The halls smelled like too much cologne and body mist, with active students buzzing around like the coffee adrenaline had kicked into high gear. Wide awake, guys with wet hair and girls with hastily tied ponytails were making their way from one class to another with casual rebellion underscoring their apathetic ambition. There was a quick prank that didn’t land too well, as the junior who was set on fire didn’t even notice before his friend put out the flame.
Read from the start to get a better experience, Joker Joker Deuce Halloween Series Part I – A Monster Awakens…
Julie shook her head as she kept walking. Her consistent thought every day while she walked the corridors of humanities was that boys were immature, disgusting, and ultimately self-destructive, no matter how much fun they were to play with. She had a little time between classes and wasn’t really in a rush to go anywhere, which made this particular time of day the absolute worst of her life. Marcus and Tori were on the other side of campus, so she was pretty much on her own for two more classes.
When she pulled out her phone to check some messages, she saw Tracy walking down the hall with Professor Stilling. It wouldn’t have caught her attention on any other day, but Tracy looked particularly beautiful on this one. They really didn’t know each other. All Julie knew was that she was a student on scholarship, and she kept to herself for the most part. But the guys couldn’t stop gawking at her. She was that beautiful. That’s what made her the talk of the student body.
“Then, why is the grade so low?” Tracy asked as she passed by Julie.
Professor Stilling looked back at her, “Uh, first of all, that’s not a low grade. And second, that grade’s saying your paper isn’t perfect.”
That’s when the professor reached his office door. He opened it gently as he put his hand on Tracy’s back, “Come on in and have a seat. We can talk about it more if you’d like.”
Tracy looked around shyly and then ducked her head as she passed through the door. Professor Stilling took a good look around the hall as he followed her inside. Julie found it all a little strange. It wasn’t unheard of for students to talk about their grades in their professor’s office. That wasn’t it at all. It was the way she looked like she dreaded entering the office, and he acted like he was about to get a special gift.
Say it isn’t so, Tracy. Say it isn’t so.
Julie just shook her head and put the thoughts of what might be going on in there behind her. That wasn’t her mess. She had messes of her own to worry about, like the phone call she had just remembered to make. She immediately switched apps on her phone and started dialing.
“Hey, Mom,” Julie greeted as she put her finger to her ear and found a place for quiet. “I got your message. What’s going on?”
Julie looked concerned as she listened.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
She kicked her leg as she listened to her mother give her more seemingly bad news.
“Am I going to have to pull out?” she wondered with a heavy heart as the gravity of what her mother was telling her was starting to dawn on her.
“Well, I don’t want you guys going into debt,” she said with all the conviction in the world.
“Are you sure?” she asked, knowing no one was sure.
“Well, heaven knows I’m not trying to keep dad from his chocolate chip cookies,” she laughed.
It was good to find a laugh in what seemed like a very deep conversation. “Well, I work in the Financial Aid office. So, let me see what I can do.”
She listened for a moment, “I’m pretty sure I can come up with something. I don’t work there for nothing.”
After listening a moment longer, “I’ll definitely look into it and get back to you. We’ll work through this.”
Both sides said goodbye four or five times while Chad stood behind her listening. She hadn’t noticed him standing there until she hung up the phone and he blurted into her ear, “Financial problems, huh?”
Her face got blotchy red as she turned around to see who was standing behind her, “Do you mind? That was a private conversation.”
Chad was visibly embarrassed as he looked around the hall to see who was listening, “My bad. I just walked up, and you were in a conversation. I didn’t know.”
“So, you stood there and listened to what I was talking about,” Julie fired back, still very heated.
“I was standing there. I could hear what you were saying,” Chad offered.
Julie shook her head and started walking away, “Unbelievable.”
“Well, you were having that private conversation in public,” Chad explained as he caught up to her.
If looks could kill, he would have dropped dead, “I don’t care where it was. You had no business listening in on it.”
“No one has any expectation of privacy these days,” he quoted from some lawbook or a television show.
At this point, Julie was doing all she could do to get away from him. But each turn she made, he followed, “I was joking. It’s just a joke. Come on!”
She looked back for a moment as her mind raced with the worst thoughts about him. He is a petty child. All those things in textbooks about losers? That’s all about him. He was patient zero. Then she turned and walked away.
Chad watched as he realized that his words weren’t getting anywhere, and had he known any better, he would have left it at that. But he couldn’t stop himself, “So, what? I heard your phone call! Act like it’s a big deal, why don’t you? What the hell, man?”
Then, he turned and walked the other way. That is, until he realized he was walking in the wrong direction. He stopped and looked both ways, then he made a quick adjustment after pointing with his finger to get his bearings.
Jeph had been looking up everything he could find about Julie. Using a system of reverse image lookups, it wasn’t hard to track down every account that wasn’t private. Even then, facial recognition software could be used to track down friends and acquaintances. This is if Jeph were at all, any kind of psycho.
Of course, he’d never spend money on an access system designed for security purposes, and he wasn’t into criminal investigations, so what did he need with that kind of capability? Besides the fact, Jeph really wasn’t trying to be a creepy online stalker. What he could find on his own was good enough for him.
That is, until he walked onto a chat forum that was talking about using Python to build a facial recognition tool. After reading through a few of the suggestions and seeing how the code was applied, it became a fun little task for Jeph to do for the next couple of hours. In no time, he had a new tool to play with, and it was pretty fast. So, that was added to his arsenal when he wanted to find someone online.
It didn’t take him long at all to learn about Marcus and Tori, the two friends she mostly posted about when she wasn’t talking about Jenny, which he was able to correctly assume was her coffee maker. It seemed like nonsense to name a coffee maker or treat it like a person in any way. But Julie was a college student, that time between being a child and becoming an adult, so naming a coffee maker made some kind of sense in her little world.
As he nodded in and out of his imaginations, he caught up on some lively conversation the chat was having that evening. They were getting into it about how to date women, and some of the advice was worth a try. It obviously wasn’t the top ten Cosmopolitan had to offer from serial daters who knew what they were doing. But what these guys were coming up with wasn’t half bad.
Although Jeph cringed when he read one poster’s idea that women at a funeral were emotionally vulnerable. Something about that didn’t sound right at first, but then it started to work on him. He thought about Julie being at a funeral, dressed in black with a handkerchief, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Hey, Julie,” Jeph softly whispered her name.
“Yeah,” she answered as she looked up at him with her sweet eyes.
“I can see you’re all depressed and everything. You know what’s good for that?” he asked as if they were at a club, not a funeral.
“No,” Julie looked at him with a sad, inquisitive tone in her eyes. “What’s good for getting over the death of someone I love?”
“We could put some Netflix on and then, we could chill,” he said matter-of-factly.
Julie looked at him, confused, “I don’t think you know what that means.”
He nodded as he realized he could definitely use some practice. The whole funeral strategy was new to him. But if someone were to die in Julie’s circle, a good line might be something to work on before the time came.
Another poster offered that it might be a good idea to find out what their hobbies are and adopt them. The example he gave was learning how to run and then finding trails where beautiful women liked to jog. Jeph laughed when he thought about a guy teaching himself how to run like it was hard. Just put on sneakers and shorts, then head out for the worst exercise in the world that burns to breathe. But if it was going to get him the woman of his dreams, it might be worth it to feel like death for fifteen minutes every other week. That’s how often they run, right?
“I thought I’d see you here,” Julie announced as she checked her pulse by the water fountain.
“Are you stalking me?” Jeph flirted as he walked out of the tree line.
It was a beautiful place to run, right on the water with a trail that went around a wooded area and headed back into town. There were benches along the way where the elderly fed pigeons and single fathers brought their children to pass them back to their single mothers. Jeph had never been to this place. He must have been imagining it from a show he had recently watched, but it was a perfect setting for him to meet up with Julie and give the Netflix line another try.
He talked her into walking with him, which seemed more feasible. That way, he wouldn’t be out of breath with every word he attempted to say. His plan was going alright so far, and it got even better when she turned to him, looking up at him with those gorgeous eyes, “I have something to tell you.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“My father wants to meet you,” she said. “I told him a lot about you, and he told me to set something up.”
“Set something up?” Jeph asked. “Like what?”
“Well, he’ll be sending his limo sometime tomorrow and take you to his yacht,” she answered.
“Whoa,” he reacted. “Sounds heavy.”
“It’s not, Jeph,” she urged. “I promise. I’ll be there. You’ll like him. I know you will. And I think he likes you, too.”
“He does?” Jeph joked.
“He does,” she joked back. “You’ll see.”
She reached up on her tippy toes for a kiss when Jeph was suddenly jerked back to reality. The conversation on the chat had turned from disturbing ideas of how to meet women to something much more sinister than that. One poster had joked that the easiest way to get a woman was to use chloroform. Then, another poster corrected him and informed everyone that it wasn’t instantaneous like it was in the movies. This led to an entire conversation about which drugs were best to knock out women and render them incapable of rejection.
“What happened to the old-fashioned way, just hitting them over the head with a club and dragging them into the cave? You know, nothing says romance like a vial full of potion meant to render a lady unconscious. Hey, baby, I brought you flowers…and a controlled substance. Don’t worry, I measured the dosage. I’m kidding, of course. I’m not one of those guys. I’m not that desperate.” Jeph found himself standing in the middle of the basement with his hand up to his mouth like he was talking into a microphone, “Thank you. That’s my time.”
He dropped the imaginary mic and wiped his hands on his jeans. Then, he sat back in his seat and stared at the monitor in front of him as he shook his head. It’s a good thing he wasn’t one of those psycho online stalkers.
If you are ready, proceed to Part VI of Joker Joker Deuce Halloween Series!
This series is inspired by Joker Joker Deuce, a psychological thriller set in a college town where students are being targeted by a serial killer. Available now on Amazon!
