Side Effects
Tales from the Kichirou Show - Chapter One
Welcome to the Kichirou Show! Where the lights are bright, and the popcorn flows freely. Join us as we travel the country and entertain the masses, reminding patrons of a bygone era with carnival games, circus acts, and the controversial sideshow.
If there is something you fear, you can run away here.
Mitch Lorrins runs to the Kichirou Show to escape murder allegations. Suz joins the show in search of a fugitive. Agi the dragon flees an intergalactic cartel, and Lucky barrels through reality in the hopes of preventing the apocalypse.
But pack up and leave, and you’ll surely bleed…
Not everyone will be able to get what they want, and no one will escape.
Tales from the Kichirou Show is a serialized volume of interconnected short stories that gradually come together to weave a larger tapestry. Start your journey here, if you dare.
Chapter One
Mitch Lorrins stared at the label on the pill bottle. What kind of name was Dream Machine? It made the medicine sound like something a crackhead would overdose on rather than a sleep aid. Despite the odd name, Dr. Simmons assured him that the drug was non habit forming. No side effects.
Safely at home and ready for bed, Mitch popped the lid off the bottle. The small pills clicked together as he coaxed two into the palm of his hand. Two specks of white in the pervasive darkness of his family’s massive house. Before he could think twice about his actions, he popped both pills into his mouth and swallowed.
“Mr. Mitch?” The voice of their housekeeper echoed through empty hallways. “Is that you? I thought you were going to sleep.”
“Yeah, Lorena!” he shouted back to her. “It’s me. I’ll go to bed in a few minutes.”
Sighing, he reclined into the plush sofa cushions. His family’s living room was where he and his friends used to watch movies and play games. They graduated from high school, and spent the following summer partying like the world was going to end. But then September rolled around, and two-thirds of his social circle evaporated like boiling water in subzero temperatures. They either left for different universities or got indoctrinated into a family business. Mitch tried college for half a semester before he finally convinced his parents that higher education was not for him, primarily by tanking every single class.
Mitch hadn’t watched TV in this room for well over a year, and yet the remote was somehow right under his hand when he rested it on the arm of the sofa. Maybe Lorena left it there. For all he knew, she sat on the sofa and ate Doritos while he was out of the house. If his mother was here, she would say something about keeping an eye on the help. But she wasn’t here, he thought spitefully. His mom took his sister and left him to languish in their cold house while she and Genevieve vacationed at a classy resort in California.
As soon as he turned on the TV, Mitch heard his name.
“Nothing new on the Lorrins case yet,” a man said to his co-anchor. “Prosecutors are pretty tight lipped on the case being built against the twenty-year-old. Born to real estate mogul and former reality TV star Travis and Heidi Lorrins, their eldest son is no stranger to trouble—”
The screen went black. Mitch held the power button down until his thumb was bloodless.
“Lorena! Did my dad get home today?”
A minute later, the sixty-five-year-old housekeeper shuffled into the room. Recently, Mitch noticed her gait becoming stiffer. She patted her hands on the shapeless, gray trousers of her uniform and gingerly lowered herself into Genevieve’s favorite chair.
“No, Mr. Mitch. He didn’t.” Her dark brown eyes regarded him with a deep reserve of sorrow. “Mr. Lorrins called to say that his business in New York is taking longer than expected. He’s going to spend the night at a hotel.”
He flared his nostrils and looked away. “That’s what he said last week.”
With an air of helplessness, Lorena shrugged. “I only know what he tells me.”
They both knew the real reason Travis Lorrins was prolonging his stay in New York, though neither were willing to acknowledge it aloud. It was the same reason Genevieve and Heidi were taking an unplanned and indefinite vacation in Los Angeles. Mitch was supposed to lie low at home, taking the heat from the media, while his parents and sister waited out the public relations nightmare in peace.
Lorena pressed her lips together, bestowing on him a sympathetic look, but he spied a glimmer of something else hiding behind her pity. Mitch had seen the same thing from others who assured him they believed in his innocence. They said he only had to weather the storm, and then his old life would be returned, stuffed into a vindicated package wrapped in apologies. And yet, he could see a question hiding behind their assurances.
Did you do it?
Interrogated by the police, reporters, friends and family, his story never changed. He and Steffie were at her apartment with two of their mutual friends. They watched a movie and played cards. Yes, there was alcohol, which was why his memories were a little fuzzy. He was confident, though, that he was only buzzed when he left her place around three in the morning. Mitch took a cab home, and that was the last he saw or heard from his girlfriend. No one bothered to sit him down and gently inform him when she was discovered dead in her apartment. Mitch had to learn of her murder from the news. Then the cops arrested him.
Everybody hated him now. The media, the public, Steffie’s family. His own family acted like he had contracted the bubonic plague, and his friends gave him the same sympathetic look he received from Lorena. He knew they were all dying to ask, though few if any ever would. At least, not sober.
Did you do it?
If word of his recent nightmares got out, the public would lynch him for sure. The only person who knew was Dr. Simmons, and Mitch only confessed to him out of desperation. Even with the bottle of pills clutched in his hand, he didn’t feel at ease with his decision. Doctor-patient confidentiality only went so far. If the police questioned Dr. Simmons, he could use his discretion to decide whether to tell them about Mitch’s nightmares and subsequent insomnia.
Mitch looked at the clock on the wall. It was past ten. Lorena should have gone home hours ago. The woman draped a blanket over him and said something about brewing tea. Something to help him sleep. He caught her wrist as she was standing up.
“You don’t have to stay so late, you know. I’ll be fine.”
“I know, Mr. Mitch.” Lorena fussed with the edges of the blanket, tucking him in. “But I don’t like those bags under your eyes. In trying times, you must remember to take care of yourself. You’re no good to anyone, including yourself, if you’re dead on your feet. Here.”
She took the remote and turned on the TV again. Quickly, she changed the channel from the news network to a rerun of Friends.
“Watch something funny to relax.”
Mitch thanked her, not knowing how else to express the depth of his gratitude. She was the only one who hadn’t abandoned him. Lorena ran her weathered fingers through his hair, teasing out some of the tangles.
“It’s okay,” she murmured. “Call if you need anything. Anything at all.”
By the time Lorena fetched her coat and purse, Mitch was still struggling to swallow the knot in his throat. The housekeeper turned off the lights on her way out the door. Mitch knew she was gone when he could no longer hear the whispering shuffle of her feet on the floor.
The lighthearted antics of the sitcom cradled and rocked his tumultuous thoughts into slumber. He felt the sleep aids taking effect, blurring his vision and making his eyelids heavy. Going a little cross-eyed, he examined the label on the pill bottle again.
Dream Machine. Hopefully, that meant the drugs would bring him good dreams.
No longer able to keep his eyes open, Mitch allowed his chin to drop to his chest. His hand went limp, dangling over the side of the couch, and the pill bottle clattered to the floor.
A bloodcurdling scream ripped the night in two. Mitch shot up so fast that he fell off the sofa. The hardwood floor jarred his knees, sending a stab of pain up to his hips and all the way up his spine. Wincing, Mitch grabbed the sofa to pull himself to his feet. The light in the living room was still on, but the TV had gone dark. He didn’t recall Lorena setting a timer.
With a groan, he stretched his arms above his head until he felt vertebrae pop. He stifled a yawn against his shoulder. What was it that woke him? Scanning the room, everything appeared to be in order. The clock on the wall said the time was 11:13 p.m. Mitch rubbed his eyes and dragged his feet into the dark hallway.
The walls of his family’s house breathed quietly all around him. Usually, the heavy ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer drowned out the quieter nighttime noises, but he couldn’t hear the comforting sound. Placing his hand against the antique clock, he didn’t feel the gentle back and forth motion of the pendulum. With a frown, Mitch moved on.
The refrigerator light was blinding in the darkness of the kitchen. The blue illumination washed him out, turning his hands the color of a robin’s egg. Neither Travis nor Heidi cooked often, although his dad was a fair hand at baking. Most of the time, they either ate at fancy restaurants or a professional chef cooked for them in their home. His mom and sister had been gone for over a week, and Mitch felt weird having a chef cook for only him. He gave the man a bonus from Heidi’s cash stash that she kept hidden in her rarely used sewing kit and told the chef to take some time off. Mitch was beginning to regret that decision now that the fridge was barren. He couldn’t cook to save his life; during his short stint in college, he lived on greasy fries and Chinese takeout.
It was too late for most restaurants to still be open, but depending on what time it actually was, Mitch knew a few places that delivered. Real greasy spoon establishments.
The digital clock on the oven was blinking 11:13 repeatedly. He consulted the clock on the microwave, which was flashing the same numbers. There must have been a brief power outage. That would explain the broken clocks and the TV turning itself off. All he had to do was find his phone to get the accurate time and then reset the clocks.
Grabbing the last apple from the crisper, Mitch made a mental note to give Lorena money and a shopping list soon. He munched on his late-night snack and went in search of his phone. The last time he recalled seeing it was just after receiving a text from Genevieve that really pissed him off. He’d thrown his phone at his bed and stormed downstairs.
Upon reaching the landing on the second floor, Mitch turned on the hallway light. This big, empty house was eerie at night. His heart picked up the pace in time with his imagination conjuring images of monsters and intruders. He would have felt a little better if the silence in the house was complete; however, he heard his home making soft noises. They weren’t the usual creaks and groans of a building settling. These sounds were of gentle, sleepy breathing.
Mitch flipped every light switch he passed on the way to his bedroom. Lorena, bless her, hadn’t touched a thing in his room while he was away. A mountain of both clean and dirty laundry dominated his bed. He swept a hand over the pile, dumping heaps of clothes onto the floor in search of his phone. Finally, he heard the telltale thump of something more substantial than fabric hitting the floor. Crouching, he located the device wrapped in the hood of a gray sweatshirt.
Pressing the power button, he was greeted by the time and date: 11:13 p.m. Friday, September 7.
Was that the actual time then?
He felt silly staring at the screen and waiting for the minute to change. Mitch wasn’t a great judge of time passing, but eventually he realized that he’d been watching the screen for well over a minute. The numbers weren’t changing.
He set his phone on the dresser and rubbed his eyes. This had something to do with too much stress and not enough sleep, he decided.
Leaving all the lights on, Mitch closed his door and turned on the TV by his bed. That was the only way to drown out the sound of the walls steadily inhaling and exhaling. He collapsed on top of the clothes strewn across his bed, determined to return to that sweet, dreamless sleep even if it killed him.
In the morning, Mitch discovered a new text from his friend Stan Okorie.
Mitch would like nothing more than to laugh with Stan and blame last night on a strange side effect of his sleep medication. However, in the light of day, the thing with the clocks seemed less like a hallucination. The timestamps on each message, both incoming and outgoing, were 11:13 p.m.
When he wasn’t texting Stan, Mitch was Googling the issue in the hopes that it was some obscure glitch that one or two other people had experienced. He didn’t realize how long he’d been sitting in front of his laptop until Lorena pulled into the driveway around noon. Usually, Lorena had weekends off, but ever since the rest of his family flew the coop, the woman took to stopping by the house early in the afternoon on Saturdays and Sundays.
“Hello!” She shouted as she walked through the front door. “Mr. Mitch, are you home?”
Mitch greeted her in the foyer. The petite housekeeper had the handles of an overstuffed plastic bag looped around one small wrist. In her other hand, she balanced a stack of envelopes and newspapers. She carefully set the mail next to the floral centerpiece on the entry table.
“Did you sleep last night? You look so much better already!” she gushed over him and pinched his cheek.
He leaned in to kiss her cheek. “I did, thanks. Is that today’s mail?”
“Yes, sir. And I didn’t feel like cooking lunch, so I stopped at the Italian deli on my way here.”
Mitch gave up telling Lorena that she didn’t have to feed him. Over the years, he had noticed that their housekeeper adopted a more maternal role with him whenever his own mom wasn’t around. Lorena made her way into the kitchen with their food, while Mitch flipped through the mail. Most of it was junk or addressed to his father. He was about to toss the envelopes aside when he caught a glimpse of his own name. Pausing, he separated the letter addressed to him from the rest.
His name was the only thing on the envelope. No address or return address, no stamp. He hesitated to open it. Anything sent to him anonymously these days was probably nothing he wanted to see.
Without another thought, Mitch threw it in with the other letters and joined Lorena for lunch.
A scream woke Mitch from a dead sleep. He sat up in bed, sweaty and confused. Low blue light flooded the bedroom. He was positive that he hadn’t fallen asleep watching TV, but the anchor for the evening news graced the screen.
“The family of Steffanie Filipek is seeking justice for the death of—”
Mitch jabbed the red button on the remote, cutting the anchor off mid-sentence. The room plunged into darkness, except for the red numbers on the bedside clock. It was 11:13 p.m. Earlier in the day, Lorena had been just as bewildered by the broken clocks. She accused modern technology of being a fickle lover and vowed to hire a professional to fix them.
With the TV silenced, he heard the walls breathing again. Before being rudely awakened, Mitch had been sleeping peacefully. The kind of sleep that made him feel like he was swaddled by a cloud. Did the TV wake him?
Mitch tried to swallow but winced. His throat was dry and cracked. Jonesing for a glass of water, he threw off the blankets and turned on the bedside lamp. When he opened the door, he froze.
Child-sized footprints were stamped in red on the floor in the hallway. More of them disappeared around the corner. Mitch squeezed his eyes shut, counted to ten, then reopened them. The footprints remained, so clearly formed that he could count every single toe. They ended at his door, as though a kid had stopped to stand in front of his bedroom. No prints led away from it.
With a shaking hand, he grabbed his phone. Mitch wanted pictures just in case…
When he turned his phone on, he saw several unread text messages.
They were all received at 11:13 p.m.
Mitch frowned. Frequently, Stan drunk-texted Mitch bizarre or nonsensical things. But this didn’t strike him as one of those instances. In fact, the string of texts didn’t sound like Stan at all. On a hunch, he replied:
Fifteen seconds passed before he received a response.
His already dry throat was crumbling, trying to suffocate him. Forget taking pictures, he was calling the cops.
Holding his phone at the ready, Mitch crept out of his bedroom. The footprints took him around the corner to the staircase. The front stairwell was vacuous in the dark, sucking at light and sound until all he heard were deep, soft breaths. The red footprints came up each step, appearing to have slipped momentarily in some spots. Mitch hit the lights, and the chandelier overhead bathed the foyer in a golden glow. More red prints entered the foyer from the kitchen. Clutching the railing in one hand and his phone in the other, Mitch quietly trod down the stairs.
Stepping into the kitchen, his bare foot encountered something sharp on the floor. With a hiss, he grabbed his foot. Something warm and wet flowed between his fingers. He hopped up and down and reached for the switch on the wall. Light filled the room, illuminating the blood covering his hand and foot.
Scattered across the floor were broken glass bottles. Craft beer bottles the color of molasses were dumped carelessly over every flat surface. Pieces of a vodka bottle dripped onto the tiles. Someone had pulled a rack of wine glasses and smashed them as well. Mitch lifted his injured foot to pick the glass shards out of his skin.
The house exhaled, reminding him what brought him to the kitchen. The red footprints walked into the dining room. As he followed them, he now left red footprints of his own. He went from the dining room to the breakfast nook and down the hallway, ending in the living room. The light was on, as was the TV.
“If the case against Mitch Lorrins goes to trial, he could be facing life in prison,” said the news anchor.
Mitch barely heard the man.
Sprawled on the floor was Lorena. Unconscious, she laid in a pool of blood. He rushed to her side and dropped to his knees. Her body was cold when he touched her wrist. His hand traveled down to her hand, where something was clutched in her fist. A white envelope soaked in blood. The envelope with his name on it.
In a daze, Mitch pried it open. The envelope was empty.
A ping alerted him to a text message.
An aggressive knock at the front door nearly made him drop his phone in the housekeeper’s blood. His phone pinged again.
“In other news,” said the anchor, “this is the final weekend to buy tickets to the Kichirou Show. If you’re looking for an escape from mundanity, then you’ll not want to miss this crazy spectacular, folks.”
Another knock echoed through the empty house, this time followed by, “Police! Open up!”
His phone pinged.
Mitch backed away from Lorena’s body. This did not look good for him. The beer and liquor, the envelope with his name on it, and Lorena … He retreated from the living room and eased the back door open. He could mourn Lorena later when he was far, far away from here. Mitch sprinted across the lawn, aiming for the woods at the rear of the property. The cut on his foot stung with every step, but that was the least of his problems tonight. What was a cut on the foot compared to abandoning the crumbling ruins of his old life?
In the darkness, Mitch heard his phone ping one more time. He chucked it into the expanse of trees that welcomed him into their prickly embrace. The screen remained illuminated for ten seconds.
The screen went black, and Mitch’s house exhaled for the last time.
Read Chapter Two - Picture Perfect
Lady... you are a rock star. No lie. This is so good!!!
Creepy. I can't wait to see where this goes.