The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

A Darknet Production

I was dead on the inside but time crept on. It was probably to the benefit of everyone that, during the peak of the lockdowns, I didn’t own any fancy weapons, Rambo guns and Lancelot swords, because it’s just possible I may have become the author of a massacre, which would have been a tremendous waste.
In my war against monotony I picked up a few hobbies: making pastries, playing ditties on the banjo, learning how to dance. I was alone in my apartment, of course, but I could still pull off tricky footwork. On a good day it was just possible to escape the death gnaw for a quarter of an hour.
My neighbor was unemployed too. We both lived on the twenty-second floor of a building that glances down on the grungy port of our seaweed-smelling metropolis, and his name, which is now famous to a small but avid community, is Herbert M. Gibb. I learned his name when a letter addressed to him from a credit union appeared in my mail slot. Apparently, Herbert M. Gibb failed to make payments on certain outstanding debts. He’s the kind of man—you can see him yourself in the video below—who seems tall somehow from a distance, like a great lonely pillar, but from up close you realize he’s only average height. A couple of times when we saw each other in the hall of our building, or in the falling elevator, we would salute each other, though soon even these salutes were more than we could manage.
Like I say, I was attempting to defy the sinister beat of the clock (I still kept the mechanical kind on the wall and you could hear its merciless ticking) with hobbies, and one afternoon I was making apple crisp. The recipe called for two teaspoons of cinnamon. Cinnamon was nowhere to be found in my spice collection and outside was a world of thunder, the kind of storm that my mother used to say was a rain of cats and dogs. Without even an umbrella or a pair of rubber boots to my name, a frantic search for cinnamon in the aisles of the grocery store wasn’t in the cards. And I had all the ingredients (minus the cinnamon) laid out on the countertop and I didn’t want to scrap the project that was at the gravitational center of my day. Since omitting cinnamon from the recipe wasn’t an option either—I’m sort of OCD when it comes to instructions—it seemed like this was the moment to shake my native shyness or dislike of social interactions or whatever it was that was keeping me and Herbert M. Gibb from becoming comrades and associates.
I knocked on Herbert’s door and waited. Knocked again. Sneer if you want, but when I knock on someone’s door and they don’t answer I don’t leave without first trying to jigger the knob while sliding a pin into the eye of the lock. When it turned out the door wasn’t properly secured, I couldn’t help but feel that in some secret way I’d been invited all along. The apartment was already familiar to me, the layout being identical to my own, even though the furnishings were pure Herbert M. Gibb.
While I was poking around through the set pieces to Herbert’s enigmatic lifestyle, an idea sprung up at me: wasn’t there something about this man that I and many others would pay to watch? Herbert feeding his goldfish, Herbert flossing the gunk out of his teeth, Herbert in his green terry cloth robe making strange faces at himself in the mirror above his fake fireplace. One moment he might be working a handheld vacuum cleaner over the crunchy grit in the sofa, the next daydreaming over a bowl of Frosted Flakes and milk. I should have gathered all my rolled-up bills from my underwear drawer and gone to the casino, straight to the roulette table, betting it all on double zero because who would have thought after the felicity of the unlocked door and the creative vision that I would already possess the spy cameras to implement the plan? The spy cameras were a remnant from a situation that arose from having dated an older woman, a redhead who wore false eyelashes and used to bite me on the neck. I’d become convinced she was tangled up in the bedsheets of other men. The spy cameras grew out of my desire to avoid slimy congress with someone who’d gotten an STD. There were six cameras in total and that covered the rooms in Herbert M. Gibb’s apartment with an extra one left over that I installed on my own balcony for a ponderous view of Herbert on occasions when he goes out to contemplate whatever he contemplates in the wilderness of his skull. I kept thinking, where has Herbert vanished off to in this kind of storm? But in what became the opening sequence on the network (one of the few scenes that didn’t broadcast live) we discovered that he went out to buy black shoe polish and a candy bar—Oh Henry! to be precise.
Yes, there are other people who have tried this, but they have all done it in a spirit of perversion and depravity, and it’s actually the curiosity of the whodunnit mystery that keeps our viewers chained to the screen. Herbert M. Gibb is adorable, if a little sad, but the trouble is that, unknown to him, a predator lurks at the edges of his life. One day Herbert M. Gibb will suffer an accident of fate—a sacrificial murder. Fans have voted an eleven-inch steel knife to be the instrument of death. Blood is guaranteed, the only question is when.
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Marcus Spiegel’s fiction and essays have been published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Santa Monica Review, Conjunctions Online, North American Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. His story, “A Tale of Two Trolls,” won a Pushcart Prize in 2022 (XLVI Edition) and his essay, “Blood from a Cactus,” was a finalist for the 2024 Mississippi Review Prize and appears in their Summer Issue. Originally from the plains of Canada, he currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee. More new fiction from Spiegel has recently been published or is forthcoming early this year at Midwest Review and Tahoma Literary Review.

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