David Wong - John Dies at the End

It had my fucking name in it. Mc Wong ald’s. What the fuck.

They haunt minds.

Someone was talking to me, from that other side. I pictured floating black figures and eyes like cigarette embers. I pictured a single blue eye in the darkness. I felt sick.

My orbit around the town finally degraded and I crash-landed at John’s apartment. I told him the McWongald’s story, hoping he’d say something like, “That’s some weird shit” and start untangling two controllers from one of his many game consoles. Instead, he said, “Get up.”

I stood and realized I had been sitting on a stack of three cardboard boxes. He opened the flaps on one to reveal that it was full of hardback books.

“Wait, what’s all that?”

“Dr. Marconi’s book.”

“You have a hundred and fifty copies of it?”

“Oh, right. You don’t remember. In Vegas, we were walking out the back and Marconi makes some comment about how we should read his book. You were all ‘fuck you old man’ and I said sure. Then I grabbed a dolly and wheeled out a whole stack. Just staring at him coldly the whole time I was wheeling them backward out the door. Daring that fucker to stop me.”

“Why?”

“They were free, Dave. Anyway, he says something in here…” John flipped pages. “It’s around the beginning somewhere. I don’t see it right now-maybe it was in a different book-but anyway he says that when you read the Bible, the Devil looks back at you through the pages.”

“What, like his Bible was possessed? Holy shit, he must have been the worst priest ever.”

“No. He says when you’re dealing with any kind of supernatural beings, Gods and Devils and angels, you tend to think about them like hurricanes or earthquakes, some kind of mindless force of nature. But if they’re real, then they have minds. They know your name . So even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows instantly he’s being read about and that you’re somebody he may have to deal with. And I’m thinking what you did in Vegas went way, way beyond that.”

“What ‘I’ did? What about us ? We were both there.”

“Yeah but I cut my hair since then. They probably think that was a different guy.”

I closed my eyes and collapsed onto John’s futon. I said, “The thing. The wig monster. Does it still come around?”

“No, haven’t seen it in months. Except about three weeks ago I was eating a corn dog, the thing appeared, snatched it out of my hand, and disappeared again. Never saw it after that.”

“No more of this. Okay? It’s over. No more chasing after this stuff. They’ve set up camp inside my head, John. It’s gone too far.”

John’s mouth said, “Okay” but his eyes said, What makes you think you can just walk away?

“Let’s order a pizza.”

THE PIZZA TASTEDlike rotten eggs. Just to me, not to John. The rest of that week, every meal smelled like formaldehyde or paint thinner. I decided it was them, messing with me. Punching random buttons in my brain. When they got bored with that, they switched senses. I would hear my name as I drifted off to sleep, as if spoken six inches from my ear. Over and over again.

Molly started to get agitated, growling at things in the darkness, prowling around our bed at all hours of the night as if keeping watch. Early one morning she woke me up, pressing her wet nose against my elbow. I went to let her outside, and she went sprinting down the street. She didn’t look back.

Not long after that, they-whoever “they” were-tried something new. The radio. I would hear entire songs changed, twisted. I got dancey and lighthearted beats under lyrics about prison rape or incest and, once, a version of “Stairway to Heaven” with my name edited in throughout. This new version that blared over the speakers of a busy shopping mall (though only I heard it, of course) was a list of all my chronic sins and vices, a musical rundown of all the reasons I, David Wong, was destined for Hell. It got to me, I admit. Even if their version of “Stairway” barely rhymed. What rhymes with masturbation?

I slowly came to the realization that these shadowy beings had the crude sense of humor of fourteen-year-olds.

That’s when things started to disintegrate between me and Jen. Our entire relationship had been a process of slow disintegration, I think. She knew something was up, mainly because there were so many more ’80s power ballads around the house than usual. She pestered me until I came clean and told her what was going on.

She nodded and said she understood, then left to go to her friend Amber’s house, ostensibly to help out with Amber’s new baby. She seemed to have taken all of her clothes with her, though, and didn’t come back that night. I sat there, depressed, thinking about coming home to the silent house night after night. Without even Molly for company.

On an evening a few weeks later, I was driving home from work with one thought cycling through my brain: I would go to the grocery store, buy a pie, and just eat the whole thing. In one sitting. A whole pie.

My radio was playing a supernaturally reworked version of an ’80s song by some Duran Duran soundalike band. It was the one with the word “Africa” in the chorus, and this version had been twisted into some kind of a racist diatribe against blacks. I tried to block it out, turning my attention to the call. Toto, that was the band’s name.

My cell phone rang.

Shocked, as always, that I had actually left it on, I fished around inside my jacket for the chirping thing. Caller ID showed John’s number. I punched the button and said:

“No.”

“Dave, glad I caught you. I just got a call from my uncle. He’s asked us to come in on a case. Like consultants.”

“Your uncle? The exotic dancer? Exactly what kind of ‘consulting’ would we be doing?”

“No, no, Uncle Drake. The cop. They got weirdness and they want us to come look at it. The crime scene is at Eight-eighteen West Twenty-third Street. By the mall.”

This stopped me. The cops called us? What, they got a ghost they want us to check out? Like we’re fucking Scooby-Doo?

“No. We talked about this. I’m going home to eat a pie.”

“I think they found Molly.”

“What?”

Molly? What, did she steal another car?

“Come get me. See you in a few.”

“I’m not going, John. I-”

I was talking to a dead phone.

I cursed and rubbed my forehead. The radio sang its bigotry in perfect ’80s pop harmony.

Let’s send ’em aaallllllll ba-ack to Aaaaafrica…

I reached down to the knob, to find the radio was already off.

Here we fucking go.

I PICKED UPJohn at his building, since it turned out his supernatural powers couldn’t stop the bank from repossessing his motorcycle.

We turned onto 23rd Street, a lineup of perfect new houses with trendy coffee-cream-colored siding and a shiny SUV in each driveway. Finding the house was easy-it was the one with the swirling red-and-blue cop lights out front, the collected cop cars making it look like the ship from Close Encounters had landed there.

One guy tells us to turn back, and we go, I thought as we pulled up a block away from the commotion. Any one of those guys says “boo” and we turn around and never come back here.

We passed a blue Jeep in the driveway, license plate STRMQQ 1. John studied it, frowning a little. Four cops stood out on the front lawn, looking unsure, like they all needed each other’s armed company right now. Eight eyes landed on us.

“Don’t worry,” John said to them. “We’re here.”

Each cop was individually pissed off by that, I could see, and it was only the arrival of John’s uncle Drake that spared us the confrontation with these guys who clearly had no idea who we were. Drake was a big guy, with a uniform that stretched and bulged around the middle. He sported an uneven mustache that I think he grew to cover a scar on his upper lip.