I had tried to warn him. Going after a theatrical, prolific serial killer would only attract the attention of that killer, especially if he was right and Eyedol games was either directly employing them or otherwise complicit. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him. I’d lost most of my skepticism after he’d shown me the comments of their company website, the conversation that seemed to be taking place there. It was just that as an outsider looking inwards, I could see that the only end was death, that once the Eye Killer acknowledged his pursuit he would simply become another victim.
I just didn’t want my friend to die. I didn’t have many friends, or at least I didn’t have many close friends, and this made me protective in the way that teenagers always are of each other. It was the same protective desire that made me lie to his parents about what he was up to at all times, knowing that his safety depended on my ability to not only lie but keep the lie going. And this time, if the Eye Killer got to him, it would be my fault. I was the one who’d told him about it. I was the one who’d planted the seeds that would kill him.
He took my warnings as insults, because the obsession had already taken hold of him and I did not have the tools to extract its roots from his mind. My expressions of concern were taken as my doubting his intelligence, my fear that he would die was an affront to his sense of self. He could not die. He could only succeed, and bring the Eye Killer to justice, whatever ‘justice’ meant.
I learned that he died on April 3rd, 1994. I don’t know if that was the day he died. I don’t think it was. I think he’d been dead for a few days already when I found what was left.
After that the cops took over everything. I was fine with that. I didn’t want to look at his shitty little apartment, or remember that his body didn’t exist, that he was just gone. I just wanted to be gone myself, as distant from his obsession and the hole it left in my life as I could.
I couldn’t move away. I was in school, and I didn’t have any extra money, and dropping out would mean having to face my parents, and I’d gone to college to forget they existed too. Maybe it was because I kept going to all the places we had known together, to classrooms and dining halls and the shitty little park behind the Life Sciences building with the ducks that I let the seeds of his obsession embed themselves in my flesh also. I was following in all of his other footsteps, what difference could a few more vestiges make?
It took me a year. A full year of piecing together clues I was sure he’d have solved much faster, of forcing myself down internet rabbit holes and forgetting to eat, but I got there. Eyedol’s other website, or what I was pretty sure was Eydol’s other website.
The chat window popped up without my prompting. Maybe that should have been surprising, but at that point I had run out of the ability to be surprised. I was simply here, at the bottom of yet another well. Why should this one turn out any different?
The date also added to my skepticism. The internet wasn’t so vast that everyone put together April Fools gags on that date, not yet, but I was online enough to understand that nothing experienced on that day should be accepted at face value.
CEBro: Shit, you’re on to the next interview
CEBro: here’s the address. Show up at 3pm and we’ll see if you’re a good fit :)
You see why I couldn’t take it seriously, right?
What kind of person would seriously believe that there would be a job on the other side of a mysterious chat room at the end of a series of puzzles? I was totally going to get serial killed. That’s the problem with obsession. It doesn’t care about its costs to you. It only cares about being fed.