Crystal Clear

Crystal Clear

Crystal stepped out of the car and walked up the steps of her home in West LA.

It had been a good funeral, lots of people there to see her being sad and see her paying her respects to a man who had made her career. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, Jarret had been the best thing to happen to her in years. He had been a rising star, and she had ridden him to the heavens so she could watch him fall. It was cold, but hey, that was showbiz.

She felt her phone rattle inside her purse and remembered that she had set a reminder for tonight. She had spent too much time out "mourning" with the other beautiful people and had almost forgotten her promise to her public. Jarret's videos, biography, and anything else that dealt with his life was trending high.

And Jarret, it seemed, had left her one last boost in popularity before he stepped out.

She set the scene before she went live. She poured herself a fashionable drink, slipped into something a little less depressing, and found a place to lounge. This could be her last chance to cash in on her ex-boyfriend, and she meant to monopolize it to the fullest. Jarret's star might have fallen, but her own could still rise higher.

Who knew, this video might even change the world.

She flounced her hair a little, trying for that crossroads of casual and effortlessly hot, and pressed Live on her laptop.

"Good evening, everyone. As you all know, Jarret's funeral was today. I have cried for him since I got up this morning, and I can't think of a more fitting way to honor his memory than to play the last song he ever sang."

She reached up to smudge her mascara a little.

Raccoon eyes always played well for the camera.

"Let me play you the message he left again, in case any of you missed it yesterday."

That was shit. No one had missed his message last night. She could already see the eyes on her, and twenty thousand people were watching already. All of them had liked and shared last night's broadcast; she was sure. Now they were all coming back for the money shot, and she wasn't about to let them down.

She pulled out her phone and pressed play as she held it close to the screen.

Jarret's voice poured through the speakers, and she had to stop herself from shuddering when she heard it. The Jarret she knew had never yelled, never really raised his voice to her, and certainly never raised a hand to her. He was a nice guy, and there had been times that she had felt a little bad about the things she'd accused him of. Even when they fought, he never put his hands on her or let his voice rise higher than a monotone. It was how his mother had taught him to be, and he had never forgotten how a man should treat a lady.

This Jarret, however, wasn't the one she had known. He sounded wrong. He sounded cruel. This Jarret sounded like he might hit her, sounded like he might scream in her face, and sounded like he might enjoy killing her for no better reason than she deserved it. She had watched him after his fall, watched the sad Jarret who made depressing ballads and soft emo music. That Jarret had been hard to watch, but this Jarret was something else.

This Jarret was the one who would have done the things she accused him of doing.

"Hello Crys, I guess you're too busy to talk to me, so just listen. I've written you a song, remember when I used to do that? It's just for you, so make sure you don't share it with anyone else. Something you can remember me by after I'm gone."

As the message ended, she composed her face and went on.

"I guess he never quite got over me. The time of death on his police report was minutes after this message ended. It's kind of sweet that his last thoughts were of me. I haven't listened to the song yet. I thought I would share it with you all on the eve of his funeral. Let's send his soul off with one last happy tribute. This ones for you, Jarret. I hope you've found peace wherever you are."

She pressed play on the next message, and the song started almost at once.

It was sung acapella, and she was surprised he hadn't used any instruments. His last song, Birds of Paradise, had been sad and depressing, but this song was clearly something darker, something more personal. It was about her, that she was sure of. It was full of angry discourse and jagged discords. This new Jarret wasn't holding anything back, had nothing to hold back, and the song was an angry dirge that scrapped across her nerves. It almost seemed like, in the background, someone was laughing too. If she listened closely, she could hear canned, animatronic laughter that cut through Jarret's pseudo screamo.

The song lasted about three minutes, and when the line finally went dead, Crystal was glad for it.

The tears that streamed down her face now were real, and she could see from the comments that she wasn't the only one crying.

She composed herself and tried to end this video without sounding as uncomfortable as she felt. Now that it was over, she wished that no one else had heard it. It had been personal, it had been Jarret airing their dirty laundry, and she had felt embarrassed to have others hear it. He had talked about so many things, things she hadn't known he had known, and things that might look bad on her if brought to light. She would have to do a little damage control now.

She would have to wait for the fires to spring up.

She rubbed her eyes again and found them wet.

"I hate that things had to end this way. Despite how he treated me, Jarret was my best friend once. I had thought, not too long ago, about being with him for the rest of my life. I imagined us having children, singing on stage together again, growing old together, and living out our golden years in each other's arms. I hate that this is how it had to end. I hate that I couldn't have been there to stop him from taking his life. I hate that…"

She thought for a moment that something moved in the corner.

She looked over quickly, afraid that maybe some fan had come in to crash her live stream, but it was just the thick curtains over the bay windows.

"I...I hate that we couldn't make things work. If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, I will link the Suicide Prevention Hotline below. Don't let someone else end like this. Jarret was too talented to…"

She heard a rasp of something directly to her left, but when she turned to look, there was nothing there.

What the hell had that been?

"To...to…" she had lost her train of thought, but she hoped it would come off as being distraught over the song, "to end up like this. Get help before it's too late. I'm going to go, I need to be alone after all this, but I hope you have a good evening and remember to be good to each other."

She signed off, and when she was sure that the camera was dead, she called Renaldo at the front gate.

"Yes, Mrs. Maldono?"

"Renaldo, there is something in my house. I am going upstairs to take a long bath, and I want you and your men to comb through the house and find out what it is."

"Do you suspect that it is a person or an animal or…"

"I suspect," she half spat into the receiver, "that I pay you way too much to ask stupid questions. Get in here, search the house, and find whatever it is."

She hung up on him and went upstairs to her bedroom, locking the door behind her.

The tub was massive, big enough for three, in fact, and it was part of the reason that Crystal had bought the house. She loved nothing so much as soaking in her tub and letting the world float by. She could hear Ronaldo moving around downstairs as she stripped off her clothes and let a heady sigh escape her as she sank into the warm water. She put her hair in a long tail and let it hang over the edge as she let the heat settle on her skin and pushed the button for the jets. Crystal had had a long day of schmoozing and networking, topped off by the terrible song from Jarret, and now she just wanted to relax.

When the chuckle crawled into her ear, she rolled over in the water and stared around the bathroom. The jets were like mini airplane engines in her ears, and there should have been no way that she could hear anything. She looked over the small room before sinking back into the warm water. She let her mind relax, her body floating beneath the surface, as the soothing jets massaged her back and arms, ridding her body of the tension she had carried all…

When someone yanked her ponytail, she spun around and put her back to the opposite wall of the garden tub.

Her eyes moved about like a trapped animal, but she saw nothing.

She turned off the jets and toweled off.

She suddenly didn't feel like relaxing anymore.

She was in bed an hour later when the shadows began to gather.

She'd had Ronaldo search the whole house twice, but neither he nor his men found anything. She sat in her bed the whole time, blankets pulled up to her chin, as they moved about her room, her bathroom, her closets, and checked every room upstairs and downstairs. The sun was setting when Ronaldo came back to report, but his news was far from satisfactory. They had found nothing, less than nothing. They had found no means of entry, forced or otherwise, and except for her coming in with the key earlier, no one had been in or out of the house since she'd left for the Funeral. The camera and the sensors had found nothing.

She was alone as far as anyone knew.

"That's impossible. Someone pulled my ponytail! Now, either it was you or one of your security guys playing a joke. Either way, I don't appreciate it."

Ronaldo looked apprehensive for a moment before saying what was on his mind, "Are you sure that, maybe, you didn't just get it hung on something?"

Crystal narrowed her eyes at him, "Are you asking me if I know the difference between having my hair pulled and getting it tangled on something?"

"No, ma'am, but you have seemed to be under some stress lately. Maybe you're just…"

"Jumping at shadows? Being paranoid? Is that what you think, Ronaldo?"

Ronaldo shrugged, "There's no one in your house ma'am, we're sure of that."

She waved a hand at him, "Then you can go, you can all go."

Ronaldo raised an eyebrow, "You don't want a night detail left behind?"

"Did I stutter? GO! Since you all think I'm going nuts, I wouldn't expect any of you to stay behind and have me waste your time. Get out of here. I don't need your services tonight; maybe not ever again."

Ronaldo looked disappointed but did as he was told.

When the door closed behind him, she wished he had stayed.

The house seemed very quiet now that they were gone, and she hunkered under the covers like a child as she tried to sleep. Maybe he was right. Perhaps all she needed to alleviate some of this stress was a good night's sleep. She was on the cusp of something great, she could feel it, and she couldn't afford to let the stress get to her now.

As she felt her eyes getting heavy, though, she could hear Jarret's last song, and it led her down into a dream of him.

She sat in a small coffee shop, sitting alone in a dark room full of murmurs. The other tables were cast in a pale circle of gloom, but beyond them was a darker area that she didn't like to look at. It almost seemed to move as she gazed at it, and it made her very uncomfortable. Things were watching her from that darkness, and they didn't like her at all.

The stage lights came on then, and there was Jarret.

He was sitting on the stage with that old acoustic guitar that his grandad had given him, strumming away and humming to himself. She never understood what he saw in that battered old thing, but she had never had any grandparents to give her a guitar, so maybe it was beyond her understanding. She had tried to get rid of it more than once, he had so many expensive guitars to play, but he always refused. Sometimes she'd catch him on the porch, strumming away and looking wistful.

Today, though, he was singing the song he had sung on her voicemail, and the guitar was playing something she had never heard before.

He didn't look at her, didn't look at anything, as he sang, and as the song went on, she began to hear things. She heard a rustle, a dry skeletal rattling, that seemed to come from that deeper darkness beyond her. The quiet rustling became laughter, like the laughter at the edges of his last song, and she began to see things appear at the tables around her. Hunched, dark little things that watched Jarret and rattled that hollow laughter like a can full of bones or a bottle full of dead leaves. The more that appeared, the more that laughter sounded like the fake, robotic laughter of a sitcom, and the volume seemed to rise as the tables started to fill. Jarret played on, oblivious, calling them there as he poured out his heart, and they clustered around the edge of the stage. She was the only person here other than him, and she felt vulnerable in this ocean of inky monsters.

When they all turned their smiling faces at her, eyeless faces seeming to notice her for the first time, she woke up screaming.

She twisted in the grip of the bedclothes, the comforter and sheets having tangled her as she thrashed around, and when she came to, she felt them grip her, and her panic became real. She could feel their hands on her, holding her down and trying to bite her with those too-big teeth. There had been dozens, maybe hundreds, of them, and now that they had seen her, she was sure they would want to get her for what she had done.

When she opened her eyes, though, she was alone.

She untangled herself from the covers and couldn't help but laugh at her silliness. What was she doing? She had gotten so worked up over a stupid dream. The song had gotten to her, and now she was projecting onto her dreams. Jarret's song had been terrible to hear, but it was just a song. It couldn't get her or hurt her or do anything but…

Her door creaked open then, a skeletal chuckle sliding up from the hallway.

She wanted to scream, but she couldn't quite find her breath.

When whatever it was did not immediately come in and get her, she decided to go have a look.

She turned on Facebook and began to live stream.

"Hey guys, it's me, and I think someone is in my house. I'm hearing a lot of weird noises."

She was in the hall outside her bedroom, sneaking around like a prowler in her own home, as she moved the flashlight on her phone from side to side. There was nothing here. The doors to the other two upstairs rooms were closed, the stairs were bare, and she could see no one in the hall. She could see names on the screen, people commenting that it looked spooky or trying to see if she were okay, but they seemed to be her only company. No one out there could be seen, and she was ready to turn back when the door to her studio creaked open, she jumped back a little.

"There, did you see that?" she asked but realized quickly that the camera had been facing the wrong direction.

Some of her viewers claimed that this "fake," but many of them were telling her to call the police and get someone out there.

She approached the door instead, wanting to see what was in there.

As she approached, she heard music coming just behind the door. The studio housed her instruments, guitars, a drum set, keyboards, and various recording equipment. She often went in to strum out a tune or jot down a song, but most of the stuff was there for show. It was expected that a songwriter would have these things, so she did. Her cord work was sloppy at best, Jarret had always been the gifted musician, but she put down some lyrics now and again and cobbled something together for a collab with this artist or that artist.

Usually, these lyrics came from the green binder she had stolen out of Jarrett's desk before she left his house, but no one needed to know about that.

She creaked the door open, spilling the hall nightlights murky glow into the room. Her hand scrambled across the wall for the light switch but froze as the phantom cord twanged out again. She heard a snippet of her own song sung in a familiar voice that came wafting from the corner. She glanced over and found someone sitting on her fifteen hundred dollar drum set, holding her three thousand dollar Les Paul, crooning her own tunes back to her in what was a distinctly sardonic way.

She started to shout, her hands finding the switch, but before the lights came on, she saw the musician look up and smile at her in an unsettling leer.

Right before the lights came on, she would swear she was seeing Jarret there in the same suit they had buried him in.

Then the lights snapped on, and she was looking at an empty drum set, her guitar leaned against it, and an unpleasant odor still hanging in the air.

"Did you see that?" she asked the viewers, her voice little more than a whisper, "Did any of you see that?"

There were many question marks and asking if she was on drugs or something, and she huffed at them.

"The man in the corner, playing guitar! How did none of you hear him?"

She didn't dare claim it was Jarret. If he was fresh in the ground and she was already claiming to be haunted by him, people would crucify her. Most of the comments indicated that they thought she needed to get some sleep, the ones that didn't state outright that they didn't believe her, and she saw that she would get no help on this front. She signed off and left the studio, taking one more look before she left.

She knew what she had seen.

Renaldo commented the next day that she looked tired.

"And you look like a guy who spends most of his paycheck on steroids and blow, but I'm too much of a lady to mention something like that." Crystal snapped back at him over her second Bloody Mary. Her chef had laid out quite the breakfast spread, fruit, an omelet, toast, juice, but she had no appetite for any of it. She had dozed off a few times last night but always been awakened by the incessant chuckling. Her house seemed to be haunted by it, and it kept her awake all night. When she had finally risen around four, she had started drinking and had yet to stop.

She had taken down the Facebook Live video, but people were still talking about it. They had all seen her blundering through her house, drunk or high, and talking about things that no one could see. It seemed to have created a division in her fans overnight, and more of them seemed to think she was high or just shit posting for attention. The rest thought she was stressed, under a lot of pressure right now, and maybe losing her cool.

Whatever it was, no one had seen what she had seen.

She lay around most of that day, going from the pool, to the living room, to the kitchen, to her bedroom, and always she felt hounded by the soft chuckles that wafted through the air. She couldn't escape them, and as the day stretched on, nowhere felt safe from the scampering shadows that came along with them. She would see them out of the corner of her eye, see them loping just outside her vision. They haunted her, Ronaldo finally leaving all together after she called him to check the house for the fifth time. She had been in her bedroom, drowsing in bed, when the door had creaked open like it had last night, and she had heard that skeletal chuckling as it raked across her consciousness.

Ronaldo had crossed his arms and scowled when she'd ordered him to search the house again.

"No."

She stared at him, shocked, "Excuse me?"

"You heard me; I said no. My men have searched this house, basement to attic, four times today. Hell, half of them have already walked off, and I don't have the heart to fire them. I'm done, Crystal. I don't know what game this is or what new drug you're on, but I'm done with this bullshit. Find someone else to keep you safe cause I'm out of here."

She had screamed at him, railed at him, told him she would ruin him, but he and his men had left, leaving her alone with the chef and the housekeeper and the driver.

And the haunting creatures that constantly laughed at her.

*

"I know I'm not crazy."

She was walking to the kitchen as the sun cast its last light over the horizon when the bathroom door opened, and she heard that chuckling coming from the bathroom. The water came on as well, the tub, she thought, and she stood transfixed by the sight of the open door as it seemed to leak darkness into the hallway. She was frozen, unsure how to proceed, so she did the only thing that had ever gotten her through this sort of stuff.

She opened Snapchat and started talking to her fans.

"This weirdness just keeps happening. The bathroom door just popped open, and the water started flowing, and I'm scared, guys."

Her chat log began to flood with messages, but she held the camera out, the light illuminating the dark bathroom as she came forward. The water was still running, the tub filling somehow, as she shakily walked into the bathroom. She found the switch and flipped, the light not coming on despite how many times she flipped in on and off. The water in the tub looked black, but that could have just been the room's lack of light.

Then the surface burst, and Jarret came out, his wrists trailing blood.

"You're really loosin in Crys. It sounds like you might be ready for the funny farm."

She could see him sitting there in the bathtub, his grinning face looking cold as the phone light illuminated him, but her screen, as she peaked at it to make sure he was in frame, showed nothing. On the screen, the tub was empty. On the screen, the tub contained nothing but the glare from the light. On the screen, the tap did nothing but gleam chromly.

In the tub, Jarret was writing Crystal is a Bitch on the wall of her tub in his blood.

"Why are you here? What the fuck do you want?" she almost screamed.

"You took my life, Crys, so I'm here to return the favor. Sweet dreams," he said, waving as black hands drug him down into her bathtub.

She screamed as the light came on and fell backward into the hallway, her finger coming off the button.

The whole exchange had taken less than a minute.

She sat trembling on the floor as the messages came rolling in.

Most of them thought she was faking it; the rest questioned whether she had had a mental breakdown.

No one believed her.

*

She looked back on the events of the night before and felt that her life was becoming unraveled.

She had spent another sleepless night wandering through her house. The laughing voices had dogged her heels, the little shadow people running in and out of her peripheral vision, and she had posted video after video to Snapchat and Facebook of her screaming at nothing or hiding from the pursuers that only she could see. They had opened any door she had closed, invaded any space she had hoped would give her refuge, and, because of them, the cook had now left as well.

Well, that had been here too, she supposed.

She had been hiding in the pantry when he'd come to work this morning. She was crying, begging the creatures to leave her alone, and when he'd opened the door, she panicked. She'd thrown cans at him, screaming like a banshee, as she drove him out of the pantry door. He had left in a huff, saying that he couldn't deal with this sort of behavior. The driver had pulled up about that time, and he had gotten into his car and pulled away as well.

When the maid hadn't shown up by noon, Crystal assumed that she was alone now.

Alone with her demons.

They hounded her again as she walked through the house. She moved like a sleepwalker, shooting video sometimes, but mostly just walking around and trying to get away, trying to find someplace they wouldn't find her. She would make updates to Facebook, little segments for Snapchat, and her views were through the roof, but not because people liked what she was doing.

Since yesterday, she had gained five thousand new followers, but all of them just seemed to be here to watch her fall apart. They laughed at her, they mocked her and said this was all a stunt, but none tried to help her. Those fans had left now, gone silent, and what remained just wanted to watch her fizzle out.

She continued to wander around the house, her whole day kind of blurring by as she ran from the laughter. At one point, she was in the hallway, a knife in her hand as she shouted into the dark corners. That's where they lived, that's where they hid, and she could see their eyeless, leering mouths now as she fell into sleep-starved insanity. However, she dropped the knife when several of them dropped out of that dark corner, and her tired legs took her up the stairs and into her bedroom.

She shot a video from the floor of her closet, hearing them caper outside as she sobbed and begged for someone to help her. The comments were mixed, most of them thinking this was an act and the others telling her to go confront them. She could see them under the door, though, and there were too many of them. She didn't dare go out there. She tried to show them to the people in her Facebook feed, but they either said they couldn't see anything or pretended they could to feed her delusion.

She passed out after a couple of hours and found herself in the bathroom, her house dark as the sun went down.

The whole day was gone, and she was looking into the cabinet over the sink and staring at a bottle of Percocet. She had gotten them from somewhere. People were always giving her drugs or leaving them behind. She reached out for them, not knowing what she meant to do with them but hoping that maybe they could help her somehow. They could make the fear go away, make her feel good, maybe even make her fall asleep.

She was so tired…

"That's a great idea, Crys. Just take the whole bottle and draw yourself a bath. Trust me when I say that drowning isn't nearly as bad as they make it out to be. Hopped up on all those percies, you'll never even know you've…"

"Shut Up!" she screamed, slamming the door on the medicine cabinet and watching the glass fall in shards into the sink.

She turned and found him in the tub again, and why wouldn't he be? Why wouldn't she see him playing guitar? Why wouldn't she see him sitting in her bathtub? He had lived for the guitar, and he had died in the bath after she had taken even that joy away from him. In a way, she guessed she deserved this. She had ruined him, ruined this beautiful creature, and now she was paying the price.

She reached in and took the bottle of pills and made her way to her bedroom.

She sat on the bed, looking at them as the sun went down, finally unscrewing the top and taking a handful before walking to the door that opened to the balcony.

The light came on as she balanced it on the lip of the veranda.

"I found these pills in my medicine cabinet. They helped a little, but...I can still hear his voice. He's telling me how this is my punishment, how I deserve to die, and you know what... he's right, I ruined Jarret's career. He never hurt me. I just couldn't stand the idea that he would keep living and loving and being loved by the people after I left. I'm a heartless bitch, and I deserve this."

She dropped the pills then, and as the video rolled, she jumped off the balcony.

She hit the pool with a loud splash, and as she sank to the bottom, her last images of this world were the creatures coming to gather around the lip of the pool.

She saw a larger one too. She saw a man-shaped silhouette as it bent down to look at her. A hand broke the surface of the water, and she saw that he was reaching for her, saving her from the depths. She hesitated, fearing it was a trick, but finally grasped the hand in desperation, coughing and gasping as she broke the surface. She looked up, panting, into the face of her savior.

Jarret smiled, but it was not the smile of the Jarret she knew.

"Glad you could join us, Crys. These guys said I needed a backup singer, and I told them I thought I knew someone who would work just fine."

Crystal glanced back to the pool and saw her body still floating at the bottom.

That would be where they found her, too, when the paramedics finally believed the frantic callers.

By then, though, it would be far too late.