by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
He buried her and refilled the hole, then tossed some cones, branches, and soil over it in a manner that seemed haphazard but ultimately looked rather natural. Not that he was overly concerned—the place was so remote that he doubted even the most intrepid of hunters would come across it. He drove out of the forest at a crawl, and it gave him time to think. He decided that he wouldn’t abandon the car after all. If the cop had called in its details and it was somehow found at a later date, it would be all too easily traced back to him. While there would be no hard evidence—he had already cleaned and disinfected the trunk painstakingly, and would do so again—he did not want to give them any reason to ask questions. That damn taillight would need to be checked out, though.
He decided to head for a large city in a nearby state—Charlotte, perhaps, or Atlanta—a place where he would not stand out so much; although he would never admit that his risk taking was becoming an addiction, he felt he could be more prudent. Besides, the city was fertile ground. Legions of anonymous girls came and went every day. They arrived on buses, trains, and occasionally planes, from small towns whose names you’d have no reason to know. Girls with new identities and fresh haircuts, running away from dubious pasts and broken relationships. They were wary and uncertain and made few new friends; they were lonely and unaccounted for; they tried their luck for a few months or years before moving back home, or overdosing, or simply vanishing; they were ideal prey.
He emerged from the dirt track onto the main road, crested the last remaining hills, and began his descent toward the plain that stretched unending to the horizon. Above him, without any fuss, the clouds swallowed up the moon like vaporous predators hunting in packs, letting the night be as it always should be—at its darkest, and most glorious.
I remember hitching my first ride to NYC. It was fall, but it was still hot. Jake and I were sitting in the backseat of a Toyota Corolla in shorts, his sweaty leg pressed against mine. I couldn’t think about anything anybody was saying. I could only feel his hairy leg. At one point, bouncing up and down the turnpike, I got a hard-on. Did that mean I was gay?
1987, one week into theater school, and already I was deep in this bout of phobia: “What if I’m a homo?” I’d go out and get drunk, make out with a couple of girls, try getting laid with some poor cleavage-revealing innocent. When I was actually drunk and actually having real sexual intercourse with them, I wasn’t afraid I was gay, but the rest of the day the drumbeat of FEAR would start again. Clearly there was a big scary demon motherfucker hiding in the dark recesses of my subconscious. Something with the same rhythm and pathology I imagine inspired Evel Knievel to jump two dozen school buses with his motorcycle. Something I was not well prepared for at the tender age of seventeen.
One afternoon I tried facing my fear and in a feverish sweat bought a copy of Honcho magazine. My heart beat like a jackhammer but my pecker shriveled in my hand. At four in the morning I went alone to a parking lot, got on my seventeen-year-old knees, looked to heaven, and prayed for the first time in my life: “Dear God, please, if I’m gay, kill me. I can’t do it. Let me die in a car accident. Let me be murdered. But please don’t let me be gay…”
In an effort to distance myself from the show-tune-singing theater clan one night, I charged into a fraternity rush at SAE. These guys were a bunch of John Cougar Mellencamp–shouting jocks who gave out free beer. No truth or dare, no sincere artsy emotional oversharing. I started doing keg hits with some guy named Jake, and we talked about BU and how much it sucked. He mentioned that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were playing in New York City. Having just read On the Road, I suggested we blow off school and hitchhike to Madison Square Garden. We did.
—
Once in New York City we scored tickets and LSD. Jake had done it before. We dropped a tab and headed into the Garden, but after about two hours we felt nothing. Sure that we had bought fake drugs, we dropped two more tabs in case there was even a little hallucinogen on one of the others.
We were jettisoned to the far side of the moon.
I remember walking out of the concert and into the autumn midnight air of Thirty-Third Street. I saw the citizens of planet Earth walking with halos over their heads. I saw the Walk/Don’t Walk signs strolling among the pedestrians. Everything was luminescent, radiant. Everyone in front of me, around me, behind me—I saw them as winged, glowing angels. I saw their skeletons inside their clothes, I saw the bones in their faces and knew we were all dying, knew that the construct of our personalities was no more significant than our outfits. I saw that being gay or straight was no more than a preference for chewing gum, or a preference for Life Savers—we were all of us involved in some massive movement in time and space. Oh my god I saw the whole world moving through the millennia and I was a lightning bug, beautiful and utterly insignificant. If I was gay, it would be a stamp of courage, a mark of bravery like a medal worn on the chest. Love and its expression needed no boundaries. I laughed. I told Jake, “Dude, you have no idea how much better I feel.” He had no idea what I was talking about. He was on a different moon, but I was sure I was having an insight that would leave me changed. My shoulders aligned themselves differently. Everything—neon light, shadows, pavement, metal cars, humans, dogs—seemed to me one miracle after another. I thanked God for not answering my prayer.
—
At that precise moment I was punched about four times hard in the face. I made brief eye contact with the man hitting me and it was clear that his fire-white eyes were burning with something lit by crack cocaine—they were exploding out of his head. He punched me into the traffic of Broadway, into the swirling, honking cars. I didn’t care. It was okay. I felt sorry for him. He couldn’t hurt me. I just absorbed the beauty of the lights around me.
Then I noticed Jake. He had been beaten too and had been shoved into the street beside me. We held hands between lanes of traffic and walked to a little island where Forty-Second Street intersects with Broadway and Seventh Avenue. It was then that I saw what looked like a cat scratch across his face. Small bits of blood were seeping through his skin, forming a line that went from the hairline on the back of his head, through his ear, under his cheekbone, and up into the place where his eye met his nose.
“I think they cut you, dude,” I said. He touched his face and felt the blood. Then he wiped it off, and the entire left half of his face fell free and hung down. I could see teeth where his cheek should have been. I quickly pressed my bandanna to his face to hold his cheek back in place. Suddenly, the street was filled with wolves, hyenas, and drooling dogs. Jake lit a cigarette and the smoke dribbled through the bandanna out of his cheek, ear, and eye. The smoke collected and formed the face of a hissing cat. I asked to see his cut one more time. He took down the bandanna and one small tarantula crawled out of his face.
“Am I gonna die?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not that bad.”
“Really?”
“I promise.”
“Is it going to scar?”
“Oh, yeah, definitely.” I almost laughed.
He started to cry. “Fuck, what should we do?” he asked, searching my face for help. I looked through the crowd of famished dogs, saw a dirty, skinny German shepherd dressed as a police officer and approached him. The giant dog sniffed Jake and his cut. Then he gasped and got on his radio: “I got a male Caucasian, approximately eighteen years old, with his face slashed, on Forty-Fourth and Broadway.”
Instantly, Jake began to convulse, sobbing while holding his face together. “Oh, fuck, I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.”
The pack of canines circling us began to grow in number.
I held Jake in my arms and looked toward the heavens. This was my fault. We raced through the city in a police car. Everything was tilted and spinning red and blue. The lights themselves seemed dizzy.
“Are you guys on drugs?” the cop asked, drooling in the front seat. I had never seen a dog drive a car before.
“No,” I answered as Jake wept openly.
“Did you get a look at the guys who did this?”
“I think it might have been God.”
“Did you even help your friend?” The dog stared at me from the rearview mirror.
“No.”
“Why not? Some guys are beating up your buddy and you just let them?”
I sat in the back of the police car and watched the blue and red lights keep spinning into a web of arteries and veins. The siren screamed like a witch.
—
Inside Bellevue we sat and waited, Jake still holding my bandanna to his face. This would be one of those cool stories we could tell later, I said. We would be badasses. Girls would think we were tough. Our lives had really begun, like we wanted.
I went to the bathroom and flushed the rest of the drugs down the toilet. Salamanders chased the drugs down the drain. Briefly, the cops interrogated me. Two German shepherds. The skinny one and a new fat one who pissed on the floor by my leg. His urine spread across the tile and up the walls and dripped back down onto my head. I told them I was not high. At one point the doctors finally came out and studied Jake’s face.
“Smile.”
“I can’t. It hurts too much,” he mumbled.
“We have to see if there is any nerve damage; smile.”
Jake smiled a sad pathetic crooked bleeding grin.
The doctor turned to me, intense. “Is that what his smile looks like?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“We just met like two days ago.”
The doctors left and we continued to wait. After about an hour and a half, two other young men who looked a lot like Jake and me—one guy with a bandage to his bleeding face, the other holding him—walked in and sat behind us.
“Is that what I look like?” the guy asked his friend, pointing right in Jake’s face. “Am I cut as bad as him?” He almost screamed.
“Stop, stop, stop…,” his friend answered as he ushered his bleeding pal to their green plastic waiting room seats.
“Oh, fuck,” the guy wailed. “Oh, fuck.” I watched a snake slither across the floor of the hospital, climb up the guy’s chair, and follow his tears into his mouth.
Jake and I sat silently, listening to them talk.
“I love you and I’m here for you,” the one kept whispering, while the other mostly cried. They held each other close, the one gently caressing the other up and down the leg.
By the time Jake went into surgery, my hallucinations had subsided. It was almost dawn and there were three other young men who had been strolling Times Square seated around us with their faces slashed open. Apparently some crack-addled fool had taken a razor blade to more than seven faces in less than an hour. A typical case of gay bashing in New York City in 1987.
Walking out of Bellevue the next afternoon, Jake looked like a villain from a comic book, his face laced up like a football. He did not go back to school. He flew home to Wisconsin. I took the train back to Boston, and until now, I’ve never told anyone this story. Partly because homophobia is embarrassing. Partly because I still worry that razor was meant for me.
I’ve been staying at a hotel in Munich where many people come to commit suicide. It’s a tall postwar building that rises above a flat stretch of concrete patio. A person can come into the hotel lobby and ride the elevator to the nineteenth floor, where there is a medical clinic and easy access to a balcony that has a very low railing. From there it’s a quick jump back the twenty floors to the concrete patio. Quick but, I imagine, with enough time for you to think a bit on your way down. Every time I go to my room on the twenty-first floor, the elevator stops at the nineteenth floor and the doors open, but no one gets on or off.
The hotel is just across the river from the center of Munich. It’s a fairly expensive hotel, and I’m staying there only because an acquaintance of mine, not even an acquaintance really, just a man I met on the train coming here, has gone out of town for a month. We got to talking on the train and he offered me the use of his place. About half of the rooms in the hotel are rented by the month as apartments and his is one of these. It’s been more than two weeks since I got here and I don’t have much money left. I have no idea what will happen when he comes back.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? The immediate bonds that you form when traveling. We found ourselves in the dining car, this man and I. He was about my age, maybe a little older, and was what I’ve heard French people here call sympathique. We fell to talking. His name was Friedrich. I told him about being asked to leave the band. Said that I’d gotten a Eurail pass, thinking that the train was as good a place to stay as anywhere else.
“If you don’t mind Munich,” he’d said, “I have a different idea of where you belong.”
There’s nothing much to do here. If the weather’s good, I sit in the English Garden and watch people drink beer. If the weather is bad, I sit in the room and watch television that I don’t understand, or I listen to American Armed Forces Radio. There’s a DVR hooked up, but the movies that are saved are all in German. It has some sort of pay-per-view system as well, but I don’t know the password. It’s late April now, and most of the days are still wet and gray and I seem to spend a lot of my time in the room.
A lot of fashion models take apartments here when they come to work in Munich. Sometimes I sit in the lobby and I watch them come in and out. It’s like standing in the street and looking through the display window of an expensive shop. I don’t enjoy being out of money. At thirty-six, I’m far too old to find anything romantic in poverty.
There are clubs in town and maybe I could go to one, and maybe meet a girl. But the drinks are so expensive in the clubs here and usually when I go to bars, I sit staring at my drink with my thoughts ringing in my head, trying to find the words to talk to a girl across the bar who I think, in the dim lights, might have looked at me. Then, while I’m working up my nerve, she gets a text from her boyfriend, or some other guy starts talking to her, or she leaves with the bartender, who it turns out she was waiting for.
Most of the suicides happen in April and May when rapid changes in barometric pressure can cause a hot wind to blow through the city and the weather turns a snowy winter day into a clear, warm spring. They call it a Foehn wind and it is said to cause a sort of insanity. Policemen don’t give tickets for traffic violations on Foehn days. There are terrible fights in the beer gardens and the Hofbräuhaus. Many people get very depressed. It’s then that they come to the nineteenth floor of my hotel and jump.
In the Englischer Garten the other day, at the beer garden by the Chinesischer Turm, I met a girl. She had jumped from the hotel last spring. By some mistake she was still alive. She was a very pretty girl, as pretty as the models at the hotel, but had a scar running down the length of her face as if she had been broken and then glued back together. I imagine that is about what must have happened. She walked slowly and she had a slight limp.
It was a Foehn day. The warm wind had blown away a morning rain and it was hot now and clear. Papers and odd bits of cloth littered the streets. I walked from the hotel to the Chinesischer Turm and sat down in the sun. I’d found some change in the pocket of a coat hanging in my host’s closet. I had gone through all of his clothes a few days earlier and this change was all I’d found. It was enough to buy a plate of sliced white radishes.
I was eating the radishes slowly when I saw the girl. She was standing by the children’s merry-go-round watching the turning horses. There were no riders. I thought that it made a sad picture, the girl watching the empty ride turn, and I watched. After a while, she left the merry-go-round and walked toward the food stalls and my table in the sun. As she came toward me, I could see her face and the scar that cut across it.
The scar interested me. It seemed to mean something. I waited until she’d gotten her beer and was sitting down at a table, next to a large, florid-faced man wearing a traditional Bavarian suit. I couldn’t offer to buy her anything and so it was easier
to wait. I sat there and the thoughts started ringing in my head and I started to think that I wouldn’t find the nerve to talk to her. The man in the Bavarian suit glanced at her, taking in the scar. He muttered something in a throaty, guttural German and took his beer to the far end of the table. The girl gave him a tired glance as he did this. Maybe it was that tired glance, or maybe the scar, the imperfection made it easier. I picked up my radishes and walked toward her. I was very nervous.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes,” she said. “A little.”
“May I sit down?”
She nodded and I sat. I offered my radishes and she took some. From his new spot at the end of the table, the man in the Bavarian suit watched us with contempt. She stared at him for a moment, and the look in her eyes was of the wind: hot, harsh, and somehow out of control. The man looked away, and when the girl turned back to me, her Foehn look was gone.
“I just haven’t talked much lately,” I said. “And I’d like someone to talk to.” It was true. I’d been by myself for so long now that when I spoke, my voice came out echoing and strange, as if a chip inside me were playing someone else’s voice.
“You’re an American?”
“Yes.”
“It is hard for Americans here. The people are not friendly, I think.”
“There are unfriendly people everywhere.”
“No, but here, they are worse. If they are young, they are arrogant and wish they were in Paris. If they are old, they only think about the Russians or the war. The others are mostly stupid.”
I smiled and took a radish. “My name is Paul,” I said. She offered me a sip of her beer.
“You are here on a holiday, Paul, or why?”
“More like ‘why.’ ”