It wasn’t a big place, the Museum of Death; rather small and cramped, but that lent to its ambiance. The man behind the glass window would solemnly take your five spot and give you a generic ticket like at a third rate carnival. You would then walk through the small rooms (clearly what used to be a living space or storeroom beneath the tavern), and question your sensibilities about life in general as you gazed upon crime scene photographs and serial killer fan mail, gritty police Polaroids and Pogo the Clown paintings.
The litter was nothing more than old newspapers and flyers for clubs and three-dollar punk rock shows with bands like Cock Mongers and Blue Orifice (Calvin could only imagine what kind of noise bands like that made).
He was about to leave, unsatisfied, when the small stairway at the bottom of which he stood became swallowed in shadow.
Looking up, Calvin was startled to see a form silhouetted in shafts of sunlight.
“You came for the Museum of Death, did you not?” the man said, his voice familiar, though Calvin wasn’t in a position to properly place his face—it couldn’t be seen with the sun glaring in from behind the figure. It reminded Calvin of the DVD cover to John Carpenter’s The Thing.
“Yes,” Calvin said a bit too eagerly.
“It is gone, as you can see.”
The man began descending the stairs, taking slow, deliberate steps.
Calving tried to process the voice, to understand why it was so familiar, but he couldn’t find a fitting face. The voice was deeply baritone, someone who would have made a good living doing voice-overs for horror film trailers, or maybe narrating Christopher Lee’s biography.
Calvin felt a tinge of fear as the man descended, but asked his question anyway, his newfound passion to find the Death’s Door video overshadowing his inhibitions. “What happened to it? Did it move to a new location?”
“No.” The man was three stairs away from Calvin, his bulk all but eclipsing the sunlight that beat upon his back. “I haven’t seen anyone so eager to return. No one would care to spend more than a minute down here in this piss-filled stairwell, wouldn’t rummage through the litter for a clue as the whereabouts of their precious museum.”
“Well—” Calvin didn’t know what to say. He was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the strange man before him, his voice like an angel of death, the smell of him something better left alone.
“I have something for you,” said the deep voice. The man reached into his seemingly endless coat and produced a VHS tape. “I believe this is what you were looking for.” He reached out the video, clutched in a black-gloved hand.
Calvin pivoted his head to see the man’s face. Nothing.
“Take it.”
“What is it?”
“You know what it is. It’s the only one in existence. I want you to have it.”
Calvin hesitated right up until the shadow of the man before him grew to such a proportion that he blocked all light from the stairwell, cloaking Calvin in claustrophobic darkness. Calvin screamed. In no more than a second’s time the darkness disappeared, leaving Calvin alone with a video in his hand.
It was as quick as the blink of an eye, the man’s appearance, like something that never happened. Calvin was left with the faint and fading quality of a disturbed dream that drowned in one’s subconscious after waking.
The foul odor of recycled malt liquor infiltrated Calvin’s nose, returning his consciousness to the present. He took the stairs to the sidewalk above. The two college types were gone from the façade of the tavern. It was an average midday in downtown San Diego. No one in the vicinity fit the description of the strange man, and the sun seemed brighter, like its very goal was to melt Calvin’s eyes.
Calvin looked at the tape, regarding it as something left over from the set of porno film shoot. The label had since worn off leaving only the residual ghost of the glue that once held it there. He wondered if the original label was even that of Death’s Door or some other movie, Death’s Door having been recorded over it.
The man had said it was the only one in existence, but Calvin had his doubts. It may be nothing at all, perhaps someone’s home video or a bad kung fu flick. The guy was probably messing with Calvin.
But Calvin wasn’t sure about that. As he took the bus home he thought about the man in the stairwell, particularly his voice. It was so familiar that Calvin was certain he would recognize him were he to see the man’s face. Perhaps that’s why the man hadn’t allowed Calvin to see his face. Maybe it had been on purpose.
On the bus, Calvin decided that the strange man must have had a cape or a sheet and raised his arms to blot out the sun after which he placed the video in Calvin’s hand and rushed out of the stairway, the brilliance of the light temporarily blinding Calvin for a moment. It wasn’t all that logical, but he couldn’t come up with anything better to explain what had happened. It was important for Calvin to rationalize what had happened. That was how he learned to deal with his fears when he was young. When things were rational, they weren’t as frightening.
The experience seemed otherworldly, but Calvin wasn’t about to go there with his musings. He wanted to see what was on the videotape. If it was nothing more than a random home video or a bad horror flick, it would be apparent that he’d been pranked, and that would be that. He could go on with his life and try to lure Ronnie back.
She would come back to him. This he knew. She was carrying their child. She needed him to be there when the baby was born. This wasn’t something he used against her, but a solid truth. Her leaving his apartment was perhaps not wholly due to the image he showed her of the dead body, but a culmination of things. Though they were both on board with living in a partnership, she had been hinting that it was time to live together. It wasn’t that Calvin was against this progression in their life, but that he had to be ready. And he just wasn’t ready yet. When the baby’s born… maybe then.
Of course maybe then! Most certainly then. What was he going to do, have Ronnie take care of their child at her mother’s house?
The bus hummed as Calvin pondered the complexities of his life. Things had been so simple after high school. Not at all as big and scary as his father and teachers had made it out to be. He got a job in construction and moved out of the house in no time. Screw all that college stuff. That’s where things got testy. That’s where the real stress in life started. But he’d avoided that. Did enough schooling all his damn life, so why voluntarily do more? Hard knocks, man.
Thing is, this whole baby deal was starting to get him nervous. That was part of why he dodged Ronnie’s conversations whenever she mentioned moving in together. He currently lived in a one-bedroom apartment in El Cajon, the largest city in eastern San Diego County. Some people called it the armpit of San Diego, but Calvin figured Logan Heights or the Barrio was the asshole. If he and Ronnie were to live together they could swing it in his place for a little while, but would ultimately need a bigger home. Two bedrooms so they could have a proper bedroom once the baby became a toddler. On his wage, in a city like San Diego, that was going to be a tall order, especially if they wanted to stay in a place as dapper as the Armpit rather than one of the many Assholes like Lemon Grove or City Heights. Ronnie acted like she could manage moving to a rougher city if need be, but Calvin wasn’t down with that.
In fact, the bus was now cruising along El Cajon Boulevard, which, despite the street’s name being the same as the town Calvin lived in, ran through many of the ethnic neighborhoods and meaner streets where rents were more affordable and schoolyards were fenced in and had metal detectors. Just rolling through these neighborhoods reminded Calvin of another thorn in his side: he didn’t have a car.