John Dies at the End

my place and then moved back in because of a fight we had over something or other. My roof started leaking and I learned about the joys of home ownership when a bill for four thousand dollars showed up in my mailbox after I got it repaired. On my birthday I went and visited my adoptive parents and it was a little awkward, as always. But they’re good people. My birthday gift from John was an envelope full of baked beans.

Jen and I didn’t talk about Vegas. We didn’t talk about Big Jim and all the things we saw and did over those two strange days. That’s why she never got along with John, I think, because John loved to talk about it, loved to read about ghosts and dimensions and demonic conspiracies. He was soaking this stuff up from the ’net and telling us all about it over empty beer bottles and greasy pizza boxes. He’d talk and she’d fidget, change the subject. I usually took her side.

But I still made a habit of watching, looking for alien white insects zipping around outdoors, studying the shadows for the dark figures we saw float out from that portal to who-knows-where. I kept a lookout for, well, anything. And I saw things from time to time. Or maybe I didn’t. A dark shape slipping around a corner, a pair of lit eyes like burning coals, floating through the night. Always out the corner of my eye or in the reflection of a window. Or in the paralyzed state between deep sleep and wakefulness in those dim morning hours. Nothing you could trust, nothing you could admit to seeing.

John got me alone one night, I guess it would have been that next spring after Vegas, and asked me straight up if I ever saw anything strange. Because he did, he said. All the time, he said. He got a job working as a janitor in the Undisclosed Courthouse and he said he saw an old man walking around the basement, a ghost, semitransparent but very real and “There, man. Just there, there as a brick wall. I mean, he was just, so incredibly there.” John rattled off more stories, told me he watched a baseball game on TV and the announcers made some comment about how the stands were half empty, how the team was having trouble selling tickets. “But man, the stands were full, Dave. I’m tellin’ ya, to my eyes every seat was filled and I think it was the undead, I think I was seeing thousands of walking souls that nobody else could see, watching the game. Isn’t that bizarre?”

I told him the truth, sort of. I said I didn’t see spirits or demons or walking shadows or anything that couldn’t be written off as a trick of the eyes. I told him I thought the soy sauce made us see all that and it had been months since we’d ingested it and no matter what the stuff was or where it was from, surely it had worked itself out of our systems by now. An awkward silence followed, John letting the implication of that statement hang in the air. Without coming out and saying it, I had just told him I thought he was either full of shit or losing his mind.

A week later I was in John’s apartment, flipping through a magazine while he sat on the couch playing some game or another. I glanced at the TV and it looked like one of those first-person shooting games where you wander around hallways looking over the barrel of your gun, tearing bad guys in half with splashes of digital blood. I was never that into them.

“You still got that pill bottle?” John said, trying to sound offhand while he hammered a control pad with his thumbs. “You said you went back and found it at Robert’s old trailer, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And was there still sauce in there?”

“No. It had two—capsules, or whatever they were—in it originally and I had taken them both.”

“Oh.”

On the screen, John shot and killed some kind of demon creature and a little box fell out of him. The screen displayed, YOU’VE GOT A BOX OF SHOTGUN SHELLS.

It wasn’t until later that I realized, with amazement and disgust, what John was saying: he would have taken the fucking soy sauce again if I had any left.

I started avoiding John after that.

JOHN DOESN’T MAKE avoiding him easy, though. He kept showing up at my house with a video game console curled under one arm, kept calling me to come play basketball, kept asking me if I was avoiding him. He was “let go” from his janitor job and he asked me if I could get him back on at Wally’s. I did and then I saw him every day whether I liked it or not. But when he tried to bring up anything vaguely spooky, I did what Jen did: I changed the subject.

And then, one day at Taco Bell there was this old woman sitting two tables away from John, Jen and me. The old woman isn’t eating. Just sitting there, both hands holding her purse in her lap.

A group of four college kids come in, frat guys, and they sat right at the old lady’s table like she wasn’t there, one guy sitting right on her. Through her. He’s sucking on this Burrito Supreme with this old woman’s elbows sticking out of his torso the whole time. Finally she just sits up out of him and daintily walks out through—literally through—one of the glass doors.

All three of our heads were fixed right on her, even Jen’s. There was no pretending we didn’t see it, we were all staring. It was the pink elephant in the room, the thunderous fart in the elevator. Denial would have been ridiculous. We finished our food and walked out and piled in my car, then Jen put her face in her hands and cried. John had this satisfied look that I wanted to punch off his face. He knew better than to say anything.

I decided right there that I could outlast it, ignore stuff like that for the rest of my life if I had to.

I was wrong, of course.

In the summer John read on a Web site about a lady in a neighboring state who claimed she had bloodstains that kept coming back and back in this one spot in her carpet. She had it steam-cleaned back to bleach white, but a week later, there was the stain again. Then they replaced the carpet. The stain came back. They had video and everything.

John told me about it and I blew him off. Then he got me drunk and told me about it again and suddenly I was fascinated. We called the lady, told her we were experts in new carpet-cleaning techniques and asked if we could come up to take a look. So based on one moment of drunken curiosity, we wound up burning up a whole Saturday making the seven-hour drive to go check out the magical carpet stain.

We heard screams from inside the house as soon as we pulled into the driveway. We banged on the door and were greeted by a six-year-old girl holding one of those sippy cups. We walked in and saw the parents watching some award show on TV while in the center of the room lay a screaming man, a flow of crimson running from his groin and staining the carpet underneath. The mother, a pleasant, heavy woman in her forties, pointed to the shrieking man and said, “That’s the stain.”

We told her we had to get some supplies from my car, then drove away. We did a search at their local library—that is, John did a search while I curled up in a chair and went to sleep—and found a story from a few years before where a man had died after getting his penis caught in a spring-loaded mole trap he was working on. He bled to death. We went back to the house the next day, asked the family to leave the room and tried talking to the bleeding guy.

We told him it wasn’t his house any longer, that his wife had sold it, that he was staining the carpet from beyond the grave. He didn’t react to us, just kept screeching and thrashing around and clutching his groin. But after about an hour of us badgering him, he vanished. Off to wherever they go. No more stain.

The carpet family was so impressed they apparently told everybody they knew about it. They knew it wasn’t some magical detergent, either.

After that we got about a dozen calls and e-mails asking us to come check out some situation or other. We thought only one was worth checking out because it mentioned “shadow people,” but it turned out to be bullshit, a college kid with a budding case of schizophrenia. In fact, of the contacts we got over the next three months, exactly one of them turned out to be a real haunting-type thing and that was Frank Campo, the guy with the spidery car. We fixed him just by telling him that he wasn’t crazy, that the horrors he was seeing were real. He seemed oddly comforted by that. He was a lawyer.

But the rest were nothing, scared and lonely old ladies and attention seekers who thought it was better to be crazy than unnoticed.

But John and I saw things. Oh yes. By then, just walking around and going about our lives, we saw things. There seemed to be a knack to it, a tuning of the eyes. Like focusing on the dirt on your windshield instead of the road outside.

I woke up one morning to find four pairs of huge eyes peering over my bedspread, inches from my face. Short little dwarf people, standing along the side of the bed with eyeballs three times bigger than a person’s should be. I blinked. They were gone. I didn’t tell Jennifer. I didn’t tell her about any of it. I told myself it was just one more