Man of Wax (19 page)

Carver pulled his chair closer to the computer they were sitting in front of. He said, “This better be good.”
 

“Well,” the Kid said, “I guess that depends on your point of view.”
 

What the Kid had concluded was that the two things Carver had seen before were types of shows. Reality shows in a way—real people doing real things. Only instead of working for some multimillionaire business owner or attempting to lose a ton of weight, these shows had a much darker, sinister angle.
 

While the Kid was explaining this, he brought up part of a show he’d saved, what was basically the same thing Carver had seen the first time he stumbled across the website that was mostly a black screen with a box in the middle: the inside of a car, hands on the steering wheel, an open highway stretching toward the horizon.
 

“And now,” the Kid said, doing his best John Cleese, “for something completely different.”
 

He typed in a few commands and sat back in his chair as the picture inside the black screen changed. The perspective was still of whoever was wearing the special glasses, only there was no open highway in front of them anymore. Now Carver was seeing a woman lying naked in front of him. Everything behind and around her was fuzzy, but her face was clear, and he could see that her mouth was open just a bit, her eyes bulging. And around her neck were hands, hands which belonged to the person wearing the glasses.
 

“Holy shit,” Carver said, leaning forward. “Is he—”
 

“Choking her? You bet he is. But that’s not all. He’s fucking her too. Fucking her and choking her at the same time.”
 

The Kid explained how he’d come across this particular scene two days ago. After the woman was dead, the man—he was listed as The Joker—went to some motel room, where he threw up and then showered for three or four hours. The next morning he started out into the city (after a half hour the Kid narrowed it down to Tampa) and just began walking the streets.
 

“The Joker?” Carver asked.
 

The Kid nodded and typed a mile a minute and brought up another screen. On it was the picture of a man who looked to be in his thirties, pale and overweight, badly losing his hair. There were a few paragraphs about him, where he’d been born and where he went to school and his hobbies, his likes and dislikes, where he worked.
 

“They don’t seem to list real names,” the Kid said. “They always give codenames of sorts, though they identify each person to an extent. Like the guy you just saw choking that girl? In his bio it said he’d always wanted to be a comedian, had even done some of his material on open mic nights at clubs. Hence he’s The Joker.”
 

The Kid continued to show Carver what else he’d come across. A list of other people—what Carver and the Kid quickly assumed were contestants—that included names like The Writer, The Poet, The Singer, Woman of Gold, Man of Cars, and so on. No real names were ever given. Another page, linked to the bios, told about each person’s families. Their husbands and wives, their children, sometimes even their parents. Evidently these family members were being held captive (something that was freely mentioned on the site to its users), which forced these people, these contestants, to do what was asked of them.
 

“They’re given instructions,” the Kid told Carver, when he took a break and they were in the kitchen. The microwave was humming, popping a bag of Orville Redenbacher. “From what I can tell their only contact is someone named Simon. You know, Simon Says? This guy tells them what to do, how to do it, all that shit. Though, to be honest, I can’t be one hundred percent sure it’s the same guy every time. From what it looks like, the people who do this shit are very well connected, and there’re a lot of them. Make good money, too.”
 

“What do you mean?”
 

“From what I can tell those people who aren’t as web savvy as someone like me—just normal people like you, for instance—pay a shitload to access these shows. Depending on what each person wants to see or witness or even experience, it all ranges from thousands of dollars up to tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands. I mean, these sick fucks are major high rollers.”
 

“But how can we be certain it’s even real?” Carver asked, trying his best to play devil’s advocate.
 

The Kid said, “Dude, you’ve seen shit like this before, only a lot tamer. You just know when it’s real and when it’s not. Tell me I’m wrong.”
 

No, as much as Carver wanted to, he couldn’t tell the Kid he was wrong. It was a feeling Carver always got in his gut, the one that said this wasn’t just some bullshit a bunch of kids were trying to play as a prank. And he’d seen his share of websites offering the promise of dark desires and pleasures, like those people who loved watching snuff films. He’d seen so many he could tell almost at once when one was real and when one wasn’t.
 

Back in the basement, surrounded by Terry Gilliam movie posters, with the computers again, Carver asked why the websites had disappeared before. The Kid explained they all seemed to be timed to stay in one place for any given hour, sometimes half an hour, and then move to another spot. This made it difficult for hackers or anybody else who was interested to try to infiltrate the system. The Kid even admitted—a little abashedly—that there had been a few instances when he’d been having a hell of a time tracking down where the sites went to next. His thought was whoever paid to get the full show was sent constant links, so they never missed a minute of the action ... though really, with the cameras on the contestant twenty-four-seven, the action was limited. Most of the time the person was either sleeping or riding in some form of transportation, that was all. But then the time came, no matter how brief, when something did happen. So far the Kid had witnessed two murders, a rape, and a man who sliced open a living donkey and began eating the intestines raw. And those were for the sites he’d managed to locate and track.
 

“I have to be careful myself, though,” the Kid said. His bowl of popcorn was beside him and he ate it happily, shoving handfuls into his mouth. They were staring at the one monitor, again watching the man listed only as The Joker as he cleaned himself up after murdering the woman. He was in the bathroom, having just thrown up in the toilet, and was now washing off his face, crying.
 

Carver asked, “What do you mean?”
 

“Like I told you before, whoever’s doing this stuff knows their shit. They can probably tell when an outside source has found any given site. They might try to move the site faster than planned, or they might try to put a trace on whoever’s stumbled across their show. Or maybe both. All I can say is thank God I have up-to-date anti-tracking software. Fuck the stuff from last month.”
 

Based on everything the Kid had shown him, Carver was certain he could bring this to his supervisor. He had yet to hear of any progress from the other team who’d been assigned to the case, and was beginning to suspect no team had actually been assigned. He had even looked into it himself and came up with nothing. He asked the Kid to copy some of the saved files and then took it to work with him on Monday and showed his supervisor.
 

His supervisor sat quietly for a long time behind his desk before sighing and leaning back in his chair. He asked Carver why he’d blatantly disregarded an order. Carver explained that he’d been troubled by what he’d seen, that he’d been working on this at home on his free time (he wasn’t about to mention the Kid’s assistance in this matter), and that from the evidence he’d collected it seemed a full out investigation should be conducted.
 

For a long time there was silence. Then his supervisor said, “Good work,” stood up and extended his hand for Carver to shake. “I can’t promise anything but I’ll see if I can get a team together to work on this exclusively. I’ll put you in charge.”
 

At home that night, Carver decided not to tell Sandra about what had happened. He’d wait until his supervisor made everything official before telling her anything. Besides, even if things did go through, he was leery of telling her about what he knew. She was a woman who spooked easily and the last thing he wanted to do was scare her.
 

Much later, while Sandra was sleeping, Leon started fussing in the next room. Carver got up and took him out of his crib, began rocking him back to sleep. He stared at the pictures stenciled on the walls of the nursery, the ones his wife was very slowly going about painting. Scenes from
Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
, Lewis Carroll being Sandra’s favorite children’s author. Carver sort of felt like Alice now, going down that rabbit hole, uncertain what he would find. Eventually he placed his son back in his crib, stared down at him for a very long time, and returned to bed.
 

When Carver woke that morning he was not in his bed. He was not in his bedroom. He was not even in his house.
 

He was in what appeared to be a rundown motel room, the kind with stains on the ceilings and cigarette burns on the carpet. What had woken him was the phone ringing beside the bed. He answered it and listened to a dark voice introduce itself as Simon.
 

“It seems you’ve gotten a little too close to what we do, Carver, so we thought we’d include you in on the fun. You’re going to play a game. As long as you do everything I say you’ll see your wife Sandra again. If not, she dies.”
 

“Fuck you,” Carver said. He scrambled up from the bed, looking around, trying to spot the cameras in the corners, hidden in the vent, wherever. A pair of glasses sat on the bedside table beside the phone.
 

Simon said, “That’s not very nice, Carver. Either you’ll play nice or you won’t play at all. Now are you ready for the first part of the game? It’s easy. Go take a piss.”
 

Even though everything in Carver’s mind told him not to, he started toward the bathroom. It was dark inside and he expected someone to be waiting in there, someone who might be his supervisor though he doubted his supervisor would be stupid enough to place himself at the scene. Then again maybe his supervisor had nothing to do with this. But someone sure as hell did. Someone had sold him out, and now Carver was certain he was very close to finding out who.
 

But then he went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and stepped toward the toilet.
 

Lying in the water, facedown, was his son.

35

Carver’s story wasn’t told uninterrupted. Not with the utility van shot up the way it was. Simon would take care of his own people, Carver explained, make sure the police didn’t get involved right away in case any of the escorts were still alive, but that didn’t mean an APB hadn’t already been put out on the van. One hadn’t come across on their own radar yet, but the fact was they needed new wheels and they needed them fast.
 

At that point I was just along for the ride, listening to Carver tell his story while first they checked me for any tracking devices (in my clothes and shoes) then while we got off at the first exit and searched for a new van to steal. That came pretty quickly, the driver and passenger jumping out and breaking into a new van and then we were in there too, Carver and myself, leaving the old van behind.
 

“What about the others?” I asked at one point, and Carver said, “They know what to do and will meet up with us later,” and before I knew it I broke down and started crying. This man claimed my wife and daughter were dead, that they’d been dead from the start, but I refused to believe it. I couldn’t give up that hope. All I had left was the promise of seeing them again, of hearing their voices, of hugging them and never letting go, and the only way to do that was to understand what exactly was going on.
 

So I stopped crying, wiped my tears, and asked, “Then what did you do? After you found your ...” But I couldn’t say it, because it made me think of Casey.
 

Carver didn’t answer me for the longest time. He just stared off into space, shaking his head almost imperceptibly, and sighed. “I took him out and ... he was bloated, so bad I could hardly even recognize him. I laid him down on the bed, wrapped him in a sheet, said a prayer, and left.” He paused and looked at me. “I just turned around and walked away.”
 

“But your wife,” I said. “You let her ...” Again I couldn’t say it.
 

Carver’s dark face continued staring back at me. “I knew there was no outlet. I’d seen the game played before. Nobody ever wins. They’re forced to do whatever Simon tells them to do with the hope they’ll win and get their family back. But they never do. My wife was already dead, just like my son, and I refused to play Simon’s game.”
 

He’d left, finding himself in a mountainous region of the country, coniferous trees everywhere. He stripped off his clothes, thinking there might be some kind of tracking device in them, and continued through the woods. Eventually he came to a nearby town. Managed to steal some clothes at night while nobody was around and then hitchhiked to the next town, where he learned he was in Maine, in the county of Wytopitlock. There he contacted the Kid, explained what had happened, to which the Kid had said, “I know, dude. I watched you wake up.”
 

Apparently Carver’s show had been listed as the Man of Honor.
 

“Your show’s listed as the Man of Wax,” Carver said. Something was different about his voice, it didn’t sound completely there, and I wondered just how often he thought about that moment in the motel room in Maine, the moment he woke up and realized his world had changed forever. “The only reason I know your real name’s Benjamin Anderson is when that delivery girl dropped off that package to you the first day.”