All-Night Terror

by Adam Cesare

  The sixth message was a URL, no text preamble, sent by his brother. The link led to a job listing based out of Syracuse. The message was the double-whammy of condescending and wistful: like Paul would need a straight job while he was swimming in all this freelance work. Syracuse!

  And the seventh was—wait. could it be? be still Paul’s over-taxed heart! —an actual paying query.

  Outside his room he heard the apartment door shut. That was Em leaving for a run before work. Yes. Em drank a morning smoothie, exercised, and was still going to go to his 9 to 5. What a sucker.

  Back to the query: it was from a record company! Not one that Paul had ever heard of, but still!

  Album covers were a business that Paul wanted to get into. Yes, the grass was always greener, but in this case it almost had to be.

  After a year of nothing but designing logos for start-up companies that never completed the “start” part, internet banner ads for non-FDA approved boner pills, and book cover designs for self-published authors that couldn’t bother to proofread their ad copy: anything else had to be a step up.

  The company, Deathclaw Records (Paul assumed they were in the business of releasing folk music), had its own stable of freelancers that they usually approached, but the band had insisted upon Paul Fritz (search engine optimized from Fritsch) by name.

  That was weird. He didn’t know anyone who was in a band, hadn’t corresponded with anyone who he thought was in a band, and wasn’t even that big a fan of metal music. He liked the more radio-friendly bands like Metallica, but learned in college that he didn’t have the patience to learn all about the different gradations of the genre. Telling “stoner” from “blackened death metal” required a genealogy chart that would’ve rivaled the great houses of Victorian England.

  The message from Deathclaw ended:

  “We could not find any rates posted on your website. Please quote us a rough timeline for completion, what you need, and whether you’d like to be paid via Paypal or check.”

  He got to ask whatever he wanted? And could be paid with a check, not in internet Monopoly money? Hell. Yes.

  He typed out a quick response:

  “I don’t post rates because I like to tailor my pricing to my customer’s needs. This would be a fairly involved project, but I’m *such a fan* of Deathclaw that I could take on this commission for around a thousand dollars. That’s if there was the possibility of it leading to more work. Half of that fee is required up-front, as is customary. I look forward to working with you. Best, Paul”

  He signed the note with an email address so they could continue the discussion like civilized adults, then hit send, hoping beyond hope that his price tag wouldn’t scare them off.

  All this action made his stomach twinge with anticipation.

  His stomach was right: no dry cereal for breakfast this morning. This windfall was cause for celebration.

  He was going to spring for a sausage egg and cheese at Dunks.

  He’d make coffee here when he got back. Or maybe, by then, Em would be back, in the shower, and Paul could siphon a cup off of the pot his roommate would assuredly brew.

  There was no need for every extravagance.

  ***

  Upon returning home, there was a response from the Deathclaw rep in his email.

  Dear Paul,

  Sounds great! If you give us an address, I’ll have the check out to you by Friday. I understand that you’re busy and may not want to begin work until the money is in your account, but if you needed inspiration I’ve attached an early mix of the album along with some notes from the band in a word doc.

  We look forward to working with you,

  Megan Block

  Marketing, Deathclaw Records

  La-tee-da!

  That was the most professional correspondence Paul had ever received.

  Well. The most professional outside of the officious emails he got from his father around tax season. He was not counting those.

  His outbox wasn’t overflowing with work, just some quickie Photoshop jobs he had lined up for an erotica publisher who barely paid...but also barely cared if their covers were shit. He could take a half-hour later to slap some corny font on stock photos. No need to even blend them.

  He could and should bump them down his list of priorities, he reasoned, and clicked to download both attachments.

  Em was out of the shower now and there was the closing of doors to signal that his roommate would soon be gone for work. Paul wouldn’t be disturbing anyone if he pumped some heavy metal as high as his dinky laptop speakers could go.

  While Windows Media Player was booting up, he opened the note from the band in a separate window.

  Paul,

  We think you’ll be able to capture the vibe we want for this record. We’re intent on moving in a new direction, away from dystopian hellscapes (so played out) and towards something more truly terrifying. Something that says “pure evil” like violence doesn’t. Those are the only guidelines we’re giving you. Please listen to the music and let it guide you.

  Don’t send sketches. Send a finished piece of art. We trust you.

  -Band

  What band? Paul thought, realizing that “The Band” had been taken long ago.

  The letter would have been frustrating if it didn’t imply an unprecedented level of creative freedom. In Paul’s experience there were two kinds of clients: ones that didn’t know what they wanted and ones that knew all too well exactly what they wanted. Both kinds were annoying, in their own way.

  And look at how that note’d been written: not the metalhead Wayne and Garth prose that Paul had been expecting. Not at all. If anything it was a little...pretentious. Which was not a word that someone who’d run the gauntlet of art school was willing to throw around lightly.

  The files were unzipped and his dying laptop had chugged to the point where it could play them. It was time for Paul to listen to some heavy metal and get sketching.

  He hit play.

  And nothing happened. The progress bar ticked off a couple of seconds from the file, but there was no sound coming from his speakers.

  He checked the control panel, but nope: this was the track.

  Then he heard it, the thrum of a guitar so low and creeping that he theorized this band, whoever they were, might be the first metal act for dogs.

  He turned up the volume, and when that didn’t help he plugged in headphones.

  The song’s third note held for what seemed like an eternity. It pressed against Paul’s eardrums, surrounding him with a kind of white noise. Not unpleasant, but this must be the introduction to the song. It was not yet what Paul Fritz would really call “music”.

  Paul clicked over to the Painter X3 window that he kept open whenever his computer was running. It was a higher-end program and he devoted much of his CPU to keeping it afloat, between that and his pen tablet, his hardware was in desperate need of an upgrade.

  Maybe he would do just that with the thousand bucks he was getting for this cover.

  The song kicked into high gear. And high gear was still pretty slow. Droning even.

  But, again: not unpleasant.

  Attempting to ignore the music for a moment, Paul tried to remember the bullet points of what the band wanted. They wanted something “truly evil” but that wasn’t a “dystopian hellscape.” And that was fine with Paul, because “hellscape” sounded like a high detail painting. Those took a lot of time. For music that was this minimalist (oh boy, there was just a cymbal crash), he could get away with a more stripped down design.

  This project was shooting thousand-dollar fish in an undersized barrel.

  He smiled and focused on the music again, not even conscious that he’d begun to draw until the first few lines blinked into existence on the monitor.

  Hey. That was pretty good. Now if he just used the fader here...

  After what felt like only a couple of minutes, there was silence in his headphones.

  That was all the sample
music they’d sent him? It seemed like he was only just getting to the good stuff.

  He opened the media player again and started from the first track, not noticing that each of the five songs was at least ten minutes, the longest topping out at 15, which meant that he’d been listening and working for over an hour already.

  Paul would normally have marked this much focus, the fact that he hadn’t checked his phone or Facebook in so long, but he was intent on getting the music on and continuing his work.

  Paul produced draft after draft of invented cult symbology. He began and cast away at least fifteen sketches of the oblique shapes that the music brought to his mind. But he could never quite match the images in his head, the shadows and glimpses of...

  What? Alien cosmology? The monsters that used to live under his bed? Its suckers eerily reminiscent of the forbidden curves of a first cousin’s sex?

  No, all of that was hack. Every illustrator and his brother. Every high school flunky with a DeviantArt account, had tried their hand at drawing some kind of Lovecraftian monster pastiche. Shaggy cosmic horrors were played out.

  Even the darker recesses of Reddit and 4chan, with their purportedly “real” images of Slenderman and “the thing in the woods” were baby stuff compared to what Paul was seeing in his mind’s eye. Compared to what he knew he could draw for this album cover, if his skills were up to snuff, if he could just get that right sketch down as a starting point.

  There was a knock on Paul’s bedroom door. He only caught a snippet of the sound between guitar riffs. The knock roused him out of his stupor. Made him realize how hungry he was, that he hadn’t even eaten the Dunkin Donuts breakfast sandwich that sat cold and soggy next to his workspace.

  “Yeah?” Paul asked, pulling the headphones from his ears with a yank that a split second later registered like the wet severing of an umbilical cord.

  “Checking that you aren’t dead in here,” Em said, opening the door to peer into Paul’s room. “Fuck, man. Open a window.”

  It was clear that Em meant it, wasn’t just kidding around. Paul’s roommate waved a hand in front of his too-healthy face.

  “I’ll think about it,” Paul said and nodded Em away.

  Em started to go, then paused. “I’m ordering pizza. You want some?”

  “No,” Paul said, screwing his headphones back in and not even having enough sense to ask: “why are you home? Pizza for lunch?” and also not noticing that outside his blinds, the world had gone dark while he’d been busy sketching the day away.

  ***

  On Paul Fritz’s 23rd listen of the untitled album from the unnamed band: he had a breakthrough.

  There was a new sound introduced into the mix this time listening to the second track. It was a discordant crashing that upended the slow but steady thrum of bass and guitar, offset it to the point that listening to the track was no longer pleasurable. In fact, it was downright unpleasant, that new hum, that intrusion.

  It was the sound of Em’s blender.

  And Paul was going to stop it. But he wasn’t going anywhere without his music.

  He kept the laptop playing, unplugging it from his wall charger, and stood. Or tried to stand. His legs had fallen asleep and he pumped them both, first the left then the right to get the feeling back into them.

  Without his AC cord, the laptop’s depleted, decade-old lithium battery would last mere minutes. But that’s all Paul would need.

  The volume was up as high as it could go, as high as the tiny speakers plugged into his ears could blast, and still Paul could hear the blender.

  He opened the door to his room, crossed the short hallway to see the kitchenette and see that Em had not heard him approach.

  “Turn it off!” Paul yelled, unable to hear the sound of his own voice between the music and the blender.

  And Em couldn’t hear him either, apparently, because Emilio kept working the stamper at the top of the blender, pressing a knot of kale down into the appliance’s whirring blades.

  Kale. Kale.

  Paul needed a way to signal his roommate’s attention, then realized he was holding his laptop up with one hand, screen open. That wouldn’t do.

  He closed the laptop, making the machine more solid. Then he held both ends in each hand like... like a holy tablet. Like he was suddenly Moses on high. Like a profane preacher delivering scripture to the uneducated, the metal enclosed inside this holy book was... and Paul... he... he...

  Clocked Em across the side of the head as hard as he could, trying to connect the far corner of the laptop with Em’s ear and succeeding. Doubly succeeding, actually, because the other side of Em’s noggin bounced off the corner of the nearest cabinet, the man completely unaware that he needed to brace his neck for impact.

  It was Paul’s follow-through on the second blow that made the splatter. That made the Art.

  The blender was still running, beginning to teeter out of control now that it didn’t have Em’s hand to steady it.

  The music continued in Paul’s ears, even though it couldn’t be, because his laptop was closed and had thus entered sleep mode. And that’s if it hadn’t been broken when he’d used it to bludgeon Em.

  But. But. Paul could still hear it. He had internalized the music. The music and the associated assignment.

  He would need to hand in something truly evil. They’d tasked him with creating a new kind of image.

  Paul looked at the blood spatter dripping from the cabinet, to the molding, and then marveled how the green of Em’s smoothie complimented the colors as the blender finally left its perch, flying out of control and spilling across the countertop.

  Then Paul ran to his room to retrieve his sketchbook.

  Then Paul switched off the base of the blender, looked to the blades, then looked to Em’s twitching body, his roommate’s breathing was labored at best.

  Then Paul created a new kind of image.

  The Executioner’s Wish

  My fist smashes his protesting mouth. Knuckles on teeth. He swallows the rest of his words with a mushy gurgle. He stumbles and doesn’t see me shake the shooting pain from my wrist. Next time he looks up; blood is spilling from the corners of his mouth. It paints a permanent red frown on his face.

  I’d usually enjoy this sight. Tonight I don’t have time.

  “Stay with me now.” I watch his eyes glaze, then roll back into white orbs. He’s the last one alive so I can’t let him collapse. I want to, but I need to know everything he does.

  His tattered sneakers scuff the floor in a tiny circle like a punch-drunk featherweight. I only hit him twice. He’s either as tough as wet paper or stoned out of his mind. I feel like cutting through the uncertainty, so I stuff my pistol in his face and cock the hammer. I let the ten or eleven dead men littering the stairwell do the rest of my convincing for me.

  “I don’t know who Casey is,” he says. Slides his jaw back and forth like it’s hurtin’. Good. “Please, man, I’d tell you if I knew.”

  I sort of believe his spiel. I mean, as much as I can. You can never be so sure with these guys. I stand there watching him, figuring I don’t have to say anything else just yet. He knows me, so he knows my reputation. He knows I’ll kill his ass if he ain’t straight.

  The groans of dying men float up through the floorboards. The smell of propellant lingers everywhere. Gunpowder incense. I try and sell my indifference to him with a shift of my eyes.

  What’s one more body? they ask.

  His eyes are locked on the barrel of my gun. It’s so close to his nose he’s gone cross-eyed. He’s trying to answer but blood spills down his chin each time he opens his mouth. Best he can do is a few rogue vowels.

  “Take a seat,” I say and point the gun toward a row of piss-stained mattresses. Discarded needles crunch beneath my boots as we head over. “I want you to start thinking about how you can be useful to me. Don’t know anyone named Casey? Fine. What blonde haired white girls DO you know?”

  “Listen man, if it’s blonde
pussy you want…”

  I don’t like where that’s going, so I crack his nose with my gun handle. The crunch that follows is music to my ears.

  He takes another second to collect himself. His runny red face dares to shoot me a glare. “Nigga, you a fuckin’ traitor to your kind.”

  “Go on and call me an Uncle Tom now. That’s right. Because I kill motherfuckers like you who’ve turned these places into warzones. You and me, skin’s all we got in common.” I almost shoot him between the eyes, but think about Casey and decide to let it pass.

  With junkie lackies like this, you can always see their gears turning. A hamster running the wheel. His thoughts are obvious, and this motherfucker’s doing mental calisthenics to get out of here intact. “Next time we have girls in stock, you can have all the blondes.”

  “Girl I’m looking for disappeared down here two nights ago. Naturally, that gets me thinking about this place. Worst kept secret in town...you know it, I know it. Any girl you’re gonna sell to the Kingdom comes here first. If you’re tellin’ me you ain’t seen Casey then that’s good. That’s real good. But start being useful, or you ain’t got a use.”

  Now he’s got that come to Jesus look in his eyes. They always get that once they realize they’re at the end of the line. “Okay. I’ll take you to the only other place she could be. But please, man, you gotta let me live if I do that.”

  I lash out and hit him with my left hand. A tooth goes skipping across the sea of needles and rubbers. I’m a righty, so he gets off easy. “I’ll think it over,” I say.

  I extend my hand and he winces like a battered kitten. That’s what I want. He eventually slips a shaky palm into mine and I pull him up. We head for the door.

  A few of the bodies are still writhing. We step over them as we head down five flights. One of those blood-caked hands reaches up as we pass through the lobby. Eyes that bulge with one final flash of life. “Cutter,” the voice says, whisper frail.