Neverchangeable | Chapter 6

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You’ve started to decompose more slowly now, the colder the season’s become. I’ll join you eventually. I'm sure of it. Until then you and the camera are my audience. It feels good to be the watched for once instead of the watcher. Finally, for everyone to shut up long enough for me to tell my story. To matter. You and I know this will all matter once the stacks of canned goods and the canteens of water run out; once December, January, February, and March pass and the ice begins to thaw and our bodies with it. Then, in the heat of summer when the tourists and the buzzards come, when Mrs. Developer and Madame Liliana come back from their real homes in Santa Fe and you and I are burning in hell; when the rot and stink get too much to hide… that’s when this confession will matter. Farley made sure of that.

It can’t be more than a few hours that pass before I hear the rustling of dead leaves again. When the footsteps stop, I hear only one set of lungs this time. You look at me as if to say, “Aha!”

I know better, though, once the voice calls out again, solitary and quieter this time. Madame Liliana coughs and then asks the sky, “What is your story?”

Silence. Then the rustle of leaves as she departs.

There is no one to translate the story for. She spins no long-winded tale sprinkled with marketable moments. She is a crazy old lady all on her own. If only she’d walked a few feet forward, pressed her ear to the door, she would have heard a singular set of lungs next to hers, as well.

You look at as if to ask, “But why aren’t you scared, boy?”

I answer your mouth, spilling with larvae like risotto, “Because then you’d have a friend in the spirit world.”

Madame Liliana’s wicked corpse fills my mind.

She doesn’t open the door.

I wait to see if Madame Liliana returns. Whether it be with Mrs. Developer or the police. No one comes back. I keep Dad’s gun on the kitchen table, pointed at the front door just in case.

Whoever gets in that front door’s gotta really want it. After what Farley did to it.

That, as you know, wasn’t until long after the windows. Long after the home videos… much, much after I started dipping into my pixelated reveries. First, from the farm, then later the lodge. Then, anywhere I so damn pleased.

I’d watch blushing ladies and their strapping gentleman embrace on the bridge or Mamas and Daddies pose with their precious babes in front of the lagoon; college kids kissing mermaids and chasing fairies through the forest for a picture; amateur photographers and their models... I watched them have their wholesome fun during the day. I’d wait to see which ones found their way to the cabin in the woods. They didn’t always stumble up there. When they did, they almost always came back at night. Then, they'd become predictable animals, partying and fucking with full abandon long past the witching hour. They always slunk away before the sun pulled itself up to expose their depravity, sticky and crusted with shame, all evidence left scattered behind.

You would be surprised. How many people there are like you and I. How many people like to watch. If you’d known what a market there is for it, I wonder if I would have ever caught you on the other end of my website, Eiyez. Would you have been one of my customers? Would you have bought one of my homemade videos of naked sweaty couples or photographers fucking fairies?

You would have been helpful, that’s for sure. In the lure.

At first, it was fun, the waiting, the fishing. Even more fun when they returned the next week, walking around in blinding daylight like nothing ever happened. As if they hadn’t just had their guts re-arranged in some abandoned cabin in the plunging depths of a haunted forest. I watched them stroll around the park, absent-minded smiles plastered on their faces. I knew what they did when they thought no one was watching. At first, it was enough.

Then, I tasted real blood. That’s when I started hunting.

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