by Rob Heinze
Have I killed before? Have I killed?
He couldn’t remember. Once, he had been a man with problems. Now he was just an animal with problems. He knew that somewhere in his diseased mind—knew that people looked at him the same way they might look at a stray dog. Yet he got up everyday, somehow alive, somehow still living, because that was the ultimate goal of human existence, no matter how incongruous it might seem: survive.
It doesn’t matter, nothing matters, not now; the cold, wet day had gotten to him.
He walked down the slicked sidewalk. He passed row-houses, front porches deserted at this hour in the morning. The sky above was nothing more than a mud mire. He wished that he could just find some warm hole and bury himself in it. He knew that once upon a time he had been in a warm hole and that hole had been his home. But as to the people with whom he had once lived, well, he had no idea about them. They were just blurred faces, ancient memories rubbed raw by the passage of time.
I asked him for money, he thought, shuffling forward. He had it. I know he had it. And his bones don’t hurt like mine.
He was thinking about Charley Allen. He was thinking about how Charley Allen had lied to him.
He stopped. There was a police car up ahead, cruising slowly along the cross-street of the Queens neighborhood. He turned and started back, not running but not walking. It had become custom for panic to take him whenever he saw a police car. He moved quickly. He turned the corner and started back down the block. He wished that he could remember how he had gotten out of Manhattan.
An obese black woman stood at the curb across the street, watching him mutely from behind her garbage cans. He wouldn’t ask her for money; she was used to people like him, and besides what could she possibly have to give? He almost missed the house into which Charley had gone, except that he saw Charley’s car and remembered him getting out of it, for he had watched him hopefully. He had seen a potential for money with Charley Allen. He stopped and gazed up at the house, boarded windows true testaments to society’s disdain for people like him; they wouldn’t even let him into a place like this.
He faced the house, a medium-sized black man with too-long nails and thick fingers. His eyes sat back in his head, as if hiding from the world.
He remembered the white man that had gone into the house. The one who had said he’d had no money, but the one whom he knew had money. He had lied.
“It’s cold,” he said, his breath frosty in the morning air.
He hesitated for only a moment longer. Then he started up the house’s short walk to the porch. He looked deep into the house’s darkness. There was no sign of the white man. He took a step in, cautious, and when he was confident that the white man wasn’t on the first floor, he moved deeper into the house. He walked across the floor, his previous wet shoes dried on the puke green carpet. He heard a distant beeping noise that was Charley’s instrument, and he knew that the white man was in the basement. His foot found a sore spot on the floor, and it winced loudly. He cringed and stopped.
There was silence, and he knew that the white man was listening.
He’s heard me, the bum thought.
“Who’s there!” A shaky voice called.
The bum left quickly, going out the front door and into the cold rain. He started down the walk, muttering to himself and glancing up to the sky as rain drops started to fall onto his rough face. He stopped at the end of the walkway—stopped cold. His eyes, in their mad foray around the world, had settled on something that made all his thoughts solidify into one misshapen lump of rage.
There was a flattened cat in the center of the road. He had no idea how he had not seen it previously, but there it was. A large pink-reddish mound, which the bum assumed were its guts, sat next to it. The cat’s tongue hung out minutely. Its eyes, cloudy, stared up at the impartial sky. The sky, gray, was equally impartial.
Anger stirred within the bum. Once upon a time he had been in a warm hole and that hole had been his home and with whom did he live? No one: they were ancient memories smudged strange by time and pain, Momma, oh the pain… His thick fingers clenched and opened, opened and clenched. There was no reason why this sight should evoke such emotions within him. Hell, he had seen people run-over in the subways and it hadn’t bothered him like this.
It’s because you’re not you, a voice said.
Right.
He turned and went along the side of the house. On his way to the backyard, he spotted a few crumbled bricks, which might have once belonged to the front porch. He grabbed a truncated one. It was cold, damp, and heavy. In the backyard, he saw the boarded door leading into the basement and went to it. It wasn’t nailed in place like the windows, and with a quick, violent pull, he was able to squeeze inside the dank basement. His stomach hurt, his bones hurt. Rain water dripped off him.
He lied; he lied to me.
He could see the pale orange glow of the white man’s flashlight, but the man was still upstairs, probably having gone up to check the noise. The brick in the bum’s hand felt impossibly heavy—bowling-ball heavy. He started to shake badly, worse than before. His entire body seemed to be just one violent muscle, beyond his control and contracting madly.
You can’t do this! A voice screamed in his mind.
“Hungry, though,” he whispered in reply.
He watched as the white man emerged back into the basement. He watched as the white man put the flashlight on the ground, and he winced as the light hit his face. The white man had spotted him!
Go, fool! Go!!!
The bum rushed towards Charley Allen. In his hand was the raised brick, light and distant now. The wind soared past his ears. His heart thrummed wildly in his chest. He brought the brick down with brutal fast strength.
In the moment before he struck, he remembered the poor cat with its round deposit of guts next to it.
There was no noise as it struck the white man, but the sensation was somehow soft and terribly sickening. There was a grunt from the white man and then the sound of his body hitting the floor. The flashlight that he had placed on the floor was knocked over and rolled around in two cycles, like the last rotations of a spent amusement ride. It settled, ghastly, on the bum’s face.
“I’m hungry,” the bum said defiantly.
The cold in the basement was worse than the cold outside, and he only wanted to get out of there. He quickly ransacked the white man’s pockets. He came out with a wallet. He opened it and found that it really was empty. He took a credit card. He didn’t feel happy. He might eat—but at what cost?
“Fuck it,” he mumbled. “Just fucking fuck it.”
He searched the rest of the wallet and saw a picture of a woman with brown hair spilling around her shoulders like a color-tinted waterfall frozen in a still-frame. Her brown eyes stared at him from above her wide smile, and under those beautiful eyes the man felt guilty. He threw the wallet angrily to the far corner, where it flopped and spilled out its contents under cover of darkness.
The white man had a gold chain that the bum coveted. There was little else of value on him. He had that odd instrument, with which he had been testing, and probably that was worth a lot of money, but the bum didn’t have the slightest idea of how to sell it. No pawn shop would want that. He grabbed the white man’s cell phone from its clip. He thought to take it, but then he decided against it. He dropped it as he stood.
He was up the basement stairs and out the front door and into the street.
He paused, looked once to the dead cat, thought about the white man lying in the basement, and then a random phrase came into his mind, a phrase for which he had no source:
There is a better place.
Then he was gone, down the street, off to fill his belly with some fast-food restaurant’s alchemy.
3
Charley Allen had never known confusion as he did after he awoke in the cold, dark basement of the abandoned Queens, NY house.
He awoke and sat up. There was no pain. Should there be? He didn’t k
now—couldn’t remember. He felt his head and discovered nothing unusual. He stood up calmly and rationally. The flashlight was out. He was in full darkness.
Okay, he thought. Okay. Let’s just think for one moment. You are in a basement. You were in a basement. You were working and you had a light. The light is now dead. For some reason, you are on the floor.
“Why?” He said, and almost screamed.
His voice sounded odd and distant, as if he were hearing himself over a pre-recorded message. He rubbed his jaw, thinking that maybe it was just sore or unused. Maybe his ears had grown strange, and maybe they had just…well, heard himself wrong. Was that even possible?
He started to walk forward when his foot stepped down on something. It was small and hard. He bent to retrieve it, and in the dark he felt that it was his cell phone. He flipped the top open, expecting to seen that carcinogenic blue glow fill the darkness, but no light shone. He depressed buttons but the phone appeared dead.
What is this? What happened?
He glanced up the steps and saw the light upstairs—feeble faint light that tried and failed to brighten the kitchen. He stumbled in the darkness towards the stairs, not noticing that his wallet was missing. The rickety stairs creaked as he stepped onto them.
Something was wrong.
He was in the kitchen, and he knew that something was wrong. He couldn’t place it, though. What was wrong? Nothing with the house, no, but—but with what? He saw the pale gray rectangle of the front door ahead. The rain had stopped. He started towards the door. Each step he took, for some reason, felt dreamlike and slow.
Maybe this is a dream?
He entered the foyer, hesitated, and emerged from the house like a man emerging after a strong storm has passed. He stood on the front porch and looked around. He listened. Then he knew the error, knew why he had almost screamed as he heard his voice, knew why a feeling of unease had permeated his mind as he had stood in the dark basement.
The quiet, he thought. That’s what’s wrong here.
He couldn’t hear a car, a car horn, a plane, people. There was nothing. The whole world had gone so quiet that Charley could hear some distant, faint hum deep in his ears as they sought noise, any noise, but found only the mechanical clicking of their own internal mechanisms. For some reason, he remembered the obese black woman who had come out of the house across the street. His eyes turned immediately to that row-home, but he didn’t see her. He wasn’t sure if he had expected to see her.
He stepped down the steps cautiously. He reached into his pocket for the packet of Dentyne. It was still there but his wallet wasn’t. A seedling of a thought began to spread and grow in his mind. The missing wallet, the unconsciousness—
I got mugged, he thought.
Immediately his mind turned back to that bum who had asked him for money.
You opened your wallet, and then blew him off…did you expect a different outcome?
But I saw him turn the corner. I saw him!
By the time his thoughts had finished, he was munching away on the gum. It crunched in his ears and head, but the habit offered no comfort now. He stood on the sidewalk. There wasn’t a bird, a dog, a car, a person: the whole world had fallen into a mythic reverence that sent his blood cold.
His Honda Civic was still sitting at the other side of the street where he had left it. And his keys were still in his pocket. The car’s hood and roof were pimpled with perfectly round spots of mist that became clear as he closed the distance to it. He tried the unlock button on his keychain, found it didn’t work, and opened the lock manually. He didn’t sit inside. He let the door hang open and stood by it, feeling oddly protected by the car.
He looked up and down the street. It cut a path through two blocks of houses, all of which appeared deserted. Cold windows stood empty of wondering faces. Cars, lifeless, loitered unwanted and unused near the curbs. He glanced once back to the house from which he had emerged; it looked like a house in which a clan of vampires might live, windows boarded against sunlight. He remembered the writing on the bedroom walls. Love is love. Love is pain. There is a better place.
What did that house do to me?
He left the car door open and started to walk towards the corner. It was less than a block, but the distance felt like miles. His feet, heavy, made brutal loud noises on the cement. He heard shifting, stealthy noises in the alley of a row house, and his heart jumped into his throat. He saw that there was only a trash can, and that the aimless wind was teasing a piece of paper, the way a person might stir the foam of a beer with their finger.
The side-street fed into a main road. He remembered that it had been a main road because making a left onto this street had been difficult. All resemblance to it having once been busy was now gone. When he reached the corner, his steps slowed. No one was in sight. The street was utterly deserted. He looked to the sky, in hopes of catching sight of an airplane, but there was nothing save for the murky gloom of what passed for the clouds.
“Unbelievable,” he whispered.
There was a corner store behind him, the sort of mom and pop candy store almost every town had. The awning over it was blue and listless. He went to it slowly, cautiously, and pushed the door open. It was surprisingly unlocked. There were bells over the door, and they jingled as it opened. He stood outside and looked into the dark store. He could smell old wet wood and what he thought were sour olives. Dark aisles stood in front of him. The store’s smallness was enhanced by the closeness of the merchandise. He felt like an intruder, as if he were disturbing some secret society’s meeting.
“Hello?”
No one answered him: the sound of his voice creeped down the aisle and petered off in the distance, near the drink cases. Unnerved, he let the door shut and sped back to his car. His mind was as far away from rational as it could be. He tried his cell phone again. It was blank and dead. He tried the power button twice, and he even tried to take the battery out and reinsert it. Nothing worked; the phone was stone dead.
Am I dead, then? Is that what’s going on here? Okay, ha ha, funny joke! Very, very fucking funny!
He reached the car, his heart thudding in his chest. He stood outside of it for a moment, letting the quiet infiltrate his mind. Shaking, he slid behind the wheel of the car and inserted the keys into the ignition.
Dear God, this is Charley Allen of Streamwater, New Jersey. I’m inquiring as to whether, in Your greatness, You might be able to…well, to give this car power. Let it start, so that I might escape this place. Amen.
The key was in the ignition. Sweating badly, heart pounding, he turned it. The lock gave, but there wasn’t a single sound from the car, not even the choking sound of a dead engine. Nothing. He tried again. Still nothing.
This can’t fucking be, he thought despairingly. He tried the radio and got nothing—no digital illumination, no fuzz, no nothing.
Trembling now, he sat back, leaving the keys dangling from the ignition. He closed his eyes. Nothing was working, okay, great, but what did that mean? He didn’t know. There were too many implications, and he couldn’t get past his first suspicion: that he was dreaming.
He opened his eyes and looked out at the empty street. To the left, almost adjacent to his car, he saw a squashed cat. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t seen it before. Its guts formed a gruesome mound next to it like a dehydrated placental sac. There were flies on it, but they weren’t moving; they, too, were apparently dead.
What made you feel as if you were dreaming when you were in a dream? The first thing was that you knew you were dreaming—beyond a doubt. Hadn’t he felt that way when he’d first seen those odd messages in the house?
If you know you’re dreaming, then you know you can awake.
For the next thirty minutes, Charley Allen sat in the car and tried to awake. He pinched himself; he closed his eyes and imagined Sarah, imagined his bedroom so that he might open his eyes and be there. It was useless. Nothing was working. He was still in the awful neighborhood with
the house in which some deranged lover had beaten their cheating ex to death…oh, God, just tell me what this is, okay? Just what the fuck is this! Tears began to cloud his vision.
He slowly got out of the car. All of his muscles felt weak. He moved with the heaviness and lethargy of a severely depressed person. For some reason, he walked towards the cat and stood above it. Had he known that this random cat was the driving force behind his current situation, he might have laughed. As he didn’t, no laughter escaped him. He gazed down at the cat, then up to the house in which something terrible had happened to him. What that something was, Charley Allen had no idea.
There is a better place, he thought.
Charley collapsed on the street. The squashed cat and he were the only things in sight.
Holy God help me.
Charley put his head in his hands and began to cry.
4
When the crying stopped, when he felt like he had some control of himself, Charley Allen stood and looked at the house. The house had done this to him; he was certain of it. Its hopeless, peeling façade concealed the secrets that lurked in the cold darkness. The shutters were eyes and the front porch was a chin. It was a sinister face. It seemed to smile a Mona Lisa smile, as if to say: I know what happened to you, Young Friend, but I will not tell you. The brightness of the paint was muted and terrible. The house had had its revenge. Build me here and let me rot. Give me insanity and let me die with that knowledge. I know, you see. I know what he did, the lover: he stabbed her a hundred times, each one a varying interval of insanity, Young Friend. Then he had left those messages just for you.
I should go back in, he told himself.
Why?
He didn’t know. He supposed that, if the house had done this to him, then it could undo too. He hesitated for a moment, then started across the empty street. The wind came down upon him and in his mind the house seemed to shrink and expand ever-so-slightly as if in anticipation of his approach. He got the front porch, stopped, then went up the steps. The front door was a rectangular blackness that somehow seemed to drawn breath, as if to pull him inside.