Martin

by George A. Romero

  Returning to the bedroom, he neatly replaced the magazines on the rack under the TV set and then snapped the set off.

  After surveying the room to make sure that all was in order, Martin walked over to the bearded man and dressed him up as if he were a life-sized doll.

  Then Martin dragged him out of the bedroom and bumping down the two flights of stairs to the garage. It was very late, almost three in the morning, and the neighborhood was as still as a graveyard. All the street lights had been turned off to conserve energy, and none of the houses had any lights on to illuminate the naked, rail-thin man pulling his unconscious burden across the well-manicured lawn.

  Martin lurked behind the hedges with his victim while the sound of a single car’s tires broke the stillness and the vehicle moved slowly up the street, its headlights making the shadows dance. Soon the car had passed, and all was quiet except for the familiar comforting buzz of the crickets. Martin looked across the narrow street. On the other side was the park with its abundant foliage and large shade trees. The narrow street and a low stone wall were the only obstacles between Martin and the dark safety of the wooded area. Martin dragged Lewis’s fully clothed, limp form out from behind the hedgerow. Taking a deep breath, Martin looked up and down the street. Then he dragged the body quickly out onto the open street. In his haste, Martin’s grip on the inert form loosened and he slumped to the ground. Martin struggled to lift him again and managed to make it to the other curb. With a burst of energy, he pulled the unconscious Lewis over to the little wall. Panting furiously, his hands shaking beyond his control, Martin tried to calm himself. During the whole ordeal, he had never once paused to think about what he was doing—it came so naturally, it was as if it had all happened once before.

  Martin checked up and down the street once more, but all the houses were still dark, their inhabitants asleep behind safely locked doors.

  Martin was able to maneuver the man’s torso over the wall, but then he fell upon the body, panting with exhaustion. He was totally worn out from his night’s activities. It was certainly more than he had bargained for when he had left Braddock that evening.

  Suddenly he spotted the pinpoint of a car’s headlights coming up over the far hill. He scrambled to push Lewis’s bottom half over the wall, and dove over himself. He managed to get over just in time, as a police cruiser appeared on the street. The officer on the passenger side of the front seat was shining a spotlight along the wall. Martin lay flat to the ground, his heart pounding furiously.

  The car passed without incident, not even slowing as the light shone right over Martin’s head. Martin breathed a sigh of relief and peered over the wall, kneeling in the dew-damp ground. He watched as the car made a U-turn down the street. As it returned, Martin ducked down, anticipating the spotlight’s glare, but the cruiser merely picked up speed and roared away over the hill.

  Martin took some time to compose himself and then he glanced at the body of the bearded man who was lying on his stomach in the weeds next to the stone wall. Martin rolled him over onto his back and looked down into his face with growing hatred and rage.

  For half an hour, Martin managed to drag his unconscious victim deeper into the park, through shrubbery and underbrush, to a stone bridge which spanned a tiny creek. The spot was very dark and isolated. It reassured Martin that the body of Lewis would never be found.

  Martin dropped his burden and kneeled beside him, exhausted and quivering. He looked into Lewis’s face and let his anger build to a peak. With twitching lips he thought, “You shouldn’t have been there, you shouldn’t have been there!”

  A familiar buzz sounded in his ears, and his surroundings started to dissolve into a spinning blur. Martin grabbed his head. He knew he was going to have one of his hallucinations but didn’t want to this time, couldn’t afford the luxury. He had no time to lose. But his mind wouldn’t listen, and he moaned and cried out in protest.

  He finds himself lying atop a naked woman. Her face is unfamiliar, her blond hair matted and blood-drenched from her struggles. He looks down and sees that he is dressed in knickers and a ruffled shirt. Gold buckles shine on his shoes. He is startled by something and looks up to find the man whom he had encountered in Tati Cuda’s room standing over him, observing the tableau.

  Martin lifts himself off the woman and a profusion of blood drips from his mouth, running down his stained shirt and dripping on her already devastated body. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

  The bearded man in the doorway cries out, “Nosferatu!”

  Martin stood up. He looked at his naked body.

  “You shouldn’t have been there!” he shrieked at the silent trees. He grabbed the unconscious Lewis, who bore a striking resemblance to the bearded man in the vision, and shook him by the shoulders.

  “You shouldn’t have been there,” he cried to him, whimpering like a puppy.

  Lewis crashes through the doorway toward the bent figure cringing against the religious shrine. The Madonna falls and shatters.

  Martin tried to stop his whirling head. He saw a modern Lewis, crashing through the supermarket lady’s nightstand. The knickknacks fell and crashed around the injured lamp.

  Sweat poured from the young man’s face. He closed his eyes but the colors still came.

  In period costume, Martin now sees himself charging toward the bearded man, who holds a large crucifix aloft. The big peasant woman enters the room. All three struggle to get possession of the crucifix. Martin manages to kick the pointed stake away and break the hold the woman has on him. He runs to the door of the old-fashioned room and looks back at the bearded man in the waistcoat and breeches.

  “You shouldn’t have been there!” he cries, as he turns and runs away.

  Martin tossed the unconscious Lewis down on the ground. He found a large, sturdy twig from which he cleaned the leaves and small branches, and brought it up to the bearded man’s throat, pushing one end against the flesh. He pushed deeper and deeper until the stick made a deep impression and popped through the soft skin of the neck like a pencil pushing through a balloon. A great gush of blood spurted forth from the hole like a geyser. Martin crouched down to drink the rich, red liquid as if it were a swiftly running mountain brook. The red liquid splashed over his shoulder and ran down his back in thin rivulets. It almost covered his entire body in a warm, red cloak.

  Martin runs for cover near a stream. With a great splash he ducks his blood-soaked ruffled shirt in the cold water. In the dark, quiet night, he scrubs furiously trying to remove the stains.

  “People are always doing things they shouldn’t do,” Martin thought as he drank deeply of Lewis’s blood in the Pittsburgh park. “Saying things they don’t mean. That’s why I don’t talk much. Unless I’m really sure of something, I don’t talk at all.”

  Now he pulls his trousers off and dips them into the cold, rushing stream as well.

  “Or else . . . people make things up,” he thought as he rested against a tree, still in his reverie. He balanced between consciousness and hallucination.

  “When they don’t know, or when they’re not sure about something, they’ll make things up . . . just so they have something to say, I guess. It’s like people can’t stand things they don’t know about. That’s why they try to make my sickness into something magic . . . like I was a ghost or a devil or something.”

  The figure at the stream looks up suddenly, as if he hears something.

  “It gets scary sometimes,” Martin went on. “And sometimes I think they’re really gonna catch me and hurt me . . . or even try to kill me . . .”

  Deep in the woods, a dim light can be seen flickering and moving through the thickness of the trees. At the stream Martin pauses and his eyes flash with attention. He squints to see.

  Martin was stretched out against the tree. He watched the last spurt of blood from Lewis’s neck as it died down to a trickle and ran into the soft moist earth. “You really have to stay calm when that happens. And you just have to remember t
hat the ones who are after you are never calm. People are never calm when they’re angry. That’s dangerous . . . but it can help you, too.”

  The lights turn into shapes, and the shapes turn into the flickering torches of a mob, marching through the woods toward Martin. He stands, his body drips with the cold water from the stream, his clothes lie on the ground beside him. The sound of the irate mob draws closer, and Martin tries to judge the distance.

  Martin’s eyes flashed for a few seconds. He felt a certain lightheadedness. He seemed to be reminiscing to an unseen listener, although in reality he was alone in the woods next to a freshly killed body.

  “And for a long time . . . I didn’t care if they killed me . . . that really helped me stay calm. Most people spend their lives worrying about dying. For a long time, I wished that I would die . . . or I wished somebody would kill me. It’s been a long time for me. A long time full of crazy people.”

  The torches draw closer. The lights spill into the clearing where Martin washes his shirt and his trousers. He runs downstream, abandoning his clothes in the stream. The mob pursues him through the woods.

  A naked Martin, streaked with Lewis’s blood, charged through the woods until he reached the low stone wall across the street from the supermarket lady’s house. He peered over the wall, but all seemed as quiet and undisturbed as it was when he left the house earlier. Vaulting the stone wall easily, he ran in a low crouch across the street. Dipping in and out of the shadows, he followed the hedge until he reached the open door of the darkened garage. Martin pushed the button to lower the rumbling door. On his way back into the house, Martin picked up the bulb that he had removed from the overhead device. As he moved through the cellar hallway to the laundry room, he mused, “I’m pretty careful about not getting caught now. I’ve learned a lot of things. I have good tools. And I have the injections. It was really hard before the injections. I got a lot of it with the key from the lady that was nursing for Uncle Palonis. But there’s a date on the bottles for when it’ll be no good anymore. Then I’ll have to get some more somehow. But that ought to be easy. That stuff’s always easy. Everything’s been pretty easy lately.”

  When Martin reached the bedroom, the supermarket lady was still lying on the floor near the bed. Her hair had dried from her perspiration and billowed over her arm. She was peaceful and in repose from her drugged state.

  Martin stepped into her shower and quickly washed off Lewis’s blood, then cleaned the tub out carefully. He dried himself with his own towel and was careful not to drip on the woman’s pink rug.

  As he put the finishing touches on his cleanup, he mumbled to himself, “Everything but people. People are the hardest thing. Sometimes I wish I had somebody to talk to about it. But then I see people together . . . they don’t talk . . . not really. They don’t say what they mean. They just kind of use each other the same way I use my blood people. But then, they have the other. They have the sexy stuff. Whenever they want it.”

  He turned to the unconscious woman on the floor and bent down at her side. He stroked her hair lovingly. He rolled her inert figure over and gazed at her naked body.

  “I’m . . . I’ve been too shy,” he thought as he looked at her smooth pale skin, her firm breasts, and her dark triangle of pubic hair. Her breathing was becoming more regular as the effects of the drug started to wear off, and he watched as her chest heaved and relaxed. “I’ve been much too shy to ever do the sexy stuff. I mean . . . do it with somebody who was awake. It must be nice with someone who’s awake. But I’ve been scared of that. I’ve even been scared of buying it the way Palonis used to. Someday maybe I’ll get to do it . . . awake . . . and without the blood part. Just do it with somebody and then be together and talk all night.”

  Martin pulled the supermarket lady up onto the bed. He caressed her unconscious form and rolled over and over through the frilly sheets, which he had changed and straightened. From a distance, it might have seemed as if they were lovers until the woman’s immobile face came into view. Martin managed to enter her, and he pumped slowly at first and then with increasing fervor, until he achieved his lonely climax.

  After Martin was satisfied with his solitary love-making, he showered once more and dressed. He gathered up his belongings—his instruments of death—and made one last check in the woman’s bedroom to make sure all was in order. The woman was still unconscious, and Martin returned her to her bed, in a clean, flimsy nightgown. He made sure that the bathroom was tidy and the nightstand arranged properly. He wanted to make sure that when her husband arrived home, he would find nothing out of the ordinary—except for his wife’s raving nightmare when she awakened from the drug the next day.

  Martin left the house through the front door just as the first rays of sun filtered through the early morning haze.

  In the empty train, he was able to rifle through Lewis’s wallet in relative privacy. Martin tossed Lewis’s driver’s license, his credit and identification cards, and his wallet out the window of the speeding train. He only kept the cash—about thirty dollars—and a photograph of the supermarket lady taken at a four-for-a-quarter booth.

  The rocking motion of the train lulled Martin into a fitful sleep. By the time he reached Braddock, the sun was just rising above the horizon.

  Chapter Six

  It seemed to Martin that he had just lain his head down on the pillow when he heard Tati Cuda screaming at the top of his voice.

  “You will go with us to church! You stay in my house. Will you embarrass me like this? This is a Catholic family! I will not be seen without you in church!”

  Martin rose quickly and put on his clothing from the previous night. He had just arrived home only a few hours before and had entered the house quietly, careful not to wake the old man or Christina. He heard the old man’s wheezing snores as he climbed the stairs and had peeked in on Christina to make sure that she was comfortable. Despite the old man’s warning, she failed to lock her door each night.

  Tati Cuda, Christina, and Martin walked the few blocks to the small Catholic church that was nestled between two deserted factories on Commercial Street. It seemed as if the narrow stone building was their only support. Martin welcomed the cool darkness as they entered the front door. Like everything else in Braddock, it was half-empty, and only a few parishioners dotted the pews. As the priest idly chanted through a Latin portion of the mass, Tati Cuda fingered a rosary intently. Christina sat and leafed through her hymn book, but Martin could see that her mind was elsewhere. She hadn’t said anything to him, but Martin could tell that she was still very upset from last night. He knew Arthur would never come.

  Martin gazed around the small church. He looked at the beautiful stained-glass windows of blue and green and red against the dark wood-paneled walls, which depicted scenes from the Stations of the Cross. These windows were the pride of the Catholic population of Braddock, and the little church was tended with loving care.

  Martin was like a small boy, wiggling and shifting his weight in the hard wooden pew. He watched the attendants as they served the priest. He stared at the crucifix above the altar. He noticed that the hands, hips, and forehead of the Christ were running with blood. The pew in which he sat had a crimson velvet cushion for his knees, and he stared at the deep, vibrant color all through the mass.

  When the mass was over, the pitifully small congregation filed out. Martin and Christina smiled at each other for the first time that morning. Tati Cuda had gone on ahead to speak to the young priest. When the two young people noticed that the old man had turned down the path toward home, they hurried to catch up with him.

  “Christina,” the old man turned to his granddaughter. “We have supper later tomorrow. I told the new priest to come to our house for supper tomorrow. You will make a good meal.”

  “As if I don’t, you old bastard,” Christina thought as she glanced toward Martin. A strange, eerie smile was spread across his face.

  Christina fixed a light lunch and when they finished, each o
ne went about their Sunday chores. Christina did the laundry and washed the kitchen floor, and Tati Cuda climbed up upon his ladder and tried to finish painting the outside trim of the house. He did it each summer, but it was becoming increasingly more difficult for him and took much longer each year. Christina hoped he would finish before winter.

  Martin sat on the back porch, gazing out over the smokestacks. He was exhausted from his night’s activities but didn’t want Cuda or Christina to know.

  “People live a certain way,” he thought, as he watched Christina through the window as she wrung out the mop in an old-fashioned wringer and started to clean the floor for a second time. “It’s like me. I live a certain way. And that doesn’t change. You can’t change what a person is. . .

  Martin got up and started to walk around to the front of the house.

  “If I had a lot of money, I could leave it all. But I don’t suppose I’ll ever have a lot of money.”

  “Go ahead, Martin!” Tati Cuda shouted down from atop his perch at the side of the house. Martin looked up, not understanding the old man’s comment. He hadn’t realized that he had wandered under the ladder.

  “Go ahead. Push me down!”

  Martin looked up in disbelief. The thought of pushing the old man off the ladder had never occurred to him. He reached out and touched the ladder, realizing how easy it could have been, and how simple to explain that the old man had probably gotten dizzy and slipped.

  He squinted through the sunlight to look up at the old man’s taunting face.

  “Go ahead, Martin,” he jeered. “This is your chance. You can be rid of me.” But Martin only turned and walked away. It was almost as if the old man were begging to be pushed.

  • • •

  Monday morning, Martin awoke to the sound of the telephone men.