Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories Page 20

  Martin glanced down and saw that he’d moved to the edge of the stoop without being aware of it. He frowned as that tingly something in his subconscious became more pronounced. This was accompanied by a nervous sensation in his gut, a feeling similar to the butterflies he’d experienced when asking girls out as a teenager. There was a strange sense of yearning in it. Martin had no idea why that might be.

  At first.

  On further reflection, he thought maybe the feeling was rooted entirely in the unexpectedness of the object. For many years, everything about his life had played out in ways that rarely contained any element of genuine surprise. Even the disintegration of his marriage was something he’d seen coming from years back. The actual serving of divorce papers had been almost anticlimactic. He was an ordinary guy living the most ordinary, unremarkable life possible. But now here was this thing, this fucking barrel, and it was calling to him.

  Martin glanced down again.

  He’d moved down a step, again without being aware of having done so. Just one more step remained between his feet and the ground. The alluring element of the mystery aside, this was odd and disturbing. It was almost as if the thing was actively drawing him toward it, as if it had projected a kind of psychical tractor beam, one that had hooked into his body and soul and was drawing him inexorably forward. Sounded absurd on the surface, but that was how it felt.

  To prove to himself he remained in control of his body and will, he took a deliberate step back up onto the stoop. Once he was there, he stared at the barrel a moment longer and downed the rest of the beer. That tingly sensation was still there, but it was slightly diminished. It was hard not to take this as confirmation that the power of the barrel’s pull increased with physical proximity. This in no way eased his fears about the thing, but that strange sense of nebulous yearning remained.

  Martin went inside and closed the screen door. He again left the inner door open so he could continue his observation of the barrel. The pull of the thing remained palpable, but it wasn’t as strong from inside the house. He tried to convince himself what he’d felt was imaginary, the result of a combination of lingering grogginess and a general feeling of unsettledness caused by the thing’s mysterious arrival. This sounded every bit as sensible as the inclination to call the police, but somehow he couldn’t quite fully buy it.

  Something else was happening here, he was sure of it. Something . . . strange.

  After tossing the empty in the trash, Martin grabbed another beer from the fridge, screwed off the cap, and took a big swig. He’d done this without thinking, which seemed to be the emerging trend of the day. It wasn’t uncommon for him to have a little hair of the dog the morning after knocking back a bunch of brews, but it almost always stopped there. He wasn’t some raving alcoholic who required a steady influx of booze to keep functioning throughout the day. Yet something in him was telling him today was different. Today he would need the comfort of at least a mild buzz to get through what was ahead.

  Hank was growling again.

  The dog was standing at the screen door and staring out at the barrel. His hackles were still up and he was quivering with either excitement or fear, maybe both. Lucille was whimpering from somewhere behind him.

  Martin took another slug of beer. “You guys calm down. This is nothing to get excited about. It’s just a fucking barrel.”

  The dogs seemed unmoved by this sentiment. Hank kept on with the growling while Lucille paced and panted. Thinking to soothe the animal closest to him with a reassuring touch, Martin reached down to stroke Hank’s back. The dog flinched at the touch and the volume of his growling increased.

  “Okay, okay,” Martin said, sighing. “I’ll do something about the fucking thing. Just give me a minute.”

  Taking the beer with him, he went to his bedroom and retrieved his phone from the nightstand. The screen lit up when he hit the home button, displaying a message that informed him of a missed call and a voicemail. His heart raced as he recognized the number.

  It was Carol’s number. He hadn’t heard from his ex-wife in months. She was off having a high old time with her new boyfriend, a much younger guy named Nathan. A fucking pretty boy. The last thing she’d said to him was she never wanted to talk to him or see him again.

  Now this.

  Maybe she’d had a change of heart. Maybe the whole thing with Nathan had soured after the initial whirlwind and now she was ready to give him a second chance. He was surprised at how badly he wished for this. Even though he’d seen it coming, her exit from his life had hurt him deeply. Also, being alone was just a drag in general. Given the chance, he’d take her back in a heartbeat, he knew it.

  Heart hammering, he pushed the voicemail button and put the phone to his ear. “Hello, asshole,” came Carol’s familiar voice. He flinched at her harsh tone and felt a new churning in his gut. “You’ll be served papers by the end of the day. I’m going for bigger alimony payments, you piece of shit. Much bigger. I recommend you agree to the terms without a fight.” She laughed. “Unless you want me to flood your family’s inboxes with those pictures from your, ahem, ‘experimental’ phase. You know the ones I mean.”

  She laughed again and the recording ended.

  A wave of disappointment assailed Martin as he took the phone away from his ear and stared at it a moment. He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. During their marriage, Carol had never spoken to him so nastily. Not once. He couldn’t understand it.

  He also couldn’t afford significantly higher alimony payments. Slightly higher, maybe, but not anything like what she seemed to be suggesting in the message. And yet the threat was real. Those pictures existed. For a moment, Martin felt on the verge of a panic attack.

  In the next moment, he heaved a breath and told himself to calm down. He chugged down the rest of that second beer and went back out to the kitchen, where he took a third beer from the fridge and joined Hank at the screen door.

  The dog glanced up at him. Martin read a sense of fear in the animal’s eyes. He was still agitated, but he was afraid of the barrel and was hoping his master could make the perceived threat go away.

  Martin scratched the dog’s neck. “Don’t worry, buddy. I’m gonna take care of this. Move aside.”

  He nudged Hank out of the way and went back out onto the stoop, closing the screen door again. The barrel was still there. A part of him had half-expected it to be gone, revealed after all as a figment of diminished, drowsy perception. For better or worse, that was not the case.

  After taking another big gulp from the third beer, Martin let out a breath and stepped down from the stoop. That prickling in his brain returned, as did the tingle in his gut. His brow creased as a new perception came, an impression that the barrel was bigger than he’d first thought. In the next instant, however, he realized this wasn’t true. It just seemed larger. In a repeat of his previous experience, he’d moved closer to the barrel without being conscious of it.

  This was undeniably disturbing.

  And yet this time he felt no inclination to resist whatever was happening. That sense of deep yearning was back, stronger than before. He felt a prickling along his arms as gooseflesh rose and hairs stood up. There was a thrumming undercurrent of strange electricity in the air, like before a big storm.

  Only there were no dark clouds in the sky.

  Martin chugged down the last of the third beer and tossed the empty to the ground. A dim, disconnected part of him made a note to pick it up later.

  The barrel was calling to him.

  It was here for him. Specifically for him.

  Only for him.

  After reaching the barrel, he moved around it in a slow circle, squinting as he examined it closely. There wasn’t much to see, really, nothing additional he couldn’t have ascertained from the stoop. The barrel was entirely black. There were no markings at all, no brand symbol, nothing like that.

  The pull of the barrel was stronger now. Much stronger. The sensation enveloped him, consumed h
im, obliterating any remaining tiny shred of resistance. He crept closer still, leaning over it to examine the lid. As he did this, he saw that it was not entirely devoid of markings after all.

  Something in a tiny white font was printed along the edge of the lid. The sense of excitement gripping him intensified. He was sure this was significant, the first real hint of why the barrel was here. Logic said this was probably just a company name printed on the lid, but that prickling in his brain was telling him something else.

  He put his face closer to the lid and squinted. This is what he read: #blackbarrel

  After staring at the tiny letters without moving a muscle or making a sound for at least one full minute as his face registered an ever-deepening confusion, Martin stood up straight and looked at his phone. He swiped at the screen and pulled up the rarely used Twitter app. Unlike his ex-wife, Martin had never been a big social media user. A quick glance at his profile showed that nearly two years had gone by since he’d last tweeted anything. He had twelve followers—all of them either relatives or co-workers—and he was following twenty-eight people, most of them celebrities.

  Though he was never going to be anyone’s idea of a social influencer—not even close—he did recognize a hashtag when he saw one and he knew what to do with it. A few seconds after opening the app, Martin Sanchez sent out the following tweet:

  BadAzzSanchez: #blackbarrel WTF!?

  A response to the tweet arrived almost instantaneously in the form of a direct message:

  BB999: Black Barrel is a gift.

  Martin stared at the screen and frowned. The response came so fast it couldn’t have come from an actual person. It had to be an auto-response. He highly doubted the mystery of the barrel could be solved by interacting with a fucking bot, but the fact that the interaction had happened at all elevated his excitement level. At the very least, he now had a strong indication that the barrel’s appearance here wasn’t as random as he’d first surmised.

  It was a gift, according to this thing, but who had sent it to him and what did it contain? These were the essential questions he’d had from the start, but now they were invested with a deeper level of mystery. Despite his lingering confusion, the existence of an apparently official Twitter account did a lot to make the thing seem less sinister. This was some kind of internet thing, some new creative form of gift-giving. He’d heard of such things.

  Martin figured its forbidding outward appearance was intentionally misleading. The barrel was most likely filled with a hodgepodge of novelty and joke items. Maybe there would be some kind of supposedly hilarious theme to it all. The more he thought about it, the more sense this made. He could almost see some of his co-workers getting together and pooling their resources to have something like this sent to his house.

  Some of the guys had attempted to cheer him up in the wake of the split with Carol, inviting him out for drinks and such. He didn’t consider those guys especially close friends—they didn’t come over to the house for Sunday football or anything like that—but, sure, it was possible, maybe even likely.

  He had some of their numbers in his contacts. A call or two might have this situation sorted out in just a few minutes. He figured he’d wind up doing just that, but first he wanted to see what additional information, if any, he could extract from the bot.

  Tapping rapidly at the screen, he replied directly to the DM.

  BadAzzSanchez: What the fuck is this thing and the fuck am I supposed to do with it?

  Again, the response was instantaneous.

  BB999: Black Barrel is a gift. Open the barrel.

  More tapping on the screen, followed by the ensuing exchange.

  BadAzzSanchez: What’s in the goddamn thing?

  BB999: Black Barrel is a gift.

  BadAzzSanchez: You already said that. Will it blow up in my fucking face?

  BB999: Black Barrel will not harm you. Black Barrel is a gift.

  BadAzzSanchez: Who sent it?

  BB999: Black Barrel is a gift.

  By that point, Martin felt like screaming. He was going round and round with the bot and not getting much of anywhere, except for the information that the barrel would not harm him. This should have been reassuring, as it fit with his latest line of thinking. What didn’t fit with any of that, however, was that sense of having been physically pulled toward the barrel by some invisible force. Your standard internet gag didn’t have that kind of capability.

  Martin sighed and tapped at the screen again.

  BadAzzSanchez: Okay, Black Barrel is a gift. Who sent the gift?

  BB999: A friend.

  BadAzzSanchez: Which fucking friend?

  BB999: Black Barrel is a gift.

  This time Martin did scream. The sound was so loud and shrill it alarmed old Mr. Sloan’s Golden Retriever, which barked from the other side of the privacy fence. His own dogs barked and whimpered in response. This was followed by an extended round of back and forth barking, which became increasingly agitated.

  Ignoring the growing canine cacophony, Martin tapped at the phone’s screen yet again.

  BadAzzSanchez: Fine. Don’t tell me. Fuck you.

  BB999: Black Barrel is a gift. Open Black Barrel.

  Sighing in resignation, Martin dropped the phone in the pocket of his bathrobe. It was clear he’d learned all he could from the bot. He gnawed on his bottom lip as he stared at the barrel and continued to ponder what to do. The strange undercurrent of power emanating from the thing was just as palpable as ever. That was still somewhat disturbing. In the wake of his interaction with the bot, however, his fear level remained at a low ebb.

  Holding his breath, he reached out to the barrel with a tentative, slightly shaking hand and touched the lid. The pull of the thing again intensified with the physical contact, but this didn’t frighten him. He felt suffused with a warmth and deep peacefulness, the likes of which he hadn’t experienced in years, maybe decades.

  Martin dug his fingernails underneath the edge of the lid and pulled at it with all his strength, but he was unable to budge it. After stepping back and staring at it in consternation for a long moment, he went back into the house, grabbing his keys as he went out to his car, which was parked in the driveway. There was a beep as he hit a button on the key fob. The trunk lid popped up as he arrived at the rear of the car. It took a bit of rooting around in the junk-crowded trunk, but he soon found what he wanted.

  After closing the trunk, he marched back through the house and back out into the backyard. Hank tried to squeeze through the screen door with him, but Martin held him back and closed the door. Both of his dogs whimpered from the kitchen. He could feel their anxious canine stares on his back as he descended from the stoop to the ground. Martin wished they could feel what he’d felt upon touching the barrel. Their fears would go away. Maybe later, after he’d opened the barrel and learned its secrets, he’d bring them out here and gently coerce them into touching it. He smiled as he pictured Hank sloppily lapping at the barrel with his big tongue, a wide doggy grin on his face.

  Martin wedged the claw end of the crowbar beneath the edge of the lid, pushing it in as far as he could. Once he’d done this, he gripped the other end firmly with both hands and pushed down as hard as he could. The lid did not yield easily to the pressure—the seal was tighter than the most stubborn pickle jar lid by a factor of about a thousand—but it did finally begin to come away from the top of the barrel.

  His face shining with sweat, Martin cranked the crowbar up and down a few more times and finally the lid came free with a loud pop. Heaving a big breath, he tossed the crowbar aside and wiped sweat from his forehead.

  Well, this is it, he thought. Time to see what’s inside this bugger.

  Before he could lean over it and peek inside, he felt a vibration in the pocket of his bathrobe. Frowning, he took the phone out and stared at the screen. A Twitter alert told him he had a new DM from BB999.

  Martin grunted. “Huh. That’s weird.”

  The bot couldn’t po
ssibly know he’d removed the lid. Could it? It was just a piece of computer code, not a person. But maybe there was some kind of hidden sensor embedded in the barrel. Maybe the sensor had sent out a signal as soon as the lid was removed.

  Martin nodded.

  Made sense. Sort of.

  He opened the Twitter app and looked at the DM.

  BB999: Black Barrel is everything you ever wanted.

  BadAzzSanchez: We’ll see about that.

  Martin dropped the phone back in his pocket and leaned over the barrel. His brow knitted in confusion as he lowered his head and peered inside. He stood there with his hands on his knees, studying the barrel’s interior for several minutes.

  It was empty.

  He saw no gag gifts. No bottles of whiskey or tins of artisan cheeses. There was nothing. The barrel’s metal interior was spotless. It looked fresh off the production line, as if it had never contained anything at all. A thought occurred to him. Maybe the barrel’s emptiness was the gag, a lame 21st century equivalent to pet rocks or some shit like that. He hoped that wasn’t the case. What a rip-off that would be. And yet the barrel’s emptiness was impossible to deny. There just wasn’t anything in the damn thing.

  Nothing he could see, anyway.

  The strange, thrumming power that continued to emanate from the barrel was the only reason he didn’t immediately give up on it. In fact, he felt it more strongly than ever now. Something he couldn’t see, something inside the barrel, was still pulling at him.

  The phone buzzed in his pocket again. He took it out and was unsurprised to see a new DM.

  BB999: Black Barrel is everything you ever wanted.

  BadAzzSanchez: I never wanted an empty barrel so I’m pretty sure that’s a load of shit.

  BB999: Black Barrel is everything you ever wanted. What do you want most, Martin Sanchez?