Chapter 1
He raped the chainsaw blade across the guy’s guts, which spilled out like sausage links all over his mother’s shag carpet. There was no getting those blood stains out now. The poor bastard just smiled up at the chainsaw. The designer drug had taken hold. La-la land here we come.
Charles continued reading toward the end. This novel was a page turner by god.
“Laredo strikes again,” he whispered with a little more than a hint of envy.
Earle Laredo was a prolific bastard. Churning out a new novel ever every couple of months it seemed. The writer’s true identity remained a mystery though. The elusive Earle Laredo seemed to exist on paper only. The publishing house probably had ten ghostwriters all using the Laredo brand. His bestsellers lined the gore shelves of most mom and pop bookstores across the US of A. Many of the major book distributors like Borders, and Barnes & Noble wouldn’t dirty their rich fingers with the likes of Laredo. He was a gutter writer. Clean out any fast food grease trap and you would find pages of Laredo’s novels. The fact that the big corporate book vendors wouldn’t carry Laredo’s stuff didn’t matter in the age of Amazon.com. Charles got his fix instantly, or nearly instantly. He didn’t care for eBooks so much as the printed versions. Laredo’s entire library was open to him via the on-line mega store, Amazon. What he found outstanding too was that most of Laredo’s stuff had been published as original paperback editions that he could find for a penny a vendor. Sure, he paid three or four bucks for shipping, but normally Charles bought four or five Laredo novels at a pinch and they all shipped at a single cost. Couldn’t beat that.
Laredo’s stuff was quick, averaged two-hundred and fifty to three hundred pages per novel. No fluff here, just good old story through and through. One of Charles’s favorite quotes was from Elmore Leonard on the subject of keeping your work lean. When asked how he remained popular in the writing biz for so many years Leonard said, ‘I just left out the boring parts’. Heck yeah! Laredo was the same in that respect. On a good day Charles could finish a single book. The books were fucking addictive man. Chainsaw’s slicing and dicing flesh. Serpents stuck down poor victim’s throats. Drive-byes with a cannon. This writer had it all. The only problem was that he was a ghost. Word on-line was that he never traveled the Horror convention circuit like his horror brethren. Rarely gave interviews, and almost no one knew what he looked like. He was a regular Howard Hughes of the literary world, or maybe a better comparison was J.D. Salinger on acid. Laredo and another writer buddy, R. Daniels were known to collaborate on novels from time to time, but contacting Daniels was even harder than his partner. Laredo at least had an unmanned website that a guy known simply as Lou created and supposedly updated once or twice a year, but Charles hadn’t seen anything new on that site in almost three months. And Daniels, well Daniels was a complete ghost.
The bio in Laredo’s books said that he was born in East Texas, some little town named Skinner that no one’s ever heard of. In another bio it stated he was born and raised in Ghost Nebraska. There was no Ghost Nebraska on the map either. Dead ends all around. Laredo’s identity stunk of a pseudonym. Charles had been in the writing biz long enough himself to sniff out a pen name.
“Guy just licked the warm greasy substance off his fingers and…” Charles read but then stopped. “What the hell?” Someone had torn out the last few pages of the Laredo novel, Cattle Prod, that he was currently reading. “Fuck me.”
Charles stood up from his cramped leather chair and walked over to his bookshelf. He had books by all of the great Splatterpunk authors of the eighties and nineties, people like Jack Ketchum, John Skipp, Craig Specter, and the grandmaster Clive Barker, but for Charles he had a special shelf for his favorite of that motley crew, Earle - I’m a ghost - Laredo. The master’s books were eye level just like in those mom and pop bookstores that sold Laredo’s junk. He looked at the spine of the current novel he was holding, Cattle Prod, the book he just got jipped on, and scowled. The chainsaw on the spine was covered in blood. The publisher’s name, Bloody Mayhem Books. They did all of Laredo’s stuff. He flipped open the copyright page to check publisher’s address. Not there.
“Just my fucking luck.”
More ghosts. Charles turned away from the bookshelf and looked back at his typewriter on the desk. It was a portable Smith Corona. Black machine with silver tipped keys. Well oiled. The way he had been once upon a time. The laptop that he rarely used was still in its traveling bag by the front door. You couldn’t create poetry on a computer, had been Charles’s motto. Looking back on the bookshelf he saw five of his own novels, paperback originals same as Laredo’s. Kinship from the start. Charles’s books weren’t bestsellers though and after a two-year dry spell his publishing house, Grindhouse Press, had dropped him.
“Assholes,” he said thinking on the memories of dealing with those idiots.
Charles never liked that publisher anyway, a bunch of pseudo-frauds the whole lot of them. They published grotesque novels but walked around in airy offices with plants on their desks and AC shooting throughout the rooms. A shiny cappuccino machine perpetually pouring the expensive shit down the throats of loser editors who wouldn’t know the first thing about what it was like to sever a man’s head with a chainsaw. Grindhouse Press published those books but never bothered to experience the visceral trenches that writers travelled down to create such horrors. Now Bloody Mayhem Books, Laredo’s publisher, they had a reputation on-line as being just one step up from a vanity press. They were housed in a large steel warehouse, address unknown, but the black and white pictures they posted on their website made the place look like a god damned crime scene. Charles liked that. The crime scene shots looked authentic - blood and novel pages spread everywhere. He thought, in one of those creepy pictures, that he saw the shadow of a man standing inside one of the open door frames peering out at whomever took that shot, as if the photographer was an unwelcome intruder instead of a PR guy. That idea of catching someone doing something nasty in private too was creepy as hell.
“Bloody Mayhem,” Charles whispered as he glanced at his own manuscripts on the desk next to the typewriter.
His unfinished sixth and seventh novels sat on the desk in a dusty pile. Coffee stains marked those unedited pages like love kisses from hell. Next to that desk was an over-flowing trash can of unusable work. On the kitchen table was a pile of unpaid bills. It was strange how shit like bills piled up without your knowing about them. Like ex-wives, Charles thought bitterly as he looked at his hole-in-the-wall motel room with the decade old water stains on the carpet and the grimy wallpaper. Charles’s shrink might have mentioned something about his surroundings being like an existential projection of his inner chaos. Fuck his shrink. He paid bottom basement prices for this one room shit-heap. It had power, an icebox, a shitter and cable T.V. for when he wanted to procrastinate on his writing, which was too often lately. That’s all he needed. The typewriter was his, given to him by his first wife as a going away present. Take it and scram, Lorraine told Charles as she booted him out of the house. The only benefit to not making any cash with his books lately was that he didn’t have to pay any damned alimony to that bitch.
“Bitches all around,” he said.
The knock on the door broke Charles from his sulking mood, or kind of broke him. To be honest Charles spent ninety percent of his time inside his head, a place he liked to call shitsville. He had moments of revelations that lifted his mood from the muck, but those moments were tough ones to come by lately. His latest foul mood was a result of having to wait almost two weeks for one of those Amazon vendor fuckers to send him out the next three paperback editions of Laredo’s novels: Knuckle Sandwich, Gear Grease, and Heavy Metal Maelstrom. Charles had read some great reviews about Gear Grease. Not so great reviews for the vendor who sold them though. The guy had delayed a week longer than expected. Claimed FedEx fucked up the shipping.
More knocks. These knocks didn’t sound like the FedEx dude, or the UPS guy, or the postal asshole. That postal asshole stank of booze every day when Charles would bump into him while he was picking up his morning paper. Another annoying knock broke Charles from his thoughts.
“Assholes all around,” he muttered to himself.
Charles removed his black framed hipster glasses and squinted through the peep-hole in the front of his motel room door. There were stains on that door and Charles took care to not place his face too close to the plasterboard. Eighty-five dollars a week and he hated it here. Glancing through the peep-hole he didn’t see anyone. Someone had to be there though, he heard the damned knock, but no one was visible. Charles glanced back through the peep-hole once more buttoning the Hawaiian shirt around his slim figure.
“Yeah who is it?”
“Delivery.”
A muffled voice called from the other side of the door. The other side of the door might as well have been on the other side of the moon when Charles was stuck in the terror of writer’s block, which had been every day for almost two weeks. Charles’s method of breaking writer’s block came with isolating himself from the world around him. Tuning into that endless ether of the creative mind. The Life of the Mind was where Charles found himself while writing his novels. Lately he had lost the road map back to the Mind. It was killing him. The block wasn’t bad for weekend writers who didn’t need to make cash from their written words. There were too many joe schmoozes out there who claimed to be writers but who worked the 9 to 5 gigs to ‘supplement their income.’ They weren’t professional writers. They were losers.
“Open up, delivery,” the voice said with a couple more knocks.
“Okay, okay.”
Charles undid the dead bolt but kept the chain on the front door.
“Delivery for a Charles Dalton?”
“Yeah that’s me…”
When the envelope stuck through the crack in the door Charles knew immediately by the bright blue envelope that it was a summons from one of his bitch whore wives looking for money. He slammed the door as hard as he could hearing a crunch. One second the room was quiet the next it exploded with screams of pain as the cheap plasterboard door snapped the delivery guy’s wrist in two. His hand dangled off the limp wrist like a queer diving off the Golden Gate Bridge.
“AH!”
The delivery dude was screaming and screaming.
Charles kept slamming the poor bastard’s wrist in the door frame to get him and his dirty rotten summons the hell out of the motel room as the guy screamed louder and louder. He didn’t want any damned summons delivered to him today – or ever.
“Out! Pig!”
Charles kicked the delivery guy in the balls and slammed the door, locking it with the dead bolt before he stared out the peep-hole again. He saw the delivery dude wander off woozy. The guy was going to pass out before he made it back to his piece of shit Cheviot.
“See, you be prepared and bad shit don’t happen to you,” Charles said proudly but as he was turning back toward his mute typewriter he noticed that the delivery dude had dropped the summons on the floor next to the inside of the door. “Shit!”
Successful delivery.
Walking back to the envelope he didn’t dare touch it. Touching it meant accepting the summons, or whatever the hell was inside that official blue envelope. Looking toward his small kitchen he sprinted to the cupboards. Dropping to his knees he found a small metal can of lighter fluid beneath the sink. Riffling through the cluttered cupboard he found a long stemmed lighter as well.
“This’ll do.”
Charles grinned looking back at the blue colored summons.
He popped off the lighter fluid cap and sprayed the fluid to excess over the envelope - getting as much of the toxic fluid off the envelope, soaking the carpet, as on the blue envelope. Charles was about to strike the lighter when he thought better of it. For just a second he realized that he would need something to put out the fire once he lit the summons. He remembered the baking soda in the refrigerator. Charles walked back and grabbed the baking soda from the fridge. Dragging the ripped open box across the tiny kitchen, spilling ample amounts of the white powder on the grimy rolled up linoleum of the kitchen floor, to the front door Charles slid the box in the back pocket of his hole-ridden blue jeans and then lit the lighter fluid. The blue summons and most of the orange shag carpet went up in a flash.
“AH!”
Charles screamed kicking and blowing on the flames before he remembered that he had the box of baking soda in his back pocket.
“Die fire,” Charles screamed up-ending the baking soda, or what was left of it onto the flames.
The white powder did very little to stop the spread of the flames that were eating away at the lighter fluid soaked carpet. Looking around frantically Charles ran to the bathroom sink where he had a spool of one-hundred-foot garden hose. Don’t ask why Charles had a one hundred foot hose, or where that hose came from. Charles screwed the hose to the tub faucet and then raced back down the hallway from the bathroom to the burning front door. Lifting the hose to extinguish the flames Charles was surprised that nothing was coming out.
“Turn on the faucet asshole.”
Charles screamed at himself and then ran back to the bathroom. Seconds later water was drippling out of the end of the hose until he found the coil knotted in the hose and unwound it. By then the fire was almost out of control. Burning up his living room. Then the water finally shot forth in a massive stream, like a giant’s ejaculation. A few minutes later covered in sweat and soot the flames were finally out. And Charles’s pathetic heart was beating like mad in his measly chest. He glanced up at the smoke detector and cursed. No fucking good.
“Holy shit. Bitches,” Charles said thinking that it was his ex-wives that caused this mess.
Looking around him he saw charcoaled rug and scorched door. The embers that were once a summons lay almost completely unburned among the mess. Just a corner of the envelope had any black on it at all. The rest of the area around it was scorched black. Karma man, fucking karma.
“Fuck you karma.”
Charles just dropped the hose allowing the water to coat the whole living room floor. He didn’t give a fuck anymore. He snatched up the laptop in its travelling bag unused and walked into the bedroom slamming the door behind him.
