The Visible Filth Read Online Free

second cup, when he heard Carrie yelp.
    She put the phone on the table and pushed it away from her. “Fuck,” she said. And then she grabbed it again. “Who the fuck were you talking to last night?”
    “What do you mean? What’s going on?”
    “You were texting someone on this thing last night.” She delivered it like an accusation. He was about to snap a reply when she turned the face of it to him and he saw the last two texts, delivered after he had abandoned the conversation.
    The first:
    PLEASE
    The second, delivered about ten minutes later, was simply a picture. Will squinted at it, couldn’t make it out. He took the phone from her and held it closer to his face. A cold wave pulsed from his heart. It was a picture of half a dozen bloody teeth. They were arranged in a cluster on what appeared to be a wooden table; the roots were broken on most of them, as if they’d been wrenched out.
    “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
    “What the fuck is that?”
    He considered it for a moment. He swiped his thumb across the screen and brought it back to the main menu. Weather, App Store, Google, Camera, Messages, Maps. All of it banal. Nothing on here, it seemed, to personalize it. He wondered what he would see if he checked the rest of her messages.
    “Don’t mess with it, Will. Take it to the cops. Somebody got hurt last night.”
    “Maybe. Or maybe they’re just fucking with me.”
    She rose without a word and brought her plate to the sink. She kept her back to him as she ran the water over it.
    “You know what? It’s Wednesday; Derek will be in after his shift. I’ll show it to him.”
    Derek was a cop in the Sixth District. He usually came in with his partner after a shift and spent an hour or two there. He’d saved Will’s bacon on more than one occasion: scaring off drug dealers, helping people out the door who didn’t want to leave, and just generally making it known that Rosie’s was protected. He was a good guy, and Will was happy to have him as a regular. He felt much better about the idea of showing the phone to him than bringing it into the precinct office, where he was pretty sure he’d be laughed out of the building.
    Carrie seemed mollified by this. She shut the water off and faced him, leaning against the sink. “What if she comes back to claim it first?”
    “I’ll just tell her we haven’t found it. I’ll let the cops deal with it.”
    She thought about that. “Yeah. Okay. That seems good.”
    He put the phone back onto the table and pushed it away from him. “So did you get your paper written last night?”
    She sighed, as if already exhausted. “Mostly. I have to go over it again before class. Probably rewrite the ending, since I was a zombie by the time I got to it. Then turn it in and hope Steve likes it.”
    Steve: her English Lit professor. It rankled him that she called him by his first name, but she claimed all the students did. He liked an “informal learning environment.” Well, how progressive of him. The fucker. Carrie had been agonizing over a paper on T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” for almost two months, and he was sick of hearing about it. She’d never fretted this much over a paper for any other professor. “I’m sure he’ll love it,” he said, making no effort to hide the sourness he felt. He knew it was petty, but it felt good anyway.
    She cast him a look which he could not interpret. “He better. It’s a quarter of my grade.”
    “Right.”
    “What about you? What are you going to do?”
    “I don’t know. I feel like I should check up on Eric.”
    “Why?”
    “He was the one in the fight last night. He got cut up pretty good.”
    “Well there’s a shock. Let him hide under his rock. I’m sure he’s fine. People like that always are.”
    “People like what?”
    “The ones who start shit. It’s always everyone else who suffers.”
    “I just want to make sure he’s okay. Concern for others is a common human trait. You’ll learn that about us