I took a deep breath before blowing into the little straw attached to the breathalyzer test.
“Keep it going, another few seconds,” the newly reinstated sheriff’s deputy Randy said from the passenger seat next to me.
Finally the device made a noise and the numbers 0.07 appeared on the screen.
“Okay, I’m good to drive. I’ll need to keep ingesting roughly one beer every hour from this point on.”
Randy nodded.
“Okay, now you go,” I said, replacing the disposable straw in the breathalyzer test.
He blew into the straw and after a few seconds it came up on the display.
“O.16. That’s not gonna do it with your tolerance, bud. I’m gonna need you to drink something, Randy. You gotta be sharp for this.”
He pulled out a bottle of whiskey and unscrewed the cap, taking a long swig of it before belching. When I was satisfied he was intoxicated enough to avoid seeing any more invisible monsters, I told him to buckle up.
Normally I don’t condone drinking and driving, even if it is technically within the legal limits, but these were special circumstances. Randy had infected me with some sort of… Well, I don’t really know how to describe it. Ghost virus? Hallucinating monster plague?
I was seeing things in mirrors and reflective surfaces now, just like he had been. It was as if they now served as peepholes into another dimension. Therefore, we had covered up the rear view and side mirrors with duct tape. I had also gotten rid of my aviators, which was a shame, because they completed my whole outfit. I was even growing a mustache to complete the small town Sheriff everyman appearance, but the hair growth on my upper lip was patchy and gross-looking still.
Before growing it, I hadn’t realized facial dandruff was a real thing. Well, it turns out it definitely is.
Sorry, I’m getting tangential again. That happens to me when I drink.
To sum it all up, Randy was the old sheriff in Hollow’s End, but he’d run into some kind of trouble recently. This trouble had caused him to see horrible things which appeared in reflective surfaces - windows and mirrors all over town which had been smashed by him in what I at first assumed was a drunken rage. Now I realized he was drinking to drown out the demons. The liquor made them less noticeable, and less frequent.
“This case has to be connected with everything that’s happening,” I said as we started driving - our destination still unknown. “That man who disappeared. In such a small town, these things have to be connected.”
“Not necessarily,” Randy replied. “This town is weird as hell, dude. Fucked up shit happens here literally all the time. You just haven’t lived here long enough to see any of it.”
I ignored this and pressed onward, trying to get something useful out of the man.
“Okay, you’re not much help. Is there someone in town who is in the know? Someone who can give us the low-down?”
“Well… The only person I can think of like that would be the butcher. He’s sort of like the unofficial mayor of Hollow’s End,” Randy explained. “But he’s not exactly the talkative type.”
“Great. That’s something, at least. Point me towards the butcher shop. Let’s go have a chat with this guy,” I said to Randy, only to realize he had promptly fallen asleep after his last statement.
I drove towards the commercial district, eyes peeled for a Butcher Shop sign.
Eventually I found it.
*
We pulled up in front of the place and I could tell right away that something was off. And by that I mean there was a terrible smell that I associated with spoiled meat. Something inside the shop was long past its expiration date, and the rank odor was making its way out to the street.
There was a closed sign hanging from the door, despite the hours indicating it should be open. Alarm bells started ringing in my mind even louder than before and I told Randy to watch the front of the shop while I went around to the back.
He was now wide awake again, acting as if he hadn’t just been asleep seconds prior.
After knocking on the back door, I tried the handle. To my surprise, it opened.
I went inside and was hit with a knockout punch of decay right to my nose. My eyes started watering at the smell of meat gone sour, the sound of buzzing flies growing louder as I stepped inside the kitchen.
There was blood everywhere - and not just in the usual places where you would expect it to be in a butcher’s shop. It was splattered on the ceiling and all over the floor. There was one particularly large bloodstain in the far corner of the room that was in the shape of a human body, and judging by the deep crimson color of it whoever had been laying there had lost a sufficient amount of bodily fluids to render them dead half a dozen times over.
I heard footsteps from the other side of a translucent plastic curtain which separated the kitchen from the front of the shop. Pulling out my service revolver, I took a cautious step forward and pulled back the hammer, ready for anything.
My heart was pounding fast as I spoke in my best ‘don’t fuck with me’ cop-voice.
“This is the sheriff. Whoever’s behind the curtain, come out with your hands up. Do it now!”
There was an identical sound on the other side of the divider, indicating another gun was being readied for action.
“No way, man,” said a gruff voice on the other side. “You’re not taking me alive.”
My heart skipped a beat as I realized I was potentially about to die. There was going to be a shootout. And a lot more blood was about to be decorating the walls of this butcher shop.
Then I realized the voice sounded familiar.
“RANDY!?”
He came through the curtain and I almost shot him anyway.
“Oh, sorry. I thought it was a bad guy impersonating you,” Randy said.
“So you decided to impersonate a bad guy? How does that make any sense?”
“They wouldn’t kill one of their own, man. Think about it.”
I let out a deep breath and counted to ten in my mind, trying to think of other ways to stop myself from murdering him.
Would anyone notice if Randy went missing? No, don’t think like that. Only bad things will come of it.
I tried to focus on the case.
“That’s a lot of blood,” I said, pointing at the man-shaped brownish-red puddle in the corner. “Looks like some bad shit went down here. Maybe this butcher guy is good for the murder of our missing man.”
“Nah,” Randy said, waving it off. “That puddle has been there for weeks. We play poker here every Friday. It’s, well, it would be too hard to explain what happened. But just trust me that the blood-letting was consensual, even if it did get a bit out of hand.”
“I don’t even want to know.”
“Well, you asked.”
“So all of this blood looks NORMAL to you?”
“For this place, yeah.”
“And the smell?”
He nodded.
“But I did notice one weird thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked, completely exasperated by this point.
“No mirrors anywhere. There’s usually a couple of them out front in the customer area that are gone now. And he hasn’t cleaned his knives. That’s not like him. He loves these knives like they’re his own non-existent children. It’s like he didn’t want them to be shiny. He wanted them to stay bloody.”
Mirrors. Glass. Steel can be polished to be so reflective you can see your face in it. Or other things.
“He’s infected too.”
“Yup. This shit’s spreading. Who knows how far it could get if we don’t stop it.”
He held up one finger, produced a flask from his pocket, and drank a large swallow of whiskey.
“Alright, where to next?” he asked after burping loudly. “This was a bust.”
*
We were walking out the front door of the place when we saw a car pull up to the curb. A young man got out, looking like he was in his late twenties.
The car had a company name on the side and I realized it looked familiar. It was actually the next lead I was planning to follow up on.
J&M Delivery Co.
Booze, burgers, pizza and MORE!
Delivering to all citizens of Hollow’s End
(Unless you’re a Subterranean)
(No forest deliveries after 4PM)
I read the sign twice and was about to ask the man why they didn’t deliver to the Subterraneans, and who the Subterraneans were, and who the hell would order pizza from a forest, but decided it would be better to stay focused.
“What are you guys doing here?” the man asked, heading towards the shop.
“Hey, Jay. We were looking for the butcher, but he’s gone,” Randy replied quickly. “Where’s Muriel? Maybe she knows something.”
“She’s been gone since last night. There was some sort of crisis and she ran out of the house without saying goodbye. I figured the butcher might have an idea where she went.”
“We were just in there. He’s gone but the doors are unlocked. Must’ve left in a hurry,” I said. “Does she have a cell phone? Maybe we can track her with the GPS.”
“Nah, she’s not really into technology. She has one of those brick Nokia phones that she’s managed to keep alive for twenty years or so, but she leaves it at home most of the time, and the rest of the time she’s at the casino where there’s no signal.”
“Okay, maybe that’s where she is.”
“I checked already. None of the employees have seen her since the weekend.”
It occurred to me suddenly that there was another missing person who I was investigating, and this man was a potential witness.
“I need to ask you about something else,” I said, pulling out a picture of the missing man. “Do you know this person?”
He squinted at it for half a second.
“Sure, that’s John Grayson. He’s a delivery driver with our company.”
“Are you aware that he’s been missing now for nearly two days?”
He hesitated, then looked at Randy.
“Is he cool?” he asked cautiously.
“Yeah, he’s already got the curse. He’s good.”
I looked back and forth between the two of them.
“What the fuck!? So this is like, just a known thing around here? If I stay in town too long I’m gonna become cursed by this place?”
“No, no. No. Well, kinda. It’s hard to explain. And even more hard to explain because of all the weird shit going down,” Randy said. “Now the important thing is this town has its hooks in you. And because of that, you’ll have a very difficult time leaving this place. You’re a part of it and it’s a part of you. That’s the way it works. One way or another, if you stay in Hollow’s End for too long, you’re gonna get bit by something.”
“I didn’t think it was possible for me to be any more confused.”
“Do you have the monkey paw?” Randy asked Jay, making me even more confused.
“No. But, I’m starting to think it might be the cause of all of this trouble.”
Feeling like I was about to lose my mind, or had already done so, I put my foot down and yelled in my loudest, most authoritative voice.
“ENOUGH!”
The two of them looked at me stupidly.
“Monkey paws? The butcher? Disappearing people all over town? Just… Tell me this is a prank. You guys are messing with me because I’m new in town. Right? Is there a YouTube video being filmed? Am I being punked? Is this a reboot!?”
The two men stared at me a moment longer then went back to talking as if I weren’t standing there.
“It’s definitely got something to do with that paw. The butcher should have just gotten rid of the damn thing when he found it in that shipment of discarded monkey carcasses. Everyone knows monkey paw wishes are tainted. Who the fuck would be dumb enough to actually use one of them?” Jay was saying.
“Well, I mean, how can you possibly know just by looking at the monkey paw that it’s evil? There have to be at least a few GOOD monkey paws out there that grant wishes, right?”
Jay and I suddenly shared a psychic thought connection, and I saw he had the same idea I did, at the exact same moment.
“You made a wish on the fucking monkey paw, didn’t you?” we both blurted out in unison.
Randy looked down at the ground. It took a few seconds for him to confess. When he finally did it was in the most obnoxious, affected, half-apologetic tone of voice I’d ever heard.
“I always wanted to be able to teleport like Nightcrawler from X-Men. I didn’t realize it was gonna open up a series of gateways to alternate dimensions, potentially causing the destruction of reality. That part was completely unexpected.”
It took me a few moments to figure out what he meant. But then it all came together.
“It was your fault! You made me see the monsters in the mirrors! It was all because of you and your STUPID monkey paw WISH!”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “But on the plus side, check this out!”
He jumped into the nearby front window of the butcher shop and, instead of shattering, it rippled outwards from its center like a pool of water disrupted by a stone being thrown into it. He disappeared into the glass and was gone.
The two of us stood there for several minutes in stunned silence, unsure if he was going to come back. I went into the shop to see if he was in there but it was empty.
Just as we were about to walk away awkwardly, he leapt back through the liquid glass carrying a bag of fast food in his hand. The paper bag was stained with grease and said, “KFC” on it.
“See!? We don’t even have one of these in town! I just teleported to Pittsburgh and back!”
The window glass continued to make ripples and didn’t settle down into its usual smoothness, I noticed. Not only that, but there was now something moving in the glass. A huge dark creature with long limbs, crawling on six legs. It was sniffing the ground like a dog hunting a rabbit. Then it turned sharply to look at us through the glass. There was no question in my mind that it saw us.
“Randy, did you ever consider that using the powers granted by the cursed magic monkey paw might be a VERY BAD idea?”
He looked at me stupidly.
A strange sound began to come from the glass window of the storefront as a set of huge legs came through from the other side, followed by another, and another. It was an indescribable sound, but if I had to compare it to anything it would be like if fingernails on a chalkboard and microphone feedback had an ear-splitting baby together.
Sitting atop the legs with too many joints was a horrifying creature with a long snout lined with sharp teeth. Odd openings split its rough alligator skin in places, looking like gills, but not quite. Its eyes were black and dull as it surveyed the downtown street of Hollow’s End.
After it was through the glass it sniffed the air, and I hoped that maybe this creature didn’t breathe oxygen and it would keel over, dead, from the toxic air of our world.
But of course the stupid thing was fine. I guess whatever world it came from had a similar atmosphere to ours.
A second later it spotted us and began to race toward us with murder in its eyes.
“RUN!” I yelled, and turned around to see Jay and Randy already in their respective vehicles and ready to drive away without me.
“Hop in,” Randy yelled shifting over into the passenger seat. “Come on man, get away from that thing. Whatever it is, it looks PISSED!”