Penny Dreadful Read Online Free Page B

a mild electric shock. Or involuntary contact with two nonhumans. I forced myself to clean up the rice, to wash the bowls. I wiped my hands on my pants and stood staring at a long black wrinkle in my shirt, where Mingus the Breather had been kind enough to sew up a nasty hole in the fabric.
    Well, then. They were real enough.
    Here we go. I found this little blue notebook in the kitchen and not sure why, but I stole it. Eve had only written a few words on the first page, notes for a class and I couldn’t be sure but it looked like Logic 101. And the rest of the book was blank.
    I was going to rip that page out and start fresh but decided not to. The disconnected pieces of logic appealed to me, the odd little phrases. They comfort, somehow. And she has such fine crooked handwriting, like bugs crawling out of my head. Anyway. Not sure what I was thinking. It had been months since I wrote anything at all by hand. Not even a postcard to my poor mother. The rare signature maybe, on a bad credit card slip. Oh, yeah. I signed a lot of room service tabs when I was with Jude. She loved fucking room service. But the last thing I would have written by hand was probably an incident report for the department that was dull as a cloudless sky, I’m sure. That shit was deadly.
    If I wanted to tell the truth, I would say that I stole Eve’s notebook because I wanted to keep a record. And what use this might be is hard to say. I know this much. I can’t really trust my memory anymore. Or my perception of what’s real. And it’s funny to think that I have never done this before. This will be my first diary. If you could even call it that.
    Dear Jude. If I knew where you were I might send these notes to you.
    But I should tell you that something bothers me and maybe it’s nothing, nothing to worry about. I have my share of paranoid tendencies. As you know. Okay. I have been back in Denver for less than a day now and I’m looking over my shoulder like there’s a contract out on my narrow ass. I can almost feel the crosshairs on my neck. It’s not you, is it? I guess it wouldn’t shock me. If you were out there. Following me, watching me from rooftops with the eye of a sniper.
    Unless I inform you otherwise, I don’t know what day it is. Which is why these notes are not dated. I don’t even know the correct time. It seems I sold my watch a few days back. Anyway. It’s only been a few hours.
    I had to get out of Eve’s place. The boyfriend was freaking me out. Did I mention she has a boyfriend, a sick fucker with bad clothes. His name is Chrome and he suggested I change my name to Fred. I’m not kidding. You would want to kill him on sight. He said something funny, though. He asked me if I wanted to go see Elvis and it sounded a lot like a threat. How about that. I’m going to Graceland.
    You remember where you were when the news came on the radio that he was dead?
    Late summer and stupidly hot and I was at Chloe’s house. My first real girlfriend and she was trashy and not very smart and conditioned by her loutish stepfather to flinch when you looked hard at her or moved your arm too suddenly and was therefore happy to suck me off right on the couch whenever I dropped by with cigarettes or ice cream. Which I felt bad about but I was only thirteen and couldn’t very well say no when she unzipped my pants and bent over me with the cool silence of a Catholic girl doing a few Hail Marys. We were watching the Stooges, I think. And the couch was covered in dirty laundry and I could smell the stepfather’s socks and Chloe’s head was busily twisting in my lap when they interrupted the broadcast to say that the King was dead. Chloe lifted her face then, her mouth puffy and red. She stared at the television, stricken and pale and she said, oh my mother loves him or she used to, before he got so fat and gross, you know. Then she resumed, she sucked me off like she was born to the task and actually swallowed my gunk. Which inspired me to