Disclaimer: I have a dream that one day my children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by whether or not they own iCarly. Which they don't, and neither do I.
A sharp crashing noise followed by a girly scream shook the walls of the Shays' apartment. Sculptor Spencer Shay, halfway through putting finishing touches on a new sculpture (a giant fork made of smaller forks), tripped and fell. He caused the sculpture to fall on top of him. Unprepared for the possibility of being pinned under a giant fork, his only resort was to scream "HELP!" repeatedly. iCarly was forty-five minutes over by then; it wouldn't be a fun fifteen minutes being scraped by hundreds of forks.
By the end of those minutes, Spencer's voice was nearly gone from all the shouting. At long last, the three teenagers comprising the iCarly gang made their way back downstairs.
"Hey," Spencer chuckled after wincing in pain from being poked in the neck, "could you guys give me a hand? I'm stuck."
"What… Spencer?" Carly asked.
"I'm stuck under a giant fork!" yelled Spencer back. "I need a hand! Or six!"
Silence. Footsteps coming closer. Spencer could see Sam's shoes in his peripheral vision inching over to him.
"Hey, Sam," said Spencer, "you'll probably need Freddie and Carly's help before you can- ow! OW!"
Sam pulled the screaming Spencer out, slowly and agonizingly, from under the giant fork. The back of the older man's shirt was torn up and little scratch marks were littered across his back. Some were deep enough to bleed out a little. Finally, Spencer pulled his legs loose and stood up, looking down at Sam.
"Thanks for the help," Spencer growled, rubbing his back. "Owww- hey…" Spencer got a good look at Sam's face as she looked back up at him. He'd never seen her like that before. In fact, hers was a look he'd never quite seen on anyone before in his nearly 30 years of life. It was a kind of surreal blankness, as if a person with a lobotomy had somehow learned to think again. It was just a little pale. Not so much to be noticeable from a distance, but enough to trigger a message that something was really off.
"Sam?" Spencer waved his hand in front of her face. "Hey, kid, are you feeling okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," Sam finally responded. Spencer gave a sigh of relief. "I guess you guys must be tired after doing iCarly tonight. Carly-" Spencer turned around to notice that Carly and Freddie were sitting on the couch with the same despondent faces.
Spencer sat on the edge of the couch next to Carly. "Did something happen to you guys in the studio tonight?" Carly looked over at Spencer and smiled. "No. Like you said, we're just tired. That's all."
"Well, why don't you run up to bed, okay?" Spencer patted his little sister's shoulder before looking over at Freddie. "You and Sam look like you need some sleep, too." Freddie nodded, lifting himself from the couch and walking toward the door. "What happened, anyway? Did you three have a random dancing skit that went on too long?"
"No," Freddie said blankly on his way out. "Good night, Spencer, Carly." Sam followed suit.
"Wait," Spencer began after a brief moment, "Carly, did Freddie get his laptop?"
"I guess not," Carly said dully after thinking about it. "I should go to my room. I'm going to my room."
"Uh… okay," Spencer deadpanned after his sister as she climbed the stairs, "good night!" The door shutting was her response.
He sat on the couch staring at his reflection in the TV. His back hurt a little, but that didn't matter. He couldn't shake this eerie thought in the back of his head that something really bad happened tonight. He had been in the sidelines the whole time Carly and her friends started doing that web show. His sister had nearly gotten into a real fight with a professional female MMA fighter. He'd heard of them being locked up by that psycho Nora girl. Hell, he'd seen them almost fall several stories out of a window washer's platform and get over that relatively quickly. All three of them must have done something really bad in that studio. He felt like he should go check, but maybe he was just being paranoid.
Sam's face… all their faces… No, no he wasn't. Something unusual happened. He slowly got off the couch and walked to the third floor.
All of the lights were still on, though the monitors had been turned off. Spencer noted that there wasn't anything out of place, so that probably ruled out them breaking anything. He looked closely at Freddie's laptop. There was nothing noticeably wrong with it. The screen was blank, but the lights around the keyboard were on.
"I'll take this over to his house tomorrow," Spencer said aloud to himself. "I guess I'm just imagining things. Maybe getting crushed by that sculpture screwed up my brain." As soon as he thought about his back, there was a spot on it that, he realized, was itching. He rubbed it a little bit, but it got worse.
"Stubborn fucking…" Spencer growled, placing his hand on the platform where Freddie's laptop sat. As he finished scratching himself, he turned and happened to notice the laptop's screen had turned back on.
Encyclopedia Dramatica. "Offended."
"What the…" Spencer peered down at the screen. It looked like a Wikipedia article, but there were nothing but pictures of… animals?
"Hmm." Spencer shrugged, scrolling down a little ways. There was a cat with some kind of green hat on, couple pictures of a deer and a rabbit. "Must've been 'cute animals' night on iCarly. Why is this page called 'offended?'" Picture of a baby seal and then…
Wait… what?
"What the hell?" Spencer blurted. Three horrid pictures suddenly greeted him. Three of the most disgusting, mockingly graphic things that he never thought could possibly exist. He laid a hand over his mouth. His mind wanted to shut the laptop and leave, but the finger on the wheel of Freddie's mouse kept scrolling.
Some of the horrors repeated themselves; others were pictures from what appeared to be the same series. Pictures of… mutilation, grotesque sex acts, later-stage STDs, harlequin babies… shown in the most unrelentingly graphic manner short of video. He kept going. Startled. But insanely, morbidly curious. He saw a hand with fingers that appeared to be sliced up with razors. Finally, a kid, looked like a teenager, just laying on a street with his guts hanging all over his body.
Spencer closed the laptop and ran out of the room, barely making it out the door before vomiting everywhere. There was no way he could have held it in before rushing downstairs to a bathroom. Hell, even if he had just run into a bathroom, he couldn't stop himself. By the time he was finished, the clothes he was wearing were completely ruined, covered in chunky vomit and bile. He gasped for air, clutching his oozing mouth with both hands. Tears stung his eyes, not from sadness but from all of the burning in his throat.
He leaned against the wall next to the studio door and slowly slid down into a sitting position. What was he going to do now? Should he ignore this? No, definitely not. But, what would be the right course of action? It seemed like a bad idea to go punishing them or anything. It's not as if they outright looked for it or anything. "They must have found it by accident. Yeah, that's it. Because they were shocked by it, I could see they were." Pause. He thought of grabbing the laptop and taking it to Ms. Benson.
"I think she'd freak out," Spencer muttered to himself. "But I don't know what else to do. They could be traumatized or something…" His eyes darted to the side, his head following. The glass door with the iCarly logo stood right next to him, looking way more innocent than this situation deserved.
The sculptor stood on his feet and clapped his hands together decisively. "Okay, I'll take the laptop over to Freddie's tomorrow and talk to him personally." He walked into the room and shut off all the lights. "They're all probably just a little freaked out and need to be talked through it. I hope."
Spencer went downstairs and sat the laptop on the coffee table, but then he heard a very low moan from the kitchen area. It was croaky and strange, startling the man with its odd tonality.
"Must be Carly…" whispered Spencer, craning his neck. It was Carly. She was bent over the sink, clutching her head in her hands. "Hey, Carly," he began softly, "I want to talk to you." Another moan. She didn't hear him say that, nor did she hear him walk over. "Kid?" He stood by her in the low light and, seeing she didn't notice him, laid his hand onto hers.
Moist. He looked down. Redness. Blood.
TO BE CONTINUED…