Chris Carter - The Caller

Mr. J felt life lose its meaning. His wife, his rock, his world, was dying in front of his eyes, and not only was there nothing he could do to protect her, but she was dying because of his stupidity. Because he couldn’t remember his own wedding date.

Blood began oozing from her new wound, dripping over her temple, and running down her left cheek. Her eyelids moved, but this time they paused halfway. She had no strength left in her to fully open her eyes.

The soul-destroying pain of watching his wife being tortured in front of him, together with the suffocating guilt he felt inside, caused Mr. J to feel faint, and for the quickest of instants he took his eyes off the screen.

The demon saw it.

‘You looked away,’ he said.

Immediately, Mr. J looked back at his phone.

‘NO,’ he called out, shaking his head. ‘NO.’

‘You know the rules, John. You look away, she gets punished again.’

Once again, the demon repositioned the chisel, choosing to place it right at the center of Cassandra’s skull this time.

Mr. J locked eyes with his wife one more time and, as he did, he went frighteningly quiet. Cassandra wasn’t there anymore. Behind her tearful and wondering eyes he saw nothing but a dark void. Her pupils had dilated. The white of her eyes had gone the color of cheap red wine. Even if right now he managed to remember his wedding date, and hoping that the demon would stay true to his word and leave her alone, the Cassandra he knew was gone. From what he’d seen, the chisel had penetrated deep enough to crash through her cranium. Her brain had probably already sustained irreversible damage. After God knew how many operations, if her life could still be saved, who knew what she would be like? Would she still be able to talk? Walk? Move her arms? Recognize anyone? And Mr. J wasn’t even factoring in the kind of psychological annihilation that the events of tonight would bring her. No matter what he did from now on, he had already lost Cassandra.

BANG.

The hammer came down again, but this time it sounded like the demon had used just a fraction more force in his blow then he had before, because Mr. J actually heard the bone fracture. A noise that sounded like someone stepping on crushed glass. A millisecond after that, he saw a fresh stream of blood surge from her new wound.

In her seat, Cassandra convulsed once. Twice. Three times. The demon let go of her head and, almost in slow motion, it collapsed forward clumsily.

Stillness before one more violent convulsion that seemed to have come out of nowhere. Cassandra’s mouth fell half-open and she began drooling from the right corner of her lips. Muscle spasm caused her shoulders to heave back and forth a couple of times before her body finally came to a complete stop.

This time, Mr. J was the one paralyzed. His eyes were glued to the small screen. His breathing was heavy and labored.

Letting go of the hammer and chisel, the demon allowed the image of a lifeless Cassandra to grace the screen for several seconds before he brought two fingers to the right side of her neck. A moment later, he tried the other side.

From his hotel room, Mr. J did the same. He extended two fingers and gently placed them on his cellphone screen, moving them around delicately, as if he were really touching his wife’s face.

‘I’m... so sorry.’ The painful words came in a murmur. ‘I’m so, so sorry, my love. I love you so much. Please forgive me.’

‘Congratulations, John,’ the demon said. He had already moved away from behind Cassandra. ‘You succeeded in letting your wife die.’

A single tear rolled down Mr. J’s face. He closed his eyes and breathed in hate. When he reopened them, they were as void of life as his wife’s. His hand moved away from his cellphone screen.

All of a sudden, in one quick movement, the camera panned again, left and up, and Mr. J’s screen was filled by something that he wasn’t expecting — the demon’s face — only it wasn’t a face, it was a mask. But despite how real and grotesque it looked, with its lacerated and melted flesh, its deformed, devil-looking eyes, its ripped nose, and its blood-smeared sharp teeth, Mr. J didn’t blink. He didn’t move. He didn’t look away.

‘Now that your little game is over,’ he said in a tone so calm and cold, he could’ve frosted the windows in his hotel room, ‘you and I are going to play a new one. A game in which I’m the best there is. A game that I’ve been playing for years and I have never lost. Are you listening to me?’

The demon said nothing in return.

‘Do you really think that hiding behind a camera,’ Mr. J continued, ‘hiding behind an ugly mask, will somehow keep you safe?’ He paused, holding the demon’s eyes. ‘Every single mark I’m sent to deal with is a runaway. They all make the same mistake you are making right now. They believe that if they run away, if they move cities, or states, or countries... if they change their names, their appearances... if they obtain new documents... whatever. They all believe that that somehow will keep them safe. They all believe that disappearing is the key to a whole new life and all their old problems will be left behind.’ A new, pregnant pause. ‘They are all wrong. Let me tell you something else you didn’t know about me, whoever you are. The first part of the job I do is to track these runaways down, wherever they might be...’ Mr. J leaned forward, getting closer to his cellphone. ‘And I am the absolute best at what I do. So know this. Wherever you go, wherever you hide, whoever you become after this. I will find you... and I will rip your heart from your chest. Do you hear me, you sick freak?’

Surprisingly, the demon kept the call connected throughout Mr. J’s entire speech.

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha.’ The demon laughed. At first it was a subdued laugh, as if he was trying to control it, but it soon got louder. Much louder.

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’

The horror-clown mouth of the vile mask twisted awkwardly out of shape as the laugh became almost hysterical.

‘ Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. ’

As if hypnotized, Mr. J found it impossible to drag his eyes away from the small screen. He knew he’d seen things in his life that no one else had ever seen. Ugly, horrific things that would’ve unsettled the sturdiest of individuals, but he’d never seen anything like this before.

Suddenly, without any warning, the demon simply stopped laughing.

A split second later the call disconnected.

Mr. J was born John Louis Goodwin, the unplanned only child to the parents of Bruce and Sally Goodwin. He was born in Madison, Nebraska, under the sign of the Crab, which was intriguing, because according to recent research done by the FBI, Cancerians were by far the most dangerous and the most cunning criminals of all the zodiac signs. The really peculiar fact was that in second place came Taurus, followed by Sagittarius then Aries. Mr. J’s father was Taurus, his mother, Aries.

The birth of a child was supposed to bring joy to a family, but in Mr. J’s instance, it seemed to bring the exact opposite. His mother, a trivial drug user since her mid-teens, who at first truly believed that a baby would bring her salvation, was struck by a debilitating case of postnatal depression. Her answer to it, completely disregarding the wellbeing of her newborn, was to upgrade her drug use from mild to junkie. In one quick step, salvation became damnation.

His father, who had never really wanted a child, preferred the bottle to the needle and the fist to dialogue. As a result of such a volatile mix, John Louis Goodwin grew up the neglected child — the proverbial ‘invisible boy’ — of a complicated, love — hate relationship.