Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

Derek looked at the floor. “That’s not exactly true,” he said.

I waited for him to continue. “What?” I said.

“I kind of made a copy.”

Derek said he had a copy of the entire book on a floppy disc, instead of a CD, up in his bedroom. The computer was so old, he said, it didn’t have a CD-ROM drive. This was all supposed to mean something to me, evidently. This certainly wasn’t like when I was a kid, where you had to wait for someone else to finish a book before you could start it. He and Adam were reading this thing at the same time, and comparing notes the next day.

I suggested we go up to his room so I could read some of it on his screen, but Derek didn’t care much for that idea.

“Then Mom’s going to know,” he said.

“Is that a problem?” I asked him.

He looked uncomfortable. “The book’s all about, like. . pussies. You know. Vaginas?”

I stared at him. “I’m aware,” I said. I poked the inside of my cheek with my tongue for a moment, then said, “Go up to your room, print off the first ten pages or so for me and bring them back, and if your mom asks what you’re up to, tell her you’re on the Lawn-Boy website or something printing off tips on how to fix the mower. And bring the disc, too.”

Derek ran off, kicking up gravel with his sneakers once he was out of the shed.

His departure gave me a moment to think. It didn’t seem even remotely possible that the Langleys could have been killed over something that was on some student’s ten-year-old computer. I was almost glad Derek hadn’t bothered to mention it to Barry. It seemed too out there.

But even if you accepted the premise that the computer did have something to do with their deaths, which struck me as pretty unlikely, how the hell would anyone know it was there? Okay, it sounded as though, at some point, shortly before someone killed the Langleys, Adam’s father learned about it, maybe even what was on it. But why would he have become quite so upset? Albert had never struck me as a prude. I could remember once, at a barbecue, Albert telling me dirty jokes.

Were Albert to learn his son had uncovered an aspiring-and now deceased-author’s dirty book on an old computer, did it make any sense for him to have cared? And even if he had, how could learning about the novel’s existence have triggered a series of events that culminated with someone killing him and his family?

That didn’t make any sense at all.

So I thought about it some more, that if you still accepted the premise that the missing computer had something to do with the murders, but ruled out Albert’s involvement as having anything to do with them, where did that leave you?

How would anyone have even known Adam had the computer? After all, it hadn’t even been given to him in the first place. Agnes Stockwell had given it to my son, who in turn had shared his discovery with Adam. So if someone had learned from Agnes, say, what had happened to the computer, they wouldn’t have even been looking for it at the Langley house in the first place, but then again-

“Got it!” Derek said, breathless, running back into the shed, clutching some pages fresh from his printer. He handed them to me.

“I think that’s the whole first chapter,” he said. “Seven pages. You’ll see, when you get into it, why it’s not really your basic porn story, you know? It’s, like, Agnes’s son, what was his name again?”

“Brett,” I said.

“Yeah, Brett. It was like he was trying to take a porn novel or something, but make fun of it. Like, whaddya call it, like satire or something. Like a send-up. Or maybe even like-you remember that stupid movie you showed me one time, when I was little, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator guy, he gets pregnant? Junior, that’s what it was called.”

I held up my hand for Derek to stop. I riffled through the pages quickly. Seven, like he’d said. Double-spaced, medium-sized paragraphs. No title page, nothing in the headers of each page with a title or the author’s name. Just a page number, tucked in the upper right corner.

I sat on the stool by the workbench and held the sheaf of papers in my hands and started to read.

Nicholas Dickless: Chapter One

Nicholas didn’t realize when he first woke up on this Tuesday morning that anything was particularly amiss. He swung his legs out of bed, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and padded into the bathroom just as he did every morning. Standing at the toilet to empty his full bladder was the first part of his morning bathroom ritual, and this Tuesday morning was no different than any of the other thousands of mornings that had preceded it, with the possible exception that when Nicholas rooted around through the fly of his pajamas to pull out his penis, he was unable to locate it.

My eyebrows went up. “You see?” Derek said, able to tell where I was in the story.

“It’s kind of different. But go on.”

I went on:

“What the fuck?” Nicholas said, to no one in particular since he was all alone, reaching somewhat frantically through the fly, still unable to locate his member. But it was worse than that. He was unable to find his testicles, as well. His genitalia were not there. He felt his pubic hair-that remained-but what in God’s name had happened to the rest of him?

He told himself that he must be dreaming. He was having a nightmare. In a moment he would wake up. He stepped away from the toilet, looked through the bathroom door back to his own bed, expecting to see himself there, still under the covers, thrashing about perhaps, on the verge of waking.

But Nicholas was not in the bed. The covers were turned back, just as he’d left them a moment ago. He approached the bed, tentatively, fearfully, and pulled the covers further down, expecting to find his cock and balls in a pool of blood, but the sheets were white and clean.

He was afraid to inspect himself, terrified to see what kind of damage had been done to him. Slowly, he pulled down his pajama bottoms. He did not appear to have been wounded in any way. There was no blood, no cuts, no obvious signs of amputation of any kind. He looked untouched and undisturbed, except for the fact that those parts of him that constituted his manhood were missing.

Delicately, he reached down to touch himself, to see if somehow his eyes were deceiving him, that perhaps that which did not appear to be there actually was. And Nicholas discovered something that was even more unimaginable than what had already transpired.

There was an opening.

I looked up from the pages.

Derek said, “Pretty warped, right? So he finds out that somehow, in the middle of the night, like magic or something, he loses his, you know, his dick, and instead, he’s got a vagina.”

I glanced through the remaining pages, then set them on the workbench.

“You’re not going to read all of it?” Derek said.

“I’ve got the general idea,” I said.

“Because it does get better. Even though it’s weird, in a way, he makes it believable, all the shit that’s happening.”

“I’ve read enough,” I said.

“It’s actually more funny than porno, you know? It’s like how his life completely changes when he’s got, like, no dick anymore. How he starts to see life from the point of view of a woman, how the only way he’s going to be sexually satisfied is to make out with guys, even though he’s not gay or anything, and shit, you can see why I didn’t want to talk about this with Mom around.”

“Sure,” I said, not really listening all that closely to what Derek was saying.

“I can go print out more of it if you want, or I could just make a copy of it and e-mail it to you and you could read it on your own computer, although maybe that’s not a good idea because then Mom will see it and she might freak out or something, right?”