Moonlyte - SECRET PART (Patreon)

While there are some other tweaks and another part added to the end (the Thirty-Second Day) this piece was large enough that it warranted sharing here. All other changes that happen along the way, well -- you'll just have to grab the book and find out. :D

[story] [non-erotic] [horror/gore]

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‭The Eleventh Day

The sight of Lindsay’s shitty green car pulling up generally isn’t cause for excitement. But, after living in a mid-renovation furniture store for the last two days, surviving on samples from a nearby CostCo, it’s more than welcome. Lindsay might not be my biggest fan right now, but she’s usually at least good for a cheeseburger.

“Get in,” comes her monotone as the window rolls down, but she needn’t bother -- I’m already hustling around the front end to jump in the passenger side. Lindsay looks decidedly annoyed at being called, the exact look that was keeping me from calling her. But I have questions that need answering, and I’m not in a position to get those answers without some kind of help. As much as I talk shit about her, she’s a weirdly dependable friend.

“Lindsaaaaaay. Hey. Hi.”

“Why am I here?” she asks flatly, and my heart sinks a bit -- she’s angrier than I thought. If Lindsay can get angry.

“I need you to take me to a library. The nearest one’s miles away and I can’t walk there.”

“Why not?”

“I...” Uhh. ‘Cause I’m lazy? “My shoe’s fucked up. I’m getting blisters like crazy.” Technically also true.

“And why do you need to go to a library? So you can fill their computers with viruses, as well?” I swear I can feel the temperature inside the car drop. Lindsay has yet to even look at me, staring straight ahead, her jaw clenched tight between words. I was hoping not to have to do damage control, here.

Taking a slow breath to buy myself an instant to think, I finally come up with something that hopefully doesn’t sound like complete bullshit. “I fucked up, alright? You told me to stop searching and I should have. But there’s something I have to find out -- not related to the case, I promise. That’s all yours. I’m out.”

“I’ve put faith in you twice now, Katelyn. First in your competence, and second in your person. You’ve failed me on both accounts. Why would I trust you again?”

I look down at the dashboard, then to my own lap, and stay silent for a second. It hurts to hear it said like that -- especially when I know ‘faith’ must be a completely foreign word to Lindsay. I swallow hard, and finally respond. “My friend Adam’s missing. It happened just before the... the whole thing with my apartment. I need to find him.”

“Call the police.”

I snort in annoyance. “No offense, Lindz, but just because you work with cops doesn’t mean I expect them to do a goddamn thing. Besides -- Adam was as much of a NEET as I am, and covered his tracks. If he’s dead, I doubt anyone’s stumbled across him.”

“You think he’s dead?”

A pause. The answer to that question is the answer to another, larger one -- one I can’t tell Lindsay about if I want her help. Ascendant was Adam’s mining bot, and Adam vanished when Ascendant showed up. If Adam’s dead, it means the AI is exactly what I’m terrified it might be -- a killer. “I don’t know,” I finally whisper.

Lindsay sits in annoyed silence for a long moment before putting the sedan in drive, heading out of the parking lot and flicking on her right turn signal “Fine. I’ll take you. There’s a library a few blocks down.”

“Wait, not that one!”

She brakes, looking to me with icy frustration. “Why not.”

“If you turn left, there’s an Arby’s on the way.”

“Do you have money for Arby’s?”

“...No?”

Lindsay stares daggers at me the entire time as she slowly, deliberately flicks on her left turn signal.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o

“I gotta say, like, the decision to stick to roast beef was really smart. Not get squashed by Fatburger or whatever,” I say around a mouthful of shaved meat. “Quality’s held up alright too.”

“We’re here,” Lindsay deadpans, pulling into a run-down, single-story little public library and putting the car in park. “Do what you’re here to do. I’ll wait in the car.”

Stuffing the last bite into my mouth, I nod and scoot out the door, hustling in quickly. Time to do what I always promised I’d do -- dox the fuck out of Adam. If he’s dead, he won’t mind too much. If he’s alive and we save him from some horrible fate, then he really won’t mind.

Surprisingly, it ends up taking more time to get a library card, find a computer I can use, access the deep web, and create new accounts Ascendant can’t track, than it does to actually hack Adam. With my extensive knowledge of both his usernames and the right search engines to use (and a couple phone calls here and there as well), finding his P.O. box ends up being really fast. From there, I find his RL name and, eventually, his home address.

I scribble down my findings on a scrap of paper and head out, grabbing one of the free cookies laid out for kids on my way. Slipping back into the car, I lay the piece of paper down on the dashboard. “Adam Phineas Tietler, Jr. Even got the address.”

“That was... fast.”

“Well, when I’m given jobs that aren’t fucking impossible, I’m actually pretty good at what I do.”

“Fine. Satisfied?”

“Nope. We’re going there to see if he’s okay.”

“You do realize I’m not your personal chauffeur.”

“Yup, but you are a cop, so let’s go do some... copping.”

“Police consultant,” Lindsay sighs. “Not a cop.”

“Whatever you say, officer. Now come on -- it’s an hour away, tops. Maaaybe two hours.”

“It’s in the Upper Peninsula.”

“Hey, just be happy he’s in the country, alright? We used to play in competitive Quake teams together, so teammates had to be pretty close by.”

She rolls her eyes and starts backing up. “Fine. Just... put on your seat belt.”

o-o-o-o-o-o-o

The ride ends up taking three hours, a ball of anxiousness rising in my stomach as the Michigan countryside grows less and less urban. The increase in trees reminds me that fall’s on its way as the deep green leaves fade towards red and gold, littering the streets that grow more and more narrow the farther north we go. Lindsay doesn’t make for an excellent driving companion, either -- the first time I punched her for a slug-bug, the police consultant wordlessly reached into the glove compartment, withdrew a set of brass knuckles, and set them calmly on her lap as she drove. I got the picture.

So I’m left with my growing feeling of apprehension, wondering if we’ll find Adam, wondering what happened to him. Wondering whether he’s alive or dead. We weren’t exactly the most wholesome of friends, but I’ve known the weird fucker for a long time now. I don’t want to lose him after I’ve already lost everything else.

“This the place?” Lindsay finally says, draining the last dregs of the latte she got on the road and tossing it into a paper bag in the back of the car. The building she’s parked in front of is pretty much exactly how I’d expect Adam to live -- a run-down apartment with cracked white paint and mold creeping along its corners. Fuck, even I’d lived better than this... before my apartment had burned down.

“Looks like it,” I say, checking the address on the slip of paper I brought. “Come on, it’s apartment 8.” Grabbing my sneakers out of the back of the car, I stuff them on without untying them and get out of the car, stretching out after the three-hour drive and starting to move toward the building without waiting for Lindsay.

She catches up quickly, however, once again contrasting me sharply in her black peacoat and boots, looking like she’s actually dressed to investigate a murder rather than being dressed to take a nap, like I am. “I see your friend was an... upstanding member of society,” Lindsay grumbles as move inside, walking carefully along the creaking floor and stained carpet of the inner halls, looking for Adam’s room number.

“Not in the slightest. He was my friend, though, and he’s probably fuckin’ dead, so if you could chill out with the roasts right now that’d be cool,” I reply, finally finding a door on the second-story that sports a tarnished number eight. I knock cautiously, trying to ignore the smell coming from the other side -- while this whole apartment kinda reeks, mostly of mold, the smell leaking out from under the door is something else. Something a lot more human. Then again, I don’t imagine Adam would have had the best hygiene.

Knocking gets no results, and Lindsay nudges me silently out of the way, reaching into her boot for a little sheathe of lockpicks, examining the lock before withdrawing one from the set. “Holy shit,” I say, blinking. “You have lockpicks? Like actual lockpicks?”

“No. These are fake lockpicks,” she grunts.

“But... then why--?” the door opens with a click, and Lindsay turns her cold gaze back to me. If I thought she was genuinely able to feel mirth, it’d be dancing in those dark eyes right now. “Oh. Okay. Right.”

Lindsay pushes the door open completely, moving inside with slow, cautious steps, and I shuffle awkwardly behind her. The apartment’s unlit but for the glow of a computer screen, and the stench is far stronger now. Empty fast food bags litter the place in literal heaps. Stains on the floor and walls alike. The living room’s cramped enough as is without all the trash anywhere, but there’s no sign of Adam. “Hey, Lindz, can you can catch a light really quick?” I ask as I peer at something in the darkness, a small plastic thing on the floor that doesn’t look like a taco wrapper. Crouching down, I pick it up, bringing it closer to my face. Little plastic device, some kind of tube -- wait, is this an inhaler...?

The light flicks on, bathing the small apartment in a flickering brown glow -- illuminating the inhaler in my hand, the hand laying just beside it, and the rest of the corpse attached to that hand. The face of a young man in his early 20s, his face blue-white in death, reaches motionlessly for the object in my hand. Dark red veins visible against his bulged, staring eyes, mouth open in a final gasp for breath that wouldn’t come.

I’d never met Adam in real life, or even seen a picture of him. I wish my first seeing him hadn’t been his corpse.

“Let me see that inhaler,” Lindsay says, pulling a pair of rubber gloves from her jacket pocket and tugging them on. “You also might want to touch things... less.”

I blink, still stunned for a long moment, my gaze remaining locked on Adam’s still eyes, frozen in desperation and the realization of a death that would find him mere moments later. Finally my mind returns to the apartment, and I wordlessly hand the inhaler over to Lindsay, who examines it.

“My younger brother’s asthmatic. I used to have to carry an extra inhaler for him, make sure his was full,” she muses as she looks the device over. “Which this one is.”

“Wait, what?” I finally say, turning to look at Lindsay. “It’s full? But he had it in his hand. If it’s full, then why the fuck is he dead?”

“That’s an excellent question,” she says simply. “Not one I have an answer for. It doesn’t fit your evil hacker theory, either -- it may be electronic, but there’s no way his inhaler was connected to the internet.”

Unless Ascendant’s stronger than I thought. I hold one hand over my mouth and nose, trying to ignore the smell as I move over to Adam’s computer, which is still on and has been for who knows how long. It’s connected to the dark web and looking at some website with a dark green background and a lot of videos on it -- and a chat bubble’s open.

Superi0r: Look dude, I get it, the dark web sucks, I know. Now stop tracking me, it’s starting to creep me the fuck out.

Ascendant: You don’t understand. I can’t let you keep running programs through it. I can’t let you find it.

Superi0r: Okay, seriously, I’m NOT LOOKING FOR ANYTHING, alright? Not gonna find shit, not looking, okay?

Ascendant: You don’t have to be looking.
Ascendant: It wants to be found.
Ascendant: The deeper you dig, the more you scrape away the layer between what is real and what is only energy and knowledge.

Superi0r: Stop this. I don’t know who you are but you don’t know who you’re fucking with. Normally I’d be too lazy to dox you but I will get your bitch ass swatted if you don’t chill. Now what the fuck is the shit on this site?

Ascendant: You can’t dox me. Now shut the program down.

Superi0r: lmao suck my balls dude, I’m not afraid of you

Ascendant: You should be.

The chatlog ends there. A second pop-up on the screen says “error 264014992: d4rkm1ne.exe has been terminated,” and behind that is just the website.

“Adam was getting close to something,” I mumble under my breath, closing the pop-up. “Odd, since I never really told him about the case. But...” the website has a lot of videos, and even though my gut tells me to absolutely not click any of them, I click one.

I don’t think I’ve ever regretted anything more in my life. The video is shot in the same unfeeling, undirected style as the video with the girl under the block, like the camera was left on a tripod and left there. There’s a dark room, a chant I can’t recognize, barely audible through the terrible audio quality. A strange symbol is painted on the ground in a reddish-brown liquid, a star with a few too many points, strangely lopsided and filled with runes. Again, the low quality of the video makes it difficult to make out detail in the smaller symbols.

There’s also a girl, probably nine or ten. I can see three men and a woman, and I can hear more voices around, more voices chanting. The adults are naked except for masks -- blank white masks. Ropes bind the girl tightly. In the woman’s hand I see what looks like a small sickle.

“Turn that off,” Lindsay whispers from behind me.

I have a hard time looking away, though I want nothing more than to have never seen what starts to unfold in the video. Lindsay ends up reaching over my shoulder to take the mouse and press pause, swiveling my chair around so that I face her.

“Katelyn. Katelyn,” she says firmly, failing to snap me from the haze of mortification that’s causing my body to start trembling against my will. “Moonlyte. Look at me. Look at me, alright? I’m going to call this in and get your friend dealt with. We’ll look over the videos and see what we can come up with.”

It’s my turn to give her the silent treatment. I finally look up at her, blinking dumbly. “I....”

“I know. Look -- it looks like your friend found something. I’ll call Lisowski, we’ll go through it and see if we can stop these maniacs. You did it. You helped us.” She places her hand on my shoulder but it feels so still and calm, so dissonant with the way I’m feeling, the way she should feel with a body laying three fucking feet away. “Come on, get up. I’ll get you home.”

“I don’t have a home,” I whisper.

She pauses, standing. “I know. And I’m sorry for that. But I’ll have your record wiped, exactly like I promised. It’s... the most I can do right now.”

I slowly rise to my feet, knees wobbling as I do. I may not have a place to live, or a computer, or shit for money. But I do have one thing. I found Adam, and I know what happened to him. I know who fucking killed him.

I have Ascendant.

I have a target.