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  Copyright 2021 Nick Kolakowski

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  Ben Baldwin—http://benbaldwin.co.uk/

  Interior Layout:

  Lori Michelle—www.theauthorsalley.com

  Proofread by:

  Sue Jackson

  Guy Medley

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Welcome to Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.

  1.

  Every day, all day, Bill smells shit or burning hair. Bill asks everybody if they smell those things, and when they say no (“What smell, dude?”), Bill thinks they’re lying to him. (Bill, your friendly neighborhood health inspector, thinks everybody lies to him.) Only when Bill starts smelling the distinct odor of his wife’s crotch does he begin to suspect something’s well and truly wrong with the ol’ noggin—she’s been dead for years.

  Not that Bill will see a doctor about his symptoms, no sir. Instead he’ll smoke and snort and screw the fear away, because a buzz always beats reality, and the idea of a tumor or an artery primed to blow is as real as it gets. On Monday, Bill takes two hundred dollars in hankie-soft bills from a corner market, in exchange for overlooking a frisky roach, and uses it to purchase a few small bags of the finest chemical concoction some creep could cook up in a kitchen sink, which he smokes in the front seat of his Official Government Vehicle before driving to his favorite strip club. That fine institution always earns an ‘A’ when inspection time rolls around, in exchange for a regular gratis lunch of a burger and pints and a bored lap-dance from someone who’d rather be anywhere but near him.

  We sense the disgusted look on your face. Really, what else do you expect poor Bill to do? Born with a nubby penis and a tendency toward obesity, the meat computer in his skull loaded with buggy software, it’s a miracle that Bill made it this far. A thousand years ago, he would have been a sex toy for Vikings on his way to becoming worm food. These days, the twin wonders of medical technology and modern law will ensure that he lives long enough to realize he can’t obliterate the memories of his dead wife and all his failures, no matter how hard he tries.

  But we’re going to help him, mostly because we don’t have a choice. Bill is our home.

  2.

  We were born on a Greek cargo ship bound for the East Coast. Like many an immigrant before us, our childhood was messy and short. The sailors pushed the lever that dumped the bilge tanks, and we found ourselves floating off the scenic coast of New Jersey, where the current soon directed us to an inlet, and from there to a pipe, and soon enough we sloshed through the speedy water-park of the local waste-treatment plant, where we slipped through a corroded filter on our way to Bill’s kitchen tap, and from there to Bill’s glass, and from there to Bill’s stomach, which offered everything an enthusiastic young parasite could ever desire: water, proteins, microbes on which to snack, and drugs—beautiful, weird drugs.

  Fortunately for us, Bill can’t even endure the twenty-minute drive from strip club to office without snorting a small pile of crushed-up pills. Got to balance out those five pints of cheap beer somehow. Forehead red and sweaty, heart hammering, pupils squeezed to pinpricks, Bill can barely see the road; so how, might you ask, can we see through his eyes? Like the vine that wraps the tree, we have tendrils everywhere, from his balls to his brain, where we’ve tapped into the sparking neurons that convey visuals and sound.

  Bill makes it back to the office after two near-accidents, pausing outside the parking garage to smoke another cigarette and check his appearance in a window, nodding in approval at his bloodshot eyes and trembling fingers and tragic hair. Maybe he doesn’t let himself see the fractures; maybe he thinks they’re normal; or maybe (and this is the worst option) Bill has chosen to embrace his sorry-ass state. It’s hard for us to tell because, despite our bits woven deep into his core, we can’t yet read his thoughts, although we have big hopes for the pink thread we’ve extended to the base of his skull, poised to wrap around his brainstem like a lasso.

  Bill’s office is a windowless hive of gray cubicles stretching to infinity, lit only by fluorescents that make everyone look like a corpse. He enters the office like a returning conqueror, arms thrown wide, emitting a wordless scream of mock bloodlust, only for his little routine to run smack into what we like to call the Unbreakable Wall of Despair, a.k.a. his coworkers. They glance from their spreadsheets and email long enough to confirm Bill’s utter lack of threat, then return to their screens without a word.

  A new and as-yet-unlit cigarette pasted in the corner of his lips, Bill helps himself to a mug of primordial brew from the coffee pot and saunters over to Janine, his flame in Accounts Receivable. Janine is a rare specimen in these parts, still holding some hope that one day she’ll escape this place with health and sanity intact. She’s still so young, at least two or three Bills away from overcoming this desire to save broken men with her love. The Fear is starting to settle in her, though—we don’t need a tendril in her brain to know she worries that she’s too heavy, too dumb, too unlucky to fulfill her puniest hopes. We want to tell her it’s okay, that anyone can climb the ladder of the American Dream. If a parasite from a freighter bilge can hitch a ride aboard a government worker with a decent ticker and a major substance-abuse problem, a homo sapien with her skills can score a split-level with okay water pressure outside of Trenton.

  But we can’t speak through Bill, who looks around to see if anybody’s watching before reaching down to cup her soft ass. She slaps his arm, playfully, and flicks her eyes toward the nearby stairwell, which leads to a little-used storage room where three times a week we spend no more than four minutes staring at the moist, pale expanse of her back as she braces against Bill’s mushy hip-thrusts (minutes we dearly wish to erase from memory, we hasten to add). Oh, Janine, you can do so much better.

  Janine and Bill, they’re bonded like ticks and dogs. When Bill’s older brother died a couple months ago, Janine outdid herself at the funeral, unleashing a glass-shattering wail just as Bill dropped the first shovel of dirt on the coff
in. Her grief warmed Bill’s heart, articulated all the things he refused to let himself feel. Bill’s brother may have raised him, but by the end Bill didn’t have the cojones to come to the hospital and say goodbye. Sometimes we think it’s not quite enough to save Bill’s body: we have to save his soul, as well.

  In the dimness of the storage room Bill pumps frantically away at Janine, sweating, heart thundering so hard it makes us more than a little concerned about a coronary in the near future. The alcohol from lunch must have dulled the nerves in his Midnight Meat Train, because it takes a full five minutes longer than usual for him to finish up . . . and when he does, we bask in that endorphin bliss, marveling at how it makes his shambles of a nervous system light up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Such glories are invisible to Bill, who fumbles his substandard package back into his pants and, with a wheeze and a muttered term of endearment, shuffles back downstairs.

  3.

  A few days later—and three hours late, but who’s counting—Bill’s crumpled soda-can of a jalopy (his personal car, mind you, not that government-funded monster) murmurs its way into the lone empty parking space of a coffee shop near his house, the engine cutting out with a loud fart, Bill emerging in full Sunday-morning glory. From his leather jacket, dry and cracked as the surface of Mars, he extracts a crumpled cigarette and torches up, exhaling a cloud of fragrant smoke. In that moment, taking a fresh jolt of poison into his bruised lungs, he seems almost human again: his spine straightens, his cheeks flush from bloodless pale to heart-attack red (an improvement, trust us), his cloudy gaze clears into the speculative laser-stare of Ye Olden Days, when Bill could still put on a good show of walking the earth larger than life.

  Bill power-draws the cigarette in four long pulls, crushes the leftover bit beneath his scuffed heel before heading inside, where his nephew Trent—a hot mess, that one—jitters over his seventh cup of coffee and the last crumbs of a chocolate-chip muffin. The coffee shop is an old-school joint, all chipped Formica and torn vinyl benches, the radio playing Frank Sinatra instead of whatever electronica Trent no doubt prefers.

  Bill takes a seat, offering Trent a close-up view of his wreckage, the bloodshot eyes and flaking lips and graying hairs corkscrewing from his chin. Bill had a bad week: two Chinese restaurants refused to pay his little toll (the nerve) and his Friday jaunt with Janine ended with a bad case of whiskey-dick. When the waitress arrives, he orders a cup of coffee and a doughnut.

  “Rough night?” Trent says.

  Kid, if you had any idea of what we face on a daily basis. Every time Bill puffs down too many cigarettes, or pops a pill of questionable origin, or decides to drown his sorrows in a tide of flavored vodka, we feel it in the same way that a sailor, clinging to the railing of a freighter during a fierce storm, endures the next monster wave crashing over him. Once upon a time it was fun to take that ride, but those days are fading in our metaphorical rearview mirror. We would hurl, if our parasitic form came with a stomach. We would beg for mercy, if we could actually use Bill’s mouth.

  Bill leans back, scanning Trent’s liberal use of eyeliner, the leopard-print jacket with the white fuzzy collar, the strands of fake pearls around the kid’s thin neck.

  “What’s that I smell?” he rasps, after taking a loud sniff. “Perfume?”

  “Cologne. Trying to be presentable, you know.”

  “More like trying to get beat.” Bill makes a great show of shrugging. “Anyway, what you need, kid?”

  “Your brother—”

  “Your father, you mean. Show some respect.”

  “He didn’t leave me any money.”

  “That’s why you call me, at eight on a Sunday?”

  Trent turns checking his watch into a piece of theater. The dramatics run deep in this family: every slight, every comeback elevated to the level of Shakespeare. “Yeah, and it’s almost ten when you show up.”

  “I know what time it is,” Bill says. “You’re nearly seventeen, Trent. You can handle yourself, right? You can get along in the world.”

  Trent opens his mouth to respond when the waitress comes around, bearing a fresh pot of coffee and Bill’s doughnut. She fills their coffee cups, and Bill reaches out, very delicately, to pinch her sleeve—holding her in place as he downs the cup in one swallow, places it back on the saucer, and cocks an eyebrow for a refill. The waitress raises the coffee pot, as if to dump it in his lap, but fulfills the request. Everybody pities stray dogs.

  “Anyway,” Bill says, after draining his second cup. “I got work all day. Don’t you got a friend you can call? That cute girl you used to hang out with?”

  “Nobody’s picking up.” Trent’s breath hitches a little, and we can hear the boy trying hard not to let his voice waver. “They’re all sick of me.”

  “Nonsense, they’re probably still asleep.” Bill crams his breakfast down his throat, gifting us with a bright sugar rush. “You need cash? I got cash.”

  “I got ten bucks, which should get me through today. No, I want you to take me with you.”

  “Where?”

  “To work. Show me what you do. How you earn.”

  “You know what I do. Besides, it’s Sunday. We don’t usually do inspections on Sunday.”

  “I’m not talking about inspections. I’m talking about . . . you know . . . the shakedown.”

  “This conversation’s over.” Bill half-stands.

  “Not if I tell someone at your office, it isn’t.”

  Bill thumps down. “Come on, kid. Give me a break.”

  “Trust me, I’ll find it fascinating. Seeing how the world really works.”

  Bill rolls his eyes. “You don’t know anything.”

  “Besides, I want to hang out with you. I never see you.” Trent picks up his chocolate-smeared knife and runs a thumb along the blade. “Show me. Or I’ll tell.”

  “Okay.” He’s a pushover, our Bill. He likes to think he’s a tough guy. If you pour a couple drinks in him, he’ll even try to act the part. But Bill knows he’s a bottom-feeder, and all bottom-feeders like company. Trust us on that one.

  4.

  Bill has the guts to show the kid an actual workday. They hustle a diner over on Bedford (“Is that mouse poop I see?”), raking in a princely ninety bucks, before pulling into the gravel lot behind Paradise Alley at a quarter past eleven. Bill shows the faintest modicum of decency by ordering his nephew to stay in the car while he goes inside Paradise Alley “for a minute.” Poor kid, hopefully he’ll prove smart enough to crack a window within the next hour, lest he fry in the late-morning heat like a puppy.

  Bill really means to have a shot of whiskey or two, the early lunch of champions, but he finds his best friend Frank at the bar, loading up. Frank is a homicide dick (emphasis on the word “dick”) who lives with his mother, snorts mountains of coke swiped from the evidence locker, and recites more Bible verses than a street preacher. He’s such a walking contradiction it’s a wonder that he can stride more than a block without vaporizing into thin air, his warring impulses canceling him out of existence like a negative subtracted from a negative. Maybe someday he will disappear. In Bill’s highly suspect vision, Frank often shimmers a bit, like a figure viewed across a wide stretch of desert.

  Frank deserves a parasite with his best interests at heart, but instead he needs to make do with the voices in his head. These bottom-feeders, how do they find one another? Bill and Frank spend twenty minutes trading shots at the bar and making fun of the furnishings, which is easy to do in a place like Paradise Alley, with its cheesy neon signage and ratty moose’s head over the bar. Bill is about to say adios and head back to the car when Frank claps him on the shoulder and asks for a favor.

  Bill follows Frank to the far edge of the bar’s parking lot, where Frank has parked his bright purple Cadillac (purchased for cheap at a police auction; he never bothered to fix the two bullet-holes in the dashboard). Frank opens the trunk to reveal an ominous-looking bundle wrapped in white sheets and bound in duct tape. Definit
ely a body.

  His panic spiking, Bill glances at his car parked across the lot. His nephew slumps in the passenger seat, head down as he plays with his phone. When Bill looks back at Frank, the cop’s cheeks are iridescent with tears.

  “Can you help me, buddy?” Frank asks.

  We can tell that Bill wants to ask about the identity of the body in the trunk. But if he says the wrong thing, Frank in his alcohol-powered lunacy is liable to pull his service pistol and decorate the gravel with Bill’s brains. Of all the days for Bill’s nephew to just show up, why the hell did it have to be this one?

  Bill swallows hard and nods.

  “Good. Let’s take a ride.” Frank tosses the keys over the roof. “You’re driving.”

  Bill ducks into Frank’s car without looking back at his nephew, and we hope the kid will stay parked behind the bar until . . . well, whenever. Bill feels a pang of sadness (a dark tinge we can smell in his blood) at abandoning a relative. He fastens his seatbelt and takes the offered keys from Frank. The Caddy starts with a vigorous roar that vibrates everybody’s gelatin in the most pleasing of ways. The crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror swings wildly as Bill slams the gas and squeals the car out of the parking lot, and Frank claps his hands in delight like an over-caffeinated child.

  “You have a plan?” Bill asks, glancing up at the rearview mirror—and almost has a heart attack when he sees his jalopy in pursuit, his nephew at the wheel. Maybe the kid is brave, but knowing how this family works, that’s probably wishful thinking. Trent’s more likely furious, or curious, or any of those lesser devils that drive humans to do really stupid things.

  “Yeah, I got a contact who owes me a favor,” Frank says. “Why we’re trusting something this sensitive to a bunch of trust-fund babies with hygiene issues is totally beyond my comprehension, but this is the situation and we’re dealing with it.”

  “Huh?” Bill doesn’t quite follow.