A Ticker Tape Tale

By Alex Grass

I found a ticker tape machine at a garage sale. You know, the machines that print out stock prices on one long paper tape?

Come on, you’ve seen them. Probably in a movie. It’s the 1920s, some pinstriped fat cat is smoking cigars in a boardroom in an Art Deco skyscraper, and he wants to know how much his railroad interests are trading for.

Ticker tape machines kind of look like miniature engines, with one long piece of paper (sort of like the little paper slip you get in fortune cookies) that’s fed to you so you can check stock prices.

Well, I bought one and brought it home.

I was sitting in my office, having a beer and, to be honest, hiding from my wife because we were constantly arguing about money, about how we didn’t have enough money, about ways that we lost money.

It just started ticking. Which surprised me, because the woman at the garage sale said it never worked as long as her father owned it.

It started ticking slow at first, like it was a toy with almost-dead batteries. But once it got going, it really got going, printing on the tape as fast as I imagined it had ever gone.

I saw stock symbols printed on the tape, symbols for corporations I recognized—the companies you buy your coffee from every day and a new phone from every year.

I didn’t remember plugging it into a power cord or telephone cord or anything else, but hey, I’d had a beer or two, so I doublechecked. I searched the machine’s housing to see where the plug went. But there was no cord. The machine wasn’t plugged in, at all, to anything.

And then it stopped on its own.

I pulled the tape from the machine and took a look. Every stock price was printed two times in a row, like this: STOCK PRICE X (TODAY) … STOCK PRICE X (TOMORROW’S HIGH); STOCK PRICE Y (TODAY) … STOCK PRICE Y (TOMORROW’S HIGH); STOCK PRICE Z (TODAY) … STOCK PRICE Z (TOMORROW’S HIGH).

I thought it was a hoax. Or one of those pranks people record for their livestream. But, hell, I was curious, so I went online to check the prices for TODAY at roughly the time the machine printed out its tape. The prices were correct.

I laughed at myself while I did it, but just out of curiosity I checked the TOMORROW’S HIGH prices the next day. And the ticker tape machine had made, across the board, accurate predictions, down to the exact fraction of a cent.

I tried to calm down. There certainly had to be an explanation for this—I couldn’t think of what that explanation might be, but there had to be one. Because the alternative was…

Well, I just couldn’t buy into the implications of that kind of hoodoo.

The ticker tape printed out more predictions every day. And every time, on the day following, the market would prove the ticker tape machine right. I tracked it from Monday to Friday, every trading session. Its predictions were accurate the entire week of trading.

I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to tell my wife, but I knew how that conversation would go: “Oh, you’ve got a precognitive moneymaking machine you bought at a garage sale? That’s great news for us! Just give me a minute to call the men in white coats.”

Do you know what I did next? Oh sure, you know. Hell, I knew I was going to do it. Anyone would.

I took everything we had in our checking account (and it wasn’t much) and I bought whatever stock the ticker tape showed making the biggest one-day swings.

The day between buying the stocks and selling them was torture. Oh, boy, my wife got a banking notification on her phone. And she was ready to just about barbeque my ass.

But the next day, the prices hit the daily highs that the ticker tape predicted. And at that exact moment, I sold everything.

Just on the first trades—the first securities transactions I’d initiated in my whole life—I made enough money to wipe out all our debt. And did I make a few more trades after that?

Oh, you bet your ass I did.

* * *

Months went by and money came in, in amounts plentiful enough to make a good Christian cringe. We went from not paying the mortgage, to paying it off. I bought matching brand new cars for me and my wife. I was riding high so high I could almost touch the sun.

But you know the story about the guy with wax wings, don’t you?

My luck turned, as it was bound to do. That was when he came for a visit.

* * *

My wife and I had already settled in our bed when the doorbell rang.

“Who is that?” she said.

“I have no idea. Just leave it. They can come back tomorrow.”

“What are you talking about? That’s rude. Don’t be rude. Just go answer the door.”

I groaned as sullenly as I could and got out of bed to go down the stairs.

When I opened the front door, there was a gaunt man in a pinstripe suit standing there. The suit’s cut was very boxy, and it had patch pockets instead of flaps. My grandfather owned suits like that; he said the patch pockets saved fabric when the country was rationing during WWII.

“Hello, can I help you?” I held the door half-closed. The guy gave off a weird vibe.

“Hello, yes, I’m here from collections.”

“Collections?”

“Honey who is it?” my wife called from upstairs.

“Just a minute!” I exited the front door and held it almost shut behind me. I whispered. “There’s some kind of mistake. I just—you see, all our debt’s just recently been paid off. All of it.”

The man smiled. I saw that he had gold caps on his canines, both top and bottom. A jewel-toothed predator. “Oh, sir, I’m quite aware you’ve paid off all your balances. That is, in fact, why I am here to collect.”

“I—I don’t understand. Collect what? If there’s no debt, what are you collecting?”

“Well, you didn’t think you could just use our ticker tape machine and that it would be free, did you?”

It was a trap, a trick or something. It had to be. Or maybe it was real, maybe it was a shakedown. Maybe there was some predatory lender out there who found out when I was hard-up for cash, who dropped a price-predicting machine right in my lap, so I’d do anything to keep it. But why wouldn’t they (he, she, them, whoever) just use the machine themselves? It didn’t matter. I never signed anything. And I bought that ticker tape machine fair and square.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

The man frowned and, I swear, his body grew inside of his suit. I could see the fabric stretch. God, his gold teeth were so sharp. “I promise you, sir, it’s a good deal less messy if you remit as required by use of our device,” he said.

“I’m not giving you anything.”

The man sighed and gently placed his briefcase on my porch right in front of him. He removed his tie. “Very well…” He took off his suit jacket and laid it over our porch’s railing, slipped his cufflinks out of his shirt cuffs. He started unbuttoning the top of his shirt.

“What the hell are you doing?” I said.

“Honey, who's down there?” my wife hollered from upstairs again.

“Hey, hey,” I said, “stop that.”

“Sir, it’s unfortunate that we should come to an impasse at, frankly, quite such an early juncture. But you have the right to choose,” he said. I saw a vertical seam open in his face, from the top of his skull to down underneath his chin. The seam widened into a rift, and when he spoke again, his voice was garbled and rough-edged and much, much deeper. “Just as we have the right to collect.”

I tried to run inside, but the collector’s hand shot out and held the door shut behind me. The split in his face opened even wider, and another face emerged through the split. It looked like a deformed baby being delivered.

Things that looked like tapeworms shot from inside his chest, like a thousand miniature grappling hooks. The tapeworms sunk tiny teeth into every part of my body. The pain was almost indescribable, like fire ants injected into my flesh. I tried to scream but only croaked noiselessly, unable to speak.

A shadow formed around us—a living, moving shadow. The collector pushed his second face through his first and closer to mine. His inner Other’s skin was made of moving black water that rippled in concentric waves all over his face.

I screamed, but the shadow enclosing us absorbed the sound. I tried to plead, but was choked by the air inside the shadow, sulfurous and ranker than summer roadkill.

The collector raised the hand he wasn’t using to keep my front door closed and put it beside my face. His nails protracted until they were better than an inch long and curled in toward themselves—they looked like sharp fruit spoons. “Next time,” the collector said in his low, low voice; his voice that was like bubonic plague, “be ready to remit.”

And then he reached into my mouth. I bucked, I thrashed and flailed, I tried to get away. But the uncountable tapeworms that shot from his chest arrested my body so I couldn't control my limbs.

I felt his sharp-spooned nails dig into my gums, and I was at last able to shriek. He ripped an incisor from my bottom row of teeth.

And then the collector let me go.

In a matter of three or so seconds, the collector’s transformation was reversed; his second face pulled back inside his first; the thousands of squirming, sharp-mouthed tapeworms sunk back into his chest. There was no evidence to show he’d ever changed at all.

I couldn’t breathe. Every inch of my flesh still stung, and there was a throbbing pain in my mouth like in broken bones. Only when the collector had put his suit jacket back on, and had begun retying his tie again, was I finally able to suck in a desperate lungful of air. I rolled onto my side, blood dripping from my mouth onto the Welcome mat, dribbling right in the middle of the letter C. I was crying.

The collector finished refastening and tightening and tying his wardrobe together, and he was suited and buttoned up again straightaway. He could walk into Smith & Wollensky, and they’d have no idea he was a tooth-pulling monster.

He picked up his briefcase and opened it. He briefly examined the bloody roots of my extracted tooth and smiled in apparent self-satisfaction. He put my tooth in a side pocket of his briefcase and then closed it shut.

“Just a reminder, sir,” the collector said, “we come on the fifth of the month.”

Then he walked off my porch and into the night.

* * *

I’m wearing my partial dentures at this very moment. I know I should stop. How crazy is it, to want money more than peace?

But I guess in that way, I’m like a whole lot of people who put their wealth before their health. The one thing, though, that nags me, keeps me up late most nights is this: When all my teeth are gone, what will the collector take next?