“Just stand…here we go.”
Raphael pointed at a spot in the grass a few feet off the sidewalk. Technically it was probably the yard of the house behind us, but it was a side yard and close enough to the street that I doubted anyone would complain. Still, I wasn’t sure what he was pointing at until I stepped closer and saw something silver glinting among the thick grass. I looked back up at him questioningly.
“So I stand there? Do I pick that up?”
He nodded. “Yeah, the witness has to be the one to pick it up. It’s one of the rules.” His eyes skittered back and forth between me and the patch of grass, his face lined with tension as he flapped his hand in my direction. “Hurry. Do it if you’re going to do it.”
I frowned and bent down, picking up what I now saw was a silver coin, though not a kind I was familiar with. It was smooth on one side, and on the other, there was a large engraved eye surrounded by lines that radiated a criss-crossed web to the edges of the small metal disc. Running my thumb over the ridges, I looked up at him as I rose.
“So what? Now I stand here and wait for something to happen?”
Raphel shrugged. “Pretty much. A lot of times…” He glanced across the street and then turned back to me. “Lots of times nothing happens. You just stand in this spot for two hours. And at the end of the two hours, you go home. You’ll find a black journal and a pen sitting outside your door. Before you go in, you write down a description of what you saw during your time out here. It can be long or short, it doesn’t matter. It can just say ‘I stood for two hours and nothing happened’ if that’s the truth. Just so long as you write something down. When you’re done writing it down, put the book and the pen back where you found them and go inside. They’ll be gone before the next morning, and around noon that same day, you’ll find an envelope at your door. $1000 bucks cash.”
I grinned. “You’ve told me this ten times and it still sounds too good to be true.” I felt my smile slip. “You sure this isn’t anything illegal?”
He grimaced. “Look, you’re the one that kept bugging me about getting you into it. Remember, I told you not to. Told you that it’s not as easy as it sounds.”
I frowned at him. “Yeah, you keep saying that, but you won’t say why it isn’t easy. Unless your lazy ass just minds standing for a couple of hours. For a $1000 bucks I can stand a lot longer than that.” When he didn’t smile or laugh, I went on. “But seriously. I thought you were just messing with me. Or maybe that there is something you’re not telling me.” I held his eye. “So is there?”
He shook his head as he dropped his gaze. “No, nothing I’m allowed to tell. That’s part of the rules. If you bring someone new in, you can show them where to go and what to do the first time, but that’s it. No talking about what you’ve seen or done.” When he looked back up at me, his gaze was stony. “And I know I’ve told you this before too, but it’s worth repeating…now that you’ve started, you do not stop until a full two hours have passed. No walking around, no going to piss or falling asleep. You have to stay here the full time, no matter what, and you have to watch…well, whatever there is to watch.”
I raised my eyebrow. “Dude, you’re starting to freak me out being all sketchy acting about it. If this is some kind of joke you and Tori are pulling, I’ll kick your ass.” I tried to laugh, but it sounded hollow and thin in my ears.
Raphael’s eyes widened slightly. “It’s not a joke. You understand? You wanted in it, and now you’re in it. So long as you take it serious and follow the rules, you’ll be okay.” He gave me a smile that looked forced. “Make good money too.” Glancing back across the street, he started edging toward his car. “So you cool? I don’t know I should stay much longer, but I want to make sure you’re okay before I go.”
Ignoring the twisting in my belly, I gave him a thumbs-up as I started my phone’s two-hour timer. “I’m cool. I’ll text you later.”
He nodded and ducked into his car, and moments later he was gone. I felt very alone and exposed now that the distraction of talking was gone. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood—the houses were older and a bit run down, but it seemed quiet enough. I’d only seen a couple of people drive by while we were talking, and after Raphael left, it was probably half an hour before another car passed.
The entire two hours, my mind kept racing, torn between fear that this all really was a practical joke and that it was not only real, but that Raphael’s weirdness wasn’t just him being anal, but him…well, him being scared.
But that was silly. I’d know him and his sister Tori since the fifth grade, and I’d never known him to get really scared or freaked out about anything. Probably he was just nervous about vouching for me and was afraid if I messed up, it would mess up his job too.
And there was no denying it was a weird job. Inherently sketch. Maybe some twisted pervert with a lot of money, or someone that wanted to harass someone without having to be around themselves? My imagination had run wild since Raphael had let the job slip a couple of weeks earlier, but if all I had to do was stand here and watch the neighborhood crawl by, what was the harm? And if some nut wanted to pay big money for it, who was I to refuse?
My other worry was that it was just a way to lure someone out somewhere so they could be snatched or serial killed or something. But Raphael had been doing it for like three months, and the guy he’d heard about it from had done it for over a year a couple of states over. So it had to be…well, if not legit, at least not too dangerous for the people getting paid.
And that all made since, sure, but it still got harder to stay out there as the twilight deepened into night. I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to be looking for or watching, so I just periodically turned and looked this way and that, my eyes finding the pools of light from the occasional streetlamp or the glow of some lit window or door. Was I missing something? I didn’t know what. But why have me hang out here for two hours unless something was going to…
I let out a short yelp as my phone’s timer went off. My two hours were up.
Me: That was stupid easy. And the book was there like you said when I got home tonight.
Sai Turtleboy: Yeah. So you filled it out and left it?
Me: Yeah, of course. Though I don’t know how I feel about you giving my address out to strangers. Long as I get paid tho, right?
Sai Turtleboy: I didn’t.
Me: You didn’t get paid? Dude what the fuck?
Sai Turtleboy: No. I didn’t think about it before, but I didn’t tell anyone where you lived.
Me: Ohhhkay. Back to being creepy. I just better have a fat envelope waiting for me tomorrow or your (donkey emoticon) is (lawn emoticon).*
They did pay, just like he said. And a week later, I found another envelope with a new time and location, as well as a photo of the spot I was supposed to stand in. Raphael said it was always considered an invitation, not an order. I didn’t, he stressed, have to keep doing it if I didn’t want to.
But of course I did. Over the next month, I did it two more times. Once at the edge of a shopping center parking lot early one Sunday morning and the other time outside a library across town until midnight. I kept waiting for something to happen, something noteworthy to report or give me a clue as to what the purpose of all this was, but it was all so…ordinary. People coming and going, some of them giving me odd looks as they passed, as though they wondered what the strange girl was doing just standing there watching as they came and went.
It wasn’t until the third time I actually saw something kind of interesting. I was posted up outside a pizzeria when a kid about my age came storming out wearing a green apron covered in white powder. He made it a few steps into the parking lot before seeming to think better of it and turning around. I had the thought that maybe he’d quit and now was going to go back to say he was just kidding, but no. Instead he went over to a gumball machine outside the door he’d exited. Picking it up, I saw the cords standing out in his neck as he screamed in the direction of whoever was inside to hear.
“Fuck you, Brian!”
With that, he swung the gumball machine from its base like he was batting for a homerun, except instead of hitting a fast pitch he slammed into the restaurant’s front plate-glass window, shattering it. He stared with some mixture of what looked like pride and surprise before dropping the machine and running for his car to make his escape from the lot.
Thirty minutes later police pulled up, and much to my dread, they headed my way after talking to some guy in a red pizza shirt—Brian, if I had to guess. They asked me if I’d been out there when everything happened. I shrugged and told them I’d been out there for awhile, but I hadn’t seen anything. The female officer frowned at this and told me she didn’t see how I didn’t notice a man breaking a window and screaming twenty yards away. I just stared at her and shrugged.
That’s when she started asking why exactly I was out there. Was I aware that there was a city ordinance against loitering. I explained to her that I was waiting for a friend and…that’s when my phone’s timer went off. Telling the officers that I was tired of waiting for my friend to show up, I turned to head back to my car. The woman cop wanted to stop me, but the other officer gave her a forbidding look and thanked me for my time. Nodding, I walked to my car and got in, blood still thundering in my ears.
What was that? Me just lying to cops like it was nothing? I mean I knew I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what I saw…those were the rules, after all. But I had never even talked to a cop before except for the one speeding ticket I’d gotten, and I’d almost broke down crying then. Now I was lying to them and walking off like it was nothing.
Odd as it may sound, the whole experience was weirdly empowering. I didn’t really feel guilty about not helping out and being honest—I was being loyal to my job and its rules, and that was more important. Plus, if I could keep doing a good job, who knew how long this money could last? Maybe I could do it forever.
Then three weeks later, I watched a family burn to death.
I was standing on the grass of an empty lot on the last street of a largely empty neighborhood. This was a new place, divided into dozens of lots and populated with a handful of houses on each of its three winding roads. I’d seen a few families coming home as I drove in, but the last street was also the least developed, and so there were only two houses across from me and none on my side. Even those two houses seemed empty, with no people or cars around. Just tall grass and patches of dirt and…well, me, standing awkwardly while I waited for my timer to tick down and hoping that no neighbor or rent-a-cop came up and hassled me for hanging out.
I was already an hour in when I saw an orange glow in the front windows of the closest house. At first, I thought it was just light from a t.v. or lamp made soft and shifting by the long white curtains hung there. But then the curtains caught, bright tongues of flame crawling up them quickly even as I noticed a flare of light from one of the upstairs windows. The house was burning. I…I needed to do something. Call 911 or something.
But you can’t tell anyone what you’ve seen. It’s the rule.
But if someone’s house is burning, shouldn’t I break the rules? It seemed like the simplest question in the world, and yet something in me still hesitated. Someone else would notice soon, right? Or there was some alarm inside that would robocall for help. A part of me recoiled at my thought processes, at stalling while I debated calling for help, but it had a small, meek voice. The louder voice told me I had made a promise by picking up that coin, and I had to honor that. At the very least I could wait a few…
I puffed out a sigh of relief as I heard the sirens in the distance. A couple of minutes later two firetrucks pulled up. The firemen immediately went to work, some of them setting up hoses while others went to the house and started looking in windows and calling for anyone who might be inside. They must have heard something, because suddenly they began frantically breaking down the front door with axes. Black smoke boiled out, followed by a dim view of what lay beyond the door. It was all fire and ashes, though I thought for a moment I saw something move in there.
It was then that the smell reached me--the thick and dusty scent of ashes mixed with the spikier smells of fire and something almost sickeningly sweet. One of the firemen had broken out one of the windows upstairs and was yelling back down. Two upstairs. Burned and no response.
One of the axemen at the front door cursed and then said there was another body on the stairs. Heart in my throat, I could barely breathe. What if I could have helped them? Or called and gotten someone there quicker. It had only been a matter of minutes between when I first saw the fire and the trucks arrived, but how many? Two? Five? How much of a difference could it have made, and what was wrong with me that I didn’t even…
”It’s a lovely smell, isn’t it?”
The voice was rough and oily in my ear, but when I recoiled, it wasn’t just from the shock or the sound of it. It was the breath that came with it—cold and fetid, with that same underlying sweetness I had already been smelling since they broke down the door. As I pulled away, I turned to find who was talking to me, but there was no one there. I almost lost my balance and fell over, but as I recovered I turned all the way around, looking in every direction. There was no sign of anyone anywhere close by. Just then, a slimy chuckle slid out of the twilight air next to me.
”But if you get a little taste?”
This was followed by a pleasurable groan and what might have been the smacking of lips somewhere above me and to my right. Forgetting everything else in my terror, I started to back away. I dug into my pocket for my car keys, and that’s when I felt the coin I’d put there. I-I couldn’t just leave could I? But how could I stay? Something was out here with me and…
My phone jumped in my pocket as the timer went off.
Tears sprang to my eyes. “Oh thank you God.” Not looking back, I ran to my car and jumped in. It was three blocks before I pulled over and tried to calm down. To rationalize what I had seen and heard. But it didn’t work. I was freaked right the fuck out, and I needed to talk to Raphael. Find out what he’d gotten me into.
Me: I just got done with a watching job. Some really freaky shit happened.
Sai Turtleboy: Don’t tell me any details. Remember the rules.
Me: Yeah, but this was really bad. I just need to talk to someone about it.
Sai Turtleboy: No, you don’t. You need to keep quiet and take your money when it comes. You did stay the whole two hours, right?
Me: Sure, yeah I did. Can you at least tell me if you’ve ever had something bad happen on one of these things? Like people die bad?
Sai Turtleboy: Look. No, I can’t, obviously. That’s still telling. But are you okay? Are you hurt?
Me: Yeah, I mean I’m not physically hurt or something.
Sai Turtleboy: Okay good. So go home, write it down, and then let it go. And if it bothers you that much, you don’t have to do it again, okay?
*Me: Sure. I guess so.
I got paid the next day as usual, but I promised myself I was done after that. I even ignored the first new envelope I received. But when the second one came the following week, I couldn’t help but open it. I told myself it was just about the money, but I think even then I knew that wasn’t entirely true. I’d been restless and unhappy not doing it anymore, and scared I might not get another chance. I’d tried calling Raphael a couple of times to ask more questions, but he never answered anymore, and when I texted, he always texted back that he was busy and we’d talk later.
The day I got the second envelope, he finally called. Told me that he was sorry he’d been distant, but he was just trying to give me time to decompress and get over whatever I’d seen before we talked too much, if for no other reason than to reduce the risk I’d try to tell him what I’d seen despite the rules. He told me he was sorry he’d introduced me to the job in the first place, but he was glad I was done with it, and…
I felt a hard smile go across my face as I cut him off. “I don’t know that I’m done. I got another envelope today.”
“Another…? Kim, let it go. I’m thinking about getting out myself. Before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what? What’re you talking about? I thought you could quit whenever you wanted.”
He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was soft and thin. “Usually…usually, yeah. But as you get into it, there are certain…obligations. Me vouching for you and bringing you in…look, it’s not just you that has a problem if you mess up, okay? So just stay away from it and we’ll both be better off. Okay? O—”
I hung up the call. Fuck him. I wasn’t messing anything up. And I wasn’t giving up this kind of easy money either. Opening my map app, I started tracking down where the new job wanted me to go.
I was standing at the edge of a playground in the middle of the night. The distant orange lights made the jungle gym and seesaws look like a forest of shadowy spiders at one end, and the other end was dominated with a better-lit but no less desolate sandbox. My stomach was already tight. Something was wrong with this place. Either that or it was about to be. It was something in the air, a sour electricity that made the hairs on my arms stand on end and made me jump at the slightest rustling from a distant tree or bush.
Still. I’d already picked up the coin. It had already been…ugh…only twenty minutes, but that was a sixth of the way done. And now…was that woman bringing her little kid to the playground at two in the morning?
Apparently so. As I quietly watched, a young woman walked her little toddler boy over to the sandbox and told him to play. When she turned back, her eyes found mine immediately.
“Are you the whistler?”
My pulse started pounding as I shook my head. I was going to just ignore her and hope she got the hint, but then I heard myself speaking in a loud, clear voice.
“I am the Witness.”
She nodded, and at this angle I could see how young she looked. How scared. I almost offered something more, but then a voice called out behind me.
“I am the Whistler.”
She looked past me and her face fell further. Turning around, I saw an old man, his head festooned with wisps of grey hair above a long red overcoat draped across broad, thin shoulders. He started walking to meet her, never even glancing in my direction as he passed, but when he reached the girl, he offered a slight bow.
“Do you bring an offering?”
The girl nodded, her face shining with tears now. “I…I do. We…we call him Jenkins.”
The man looked at the little boy half-heartedly digging out a hole in the sand nearby. “This one is your child?”
“Y-yes.”
He cut his eyes back to her sharply. “And this is your offering.”
She paled as she began to nod frantically. “Yeah…they said that would be enough. What you wanted. I…if I need to give something e—”
“No.” He raised his hand to silence her even as he began walking past her to the boy. “This will suffice. You will have what you wish.” The man was reaching into a coat pocket to pull out what looked like a large, silver egg.
“So you’ll fix Timothy’s heart?”
I sucked in a breath as the man whipped his head back toward her, his mouth a hard snarl above eyes that seemed to flash in the lamplight. “You will have what you wish.” Then, just as fast, he turned back to the boy at his feet and slammed the metal egg into the side of his skull.
I let out a small scream as the boy fell over limply, his face buried in the sand. I wanted to run—either forward to help the boy or just somewhere else so I could get help—but something stopped me. I still had over an hour left. I couldn’t move from this spot yet, and even if I did, I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d seen. Maybe I could get that boy medical help though, if I kept it vague and…now the man was sitting the egg down next to the boy and stepping back. He never looked in my direction, even when I screamed, and now he only had eyes for the egg, though I was starting to see why. It was shifting and splitting, its moonlight shell segmenting into a hundred, then a thousand smaller pieces as something unfurled from inside.
I could lie and say I didn’t see it well, and it’s true I don’t remember much of what it looked like, but I think it’s just my brain couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. It was all moving parts and small tendrils that became larger as they latched onto the boy’s head, curling into his ears and wrapped around his throat.
Stifling a whimper, I watched as the thing began to tug the poor little boy under the playground sand. Witnessed as the boy came to just as his eyes went below the surface. He screamed—the sound was a terrible, undulating wail of pure terror and pain, and his small arms and legs kicked up fans of dirt as he got pulled deeper into some impossible hole. I had to do something. I did have to do something, didn’t I?
As if hearing my thoughts, the man’s gleaming eyes cut to my own, and something in that terrible gaze frightened me even more than the half-submerged squealing child at his feet. His lips twisted sharply as he watched me, his eyes never leaving even when he put a leather shoe on the child’s back and shoved him deeper into wherever that monster was taking him. Face unreadable, he extended a hand to me silently, though I wasn’t sure if it was a greeting, an offering of his own, or something more sinister. Perhaps it was that final gesture, or maybe everything that had been building that night and those before it, but something broke in me then. And when I started running, I didn’t stop until I got home and had the door locked behind me.
It was as I turned the latch that my phone’s timer began to buzz.
There was no journal that night and no money the next day. That was fine with me. I was done. For real this time. Whatever this was, I never wanted to be near it again.
It was days later before I even tried calling Raphael. I wasn’t going to tell him any details, but I did want to encourage him to get out too. Whatever being a Witness really was, however much it paid, it wasn’t worth our souls.
He didn’t answer. After three days of trying I called Tori, but she hadn’t heard from him either. That was yesterday, and today I woke up determined to go out and find him.
Turns out I didn’t have far to go.
When I opened my front door, Raphael was across the street, just standing there. I called to him and waved, but he just stared at me. He wasn’t there to talk. He was there to bear witness.
I closed my door back and started writing this down. It’s taken me over an hour and he’s still out there. I’m afraid I know what that means.
Raphael’s time is almost up.
Comments