The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud Read Free Book Online Page B

thing.”
    He shook his head, unable to process what he was hearing. “Death cults?”
    “Well I don’t know, Will! What the fuck are these people doing? Texting each other these things?”
    “Carrie, did you go looking for it?”
    “I was trying to figure this out!”
    He stood and started pacing, his body sparking with an energy as much excitement as fear. “Well? Did you find anything?”
    “I can’t remember,” she said quietly. He thought of the dark, wet tunnel on the screen last night.
    “Don’t go looking again,” he said.
    Carrie sighed, putting her forehead in her hand. The phone lay limply in her other one. “Don’t tell me what to do, Will.”
    He put out his hand. “Give it to me.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Please. Please, Carrie. Give it to me. I’m going to give it to the police, like I should have done last night.”
    “No you won’t.” She set it on the end table, and left him to fetch it himself. “People look so normal on the outside,” she said.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Inside it’s all just worms.”
    He strode toward the end table and snatched up the phone before she could change her mind. “I don’t understand you,” he said.
    She arose from the couch and disappeared into the bedroom, emerging a while later dressed for the day.
    “Have a good night at work,” she said.
    “Just like that?”
    “Give up the phone tonight. Then we’ll talk.” With that, she was gone.
    He fell onto the couch, wanting to be angry. She had no right to give him an ultimatum. He’s the one who found the damn thing, he’s the one who saw the pictures and tried to protect her from them, he’s the one who’d had to listen to that awful voice after she insisted he make the call. The more he thought about it all, the more righteous he felt.
    But he still couldn’t get angry.
    He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to feel. The spikes of fear he’d experienced earlier always seemed to retreat to a low-grade anxiety during the day. He couldn’t bring himself to believe in what he was seeing. This had to be some kind of elaborate joke, or maybe one of those bizarre role-playing games, and he’d been caught up in it. If anything, he was less inclined to turn the phone over to the police for fear of being laughed at.
    He took the opportunity to check her computer in the office room, personal space be damned. He booted it up and toggled her history. Some .edu sites, links to papers on T.S. Eliot, a few celebrity gossip sites, a lengthy spell of window shopping at Amazon. Somewhere in that time the weight of what she’d seen shifted her focus; what started as a perusal of furniture and clothing ending with a browse through the true crime section, followed by books on the occult. There were links to a few sites after that, but not many – ancient, horribly designed sites about Satanism and witchcraft, hosted on long-defunct platforms with rudimentary interfaces. It was as though she’d been engaging in a geological dig through the strata of the internet’s past. From there she seemed to have spent considerable time looking into something called The Second Translation of Wounds . The last recorded site visit was time-stamped 11:17. Several hours before he arrived home.
    After that, there was no record of her activity. It was as though she’d shut the computer off. Or – he thought, despite his efforts at rationalization – cracked through the lowest stratum to something else.
    What had she been looking at?
    What did she find?
    He shut the computer down. The whole thing made him feel sick. He went into the kitchen and made himself a screwdriver. Two or three more of those and he’d be able to push the whole thing out of his mind.
     
     
    T HE NIGHT WAS surprisingly busy, and at first he was able to lose himself in the tide of work. Most of what he termed the Rosie’s Regulars made an appearance: Old Willard, the raisin-faced ex-POW from the Korean War, smiling through his sublimated