“I want to burn that house to the ground. No, I’m going to burn that house to the ground, and you’re going to help me.”
George looked at me with serious eyes. I had never seen such a strong scowl on his face. The usually jovial and Falstaffian fat man looked like a ravenous wolf.
Or a crazed killer.
I put down my red plastic cup full of beer. The two of us stood outside on the porch. A slight wind cut through the summer humidity. It did little to stop the sweat from dampening my shirt. George had already stripped off his tie and slouched by the railing in a t-shirt and basketball shorts.
“Did you just involve me in a criminal conspiracy?” I asked with humor in my voice. Rather than laugh or mollify my growing worry with a “Just kidding,” George repeated his earlier refrain.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t have hard proof, but I have a gut feeling. That house…it’s the source of it all.”
I followed George’s finger and studied the house across the street. It must have been a nice place once upon a time: two-storied, half red brick and half clapboard, and ringed on four sides with green grass and plenty of space for a garden patch. The detached garage indicated that the home’s construction dated to the first days of the automobile.
However, the cozy and quaint foundation had long ago been buried underneath a solid decade of debris. A mountain of empty plastic bottles exploded from the front porch, while gutters and awnings hung broken and limp beside cracked walls or scum-covered windows. The front door had holes that had been shoddily repaired with old newspaper and superglue. Somewhere out of sight, a mangy dog barked warnings to all possible intruders. The place was a crack house, or, more appropriately, a meth house in the middle of a small town neighborhood replete with single family homes and at least two corner coffee shops run by aging hippies.
“I watch the place at night,” George continued. “People…all kinds of freaks…walk in and out of that place at all hours. Sometimes there’s packs of ‘em, and other times it’s a single person. But you can see; you have eyes. What do you think goes on in there?”
“Drugs,” I mumbled.
“Yeah, right. Drugs. Meth, heroin, pills, crack, coke, crank, whatever. It’s bad enough knowing that at any moment that place could explode. Don’t meth trailers explode all the time?” George looked at me for confirmation.
“All the time,” I affirmed.
“Just my luck, right? All it takes is one cook asleep at the spoon, and BLAM! There goes the neighborhood.”
“And you want to burn it down?” I asked. “Your plan sounds dangerous to everyone on this street, and to everyone two streets over too.”
George hung his head low. “Christ, I know you’re right. Still, somebody ought to do something about that place.”
“Call the cops.”
“I have. I’ve called them a hundred times, but it never seems to stop the place. I’ve seen the smokies arrest a gaggle of tweakers at noon, and by five o’clock, the whole operation is up and running again like nothing happened. I’d say they’ve arrested over twenty people at that house, and yet drugs keep getting sold and people keep dying.” George swung his eyes towards mine, caught hold of them, and refused to break the connection.
“People keep dying just like Jared,” he said.
The comment cut like a knife. George and I had just come from Jared’s wake. Open casket. Rather than the short, pugnacious friend with the ready smile and razor-sharp wit, we had found a pale and bloated simulacrum that could not speak or smile. I had reached out to hold Jared’s hand but recoiled when I felt the coldness of his skin. That’s when I knew that he was gone and never coming back.
“Did that house have something to do with Jared’s death?” I asked.
“Like I said earlier, I don’t have concrete proof of anything. All I have are suspicions.”
“Ok, George. Lay out your suspicions for me.”
He took a big swig of beer, crumpled up his solo cup, and tossed the remains into a lone garbage can. He wiped his mouth with the back of hand and then belched loudly. It was weirdly comforting to see that, at forty, my old friend George was still the same old slob.
“First thing: Jared died of a drug overdose. That’s what the toxicology report said. I saw it myself.”
“He died while on a cocktail of drugs, I heard.”
“Yeah. There was a lot of bad stuff in his system: oxy, weed, some anti-seizure and depression meds, plus a whole lot of booze. Basically, his heart exploded, and his organs failed. But what I really want to say is that the report mentioned an ‘unknown substance.’ Jared took large quantities of this ‘unknown substance.’ Something like five percent of his entire bloodstream was full of the stuff.”
“Damn,” I said as I filled my cup with more cheap beer from the keg. “You have any idea what it could have been?”
“I think it was string.”
“String?”
George flashed a funny look, then relaxed. “I forgot,” he said. “You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Fifteen years.”
“Right. You’ve probably never heard of string at all, have you?”
“Nope.”
“String is kind of hard to explain.” George scratched his salt and pepper beard, then rubbed his large belly. His expression was a mixture of contemplative and comical. He was trying hard to look wise, but I smirked because all I could see was the clumsy doughboy who made a semi-legendary career out of pissing and shitting his pants at parties. Years ago, when George, Jared, and I all suffered through undergrad, it was considered a prize to snatch up George’s soiled underwear and use it as a weapon at a later shindig. Such were my halcyon days before my marriage, the subsequent divorce, and much later, Jared’s death.
“String is a street drug that can’t be accurately described,” George continued. “I don’t know what it looks or smells like. Some bozos will say it’s a black and sticky substance. Others will tell you that it’s a yellow powder that smells like rotten eggs. None of that is true, or maybe it is. I don’t know as string’s properties are unknown. Hell, nobody knows what it’s made from, and the cops still refuse to believe that it even exists.”
“So, it’s like a local legend?”
“Sort of, but it’s real. Ask any bartender, Uber driver, or paramedic and they’ll tell you about what string does to people. It’s the most dangerous high imaginable. It turns people unpredictable. Violent. Like PCP, but worse. And on top of it all, stringers have lust in overdrive. We’re talking two Blue Chew and a can of Monster type of lust. Sex zombies. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“If that’s the case, then this town should have seen an upsurge in sex crimes, right?” I tried my best to sound analytical. I steepled my fingers and placed them under my nose. George turned his head and nodded towards a series of white papers blowing in the breeze. I looked and saw that each piece of paper was stapled to a light or telephone poll. The bold letters of “MISSING” stood out in red.
“I’ve been seeing those posters all summer, and some before that during the spring. Every single time it’s a woman that is missing. And, if you do a little cross referencing like I do, then you’d know that half of them missing women were either prostitutes or employed in near-prostitution.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Rub and tug parlors, for one. We’re growing those like a fungus in this town. Some strippers, and others consorts of the pure online variety.”
“How the hell do you know all of this?” I asked. I felt duty-bound to be skeptical. After all, unlike George and our remaining friends from school, I was the one who had gone off to the big city with a graduate degree and the hope of earning six figures. This fact made it a requirement that I push back against small town superstition and irrational thinking. Internally, however, I was already halfway to believing George.
“My grandmother still gets the Post. I get bored when I watch her, so I’ve taken to reading the thing front to back. You’d be surprised how much local color our hometown rag provides, especially if you know how to read between the lines. Once I started noticing all the overdoses, and posters, and assaults, and other general mayhem, I began taking the news seriously. That’s how I came to put two and two together. This town is in the middle of a crime spree, and the driving factor is string. And,” here George straightened himself and glared at the house across the street. “that house right there is making it.”
“You’re a one-man vigilance committee,” I said. I patted my old friend on the shoulder. He gave my hand a subtle shrug.
“I don’t know if you’re mocking me or not, but it matters to me. You left, and good for you. Not all of us have your smarts. Me? I’m as dumb as a bag of hammers. Can’t work with my brains, so I have to work with my hands. All I have in the world are these hands and this house. I like this house, and I like this town. I feel no reason to leave, so when I see that everything is going to hell in a handbasket, I feel compelled to do something. And now that Jared’s gone, I can have my revenge and be justified.”
“I feel like you’ve taken a few logical leaps, but I get your point.”
“That’s good,” George said. “And what about string? Have I convinced you that it exists?”
“I guess so. I have no reason to doubt you.”
“That’s good. That’s great. So, one last question: are you down to do something about that piece of shit house right there?”
“Igniting a place full of corrosive chemicals is a bad idea.”
“I already admitted that. We can do something else instead.”
“Like what?”
George breathed heavily and hung his head. He started pacing. For the most part, he kept his eyes on his target across the street.
“I got an idea,” I said to break the tension. “If you’re convinced that we ought to go in there, then why don’t we collect evidence? Take pictures and record videos. Give the cops so much that they have to do something.”
George nodded his head. “Get the city to demolish the place afterwards.”
“Yeah. That’s fine,” I added.
“One problem,” George said. “There’s going to be people inside.”
I stopped and considered the issue. “Ok, but you were going to burn them alive.”
“Fair enough. Maybe we can get them out of the house somehow.”
“You got any knock-off police sirens?” I asked.
“No, I got a better idea. It’s so stupid and so simple, but I think it might work. I’ll take care of it. All you have to do is meet me here after midnight, ok?”
“Does your plan involve immolating a bunch of junkies?”
“I don’t know what that word means, but no, it doesn’t.”
With that, we shook hands and agreed to meet again dressed in black.
***
“Are you serious?” George and I stood on the porch again, this time the sky was black and both of us were dressed like ninjas. Somehow, George had stuffed his corpulent body into skin-tight yoga clothing. He looked like a giant blood sausage.
“No, I’m telling you, they all raced out of the house like rats fleeing a sinking ship. It was hilarious.” George’s grand plan was nothing more than a simple phone call to the ancient, but still operable landline in the house. When a sleepy voice answered, George, with a towel draped over the speaker to muffle his voice, told the junkie that a police raid was imminent on the home. “That’s all it took,” he said. “The place ought to be empty.”
“It better be,” I said. “But, just in case it isn’t, I brought this.” I reached into the pockets of my black jeans and held up a sub-compact Smith & Wesson. George’s eyes grew wide. He reached into his black sweatpants and produced a KA-BAR.
“You have more firepower than me. But together, no stringer stands a chance.”
“I don’t want to use this.”
“Neither do I.”
“But we agree…”
“Self-protection is a must,” George said. We bumped fists. The unspoken agreement was enough for me. I pulled the black balaclava over my face; George copied me. I checked my cellphone and saw that it was 1:08 AM. I then made sure that it was in airplane mode. Once done, I asked George if he was ready.”
“Not just ready, but excited,” he said.
We ran across the street in a crouch. George took the lead, and after making sure to avoid the graveyard of plastic bottles, he located a flimsy screen door at the back of the house. The swiftness and sureness of his movements indicated that he had visited the house before. I whispered my suspicions to him.
“Guilty as charged. Never been inside before, but I have played recon several times. One time I rescued stray cats from the backyard, and a few months ago, there was a junkie queen who crashed here. She used to walk around naked a lot. I got lonely.”
“Jesus, dude.” I elbowed him in the ribs. George slapped the back of my head. It was a hard slap that temporarily disrupted my equilibrium. I apologized and followed him into the dark, foul-smelling house.
“Something definitely died in here,” I said.
“A lot of things,” George added. “This place is a death-trap too. I’m surprised it hasn’t collapsed already.”
George wasn’t wrong. Mold and rotten floorboards made up most of the ground floor. Strange dark smears punctuated the dirty floorboards, and we did our best to step over the clusters of broken furniture and soiled sleeping bags. After crossing the living room, we entered a narrow hallway squeezed on both sides by various trinkets. My stomach churned a little when I noticed that most of the objects were intended for kids. The kitchen was even more disgusting. All four burners on the stove were caked over with grease and ash, and the sink had a halo of buzzing flies. I leaned over and stared into the pile of unwashed dishes. I gagged hard when I noticed several cereal bowls half-full of curdled milk.
“These freaking pigs, man. How can you live like this?”
“Stringers are a strange breed, dude.” George spoke through pinched nostrils. “Hygiene doesn’t matter when you can get a high that strong.”
“Ok, but damn. This is like living in a sewer.”
“Let’s go up to the second floor. Maybe it’ll be better up there.”
It wasn’t. The second floor contained a bathroom with a disabled toilet and a shower full of clothes. Next to the bathroom, George and I stumbled into two bedrooms that were covered in mattresses, dust, and discarded sex toys and condoms. George and I labeled these bedrooms as the house’s “fuck rooms.” The pungent stench of sweaty bodies hung like a fog in the fuck rooms, and this smell was only mildly better than the filth of the ground floor.
“We should take pictures of all this,” George said.
“I haven’t seen anything illegal though,” I added.
“Screw the cops; we got enough evidence here to get this place condemned by the city.”
I pulled out my phone and took pictures of the most heinous things in the house. I documented the second floor like a crime scene, taking multiple pictures of the same object from different angles. By the time we finished back on the ground floor, I had over one hundred new pictures on my phone.
“Only one last place to look,” George intoned with a sense of evil.
“Yeah, the basement, right?”
“The basement.”
We hunted for an entrance to the house’s basement for an embarrassingly long time. There was no obvious door, and if there was, it was likely hidden behind a mountain of waste. We tapped on walls and shifted empty diaper boxes around and still couldn’t find what we were looking for.
“Hey, wait…” I said after an errant glance drew my attention to a small, child-sized door underneath the main stairway. The door was an odd shape—an isosceles triangle pointed towards the east. A strange series of latches held the door in place at three points, and one of the latches had an additional lock attached to it.
“Welp, that’s a no then,” George said. “Can’t get into there without using that gun of yours.”
“Hold on a second,” I said as I reached up and grabbed the lock. I found it rusty, and all it took was a hard pull to break the mechanism. Two pieces of rusted metal rested in my hand before I threw everything behind my shoulders.
“On second thought,” George said. “Now the question becomes how I’m going to get my fat ass through that door.”
“You aren’t,” I said. “Only I can fit through this thing.” He and I both looked at the dimensions and knew that basic physics were against George. “I don’t really want to do this, but…”
“But you’re going to,” George said with invective. “Just do it quick, take pictures of whatever you can, then come back up.”
I nodded in agreement, but George could tell that my heart wasn’t in it. He pulled out his phone and showed me the time. “Here’s the deal: I’ll give you five minutes. After that, no matter what, you can come back here, and we’ll go. Deal?”
“Deal.”
I placed a trembling hand on the small door and pushed. The other side of the triangle proved to be a wooden box of a room, almost like a spare cubbyhole. The space was tiny and caused claustrophobia. On the floor, I located a small rope that, after a short pull, opened a small ladder that led down. The smell that came from below was not pleasant, but it was far and away the least offensive smell in the whole house. It smelled earthy, almost like a root cellar or freshly raked garden. I could almost taste the black soil on my tongue.
I gingerly crawled down the steps, taking them one at a time as opposed to my usual two or three. When I reached the bottom, the cold concrete floor greeted me with an icy chill that somehow penetrated the leather of my shoes. The freezing air caused clouds to form with each breath. Down there, it was not July but January.
“Ok. Five minutes isn’t long,” I said to myself as I began my first inspection. I took a left and encountered a room full of bottles. Unlike the plastic refuse upstairs and outside, these bottles were made of glass and looked clean. I picked one up and saw that it was shaped like a test tube. Others were shorter and fatter, or taller and thinner. Each belonged in a laboratory rather than the basement of a drug house. None were labeled. They had been stacked neatly in ten rows, and the bottles and vials filled the whole room. I leaned back on my left leg and snapped three pictures.
“Don’t know what kind of evidence that is, but it’s not normal.”
The next room proved more obvious. Off to the right of the pulldown stairs was a thimble-sized laboratory complete with a single Bunsen burner, a miniature stove, and several pots and pans. I looked inside and saw that each pan contained a sticky black or dark green substance. I almost stuck my finger in the substance but thought better of it. I stood over one simmering pan and sniffed. It was an obscene and unnatural odor that smelled both natural and artificial, like a Frankenstein cross between chemical and organic. I hated it immediately. I took several more photos.
My internal clock told me that I was down to a minute or two. There was one final part of the basement, and it led behind the stairs and down a slim corridor. Reluctantly, I left the little laboratory behind and entered the final room. Now, months later, I wish I hadn’t.
The final part of the basement had a low ceiling. Its wood was darker than the rest, making the entire room appear black. Space was at a premium; the floor was a hothouse, with tiny pale plants growing from clay pots. These plants grew in darkness and cold, and after turning on my phone’s flashlight, I saw that the plants were strange-colored flowers—some a cold blue, and others a vibrant lavender or purple. I touched the petals and found them squishy, but soft. In any other circumstance, I would have considered the flowers beautiful, but in that environment, they took on a weird, menacing quality. Adding to this were the roots of the flowers, which were bulbous. Some of these roots made interesting shapes. I picked up one of the bigger flowers and saw that its thick root had formed itself into the vague outline of a seated man. Another root looked exactly like a face—a devilish face with a crooked smile and a cyclopean eye.
“Time’s up,” I heard George yell. From above. I requested a few more seconds to take pictures of the plants. I quickly reviewed the photos and found them good enough to share. Then, without really thinking about it or planning it, I looked up.
“Fuck!” I screamed as I ran out of the room and towards the steps. I took the steps in a flash, and when I came to the door, I didn’t even bother to close it.
“We need to burn this fucker,” I said in between hiccupping breaths to George. “We need to burn this thing right now and then forget all about it.”
“Did you find string down there? They’re making it, aren’t they?”
I refused to answer. I brushed past George and entered the kitchen. I looked for any kind of starter. George saw this and stopped me.
“You go back to my house, man. I’ll take care of this. This is my neighborhood, and it’s my job.”
George saw the fear and rage in my eyes and made a fist. Rather than lash out, I controlled myself and did as George said. I left the house and went back to George’s porch. I found an unopened beer can and got comfortable. I stayed there until I saw George emerge just as the first flicker of flames engulfed a grimy side window. George joined me on the porch, and we stayed there in silence until the first firetrucks appeared.
When we were inside, with two fresh bottles of beer from George’s refrigerator, he looked at me and asked the worst possible question: “What did you see down there?”
I dodged the question at first. I showed him the other pictures I had taken, from the little lab to the sea of strange flowers. These images did not quench his curiosity, so George asked me again.
I finished my beer in two gulps. George kept prodding me, kept asking about string until I finally blew up at him.
“It’s so much fucking worse than a drug, man. And even if that’s how string is made, it’s much worse than any mad scientist shit you can think of.”
“I saw string in those pictures,” George said pointing to my phone. “That black stuff in that lab, I guarantee you that’s manufactured string.”
“It may be, man, but the shit in the flower room was worse.”
A long pall of silence descended over us and only ended when my old friend whispered: “Tell me once and never tell me again.”
I looked up, and to my horror, I saw the shadow of the thing from the basement hanging behind George’s head. I knew it wasn’t really there, and yet I could see the putrefaction and smell the decay intermixed with the scent of flowers.
“If what I found was string, then string is made from these flowers that have human-shaped roots. You’ve seen the flowers in the photos, but what you didn’t see was what feeds the flowers. I was too frightened to take that photo.”
George waited for an answer. I did my best, but even now, I don’t think I fully captured the full horror of it all.
“The flowers drink from a tube that is connected to…to…uhm…a man’s parts.”
“What?” George asked.
“A tube connected to a hanging man. Not fully dead but rotting with sores in most places. A scabby man with a noose around his neck. And that tube was connected there…and it was draining fluids from him.”
George asked about the fluids. I didn’t have to clarify; my eyes told him the answer.
“Jesus Christ. That’s why stringers go sex mad like animals. Who was the guy?”
I shot my index finger up and wagged it. “Never again, George. I told you once, and now never again.”
George left the room and found the nearest window. He informed me that the house was already gutted, and that the firefighters weren’t even trying that hard. I would learn later that George’s neighbors all knew that he had done it, but all collectively agreed to keep it a secret. Because of that, George’s name never came up in the homicide inquest when they found the partial remains of the hanging man in the basement. To my knowledge, he’s never been identified.
String still exists, but George keeps telling me every time I phone home that the drug problem has moved on to another town.
— Arbogast is a neo-pulp writer and the owner of 1325 Publishing. He is a co-editor at the Bizarchives, and his work has appeared in the Bizarchives, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, Futurist Letters, and many more publications. He is the author of seven books, with his latest being THE RETURN OF PATRICK MIDNIGHT.