Broken Monsters (24 page)

Jonno finds
that overnight celebrity suits him, even if it's Detroit-style. The brunch party at some musician's house in Hubbard Farms is an excuse to catch up on the scandal—did you hear it was made out of part of Daveyton's body?—and most of the cool culturati hanging out have been up all night, half of them crowded into the cozy kitchen, making French toast, the others smoking weed and idly shooting hoops in the tangled garden. A kid with sideburns decides they have to make it more challenging and try to score from a moving skateboard. But that's only the warm-up act, because there's no doubt that Jonno is the main attraction. They're impressed in a not-impressed way, which means very. It's the magic words “exclusive footage.”

He and Jen stayed up all night editing it together. Well, she did—he massaged her shoulders and brought her appropriate snacks, and finally passed out and woke up at seven to find her finishing it off. It's a rough cut, a place holder, but Jen says they need to move with the times and put it up immediately before someone else beats them to the post.

Tight communities mean that word gets around. Now all he needs is for the major websites and, better yet, the TV stations to pick up on it. He keeps his phone handy, in case, but he knows he's competing with the professionals. What he needs is a scoop.

Jonno has never had a particular interest in serial killers. But he's a fast learner and a good researcher, courtesy of a million listicles: “10 Signs You Might Be A Psycho.”

Number one: Narcissism.

Oh, it's good to get close to danger. To flirt around the edges. The fascination of the terrible, just
terrible
things people do to each other. He's an ambassador from the land of monsters, and they all want to hear all about it. He plays it up, practicing lines for his piece.

Not that he has much to go on. But who needs facts when you can go with wild speculation? And there's no shortage of that. Everyone he talks to has a theory, all playing armchair detectives.

It's a gang revenge killing—all these years later, it turns out that they were targeting Daveyton all along for snitching on a drug boss he was running for.

It's the ex-mayor trying to destabilize the current administration from inside prison.

It's the result of a terrible military experiment on Zug Island.

Mutations.

It's Nain Rouge.

“Who?” he asks.

“The red dwarf,” Jen explains. “Some cities get Olympic mascots. Detroit has a bad-luck bogeyman with his own annual parade.”

He gets as many of them as he can on camera.

Of course the most popular is the most obvious: a serial killer targeting kids. But then a jewelry designer who must be wearing half her collection in her face chirps up with something interesting: “But what about the woman in the oven?”

“I caught a headline,” Jonno says, fishing. He pulls up the article on his phone, but it's tellingly curt, especially for a white middle-class femicide.

“I hear they found her head spinning on the wheel. And she was covered in satanic symbols made out of clay.”

“Who told you that?”

“I heard it from a friend of a friend. Someone who works there. Robin Mitchell.”

Jen touches his arm. “You remember, the guy from the dinner party.”

“There were a lot of people at that dinner party,” Jonno says. “Can you get me in touch with him?”

“Sure.” The jewelry designer is avid, delighted to be caught up in it all. “Let me just text Allie and see if I can get his number.”

In the meantime, the promo girl offers him a free pair of shades. He takes great delight in turning her down.

An hour later, he and Jen have tracked Robin down and convinced him to come out to the parking lot of Miskwabic Pottery, or, as Jonno likes to think of it, “the scene of another monstrous crime!” He does vaguely recall him—good thing the arts scene is so cozy, one of the advantages of a downsizing city.

They position him in front of the building, the yellow police tape across the door clearly visible. Robin keeps glancing over his shoulder, uncomfortable. “The police told me not to talk about it. They were very specific.”

“You've got a responsibility to the people of Detroit,” Jonno says. “The pigs are trying to cover this up. There's some madman killer out there and they don't want people to know.”

“Yeah, but they said it would mess up the investigation.”

“So don't talk about the case. Talk about your experience.”

“Do you have to use my face?”

“We can pixelate it out and distort your voice if you want,” Jonno promises.

The video goes up that afternoon, unpixelated. “A serial killer who makes Hannibal Lecter look like Woody Allen,” is how Jonno describes the murderer. That's the pull quote that gets used in all the media, that gets him calls from news outfits across the country—and that evening, one from a TV executive in New York. She has a major true-crime show, she says. A
major
show on a
major
network.
Murder48.

He says he's heard of it, by which he means Jesus fucking Christ.

They like his style. His insouciance. They want an exclusive documentary, following the action as it unfolds. Does he know the investigating officer? Can he get access? Will the police cooperate, does he think?

When he stalls, she cuts in. It doesn't matter if they don't. There are ways around it. But she needs to know what footage he has access to. Can he send over everything he has? She'll give him access to their upload site. They need to know they'll have enough material before they can pitch it to their commissioning board. If he can deliver “something hot,” she'll get a producer and a camera crew out to him pronto.

“What about the contract?” he manages to get in.

“I'll email you one right away. Sign it and send it straight back.”

“Shouldn't I get an entertainment lawyer to look at it?”

“It's a standard contract, giving us exclusive rights.”

Cate.
Cate will know someone.

Any excuse, huh, boychick? And where are you going to get this extra material?

He'll figure it out. He always does.

He doesn't call Cate. He'd rather she switched on the television and saw him.

The contract arrives in his email inbox, and he signs the shit out of it.

“Hey TK,
there's someone who wants to see you. I've locked up already, but he ain't taking no for an answer,” Big Dennis says, poking his head into the computer room—a tiny office with two beat-up desktops that Reverend Alan believes were donated by a kind benefactor. They were, sorta. Reclaimed from an insolvent drugstore where TK happened to be the first salvager to crowbar the door open. The PCs are doing much more good here than they were there. No harm, no foul.

“Tell him to come back tomorrow. Church is closed. We got special permission to stay late and watch my man Ramón's screen debut.”

“Oh yeah?” Dennis leans over to look. “That you, Ramón? Kneeling down on the ground?” He's impressed.

“Crazy hipsters got him talking about graffiti. You believe any of that shit you saying?”

“No, I was playing them, brother,” Ramón says. “Look, look how pretty Diyana looks. Don't she look beautiful?”

“She really does, Papi,” TK says and then nearly falls off his chair as the creepy guy with the knife-blue eyes shoves into the room behind Dennis. He's cut his hair so that it's sticking up like white thatch, and still weirder, shaved his eyebrows.

“You! You know computers. You have to show me.” He's swallowing his vowels, which makes it hard to understand him. Further gone than he was the last time, and that's saying something. TK instinctively clicks away from the image of Ramón and Diyana. He feels like the man might taint it somehow if he sees it.

“Nice to see you too, man, but we're shut up for the evening. Why don't you come back in the morning?” TK says, putting his hand on his walking stick–machete just in case. “You take my advice and go for a counseling session?”

“Please. I don't understand what's happening. I have to see the video. You have to show me. The one they're talking about.” He looks so broken that TK cracks.

“All right, what video? And let me say straight up that we don't tolerate pornography here.”

“The Dream House. The body.”

“Oh, that one. It's been all over the news.” TK types in the search. It comes up on the same YouTube channel as the video with Ramón. He doesn't like it. This stranger all tangled with the crazy things on the news and in his head. The video takes a while to buffer, but when it finally loads, the man shoves his face right up to the screen, watching intently. “Play it again.”

“Ah, come on, man. We're busy here.”

“They didn't show the body.”

“Guess it's sensitive. Or maybe it's a cover-up, like the journalist guy says.”

“Who sees this?” Blue-eyes grabs hold of the screen like he might yank it right out, make a dash for it. Wouldn't be the first time someone tried that. There's a reason TK has it chain-locked to the table.

“Whole of the damn Internet. Anyone in the world. Look, this here counts the number of people who've seen it. So far it's got 158,433 views. Shit's gone viral.”

“What does that mean?” The man looks at him with what TK thinks of as gutter eyes, the expression when you're desperate for something, anything, to pull you out.

“Viral. It's spreading, catching on. Like an infection, Ebola or something.”

“How do I catch it?”

“You mean how do you make something go viral? Go big, man. Dress your cat in costume. Or do something fucked-up like this.”

“The doors are going to open.” He looks alarmed. “I…I have to go.”

“Open door around here anytime, my friend,” TK shouts after him. “Especially for counseling, you know what I'm saying!” Good riddance, he thinks. “Yo, Ramón, how much this filmmaker pay you to be in his video?”

“What? Uh, ten dollars each.”

“He's offering more than that here.” TK reads out the words in the “about this video” box. “‘Got leads on the Detroit Monster? $50 for your exclusive interview. No fakes.' Phone number right here. Bet he gets a million calls in the first half hour. I bet I could tell him a story or two for fifty bucks.”

But Ramón isn't listening. He's staring after Mr. Crazy.

Clayton's body
is pacing the sidewalk outside the church, head tucked down against the wind, a cap rammed down over his hacked-off hair while the dream tries to decide what to do, where to go.

Everything it had planned is in ruins. It watched the girl coming down the steps into the dark garden, willing her to go away, go away, go away, but she went straight to the deer-boy as if he was calling out to her. She came so close, it could have reached out to touch her. It could feel how something opened in her head as she examined its creation, the dream stirring inside her like a million butterflies.

It wanted to go after her when she fled, but then the sirens came, and it felt the man's fear of everything that meant, a thousand variations of TV shows in his memory. Trapped in a jail cell, or worse, being shot, killed. If Clayton died, his heart faltering, the blood in his veins slowing to mud, the neural stars burning out, would it be trapped within the physical flesh, watching helpless as the body started to break down?

It hid in the basement all night and all the next day, tormented by the man's fears, but it needed to know what had happened, if the Police were coming. And it still held out hope that the deer-boy had transformed, and it had missed the moment.

It found the news on Clayton's father's television, but they didn't show the boy, only dark images of the yard and the Police and a covered shape and the arrogant man, the one who was supposed to bring his camera. He kept talking about a video and how it was all over the Internet, but Clayton's memories were blank about the Internet.

Which is why it came here to the church, remembering the big black man who said he knew everything about computers. But the video it saw was no different from the dull flickers on the television screen, and now it feels more adrift than before. The man at the church talked about viruses inside the mind, and maybe that's all it has become—an infection trapped inside Clayton's head.

It has to leave here. It has to get away, back to the cool dark of the basement where it can try to make sense of things. It is so lost inside its confusion, it doesn't hear the little man approaching as Clayton slots the key into the door of the truck.

“Wait!
Por favor,
I wanna talk to you.” He reaches for Clayton's arm.

The dream pulls away, horrified at the physical contact, the fleshiness of the scruffy man's hand.

“It's you, isn't it?” says the man with red shoes, shaking with excitement. “The doors. You're the one.” He twists a rope of beads in his hand.

“Yes,” the dream says. The man inside the body is grateful to be recognized.

“I can tell. Things are different around you. You make them different, but only a little bit. Like looking through the heat wave from a car muffler.”

“It's leaking out,” the dream confesses. “I don't know how to control it.”

“But you know how to open the doors, don't you? I can help you. I'm good at figuring stuff out. I used to be a mechanic. Maybe you can plug the leaks, or maybe you need to blow it all wide open? Flush the gasket.”

And all at once, it becomes clear. The art party was wrong. The scale wasn't grand enough. There were other works fighting for attention, other consciousnesses beneath the surface, like the music and the voices at the party fighting each other.

The people are the doors. It needs to bring them all together, to focus them in one place, on
its
vision and purpose. Isn't this what it has been working toward all along? Like the curator said, a solo exhibition.

But it will need—it drags the word from Clayton's head, like a dirty string—a disciple.

“What's through the doors? What's on the other side?” the man says longingly.

“Anything you want,” it says through Clayton's mouth. “Anything you can dream.”

If it is an infection, maybe it needs to spread.