Halloween
part 1
written as a post on OneStoryADay
With a convulsive start, I awaken. There’s a few moments where I don’t remember anything, I’m just conscious, but then it all floods in again, waves of memory, realization. It’s Halloween again. It has to be. And, like every year on this evening, I’ve come back, to find out why. To find revenge, if it’s there to be had, or at least to find reason enough for me to die in peace, fade away. Every year, the walls grow thin, and the weaker ones of us wake up and go roaming, looking for those things that tie us still to this world.
For me, it’s her. I’m
not the only one that comes back, and I’m not the only one with this reason.
I’ve never seen her, and I think it’s because she died knowing she
was loved, and maybe expecting to see me when she got to the other side.
But I can still hear them laughing, as the smell of the smoke from the
gun stung my nose, as the roar of the gun rang my ears.
Laughing.
Every year it gets harder to find them, to pick up the
trail. I sometimes freeze, afraid
that they’ve come to some bad end at the hands of some lucky cop, or maybe
just wrapped around a telephone pole. I
get scared that I come back for no reason, and that maybe I’ll be like the
ghost stories you can read in any compilation, a spirit that can’t rest,
searching forever, lost and alone. There
have been clues, yes, and as I sit and wrack my frozen, numb brains for the
things I’ve uncovered, I begin to stir the memories and sift the clues.
I’m in an alley, and I can feel the rest of them passing
by, those of us who come every year to watch and search. This is one of the way stations for we weaker ones.
Those who are stronger simply make their own, tie themselves to one
place, or many, to one thing or one feeling, and they lurk and paw at the edges
of the world. I know that if I look
left or right, I can see them no more than anyone else.
Maybe a medium can see them, maybe a Polaroid of this alley at this
moment would look like a rush-hour sidewalk, but places like this tend to slip
by people’s notice, for when one of the living actually takes notice of a
place like this, it freezes their blood with its aura.
I step out of the alley, and hit the street proper.
I’m not far from the first stop in my search.
There’s a payphone ahead. It’s
mine, and if I weren’t so afraid I’d lost them, the laughing ones, maybe it
would be my anchor to this world. I
walk up, and someone steps in my way. A
young man with all his hair shaven off. His
face is sunken, and were it a shade more yellow, he would easily resemble a
cadaver.
“Yo, man, you got a quarter?” I shake my head, and he grows sullen. You can almost hear him reason out the fact that I’m
walking to a phone, looking like someone about to make a call. His eyes dart back and forth, scanning the streets.
To his satisfaction, he finds nothing to interfere with his plans.
Out comes a knife. “Yo,
motherfucker, gimme your wallet, all your money.
Now!” The knife jumps
forward in his hand, as though it were a dog struggling against its leash. I tell him I have none, and his eyes grow wide in disbelief.
How dare I insult his cunning? The
knife sweeps up, and I don’t even bother to move.
After all the days of nothing, of numbness and loss, the pain will be a
welcome thing, a reminder of what I used to be.
He opens the side of my face, and I stand there for a while, letting the
blood run down my face in red sheets. I
bleed, and look at him. Blood,
I’ve often thought, feels like warm oil when it’s pumping down across your
skin. Slick, slightly greasy.
A few seconds pass while he tried to intimidate me, to
regain his lost ground, and then he rebounds off of the side of the phone booth
and falls to the sidewalk. I’m
making the call when he skitters away. I
just dial, while thinking of the one I’m trying to call. It’s not the same number, usually, and sometimes other
people answer, but I know I hit the mark, when eventually I’m told there are
no new leads. I thank the people
listening in, and sometimes I think about those books, and wonder if I’ll be
in one soon. The phone spook.
I turn and exit the booth. While
I wasn’t thinking about it, the wound on my face left, and with it went the
blood. I turn my eyes to the
buildings of the city, and start off in the direction of the place I seek.
I step through a shadow, and I have to stop.
I’m nearly there. It’s
disorienting, crossing such great distances, so fast, like in dreams, where the
landscape twists inside out and becomes something new simply at your mind’s
whim.
What if I’m dreaming all this? What if I never find them?
Why should I keep searching?
I feel the wind pass through me, and I know without having
to look that I’m fading again. There’s
a strange wash of disassociation as if this were all happening to someone else,
and I wonder if perhaps this time I shouldn’t simply let it go.
And then I hear them laughing. Laughing. The
hell-stench of spent shells, and the stink of their nervous sweat as they crowd
over me. I can hear myself asking
why, and they laugh and laugh and laugh. My
last thought was of her, and how if I could I would rise up from the filthy
street and make them pay, make them, one by one, see what beauty they had
destroyed. They killed everything
good in the world, and they laughed.
They laughed.
People are started to walk wide around me now.
Nothing unnerves like a man standing stock-still, eyes far away.
I’m back. I walk, and
walk, and finally I find one of the ones who still remembers me from the year
before. They run, but I catch them,
stepping through the shadows until he’s blubbering on the sidewalk. He says I can find one of the ones I’m looking for, and he
says a street name. I step through
the shadows, crossing the city blocks in the blink of an eye, and when I clear
my head, standing there at the intersection, I see him, standing up against a
wall, talking with someone. They
see me coming, and his friend walks away.
Him. He turns
and looks at me for a moment. He
knows my face, but not from where. He
smirks as he searches his memories, finding enough about our last encounter to
remember that I’m not a threat.
“You laughed,” I tell him.
His eyes go hard, and out comes the gun. My mouth waters, and I realize I can taste the gun oil in my
mouth still. A taste of Death.
He doesn’t bother with semantics.
Who I am, why I care about his laughter, it all leaps away from him in
stinking puffs of gunsmoke. The
bullets rip through me, but here he is, and I am whole before they finish
passing. Finding him like this is
so strange, after all the years of searching in vain.
Am I to be rewarded so easily? He
looks startled for a moment, and the gun falls from his nerveless fingers.
I feel the old wounds, my ties to this world, and I know that he sees me
as he saw me last, broken, distended, and bleeding.
Now he knows me.
“Where are the others?” I ask him as I put my hands on
him. I need them to know the horror
of what they’ve done. I need
them. He doesn’t answer. The feel of the chill of the grave is too much for him, and
he spasms and falls away from me. He
tries to backpedal on the concrete, but I fetch him to me, and I start to ask
him things, terrible things. I just
want him to know, but the pain and hate of all the years spent searching have
made me cruel. I hate and I hate,
and I ask him again, and his bloody finger falls in a pool of his own passing,
pointing the way. Some of them are
dead, now; lost to the great beast of the city.
One of them is waiting for me. He
is prosperous, now. Grown fat on
the money of the lost, selling their lives, their very souls for the powders of
the Lethe. He helps them to escape,
to forget. I will help him
remember. I will help him see.
I look up at the light of the city, reflecting low on the
bellies of fat rain clouds. The
light looks noxious, dangerous, and I think it’s a good light for tonight.
In other parts of the country, the world, maybe, there are children
playing games, and getting candy, and sweating lightly behind their masks, but
here, the children have all run away. Nothing
hunts for treats tonight but the hookers and the pimps, the lost.
Here the sweets scar your very life, like the witch’s poison apple.
I step through the streets, hunting through the ones I know, the ones
I’ve roamed before, and it seems a long time before I find the right place.
I absently remind myself to buy a watch.
In the building ahead, I will find another one of them, and
then it’s a short trip to downtown lock-up.
I step up to the man lounging in the doorway, and say the name.
A coarse string of epithets precedes the gun, this time.
I shouldn’t know anyone here, apparently.
The man makes a lot of noise, and a head pokes out of a window above. Someone calls down to the doorman, and he pulls the trigger
on his gun. In the roar, he
doesn’t realize that I have already gone.
I step into the room that the window-yeller occupies, and I
say a name into his ear. He jumps
and screams, and someone behind us both opens fire. The window-yeller falls, his life’s question answered.
I turn and look. It’s not my man. I
say the name. The man with the gun
propositions me. I think of the
void, and I wonder how time I have left.
I know it’s not enough.
I’m quick with the man with the gun, but not fast enough.
His blood is still spraying when the door jumps out of its frame and
attacks the coffee table. There are a lot of men outside, and they have guns too.
They guard a prize I covet. I
step through the bullets and flying shards of the apartment and check the
hallway behind them. He’s not there, but someone has a cell phone, and they’re
talking to him. I walk up to the
man with the phone, and he sees me. As
I am. I take his phone from his
shriveled, prematurely aged fingers, and I ask the one on the other end where he
is. The man on the other end is not
my man. He wants to know who the
fuck I am. I say the name, and he
hangs up. Upstairs I hear
yelling, and a door opens hastily. Feet
move heavily, and in a moment, I am there too.
This place is a hell of confusion. Someone has stepped on their anthill here.
I find my man, and his men find me.
Their bullets tear the air, and I feel the hurt that keeps me here.
He laughed, and he is still sort of smiling.
I can feel the hate coming. These
idiots, living their stupid lies, hurting for nothing, letting it all go to
shit, when time is so terribly terribly short, and life too full of misery.
A handful of paper marks their comings and goings, and in the end, it’s
not even enough to wipe an ass clean. The
hall is full of holes and smoke, and the dust of destruction.
I am beside him, and my hand finds his bare arm.
He screams when I tell him who I am.
I tell him with images, stolen from the void, from my mind, from his
friend’s. He screams in their
midst, and someone tears me away. I
tear them, too, and he is running while the chunks of meat bounce to a stop.
This one has to know.
I have to tear through his fear and make him see the ultimate truth of
his crime. He can be afraid of me,
and die afraid, and that would be nice, but it would be simple, and petty.
I know that he doesn’t know the difference, that his mind is so full of
the thousand justifications he needs to do the things he’s done, that in the
end God Himself is the wrong one, and all this shit he lives in the midst of,
this shit he thrives in, all this is the only real thing to him.
It was easy for him to laugh, because to him it was simply
fun. I have to show him the truth.
He runs, and I step through the shadows.
We dance and dance, until he slams the door open onto the street, and
stumbles out into the dark dirty lines of the city’s veins.
He is so blinded by his fear that all he wants is to get away.
I’ve stripped away all his armor and torn down his walls, and the truth
is a hell-thing, destroying him from the middle of his mind.
I reach out for him, so hot to have it done, that even I don’t notice
the car slapping us into the air. We
hit the ground, limply, and I’m on him before the car slides all the way to a
stop. Men pour out of his building
onto the sidewalk, and the driver decides that stopping to help here would be a
bad idea. He leaves more rubber on the road in his passing.
I ask my man a question, and blood dribbles out of his ear like a
tipped-over bottle. He looks at me,
and this time I think he really sees me, really sees it all.
He starts to speak, and then his men are on me, beating, ripping.
I fade away. My man is gone,
and there is one more to visit.
But I’ve spent too much time again, and this time the
shadows keep me in their dark embrace. I
can feel my heart breaking again, as it realizes that the world has been denied
it again. I think about next year,
and having to start over.
I think about whether or not two of them is enough.
I wonder if I’ll bother next year.
The last thing I hear in the swiftly-creeping numbness of
the void, is the sound of laughter. I
chase it with fresh sounds. The
sounds of screams, and wet, grisly retribution.
I have a year to mull it over.