by Hunter Shea
ASYLUM SCRAWLS
BY HUNTER SHEA
WITH NORM HENDRICKS
Copyright © 2013 Hunter Shea
Cover image and design copyright 2013 Mike Chella
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the authors or artist.
A big thank you goes out to Mike Chella. When I approached him to create the cover over cocktails at the Yard House, I thought I was making his life simple by saying I only needed four white walls with a straight-jacket on the floor. Little did we know that getting the graphics of a straight-jacket just right would cause him to lose so much sleep. I can still hear him cursing me out, his expletives floating out to space and back. But here you have it on the cover of Asylum Scrawls, most certainly the first computer graphically rendered straight-jacket on record.
There was no way I was going to put out my first short story collection without including the man who lit the fire under my ass to write, Norm Hendricks. Without him, I’d never have had the guts to even try. For a guy who writes so seriously, he’s actually funny as hell.
This is a dream project for all of us. We’ve talked about doing something creative together for going on 20 years now. What can I say? We like to procrastinate.
Dedicated to the loving parents Norm, Mike and I have lost oh-too-recently. Forever in our hearts, we’ll miss you every day until we meet again.
THE STORIES
The Faceless Girl
Stoned
Phantom Feeling
Piper – By Norm Hendricks
Commandment Eleven
Mercy
Foul Ball
I love a good ghost story. I live with a ghost. When I have the time, I go to weird places looking for them. It’s an obsession. Ever since the publication of my first book, Forest of Shadows, my attraction to the afterlife has only grown stronger. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that there is something to the millions of ghost stories that have been told around fires, in dark lit homes and even office cubicles. What exactly that is, no one can say. That’s the attraction of the unknown. The not knowing is what opens the door to fear. So turn the knob, and open the door wide…
THE FACELESS GIRL
There are many perks to having a girlfriend that is a makeup artist to the stars, and this was one of them – or at least I thought so when pulled into the circular drive that frigid November afternoon. Tires crunched and popped over the remains of the seventh snowfall of the season as I pulled my weathered, creaking Ford round, my eyes locked on the indifferent face of the looming mansion. It had been a brutal winter and we were all getting a little stir crazy. The trip to the Adirondacks was just what we needed to get us though until the spring.
“He really said the place is yours for the weekend?” Janice said from the backseat, whistling at the grandeur of the place. Johnny, her boyfriend of two years and just as many abortions, popped his head up front, slapping an iron hand on my shoulder.
“I say we go all rock star on the place,” he said.
His breath was sour with beer and beef jerky. I never understood what Janice, a poli-sci major and staunch conservative, saw in him.
Yin and yang.
That’s how Eva explained it to me. I didn’t buy it. I often wondered what daddy did to young Janice to make her the yang to Johnny’s sophomoric yin. I’d heard her father once ran over a man as he darted out of a bodega in the Bronx. The man died. The fact that he had just held up the bodega gave her dad a free pass. Kill a criminal once, shame on the bad guy. If her father had any remorse, his family had yet to see it.
Eva narrowed her hawk’s eyes at him and said, “Everything is going to look exactly the same way we found it when we leave on Sunday. You got it? If anything breaks, you couldn’t work enough shifts at Target to pay for it.”
Johnny held his hands up, a beer in his left. “I was only kidding around. You all need to catch up to me in the beer department and relax a little.”
I looked at Eva as I put the car in park. Her stare said, You and I both know he’s not kidding. We’ll take turns keeping an eye on him.
The icy breeze stung my lungs when I got out of the car. The air in the city didn’t smell anything like this – pure, woodsy, sharp as a blade, soothing as medicine.
Eva coyly bumped into my shoulder and I put my arm around her. “I can’t believe we’re staying at Mick Harrison’s mountain estate,” I said.
Mick Harrison had taken the action hero torch from the likes of Schwarzenegger, Willis and Stallone. With his hardened, good looks, athletic build an sardonic smile, he’d made over 100 million dollars in the past two years alone. Eva had confided in me that his off-screen persona pretty much squared up with what we saw on the screen. He was a rough guy, having grown up poor in dangerous neighborhoods. Five years in Hollywood hadn’t softened a single one of his sharp edges.
“He appreciates how handsome I make him look, especially on days when the booze and drugs and partying leave him looking like an old, worn-thin throw rug.” She pulled a key out of her coat pocket and dangled it before us for effect. “Shall we go into the parlor?”
The bronze Federal style house looked as if it had broken the bonds of the evergreen trees, proudly displaying its independence from the all-encompassing forest. Each window was framed by deep, teal shutters. A flight of old but well maintained brick steps led up to the front door, its wood thick and imposing, as if it held the secrets of the new world before there were declarations and civil wars.
Johnny and I grabbed the bags and cooler, letting Eva and Janice take the lead. A gust of wind ripped through the trees, sounding like a wounded animal’s scream. The sun was setting fast. It would be below freezing soon. I hoped the house was heated. Harrison, for all his movie star fame and fortune, was a closet miser. The only reason he bought the house in the Adirondacks was to keep up the appearance of the well-to-do leading man of cinema.
The door opened not with a haunted house groan, but a whisper. Eva flipped a wall switch and a chandelier dripping with crystals came to brilliant life.
While the exterior was old world American opulence, the interior was pure modern decadence. The walls and floors were a sterile white, the furniture black leather and rarely used. Every mod-con known to man was in plain sight. Even the dust bunnies must have cost a fortune.
“Do you see that Blu Ray collection, dude?” Johnny said, pointing at the hundred-plus-inch plasma TV flanked by shelves and shelves of movies. A man could lock himself in the house for ten years and never watch the same movie twice.
“Is it okay if I die in here?” Janice asked, giggling with excitement as she ran her fingertips over framed prints of movie posters from Harrison’s better movies.
“I can always ask,” Eva said, laughing. She reached out for my hand and the four of us explored the bottom floor, the tour ending in a kitchen that was designed to cook for armies.
Janice opened one of the oven doors. There were four, set into the stone wall. “I bet he’s never even used this. It’s cleaner than a showroom model.”
“I guarantee plenty of caterers have used them, and then busted their asses to make it shiny and new – or else,” Johnny said, belching. He handed a can of beer to each of us. It seemed improper to be drinking from a can. I couldn’t believe a house was making me self-conscious. “To a kick ass weekend.”
We tapped our cans of discount beer
with decidedly less gusto than Johnny.
“You better be careful,” I said to him. “You’re in danger of becoming a caricature.”
“Bite me.”
“Getting warmer.”
“Can you stop picking on him for just one day?” Janice said, leaving the kitchen in a huff. According to the rules of our dynamic, I was the bully, not through muscle but by my damned, forked tongue. If truth be told, I was honored by the moniker. My father, a man who spent words like they were gold nuggets, told me the geeks would inherit the earth. I followed his advice and got a degree in IT engineering. It wasn’t until I had endured the minefield of high school that I realized the old man was right. For guys like Johnny, his best days were behind him. Life as an adult would pale in comparison to his year as the adored captain of the baseball team.
Johnny followed Janice. Eva shook her head, though there was a faint smile on her lips.
“Go easy on him, for me, please?” she said.
“I have my limits.”
She tossed her coat onto the marble-topped island and undid the top three buttons of her shirt. “There’s nothing I can do to get you to play nice?”
I locked onto the violet bra, caressing her soft, full breasts.
Geeks are trumped by lust every time, I said to my father across the transom of space.
As a form of apology, I brought Johnny another beer. All was forgotten by the time we combined our efforts to start a fire. As city boys, we had little experience with fireplaces and flues. The ensuing black smoke was so heavy we had to open the bay doors. A devastating chill cut through it like a cleaver.
“So much for sitting by a cozy fire,” Eva said, warming her upper arms with her hands, arms across her chest.
Janice coughed like an asthmatic. Johnny covered the lower half of his face with his shirt.
“Most of it should clear out in five minutes or so,” I said, not believing a word of it. We had turned the place into an oversized smoker.
“Why don’t we go upstairs until we can breathe down here?” Janice suggested.
“I bet Harrison has at least one Jacuzzi,” Johnny added before running up the stairs like a kid at Christmas. Janice was quick to follow, her laughter echoing in her wake, the heels of her boots clack-clacking.
I put my arm around Eva, felt her shiver against my side. “Promise me there won’t be any Jacuzzi fueled orgies.”
Smirking, she said, “Why you little prude.”
As we ascended the stairs, I said, “It’s not a matter of being a prude. I just have no desire to see Johnny in his birthday suit. Now Janice, that’s a different story.”
I grinned and caught a quick elbow in the side.
“See, you’re no less of a pig than him.”
Before I could protest, she crushed her lips against mine.
“I knew it!” Johnny shouted.
The first room was the size of my entire apartment, with a four-poster bed, vanity and plush, Victorian type chairs. Fabric wallpaper with muted designs added some warmth to the room. Johnny and Janice were in the connected bath, he standing in the Jacuzzi.
“I call shotgun,” he said.
“You can’t call shotgun on a Jacuzzi,” Eva said.
“I can and I did. You two can find your own.”
The windowpane shuddered, tiny ticks pattering against the glass. It had begun to snow. A chilly finger of wind wrestled through a gap in the wood frame.
“It’s all yours,” I said, imagining how cold it would be if we were wet and naked – at least when Eva and I were wet and naked.
Janice bounded out of the bathroom. “Let’s look at the others.”
It was like a game of one-upmanship, going from room to room, each succeeding ode to the gods of interior decorating richer than the one before it.
“How much does he make a picture?” I asked Eva.
“I think I heard over thirty-five million.”
It was a staggering thought. Each movie required him to be on set for three to five weeks. He made three to four movies a year. I decided at that moment to loathe Mick Harrison, despite his generosity, though in actuality, I felt this weekend trip was a ploy to get Eva into his bed. Was it working? To give voice to my concern would only make things worse. I had to ride it out in silence and give Eva the keys to my trust.
“This is a lot of house for a single man,” I said.
“I don’t think he comes up here alone,” Janice said, winking. I wondered if I should offer Janice to Harrison in Eva’s place. I could see that for her part, it would take little convincing.
A pair of white double doors capped the end of the long hallway, twin portals to a higher dimension. “That must be the master bedroom,” Eva said.
“Maybe we should leave that room alone,” I suggested. “I wouldn’t want him to think we were going through his coke stash or hidden videos of women in his bed. Every man needs his privacy.”
That got a laugh out of Johnny. We had our moments.
“He didn’t say not to go in there,” Eva said, her curiosity getting the better of her. She and Janice placed a hand on the doorknobs. “What do you think?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I think that if you don’t see what’s inside, you’ll leave here with regret. Why, I don’t know, but I do know how you tick.”
“Just open the doors. Who the fuck cares? It’s just another bedroom,” Johnny said.
I swallowed a snide comment before it touched my tongue. Eva gave me an appreciative nod.
“Okay, here goes. This is where the magic happens!” Janice said with a mischievous grin.
They turned the knobs and swung the doors wide.
Eva screamed first. Janice piggybacked on her. Even Johnny grumbled a few choice curses, dropping his beer.
I found myself stepping back before I could see what had caused the raw fear to spread through them fast as a lightning strike. Janice, hopping on the balls of her feet and covering her mouth, blocked my view.
Moving closer, wedging myself between the girls, I experienced a moment of absolute death – my lungs, heart and brain ceased functioning for the space of one, maybe two seconds, but it was enough to douse my body with the chill and certainty of the grave.
It –she? – stood facing us, the guardian of the master suite, an opaque creature of light and shadow. She, yes, it was most certainly a she, wore a knee length dress, the print impossible to discern through the radiance that emanated from her. Small, fine-boned, with long, wispy hair that hung in loose strands past her shoulders.
The problem, aside from the glaring fact that she was not flesh and blood but more of a hologram, like Princess Leia played through R2D2’s tiny projector, was that she had no face. Amid the fine hair of her wavy bangs was a wavering haze, veiling all facial features. She was incomplete in many ways, yet with enough form to prevent any denial of her existence.
Sobbing, Eva nearly knocked me over as she buried her face in my chest. Janice attempted to do the same with Johnny, but he sidestepped her embrace and took a step closer to the bedroom’s threshold.
“Holy crap,” he said, his voice tinged with awe, fear, and was that reverence? He made the sign of the cross, which I found almost as strange as the apparition in the movie star’s bedroom.
Janice melded into Eva and I was freed from their orbit. I joined Johnny’s side. The faceless girl remained still as stone. Occasionally, the ends of her hair would sway, barely perceptible unless you were staring at it long enough.
I closed my eyes several times, taking long pauses when my lids were down. She remained, even when I turned away and back again. If this was a ghost, she was breaking all of the ghost rules as I knew them.
“This has to be some kind of 3D projection technology,” I said, poking my head as far as I dared into the room, looking for the technological progenitor of the strange chimera. Harrison had the money and access to anything his heart desired. It stood to reason that a man entrenched in movie magic had plucked some of tha
t fairy dust for himself.
“I don’t see anything,” Johnny said.
“It could be so small, we’d have to be right on top of the lens to spot it.” Keeping as far from the hologram as I could, I stepped into the room. I motioned for Johnny to do the same but to keep on her other side.
He took a step, stopped, inhaled through his nose and shook his head. “What if it’s not?” he said.
Eva’s whimpering resonated down the great hall.
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “And if I’m wrong, what harm has she done?”
Johnny retrieved his beer from the floor, sucking down the dregs. He tossed the can behind him and strode into the room, angling his body so there was no danger of contact with the apparition.
“Look at his breath!” Janice exclaimed.
Thick trails of mist coiled from his nostrils and mouth, breaking tenuous clouds over his head.
“Jesus it’s cold in here,” he said, hunching his shoulders.
I watched my own breath as it turned to fog. “There has to be an open window.” I held out my hand, but felt no draft. The bedroom was cold as a mortuary cabinet.
As I made to go to the double windows opposite the queen-sized bed, Eva shouted, “Don’t!”
“I need to check to be sure,” I said.
“I don’t want you going any further into that room. Just come out here.”
“And what, go downstairs and pretend we didn’t see this? There’s nothing to worry about. Has anyone been hurt?”
Johnny snorted. “No.”
“Right. So there’s no reason to get over excited.”
I turned my back on the girls and Eva said, “Wait.”
I turned back round. Now that I was behind the mirage of the faceless girl, I could actually see Eva and Janice through her body.
“What if the doors slam shut and we can’t open them?”
“Consider yourselves lucky,” Johnny said. “You’ll be on the good side. Come on, let’s find out which window is open.”
