Fortunately, his bedroom was on the other end of the apartment, away from the low end of the party pad’s incessant rap beats. Sometimes Calvin wondered how it was they got away with such loud parties in an apartment complex. Probably that Celia slut that lives there, sucking off the manager.
There were three twenty-somethings living in the apartment next door—Celia, Marcus and Jose—and they were a handful. If it wasn’t for Calvin’s bedroom being on the other side he would have complained by now, and those weren’t the type of people you wanted to complain about, especially if Celia was giving the manager the ole tube snake boogie, and Calvin was fairly certain she gave just about everybody that treatment. She was a certifiable tramp. If you looked up “slut” in the dictionary there was a picture of Celia.
Ronnie hated Celia, hated the way she would sit in the green plastic chair in front of her unit smoking cigarettes and mad-dogging Ronnie as she walked up the stairs to Calvin’s place. Ronnie especially hated the “fuck me” eyes she flashed at Calvin. Always just a crook of a grin there. It was a practiced expression that Celia had probably mastered by the time she was thirteen.
“Hi, Cal,” the bitch would say, batting her fake eyelashes, makeup only a few levels below that of a clown. Ronnie could rip her face off the way she looked at her boyfriend, but that would only create a problem between Calvin and his neighbors, namely Marcus and Jose, so she just dealt with it and had faith that Calvin would never succumb to temptation, not that she thought he was tempted. You would have to be high on glue to want to touch a skank like Celia.
Calvin shut his door and slipped into bed. There hadn’t been too much trouble with the neighbors, but that could always change when someone’s favorite song came on the radio. Jose didn’t like him, Calvin knew that, and Marcus was nonchalant, but that damn Celia, she always had the look in her eyes like she wanted to eat his underwear for breakfast.
The room was dark, quiet and peaceful, until the shadows began to shift, replacing thoughts of Calvin’s neighbors with that of decaying flesh, dead bodies in puddles of blood like spilled red wine leaking from bullet holes, lacerations, decapitations. Death bloat. Rot. Execution. Dismemberment.
Calvin desperately wanted to sleep, but couldn’t relax, and his mind was beginning to get the best of him. Corpses stared from the dark, some of them creeping up all slow like zombies. All faces Calvin knew, faces from Death’s Door.
Calvin’s eyes darted around the room. He tried to see the corpses for what they were, just images in his mind like his eyes were able to project holograms, like sick effigies. The one staring at him with the destroyed mouth from a suicide shot, for example, was nothing more than his swivel chair with a jacket hanging on it. Try as he might, Calvin couldn’t shake the image of Suicide Man staring at him with questioning eyes. Hey man, nice shot.
“You…” the man said, his voice gurgling from the glistening mess that was once his mouth and throat. His voice came out in a sluice of thick blood and a pulped tongue. “You watch my suicide! Why?”
Calvin’s arms and legs erupted in gooseflesh. He reached his hand out and turned on the bedside lamp extinguishing the images that flooded his dark room and revealing what he knew was there all along: nothing but a bedroom. No dead bodies.
Russ’ words echoed in Calvin’s mind: “There are some things that aren’t meant to be seen over and over again, and the images on that video… I think maybe they’re better left alone.”
But there was something like a spell, something that defied logic, calling to Calvin, a voice in his mind deep and demanding.
“I can’t sleep with the light on.”
Calvin tried to ignore the voice, to push it aside, but it was persistent, and it called for him to get the video from the living room and play it in his bedroom. The TV would create a light source that would keep the nasties away.
Because they will never go away, Calvin, said the voice.
“I…” but he couldn’t say anything, and before he knew it, he was retrieving Death’s Door from the living room and placing it into the TV/DVD/VCR combination unit in his bedroom.
He rewound the video to the beginning and smiled as I. B. Ghastly began a morbid narration, describing each death scene with lush reverence like a connoisseur of the macabre, a ringmaster of filth, a conductor of the vile.
Calvin could rest easy now that the faces weren’t looking at him, but locked in the video where they belonged. Mr. Ghastly’s soothing voice serenaded and soon enough Calvin fell asleep.
“… Smuggled in from Middle Eastern countries. Many of these images have never been seen on American soiclass="underline" decapitation, death by firing squad, body pits, torture. Are you ready, Calvin? Have you not seen enough murder and death yet?”
Calvin was fast asleep by the time I. B. Ghastly began talking to him, and this time it was very much like a hypnotic weight-loss or quit-smoking tape. Very much indeed.
“These scenes are for you, Calvin, all for you.”
The videotape stopped, darkening the room. Mr. Ghastly’s narration continued in Calvin’s dreams, visions of a thousand deaths dancing in his mind like a putrescent version of the Dia de los Muertos parades in Mexico, only the skeletons weren’t made of candy, they were real.
Chapter Six
Ronnie arrived at Calvin’s house to pick him up for their date Saturday afternoon. She asked him when he was going to get a car, which was a go-to question almost every time she picked him up for a date. She wasn’t exactly old fashioned, but something about picking him up all the time was wrong. He had a good enough job, and was damn lucky his boss picked him up everyday—most electrician’s apprentices were required to have their own form of transportation. Maybe if his boss gave him an ultimatum Calvin would actually hit some used car lots or check out Craigslist.
He told her that he had a truck once, when he was sixteen. It was a gift from his parents, a Frankenstein vehicle that was assembled from his uncle Gus’s junkyard. He wrecked it when he was nineteen and never looked back. Ronnie wondered if it was the wreck that frightened him from driving again or if he was just too lazy and unenthusiastic to bother. With an uncle who owns a junkyard, she would have thought Calvin’s options to be pretty well open.
Calvin didn’t know shit about cars, though. He couldn’t even change his own oil much less fix up an old junker, because the truth was, Uncle Gus would give him a vehicle from his junkyard as long as Calvin fixed it up himself.
“Uncle Gus only says that because he knows I don’t know how to work on engines,” Calvin said after Ronnie drilled him about his car situation. “He’s not as nice as he seems, you know. He charged my dad for my old truck, and it was a piece of shit.”
“That damn Celia was sitting out there when I walked up,” Ronnie said, changing the subject on the drop of a dime, as she was known to do. “I can’t stand her.”
“They had a party last night. Probably hung over.”
“How do they get away with that? Doesn’t anyone complain?”
“I think the manager parties with them, that and the fact that they have a corner unit. Besides me, their only other neighbor is number C down stairs, and I think they’re old and deaf.”
“Number C?”
“Number, letter, whatever.”
Calvin’s fuse was short despite him waking up feeling better than he had in weeks. He really hadn’t been looking forward to seeing Ronnie. He couldn’t explain why if asked, but going out with her tonight seemed like going to a birthday party for a co-worker because you feel it’s the right thing to do, watching the clock like an eagle for enough time to slide by so you can leave without looking like a complete asshole.