What the Hell Did I Just Read E-Book

David Wong

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

From the writer of the cult sensation John Dies at the End comes another terrifying and hilarious tale of almost Armageddon at the hands of two hopeless heroes. It's the story "They" don't want you to read. Though, to be fair, "They" are probably right about this one. No, don't put the book back on the shelf – it is now your duty to purchase it to prevent others from reading it. Yes, it works with ebooks, too; I don't have time to explain how. While investigating a fairly straightforward case of a shape-shifting interdimensional child predator, Dave, John, and Amy realized there might actually be something weird going on. Together, they navigate a diabolically convoluted maze of illusions, lies, and their own incompetence in an attempt to uncover a terrible truth that they - like you - would be better off not knowing. Your first impulse will be to think that a story this gruesome – and, to be frank, stupid – cannot possibly be true. That is precisely the reaction "They" are hoping for.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by David Wong

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Book I

1. A Child Got Kidnapped by a Demon or Something

2. A Screaming Clown Dick

3. Joy Park

4. A Monster’s Pictures, a Grieving Widow, Sex

5. Amy’s Breakfast With Evil

6. The Rain Continues, and Also John Dies

7. The Battle of John’s Living Room

Book II

8. Attack of the Fuckroaches

9. Another Child Goes Missing

10. A Flashback to Amy’s Traumatic Waffle Experience

11. This Isn’t What it Looks Like, I Swear

12. Diogee Wasn’t a Good Dog

13. Wait, What the Fuck?

14. A Brief History of Invasive Fish Species in the Mississippi River and Their Impact on International Commerce

15. Soy Sauce

16. The Great Dildo Flood

17. Joining Maggie for Breakfast

Book III

18. Once Again, Marconi Selfishly Tries to Steal the Spotlight

19. The Crew Encounter Some Additional Complications

20. The Ass Letter

21. We All Must Learn from Kurt Russell’s Tragic Mistake

22. The Heroes Agree to Help Murder a Dozen Children

23. A Plan With No Possible Flaws

24. An Experiment Yields Some Inconsistent Data

25. Well, They Certainly Fucked that Up, Didn’t They?

26. Grappling Hooks Aren’t Cheap, You Guys

27. This Womb of Mine

28. A Completely Successful Plan that Ends the Story, This Is Probably The Final Chapter Right Here

29. The Danger of Acting on Incomplete Information

30. Mobile Surgery

31. The Undisclosed Hospital was Recently Renovated and is Now a Pretty Nice Facility

32. Five Days Later

33. A Completely Uneventful Denouement. We Can Probably Cut this Part, Seriously, Stop Reading

Afterword

Also Available from Titan Books

WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ

ALSO BY DAVID WONG

John Dies at the End This Book Is Full of Spiders Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ

A NOVEL OF COSMIC HORROR

DAVID WONG

TITANBOOKS

What the Hell Did I Just Read

Print edition ISBN: 9781785651656

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785651663

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: October 2017

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2017 by David Wong. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously

This edition published by arrangement with St. Martin’s Press.

Design by Rob Grom and Titan Books.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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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.

WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ

“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 squinted 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” paperback 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.

I cleaved off a ragged chunk of muffin with my fingers and answered, “Fuck you and all of the ancestors who led up to you.”

“Dave? We got a missing little girl. You got a pen?”

“If it’s a missing child, call the cops.”

“The cops called me.”

I closed my eyes and let out a breath that smelled like I’d eaten an entire wet dog and washed it down with sweat wrung from a hobo’s undershirt. Let me give you a tip: if you’re ever the victim of a terrible crime—like, say, your kid goes missing—and you see the cops consulting with a couple of white trash–looking dipshits in their late twenties, it’s time to worry. It’s not because John and I are incompetent at what we do—and I assure you, we are—but because you need to start asking yourself a very hard question. Not “Will I get my child back?” but “Do I want to get my child back?”

I dipped my finger into the coffee, which already felt near boiling. I fished out the burning orb and placed it back into its container, which automatically closed around it. I took a sip, winced, and decided that the first person to ever drink coffee was probably trying to commit suicide.

I asked, “What makes it a, you know, a Dave and John case?”

“It’s another locked room situation, it looks like. There’s more, I’ll explain when you get here. But it looks pretty John and Dave to me. Do you have a pen? I have the address here.”

“Just give it to me.”

“One-oh-six Arlington Street. Next to the vape store?”

“You thought I needed pen and paper to remember that?”

“And hurry. I’ve heard you’ve only got forty-eight hours before the trail goes cold.”

“You heard that in a movie. Last week. We watched it together.”

He had hung up.

I sighed and ate another hunk of muffin. I glanced out the window, the bottom half glowing pink from the neon sign of the business downstairs. They left that sign on day and night; the constant hum made me want to blow my brains out.

Oh, well. It’s not like I have anything else to do.

Still, I was going to finish my muffin first.

Let me tell you what’s bullshit about every supernatural horror movie. Whenever the monster or angry ghost lady turns up, everyone is skeptical for at least the first third of the running time. It’s usually between forty and fifty minutes in that the protagonists begrudgingly admit that the ominous Latin chants emanating from the walls aren’t a plumbing issue. In real life, the very second Mom sees something red oozing from the ceiling, she thinks “blood” not “water from a rusty old pipe.” I wish people were as skeptical as they are in the movies.

This town, the name of which will remain undisclosed for privacy reasons, has been called the Bermuda Triangle of the Midwest. Or at least, I think I heard somebody call it that. I actually wish that was true, too, because there’s nothing to the Bermuda Triangle—just a bunch of routine maritime disasters that grew in the telling. A cargo ship never arrives at port and the headlines coyly say it “disappeared.” It didn’t “disappear,” guys—it sank. It’s a boat, in the ocean. Shit happens. What goes on in [undisclosed] is . . . different.

My point is, it’s hard to sort out the real stuff from the superstition. So, because I’m sick of getting your e-mails asking for advice, let me just quickly run through it:

1. If Your Home Has a Poltergeist

We got a ton of these calls after that movie Paranormal Activity came out, panicked people saying they had rocking chairs rocking by themselves, untouched drinking glasses scooting off a table, clocks running backward, etc. If you’re in this situation, you can combat it using a technique known as “Getting the Fuck Over It.” You’re telling me you’ve got angry spirits of old murder victims or something floating around and they’re causing less of a disruption to your life than an unruly house cat? Why not worry about your high blood pressure, or take a moment to see if your smoke detector batteries are up to date? Those things are way more likely to kill you than whatever is knocking over salt shakers in your kitchen at night.

2. If You Have Seen a Ghost

If you’ve seen, say, a translucent old woman in a long flowing gown drifting down your hall at night, that’s almost definitely a hallucination or just a regular ol’ dream. Think about it: why would a ghost be translucent? Smoke and fog look like they do because they’re made of tiny particles suspended in the air. Are you suggesting the soul is made of tiny particles?

In reality, your whole idea of what a ghost looks like comes from Victorian era photos, when long-exposure cameras required the subject to sit still for several minutes due to the primitive technology. If the subject left halfway through, you’d get that ghostly image instead. Fun fact: this is also the reason nobody is smiling in those old pictures—try holding a smile for seven straight minutes. If you’ve actually seen a ghost—and I assure you that you probably have, within the last month—it would have just looked like any real, solid person. It’s likely nobody saw that person but you and no, you can’t photograph them. You’re not seeing them with your eyes.

3. If an Evil Spirit or Demon Has Confronted You

If said entity appeared before you and started speaking, the good news is you’re not losing your mind. Contrary to what TV and movies have told you, it’s nearly impossible to have a hallucination that you can both see and hear—the mentally ill either just hear voices, or just see things, due to how the brain is wired. If you can both hear and see it, you’re either just having a dream, or you have an actual demon in your home.

If it’s the latter, you shouldn’t bother listening too closely to what it has to say. It may sound really important—prophecies of future doom, that sort of thing—but I assure you, it’s just toying with you. If you ignore it, it’ll eventually get bored. The odds are it’s not strong enough to possess you, kill you, or do serious damage to your property. If it tries, feel free to pray or put up lots of crosses in its field of vision; I’ve seen that work before. You don’t have to go with Christian symbolism, but not all religions work (for reference, at the end of this book I have included an index of which religions are true and which are false—there are some real surprises). Also, try playing lots of 1980s era power ballads, they hate that. I think because it’s the closest earthly approximation of the music they play in Heaven. I don’t know, we’re just guessing here. Conversely . . .

4. If an Angel Appears and Speaks to You

Here, the risks are different—if a messenger from the Almighty actually bothers to contact you, it’s probably not the best idea to just ignore it. So, obviously, the first step is to make sure it’s an actual entity and not a dream you’re having, which is surprisingly simple: just ask the angel a question that you yourself don’t know the answer to but that you can verify later (like, “What’s the square root of 123,456,789?” or “What will be the final score of every football game this Sunday?”). If their information is good, well, then you know you weren’t dreaming and whatever prophecies or advice they gave you could indeed be valid. Of course they, too, could be imposters, so if they ask you to do something morally questionable—like stab your own child or something—you’ll need to use your own judgment. Let’s face it: if there is a god and he’s the type to think it’s unreasonable to refuse such a request, we’re all screwed anyway.

5. If You Have Been Abducted by an Alien

Cases like this are almost always simple sleep paralysis—a sort of wakeful dreaming during which it is common to see or sense strange visitors. Another fun fact: the typical “gray” aliens, with their bulbous heads and big almond-shaped eyes, didn’t show up in abduction stories until 1964—about two weeks after similar aliens appeared in an episode of the scifi horror series The Outer Limits. The phenomenon of abductees claiming to have been probed anally didn’t start until 1969, the year colonoscopies became common. What I’m saying is, the creatures that visit you in the night are either manifestations of your own anxiety or are making your anxieties manifest just to screw with you. Either way, the call is always coming from inside the house.

6. If You Have Seen a Monster

I’ve never understood the panic over monsters. I mean, which would bother you more, finding out your grandfather had died in a painful industrial accident, or that his head had been neatly snatched off his body by some giant, leathery winged horror? Dead is dead and in the latter case, he didn’t feel a thing. So why should the monster be the one that gives you nightmares, aside from the miniscule chance that one day your grandad’s chewed-up eyeballs might get shit onto your windshield on your way to work? Also, what if you kill your “monster” and it turns out it’s like a werewolf situation, where the thing transforms back into a human as it dies? Your ass is going to jail.

If it’s not threatening you, just let it be.

7. If You Have Seen a Man-Shaped Figure Made of Inky Blackness with a Pair of Eyes that Glow like the Embers of Two Smoldering Cigars

Congratulations! You’re one of the few humans to have ever seen the universe as it truly is.

If it happens again, run.

2. A SCREAMING CLOWN DICK

I stepped out into the rain that had been hammering us relentlessly since Columbus Day. After a month of it, everything that wasn’t pavement was a squishy muck that with every step squirted through the hole in my right shoe and soaked my sock. Drainage ditches were advancing menacingly across yards and parking lots, day by day. Over in what was left of the good part of town, they were putting down sandbags. No army of volunteers was coming to sandbag the dildo store.

Yeah, my apartment is above a sex toy shop, called the Venus Flytrap. Our neighbor on one side is the skanky Coral Rock Motel (which is convenient for the clientele there) and next to it is one of those tiny used car lots where the stock is surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire, bearing signs offering weekly payments and no credit checks (they don’t mention the cars come with remote gadgets that can disable the engine if you miss a payment). On the other side of us is a tiny burned-out shop with a bashed-in front window exposing its charcoal guts to the world. I remember when that used to be a candy store, back when I was a kid. It always had this warm caramel smell, the scent of melted butter and sugar and holidays. No idea what happened to the kindly old couple who ran the place, all I know is that now raccoons nest in the blackened old display case and raindrops plink off the broken beer bottles that drunks have flipped through the window as they stumbled past.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a town that was actually growing, where vacant lots give birth to trendy restaurants and old warehouses are torn down to make room for brand new housing developments. A city like Seattle or Austin, where you can actually feel like human civilization is advancing forward, progressing toward some kind of goal. I bet it just changes your whole attitude.

My car, which I got for free because the previous owners thought it was possessed (the groans were actually from a defective power steering pump), carried me past a permanently closed Walmart—yes, even our Walmart went out of business—and into a neighborhood of large Victorian homes that had probably been the fancy part of Undisclosed back in the old days. Several of the houses had been turned into somewhat shady businesses—a consignment shop, a gun dealer, and the aforementioned vape store were all in a row, next to a blue Victorian home that was still a residence. At this hour, it was the only one with lights on inside. As I pulled over, my headlights flashed across a cop SUV parked out front, with John’s Jeep right behind it. I sighed, checked my hair—it looked like a wig that had been flushed down a toilet and recovered in the sewer six months later—and dragged myself out into the rain.

When I got close to the SUV, I found there was an officer in the driver’s seat, eating a McMuffin and playing a game on his phone. A kid with a square jaw and wavy movie-star hair. It wasn’t somebody we’d dealt with before. He rolled down his window just a crack as I approached, enough to talk through it but not enough to let the rain splatter in.

I said, “Excuse me, is this where the missing girl is?”

“No, sir. If she was here she wouldn’t be missing.”

“Uh . . . okay, I got a call from John, I’m—”

“I know who you are. He’s inside, with Herm.”

I went up and found the front door was standing open. I didn’t want to just let myself in, since people lived here and I wasn’t police. I just sort of stood there awkwardly until the detective appeared a minute later. An older guy, face was mostly mustache—I felt like I’d dealt with him before but couldn’t remember where. Clothes were more casual than what you see detectives wear in movies—khakis and a polo shirt under a windbreaker, looked more like a guy the landlord would send to repair your furnace, the type who’d bend your ear about filter maintenance on the way out. He let me inside just enough to get out of the rain, then put up a hand to stop me.

I said, “I’m David Wong—”

“I know. I remember you from your involvement in every single horrible thing that has happened in this town for the last several years.”

“What about the mayor’s bestiality scandal? I wasn’t involved in that.”

“That we know of.”

John walked up from behind the detective, wearing a black overcoat and under it, a gray suit and tie. He yanked off his reading glasses and said, “Dave, this girl is just missing as fuck.”

He handed me a photo. I asked, “Why are you wearing that?”

“Which thing?”

“All of it. I didn’t even know you owned a suit.”

“Oh, I have to be in court later. That public indecency charge. I’m going to fight it, lawyer dug up some good case law where they found that body paint counts as clothing.”

I glanced at the picture. It was a little girl, all right. Elementary school age, long blond hair. The type of missing kid the news media actually notices.

John said, “I think this case is a screaming clown dick. The girl’s name is Margaret Knoll, they call her Maggie. Parents are Ted and Loretta. She went missing a few hours ago.”

I handed the photo back to John and said, “That’s all the time it took the cops to decide it was Dave and John territory?”

The detective said, “How many bites do you have to take out of a shit sandwich before you figure out it’s shit? Follow me. And wipe your shoes.”

* * *

The house’s interior was as depressing as the magazines at a Laundromat. It looked like maybe they’d just moved into it a couple of weeks ago, like they’d been there long enough to get the chairs and sofa in the right spots, but hadn’t hung any pictures or otherwise decorated. The place just seemed lifeless.

The father of the missing girl was a tiny little guy with a mighty blond beard, kind of seemed like a character out of a fantasy novel to me. He had a tattoo on his right bicep that looked like it was from some military unit, a skull in front of an ace of spades. Probably no more than five years older than John and I but with a lot more miles on him. I figured there had been a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan or both, and it looked like he’d returned to a job of manual labor. He was on the sofa, rough hands clenched between his thighs, one knee bouncing. A caged animal. Seemed like the kind of guy who’d have a whole detailed routine for how to make up with his wife after he got rough with her.

Ted Knoll looked me over. What I was wearing could best be described as the opposite of a tuxedo.

He said, “You’re the guy? You look like a bag of smashed asshole.”

“Thank you for the feedback. So it’s been explained to you? Who we are?”

“I asked for you. If it was up to me, cops wouldn’t be here at all.”

“Okay. Sure. So, what’s going to happen is, I’m going to ask you a series of questions and it’s not going to be at all clear why I’m asking them, some will seem random or even cruel. All I ask is that you simply answer those questions as best you can, and don’t interrupt to ask me why I’m asking. If you don’t know an answer, just say you don’t know. Okay?”

He nodded.

“Is Maggie’s mother here? I’d prefer to not have to go through this twice.”

“She don’t live here, we’re separated. She don’t know I’m talkin’ to you and we’re gonna keep it that way.”

“Ah. All right, when did you notice your daughter was missing?”

“Got up in the middle of the night, don’t know why, happened to walk past her room and saw there was no lump in the blankets. Went in to check, bed was empty, no sign of Maggie anywhere. Front and back doors of the house were both closed and locked. All the windows locked, too. We got an alarm system, either they figured out how to disarm it, or they managed to not trip it. Got security cameras front and back, looks like they went dark at around two in the morning, stayed off for an hour, just a black screen, like somebody knew exactly what they were doing. Like they’d planned it.”

“All that aside, we’re one hundred percent sure your daughter’s not hiding in a closet, anything like that? We’re not going to find her in the attic, or crawl space, or garage? Under a bed? In a kitchen cabinet?”

“I’ve torn this fuckin’ place apart. She ain’t here.”

“In the days or nights leading up to this, did you have any strange dreams?”

“No.”

“Did you see any shadowy figures, like maybe out of the corner of your eye, but when you turned to look, nobody was there?”

“No.”

“Do you ever have memories of events that never happened? A presidential election that turned out differently than the newspapers say, a famous person you was sure was dead, turning out to be alive?”

“No. I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re gettin’ at.”

“Did you see anything else unusual leading up to Maggie’s disappearance?”

“Five days ago, a man named Nymph showed up and said he was going to abduct her soon.”

John and I exchanged a look. John said, “I think that might be our first lead.”

To Ted I said, “Did you call the cops after that?”

“I did not.”

“Because you don’t think this was just some local deviant. Or else you wouldn’t have asked for us.”

“Also, don’t got much use for cops.”

“Tell us about that encounter, from the start.”

“It was last Sunday. After church. I was in the driveway putting an alternator on the Impala. Guy walks up, dainty little guy, looked like a fag, or a child molester. Got this lispy little voice, holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger, like you’d hold a joint. Made this little duckface every time he took a puff, I wanted to punch him before he even said a word. Came mincing up the driveway, I didn’t even see a car pull up or anything, he was just there. Maggie was in the yard with me, chasing the cat around. This guy comes up, says his name is Mister Nymph. Actually referred to himself as ‘Mister.’ ”

“Wait, say the last name again?”

“Nymph, like short for ‘nymphomaniac’ or somethin’. That’s how I heard it anyway.”

It wasn’t a name we’d run across before.

Ted continued, “So he looks over at Maggie, and he’s got his leering look, you know, and says I have a beautiful daughter. Starts asking me a bunch of weird questions about her. Then he says—”

“What kind of questions?”

“Started out random things. How much does she weigh. Do we let her eat meat. I’m not answering any of these as he asks; I’m just asking him who he is, what does he want. But he just keeps up with the questions. And they just get creepier as they go. Does she shower or take baths. Do my wife and I allow her to see us naked. Do we let her shop for her own underwear.”

“Like he was trying to get you agitated, then.”

“Guess so, yeah. Told him to get off my property; he said he was just asking questions. I tell him he’s got five seconds to get off my driveway, tell him that he’s threatening my child, as far as I’m concerned. I say that in this state I have grounds to kill him where he stands, based on that alone. Finally he says, and he’s saying it like he’s shopping for a car, he says, ‘I’ll take her.’ Says he’ll be back in a few days to pick her up. I take a step toward the guy, big wrench in my hand. Then I turn to check on Maggie real quick, just a split second, then I turn back to Nymph and—”

“And he was gone,” finished John.

Ted nodded. “I asked Maggie if she saw where the guy went, she said she didn’t see nothin’. Said she saw me standing in the driveway alone, yelling at nobody. By the next day, I was doubtin’ myself.”

John said, “You thought it was a hallucination?”

Ted shrugged. “Came back from Iraq, had the PTSD, dreams mostly. Figured . . . I dunno. Also done some substances in my time, before Maggie was born, but I’ve heard about how that stuff stays in your system. I guess I wanted it to be that and not this other thing. The shit that they say goes on in this town. The reason everybody moved away, the reason I got this house for fifteen grand. I had always figured it was all panic and superstition. I’ve seen plenty of women and little kids torn to pieces, and the culprit wasn’t no monster. Men do it just fine.”

I said, “So, what exactly are you willing to believe?”

“I believe in results. I believe in technique. What you two do, either it works or it don’t. If it don’t, I’ll find somebody else.”

I said, “The way I try to explain it to people is this. You look outside in the daytime and there’s the sun. It’s there, everybody agrees it’s there, everybody knows what it is. But what you don’t realize is that the sun is also really loud. It’s a giant ball of nuclear explosions. Have you ever been really close to a lightning strike? You know that clap of thunder that’s so loud that it almost makes you piss your pants? Imagine hearing something that loud, nonstop, day and night—that’s how loud the sun would be, even from a hundred million miles away. About a hundred and twenty decibels. The only reason you can’t hear it, is because your ears aren’t equipped to—there’s no air in space to carry the sound waves. Do you understand? This universe is full of huge, powerful, noisy things that you just can’t perceive the right way, due to how your sense organs are built. John and I, our senses are a little different than yours, that’s all.”

John said, “It’s kind of like how you can’t hear that your pet goldfish is just constantly screaming, but other fish can. Now this particular guy, Nymph or whatever his name is, he’s not in our database—”

Note: We do not have a database.

“—but everything’s a mystery until it’s not. This looks like what we call a ‘locked room’ abduction. Victim missing, but no sign of entry or exit. We’ve seen a few of them before.”

Ted said, “If you don’t mind me askin’, how many of those times have you found the victim alive?”

“More than you’d think,” answered John. The answer is one, by the way. “When they say the things that happen around here are beyond understanding, that’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes weirdness occurs and everybody is perfectly fine afterward. Maggie could just turn up in her bedroom again, five minutes from now.”

“Is that what you think will happen here?”

Before John could answer, I said, “We don’t think anything right now. We’ve been at this for a while, and here’s what we’ve learned—however you think it’s gonna go, is not how it’s gonna go. About here is where I usually tell people not to get their hopes up, but I don’t think I need to say that—you know what the world is like. So, instead I’m just going to say that we’ll do our best.”

Ted nodded. “Part of the job is that guy, Nymph, whoever he is, we find him and destroy him. Alpha Mike Foxtrot.”

John said, “You can take that to the fuckin’ bank.”

The detective held out his hands and said, “Guys, I’m standing right here.”

Ted said, “So, if this is what we think it is, where do you start looking?”

I thought, good question.

John said, “The fact that he came to you in advance is important. He could have just snatched her in the night, presumably, but there’s a game being played here. So that means there’s a good chance we’ll hear from Nymph—or someone like him—very soon. At that point, we try to figure out exactly what ‘game’ he’s playing. And then—”

I finished for him. “We don’t fucking play it.”

Ted nodded. He seemed to have gained some confidence from this conversation, which meant we had done a good job of concealing the fact that we had no idea what the hell we were doing.

The detective looked at his watch, nodded, and said, “Well, looks like you guys have it handled.”

He turned and strode down the hall and out the front door. I hurried after him.

“Hey! You’re not walking away from this—wait!” He stopped to open the door of the SUV. I put a hand on it to keep it closed and he gave me a look like I was a mosquito he was about to splatter. “Where are you going?”

“Oh, I have to call the feds, of course. We’ll have a team from the FBI here in half an hour, they’ll work with a local task force of a dozen of our finest men!”

He knocked my hand aside and ducked into the passenger seat. He slammed the door and the other cop started the engine. I knocked on the window and he rolled it down.

I asked, “Wait, was that sarcasm?”

“What do you think? I’ll see you boys later. Or not. Who knows? I’m going back to the station.”

“You can’t just walk away from a missing child!”

“Watch us. You think this is my first day on the job? You think this is my first day in this town? You heard the story, even if we don’t exactly know what’s going on, we know enough. If They took her” (I could hear the capital “T” in his voice), “then it’s like trying to rescue an orange after it’s been juiced. Not my monkeys, not my circus.”

“It literally is! This is your job.”

His shoulders slumped. He let out a tired sigh. “You’re right, you’re right. Here, let me give you something. It might help.”

He stuck his right hand inside his jacket, then pulled it out to reveal he had his middle finger extended. He stuck his hand out of the window and sped off down the street singing, “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOUUUU!!!!”

I watched the SUV’s taillights dissolve behind a gray curtain of rain. I would have called the guy’s superiors to complain, but the chief would just say the same thing, only louder.

You might be wondering if the “They” he was just referring to is the same “they” who showed up at John’s place a few weeks ago. The truth is that nobody knows. Lurking behind everything are these walking shadows who can manipulate a human soul as easily as a finger puppet is manipulated by a drunk mime’s penis. Here in our world, there are people who do Their bidding willingly, others who do it unwillingly, and still others who serve Their purposes without even knowing They exist. So, yeah, I admit it probably does make it hard to fill out an arrest warrant.

I sighed and made my way back inside.

As soon as I arrived back in the living room, Ted said, “Thought he’d never leave. So if we’re gonna hear from Nymph, when do you think—”

His cell phone rang.

3. JOY PARK

Ted’s ringtone was “Flight of the Valkyries.” He answered and immediately his expression made it clear who was on the other end. Not “Mister Nymph,” but his little girl.

He squeezed his eyes shut and said, “Oh thank god. Shh . . . listen. Baby, where are you?” A pause. “What? Hey, tell me where you are . . .”

John muttered, “Put it on speaker.” Ted tapped his phone and I heard the tinny voice of a little girl, in midsentence.

“We saw Prince Blacktail and we took a picture of him and Betty the Bear and I ate a chocolate pickle on a stick.”

Ted said, “Maggie, where are you? Who are you with?”

“Do you want to talk to Daddy?”

“I’m here, this is me. We’re at home. Where are you?”

“I can’t hear, the people are really loud. It’s really crowded. We’re in line for the Night Wheel.”

Ted looked at us. None of us had any idea what that meant.

John said, “Hi, I’m a friend of your dad’s. Are you at a park? Like an amusement park? Tell us where you are and we’ll come join you.”

“We’re at Joy Park! It was a surprise for my fly box!”

It was word salad. Ted closed his eyes, I imagined the rage and frustration turning his brain into a sputtering pot of chili. “Honey, can you hear me? Do you know what town you’re in? Or, do you remember how long you drove to get there?”

“Do you want to talk to Daddy? Hold on.”

“No, honey, I . . . are you still there?”

There was a pause, some faint voices on the other end. Finally, a male voice came on the line. It said, “This is Ted. Who’s this?”

Ted, the one sitting in the room with us, looked at his phone, then looked up at us. We had no suggestions.

“Who are you, you son of a bitch? Bring back my daughter!”

From the phone, a man with a very similar voice said, “What? I ain’t got your daughter, dude.” A faint female voice could be heard asking a question, and the man on the phone replied to her, “No idea, somebody she dialed on accident.”

The call disconnected.

Ted stood bolt upright off the sofa, looked at me, and said, “What the fuck was that?”

Another good question.

John said, “Try to call her back.”

He did, and shook his head. “They turned it off.”

John was quickly scrolling through something on his phone. He said, “I tried doing a search for Joy Park. I don’t find a place by that name. Not within driving distance. Lots of, uh, people.”

I said, “Maybe we heard her wrong?”

“Even so, what place like that would be open before dawn?”

Ted said, “That sounded like me. On the phone. And in the background, that was Loretta. What is this?”