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For all of the old gang dorsum home: Big Joe, Fatty Steve, Hoss, Chunk, Moose, and Tank. May they all rest in peace.

"You want to hear a story? Well, buckle the fuck up."

PROLOGUE

It rained similar we were a splatter of bird shit God was trying to hose off his deck. The iii of usa ripped through the downpour in a beige 1996 Saturn Coupe, me at the cycle.

I squinted drunkenly into the rearview mirror and tried in vain to find the headlights of the blackness truck that was chasing united states of america, but I actually wasn't sure if its drivers needed headlights to come across or if they even had eyes. I also wasn't sure it was a truck, or if information technology was black, or if we were being pursued at all. It was definitely raining, though.

My friend, John, was in the passenger seat and the simply reason he wasn't driving was considering, in addition to also beingness drunk, he was wounded—both of his hands were wrapped in the T-shirt he'd torn off to use as gauze. His wounds had not been inflicted by our pursuers, at least non straight—he had burned himself grabbing a fondue pot full of melted chocolate that we had been dipping fried chicken strips into (try it quondam, seriously). My girlfriend, Amy, was in the back seat. She wasn't driving considering she didn't know how, simply she plainly did have enough expertise to guess my functioning, screaming warnings at me to keep my optics on the route and to watch out for that bend and oh god we're all gonna die.

In Amy'south correct hand—her only hand—was a little grey metallic container nigh the size of a shot glass. That container was what the occupants of the truck were after, and I had known this the moment they had burst into John'due south living room ten minutes ago.

We had just been minding our own business, eating our chocolate chicken and making our way through a theme movie nighttime (nosotros'd picked out four films in which the ending is probably the main graphic symbol'southward dying hallucination: Taxi Driver, Minority Report, The Shawshank Redemption, and Mrs. Doubtfire). In through the front door came this whirlwind of a half-dozen men(?) in black cloaks, all wearing what looked similar rubber Halloween masks—drooping, expressionless faces with lifeless, skewed eyeballs. The lead cloak was wearing the mask of a puffy-cheeked babe and brandished a weapon that looked like a huge, electrified Toblerone bar—a series of black pyramids in a row, fed by cables that ran inside his robe. John's little Yorkshire terrier was yapping its head off, probably asking the intruders to take him away to a better dwelling house.

The "man" with the Toblerone gun had screamed, "WHERE IS It?" in a phonation similar a spider that had learned to imitate human being speech via some online courses it had taken. We hadn't had to ask what "it" was. John's house is my favorite place in the earth, just in that location's nothing else in in that location you lot couldn't supercede with a trip to Target or a garage sale held at a meth dealer'due south firm. No, they had come up for that little brushed steel vial Amy at present held in her manus.

They weren't getting information technology.

So, John had grabbed the fondue pot and slung the molten contents at the thing with the spidery phonation, inflicting hot chocolate-brown splash damage on everyone in the room. Amy grabbed the vial from its hiding identify (sitting in plain view on John's kitchen counter, next to a novelty bell shaped similar a triathlon trophy) and we sprinted out the dorsum door into a raging thunderstorm. We piled into my car, I floored it, and that'due south where we are now.

The rain was blasting directly into the windshield, the drops whipping toward me like hyperdrive stars. Visibility was slightly worse than what you get within a car wash after they spray on that multicolored foam. Amy was yelling turn-by-plow directions at me and I was obeying, even though none of us had discussed where we were going. She ordered me to end just every bit nosotros arrived at a rusty bridge suspended over a roiling, bloated river. She threw open the rear door, sprinted out into the storm, and chucked the vial downstream as difficult equally she could. The aroused, rumbling current swallowed it without and then much as a plop.

John and I ran upward to the rail and exchanged frantic "Did that really just happen?" glances. None of us spoke. A decision had been made and could not exist taken back.

Amy had been right, of course, to do what she did. Goal Number 1 was to keep the vial out of the hands of the cloaked things that were chasing u.s.a. and Goal Number 2 was to make sure they knew we no longer had it, otherwise they'd simply strap us to chairs and endeavour to torture its location out of united states using some unspeakable method involving black magic and ability tools.

John said, "When they get here, let me do all the talking."

I said, "Amy, when they get here, I desire you to do all of the talking. I'll be busy restraining John."

Our pursuers, however, never arrived. I don't know how long we waited, leaning on the railing, watching the frothing current twisting and breaking below. Cold rain howled into our ears. John absently licked chocolate off his fingers. Amy shivered, her red hair disordered confronting her skull so that it looked like she was bleeding profusely from the scalp. Maybe they knew we had chucked the vial, mayhap they had never followed u.s. at all. You're probably wondering who "they" are and who they work for and those are both corking questions. Nosotros climbed back into the machine.

John tied his wet hair into a ponytail, lit a cigarette, and said, "I fucking knew something like this was nearly to happen."

Amy tried in vain to dry out her glasses with her moisture shirt and said, "Well, thanks for letting us know."

I said, "If they dredge the river, they can find it."

"Information technology floats," replied Amy. "Did you see that electric current? River flows into the Ohio, that flows into the Mississippi, that drains into the Gulf of United mexican states. They'll never observe it, unless…"

She trailed off only nosotros all knew what she had left unsaid: they would never observe the vial, unless the contents wanted to exist found.

No ambush was waiting for u.s. back at John'southward place. The strange men-like shapes in their dark robes and Halloween masks were nowhere to be found, on that or any of the following nights. We had spent the balance of the evening dealing with the dog, as we had come back and found information technology lapping up the chocolate on the rug. It turns out chocolate is toxic to dogs; information technology started puking everywhere and nosotros had to blitz it to the vet.

Or, that's how I recall it, anyhow.

1. A CHILD GOT KIDNAPPED BY A DEMON OR SOMETHING

Me

I woke up on the floor of my junk room, a tiny second bedroom in my apartment that's piled high with the weird bullshit I collect. Though I guess that wording would imply that I seek this stuff out; I really meant "collect" in the manner that dead bugs "collect" on your windshield. The offset thing I saw when I opened my optics was four ventriloquist dummies, where they had been propped upward around my face then that I'd find them staring downward at me when I woke. I thought the things were creepy as hell, and Amy knew that, which is why she had put them there. She is a monster.

I sat upward on my elbows, feeling like a rat had chewed its way into 1 of my center sockets and so clawed its manner out the other. I s

quinted and saw that stuck to one of the dummies was a Post-it Notation that read:

You lot were sleepwalking again!

I went dorsum to work

Muffin on the tabular array

Love you lot

—Amy

At the bottom she had drawn a picture of a muffin, trivial scribbled dots to betoken blueberries. The dots were really blue—she had gone and found a different pen to practice that part.

It was still dark out, I could sense it even though the one window in the room was more often than not obscured past a big painting that was leaning confronting information technology. It was a painting of a clown that the previous owner had insisted was cursed (that is, the painting was cursed, not the clown, unless he was, which is entirely possible). "Cursed" turned out to exist a ridiculous exaggeration, though. What was happening was the painted clown's mouth was slowly irresolute shape with time, as if information technology was silently mouthing words. I don't doubt that if you ready the painting in front of a time-lapse photographic camera for a few months and hired a lip reader to examine the results, it would turn out the clown was saying something very creepy or even profound. Mayhap it's a prophecy. And, if you want to pay to do all that shit, be my guest. Only as far as I'k concerned, if the object isn't killing anybody, it isn't "cursed." I've had it in the junk room for 4 months and information technology hasn't inconvenienced me once.

My cell phone was ringing from somewhere nearby, which I causeless was what had woken me. I knew that at this 60 minutes, it wasn't somebody calling to tell me they'd accepted my job application, and so it was either:

A) a drunken misdial from somebody, in which case I would dedicate my life to finding that person and murdering them;

B) an emergency;

C) an "emergency," and those right there are sarcasm quotes.

If it was Amy, then information technology was a expert chance information technology was "B"—an actual emergency. If it was John, well, information technology could be any of the three.

A psychic one time told John that his concluding words would be, "Hold my beer." When he was xi years old, he had disappeared for ii weeks, creating a small-scale media frenzy in the area. When he turned up again at home, unharmed, he told reporters and police that he had gotten lost in the forest and survived by killing and eating a Sasquatch. His sophomore year of high school, John was suspended multiple times because for every single creative writing assignment, he had turned in a different version of a story about a teenager (named "Jon") who was sneaking into the cafeteria and jerking off in the food. His senior twelvemonth, he started a garage ring that was apace banned from every society, bar, park, and concert hall in the region due to his insistence on playing a song called, "This Venue Is a Front for Homo Trafficking, Someone Call the FBI, this Is Not Only a Joke Song Title." When John'south first girlfriend asked him what his ideal threesome would be, he had answered, "Me, Hitler, and Prince. I just watch."

In the fifteen years I've known him, I'd say seventy percent of the overnight calls I've received from John were drunken misdials, 5 per centum were genuine emergencies (like the time he chosen to let me know he was near to be compacted inside a garbage truck), and 25 percent were "emergencies" and actually I tin't make those sarcasm quotes there large plenty. Only in the past twelve months, the situations that John felt warranted a call in the wee hours of the morning included:

A) a dream/vision he had of me dying violently in Bangkok, with a warning to stay far way (note: we live in the American Midwest and I couldn't afford a aeroplane ticket to Bangkok even if I sold myself into the Thai sex trade upon arrival);

B) urgently notifying me of a "cryptid" he had snapped a photo of in his back yard, which turned out to be a passed-out drunk in the back half of a horse costume;

C) the results of a blindfolded experiment he and his friends had performed that confirmed that all Froot Loops are the same flavor, just unlike colors ("nosotros're doing Skittles adjacent, get your donkey over hither");

D) his million-dollar idea for a "Dial Zoo," which is similar a petting zoo where yous get to punch the animals.

The final such telephone call I had gotten from him was two weeks ago. It was but a few seconds of ambience party noise, before I heard John's voice say, "What's that audio? Everybody tranquillity, I—Ha! Hey Munch, check information technology out! I farted so hard it dialed my phone!"

Simply, of course, I couldn't just ignore his calls because there was always the chance it was something apocalyptic. That was the hell of knowing John.

The phone sounded close, probably in the room with me. I knocked the dummies bated and pawed effectually the junk in my immediate vicinity. Backside the dummies was a piñata that the previous owner claimed was indestructible. So far, nosotros'd tried shooting it with a shotgun and running it over with John's Jeep and, certain enough, the candy was still safely rattling around inside. Over again, that's pretty weird, merely what possible use is that to anybody? It's just a waste matter of perfectly skillful processed. If yous're maxim nosotros should give it to the government so they can mimic its witchcraft or any to make better torso armor for the military, I'm thinking you trust the government fashion more than I do. If it's a bona fide Object Cursed with Black Magic, handing information technology over to the feds would be like giving a toddler a chainsaw to cut his birthday block with. "Oh," you're probably proverb, "so it'southward better off in your apartment?" I don't know, dude. Do you want it? Ship me your accost. Yous pay for shipping.

I finally found the phone sitting atop a bookcase, next to a VHS box set of a series of 90s action movies starring Bruce Willis (The Ticking Man, The Ticking Man 2, The Ticking Man: The Terminal Chapter, Ticking Man Resurrection) that as far as I could tell, did non exist in this universe. We never watched them, nobody has a VCR, and they looked kind of shitty.

The telephone's display said it was John calling.

I groaned and stumbled out into the living room to discover that no one had broken in and renovated the place while I was out. There are reality shows where they do that, right? I heard the plink-plink-plink of the roof leaking in the bathroom, which the landlords wouldn't set up because my apartment is on the flooring higher up theirs and the leak wasn't making information technology down to their level considering, by pure coincidence, the baste was positioned to fall straight into my toilet. That was good for them, because it limited the damage the leak could do to my flooring and their ceiling, only bad for us because it meant Amy had to hold a bowl in her lap when she peed (whereas I but let it drip on me).

The phone rang over again. I went to the kitchenette and poured a mug of common cold java from a pot that had been brewed yesterday, or maybe terminal month. Information technology was v in the forenoon, co-ordinate to the grease-clouded clock on the microwave. I found the muffin—huckleberry, simply equally it had been depicted in Amy's illustration—sitting on the folding bill of fare table nosotros eat dinner off of. It was next to a pile of random junk that had been mailed to me in the terminal few weeks merely had not yet been filed away (and here "filed" ways angrily flung into the junk room while muttering fuck words). Most of the stuff in at that place arrives like this, just strangers sending information technology through the mail. Sometimes you can get a distressing glimpse into their lives via the packing material—one artifact came packed in wadded-up pages from that Jehovah'due south Witness mag, The Watchtower, another was ensconced in shredded hospital bills, another in scraps of cardboard torn from three dozen boxes of the exact same Lean Cuisine frozen dinner.

Why do they send me this stuff? Well, you lot know how occasionally you lot get stuck with something purely considering y'all don't know how to throw it away? Either because information technology seems too sacred to get smooshed in with moldy coffee grounds (an one-time Bible, an American flag, a birthday carte from your grandma) or because information technology seems vaguely dangerous (old shotgun shells, a broken dagger)? All of the shit I've collected is kind of a combination of the two—sacred, lethal, or both. And so, they dig upward my address and stick it in the mail. "David Wong volition know what to do with it!" No, I admittedly will not. Information technology just piles up and the stuff that doesn't seem also dangerous gets sold on eBay (there'due south a whole "Metaphysical" category on the site at present, information technology's nifty).

Among this week's junk had been a water-damaged "haunted" paper

dorsum copy of Bad as I Wanna Exist, the autobiography of Chicago Bulls ability frontwards Dennis Rodman. "Haunted" considering this copy, and only this copy, had multiple chapters describing how Rodman conspired with several teammates to ritualistically murder over fifty prostitutes in the years they traveled with the team. It doesn't appear the volume was doctored in any way, the pages have the same typeset every bit the residual, and they're exactly as aged. I did some Googling, could find no other reference to the being of this edition of the volume, or to the killings. As usual, I have no idea what information technology ways.

Next to the book was a pocket-sized piano-black twelve-sided box, each side etched with a unlike rune in emerald green. I waved my hand over the box and exclaimed, "ODO DAXIL!" The box unfolded and I felt radiant estrus waft across my face up. Inside was a glowing orange sphere the size of a marble. Nosotros got this one a couple of weeks ago. At first it didn't seem to do much other than emit quite a bit of heat only then, while John was over for Pancake and Video Game Nighttime, he thought he heard a tortured wailing from within the sphere. I initially dismissed the idea, every bit he was pretty boozer and I call up he e'er hears tortured wailing when he drinks. Still, the side by side day nosotros took information technology to the middle school where a friend and former bandmate of John's named Mitch Lombard (nickname, "Munch") had gotten a chore as a substitute science teacher despite his cervix tattoos. He studied the glowing sphere nether 1 of their microscopes for a silent moment, then looked upwards from the viewfinder to whisper, "His suffering is unimaginable, but the estrus of his rage could incinerate the universe a 1000000 times over. All is lost. All is lost." Munch had then passed out, blood running freely from his nose. That was the last time we'd discussed it.

I grabbed a pair of tongs from a kitchen drawer, picked upwardly the glowing sphere, and dropped information technology into my mug of common cold coffee equally the telephone rang for what I knew would be the terminal fourth dimension before it would get dumped to vocalization mail.

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