Three
by Ryan Mayers

   I’ve come to believe that there is nothing quite so daunting as a blank page. Seriously. When was the last time you sat there and looked at a page with nothing on it and thought "Wow, that’s nice. I’m glad there’s nothing here." I bet the answer is never. I mean, think about it. If you’re an artist, a blank page means you haven’t been inspired yet. An author, it means you haven’t figured out what to write or, even worse, you have nothing to write about. Almost any profession, it’s the same. Blank is bad. I used to think that maybe it was because the blank whiteness was a symbol of inability, of near failure, but I recently decided it was something much deeper, more instinctual. Man (and woman) has the innate desire to create, to bring forth order and symmetry from chaos and nothingness. Thus, the feeling of failure when you stare at something blank stems not from a feeling of inability, or even of failure, but of some deep seated insecurity. Why do we feel the need to create? Why do we feel that it is our duty to populate the minds of our fellow humans with more useless drivel? There are already museums crammed full of art, books to the rafters in countless libraries, untold numbers of computer programmers looking for the next big technological revolution… Why? What’s the point? By the way, my name is Charles. I wash dishes.

   Now, before you laugh, this is not as inane as it sounds. There’s a certain skill in getting the grease off all these pans, and I like to pride myself on the fact that I have mastered that skill. I’m also twenty-three years old, and I live in my parents’ basement. To some this may seem like a negative thing. To me, it cuts down on rent. Also the food bill. I started working in the restaurant when I was seventeen. Ahh, seventeen. Back then, the world was my oyster. I had dreams, man. Dreams! Granted, many of them involved women in various stages of undress, but still. Dreams are dreams. The restaurant I work at specializes in selling prepackaged heart attacks to the gullible masses. They’re smart, though, the restaurant guys. They realized that if you just kill people off right away, then you won’t sell many "hamburgers". You gotta do it real slow-like. This is something I realized in my second year, when the first of my dreams were dying off (when you work in fast-food you tend to get more acne, and acne, while interesting, is not attractive, and girls don’t really care for guys with large white bubbles on their faces).

   I remember asking the manager how he felt about selling death. He looked at me like I was insane, and so I backed off. The next day, I was taken off the register and put on dishes. While there’s never been any real proof, I can’t shake the feeling that it was a form of retribution. For some reason, people don’t like being called death merchants. Go figure. Anyway, I kept the job out of spite. Even back then I was a scrapper. They made me wash dishes, I smiled. They made me clean the crap out of the bathrooms, I smiled (and held my breath). Eventually they gave up and just left me alone. There’s nothing wrong with washing dishes. It’s peaceful. Plus they always buy this bulk soap that makes really nice smelling bubbles. Lemony. My hands are always nice and smooth, too. Never dry. When it came time for college, I tried. I really did. For nearly three weeks I attended community college, sought to become a good student, to develop some sort of caring for what was being taught, but I couldn’t. It was just too boring. The professors were idiots, telling us things that I already knew and then being snide when I mentioned it. It’s always hard to care about something when the people telling you about it are jerks. Hence the problem I have with anyone related to talk radio. Also Oprah.

   I left school and came home. My parents weren’t all that happy. They saw it as giving in. I tried to explain that what I was doing was challenging an artificially imposed system of values. Why should I go to school to learn what I already know and get some stupid piece of paper? Why should the world be run by people who have a piece of paper when nine times out of ten I could do a better job than them anyway? They didn’t agree. Mom cried, dad got mad. It was quite the scene. I ended up walking out and going for a drive. I got to the bluff and stopped, my windshield catching the glare of the moonlight. Peaceful. Serene. I felt myself slipping off into a doze, and it wasn’t until the cop rapped on the window that I came back. He was angry, and at first I couldn’t understand why. Then I realized it was pouring rain and he was standing there with no coat. He was motioning for me to roll the window down, and I complied. I’ve never been one to fight with the law, except in spirit. He leaned in and brought a goodly amount of water with him.

   "Didn’t you hear me honking?" The cop was furious, his face bright red. I almost expected him to start steaming, the water sliding down the side of his face to boil and steam away.

   "No sir. I was asleep."

   "On the bluff?"

   "Yes sir."

   "Well, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you to step out here."

   "Why?"

   "We’ve received some complaints about a car matching your description driving erratically around town."

   "Erratically?"

   "Drunkenly."

   "I know what it means. You think I’m drunk?"

   "I think you’re trying to sleep it off."

   "So what do you want me to do?"

   "I want you to get your sorry self out here so I can check you for intoxication." I sighed and reached for the handle. He backed off and the rest is a little hazy. I remember pushing the door open, then the cop lying on the ground, his arm bent at a weird angle, and then his head was a massive crater, and I was holding the gun. I stood there in the rain, my clothes soaked through and thought about what to do. Surely someone knew he had been up here. Did he tell them my license number? He had to have… right? It took me a minute or two of thinking, but I finally decided on what to do and reached down to grab him around the waist. He was a heavy guy, but it was made easier by my sheer determination. In times of duress a person can lift several times more than their own body weight. There have been cases of mother’s lifting cars to save their children and the like. I lifted him and sat the body in the driver’s seat of the cruiser. I wiped my prints off the gun and placed it in the officer’s hand, then pressed the brake and switched the car over to neutral. I got out and trudged my way back to my car, backed up and drove off.

   The news carried the story the next day. The car wound up rolling off the edge of the bluff and breaking up on the rocks below. Officer Stan Krakowski was a ten-year veteran on the force and had indeed called in my license number. The cops came to see me and asked a lot of questions. When had I left, what had we talked about. They seemed relatively convinced that I hadn’t killed him. There were two reasons for this. The first is that Officer Stan, while being a very good cop, also was quite fond of the sort of fare that could be easily bought at my place of employment. Point blank: he was a fat pig (pun most definitely intended). I am not a very big guy and so they figured that if I had tried anything he could easily have wiped the floor with me. The second reason was that Stan had just gotten divorced and wasn’t taking it very well. It was a hard time in his life and they thought it more likely that he had committed suicide than I had had anything to do with his death. I played it up, told them that he had seemed really depressed, had been fiddling with his gun the entire time I was there. They seemed to buy it and went away, leaving me in peace.

   The irony of the whole thing was that I wasn’t the right guy. I don’t mind imbibing the occasional spirit, mind you, but I draw the line at drinking and driving. Officer Stan, now… That was a different story. You see a lot of weird things when you work fast food. As a dishwasher, I was constantly being scheduled to help close. That meant staying up until all hours of the night to help shut the place down. We had to clean, had to take out the trash, had to get stuff ready for the next day. In short, we were lucky if we got out before one in the morning. It was a Friday night when I saw it. We had finished around one-thirty and everyone else had left. I was sitting on the car hood in the darkness, staring up at the sky and thinking through my life, when I heard a loud noise from over by the bar. Across the street from where I worked was a bar. They liked to drink, liked to play loud music, and occasionally liked to have the ambulance come and pick up the loser of a fight. The winner generally got a free drink.

   Anyway, the noise was Officer Stan getting kicked out. He didn’t think he should be leaving and was being very vocal about it, dropping the f bomb repeatedly and making gestures with his hands that would have made a sailor blush (or, if he were gay, become very happy). The guy in the bar must have had enough, because the next thing I saw was Stan shutting his trap and walking away. I kinda figured it must have been a gun. Stan went directly to his car and got in. When I say directly, I mean he didn’t stop anywhere else, not that he walked there in a straight path. Officer Stan was, quite obviously, more wasted than a ten dollar off coupon at the Clam Juice Emporium. Ain’t nobody gonna drink ten dollars worth of that puke…

   So Stan got in his car. At this point I was quite interested. See, I had had my run-ins with Stan in the past, and it seemed to me that if he thought he could get away with driving while he was drunk, then something needed to be done. He started the car and pulled out backwards, narrowly avoiding the car in the spot behind him, and fishtailed it out into the street. I saw what was going to happen before I even saw the girl. She was young, maybe twenty, and most definitely did not deserve what happened. The bar was hopping again, and no one was watching out the windows. They were, in fact, blackened from the inside, so it would have been impossible to see anyway. The world was asleep. It was me, Officer Stan, and the girl. My mouth dropped open as I saw him fly down the road, his lights not on, and slam the girl so hard she flew across the street, bent nearly in half the wrong way. She landed in a twisted heap and he didn’t stop. Probably didn’t even know it happened. I ran to the girl, tried to something, anything, but she was dead before I got there. It was a quick decision, but I ran off to my car and got in, pulling out and heading the wrong way.

   She was on the news the next day, but not in a major way. She was a transient, a hobo, and no one cared, apparently. Stan was never fingered for it, and I never turned him in. Who knew when something like that might come in handy? That’s the secret, you know. The secret to success. You can know all there is to know about your job, but without some sort of leverage you’ll never get anywhere. Blackmail is leverage. Blackmail… Some call it information, some call it a "good idea", as in "It would be a good idea to give me a promotion sir, unless you’d like your wife to see these…" He came in a lot, I knew, and so waited for my chance. It never came. Stan was a pretty popular guy, apparently. Well, popular with his friends. His wife didn’t seem to like him, and I think the bruises she always sported might have had something to do with it. And so when the cops told me she had divorced him I wasn’t too surprised. I had to fake it, though. It wouldn’t do to let on that I was privy to more than the bare facts about the man. People tend to wonder when you know a lot about a newly dead man. It had felt good, though. That was the thing. I had liked doing whatever it was that I did. If I had to guess, I would say I managed to get the gun and had shot him in the face. I could almost imagine the resistance of the trigger… It felt good.

   It’s been said that bad things come in threes, that when catastrophe strikes it generally dose so with two friends. This generally comes into play with celebrities, but I’ve been noticing that it happens with other things to. I mean, look at Stan. He killed a girl, got divorced, and then got shot in the face by some punk kid who worked at a fast food joint. Plus he was fat. Three seems to be a very influential number. There are three basic stages to life (child, adult, and old), and there are three parts of the world (in the Christian belief: heaven, earth, and hell… in a more generalized sense there’s the sky, the earth, and the underground). In my life there were a lot of bad things, but I started thinking that maybe they all fit into three categories. I mean, the law was one problem. I was a kid, so they hassled me. I didn’t fit their mold, so they thought I was doing something wrong. Jerks. As I said before, I was always too much of a pansy to actually do anything wrong, but in my heart I was a rebel. A real law-breaker. So there was the law. Then there was my job. Truth be told, I loved washing dishes. It was simple, mindless work that wasn’t overly taxing, and while the pay wasn’t all that good, it wasn’t as bad as what some people have to do (like cleaning sewers or something like that).

   No, what was bad about it was the people in charge, the "management". They knew full well what they were doing, how they were exploiting people to make a quick buck, but they kept doing it. Always they were trying to find ways to save costs, and a lot of that came out of the quality of the food. I don’t think it would have been so bad if they at least made good food, but no. The hamburger meat was less than half cow. They kept cutting costs by adding filler. A few pounds of sheep intestine here, a large block of some random meat there… In the end it added up to more money, and that’s all they cared about. There was a butcher down the street who did all the preparation for them. It wasn’t that expensive, and it made for good ad copy ("Fresh meat from down the street"). Anyway, they were evil. Anyone who will take advantage of someone else in an attempt to make a buck is evil. Wait. Scratch that. By that definition, most everyone is evil. Those people who will do that without regard for safety or morals are the evil ones. These guys were definitely bad like that. They realized that we had never had a fire and so pulled out the extinguishing system. Saved them a grand total of four hundred dollars a year, and now the kitchen is set to become a tinderbox. The meat thing was the worst, I think.

   They had started out with good intentions, had at one point used real beef. One hundred percent. Then it had gone down hill. Cheaper meat meant more profit, and so the beef dropped to ninety percent, then eighty. Now it was hovering around fifty. The other half was made up of various things: intestines, rats, fingers… It was nasty, really, and yet no one seemed to notice. Well, I noticed. At first I wasn’t sure what I could do. The fault wasn’t with the butcher. He was just doing what they told him to do. No, it was them. Well, was the big man. The others, I figured, were minions. The real root, the true evil, was the owner, Mr. Todd. I watched him for a week before I figured it out. He would come in and check things out every day about three, make sure everything was on the up and up. It was on one of those trips that I figured it out.

   He was on a visit and one of the customers came up and complained about their burger. It tasted funny, she said. He had gotten her a new one and swore up and down he was sorry, then went back to where Kyle was making food. Kyle was relatively new, still learning the trade, and so I could almost understand if Mr. Todd wanted to hash some things out about proper burger making. It didn’t turn out that way, though. Mr. Todd threw the burger in Kyle’s face and swore at him. Bad burgers mean bad business. Rule number one. Kyle looked like he might cry, and so when Mr. Todd reached for the knife I don’t think he noticed. What stopped him from doing it then, I think was that he saw me. His face grew redder and he put the knife down, then stormed off after telling Kyle he wasn’t leaving until after closing. That night I hung around until after everyone but Kyle and Mr. Todd left. I parked my car behind the dumpster and waited. Through the window I could see into the kitchen and Mr. Todd yelling at Kyle. The tears were back and now they were flowing freely. I remember looking around and seeing that there was no one there, that no one could see if something happened, and then looking back to see Mr. Todd kneeling, the bloody knife raised above his head as he brought it down again, and then again, his face a leering mask of contempt.

   I gulped and said a silent prayer for Kyle. He was in a better place now, I hoped. Mr. Todd got to work and wrapped the body in a tarp he got from his trunk. He laid the bundle in the car and used a hose to clean the floor. He used a sponge and wiped the counters and the ceiling clean, and then burned the sponge out by the dumpsters. The last step was washing the knife clean, which he did quickly and efficiently. I admired his technique, actually. As I said, dish washing is a skill. He left, then, and got into his car. I followed, lights turned off, and watched in horror and disgust as he turned in at the butcher’s and got out, dragging the bundle with him. I decided it might not be wise to hang around and so sped off into the night, flipping my lights on when I was sure I was clear of his sight. The next day was a frenzy. They had found the body (most of it) in a dumpster behind the butcher’s. The last place they knew he had been was the restaurant, and so there were cops all over the place, looking for clues. It almost came down the wrong way. Some overzealous rookie found traces of blood in the cracks of the floor and it took quite a while for Mr. Todd to convince them that blood in the cracks at a restaurant is not all that uncommon. We did deal with raw meat, after all. I ended up backing him up. They asked where he was that night, and I chimed in saying we had been there til closing and then left. I think he realized I knew then, but he couldn’t say anything. I was saving his skin, after all. They left, eventually, and nothing came of it. Someone else must have gotten him, taken him and done something horrible.

   The next day I started the plan. A little bit of mouse poison dropped into just the right batch of meat… The sickness came quickly. Customers dropped like flies and word quickly got around that the restaurant was to blame. It was fun, really. Mr. Todd came to me one day and said we had to talk.

   "I know what you’ve been doing Charles."

   "What’s that Mr. Todd?"

   "The poison. Stop. I wouldn’t want to have to let the cops in on this little secret."

   "Ahh. Yea. We wouldn’t want the cops finding out any secrets, right? Secrets can be dangerous, Mr. Todd. Very dangerous." He must have seen something in my eyes, because he backed off. I stopped the poison then, and watched to see what would happen. People stayed away for a while but started coming back, slowly. The restaurant’s name was tarnished then, and Mr. Todd was furious. Everywhere he went people were leery. They gave him a wide berth when he passed and before long he was ostracized by all but his closest friends. It was a Monday when I did it. I waited around after work, hiding in the same place, until Mr. Todd came out carrying the money. Every night he took the cash from the restaurant and every morning he deposited it in the bank (a little short every time, I believe). I waited until he was almost to his car and then stepped out from behind the little wall. "Evenin’ Mr. Todd."

   He whirled around, the money bag hitting him in the back of the arm. "Don’t scare me like that." His free hand went to his chest and he gulped for air.

   I walked up to him. "Sorry. I just thought that maybe we should talk."

   "About what?"

   I reached him then and pulled the knife from my pocket. "About this. This is the knife you used on Kyle, Mr. Todd. You remember Kyle?" Fear filled his eyes and he started whimpering. "That’s right Mr. Todd. I would tell you to say hi to him, but I don’t think you’ll end up in the same place." The knife slid easily into his stomach, the hilt stopping the forward momentum. I pulled it back out and he grabbed at the wound, blood seeping through his fingers, a dark red waterfall spilling out on the ground. He wheezed and fell to his knees. "They’ll think it was a mugging, you know. No one likes you anymore anyway." I then slit his throat. The geyser was not quite what I expected, but admittedly he had lost a lot of blood already. He died quickly, and I stooped to grab the money. It wouldn’t look like a mugging if I left the money. Before I left I wiped the handle of the blade clean and tossed the knife into the bushes for the pigs to find.

   His body lay there in the moonlight, the stench of death spreading its tentacles hands outward like some sort of virus, and as I drove off, the bag on the seat next to me I realized that it wasn’t over yet. There were now two bad things, when everyone knows bad things come in threes. It wasn’t over yet because at least one more evil person had to die, one more scourge needed to be eradicated from the earth. I just didn’t know who yet. I got home and took the money out of the bag. No use in wasting it, right? The bag itself I burned, taking the lighter from my pocket and setting the fibers alight. It went quickly, losing itself in the orange flames, turning into so much ash and smoke. All that was left was the zipper, a burning hot tongue of metal lying on the ground in a twisted smile. What I realized as I stood there was that the zipper was smiling at me, at what I had done. It was like some divine sign that I was right. As I shifted my weight to stand, however, I realized I was wrong. This was no divine smile. It was evil. Malevolent.

   I hurried into the house and shut the sight out of my mind. There was nothing wrong with what I had done. They were evil, they were bad, and they deserved it. They deserved it. I opened the door into my basement room and fell onto the bed, the money stuffed into my pocket… They deserved it. I felt the room begin to grow hot and curled my legs up into the fetal position. It was happening again… The hallucinations… I reached a trembling hand over to the bedside table and grabbed for my bottle of pills. The top was hard to get off, one of those child proof ones, and I ended up dropping it on the carpet, where it rolled under the bed. I went to reach for it and saw black shapes moving, flowing, slithering, and I pulled my hand back quickly. Who needs pills… That’s when I heard the laugh.

   I turned and saw the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen. It was a figure, almost like a man, only clothed in flame and ragged flesh. I could see its skeleton through the fibers of its skin, right through to the black heart, and with each word it squished like a rotten tomato. I won’t tell you what he said, but suffice it to say I was terrified when he finished. It was good, what I had done, and I had one last thing to do… One more job to fulfill, and then I would be done. The three needed to be completed. That brings us pretty much up to tonight. I saw the figure two days ago, and have been terrified ever since. The plan came to me this morning, in my cereal. I was eating and the shapes arranged themselves in a picture of a man and a woman sitting on a couch, headless, with their heads in the freezer. It wasn’t very detailed, mind you, but I knew what it was… And who had sent it…

   That night I told them I had something important that we needed to discuss. They were excited, thought maybe it was something to do with me maybe moving out on my own. If only they knew, right? Anyway, I got them both into the living room and came in with the butcher knife behind my back. Dad was first, mainly because I knew if I got him out of the way then mom would be easy. He was looking away when I came in, trying to watch a game on the television, and it was so easy. I pulled the blade out and ran it along his throat just under the Adam’s apple. The fount was immediate and spectacular, the glow of the television catching in its red streams, and he made a very feeble attempt to reach up and grab me. I ducked to the side and he fell off the couch, face first into a pool of his own blood. Mom was a picture of horror, her hands to her face. She had yet to make a sound, and I was pretty sure that was only because she couldn’t quite get the scream out. I leapt forward, the knife held in front of me, and it buried itself in her chest. She fell forward and onto the floor, her hands flying up as she went, one landing on dad’s shoulder.

   I staggered back then, realization dawning on me. What had I done? The laugh came again, then, from behind me, and I turned slowly, already knowing what I was going to see. The figure was back, a smoking vision of hell. It laughed, the flames wavering with each intake of breath and then vanished into thin air, leaving absolutely no trace of its existence. I staggered into the kitchen and fell into one of the dining room chairs. My gaze, glazed as it was, fell on the open paper at the table and I saw a story about the restaurant. It was a regional piece, something about the history of the place, all about the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Finkle. The dazed feeling snapped away and I darted my head closer. No, that wasn’t right. Mr. Todd owned the restaurant. He… didn’t he? I read the article and something in my head started to flutter. They had owned the restaurant for the last fifty years. There was no mention of a Mr. Todd. I suddenly felt fear course through me and I went to the blue box at the end of the counter and grabbed several weeks worth of papers, leafing through them until I found the story on the boy. The boy had been killed, yes, and they had no leads on what had happened to him. They did know what had killed him, though. They found the blade sitting near the body, blood still drying on its cold steel. It was a black handled blade, serrated to make cutting meat easier, and as I looked at the picture the flutter turned into a scream.

   I suddenly had a flash of my mother complaining about how her knife was missing. About how the knife I was looking at was missing. The knife was hers, was ours. And it had been used to kill the kid. Pictures were running through my head then, snapshots of what I was beginning to realize was never true. There was Mr. Todd killing the kid. There was the money. When I thought of the money I ran to the steps and down to my room. I dug around under the mattress and found it, the wad of folded bills. I pulled them out, already feeling more at ease, and then saw that all I was holding was leaves. The fear exploded in me and I fell on the bed, realization dawning on me. Hallucinations… How long? How many murders was I responsible for? That’s when I realized what had to happen. The three had yet to be completed. There were two evils gone already, two scourges eradicated from the earth. I was the third.

   And so now I sit here, finishing this and holding the gun in my other hand. When I put the pen down, I’m going to put the barrel in my mouth and end this. I can smell the smoke again, can feel the heat. I thought I beat this once… It was the pills, of course. I can see that now. The figure is there, now, looking at me. I can see its heart. I need to do this now, before I wuss out. Alright. Farewell. Forgive me.

***

   He put down the last sheet and glanced quizzically at the body slumped over the desk. The gun was lying on the ground, dropped there as the life fled the body. He looked up, toward the wall, and resisted the urge to be sick. The house was a bloodbath, the scene of a massacre. The man had killed his parents with a butcher knife and then taken his own life in a final desperate act… If the note was to be trusted, he also had killed at least two other people. The man shook his head. What a waste. He bent over and grabbed the gas can from where it lay, popping the lid off the nozzle. It had taken him years to set it up, to take Charles’s growing insanity and direct it, to focus it. The figure had been his creation, an entirely hypnotic suggestion. Charles’s hallucinations had helped with that. He knew what he was supposed to be seeing, and his mind made it real for him. Regardless, he know knew it worked, knew he could control people, make them do his will. He reveled in the knowledge as he soaked the house in gasoline.

   The cops would find the wreckage and determine that something bad had happened. With three dead bodies, there would be an investigation, but all of the evidence, the important evidence, would be eradicated. It was a near perfect crime. There would be grieving, of course, and a period of mourning, but no one really expects a doctor to get that close to his patient. Even a psychologist. A sense of power flowed through him as he finished pouring the gas and stood near the front door with the lighter. He could do it. His finger moved to the wheel and in the split second before he turned it something happened. It wasn’t anything tangible, anything all that remarkable, but to the doctor it was terrifying. The world suddenly grew cold, almost as if… as if…

   Ghosts. His was a rational mind, a piece of machinery he felt was up to the task of keeping reality separate from delusions and fantasy, but in that split second he was convinced that there was a ghost stalking him, and it was that feeling that made him slip. His finger pulled the wheel and at the same instant the lighter slipped in his gasoline slicked hands, the flame touching the liquid and igniting him in an instant. He dropped the lighter and it caught the trail he had created, turning the house into a blazing inferno in mere seconds, but he didn’t care, didn’t even notice. The pain was intense, the flames eating through first his clothing and then his skin, melting him like an oversized candle. His screams were lost in the hissing and screaming of the wood around him, the protestations of the house as it fell into itself, and as the sirens came he breathed his last, his eyes seeing the bright yellow and orange fade into black, an eternal lights out, the curtain drawn for good. The cops would later find his notebooks, buried under a stack of papers in his office. He was meticulous in all he did, and they would discover that he had been manipulating Charles for several years, ever since his parents first brought him in for counseling. The diagnosis had come quickly. Charles was a sociopath, but he didn’t quite know it yet. Hypnosis had followed, subliminal ideas planted deeply, triggers to create a murderer. It was all planned out, all written down. An experiment in mind control, a proof for publication… And it had all failed, been destroyed, burnt… All because of the three… Three…

©2004 Ryan Mayers