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Julius
======
[1]
When Julius Sutcliffe stepped out of the front door
that morning and discovered that some frat-boy bastard
had stolen his garden gnome, it was very nearly the
last straw. "My gnome," said Julius, staring at the
little indentation in the ground where the gnome had
once stood. "Someone took my gnome." He then burst
into tears like a little child, unselfconsciously and
with a total, wailing despair. A young female jogger
passing by glanced worriedly at the unkempt man in a
stained wife beater shirt and faded under shorts,
wondering if he was going to snap and attack her.
Julius didn't notice. Julius didn't care. Someone had
stolen his garden gnome, and nothing else in the world
seemed to matter.
Eventually, the tears ran dry and Julius sat down on
the front step and stared off into space, his eyes
totally unable to focus on anything. Behind him, the
little house, which had once been so neat and well
maintained, sagged and peeled in the morning sun. The
lawn encircling it was overgrown and weed-infested,
and the car in front of the garage on the little strip
of cracked asphalt hardly looked better, though it
appeared to have been driven recently. The entire
scene was so depressing, alarming even, that the
neighbours were starting to talk about going to the
authorities to get Julius committed, evicted or both.
Julius himself was, of course, totally oblivious to
the effect which his disintegration was having on
anyone, least of all himself, and it had been a good
while since he had really felt anything at all. Until
today.
Julius sat there crying for some time as the morning
passed, until his reserve of tears was drained dry,
and then he just sat on the stairs, blood-shot eyes
glazed over, staring into nothing. Finally, responding
to some automatic impulse, he stood up, turned around
and walked inside, closing the door behind him.
[2]
The days flowed by. Julius' capacity for objectively
perceiving the passage of time was decaying, and he
was not even sure how long it had been since the
bastards had taken his gnome. Moreover, there were
periods when he woke up without being aware that he'd
been asleep, or realized that he was in the middle of
doing something with no memory of having started it.
He ate occasionally, got sleep whenever his body
demanded it, and watched a great deal of television
the rest of the time. He also watched a lot of porn.
In the beginning, the heavings and thrustings of the
silicon-pumped mannequins on his screen had managed
stimulate him enough to be worth masturbating to, but
each day the films lost a little bit of their power
until he just ended up watching tape after tape before
passing out on the sofa.
Once in a while, he also checked his e-mail on the
old computer in the den, more out of habit than
anything else. In the beginning, he had spent hours in
front of the screen, hoping that his wife would write
to tell him that she was coming back, that it had all
been a terrible mistake. Then he had discovered chat
rooms, and had spent time talking to people as
hopeless and depressed as himself. Now he just cleared
out the spam before logging out perhaps watching some
of the sex clips he had downloaded in brighter, more
proactive times.
That day, however, there was a message for him. Not
spam, an actual e-mail sent to him. The subject line
read 'WE HAVE YOUR GNOME'. No text in the message
body, just a file attachment. He clicked to open it. A
photo. Taken with a digital camera. Of the garden
gnome that had formerly lived on his lawn. Julius
blinked, feeling the slow trickle of anger seeping
into him. He could almost feel the bastards' hands
picking up the poor little gnome and throwing it into
the trunk of a car.
[3]
Later that day, he received another e-mail. It was
from the same, unfamiliar address. THE GNOME MAKES A
FRIEND, ran the subject line. Again it was a blank
message with a file attachment. He opened the file,
the same as before. The picture unfolded onto his
screen. A strange little noise escaped from Julius'
throat and his red-rimmed eyes widened.
On the screen, a man was tied to a chair. A garbage
bag was duct-taped to his head around the neck, which
would probably have been dangerous to the man if it
weren't for the straight razor slitting his throat. A
pair of black-gloved hands, belonging someone wearing
a suit standing behind the chair, were doing the
cutting. The victim was twisting as far as his bonds
would allow. A little dribble of very dark blood was
trickling from the neck. In the man's lap, drops of
blood on its little red hat, was the gnome.
"You're fucking with me," Julius whispered, not
believing it for a moment. It had to be a hoax, but
something about the picture...it was so real, so
authentic that Julius could almost hear the man's
muffled, terrified screams.
After a moment, Julius replied to the e-mail. WHO IS
THIS? IT'S NOT FUNNY. His heart was beating and a
strangely physical sensation of fear was tickling the
skin along his back. He rubbed his hands together in
anxiety. Send. He wondered what he should do. Inform
the police? Probably. No, certainly. The picture was
real. Somehow, he knew that it was real. He should
just tell the police...
A jangly tone informed him that a new e-mail message
had arrived. Julius, feeling as though he were moving
in slow motion, took a look at it. His forehead
prickled with sweat as soon as he did.
IS THERE ANYONE WHOM YOU’D LIKE MR. GNOME TO KILL?
He almost laughed at the correct use of the word
'whom,' (bad grammar was a pet peeve of his) and
looked across the room at the telephone on the wall.
His legs unsteady, he stood up, walking over to the
phone and picking it up to dial the police when
something stopped his finger from completing the three
digit number. He suddenly had an image of having to
deal with policemen here, in his house, of having to
interact with authority figures in a specific, lucid,
functional way. He looked at the mirror on the far
side of the room and saw the gaunt, haggard man
reflected back at him there. He saw the man who'd been
fired from his job after threatening the boss with a
baseball bat. The man who'd been finally asked to
leave a local shopping mall after sitting in the food
court, hour after hour, day after day, watching happy
families with a strange, wistful expression on his
face. The man who'd been so badly beaten by a pimp for
getting rough with a prostitute that night not so long
after the divorce had gone through.
He looked at the face in the mirror and knew with
absolute certainty that, no matter how things turned
out, he couldn’t deal with the police long enough to
establish his innocence and non-participation in the
murder documented on the screen. After the months of
degenerating into what he now was, the shock would be
too great. It might finish him off completely.
Julius put the telephone receiver back in its cradle
and wandered aimlessly around the room. Every so
often, he glanced at the computer screen. The image of
the killing had long since been replaced by an old
screen saver of little animated bits of pasta dancing
the Macarena. "Heyyyyyy…Maca-RONI!" it sang every
thirty seconds or so. He felt faint as though about to
lose consciousness, and the annoying fucking sound of
the little dancing macaroni sounded as though it were
coming from out of a tunnel. He considered going to
the bedroom and taking the little revolver out of the
closet and putting it into his mouth and blowing his
brains out of the back of his own head. Instead, he
pulled down his under shorts and tried to jerk off.
The attempt proved unsuccessful.
[4]
As the days went by, Julius' mailbox began to fill up
with pictures of the garden gnome in the midst of an
ever-widening spiral of atrocity. The beginning was
mild compared to what was to come: the second picture
was much like the first, even down to the M.O. It
didn't take long, however, for the depravity and
imagination of the anonymous killers to being bringing
things to the next level, upping the intensity with
each new photograph. First, the straight razor was
taped, blade out, to the gnome itself, and the
black-gloved hands held the gnome as it horribly
mutilated a woman's face. (Somehow, the pictures of
violence done on women proved more satisfying and
perversely interesting than those showing violence
towards men.) After several photos like these, three
of which arrived on the same day, the killer or
killers changed tack again: the next batch of photos
were taken after the murders were committed, with the
gnome arranged in horribly inventive ways upon each
corpse. In one, the gnome appeared to be felating a
man whose penis had been severed. In another, the
gnome had been placed behind a headless body, the
little, smiling, bearded head poking up from the stump
of a neck. A little cardboard cut out in the shape of
a comic book word balloon rose from the gnome's head,
the words probably some attempt at humour but rendered
illegible by the bloody fingerprints smeared all over
its surface.
By the time this cycle had played its way out and the
gnome began appearing with body parts rather than
bodies (a necklace of ears, seeming to bow as a pair
of severed hands was made to clap), Julius' capacity
for horror and revulsion had faded to a kind of
incredulous fascination. The certainty that he should
call the police no matter what it would cost him
psychologically or even legally gradually began to
lose its urgency, and he began to realize that he was
actually starting to look forward to the e-mails. This
feeling of anticipation, being a vaguely positive one,
felt novel and clean. Sometimes, it would occur to him
that if the murders being done for him were the real
thing, an appalling number of innocent people were
being killed in horrendous ways. This bothered him,
but only a little. The bad dreams bothered him more.
As his interest and tacit participation in the
killings grew, so did his awareness of himself and his
own surroundings. The fog was lifting. He could feel
it. Moreover, the wait, sometimes long and sometimes
mere minutes, between each transmission became
unendurable, and it became clear to Julius that the
time had to be filled or else he would simply lose his
own mind with impatience. He began to clean the house,
at first. Then he mowed the lawn. Washed his clothes.
Got moving and active and connected with things,
albeit it the little universe contained within his
house. He particularly enjoying doing the laundry,
though, for some reason, the new mental clarity tended
to become a little fuzzy at these times, and it
sometimes seemed as he would finish filling the
washing machine before he even started. The number of
clothes, too, seemed oddly large.
Still the pictures came, increasingly more bizarre
and increasingly more...interesting. Occasionally. The
question would be repeated –- IS THERE ANYONE WHOM
YOU'D LIKE MR. GNOME TO KILL? For some time, Julius
knew what his answer was to that question, but
something had held him back. On this day, as he sat
down and marvelled at how the could have possibly
gotten an entire severed face off a human skull, he
knew that the time had come. He typed his answer and
sent the message along on its way.
[5]
The next day, Julius Sutcliffe showered, shaved and
put on his best cologne. He looked at himself in the
mirror. The crazed hobo apparition he'd seen there on
the day of the first e-mail was gone, replaced by
someone who looked vaguely familiar and a full decade
younger. "You're a handsome devil," he told himself,
and he actually believed it was true. Something moving
in the mirror caught his eye, and he turned to see a
spider shaking a web that had not been there the night
before. Julius reached over and squashed the spider
with his thumb. The creature crunched into a pulp and
Julius brought the smeared remains closer and
inspected them. With a smile, he washed the spider
corpse off his hands and dried his skin on the fresh
towel hanging from the wall.
Stepping out of the bathroom, he walked over to the
den, feeling the breeze from the open window, pleased
with how clean the entire house felt. Outside, he saw
that some neighbourhood children were running along
the sidewalk, shouting at each other in high-pitched,
excited voices. It struck Julius that none of the
murdered people in the photos were children, and he
wondered why that was. Kids, after all, looked the
same on the inside as everyone did, and their small
size meant that cleanup would be easier. He grinned
and watched the kids until they turned the corner at
the end of the street. If the little darlings weren't
careful, somebody would come along and kill them.
He then sat down at the computer, turned it on, typed
in his e-mail password and saw that there was a new
piece of e-mail in his mailbox among the various bits
of spam. The size of the file attached to the mail was
huge, and he felt like a child about to receive a
present. Unhurriedly, he manually deleted all of the
spam ('ELIMINATE DEBT NOW!,' 'HER A$$ IS HOT 4 U!'),
lit a cigarette, sat back comfortably in his chair,
and opened the attached file. A slide show came to
life on his screen, and series of images began to
flick across it. They were all images of his wife
being tortured, violated and then killed. It was like
a flip-book of horror, each image coming sequentially
from the last, documenting the physical deconstruction
of the woman he had spent so long wanting back. He
barely even noticed the blood or mutilation or even
the little garden gnome ubiquitous in every frame. All
he saw was her face, not contorted in agony as it was
there, but laughing and sleeping and looking at him as
he placed the ring on her finger all those years ago.
He realized that his entire life had collapsed around
him because it wasn't his wife that he was missing; it
was his marriage and stability and order it seemed to
provide that he couldn't do without. The wife he'd
been lamenting was an abstraction, a foundation for an
entire little world that simply could not exist
without her. He'd been trying to prop it up for so
long that he was able to do nothing else, and as it
crumbled all around him, all he wanted was for things
to be the way they were before. He felt himself let
go. "Goodbye," he said, touching the screen gently. He
saw the final picture of her dismembered corpse being
dissolved it a vat of acid (and there was the gnome,
perched on the edge of the tank), and then the
sequence went back to the beginning for another run
through. Julius turned off the monitor and sat there,
feeling the shape of the hole inside him and knowing
that, as painful as its presence was, it was not so
deep that it could contain him.
From outside, he heard the sound of a car door
slamming and of the car driving away. Knowing what
he’d find there, Julius stood up, walked to the front
door and went outside.
[6]
On the lawn was the gnome, exactly where it had stood
before. It was clean, with no sign of the blood and
carnage it had been subjected to over the past few
weeks, looking for all the world as though it had
never been moved at all. Just then, the same female
jogger that ran past his house every morning ran past
again, and Julius caught her eyes and nodded, smiling
slightly. She looked at him strangely, and for a
moment Julius pictured her dead with a garden gnome
perched on top of her chest. As she ran out of sight,
Julius considered that maybe it was time to start
dating again.
Feeling better and younger and freer than he
remembered ever feeling before, Julius looked up at
the sky. It was a warm, sunny day.
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