7
The crime scene photos looked exactly like her son’s bedroom, yet alien and strange. The desk was the same, every detail in place, but the little reflective table number marking Nick’s iPad as evidence made it seem foreign, unreal. The note was there on the desk, but her eyes fixated on the small glob of red just at the bottom. Somebody was asking her something, but she just stared blankly at the projected image, barely there at all.
“Mrs. Sanders?”
“Yes?”
“Is this your son’s iPad in the photo?”
“Yes.”
6
When Nick saw the blank box next to the pumpkins on his front doorstep, his heart began thrashing in his chest like a trapped fish. He brought it inside, afraid someone would see him. He stared at it on his bed for a long time, then opened it. There was a gun inside swaddled in a bloody washcloth, the barrel poking out like a newborn. His breath caught as he stared, numb and doused with cold. He couldn’t breathe. The only sound was the start-stop wash cycle of blood in his ears. His phone buzzed in his pocket and his iPad plucked out a singular ping sound. He left the gently opened mouth of the sleeping gun, moving to his iPad without thought. The notification was from Tommy. Two words, dense and viscous, just words, but thick with dark potential. They seemed funny when he typed them. They were not funny now, they were blunt and scary.
5
Dark thoughts fed on Nick’s sanity, gnawing. He had fallen into a bottomless pit and was watching the bright world speed away from him. He kept seeing that picture, the body lying there almost peacefully. Then that text would read itself quietly in his mind and he would check his phone. He was doing it compulsively now. Still no new messages. He didn’t know if that was good or bad.
“Nick, dear? Your mother’s on the phone, she wants to speak with you.”
“Mom?”
“Hey honey, what’s wrong, the nurse says you're sick?”
“Can I come home mom, please?”
“Honey, I’m still at work, but if it’s really—”
“I can walk, mom. I think it’ll make me feel better, maybe.”
“… Alright, if you’re sure. Just go home and rest, okay? Don’t forget to turn the porch light off so the Trick-r-Treaters don’t bother. I’ll be home late, but I’ll come in and check on you.”
The nurse took back the phone, watching Nick walk away. He looked thin, barely there at all. His insides were taut. He was a toy that had been wound up too many times and now there was only the groaning clicks of gears with each twist.
4
Bright hot afterimages of the dead man were seared into Nick’s mind. The third eye in his forehead cried a thick tear of blood. He looked peaceful, but that made it worse somehow, because it was just how he remembered Tommy’s dad, but with something undefinable missing. It was haunting. Nick felt the fuzzy feeling of imminent vomit. He checked his phone and saw a notification. It was from Tommy. A different number, but it was him, had to be.
“Left you a present. It’s your turn.”
Nick became pale, his sallow eyes retreating into his skull. When the teacher said his name, he looked like he touched an electric fence.
“Are you feeling alright, Nick? You look a little peaked…”
“What? No, I dont… I look what?”
“Peaked? Sick, you look unwell, Nick… I think you should go see the nurse.”
He walked down the empty halls, following the runway of lights reflecting off linoleum. Muffled voices sounded from passing classrooms and the fluorescents purred menacingly. Nick’s mind kept drifting to the message, “Left you a present”, and he would feel at his phone, ice cold against his thigh like a fresh pack of mint gum. It seemed to burn his skin. He had deleted everything in a panic, praying the whole thing would go away, that it wasn’t real. That last night never happened — that the message was just a wrong number.
Every hushed conversation was about him, they all knew what happened. Every opened door was the cops coming to arrest him. He would say, “I didn’t know” and they would say, “then why’d you delete it all, Nick? Huh? Seems like something a guilty person would do, doesn’t it?” And they would just keep coming with questions and evidence, and he’d say anything in the end, and then he’d spend the rest of his life in prison. He’d seen the shows, he knew how it worked. Can they put a fourteen year old in prison? He didn’t think so, but with something this serious they’d probably find a way.
3
The message sat on Nick’s iPad screen for an eternity, his heart thudding in his chest as he read and re-read it.
“it was your idea you told me to do it”
He couldn’t even answer it. That wouldn’t matter, would it? He would just tell the truth, that’s what his Mom always said to do, and then it would be okay. But that was with little things, this was so much bigger: this was murder. He didn’t do anything… it was all just a joke… just a stupid joke. They would see that, right? He didn’t do it… He tried to convince himself, but couldn’t.
Nick’s wide eyes were so filled with terror, it left no room for tears. The cruel logic of the thing twisted itself into unsightly nightmares in his mind, a python swallowing a deer. In a way, it was his idea, and that’s what scared him. He sent those two words, did it almost thoughtlessly. Almost. “Shoot somebody”. There was morbid curiosity lurking in the shadows of his motives, he had felt it there. Then as images came in, he watched the curiosity unfurl, morphing into something big and evil. His heart clomped heavily in a downhill run. He swiped everything into oblivion with a horizontal flick. But he knew it would never go away, yet still prayed it would. He lay in bed awake for a long time.
2
A spectral head floated in the darkness, disembodied by shadow and night. The intelligent glow of Nick’s iPad lit his face from below. He looked like a Halloween decoration. He typed out something simple at first, a trial of sorts.
“Pet the cat.”
Then the picture came a few moments later. A thin white arm stretching past the phone’s unblinking eye to rest on an indifferent Maine Coone.
Nick smirked, then scrolled up to Tommy’s original response.
“K you can go first five”
Nick started typing again.
“Turn off the TV”
A few moments later the picture came. The hand, washed out to a blinding smear by the flash. A blurry thumb was pressing down the power button of a remote. In the small reflection of the TV was the blinding star of phone photography that obscured Tommy’s face, but the shapes were there. It was sort of eerie.
Nick stared at the picture for a bit, then a phantom thought flitted across the depths of his mind, barely there at all. The embarrassment and shame he felt earlier seemed to shrivel, darken, and curl in on itself like paper thrown into a fire. His shame became anger.
“Break the TV.”
He texted it without much thought, wanting to see if Tommy was as crazy as he used to be. When the next image came though, Nick stared wide eyed, then laughed aloud. A fist making a small valley in the soft screen of pixels.
Nick sat up straighter in his bed and leaned closer to his iPad.
“Leave the room.”
An image came through of Tommy’s house just as Nick remembered it, everything in the same place, yet rendered unfamiliar by the night and blur. Nick felt his shame and anger, that shriveled ash of paper, fold tighter until it was a sort of morbid curiosity — schadenfreude. Tommy was still crazy, but how crazy? A new idea surfaced, then receded into the depth of his mind. Tommy’s dad had a pistol… It was probably still where it was when they played with it all those years ago. Nick hesitated, his thumb hovering above the screen, then he typed.
1
Tommy spoke with an unsettling excitement in his face, but behind the eyes, Nick saw nothing.
“It’ll be just like we used to play, remember?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Nick remembered, but not fondly. With Tommy, it was always weird or scary. He remembered one time when Tommy made him put his tongue on the cat’s butthole, and he felt that disgusting shame and embarrassment all over again. Inside Tommy, some kind of switch is thrown and the smile snaps off.
“Well, I gotta go. Text me if you wanna play. You can even go first. We could call it ‘Nick Make Me’.”
Written for the Macabre Monday Halloween contest. 4th place.
Oh my god. So sinister! that's very tight. not a word wasted there. need to read this several times. HOW did you get only 4th place Keith... it's literally toe curling.
as an aside... i have two maine coons and... well... you wouldnt want that much hair round your backside thats all im saying
Wow! A train wreck I couldn’t look away from! Excellent, taut, and intense - so sleek and murderous.