Paranoia

  Paranoia

  P.J. Fox

  This story is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living, dead, or undead, or to places or events existing within the world as we know it is purely coincidental.

  PARANOIA

  Copyright © 2014 by Evil Toad Press

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Evil Toad Press

  Cover design by Evil Toad Press

  Published by Evil Toad Press

  ISBN: 978-1-942365-33-4

  FIRST EDITION: January 2015

  BY P.J. FOX

  THE BLACK PRINCE TRILOGY

  Book One: The Demon of Darkling Reach

  Book Two: The White Queen

  THE PRINCE’S SLAVE

  Part One: Captive in His Castle

  Part Two: Bound in His Bed

  Part Three: Collared in His Care

  THE HOUSE OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

  Book One: The Price of Desire

  Book Two: A Dictionary of Fools

  The Prisoner

  The Assassin

  Paranoia

  COLLECTIONS

  I, Demon

  NONFICTION

  I Look Like This Because I’m A Writer: How To Overcome Sloth, Self-Doubt, and Poor Hygiene to Realize the Writing Career of Your Dreams

  Self Publishing Is For Losers: The Evil Toad Press Guide To Self Publishing

  For Jane

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Afterword

  About the Author

  1.

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl?” Ned’s expression was frankly disbelieving.

  His—supposed—friend shrugged. He did a lot of that. “Well,” he said, coming to his own defense, “sometimes it’s hard to tell.” He spoke in the same bored monotone that he always did, even now. Even looking at someone else’s genitalia, and the only set he was apt to ever see, didn’t excite him.

  “Couldn’t you just flip it over and look?” he asked.

  Had William flipped himself over and looked?

  William, who refused to be called Will because Will was a verb.

  “Don’t be crude.” William sniffed, summoning up all the injured pride of a seventeen year old who never missed a single Bible study. “Besides, we figured it out eventually.” William took a bite of his peanut butter and banana sandwich. “We googled it.”

  “You googled it? You couldn’t tell if a mammal was a boy or a girl?” Ned’s face was a study.

  Brad snorted.

  “It’s not that obvious!” William glared back and forth between his two friends.

  “But there are only two choices!”

  Ned arched his eyebrow at Brad. “Maybe he’s never seen a penis before, so he’s confused.”

  “You guys, there’s fur!”

  Ned ran a hand through his hair. “And this story is interesting…because?”

  “Well, we’re kind of worried about Hercules.” Hercules the fucking cat. “He hasn’t, um, developed any boy parts yet.” William paused. “Like, you know, balls?”

  Yeah. Ned knew what balls were. That William did, too, was all that surprised him. He thought about how to frame his response. “I hate to break it to you, bro, but maybe Hercules is, um…like, a girl.” You know, dumbass, on account of having no fucking balls.

  “Hercules is not a girl!” William sounded extremely injured. Fucking sexist dirtbag.

  Ned turned to Brad. Fucking Bradlee Cooper Wagner. He didn’t even know why he was friends with this bag of dicks. He hated him. And fucking William I Masturbate to Cats Hall. He hated his school, and he hated this town. “I know this isn’t nearly as interesting as Hercules’ gender identity struggles,” he said, wondering even as he spoke if they’d agree, “but somebody tried to kill me on the way home from school today.”

  Brad blinked. “Was this before or after play practice?”

  “No, I’m serious.” Ned shook his head. “I think it was the same guy who’s been breaking into the house.”

  Brad snorted. “Oh, yeah, right, the mystery creeper who—for no reason whatsoever—vaults in through the window and rearranges your shit. Again, for no reason at all. Uh huh. Maybe if you leave a tooth under your pillow, he’ll give you a dollar.”

  “Hercules is not a girl!”

  They turned as one. “Shut up!”

  William stared into space, sulking. Ned turned back to Brad. “Brad, I know how this sounds, believe me. But this was…not normal.” He recounted the day’s events in detail. How a car had tried to run him off the road and how he’d only ended up alive because he’d plunged headlong—entirely by accident, but he didn’t add that part—into Steer Swamp.

  William and Brad just stared at him.

  William spoke first. His tone was horribly patient, as he recounted back to Ned the facts of Ned’s life. As though Ned himself needed any confirmation that they were strange. As though Ned, himself was laboring under the misapprehension that these kinds of things were normal.

  “Okay, so let’s get this straight: some crazed axe murderer tries to kill you—”

  “Car murderer.”

  “Car murderer, out in the open and in broad daylight, where anybody could drive along and see him. But then he also broke into your house two nights ago to steal your jacket?

  “Ned, what sense does that even make? If he wanted to kill you, wouldn’t it make more sense to kill you in the privacy of your own home? Your own empty home, I might add?”

  “It’s called gaslighting,” Ned said.

  “No, that’s when you don’t know it’s happening to you. Since you’re wise to this guy’s game—this assuming, for the moment, that he exists. Which he doesn’t—then it’s not gaslighting anymore.”

  Gaslighting was a term that inveterate paranoids like Ned knew well: a form of mental abuse in which false information was fed to the victim in hopes of making him doubt his own memory, perception and, ultimately, sanity.

  “I might know,” Ned said patiently, “but nobody believes me. So eventually, see, I’ll start wondering if you all aren’t right and I am the one with the problem.”

  William threw up his hands in mock relief. “Finally, he understands!”

  Ned’s expression darkened. “Except I’m not crazy.”

  Brad sniffed. “No offense, man, but I think you need to lay off the H.P. Lovecraft.”

  William thought for a moment. And then, putting on his understanding face, “you know, Ned, it’s been a tough year. Is it possible you’re having, well, a harder time than you realize?”

  He meant the fact that Ned’s father had died, his mother rarely left her bedroom—not out of sorrow, she hadn’t left it much before his father died and didn’t seem terribly affected by the incident—and his sister was the world’s biggest bitch. And all of that was a bummer, but none of it had caused Ned to start hallucinating. In a way, having his raging beast of a so-called father die on him had been a relief. Not that he’d admit as much to William.

  Or anyone.

  There were things you were supposed to think, and things you weren’t.

  Having a sucktastic home life wasn’t new. Neither was nobody believing him. If he’d been going to go crazy from that shit, he would’ve done so a long time ago. Like when he was ten, and he found the heroin addict in the shed.

  Ned lived on a spit of land called Outlander Point. His town, which clung to the
rocky New England coast, was shaped like a lima bean and Outlander Point formed the far end. A town called, ironically enough, Success. Even though no one there succeeded at anything much besides staying put. The pilgrims who’d made land here had wanted a record of their accomplishment; Plimoth had already been taken.

  But a few weeks after Ned’s tenth birthday, Outlander Point had been terrorized by a series of break-ins. Family heirlooms, expensive electronics, house after house was wiped clean. Nobody knew who the burglar was, or where he might be hiding out.

  Except Ned, of course. He knew. But nobody listened to him.

  The Wells family owned a long, thin strip of land that curved along the shore. Their house started out life as a summer house and had been renovated for real life a couple of decades ago. The main house and garage occupied the far right-hand side of the lawn, leaving a meandering garden on the left that had once been a croquet court and a hedge maze and was now mostly grass. Most of it wasn’t visible from the house; a stand of trees marched down from the ocean, bisecting the property nearly in two. Almost at the other end, out of sight of the main house was a small hut. His family had always called it “the playhouse.”

  It was originally intended as a summer schoolhouse—taught, of course, by a governess, as those long-ago children didn’t mingle with the great unwashed. Over time, it’d fallen into disuse. Ned and his sister had begged to use it for years, but his mother refused. Camilla was nothing if not keen on arbitrary rules. She feared change, and would rather let things rot into dust than see them in a different light.

  Ned had been playing hide and seek in the trees when he’d first seen the man. Scruffy and unwashed, he’d carried a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Ned watched through the windows, horrified, as the man shot heroin between his toes. Little legs pumping, he ran back to the house as quickly as he could. His mother was in the kitchen with a friend.

  He tried to tell her, mom, there’s a heroin addict in the playhouse!

  Ned, we’re having grownup talk. There’s no time for pretend right now. We’re talking about something very scary—a crime spree on Outlander Point. Go play your game in the other room. Her tone had been clear: these are adult things. You wouldn’t understand. Ned hadn’t, according to Camilla, been capable of understanding anything and still wasn’t.

  No matter how hard he tried, Ned never could get his parents to listen. He’d begged them, just walk down with me and have a quick look, and then I’ll never say another word about it.

  Finally, the police came boiling through the trees like maggots on a corpse. As they led the man away, Ned’s heart swelled with hope. He’d tell his parents, bet you wished you’d listened to me now! Realizing that he’d been right all along, they’d finally start taking him seriously. Finally start realizing that there was something worthwhile about him.

  His mother punished him for being bad and sent him to bed without supper.

  But mom, he whined, I told you what was happening!

  Ned, you saw no such thing. You saw a broken beer bottle and imagined the rest. There was certainly nobody living in the playhouse—someone would have seen him.

  But mom, I did see him!

  You saw no such thing!

  But the police were here! They say he was here!

  They say no such thing, Ned. Stop making up lies.

  How do you know I’m lying? You never even looked!

  Enough! You’re a nasty, bad boy. You just have no consideration for other people. All this time playing, and never a thought for your poor mother and all she goes through.

  Ned watched an oil tanker chug slowly across the channel, far beyond where he and his friends were seated. He wished he were on that oil tanker, going somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  After a long moment, William spoke. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you are right—why would anybody want to kill you? You’re just a teenager, for God’s sake.”

  Ned didn’t respond. There was nothing to say.

  2.

  Ned tossed and turned; no position felt comfortable. He’d fallen asleep early and slept soundly for maybe an hour before the dream started again. The victim of recurring dreams since childhood, he should’ve been used to this. But on nights like these, when the close air of his bedroom pressed in on him and his sheets wound around his ankles in a sweaty tangle, his fears felt very fresh and new. They played in a twisted feedback loop of visions and sensations, his stress growing until, finally, it pushed him into wakefulness.

  Finally, utter exhaustion pulled him into a dreamless sleep.

  He hibernated, unmoving, until some sixth sense snapped him into wakefulness. Heart pounding in his chest, Ned felt every sense shift instantly into overdrive. His skin tingled. His blood vessels contracted and relaxed. His ears stretched wide. He knew, the way animals in the forest knew, that he wasn’t alone.

  Someone—or something—was in the room with him.

  Ned didn’t believe in the boogeyman, not really. Intellectually, he knew some things just couldn’t exist. But sometimes, on dark nights when he was alone in the house with the groaning wood and settling plaster, his heart didn’t believe. Those shadows hid too much.

  Maybe if I pretend I’m still asleep, it’ll go away and leave me alone. But even with his eyes squeezed shut, he could sense a white, ethereal presence looming over him. He pictured its narrow, vulpine face and glowing red eyes, one skeletal claw reaching out for his neck….

  His eyes snapped open. The darkness was complete. No specter hovered above his bed, and yet…Ned knew he wasn’t alone. He could sense another presence sharing the space.

  Shifting his weight onto his elbow, he propped himself up and peered into the corner of the room. He could almost see the outline of a crouching shape. As his eyes adjusted, he became more and more sure it was there. He squinted, opened his eyes again, and…nothing.

  Get a hold of yourself. There’s nothing there. He tried to be resolute. Nothing.

  And yet…he couldn’t see it, but at the same time he knew something was advancing toward his bed. Knew, the way mice knew to freeze when owls passed overhead. He could sense it, not with his eyes or his ears but with his mind. That long-forgotten node at the base of his brain, the primitive glands that truly drove him. Drove them all.

  He saw it in his mind’s eye: advancing toward his bed, slowly, one step at a time, long arms outstretched…ready to twist its claws into his exposed ankles and drag him off the bed. Don’t be ridiculous. He swallowed once, and waited.

  Nothing came.

  That’s because there’s nothing there, fool.

  He flopped back down, pulled his quilt up over his shoulders, and tried to go back to sleep.

  He was an idiot. Maybe Brad was right, and it was time to lay off the Lovecraft. Maybe he should take up a new, more normative hobby. Like checkers, or stamp collecting. Nobody who collected stamps for fun had bad dreams, did they?

  A foot squeaked on the hardwood.

  He shot up like a rocket, pulling himself into a ball and straining to penetrate the gloom.

  Someone—or something—was there.

  Was.

  His heart raced. His fingers clenched and unclenched on his covers. Adrenaline tasted bitter in his mouth.

  Waiting. And then it moved. Ned tried to tell himself it was just imagination; he couldn’t possibly have seen what he’d seen, his room was too dark. The merest hint of color here, a faint outline there, it meant nothing. His mind was playing tricks on itself. And if he was so scared, why didn’t he call out for help? His mother might be passed out face down on the couch downstairs, snoring into a puddle of her own drool, but his sister was only in the next room. And she’d wake up, if he called loudly enough.

  Slowly, one of the shadows began to detach itself from the wall. Ned watched it advance, its blocky shape a blacker shade of black. A long, narrow head, then two sloping shoulders took shape. It was a man. Ned crab-walked up the bed, using his elbows to pull hi
mself along.

  The man-thing waited at the foot of the bed.

  Watching Ned tire himself out.

  It seemed very patient.

  He pushed himself flat against the wall, his heart thudding against his ribcage.

  The man-thing leaned forward. Impossibly long arms stretched toward the bed. Ned was trapped. He pulled his knees up to his chin, but still the creature advanced.

  He opened his mouth to scream, but couldn’t force out more than a squeak.

  Skeletal fingers closed around his neck. They were just like he’d imagined: bleached and hard, like bones. He tried to swallow and couldn’t. The fingers began to squeeze.

  They were cold, so cold.

  3.

  He woke to hot sunlight streaming through the window. Hot, sweaty sheets encased him like a Roman toga. Fighting his way free, Ned surveyed his room. Everything looked the same, but he couldn’t shake that feeling of strangeness, of other. His piles of dog-eared books, even his row of Norwegian trolls seemed somehow foreboding with their stupidly cheerful faces. He lifted his arms and smelled his pits. Goddamn, but he smelled rank.

  It must have been a dream.

  He ripped his sheets off the bed, bundled them up and tossed them into the corner. There were no claw marks gouged into the floor, no dirt tracks leading into his room. He tried to laugh at himself, but couldn’t. He didn’t have time to take a shower, so he gave each pit a quick shot of Febreze. And then, after a moment’s consideration, his crotch, too.

  Well, it wasn’t like this was prom night.

  He hopped around in circles, trying to force his left foot into the hole of his pants leg. His pants needed a bath, too. Hopefully nobody would walk too close. Not that they usually did; he wasn’t exactly Mr. Popularity at Eisenhower High. Which…Success High would’ve been a little much. Although he had, indeed, gotten high quite successfully there. The janitor, who kept a pretty good stash on hand, was a friend.