MAGIC WAND
The knocking at her door boomed like gunfire. Sheila's heart skipped. Her vision blurred. She jumped from her sofa, sending the laptop tumbling. Ducking low to the ground, she craned her neck to look out her basement window. A shadow obscured her porch light. She shivered. Instinctively, Sheila ALT+F4'ed her BitTorrent client. One never knows when the MPAA will send their goons.
"G-go away!" her voice sounded terribly thin.
The knock boomed louder, clenching Sheila's chest. Her apartment shrank to a prison. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Frantic, she looked from wall to wall, desperate for something: a sword, a club, an AK-47, anything. Why hadn’t she bought a sword? Sheila grabbed the only weapon-shaped item she could find: her bulbous wand vibrator. Lip trembling, Sheila reached to the door knob. She cursed the irony of her situation. Murdered in her apartment, the Bakersville Independent would be without the obituarist needed to tuck her life away on page A9 of tomorrow's rag.
Screaming like a maniac, Sheila pulled open the door and swung the vibrator.
"Ow!" The shape outside recoiled, hands over head. "Ouch! Christ, what the hell? Stop!"
Through the tears and adrenaline, Sheila saw not one, but three people darkening her doorstep. There was no ghastly reaper come to separate soul from body. There was no smoking rifle.
"The Bakersville Irregulars!" Sheila shouted. "How the hell did you get here?"
Harris rubbed a growing red splotch on his forehead. It'd be one hell of a bruise come daylight. "Science, bitch. Water plus potassium plus rubidium equals boom!"
Arthur stood beside Harris, slouching to make Notre Dame's hunchback look like a picture of spinal health. Kavi hovered behind, a sick shade of ash. Each wore a collection of cuts and bruises to match their prison olives. Dust, stone and blood scabbed their skin. They looked like a Sears portrait from hell.
"Wait," Arthur pointed to the wand dangling from Sheila's hand, "did you just attack Harris with your vibrator?"
"Uh…," Sheila looked at the wand. "It's a back massager."
"Augh!" Harris pulled the hem of his shirt to wipe his forehead, exposing the vast, doughy whiteness of his belly. "I think I'm going to be sick!"
"Ech," Sheila shielded her eyes with the vibrator. "That makes two of us."
Kavi pushed past them and walked into the apartment. "As much as I love standing out here with you shouting our names for everyone to hear, we're coming in."
Sheila brought the Hitachi to her ear and twisted a two-handed grip, ready for another home run swing. "I’m not going down without a hell of a fight."
"I don't know what you think you know," Arthur pushed down the vibrator with a gentle hand and followed Kavi into the basement apartment, "but we have less than zero interest in harming you. We're innocent. Wasn't us that sent you our stories."
"Your…," Sheila swallowed hard. She closed the door as Harris entered her apartment, still wiping his face. What had been a neatly assembled puzzle now looked a jumble of disparate pieces. "But you sent…"
Kavi plopped down on the sofa. "You ever hear of a guy named Bernard Highley? Tall, lumbering oaf? Bald?"
"With a scar near his eye." Sheila said.
"I see he paid you a visit as well," Arthur said.
Sheila scoffed. "Tell me why I shouldn't call Hardcastle right now." She swooped to the coffee table and threw down the wand. Arthur, a step quicker, grabbed her phone before she could.
"This can be as quick as you'd like, Sheila." Arthur sat on the coffee table. He plucked Sheila's computer from the carpet and opened it on his lap. "We just need to check some facts..."
Sheila lunged toward the Arthur. "No! Let me—"
"Oh my." Arthur's eyes widened. "Oh wow, that's…," he grinned at Sheila. "I must say, I applaud your taste in men. I'll keep these tabs open in case you need them for later, but, if you'll excuse me, I have some internet to surf."
Arthur's fingers drummed an intoxicating rhythm on the keys. Harris and Kavi gathered close. With a deep breath, heart like a kick drum, Arthur hit Enter.
And there he was. Bernard. Not Bernard Smith as Arthur had met him at Rainbow Laines, but his real name, Bernard Highley: The Immolator. Hands stretched as if ready to grapple, he scowled from the screen, a flaming red singlet bulging over overworked pecs and underworked abs. Hulk Hogan hair hung like a wet mop around a face painted in orange and red flames.
"Shit, that's him," Sheila flopped down on the sofa beside Arthur. "That's the big fucker that chucked a brick through my window."
"Bloody hell," Arthur said.
The accompanying article, dated five years previous, detailed in terse, unenthusiastic language Bernard's tour with a low-tier pro wrestling outfit. His pyromania schtick saw him finish opponents with a signature 'Firebomb Superplex,' and then set his fallen foes ablaze.
"What now?" Harris cried. "Challenge him to a steel cage match? Hit him with a folding chair?"
"Try the address on the car title," Kavi peered over Arthur's shoulder. "Main Street, is it? See who owns the property. If there's any info there."
Arthur keyed the address and shook his head. "Dunno. I don't see anything here. Just an apartment."
"What if...," Harris let out a low breath. His brow furrowed. "Highley can't be a super common name, can it?"
Arthur shook his head. "That's crazy."
"Bail," Kavi whispered.
"What?" Sheila said.
"He put us out on cheap bail after the robbery. And then after...after Miss Leslie...he put us in jail, even though Miss Leslie said it wasn't us."
"Who?" Sheila said.
"Jesus Christ." Harris said. "He put us where he needed us so the stories could come true."
"Why, though?" Kavi said. "And how would he have our stories?"
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Sheila looked between her unwanted guests. She craned her neck to get a vantage on the computer screen.
Arthur shook his head, arms crossed. "There's no Highley on your spreadsheet o' rejections, Kavi. We would have seen that straightaway."
"Arthur," Kavi pulled the laptop from Arthur's hands. "Do you mind if I…?" Her hands hovered over the keyboard, fingers wiggling. "This only makes sense if one of these publishers is local.” She conjured onto the screen a white window, filled corner to corner with glyphs and strings of words. A second window, black by comparison, chugged away like something from the Matrix.
Arthur squinted to the screen. "Computer hacking?"
"Hacking is CSI TV bullshit. It's an HTML scraper I coded. Perfectly legal. I usually use it to compare other library website functionalities to our own. But here I'm telling it to search 'Highley' on the websites for publishers without physical addresses. I’m hoping for domain registration information, billing addresses, stuff like that. Or any external links buried in the… Ah shit."
Kavi clicked a blue hyperlink buried in the sea of HTML. A new window splashed across the screen.
Cruel fate suckerpunched the Irregulars, breath flying from their chests. A book hovered in the left corner of the new window. Kavi, Arthur and Harris stared from its blood-red cover, each holding a Bakersville PD mugshot placard. Golden serifed text above them announced: "The Bakersville Irregulars." The book's subtitle explained the rest: "How Three Failed Writers turned the World’s Worst Fiction to true-life crime." Beside the book, organized in blocks of neat, antiseptic text, sat the ordering in formation. The price. The release date. Written by:
The Admiral.
"'World’s Worst fiction?'" Arthur said. "Fucking rude."
"'Failed writer?'" Harris said. "I've been published on multiple blogs."
"He…" Kavi struggled for the words. "He's publishing a true-crime story about us."
"Who the fuck are we talking about?" Sheila threw up her hands.
Arthur threw his head back, looking past the sparkled popcorn ceiling to the heavens above. "Who in their bloody right mind would want to read a story about us?"
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