Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (read e book TXT) 📗

almost shut, his lips split. He's three years older than her, but he looks like her grandma, and she says, “So why is it you're doing this?”

And Webber peels off the wig, all the strands and curls of blond hair stuck to the blood dried around his nose and mouth. Webber says, “Everybody wants to make the world a better place.”

Drinking his lite beer, Flint looks at Webber. Shaking his head, he says, “You fucker . . .” Flint says, “Is that my wig?”

11

Not every day was filled with terror.

The Matchmaker called this one job “picking white peaches.”

You drag two scrolly white sofas together, face to face, straight under the “tree.” On this island of sofa, you build a “ladder” by piling together gold-carved little tables. Each table with its heavy, gray marble top veined pink. On top of those, you stack brittle, eggshell-delicate palace chairs, so you can climb higher and higher. Until you're looking down into the gray nest of everyone's dusty wig, everyone's face tilted back so far their mouths hang open against their neck. So high you can look down into the pit behind their collarbones and see the stair steps of their rib cage disappear into their dress or collar.

Everyone, our hands are wrapped in bloody rags. Gloves hang flapping-loose with fingers empty. Shoes are stuffed with balled-up socks to replace missing toes.

We call ourselves the People's Committee to Conserve the Daylight.

The Matchmaker, he takes down a “peach,” wrapped in velvet to protect his hand, and he lowers it to skinny Saint Gut-Free. Who hands it to Chef Assassin, the chef with his big stomach hammocked in the waistband of his pants.

Agent Tattletale, with the video camera pressed to his face, he records the peach passed hand to hand.

The oldest peaches, the ones gone dark, you can see yourself reflected in them. The Matchmaker says it's the tungsten filament. As electricity passes through it, the thin wire would burst into flame. That's why each peach is filled with some inert gas. Most of them, argon. Some gas you can't breathe, it keeps the tungsten filament from burning. The very oldest filled with nothing. A vacuum.

The Matchmaker, with pink freckles across his cheeks, more pink freckles on his forearms where his sleeves are rolled back to each elbow, he tells us, “The melting point of tungsten is six thousand degrees Fahrenheit.” The normal heat of a “peach” is enough to melt a frying pan. Hot enough to bring copper pennies to a boil. Four thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

Instead of bursting into flame, the tungsten filament evaporates, atom by atom. Some atoms bounce back, off the atoms of argon, and attach to the filament, again, in crystals small as perfect jewels. Other atoms of tungsten, they attach to the cooler inside of the glass “peach.”

The atoms “condense,” the Matchmaker says. Coating the inside of the glass with metal, turning the outside into a mirror.

Frosted black on the inside, this turns the lightbulbs into little round mirrors that make us look fat. Even skinny Saint Gut-Free with his pant legs and shirtsleeves always twisting and flapping around the bony stalk of each arm and leg.

No, not all our days were filled with murder and torture. Some were just this:

Comrade Snarky holds a peach, turning her face to see it from different angles in the curved glass. The fingers of her free hand, the fingertips pulling the slack skin back at the top of one ear. While she pulls, the dark hollow under that cheekbone is gone. “This is going to sound terrible,” Comrade Snarky says. Her fingers release the skin, and that half her face turns back into shadowy sags and wrinkles. “I used to see photographs of those people behind barbed wire in death camps,” she says. “Those living skeletons. And I always thought: ‘Those people could wear anything.'”

The Earl of Slander reaches toward her, stretching his arm to collect her words in his hand-sized silver tape recorder.

Comrade Snarky hands the peach to the Baroness Frostbite . . .

Who says, “You're right.” The Baroness Frostbite says, “That does sound awful.”

And Comrade Snarky leans into the microphone and says, “If you're recording this, you are an asshole.”

The Baroness Frostbite, with her teeth loose and rattling in her gums, each big white tooth tapering to show its thin brown root, she hands the peach to the Duke of Vandals.

The Duke, with his ponytail undone and hair hanging in his face. The Duke of Vandals, his jaw works in slow circles on the same wad of nicotine gum he's chewed since forever. His hair the smell of clove cigarettes.

The Duke hands the peach to Miss America, the black roots of her bleach-blond grown out to show how long we've been trapped here. Our poor pregnant Miss America.

Above us, the tree blinks dark for a moment. That moment, we don't exist. Nothing exists. The next moment, the power flashes back. We're back.

“The ghost,” Agent Tattletale says, muffled through his video camera.

“The ghost,” the Earl of Slander repeats into the tape recorder inside his fist.

Around here, every power surge, every cold draft or strange noise or food smell, we blame it on our ghost.

To Agent Tattletale, the ghost is a murdered private detective.

To the Earl of Slander, the ghost is a has-been child actor.

The brass branches of the tree. Each branch, loopy, bent, twisted as grapevines dipped in dull gold. Dripping with the glass and crystal “leaves” of the tree. The tinkling rustle as you reach inside. The burning smell of dust on each “ripe” peach, still glowing bright white. Too hot to touch without a handful of fabric, a scrap of velvet skirt or brocade waistcoat, to protect your hand. The other peaches, “rotten,” gone dark and cold, frosted with dust, and draped with white strands of cobweb. The glass-and-crystal leaves, all white and silver and gray at the same time. As they turn, their edges still sparkle, a moment, a flash of rainbow, before they're no color again.

The branches, twisted and