Short Story

Warning: This short story may contain offensive or explicit language.

That was my self-appointed mission today, to keep watch over Chuck Palahniuk’s hard-backed book HAUNTED.

I arrived a little late at the Abingdon Library. I turned the corner and saw the door ajar. The fists of panic constricted around my parched throat as I staggered across the threshold. I lay my rucksack down beside the chair leg, undid my coat and took my place in the comfy chair there in the corner by the radiator beside Chuck’s book, pulling my arms out of my coat so that it was behind me in the comfy chair. I’d chosen a book, to look less conspicuous; I was in a library after all, so when in Rome.

The book I’d chosen to help me ‘fit in’ was Philip K. Dick’s A SCANNER DARKLY, a book I’d read as a teen and not thought too much about. I hadn’t even meant to choose a PKD book, he’s not really my cup of tea. I just found myself in Fiction, D-F, and suddenly it’s in my hand and I’m installing myself in the guard’s position beside Chuck’s book. I could see it there out of the corner of my eye as I scanned SCANNER and scanned the library for likely scoundrels, blackguards and ne’er do wells.

My eyes were all bloodshot from the tears on the bus this morning. My hair was all over the place because I’d taken a shower without soap or shampoo. My breath stank because of that Thai Green Curry take away I had last night and the fact that I’d run out of toothpaste a couple days ago. I needed a shave, too. Yeah, I know, I’ve gotta get organised but… today’s a very important day, as you know. I’d panicked a bit when I realised I wasn’t gonna be first in line when the library doors opened at 9 a.m. sharp but it was okay. Chuck’s book was still in librio.

I didn’t even notice the first demon who arrived to suss out Chuck’s book, she was camouflaged as an old person but her wretched, hacking demeanour didn’t conceal her true identity from me. She sneered at me like I was a pile of steaming dog shit.

A woman with dark, curly hair, mid twenties, came in next, invaded my protected little section; well, I say invaded but she didn’t exactly make it over to Chuck’s book. She saw me sitting there and she knew who I was, what my mission was. She knew right away. I’d might as well have been wearing a rectangular, clip-on badge that proclaimed OFFICIAL PROTECTOR AND GUARDIAN OF CHUCK PALAHNIUK’S HAUNTED. I was that obvious but what the Hell, we all need roles in life. Right? She took up a counter-striking position on a free-access internet terminal adjacent to me and pretended to scour emails and websites, biting her lip while she waited for me to leave.

Third person so far. Gosh, this book is real popular; good job I’m here to protect it, today. You can see them glare at it and lick their lips hungry to rip it open and devour it page by page. But not today, my friends; not today. My mission is to see that no harm should come to Chuck’s book.

The fourth, and definitely the most lethal demon so far, had on pink woollen gloves and matching pink stitched trim on her gabardine winter coat. She had the eyes of a huntress, cold and focussed, Chuck’s book didn’t stand a chance with her sort on the prowl. She did this thing with her pretty nose, this magical thing like Samantha out of Bewitched, and made me feel violently sick so that I had to run to the disabled toilet to puke.

When I returned, Chuck’s book was M.I.A.

I couldn’t believe my luck, or lack of it. I stood there, sweating and panting from my brisk emetic exertions, looking at a blank space on the shelf where Chuck’s book had, only moments ago, resided. I had to track down that FUCKING BITCH DEMON before it was too late and Chuck’s book had been digested.

Before I could gather my shit together another hunter of Chuck’s book trotted over hungrily, you could hear the expectant peristaltics of its intestinal system churning away. Guess we were both out of luck today. I checked out the Phillip K Dick book and skipped out the exit hoping that she hadn’t already escaped in her car with her abducted tome. I couldn’t understand how I’d been beaten so easily. But it’s not like she was hard to track as she left a series of fur-lined footprints wherever she stepped that would eventually melt like snowflakes in the summer sun.

She sat in a grotty café, there by the window, watching pedestrians go about their day. Her eyes like calm pools of meditative bliss as she cradled her banana-flavoured hot chocolate drink.

“Mind if I…?” I placed my hemispherical mug of frothy cappuccino next to the tall thin glass beaker that held her pungently aromatic beverage and took a seat facing her, slipping my rucksack onto the floor by my left foot. It seemed right and proper that our cups sat beside each other, a marriage of circumstance, gladiators in a gory arena. The look on her face was sheer perfection. I only then noticed she was wearing glasses, thin ones, a pale blue in colour. The generous whip of cream hadn’t yet melted into her drink and the long spoon lay on the glass saucer. She raised the tall, glass beaker to her lips like a pensive Catholic priest would, with the fingertips, and took a noisy slurp.

“I know you, don’t I?” she wore a creamy moustache.

I reached into my rucksack and pulled out the book I’d been reading when she’d come into the library and zapped me with her puke ray. I showed her Philip K Dick’s A SCANNER DARKLY.

“My cover. Remember? You blew my cover.” I tossed the book down on the table. She pretended not to have seen it before, scowling down at it furiously like it was a crushed bug.
“Waitress.” she called over to the waitress, suddenly. I thought, that’s it, the bitch is gonna call over the waitress and ask for the manager and I’ll be turfed out of here without Chuck’s book and she’ll be grinning at me from the window of this grotty café. Grinning – showing all her big, irregular teeth. Grinning at my inadequacy as an adversary.

Her eyes sparkled with unadulterated evil as the waitress made her pedestrian way to our table.

“Could I have some napkins for this drink, it’s wickedly creamy.” she lifted her left eyebrow when she saw me physically relax and let out a caged gasp of relief.

“You’re gonna bust a blood vessel.” she said.

I confessed that I was wound a little tight today. I grinned shyly. It must have looked like I was in tremendous pain.

“I don’t know how to ask this…” she said, the beaker of banana chocolate perched on her well-manicured fingertips ready to spill. Creepy crawlies of revelation started to foam out of her banana chocolate and bubble down over her fingers. I watched these crystallising creatures scurry across the table towards me with paranoid purpose. I started to gasp. I was in a vacuum of panic separated off from the rest of the café, the rest of Abingdon turned to fine ash and blown away, the rest of the Earth blinked out suddenly and it was just me; and those insects, their spiky legs dancing over my hands, my forearm hairs lifting in sheer horror, their singing feelers on my neck, my face, my lips. My eyelids tickled. I could taste their acid sting in the back of my throat.

“I think…” she sipped her precarious drink, her words like a metal assault on broken rainbows, a torture of the scorching flesh caught in a petrol embrace. It was almost too unbearable to hear her speak. I hung on for grim death, sure in the knowledge that, with such magical power, she was gonna evade me once again and I’d fail in my task to protect Chuck’s book.

I tried to focus on the task in hand, must protect Chuck’s book, must protect Chuck’s book, this mantra ran round and round in my head in screeching stiletto heals. Must protect Chuck’s book.

“I think…” had she begun again? “…that woman knows you.” she flicked her catlike eyebrows away over my left shoulder.

I swung round in an explosion of dread, absolute horror tearing through my trembling nervous system.

“Who?” I said out loud.

A woman sat watching us from across the café, she was nodding and hissing into a mobile phone. Yes, yes, it’s him, she was saying. Her eyes were insanely wrong, just all bloodshot and bulging, crackling with terrible noise. I turned back right away. What were my options? I could feel her eyes drilling a hole in the back of my skull. The woman at my table, the one who I suspected (knew) was the Chuck’s book lifter, went, “Oh, shit, she’s coming over. Look, I’d better be going…” she tried to make a swift exit but the wild eyed freak had pounced already.

“Where is she?” she accosted me. Where was what? Chuck’s book? I didn’t steal it. It was her, the woman desperate to flee. She stole it. I’m here to retrieve the damn thing, stupid loon of a mollusc. No, she said “~she?” where is she? What did she mean by she? Who was this annoying crustacean?

“My daughter, you fiend.” she rambled on like a tractor on clayed ground.
“It’s in his bag, you know.” she chattered on to the book stealer, “He has my daughter’s coat in his filthy little bag there, as a keepsake.”

“I don’t know what she’s talking about.” I said to the book stealer, who had somehow turned into my ally in this weird war.

Wild-eyed woman reached down for my rucksack and I instinctively kicked out with a foot. This did not deter her and soon she was unzipping and pulling from my rucksack this wrinkled, pink, fur-line-hooded kid’s coat that I’d never seen before. Was this the twisted humour of some malevolent TV show who’d hired a street magician and accomplice to freak me out today? I looked around for film crews revealing themselves finally, grins upon their gormless faces. The show’s leering host shoving the mike into my face. I gritted my teeth and made fists.

As she unravelled the crumpled-up kid’s coat and flattened it out and cradled it, she never took her imploring eyes off me, her fixed gaze (paradoxically) like the shriek from breaking vases always penetrating with shard after shard of sobbing sorrow. I couldn’t help this mad woman, nobody could. Waitress! that’s what I wanted, a helpful waitress to come and clear away all the confusion.

I got to my feet and staggered against the table, knocking our drinks flying. The waitress materialised as if out of smoke, she was made of smoke; ephemeral, pregnant with writhing thrombosis of the genitals as she busied herself with the task of cleaning up the mess I’d caused. There was this totally erotic scent coming off her, like you’d fall over from its power to allure, this über-perfume I’d never smelled on a woman before. I was standing there looking down on the top of her bare head and I could smell this vinegary essence mixed with olive oil and honey literally evaporating off her scale and there, just where the hair parts, a clitoris grew. Like watching a mushroom rise from the black soil in one of those nature programmes I like to masturbate to. Like that, a clitoris budding and stretching out towards me, tilting back her head from where a vagina was sliding open within the parting of her hair. I got hard, though harder than I’d ever been before. I could feel my cock tenting against the fabric of my dingy jeans. I wanted to reach down and unzip myself, ease out that thick length of hungry meat from its cage and slam it into her gaping skull, huge slathering balls of perly tumescence were dripping from the gash inviting my most brutal of insertions into her lubricated brain cavity. What could germinate in the brain of such a cunt after my seed had spilled into her whore cranium? I…

“You stole my girl!” the loon erupted beside me, tears rolling down her puffy red pig face. The waitress glared up at me and the magic of the moment was cracked open like an eggshell.

In through the door suddenly burst my hero Chuck Palahniuk. Trust Sir Charles to save the day. It wasn’t some B-movie look-alike either, it was actually the Chuckmeister, in the flesh, he must have been over from Oregon on some whirlwind book tour that took in a neighbouring town to Abingdon, signing the latest copies of his hardback books like real writers do. Drumming up sales. Expanding his fan base. Maybe he even brought his wife and daughter over with him too. Maybe they’d lodged at the Randolf Hotel across the way in Oxford, used it like their base camp on the ascent of Everest. While fame and fortune caressed the memory of his soon to be devoured daughter. Maybe I’d found something real special, sleeping in her little cot as I posed as a male chamber maid real early this morning. Maybe I’d … well, there’s no point in denying it. I’ve been a very naughty boy, Chuck, what you gonna do about it?

“This him?” Chuck asked the weeping witch. She sobbed, and gagged, as she nodded madly; she was by now near hysterical with worry and torn asunder by sheer, naked terror. Chuck pulled back a fist and launched it into my face. The universe imploded around that fateful conjunction of him and me. I had connected with The Chuck. My face had been the kneeling altar for his praying knees. My skull found solace in the benediction of his boot. My stomach ruptured as his loving boot kicked me clean of my sin. I was under the loving, paternal, eye of one of the greatest daddy’s of them all.

“Pity you’ll never find her.” I grinned as my teeth were kicked out of my face. I vomited blood onto his shoes, knowing he would never stop kicking me until I was nothing but pink pulp writhing like a bowl of maggots. Pity he’ll never understand what I did with his haunted daughter.

Credit:
Thumbnail cover from Chuck Palahniuk's Book, "Haunting" (2005, Jonathan Cape Ltd ).