Terror Scribes

by Adam Lowe

  The top of his thumb presses against her belly and he can’t see the hilt of the knife underneath. He can’t feel it anymore. He remembers how the fine baby hairs on her stomach felt—how clean and salty her skin tasted. This would be their last touch and he felt cold and detached. He looks in the mirror to check if he is crying because he can’t tell—none of his nerves are working.

  A stranger looks back at him from the mirror. The man has black skin, dark as the underground. He blinks and the man looks like Jet. Behind Jet he can see Steve sitting on the bed strumming his white Les Paul. That already happened. This already happened. He looks down and she’s crawled away from him under the sink. There’s no one in the mirror except Sid. No one. He’s sad. Never more alone.

  “Don’t want to leave a mess for you, Sid,” she mumbles. “There’s water in here. I can clean everything up. No big deal. Just let me sleep. I’m tired, Sid. He gave us some bad shit, is all.”

  He finds himself standing back several feet away and looking in on the bathroom, where his Baby, his Angel Girl, rests. The knife is on the ground and he checks his hand. It is clean and her blood is not there. He is clean. She is clean. He hears something behind him and sees a face in the hallway he recognizes but just can’t place. The face is in darkness and shade. Is it the Italian? The Iranian? The Puerto Rican? Or is it the shade making their skin darker? Gabriel is leaving, his duty fulfilled.

  Where’s the boy?

  Sid screams his name.

  The Hotel Chelsea vibrated and Alex sat straight up, believing he heard someone yelling his name. What the heck is that? He looked around his room and expected to see his father. Then he remembered that his father said he wasn’t coming home and asked if he’d be all right. He was going to spend the night at Judy’s place. Judy—the new woman. She was prettier than his mother, and nowhere near as mean. Not yet, at least. His father told him that they all get old and mean eventually. And what about Nancy? He wanted to ask his father. She’s already old and mean. What does that mean?

  Someone was playing music loudly. He could barely tell what the song was it was so distorted, but he focused and figured it out.

  Frank Sinatra. “My Way.”

  Am I going to get in trouble for this? I gave him that record. The last thing he wanted to do was to jeopardize them having a place to live. Not that he believed the Hotel Chelsea was perfect, but his father loved the Hotel.

  He kept waiting for someone to yell to turn it down, but no one did. The song was almost over as Alex crept from his bed and inched towards his front door. Just as it ended Alex perked up and put his ear against the door.

  The record player was so loud he could hear the needle dropping on the grooves. He waited for someone to holler and scold Sid. Instead, the song started again.

  He stood from the door and went to the bathroom. It was almost noon and he couldn’t believe he’d slept so late. Alex was supposed to meet his father—supposed to go to the studios and meet up for lunch. Later they were all supposed to go out for dinner. His mother was coming into the city to try an. “...figure a few things out.” Of course, Alex was skeptical. The last thing he wanted to do was to head face-first back into the abusive, unkind life in Ocean City. Anything was better than that, even listening to someone blast Frank Sinatra records in the hallway.

  Alex got in the shower and started getting clean. The song was so loud he was beginning to think it was playing inside his own head.

  No. Not that. It’s still coming from the outside. Go in and do what you have to do. He’s trying to make you crazy on purpose so you will go outside in the hallway and they’ll be there.

  He pictured them standing there, covered in blood, covered in white, foamy, soap. They were trying to get clean. Wash away the pain with soap and gore. Bleed out and clean out. Bleed away and clean away. That was it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Their eyes were vacant. Their hearts colorless and albino, beating outside emaciated bodies. Sid hands him the records, a smear of blood-tainted mucous left behind from his hand. Alex doesn’t want to touch it. Because sometimes it’s about more than just the music. He could hear Sid in his head. Alex washed harder and quicker and tried to think if he could go out through the fire escape or one of the other ways. There was nothing he could think of. The Hotel Chelsea just wasn’t built that way, not from where they were. Damn. Maybe if I hurry up and get out of here fast enough they won’t see me.

  The music stopped.

  Sirens.

  Finally someone had called the police. Alex heard voices. Footsteps filled the hallway. What had taken them so long? New York certainly wasn’t like Ocean City, where if you called the police they were there in their squad cars within a few minutes. Maybe that’s what everyone meant when they said living in the city was hard and cold. He wanted very badly to run away out into the street, and get on the subway, and to see his father. He’d tell him that they couldn’t live there any more, that things had changed, and that bad people had come to lay their hats with them. Not a place for a young boy, nope. Not even a place for most normal people. Yes, he was normal. He wasn’t like them and he was fine with that. And so was his father. And so what?

  Two knocks.

  Was it his door? Was it the one next door?

  Alex didn’t want to answer. He hopped on his bed, and wrapped the blankets over himself. They probably had heard him in the shower. They probably heard that he was in there. Damn it! He was still wet. There was no knock. Alex grabbed his clothes, which he’d laid out on the foot of his bed, and put them on as fast as he could. Then he got right back into bed, right back under the covers, right back underneath.

  What are they going to do? Come in here? This is my fault. I shouldn’t have ever let him have that record. I think I spurred him into doing something. It was me that inspired all this. And something bad’s happened. Something terrible.

  Bam!

  The knock nearly sent him flying from his bed it was so loud. He wished his father was with him and hadn’t abandoned him by going to work. If only he hadn’t been alone through all this.

  “Alex?” The voice was familiar. “You home?” His father. “I forgot my keys.” Could it really be his father after all? Could it really have been just the right person. “Alex?” his father sounded less patient, and nervous.

  He didn’t want to answer, afraid that it might be an impostor. It seemed too good to be true. How could his father know he was in trouble? How would he have known while he was a t work?

  Then he heard the key jangling and there was some mumbling. “Okay, okay, thanks.” The door opened and he saw his father being let in by the building’s superintendent.

  Stopping for a moment, his father regarded Alex. “You okay?”

  Alex didn’t see the Superintendent, but heard him.. “Kid’s scared. Look at him.”

  “Okay, okay,” said his father. “Thanks. Let me talk to him.”

  “Alex?” he said. “I saw something on the news. There’s been some bad stuff this morning. We need to go.” His father rushed to him and hugged him. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  He couldn’t say anything back for several minutes. As they walked out from their apartment and down the stairs, he saw the policeman ganging around Sid’s room. For a moment he got a glimpse inside. It looked as he’d remembered it, although there was no cigarette smoke. Someone took a picture and he saw blood on the rug. Black, branch—shaped pools of inky spilled chocolate syrup. It was out in the hallway, too. He couldn’t help remembering that he’d been standing there only yesterday, in the same spot, where he’d given Sid his free Frank Sinatra record. And now, in a blink, everything had changed. Everything went still. Everything went black, and Alex and his father never looked back.

  John Palisano’s journey to horror fiction is a strange one. For a while he toured with with rock bands, while writing songs, poetry and fiction. His first fiction publication was at Emerson College, where a short film was produced from an early foray into scriptwriting. After college he moved
to Los Angeles, where he took an internship with Ridley Scott. He learned much, and worked on many big budget films, as well as producing a couple of low-budget films himself. But he found the demands of filmmaking tiring and instead began writing fiction. He discovered that placing his stories with professional magazines was more difficult than financing films, but he continued to write anyway. Many years later, he now faces the impending release of his novel Nerves from Bad Moon Books, which is due out in the winter of 2012. In the meantime, he has lots of short stories appearing soon, and several movie projects, too.