The Watcher in the Wall (9 page)

Slow down, tiger,
she typed.
You on here to get laid, or do you really want to die?

Then she waited. Regarded Gabriel98’s profile picture again, those haunted, piercing eyes. Felt something, and it wasn’t necessarily the urge to die.
Write back,
she thought, and immediately hated herself for thinking it.

Then her computer chimed. His reply.
Oh, I’m going for it,
he wrote.
One hundred percent. I’m just searching for someone who’s actually serious about doing it with me
.

There are so many posers on these sites,
Madison wrote back.
Most of these assholes are going to die warm in their beds in the nursing home sixty years from now. There’s nobody real.

Totally agree,
Gabriel replied.
Too many time wasters. And you?

Madison blinked.
And me what?

Are you real?

Madison looked at Gabriel’s picture again.
Hell yes,
she wrote.
I’m as real as it gets
.

<
32
>

They worked on
the profile for a solid hour. Chose a username—XXBlackDaysXX—and raided Mathers’s laptop for an old school picture.

“Why me?” Mathers asked Windermere.

“You’re barely out of grade school,” Windermere told him. “Plus, you’re not famous yet. Stevens is too old to be playing a moody teen, and I’ve had my picture in the paper too much to stay incognito.”

Mathers grinned. “The curse of the Supercop.”

“Anyway, if we want to attract this girl’s attention, it’s better if we’re a guy.”

“That’s assuming she’s a girl at all.”

“She’s playing a girl on the Internet, Derek. We’re playing the guy who thinks she’s cute in her profile picture. That’s all that matters, at this point.”

“Fair enough,” Mathers said, uploading the picture. “But we need some kind of backstory. What’s our boy doing on this forum, besides scoping out the hotties?”

Stevens and Windermere didn’t say anything for a moment. Then Stevens shifted his weight. “Sure,” he said. “What if we’re being bullied in school? That seems pretty common.”

“Okay,” Mathers said. “Why, though?”

“Because we’re clumsy and awkward,” Windermere said. “Because we’re constantly doing silly shit like falling on our faces in front of the whole school, or wearing our shirts inside out. Or wearing the same clothes over and over because our dad’s in the hospital and our relatives don’t have enough money to buy us a new wardrobe every month—or year, for that matter. Or maybe we don’t have any friends because we’re too tall and funny-looking, and we don’t go to school dances, because if we do, we just stand against the wall because nobody would ever be caught dead dancing with us.

“We’re lonely,” Windermere continued. “We see everyone else in the whole goddamn school walking around with friends and, like, girlfriends or whatever, but we go home alone. We go home and wash our shitty clothes until they’re threadbare so we can wear them tomorrow without smelling bad, and we don’t go to parties or out to the movies, and even the friends we
do
think we have would sell us out at a moment’s notice, just for a chance to be more popular.” She exhaled. “How’s that?”

Stevens and Mathers were staring at her. Mathers’s eyes were wide,
like she’d just told him she’d emigrated from Neptune. Stevens was studying her with that concerned-dad expression of his, like he knew there was something the matter and he didn’t want to let it go until he’d sorted out the problem.

Windermere took a step back, feeling flushed. “Or, whatever,” she said. “Those are just, you know, suggestions.”

“That’s a backstory, all right,” Mathers said, turning back to his laptop. “Should I just type that out and send Ashley Frey a message, then?”

“Heck, no,” Stevens replied. “We send her a message so quick, she’s going to smell something funny. We need to draw her to us.”

“Okay. How?”

“We wait,” Windermere said. The men turned to her, as though they hadn’t expected her to speak up again. As though they figured her little rant had been her exit speech. She pressed on. “We bat our eyes and try to look pretty, and hope that she sees us. Maybe we post something on one of the forum threads, something she’s bound to see. Something that’ll make her take notice.”

“I like it,” Stevens said. “Some kind of forum post. She likes lonely teenagers. Let’s play up Carla’s angle.”

“But we’re not lonely teenagers,” Mathers said. “What if she sees through us, smells a rat?”

“We’ll take that chance,” Stevens said. “I’d say we have a pretty authentic, ah, backstory to work with.”

“Fine.” Mathers studied the screen, his picture in the profile XXBlackDaysXX. “But if this comes back to bite me, I’m going to be pissed, you guys.”

Windermere hit him. “What are you going to do, Mathers?” she said. “Tell the principal?”

<
33
>

Gruber friended DarlingMadison
on “Brandon’s” Facebook page. Printed out her profile picture and brought it to work with him, taped it up in his locker in the break room.

He couldn’t see her picture without thinking about Sarah. Without flashing back to that last night in the double-wide, to the thrill he’d felt as he watched her, that high-voltage intensity, the power. Earl hadn’t killed Sarah;
he
had. And he would do it to this girl, as he’d done with all the others.

He typed her a message on his phone.
So what brought you here? Why do you want to kill yourself?

She answered.
I’m just sick of living,
she said.
You know? Sick of putting out the effort all the time just so a bunch of assholes at school can push me around. My mom keeps moving us to new cities and I keep having to change schools and I never fit in. I hate feeling like an outsider, but it’s never going to change. I figure I might as well get on with it.

Yeah,
Gruber wrote.
I know what you mean. Why do you move around so much?

Mom’s broke,
DarlingMadison replied.
Dad ran away. Dog died. It’s like a country song. Wah-wah.

Gabriel98:
Do you like country music?

DM:
Hell no. Sure made it awkward when we were living in Texas.

DM:
Do you?

G:
Not really. Some of it’s okay.

DM:
What music do you like?

Gruber opened a new Internet window on his phone, brought up a music website, trendy hipster stuff. One of his prospects had sent him the link when he’d made the mistake of telling her he liked Justin Bieber.

G:
M83. Kanye. Arcade Fire. I like a bit of everything.

G:
You?

DM:
Yeah, pretty much. I really like classic rock, but nobody else does. One more reason I’m an outcast.

G:
What kind of classic rock?

DM:
Zeppelin. Rush. The Who. Frank Zappa. I dunno. Shit my dad used to play when he drove me to school in the morning.

Gruber almost wrote back, telling her he hated that stuff. Remembering Earl playing it in the kitchen of that little double-wide, volume cranked, singing along, loud. Realized he was forgetting himself, getting careless. Too caught up in the whole Sarah connection.

Right,
he wrote back instead.
I know a little bit of that stuff. It’s cool.

DM:
Hah. You don’t have to patronize me. I know I have weird tastes.

Was she mad? Gruber wished he could see her face. He could always tell if Sarah was mad, just the way she looked at him. The way she said his name,
Ran-dy
, the syllables clipped and distinct. He always knew.

He couldn’t know with this one, but he wanted to know. He didn’t want to lose her. He couldn’t.

Then she wrote back.
Anyway, whatever. Why are
you
doing it?

The door to the break room opened before Gruber could think up an answer. Adam Osing, Gruber’s acne-scarred punk boss, poked his head inside.

“Gruber,” he said, frowning. “What are you doing in here? Your shift started twenty minutes ago.”

Gruber held up his phone. “Important phone call. Family emergency.”

Osing’s expression didn’t change. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Do it on your own time. We need you in ladies’ fashions. Cleanup in the maternity aisle.”

Osing waited, watched as Gruber made a show of turning off his cell phone, tucking it away in his locker. Turned on his heel and walked back out of the break room as Gruber closed the locker door. Quickly, in case Osing returned, Gruber fished the phone out of his locker. Opened the chat box.

DarlingMadison had written,
Hello?

Gruber stared at the screen, Earl fresh in his mind, Sarah. He could see Sarah dancing around her little bedroom in that pretty blue dress. He could hear Earl’s music cranked out in the kitchen, Jim Morrison singing “Five to One” at high volume. Could remember the way his body tensed up when Earl’s boots stopped outside his bedroom door, the way his whole being would freeze up from the fear.

The break-room door opened. Osing again, his cheeks flushed and getting redder. “Move it, Gruber,” he said. “I catch you on that phone again during work hours, I’ll shit-can you, I swear.”

Gruber turned away. “Yeah. One second.”

Why am I doing this?
he wrote.
Because fuck my stepfather, that’s why.

<
34
>

Fuck my stepfather,
that’s why.

It was Earl who’d found Sarah’s body. Gruber watched him push open Sarah’s door, watched his bleary, drunken eyes scan the room. Watched the way those eyes seemed to come into focus when he found Sarah in the closet. Watched how Earl didn’t do anything, didn’t run to her, try and save her. Just took a pull from the bottle in his hand and spit and looked at her.

“Well,” he said. “Shit.”

The police showed up pretty soon after that. Gruber replaced the painting and climbed into bed and pretended he didn’t know, pretended to be surprised and sad and scared. The police investigated Sarah’s room and took her body away, and then an officer in plainclothes came into Gruber’s room and sat down on the bed and started asking questions. Gruber didn’t tell him about the hole in the wall, and the man never knew.

But the police found out about Earl. It took a few days, but then they came back to the motor court again and parked in front of the trailer, three patrol cars, and they came into the house and stood in the living room with Earl and Gruber’s mom, and they talked about the autopsy and the bruises they’d found, and the cuts and the other things, too.

And then Earl was shouting and swearing and fighting with the cops, and a couple big officers put him in handcuffs and took him out of the trailer and locked him up in the back of their cruiser and drove
away, and then it was just Gruber and his mom in that double-wide, and even that didn’t last very long, a day or two, maybe, and then the doctors came for Gruber, he’d gone with them, and that was the last he ever saw of that shitty double-wide.

But he dreamed of going back. Finding Earl—it wouldn’t be that hard. Showing him how he’d grown up. What he’d become. Showing Earl what it felt like to be the weak one for a change.

He’d traced the route home many times in his head, imagined himself surprising Earl with a visit. Turning the tables on the bastard, bashing his head in. Showing him just what a powerful, hateful being he’d created.

But he hadn’t done it, not yet. He didn’t know where Earl was living, for starters. And anyway, he knew he’d go to jail if he murdered his stepfather, might even wind up on death row. And Gruber didn’t want to die, no matter how much he hated Earl. He was too addicted to the watching.

•   •   •

It had taken a long time to develop his method, a lot of trial and error, a few narrow escapes. People didn’t take kindly to men with Gruber’s tastes. They called the police, or sometimes they came after Gruber themselves, with baseball bats, knives, a pistol once or twice. He’d learned to steer clear. Picked up a snuff habit, underground videos. Death and dismemberment from the comfort of his home. Knew there had to be a way he could get his own fix.

The epiphany came unexpected and was long awaited, more than a decade after Sarah. He was working the next state over, some dead-end job pumping gas for cash a quarter mile from the local high school.
Three kids came into the gas station, burnouts, all of them, black clothes and heavy makeup, the strong odor of pot.

“That’s not how the guy on the forum said to do it,” the tallest one was saying, his voice a dull, disinterested monotone. “He said you need to run a hose from the tailpipe to the window, if you really want it to work. Otherwise it’ll take, like, forever.”

The only girl in the group shook her head. “Whatever,” she said. “It’s not like I have a car, anyway.”

“Besides, who says you can trust a guy on a suicide forum?” the third one said. “By the very nature of his still being alive, he’s untrustworthy.”

The kids brought their purchases to the counter—bags of chips, Snickers bars, a bag of beef jerky. Gruber studied them as he began to ring it up.

“What forum?” he asked.

The kids looked at one another, suspicious, surprised that he’d spoken. Looked around the tiny store.

“The forum you’re talking about,” Gruber said. “What is it?”

Another long pause. “Never mind,” the girl said. “Just ring up our lunches,
please
. We’re late for class.”

“You said a suicide forum,” Gruber told her. “What does that mean?”

“Duh,” the girl said. “It’s a forum for people to talk about suicide. Like, methods and stuff. And if you’re not sure and want someone to talk to.”

Gruber felt an electric thrill course through his body. “A forum,” he said. “On the Internet?”

The kids didn’t even bother to answer. Just looked at him the way the kids at his school used to, like he was slow. Simple.

“What’s it called?”

The kids hesitated again. “Death Wish,” they said finally. “You’re not, like, going to tell anyone, are you?”