic “Did that really just happen?” glances. None of us spoke. A decision had been made and could not be taken back.

  Amy had been right, of course, to do what she did. Goal Number 1 was to keep the vial out of the hands of the cloaked things that were chasing us and Goal Number 2 was to make sure they knew we no longer had it, otherwise they’d just strap us to chairs and try to torture its location out of us using some unspeakable method involving black magic and power tools.

  John said, “When they get here, let me do all the talking.”

  I said, “Amy, when they get here, I want you to do all of the talking. I’ll be busy restraining John.”

  Our pursuers, however, never arrived. I don’t know how long we waited, leaning on the railing, watching the frothing current twisting and breaking below. Cold rain howled into our ears. John absently licked chocolate off his fingers. Amy shivered, her red hair matted against her skull so that it looked like she was bleeding profusely from the scalp. Maybe they knew we had chucked the vial, maybe they had never followed us at all. You’re probably wondering who “they” are and who they work for and those are both great questions. We climbed back into the car.

  John tied his wet hair into a ponytail, lit a cigarette, and said, “I fucking knew something like this was about to happen.”

  Amy tried in vain to dry her glasses with her wet shirt and said, “Well, thanks for letting us know.”

  I said, “If they dredge the river, they can find it.”

  “It floats,” replied Amy. “Did you see that current? River flows into the Ohio, that flows into the Mississippi, that drains into the Gulf of Mexico. They’ll never find it, unless…”

  She trailed off but we all knew what she had left unsaid: they would never find the vial, unless the contents wanted to be found.

  No ambush was waiting for us back at John’s place. The strange men-like shapes in their dark robes and Halloween masks were nowhere to be found, on that or any of the following nights. We had spent the rest of the evening dealing with the dog, as we had come back and found it lapping up the chocolate on the carpet. It turns out chocolate is toxic to dogs; it started puking everywhere and we had to rush it to the vet.

  Or, that’s how I remember it, anyway.

  1. A CHILD GOT KIDNAPPED BY A DEMON OR SOMETHING

  Me

  I woke up on the floor of my junk room, a tiny second bedroom in my apartment that’s piled high with the weird bullshit I collect. Though I guess that wording would imply that I seek this stuff out; I actually meant “collect” in the way that dead bugs “collect” on your windshield. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was four ventriloquist dummies, where they had been propped up around my face so that I’d find them staring down at me when I woke. I thought the things were creepy as hell, and Amy knew that, which is why she had put them there. She is a monster.

  I sat up on my elbows, feeling like a rat had chewed its way into one of my eye sockets and then clawed its way out the other. I s
quinted and saw that stuck to one of the dummies was a Post-it Note that read:

  You were sleepwalking again!

  I went back to work

  Muffin on the table

  Love you

  —Amy

  At the bottom she had drawn a picture of a muffin, little scribbled dots to indicate blueberries. The dots were actually blue—she had gone and found a different pen to do that part.

  It was still dark out, I could sense it even though the one window in the room was mostly obscured by a large painting that was leaning against it. It was a painting of a clown that the previous owner had insisted was cursed (that is, the painting was cursed, not the clown, unless he was, which is entirely possible). “Cursed” turned out to be a ridiculous exaggeration, though. What was happening was the painted clown’s mouth was slowly changing shape with time, as if it was silently mouthing words. I don’t doubt that if you set the painting in front of a time-lapse camera for a few months and hired a lip reader to examine the results, it would turn out the clown was saying something very creepy or even profound. Maybe it’s a prophecy. And, if you want to pay to do all that shit, be my guest. But as far as I’m concerned, if the object isn’t killing anybody, it isn’t “cursed.” I’ve had it in the junk room for four months and it hasn’t inconvenienced me once.

  My cell phone was ringing from somewhere nearby, which I assumed was what had woken me. I knew that at this hour, it wasn’t somebody calling to tell me they’d accepted my job application, so it was either:

  A) a drunken misdial from somebody, in which case I would dedicate my life to finding that person and murdering them;

  B) an emergency;

  C) an “emergency,” and those right there are sarcasm quotes.

  If it was Amy, then it was a good chance it was “B”—an actual emergency. If it was John, well, it could be any of the three.

  A psychic once told John that his last words would be, “Hold my beer.” When he was eleven years old, he had disappeared for two weeks, creating a minor media frenzy in the area. When he turned up again at home, unharmed, he told reporters and police that he had gotten lost in the woods and survived by killing and eating a Sasquatch. His sophomore year of high school, John was suspended multiple times because for every single creative writing assignment, he had turned in a different version of a story about a teenager (named “Jon”) who was sneaking into the cafeteria and jerking off in the food. His senior year, he started a garage band that was quickly banned from every club, bar, park, and concert hall in the region due to his insistence on playing a song called, “This Venue Is a Front for Human Trafficking, Someone Call the FBI, this Is Not Just a Joke Song Title.” When John’s first girlfriend asked him what his ideal threesome would be, he had answered, “Me, Hitler, and Prince. I just watch.”

  In the fifteen years I’ve known him, I’d say 70 percent of the overnight calls I’ve received from John were drunken misdials, 5 percent were genuine emergencies (like the time he called to let me know he was about to be compacted inside a garbage truck), and 25 percent were “emergencies” and really I can’t make those sarcasm quotes there large enough. Just in the past twelve months, the situations that John felt warranted a call in the wee hours of the morning included:

  A) a dream/vision he had of me dying violently in Bangkok, with a warning to stay far way (note: we live in the American Midwest and I couldn’t afford a plane ticket to Bangkok even if I sold myself into the Thai sex trade upon arrival);

  B) urgently notifying me of a “cryptid” he had snapped a photo of in his back yard, which turned out to be a passed-out drunk in the back half of a horse costume;

  C) the results of a blindfolded experiment he and his friends had performed that confirmed that all Froot Loops are the same flavor, just different colors (“we’re doing Skittles next, get your ass over here”);

  D) his million-dollar idea for a “Punch Zoo,” which is like a petting zoo where you get to punch the animals.

  The last such call I had gotten from him was two weeks ago. It was just a few seconds of ambient party noise, before I heard John’s voice say, “What’s that sound? Everybody quiet, I—Ha! Hey Munch, check it out! I farted so hard it dialed my phone!”

  But, of course, I couldn’t just ignore his calls because there was always the chance it was something apocalyptic. That was the hell of knowing John.

  The phone sounded close, probably in the room with me. I knocked the dummies aside and pawed around the junk in my immediate vicinity. Behind the dummies was a piñata that the previous owner claimed was indestructible. So far, we’d tried shooting it with a shotgun and running it over with John’s Jeep and, sure enough, the candy was still safely rattling around inside. Again, that’s pretty weird, but what possible use is that to anybody? It’s just a waste of perfectly good candy. If you’re saying we should give it to the government so they can mimic its witchcraft or whatever to make better body armor for the military, I’m thinking you trust the government way more than I do. If it’s a bona fide Object Cursed with Black Magic, handing it over to the feds would be like giving a toddler a chainsaw to cut his birthday cake with. “Oh,” you’re probably saying, “so it’s better off in your apartment?” I don’t know, dude. Do you want it? Send me your address. You pay for shipping.

  I finally found the phone sitting atop a bookcase, next to a VHS box set of a series of 90s action movies starring Bruce Willis (The Ticking Man, The Ticking Man 2, The Ticking Man: The Final Chapter, Ticking Man Resurrection) that as far as I could tell, did not exist in this universe. We never watched them, nobody has a VCR, and they looked kind of shitty.

  The phone’s display said it was John calling.

  I groaned and stumbled out into the living room to find that no one had broken in and renovated the place while I was out. There are reality shows where they do that, right? I heard the plink-plink-plink of the roof leaking in the bathroom, which the landlords wouldn’t fix because my apartment is on the floor above theirs and the leak wasn’t making it down to their level because, by pure coincidence, the drip was positioned to fall directly into my toilet. That was good for them, because it limited the damage the leak could do to my floor and their ceiling, but bad for us because it meant Amy had to hold a bowl in her lap when she peed (whereas I just let it drip on me).

  The phone rang again. I went to the kitchenette and poured a mug of cold coffee from a pot that had been brewed yesterday, or maybe last month. It was five in the morning, according to the grease-clouded clock on the microwave. I found the muffin—blueberry, just as it had been depicted in Amy’s illustration—sitting on the folding card table we eat dinner off of. It was next to a pile of random junk that had been mailed to me in the last few weeks but had not yet been filed away (and here “filed” means angrily flung into the junk room while muttering fuck words). Most of the stuff in there arrives like this, just strangers sending it through the mail. Sometimes you can get a sad glimpse into their lives via the packing material—one artifact came packed in wadded-up pages from that Jehovah’s Witness magazine, The Watchtower, another was ensconced in shredded hospital bills, another in scraps of cardboard torn from three dozen boxes of the exact same Lean Cuisine frozen dinner.

  Why do they send me this stuff? Well, you know how occasionally you get stuck with something purely because you don’t know how to throw it away? Either because it seems too sacred to get smooshed in with moldy coffee grounds (an old Bible, an American flag, a birthday card from your grandma) or because it seems vaguely dangerous (old shotgun shells, a broken dagger)? All of the shit I’ve collected is kind of a combination of the two—sacred, lethal, or both. So, they dig up my address and stick it in the mail. “David Wong will know what to do with it!” No, I absolutely will not. It just piles up and the stuff that doesn’t seem too dangerous gets sold on eBay (there’s a whole “Metaphysical” category on the site now, it’s great).

  Among this week’s junk had been a water-damaged “haunted” paper
back copy of Bad as I Wanna Be, the autobiography of Chicago Bulls power forward Dennis Rodman. “Haunted” because this copy, and only this copy, had multiple chapters describing how Rodman conspired with several teammates to ritualistically murder over fifty prostitutes in the years they traveled with the team. It doesn’t appear the book was doctored in any way, the pages have the same typeset as the rest, and they’re exactly as aged. I did some Googling, could find no other reference to the existence of this edition of the book, or to the killings. As usual, I have no idea what it means.

  Next to the book was a small piano-black twelve-sided box, each side etched with a different rune in emerald green. I waved my hand over the box and exclaimed, “ODO DAXIL!” The box unfolded and I felt radiant heat waft across my face. Inside was a glowing orange sphere the size of a marble. We got this one a couple of weeks ago. At first it didn’t seem to do much other than emit quite a bit of heat but then, while John was over for Pancake and Video Game Night, he thought he heard a tortured wailing from within the sphere. I initially dismissed the idea, as he was pretty drunk and I think he always hears tortured wailing when he drinks. Still, the next day we took it to the middle school where a friend and former bandmate of John’s named Mitch Lombard (nickname, “Munch”) had gotten a job as a substitute science teacher despite his neck tattoos. He studied the glowing sphere under one of their microscopes for a silent moment, then looked up from the viewfinder to whisper, “His suffering is unimaginable, but the heat of his rage could incinerate the universe a million times over. All is lost. All is lost.” Munch had then passed out, blood running freely from his nose. That was the last time we’d discussed it.

  I grabbed a pair of tongs from a kitchen drawer, picked up the glowing sphere, and dropped it into my mug of cold coffee as the phone rang for what I knew would be the last time before it would get dumped to voice mail.