Transcription (25 page)

“That’s terrible,” James said. He did a quick accounting in his head of his own time the previous night, just to be sure he wasn’t the culprit. No—the story was still fresh in his head. He had written about the organ thief. I couldn’t have been him. “How did you know it happened?” James asked.

“Well, for one, I heard it. Second, his broken-door is wide open, and he’s laying there, dead, in his living room. If you ever left this place, you might have noticed.”

While Bo spoke, James rounded the corner into his kitchen. He peered into the cabinet and found another drink. The sweetness from the first one was already starting to go to his head. He felt a little dizzy, but at least the headache and burning stomach were going away.

“That’s a shame,” James said.

“Yeah. That’s one way of looking at it. What are you going to do when the power goes out? Have you thought of that?”

“I’ve got canned food that doesn’t need cooking. I can work by candlelight.”

“And when your food runs out? The grocery store will be open today, but I don’t know how long it’s going to stay open. There’s widespread looting already in the big cities. Big sections of Raleigh and Greensboro were on fire last night. Police are overwhelmed.”

James scratched his chin. “It must be slowing down by now. There can’t be that many more people who have read the story, can there?”

“It’s not about the damn story anymore,” Bo said. “Nobody trusts anyone. Probably half the crimes don’t even have anything to do with the Torture-cising. You hear that?”

James had heard it—it was the same popping noise. He didn’t think much of it. Kids with fireworks, probably.

“That’s gunfire.”

“No.”

“Yes. People are hoarding food, locking themselves indoors, and shooting at anyone who gets close to their property. It was all over the news.”

“But it’s daytime.”

“Nobody cares anymore. They don’t know the rules of your story. They just know that a significant percentage of the populace went crazy and started attacking anyone within striking distance. It started as Torture-cising, but now it’s just mayhem. Oh, Christ. Who would have thought that civilization would end this way.”

“Just give it some time,” James said. “Everything will be back to normal soon, I’m sure.”

“No,” Bo said. “The hospitals are jammed. Police and fire are overwhelmed. Lots of businesses are shut down, so it’s difficult to get basic necessities. This is only going to get worse. People don’t trust each other anymore. Society is over.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“You’re not taking this seriously. Listen—this started here, and you have to figure out a way to end it. Come up with some way to fix your mess.”

James shook his head, rejecting the idea. “That’s just not possible.”

They heard another knock at the door. Bo moved towards it and looked out the peephole. Before James could object, Bo unlocked the door and let Danielle and Chloe in.

“We tried to call you, but the cells are out,” Danielle said. She pointed to Bo. “Your neighbor threatened us when we knocked on your door, and we thought you might be up here.”

Bo fished his phone out of his pocket and stabbed at the display. “Shit.”

“My God,” Chloe said. “You’re one of those hoarders.”

Danielle flipped the switch on the wall, illuminating the dusty stacks of boxes in James’s dirty little apartment.

“Those are all the writings,” Danielle said.

“Bo, we have to get out of here. My parents have a place in the mountains. We’re going to go up there until shit settles down. Will you come with us?” Chloe asked.

Bo let out an exasperated breath. “Yeah, I will, but don’t you think we should try to do something? Everything started here. There has to be an answer. There must be a way to fix this mess.”

“I think it’s too late,” Danielle said. “I mean, I hate to say it, but it seems like this has gone too far. If I could have gotten those sites to take down the story earlier, the problem could have been contained. But I didn’t even imagine that there was a way to…”

Chloe put her hand on Danielle’s arm and interrupted her. “Danny, don’t. You’ve been beating yourself up. You didn’t know this was going to happen. You had no way to know.”

One by one, they looked to James.

“I didn’t ask for any of this,” James said. He was halfway through his second nutritional drink and his stomach felt like it was going to burst. He set it down on the counter. “You can blame me if you want, but I don’t know what good that’s going to do.”

“There has to be an answer to this,” Bo said.

James shook his head. “No. There’s no answer.”

“Tell us what you know, James. Please? Maybe we can see something you haven’t. How did the story work? How did it hypnotize me?” Danielle asked.

“Hypnotize might be the wrong word,” James said. “It possessed you. It turned you into its agent.”

“What do you mean?” Danielle asked.

James leaned on the counter and took a deep breath. “The explanation itself might be dangerous.”

“Why?” Bo asked.

“I can’t say for sure how I got wrapped up in it. It might have been from my father’s explanation in the letters. Maybe it was inherited. Maybe Bobby and I both got caught up because we found his body. Since I don’t know for sure, it seems foolish to tell you.”

“There’s no harm in communicating information,” Chloe said.

“Really? Can you be so sure?” Danielle said.

“I think we have to know,” Bo said. “I think it’s our only chance at finding a solution. Does anyone believe that things will actually get worse?” He looked around to the others. James stood there, with his arms propped up on the counter and his shoulders hunched. Danielle chewed on one of her fingernails and then tucked her hands under her armpits. Chloe’s eyes blazed—jumping from person to person.

“Then if nobody objects, tell us what you know,” Bo said.

James nodded.

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When James finished, Danielle stood and walked between the columns of boxes. She kept her hands to herself and inspected the stacks with wide eyes.

“Yeah, but how do you know?” Chloe asked. “How can you say for sure that if you didn’t transcribe a story each night that you would be forced to act one out.”

James couldn’t look at her when he answered. “Because of what happened to my best friend, and my dad, and his friend, Ron. And because I
did
miss a night. Before that, I had a sliver of doubt. Since then, I know the consequence.”

Bo sat down on one of the stools while Chloe paced back and forth.

“So this is some kind of malevolent force, right? Where did it come from? What does it want?” Bo asked.

“He told us where it came from,” Chloe said. “His father picked it up from that jail cell. What’s there now? Maybe we can go back there and figure this out.”

“Are you crazy?” Danielle said. “That’s the last place we should go.”

“It doesn’t matter,” James said. “The prison was closed in the seventies. Shortly after that, the property was sold off to a developer and there’s a shopping center there now. As far as I can figure, the location of the cell is now in the middle of a parking lot. I haven’t found any reports that people have gone crazy while parking there.”

“From the story, you’d have to be there on a specific date,” Bo said. “And maybe you’d have to be locked up all night in that one spot, right?”

“This is impossible,” Chloe said. “The details we do have are tiny, and they don’t make any logical sense. His father was possessed by this killing spirit, the same as other career criminals, but somehow he satisfied the urge just by writing about it. Then, magically, the curse moves to the son. And Danielle gets infected just by reading a story? There aren’t even enough things that make sense for us to form a theory of what’s happening.”

“Maybe it’s nitpicking,” Bo said, “but Danielle didn’t get the curse. She was a conduit for that one story, but if she had gotten the curse, she would have had to have written about something every night, right? Either that or she would have been out committing crimes.”

They all looked to Danielle. She had found the box with the initials “RG” on the side. She was circling it when she realized that they were waiting for a response.

“I’ve been locked inside every night. And, no, I haven’t been writing,” Danielle said.

“So then she doesn’t technically have the curse. That’s still only with James,” Bo said.

“Maybe James had the right idea,” Chloe said. “Maybe you guys should have let him commit suicide.”

“Chloe!” Danielle said.

“What? Can you really say that the world needs this guy around? Is he benefitting humanity in any way? He’s just stuck in here, generating nightmares,” Chloe said.

“It’s not his fault,” Bo said. “Besides, after his dad died, the curse didn’t go away, it just moved. What if one of us gets it?”

“Why the hell didn’t you move to the middle of nowhere? Why did you have to stay around a populated…” Chloe didn’t finish her question. She stopped when they heard more gunfire. This was much closer to the building. Bo moved to the curtains across the screen door. With one finger, he moved it to the side.

“What is it?” Chloe asked.
 

Bo put his hand up, signaling her to stop, and then put his finger to his lips. He backed away from the curtain and made sure they all understood to be quiet.

Outside, at another apartment door, they heard banging and then a muffled voice.

Everybody remained frozen, listening.

Danielle was closest to the door. She moved another tiny step closer and then froze with a jolt when the banging erupted on James’s door.

BANG. BANG.

They heard a muffled voice in a conversational tone.

The next voice they heard was shouted through the door.

“This is the police. There is a fire coming. We’re ordering everyone to evacuate to the high school. Leave all your possessions and bring only one change of clothes.”

Bo shook his head and motioned for everyone to stay quiet.
 

They heard the muffled conversation again and then everything was quiet. Bo moved towards the center of the room and called everyone to him.

Bo whispered, “That wasn’t the police. They’re probably just trying to get everyone to leave so they can loot the place.”

“There was a fire in Charlotte,” Chloe said. “I heard about it on the radio. What if they were telling the truth.”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t get out of here,” Bo said, still whispering. “But those men are dangerous and we should wait for them to…”

POP!

The sound was from right outside the door. Something crashed down the stairs. Danielle jumped when the door handle jiggled. The deadbolt was engaged and the door didn’t move.
 

Bo moved back to the curtain. He carefully pushed it aside, just enough so he could see outside. After a minute, he returned to the others.

“They’re leaving, but we should give them a few more minutes before we try to go.”

Chloe nodded.

“I can’t leave,” James said. “I have to stay here, with the stories.”

“What good is it going to do if you’re here with the stories when the place burns to the ground?” Bo asked.

“Let him stay,” Chloe said.

“What if the answer is in these boxes?” Danielle asked.

Bo frowned and Chloe tilted her head.

“What do you mean?” Bo asked.

“One of these stories started this problem, right? What if there’s an answer in one of them? Maybe we can figure out a way to stop the progress, or restore everyone’s confidence in society.”

“That’s crazy,” Chloe said. “How would that work?”

“I don’t know. I guess the same way it began. We take one of the stories, put it online, and let everyone read it.”

James shook his head. “I’ve been through all these boxes, and all I’ve ever found was terror and grief.”

“You’re looking at it one story at a time though,” Danielle said. “What if we could combine the stories somehow? What if we could bounce one plot against another and somehow make the overall into a positive?”

“That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Bo said. He pushed the curtain aside again.

Danielle kept going. “You know how some stories are about grim things but then the moral of the story is uplifting? What if we put something like that together and got it out in the world. Couldn’t we uplift everyone?”

“The first big problem is that you’d have to make the thing go viral,” Chloe said. “You can’t just decide that your story would go viral. You should know that better than anyone, Danny. You remember how hard you had to work just to get a few hundred readers cobbled together?”

“But this would be the sequel to Torture-cise. I’m sure that some people would read it just because of that,” Danielle said.

“That’s the other problem,” Chloe said. “Nobody is reading anything anymore. Some people are afraid to even listen to the news, because they heard that there’s a story that’s hypnotizing people. They don’t want to fall under the same spell that made everyone else go crazy, so a lot of people have just locked themselves away.”

“We don’t have to get everyone,” Danielle said. “Just enough people.”

When James spoke, everyone looked to him. “If you did have the right story,” he said, “they don’t have to read it.”

“Okay,” Bo said from the curtain. “They’re gone. I just saw them go into building eight. We can sneak out the back.”

“I can’t leave,” James said again.

“Fine,” Chloe said. She was already over at the door, looking out the peephole. “They killed Mr. Dilton.”

“What?” Danielle said. She hurried to Chloe’s side. After they’d both looked out the hole, they opened the door a crack and peeked through.

Chloe turned back to Bo and James. Panic was beginning to bloom across her face. “The building is on fire.”

Danielle opened the door a little more. James smelled the smoke.
 

Bo tugged at James’s arm. “Come on, man, we have to get out before this place burns down.”

James glanced around at the stacks of boxes.