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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jason Pargin
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April 6 - April 9, 2024
The man appeared to be in his early fifties and had the kind of sad, droopy features that made him look like God hadn’t finished inflating him.
Next to it was an oversize glass jar, half-full of crinkled dollar bills with a masking tape label that said: “I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS” JAR
“I don’t want you shooting anybody today,” said Amy, “even if solving a complicated problem by shooting it is just about the most American thing I can imagine. We have to get the guy to stay willingly.”
Sometimes when life’s Warning Light won’t stop flashing, the best thing you can do is just put some electrician’s tape over it.
A fresh flash of orange lit up the scene, the pop arriving a second later. That delay always freaked me out as a kid, like time was broken, the signal of reality out of sync.
John uncapped the gas can. Amy said, “Kick them into a pile. And don’t let the fire spread. Everything is pretty dry out here.” “Don’t you worry,” said John as he soaked the eggs. “Fire and I are old lovers. You treat her with respect, give her room to breathe, and everything will be juuuuust fine.” * * * Four hours later, we watched from afar as the city mobilized to put out the massive forest fire we’d started.
The cop rubbed his forehead and said, “Have you people ever thought about moving away? I think the whole town would chip in for a U-Haul. Get the hell out of here.”
We went back to John’s house because it was closer, spending much of the walk discussing what we were going to do with Eve. John noted that the point-blank shotgun blast hadn’t even left a smudge on her shell (unlike the eggs, which had instantly popped and vaporized in contact with the fire). I’m not going to go into details, because what occurred next doesn’t cast us in a good light as professionals. I’ll just say that over the next few hours, we discovered that Eve’s carapace could not be penetrated or even damaged by a drill, nail gun, blowtorch, chain saw, sledgehammer, or bolt cutters.
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driving to see what crisis John had encountered or, more likely, created.
I stepped out onto the rusty metal stairway to find the August night air had been pre-sweated for my convenience.
Without a glance into the back seat, I said, “I wondered when you’d show up.” I checked the back seat, but it was empty. It usually was, but I have been ambushed by bad guys waiting in a dark back seat before, so every time I get in, I try to say something to mess with them, just in case. I’m thinking about switching it to, “I’m surprised you came alone.” Plant some doubt in their mind.
The high school basketball team only has four players, and one of them is thirty-six years old. The number one industry is multilevel marketing schemes, with meth manufacturing coming in a close second. There’s a citywide ordinance that all corpses must have their legs and arms severed before burial.
Humans will twist themselves into knots rather than admit that the unknown might be unknowable.
John’s place came into view, a two-story house that was mostly painted yellow, aside from a band of the prior black paint at the top that we couldn’t reach because his ladder got stolen during the job and he never got around to replacing it.
I asked, “So where’s the rest of him?” because sometimes I ask questions even when I desperately don’t want to know the answer.
“My point is, if he was telling the truth, what are we supposed to do in response to that? I mean, right now, what do we do? How do we know what mistake we made?” John lit a cigarette while he considered it. “It’s tough, because I’d previously assumed we’d done everything in our lives perfectly up to now. Don’t tell Joy I smoked in the house.”
“It’s their daughter. There’s unusual activity with one of her . . . things she owns.” I froze. I slowly turned on him. “John, does this object happen to be a toy, by chance?” “I would have to double-check my notes. It’s not a doll, if that’s what you’re thinking.” We’d eventually had to rent a storage locker to keep all the haunted/possessed/cursed dolls we’d accumulated, thanks to a series of enormously popular movies on the subject.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not mad. I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get me out of the house, to take my mind off things. But if I have to stand there while you pretend to purify somebody’s haunted SpongeBob, I’m going to start laughing, and that’s going to ruin the whole bit.”
“Are those real teeth? You could have just told me what she had. You didn’t have to dump them on the table for dramatic effect. We eat here. And what does this have to do with the haunted toy? And whose teeth are these?”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have wanted to deal with that alone, that whole situation was da filthy.” I whipped my head around to face him. “It was what?” “It was crazy. The whole thing, I mean, I woke up and—” “No. No. You didn’t say ‘crazy.’ Tell me what you said.” “Oh yeah, I said it was da filthy. It’s what people say now, like when a party gets out of control and stuff gets broken, the kids are like, ‘Man, that shindig was hella da filthy, hog-swingers.’” “Pull over. Let me out of the fucking van.” “What?” “No one has ever said that phrase in the history of language, and they’re not
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Not a speck of dust anywhere in the room; whoever they paid to clean their house did the job like they knew they’d be fired the moment they left a single strand of lint behind.
I tried not to let my face convey that I didn’t find any of that particularly convincing. I’m not a parent myself, but I’m fairly confident that wherever you find grown-ups with a secret safe where they keep the dangerous stuff, you will find kids who figured out how to open that safe within days of its installation. I’m also confident that mice have been finding their way in and out of mouse-proof containers since before humans ever thought to keep them as pets.
There’s a reason we have all those “haunted” dolls crammed onto shelves in a storage locker: If they were actually possessed, we’d have been able to sell them for quite a bit of money.
I said, “The brother’s home.” Gracie was yelling something from her window. The brother listened, then took off running after the van. “He’s, uh, chasing us.” He moved like he was sprinting to defuse a bomb before its timer hit zero, arms pumping like the T-1000. The kid could run. He absolutely looked like he could rip a person’s teeth out if he really wanted to, or even mildly wanted to. “John, I think he’s gonna catch us.” He glanced into the rearview. “Are we going to have to get out and beat his ass?” “I think we’d wind up losing the mom as a client,” I said, though I was actually pretty
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Now, in a horror movie, this is where the character decides it was all in their imagination, at which point we’d immediately cut to some other character having an inexplicable sighting of their own, then neither character ever shares what they know with the other until like eighty minutes into the movie, after six other people have died horribly. John, Amy, and I have thus made it a formal rule that anything weird is to be shared with the rest of the group immediately, if at all possible. Granted, we had just made that rule a couple of months ago, after almost a decade of fucking around to
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Amy and I have one thing in common, which was that we both have what can politely be called anger issues, only we express them in very different ways. I tend to take some kind of rash action that will ruin my life for months or years after. Amy, on the other hand, tends to shut down, or cry, or otherwise remove herself from the situation. Or, as she did here, simply release air out of her nose and press her lips together so hard that they were probably bleeding a little.
“Really? Jesus. Also I’m just now realizing that, as a team, we’d be more effective if it was just you, working alone.”
I said, “It appears this may already be a Category H situation.” John’s eyes went wide. “Oh. Oh, shit. Who?” Note: The H in “Category H” stood for: Holy Shit Someone Has Actually Died from This, Are We Absolutely Sure Nobody Else Can Handle It? A Category H, as you can imagine, can go from curiosity to crisis real fast.
I shouted, “What the fuck?” in a tone that was earnestly pleading for an answer.
He found the news story Amy had referenced earlier, the gang of kids in Florida who had taken a homeless man’s teeth. The kids actually insisted they had paid the homeless man to pull the teeth out himself, though that was almost worse.
“It seems like whatever dark energy was coming off this thing, it followed us home. But we’ll be all right, this is what we’re trained to do and it’s the reason we have a reputation for fixing problems like this,” I said, fitting three bald-faced lies into a single sentence.
Amy found all those distasteful and suggested we rename the substance “Armus,” saying there was an evil, tar-like alien in Star Trek named that. Then John started calling it “Arby’s Sauce,” either because he misheard or because his mind is deteriorating at a frightening rate.
Bas’s room was what I imagined my high school bullies went home to every night. A shelf with trophies. A row of autographed pictures of famous athletes on the wall. A framed news story about a high school football team, presumably his, winning a state championship. A TV positioned so that he could play video games from his bed. Dirty clothes scattered on the floor, mostly T-shirts and shorts. In one corner, there was an altar built out of human bones, topped with a glowing skull that was floating two inches from its stone base, slowing spinning in circles.
On its cover was a tangle of thin lines, like a complex maze or a doodle drawn during a very long, boring lecture. Above it were the words The Book of Xarcrax, and I was immediately a little embarrassed for both the author of the book and everyone who’d purchased it. They’d named their god like a goddamned mini-boss in a video game. Bas had the bedroom of a high school jock, but if the dudes on the football team saw this, he’d be saddled with a permanent and shameful nickname within minutes.
It’s not the kind of thing amateurs can do, is my point, at least not without accidentally sucking themselves out of the universe in the process.
“It’s not about the money. It’s about what kind of conversation he’ll want to avoid. You mention psychics and, well, that’s silly female stuff. You mention drugs, and it’s time to start yelling and grounding everyone. All wives have secrets. All wives learn how to navigate their husbands’ rage.”
John approached Bas, who was covered in colorful splatters and looked like he’d just come from learning a hard lesson at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
John grabbed an empty paper coffee cup from the counter and tossed it through the book. We watched as it landed on the filthy concrete floor on the other side of the portal, then rolled to a stop. Nothing else happened, so we closed the book and re-belted it. Amy said, “That confirms something that we already knew or should have known. From now on, you definitely don’t want to put your face right in front of the book when you open it.” I said, “Because of the smell?” “Because that guy on the other side might throw a rock and smash your face in.” “Ah, right.”
I am also aware that when the Spanish were forcibly converting the indigenous peoples of Mexico to Christianity five centuries ago, they told worshippers of Tlaloc the story of God demanding Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. For you see, this was how they reassured them that their gods were not so different after all.
“The music should work regardless of size. But let’s hope it’s not a kaiju-scale entity, because I don’t want to have to pay for the damage its corpse causes when it goes down.”
Benjamin screamed in a way that would ruin slasher films for you if you ever heard it. No actor can imitate it; it’s the sound of an adult human reduced to infancy, the universe suddenly such a terrifying and treacherous place that the only reaction is to utterly abandon dignity and howl at it with all your mind, body, and air. When you encounter that awful noise for real, actor screams seem like a halfhearted mockery in comparison.
It really seemed like a pack of dudes watching everything fall apart and deciding that job #1 is to figure out who is going to get blamed.
“They may still want this thing to get out. See if you can talk to them. I’ll keep looking. If I go up there myself, I’m liable to just start smashing their faces in.” Amy thought it was a sign of progress that David recognized in advance a situation that he would likely have just made worse.
Humans, David had once told Amy, find nothing more enthralling than the act of exclusion. Starting a club and locking out new members, basking in the cruel joy of seeing a sad nose pressed to the window. If the members grew up as outcasts themselves, they’d sooner die than give up their chance to finally be the only ones on the warm side of the door.
John nodded. “Don’t worry, I have a better idea.” He pulled out his phone and dialed. “Joy? It’s me. I need you to get everyone together. Owen, Crystal, Munch, Head, Kelly—everybody. Tell them to each bring their vehicle to the Doll Enema theater and park in a circle around the building. I need you to come, too. Take my van. The keys are on the hook in the living room next to the halberd. Then all of you will turn on your stereos at full volume and play ‘Set Adrift on Memory Bliss’ by P.M. Dawn. We’re creating a containment perimeter around the building. There’s a creature on the loose, and if
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He held one up and said, “Just got them. On this end it’s a flashlight, bright enough to summon Batman.”
Amy powered up her flashlight. It was so bright I was surprised it didn’t hum like a lightsaber.
John wished, for the hundredth time, that Amy possessed the ability to forgive herself as easily as she forgave others. If you can’t do that, every mistake just sets up camp in your memory, gnawing on your happiness like a tumor.
He also liked to cash in on his Undisclosed fame in ways he knew Amy and I didn’t really approve of, including charging for guided “ghost tours” through desolate neighborhoods that weren’t so much haunted as neglected—basically charging people to come look at our poverty.
At the level of poverty where we exist—not starving but hopelessly locked out of the middle class—it feels like flying over an active volcano on the back of a winged creature that is friendly but also very drunk.
