I went over and looked out. He was lying on the fire escape, his head against the railing. He looked right at me.
“You crazy, cocksucker. What if there hadn’t been no fire escape?”
“You’d have your ass punched into the bricks. Still might.”
He got up quick and clamored down the fire escape like a squirrel. I watched him till he got to the ground and went limping away down the alley between some overturned trash cans and a slinking dog.
I picked up his razor and put it in my pocket with the one I already had, then walked over and kicked the big man in the head just because I could.
I KNOCKED ON THE DOOR. NO ONE ANSWERED. I COULD HEAR SOUNDS FROM inside. It was similar to what I had heard on that record, but not quite, and it was faint, as if coming from a distance.
No one answered my knock, so I stuck the key in the door and opened it and went straight away inside.
I almost lost my breath when I did.
The air in the room was thick and it stunk of mildew and rot and things long dead. It made those boiled pigs’ feet and that pissing cat and that rottentooth bastard downstairs smell like perfume.
Tootie was lying on the bed, on his back. His eyes were closed. He was a guy usually dressed to the top, baby, but his shirt was wrinkled and dirty and sweaty at the neck and armpits. His pants were nasty too. He had on his shoes, but no socks. He looked like someone had set him on fire and then beat out the flames with a two-by-four. His face was like a skull, he had lost so much flesh, and he was as bony under his clothes as a skeleton.
Where his hands lay on the sheet, there were bloodstains. His guitar was next to the bed, and there were stacks and stacks of composition notebooks lying on the floor. A couple of them were open and filled with writing. Hell, I didn’t even know Tootie could write.
The wall on the far side was marked up in black and red paint; there were all manner of musical notes drawn on it, along with symbols I had never seen before; swiggles and circles and stick figure drawings. Blood was on the wall too, most likely from Tootie’s bleeding fingers. Two open paint cans, the red and the black, were on the floor with brushes stuck up in them. Paint was splattered on the floor and had dried in humped-up blisters. The guitar had bloodstains all over it.
A record player, plugged in, sitting on a nightstand by the bed, was playing that strange music. I went to it right away and picked up the needle and set it aside. And let me tell you, just making my way across the room to get hold of the player was like wading through mud with my ankles tied together. It seemed to me as I got closer to the record, the louder it got, and the more ill I felt. My head throbbed. My heart pounded.
When I had the needle up and the music off, I went over and touched Tootie. He didn’t move, but I could see his chest rising and falling. Except for his hands, he didn’t seem hurt. He was in a deep sleep. I picked up his right hand and turned it over and looked at it. The fingers were cut deep, like someone had taken a razor to the tips. Right off, I figured that was from playing his guitar. Struck me, that to get the sounds he got out of it, he really had to dig in with those fingers. And from the looks of this room, he had been at it nonstop, until recent.
I shook him. His eyes fluttered and finally opened. They were bloodshot and had dark circles around them.
When he saw me, he startled, and his eyes rolled around in his head like those little games kids get where you try to shake the marbles into holes. After a moment, they got straight, and he said, “Ricky?”
That was another reason I hated him. I didn’t like being called Ricky.
I said, “Hello, shithead. Your sister’s worried sick.”
“The music,” he said. “Put the music back on.”
“You call that music?” I said.
He took a deep breath, then rolled out of the bed, nearly knocking me aside. Then I saw him jerk, like he’d seen a truck coming right at him. I turned. I wished it had been a truck.
LET ME TRY AND TELL YOU WHAT I SAW. I NOT ONLY SAW IT, I FELT IT. IT WAS in the very air we were breathing, getting inside my chest like mice wearing barbed-wire coats. The wall Tootie had painted and drawn all that crap on shook.
And then the wall wasn’t a wall at all. It was a long hallway, dark as original sin. There was something moving in there, something that slithered and slid and made smacking sounds like an anxious old drunk about to take his next drink. Stars popped up, greasy stars that didn’t remind me of anything I had ever seen in the night sky; a moon the color of a bleeding fish eye was in the background, and it cast a light on something moving toward us.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“No,” Tootie said. “It’s not him.”
Tootie jumped to the record player, picked up the needle, and put it on. There came that rotten sound I had heard with Alma May, and I knew that what I had heard when I first came into the room was the tail end of that same record playing, the part I hadn’t heard before.
The music screeched and howled. I bent over and threw up. I fell back against the bed, tried to get up, but my legs were like old pipe cleaners. That record had taken the juice out of me. And then I saw it.
There’s no description that really fits. It was . . . a thing. All blanketwrapped in shadow with sucker mouths and thrashing tentacles and centipede legs mounted on clicking hooves. A bulblike head plastered all over with red and yellow eyes that seemed to creep. All around it, shadows swirled like water. It had a beak. Well, beaks.
The thing was coming right out of the wall. Tentacles thrashed toward me. One touched me across the cheek. It was like being scalded with hot grease. A shadow come loose of the thing, fell onto the floorboards of the room, turned red, and raced across the floor like a gush of blood. Insects and maggots squirmed in the bleeding shadow, and the record hit a high spot so loud and so goddamn strange, I ground my teeth, felt as if my insides were being twisted up like wet wash. And then I passed out.
WHEN I CAME TO, THE MUSIC WAS STILL PLAYING. TOOTIE WAS BENT over me.
“That sound,” I said.
“You get used to it,” Tootie said, “but the thing can’t. Or maybe it can, but just not yet.”
I looked at the wall. There was no alleyway. It was just a wall plastered in paint designs and spots of blood.
“And if the music stops?” I said.
“I fall asleep,” Tootie said. “Record quits playing, it starts coming.”
For a moment I didn’t know anything to say. I finally got off the floor and sat on the bed. I felt my cheek where the tentacle hit me. It throbbed and I could feel blisters. I also had a knot on my head where I had fallen.
“Almost got you,” Tootie said. “I think you can leave and it won’t come after you. Me, I can’t. I leave, it follows. It’ll finally find me. I guess here is as good as any place.”
I was looking at him, listening, but not understanding a damn thing.
The record quit. Tootie started it again. I looked at the wall. Even that blank moment without sound scared me. I didn’t want to see that thing again. I didn’t even want to think about it.
“I haven’t slept in days, until now,” Tootie said, coming to sit on the bed. “You hadn’t come in, it would have got me, carried me off, taken my soul. But you can leave. It’s my lookout, not yours . . . I’m always in some kind of shit, ain’t I, Ricky?”
“That’s the truth.”
“This, though, it’s the corker. I got to stand up and be a man for once. I got to fight this thing back, and all I got is the music. Like I told you, you can go.”
I shook my head. “Alma May sent me. I said I’d bring you back.”
It was Tootie’s turn to shake his head. “Nope. I ain’t goin’. I ain’t done nothin’ but mess up Sis’s life. I ain’t gonna do it.”
“First responsible thing I ever heard you say,” I said.