David Wong - John Dies at the End

“No, no. No. Sleepwalking, you know. Blackouts. I thought something with the medication maybe.”

I’m sick of your lies, scumbag!

I said, “John?”

He pulled a saucer from a strainer in the sink. He squirted some of the fluid from the bottle onto it, then found a spoon on the counter.

He said to her, “Imagine something. A physical object.”

“Like what?”

“Anything.”

She actually smiled, amused, ready to play along. She pushed her hair from her forehead and I noticed that, tragically, her bangs were the exact length to fall right into her eyeballs. She squinted into an almost comical expression of concentration. The gel in the saucer began to bubble and rise, twisting and spilling upward like the wax in a lava lamp. At the top it slowly spread outward, like a mushroom. After a moment it held the shape of a tree, six inches tall, like one of those little crystal sculptures some old people keep on their shelves.

Amy was impressed. “How…”

“We have no idea,” I said. “Somebody mailed it to me. Guy said he worked for an oil company and they found the stuff stuck to the end of a drill bit that had been about a thousand feet down. They thought it was lubrication or something, like they had a leak. Until the stuff killed one of them.”

The tree was already beginning to melt and puddle back into a gel pool. John held the spoon just above it and said, “Yeah, it’s pretty impressive that it can do anything at all, considering it’s just a big faggot .”

The gel turned bloodred. The shape shifted, grew a hole in the center. Spikes emerged from the edges. Teeth.

“Ooh, you don’t likes that, do ya?” John taunted. “I’ve seen gel that could make shapes twice the size of you. If you’re so special why don’t you go out and get a job, you pus-”

With a blur and a clink, half of the spoon was gone. The gel creature had it in its jaws, bending it and crunching the metal shard like a dog on a bone. A chair clattered to the floor and suddenly Amy was standing, arms wrapped around her abdomen.

“Just wait,” John said. “It always calms down after a second.” The color of the thing faded from crimson to pink and back to clear again. It eventually settled into a puddle, the chunk of bent spoon wading in the pool.

I said, “We got a whole collection of weird shit like this at home. The stories you heard about us? They’re mostly true. This is what we do. We have a talent for it. We have seen shit that would fuel your nightmares. So you need to understand, Amy, that there is nothing you can say that will make us think you’re crazy. But we need to know everything if we’re going to help you. Do you want our help? Because weird things are happening tonight. Big, weird, stupid things.”

She brushed her hair from her eyes, nodded, then said, “Okay.”

“Talk to us.”

She said, “The basement.”

THE DOOR TOthe basement was hidden behind a shelf. Not a cool pull-the-book-off-the-bookcase-to-make-it-swing-open Batman secret passage, but a regular old bookshelf that somebody had set in front of the slim door in the storage room to discourage strangers from going in. Strangers, or a thin girl without the upper-body strength to move a bookcase. It took John and me both to scoot it aside, even without a lot of books on the shelves.

Amy shoved open the door, then reached around in the darkness until she found a pull-string for a dangling lightbulb, the once-white string now a greasy brown.

Cobwebs.

Bare brick walls.

A smell like a pile of wet dogs.

I realized about halfway down the creaky stairs that we were letting the girl take point on our adventure into the dark basement and how utterly unheroic this was.

I reached out and, with a small move of my body, did something that would change my life forever. I gently moved Amy aside and stepped down ahead of her, putting myself between her and the shadows.

Cold down here. I saw little rectangles of white floating in the darkness to my left, ground-level windows buried under snowdrifts.

Around a corner I saw something long and jagged poking out of the darkness, like a tree branch. In the dim light my imagination went wild, seeing razor-sharp claws on the end.

I stepped around the corner, blinking to get some night vision back. In my adrenaline-charged state, I saw a monster, the “arm” ending in a squat body, covered with pointed plates like an alligator’s back, tall legs like a grasshopper, jointed backward and sticking up in the air, giving the creature a “W” shape. The head had twin bundles of eyes, clustered like an insect, which wrapped around to the back of a narrow skull. The mouth was long and equipped with mandibles that ended in points as sharp as hypodermic needles.

I stared at the thing, blinking, thinking it would reveal itself to be, I don’t know, a hot-water heater or something. Then I realized the monster-shaped shadow was, surprisingly, a monster.

Amy rounded the corner. I screamed “GET BACK!!!” and threw out a hand to stop her, catching her right in the face. I had the gun in my hand, yanking it free and firing in one motion, the sound deafening in the basement. I was sure the shot was wild, as likely to hit my foot as the beast.

The creature’s shoulder exploded in a shower of yellow sparks. The extended arm flew off, tumbled to the ground, the jagged end aflame.

I kicked the creature in the chest, knocking it to the floor. I picked up the severed arm and clubbed the beast with it over and over again, screaming at the top of my lungs over the thunk thunk thunk of the beast’s own limb smacking its crotch.

After a moment it became apparent that the monster was not fighting back. It lay there, its limbs splayed stiffly into midair, as if petrified. I gave it seven or eight more thumps with its arm and then dropped the limb on the concrete floor with a thud. I sucked in huge breaths of dank, moldy air, trembling.

John approached, looking down at the broken beast. He said, “It wasn’t very agile, was it?”

“Guys…” Amy pushed past us. She squatted and picked up the monster, setting it on its feet again.

“It’s not real, you guys. It’s a model. A prop. Jim made it.”

She balanced the thing on its feet, then stumbled past some strewn cardboard boxes and found another switch. This one turned on a fluorescent shop light overhead.

The creature was actually a lot more horrifying under the glaring lights. The other arm was curled at its side, with talons that looked like they could cut down trees. I could see my reflection in each of the hundred little bundled eyes, a kaleidoscope of my own very tired and pale face.

I said, “Oh. I’m, uh, sorry about that.”

She turned to me, eyes bright, looking like that was just about the most entertaining thing she had seen all year. I looked the monster over. It was, at the very least, an astonishing work of creature art.

John said, “Look at that. At the arm, the tendons and all that.”

I examined the broken arm on the floor, the wound ending in a frayed spray of torn bone and connective tissue. Big Jim had sculpted the inside of this thing, the musculature, tendons, bone, presumably organs as well. Impossible.

“He was into that stuff,” Amy said. “He had all of those sci-fi magazines, and he used to have subscriptions to magazines about makeup and effects and all that stuff. Always mixing big buckets of latex. He wanted to do that stuff when he grew up. This one took him two months. He would come down here after work and just stay. I wouldn’t hear him until early the next morning. Just hours and hours…”

She trailed off, the memories of her dead brother taking her mind elsewhere. It seemed like a bad time to mention that I thought it would take a six-man crew from Industrial Light & Magic to make a prop like this, on a budget of a quarter-million dollars. This was soy sauce craftsmanship.