Part One
Dear Mr. Kite:
Here (again) is my short story, Care and Feeding, to be considered for publication in your magazine. I am a huge fan of Fear Garden and think this story is perfect, tonally speaking. I’m sorry to keep writing you, but I just know this story belongs with you. I’ve even sketched a potential cover piece (also enclosed).
Thank you for taking the time to read. I’ve enclosed an SASE for your positive response.
Sincerely,
Michael Bodaeker
***
When I opened my apartment door last Friday and flicked on the lights and the lights didn’t work, I did not get scared. It’s one of those things you do every day: Open door, step in, turn on lights. Then this one time the lights don’t come on and the door swings shut behind you and you’re alone in the dark with an armful of groceries. That’s just life. Nothing scary about it.
I flicked the switch a few more times. Nothing.
A car passed outside, light slivers cutting through the blinds. Something smelled.
I heard the late news from my neighbor’s apartment, another in a string of mini-mart robberies. Two suspects. Very violent. Killed the clerk. Took lots of cash.
I did not get scared. Fear doesn’t affect me. I’m desensitized.
I put the groceries down. I’ve lived in my one bedroom on Holt Street for three years. I know it well, but not well enough to avoid a chair to the nuts in the dark. I started off with hands fending, hoping for the kitchen. I was sure the lights in the kitchen would work. I must have looked funny, walking like that in the dark.
Slipping surprised me, and when I fell the impact sent a bolt of adrenaline through my neck. Hurt too. My elbow. Still does. I started shaking (from the adrenaline). I tried to get up. I put my hands palms down on the wood floor and felt more of what I slipped in, and now my hands slid and I fell again, chest down in the stuff, which was thick and sticky-tacky.
This is where I got scared. I read so much horror, pages and pages of the stuff, more than most people would imagine there is in the world, so I’m hard to scare. Slasher films do nothing for me. Roller Coasters – forget it. I need to see some pretty frightening shit to actually be afraid – 9/11, the rape scene in Irreversible frightening. But here I couldn’t see. That was the problem.
Fear rode in on adrenaline’s back. It made my hands shake and my breath short. I lolled around in whatever was spread in so wide and thin a layer on my floor, trying to get up and failing, flailing in the liquid, feeling it all over me.
I knew it was blood.
Even before I felt DeRay Morton’s fur, tamped down and cold under my fingers, I knew it was blood.
Then I was up and then in the kitchen and then groping for the light switch, knowing I was smearing blood all over the wall (because it had to be blood) and not caring.
The kitchen lights didn’t work either.
***
The cops made faces at my posters and artwork and collectables, as most people who aren’t hardcore horror fans will. The black cop’s name was Peterson. He sneered up at my framed Fear Garden #1 cover, signed by me and Bernie Wrightson, who did the illustration. He said, “Fear Garden?!” Like he was repeating the name of a disease I’d just diagnosed him with. “Cancer?!”
The white cop was Wallace. He’d actually heard of my market, which was cool, I guess. When I told him I was the editor, he made a noise like, “Huh,” and went back to poking DeRay Morton with a pencil. Someone had cut DeRay across the neck and down the belly, then laid him out face up, so that the blood pooled all around him like some weird flower, immaculate except for where I’d fallen and smudged it. I had trailed blood across the floor and on the walls; it had hardened on my hands like dry paint. Wallace seemed more upset about DeRay than I. He couldn’t stop staring and poking.
Peterson eyed my Hellraiser poster set, my The Thing action figures, my Freddy cardboard cut out, my original Spawn cell, signed by Todd McFarlane. He said, “You really dig this stuff, huh?” Like appreciating horror art implicated me in the grotesque murder of my cat.
I said, “Yeah, so what?”
And he said, “Whoa, Mr. Kite. I didn’t mean anything.”
And I said, “But you implied…”
And Wallace said, “My partner didn’t imply anything, sir.”
And I said, “I might work in violent media, but that doesn’t make me violent.”
We all sat with this awhile, looking at one another and at DeRay Morton hardening on the floor.
Then I said, “But this does have something to do with the magazine.”
***
Dear Mr. Kite:
I know I’m supposed to give you three months to respond to submitted materials, but we both know Care and Feeding is perfect for Fear Garden. Why do you need so much time?
Print my story, Mr. Kite. I’ve enclosed another copy and an SASE. My number is at the top of the manuscript. Feel free to call me with the good news.
Sincerely,
Michael Bodaeker
***
The cops showed up again forty eight hours later, just after midnight on Sunday. Peterson looked shiny and in control, like Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea, just before the shark got him. That movie sucks.
“Sorry to come at you so late, Mr. Kite,” Peterson said. “Wallace and I were real bothered by what happened to DeRay Morton. My mother must have had thirty cats while I was growing up…”
“And my dog Bruiser was about the best friend a kid ever had.” Wallace looked winded and disheveled.
“We happen to know Mikey Bodaeker. He’s a foster parent for the city, he and his wife, seems like we’re by his place every other night.”
“Some people adopt kids to have a positive influence on the lives of youngsters,” Wallace said. “Some do it for the money.”
“Bodaeker does it for the money.” Peterson was grim.
I said, “Uh huh.” I had been writing next issue’s editorial, thanking cover artist Geoff Darrow and trying to make discovering DeRay Morton sound as scary as it had felt.
“Anyway, Mr. Kite,” Wallace’s hair stuck up at odd angles from his wide wedge of face. “Seeing as how we can’t get the crime lab to collect physical evidence on a cat’s murder, and how we know Bodaeker’s to blame, and how the sentencing for animal cruelty’s pretty light anyway, we thought we’d keep this out of the courts.”
At the end of the concrete strip leading from my front stoop to the street, Wallace and Peterson’s cruiser vibrated in the still evening. The cops stood side by side, hands clasped at their crotches, studying me.
“Out of the courts?”
“You want to take a ride with us, Mr. Kite?” Peterson pivoted, looked back at the cruiser, which shook again. A white shape moved in the back window, just visible.
I thought of DeRay Morton, who’d always been a good cat to me, and kept my apartment free of mice, and occasionally brought bird heads proudly to my pillow.
“I’ll take a ride,” I said.
***
I sat in front between Wallace and Peterson. Bodaeker had the back seat all to himself. The tats on his arms looked menacing from a distance, but close up I saw they were Marvel Comics’ characters – a Frank Miller Wolverine on his right arm, a Jim Lee Punisher on his left – and blurrily rendered. His face was sharp, his hair short and shoe polish black. He punctuated long stretches of silent sulking with explosions of anger. “This is crap! You can’t just take me away!” He bled from a cut above his eye. He wanted to know where we were headed. The cops never answered him. It wasn’t hard to tell though. 405 south, Century Boulevard, the airport.
We passed private jet hangers. We pulled through a parking lot and over a knocked down section of fence. We rode runway. We stopped and got out and couldn’t see anything but black for what looked like miles. Jumbo jets bombarded us every few minutes. Who says there are no remote areas in LA?
They had trouble getting Bodaeker out of the car. He kicked and shouted and pressed himself against the door. Wallace looked a sight trying to grab him, fending the kicks, saying, “Easy, Mikey. Easy.” Peterson went in, got Bodaeker around the waist and pulled him out. Then Wallace went to work, face and chest and stomach and crotch, and even stomping Bodaeker’s knees with his boots for a while, which I never would have thought to do but seemed to hurt a lot. “Cat killing son of a bitch,” Wallace kept saying.
“What’s his story about anyhow?” Peterson asked, both of us watching.
I said, “Bodaeker’s? Something about a giant hamster or something. I don’t remember.” My voice shook a little. It was so dark out, Bodaeker’s blood like black paint on the tarmac.
“What was wrong with it?”
“Nothing really. It was average. By the time I got around to reading it he’d already sent me two threatening letters. Sort of took him out of consideration.”
Bodaeker said, “I didn’t say nothing, Wallace! I swear. Please!”
Wallace kicked him hard in the ribs, “Cat killing piece of shit.”
Peterson said, “You must read a lot of stories, see a lot of scary pictures.”
“Uh-huh,” It was hard paying attention to everything.
“You get a lot of crazies like Bodaeker? Lot of angry letters?”
“I guess.”
“Yup.” Peterson sounded like he’d been proven right, “People get awful strange about their creative stuff.”
Bodaeker vomited in a spout. It splashed the cuffs of Wallace’s uniform. Peterson laughed and said, “Take a breather, partner.” He took off his watch, a shining thing, and handed it to Wallace as they traded places.
Wallace wheezed beside me, hands on knees. “Piece of crap like this,” he said, “system lets them squeeze through. That’s what the uniform is about. Picking up the crap.”
Peterson ground Bodaeker’s forehead into the pavement, Bodaeker grunting and moaning, his t-shirt blood and sweat stained. I flashed DeRay Morton, a palm-sized kitten. I flashed him vivisected in the living room. I said, “Thank you, Officer.”
Wallace smiled. “Hey, don’t mention it. This is the rewarding part of the job.”
Peterson’s boot crunched Bodaeker’s ribs, sounding like a bag of glass under truck tires. Jet engines quashed the moans.
Part Two
I couldn’t sleep that night. Next day either. By the time Officer Wallace showed up at my door after 5:00 pm I was blitzed from being awake, seeing sharp edges on soft things.
The big white cop looked well rested and bulging. He smiled and bounded into my living room, taking a minute to frown at DeRay Morton’s death spot, now scrubbed clean. He held a thin pile of papers, stapled in one corner. He declined water.
“Bodaeker spilled,” He said.
“Spilled what?”
“On us beating him. Some I.A. guys found him at the hospital. They know he has history with us. He spilled.”
“Alright.” I wished he would leave.
“We need you to sign this.” He dropped the papers on my coffee table, next to this month’s submissions. The one I had been reading was set in Iraq, soldiers terrorized by oversized desert ants.
“What’s it say?” I asked. It was at least fifteen pages, single spaced.
“It’s your statement about Bodaeker. The history of events leading up to the death of your cat, the letters, calls and threats. How he attacked you in your home last night and you defended yourself.”
I laughed, “Me? I did that to Bodaeker?”
Wallace smiled wide, good friends, “You’re a black belt! That plays, right?”
“Okay…Officer Wallace,” I realized I didn’t know his first name; his or Peterson’s. “Let me just read it and—”
“Why do you need to read it?”
“You want me to sign it, right? It’s my statement.”
“So this you want to read? What are you worried about?” He laughed sharp and serrated.
I didn’t want confrontation with my policeman friend. I saw him doing what he did to Bodaeker’s knees. I backed away from him and put my hands in my pockets. “When did you write all that?” I asked.
He made a face like I was inscrutable and had been for many years. “What do you care? Sign it, please.”
“As soon as I read it.”
“We helped you, Mr. Kite. We’re still trying to help. And what about Mikey Bodaeker? When he heals up, you think he’s coming after us? We can’t protect you if you don’t sign. The law can’t protect you.” He kept smiling.
“Okay,” I grabbed the papers off the table, sat down and started reading. It said: My first contact with Michael Bodaeker came July 9, 2005 in the form of a submission to a horror fiction magazine called Fear Garden, of which I am editor—
Then the pages were torn from my hands and Wallace’s face was in mine, his big cop’s body bent at the waist, knees locked straight like a pitcher looking for signs. His uniform looked too small. “Even after what we did for you,” he said, “you still don’t trust us?”
Officer Wallace walked out. He took my statement with him.
***
Dear Mr. Kite:
A genius like you knows a lot more then me, right? You know what’s scary, right? You have a piece of shit magazine, so you’re the expert, right? You’re the expert and the rest of us are stuck trying to impress you so you’ll publish us for contributor copies of a magazine no one even reads anyway, right?
This is your fifth and final chance to publish my story, Care and Feeding. Not final like, after this I’m submitting to Cemetery Dance. Final like, if you don’t publish my story this quarter, you won’t be publishing any more stories ever.
Since you’re a genius, you must know what I mean.
Right?
Michael Bodaeker
P.S. An SASE is enclosed.
***
I spent the rest of the week like every other. I got Fear Garden ready for the September printing. I worked twenty hours at Baker’s Books. I delivered x-rays for some local doctor’s offices. I had drinks at the Snake Pit. I slept. I dreamt of Michael Bodaeker, ribs like broken glass. I did not get scared.
I saw police cruisers everywhere. The city is full of them, rolling slow like beetles, armored and lit up and crammed full of machinery and weapons. They are comforting and worrisome.
My clock was dark when I awoke last night to noise in the kitchen. My bedside lamp wouldn’t turn on either. I thought of Officer Peterson after DeRay Morton’s murder, finding the fuse box behind the couch, flipping the big switch, saying, “Here’s how he shut your power off.”
Something shifted outside my bedroom door, something slid. I sat still, one hand on the worthless lamp switch. The elastic band of my boxer’s felt damp. I’d been sweating.
The door crashed in, canting to one side, hitting the bed and sliding to the floor. Michael Bodaeker fell atop it, cracking the thin wood near its equator. He brought outside smells into my bedroom, night and dust and liquor sweet. Then he was up and scrabbling for me, a stranger in my home, and the law couldn’t protect me.
I yelped and backed into the wall, smashing my head. Yes, I was scared.
“Tired of taking their crap!” Bodaeker shouted, “Tired of it!” His hand felt freezing on my bare chest. His face found a chord of moonlight. His eyes were blackened slits, his forehead sliced, his nose misshapen, teeth missing. He put one palm to my cheek, pressing my head to the wall. With the other hand, he reached back to Anaheim and everything slowed. I saw his torso twist, his arm swing, felt his palm slide, then a burst of bright blue firelight before everything got dark.
***
“Just wait, Mikey.”
“You want me to do it or not?”
“We brought you here didn’t we? Of course we want you to do it. Just wait.”
“And we’re even after this, right? For chrissakes you guys make me regret the day I ever saw–”
“Sure thing, Mikey. Even On Ever After. Oh, here he comes. Hello, Mr. Kite.”
Something blurred the vision out my right eye, blocking out Officer Wallace, who I knew was there. Through my left I saw Peterson, and kneeling in front of him, Bodaeker, his face a horror show mask. Bodaeker held the something pressed to my face. The something was cold and black. My head hurt.
“Okay, Mikey,” said Peterson. “Count down with me, now. Ten…Nine…Eight.”
And Wallace, speaking over them, said, “Can you see, Mr. Kite? Can you see Bodaeker?”
Bodaeker and Peterson said, “Seven…Six…Five”
There was a metallic grind and a click near my head, my skull vibrated with the noise.
“Just Nod, Mr. Kite.”
“I see him!” I screamed, “I see Bodaeker!”
“Four…Three…Two…”
“Alright.”
And then Wallace shot Bodaeker in the back of the head, and Bodaeker’s smashed face lost its ability to hold its own shape, melting and folding in on itself like wax, and Bodaeker’s blood gouted over me; blood in my eyes, nose and mouth.
I said, “Ghhaaaaa!”
“Oh, man,” Peterson said, laughing. “Man!”
One of them grabbed me, hoisted me up. I saw Bodaeker on my living room floor, his blood pool already much wider then DeRay Morton’s had been, and growing still.
They sat me down at the kitchen table, jammed a glass of water in my face; my glass, my water. Each of the cops pulled up a chair – my chair – swung it around and sat backwards on it, facing me like bookends. I drank, trying not to look at them. I left blood prints on the glass. I was not scared anymore though. I told you, I’m desensitized.
“Okay, Mr. Kite…Can I call you Rich?” Peterson asked.
“Call him Rich,” Wallace said.
“Okay, Rich. What Mikey Bodaeker is for you, is a lesson.”
The water was warm, chemical tasting – straight from the tap. I had bottled in the fridge.
“The lesson is, if you see Officer’s Wallace and Peterson do something – something like say, rob a mini-mart, or murder the guy who saw them rob a mini mart – you keep your goddamn mouth shut. If you open your mouth, you’ll end up like Mikey Bodaeker, dead on the floor of some guy you don’t even know, with a paper trail and a witness statement connecting you to that guy, and that guy ready to confess to killing you in self defense. You still got that statement, Wallace?”
A flourish, and there it was on the table, complete with pen. I put the water down, found the last page and signed.
“Well done,” said Peterson. “See, I told you he’d sign.”
Wallace said, “You were right.”
“Officer Wallace worked long and hard on that statement. Just like he worked on the story Bodaeker submitted. What was it called?”
“Care and Feeding.” Pride in Wallace’s voice.
“Yeah. Mikey Bodaeker ended up like so because he talked out of turn. I expect you’re smart enough not to do the same, even if people come around asking questions, which they surely will. Am I right?”
I nodded, emphatic. I felt sure of myself. Desensitized.
“Good.”
They both stood, equipment rustling on their uniforms. “I never understood my partner’s thing for stories, but I think he’s pretty talented.”
“Thanks, Al.” Wallace said
“You should print Care and Feeding. After all this, it can only help your circulation.”
I nodded. They were right.
They are always right about everything.
