It belonged on my wall. I needed her eyes on my wall.
“Who’s that?” Spud asked from beside me. I swallowed, having forgotten he was there.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“That’s really sad,” he told me, with far too much lament in his voice. “She was hot.”
For a moment I couldn’t figure out why he sounded so down, but then I noticed the headline at the top of the page: SAN FRANCISCO FAMILY DEAD, BURNED IN HOME.
I’d had the breath knocked out of me before. When I was nine, my neighbor Andrew Roscolli had lost twelve Pokémon cards to me in a bet, and in a rage he’d hit me with a baseball bat. That was the feeling that overcame me the second I read that headline. Instantly I was lightheaded, blinking, my throat dry as dizziness forced me to lean against the car’s side to steady myself. The cold metal brought me back, squeezing the edges of the newspaper so tightly that I crumpled it.
“Calm down, man,” Spud told me. What was wrong with me? I unfolded the bottom of the paper only to find that the article wasn’t a part of the clipping. There were names, though, in the caption: THE STEWART FAMILY. Steve and Margaret, with their twin sons Bobby and Steve Jr. And the girclass="underline" Callista.
My heart was beating faster now. I glanced to the top of the newspaper. It was dated five days ago. She’d been alive so recently. Barely gone. Freshly dead.
“You think he killed them too?” Spud said, voicing what I was too shaken to say.
“That would…make sense,” I agreed, gesturing emptily at the briefcase and then rubbing my forehead to ease the pounding headache that had arisen. Why? How could there be any reason to kill this family? Then go after me but leave my family unharmed?
Those thoughts made my insides reel. What are you doing, Michael? I didn’t know these people and there was no logical reason for me to act like I cared.
I folded the newspaper up immediately, not wanting to think about it anymore. Moving it revealed that there was actually one final paper in the bottom of the briefcase: an index card. I reached for it.
There was a scribbled note on the front, written in pen and smudged slightly by the writer’s hand. My name was written and circled with my business email address below it.
But to the right of my name was something else: a website address, also circled, with an arrow from my name pointing toward it.
“I’m on that!” Spud jumped to reach for his phone, but I was faster, pulling mine out of my pocket. I started my web browser. No connection at first. I held my phone up high, begging for it to work, until finally I managed to grab a strand of Internet through the trees.
It was difficult to type the long website address with my hands trembling and my sweaty thumbs sliding on the screen. Spud’s head pressed close to mine so that we could both see, the webpage loading slowly, every second feeling like forever. First came the black background, then some of the text, then lastly the subtitle at the top:
Only those who listen can hear what is true.
The website was arranged simply and had little design or flourish: only a plain black background, a long row of text for content and a sidebar on the right with links to archives. As I zoomed in on my tiny screen I saw that the archive dates went back for years, hyperlinks to hundreds of old posts. A blog.
The articles on the front page were truncated and showed only their titles and the first paragraph before having a link to read more. I scrolled down with my thumb and read the titles, most of them not making much sense to me. I saw one called THE FINANCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL CHIEFS OF INFLUENCE, and another THE AQUAFUEL TECHNOLOGY, and further down the page one called POST DEMOCRATIC PLAN OF ACTION.
Photographs broke up the page in several spots, and I paused on one of a pencil illustration of a coastline’s side view and deep under the sea that surrounded it. The picture showed a giant wave approaching the coastal city, but far away under the water was a long torpedo-shaped submarine. The title read, THE TSUNAMI DEVICE, and below that the beginning text:
Harken, all seekers of truth. I received this most recent correspondence and illustration from Anon this weekend, who reveals in it not only the further malicious intent of the Society, but their absolute disregard for the lives of those their procedures affect. For while even guilty offenders receive a trial, the humans who are in the path of these technologies fall to the side like slaughtered cattle, as witnessed by the …
And it cut off there, with a link for me to read more below the fold.
“It’s like a conspiracy theory…” Spud said under his breath. I looked at him, and he pointed to the page.
“These are all about secret government things,” he said. “Look at the titles: “Post Democratic Plan Of Action”? That’s like some sort of end-of-the-world theory I’d guess: what they’ll do when democracy falls apart. Like the black helicopters and Area 51.”
He gestured toward the illustration of the coastline. “This is about the tsunami that hit Indonesia a few months ago—see the date? It looks like whoever-this-is… this Anon person… he’s trying to say that it was a cover-up, and leaked it to this blog.”
“How do you know so much about this?” I asked with surprise.
“Don’t you ever listen to AM radio after midnight?” Spud asked, looking a little shocked that I didn’t. “I’m telling you, this is one of those sites. They pull out all this proof about a New World Order and aliens space ships and stuff. At least…what they call proof.”
He scratched his neck. “You wouldn’t believe how many of these things go through torrent sites. According to them, pretty much everything out there is a hoax by the government.”
“And you’ve read this site?” I said. He shook his head.
“No, never seen this one,” he replied. “I don’t really read much of it, just when I’m bored at night. Most of it’s on the radio. People call in all the time saying they know something. But you can’t take it seriously.”
Of course I can take it seriously. Because if the car was there, then I’d really met Mr. Sharpe. And if Mr. Sharpe existed, then he had tried to kill me. And if I was still alive, that meant he had failed, and the silver claws that I’d seen smashed through the roof of my car hadn’t been a delusion at all.
These thoughts caused everything I’d believed to be turned over. Many of my clients might have thought that my abilities were paranormal, and if it drove up sales I didn’t mind perpetuating that belief. But now that I felt I had seen something concrete, I didn’t know what was up or down anymore.
“What does this even have to do with me?” I asked aloud. It wasn’t like I knew anything about this stuff—no obvious reason for Mr. Sharpe to connect this site to me and come to the conclusion that I needed to be dead. Spud and I exchanged glances but neither of us had a good answer.
All this time, my thumb had been scrolling the webpage, and suddenly when my eyes turned back to the screen, my finger stopped abruptly. In the sidebar were links under a subheading labeled Introductory, bolded in cobalt blue with titles like FEDERAL RESERVE CARTEL and DIVISION OF EARTHLY POWERS. One in particular had caught my attention: THE SILVER-CLAWED GUARDIANS.
I clicked the link in the same instant I spotted it. However, I was greeted by a screen that required me to log in.
“What’s this?” I told Spud, gesturing. “Break through this.”
Spud snatched my phone and started to type quickly. However, his face showed from the start that he wouldn’t get far trying to break in. He tried a few logins and passwords but gave up without much of a fight.