This Town Needs a Monster Read online

  This Town Needs a Monster

  Andersen Prunty

  This Town Needs a Monster copyright © 2017 by Andersen Prunty. All rights reserved.

  Published by Grindhouse Press

  POB 293161

  Dayton, Ohio 45429

  grindhousepress.com

  Front and back cover illustrations copyright © 2017 by Katja Gerasimova/Shutterstock

  Cover design copyright © 2017 by Grindhouse Press. All rights reserved.

  Grindhouse Press logo and all related artwork copyright © 2017 by Brandon Duncan. All rights reserved.

  This Town Needs a Monster

  Grindhouse Press #032

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Andersen Prunty

  Other Grindhouse Press Titles

  Also by Andersen Prunty

  Failure As a Way of Life

  This Town Needs a Monster

  Squirm With Me

  Creep House: Horror Stories

  Sociopaths In Love

  The Warm Glow of Happy Homes

  Bury the Children in the Yard: Horror Stories

  Satanic Summer

  Fill the Grand Canyon and Live Forever

  Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories

  Sunruined: Horror Stories

  The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians

  Hi I’m a Social Disease: Horror Stories

  Fuckness

  The Sorrow King

  Slag Attack

  My Fake War

  Morning is Dead

  The Beard

  Zerostrata

  Jack and Mr. Grin

  The Overwhelming Urge

  For Carrie—

  Thanks for the past five years. You’re my best friend in the world.

  Beginnings

  Where am I?

  I’m in Gethsemane, Ohio. It’s the same place I’ve been for the past forty years. It’s where my parents brought me home from the hospital. I didn’t think I’d still be here but there’s no place I’d rather be.

  It’s the beginning of a new life but it feels like the end of a journey. A long, circular journey. I always thought I’d have to go far from home to find happiness but, and I know this sounds clichéd, it was practically in my backyard the entire time.

  Oh, a backyard. I have one of those now.

  Because I have a house for the first time in my life. It’s not a huge house but I don’t really need a huge house. This is adequate. It’s probably more than enough. It’s perfect.

  I have a partner—a woman—who I know isn’t going anywhere. We have similar goals in life and that’s what really matters. I don’t know if she loves me or not. You can never really know that about a person. I’m not even entirely sure she is a person. Besides, love fades. Love dies and goes away. What I need right now is stability. It’s what I’ve always needed but never had. As long as we’re both serving our community, both doing our part, then I don’t see any catastrophes happening. As long as we never want more.

  The community is what’s important. With the community comes service. The community is responsible for this life. This is the best life for me. And that’s perfection.

  I used to feel so alone and disenfranchised. I sought answers and, in my own way, I sought happiness. I never found them because I was always putting myself first. The only thing that came from that was starting over, time and time again. Bringing a modicum of happiness to myself while ignoring everyone around me if not making them outright miserable. A new beginning every few years, all of them leaving me feeling broke and broken and hollowed out.

  None of them were like this.

  This one will be different.

  I finally found someone who could give me a voice. Someone who could give all of us a voice. A voice for the voiceless.

  It was exactly what I needed.

  I’d never really known darkness.

  I’d never truly fucked up.

  I’d never really done much of anything.

  Before coming in contact with the community, those were often the thoughts that swirled in the gray area between consciousness and sleep.

  When I thought back on my life, I thought about it in terms of absences, things not done, emptiness. I didn’t realize how terrifying this should have been. The most frightening thing about a void is not the emptiness, it’s that it’s just sitting there, waiting for something to fill it . . .

  That’s what I have now: a full life.

  I’m sure there will be consequences but the rewards will fully outnumber them.

  Everything has consequences.

  If I ever have any doubt, all I have to do is pull up the video files on my laptop. All I have to do is focus on the Brad Renfield in those videos, the close-ups of my face, the look in my eyes. The only thing I see there is guilt and shame and fear and paranoia and anxiety and longing and lust. A man, more than old enough to know better, doing things simply because he’s told to without knowing why. Without knowing the answers.

  A man without a life.

  A man without knowledge.

  A man without a community.

  A man without happiness.

  I imagine how horrifying it would be to wake up and look at that face in the mirror every morning.

  Horror. Yeah, it’s all around us.

  We can shut our eyes and try to block it out but it’s happening anyway. Happening all the time.

  This is how I opened my eyes to it.

  How I learned to embrace it.

  This is how I found happiness.

  Dawn Syndrome

  “I need you to meet me in the field.”

  Travis had woken me up. I never turned the ringer on on my phone and was surprised the vibration had been enough to rouse me. I’d unthinkingly answered it and wished I hadn’t.

  “Are you there?”

  He sounded frantic. He usually didn’t get like this unless he’d been drinking.

  “It’s late, Trav. I have to be at work in a few hours. You do too.”

  “Fuck that.”

  I continued pulling cobwebs out of my dusty brain. I’d quit drinking a few months ago and, once the insomnia passed, I began sleeping deeper and dreaming more than I ever had. Sometimes the dreams were so vivid that, upon waking, it was tough to separate them from memories.

  “Okay, but I’m not leaving unless you tell me why.”

  “I’m fucked, man.”

  At least, it didn’t sound like he’d been drinking. But this was the sort of thing he came up with when he had been. I’d always thought of myself as a fun, happy drunk. Travis was the opposite. He grew sad and melancholic, became a colossal downer. Quitting drinking gave us one less excuse to hang out together. Probably one of the reasons I’d stopped.

  This was the sort of late night attack he’d lobbed at me on MyFace once we’d stopped hanging out every night. Ultimately I’d had to quit that too. It was probably for the best. Social networking did nothing for my anxiety.

  “Just take a deep breath and calm down, man.”

  “I’ve already done that, Brad.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time he’d said my name aloud. The effect was surprisingly chilling.

  “Okay. So you’re finished. What does that even mean?”

&nbs
p; “Not finished. Fucked. Completely fucked, man. It means I want you to shoot me in the face. Put me out of my fucking misery.”

  I coughed out a laugh. Maybe he was just putting me on. I realized I was smiling.

  “It’s not fucking funny!”

  The smile dropped away.

  I tried not to sound mad. “You can’t call someone up in the middle of the night and ask them to shoot you in the face and expect them to take you seriously.”

  “You know I can’t do it myself. It would kill Mom and Dad. It has to look like an accident. I thought you’d want to help. It’s going to happen one way or another.”

  “Just calm down and go to bed. Are you drunk?”

  “I’m not fucking drunk or stoned. I’m as sober as I’ve been in two decades. I have clarity. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I’m seeing things clearly. That’s how I know I’m fucked. You’re fucked too. We’re all fucked. I don’t expect everyone to have the balls to remove themselves from this . . . this conspiracy, but I’m not taking part in it another fucking day.”

  “I just . . . I can’t do anything like that. Maybe you need help. Have you thought about calling someone who can help you?”

  “It has to be you. You’re the only one who can do it. You’re the only one I trust. I don’t think you’re a part of it yet.”

  “I’m . . . not a part of anything. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. But I can’t do what you’re asking me to.”

  There was a pause. I heard him nervously breathe out before saying, “Then I’m going to share the photos.”

  He’d thought this through more than I’d given him credit for.

  Now it was time for me to do some thinking.

  It sounded like he was having some kind of psychotic paranoid episode. What the fuck did I know about that shit? I was a landscaper, not a doctor. I wasn’t even that great at empathizing. The simple fact that Travis was reaching out to me instead of practically anyone else in the world was incredibly sad. I had tried to distance myself from mental illness as much as possible. It seemed like one of the most truly terrifying things in the world. But, with the threat of sharing the photos, Travis was hellbent on getting me there. I didn’t need to ask which photos. I knew. The threat of sharing them even made Travis’s reasons for wanting me there irrelevant.

  “Fine,” I said. “Give me about a half hour.”

  “See you there.”

  Then he was gone.

  My phone winked out in my palm.

  Now I had no choice but to go. There wasn’t any way I was going to shoot my best friend in the face, even if he was a terrible friend, probably even a terrible person. He wouldn’t do anything until I met him. That would force him to think about it for a few more minutes, at least. I assumed he already had a gun. If he wanted me to shoot him, getting the gun away wouldn’t be a problem. Once I had that, I could find out where he had the photos. Probably on his phone, but maybe on his laptop or even printed out. Maybe I could convince him that destroying or deleting them was a good idea. The photos had been a really stupid idea. Sometimes you do things in the heat of the moment without thinking it could possibly lead to death or, at the very least, a horrendous beating. Sometimes you do things you have no recollection of doing and yet it occupies some alley of your brain like a malignant ghost waiting to spring forward during the quietest, most unexpected moments.

  I slid on my jeans and t-shirt, thankful it was a warm night in June and not freezing cold. I grabbed my keys and took a deep breath before heading out of the apartment.

  I should have felt bad about feeling put out but this thing with Travis had been building for some time. Possibly another reason for giving up drinking, hoping Travis would follow my example. If I wanted to feel really altruistic about it.

  We both worked for the same landscaping company—Billups’ Interior and Exterior. “Keeping You Green Inside and Out!” Travis had gotten me the job. Lately he’d been calling off more than he’d been coming in. I went every day because I had to pay rent and bills and buy groceries and gas for my truck. Travis still lived with his parents, was an only child, and his mom did everything shy of wiping his ass for him. We were both forty and I wondered why he didn’t have any desire to at least try acting like a grownup. He said it didn’t matter. It was just buying into the experiment, the conspiracy. Also, he said people scared him. I tried telling him people had always been kind of terrifying but he swore it had gotten worse the past couple of years. Like society itself was coming to some kind of critical mass. He blamed all kinds of things: corporate America, prescription medication, the internet, social networking, alcohol, marijuana, heroin, narcissism, television and the media in general, the nearby air force base, colleges, the prevalence of the commercial medical industry. He said the only reason we had jobs in landscaping was because people were too incapacitated to do it themselves but still had the need to keep up appearances because Gethsemane was such a staunchly middle class conservative town. Some places we took care of the outdoor landscaping as well as watering and pruning the plants in the house. Travis swore some houses were completely abandoned, that he hadn’t seen any signs of life there for years. He also said some of the houses contained dead people, lying in their beds, turned to rust. Others contained hollowed out shells of people, food for whatever his evil of the day was to latch onto and drain of life and soul. All of this, of course, led to him thinking the town was some kind of military installation, ground zero for the Grand Experiment. He was always a little hazy about what all the Grand Experiment entailed.

  I couldn’t help but think this was all in Travis’s head. That, deep down, he wanted it to be this way. Gethsemane was not without its quirks. Nearly a decade ago there was a rash of suicides that, for a town of around five thousand people, struck a chord. The suicide virus (what the papers called it) ended with a bizarre storm killing several more people. The townsfolk came to a general consensus it had been a tornado, but it was never verified by the National Weather Service. The people of the town seemed to pull together. Tragedy had a way of doing this. I started seeing flyers for something called The Healing League. Naturally, there were a number of theories surrounding the suicides—a suicide pact, a monster, Satanism, possibly even a very sly murderer or something supernatural—but people seemed to agree it had been largely caused by economic hardship brought on by the market collapse, the closing of the nearby GM plant, and a strain of bad drugs. Never mind that the suicides had been teenagers with little to no connection to any of these things. The solidarity sweeping the town in the light of these events inevitably dissipated and people went back to their old ways. Being a small, conservative Ohio town, this meant people went back to being isolated, hateful, and rude. All of which prompted Travis to say one night around a campfire: “This town needs a monster.”

  Maybe I should just shoot the miserable fucker in the face.

  * * *

  The field was a vast expanse of grass a few acres behind Travis’s childhood home. It couldn’t even really be called his childhood home since he was currently living there. Maybe calling it his forever home would have been more accurate. He’d made a couple of attempts to get out—one of those attempts had us renting an apartment together—but he always ended up back there. Gethsemane was about ten miles west of Dayton, about an hour north of Cincinnati and south of Columbus, five hours from Chicago, in the middle of a country that could be traveled coast to coast in less than a week and, still, we had both failed to escape. We’d both turned forty the previous year, so I guess we still had the rest of our lives to get out but it was starting to look a little less likely every year. Eventually, I would just become complacent with it, tell myself it wasn’t that bad, and resign to stay there the rest of my life. Maybe I already had. As it was, I had to work so hard just to keep my head above water I couldn’t even really think about leaving. My parents had me later in life and had both passed a few years ago, within months of each other. Other than lack of f
unds to go elsewhere, there really wasn’t anything keeping me there. Travis was the only person I even considered a friend and, these days, I spent most of my time trying to avoid him.

  The field was accessible by a narrow gravel lane cut through a thick swath of woods. I don’t know why the grassy field hadn’t been tilled up and used for soybeans or corn like most of the other property but, then again, I didn’t really know anything about that kind of stuff. Maybe the ground was no good for it. Maybe it was cursed or something. Maybe one of the previous families who owned the land had been buried there, the grave marker long since disintegrated or stolen.

  I pulled into the turnaround and angled the truck toward the field, flipping on the high beams. A low fire burned in the middle of the field but I didn’t see any sign of Travis. Maybe he’d calmed down and hadn’t bothered coming at all. Maybe he’d gotten tired of waiting and decided to take care of things himself. Either of those scenarios would have pissed me off but at least I wouldn’t have to reckon with shooting him in the face.

  I pulled the truck forward so the woods shielded it from the road. We didn’t have a lot of cops in these parts but, at this hour, they got bored and tended to explore any possible situation that would keep them awake. That is if they weren’t already napping in the parking lot of the Snack Barn or on some abandoned country road.

  I shut off the truck and scanned the field, all purplish and dewy in the moonlight.

  No sign of Travis.

  Why had I even bothered coming?

  I should have just called 911 and reported a person in distress. I could have done it anonymously and maybe the shame and embarrassment of surrounding Travis’s stupidity with some obnoxious fanfare would keep him from being so thoughtless in the future.

  Or at least keep him from dragging me into it.

  No. That was a terrible thought. I was just tired and cranky and lazy. For me, suicide had never been an option. I felt like life was one long, brutally sick joke and intended to stick around for the punchline, even if there wasn’t one. But I could see how the thought of it comforted some people. It was like poor man’s insurance. Or insurance for the hopelessly broken.