Page 38 of To Love a Monster
Usually, the messages disappear after a few seconds.But this one doesn’t vanish.It stays there, glowing, real.
I read it twice.Then again, and I can’t help but smile.He left the thread open, inviting me to text him back for once.I don’t know what to say at first.What do you text a ghost who finally shows signs of wanting to stay?I bite my lip, fingers hovering over the screen.The words feel ridiculous.Too light.Too normal.
So ...supper?
And for a second, I hesitate.This is all too weird.But without putting too much thought into how weird the whole situation is, I press SEND anyway.Because I’ve already made my choice.Maybe I made it the second I stopped being afraid of inviting him in.The response comes almost instantly.
Only if you’re dessert.
Heat rushes to my cheeks.I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling like an idiot.The message still glows on the screen, and even though it’s maddeningly cryptic, so him, my chest feels lighter.He hasn’t disappeared.He’s still tethered to me, even if it’s by nothing more than words on a screen.
I toss the phone onto the bed and head to the kitchen and flick the kettle on.The smell of coffee soon fills the space, warm, grounding.Familiar in a way nothing else has been lately.Cup in hand, I wander back toward the studio corner of the cabin, where the canvas waits, blank and expectant.
Something stirs in me and my fingers itch for the brush, for the colors.I dip into the palette, midnight blue, crimson, a slash of smoke gray.There’s no hesitation, no second guessing.
This one won’t be soft, it won’t be abstract.It’ll be honest, a shadow and a flame.A storm wrapped around a heartbeat.Something that feels like danger but looks like home.
The image comes together in layers, each one bolder than the last.A figure, half-submerged in smoke, his back to the viewer.Broad shoulders, spine curved slightly forward, as if he’s bracing for a blow or preparing to deliver one.His form is cut in charcoal strokes, edges bleeding into the night behind him.He’s faceless.Silent but unmistakable.
Behind him a second shape emerges.Smaller, closer.A woman is tucked into the hollow of his silhouette.Her form is softer, less defined, like she’s dissolving into him.Around them there are swirls of crimson.Not blood, not fire.Something between.
****
Nikolai
Iwatch her throughthe feed after she tosses her phone onto the bed and walks over to the kitchen.She’s barefoot, her hair messy, robe tied loose at the waist.
She makes coffee and takes her mug over to where her paints and blank canvas wait.I let myself watch for one second longer than I should.Her brush strokes are slow, deliberate, focused.She leans in like she’s telling the canvas something she can’t say out loud.
Then I turn back to the drive.I sit at the table in my cabin with the lights off, only the faint morning glow bleeding through the windows.My laptop is open and the clone drive is plugged in.Everything I pulled from Carl’s system is copied, intact and untouched.I start with the obvious.
Emails.At first, they’re mundane.Spam, a couple of receipts.An automatic notification from a hardware store downtown.Then, I stumble across a series of drafts never sent.Messages he started typing but never finished.One addressed to “A” short, vague, but with enough intention to raise alarms.
I click on his browser history.Unremarkable, until it isn’t.Hidden sessions.Obscure searches.Private tabs wiped clean, but partially cached.Surveillance gear.Property records.GPS spoofing.Background checks.
Next, I look at cloud backup.He thought he was being smart.But his sync protocols are sloppy.One folder, deep, nested behind layers of renamed junk directories, catches my eye.Inside, I find a set of attachments.No titles.No previews.Just files tucked into digital shadows like they’re meant to be forgotten.
I click and the images start to load slowly.At first, they’re almost indecipherable, dark, grainy, soaked in static.I enhance the contrast and sharpen the noise until shapes begin to form.
Then I see it, a man and a woman tied to chairs.Their arms are behind their backs.Faces battered beyond recognition.Their eyes are swollen shut, noses clearly broken.Blood dried in thick, cracked rivulets down their necks.Skin slashed open on the woman’s cheek.Duct tape pressed to the man’s mouth, half torn loose.
The woman’s head lolls to the side, neck limp, throat bruised in a single ugly ring.The man, his torso is bare, ribs sticking out beneath purpled flesh.Burns on his chest.A split above one eye that hasn’t clotted right.His jaw is broken, hanging slightly out of place.
They’ve been tortured.Systematically.And they’re clearly dead.My breath stalls in my lungs.Cold and solid.The man looks familiar.Not immediately, the damage makes it hard to tell.But there’s something about the color of his hair.the shape of his face, the slope of the shoulders.
Something that pulls at memory like a hook.I narrow my eyes, open another window on my personal laptop, and pull up my own report.I scan through it all.Local residents.Backgrounds.Images and then I find him.Jake.
The woman next to him is his wife.Registered co-owner of the hardware store they ran together.She was quieter.Kept to herself and barely showed up in local chatter.They weren’t flagged when I compiled the original report.There was no missing person alert or registered deaths.
But now...I open a separate window and dig into regional law enforcement reports, starting just after the date I submitted my pre-op file to Matteo.And there it is.They were reported missing four weeks ago.By neighbors.A few friends.No obvious signs of struggle in the house.No activity on credit cards.Phones dead.Vehicles still parked in their usual spots.
To friends and family, they simply vanished.No calls, no notes.They just disappeared without explanation.But the police closed the file.A little digging reveals that two days after the missing persons report was filed, an anonymous tip came through.
Said Jake and his wife were guilty of fraud, that they were under investigation.That they fled before the charges could land.The message implied that arrest was imminent and that the couple knew it.There was no record of who came in with this tip.But warrants were issued and the case was reclassified.
They were no longer “missing.”They were now seen as fugitives.The system believes they ran.But I’m staring at their corpses.Beaten, bound and dead long before those warrants were signed.Someone made sure the world would stop looking for them.
The backdrop is familiar.A narrow aisle with metal shelving.Pegboards half-full of tools and supplies.The wall behind them is lined with old signage, rusted and chipped, like it hasn’t been updated in years.It looks like the small hardware store in town, the one Jake ran before he vanished.
