Neverchangeable | Chapter 4

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My eye has adjusted to the darkness now. I can make out more of the scene I’ve watched for weeks from the other side of my cell phone. You, clearer than ever, point at me with your rigid finger, skin barely hanging on to the bone. The maggots have multiplied. They swarm your mouth and eyes, the tongue and eyeballs long gone, the larvae eating away at the fatty remainders of your partially liquefied brain. It will only be so long before your lips and gums are devoured too, your cheeks, hips and buttocks, your thighs, your cunt. I calculate how long it would take for every crumb of you to be eaten by the same maggots you used to dump out of our compost on Tuesdays.

I’m not sure how long we’ve been here, you and I. Day and night feel the same. No accidental slant of sunlight glints through the window, once wide and open, now a wall of cement. I did that to keep out the trespassers. A little late, I admit. You know that. You know exactly when I cemented in the walls. Before that night, you and I both know I had trouble… letting go.

What you don’t know, what you probably wouldn’t believe, is that my obsession didn’t start out like that: an obsession. It started as a duty. Yes, even the first time twenty years ago. We don’t have to talk about that yet, though. For now, let’s stick to what happened after Dad died.

After I’d cleaned up the vandals’ mess the first time they’d come around, after I put up the cameras, it wasn’t long until more stragglers came in. Usually, they’d stumble up during the daytime, young people mostly. Adventurous types who went off the beaten path. Twenties, sometimes thirties. Old enough to be degenerate, young enough not to care. At night, they’d come back with more friends, cases of beer, drugs, music. Some would bring graffiti bottles, the twenty-somethings mostly, staking their place in what was supposed to be our home. Putting up the cameras meant protecting what was mine.

Yours.

Your maggot eyes dance as though to correct me: His.

Always, his. Even when he never did anything to deserve it except be born unlucky, then have the good fortune to stumble upon a psychopath like you who liked him. What a joke.

Those nights, alone with my pixelated reveries, back before Mrs. Developer emerged from the waters with her alligator eyes, were my piece of the cabin. All the cameras and wires and grainy films of strangers trespassing in the night were mine alone. Not yours, not the trespassers’, not Farley’s. Not even Mrs. Developer’s. All those tourists and guests became punks and criminals in my eyes once they crossed the property line at night. Sometimes they really were criminals. Sometimes I think they knew the camera was there. Maybe they underestimated the camera; didn’t think anyone was on the other end, or if there was, that they wouldn’t do anything about what was being filmed. Maybe they hoped someone was there. Someone like me.

Remember Freddie Fergus from high school? The one who sold GHB in the cafeteria and became a real estate agent after college? Came up here once. Bet you didn’t know that. I caught him one night from my bedroom at the farm, right before it belonged to Mrs. Developer. The stars on the ceiling don’t glow after forty-odd years. My phone screen’s blue light painted the plaid wallpaper Daddy put up in there before I was born. I unzipped my jeans and dipped into my black-and-white pixelated reverie. I watched Freddie through the camera, forever the salesman, pass out little pills and baggies from this cabin here’s kitchen. Indented lines left on the table from butcher knives and paring knives, hunting knives and pocket knives were filled with cocaine. I watched Freddie lean down and snort two lines. He held his lady-friend by the neck close to the table and laughed as she inhaled. She pushed him away but laughed too. Freddie grabbed her by the thighs and pulled her into him. She ground her hips in to his and bent forward to do another line. They went out to the fire with the rest of the crowd, out of my sight, but I could hear them. I could hear their filth.

That was the first time I’d caught anything on the camera. Freddie Fergus with his drugs and homes and women, who sold date-rape drugs to teenagers and winked at the camera before fucking twenty-something-year-old ravers in our front yard. Freddie was one hell of a catch. He wasn’t my favorite though. Just my first. My favorites were the ones who didn’t see the camera. The trespassers whose crime was crossing my line.

Don’t look at me like that.

You’d always tried to get me onto fishing. Said hunting was too much for me to handle. Like I was a little bitch. Wanted me to throw earth worms on hooks and just wait. I got so good at waiting. I’d sit there and wait and wait and wait for something to bite. All that so a fish could flop around in my hands like some useless thing. You always told Daddy to make me throw the fish back, anyway. That or give them to Farley to gut and clean for dinner. You started hiding the knives after you caught me getting a woody, gutting the fish. Never told Farley any of that though. Farley wasn’t the one looking at my cock all the time. Just you. For medical purposes you said.

Was that night with Becca at the bonfire for medical purposes too?

Shut up.

Do you hear that?

Voices laugh. Not twenty-something voices or thirty-something voices. Booming voices. Mature ones. There’s a jostle of equipment. A man’s voice thanks Mrs. Developer for letting them interview her and Madame Liliana before introducing the segment. His voice wears a broad smile. He says, “Welcome to Faeland Woods, a magical, outdoorsy adventure through some of Kingston’s most mystical – and haunted – hidden gems…”

My own security camera’s eye burns on the back of my neck as I imagine the news anchor’s camera swinging in the direction of our cabin. In the distance I hear Madame Liliana’s voice. She rings out, “Tell me your story!”

Then come the coughs. Then the hacking. Mrs. Developer’s voice chimes above all of the noise. She chuckles between gasps, “Lili’s good. Lili’s the real thing.”

Mrs. Developer’s voice is muffled. Muted, as if her peeling nose and bright pink mouth are covered with a scarf. More coughs fill the silence where Madame Liliana’s reading should be taking place. Madame Lili’s voice comes out in half-strangled bursts:

“Once, years ago…”

Ack, Ack

“Not long ago…”

Ack

“Now, right now, the evil spirits are with us!”

Madame Liliana shouts at Mrs. Developer and the booming voices. Maybe she’s shouting at the evil spirits. Or us. She roars, “Get out.”

Equipment clangs and dead leaves shuffle in the distance. Coughing fades. You, the camera, and I, however, remain.

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