David Wong: John Dies at the End

John opened the door to his third-floor apartment and immediately gestured toward a very cute and very frightened-looking woman on his sofa. “Dave, this is Shelly. She needs our help.”

Our help.

That dread, like a punch in the stomach. You see, people like Frank Campo, and this girl, they never came for “our help” when they needed a carburetor rebuilt.

We had a specialty.

Shelly was probably nineteen, with powder-blue eyes and the kind of crystal clear pale skin that gave her a china doll look, chestnut curls bundled behind her head in a ponytail. She wore a long, flowing skirt that her fingers kept messing with, an outfit that only emphasized how small she was. She had the kind of self-conscious, pleading helplessness some guys go crazy for. Girl in distress. Makes you want to rescue her, take her home, curl up with her, tell her everything is gonna be okay.

She had a white bandage on her temple.

John stepped into the corner of his tiny apartment that served as the kitchen and smoothly returned to place a cup of coffee in her hands. I struggled to keep my eyes from rolling; John’s almost therapist-like professionalism was ridiculous in a room dominated by a huge plasma-screen TV with four video game systems wired to it. John had his hair pulled back into a neat job-interview ponytail and was wearing a button-up shirt. He could look like a grown-up from time to time.

I was about to warn the girl about John’s coffee, which tasted like a cup of battery acid someone had pissed in and then cursed at for several hours, but John turned to her and in a lawyerly voice said, “Shelly, tell us your story.”

She raised timid eyes to me. “It’s my boyfriend. He… he won’t leave me alone. He’s been harassing me for about a week. My parents are gone, on vacation and I’m… I’m terrified to go home.”

She shook her head, apparently out of words. She sipped the coffee, then grimaced as if it had bit her.

“Miss-”

“Morris,” she said, barely audible.

“Ms. Morris, I strongly recommend a women’s shelter. They can help you get a restraining order, keep you safe, whatever. There are three in this city, and I’ll be happy to make the call-”

“He-my boyfriend, I mean-he’s been dead for two months.”

John cast a little gleeful glance my way, as if to say, “See how I deliver for you, Dave?” I hated that look. She went on.

“I-I didn’t know where else to go. I heard, you know, through a friend of mine that you handle, um, unusual problems.” She nudged aside a stack of DVD cases on an end table and sat the mug down, glancing at it distrustfully as if to remind herself not to accidentally drink from it again, lest it betray her anew. She turned back to me.

“They say you’re the best.”

I didn’t inform her that whoever called us “the best” had pretty low standards. I guess we were the best in town at this, but who would you brag to about that? It’s not like this shit has its own section of the phone book.

I walked over to a cushioned chair and scooped out its contents (four worn guitar magazines, a sketch pad, and a leather-bound King James Version of the Holy Bible). As I tried to settle in, a leg broke off and the whole chair slumped over at a thirty-degree angle. I leaned over nonchalantly, trying to look like that’s exactly what I had expected to happen.

“Okay. When he comes, you can see him?”

“Yes. I can hear him, too. And he, uh…”

She brushed the bandage on the side of her skull. I looked at her in bewilderment. Was she serious?

“He hits you?”

“Yes.”

“With his fist?”

“Yes.”

John looked up from his coffee indignantly. “Man, what a dick!”

I did roll my eyes this time and glared at John once they stopped. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a ghost, but I’m guessing that if you did, the thing didn’t run over and punch you in the face. I’m guessing that’s never happened to any of your friends, either.

“When it first happened,” Shelly said, “I thought I was going crazy. Up until now, I’ve never bel-”

“Believed in ghosts,” I finished. “Right.” That line was obligatory, everybody wanting to come off as the credible skeptic. “Look, Miss, I don’t want to-”

“I told her we would look into it tonight,” John said, heading me off before I accidentally introduced some rational thought into this thing. “He’s haunting her house, out in [town name removed for privacy]. I thought you and I could head over there, get out of the city for a night, show this bastard what’s what.”

I felt a burst of irritation, mostly because John knew the story was bullshit. But then it suddenly clicked in my mind that, yes, John knew, and he had called me because he was trying to set me up with this girl. Button-cute, dead boyfriend, chance to be her hero. As usual, I didn’t know whether to thank him or punch him in the balls.

Sixteen different objections rose up in my mind at once and somehow they all canceled each other out. Maybe if there had been an odd number…

WE HEADED OUT,in my Bronco. We had told Shelly not to drive herself, in case she had a concussion, but the reality was that, whether or not her story was true, we still had vivid memories of Mr. Campo and his unusually spidery car. You see, Frank found out the hard way that the dark things lurking in the night don’t haunt old houses or abandoned ships. They haunt minds.

Shelly was in the passenger seat, hugging herself, looking blankly out the windshield. She said, “So, do you guys, like, do this a lot?”

“Off and on,” said John. “Been doing it for a few years.”

“How does somebody get into this?”

“There was an incident,” he said. “A series of incidents, I guess. A dead guy, another dead guy. Some drugs. It’s kind of a long story. Now we can see things. Sometimes. I have a dead cat that follows me around, wondering why I never feed it. Oh, and I had one hamburger that started mooing when I ate it.” He glanced at me. “You remember that?”

I grunted, said nothing.

It wasn’t mooing, John. It was screaming.

Shelly didn’t look like she was listening anymore.

“I call it Dante’s Syndrome,”

John said. I had never heard him call it any such thing. “Meaning, I think Dave and I gained the ability to peer into Hell. Only it turns out Hell is right here, it’s all through us and around us and in us like the microbes that swarm through your lungs and guts and veins. Hey, look! An owl!”

We all looked. It was an owl, all right.

“Anyway,” I broke in, “we just did a couple of favors for people, eventually word got around.”

I felt like that was enough background and I wanted to stop John before he got to the part where he says he kept eating that screaming hamburger, down to the last bite.

I left the truck running as I jumped out at my place for supplies. I bypassed the house for the weatherworn toolshed in the backyard, opened the padlocked door and swept over the dark shelves with my flashlight:

A Winnie the Pooh toy with dried blood around its eyes;

A stuffed and mounted badgerconda (a cross between a badger and an anaconda);

A large Mason jar filled with cloudy formaldehyde, where inside floated a six-inch clump of cockroaches arranged roughly in the shape of a human hand.

I grabbed a medieval-style torch John had stolen from the wall of a theme restaurant. I picked up a clear squeeze bottle filled with a thick green liquid that immediately turned bloodred as soon as I touched it. I reconsidered, sat it back on the shelf and grabbed my vintage 1987 ghetto blaster instead.

I went into the house and called to Molly. I opened a small plastic tub in the kitchen cabinet filled with little pink, rubbery chunks, like erasers. I put a handful in my pocket and rushed back out the door, the dog following on my heels.