Kyle’s Room
“So, this is the room…” Kyle thinks. It was this room where the killer lived.
It is strange to be in the room. Not only to be in it, but to live in it. To live in a place where death lived.
This is where he plotted… This is where he sat…
Kyle sits down to the desk. It’s a solid, flame mahogany writing desk, with 8 dovetailed drawers, brass handles, and legs ending in lion feet. The matching antique Victorian carved walnut botton back armchair is hard and uncomfortable. Kyle prefers the modern, minimalist style architecture, furniture of his childhood home. The old-fashioned fittings of this place give him the creeps.
It’s the same ugliness throughout the house, Kyle laments, the same Dracula-type furniture- dusty antiques, big and brown, oak and cherrywood, red velvet chairs. Much of it has sat in the house since it was built. Much of it remained even after… Only a few items that were too splattered with blood, too stained, had been removed, Kyle had read online… Aside from that, it was the same furniture… In the same house…
Kyle had read about how in Asian cultures, they believe ghosts can attach themselves to furniture, to buildings. He’d read how the Japanese would rather have a building demolished and build a new place, because they believe any house that was previously occupied will be haunted. Ghosts alive inside the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the furniture.
There could be something to that, Kyle ponders. Buildings and inanimate objects could have memories too, like us, but theirs probably are longer and less selective…
Unlike a lot of mass killers, Colby Oswald didn’t shoot himself in the end. He’s alive. He’s in jail, but he’s alive.
Kyle lays his chin to his chest, exhales deeply. His eyes fix to the desk in front of him. This is Colby’s desk. This is where he wrote his manifesto. Allegedly there’d been a handwritten manifesto, written on notebook pages, inked in blood. It’d been discovered by police, laid out on this desk… It was described as a diatribe, rambling doggerel, cryptic passages documenting the haunting and demonic possession.
None of it was made public. It was sealed, kept under wraps like the Columbine Killers’ “Basement Tapes.” It was scheduled to be made available to the public in the year 2100.
Kyle has a tingle run through him. The hairs on his arms prickle. He shivers. He feels someone standing behind him. A presence. A towering figure. He spins around in his seat to see his dad standing behind him, in the doorway, arms akimbo.
“Dinner’s at 6,” are the only words his dad speaks, before his arms slacken and he turns and lurches out of the room.
His dad’s face looks paler than snow. His face drained of blood. His dad’s voice, as usual, sounds flat yet angry, quiet, yet carrying an echo of menace.
Wordlessly, Kyle swings his gaze and nods in assent…
Kyle opens his laptop and places it on the desk. His desktop is in the corner, still in its sealed box. He’ll set it up later.
He opens the ghost app on his phone. He wants to see if it works. See if he can catch a ghost. The video player screen on the app sits empty and the low hum of white noise sounds. He slips the phone in his jeans’ front left pocket, thinking the app will protect him, like an amulet or a talisman.
Clicking open and lifting the screen of his laptop, he presses his index finger to the power button. But nothing happens.
He presses again.
Nothing.
Annoyed, knowing he’d charged the battery, he stands up, walks over to his backpack, which is lying on the floor nearby, and squats down, zips it open, digs out a charger. Then he rises, moves back to the desk, and plugs in the charger to the laptop, then moves with the charger in hand, and kneels to insert its prongs into the wall socket by the desk.
The second the charger’s metal prongs slide into the outlet, Kyle’s body experiences a shock. His body glows phosphorescent blue. He tumbles to the hardwood floor, which feels like warm water. And he lies there, boneless, as if floating.
Then he’s levitating. His body lifts; ascends toward the ceiling. He summons the strength to shift his hands, defensively, as he approaches the ceiling, but instead of crashing into it, he’s flying through it, as if water through a sieve.
Then he finds himself rising above the house, above the neighborhood, above the city, and he is plopped into the soft cushion of a white cloud. He rests atop the fluffy white cloud, finding himself naked, and his penis has become a great green cobra that’s peacefully purring, like a cat, and resting its head on his stomach. The penis cobra is eying him, flicking its forked tongue, flashing a wry little snake grin.
A furious, Disco-Dancing Jesus emerges from up through an adjacent cloud, pumping 70s dance music following him. The Disco-Dancing Jesus boogying, scowling, dancing toward him. Disco-Dancing Jesus in a Saturday Night Fever leisure suit that’s silver, sparkly.
From behind Jesus floats in, like a small blimp, a wild-eyed Colby, who is also naked, and also with a great green cobra penis. Colby is flanked by a small gray furry creature, something between a goat and a man, with a face Kyle recognizes but can’t instantly place. Colby and the goat creature have angry expressions, faces pulled into contempt.
Colby, the goat man, and Disco-Dancing Jesus shapeshift into their images on three big-screen televisions, the televisions twirling and ascending, as if they are spaceships searching for stars.
Then Kyle falls through the cloud, like a trapdoor is opened, and he plummets back to Earth, as if he were a skydiver without a parachute, and he drops back into his bedroom, waking up on the floor, startled, after hearing a loud thud.
