John Dies at the End (30 page)

That’s me in the spotlight

Losing my religion

Tryin’ to beat a tight-assed Jew . . .”

Krissy dug into her purse and pulled out a little black plastic thing that I thought was a flashlight but when she pressed the button a blue spark jumped across the end.

“It’s a Taser. A, uh, stun gun. I don’t think I’ve got anything else in here.” She sifted around in the purse. “Nail file . . .”

“No, let’s go.”

Our hearts hammering, the three of us approached the sprawling building, none of us making a sound other than the crunching of gravel under our shoes.

I made my way to Wexler’s car, edged toward the window with the gun.

Nobody inside.

Ahead was the tall, rusted metal framework that I supposed was going to be a fancy awning for the main entrance. Beneath it was a row of huge windows and a bank of doors, all boarded over with plywood.

Among the graffiti, something had been painted in bold letters two feet high. On closer inspection we saw the letters were twitching, moving ever so slightly.

Slugs.

A couple hundred of them had slimed their way up the boards to spell out a phrase that I was certain was right from “Korrok,” whoever he was:

YOUR DOOMED

His spelling, not mine.

One panel of plywood had been pulled partially off its frame, presumably by Mr. Wexler.

John said, “Dave, you got the gun. You should go in first.”

“You got the stereo! Besides, if I go in and get killed right off the bat, you’re all fucked. But if you get attacked I can rescue you with the gun.”

“Maybe Krissy should go, like as a decoy.”

She moved toward the opening but I shouldered her aside.

The stink hit me one foot inside the place. Rot and mildew and dead rodents.

The empty storefronts were boarded up, giving us a single, impossibly long corridor. The floor was littered with paper cups and candy wrappers and cigarette butts and other teenager droppings. I saw a used condom under my shoe.

Our only light was from a huge skylight running down the length of the building. Parts of it had been boarded over, other sections were spiderwebbed with breaks and clouded with mounds of accumulated dead leaves. When we walked under the boarded-over sections of the glass we found ourselves in pools of absolute blackness.

John lit the flashlight. He fired up the stereo.

“Home Sweet Home” by Mötley Crüe.

We plunged ahead, a creeping pool of light and music in the dead space.

A sound.

Shoes scraping on floor tile.

I raised the gun.

“Wexler?!”

No answer.

We reached a bend in the mall, the hall taking a ninety-degree turn to the right. Blood was pumping in my ears. Palm sweat greased the handle of the gun.

Ahead of us, shoes scraping tile.

A shadowy shape.

Not shoes.

Hooves.

Moving fast.

It was as tall as a man. It passed into a shaft of moonlight.

John screamed a profanity.

I squeezed the trigger.

Gunshots hammered the air.

Krissy shrieked.

Yellow flashes from the gun barrel. Glimpses of brown fur and antlers in the darkness. A deer?

Maybe it had been one, once. This creature had grown several new sets of eyes. Each of its antlers ended in a snapping set of lobsterish claws. It looked like it had a novelty chandelier from a seafood restaurant on its head. Looking back, I have to say it was the stupidest-looking thing I had ever seen.

It stumbled as it got close and my wild shots started to land, blossoms of red opening up on the beast’s chest and neck.

It tried to turn away, showing me its rib cage and taking several broadside shots for its trouble. The mutated deer collapsed, thrashing on the dirty floor tiles and leaving red smears like a child’s finger painting.

It twitched one last time, and was still.

My hands were shaking. The gun looked broken, the top half of it pushed an inch from the rest of the mechanism. After fiddling with it for a few minutes I realized this is what the gun naturally did when it was empty. I pushed in the button to release the empty magazine. Great job conserving ammo so far.

We approached the fallen was-a-deer, kicking brass casings as we went. I pushed at its furry hide with my foot. As solid as a dead deer. I turned to Krissy, asked, “You see it?”

She nodded, eyes still wide.

“Oh, look!” yelped John. “Look at its ass!”

The deer’s ass was melting, puddling on the floor like candle wax. In less than a minute the entire hindquarters were a brown pool on the floor, the ribs quickly caving in like a punctured balloon at a Thanksgiving Day parade. As the front legs and head flattened, the liquid residue from the hindquarters dissolved before our eyes, leaving dry floor behind.

There was one part that didn’t melt, a section in the middle of the animal that protruded from the pink and brown slime. Square. A box about six inches to a side.

I scooted it away with my foot. Heavy. When the goo dissolved from it, I saw that it was a green-and-yellow box marked . . .

“Shotgun shells,” John said. “Too bad we don’t have a . . .”

His voice trailed off as his gaze shifted to a lone wooden crate over by the wall, presumably full of floor tile or coils of electrical wiring and other mall fixin’s.

John delivered a series of hard kicks to the side of the crate, cracking and splintering the boards. He plunged his hands into the opening and pulled out a dark length of plastic and metal that I had already guessed was a shotgun.

Growls emerged from the darkness, followed by the scratches of claws. Many claws.

I clenched the empty gun in my hand, pointing it stupidly into the darkness. John frantically loaded the shotgun.

“WHOA, LOOK AT
the time!” said Arnie, standing to leave. “Mr. Wong, it’s been a hell of a lot of fun talkin’ to you. But I should start my drive back; I got six hours ahead of me. The piece may not run next month, but soon. They may want to run it on Halloween, you know.”

“Arnie, please. You came all this way. Don’t walk away thinking what you’re thinking.”

He dug his car keys from his pocket. “I’m not here to judge, I said that already. The shotgun, hey, the roofers could have left that behind. And maybe that deer got fed up with the local hunters and ate one of them, including the shotgun shells the poor guy had in his pocket.”

He pulled out a cigar from an inside pocket and jammed it into his mouth.

“No, it’s nothing like that. The thing in Wexler, it had the power to call up on these things I guess, to try to kill us. But I think Wexler was still inside there, too, and he was working from the other end, helping us out. He was on the sauce, you know, and he used it.”

“After you told me the part about Las Vegas, you know how I said it was the stupidest story I had ever heard?”

“You didn’t say that.”

“Well, I was thinkin’ it. But I’ve decided I owe that Las Vegas story an apology because this last thing made that one look like
The Grapes of Wrath
. I’ll see ya around.”

Arnie walked toward the exit. I followed, stopping quickly to pay the lady at the counter.

“Wait,” I stammered as he pushed through the door. “I got, you know, all that paperwork on the Hyundai and the accident and all that. The insurance company, they took pictures of the scene and, well, you can’t really see anything but they describe the scene in the report, the dead roaches and all that. I went back that next morning and I got a hand, a clump of the bugs in the shape of, of the fingers. I got it at home . . .”

Nothing from Arnie. He didn’t even nod.

“In my toolshed, in a jar. I can show it to you. I mean, what kind of a person would fake that, would sit at home and glue a bunch of roaches together? ‘Honey, what are you doing?’ ‘Oh, I’m making a roach hand. You know, to aid my credibility with the press.’”

Arnie said, “The kid you say you killed during the Las Vegas thing? Fred Chu? Say I go looking into that, his disappearance.”

I hesitated. “Do it. Those records are out there. I’ve been honest with you, I keep saying that.”

“So you admit killing him?”

“Off the record, yeah.”

“And the other kid that died, Big Jim—”

“He’s really dead, too. You can look it up.”

“I already did. But Big Jim, he would have gone to the cops about Fred, wouldn’t he? That you shot Fred? He didn’t seem too happy about it.”

“I—I don’t know. We’ll never know.”

“Worked out pretty good for you that Big Jim died then, didn’t it?”

“Fuck you.”

“Don’t you see? You got all this ridiculous shit swirling around in your story, Wong, but then you got the parts that are real, the parts that can be verified. And they’re all felonies. A dead kid. A missing kid. A missing
cop
. So why don’t I do both of us a favor and pretend we never talked? Because I’m not sure I wanna hear the rest of it.”

He unlocked the door to a white Cavalier and ducked inside.

“Wait!”

I jogged up to the car and circled around to the passenger side. I gently smacked the window with my palm. Arnie hesitated, then reached over and unlocked it. I leaned in.

“Can I sit down?”

He paused once more, not wanting to prolong this but not quite sure how to get rid of me. Maybe he was afraid I was dangerous, liable to fly into crazy-man violence if turned away. He used both hands to scoop up a bundle of notebooks and folders from the passenger seat. I ducked in and arranged my feet around a pile of recording equipment and cassettes on the floorboard.

“Here,” I said. “Look.” I pulled a single folded sheet of paper from my pocket. “It’s been in my pants all day so it’s kind of wrinkled and, uh, moist, but read it. I copied that from Dr. Marconi’s book.”

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leaving it looking like a jar of pickled eggs that had been eaten and then vomited by a gorilla.

The strange ritual was done in service to a deity who to my ears sounded like “Koddock” (the tribe had no written language). I was told that each member bore the mark of this god and I was allowed to witness the branding ceremony each member undertakes at the age of manhood.

The young man was forced to lay facedown on a mat, naked. The priest then brought out a clay jar containing the writhing maggots of bot flies. The larvae were placed on the back of the young man, arranged in the shape of Koddock’s symbol. The maggots then chewed through the top layer of skin, digging holes a half-inch deep. I was told the larvae would, according to ceremony, be allowed to remain in their warm, wet tunnels in the young man’s back for seven days. If the young man succumbed to the itch and scratched the spot, he would fail the test of manhood and would have to wait a year before attempting it again.

On the seventh day the larvae are extracted by the priest and the wound treated. What remains will be the trails of scar tissue, following the paths eaten by the worms. These scars would form the “brand” of Koddock. The priest showed me the finished symbol and the pipe literally fell from my mouth.

Once more, it was like the symbol for pi, only rotated ninety degrees to the left. The same symbol I had seen a Manchester toddler draw in his trance state months before.

I was so stunned by what he told me that I could not keep my feet. Sitting on the floor of my hotel, I pondered the enormity of the revelation and sought out my flask.

Haleine explained that there was an Egyptian god named Kuk, who was already known to Egyptologists (in the Ogdoad cosmogony, Kuk

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was a frog-like god who represented darkness and chaos). Haleine, however, believed he had stumbled upon a cult that worshipped his rash and destructive son, Kor’rok. This god was represented symbolically by a man punctured by two spears, one in the mouth and one in the groin, the twin centers of desire for mankind.