John Dies at the End (John Dies at the End, #1)

by David Wong

I felt like that was enough background and I wanted to stop John before he got to the part where he says he kept eating that screaming hamburger, down to the last bite.

Twisted!

A large Mason jar filled with cloudy formaldehyde, where inside floated a six-inch clump of cockroaches arranged roughly in the shape of a human hand.

Putrid.

“Oh, no!” I heard John shout over the running water. “It’s dark in here and here I am in the shower! Alone! I’m so naked and vulnerable!”

This John guy is a silly billy.

I heard Molly plop down on the floor below. I reached down to pet her and she licked my hand the way dogs do. I wondered why in the world they felt the need to do that. I’ve often thought about trying it the next time somebody got their fingers close to my mouth, like at the dentist.

Cute.

I half closed my eyes, my mind flooding with images of the 103 billion humans who have been born since the species appeared. A sea of people living, dying and multiplying like cells in a single organism. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to clear my mind by focusing on a mental image of the waitress’s boobs.

Lol, men.

“She was a strung-out, crank-addicted cannibal, dabbled in vampirism and shamanism. My mom, she worshipped some major devil when I was a toddler. Blew her welfare check every month on black candles. Sure, Satan would do her favors now and then, but there’s always a catch with the Devil. Always a catch.”

His mom.

I walked away, forcing the steps. It was that jarring sensation of unreality, like the first time you see the road go spinning around your windshield in the middle of a car crash. I was actually dizzy, unsteady on my feet.

From day one it was like society was this violent, complicated dance and everybody had taken lessons but me. Knocked to the floor again and again, climbing to my feet each time, bloody and humiliated. Always met with disapproving faces, waiting for me to leave so I’d stop fucking up the party.

Yes, the entire spiraling trajectory my life took since that night was because I lost a debate with a dog.

Understandable.

He’s seen things, the kind of things that sit in the brain, like a tumor, poisoning everything around it.

“I need you to get in that mind-set, Arnie. We’re out here, in public with lights on and the whole world’s solid and lined up real neat. But down in that basement, in the dark, alone, you believed in things. Dark things. I need you to open yourself up like that. Okay?”

Man, I gotta focus on one thing at a time or my brain’s gonna melt and run out of my ears like strawberry jam.

The carpet was still a few shades off from its original color and the walls were forever stained a faded reddish-brown. And there was a smell, awful and organic. Mildew and rotten milk and shit.

It was a painting. A floor-to-walls-to-ceiling mural. He had painted the walls, the trim on the windows, the damned glass in the window. He painted over the curtains, painted the carpet, painted the sheets and wrinkled comforter on the unmade bed so that, when viewed from the doorway, the effect was beyond photographic. There was a half-full water glass on the nightstand, and a sprout of ice-coated weeds painted on the wall continued on the nightstand and onto the glass. There was a little crack in the glass and the artist incorporated it into the painting, the fracture becoming a glint of sunlight off an ice-covered leaf.

The rungs were slippery with mud, and the dirt stank like mold all around me. As I went down, I was hit with another smell so strong it seemed to generate its own warmth. Sharp and rotten and fecal.

The back of the television had been removed and a strip of what looked like red seaweed led out of it and into a large, dead fish. The gut of the fish had been slit open and bulging out of it was a pink, wet mass of something the size of a basketball, like its innards had swollen to fifty times its normal size.

The only reason we would normally perceive that span as being a short amount of time is because the wet mechanism of our bodies simply can’t accomplish very much in that span. But a supercomputer can do over a trillion mathematical equations in one second. To that machine, one second is a lifetime, an eternity. Speed up how much thinking you can do in two seconds and two seconds becomes two minutes, or two hours or two trillion years.

It was the nightmare we’ve had a thousand times, a horror we can’t run from because the horror has swallowed us whole.

“Now what I think,” he said to his lighter, “I think all that stuff is both real and not real at the same time. And I think the people who see it and the people that don’t are both right. They’re just like two different radios, switched to different stations. Now I ain’t no Star Trek fan and I don’t know about other dimensions and all that. But I am an old Catholic and I do believe in Hell. I believe it ain’t just rapists and murderers down there; I believe it’s demons and worms and vile things that wouldn’t make no sense to you if you saw them. It’s the grease trap of the universe. And I think somehow, through some chemistry or magic or some voodoo, that faux Jamaican S.O.B. opened the door into Hell itself. He became the door.”

Oh, that sound. Not something coming through my ears at all but a kind of shrill electricity in my brain, a million sharp, spiky, poison thoughts ricocheting around my head.

“Don’t make this about me. The people in Vegas, the ones who vanished? They never existed, Arnie. No, listen. This is hard to understand, but the moment they were sucked into that hole, or whatever it was, they didn’t just stop existing in the here and now. They were erased from the past, too. That’s why there’s no report of them being gone. At that moment, they were never born. If I had fallen in there, you’d be able to go back and see that my mom never had a male child and she never named him ‘David’ and we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

Interesting concept.

Danny Wexler appeared to be a statue carved from solid shadow.

“A cockroach has no soul. Yet it runs and eats and shits and fucks and breeds. It has no soul, yet it lives a full life. Just like you.”

“Who are you? Who are you to one like Korrok, who fills his belly with great men, swallowing them as a whale swallows swarms of krill? The desires and ambitions of men who towered over you are, in Korrok, digested over eternities, fermenting into an anguish that exceeds the sum of all of living mankind’s suffering through the ages. Populations of worlds roil in his guts, the mad screams and desperate longings of seven trillion souls escape every time Korrok farts. And he does fart. So let me repeat my question: who are you, you shit-spewing crotchfruit?”

Crotchfruit

I had never seen anything approaching that look on a human face before. The intelligence behind it was so hateful it was alien, unfeeling, unreasoning, infinitely terrible.

You’re the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.”

Loool

None find life outside of the throat. His jaws are like a lover’s embrace.

At this point two elderly security guards in parkas, the guys who normally work the front desk at the plant, asked John to step behind the tape. John claims that here he told the guards that he could not speak English and when this failed to persuade them, he faked a violent seizure. I am unclear as to the purpose of this part of his plan. John flung himself down and began rolling around in the snow, thrashing his limbs about and screaming, “EL SEIZURE!!! NO ES BUENO!!!” in a Mexican accent. Half a dozen pairs of boots came mushing through the snow toward him.

So stupid looool

I pulled out a bottle of water and soaked a shop towel. I went to hand it to Amy, realized stupidly that she had no hand to take the towel with since she only had, you know, the puke hand and the nonexistent hand. “Here,” I said. I took her arm by the wrist and wiped vomit from her fingers. Amy wrinkled her nose in disgust at this, but to be honest I had never attended a party of John’s where someone didn’t either vomit on me or near me. I was kind of inured to it.

Very sweet.

Amy put her hand on mine, her other hand balled up in a fist on the table.

She has one hand

“I do understand. Trust me, I do. And it takes a special kind of person to make up something so utterly bullshitty.

Lool