Swallowed By The Cracks e-Pub Read online

  The door of the coffee shop opened, and Walter's heart skipped into his throat.

  A man with a shaven head, chambray shirt and black quilted vest stepped into the gloomy afternoon. Despite the day's gray cast, he wore thick, dark shades over his eyes. Casually, he regarded Walter, then turned his back and entered the crowd of wandering pedestrians.

  Simultaneously relieved and disappointed, Walter felt any confidence he might have retained escaping him as if someone had punctured a balloon to release his courage into the atmosphere. If instead of the bald man, Barry had been the one to come outside, if he had seen him standing there, then he would have been forced to speak with him; they might have shared a cup of coffee; they might have had a really good time.

  But Barry had not come outside, and Walter knew he wasn't brave enough to join him inside.

  In submitting to his cowardice, he turned to leave and nearly collided with a woman.

  She was a blur of dark brown hair, and her hand went quickly to Walter's shoulder to stave off a collision. In the wake of her touch, he felt a piercing sting in the meat of his shoulder. A fingernail or perhaps a sharp ring gem had cut him. Walter tried to get a look at the woman, but she was already beyond the card and candle boutique, walking with a purposeful haste along the glass front of the coffee shop, the tail of her green trench coat, whipping in the breeze.

  Walter rubbed his injured shoulder and as soon as he touched the epicenter of his pain, the anguish soothed, faded and died away completely.

  Walter cast a last, hopeful look at the door of the coffee shop.

  He turned away and walked back to his car.

  * * * * *

  GDTLP: He was probably a total Teek.

  Walter laughed, reading Gary's assessment of his failed date. His friend's use of cyber-slang was a wonder, constant and always changing. A few weeks ago, Gary had hooked into the term "Teek," (apparently "Troll" was passé) and now used it whenever he got the chance. Walter thought to ask Gary what the word meant, but he didn't want to suffer through his friend's jeering, so he decided to look it up when he had a minute.

  Situated comfortably in his home and sitting before the glow of his computer screen, Walter was feeling secure again. Of course, Walter had mentioned nothing to Gary about his earlier anxiety or the evaporation of his courage as he looked at Barry through the glass door of the coffee shop. Instead, he lied to save his ego.

  WH61: He looked like a whale in a Wal-Mart tank top … he wrote.

  GDTLP: LOL! Teek bitch.

  Walter winced. He didn't like Gary calling Barry a Teek. Even though he wasn't sure exactly what the word meant, he'd seen it in enough chat rooms to know that it wasn't good. And he certainly didn't think the guy deserved to be called a bitch, but Gary was just being supportive of his friend. So…

  WH61: Teek is right.

  He rubbed his shoulder, feeling the memory of pain there and looked at the screen, waiting for Gary's reply.

  After returning from his failed date, Walter had gone to the bathroom and stripped off his shirt to examine his wounded shoulder, but he'd found no cut or abrasion. A small disc of skin, maybe the size of a nickel seemed to be discolored, grayish, but that could have been the light. He hadn't been bleeding, and his clothing wasn't torn. The woman in the long coat had just clipped him on a nerve in passing.

  GDTLP: TTFN. Hooking up. C U ltr.

  Walter smiled, typed in C U, and pushed away from his desk. The phone rang, and anxiety writhed in his belly. That would be Barry; he'd want to know why Walter had missed their date.

  He let the phone ring and walked into the hallway.

  Walter's house was a big ranch-style job with everything he could possibly want. His furniture was sleek, efficient and well matched. The office, perfectly appointed with everything he needed for his job as a technical copywriter, had actually been the master suite of the house with a big bathroom and enough space for a sofa on the far wall. Since Walter spent most of his time in the room, he wanted it to be the most comfortable. He'd installed his bed and clothing in one of the smaller spaces across the hall. The living room was spare but nice with a flat panel LCD television he'd bought with money saved for a vacation he never took, and the leather sectional – forming an L at the room's center – could accommodate ten people, though Walter couldn't remember the last time he'd asked friends to his house.

  In the kitchen, he retrieved a beer from the fridge, ran the cold bottle over his brow and closed his eyes in guilty frustration when the phone started a second round of intrusive ringing.

  Not yet ready to be confronted or condemned by Barry, Walter ignored the phone's trill and returned, beer in hand, to his office. In the black manager's chair, he stared at the screen.

  Walter sipped his beer and opened up Google to run a search on the word, "Teek." He couldn't visit any chat rooms for a while because Barry might catch him, and he certainly didn't feel up to getting any real work done, so instead he decided to satisfy his curiosity about the odd term.

  He clicked on a couple of suggested pages from the menu, but they were all about some science fiction book by an author he'd never heard of, and he found no connection between the book's synopsis and the cyber slang his friend Gary tossed around. He scrolled down the listings, clicked on the second page, scrolled down.

  Walter continued this casual scan until he came to a page listing with the title "The cyber legend Teek in today's interactive community." This sounded about right to him so Walter opened the page.

  Derived from the word, Mortique and abbreviated as seems mandatory for the syllabically challenged denizens of the World Wide Web, Teek are to the Internet what the Bogeyman and Bloody Mary are to children: a myth for a wired society.

  Well that's interesting, he thought. The page covering his screen was simple, with block type and few aesthetic touches; it looked like some college kid had posted a term paper on the web.

  He sipped from his beer, scrolled down the page and continued to read.

  * * * * *

  The term Mortique can be traced back to 1867 and the works of Jean Claude Van Maele (1830-1878). A Belgian novelist, Van Maele's early works, mostly short poems and prose fragments were collected in a volume entitled, L'ombre de l'Esprit. The title translates to The Shadow of the Spirit, though in researching Van Maele's history, it is suggested that his use of the word L'Esprit was intended to mean the less obvious definition (i.e. mind). The Shadow of the Mind as a title better suits this odd aggregation of experimental literature, particularly if one notes Van Maele's lifelong struggle with emotional instability.

  Though Van Maele went on to become one of Belgium's most respected nineteenth-century novelists, his early works were written off by critics of the day as infantile "ghost stories" designed for the amusement of the lower classes. In L'ombre de l'Esprit, one such tale involved a young Marquis who stumbles into the courtyard of a crumbling castle and encounters a grizzled old man whom he finds squatting on a boulder. The old man puts a spell on the Marquis, causing the royal to wither and die. As his victim succumbs to the spell, the old man explains that he can only survive by ingesting the flesh of the dead. But plague and fear have driven the peasants from the neighboring countryside, and he has been left to starve in the broken keep. Once the Marquis is dead, the Mortique finds his personal papers and drafts a letter to the Marquis' beautiful young fiancée. The ghoulish man, writing as the Marquis, insists that the young woman join him in the countryside. When she appears, she too is placed under the creature's spell. Then, he writes to her loved ones – father, brothers and friends – and all come to the isolated fortress to become food for the aged monster.

  The story itself might have gone completely unnoticed by historians were it not for the questionable success of Ian Harrison (1895-1948). A contemporary of Lovecraft and devoted reade
r of Poe, Harrison plagiarized Van Maele's tale of the Mortique. His story, Hungry are the Lost, was so unforgivably derivative that Harrison went so far as to call his hero Markus. Though the setting was changed to a dilapidated estate in New Hampshire, Harrison made no other efforts to hide his theft of Van Maele's work. The only concession to originality in Harrison's tale was a short passage that suggests the origin of the Mortique.

  In Harrison's version, the old man tells the dying hero that he is descended from a band of religious pilgrims, who upon finding themselves lost and starving in a desolate wilderness, are forced to feed upon one another. But being devout to their god, they refuse to partake in the flesh of their brothers and sisters until natural decomposition signals the end of the fallen as spiritual beings. Once certain that the souls of the deceased have fled, the Mortique of Harrison's tale consumed their dead. Despite their caution they were cursed for their unwholesome behavior – damned forever to exist on a diet of putrescence and decay.

  (Walter found this last line unduly grim, and he winced in disgust. He sipped his beer and an electronic voice announced that he had mail. He opened his mailbox and saw Barry's name in the sender field. Quickly, he clicked back to the description of the Teek, an action of avoidance more than curiosity at this point, though admittedly he was interested to discover how these antiquated creatures had made their way from a nineteenth-century fairy tale to the present day.)

  Van Maele's Mortique make their appearance in modern culture through the dreadful film adaptation of his tale. The 1982 film The Voice on the Phone is an updated version of Van Maele's story, in which a group of teens are drawn by a series of phone calls to meet their fate in an abandoned butcher's shop. The film's first victim (named Mark this time) is carrying his "little black book" and the killer (a rather embarrassed looking Cameron Mitchell in the title role) works his way through the phone listings to draw unsuspecting young women to his lair. Unlike Van Maele's villain, Mitchell uses a drug compound, administered with a filthy hypodermic needle, to expedite the death and decay of his victims (in one of the worst stop-motion animation sequences this writer has ever seen).

  Certainly it is this last example of the Mortique that has spawned the cyber slang definition of Teek. The film rose to cult status in the late 80's and was a favorite of the midnight movie crowds including university students, many of whom went on to prosper during the Internet boom.

  With the advent and proliferation of the Internet, new fears arose in the form of child molesters, serial killers and other contemporary villains who used technology to lure their victims. Early on, the term Teek was relegated to these digital predators, but has since evolved to include anyone who misrepresents themselves in chat room settings with fabricated profiles.

  This takes us back to the wondrous element of anonymity the web provides for…

  * * * * *

  Walter spent twenty minutes reading and musing over the origin of the Teek, and he thought they were a perfect addition to the web's fantasy kingdom. They could pretend to be anybody, court and lure their prey, and if they were skilled enough, even maintain the identity of their victims for a time so as to throw off suspicion and avoid discovery – a perverse kind of identity fraud.

  He thought that was kind of cool, but it also disturbed him. After all, he worked from home. With Netflix and GroceryNow, he could go days without ever stepping outside. No, he corrected, he could go weeks. Add to that the fact that most of his friendships were web-based, and he actually got a chill. He really could disappear and almost no one would be the wiser. Of course, work was a different matter. He was in contact with his bosses and clients almost every day. Certainly they'd notice if he just vanished.

  Walter's stomach rolled and a wave of exhaustion fell over him. The day's events, the beer and the reading had made him tired. He dropped his beer bottle in the wastebasket, stood and walked across the hall to his bedroom for a quick nap.

  * * * * *

  When the dream started, Walter was standing in the middle of a city; it could have been any city. Tall buildings of concrete, glass and steel towered above paved avenues and streets that teamed with vehicles and pedestrians. People brushed past him and the touch of their shoulders, their hands and their clothing on him felt almost erotic in its intensity. But he was frightened. In addition to the libidinous sensations the caress of fabric and flesh brought to him, there was also a feeling of dread.

  Because within the throng of executives and tourists, someone waited to grab him and hold him, though for what purpose he could not imagine. Eyes that probed with unwanted attention ran like a dry wind over his neck, his back and his cheek. His exposed skin chapped and flaked under the assessment of those arid stares.

  Terrified that he should be turned to dust, Walter held out his arms as if to take flight and wished the city and its crowding populace away…

  And his will seared the color and depth from all around him until Walter stood not on a city street but beneath towering, yet sheer panes of glass. The limpid sheets rose to a sky that had darkened from sunlit blue to a grim, brain-gray. The street below him shifted and crumbled until the city avenue was reduced to a desert of grainy sand, from which the towering panes rose. On the surface of the clear sheets, two-dimensional representations of the city's buildings and populace were etched. In the nearest pane of glass, he saw Barry's face concerned and pleading, staring out at him.

  Through this panel, Walter also saw three people, still whole and with full dimension. All three wore trench coats of a deep forest green. Their faces were swollen, lumpy and covered in a sickly yellow skin. Their eyes were small, black and hungry.

  Frantic to escape this flat, horrible world, Walter spun on his heels to run.

  A woman in green touched his shoulder, and Walter cried out.

  * * * * *

  His eyes snapped open as the echo of his cry faded. The room was filled with night's shade, the only light coming from the numbers on his alarm clock.

  He had napped for over three hours and now woke with a parched throat and a bad belly that rolled and kicked painfully. Feeling achy and still tired, Walter climbed out of bed, went to the kitchen for a glass of water and ended up drinking three. But the liquid seemed to be exactly what his troublesome gut required for its revolt.

  He barely made it to the bathroom in his office before his clenching stomach let loose. After struggling with the button and zipper on his chinos, he frantically lowered the toilet seat and perched on the porcelain just as a jet of hot fluid burned through his bowels and evacuated. Sweat popped up on his brow and Walter gasped for air as the molten stream left his body. Behind his eyes, a needle-sharp pain insinuated itself and blurred his vision.

  Once he was certain that his body had nothing left to expel, Walter splashed water on the hot skin of his face and then leaned on the counter to support his weak legs. A moment later, his strength returned; his face and neck cooled and the pain behind his eyes receded, leaving only a vague ache.

  Maybe the beer he'd had that afternoon had gone bad, or perhaps it was something else he'd eaten. Running through a brief list of his meals and snacks but identifying nothing that might have made him ill, Walter returned to his office and clicked off the screen saver.

  His e-mail box had ten new messages; Barry's was the first, the rest were junk ads. Walter erased the spam, and with great hesitation he moved the arrow over the bold, subject line of the remaining message. He squinted in readiness as if Barry's accusatory words might cause the monitor to explode in his face and then clicked on the subject line.

  Walter,

  I'm so sorry to hear that you aren't feeling well, but it was very sweet of you to try to call the coffee shop and let me know (they really should have paged me). OF COURSE, we can reschedule when you're feeling better.

  If you feel up to chatting later, I should be home after si
x. If not, get plenty of rest and know that I'm thinking about you.

  Warm hugs and a kiss on the forehead (you are sick after all, LOL. ).

  - Barry

  Walter read the message three times, feeling certain that he had missed something important, and yet experiencing a great sense of relief that Barry was not at home cursing him. Still, he had not written him an e-mail.

  Had he?

  Walter opened his "sent mail" folder and right at the top was a subject line that read – Sorry, sorry, sorry!

  It was addressed to Barry.

  He opened the note, which quite simply stated that he'd managed to get food poisoning, and it had hit just as he was leaving to meet Barry for their date. The note was brief, to the point and made it very clear that Walter was not a flake, just unforeseeably stricken. He'd even added to the deceit by noting that he tried to call Barry at the coffee shop but the clerk had refused to page him. In closing, he had begged, in a humorous yet sincere manner, that they reschedule.

  Distressed and confused, Walter shook his head in wonderment and instantly regretted the action because it brought the needle sharp pain back to the cavern behind his eyes. His stomach flipped and a fresh dew of sweat broke out on his face. Despite his discomfort, he drafted a quick thank you, mentioning that he felt worse than he had, which was true enough, and assured Barry that he'd be in touch once the illness subsided.

  The mysterious correspondence nagged at him, though. He began to think in earnest that someone might have hacked into his mail account.

  Only last month, three guys had been arrested in Cleveland and the news reports said that they'd stolen data on over thirty thousand people. They'd used the stolen identities to rob bank accounts, max out credit cards and set up phony Internet businesses.

  Maybe someone had pirated his account.

  But his logic was not only faulty; it was just plain silly. Even if someone had been able to access his account and had read his correspondences to discover the details of Walter's date, who could have guessed that he'd back out of the meeting at the last minute? How could they have been so accurate in identifying a sickness Walter hadn't even experienced yet? Furthermore, why would they?