Some forgotten old lyric sprouted in Calvin’s mind. Once you’re born you start dying.
He clicked the touch pad, bringing forth another picture of death, this one of a suicide. The body was wasted away, having not been discovered for over a week in the heat of a Texas summer. He clicked the touch pad again, revealing the next picture. They were pretty gruesome. It was almost hard to believe that there was a time when he and his best friend would scour the Internet looking for this stuff. Back in those infantile days of the World Wide Web it was all about rotten.com, and they had spent a lot of time staring at these kinds of pictures with stupid grins on their faces, priding themselves that they had the intestinal fortitude to eat lunch and look at this stuff. They had even joked once that a particularly gangrenous wound looked kind of like meatball marinara, and damn that made them hungry for a sub sandwich.
Calvin understood why Ronnie left, but was a bit confused as to why she fled so quickly. He wasn’t trying to be cruel or gross her out. He just wanted to calm what he saw to be an irrational fear. It hadn’t occurred to him that maybe the pregnancy had something to do with her response.
He clicked the next grisly photo: a half a body found floating in the ocean, likely the victim of a shark attack or perhaps the guy was sleepin’ wit da fishes.
Ronnie couldn’t be far up Madison Avenue, but Calvin wanted to call her. She may not hear her cell phone ring, but would she answer anyway? He thought not. Ronnie was the type of girl who would call when she was damn well ready to talk. She’d always been that way. She might not have been able to stomach what Calvin showed her, but she was one of the strongest willed people Calvin had ever met. What in hell made him think he could enlighten her after the cage fighter clip had upset her so badly?
In the meantime he flipped through the pictures on deadthings.com. It wasn’t quite what he had been looking for earlier, before ushering Ronnie off in disgust. He had been looking for a video called Death’s Door. It was by far the most grisly death-scenes video he had ever seen, more infamous than the Faces of Death videos and harder to find than the Traces of Death series. It was the kind of video that you found at the swap meet, but only if you asked the guy selling movies, and only if he trusted you.
It was at the Museum of Death that Calvin first saw Death’s Door. He was but sixteen years old and more excited about being able to drive downtown to the infamous Museum of Death than he was anything else when he passed his driving exam. At the time, he was into heavy metal and horror movies, the more blood and guts the better. Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a great film, a classic, but not bloody enough for Calvin’s tastes. He had preferred Peter Jackson gore fests like Dead Alive and Bad Taste or Italian splatter flicks from Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi. The acting and plot had been secondary to his insatiable passion for the red and chunky.
But that was back when he was an impressionable teenager. Eventually he began to realize the brilliance of films like Halloween and golden age classics going back to silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Unknown. If it was horror, Calvin was into it.
He seemed to be able to find everything but Death’s Door. Calvin had always thought you could find anything on the Net, but apparently he was wrong.
A glance at the clock told him it had been a half an hour since Ronnie left. She would be home by now, probably telling her mother how much of a creep he was, a would-be serial killer, a goddamned freak-psycho-sadist.
He had never seen her get so mad over anything before, not to the point of fleeing his house and high tailing it down the road. She was strong willed, but not rash. Must have something to do with the pregnancy. Next to the images he’d just seen on his computer, he couldn’t get that thought out of his mind. He’d been insensitive. That shit didn’t bode well with pregnant women, even in the first trimester.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she was expecting and he hadn’t even popped the question yet. Though they had mutually agreed that marriage wasn’t something they believed in, he knew that opinions changed. What if this was just the catalyst for something deeper?
Till death do we part, thought Calvin. The notorious vow struck him as odd, so many people mentioning their mortality on the day of their marriage. It’s always there, death is, hiding in the shadows or peering over our shoulders, waiting for the fatal accident, a purposeful murder, a desperate suicide, a debilitating disease. Always there to collect on God’s bet.
God’s bet? Calvin wasn’t a believer, but he found himself using religious terms from time to time as if somewhere in his secular upbringing someone slipped subliminal Bible tapes in the stereo while he was sleeping.
Another look at the clock told him it had been two hours. He couldn’t believe he had been sitting at the computer for that long searching out a miserable video that seemed to have never been in existence, its scarcity lending to its dark aura and also to Calvin’s sudden obsession to find it.
He had called Ronnie once in that two-hour span. Left her an apologetic message, trying his best to sound sorrowful though he was half absorbed with the images of death on his computer. As he set the phone down, his eyes never leaving the scenes of lost mortality, the message seemed like a throwaway memory, and he wasn’t even sure what he said to her.
But that was two hours ago.
Downtown there was a tavern with a little stairway beside it leading to a door with an engraved wooden sign above that read: The Museum of Death. It was calling to him.
Once you’re born you start dying.
Chapter Two
There were two college types standing outside the tavern. They gave Calvin suspicious eyes as he descended the stairs beneath the weather-cracked sign of the Museum of Death. The stairway was dark like walking into an underground crypt. Calvin supposed that was a part of the attraction.
At the bottom of the stairs Calvin faced the door, but it was locked and there were no signs indicating what lay beyond, no hours of service, ticket prices—nothing.
He turned, looking up the narrow stairway and out at the world beyond, the bright sky and odors that mingled together into a distinctly urban, city smell. People walked by never looking down the flight of stairs as if these particular stairs had never existed. The overwhelming odor of malt-liquor-urine was a reminder that Calvin was standing in a bum’s bathroom. A space that was formerly the miniscule entrance to a place he had perhaps spent too many formidable afternoons in.
Cupping his hands around his face he tried to look through the window on the door, but it had been painted black long ago. Even if it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything unless there happened to be a light on inside.
Calvin had a sinking feeling just like when Ronnie walked out on him. He had an expectation, a hope that he could ask the man at the ticket booth where they acquired the Death’s Door video that had been shown in one of the small rooms of the museum all those years ago.
At Calvin’s feet was a cluster of bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and litter blown down from the street above. He knelt and carefully sifted through the trash hoping for a flyer that would have the new address of the museum, something, anything to lead him in the right direction.