Liar Liar Liar

If anything about Damien was certain, it was that you couldn’t trust him with anything. His lies, his big mouth, and his all-around shady character drove everyone away.

His parents never really cared about him. They had always wanted a girl and as soon as he was old enough, he got kicked out of the house. They had been anything but a good example for him, but even so, he somehow only got worse from there.

He was twenty-nine, going on thirty in a month, and his whole life he had never had a real friend. Anyone who had tried to reach out to him, thinking maybe he was just misunderstood was quickly and efficiently proven wrong.

He never had a friend. Until that day.

Everyone in town knows this story. We’ve all found out somehow. They met in the strangest of places. An old cemetary, in the rain, if you can believe something like that. He had been going there to smoke, having just been fired from yet another job. She was going there to visit a grave, unmarked, to lay a single, stunningly black rose in front of it.

It happened to be just the grave he was sitting on, cursing and trying to light his hopelessly damp cigarette. She liked him immediately, the story goes, if that is even possible, liking so uncomfortable a person, but they quickly took to dating. Luna, her name was.

Luna, as it turned out, lived in a small house near the edge of town. Damien always wanted to see her house, but she was so strange, she always avoided the question.

One day he brought her a gift. A necklace. No one knows how he ever got the money for it, probably robbed some rich old lady in an alley, but the necklace was really something special. A silver chain, with a pendant of a little silver snake wrapped around an emerald that seemed almost alive. She loved that necklace. Never took it off.

One day, they were going to visit the place where they met. I found out this bit straight from the source, my brother saw what happened. They walked together, right up to the gravestone where it all started, and they were just holding each other, looking at the moon, when all of a sudden, she says to him, “Do you want to know my secret?”

And that rat Damien, he loves nothing more than a secret. A secret he can tell. So, of course, he says, “Yes.”

And she leaned right in, and whispered something in his ear. She was whispering a long time. And when she finally leaned away, my brother says that he will never forget the look on Damien’s face. He was so horrified, my brother told me, would give you goosebumps just to look at him. But then it passed, and after a while she looked at him and said, “Promise me, you can never tell a soul.”

“I promise,” he said.

What a liar. Because two days later, there was a call to the police station. It was Damien. And he was scared. I know because I work at the police station and I picked up the phone that night.

“You have to help me,” he whispered into the phone, terrified. He sounded like he was going insane. “You just have to help me! Please!”

“Calm down, calm down,” I replied.

“I can’t calm down!” he screamed. “She’s going to kill me! I know her secret!”

“Okay, fine, what is this big secret?” I asked, deciding to humour what I was sure what either Damien overreacting, or Damien just plain old acting.

On the other end of the phone, I heard the sound of a door opening in the backround.

“She found me. Oh god, she found me! Oh god-” and then he screamed.

“You promised…” whispered a feminine voice on the phone, and the line went dead.

I didn’t find out what had happened for a while, but I got help right away, and the folks I work with eventually got what we knew of the story to me. No one ever saw Luna again. All we ever found of her was that necklace Damien got her, covered in blood, on top of the gravestone she liked to visit. The dirt under the gave looked freshly disturbed.

As for Damien, by the time the police got to his ugly little apartment, he was dead. His body was completely mutilated, and there was blood everywhere. Some sicko had written on the walls with it, too. All the walls. Just the same word, over and over.

“LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. LIAR….”