David Wong - John Dies at the End

Amy opened the door with the too-happy-too-see-me look I associate with crazy people and dogs. She wore thin wire-framed glasses-she didn’t have them last night but I guess she didn’t wear them to bed-and seemed to have put a lot of work into her hair. Jeans and bare feet with tiny red toenails. It made me cold just looking at them. I observed that she still didn’t have a left hand.

“Hi!” she sang. “Come in!”

Molly was standing in the entryway, looking at me with utter disinterest. Amy turned around and gestured to me, said, “Look, Molly! David’s here! You remember David!”

The one who made you explode!

The dog turned and walked away, making a sound that I swear was a snort of derision. Amy led me through the living room. The television was on, displaying nothing but the face of a white-haired old man staring quietly at the camera. PBS, probably. There was a picture on the wall, a black velvet Jesus painted in comic-book tones. There was only a lone table lamp in the room, which left about half of the space in shadow.

Of all the creepy places to spend a night…

She said, “You look tired! Your eyes are pink.”

“Eh, I haven’t been sleeping. Got a headache.”

Feels like elves tugging on fishhooks in my brain…

“Be right back!”

Amy vanished into the kitchen, almost bouncing.

Vicodin.

I sat on the couch and glanced at the TV again, same old guy. Odd-shaped face. He leaned over, whispered to someone just out of frame, then looked back toward the camera again. Weird, because he seemed to be looking at me.

Amy bounced back in, a green Excedrin bottle in her hand and a red Mountain Dew bottle in the crook of her elbow. She nodded her head toward the TV and said, “Cable’s out. I hope you brought something to read.”

I looked at the old guy, looking right back at me.

Oh, SHIT.

The screen blinked, went to black, then came up on MTV. Some reality show with teenage girls screeching at each other.

Amy set the bottle in front of me and said, “Hey, it’s back! I got that cherry Mountain Dew. John said you liked it so blame him if it’s not…”

It’s not cherry, dear. It’s RED.

“No, it’s fine, thanks.”

I studied the television. Nobody home but the screeching girls.

Amy said, “It comes and goes. John says that he saw a bunch of birds on the lines and they were flapping their wings but couldn’t take off because their feet had frozen there.”

Without breaking my gaze with the TV, I said, “To John, something being funny is more important than being true.” I glanced at a grandfather clock that was ticking but was off by approximately seven hours.

The television blinked back off, switching to snow.

Amy said, “See?”

I said, “When the TV goes out, it’s just snow?”

“Sure.”

“Never anything else? Like-other programming?”

“No. Why?”

I shrugged. She couldn’t see the old man.

By responding to her attempts at small talk with nothing but ambiguous grunts, I was able to drive Amy back upstairs to her room. I glanced at the grandfather clock…

12:10 A.M.

… realized again that it was utterly useless, then looked at my watch instead:

7:24 P.M.

This was gonna be a long damned night. I thought absently that maybe if Amy got taken at midnight again I’d be able to duck outta here and go sleep in my own bed. Nobody would notice.

There was a coffee table in front of the sofa and I noticed some magazines resting on a shelf on the end of it. I sifted through them. Cosmo . I picked up the top one and flipped through the pages. Topless woman. Another woman, naked, except for some whipped cream on her naughty bits. Two more pages, a naked man’s ass. I had seen less nudity on Cinemax. I glanced up at the velvet painting and suddenly felt sacrilegious ogling naked models. I stuffed the magazine back in the coffee table and nodded an apology to Badly Drawn Jesus. I looked at my watch again.

7:25 P.M.

I leaned over on the couch and put my feet up. Like lying on a pile of felt-covered bricks. I wondered if I could set all of the clocks ahead to midnight, maybe fool them into coming early.

John and I had looked into the case of a Wisconsin guy who spontaneously combusted while driving his green Oldsmobile last year. We had one witness who claimed the flames formed a huge, satanic hand at the moment of explosion. We went up there, talked to a few people, came up with nothing. Eventually we get a call from a goth kid up there who was heavily into Satan worship. The kid said he had made a pact with Satan to kill both of his parents, then backed out of it when his mom unexpectedly bought him a video game console. The kid, as it turned out, also drove an olive-green Oldsmobile.

The avenging demon-or whatever it was-got the wrong car, barbecued the wrong guy. So they can make mistakes. They can confuse identities. The kid felt terrible about it and from then on spent every night on his knees, praying to God for another chance. For my own safety I pray that Brad Pitt doesn’t do anything to piss off the dark realms.

Eyes getting heavy. A shadow moved on the far wall, probably from passing headlights in the street. My eyes closed.

Open again. Darker. Had time passed? Shadow on the wall again, elongated figure of a man.

No, just the tree outside the window…

Another shadow, next to it. Another, a forest of shapes. Moving, slowly. Was I dreaming this? Suddenly there was darkness right in front of me, pitch-black. Two orbs of fire appeared right in the center of it, two burning coals floating right there, inches away.

I flung myself upright, my muscles on fire with adrenaline. The room was normal again. There was still a lone shadow on the far wall, which was in fact just a tree backlit from the front yard. I walked over to it, reached out, and touched it. The shadow didn’t react. That was good.

My watch: 11:43 P.M.

I pounded up the stairs and burst into Amy’s room, terrifying her. She was on the bed with the laptop, legs crossed under her, a handful of what looked like Cheetos frozen halfway to her mouth.

I caught my breath and said, “How can you eat those and type on your computer? Don’t you get that orange shit everywhere?”

“Uh, I…”

“Come downstairs. If this thing’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. But I want to be on the ground floor and near an exit.”

“Why?”

In case we have to run screaming out of this place.

“And put some shoes on. Just in case.”

11:52 P.M.

The television was back to regularly scheduled programming, the basic cable package of somebody who doesn’t watch a lot of TV. No movie channels. I turned it off and turned to Amy, who was sitting stiffly on the stiff sofa, biting a thumbnail.

She said, “What are we waiting for?”

“Anything. And I do mean anything.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” I stalked around the walls of the room, stopping to peer out of the big bay window. Not snowing, at least.

As long as you don’t bring up your brother…

“You said yesterday that, like, most of what people say about you guys is true. So-there are some things that I’ve read that, you know…”

“What do they say, Amy?”

“That you guys have, like, a cult or something. And that Jim died because of something you guys were into.”

“If that were true, would I admit it?” I glanced at my watch, something that was becoming a compulsion with me.

11:55 P.M.

“I don’t know. You were there, though, right? In Las Vegas?”

“Yeah.”

“And John says he didn’t die in an accident, the way the papers said.”