Cracks In The Shell

I wrote this as part of the All In Good Time phenomenon on reddit.com/r/nosleep. I'm not one of the original 16, but I decided to piggyback off of this and try my hand  

Whatever you do, don't trust Alan Goodtime.
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Pistachios. They're so pretty, I thought, hefting a bag in my hands and then putting in the shopping cart. They're that unmatchable green colour. They have those perfectly smooth cupped shells. But each of them has a crack, a canyon, straight down the centre. You can break them open so easily. 

What a metaphor for life. We all have cracks. We all have imperfections, a weakness that one can take advantage of, and eventually get to us. Yes, we all have our breaking point. All of us. Even Alan Goodtime.

Yes, I know of the man. I've read so many stories about him. After a while, of course, they're all the same; the first ones were pretty good, though. Alan Goodtime. The man who owns a cursed shop. Man of the Japanese Maple, otherwise known as NK. A killer, a psycho, a ruiner of lives. Even Alan Goodtime has his defects. I know; I've met him. 

I can't say how Alan picks his victims. From the way the shop seems to appear in just the right place, the way the number 1111 finds its way into a specific person's life, the way a story posted at the top of the list will disappear after you've read it once - it seems like he's got a twisted order to his doings. But who knows - maybe his decisions are a matter of chance. He certainly picked the wrong person this time. 

It was years ago, back when I was nineteen and had been living on my own for almost a year. I had moved out as soon as I had the chance, for personal reasons that I'll discuss later. I read the Goodtime stories. They made me smile, but they didn't scare me; even as a child, I had been unnaturally stoical. I watched The Amity Dollhouse on TV when I was eight without my parents knowing. I fell asleep in the middle of it. But the original Goodtime stories had a nice ring to them. They sparked my curiosity, even though I didn't believe them until I found a pistachio shell under my pillow.

Even then, I was pretty sure somebody was trying to play a trick on me. The kids across the hall used to love to do that - Prank The Lonely Girl. They would get bored of it eventually, then find a new idea a couple of months later. Though I was curious how the little buggers had managed to get into my browser history in the first place. I put a new passcode on my laptop and thought nothing of it.

Then one day, when I was walking home from work, I saw a neon sign on a formerly abandoned building. All In Good Time. It was then that I put some faith in the stories, and decided to investigate. 

I tend to take unnecessary risks. It's all a part of my condition; I don't put too much thought into self-preservation. Perhaps it was why I had gained a lot of weight since moving out and no longer caring about healthy food. So, even having read about the boxes on the shelves and the red maple leaves and the pistachios, I walked inside. I still didn't believe it all. The repetitive themes, especially in the piggyback stories, just seemed artificial after you'd read a lot of them, and made the whole thing seem so tiring that after awhile it became meaningless myth. 

A bell on the top of the door rang once. Dust floated about, illuminated by the sunlight. I glanced down subtly. Regular vinyl flooring, not ghost-white stripped maple. I walked forward. 

There was Alan, man of legend, eating those infernal pistachios. They were the Sweet Chili kind. I'd never read about that in any of the canon stories, but oh well. Alan raised a hand in casual greeting, his other hand occupied with cracking open one of his nuts. It was starting to get annoying how my run-in with this man was following the stereotype almost to the letter. I was starting to think that perhaps the stories I'd read didn't lack originality on the part of the authors, but on the part of Alan himself.

"Can I help you find something?" he asked through slightly rotten teeth. All that salt in packaged pistachios can't be good for your dental health. Or - I noticed his substantial paunch, busting past the limits of his ghostly frame - for your health in general. 

"Thanks, but I'm just here to look", I told him, though now that I think about it, I wasn't really there for any specific reason. The shop was there and so I went into it. 

The walls were full of things. On one of the lowest shelves sat several of the infamous red-packaged boxes, silent and staring. I glared at them. Why couldn't Alan pack his WMDs in vases? Maybe bowls, or even trays? Something different for everyone, for the purpose of individuality. Now that was something I would've liked to see. 

The rest of the shelves were full of nothing in general, organised in no way whatsoever. A stuffed and mounted housecat. A section of a picket fence strung from the ceiling. A packet of wildflower seeds. Finding nothing of interest to me, I turned towards the door. In my peripheral vision, I could see Alan straightening up, ready to call me back. I turned to him. "Have a nice day", I said. Not knowing how to respond, he just stood there as I exited All In Good Time and continued on my way.

You see, that is the first of Alan Goodtime's foibles: he has a hard time getting you under control unless you take one of his purged things. 

Still, he tried. I have to give him credit for that. In the morning, I found my cat Osiris playing with a pistachio shell on the floor. Another one? Upon closer inspection, I found them littered all around the room, lined up perfectly beside the baseboards, even creating a trail across the doorway. Pretty. But useless. I swept them up and put them in the trash. I left Osiris the one he was playing with. He licked it until he had gotten all of the salt off, then left it, his short attention span directed to a fly on the windowsill. 

Later in the week, I opened the door to find a solitary box sitting outside the mail slot. I hadn't heard anybody knock, yet there it was, red tape, chalk marks, and everything. I left it on the coffee table, where it sat, unsure how to deal with me. It didn't even migrate to other parts of the city. This bored me to no end. First a lack of originality, then a lack of excitement. How did this stuff even scare people?

The box just sat there until, starting on a weekend Netflix binge, I moved it to the corner of the living room, where it steadily gathered dust. 

Finally the pattern came to a climax. On Monday, I noticed a strange heat emanating from the corner of the kitchen, where I grew an aloe plant in a terra cotta pot. Osiris refused to go near it, hair standing on end. The aloe plant was half-dead, yet the heat I felt seemed to be coming straight from it, fiery and sickly like a fever. The next morning, there was blood seeping from the soil and onto the floor. I found Osiris dead in the tray beneath the pot, surrounded by a few deep red leaves. I dropped him off in a plastic box at the animal shelter to be put in the incinerator. 

After another week or so, a claw-like branch reached up through the still-red soil like an old woman's hand rising to the sky in the throes of death. It was eerily beautiful, and ghostly pale. It was a Japanese red maple sapling, stripped of any bark or leaves. Finally something interesting. This was the unique twist to my story with Alan Goodtime. The next day, my aloe plant died, oozing black liquid, deflating slowly.

Now, I decided, it was time to talk to Mr. Goodtime. Osiris I couldn't care less about; I simply took care of him because I was expected to, having gotten him from my parents as a gift. And aloe plants are plentiful in west Texas. But I was a bit tired of cleaning up unappetising liquids from my kitchen floor. So I grabbed the sapling by the trunk, which was now about three inches in diameter, ignored the heat, and uprooted it. 

In other accounts of run-ins with Goodtime, the red maple signifies doom; it causes helicopters to crash, it kills people, it cannot be touched without some harm coming to the guilty party. But I suppose the saplings are not as strong as the mature trees. My fingers were a bit singed, and over the next few days, the top layer of skin on my hands flaked and fell off. But that was the worst of it. 

On the way to Goodtime's shop, I tossed the box in the lake, where it bobbed silently as if watching me go. Irritatingly, though, it appeared in my front seat when I pulled into the parking lot. Goodtime's shop was still there, theoretically because he hadn't yet gotten what he wanted from me. The tree in the backseat had begun to drip a thin red liquid, not as viscous as blood, but similar in colour. I grabbed it, shook some of the liquid off onto the parking lot, and stalked inside the shop.

Goodtime looked up. "Miss Nicole. Wonderful to see you again."

I had never told him my name.

"Not so wonderful", I answered. I lay the sapling on its side on the counter; now the blood-red liquid was his to clean up. "I need you to take your sapling back, please."

"Are you absolutely certain?" he asked, a threatening tone in his voice. "It's quite a lovely tree. And I assure you, it will grow in time."

"It doesn't match my wallpaper", I told him, "And the grout in my tile is very hard to clean. This tree is more of a mess than my cat."

He frowned at me sternly. "Now is not the time for humour, Miss Nicole. The thing you love most is missing, is it not? - You can't simply return the tree and have your problems be over. You must pay me something in return for your missing property."

Now I raised my eyebrows. "The thing I love most? Let's see...your tree poisoned my cat. But I didn't love him. I simply kept him out of respect for my parents."

Goodtime's brows lowered. A storm of anger crossed his face. I continued.

"Your tree also leached water and oxygen from my aloe plant. But nobody in their right mind would fall in love with a plant - except, perhaps, for you, and I can't be entirely certain that you're in your right mind." I leaned back on my feet. "So I can't say that anything I love has gone missing. Unless, perhaps, I've missed something?"

"You are lying", Goodtime said, pointing an accusing finger at me. "The tree never fails to do its work. Many have tried and failed to outsmart me, Miss Nicole. There is a simple solution to all of this, however: you pay me back, and the thing you're missing will be returned to you. But test my patience much longer and you'll never see your most beloved possession again."

"That's just the thing, Mr. Goodtime. I don't love anything."

Goodtime froze for a moment. This is the second of his vices: you must love something in order to fall prey to him. I didn't. Like a lack of self-preservation and shortage of control, it is all a part of my condition.

"Nice try", he hissed. "You must love something. Everyone does. If not something else, then you love yourself, at least. Surely I can take that away from you."

"No," I told him quietly. I leaned across the counter, pushing the sapling towards him across its wide expanse. As I reached forward, my sleeves pulled back, giving Goodtime a clear view of the scar tissue crossing my wrists and disappearing into my sleeves, where it stopped just above my elbow.

His expression turned icy. He had made a mistake. The pistachios in his hand fell to the counter with a soft rattle. 

"If you don't intend to buy anything, then I'm going to have to ask you to leave", he said quietly. I didn't need a second suggestion. I turned on my heel and exited the door. The box in my car was gone.

As I was starting my car, I caught a glimpse through the window of Goodtime lifting the sapling into a cardboard box. I watched as he wrapped red tape around it and marked it with six chalk lines. As he placed it on a shelf, it rocked from side to side as if eager to be opened, and red stains spread out from the tape lines. Goodtime caught sight of me watching from the driver's seat of my car, and gave me a threatening glare. I pulled out of the parking lot and left.

Driving by weeks later, I saw the lot cordoned off with police tape. Apparently there had been a fire there. There were half-burnt double samaras, or maple tree seed pods, scattered on the ground. I drove past the lot without looking back.

I have since received treatment for the depression that drove me to leave my family and to utilise my father's razor in an empty bathroom; I have learned to love again, and to live again. But this was one time that my condition saved my life rather than stealing it.

Woe to whoever gets that box. I wish you godspeed, and I give you a warning: whatever you do, don't trust Alan Goodtime.