pascal_curious | Chapter 3: Our Brother the Stalker

When a slightly inebriated Lazlo and Nervous staggered back to the bunker, I had my feet up on the sofa, Star Trek 2.0 on the tube and was half way through a pint of Chunky Monkey. They stumbled over the threshold and into the living room while laughing at Vidcund’s efforts to woo a Ms. Amber St. Clare. The two of them sprawled lazily in front of the TV.

“You should have seen him, big brother. It was sad,” explained Lazlo, “You know how he gets to be a pest. Poor Amber just wanted to clean up and go to bed and he was following her all around the place, flapping his gums about his ‘important and highly classified’ job and how nice it is too live here and how they should get together sometime and go out so he can show her around town.”

“At least we helped clean up,” added Nervous. “He was just following her around blabbing away.”

“She is probably regretting having moved in next door to us,” I remarked dryly.

My stomach had started gurgling and suddenly the half melted ice cream I was holding looked incredibly unappetizing.

“He’s been poking around our place a lot lately,” mentioned Nervous quietly; he rarely talked about his home life. “Loki has been working overnights and Vic will sometimes drive past the house a couple of times a night. If he sees Circe outside he stops to see her.”

“Great,” I grumbled. “Our brother is a stalker.”

Pains were now radiating across my lower back. I squirmed around on the sofa to get comfortable but didn’t have any luck.

“I think Circe likes it when Vidcund stops by. She always ends up inviting him in and he stays for a couple of hours, just talking,” explained Nervous, suddenly very interested in the grout in the tile floor. “I just hope Loki doesn’t come home early some night and find Vic there.”

Circe and Loki Beaker had adopted Nervous when he was just a boy. He had been taken away from his mother by child protective services. We knew Nervous wasn’t his real name; in fact, we didn’t even know his real name at all. We had always just called him Nervous because Loki and Circe called him that. I tried to make a mental note to ask Nervous about his name one day, but a sharp pain through my belly blew the thought right out of my mind. I winced, trying not to be too obvious, but the container of ice cream fell from my lap and rolled onto the floor making a puddle of banana-y ooze.

“You okay, Pascal?” asked Lazlo, already reaching for the fallen container.

“Yeah, just shouldn’t have had the ice cream,” I grunted, lying once again. The pain was awful and I was really beginning worry about what was happening to me.

‘ Damn John, he knows what is going on and he won’t tell me,’ I thought, remembering how he had evaded me at the party.

I managed to recover my composure and shifted my position on the sofa again. Nervous had already gotten the dishrag and some paper towels to clean up the mess. If I hadn’t been so obviously in pain, I am sure the mess would have been left to me to clean up. Lazlo and Nervous were both notorious slobs.

“Serves Circe right, marrying Loki,” I remarked venomously as Nervous did a piss poor job of cleaning up the mess on the floor.

“Do I detect a bit of jealousy, big brother?” Lazlo chuckled. “If I remember correctly, it was you who first tried to kiss Circe in the schoolyard.”

“Jealousy has nothing to do with it! Vidcund may be a pompous ass at times, but at least he would be good to her. Why she broke up with Vic in the first place, I’ll never know. Loki is such a mean sonofabitch.”

The pain I was experiencing was making me extra irritable.

“Money,” answered Nervous quietly as he rinsed out the dishrag. “But I think maybe she is beginning to see Loki for what he really is and that’s why she likes to have Vic around, because he treats her like a man should.”

Lazlo and I were both left speechless. That was the most profound and personal thing we had ever heard Nervous say about his adoptive mother. Nervous noticed the uncomfortable silence and made an extra good job of rinsing out the sink to avoid saying anything further.

It was then that we heard it, an ear piercing scream; a shriek of terror. I had heard that scream once before, only that time it had been coming from my own mouth.

Chapter 3: Our Brother the Stalker

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