MalContents (19 page)

“Vaguely. He had a hard drive crash.”

“That he did. And you fixed it. His name was Myron Millspaugh. Do you remember what you found on Millspaugh’s hard drive when you got it going again? Think hard, Mr. Baker. There was something on that hard drive you felt funny about.”

It was coming back to me now, the pictures on Millspaugh’s computer. They were gruesome images of dead people, the kind of thing you might see in a police crime scene book. Nothing illegal per se, you can find that kind of stuff all over the web just by googling death, but certainly disconcerting. I’d looked at them for a few seconds and then moved on with my work, disgusted but too busy to dwell on it. You gotta understand, people have all sorts of weird things on their computers. I try my best not to invade people’s privacy, but sometimes you need to check that files have been recovered, and that others haven’t been corrupted. Like I said, they were gross, but not illegal.

“There were pictures of dead people,” I said. At this, Angie looked up at me, as if speculating where this conversation might be leading. But truthfully, I had no idea where it was going.

“Good memory, Mr. Baker. That’s right, they were pictures of dead people. Or more correctly, some of them were dead, some were just wounded. Now let’s think a bit harder for a second. You ready?”

“What?”

“Are you ready!”

“Yes.”

“Good. As you were shutting down his computer, after you made sure it was working and after you glanced at those photos, you saw something else that felt funny. Do you remember?”

How was this guy pulling these memories from my mind like this? It was true, I had felt funny, and I could remember the moment clearly now. Right before I’d shut down the computer, I’d been looking at one of the gross pictures, a dead man lying on a cement floor in what was arguably a basement. An old antique floor mirror was in the background of the picture. The reflection showed a man standing off to the side, a man wearing a red baseball hat. Just like the one Millspaugh wore. The image was blurry, and hard to make out for sure who it was, so I’d decided not to look again. Like I said, I try not to get into people’s private files. Millspaugh surely had his reasons for keeping the pictures, and besides, he was a jovial guy so I figured there was nothing to worry about. Okay, for a second I had thought, maybe it’s Millspaugh himself in the photo, holding the camera, but like I said, it could have been anyone. My business hinges on word-of-mouth referrals. It’s not like I can just accuse a client of a crime without concrete evidence.

I hadn’t turned to computer back on.

“Yeah, I remember there was a picture . . . the red hat, is that what you’re referring to? Was it Millspaugh?”

“Smart man, Mr. Baker. Now let’s fill in the rest since—” he checked his watch again— “we’ve only got a minute left. It was indeed Millspaugh. And those dead bodies you looked at, they weren’t from some website or movie, they were real.”

I trembled. “Millspaugh killed all those people?”

“Oh yes, and then some.”

“Then let’s just call the cops! I must have his address in my files still. Let’s just—” For the first time, he raised his up face and looked at me. Suddenly, I was screaming, my shivering body going flush with heat. Both Angie and Mandy let loose with shrieks as well. My eyes bulged and I fell backward.

The man before me had no discernable face. Just a black, wrinkled head that looked like a dried prune. Charcoal veins ran under jagged cracks like worms in dirt. Where there should have been eyes, there were holes of deep blackness, ringed by the off-white sheen of dirty skull sockets. The mouth was a mere bloody slit wherein a chewed-up purple tongue twitched feebly. A few yellow, rotting teeth jutted out at odd angles. In the center of this mess, two elongated holes made up the space where his nose should be. Stringy white hairs like canine heartworms provided the eyebrows. He was a rotted corpse.

“We can’t call the cops, Mr. Baker,” he continued, walking over to where I was sitting on the ground. The closer he came the more I backpedaled, my mouth agape, my head shaking silently. Beyond him, my wife and daughter were frozen in shock. “We can’t call them because it won’t matter. Millspaugh is dead.”

It was by sheer miracle that I was able to find my voice. “Then why come for me?”

“Because we all have choices to make. Yours was a simple one, look at the picture again and see if Millspaugh was the man in the mirror, or leave the computer off and decide not get to get involved.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t want to know. You chose not to know. Your choice cost me everything I cared for. Many others as well. Millspaugh butchered me after you gave him his computer back. Or rather, he continued his butchering of me, beginning where he’d left off when it broke. He set it up in the basement again like he always did, along with his video camera, and proceeded to cut me to ribbons over the next three days. All the while he told me how I would be a star, how he’d sell my death to a world I never dreamed existed. And what an agonizing death it was, Mr. Baker. The teeth-pulling, the acid, the dull blades, the castration, the hot brands, the sodomy. I cried like a little girl. And then I died. That’s when I became aware of you. The afterlife is not like this life, Mr. Baker, time does not move in a linear fashion. Futures and pasts are not singularities. There are many, many ways life can play out, and you get to see them all when you die, like a giant starburst surrounding you, each point outstretched to a mere possibility, suggestions of what could be or what could have been. What comes true and what does not are easy enough to tell apart after a while. I saw you that day in your shop, ignoring the evidence before you. I saw a salvation that could have been, but wasn’t.”

“I didn’t know.”

The ghost loomed over me, bent down and held his hand out toward the water. Something jumped out of the lake, crawled its way across the ground and made its way into the trees and eventually the ghost’s hand. He dropped the object in my lap. The shape was unmistakable; it was my gun. Dry as a bone.

“Yes you did,” he continued. “I saw it in your eyes that day in the shop. You knew what you’d seen.”

“I can’t shoot—”

“In a minute. I’m not done. After Millspaugh put my remains through a wood chipper and scattered my pulp into the marshes, he saw my family on the news and went after them. It was his epic movie, an entire family on film. He cut my wife’s head off, broke it into pieces with a sledgehammer. Then he opened my teenage daughter’s vagina with a butcher’s knife and stuffed chunks of my wife’s head inside her. After he sewed her back up, he bound her and locked her in the same room in his basement where’d he kept me. My daughter died weeks later from infection. From carrying pieces of her mother’s head around inside her uterus. A month after that, Millspaugh butchered an old woman he befriended at the grocery store. As he was driving home from discarding that woman’s remains in the marshes, he had a heart attack and died. Are you following this, Mr. Baker? Do you understand my motivation now? There are no pieces of the victims left to be of use to the police. And Millspaugh has been relegated to a place that, quite frankly, could not possibly be bad enough for him. Not as far as I’m concerned.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“No you’re not. You’re just begging. And now you must make a choice, the same as I’ve made a choice. Oh yes, Mr. Baker, I’ve made a choice here as well. A choice I thought long and hard about. Which is why I gave you all day, so that you’d have a chance to think long and hard about your decision. I’ve chosen to take something precious away from you, but only one, which is generous considering what your choice cost me. For me, my choice here will likely send me where Millspaugh now resides. A place of eternal misery and torture. Tough choice, believe me. But I’m angry, Mr. Baker, and I’m willing to take the risk that my soul, instead of turning toward the light this time, will be sucked down into darkness and pain. Such is my choice. Now, it’s time for yours.”

He pointed his own gun at Mandy and Angie. “Choose one of them, or I shoot both. My gun is real, but no bullets will hurt me, so don’t bother. And if you’re thinking of killing yourself, know that I will shoot them both before your body hits the ground. Now . . . choose.”

My trembling body caused the snow under my ass to crunch. There was nothing else I could do but sit and stare. Hearing this man’s, this ghost’s, story of what Millspaugh had done to him, to his family, made my heart ache. But enough to kill my own family? No.

I shot a glance at Mandy, willing her to run, but she was crouched in a ball now. The specter saw my gaze, turned and waved his arms at the nearby trees. The branches and roots jumped to life, animated like that scene in
The Wizard Of Oz
. Only this wasn’t amusing, this had me pissing my pants in fear and hysteria. The branches wrapped around Angie and Mandy and pinned them to the trunks. The specter looked at me again.

“Take your gun and choose who you are going to shoot.”

“I can’t. I won’t.”

“So you’d rather I shoot them both.” He pointed the gun at Mandy’s head.

“No, please don’t,” I sobbed. My little girl, so grown up already, was looking at me with eyes wide enough to put the moon in. “Another way. Isn’t there?”

“Afraid not. I’m counting to five. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five—”

“Wait! Wait, please.” I stood up, my legs vibrating violently. I looked into the corpse’s rotted face and prayed for help, but none came.

The ghost’s black eyes and slit mouth sneered at me. “You’ve chosen?” He cocked the gun, still aimed at Mandy’s head.

I knew I could not stop him. How could I? How do you kill that which is already dead and can move through space and time?

“Have you chosen?” he asked again.

I nodded. Somehow, yes, I had chosen. When you’re a parent, you do what you can for your children. Against the tree to my left, Angie’s face was covered in tears and snot. She was shaking her head no, but I saw the resignation in her face. She knew we were beat. How else could it end, with all of us dead? I couldn’t do that to my daughter.

“I’m waiting, Mr. Baker,” the ghost said.

“Can I say goodbye?”

“Did I get to say goodbye? No, Mr. Baker. Do it or I do them both. Now!”

His voice sent electricity through my bones. He squeezed his finger on his trigger. I saw it pulling back, milliseconds away from killing my daughter. I raised my gun and pointed it at my wife. “No, baby,” she pleaded. She hadn’t called me baby in years; it was what we called each other back in college, back when the love was exciting. Now our love was something deeper, something closer to symbiosis. Twenty years of marriage, your lives just fuse together. Seeing her there against the tree, helpless, scared to death, knowing what was coming, I felt like I was cutting my own heart out.

“I love you,” I said, and shot her in the head.

The back of her skull blew off and spattered the tree behind her, and even in the dark I could see her brain goop its way down the bark. The branches holding her let go and her body fell limply to the ground. Mandy let loose with a scream that couldn’t find its voice, nothing but pluming air and running drool. The ghost stopped pulling his gun’s trigger.

“In the future, Mr. Baker,” it said, “learn to make the right choices in life.”

He tipped his cowboy hat at me, and then disappeared into the frigid night air. Just like he’d never existed.

The gun dropped from my hand, hit the snow-covered ground with a light
thunk
. Likewise, I sat myself down and stared into the dark trees. I could see Mandy on the ground as well, the branches no longer restraining her, her lithe body shivering in the cold air. She was slowly crawling her way to her mother, sobbing, repeating the word no. I couldn’t watch.

Instead, I glanced at my toes, which were turning blue. Then red. Then blue again. Red. Blue.

It wasn’t until a hand fell on my shoulder that I realized the colors were coming from the lights of a police boat at the edge of the lake, that detective Larson had finally arrived. A young officer stepped past me and lifted up my daughter, held her as she finally found her voice and let loose with a torrent of rage and pain so profound I thought the sky would weep for her. The scene unfolded around me as if I wasn’t even there, like a man in a movie theater. I knew Mandy would never be the same again. But she was alive, and that mattered.

Larson shouted an order and more cops made their way into the thicket with us. One of them picked up my gun and dropped it in a bag. His hand still on my shoulder, Larson said, “Stand up, Mr. Baker, you’re under arrest.”

I didn’t answer, just sat there, letting the bleak, cold earth seep into my ass. Eventually, they lifted me up, handcuffed me, and took me to jail.

Tick.

Time passes.

Tick.

Sometimes slowly.

Tock.

I haven’t seen Mandy since before the trial. I haven’t even seen a picture of her. The hospital where she receives treatment said she was unfit to attend. She doesn’t talk, just stares at the walls. Her mind has shut down. Once in a while she screams about ghosts and they sedate her. The doctors concluded her state is the result of severe mental abuse on my part. That and watching me kill her mother. They don’t know if she’ll ever snap out of it. My lawyer brought them a letter, wherein I explained the night with the ghost, hoping they’d put two and two together. They called it the ramblings of a psychotic killer. They think I brainwashed her.