American Monsters (7 page)

You are a member of the corporate elite of A
merican society. You and your fathers before you placed incredible value on the accumulation of capital, which you have been putting into high-yield investments through assorted Swiss banks, offshore accounts and your native Wall Street. These have blossomed, and allowed for a Hearst-like opulence in your life.

But your heart is bitter, as bitter as the one devoured in the Stephen Crane poem. Your money has placed you in contact with many of your same station
― the grandkids of oil magnates and the imperialistic colonizers who laid the eggs of oppression throughout the world. But you’re not considered on the same level as these men. In fact, you are denigrated and disparaged daily as your nationwide chain of motels erupts in sex scandals, splashed across tabloids and local newspapers. Not by your hand of course, but by the hands of those men who use your notorious motel chain to conduct business with assorted prostitutes and drug dealers. You know now that your idea for a place where the masses can find a nice yet fairly inexpensive room left much to be desired. Those very masses, and your corporate friends, decided to use the motel as a haven for sexual misconduct.

You remember when you first began the motel business. It was before Psycho, when people, good hardworking people, would use the motel as a tool of travel. But something degenerated in these people for whom you wished to provide a service. Your business deal with the people was violated as, one by one, stories of sadistic sexual practices taking place in the Motel Chain began corrupting your immaculate reputation. The most stunning of these violations occurred when your best friend was caught in a Room 312 with your wife. Imagine the worst case scenario, and then add half a bottle of manic news coverage. It all makes for an extremely queasy stomach. What makes it worse is that they have since gotten married, and have four children now. You, on the other hand, are all alone.

You’ve been planning something big.

You have made it a habit to hire private detectives to keep an eye on your ex-wife, her bastard husband, and their four kids. Information that your private dick has gleaned is that the two older kids have been attending these infamous “rave” parties. From what you have gathered, these parties are just an excuse for young people to get together and do drugs. You have proof that the two older children have been doing these drugs. You have proof that most kids at these things do all kinds of drugs. You have a notebook in which you keep articles and information about what drugs, how they work, what they do to the brain. You have decided to kill your ex-wife’s children.

You have never forgiven her for her public and disgusting marital infidelity, and the fact that she has remained with that prick — and had numerous kids with him — it’s more than you can take, and you have been planning your revenge for years.

At the moment, you are waiting for the DJ to show up and discuss your plans for the carnival of death. As you wait, you look around the house that seemed to take on a life of its own as it was being built. In a daze that seems to appear only upon entering, you really have no recollection of many rooms there are, and how many of them got there. Sometim
es you are afraid to be there alone, but not today. You wait in the lobby for Mr. John Doe.

He arrives a few minutes after 2:00pm.

― Wow man, this is some crazy house. How long did it take to build this thing?

― Years, son. Years.

A chill runs through your body. At moments you wonder who it is you have become. A creepy old man who has nothing but destruction on his mind. But you don’t dwell on these things too often. You shake it off and turn back to John Doe.

― Shall we retire into the lounge?

You and the DJ walk through a mirrored hallway into a room filled with books. The ceilings are twenty feet high and are lined from top to bottom with eternal volumes. You both sit in high plush velvet chairs.

― Would you like a drink?

― No actually I’m fine. Let’s just get this over with, you know.

― How is the music coming along?

― I’ve been working with this computer program that lets me pinpoint vulnerable areas of the brain while on assorted substances, and I think I’ve figured out a way to create embolisms with subliminally coded messages within the music.

― And it works?

― It seems to, so far. The food and drinks will be spiked with ecstasy and acid, yes?

― I’ve been in touch with a gentleman who has mass quantities available. Anybody that drinks water on Hallow
een night will have their mind in the right place for the music.

― Good idea, sir. Water would be the best place for anything. Every single person that arrives at the door that night will drink at least one bottle of water. That is a guarantee.

― I’ve had the contractors put in an extensive speaker system throughout the house. There are speakers in every bathroom, bedroom, and space that one could possibly stand. Nobody that is in this house will be able to escape it. I even have speakers out in the woods out there. It will be all around us. I recommend being sober.

― Oh, I don’t do drugs. Will never touch the stuff again, and all of these assholes who do this shit, well they deserve to die. Anyway, I have special earplugs too, just in case.

― Just concentrate on making the music and protecting yourself from the events that will occur on the 31st , okay? I will transfer the money the morning after the rave, if all goes well.

― Sounds good.

― Set-up starts on the 29th, I’ll expect you back here then. Good luck.

― Yeah, you too sir. Good luck.

You walk John Doe the DJ to the front door, and wave as he drives off in his Volkswagen Rabbit. You turn around and are engulfed by the wide door mouth of the mansion. It smirks nastily as your body disappears through it.

What an odd bird, you think, as
you drive away from the notorious Motel Chain Mansion. It was your first time being there, and it was a sign of Mr. Motel Chain’s oddness that he didn’t even bother to give you a proper tour. Never mind, you’ll see the whole thing soon enough. As you glance into your rearview mirror at the looming mansion, you notice how much the facade looks like a face. You almost swerve off the road when you catch the house winking at you. You figure it was probably a window being shut or the curtains being drawn. How bizarre. You feel an odd sense of relief as you drive away from the Mansion. There is something off with that building. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something felt strange. Well, you’re being paid a million bucks to kill a whole slew of kids, that should be enough to weird anyone out. But maybe not you, though.

Your mind wanders back to your ex-girlfriend. Well, she’s not really an ex-girlfriend because you two never broke up, really. You killed her, but it was an accident. And you haven’t been with anyone since, so who knows what that makes you. Probably nothing. A murderer. That is why you don’t do drugs anymore, because you were fucked up the night your girlfriend died, and she died because you suffocated her with love.

You remember what a nice time you two were having on ecstasy: hugging and talking. You both decided to go for a walk to the park down the street from your house and somewhere in there you two started hugging again, and you were holding her so tight, so tight, and then, you don’t even really know when she died but when you broke from the hug she just tumbled to the ground. You don’t know how you could hug someone to death, it’s just way too Othello for real life, but it happened and there you were. Rolling on ecstasy in a park with your dead girlfriend at your feet.

You didn’t know what to do so you dragged her body and threw it into a manhole that you pried open with difficulty. You walked home. There was a big stink about her going missing. Her parents, the police, everyone knew about her, and everyone was keeping an eye out. She never turned up, and her parents still haven’t had a funeral for her. They will not let go of the chance that she is still alive. You haven’t told them because who are you, really, to burst their bubble?

You did decide that you would never do drugs again. You have made it part of your purpose as a DJ to advocate abstinence from drugs, an attempt to take the rave back to its roots. The people that attend parties now aren’t even real party kids, they are just going because everything is commoditized and fetishized to the point where all meaning is lost. You remember the days when parties were about hearing and appreciating great music, meeting loads of people and as an enhancement of these two key points, getting fucked up. Now, it’s all gone to shit. Nobody has anything to do with the scene except for the drugs. The peace, love, friendship and respect that used to exist within the party scene has been commercialized. You used to be able to pay five bucks for a great party. Now, you can’t even find a party whose cover charge is less than thirty dollars.

You had actually planned to give up the whole DJ thing, but when Mr. Motel Chain offered you the job, you took it as a last public statement. It’s time to get a real job and stop being so concerned with the bullshit politics of party kids. You’re over that, or at least will be once you’ve helped teach a lesson to the trendy flocks of sheep that will wait, like lemmings, to jump to their deaths. Yes, the metaphors are mixed, but you know what you are talking about. This scene is dead. It should start acting that way. After you’re done with it, it will be like your girlfriend’s body in the sewer, rotting away to nothing. Who will even care enough to remember?

You are in a wet, dripping, dark place. The walls are soft and squishy and warm. There are two other people with you, somehow you’ve been sucked inside something. You remember opening a door, and then there was this warm wetness al
l around you. You’ve lost the two comrades. You are sliding down a tunnel. There is nothing to grab onto. You can see light up ahead. You shoot with incredible force towards the light, only to emerge out of what seems like a cave being guarded by a huge bloody fanged mouth. The other two shoot out beside you, and stare at the fangs until they move sharply closer to bite... There is fire all around, you are covered in blood―

You wake up. Sweating and confused.

Your online name is Console-Cowgirl and something really bizarre has been happening to you lately.

About a month ago, you scratched the cornea o
f your left eye and had to have laser surgery. After a week of being in complete darkness in order for your eye to heal, you began to see things. It started with odd images in the corners of your eyes, peripheral glimpses of faces and buildings that disappear as soon as you turn your head. It is unsettling, like a bad acid trip that lingers around the margins of your vision. But you’ve never done acid. You’ve never been into that. Your online life is enough of an escape for you to not look elsewhere for altered states of being. At the same time, these images recur, have been recurring since the operation and since you’ve started wearing special contact lenses to protect your corneas. The dream you just woke from is among many that you’ve had in the last month and it carries with it a sense of foreshadowing that you can’t understand. What does this mean?

Bright white light exploding all around you. You grab the nearest wall but it seems like elastic, like it wants to pull you into the structure of the building. You see bodies lying on the floor, lots of bodies, they aren’t moving, they have trickles of blood seeping from their ears. Some of it has pooled on the rocking floor. It is so loud, so loud you don’t know how you can see anything. Your eyes are dry and aching from the smoke in the air, bright lights explode all around you, then nothing.

Wracked with the latest series of psychotic visions, you climb out of bed and head to the bathroom. While peeing, you wonder what changed. These dream-like interludes are disturbing and they happen at random moments, like somehow your brain is hardwired into some cybernetic matrix and trips up every once in a while with metaphysical information that surfaces when least expected.

What you don’t know is that the combination of hours upon hours staring into cyber-dimensions, combined with the laser surgery and contact lenses, has altered the hard-wiring of your brain. The dreams and images are a product of a Cassandra mutation, one that causes your eyes to emit light instead of absorbing it, putting you in touch with astral information doled out in synaptic bursts. If someone were to catch your blind visionary gaze they would be sucked into cyberspace, trapped in a matrix of memory and collective unconscious, lost in your mind.

The incredible amount of déjà vu you have been experiencing is related to some change in your physical form. You wonder if you can catch telepathy from someone. You don’t know how else you could be able to read into people’s heads so easily. You’ve been avoiding crowds, spending more and more time online, chatting with random people, not worrying about what grotesque image will surface next in their twisted minds. It’s too early to be awake, and you decide a few more hours' sleep is worth the freakish dreams that are sure to follow. You count the flying windows until you fall back to sleep.