Excerpted from Damned Lies Strike Back (Damned Lies #2): Home Sweet Home
Present Day
The walls were bleeding.
I arrived home from the hospital to discover that the walls of my apartment were bleeding. The walls didn't exactly gush blood all over or squirt with great force like an arterial spray, but the blood did drip down the walls pretty consistently. I wasn't at risk of drowning in blood at any point, but my carpet was ruined and I wasn't getting my deposit back.
Though my carpet was stained, I didn't think it was real blood. For one thing, it lacked any smell. For all the blood that had spilled from my walls, it should have smelled like a charnel house, but honestly the apartment didn't smell different than usual. An apartment stinking of blood would have been a deal breaker and I would have had to vacate the apartment immediately. But without smell, the blood was more of an annoyance. It certainly didn't scare me.
Also, the blood was thicker than I'd expect. I admit that I don't have a ton of experience with blood, knowing mostly my own, the few splatters I've caused to come out of my enemies, and the thin blood in frozen packets of meat from the supermarket. But this wall blood seemed off. It was thick like jam, maybe a good strawberry jam. Unfortunately, it didn't taste like strawberry jam - something I learned to my dismay. When I tasted it, I found it was very salty, like a salty jam. It was also then that I wondered if I should get myself tested for diseases transmitted by blood. What a story that would be, huh? "Yes, I have vampirism. I caught it through blood to blood contact with my wall."
The living room was the worst offender for blood. The walls bled at random spots all through the apartment, but most of it was coming from a particular wall in the living room. Written on that wall in bloody gashes was: YOU WILL DIE SOON. Each of those letters was bleeding profusely. I moved some furniture and put down some towels to sop up that blood, but the living room looked to be permanently stained.
For those keeping track, there had been two attempts on my life recently. So I wasn't really sure if that bloody statement on my wall was a statement of fact, a warning, or a prophecy. If it was a prophecy, I wondered if changing the words would change the prophecy. I was pretty sure I could take a knife and carve a T into that sentence. YOU WILL DIET SOON would be far less scary, and I'd then think the bleeding walls were just nagging me to get into better shape. My apartment sees me naked most often, so I guess it knows best how out of shape I am. I didn't think I was that out of shape, but I guess my apartment knows best.
It was when I picked up the kitchen knife to scratch in that T that more paranormal activity occurred. Cabinets opened and closed themselves. My laundry hamper spit out all of its clothes onto the bedroom floor[1]. The wall behind my bed seemed to now be made of jelly or something similarly soft, as random limbs kept reaching through it, groping blindly at my pillows.
When I entered the kitchen, the lid of the cookie jar flew off and a cookie flung itself at me. Luckily I caught the cookie in my hand and seconds later discovered that ghost-propelled chocolate chip cookies were still delicious. I wondered if we could find a way to implement and market ghost-propelled cookie jars. The convenience factor was off the charts. Want a cookie? "Ghost, cookie me!" A cookie would fly towards you, dripping with malice, and you could pluck it from the air to feed your face. Luckily, as I had just found out, malice has no adverse effects on taste.
I admit that I had no idea if it truly was a ghost that is causing these issues. You might ask, "Are you serious? Your walls are bleeding, a threat was carved into your wall, your cabinets are opening and closing, arms are reaching through your walls, and someone just threw a cookie at you, how could your apartment not be haunted?"
Dear Reader, I am not disputing any of these claims, only the cause. A lifetime of television, movies, and strange life shit has honed my mind into a sharpened piece of reasoning apparatus. Ghosts are just one of the possible causes of these phenomena. Other such causes include, but are not limited to, the following: poltergeists, psychic children, magic, aliens, hallucinatory drugs, an alternate dimension analog of my apartment, a Hollywood special effects team, intergalactic space wizards, LASERS, ninjas, demons, vengeful deities, mischievous deities, uncaring impersonal but very clumsy and unapologetic deities, Silent Hill, that little kid from the Twilight Zone, Old Scratch himself, a curse, trapped spirits and/or demons, a building with hemophilia that cuts itself, one really really pissed ex girlfriend, a dimensional portal to Hell, an erection lasting more than four hours, a manifestation of a horror movie into the real world caused by a djinn or other bad wishing, fever dreams, a sentient building, Bizarro Elvis, the Antichrist, the Best Little Demonic Whorehouse in Texas, mental illness, brain damage, living downstairs from a cut-rate blood bank, a vision from God, or even a cursed sword.
I pulled up my floorboard and checked my cursed sword. It was secure. It was sheathed, the straps clasped, covered in oilcloth, and its box tightly locked. That was one thing off the list.
I looked out the window and noticed my normally pleasant view of downtown Austin was covered in flames. Not a gigantic dark plume of smoke that would occur if the city was actually on fire or a bomb had occurred. No, this was more if Austin existed in Hell. Every building was covered with roaring flames, the sky was full of red rolling clouds, and Town Lake was now full of boiling blood. I'm sure if I pulled out some binoculars, I could see the souls of the tormented or the demonic employees of Hell, but I wasn't that interested in accuracy or attention to detail.
I opened the glass doors to my porch and hobbled outside. I had broken my leg in my car accident and had been in traction for weeks. My leg got out of traction a week ago, and my doctor was amazed at the progress my healing has taken. There's a reason for that, but none that I could tell my doctor, and none that I could tell you without a long story. Suffice to say, I heal very quickly. Because my leg was improving so much, I managed to be sent home with only a cane to use, rather than the typical crutches. My leg was still in a cast, so I hobbled everywhere I went.
From my porch I could actually hear the cries of the damned echoing from downtown and it wasn't even Saturday night. I chewed my cookie for a minute as I contemplated my new view. I returned to my apartment and decided to go ask a neighbor if they also had a picturesque view of Hell. When I stepped outside my apartment, I noticed that there were no screams of the damned. I very slowly hobbled downstairs and around the side of the building to where my window faced. Downtown looked how it usually does: non-fiery, sparse, and photo-worthy. I climbed back up to my apartment and was greeted with the same fiery view of downtown Hell. It was a neat trick, at least.
My phone rang.
"How do you like your apartment?" said the voice at the other end.
It was my clone. He had recently started trying to kill me again after a twenty year hiatus. No reason had been given other than a cryptic note about killing me to help usher in the apocalypse. Not really an explanation I put a lot of stock in, but with bleeding walls, I was willing to be a little more open minded about his supernatural affiliations.
"So I'm guessing you had something to do with this," I said. "I admit it's a really good prank, but it's still just a prank."
"A prank?" he said, offended.
"Well, I'll admit I'm not quite sure how you did it, but it does seem kind of weak. It's shocking, but it's not really dangerous. Not unless you have somebody hidden in the closet with an axe. Is there an axe murderer in the closet?" I opened the closet. "Nope, just my old clothes and a sleeping bag."
"Aren't you scared?" he asked.
"Why? I mean, I'm scared of losing my apartment deposit, but other than that it's not scary. Yes, it looks freaky, but it can't hurt me. It's all more inconvenient than dangerous. So far the biggest danger is getting hit by a cookie I didn't catch."
"What? Getting hit by a cookie?" My clone was confused.
"Oh yeah, the ghost or whatever is doing this threw a cookie at me from the jar. But I caught the cookie and just ate it."
"That's actually pretty cool," admitted my clone.
"I know! I was thinking we should find a way to market that! Ghost powered cookie jars are an untapped market."
"Wait, wait, wait, let's get back to the matter at hand. I want you dead. We can't go marketing stuff together. You have to die for the ritual."
"What ritual is that?" I asked.
"Oh no, it's not going to be that easy for you," he said. "I'm not even going to be tempted to give a villainous monologue until you are in my clutches and I have some sort of classic death trap counting down. There can't be a possible way you would escape such a thing!"
Clearly there had been some degradation in my clone's brain functions over the years. Or too many Bond films. Admittedly, it could be both.
"You want to kill me," I reasoned. "Surely a condemned man gets to know the reason why."
"Let's just call it revenge," he said. "Or unpaid debts. Or just that this world isn't big enough for two of us."
"It used to be," I suggested. "It's been nearly twenty years. Why now?"
"Things change," he said with a smile I could hear. Then he hung up.
I sighed heavily and decided I needed something to eat. I hobbled back into the kitchen and grabbed a cookie that streaked towards my face and chewed on that while I made a sandwich. The mayo in the fridge had turned rancid, though I wasn't sure if that was paranormal corruption or simply due to my long stay in the hospital. The ketchup was fine though.
As I chomped on my sandwich at the kitchen table while my cabinets furiously opened and closed themselves to try to get my attention, I realized I needed to call Bruce. This clone problem was just not going to go away. It was time to go on the offensive. And for that, we needed answers.
Continued in Damned Lies Strike Back, Available NOW!
Footnotes
[1] I swear the bedroom floor was clean before that happened.
Present Day
The walls were bleeding.
I arrived home from the hospital to discover that the walls of my apartment were bleeding. The walls didn't exactly gush blood all over or squirt with great force like an arterial spray, but the blood did drip down the walls pretty consistently. I wasn't at risk of drowning in blood at any point, but my carpet was ruined and I wasn't getting my deposit back.
Though my carpet was stained, I didn't think it was real blood. For one thing, it lacked any smell. For all the blood that had spilled from my walls, it should have smelled like a charnel house, but honestly the apartment didn't smell different than usual. An apartment stinking of blood would have been a deal breaker and I would have had to vacate the apartment immediately. But without smell, the blood was more of an annoyance. It certainly didn't scare me.
Also, the blood was thicker than I'd expect. I admit that I don't have a ton of experience with blood, knowing mostly my own, the few splatters I've caused to come out of my enemies, and the thin blood in frozen packets of meat from the supermarket. But this wall blood seemed off. It was thick like jam, maybe a good strawberry jam. Unfortunately, it didn't taste like strawberry jam - something I learned to my dismay. When I tasted it, I found it was very salty, like a salty jam. It was also then that I wondered if I should get myself tested for diseases transmitted by blood. What a story that would be, huh? "Yes, I have vampirism. I caught it through blood to blood contact with my wall."
The living room was the worst offender for blood. The walls bled at random spots all through the apartment, but most of it was coming from a particular wall in the living room. Written on that wall in bloody gashes was: YOU WILL DIE SOON. Each of those letters was bleeding profusely. I moved some furniture and put down some towels to sop up that blood, but the living room looked to be permanently stained.
For those keeping track, there had been two attempts on my life recently. So I wasn't really sure if that bloody statement on my wall was a statement of fact, a warning, or a prophecy. If it was a prophecy, I wondered if changing the words would change the prophecy. I was pretty sure I could take a knife and carve a T into that sentence. YOU WILL DIET SOON would be far less scary, and I'd then think the bleeding walls were just nagging me to get into better shape. My apartment sees me naked most often, so I guess it knows best how out of shape I am. I didn't think I was that out of shape, but I guess my apartment knows best.
It was when I picked up the kitchen knife to scratch in that T that more paranormal activity occurred. Cabinets opened and closed themselves. My laundry hamper spit out all of its clothes onto the bedroom floor[1]. The wall behind my bed seemed to now be made of jelly or something similarly soft, as random limbs kept reaching through it, groping blindly at my pillows.
When I entered the kitchen, the lid of the cookie jar flew off and a cookie flung itself at me. Luckily I caught the cookie in my hand and seconds later discovered that ghost-propelled chocolate chip cookies were still delicious. I wondered if we could find a way to implement and market ghost-propelled cookie jars. The convenience factor was off the charts. Want a cookie? "Ghost, cookie me!" A cookie would fly towards you, dripping with malice, and you could pluck it from the air to feed your face. Luckily, as I had just found out, malice has no adverse effects on taste.
I admit that I had no idea if it truly was a ghost that is causing these issues. You might ask, "Are you serious? Your walls are bleeding, a threat was carved into your wall, your cabinets are opening and closing, arms are reaching through your walls, and someone just threw a cookie at you, how could your apartment not be haunted?"
Dear Reader, I am not disputing any of these claims, only the cause. A lifetime of television, movies, and strange life shit has honed my mind into a sharpened piece of reasoning apparatus. Ghosts are just one of the possible causes of these phenomena. Other such causes include, but are not limited to, the following: poltergeists, psychic children, magic, aliens, hallucinatory drugs, an alternate dimension analog of my apartment, a Hollywood special effects team, intergalactic space wizards, LASERS, ninjas, demons, vengeful deities, mischievous deities, uncaring impersonal but very clumsy and unapologetic deities, Silent Hill, that little kid from the Twilight Zone, Old Scratch himself, a curse, trapped spirits and/or demons, a building with hemophilia that cuts itself, one really really pissed ex girlfriend, a dimensional portal to Hell, an erection lasting more than four hours, a manifestation of a horror movie into the real world caused by a djinn or other bad wishing, fever dreams, a sentient building, Bizarro Elvis, the Antichrist, the Best Little Demonic Whorehouse in Texas, mental illness, brain damage, living downstairs from a cut-rate blood bank, a vision from God, or even a cursed sword.
I pulled up my floorboard and checked my cursed sword. It was secure. It was sheathed, the straps clasped, covered in oilcloth, and its box tightly locked. That was one thing off the list.
I looked out the window and noticed my normally pleasant view of downtown Austin was covered in flames. Not a gigantic dark plume of smoke that would occur if the city was actually on fire or a bomb had occurred. No, this was more if Austin existed in Hell. Every building was covered with roaring flames, the sky was full of red rolling clouds, and Town Lake was now full of boiling blood. I'm sure if I pulled out some binoculars, I could see the souls of the tormented or the demonic employees of Hell, but I wasn't that interested in accuracy or attention to detail.
I opened the glass doors to my porch and hobbled outside. I had broken my leg in my car accident and had been in traction for weeks. My leg got out of traction a week ago, and my doctor was amazed at the progress my healing has taken. There's a reason for that, but none that I could tell my doctor, and none that I could tell you without a long story. Suffice to say, I heal very quickly. Because my leg was improving so much, I managed to be sent home with only a cane to use, rather than the typical crutches. My leg was still in a cast, so I hobbled everywhere I went.
From my porch I could actually hear the cries of the damned echoing from downtown and it wasn't even Saturday night. I chewed my cookie for a minute as I contemplated my new view. I returned to my apartment and decided to go ask a neighbor if they also had a picturesque view of Hell. When I stepped outside my apartment, I noticed that there were no screams of the damned. I very slowly hobbled downstairs and around the side of the building to where my window faced. Downtown looked how it usually does: non-fiery, sparse, and photo-worthy. I climbed back up to my apartment and was greeted with the same fiery view of downtown Hell. It was a neat trick, at least.
My phone rang.
"How do you like your apartment?" said the voice at the other end.
It was my clone. He had recently started trying to kill me again after a twenty year hiatus. No reason had been given other than a cryptic note about killing me to help usher in the apocalypse. Not really an explanation I put a lot of stock in, but with bleeding walls, I was willing to be a little more open minded about his supernatural affiliations.
"So I'm guessing you had something to do with this," I said. "I admit it's a really good prank, but it's still just a prank."
"A prank?" he said, offended.
"Well, I'll admit I'm not quite sure how you did it, but it does seem kind of weak. It's shocking, but it's not really dangerous. Not unless you have somebody hidden in the closet with an axe. Is there an axe murderer in the closet?" I opened the closet. "Nope, just my old clothes and a sleeping bag."
"Aren't you scared?" he asked.
"Why? I mean, I'm scared of losing my apartment deposit, but other than that it's not scary. Yes, it looks freaky, but it can't hurt me. It's all more inconvenient than dangerous. So far the biggest danger is getting hit by a cookie I didn't catch."
"What? Getting hit by a cookie?" My clone was confused.
"Oh yeah, the ghost or whatever is doing this threw a cookie at me from the jar. But I caught the cookie and just ate it."
"That's actually pretty cool," admitted my clone.
"I know! I was thinking we should find a way to market that! Ghost powered cookie jars are an untapped market."
"Wait, wait, wait, let's get back to the matter at hand. I want you dead. We can't go marketing stuff together. You have to die for the ritual."
"What ritual is that?" I asked.
"Oh no, it's not going to be that easy for you," he said. "I'm not even going to be tempted to give a villainous monologue until you are in my clutches and I have some sort of classic death trap counting down. There can't be a possible way you would escape such a thing!"
Clearly there had been some degradation in my clone's brain functions over the years. Or too many Bond films. Admittedly, it could be both.
"You want to kill me," I reasoned. "Surely a condemned man gets to know the reason why."
"Let's just call it revenge," he said. "Or unpaid debts. Or just that this world isn't big enough for two of us."
"It used to be," I suggested. "It's been nearly twenty years. Why now?"
"Things change," he said with a smile I could hear. Then he hung up.
I sighed heavily and decided I needed something to eat. I hobbled back into the kitchen and grabbed a cookie that streaked towards my face and chewed on that while I made a sandwich. The mayo in the fridge had turned rancid, though I wasn't sure if that was paranormal corruption or simply due to my long stay in the hospital. The ketchup was fine though.
As I chomped on my sandwich at the kitchen table while my cabinets furiously opened and closed themselves to try to get my attention, I realized I needed to call Bruce. This clone problem was just not going to go away. It was time to go on the offensive. And for that, we needed answers.
Continued in Damned Lies Strike Back, Available NOW!
Footnotes
[1] I swear the bedroom floor was clean before that happened.
