Halloween IV: The Ultimate Edition

by Nicholas

  The convention itself begat parties the likes of which no convention could shake a stick at, except perhaps a biker convention or one hell of a Rave.

  From hotel room to room I wandered that night, a two-fisted drinker of whatever beer can or whiskey glass fell into my hands, until a bottle of tequila eclipsed my vision.

  I was on the eighteenth floor, my final social call of the night. By the look of my watch at the time, I’d say it was past last call under public circumstances.

  My last call was just moments away.

  I was seated out on the balcony of a room a few levels higher than my own, a room complete with a king-sized bed, cable television with channels exhibiting movies still in theaters, a refrigerator bar chock full of tiny bottles of the finest alcohol that you’d have to pay for at checkout time for each partaking, and a little more than three dozen young adults from an age range of high school until the point where they were no longer in the category of being a young adult.

  I was quite comfortably intoxicated, slouching back within a cushioned metal-framed chair and smoking the last cigarette in my pack, over-looking what seemed to be the entire city of Pasadena and beyond, when someone slid open the sliding glass patio door beside me and an arm extended the accursed tequila bottle to obscure my view.

  I grasped it. I guzzled. You’d have to be a seasoned drinker for a feat like that.

  I continued with my ramblings on to some enthusiastic unpublished writer, encouraging him about the whole “writing what you know” curse that all of us writers have to deal with now and again. To the opposite side of this person assembled a group of four post-teen individuals taking part in smoking the most elaborate hookah, questioning one another as to whether they were actually getting a weed high or if what they were smoking was really incredible tobacco, they didn’t seem to know for certain.

  The sliding door slid open again; a young twenty-something flaunted herself into the crisp night air as though she were mother earth and the rest of us dwelt upon the moon and revolved around her, and she was greeted by the hookah-smokers with all the fanfare of a celebrity making a grand entrance. If I had been born a blonde-haired little sweet thing and flaunted myself at her ripe young age in tight and frilly witch’s lingerie, I wouldn’t have had to sell books to be in such a status quo.

  For some reason beyond my day-to-day etiquette, I stood up and offered her my seat.

  Something happened just then.

  There was no time to reflect on events just then, or even to prevent what happened next. Perhaps the young woman merely tripped and collided into me by some clumsy half-ass accident, or it was some morbid twist of fate that sent me with such force off the balcony railing. There was no time to reach out for a flailing grasp at life itself, for that panicked rush of adrenaline which courses through one’s reflexes towards the red alert/survival instinct mode which would cause hands and fingers to lash out at anything to hold onto for dear life to make best of those urgent seconds of nightmare.

  No time for reflexes to kick in, no time to think.

  I fell.

  I fell eighteen floors.

  That gave me less than eighteen seconds to live, like a bungee jump without a cord, and I thought no last thoughts. There was wind against my chest, battering my dime store black windbreaker and assaulting my face and blurring my eyesight like a videotape on fast forward.

  I remember the impact.

  My body splattered like a tomato thrown by a major league baseball pitcher with a game at stake, my bones shattered like glass.

  I felt no pain, as instantaneous as the entire incident was, and oddly enough no degree of pain set in as I found myself still conscious, still able after a few moments to move.

  I raised my head. A portion of my senses adjusted to the extent that I could feel the cool chill of the early morning breeze, and I felt at one with the hedges and flower beds which met with the paved cement walkway which cradled my otherwise cold dead body. There was a silent hush in the darkness which enveloped me with an alertness and the comforting assumption that I wasn’t truly dead…..

  ……that I was still alive.

  I could still see. I could feel the pounding of my heart within a rib cage impossibly fractured yet intact enough to protect it and keep it going, cradled between lungs miraculously operable and taking in each heaving breath.

  As I raised my gaze to the flower bed facing me and then to the hedges just beyond, I began to notice a sleek wispy smoke rising from the foliage and streaming towards me ever so slowly but deliberatively as though it was alive, making its way as though it in itself was an entity emerging to curiously inspect what had fallen from the sky.

  It appeared as like cigarette smoke, and I surmised from the countless butts discarded from the party-mongers in the balconies above that perhaps one or more hadn’t quite extinguished yet but was fanning in the breeze and fueled by dead leaves or my traumatized imagination.

  But then it began to speak to me.

  “Be still,” it said in a calm voice, as if I was preparing to go anywhere.

  It was the voice of a young male, perhaps as generally young as the hotel room partiers who’d unwillingly scratched me from their festivities.

  “I shall overtake you,” it instructed, “and the both of us together will show them just how it feels to fall from a grace so high above themselves.”

  Not knowing altogether exactly what the voice meant, I found myself asking, “Who are they?”

  And then the vaporous spirit overwhelmed me, giving me no further time to accept it nor deny it; as far as time was concerned, it had deprived me of any chance to have thwarted my fall, and its sly scheme of depravity couldn’t award me this chance to fumble for a moment to fend myself away from the immediacy of my fate, when it came down to it, down to eighteen stories and cold hard cement and a ghost that had been waiting below to possess me.

  By the blink of an undead eye, I suddenly wasn’t myself, or whatever I had been, lying there.

  I had become someone else, or some thing…….

  ***

  I could not recall exactly what events transpired on my way back inside the hotel. I couldn’t remember how I raised myself from the cold cement walkway, nor could I tell whether anyone had witnessed the initial event of my remarkable resurrection. I know I had no time to consider whether or not I’d even left any marks or remains of myself on the ground where I impacted.

  In hindsight, I bitterly reflect upon how no concerned individual came rushing down to desperately check on me or even view what remained of me, how the cries of an ambulance or police sirens did not in any passage of time drown out the voice which spoke to me, that voice which beckoned me back into the hotel and to the door of the room I’d fallen from, from the eighteenth floor.

  I found myself arriving at that door.

  And I knocked.

  I waited a moment, then another, listened to the scattered voices of desperation at the door’s opposite side. People were panicked. I distinctly heard the phrase “can’t go to jail….,” then words and phrases muffled, then clearly the word “cops” was uttered, then a cry, and afterwards…..

  The door opened.

  “Sweet Jesus,” exclaimed the late-teen glossy-eyed kid with the crew cut and black trench coat that appeared at the door. This individual was the same one who’d invited me in the first time I had arrived at the room for a grand entrance and an even grander time, though his eyes were glossy to a lesser degree then, and he had been a lot calmer. Now I knew that my presence had evoked a more profound quality, as I could tell in the kid’s horrified demeanor, and I felt myself as much as like a vampire not needing to even touch his victim to drain him of life and a healthy skin tone. He retreated backwards slowly, step by step, allowing me to follow him past the threshold of the door. I knew it would be an understatement to proclaim my appearance to be unexpected, but there arose within me a temper nourished by my present company’s failure to respond to my fall the way they shoul
d have; rather than having done the right thing, they’d apparently locked themselves in the hotel room and driven themselves into drunken hysterics wondering what was going to happen next.

  Well……I was going to happen next.

  I entered the room fully, closed the door behind me until it clicked shut, and found myself alone full of guests spooked into a tomb-like silence at the very recognition of my presence. Most of these inebriated assholes had already risen from their lazy positions on the bed or from chairs or loungings against the wall upon the carpet; some were perambulating about in a mental haze until their eyes caught sight of the spectacle of the celebrated novelist thought dead from his untimely balcony mishap. Others gave notice to me only after they’d paid mind to the distractions of their friends, to see what the hell everyone else was looking at. As soon as I held the room’s full attention, it became as if all eyes were the pointed arrows of a multitude of compasses, and I was North.

  For that moment.

  Someone spoke, a scraggly-haired kid holding a half-empty Miller bottle. “Dude…..are you okay?”

  “No,” I replied, though the reply was not necessarily my own, “we’re not.”

  It was then when I lost myself completely. The misty spirit I’d encountered in the aftermath of my fall overtook me fully, possessed me powerless as a puppet to the hand reaching upwards within me to control, though I remember every moment of what transpired afterwards.

  With a single downwards thrust of my hand, I severed the steel knob of the room’s door and it thumped against the shaggy carpet, rocked to a halt. The guy in the trench coat continued with his cautious attempt to back away from me, backed further as I continued my approach through the room amidst all onlookers agasped; the sliding glass door to the balcony yawned into the outside night, and he backed further into the open air until his backside met the balcony railing. Before he appeared even remotely conscious of where he was, I took another few broad steps towards him and he toppled over to his doom.

  This inspired more of a panic than when I had went his way. The panic pissed me off and only added to the strength of the force which manipulated my actions. I turned to face them all, and I was genuinely and uncontrollably enraged. The entity which possessed me spoke out, exclaimed through my lips and with my voice, “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about! Quite a rush, ain’t it? Why don’t we all give it a try?!”

  A despicably young paltry mass of a girl for such a gathering cowered beside the section of patio where the hookah had been abandoned, and my inward spirit drew me towards her until the distraction of a woman to my left swung me over to face her. It was the woman I’d previously surrendered my chair to, and I gazed upon her with a mixture of bitterness and pleasantry. She appeared confused and plainly at odds with her drunken stupor, and he moved to escape; I blocked her way into the room. My right hand shot out over her jaw and I grasped it, dug my index finger into her mouth. She was too overwhelmed with my presence and the reality of it all to bite, and if she had thought to, my finger would have been her only trophy of vengeance for what I was about to do. I raised my arm, lifted her, and swung her over the railing, let go, watched her fall.

  At once I found myself tackled by the onslaught of two hefty bar-bouncer types coming at me from behind. I had not seen them before, but there was no time to wonder further about them. I dropped myself into a hunched position, jerked my body into an upwards heave with a strength I didn’t know I had in me, and with a backwards lunge I managed to topple the two up and over the railing simultaneously.

  Voices screamed from inside the room, the chaos echoing out and around me and beyond to the landscape of city below. I arose to behold a greater portion of the occupants struggling and flailing against each other for the motel room door. They were beginning to realize there was no escape, though they tried…….oh, did they try.

  I smiled a twisted smile that wasn’t my own, and I went inside to greet them more personably.

  ***

  I sit here now, upon the chair I’d originally claimed after my first entrance to the outside balcony, the chair I’d politely offered to the young lady whose remains were now and for a little while afterwards splashed across the cement surface of where I before held her place. So many have perished this night, so many souls have gone away to wherever it is souls go, including my own. A couple of dozen or so of the once festive horror convention partiers whose company I’d kept now littered the grounds below, and I’ve only just begun to experience a sort of peace I cannot quite comprehend.

  The lights of the vast city beckons, glistening and gleaming as they are from the somber reaches of my viewpoint here on my now lonely terrace. Not even the company of the youngest and most innocent girl still cowering and shivering from fear and the cold behind the hookah can add to the comfort that I feel, and I vaguely give notice to her incessant scribblings into a notepad as though drawing a caricature of what was left of me.

  Of what was fading away.

  I became aware of the sounds of sirens, growing ever close, and a voice inside me told me that it was about time those sounds were heard, after all this tragedy. I agreed. The next sensation I was aware of was that of my own flesh shrinking as I sat, seeping dark thick blood, my own bones crackling in rapid decay and what remained of me sinking deeper into the confines of my chair.

  It was as if I had fallen again, and the impact returned upon me ever so morbidly graceful and painless. My body was limp; I was bleeding even more profusely, bloody, breaking, broken……

  There came a voice from the depths of my being, a tranquil inflection from a departing soul growing more distant until it could only produce feelings rather than words, feelings of a vengeance now fulfilled, perhaps not as much a retribution as a release somehow, from a spirit kindred to my own in that we suffered the same fate. Perhaps the only way to free ourselves was to free our mutual angers, and to impose the same fate on the morally irresponsible whose ignorance directly or indirectly evoked our mutual demise. Whatever the case, the spirit’s departure left me with parting, fleeting words, the clearest words, the words that made the most sense:

  Hmm, I can still bleed.

  And though having died once, and dying again just now, I gazed down upon my rotting self and indulged in my own last thoughts:

  Hmmmm.......I can still bleed.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nicholas Grabowsky in 1988 in his rented room in the rearside of a friend's house where he wrote his earlier novels, including the Halloween IV novelization.

  Nicholas Grabowsky’s novels of horror/fantasy, both as himself, as Nicholas Randers, and as Marsena Shane, have generated worldwide acclaim for over three decades and praised by many of today’s most popular horror gurus in the literary world. He began his career in traditional publishing houses with brisk sellers in mass market paperback horror, and the last ten years have seen him hailed by many as a mentor and advocate to the smaller presses, which has become to him a personal passion.

  His body of work includes the award-winning The Everborn, The Rag Man, Pray Serpent’s Prey, Halloween IV (and its special edition), Diverse Tales, Reads & Reviews, Red Wet Dirt, The Wicked Haze, Sweet Dreams Lady Moon, June Park, Tale of the Makeshift Faire, numerous anthologies and magazine articles, a Nancy Reagan biography, with projects extending to screenplays, poetry, songs, film, and a wide variety of short fiction and nonfiction since the 1980’s.

  He’s a veteran special guest at numerous genre conventions and makes appearances and signings across North America. He has been in the limelight a radical gospel preacher right out of high school and in the following years a rock vocalist, teacher, lecturer and activist, editor, publisher and founder of the Sacramento-based Diverse Media small press, which in 2008 blossomed into the subdivisions of Black Bed Sheet Books, which publishes “exemplary literature, fiction & non” but specializes in horror, and Black Bed Sheet Productions, which produces independent film.

  Currently, Nicholas is at work with numerous
anthologies, graphic novels and comic books, an Everborn sequel and the novels The Downwardens and The Sirens of Knowland. His independent film projects include the upcoming slasher creature feature Cutting Edges.

  www.downwarden.com