From Between Worlds, Brendon Nutt [the top 100 crime novels of all time txt] 📗

Epilogue

The supernatural has always been a part of my life, regardless if I wanted it to be or not. I had convinced myself so much of it was the overactive imagination of a kid who spent too much time in his head in order to cope with all the shit life threw at him. The memory is a fickle thing, a picture book drawn by a bad artist, an unreliable narrator picking away at the important bits while slamming square pegs in round holes to try and make them fit a narrative. It is also something of a benevolent protector, shielding us from what lies just beyond the veil that divides our fragile concepts of reality and the sledgehammer that is the truth. These last few months really showed me that. So, where do I begin talking about the events that became the hammer to the glass that was my hated reality?

 

*click*

 

“Really?” I said to the barrel of a six shooter staring at me dead between the eyes, “I’m trying to have a serious introspective monologue.”

 

The trench coat wearing man dressed like John Wayne taking himself way too seriously, with his one pure as white eye and a hole where the other would have been stood at the other end, looking like something made from the fever dreams of the Duke himself.

 

“Jusssstice…” he hissed between gums and rotted teeth, proving that America has always had one hell of a health system.

 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah... fuck you. I’m tired, I’ve been driving for hours now, I can’t remember the last time I slept well, and most importantly, I’m not sure if I mentioned, but fuck you. So what if its gone!? Better for us, you all don’t deserve to be here anyway, you get that?”

 

I know, I know, this is a weird place to start, but something about having a gun pointed at your head by a homeless looking Wyatt Earp when you haven’t slept well in awhile just gets you thinking. Reflecting on how you got here. In the grand scheme of what’s coming up, this guy is nothing more than a distraction. Hell, if this was a movie, right now we would freeze frame, have some music and I’d say “I bet you’re wondering how I got here!” Here’s the thing, we won't be coming back here, at least not for a long time. Maybe not ever, because what I’m trying to convey here is that life is absurd. This whole damn thing is funny, it is dumb, and then its gets very, very real.

 

“Jusssti”

 

“Yeah, I get it! Justice or whatever, fuck you bu..”

 

*BANG*

 

Chapter 1

 

The truck backfired and sent puffs of black smoke into the warm desert air of Southern California.

 

“That’s… probably a good sound,” I said, leaning up against the closed driver door of the white, I think a Ford, truck, my arms crossed on the rolled down window.

 

“Its normal,” retorted Parker tiredly as he tried to start it again. He reached down to the area where keys would normally go, and hits a two button switch he had moments ago set-up since he had lost the keys.

 

“Yeah, but still probably not good.”

 

“Hey! Don’t you doubt the dirty girl, Junk Truck is doing her best,” he gave me a glare and then hit the buttons in sequence, the truck starting to life. He then smiled in success, “see, just takes persistence.”

 

“Bet that attitude helps with the college girls.”

 

“Oh yeah, living in a barely working truck in the middle of a desert really gets them going.” Parker rolled his eyes.

 

I gave the dented door a solid pat, “just takes persistence.”

 

“Fuck you.”

 

“You’re such a romantic!” We laughed a moment and then stared out into the desert. Being surrounded on every side by dirt and dead things with the faintest hint of homes and businesses on the horizon really had a way of reminding us… this town sucks.

 

I had thought I had escaped it. I moved to Chicago to go work with my uncle after high school, but I got a year into that excursion, which turned out to be enough time to experience each of the four seasons and realize that they were all awful. I moved back to sunny, not the nice part of southern California three months ago and was able to reconnect with my good school buddies without any trouble. They were pretty much the same as they were before graduating, just with more time on their hands since full time work wasn’t exactly common out here.

 

We had all been raised in this city, finding each other through various mutual friends, becoming close through being able to relate to one another’s past and creative ways of dealing with that past. By that, I mean both via misguided coping processes like teenage drinking and rebellious behavior as well as some form of creative and imaginative pursuit. For example, Parker is a hell of smart dude, beating a life that could have crushed a normal person with a smile and persistent ingenuity. He was in and out of the foster system his entire childhood. When I first met him in middle-school, he was living in a shitty little two bedroom home with three other kids and a middle-aged couple that spent more money on booze than food.

 

They had this super old computer at the time that all the kids had to share, and I’m talking old, this was 1999 and his computer was still running on DOS and had those floppy disks, you know, the big black floppy disks as we called them, because dick jokes are funny. He didn’t really have a great deal of toys and I loved video games. So, he would come by and play games with me and then go home and program a game similar to that. Parker did more with less and with it, he developed a hell of a talent with a computer, a talent that sadly went to waste at this point.

 

You see, Parker didn’t stay with those people for too much longer. By our sophomore year in high school, he had been removed from that home of drunk abusive losers and put into the home of a nice woman in a good middle class home. She was something of a saint, a damn nice lady and good to Parker. Sad thing is, after graduation and after I had left to go to Chicago, she was killed in a hit and run. It was rough to hear, but Parker… well, he was an adult now and however it went down, he lived out here now.

 

He lived right smack in the middle of a big desert lot, in an old beat to shit white pick-up truck that didn’t have any power steering, had a coat hanger for an antenna, and a lazy eye for one of the headlights. I mean that, when he drove at night, one light was on the road and the other was freaking out people in their homes as it shined brightly into their windows. It was also useful when we drove by desert areas, as we could see a good distance into what is usually freaky, that is where the axe murderer is, level darkness.

 

Parker was always an awkward looking kid, tall and lanky with a blonde curly jew-fro and light colored facial hair on a thin long face. Now though, he was skinny, like Jared Leto in Requiem for a Dream skinny. You could tell that despite his best efforts, he wasn’t eating well. He never accepted help though, be it to pay for a dinner or to stay at one of our homes. He was stubborn about it and had a masterful way of deflecting pity with a smile and a sense of humor. That’s one thing I could always admire about him, he was almost always smiling and joking like everything was pretty chill in the world.

 

“Hey, you coming tonight?” Parker asked, breaking the silent meditation we had fallen into.

 

“To the asylum? Yeah, of course, Drew will be picking me up at my place, think he will be bring Andy and Erin.” I pushed myself away from the door I had been leaning on and started to make my way to the passenger side.

 

“Oh, nice, guess I’ll be meeting you guys,” he reached over, opening the door from the inside with a grunt, since the door handle was broken on the outside, “there then. Oh! I picked up some new shit for the investigation!” He pointed at a bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat, his tired looking eyes opening wide in excitement with a grin.

 

I reached into the bag curiously, finding a still in the package voice recorder, a couple extra small tapes, and an EMF meter. I nodded, pursing my lips together and slanting my eyes in a look of curiosity.  

 

“Cool, right?” Parker asked excitedly.

 

“Looks like it was built in the 1980s, they all do. Nobody can seem to make a good looking one of these things.”

 

“Aww, shut up. It’s cool!” He took it out of my hand, glaring at me with a smile creeping on his face.

 

“Probably worth the price of free you got them for.”

 

“When you got a talent,” he shrugged and tossed the meter at the bag on the ground, missing the opening, but making quite the racket. By a talent, he meant shoplifting, something I guess he picked up when he became homeless. He was good at it, and was getting pretty bold in his attempts as well. That worried me, of course, but we didn’t focus on it much.

 

Oh yeah, I should probably explain the asylum thing too. You see, we had gotten into ghost hunting. The idea of being somewhere creepy and maybe haunted excited us. We were sort of into the idea of the supernatural in some form or another, and the whole concept of spirits roaming the earth for various reasons had a romanticly dark appeal. Plus, this was 2007 and the TV show, Ghost Hunters, was extremely popular. Beyond that, we had become friends with a couple of your typical goth kids, many of which had started practicing various forms of witchcraft, such as Neo-Paganism and Wicca. It all felt rebellious and interesting, plus, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t real. We were roleplaying, psyching each other up, and playing along to suppress our boredom.

 

Honestly, it's no surprise that a group of bored 19 year old kids that had just welcomed adult life with varying degrees of apathy were finding inventive ways to keep themselves entertained. The asylum was this abandoned hospital that was shut down under controversy a handful of years ago, a decrepit looking creepy building out in the middle of the desert without much of anything around it. We had been there three times before, experiencing little bits of creepy shit, but by the second visit, we had brought alcohol with us. To the surprise of none one, the booze acted as one heck of a distraction to our serious attempt at being the ones that found