Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (38 page)

“‘Feed me,’
he said. ‘Sustain the greed.’

“Many years
had passed since the end of the war. I convinced myself that my encounter with
Gaki was nothing but a casualty of humanity, a way of coping with the
atrocities I witnessed and committed. It wasn’t until I married, had my
children, and reentered society that his sickly voice returned. He came to me
in dreams that were more real than reality.”

***

The key felt
loose in the lock, like an old prostitute. The image forced a smile across
Ravna’s face as the door to his apartment swung open on creaky hinges. A single
floor lamp stood like a lone sentry in the far corner of the one-room
efficiency. Male undergarments fouled with yellowing underarm stains clung to
the shade, positioned as they were thrown by their owner. Next to the lamp, and
lining the adjacent wall from floor to ceiling, stood stacked crates of
records. LPs from the fifties, sixties, and seventies filled every space, with
some jutting out where the sleeve had become crinkled or folded. Pizza boxes
and coffee cups covered the floor, except for an oasis of beige, plush carpet
turned gray underneath a recliner. The fifty-two-inch, flat-screen television
above the mantle flickered to life as Ravna punched a button on the remote. The
local news anchor’s mouth sped along silently until the sound output reached
the speakers mounted on each side of the screen. Several horror-movie posters
clung to the pitted drywall, frames tilted and Plexiglas bowing outward from
decades of gravity’s unrelenting pull.

“. . . until
further investigation is complete. Residents are reluctant to consider the
recent event the work of a serial killer, although those we spoke to have begun
locking their doors at night, a first for this community.”

Ravna shook his
head and scrolled through the channel menu until he landed on Arena Rock
Rampage, SoundSystem station number 302. The info on the screen identified the
artist as Leaf Hound, but Ravna knew from the first chord of that most
righteous riff that it had to be them. He fell backwards into the recliner. His
thumb fell into the worn depression of the volume button and he pushed the
level up as far as he could before Ms. Winkerhausen in 4C would call the
police.

Sweet riff rock
from the 1970s always made Ravna horny. His encounter with the goth princess at
his favorite coffee house added fuel to the fire. She worked him like a
stripper, eye contact and personal questions with no interest in an answer. Encourage
them to leave their paycheck and then return next week with another.

He reached into
his messenger bag and removed the company-issue laptop computer he felt obliged
to transport like an undeserving child.

Slasher
Dasher was founded by two college kids in 1979. With a love for horror films
and a witty way with movie reviews, the pamphlet turned into a full-blown
enterprise. With offices in various cities and a network of full-time writers
and stringers, Slasher Dasher employed the hippest of the hipsters. They armed
their staff with the newest technology and sent them in search of the best
horror films, those created by the major studios and those born in the
basements of suburbia. Ravna took the job three years ago when he became fed up
with life in the cubicle. His divorce was finalized and the house was sold. Needing
very little money to live, the staff-writer position at Slasher Dasher was the
perfect opportunity. Ravna wrote like a fiend and wrote constantly. Having his
reviews done for the magazine left him with hours each day to write and drink
coffee.

The laptop came
to life as the proto-Plant vocal stylings of Leaf Hound filled the room. Ravna
waited for the operating system to load those mystic lines of code that made
the modern world possible. His clock widget appeared first, followed by a
barrage of sticky notes clinging to every icon on the desktop. They made a
virtual mess the same way their paper counterparts made a physical one. Ravna
launched his web browser and dismissed his usual page of news feeds, seeing
that very few new headlines were added since the last time he glanced at them
an hour or two before. He pulled the search box down from the file menu and
hesitated.

Ravna set the
laptop on the arm of the recliner and walked to the kitchenette area of his
efficiency. He pulled the stainless-steel handle of the refrigerator and spied
two bottles of beer on the bottom shelf, lodged between a box of baking soda
and an unidentified, black lump sealed in a plastic baggie.

“Gotta calm
that espresso down,” he said to the first bottle as he tucked the cap
underneath his T-shirt and twisted until he heard the familiar sigh. Ravna took
a swig and relished the bitter sharpness of the import. He shut the door and
tapped the bubble-topped 1959 Frigidaire unit.

“Keep on
keepin’ on, my good buddy.”

The
refrigerator did not reply.

Ravna returned
to his recliner as the album approached “Stray,” one of his favorite songs. He
chugged half of the beer and let his body fall deep into the molded cushions. With
the click of a few buttons, Ravna dispelled the other applications and their
incessantly nagging messages. He returned to the web browser’s search box with
no digital procrastinations remaining.

“Preta, Gaki,”
he typed in the box.

Without the
need for journalistic integrity on his own investigation, Ravna selected the
first result on the list. He began to skim the document like a ten-year-old boy
discovering his father’s stash of porn under the bed. After a few moments, he
hammered his word processor with key observations.

“Preta, or
Peta. Name for a ghost of human suffering originating from Buddhist, Hindu,
Sikh, and Jain texts. Known as “hungry ghosts” in English. Pretas were jealous
or greedy people, and now their karma gives them an insatiable hunger for
repugnant things, such as human corpses or feces.”

Ravna whistled
out loud, clicked the scroll-down arrow, and continued taking notes.

“Pretas are
invisible, but some can see them in states of distress. They have sunken eyes,
mummified skin, narrow limbs, enormously distended bellies and long, thin
necks. The metaphor suggests enormous appetites that cannot be fulfilled. In
Japan,
preta
is translated as
gaki
, and the word is often used to
mean a spoiled child. To Hindus, the creatures are very real.”

Ravna shut the
lid without bothering to power down the computer. His mouth was dry and the
rest of his beer did nothing to quench the thirst. He fumbled for the messenger
bag and pulled the old book from inside. With trembling fingers, he revisited
the pages he had marked with Post-it notes.

Chapter 7

He threw the
razor into the sink and reached for a towel on the rack. Drew held the princess
wash cloth to his bleeding chin and sneered into the mirror. “Tough shit,
sweetie,” he said. “Daddy’s bleeding and your towel was the closest one.”

He managed to
wipe the shaving cream from the rest of his face while the bleeding slowed to a
trickle. Drew straightened his tie and pushed his hair over each ear. A sallow,
empty face looked back. Drew slammed the medicine cabinet shut and marched down
the steps on his way to first the garage, and then the office.

***

Brian sat on
the corner of Drew’s desk holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a wry smile. He
slid around to face Drew as he sat in his chair. “You look like shit,” he said.

“Not sleeping
much,” replied Drew.

“Why not?”

Drew looked up
at Brian and shook his head. “I guess I’m sleeping, but the dreams are what’s
leaving me exhausted in the morning.”

“Dreams of wild
orgies?”

Drew rubbed his
forehead and pushed the power button on his PC. The machine came out of
hibernation with the whirring of a fan and a couple of clicks. “My head’s
pounding.”

Brian stood and
shrugged his shoulders. He walked toward the break room while draining the last
drops of his lukewarm, watery office coffee.

Drew watched
him go and turned back to the monitor. He started his e-mail program and
waited. Sunken, bloodshot eyes stared back at him through the black spot on the
monitor. The extension on his desk rang, jarring him from the contemplative
moment.

“Yo.”

Nags like
the wife
, Drew thought. He paused, knowing Brian would continue whether he
acted disinterested or not.

“Johnson ain’t
here today.”

Drew sat up in
his chair and leaned into the cubicle row until he could see the drawn blinds
on the supervisor’s office. Only darkness leaked out between the plastic rows. The
coiled phone cord pulled taut and Drew sat back up. He glanced toward Vivian’s
empty cubicle, and then put his head in his left hand while cradling the phone
in his right.

“He’s never
missed. Got, like, the company record for attendance or something. I don’t
think he’s called off in seven years.”

“That’s what I
was trying to tell you when you were acting like a little bitch this morning.”

Drew smiled and
rolled his eyes. “Okay. I’m listening. You’re like a girl with a secret that
you can’t wait to tell.”

“So here’s what
I know,” Brian began. “Folks from upstairs were sniffing around this morning. There
was a board meeting and Johnson was a no-show. Not only that, but he didn’t
call. Nobody really knows where he is.”

Drew sighed. “And?”
he asked Brian.

“And what? You
don’t think that’s crazy?”

“Call me when
you find the YouTube clip of Johnson in bed with three strippers and a line of
cocaine. Until then, I really don’t care if the guy isn’t at work because of his
hemorrhoids.”

Drew tossed the
receiver into the cradle and went back to his e-mail. The bolded subject lines
sat like cattle marching to the killing floor. With every delete, the line
disappeared and shifted the others closer to the knife. The bottom right corner
of the program read “89 new items,” bringing Drew’s forehead into tightly
creased ribbons of skin, the wrinkles looking like windblown dunescapes.

His eye skimmed
down the “sender” column, stopping around line forty-six at a message with no
sender listed. His arms tightened and his fingers fumbled on the keyboard as if
he had spent the last hour in a snowball fight without gloves. Drew scrolled
down until the unread subject line without a sender stared back from the middle
of the screen.

“you
know where he is”

Drew looked at
it, a simple sentence without proper capitalization or punctuation, the
hallmark of digital communication.

 
Won’t be
long before we go completely phonetic. Fucking idiots.
His hand slid the
cursor over the subject line and Drew’s pointer finger depressed the left mouse
button. The body of the message filled the screen as the attachment crawled
from the top of the box toward the bottom. Line by line, pixel by pixel, the
image digitally unraveled.
Cut the resolution, for fuck’s sake. How long
have people been sending digital photos to one another? Ten years, twenty
years?

The first few
lines of the image rolled down with utter blackness, leaving Drew to wonder if
the picture had become corrupted on its travels through the wire, across
routers, and finally through the company’s e-mail server. As it continued to
load, Drew saw the faint, scraggly lines that transformed into the tops of
trees. The dark-brown branches tried hiding in the darkness of the night, their
naked, spiny arms twisting toward the sky. Dull flashes of faded color
punctured the stark desperation of the image. Shades of blue like the bottom of
an abandoned swimming pool clung to the bones of the tree, discarded shopping
bags doomed to dance in the branches for all time. Mounds of broken concrete
obscured the bottoms of the tree trunks. Jagged lines of piercing, white stone
lay toppled on each other. Drew squinted at the monitor as his brain tried to
categorize the photo or identify the location of it. The lines of the image
picked up speed as it raced toward the bottom with the last of the pixels.

Dump site. One
used by demolition companies, or possibly the aftermath of a dead factory
brought down by the wrecking ball.

The image
finished loading and the number of objects at the bottom of it forced Drew to
pause and refocus. Unlike the stark emptiness of the treetops and night sky,
the ground lay covered with the bones of dead industry. Wires, steel rebar,
cinder blocks, rotted, wooden beams, and plastic casings of all sorts lay
jumbled on the ground in heaps. The paltry flash on the camera illuminated the
construction refuse, but not the rodents in their nests. Drew stared at the
jumble of wire snaking through the image.

He sat back and
looked at the ceiling, taking a deep breath and shaking his head, contemplating
an instant delete or another look. With Johnson out, Drew could not come up
with a reason not to linger on the image for as long as he wanted.

He looked again
and immediately found part of the picture that had not revealed itself at first
glance. In the bottom, right corner Drew found the soles of two shoes that
seemed to be attached to the legs of someone lying on his back. His eyes
followed a piece of broken conduit to the right, where they stopped on a
rectangular, black object. Drew pulled closer to the monitor and squinted. He
moved the cursor to the file menu and clicked until the tiny magnifying glass
appeared. He dragged the slider to 250 percent and the gray pixels exploded on
the monitor, followed by a readjustment of clarity characteristic of a high-resolution
image.

Drew
grabbed the horizontal scroll and pushed it to the right until the soles of the
shoes nearly filled his monitor. He knocked the zoom back to 200 percent so the
rectangular object would fit on the screen. Drew identified the black messenger
bag, the nylon type used in cheap promotions, like office apparel. In the
middle of the outer flap sat a logo, its intricate design obscured by the low
light of the environment, but its shape evident to Drew. The design was his
creation, the logo now tattooed throughout the office building on mugs,
stationary, messenger bags, and more. It was the design that earned him the
promotion, the house in the nice neighborhood, his spin on the “American Dream.”
It was the piece of work that earned him accolades in the graphic-design
department. It was also the design sewn into the black messenger bags
distributed at last year’s holiday party, the one used by only one person in
the office.