The Visible Filth Read Online Free PDF

sniper took a shot at him from the dense foliage. He keyed himself into a crouch.
    It buzzed again, and he glanced over.
    U want it?
    Fuck you, he thought.
    Buzz: Keep it.
    He dropped the controller and typed a response. Don’t want ur goddam phone. Pick it up at the bar tonight.
    A moment passed. Did u look at all the pretty pictures?
    He typed. Maybe I should take it to the police.
    Take a look. Might like what u see.
    He waited, but nothing else came from the phone. The video game was frozen on the death screen. A blurry image of his avatar’s bullet-riddled corpse lay behind the reset prompt.
    He switched it off and gave his full attention to the yellow phone. It felt like a conduit of some dark energy, and he felt uncomfortable holding onto it. He placed it on an end-table beside the couch and called up the menu. The camera icon pulled his eye toward it, as though it exerted its own peculiar gravity. He touched the icon and scrolled over to the picture gallery.
    There were four saved images and a video file. He stared at them a moment, trying to come to terms with what he was seeing, trying to arrange the world in such a way that would accommodate his own mundane life, the daily maintenance of his ordinary existence, along with what he saw arrayed before him in neat little squares, like snapshots of Hell.
    He tapped his finger on the first one so it ballooned to fill the screen.
    It looked like a close-up shot of a sleeping man’s face. He was middle-aged, balding, with a large, flat nose; his face was soft and rounded, like the features of a stone carving which had been worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. There was nothing sinister about this picture; it might be an intimate portrait taken by a lover, or a dear friend.
    The second was the same man from the same angle, but taken from a few feet further away. In this picture the man was clearly dead, felled by a violent strike to the head. The rounded dome of the man’s skull, cropped out of the first picture, was here depicted in its shattered complexity: bone and brain and blood extruding from the crown like a psychedelic volcano caught in mid-expulsion. The man was lying on the sidewalk. The blood around his head reflected a disc of overhead light, a streetlamp or a flashlight. The picture had been taken at night. He noticed what appeared to be a wedding band on the man’s left hand, which lay palm up, white and plump.
    The third picture revealed a new setting. This one had been taken indoors, under a harsh light, probably a fluorescent. Seventies-style wood paneling covered the wall in the background. A utilitarian white drafting table occupied the foreground, and resting atop it was the same man’s head, severed from its body. It sat planted straight on the table; someone must have taken the time to balance it, to arrange it just so. The wound in his head was not visible from this angle. No blood marred the scene, save the inevitable blackened ring around the neck. It seemed that some care had been taken to clean the blood from his head, primping him like a schoolboy for his yearbook photo. A slender red book lay on the table behind it, partially obscured, its spine facing the camera.
    Will tried to slide on to the next one, but his fingers had gone numb and the phone clattered to the floor. He experienced a wild and irrational fear that someone had heard him and would see what he was looking at, and he felt an overwhelming shame – as though he’d been caught looking at the most outrageous pornography, or as though these ghastly photographs depicted his own work.
    Putting the phone back on the table, he closed his eyes and forced himself to calm down. His breath was shaky, his nerves jumping. It occurred to him, abruptly, like some divine communication, that he did not have to look any further. He knew something awful had happened, that a murder of grotesque proportions had been committed and documented, and that any further examination was