Chapter 6: 6

“I say we go with the ‘Rusty Pipes,’” Lee said. She was grouchy after having this debate so many times, and Ellias had finally convinced her that ‘Rusty Ol’ Pipe’ was not a good band name.

“But it’s so… meh,” Ellias pointed out.

Sierra had her headphones on as usual in the corner of Christian’s room. Her laptop screen cast an eerie glow across her face as she worked.

Lee sighed. “We don’t have much time left before Hallow’s Greed,” she argued. “We can’t keep swapping band names like this. It throws off our aesthetic.”

“Exactly what aesthetic do you think we have?” Ellias asked. He pointed to Lee, “We have a punk,” he pointed to himself, “a macho,” he pointed at me, “a goth,” then Sierra, “a nerd–”

“Geek,” Sierra corrected him.

“Whatever,” Ellias dismissed her. “Christian’s the good boi, I mean… we don’t really have a unified identity.”

“That’s why we need to figure out our band name,” Lee explained. “Then we can figure out how to dress and everything.”

Ellias sighed heavily. He looked around our group, “does anybody else have any suggestions?” he asked. “‘Rusty Pipes’ sounds dumb.”

Currently, I was on my own computer flicking through all of the pictures to see what we had to work with.

“I have pictures of a dead rat,” I said. “If you want to work with that.”

“It would be hard to find more dead rats for future album covers,” Lee said.

Christian frowned, but didn’t comment about how he routinely fed his snake dead rodents.

“Actually,” Lee said. She got up and came over behind me. “Do we even have a decent picture for our album cover?” Her eyes examined the thumbnails on my screen.

“I didn’t get anything of quality,” I said. “Also we left the pipe there so we won’t be able to use that for album covers either.”

“How hard is it to find a rusty pipe though,” Lee pointed out.

“Harder than you might think,” said Ellias.

Christian was currently giving Mr Slithers, who was a massive reticulated python probably ten feet long and thick as an arm, some gentle pets on his head. The black and brown coils moved about but there was no tail in sight so it was hard to tell which part of his body was which. “What about ‘Rusty Scales,’” he suggested offhandedly.

He gently withdrew his hand and fitted the glass front back on.

Lee thought about that one. “It’s promising,” she decided.

I watched as Mr Slithers slowly coiled himself back under his heat lamp and prepared to sleep.

Lee sighed behind me and rubbed at her eyes. “We have so much work to do,” she groaned. “We still have to practice our songs, too, but those assholes keep taking over the practice room.”

“Our own amps are gonna have to be good enough,” said Ellias. “It’s not that surprising we’d have trouble using the school’s equipment.”

“But they’re so much nicer than ours,” Lee complained.

“Let’s just take care of one thing at a time,” Christian said calmly. He went over to a white board off to the side and started wiping all the markings away. Several of them were penises Ellias had drawn. Some of them were squirting. 

Christian wrote ‘To Do:’ in big black letters and switched to a smaller marker to start making bullet points.

“Our band name,” he said and put it down. “Our album cover, and then we need to master our three songs.” He made a separate bullet for each. “What else?”

“Our registration for Hallow’s Greed,” Lee put in. She was still grumpy after seeing my photos weren’t quite what she wanted. “And we should probably figure out what our equipment will be and what we’ll wear. I don’t care if we’re wearing exactly matching outfits but we should coordinate with each other. And who knows, maybe we’ll figure out some fun costumes to fit in with the halloween theme.”

“Okay,” Christian wrote all of this down. “That’s only six things,” he said.

“But we only have six weeks,” Lee pointed out. “That’s not a lot of time to master so much stuff. She sighed. “Maybe we should just wait until next year.”

“No,” Ellias snapped. “I did not almost get arrested on Sunday just to laze about while those assholes go and have all the fun.”

I raised my hand and it took them a moment to acknowledge me. “What if we each took a task to work on ourselves?” I asked. “Sierra and I could take care of the album cover, Lee and Ellias, you guys could do the band name, since you seem to care the most about it, and Christian could look into what kind of equipment we’ll be able to borrow for the festival.”

Lee frowned. “How will you make the cover art if you don’t know our band name?”

I shrugged. “We’ll make a couple and we can vote on which fits best. It’s not perfect, but what’s the point of working in a team if we can’t divvie up the work?” I asked. “Isn’t that why I’m here to begin with?”

Lee frowned discontentedly.

Sierra had stopped typing and said, “I’m fine with this. I have good photoshop skills.”

Ellias had folded his arms a while ago and finally released them. “That makes sense,” he agreed. “We can figure out who’ll take care of the registration when the time comes and our practices will have to be held together at least some of the time.”

I nodded agreeingly.

“Fine,” Lee said. “But everything better be good.”

We split into our groups and went about our separate tasks. Sierra paged through my photos to see what we had to work with.

“I can take more if we need them,” I told her. “Or if there’s anything specific you want.”

She nodded.

We spent a good hour and a half making small sketches of possible album covers, many of them with the asylum photos, and some which were closeups of the dead rats eyes, which somehow both looked sleepy and stared into your soul.

“Can I ask your opinion,” I asked Sierra when the others had settled into their own routines.

“Shoot,” she said.

“That thing that happened at the asylum, should I go to the police about it?” I asked.

“That’s up to you,” she said. “Doesn’t bother me one way or the other.”

“Ellias seemed really against it,” I said.

“Ellias’ situation is different.” Her eyes read over text instructions on a photoshop tutorial on adding noise to photographs. 

“Yeah but… you know.” I shifted uncomfortably.

“If it bothers you enough that you keep thinking about it, you should go to the police,” she said. “Just don’t mention any of us.”

I nodded. “That makes sense, I guess.” 

“Can you get me some closeups of Mr Slithers at some point?” she asked. “I think that could be fun to play around with.”

“Sure, when I have my camera with me.” I felt comforted that she was okay with me going to the police. What she said made sense. Ellias didn’t tend to like authority figures. He’d said they never took him seriously before. I thought maybe the problem ran a bit deeper than that. He was, after all, a transman in a society where transmen weren’t always respected. Then again we were all not heterosexual cisgender white men so we all had our issues with that.

I sighed and started trying to figure out how to phrase this to the police.

---

I was familiar with the police station. It was located a few blocks down from the school after several houses. The inside was cool and lit by fluorescent lights. One of them flickered annoyingly.

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 A kind older woman manned the front reception desk. She smiled down at me as I came in.

“Hello, Lexi, is something wrong?” she asked.

“I’d like to report something,” I told her. I was uncomfortable. There was no simple way to explain this situation.

“Okay,” she nodded rather dramatically as she did so and started organizing papers. “Are you or anybody else in immediate danger?” she asked.

“Uh… no I don’t think so.” I wasn’t sure if being dead constituted as immediate danger.

“Okay, and what would you like to report?”

“A dead body,” I told her.

She stopped. “A dead body?” she asked. 

I nodded.

“Okay, let me get an officer to talk to you.” She typed a few numbers on her phone and waited for a long second. “Hi,” she told the man on the other end. “I have Lexi here, she says she found a dead body.” 

There was a pause.

“Okay, thank you,” she said and hung up. She turned to me, “you can have a seat and Officer LeBlanc will be with you shortly.”

“Thanks,” I told her. I took a seat on the bench and twiddled my thumbs waiting.

Officer LeBlanc showed up and looked down at me. There was concern on his face.

“Lexi,” he said. “What’s up?” he made a gesture for me to follow.

I waited until we were back in his office, which was a mess. Papers were everywhere and several photos of his wife and kids sat on his desk.

“I think I witnessed a murder,” I told him.

“Ohhhhkay,” he said slowly and opened a drawer to produce a form of some kind. “Have a seat. Can you tell me when this was?” he asked. He was already filling out the information at the top of the page.

“Sunday,” I told him as I was pulling out one of the smaller chairs and sat down. My lower back spasmed at the sudden pain but I held back the wince. I didn’t want Officer LeBlanc to see it. 

He nodded. “What time on Sunday?” he asked.

“Somewhere between two and three,” I said.

“PM?”

I nodded.

“Okay and where did this take place?”

“It was in the old asylum,” I admitted. I couldn’t help but shift around, uncomfortable in the chair.

“So… you were in the old asylum,” he filled in. “You were trespassing.”

I nodded.

“And what did you witness?” he asked.

“Well… I was running away from the security guard and we ended up down in the basement.”

He nodded along.

“Uhm, and there’s this door down there labeled maintenance. It opened and there was someone down there, and they were staring out at us, and the security guard demanded they come out. But then, that person jumped on him and dragged him back into the maintenance room. He was screaming, and then he wasn’t.” I went quiet. My heart was pounding in my chest again, trying to explain this in a way that made sense.

Officer Leblanc waited until he realized I wasn’t going to continue.

“Did you leave after that?” he asked.

I nodded. “I ran back outside.”

“Okay,” he said. He had stopped writing. That by itself said enough. He didn’t believe me. “Lexi,” he said gently, “I understand you’ve been going through a lot lately. However, as far as we know, there is no security guard posted to the old asylum. Nor have we heard any missing persons reports.”

I stared at my feet.

“I will keep this report in my office just in case but, to be frank, I don’t…”

“Believe me,” I finished for him.

There was a silence.

“How is your mom doing?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Has she been keeping up with your psychiatry appointments?” he asked.

I nodded.

He sat back in his chair to gaze at me. Then he turned and plucked a business card off the desk.

“This is my personal number,” he explained, handing me the business card. “Give me a call if you feel like you're endangered, okay?” he asked.

I nodded again.

“Is there anything else you wanted to talk to me about?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’m okay,” I said. 

He nodded. “I’ll walk you out.”

The older woman at the front desk gave me a kind, pitying smile as we passed her.

I hung my head. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. But at the same time, why didn’t they believe me?

---

AN: Hello everybody, as always thank you for your support <3, it means a lot. Please let me know if you ever feel uncomfortable by something a character says or anything. I am a pansexual, my SO is trans and almost all of my friends fall somewhere in the 'diversity' community so I frequently have people skim over passages I'm not sure about but I do want to know if theres anything triggering or offensive because I don't want to misrepresent or make anyone uncomfortable. There are a few times when its intentional but that's a different animal than just casual conversation.

Also I need to commission a book cover for this story. I was gonna do one myself but then I decided I'd rather support another artist so if you're interested, reach out and give me a link to some sample artwork and we can talk pricing and whatnot. My budget is limited but I strive to spread the monetary love around.

Thanks for reading!

--SR Fox

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