The Mall of Cthulhu Read online

  Laura clicked off the TV in disgust. With the TV off, she could hear Ted dry-heaving in the bathroom. The sound made her slightly nauseous, as did the thought of cleaning his puke splatters off the pristine white tile in her bathroom. He had been kind of okay for a few hours, had then vomited, had then eaten an entire large pizza from Fred Ciampa's Same Old Place, and now appeared to have finished vomiting that up. Laura knew it made her a bad person, but she was just tired of holding up his head and wiping his chin. She figured that Ted, especially with all the alcohol and drugs he'd done in the last ten years, could probably vomit on his own with the best of them.

  What was she going to do? They had to go to the police. Didn't they? If the police knew about Ted, it would certainly be better to go to them before they came knocking on her door. But it had been ten hours. Laura would not be surprised if she were the only number Ted ever called from his phone, so surely the police would have called her by now if they had Ted's name. So she had to assume that the police did not have the shooter, that someone else had come for the shooter and had taken all the information that would lead the authorities to Ted. If people willing to wade into a crime scene across from a courthouse and remove a screaming burn victim and a computer in the moments before the police arrived were looking for Ted, Laura wasn't sure any place was going to be safe enough.

  So maybe they should go to the police. Maybe that was the best way to keep Ted safe. Except that Ted's story fundamentally didn't make any sense. One deranged customer (or employee, Laura tried to stop herself from thinking) shooting up a Queequeg's was a believable atrocity, but the idea that there was some kind of swift-moving conspiracy behind this—well, it just didn't make any sense. Why would an organized group of whackos target Queequeg's without issuing a statement explaining themselves? And why would they strike the customers rather than the establishment? Terrorists? But a suicide bomb is a much more reliable way to take out a café full of people. No, something was wrong with Ted's story, and that meant they couldn't go to the police.

  Ted emerged from the bathroom, face and hair freshly wetted down. A plush purple towel that matched the bath mat and hand towels in the bathroom was around Ted's neck, and Laura winced thinking about Ted wiping his puke with it. Well, she could always buy more towels.

  "Hey—what's the word from the local news? What did the hottie on channel 29 say about me?"

  "Which one?"

  "Bridget Tran y Garcia, of course!"

  "She really doesn't look Irish. You think she just decided to add Bridget when she got hired in Boston?"

  "Who cares? She looks really hot! What did she say?"

  "She said your police composite sketch made you appear devilishly handsome, and that she was aching for your touch despite, or possibly because of, the heinous act you'd just committed."

  "Cool."

  "Yeah, that's about as good as it's going to get, I'm afraid. So far you're just a "person of interest," but I'm sure the Boston Mail will have you upgraded to suspect by five a.m."

  "Nothing about Half-caf?"

  "No. Which means the police probably don't have or know about him. Which means he probably wasn't acting alone, which means—ugh, I hate to say this—fleeing in terror down to the harbor was probably the right thing to do."

  "Man, I wish I could tape record that. Could I just write 'Ted was right' on your calendar?"

  "No."

  "So nobody thinks I might have been the guy who got away and was now hiding in terror?"

  "Well, that's not as good a story as you flipping out because Michelle docked you for a seventeen-minute break or something. In that scenario, there's only one bad guy, and that's just much simpler and easier for everybody to get their heads around than some kind of conspiracy. Which seems weird, because these psychos almost always work alone. I can't understand why there would be any kind of organization behind this, Ted, I really can't. It doesn't look like terrorists, and it doesn't look like some fair-trade blow against Queequeg's corporate hegemony."

  "Is that how you say that word?"

  "What?"

  "Hege . . . that one. I've only ever seen it written."

  "I don't know, Ted, that's the way I say it, okay?"

  "Okay,"

  "But do you get what I'm saying? I mean, I'm mostly an ATM snoop, but I am a law-enforcement professional, and your story and the data just don't fit."

  Ted looked angry. "So you think I did it?"

  Maybe. Probably not. "Of course not. I'm just saying that your story rests on a conspiracy that makes no sense."

  Ted's face went from angry to embarrassed, and he was now shifting from foot to foot and looking kind of guilty. "I think I might have a clue about the conspiracy."

  "What?" Ted reached into his butt pocket and pulled out a CD. "What the hell is that?"

  "Uh, it's a CD that fell out of Half-caf's bag that I pocketed."

  "Jesus Christ! Why the hell didn't you tell me this?"

  Ted's face twisted up and turned red, and Laura felt guilty for snapping at him. "Because!" he yelled through tears that turned into gut-wrenching sobs. "Because this makes the whole fucking thing my fault! Those people . . . " More sobbing. "They just wanted a goddamn latte, and they got their brains plastered all over the walls, and it's my fault! Oh God!" He fell to the floor and tried in vain to vomit, but just crouched there with his mouth open making strangled coughing sounds.

  Any annoyance Laura felt fell away. He really was a pathetic creature, and it was saving her that had made him this way. Now she went to him and rubbed his back and pulled his hair away from his face. "It's not your fault, you know," she said quietly. "People leave shit in coffee shops thousands of times a day, and this is the first one I ever heard of who ever came back and shot the place up. You didn't cause this, Ted. You're a victim."

  "Yeah . . . " Ted raised his head. "Jesus, Laur, it was so horrible. It was so horrible."

  "I know. Why don't you try to get some sleep." She helped him to his feet, wiped the corner of his mouth with her plush purple towel, and brought him down the hall to her room. In spite of the clean, zen simplicity of Laura's room, Ted managed to make the place seem messy and chaotic. His rumpled, dripping form overruled the neatly made bad and transformed Laura's bedroom. She helped him over to the edge of the bed, and he lay down on it. Laura thought about asking him to remove his shoes, then thought better of it.

  "Uh, Laur?" he said.

  "Yeah, Ted?"

  "I know this is silly, but would you mind just sitting here for a minute? I know I'm a baby, but I just don't want to be alone right now."

  "You're not a baby," she said, and sat at the foot of the bed. Five minutes later he was asleep, and she took the CD and popped it into her computer.

  Five

  Ted was eighteen. He was in the library, sitting in a little carrel piled high with books for his paper on vampire legends for his folklore class, when he saw the photo of Elizabeth Stevens, alleged vampire from 1890 who'd been buried alive by fearful townspeople who blamed her for a tuberculosis outbreak. "Bitsy," he said. "Fucking Bitsy."

  Suddenly he was in the Omega house, standing in a corner, wearing an ill-fitting blazer, trying to catch Steve's eye as the sorority girls swarmed around him. "There are no mirrors here," he said to Steve. "What kind of sorority house doesn't have mirrors?"

  "Maybe they're all on the ceilings of the bedrooms," Steve said, leering. "I'm gonna find out!"

  And two weeks later, Ted was covered in blood, swinging the axe he'd dipped in holy water at St. Swithin's a few blocks away. He kicked in a door and saw Nancy bent over Steve. Steve was screaming. It took two strokes to take Nancy's head off. The stump of her neck steamed from the holy water, and her blood covered Steve, who was still screaming.

  "Oh Jesus, oh God, oh Jesus, you were right, Teddy, I'm sorry I didn't believe you, shit, she got me." And Steve began to sob. "I'm done, oh, God, Teddy, you have to save me, you have to save me."

  Tears blurred Teddy's vis
ion. "I'm sorry, Steve, I'm sorry, I'm too late, I'm too late."

  "Then kill me, Teddy, please, you have to fucking kill me! Don't make me end up like them, don't make me melt in the sun, please! Please, for Christ's sake, kill me before I turn! Kill me! Make it quick!"

  "I . . . I can't do it, Steve, I'm sorry, I . . . "

  "Bullshit you can't! You just took Nancy's head off, you can do mine! Do it, goddammit!"

  "Oh, Jesus, please, Steve, don't ask me this, don't, please, I can't . . . "

  "Kill me, you little pussy! It's you or me! I can smell your blood, Teddy, I can hear your heartbeat, and I don't want to kill you either, but already I want to drain your body, I wanna stand over you and howl with your blood running down my chin, don't make me do that Ted, I'll go to hell. So just do it, you worthless pussy! Fucking kill me, okay? Save my soul! Do it!"

  Ted reached the axe back, but it had turned into a coffee urn, and Steve had turned into Half-caf, and he threw the boiling hot coffee on him, crying and shouting, "Die!"

  Ted woke up screaming, with tears running down his face. He sat bolt upright in bed, realized he wasn't in his bed, and screamed again. He looked at the clock—it read 4:18, and he realized he was at Laura's house.

  He was relieved to be somewhere safe, and to be in the dark, away from the blood, the fire, and the screaming that haunted his dreams. He loved the way everything in Laura's apartment was neat and orderly and uncluttered. It was so unlike his apartment, so unlike his mind. He got out of bed and walked to the bathroom without tripping over dirty clothes or crunching DVDs under his feet or knocking over week-old, half-eaten Chinese takeout containers. He peed for a long time into a toilet bowl that was not stained brown, and he washed his hands with a tiny, un-slimy scented soap and dried his hands on a little towel instead of his pants. He realized his screaming would probably have woken Laura, so he decided to poke his head into the living room and offer her the use of her own bed for the next few hours. He certainly wasn't going back to sleep tonight.

  Laura was not asleep on the couch. She was in front of her computer, which was giving off the only light in the room, and she was sipping a mug of tea. "Hey," she called back to him. "You did pretty good. I thought the nightmares usually hit at 3."

  "Yeah, I got an extra hour in. Lucky me."

  "So I gotta tell you, I am completely stumped."

  "About what?"

  "I have been looking through this CD for hours. It's mostly spreadsheets, with no labels on the columns. The files are called things like 'Spreadsheet 1,' or 'Spreadsheet 24.' I mean, I guess it's possible this guy was keeping Whitey's books or something, but you really would have to know exactly what you were looking at to make any sense of this. I mean, somewhere there must be information on what the column headings are and what these files correspond to, but this is pretty useless stuff without that information."

  Ted pulled a chair over next to the computer. "And that's it?" he said.

  "Well, that and a couple of save files for some computer game."

  "What games?" Ted guessed they all involved a psychopathic shooting spree.

  "Uh, let's see. 'Age of Mythology'; 'Roller Coaster Tycoon'; 'Virtuality.' Ever heard of any of them?"

  "Yeah. Age of Mythology is one of those strategy games, Roller Coaster Tycoon is pretty self-explanatory, and Virtuality is a game where you can create a virtual person, or a whole group of virtual people, and then put them in a house, get them a job, take them out, stuff like this. You can go online and put your people into the Virtuality world, and they can interact with other virtuals."

  Laura looked at Ted blankly. "Why exactly the hell would anybody want to do that? Do you get to like have sex, or go on shooting sprees or something?"

  "Nah. The software won't let you do anything like that on screen. I guess you could talk about sex or something. But you definitely can't kill anybody."

  "So what's the point? I mean, I get why all these fat dorks want to be buff adventurers and stuff, but why would you want to play a game that's just as mundane as your real life?"

  "Got me. It seems especially weird if you're a psychotic killer holding Whitey's accounts on a CD."

  "Yeah. Well, look, I'm going to make a copy of the CD and take it to work, and don't worry, I'm not going to say where I got it, but I'll just ask one of the data guys who has a crush on me to look at the spreadsheets and see if he can at least figure out what they are supposed to be."

  "Does this data guy know his crush is a non-starter?"

  "This might come as a shock, but the FBI is not exactly the safest workplace in which to come out."

  "So you're using the guy's poor doomed crush to get him to do favors for you."

  "Pretty much, yeah. You got a problem? Because, if you'd rather I didn't engage in that unethical behavior, I could start being strictly ethical, which would of course involve turning the CD over to Boston Police before I have anybody look at it and also telling them the whereabouts of a certain person of interest."

  "Okay, okay, geez, you don't have to bite my head off." Ted hadn't missed Laura's annoyance, her "I'm your long-suffering friend" vibe that had been growing ever since she'd been transferred to Boston and he'd moved up here to be close to her. "You're not really going to turn me in, are you?"

  "Agh, no, Ted, I owe you my life, and that's why I'm putting my entire career on the line here, but it does kind of stress me out, you know, I mean, I don't know if you've really thought about what the consequences might be, but I do this stuff for a living. I know exactly what could happen to me if we get found out, and I'm not really comfortable withholding evidence in a murder investigation, so I'm a little on edge."

  "Plus, you can't get your favorite latte today," Ted offered, hoping to lighten her up a little bit.

  Laura cracked a smile, which felt like a victory. "Tell me about it! I have to drink that sludge from the lounge!"

  "You'd think Ashcroft could spring for a cappuccino machine for the hardworking government employees on the front lines of the war on terror."

  "Yeah, ask him the next time you talk to him, willya?"

  "I'm on it."

  "Okay, listen. You need to cut your hair and shave the goatee today. I have disposable razors in the medicine cabinet. Do not use my regular razor. Otherwise, watch some TV, do not under any circumstances leave the apartment, and most importantly, absolutely no porn on my computer."

  "Geez! I'm going to be here alone for nine hours! What am I supposed to do? They're gonna miss me over at chubbymilf.com!"

  "Okay, I have no idea what the hell you just said, but I'm sure it was disgusting. No porn!"

  "Okay, okay."

  Laura showered and got herself looking professional, and Ted examined her cereal selection. An array of bran-based products displayed in identical glass and steel canisters from the Container Store lined the back of the kitchen counter. Grape Nuts was the closest thing he could find to something edible. He wondered briefly if Laura suffered from constipation and reminded himself to check the medicine cabinet later. Hey, he was supposed to go in there and get a disposable razor anyway! If he happened to see some stool softener while he was there, well, that would just give him something to tease her about!

  Which, upon reflection, would be a terrible idea while she was in "my entire career's on the line" mode. Laura left, and Ted waited a respectful ten minutes before cruising for pornography on her computer.

  For some reason, tight-bodied lesbians in the throes of simulated passion weren't doing it for him today, so Ted closed the laptop and went to cut his hair and shave his beard.

  Great, Ted thought once he'd finished and thrown away all his discarded hair. He'd accomplished his task for the day, and it wasn't even nine o'clock yet. What the hell was he going to do with the rest of the day? He needed to be not thinking. Where did Laura keep her booze? He opened cabinets in the kitchen, and found only orderly stacks of dishes and alphabetized spices and dry goods. "Come on, Laur, where's the booze? Don't
you even have any cooking sherry or anything?" Finally, in desperation, he opened the freezer. He seemed to remember Kendra, that attorney Laura dated briefly, pulling some kind of horrible-flavored vodka out of there when he was here last summer . . . .

  And, of course, it was still there, and probably hadn't been touched at all since Ted was here, it was sort of two-thirds full, as Ted imagined most bottles of frozen fruit-flavored vodka were in yuppie freezers all over America.

  He reached for the bottle, yelling at his inner Jiminy Cricket to shut up, yes, he was going to drink the whole fucking bottle and then probably puke it up, but so what? He was a raw nerve, he was probably having some kind of post-traumatic stress, he needed it . . . he knocked a pint of Chunky Monkey out of the freezer, and it bounced painfully off the top of his foot before hitting the floor. He looked at the ice cream on the floor and the bottle of lingonberry vodka (What the hell was a lingonberry, anyway?) in his hand, and stood there until the freezing cold bottle started to hurt his hand. He put it back into the freezer and closed the door and leaned down to pick up the ice cream.

  "I reserve the right to get absolutely shitfaced on that horrible shit any time I fucking want, okay?" he said testily to Laura's empty apartment. He picked up the ice cream. "Hmm, I wonder if this would be good with Grape Nuts on it . . . "

  While he ate, he decided he'd have a try at the original CD while Laura's IT buddy looked over the copy down at the federal building. He looked briefly at the spreadsheets and found they made no more sense to him than they had to Laura. He tried to look at Half-caf's Age of Mythology and Roller Coaster Tycoon files, but he couldn't open them without the software. But Virtuality was web-based. Once you bought a subscription, you just logged in. Maybe he could make himself useful and find something out today. Maybe at least view a profile or something, find out something about Half-caf. But then if there really was some kind of conspiracy behind Half-caf's rampage, then there were other people still out there looking for Ted and the lost CD, and they would probably be lurking in the Virtuality world waiting to see if anybody would log in with Half-caf's account so they could trace the connection back and get the CD. So he couldn't use Laura's internet, or they might trace it all the way back here. What he needed was a wireless hotspot. Such as he happened to know was at the Queequeg's down the street.