“Why won’t you let me in!” he shouted and then thought, Christ, I’m acting as if this thing were human.
A voice shouted from behind him, “Hey!”
Samuel turned, half expecting to see a wonderful peace officer standing there with his little shiny badge in his little blue suit. Instead, it was a slight man in dirty navy-colored coveralls, supporting himself against the handle of a wide broom. “Hey,” he repeated, moving closer to Samuel, his right hand swishing the broom forward while the other hand braced his back as he crept along in the gravel. “Yuh-yuh-you wuh-wuh-want in there?”
The man was very close to Samuel now. Samuel noticed that his left eye blinked rapidly open and closed while his right eye stared forward, occasionally shooting off to catch some movement in the woods beside them.
“I guess I want in there almost more than anything, right now,” Samuel told the man.
“Huh-huh-who are you?” the man stuttered.
“Samuel Bean,” he said, extending his hand. “And you?”
“Kuh-Kuh-Kent MMMMMMurr,” he spat out, switching the broom to his left hand and holding out his right. “Huh-huh-Who suh-suh-sent you?” Both eyes were now open wide, boring into Samuel.
“Who sent me? Whaddya mean?” Samuel asked and then realized that he didn’t want to wait through the man stammering out an explanation. “Well, nobody, I guess. I’m doing a painting. Just decided to come down and check it out. So, you can get me in?”
“Sure can,” Kent Murr spat out and began walking outrageously slow toward the padlocked door. Samuel followed him, anxiety like lighter fluid on the flames of his anger.
After what seemed like an hour, Murr finally reached the door. He leaned his broom against the dirty brick of the outside, hunched down, and seized the lock in shaky hands. After several attempts at trying to line the key up with the slit in the lock, Samuel grabbed the tiny key ring with this one single key on it and pushed it in.
Murr began stammering as Samuel jiggled the key around until he heard a click. “Luh-luh-live uh-uh-up yonder in da da woods…”
Samuel pulled the heavy door up.
“She died in there,” Murr said with no stammer. “Still in there,” he added, deftly seizing the key from the lock and moving away.
When Samuel turned to watch him go, Murr was already a few yards away. “Duh-duh-don’t ferget to cuh-cuh-close up,” the man called from over his shoulder, raising his right hand in a wave of departure.
“Fucking nut,” Samuel muttered before entering the factory.
Inside seemed impossibly cold. Inside seemed impossibly damp. Inside seemed impossibly dark and dirty. Samuel decided he preferred the outside, but his fascination and curiosity pushed him farther in.
Samuel, having felt as clean as a newborn less than an hour before, automatically felt grimy and dirty. Shattered bricks, cinders, and shredded shingling littered the floor with copious amounts of animal excrement dropped from various dwellers of the dark. Spider webs clung to every possible corner. There didn’t seem to be any opening anywhere. Samuel began to feel very claustrophobic even though the inside of this manufactured manufacturing beast was huge. The darkness and filth were oppressive.
‘She died in there,’ Samuel mused the words of Kent Murr. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Who died in here? Careful, man, you’ll spook yourself out. Try not to think about it. Think of Gina. Sweet Gina. ‘She died in there. Still in there.’ What the hell!? Who.
Samuel pulled a tiny toylike flashlight, the only thing he’d had, from his pocket and shuffled deeper into the darkness. His beam of light fell on rows of antiquated machines of mass production. They were set in rows. He marveled at the exact design of each row and how every machine in that row looked the same. They’d even aged the same way, the spiders spinning their overtly similar webs, the bats shitting the same piles of shit in the same exact spots. And he moved along the ends of these rows, not wanting to get in between the machines, afraid they may start up and devour him.
Samuel was drinking the darkness, the clotted textures, moving farther and farther back into the old factory.
Something caught his eye.
A light.
Farther back in the factory a light was on.
Samuel paused. It wasn’t fear really. He had to devise a plan for he was certain about proceeding to the very place that light was on. Probably, he reasoned, it was just something the creepy Kent Murr had concocted because an old factory wasn’t really abandoned if there were still lights on in it, was it? Maybe it served as some sort of makeshift hideout for a group of kids or some bums that had grown tired of riding the rails. Samuel figured he would just stick to the truth. He was a painter. He had to know what this place looked like on the inside. Kent Murr had let him in. No harm to anyone. He would just turn and walk away.
As he drew closer to the light, he had no real use for his weak flashlight. It was a fluorescent light and he saw now that it was coming from a room. What he’d seen from way back there was just the doorway. The door wasn’t even open. All that light was pouring from the window of the door. Samuel could see flowers on the wall in there.
The closer he got the more clearly he could see but the scene got farther from his understanding. He’d never seen anything like it so he had to put it together piece by piece.
Okay. It had once been somebody’s office but it was now devoid of any real office qualities except for the huge wooden desk in the middle of the floor. A naked body adorned the surface of the desk. Flowers were scattered all over the floor, climbing the walls, outlining the body on the desk.
Samuel opened the door, greeted with the scent of the flowers. It smelled like walking in the hills after a spring rain.
Samuel stared at the figure, a beautiful female figure. She was young and quite voluptuous in her nudity, though lifeless. He noticed her eyes; large, gray, staring into the bright fluorescent above the desk. Her skin was smooth and gray, but so beautiful, so many shades and values. Her hair was jet black, cascading in soft rolling waves over her shoulders.
“My daughter,” a voice said from the darkness behind Samuel.
His heart pounded. He froze with confusion and, yes, now fear. Being in the bright room had caused him to lose whatever night vision he’d gained and the darkest of dark greeted him as he turned to face the voice. Samuel placed the voice as Kent Murr’s.
Murr stepped into the bright light and Samuel realized that he was much thinner and paler than he had at first thought. From behind his back Murr pulled a bouquet of red roses that the lighting turned nearly violet. He picked up the oldest looking bouquet of flowers at the foot of the body, pulled them up to discard them on the floor, and put the new bouquet in their place.
“The prettiest things grow wild up there. In the hills.”
“They’re all very beautiful.” Samuel made it a point to stay at least arm’s length from Murr. Samuel realized that Murr no longer stuttered and his eyes were perfectly normal, sedately hooded at that. He couldn’t help looking away from Murr to drink in the sight of the body on the desk.
“She’s not dead,” Murr said, placing a hand on her foot. “Touch her. You’ll see.”
Samuel reached out and touched her forearm. Although she wasn’t as warm as a living human body, she wasn’t completely without temperature. And her skin felt very pliant, like one of the petals on the flowers surrounding her.
“Unbelievable,” Samuel whispered. “Why is she in here?”
“Oh, she was dead once. When I found her. She can’t go out in the real world.”
A slight moan escaped the body. A very low, sensuous moan. Her eyes blinked once.
“Sometimes she gets hungry.”
Murr unbuttoned the cuff of his right coverall. The wrist was purple, mangled and scarred. With his left hand, Murr pulled a small knife from his pocket and made a very surface incision on his wrist. He let the blood drip over her lips and chin before lowering his wrist and letting her hungrily suckle.
When he pulled his wrist away, her tongue snaked down over her chin, licking it clean, leaving it glistening with her saliva.
“I know what you thought, out there,” he motioned toward the front of the factory. “You thought I was the village idiot. Hopefully everyone does. When Linda was alive, I was the proudest father in the world. Mr. Bean, you don’t know how much I loved Linda. No, it was nothing sick. I wanted all the best for her and was able to provide it. I wish I could have done more. She always came to me with all of her problems. I listened attentively, trying to offer suggestions. Just trying to help. Then I began to fool myself when she stopped coming to me. ‘She’s too young to have serious problems,’ I told myself. There’s nothing wrong. She’s just growing up. It was all lies. Still, I don’t know what pulsed inside her brain. I don’t know what happened to her. What led to her death.”
Murr walked around behind the desk. Tears rolled silently down his cheeks.
“My daughter,” he stroked her hair with his hand. “Exactly as I found her. I had to rob her grave to put her back, but she’s still beautiful.”
Samuel knew that Murr was trying his best to sound casual and poetic even though the tremor in his voice was threatening to throw him into incomprehensible sobs.
“I ran this place. I owned this place. She was only seventeen. I don’t know why she was down here. I don’t know if I really want to know. But one or more of those vile mindless beasts that sold their lives to this stinking death hole murdered her. Maybe she did ask for it. Maybe she was that kind of girl. She was never easy. But this. Nothing justifies this.”
Awkward under standard social interactions, Samuel was entirely without words.
“I’m sorry,” Murr said, breaking down. “Is this… is this what you wanted to know.”
“This is, uh, more tragic than anything I could have ever imagined. I’m very sorry.”
Samuel extended his hand and entwined his fingers with Murr’s thin and trembling fingers over Linda’s body. Not only was Samuel no longer afraid of Murr, he wanted him to feel every bit of sympathy he was able to give.
“Well,” Murr began. “I suppose you got things you gotta get back to.”
Samuel took his cue to leave.
“Thank you for letting me in, Mr. Murr,” Samuel said and left.
Once outside, Samuel felt drained and sensuously dirty. He started home toward Gina, wanting only one thing—beautiful, seventeen-year-old, dead Linda Murr.
Gina greeted Samuel at the door, practically yanking him inside. After shutting the door, she quickly unfastened his pants and had them down to his knees. Her hands were all over him—her lips, her tongue—and nothing was happening.
Samuel’s mind was back in the industry. The face of Linda Murr as she licked her father’s blood from her lips. So beautiful in her death.
She was death.
She was darkness.
She was loneliness.
She was the muse.
And by the time Samuel started getting excited, Gina was frustrated.
“I need to finish the painting,” Samuel said.
“It’s been almost a month,” she was nearly crying. “We haven’t even been married a year and you’ve already stopped fucking me!”
In his studio, Samuel couldn’t concentrate enough to paint. He was planning his next visit to the industry where the heart of the painting, alive in death, breathed and throbbed beneath the surface of his fingertips.
Samuel spent the next few hours smoking cigarette after cigarette, gazing between his now lifeless canvas and the dark expanse out his window, listening to Gina bang from room to room in the house, slamming every door as violently hard as possible. Eventually she burst through the door to the studio.
She stalked toward him so fast he nearly fell out of his chair. She had suitcases in her hands.
“You call this working?” She walked over to the painting. “Yeah, that’s beautiful. Really fucking brilliant. I can’t even tell what the fuck it is. That must mean it’s really good, huh? Wait, though, it needs something.” She coughed and spit onto the painting. She was crying, shaking, near hysterical with anger. “I’m going to stay with my parents for a while. Maybe you can call me when you grow a personality or a cock. Really, either one would do at this point.” Then she stormed out, slamming the door hard enough to put a crack down the middle of it.
Samuel felt numb.
He spent the rest of the evening drinking beer and Jack Daniel’s, winding up at the industry. This time the door wasn’t locked. No flashlight now and his mind was as dark and cloudy as the inside of this place.
And he found himself at her altar, his hands running over that smooth skin, color rising in her cheeks as she pulled him to her, their lips meeting.
Linda’s hands were all over him and she tasted like the sweet decay of dead roses. Samuel gasped for breath as she pulled her lips away and slid them down his neck. Samuel couldn’t open his eyes. He grew weaker with each breath he took. Feverishly, he continued to move his hands over her body, feeling the heat between her legs, the hardness of her ribs, the soft heft of her breasts, and the slow, increasingly strong beat of her heart.
Sliding into darkness, Samuel heard her voice, seductive and cold—“Mmm… I could get drunk off his blood. You bring the best flowers at night, Daddy,”—and the last thing Samuel saw through the doors of light that were flying open in his mind was Gina’s tear-streaked face.
Gina and her father have finished loading all of her stuff into the moving van. She sticks a stick of Samuel’s opium incense between the floorboards, lighting it and one of his clove cigarettes with the same match. She looks at his painting on an easel positioned in front of the window. She’s never liked his paintings but when they first met he seemed to handle her with the same passion and care as he did those horrid canvases. As she looks out the window she sees the mill sitting like a cancer on the hill. Black smoke pours from one of the hideous brown smokestacks.
‘That’s odd,’ she thinks. She figures a homeless guy has probably found a furnace and started a fire in it.
“Gina, honey, it’s all packed!” her father calls up the stairway.
“Coming, Dad!” she calls back.
Gina crushes the clove on the floor and leaves the incense burning as she crosses the room and closes the door on the smoke of Samuel.
Sad Clown, Kentucky
1.
Moments of clarity. A fleeting moment when everything makes sense. An instant when a decision is made. A life-altering decision. Charles Zasper had a moment like that. It wasn’t the moment he found his mother dead. No, his moment of clarity, his epiphany, came later. But it couldn’t have happened if his mother had not died. In fact, he would realize later, perhaps to relieve himself of any guilt he felt, that everything had to happen exactly the way it did for him to get where it was he was going.
2.
Charles Zasper was not an extraordinary man and the circumstances that brought him to live with his mother were not extraordinary circumstances. In the life of Charles Zasper, things just happened. And, up to a point, they happened in an ordinary fashion.
Charlie graduated from Oretown High School in southwestern Ohio with average grades. He selected an average community college to attend, planning on majoring in computer science when he finished his requirements. When he was twenty, he met an average woman, although it took him a while to realize she was average. It was also when he was twenty that he dropped out of school and went to work in one of Oretown’s many factories. It wasn’t a spectacularly high-paying factory, for those did exist in Oretown. It was an average factory, a paper mill that made boxes for White Castle restaurants that paid average wages and had average benefits.
Charlie and his wife, Nora, bought a house in one of Oretown’s many average suburbs. There they ate, slept, fucked, argued, and talked about having kids. But Charlie had a low sperm count. Even they give a lackluster performance, he sometimes thought. When he was twenty-five, Charlie
and Nora went through an average divorce. They had simply grown tired of one another. The good days were no longer good enough to cancel out the bad ones. Charlie quit his job at the paper mill and moved in with his mother. Between his half of the divorce settlement that came from selling the house and splitting the money in half and his mother’s social security, Charlie didn’t figure he’d have to work again for a long time, if he lived modestly.
Which was good, because Mother was getting on in years and Charlie didn’t really have any intention of ever working again. He didn’t see the point in it. It felt like he was working for somebody else. Besides, Mother needed somebody to look after her. Ever since Charlie’s dad died when he was twelve, Mother had been fiercely independent. But now it was nice to have someone go to the store for her, or make out the bills, or help with some of the more laborious upkeep of the house. Charlie was that person. It was something he didn’t mind doing. He loved his mother and it was nice to spend time with her before she died. It was clear she was going to die soon. At least, it was clear to her.
“The beautiful place is calling my name, Charlie,” she would say. He didn’t really want to hear it. He didn’t want to think about her dying but he knew it was inevitable.
Charlie spent most of his time at Mother’s house stoned during the day and drunk in the evening, watching television and reading books. Well, he had started out splicing his TV watching with reading but then he realized most of the books he had thought he enjoyed contained stuff he didn’t really want to think about. The television was different, though. It didn’t really matter what was on, Charlie watched it. Day after day, he sat frozen in front of the TV. Sometimes he laughed only to wonder, a couple of minutes later, what it was he was laughing at. Sometimes, whole days would pass and, when he went to bed at night, Charlie had no recollection of what happened that day. Well, he’d watched TV all day, of course. But what had he watched? He couldn’t remember. The talking heads simply ate away his memory. So from the time he moved back in with Mother until she died was really one long continuous daze.
Sunruined: Horror Stories Page 7
