Wunjo

by Daniel Loring Keating 

(previously on The Other Stories, episode 60.3)

 

 

Part One: Joey

 

I heard about it from Jake first. No idea where he heard about it, but I guess that doesn’t matter now. He went to the website with his girlfriend, ‘cause Angie had been kinda reluctant, you know? The way girls are sometimes. She wasn’t reluctant that night.

Brendan tried it next, and it did even more. Mary went totally wild. We wouldn’t have believed half the things she did, if Brendan hadn’t shown us the video she’d insisted on making. So that’s why I figured it couldn’t hurt with Denise.

“You seriously couldn’t have just shown me this on your phone?” She looked around my bedroom at the old movie posters on the walls, swinging her arms.

I shook my head. I was a little sweaty now that we were getting down to it, but I didn’t want her to think I was nervous, so I brushed the sweat away with my sleeve, pulled out my computer chair, and sat down. “You’ll be able to see better from the bed.”

She rolled her eyes as she sat down, smoothing her skirt under her as she went. “This better not be porn.”

I started typing. “It’s not porn.”

The URL was a mix of simple and difficult: just five characters, but the character proceeding the ubiquitous “.com” wasn’t on the keyboard. It was a rune that looked a lot like a spiky letter P: ᚹ

I’d saved the character in a file on my desktop. I copied and pasted it into the URL bar and hit enter, my heart starting to thud heavily. I couldn’t stop moving, tapping my feet, wiggling my fingers over the keyboard.

This was it.

I’d made sure I had condoms. Denise wasn’t the type to carry that sort of stuff on her, and anyway, if this worked, she wasn’t going to be thinking about it.

The page finished loading. It showed the rune in bright orange against a red background with shaded edges. The more you looked at it, the more it seemed like the rune was pulling off the screen toward you, growing, ready to envelop you in whatever fire was frozen into the enticing colors of it.

I scratched the back of my head. Yeah, intense. The guys warned me there’d be a little of that.

I looked back at Denise, expecting to see her starting to sweat, starting to want me, maybe starting to slip out of her clothes. That skirt was going to look real good on my floor.

What I found in her eyes was a rage unlike any I’d ever seen in anything short of an exploding bomb. Her fingers curled, the muscles tense. Her shiny pink fingernails looked more like claws than the manicured nails of a teenage girl. Her lip curled upward in a ferocious snarl. Her breathing came deep and heavy. Hatred oozed off her, so thick I could smell it in the air.

She leapt for me before I could ask what the hell was wrong. Under other circumstances, I’d have been able to fight her off - I was on the swim team and worked out all the time and she was about a hundred pounds soaking wet - but the pure fury in her overwhelmed me. I got one good scream out before she tore out my throat and laughed a deep, throaty laugh down at my half-beheaded corpse.

 

 

Part Two: Officer Brandt

 

It just didn’t make sense.

It sounded so trite to say that Denise was a good girl, that she’d never hurt a fly, much less tear out her boyfriend’s throat, eyes, and intestines, and wear them as trophies while chasing and beating people in the street. But, God, even saying those things sounds ridiculous. Yet it happened. A dozen people witnessed it, and of course we found Joey’s body, in the middle of his trashed room at the end of his trashed house. Thank God his little brother wasn’t home.

But yeah, we looked into it. Small town; you know how it is. In the city, it’d have been an open and shut case, but around here, everyone knows everyone. They also know when something doesn’t add up, and little Denise McCroy (who sang soprano in the church choir and wrote about wanting to be an astronaut someday) going unhinged and massacring her boyfriend… didn’t add up.

So, I asked around. Most of the kids echoed the same stuff. She was helping design the sets for the spring play. She helped Mickey Spitz when he fell down the stairs and broke both his ankles and everyone else just laughed at him because he was a dork. Hell, she volunteered for hall monitor duty. What kid does that?

Angela Markins was the one who told me about the website.

“Just don’t tell my folks about this, okay?” God, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that on a case involving kids, I’d buy a better world for us all.

We were standing outside. She’d called in that she had some info and I pulled her out of class, just before lunch. The sun was bright that day, shining down on us, and Angela kept looking at the ground like she wanted to hide from it. “I can’t make promises like that, kid. It all depends on what you tell me.”

She scratched at an ancient black blotch on the sidewalk, probably gum that had cooked in the sun for a few dozen years until it was indistinguishable from any other stain. “It’s not anything - I mean, I didn’t do anything wrong, or anything illegal, and I just don’t want them to know what I did.”

I let that kick around in my head for a minute. I had to word this carefully. “Okay. So long as you didn’t do anything illegal, I promise I won’t tell your parents.”

She nodded, still staring at the ground. “There’s this website.” She told me how the boys showed it to the girls, and what it made the girls do. She told me what it made her do. By the time she was done, she was crying. “You probably think I’m crazy.” She rubbed at her eyes.

I offered her a tissue. “I think the world’s just crazy enough for that to make sense.”

She handed the tissue back to me. “Is Jake going to be in trouble?”

I accepted the tissue, balled it and stuffed it in a pocket. “Do you want him to be?”

She shook her head. “I dunno.” She looked down again, blushing furiously. “At the time, it felt good. I don’t know if that means he shouldn’t get in trouble, or who I even am, you know?”

I knelt down so that I could meet her eyes. “You listen to me, Angela Markins.” She met my eyes, hers red, cheeks swollen from crying. “Whatever happened in that room, it wasn’t your fault. I don’t know much about feelings. You should probably think about talking to someone who does. I do know that you don’t need to feel ashamed of yourself or anything.”

She smiled. “Thanks, Detective Brandt.”

 

***

 

Before you say it - yeah, I know, I shouldn’t have tried it. But it was just a website, for crying out loud. Half of me did think poor Angela had gone ‘round the bend. Maybe he’d slipped her something or maybe she’d had a very sudden sexual awakening and after the fact didn’t know what to do with herself. If it was crazy to think that just going to a website made Angela and her friend Mary lose control and do things that’d make a prostitute blush, it was insane to think that same website made Denise a murderer.

So, I tried it. According to Angela, it didn’t have any effect on the boys, so why should it have an effect on me?

I shut the door to my office, and I did some reading. Turns out the little symbol she drew me is a “wunjo.” Comes from the Norse. Means a whole bunch of things, which really gets you thinking, how do people handle it when the letters mean stuff apart from the words?

Anyway, after a few minutes of reading about it on those encyclopedia sites the kids aren’t supposed to use for their school projects, I took a deep breath, copied and pasted the character from the encyclopedia into my web browser, and hit enter.

My office door, behind me, opened at that exact moment.

I hadn’t known Officer Sandersson long. She transferred in from upstate a couple weeks back. We were gonna have a cookout the next weekend as a way to get to know her, welcome her in, see if she could finally settle our age-old debate: whiskey versus beer.

Instead, she saw that symbol on my monitor and her eyes went black as coal. I whipped around in my office chair, trying to block her from seeing it, but it was too late. She stumbled, her arms shooting out to grip the frame of my door. She stopped falling, but her fingers dug straight through the door frame, tearing away chunks of wood which she crushed into flat pulp when her hands closed over them.

She dropped the wood pulp and laughed, her voice a deep bass, vibrating in a way that wasn’t natural. She looked up, and her eyes were a black abyss, a hole through which I saw everything wrong with my life, everything I’d never be able to fix, everything that would haunt me until the day I died. “Your world will end in fire, little one.”

“That so?” Against everything I wanted, my hand crept toward my gun, unfastened the holster. “Who’m I speaking with, if you don’t mind my asking?”

The darkness bled from her eyes in clouds. I had to look away to maintain what was left of my composure. “I am more than you can imagine, more than you can dream, more than you can fear.” She laughed again, and it shook the walls.

I gulped, too terrified to wonder if I’d gone mad. “Did you hurt those kids?”

“Never!” The building shook again, or maybe it was just my soul. “The symbol shows only what we are. Some are fornicators, some are warriors, and some, like this flesh bag, are vessels.”

“Vessels? Well, that sounds neat.” I inched the gun out of the holster, my sweaty hands slick on the grip. “Is Lisa still in there? You know, that’s the name of the, eh, ‘flesh-bag’ you’re wearing.”

The thing that was Sandersson smiled. “Not anymore.”

“Hey, Detective, I - whoa, what the hell?”

The demon in front of me whirled. Officer Huzi stood behind it, holding a file, his eyes roaming between the gouges in the door frame and the horrible voids of the demon’s eyes. With a guttural cry it leapt for him.

My first shot blew its brains out, splattering Huzi with gore.

I don’t know if Lisa was still in there. The thing could have been lying. It wasn’t exactly a reliable source, you know? Maybe that’s the lesson I need to take away from all this while I’m out on administrative leave, trying to figure out how to explain to some state IA board why I killed an officer in the middle of our station house.

Then again, it might not be so hard to explain, since I accidentally left the website up on my computer monitor for the night cleaning lady to find.

 

 

 

AUTHOR BIO:

 

Daniel Loring Keating grew up in post-Industrial New England, where he earned a BA in Creative Writing from Chester College of New England. He has an MFA in Creative Writing at the California College of the Arts, where he was the Managing Editor of Eleven Eleven Journal. His speculative work has appeared in the Eerie River Publishing anthology Dark Magic, the Last Girls Club, and in OFIC Magazine.