I want you to know this story keeps going and I'm going to post Monday to Friday until it's done, usually around nine or ten. This is the third chapter. You'll find everything out. I promise.
The first one is here: http://redd.it/31knyw
And the second is here: http://redd.it/31p6tn
But I left you right before I was about to join the Beowulf Club. This is what happened next.
The trees looked like long arms. The others stared at me. I looked at Lori.
"I want in," I said.
The joint they gave me —i don't think it was just pot. It seemed chemical and strong and it made my jaws ache, my muscles twitch. Things were moving at the edges of my vision. People didn't had firm edges. I watched Bangs Sundress disappear and then reassemble. Lori was cutting her palm. Then she was cutting mine. I could hear something moving in the woods.
"You're in," she was grinning, all teeth. "You're a member of the Beowulf club now. Forever."
The world went out in the middle. I can remember some things: a mattress next to the camper, someone pressed against me, another cut, and the noises, the noises like engines revving.
"Come on," Lori whispered, standing above me,"something is happening."
I stood up. I had been on a mattress on the ground. Leaves and twigs were in my hair, on my shirt. The sun was setting and everything was shadows.
"What's going on? What happened?"
"Quiet," she put her finger against her lip, "come on."
I stood up and followed her into the dark, toward the sound of the motors.
Their noise grew louder. We were climbing up a hill, and when we reached the top, a small clearing below became visible: a green field turning into shadows, bordered by a river.
There was a man running.
Behind him, there were two quads, slowly keeping pace with him, occasionally cutting in front, causing him to fall, and then pulling back. I looked at Lori. She stared straight ahead.
The quad headlights came on and they began to circle the man. He was in his forties, wearing jeans and sneakers, a Lebron t shirt. He looked terrified in the sudden illumination. But the brightness of headlights allowed me to see the drivers.
It looked like they were wearing masks. But they looked too real. Their heads looked like wolves, with long snouts and sharp white teeth. Their tongues were long and wet and red as they encircled the man. He had stopped running and was grabbing his jeans with his hands, bending over. I thought of how dogs run in circles around you, how that behavior is inherited from wolves. I thought about how humans had bred out what the wolves do after they circle you.
They run in and bite until you are too weak to fight and then they kill you.
The first quad drove in and hit the guy right in the chest. He flew up in the air and landed hard. I heard him scream and the other engine rev and I started running.
"Hey!"
Lori was shouting behind him but I just kept going, away as fast as I could through the thick trees and branches in the last fading sun.
I got home and locked the door. My head was throbbing and my chest hurt from running. I didn't think Lori knew where I lived, but she could probably find out at the store.
I ran through possible drugs that could have been in the joint, deciding on pcp or maybe bath salts. PCP is kind of old school. It was probably bath salts. That seemed very 2013 of them. So maybe none of it really happened. Just really vivid hallucinations. Then I remembered Lori cutting my palm. If it really happened, my hand would still be cut.
I looked down at my right hand. I didn't want to look because which is worse? To see something that didn't happen or to see something that shouldn't have happened? I unclenched my fist and turned my hand over.
There, running horizontal across my palm, was a long cut.
I don't know how I fell asleep. I thought I was going to be sitting on the couch all night and then, suddenly, there was daylight pouring through the window and onto me and someone was pounding on the door. I opened it and it was the cop, Officer Michaels, telling me my dad was dead and I needed to come with him.
I rode in the front seat. The cop had wanted me to identify the body first, but when I explained I wouldn't be able to recognize him, he said it was fine, he would take me to my dad's house. That's why we have DNA testing, he said, the breeze coming in through the windows. It was spring. Trees crowded the sides of the roads and the big flat stretches of field were green and new looking. Everything that dies get born again.
We took Route 19, following it as it left the town and traffic lights behind, watching the landscape transition into farms and dull looking cows. As I was about to ask the cop how much longer, he turned to the left.
"This is it," he said. "This is the house."
The house was in ruins. Located just off the road, it hovered ominously at the edge of the deep woods that surrounded the town. I felt my body tense as I remembered yesterday and what had happened. The lawn had became part of the forest, dense and deep and waving in the slow breeze. Everything was green and black. Twisting vines grew through windows without glass. Bursts of green came from the roof, like trees were trying to grow there, for some desperate reason.
Nature was swallowing the home alive.
"I want to make sure you remember what I told you coming out here," the cop said.
He was getting out of the car. I was already out, moving toward the door. I heard him telling me it might not be something I wanted to see.
I opened the door.
The trash nearly touched the ceiling. It was in bags, in stacks, in massive heaping piles. Tiny clearings cut in between the heights. They were little paths in forests for kids in fairytales. Newspapers, plastic bottles, paper plates, plates, books, magazines, pots and pans and spoons and silverware. All the mundane possessions of a house but in looming towers. And the smell. I could barely breath. It was vinegar. It was feces. It was rot and death and the metal smell of blood. I started coughing and backed out.
On the grass outside, in the warm sunshine, the dirt still felt cold with the heaviness of winter. I threw up. Yellow and wet. When I was done, I stood up and saw Officer Michaels holding a face mask, one of those you wear for painting, or for SARS or ebola outbreaks. I pulled it on and told him I was all right. We went back in.
The house seemed to swallow us. We waded through the garbage. I didn't touch anything. The smell kept pulsing at me, coming in waves. The cop said they were dead animals in there. Cats. Squirrels. Maybe other things.
"How'd he die," I asked.
"It was over there," he pointed at an area in the corner. "A pile fell on him. It was over fast, the examiner told me."
When you don't know someone who is very important to you on a genetic level, you try to imagine them. It was a game I played with my dad. My mom never showed me a picture. She never told me a story. She never even said his name. The only two things she ever said were he was white and he was mean.
I looked biracial growing up, but everyone still called me black. I wasn't one of those light skinned kids who could maybe be Spanish, maybe be white in the right lighting. No. I looked black with dark hair and dark eyes and dark skin. But my mom never stopped saying I wasn't black. I wasn't all black. I was part him. Part white. Part violent and unknown. I think she told me so often because she was so obsessed with it herself. Like she thought I was poisoned by him. I felt like that. My father was something toxic in my blood that would kill me. But I didn't know what he looked like. So I started assigning white men from television to play the role of my father.
At first, it was dudes from commercials. Guys selling cars. Guys selling trucks. Guys selling anything. They turned into my father whenever my mother told me how much she hated him. Or whenever she wouldn't come home for a night. The car salesmen and truck salesmen and anything salesmen would turn into him. They would sit on the couch and ask me about my day. And then they would vanish.
Later, I cast movie villains as him. The guy from Die Hard. The torturer in Marathon Man. The guy who shoved Buscemi in the wood chipper in Fargo. That's who ny dad was to me. He was a killer.
So that was who I imagined dying on the ground, trapped under his own trash: Alan Rickman. Lawrence Oliver. Carl Showater. One of those violent men, bleeding and dying alone.
I asked the cop how he knew to find me. He said I needed to come out to the kitchen. That there was something I needed to see.
As bad as the living room was, the kitchen was worse. Roaches stampeded when we walked out. The refrigerator was open and a thick, furry black mold, like a dog's cost, billowed out from out. The clear window of the oven was cracked.
"Jesus," I whispered.
On the fridge there was a square space completely clean and there, held up by magnets, was a white piece of paper, the curled edges yellowed with age. On it was my name, my date of birth, my social security number along with a list of addresses, everywhere I had ever lived, with each neatly crossed out save my current location.
Below it was written: this my blood.
"That's how we knew to call you," the cop said. The kitchen shimmered around me, the trash moving. Warm sun pulsed in in through the windows. Everything was hot and spinning,I threw up, again, this time on the filth strewn linoleum. The ceiling fan above me was on, slowly tracing endless circles. I felt like I had swallowed an animal whole and alive and it was trying to crawl its way out of me.
"We got a call. Someone called 911, then they hung up," the cop was saying. We had gone back outside again to catch our breath. The smell felt like it was in me. "I came out here and I found the door open. He was already gone. I'm sorry."
The cop talked the way the beach feels when it's raining and you're watching the grey skies blend into the grey ocean from the hotel. The blankness was comforting.
"Who called 911?" I asked, "I thought you said he died instantly?"
"Oh," he said and he sounded kind of sad, "I think he did die fast, but probably not instantly. He had enough strength to cal but— you don't need to hear, right?"
The wind was picking up, ripping through trees and across long stretches of grass. I could smell flowers cutting through the dead smell.
"Why don't you go," I asked him. "I'll stay here."
"You want to stay?" He looked back at the house. "Here?"
"It's my house now."
After he got in the car and drove off, I was left alone. At first I didn't go back in. I didn't do anything. It was afternoon by this point. On the two lane road an occasional car drifted past. I went to the front door again. I turned on the lights. What was I expecting? For them to not click on and then I could leave, never to return? But they did turn on. The house waited, impatient for me again. I went back in.
My mask felt tight and I wasn't sure what I was looking for. Chairs were on top of piles of crap. Broken tables were covered with clothes. I threaded my way through the living room, past the spot where he died, into the kitchen. There was a door at the edge of the kitchen. I opened it and saw two sets of stairs: one leading up, the other down. Both had so many things on them you could barely move. I went upstairs. I think I knew I wouldn't be able to handle the basement.
The passageway was slightly wider once I entered the main hallway. The walls had paintings hanging on them. I don't know why that surprised me. It did. They were all paintings of farmhouses: silos and pigs and fences. Idyllic scenes of nature. Then there were framed sketches of wolves, all done in black and white. A window in the hallway was covered in something sticky. I kept moving.
A bedroom door was at the end of the hall. It was half closed. I pushed it open with my foot and flipped the light switch. The whole room was filled with paper. Everything was folders with paper shoved in, huge tall piles of battered notebooks. There wasn't as much trash detritus as there was in the other rooms. This was a file room. A crazy file room, but a honest to god functioning file room.
I sat down on the floor and grabbed a folder. Inside were about fifteen hand scrawled pages. I took a breath and opened. Every page, the same thing was written. MR GRIEVES MR GRIEVES MR GRIEVES MR GRIEVES over and over and over again.
I picked up the next notebook. The same thing. And the next the same. And the next and the next and every paper in the room was covered with his name. Like it was some kind of God and this was a celebration, a church, a temple for something terrifying.
Through the filthy windows I became aware of something other than sunlight. It was blue and red and flickering.
I made my way down the stairs and through the filthy house. There were cops outside. Four of five cars. They were out of the cars and holding guns. I held my arms up and stepped out.
They screamed for me to get down and when I did they handcuffed me. Grass was in my mouth. I saw them rushing into the house. One bent over me, he kept asking who I was and what I was doing there. I couldn't talk. I kept saying Officer Michaels and the guy kept screaming, saying who the fuck are you talking about?
Another car came. Dudes came out in hazmat suits and went into the house. They were carrying bags. I was still on the ground. A new cop came to talk to me.
"What's your name?"
"Ezekiel Monday."
"All right, Zeke, why are you here?"
"I'm here because this is my dad's house." My neck hurt from being twisted on the grass. I couldn't really move.
"Your dad lives here?"
"No. He died. I guess. Officer Michaels said he died, and I needed to come here."
"Officer who?"
"Michaels. Big dude? Tattoos?"
"I don't know who you're talking about. Stay here."
The cops were all milling around, talking to each other. Another car came up. More hazmat guys came out.
"So what you're saying is," the cop had come back. He was tanned, in a leather kind of way, with small constantly moving eyes, "your dad died here?"
"Yeah. That's what I'm saying. What's going on?"
"We came out here last night," the cop said, "and found a body — your dad, I guess. Because we thought it was the guy who lived here. So we brought the body — christ, I'm sorry — the person to the morgue. Then, we get a call after lunch. Turns out it's not your dad."
"What?"
"The body. It isn't your dad. Its not the guy who lived here. It's this guy instead," he held up a picture, a guy in a Lebron shirt, "you recognize him?"
"What is this? Who was the guy who took me here?" My chest felt tight and insane, like it was going to break, "Officer Michaels? He had a cop car! Who was he?"
"We'll find out," he said, "but do you recognize him?"
I looked at the guy I had seen killed last night in the woods.
"No. I've never seen him."
"All right," said the cop, "give us a minute and we'll help you out."
"Wait, what's going on with all the suits? And where's my dad?"
He took a moment. Then he spoke, very quietly, "We don't know where your dad is, but we definitely want to talk to him and it's for the same reason these guys are wearing the suits," he paused, then, "because in the basement there are twenty deep freezers and they're fucking full of bodies. And we'd like to find out why."
Submitted April 08, 2015 at 07:32AM by Orphanology http://ift.tt/1N63f3P nosleep
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