Inglehart's Monsters, Pt. 3

The records were highly censored. I read through all of the records over and over again, black marks were littered all over the pages. Names were deleted even though dates were left there. Names were replaced by numbers, signifiers for each prisoner. The unemotional signifying of the prisoners brought the stark realization of those cameras from my old office: there are no humans here. People littered the solitary prison cells as I looked from the new office from the Tower, but they weren’t humans. They were closer to being an animal caught in a trap. I waited for the gnawing off of limbs.
It had only been about a week since Bart had been placed into the facility here. Inglehart had been specific in keeping what he had done under wraps until we could figure out just what had happened. All of Bart’s symptoms seemed to just point to a complete mental breakdown. I tried to keep him under observation for days in isolation. He never moved from the corner of the room. He only rocked back and forth in the far left corner from my vantage point. This was the work Inglehart had told me would give me the experience I need to work with the prisoners.
The first week I had working with a prisoner came as a shock to me.
The prisoner displayed the typical traumatic disorders associated with isolation; dissociative personality disorder, paranoia and a developing multiple personality disorder. His physical body had deteriorated to a point of what appeared to be acutely related to psychosomatic illnesses, or Munchhausen’s Disease. Prisoner 764 had spent an entire week of his time with me speaking of how he had been sick ever since his second week of his tenure in the prison.
Every other prisoner displayed the same tendencies of dissociative personality disorder, including a personality override. Each prisoner had a minimum of three personalities, one of which appeared to be violent towards themselves, if not anyone within arm’s length.
The last day will stick with me until I die.
The time together had been just as it always was with Prisoner 764. His continual litany of woes and illnesses brought him to the point of death. As I was working on his prescription of opiates, he jumped across the table between us. He knocked over the chessboard. Sinewy fingers wrapped tightly, squeezing my neck. I was becoming light-headed, almost blacking out as the guards ran in, faces hidden by their masks.
I struggled to my feet and screamed at the prisoner. I was swearing, promising, praying that the prisoner would be put into the desert around us to die in the sand. As I was screaming, I barely noticed the guards place a hand on my shoulder. I barely noticed the needle be pressed into my neck. I just remember the black.
****
I woke up in Inglehart’s dining room. The crimson walls and high seatbacks were as imposing as they were when we all first got there. I sat and my bags were placed by the door which we had been forbidden to open.
Inglehart shuffled in looking over his notes.
I sat motionless as he sat across from me. His saggy, wrinkled flesh was contorted into a face of seriousness. He began to tut as he read the notes. Long minutes felt like hours as I watched his bright blue eyes skirt the page in the same place.
He finally looked up at me and had his wolfish smile as he spoke the words which I knew were coming, “You’re going home. You have finished your research.”
I nodded and began to rise.
“Wait,” his voice cut into my muscles as I lowered back into my seat. “You have not been told why. Wouldn’t you like to know what you are allowed to bring back into the world from here?”
I searched his face. He turned his attention back to the stack of papers and began to split it into two distinct piles. He worked quickly and deftly, hands moving only as fast as they could. Finally, he reached the end of the stack. Inglehart smiled at me and made his wrinkled hand push the smaller stack to me.
I didn’t reach out but looked at the other stack. He followed my eyes down and smiled.
“This shows too much of what I am doing here, too much of the eugenic quality of my work. After all, a Jew that believes in purifying humanity is quite an outrage. Especially if that Jew has numbers etched into his skin.”
He leaned forward to meet my eyes, “the monsters I keep here are specifically kept as not to be able to breed anymore. I do not go out of my way like I was forced not to breed, these monsters are whole; a gift I was not given. However, you have caught onto how these men may have no communication and or lobotomies, so I think it’s a win-win. Take your things and go.”
“Doesn’t this take away from the whole fact of being human? You do not give them a chance, you don’t rehabilitate. There is no chance of salvation here.” My voice was becoming shaky as I met his blue eyes.
“Do not play this game. You know as well as I, salvation is a lie. No one has salvation,” he slowly stood up. “That crucifix around your neck is a lie. That was what Bart saw here, no isolation or mental lapse from separation. He saw the human condition; we are born to be slaves and to hate. This is my evolution, my way to breed out the people who cause these problems. No homophobia, no racism, no one there to kill or inflict pain on anyone the way my mother met!”
His voice echoed through the hall as he stood rigidly. Slowly, he sat back down and threw the other stack of papers into the fire behind him.
“Sometimes, those few who have had a chance must be erased to ensure that they never be brought back.” His voice became small as he looked at his shaking hands, “the violent have become a scourge on our society. This is my way to pay it back, to eradicate those violent and to physically force it out of them.” He moved his hands slowly up his sleeve to look at the numbers in his skin, “I stand up in spite of no one doing that for me. No cares what happens to them, just like they don’t care about the victims, they only want to make sure it never happens to them. Selfish machines are all we are. Now go.”
****
I don’t know what happened to the others. I was ushered out of the place. I left after what he said. The desert air filled my lungs outside.
I got onto the bus waiting for me and looked at the gates.
I did not become death, but I had dinner with him.



Fins.

Inglehart's Monster's Pt. 2

It must have been a bad dream. I woke up being told that it was. The others had made it seem like it had been an odd shared dream, but nothing more than that. No one had a dream of a grotesque figure with oddly lined faces grasping at them with faux hands like I had. Each had remembered that they were taken back to their rooms in a sleepily, alcoholic stupor. I shrugged off my fears of Inglehart and his monsters as being nothing more than fear induced nightmares. I had spent the entire trip to Inglehart’s prison reading his reports on the atrocities he had seen.

            The nightmares must just have been those catching up with me.

            I was told to report to the Tower’s psych ward to begin my studies. The hallways were subtly changed as I walked to the corridor which would take me to the offices. My bag was slung on my left shoulder with all the books I could find on prisons and psychoanalytic punishment for criminals. Echoes of my footsteps rang through the hallway. Finally reaching the tunnel’s opening one which was, as Bart had pointed out to me, hidden behind the pillar barely a mention that there could have been a staircase if a person was not careful I went to my home for the next several months.

            The office was quite large and gave me a good view of the isolation cells which had made Inglehart so famous on multiple display screens. My office was underground and, as Bart explained to me over coffee this morning, the outside glasses offered only a hallway and nothing more from there.

            “It’s so odd to think that they have the glass which is only ever used for the occasional patrol,” Bart had said in his musical voice. “After all, wouldn’t something like your work –” motioning to me with the hand holding the bacon covered fork “—benefit from actual watching of the prisoners?”

            I nodded as I sipped my coffee, but explained the working of what the glass, especially the one way view of it did. It was like when you see a camera in a store, I told him, the camera for the most part will keep order. You only need to catch one of every four criminals to ever enforce order. Along the lines of–

            “Big Brother.” Bart finished my sentence for me. I had nodded then, but I had looked at the time and rushed out the door. As I looked now at the screens, this authoritarian view of these criminals – thought the scum of the earth to me at that point – scared me. I had never noticed the nausea of being able to watch all of these people all of the time. See their mistakes from the objective god view. Correct them as they went about their day in a lobotomized zombie way. Even from my view upon them now, I could see the scared and nervous actions.

****

The view I had gave the expected results as I had been told the idea. If a prisoner put his hand through the bars I was to record it, their name and report it. As it happened, the prisoners would be given a shock or something, I couldn’t see from what or where – if there had been a generator, it was hidden – but it was highly effective at keeping the people where they were and in the cell. Operators were the only voice I had to interact with for the nine hours I was in the viewing room, excruciating boredom allowed me to work on my thesis and to think of the night before.

            From my vantage point, I couldn’t be sure of the humanity of the prisoners. I suppose that was the point, though. The more you know of these prisoners, the more a person wished to help them. We had been told before coming here of the crimes these men had committed. Rapists, murderers, cannibals and paedophiles had been the justification from Inglehart to bring into this place. Since isolation and possible violence from other prisoners in other prisons may have been perpetrated, the powers that be had allowed a small segment to be taken to this dark Tower in the wastelands.

            I could not understand what had driven these men to do such things. I supposed that’s what made me so obsessed with understanding them. I counted the days until Inglehart had promised me by the letter he sent to place me into a clinical position with the prisoners. It would come in weeks and I would speak, interact and see these monsters face to face. See the Grenwich Killer, a man who had killed six women and used their flesh as fish bait; speak to the Ilium Clown, a children performer that preyed on the fat children he worked with. These men had become my obsession, not in the perverted way of wanting to emulate their atrocities, but what drove them to do it beyond the court transcript of the Ilium Clown’s step-father making the Clown his second in the polyamorous marriage or the Innsmouth Eater by having delusions that his father was the Devil himself. These were the nurture side of the crime, the parts we can see and point to as a way which they could use as a means of getting a lesser sentence.

            I wanted more, I wanted into their synapses. Look at the brain chemistry; see if we could fix them. Explain why people could do evil by more than just stating that people were evil. I counted the days until I could sit and speak to these monstrous people and understand why. I just didn’t know that, despite his false pretentions, Inglehart had been working with this for years. That his way of understanding was archaic, hate driven and more appropriate to the Medieval Ages rather than a time of rational thought and reason. This man was a monster.

****

The days past like this for some time. It had been weeks since we had gotten to this prison. A few of us had gotten on each other’s nerves as our dreams became worse and worse. Bart had been the first to bring up his nightmares to me. He said that in his dreams there was always a grotesque monster at the foot of his bed. Bart always confirmed just how bad it was getting in the nightmares; he was waking up in cold sweats and kept seeing that monster getting closer and closer to him.

            Bart’s mental health finally broke three weeks into our work. I remember the morning since I was supposed to finally be working in the mental health clinic. Bart had not woken up before me as he normally did. I ground the coffee and knocked on his door.

            Each knock was met with silence.

            I continued to knock at his door until I finally had the courage to open the door to his room. His warm purple walls were covered in blood as Bart lay on his bed covered in the gore. The colours of the walls were distorted as the scarlet was only made darker by the warm walls. I must have screamed since Gary came rushing out of his room with tousled hair and in a bathrobe.

            They had been sleeping together. Bart and Lana, that is. They had been experiencing separation anxiety and stress from their work here. They had relaxed by the occasional round in the bed. Gary confirmed who Bart was sitting in when Lana’s room was empty.

            Bart was only laughing and as the faceless guards grabbed him, he said laughing to me, “I got it. I got that fucking ghoul.”

           

****

The weeks progressed on from here as would be expected. Gary and I were given a week off and a psychological examination along with mandatory grief check-ups. Gary was his only because he had lived with them, Bart was my friend and Inglehart was surprised at the amount of grief I was feeling.

            He sat in front of me in his office. The crimson walls, chestnut cabinets all ended in his pale, slight frame. Disbelief covered his face as he was chewing the words over in his head.

            “Withdraw?”

            The deep voice seemed to echo in the room, or just in my head. I tried to form the words. I failed at explaining that I had everything I needed, failed to say that I needed nothing else and just stumbled over the words not forming in my mouth.

            “You want to at least look at the clinic and our patients.”

            He never said prisoners, only ever patients. As if he was trying to cure them.

            “You will need to communicate with them and find out the rehabilitation. Allow the cute to soak into your system, look at the way we have cured the evil within them.”

            I should never have told him that fateful word, that damn yes.

Inglehart's Monsters Pt. 1

The official reports weren’t exactly accurate as to what happened. The doctor and his experiments dove deeper into the pseudoscience based on the occult beliefs of Doctor Inglehart rather than the hard biology that I and the other students had expected. We were mostly pre-med students in our final years just before our entrances into the programs each of us had picked out. I had been the exception; I was a psychologist with a thesis in the work of criminal institutions and how they break people. The story we were fed was that we would be working with the patients Doctor Inglehart had been working with for years. This was the first time students had been allowed to go to his clinic which had been on the edge of scientific advancement and insight which all four of us were ready to be a part of, but then we saw what had been happening.

            Doctor Inglehart had been, at least up until I saw what he was doing, a great hero of mine. A survivor of the childhood atrocities of the Holocaust and an immigrant and refugee to the Americas when only a child, he had always been proud of his history and told everyone who would listen of what happened. How when only six he had seen the medical experiments which his Jewish ancestry had been seen by the Nazi scientists to be perfect for them, since as Inglehart had said, “We had been as close to humans as they could possibly believe.”

            When we all exited the bus which had picked us up, the first thing we saw was the isolation. The prison which Inglehart worked as a part of had made me sick when I first saw it. The panoptical set up gave me an intuition which, even as I think back to it now, makes me feel as if I have to turn over every object and look at each of the dark corners in my room for the cameras which was being used to make us feel uneasy.

            The octagonal ring of the first six floors gave rise to the grey obelisk which rose only twice as high as the ring. At the top of the obelisk was a glass tip which fed back into the, upon closer review, octagonal walls of the tower. Each level had glass looking out to the surroundings. At this point I almost threw up. Once I had the realization that someone maybe watching me at any time forced me to walk more upright and with a rigidity which my mother would be proud.

            Doctor Inglehart’s diminutive but powerful figure was there to welcome us at the door of the prison. Above him, the desert’s brightness reflected on the words “Sum ego factum est mors exterminatore mundorum”.

            I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

            The wolfish smile broke the saggy flesh of the small man, a hardy laugh and a surprisingly deep voice as he said, “Welcome to my home, my own world.”

            If at this point I know what stood before me, I would have left. Except that I had no idea. Instead of screaming and crying and fleeing like I wish I had now, I followed the man before me. The man who had spent his life trying to find out the inner most workings of a person, to see where evil was and to end it; this man looked to create a utopia of created and crafted human beings living outside of the realms of human evils to make us the God which had failed him and his family.

            All of the hallways that snaked through the facility ran behind the cells. We were given a tour of the facility from the side which we would be working on. The cells, as Doctor Inglehart explained, had the opening facing the tower. The prisoners had to look at the Tower all day within view of the few around them. A barbed fence on the other side of the cell kept the prisoners far enough away from the Tower, Inglehart had said, with the prisoners close enough to see what happened to those that misbehaved. To see the ramifications of socially misbehaving or doing things seen as evil from the outside world had lowered the prisoners’ rebellious nature in check.

            As we were walking through the hallway, I took a look into the small frame before me and saw a small figure huddled on the side of the cell, the side with the bars and door going into the courtyard. The cell was only eight feet wide by ten feet long with a roof of what would seem to be seven feet. Littered on the floor were torn paper and destroyed books. Each of the pieces of the paper had a chicken scratch all over them. What I could see of the man’s arms had scars up and down his forearms and as his head moved up I could barely make out his eyes.

            But I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw Doctor Inglehart standing there with a large smile. His deep, warm voice came out like it had been full of honey, “Come, we are almost to where you will be living and working.”

            I followed him with only a slight look back at the window as we made slow steps away from the prisoner and his cell.

****

The rooms we were to be staying in were warmer than the hallways had been. The colours all played and mixed together in a way which made me realize just how sleepy the trip had made me. The warmth of the desert from outside wafted its way through the open windows on the wall, revealing the ocean of sand on the outside of our home for some time. 

            The other students and I all made hasty introductions in our cramped living room with one another. Gary was the tall, lanky one. His large hands belied the grace within them and the skill with which had made him a promising surgery student. Lana was only a few inches shorter than my 6’1” frame. Her auburn hair shone and she had the warm smile of a paediatrician. Bart was the one built like a football player. He had been a promising running back until a major concussion made him give it up, but he was a master at physiology and the mental aspects of injuries. 

            I must admit, I seemed out of place. I had only been, as I said before, a student of criminal psychology stemming from my fascination with Ed Gein and Ted Bundy. I was writing my thesis on the institutions of justice and how to rehabilitate the prisoners and the proper prison build for control of those under lock and key. 

            We all dispersed as we looked at our sleeping quarters. The colours followed us into the sleeping quarters. I placed my few bags down, my few belongings which I felt my life would be tolerable complete with a laptop, a few books and a number of pens. I had left my phone back at home in San Jose, I didn’t think I would ever have a need for it while I was working. My warm, bare walls caused the sleep to tug at my eyes as I sat on the edge of my bed. I had a few hours until Inglehart had said he would be back, so I stretched out and went to sleep thinking of the man in his cell.  

****

The cool afternoon air woke me up before the knock at my door did. As I opened it I hastily put on a long sleeved shirt on. Bart’s wide, dark face welcomed me back to the land of the living.  “Inglehart’s here, we’re about to head out to his quarters for dinner.”

            The deep voice echoed in my room as I nodded understanding. Closing the door quickly, I went through all the papers I had brought with me and sources I would need for the paper. I found the pen I needed and walked out into the living room. Everyone had dressed up for the night except for Inglehart and me. I must have looked confused as Inglehart laughed.

            He was still in the same brown scrubs he had been in this morning. Lana had put on a short, iridescent blue dress. Bert had a button up shirt with khakis tightly spread over his broad frame. And Gary looked as if a Muppet put on a suit.  Seeing Inglehart in his scrubs made me comfortable as I nodded in agreement to the question that Inglehart posed to me.

            The warmth of the living quarters died quickly as we walked into the hallway of Inglehart’s prison. We followed him downstairs and toward what I thought was the direction of the Tower. I asked Bart if I was right or if I needed to fix my direction, but he needed warmly to my question.

            “It is. I know you study prison systems, but what you should do is look at the way the prison is set up. It’s almost like a spider’s web. We live on the outside, but we have our own strand going to the tower. The stairs,” he pointed behind us, “are hidden to make it seem like there isn’t a way out if a prisoner happens to breakout of their cell. So, it’s almost set up to make a person go insane if they aren’t meant to get out.”             I looked at him with a new admiration. His knowledge of the intricacies of the prison’s architecture was remarkable. I poked into why he knew that.

            He laughed, “My girlfriend’s professor helped design this prison. She does architecture and his last consulting job was on the type of prisons we set up now,” he looked at me as we were heading down to the near of the end of the hallway, “all of them are based on Doctor Inglehart’s design to create insanity of those guilty members of our society.”

            The hallway opened up to a large dining hall. Scarlet walls enclosed us as we stepped quietly into the room. A feeling of the far away castles in the Eastern European countries inhabited by our childish nightmares was rested in this room. In the centre of the room was a long brown and wooden table with five chairs around it.

            We all took our seats in the table. Each person was only an arm length away from the other as Inglehart took the seat at the head of the table. His small frame came only up to the middle of the seat. The quick arm movements from him brought out the food from the other room.

            The first guards we had seen all day came out. Large framed men carrying platters full of food placed the trays before us. The grey and brown uniformed men were in and out in only moments with our hearty, German feast placed before us.

            “Please, eat and I shall show you the fruits of my labour,” Inglehart’s deep voice echoed in the room. “Please.”

            The pork was sliced into thick pieces or stuffed into the casings of sausages. Sauerkraut was boiled with the meat left over from the pig. Potatoes and rye bread were left to round out our feast. As we finished the last bit of meat, a heavy, dark chocolate cake was brought out as a sleepy silence feel over us. Inglehart had been talking the entire night. Prisoners and their inhumanity, the want to look to see if we can find our human emotions, the way in which by using those that have become a stain upon the society, we may advance our understanding of what human beings are.

              As the sleepiness overcame us all I could make out of the blurriness I could see a grotesque coming closer to me. Before the black finally came, I felt hands.  

The Reality of the Situation Is... Pt. 5

9.

The news reports read like this:

            “Important city official has disappeared. Connected to the case is a ‘Kevin Elrich’, a private detective and freelance journalist. The latter had been hired by Ms. Catherine Connely, the city official and sister of Jessica Turnig. Mrs. Turnig was the recently murdered wife of the mayor. Mr. Elrich had been, according to recent reports been experiencing certain psychological oddities, including speaking to his cat. Shortly after the discovery of Ms. Connely’s body, a short two days after her sister was found murdered in their parents’ home, Mr. Elrich had altogether disappeared. Mr. Elrich was the last person to be seen with Ms. Connely and it is assumed that he is the prime murder suspect.0

            “Kevin Elrich had left and without a trace disappeared. The grisly scene of Catherine’s body being torn in the bottom of the tunnels running snake-like under the city had connected him to the murder case. The case remains unsolved as to how Kevin Elrich disappeared completely from the city without being seen by anyone who witnessed him entering into the tunnels with a violently crying Catherine Connely.”

On a personal note...

So, I -- the author of this -- admit this was nothing as good as I can write. Therefore, I have decided to end it now and pick it up at a time when I have to truly work on this. I came into writing this during an existential crisis and without realizing that I had only a week to work on it and it changed in my mind as I was writing. This will not be the end of Kevin and Sam, this will not be the end of this case, this will not be the end of this story. However, in November I will be writing short stories for post during the week, depending on the time I get to write, Monday and Thursday. Since I have felt like I let everyone down, December to January will be one saga which I have been truly working on for sometime that I've become completely obsessed with; and, since it is a much longer time, I'll feel better with this one.

I apologize for how poorly this one went, but I love Kevin Elrich and Sam the Cat, this won't be the end and I will rework this story. Enjoy and on Halloween, I will have a post for the marking of the only day people get to watch the movies which I love.

Cheers,

T.

The Reality of the Situation Is... Pt. 4

8.

If there is anything I must admit from this last day, is that I have lost all my dignity. I could not save anything I may have kept from being creepily standing in the back of a dead girls house to being verbally bitchslapped by my cat, so anything I have left is now gone.

            When I heard her voice, I screamed.

            Screamed like those women in the movies that are having babies, or those babies going to their first horror movie. I screamed.

            The next moments are all a blur of embarrassment and humiliation. As I screamed, I fell to the floor and played dead. From my vantage point on the ground, I saw Sam fly and attack someone’s face until a black bag was put on my face.

            I was being dragged like a dead body from my apartment. Hands gripped my limbs and pulled as if it was a perfectly normal thing to see a grown man pulled like a terrorist out of his home on a Thursday morning.

            The ride to wherever we were going took what seemed like forever. The metal floor of whatever I was pushed onto rattled and bruised my ribs as we went. My ribs screamed in pain as the floor played like a xylophone on my body.

            As the ride went longer and longer, I began to think of everything I was missing. Fish tacos on the peer and the beaches of a tropical island. As I thought more and more of the tacos, they grew arms and began carrying cocktails on the sand. Those bastards.

            I began to ruminate how I would end up killing those man-tacos as I was manhandled off the metal floor and down stairs. The pulling at my limbs felt as if they were about to be ripped off. Rough hands and smooth cement stairs began to batter at my roughed up body.

            The smell hit me first. I barely noticed that my hands were being held up by a hook as I smelled the rot of a thousand years of isolation. The mask was taken off my head and I barely recognized the others with their chilling blue eyes all lined up on the wall of the circular room for the thing.

            It was half way cemented into the ground. The amphibious body had elongated arms that were draped over its head. As I stared at it, the face peered through the arms. The large eyes stared at me, the pupil-less eyes, and puffy lips opened to reveal sharp teeth.

            I pulled at the meathook to get down as the grooves in the floor went from it to me. The cold air began to pull at my arms and the Woman’s hand cupped my cheek.

            “Please,” she said as she moved around to stand in front of me, “stop pulling and fighting.”

            Her voice cut straight into my muscles, I was paralyzed by the inhumanness in it.

            “You have the ability to die for something, it won’t be long.”

            I began to think of the Taco-men bastards and how I was about to die for them.

            Bullshit.

            I fought as hard as I could and it felt like it was done in slow motion, the only redeeming thing in my worthless life. I caught her small chin under my foot. She stumbled back and her mouth was full of blood as she screamed at me. That beautiful creature saved my life.

            I closed my eyes and turned as I heard the ripping and tearing from the centre of the room and felt the warm fuzz wrap around me. A small whispery voice came from it.

            “Think of somewhere. Anywhere.”

            So I did.

The Reality of the Situation Is... Pt. 3

6.

            “You can talk?” I looked at Sam in complete astonishment.

            “Don’t over think this, you’d have figured it out sooner or later.” Sam walked over to the desk.

            “But you don’t have any of the required anatomical stuff,” I must admit not my most poetic term, “to produce speech!”

            Sam jumped up to the desk; he circled around the desk’s top a couple of times and sat sphinx-like on the top of the desk. “Don’t over think it, some things just have to be accepted for the time being, trust me, I’m not the weirdest part of this whole thing.” He licked his paw and rubbed his face, “now how much do I have to tell you and how much do you know?”

            This is where I will take out the dialogue. I wish to retain some form of dignity, so I will tell you the general story which Sam put in front of me without him looking at me like the stupid meatsack with eyes he believed me to be. As it turns out, Sam is of royal blood. He was part of a long line of litters that reached all the way back to the cats that the Egyptian Pharaohs owned and worshipped. As he went on, he began to throw out terms that I could barely understand, but with the terms were so ambiguous that I couldn’t imagine: the Dark – some form of “otherworld” he would speak about with a horrible respect, the Ones – which must be a mistranslation since there was no closer word, and the Wall – something that separates us from these mad beasts which I assume can only try to eat my soul if I lose my ball on their lawn.

            He began speaking about how Jessica – the girl who had been killed, he seemed resolute about this and not a suicide since his brother, that other cat – had stuck her nose too far into the disappearances. I had heard of these, but nothing had been come out of the police looking into it. People would enter subways and mass transit systems, but they wouldn’t come out. Many people had used these systems to leave and she had looked into journalists that had been doing research, but then paid for the silence. That’s why Sam was here, he was to look after me not getting involved.

            “What makes me so special?” I asked, “I’m just a guy that looks for work.”

            “Well,” Sam said slowly, “you aren’t exactly the smartest person in the world. You don’t know when to stop. We had to make sure that you wouldn’t become involved with these disappearances. This is the only way we can rebuild the treaty.”

            “I don’t do anything that any other journalist and part time detective wouldn’t do!” I was hugely offended, my ethics and practices were under danger here.

            “Remember when you had a case that was looking for a lost dog and somehow got the Mayor impeached?” Sam looked at me accusingly.

            “How was I supposed to know he was part of a zoophilic ring?!”

            “That mayor was also that last person that was holding the Wall strong without the cost of what it is now. Since he has left,” Sam was becoming irate and raising his small voice to fill the room, “the Wall has become gapped and there could be danger of the unmentionables to be able to sneak through. That man that was following Jessica, the one that wanted to kill me, is one of them. You should be terribly afraid of him.”

            I looked and sneered at Sam, the small sphinx in my giant’s world, “why should I be?”

            “Remember Ghostbusters? He is Rick Moranis!”

7.

            “Alright, this is just getting absurd.” I swear to whatever is holy in this world, Sam had a look of total disbelief on his face.

            “You’ve spent the last three hours, talking to a cat about a magic world that has the sole want to enslave all of humanity,” Sam’s eyes became slits, “and me comparing someone to Rick Moranis is absurd?”

            Of everything that could possibly happen, I realized that Sam – a fucking cat – began to judge me. He thought I was stupid.

            “Look, I wouldn’t mind being told what any of this means. I’m being told my entire life can be killed by my taking part in this case. I don’t know whether I am going to become a sacrifice to some people that sound like from Lovecraft or become a cockroach!” I looked at Sam in the early morning light as he looked back at me, his feline face was highlighted by the rays of a rising Sun.

            “Unfortunately,” Sam tried to smile, “both of those things might become to pass. The Wall is currently being powered by blood sacrifice, but we have to figure out a way to get around that. Especially as the unmentionables are out, that lady though,” Sam shuddered, “is the dangerous one.”

            I thought about her otherworldly face, the cheek bones that weren’t right and the robotic way she spoke to me, how pristine she walked around.

            I looked at Sam and the hair rose on the back of my neck, “Why her? What does she have to do with it? Is she the Dark Incarnate or something?”

            “No, I’m the Zuul of Ghostbusters.”

The Reality of the Situation Is... Pt. 2

4.

The USB slid into the port well. My computer started to slowly register the new device that was hooked up. A small window popped up filled with document and image files. Colourful pixels filled the small window before I started to copy and sort the files to my laptop’s memory.

            The light cast over the small and desolate office I called home. I called out for Sam as I reached for my can of tuna. He wouldn’t come and I called out again. I breathed out and went back to the computer.

            Pictures began to cycle on the screen. Each picture on the USB drive had been copied and the document copies were spread out on the drive’s other folders. Each document was either a receipt or a journal article that had been coloured in a multitude of hues. I went back to the pictures.

            The passed girl was in each picture. A revolving door of people with the girl came into focus on my computer screen. As I cycled through the pictures again, there was another person that was common. A man in a hat and overcoat in the back of the pictures at first, but as the pictures went on with the dates on the file the man began to look more openly and maliciously at the girl.

            I couldn’t tell if he was a Photoshop or not. The man began to stare at the girl openly, and what appeared to be off-coloured eyes stared at her. The eyes weren’t normal; the almond eyes weren’t a normal colour. They were purple. I shrugged and breathed deeply, the damn contact lenses.

            I got up and unplugged the USB drive. I needed to see Jason.

5.

Jason had his large frame crafted by oceans of soda stuffed into the spinning captain’s chair. The mountains of flesh which greeted me were dimly lit by his four monitors. His face was curtained by black straight drapes around his face.

            “Alright, Kev,” Jason wheezed, “let me see what you’ve got.”

            I handed him the drive. The stubby fingers took the drive from my hand and inserted it smoothly into the computer. As he did so, a small breath was let out from his direction.

            “There’s a guy on these pictures. I want to see if any of the pictures have been tampered with and get print outs of the originals.” I sat back and watched Jason’s fingers fly over the keyboard. The pictures began to run through the program as the printers pushed out pictures and documents.

            Enough paper to republish War and Peace stood on the printer. Colours dashed along the paper were dim in the monitor.

            “All the pictures are printed out as they were before any tampering. If you want to see them now, they’re on the monitors,” Jason said as he turned to me. I grabbed the paper and went to the monitors. The girl was there, the revolving cast of people – the man. He was still there. Same coloured eyes.

            “The girl is sexy.”

            “What?” I broke my eye contact with the man and looked at Jason.

            “The girl, she’s hot. Are you following her?”

            I looked at him. “No, I’m investigating her death. She might be sexy now, but she may turn into Bloody Mary overnight, look out. Is this guy,” I pointed to the guy in the back, making sure my finger wasn’t touching the screen. Jason hated that, “real or a fake?”

            “The guy that has a total Akhenaten thing going on? If he’s fake he’s a cut out and not an implant into the picture.”

            “Go back to that first part? Akhenaten?” I looked at him quizzically.

            “Akhenaten, look, he’s a weird looking pharaoh from ancient Egypt.” He pulled up a picture of a statue of Akhenaten. They shared many similarities, a lack of shoulders, a long, elongated face, the almond eyes and what looked like a serpentine figure.

            “Well done, Jason. I’ll be back tomorrow or something, I got to look through this stuff,” I shuffled the papers, “see you, bud.”

            I got up and started to walk out, as Jason said, “Hey, I’ll send you some links of this guy. You may want to read some of the hilarious shit people say about him.”

            His voice died as I walked out. I was looking at the paper as I walking down the street back to my office. The receipts were colour coded to journalists, many of whom worked for large syndicates are in the list. Colours that listed as edits, changes and complete deletion, but payment for the article was listed with separate hues for each.

            I looked up and saw that I had arrived to my apartment and walked up to my office. I was looking at my papers to read as I opened up to a truly astonishing scene.

            Allow me to say this about myself: I don’t get scared very easily. In fact, I don’t normally get scared by anything that should probably scare me. Suspense movies, thrillers and horrors have all come and gone without my notice and I leave without caring about being scared. I say this so you may understand that when I saw the man from the picture, purple eyes and all, holding a knife to my cat’s throat, I screamed. I didn’t know what else to do.

            He looked at me and went out the opened window and I realized that I had continued to scream.

            Sam looked at me, feline eyes and all, and said, “Thank the gods you’re home.”