One night after work, I called a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time to meet me for dinner at an Italian restaurant that had recently opened up downtown. The Il Pomodoro had been getting rave reviews, so, since I was jonesing for some pizza, I figured we could both grab something to eat and catch up. She sounded excited at first, but when I mentioned the restaurant, she became agitated.
“Look,” she said, “can we scratch that? I hate Italian food.”
“Okay,” I said, stopping at a crosswalk at a red light. Never heard of anybody who hated Italian food, but okay. I let it go.
She suggested we go to a little place on Telegraph near her apartment. I shrugged and said it was no skin off my back.
“Jesus,” I heard her say on the other end. I stared at my phone like I had insulted it somehow. I asked her if something was wrong, but she insisted everything was fine. “I’m just a little…no, it’s nothing.”
With phone pressed to my ear, I started crossing the street. “Did something go down at work?” My friend was a buyer for a major email retailer. She was always on the road, traveling from one runway show to another, buying off-the-rack designer brands. Mostly handbags and shoes. When I first met her at a club, she told me she loved her job, loved traveling to New York, L.A., and Miami, to constantly be somewhere else, always on the move. At the time I thought she was just cosmopolitan and wanted to live that high glamorous life. But she was also down-to-earth, funny, as comfortable shooting hoops as she was wearing Jimmy Choos. But she also complained about some of the people she worked with, so I thought maybe it was one of those days.
“No, no, it’s nothing. I’ll meet you there.”
When I got to the restaurant, my friend was already sitting at a booth near the window. She was dressed to the nines, as usual, but something was off. She appeared just a little less polished like she’d been running––her hair a little out of place, her clothes a little rumpled, her skin sweaty. She looked jumpy as hell. Her gaze darted around the crowded place with this mad, paranoid look in her eyes. When she saw me, she burst into the kind of smile you have when you’re relieved somebody showed up unexpectedly to bail you out of a bad fix. Even when I approached and hugged her, she trembled a little bit and clung hard to me. Something was wrong.
“So what’s up?”
She pressed her lips tight and nodded. Though she was smiling, she still looked anxious. When a woman came out of the restroom, she flinched and whipped her head in that direction before, sighing, relieved, she focused on the traffic and pedestrians passing by beyond the plate glass window.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I said, patting her hand.
“Nothing,” she said, then picked up the menu. “Hey, now you’re here, we should order. I’m starved.”
I stared at her while she scanned the menu with a wild look in her eyes before I flagged a waiter.
While we waited for our orders, I tried to perk her up with small talk about office work and music or the latest trailers I’d watched online and thought looked interesting, but nothing seemed to help. She smiled and nodded and occasionally made a few comments, but I could tell her thoughts were a million miles away. I wanted to get down to the bottom of what was bothering her, but I knew I’d only get slapped down again, so I decided to wait it out. Even though we didn’t always see a lot of each other, we were still close friends. She’d tell me what was wrong when she was ready.
After the waiter returned with our meals, we ate mostly in silence with the ambient restaurant noise filling in the gaps. Though she claimed to be starving, my friend only poked at her plate of pulled BBQ jackfruit and fries. I’d finally had enough when she flinched again, this time after a noisy group of college students entered the restaurant.
“What the hell’s going on with you?”
She frowned. “Nothing.”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve been acting jumpy all night. Did something upset you? Was it me?”
“No,” she said, wounded. “Why would you think that?”
“Then what is it?”
She shook her head, flared her nostrils, then looked away. I didn’t want to upset her any more than she already was, so I backed off again.
But the rest of the night didn’t improve.
After dinner, I walked her home through the dark streets, neither of us saying much. She constantly checked over her shoulder to make sure we weren’t being followed and toyed with her braids like a kid about to deliver an Easter piece at church. When we passed by a lamppost, my eyes were attracted to something posted to it. It was one of those missing-person flyers. “Have you Seen This Woman?” it read. Underneath was a grainy black photograph of a young woman in her late teens with bright, friendly eyes and a warm smile.
My friend shuddered.
“I think that’s the fifth one I’d seen in the past few weeks. We were talking about it just this last Saturday at my barbershop, how people just seem to be up and vanishing over the last couple of months. My barber said two people alone in his ‘hood disappeared without a trace. Everybody’s getting rattled. I mean, a serial killer could be out there, and the cops ain’t doing…”
My friend started to heave and darted her eyes once more. She grabbed my arm and told me to keep moving. “Please, let’s just go.”
“All right.” I had no idea why she was so damn nervous. However, after thinking about all those missing people, I started to get a little uneasy too. A little chill went up the back of my neck, and I could feel all the hairs tightening.
When we approached her building, she stopped and stared up at it. She was quiet for a few minutes, still a little agitated, before she turned to me and asked why I suggested we go out for Italian earlier.
“Just wanted some pizza, and I heard that place was pretty good. Why you ask?”
“I hate Italian food.”
I laughed ’cause it was the craziest thing I ever heard. Not that she hated Italian food, but the way she said it with such intensity. I laughed ’cause now she was making me nervous. She stared hard at me like she needed to get something off her chest. “Seriously, what’s up? Why you acting all paranoid?”
She took a while to answer before she said: “That restaurant, it triggered a lot of bad memories.”
The wind picked up and threw tree branches every which way. She jumped, then looked at me with those nervous, agitated eyes. She was starting to spook me out. It took her a while before she said anything, her facial expressions taking on different colors, her conflicted emotions right there on the surface. Then, drawing in a deep breath, she sat down on the porch steps, and began her story:
“Did I ever tell you about my cousin, Del?” she asked. And before I could say anything, she answered her own question. “No, of course not. I haven’t talked about this in years.” She paused to draw out a deep breath, then plunged into her story. “Me and Del were close growing up. Our daddies were twins and since we were spitting images of them we were sort of like twins ourselves. That’s what most people called us. The Twins. Two peas in a pod.” She paused again and stared off into the dark street. “That’s why what happened to me hit me so hard. Because he was like my twin brother.”
I frowned and stared at her hard. What happened? A strange, sinking feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. I clutched my hands in my lap and waited for her to explain.
“Del is one of the smartest people I know,” she began again. “He always had his head screwed on tight and knew exactly where he was going. When we were kids, he’d always tell me he was gonna grow up and be the richest man on the planet.” She laughed. “And you know what? I believed him. He just had this drive, this determination. He always set about succeeding in everything he did. One summer, when he was ten, he set up a lemonade stand on our block and made about $200. And instead of spending it all, he set up his own bank account and saved it. I never doubted at all that he’d grow up to be successful.
“About fifteen years ago, he was exactly where he wanted to be. He had a great job as a finance officer and had recently bought his first house, a little place in the suburbs. He was getting that marriage itch, you know? He was seeing somebody who worked in his department. I never met her, but he told me she might be the one. He was serious. So, his buying the house, I guess he was already building his little nest.
“Anyway, the house was this two-story fixer-upper at the end of a cul-de-sac, overgrown with a garden, a little rough around the edges. But he figured he could fix it up, get it to look top shape, and make it a home.
“Every weekend, before he moved in, he worked on the house, threw up fresh coats of paint on the walls, pulled up the ugly, stained carpets and sanded the hardwood floors underneath, and had the kitchen remodeled with stainless steel and marble.”
“That must’ve cost an arm and a leg.”
She smiled. “Like I said, he was doing good getting that bag. He could have gotten a fancier place out in the city, but he wanted to own a home. It was what he’d always wanted. The American Dream. And like I said, whatever Del wanted, he always set out a plan to get it.”
She sighed.
“If there was one thing that bothered Del, one little fly in the buttermilk, it was the neighborhood. He lived on one of those quiet, tree-lined streets, so quiet you could hear pins dropping everywhere. When he first bought the house, he was afraid he wouldn’t be welcomed, but that wasn’t the case at all. Sure, he got a few looks now and then, but mostly the neighbors were nice.
“That was until he met the Bursons.”
“The Bursons?”
“They were a couple who lived next door. Twenty-something, straight out of central casting. Good-looking, smart, outgoing. The husband used to work in finance like Del but he quit his job a few years before and opened a restaurant. It had always been his dream. His wife was in advertising, so she quit her job and helped with marketing. A third partner was an old college friend who specialized in Italian cuisine, so he handled the menu and became the chef.”
“Anyway, the Bursons showed up on Del’s doorstep one day with a plate of cookies and smiles. They were the welcome wagon. They talked, ate cookies, and realized they had a lot in common. Del was usually the friendly type. He could get along with anybody as long as they got along with him. So it wasn’t unbelievable that he hit it off with a couple of strangers.
“It seemed he’d been spending most of his free time with them. They hung out together at each other’s houses, watching sports, drinking craft brew, and playing pool. He eventually met the third partner and Del hit it off with him as well.
“He couldn’t stop talking about the Bursons. The Bursons this, the Bursons that. I was getting so sick of these people. It was like he joined some kind of cult,” she said. “I kept telling him to be careful. I mean, maybe I’m cynical, but you never know with some people.”
I nodded. “You never know.”
I remembered something my friend told me years ago. As I mentioned before, she enjoyed traveling for her job, which meant she wasn’t pinned down in one place for long. Because she was always on the move, she was rarely home. As soon as she came back from a trip, she was off traveling again, sometimes even overseas. She’d meet new people but rarely made new friends. When I asked her why that was, she gave me a weird look and said, “I don’t trust people.” It made sense at the time. I didn’t trust a lot of people myself. But now, sitting on the porch steps and listening to her story, I was beginning to think there were some hard-core roots to her cynicism.
“Del was the exact opposite. He was a people pleaser. I tried, I tried, I tried to warn him so many times, but he never listened. He always had his mind made up about things, about people. When he told me he was going into business with these people, he had his mind set on it just like he had his mind set on everything he wanted in life.”
“Go into business?” I said. “The restaurant, you mean.”
She nodded. “They wanted to start a franchise. You know, like the Olive Garden, except with fresh and organic ingredients. The Bursons asked for Del’s opinion and he told them the truth. The market was oversaturated. Then they asked him to try their cuisine first before making up his mind. So one night he went to their restaurant. He asked me to come along as a date, but I had an early flight to Chicago the next morning and couldn’t go.”
“Didn’t you say he had a girlfriend? Why didn’t he take her?”
“That was what I was wondering, but when I asked, he told me they were just casual, which was bizarre ’cause he kept telling me he thought she was the one.”
“Okay, so then what?”
“I spoke to him a few days later.” She shook her head incredulously. “He couldn’t stop raving about how great their food was. He said he’d never tasted anything like it before. Especially their meat sauces. ‘It’s all in the sauce,’ he kept saying. After that, there was no convincing him otherwise. He said they were sitting on a goldmine.”
“So he went into business with them.”
She nodded. “I told him he was crazy. Even I knew restaurants open and close all the time. He was so prepared to sink all his finances into that business, and for what? He barely knew these people. I told him I had a bad feeling about this, that maybe he should slow things down. He still wanted my approval, so there was that. ‘Just check it out first,’ he said, ‘go to the restaurant, meet the Bursons, try their specialty, spaghetti and meatballs, and then tell me it’s a bad idea.'”
“So you met these people? The Bursons?”
She nodded, then shuddered with revulsion. Once she was back in town, she and a friend dropped by the restaurant on a Saturday night and right away she got a bad vibe. “You know how when you walk into a room and you’re the only person you know there that’s like you?”
“Hell, yeah,” I said with a nervous laugh.
“Well, it was like that only ten times worse.”
The restaurant was called Il Rustico, and it looked like it, she said––small, ivy climbing the walls, exposed brick inside, filled with seven tables covered in checkerboard cloths and set with candles, flowers, breadsticks, and those big wine jugs with wicker bottoms.
“You know, very stereotypically Italian.”
I nodded. “Like they were trying to be authentic, but getting it all wrong?”
“Exactly,” she said, her eyes widening.
The kitchen was in the rear and was equipped with a huge wood-fired oven that, along with the candles, gave off the only light in the place. There were maybe ten people sitting at the little tables, drinking wine. As soon as they stepped through the front door, everybody turned their heads to look at them. All at once. Some of them had huge grins on their faces, and others just stared blankly at them, their eyes gleaming in the firelight.
“It was the freakiest thing I’d ever seen,” she said. “My friend wanted to get the hell out of there, but I had to stay. I needed to find out what was going on.
“Mrs. Burson swept from the kitchen area and swooped right down on us like a hawk. She was this tall thin lady, all friendly smiles and everything. She kept going on and on about how Del and I looked alike. ‘Oh, Del told us the two of you were practically twins, but I had no idea.’
“She introduced her husband, this tall, wiry dude with long hair tied up in a man bun, a scruffy, mountain-man beard, and intense eyes. He smiled, just like his wife, in this really weird, creepy way. Neither of them said a bad word about Del. He was the sun and the moon to them. ‘He’s practically like family now,’ they said.
“Mrs. Burson showed us to our table near the back. The other diners were still staring at us, like really creepy.” She shuddered. “Made my skin crawl. Then she started to walk away, which I thought was weird too because––what? No menu. She just smiled and said: ‘None necessary. We know exactly what you need.’
“My friend and I were getting more uncomfortable by the minute. Everybody was like staring at us and the whole mood, the decor, everything was off. That was when we noticed the other customers weren’t eating. They didn’t even have food set out in front of them. There were no waiters, there wasn’t even food being prepared in the kitchen. It was just so weird. At that point,” she continued, “I just wanted to get up out of there. But at the same time we didn’t move. It was like we were frozen. And scared. We didn’t know what the fuck was going on.”
I nodded again in complete understanding. “I’ve been in a few situations like that myself.”
She shook her head. “No, this was much, much worse. They didn’t threaten us or anything. And it wasn’t like they were letting us know we didn’t belong. It was just this weird vibe they were giving off. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. I mean, if they had threatened us, that’d be scary, but we would’ve known what was happening. But this––we had no idea and we were just confused, and that’s what freaked us out the most. I mean, you know, was this happening? Was it all in our heads? We didn’t know.”
I patted her hand to calm her down. She took a deep breath and shook her head. After a few moments, she continued her story.
“So then the Bursons returned to the table with a huge plate of spaghetti and meatballs. The chef was there with them. He’s shorter, compactly built, you know like an athlete, but with piercing eyes and that same weird smile.
“I do have to admit that that dish did look good. I mean, really good. The pasta looked homemade, the meatballs were made of freshly ground beef and pork, the wine sauce a deep, rich red. I mean you could smell the garlic. They delivered it on a single platter and placed it on the table. Mr. Burson took a chunk of parmigiana and shredded it on top, while Mrs. Burson poured us some wine. Then Mr. Burson waved his hand and said, ‘Buon appetito.’
“Mrs. Burson laughed and said: ‘You know, he’s not Italian. But don’t bother telling him that.’
“Then he said, ‘I may not be Italian, but I like to put my own twist on things.’
“And then they all gave each other this weird look. Me and my friend looked at each other like, ‘What the fuck?’ I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing here?'”
“I’d have got the fuck right out of there myself,” I said.
She shook her head. “If you were the one telling this story, I’d have thought the same thing myself. But every time I kept thinking I needed to get out of there, I thought about Del. I just felt like I needed to figure out what was going on. Something in the back of my mind was telling me that I just needed to understand why Del was so big on these folks, you know?”
I nodded, though to tell you the truth, I didn’t know.
“Anyway,” she continued, “the Bursons told us to enjoy the food and went back to the kitchen.
“My friend and I just stared at the food. Neither of us wanted to take a bite of it. I mean it looked delicious and it smelled awesome, really garlicky—too garlicky, to be honest—but the whole experience was––”
“Off,” I finished and nodded. A chill entered the air and I rubbed my hands together to keep warm.
“The other customers weren’t eating either. They were more preoccupied with us. This old lady––God, she must’ve been a hundred years old, just all wrinkly and shit––leaned over and said in this really creepy way, ‘It’s the sauce. That’s what makes their food so special.'”
She pulled a disgusted face, shuddered, and hugged her arms. Another breeze rattled through the tree branches, shaking loose a few leaves. A car drove past. The driver was hidden behind the tinted windows. My friend shivered again, then grabbed my arm and started dragging me up the steps.
“Let’s get off the street,” she said.
Once we were inside her apartment, I thought maybe she’d relax a bit, but she was just as nervous. She went over to her window and stared out through the curtain. I asked if she thought she was being followed, but she didn’t answer. She just stared out the window.
I suggested getting something to drink, then went to her fridge and found a couple of sparkling waters. I opened them both and handed her one. She took the bottle but she didn’t drink. She continued to stare out the window. I told her that she didn’t have to finish the story if she didn’t want to, though at this point I was more curious than ever. What happened in the restaurant? Why weren’t the other customers eating? And what was the deal with the Bursons? Thankfully, for me at least, she shook her head and said she wanted to continue.
“I need you to hear this,” she said vacantly.
After the old woman’s comment, she and her friend finally struck up the nerve to get out of there. “We grabbed our stuff and headed for the door. The other customers stood and followed us. The Bursons came from around the counter, saying: ‘Where are you going? You haven’t touched your food.’
“Me and my friend made up some excuse, but the Bursons said: ‘We can’t allow you to leave. Not until you finish the plate. Waste not, want not.’ And they smiled at us like we were a couple of stupid kids they were tricking to eat their veggies.” She shook her head. “We just got out of there fast as we could.
“We started walking up the street toward our car when we looked back over our shoulder. They were following us.”
“The Bursons?”
“All of them.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You telling me everybody in that restaurant just got up and followed you outside?”
She turned her head to look at me and nodded. Her eyes were wide and glassy. She and her friend ran toward their car. When they looked back again, the Bursons and their customers were racing after them. “God, me and my girl never booked our asses so fast.
“We managed to get to our car and locked the doors. Mrs. Burson ran to the driver’s side and looked in at us. And I swear to God,” she said with a little catch in her voice, “she had this intense look in her eyes. Like she wanted to kill me.” Her eyes widened and she pressed her hand to her mouth as if to suppress a scream. Her fingers began fumbling with her hair as her gaze turned inward. “But then in a flash, her expression changed, like a light was switched on, and she just smiled that weird smile at me.
“She tapped her long fingernails on the window and said, ‘Why don’t you come back inside. If you didn’t like the food, we can offer you something else.’
“And her husband chimed in, saying, ‘Come on back. You’re Del’s cousin. We’d hate to get off on the wrong foot.’
“I wanted to honk the horn and scream for help. But who would’ve helped us? Who would’ve believed us? My friend kept hollering at me to get the hell out of there, so I started the engine and drove away.”
“Did they follow you?”
She sipped her water at last and shook her head. “Thank God, no, but we kept staring over our necks the whole way to make sure we weren’t. Soon as I got home, I locked all the doors and windows. I’d never been so scared in my life.”
“Damn,” I said, trying to wrap my head over everything she told me. “If the Bursons were this creepy, then why the hell was your cousin friends with them, much less want to go into business with them?”
“I don’t know,” she cried. “They just had some strange hold on him.”
She came over to the couch and sat down beside me. She was trembling. Now it made sense, her earlier behavior when I asked her out.
After her experience at Il Rustico, she confronted her cousin and told him what she told me. They’re bad news, she warned, but he didn’t believe her. He thought she was crazy. But she refused to let him belittle what she experienced.
“I know what happened to me,” she said. “We fought for days about it, but he just would not listen. Finally, I told my dad and he told my uncle. They decided to have a sit-down with Del, but that only made things worse. A few days later I got a text from him: ‘I trusted U.’ And after that: He disappeared.”
I frowned. “Disappeared?”
“Vanished.”
There was no sign that his house had been broken into. All his belongings––ID, credit cards, car keys, clothes, etc––were gone, but it didn’t look like they were stolen. There was no indication that he had put the house up for sale or that he had left the city or anything. But it wasn’t like Del to just take up leave without telling anybody. Her family called the police but they said there was nothing they could do. Not until twenty-four hours had gone by. “But who knew how long he’d been gone?” she seethed. “Nobody had seen or spoken to him for a few days. Even his office claimed he had called in sick and hadn’t been to work since.”
Twenty-four hours passed and they still heard no word from him. At last the police got involved. They searched his house for clues, but so much time had passed that the evidence had slowly vanished along with him. My friend knew exactly what happened. “They did something to him,” she said. She told the police to question the Bursons. But the Bursons claimed they hadn’t seen him either, which was strange to them because they had become so close. The police also questioned his ex, the one he ghosted after meeting the cult.”
I shot up my eyebrows. “Wait, hold on. You telling me they were a cult?”
“Without a doubt. It has to be. That’s the only explanation I have for why Del was acting so strange.”
I nodded slowly. It did make sense. I told her to go on. I wanted to know what his ex told the police, but my friend gave me a sad look.
“She disappeared too.”
“What?” I blurted. “She’s gone too?”
My friend nodded. “Before Del disappeared.”
“Did you know that before?” I asked.
“I never met her.”
“Yeah, but did Del tell you that his ex had disappeared?”
She shook her head.
The police didn’t think the disappearances had anything to do with each other, but my friend wasn’t convinced. She decided to track down family members of Del’s ex and they were just as befuddled as she was. But one thing they told her stood out like a pair of headlights. Months ago, just after Del met the Bursons and he had inexplicably broken things off with this girlfriend, he called her up and asked her out for a date. Her parents thought that was strange because their daughter seemed absolutely certain it was over for them.
“You know where he asked her to meet him?” I shook my head. “Il Rustico.” She drew in her breath. “That was the last time they saw or heard from her.”
I sipped the water, then set the bottle down on the coffee table. I hadn’t noticed till now that my heart was punching like a prizefighter in my chest. I thought I knew where this story was headed, but now I wasn’t so sure.
“Did they talk to Del about what happened to her?”
She took another sip of water and breathed in deeply. “He said she stood him up. He figured that was a sign it was really over. The cops basically ruled him out as a suspect.”
“The same cops who’re investigating his disappearance?” I said, incredulously.
She shook her head. “Different town. So, yeah, it was news to me. Del sure as hell never said anything. But that’s not the only thing. You know who backed up Del’s story?”
My mouth dropped open. “The Bursons.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“Well, it’s starting to sound more and more like a cult then.”
“But it wasn’t getting me any closer to finding out what happened to him.”
My friend decided to search around her cousin’s house for answers. She drove up late at night. The Burson’s house was draped in darkness; nobody was awake or at home. She let herself in with a spare key Del had given her and started looking around. Just as the cops said, nothing was out of place. She searched his office and bedroom, went through drawers and closets, but there wasn’t much there. The cops collected his PC and files as evidence. But when she looked through the drawers of his nightstand, she found something the cops had missed.
“It was stuck to the back of the drawer,” she said. “I would have missed it myself if I hadn’t felt my fingers back there.”
It was a key. More like it: A key in a little baggy. There was a Post-It note attached to it that read Il Rustico. “A key to the restaurant?” I asked. She nodded.
She realized the only real answers she needed were back there.
When she got back into her car, she noticed that a single light was on in the Burson’s house. Her heart stopped. “Were they watching that whole time?” she said. She peeled out of the driveway so fast and headed downtown. Every once in a while she looked over her shoulder to see if she was being followed. She noticed a car behind her, but she wasn’t sure if it was the Bursons.
“Shit, I was so paranoid.” I nodded. I was getting paranoid too.
She took the side streets off the main thoroughfare, trying to find every way to evade her followers. When she reached Il Rustico, she was certain she’d given them the slip. She pulled around the back of the restaurant in the staff parking lot, hopped out of the car, and ran to the back entrance. The key slipped in easily.
“No alarm system?”
She shook her head. The restaurant had been closed for the night. It was empty. And dark. She located a light switch and turned it on. The back entrance led into the storage and kitchen area. The rooms hummed from all the electrical appliances. A long island where most of the food was prepared––a pasta press, a big butcher knife, a few other pieces of equipment––was in the center of an enormous kitchen area, and a huge steel refrigerator and freezer and metal shelves lined with bags of flour and sugar, strings of pepperonis, huge wheels of cheese, jars of olives, and large tins of olive oil occupied the back wall. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, but something felt wrong.
“There was this weird smell. At first I had a hard time trying to figure out what it smelled like,” she said. Then looking at me intensely, she added: “Then it hit me. It was formaldehyde.”
“Formaldehyde?” I said. “Like in a…”
“Morgue.” She shuddered, then hugged herself.
I held my breath. I didn’t like where this was all heading.
“One of the big, steel freezers hummed loudly,” she continued. “I don’t know why, but something told me to open it. So I went over to the refrigerator, closed my eyes, counted to three, and then I opened it.”
At first, she didn’t know what she was looking at. Large plastic freezer bags with dates labeled on them crowded the shelves. But as she leaned in and examined what was inside the bags, the horror set in.
“It was body parts,” she said, her eyes widening in terror. “Human body parts.”
My mouth fell open.
“Rows and rows of body parts: Arms and legs. Hands and livers and hearts and fingers and toes. And there were these big jars…and it looked like tomato sauce…but it wasn’t tomato sauce…it was blood.
Human blood!
She planted her face in her hands. “I screamed! I just screamed!”
I leaned back against the couch with my mouth still open. I couldn’t think. Everything she was telling me canceled out all my thoughts as if there was a huge electrical discharge that short-circuited my brain.
My friend lowered her hands to her lap and stared straight into the middle space. A strange look came over her face. It was like she was back there, back in that horror.
“I was screaming and screaming, and then behind me I heard: ‘We believe in using the freshest ingredients.’
“I wheeled around and the Bursons were standing in the doorway. And their customers…the same ones we saw when me and my friend went there the first time…they were all watching me with those weird smiles.
Mrs. Burson said: “All organic. All natural. Rustic, you see.”
My friend started to back away.
“You really should have taken Del’s advice and tried our meat sauce,” Mr. Burson said. “I think you would have understood if you had.”
My friend screamed: “What did you do to my cousin? Where is he?”
Del stepped out of the crowd, smiling. “Here I am.”
My friend was stunned. She started to run toward him, but stopped when she noticed the strange, almost rapturous look on his face. And the grin. That same weird grin.
“Wait a minute,” I said, now incredulous. “You’re telling me he was in on this?”
She nodded as her lips started to tremble.
Del explained that when he found out the truth he was as horrified as she was. But then the Bursons explained it to him after he had their pasta and meat sauce. “It makes you feel,” he said, “different, more energetic, more alive.”
“It’s the sauce,” one of the customers cut in eagerly. “It’s all in the sauce.”
Her cousin wanted her to try the food herself and know what a goldmine they were sitting on. “Think of all the money we’d make,” he said.
Horrified, she asked where––and that was when she pointed at the refrigerator. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words. She looked at me, eyes glassy with tears, and reminded me of the missing person’s flyer we saw earlier.
“You noticed all of a sudden people turning up missing in town.”
“You mean like your cousin’s girlfriend?” She nodded. It dawned on me. I wanted to throw up.
Her cousin kept trying to explain that they were special. The Bursons were letting them in on their business venture. “We got a good thing here,” he told her. “They were gracious to let us in on it.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Burson said. “We believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
“It’s what we’ve always wanted,” Del said. “The American dream. It’s right here, right in our hands, and all we got to do is take it for ourselves.”
At this point, my friend was in tears. She couldn’t believe what her cousin was telling her. He wasn’t the man she grew up knowing, her best friend, her twin. He approached her and produced a small bowl with meat sauce behind his back and told her to try the sauce. “It’ll all make sense when you try to sauce,” he said.
The Bursons and their customers stepped forward, still smiling, still telling her: “Go on. Eat the sauce.”
She screamed and backed away.
“Eat the sauce,” they all said.
She screamed again, then noticed the big butcher knife on the island. Del noticed that she noticed and started to edge toward her closely, ready to grab her.
My friend lunged for the knife and started swinging it at him. Everyone stopped chanting momentarily and became serious.
My friend swung and swung with tears in her eyes, backing away towards the exit, all the while her cousin and the Bursons and their customers picked up the chant, “Eat the sauce. Eat the sauce.”
She fumbled with the door. Her cousin drew closer toward her, darting out of the way with each swing of the knife. “Come on,” he said, “It’s not as bad as it sounds. I promise, you’ll change your mind once you’ve had a taste.”
Somehow she managed to open the door and run out. She sprinted as fast as she could toward her car. But they jumped onto the hood once she got inside. Her cousin pulled at the door and nearly yanked it open until she slammed it shut and locked the doors. The customers had fallen onto the hood and were banging on the windshield. “She’ll make a tasty sauce,” one said.
She screamed again and slammed the car in reverse. As she peeled backward out of the parking lot, she watched them fall off in a pile, while the Bursons and her cousin stood in the dark, watching her leave.
“I got away,” she cried as she put her head in her hands. “I got the hell out of there.”
She drove straight to her father’s house and told him everything. Convinced that Del was in danger, her father called his brother and then the police. The detectives came and questioned my friend, but she could tell they didn’t believe her. Who would? Her father and uncle put down their feet and demanded the cops do something. “I told them to go to the restaurant and see for themselves before it was too late,” she said. The detectives did go to Il Rustico to question the Bursons, but just as my friend had feared, it was too late. The restaurant had closed for business. Everything was cleared out, including the human remains my friend had found in the freezer. The only thing they left behind was the butcher knife, the one my friend used to defend herself. It had blood on it and, inconveniently, my friend’s fingerprints as well.
They took her in for questioning.
She repeated her story to them, and again they refused to believe her.
“They treated me like I was the criminal,” she said bitterly.
For days they held her under suspicion. She even had to get a lawyer. Eventually, after forensics concluded that the knife was covered in pig’s blood, not human, my friend was cleared.
The investigation into her cousin’s disappearance continued, but with no new leads, the case grew cold. Even the missing person’s case involving her cousin’s ex-girlfriend went nowhere. For months, my friend would see fliers of the ex-girlfriend posted to lampposts, asking for information regarding her disappearance. That photograph was the only time my friend had ever seen his ex.
“She looked like somebody I would have liked,” she said mournfully.
As for the Bursons, they seemed to have cleared out of town as well. Their home was put on the market.
Nobody knew what happened to Del.
My friend was traumatized. She couldn’t sleep and when she did she had nightmares. All it took was the mention of pasta and meat sauces to trigger her. A few months after her encounter, she moved here to get away from the memories. But they followed her, both the memories and the Bursons.
“I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. They won’t stop till they get me.”
I shook my head, incredulous. It all sounded wild. My friend asked if I believed her. I did believe her, even though I still had trouble believing the story itself. It was just too insane.
We both jumped at the squeal of tires on asphalt outside. My friend and I ran to the window, getting there long enough to catch a dark car peeling around the corner.
“It’s them,” she whispered.
I ran outside. The entire street was quiet and empty. I shook my head and turned to go back inside. On the doorknob of the building entrance, I noticed a circular flapping gently on the doorknob. I pulled it off and brought it back inside. My friend and I stared slack-jawed as we read it in the lamplight of the lobby. It read:
You are cordially invited to the grand opening of a new restaurant, Il Pomodoro. Come one, come all. We’ll be waiting!
Il Pomodoro! That was the place where I had planned to meet my friend for dinner. She looked up at me, eyes nervous and darting. I didn’t say a word. I stared at that flyer, sick as a dog as I read the last words.
P.S. It’s all in the sauce!
And then my whole body started to ache like it was being eaten from the inside out.
