Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28428152-20181023045654

Chapter XVII

Joe and I shambled our way through the door and into our favorite hangout spot: The Skuzz Bucket, a dim pub full of noisy drunks, pool, and the hottest wings in town. We were both ready to unwind; it had been a long day at Lunar Skies.

“God,” Joe said as he took his usual seat at their usual table near the bar, “nineteen incidents in one day.”

I sat down across from him and wheezed in exasperation. “I know. I’ve never seen them like that. My muscles are sore from all the restraints we had to do. It was like one after the other.”

“I mean Christ, we even had to restrain Willy! It was a fucking riot down there!”

I nodded my head and massaged my calf where one patient had kicked me repeatedly.

“Fuckin’ got nailed in the nuts more than I have in my whole life, man,” Daniel continued. “Whatever, I just wanna get my food and some beer. Then go home, relax, maybe catch up on some Breaking Bad.”

“Shit,” I said, “I’m going straight to bed when I get home. I’m tired as hell.”

I scanned the crowded room. My eyes locked onto one of the waitresses and I hailed her down.

“Hi, how are y’all doin’?” she asked, a wide smile plastered across her face.

“I’m doing fine,” I said.

“Good, good,” Joe added.

“That’s great to hear. What can I get you boys tonight?”

Joe coughed and said, “I’d like a platter of Skuzz Rounds and a Samuel Adams, please.”

“Okay, and what about you, sir?”

“I’ll have the Skuzzy Bucket o’ Wings and I’ll also take a Samuel Adams.”

“What kind of sauce would you like?”

“Skuzz Sauce.”

“Feeling brave, huh? Well, I’ll go ahead and get your drinks, and your food’ll be ready in just a minute.”

Joe waited until the waitress was out of earshot before he leaned over to me and said, “Damn, you see those tits? Fakest lookin’ honkers I’ve ever seen.”

I faked a chuckle and pretended to check my phone. I’d never been a fan of Joe’s attitude towards women.

“Bet if I poked ‘em with a pencil, they’d pop like balloons.”

“Yup.”

Joe, for once in our friendship, seemed to have picked up on my subtle cues of disinterest and swiftly changed the topic, but not before we had a chance to receive our drinks.

“Anyways, how those interviews going? Got any crazy stories?”

I laughed and said, “Dude, you have no idea. I told her I was using these as ideas for a book, but damn, I might as well. Jan is fuckin’ nuts, dude.”

“How so?”

“Okay, so get this: there’s this ghost-monster thing called The Nameless, right?”

“Ghost-monster?”

“Uh, demon thingy, I guess. Anyways, she thinks this thing is trying to kill her. And she thinks that it killed her friend Mike before she came here.”

Joe snorted. “Jesus, that’s fucking rich. Whatever happened to ‘Oh, Jan’s not a retard?’”

“She told me more,” I replied. “But I mean, I still don’t think she’s, like, that dumb, but she’s definitely crazy.”

“Pssh, you’re telling me. If she can talk your head off like that about a demon that’s after her, she must be. But I dunno man, I really think you should stop talking to her. I mean, money’s great and all—believe me, I wish I had more of it myself—but she’s been following you around like a puppy.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” I said with a swig. “But, I mean, I get it. She’s lonely, and she is admittedly a little… slow. But, I dunno, that money really calls to me.”

Joe shook his head and took a long drink from his glass, though he stopped suddenly and lowered it slowly, his eyes fixated towards the bar.

“What is it?” I asked.

He squinted his eyes in confusion and whispered, “Hey, since when did Hal start coming here?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Is he here?”

“Well,” he said, smacking his lips, “he’s sitting right over there, and it looks to me like he’s staring daggers into the back of your head.”

A pit formed in my stomach and I turned to look behind me. Sure enough, there he was: Hal the security guard, glowering at me with a beer in his hand, his heavy eyebrows slumped over his eyes. I quickly averted my gaze back to Joe.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” I hissed. Joe shrugged his shoulders.

“No clue.”

“God-dammit. It’s bad enough I have to look at him at work, now he’s gotta come here? Jesus!”

“Yeah. Wanna go kick his ass?”

“No, you know I couldn’t do that. It was my stupid-ass anyways. Fuckin’ pulling that shit on him last Christmas. God, I was such a fucking idiot.”

“Hey, man, I was just kiddin’. I might be dumb, but I’m not that dumb.”

I looked back towards Hal. I noticed that he was caressing his finger over his pocket as a smirk crossed his face.

“Why’s he looking at me like that?”

“Don’t kno—Dude, he’s got a fuckin’ knife!”

I turned back around and sure enough, he was playing with a pocket knife, twirling the blade in his fingers like a baton.

“Fuck. Hey, you wanna bail, Joe? We can leave the money on the table, but I don’t exactly feel like getting stabbed tonight.”

He took a moment before responding. “Probably not a good idea. He’s heading outside, and he’s still got the knife out. He might jump us when we step outside.”

I rubbed my temples, cursing myself for having been such a shithead that Christmas.

“Fine,” I blurted. “Let’s just enjoy our hot wings, play some pool, and try to lose track of time, I guess.”

“Whatever, man. Don’t have anything better to do anyways.”

We ended up staying until closing time, both of us plastered and happy. By the time we’d stepped outside, both of us had long forgotten about Hal and his knife. At least, until I went to my car and found the tires slashed and large gouges in the paint.

*  *     *     *  *

Janice patted Rosa’s back in an effort to comfort the sobbing wreck. It had been four days since Mike’s bizarre disappearance, and Rosa had since become inconsolable, locked away in her dim apartment that still held the cluttered leftovers of Mike’s existence.

“I-if only I hadn’t t-told him to get out!” Rosa wailed, her face buried in Janice’s chest. “M-maybe he wou-wouldn’t have gone insane!”

“It wasn’t your fault, Rosa. And he’s not gone forever, he has to be somewhere. They’ll find him.”

Rosa sniffed but didn’t say anything.

“He was probably on something he shouldn’t have. He never was careful.”

“Stupid bastard n-never cared,” Rosa replied, her voice thick with tears. “He just w-wanted to get high all the time. And do his stupid physics projects.”

She pulled her head up and stared at the coffee table, her red dreadlocks hanging over her face. “Kept telling him to get off that shit, go to therapy, or come with me to an NA meeting. He’d just laugh.”

Rosa reached over to the coffee table and put on her glasses—she hadn’t bothered with contacts that day.

“I don’t know how he managed to keep up with school. He’d come home high off of God-knows-what every night.”

Jan smiled; she didn’t know what to say, she only knew to show her friend that she was listening. Rosa pushed her hair out of her face and reached under the couch, pulling out Mike’s dirty old bong.

“I thought you quit?” Jan asked. Not judgmentally, only observantly.

“Fuck that.”

Rosa pulled out a bag and dumped its contents onto the table, haphazardly grinding the weed.

“You mind putting on some music? Just play whatever’s in the stereo.”

Jan nodded and made her way across the cluttered floor. As she turned it on and pressed play, she could hear a familiar bubbling behind her.

“You want some?” Rosa offered when Jan sat back down. She hesitated but indulged nonetheless.

“’You know day destroys the night. And night divides the day. Try to run, try to hide, break on through to the other side!’”

“No, no, not this song,” Rosa coughed. “Put on that Bob Marley CD right there. Skip to the second song. ‘No Woman, No Cry.’”

Jan obliged, her lungs on fire. When she sat back down, Rosa handed her the bong again.

“You know,” Rosa said a few minutes later after they’d exhausted Rosa’s supply, “usually I hate it when Mike would put this on when we used to smoke. Felt too… stereotypical, you know? But… I dunno. It was always his favorite album, though he didn’t usually tell people. Most of the folks who we hang out with aren’t into that kinda thing.”

Jan nodded absently as she pulled a blanket over herself.

“He said that his mom used to sing him this song to sleep when he was little. Before she forgot him. I think that’s why it was his favorite. It reminded him of… of… a time when things were better in his life. Before everything happened.”

“Before wha… what happened?” Jan yawned, her eyes heavy.

Rosa shrugged. “Don’t know. He never told me everything. Said it was too much. Too much to bring back. All I know is that it wasn’t long after his dad—I mean his mom—left. I think he said he was… fifteen? No, fourteen. Anyways, the only thing he ever told me about it was that something happened when he went camping with… his uncle… his grandpa… Clay, Clay was there, too—”

“Wait, they go back that long?”

“You never knew that? Yeah, they go back since middle school, man. Oh, and they had a friend named James who went with them, too.”

“Has Clay ever told you about it?”

Rosa shook her head, curling herself into the corner of the couch.

“Nope. Never asked, either. I figured… that if Mike didn’t wanna talk about it, then Clay wouldn’t either. And I can understand why.”

“Why?”

“Uh… because I do know that something really bad happened out there, and Mike’s grandad and their friend James got killed. But he would never tell me how. His eyes would just kind of go blank, or big, like he was looking at a corpse, and he’d refuse to talk. He’d be like a little kid for a while afterwards, too, so I stopped asking about it. But whatever it was must’ve been bad for him to act like that. You know?”

The room was silent for a few minutes, the music crawling by in the background. Then Jan remembered something.

“I’ve heard Mike talk about James before,” she said.

“What?”

“Like, not to me, but like, to himself. You know? It was that first night he came over to stay, I heard him saying James’ name while he was asleep. Telling him not to go, or to come back, something like that.”

The silence hung in the air again, each of them lost in their thoughts.

“Fuck,” Rosa huffed.

“What is it?”

Rosa rubbed her forehead and said, “I just remembered that Greg called me up yesterday. Asked if I can fill in vocals for the show on Tuesday.”

“Th-they’re still playing?” Jan shouted. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Yeah. And I told them I would. I don’t know why.”

Rosa closed her eyes and leaned her head back.

“He also said he wouldn’t be able to make it. Asked if you could fill in on guitar.”

“Fuck no, I’m not doing that. It’d be like…. It’d be like having a party at a funeral.”

“Yeah, but I already told them I would. Are you sure you don’t want to? I know you don’t like the idea, but it’d help to have somebody there.”

Jan took a breath and thought for a minute.

“Yeah, I guess I can do it. Won’t be fun, but fine, I’ll go.”

Rosa gave a forced half-smile and said, “Thanks.”

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Jan asked.

Rosa opened her eyes slowly, not meeting Jan’s.

“Yeah.”

“What did you guys fight about? It’s okay if you don’t wanna talk about it.”

“It was stupid,” Rosa replied. “He wanted to get a gun. Said we needed it. He knew I hate guns, so I told him no. But he kept pushing me about it. Said that we—he­—needed it. Said that somebody was after him. Never would tell me who. He was high, though. I think on coke. Wouldn’t fucking drop it. And of course, I was pissed at him for using coke, he knew I hated that shit. Told him never to touch it. And it just kind of went from there. We screamed at each other for like an hour before I told him to j-just get… get out.” Rosa wiped her eyes.

“I told him to choose me or d-drugs. That I-I never wanted to see him again until he was clean. And then he left. I-I think I’m gonna go to bed. You can use the couch if you want. I don’t care.”

Before Jan had a chance to say anything else, Rosa rose to her feet with legs trembling and hurried to the bathroom. Jan wanted to go after her, but she knew that Rosa needed her space. So instead, she turned off the lights and went to sleep.

The couch was warm and soft, and Jan nestled further into it, annoyed that her body had woken her up. She pulled the blanket tighter around herself, sighing at the softness of it. She could feel some remnants of the marijuana still in her system, which only made her want to go back to sleep even more. Then her eyes shot open.

She checked her watch.

“Shit,” she hissed. She was late for work.

Jan sprang up from the couch and scurried around the apartment, grabbing everything she’d brought with her. She stepped into the hallway that led into Rosa’s room, about to say goodbye. But she heard snores and decided against it.

The way home was quick, as she drove about ten miles over the speed limit. She cursed herself for not taking her uniform with hers to Rosa’s. She’d promised that she’d be up early enough to have time.

As she drove, the music that had come on when she started only served to make her feel more anxious, but for reasons she couldn’t think of, she could only turn the volume up, her heart racing as thoughts thrashed around in her brain about her boss and Mike Erikson. It was him, after all, who’d given her the CD playing on her stereo, [A-B] Life.

“’Let us die, let us die. And in dying, we reply, “Oh, don’t you tell us about your suffering. No, look in our eyes, look in our eyes.” Let us be, let us be.’”

Jan narrowly avoided hitting a cat running across the road, though she still didn’t slow down. The race home had no longer become about putting on her uniform. Rather, Jan had come over with an overwhelming false hope to see Mike. She knew he wouldn’t be there, but it couldn’t be real, she thought. She would come home, and Mike would be sleeping on the couch, whispering of friends gone by.

“’When you laugh, you’ll feel my breath there, filling up your lungs. And when you cry, those aren’t your tears but I’m there, falling down your cheek.’”

Jan swerved into the driveway ten minutes later, Mike’s shitty old station wagon still as he’d left it. Inside, Dibby was howling fanatically, clawing at the window and waggling his tongue at her.

“Yes, I know, Dibby,” she greeted as she went into the house, blocking the door to keep him from escaping in his excitement. “I know, Mommy was gone the whole night. I’m glad to see you, too.”

She sped into the kitchen to fill his bowl for the day, glancing into the den. The room was empty.

Jan had to hold back tears as she changed into her work clothes, her irrational disappointment welling in her chest like a monster surfacing from the deeps ready to pop out, like in that movie Alien she’d seen recently.

It was on her way out that Jan noticed it lying on the coffee table. She didn’t remember it being there when she arrived. But she definitely would have noticed it before, in the four-and-a-half days that had passed.

She had stopped in her tracks, her Dingle Burger outfit filling her nose with fumes of rotten grease.

It was a black book. The same one she had seen on the counter next to Mike. She turned her head, swearing she felt eyes burning into her skull. But she saw no one.

She leaned down to investigate it further. It appeared to be made of some kind of leather, though she hadn’t quite seen anything like the material before. A severed head was stamped in red on the front, and on the spine was written, The Book of Agony. She cradled it in her hands, the weight of the object disturbing her for reasons she couldn’t comprehend. There was a smell to it, too. It smelled of pennies and burnt paper.

She was about to open it, but Dibby snarled at the strange book, bringing Jan back to her senses. She needed to go to work.

She would look at it later. 