by Greg Herren
Such sunken retail spaces were common throughout the city, usually the location of hair salons or herbal shops or laundries. I hadn’t noticed the stairs in my haste, but the trill of Zach’s phone guided me to them and down until I stood outside a door that had been left ajar. My call went to Zach’s voicemail and I redialed his number. His ringtone chimed again. Before entering the place, I scanned the window and the door but found no indication of what manner of establishment operated behind it. Only the name Holloway painted on the window identified the space. But the paint had faded and was all but scratched away. The last two letters were little more than ghosts on the dark glass. A large For Lease sign lay on the concrete at the foot of the stairs. I toed open the door and peered inside the dreary shop front, which had been gutted down to the concrete and the plaster. Not so much as a display case remained. Phantom stains haunted the walls.
Zach’s phone lay in the middle of the floor; its screen glowed. I retrieved the device, dropped it in my pocket, and then used the screen of my phone for light in the gloom. Graffiti ran over the stained walls—some of it written in ink, some of it scrawled through the dust. On the far wall, slogans and names had been jotted down, some so faded and covered in filth they proved illegible. Others appeared fresh as if written soon before my arrival: Bobby Rocket, 2003; The Fabulous Freddy; I never want to leave; followed by Leaving is not an option, bitch. Tee hee; I love you Derek, and I’ll wait 4EVR. On opposite ends of the wall, I found two phrases that struck chords with me. The first read, Why Lincoln??? Naturally, I thought of Lincoln Schon, and wondered if Zach had penned this question on the grimy wall—though the ink was so faded it appeared as if the words had been written years ago, not days. The second odd missive—The hollow is filled with beautiful monsters—clarified something Zach had said before I’d lost his call.
He’d said, “The how iss fill wi’ bootifuh monsess.” On the wall before me, written in what appeared to be candy apple lipstick, was the translation of that cryptic message. Turning back to the window, I noted the scratched and faded sign: Hollow—. That place, that gutted and filthy shop, was the hollow, or it once had been. As for the monsters, I began to sense that if I remained there long enough they might come to say hello.
For all I knew a makeshift crack house had been established in the back rooms of the abandoned retail space. Guards with knives or guns might stand just beyond the doorway to my left or through the archway at the far side of the room. I stepped away from the wall and peered through the dimly lit chamber at the two passages I’d considered, and there at the far end of the shop, staring at me from the shadows, stood a pale young man with sunken and vacant eyes. He was naked but there was nothing erotic about him. Skinny. Sickly. The shadows defining his ribs ran like bruises around his sternum, and his belly had seemingly collapsed. I turned the light of my phone to him, but he slid to the side, vanishing.
I knew the boy was not Zach; the height, the build, the hair color were completely wrong, and yet, he shared the same weakened and dazed constitution Zach had exhibited that night at my apartment. I followed him.
Next to the place where the boy had been standing was a passageway so narrow I had to turn to the side to step into it. With my back against one wall and another only inches from my face, I scooted along the alley. When my shoulder hit an obstruction, I used my phone’s light to make sense of the space, only to find that I’d squeezed myself into the first corridor of a maze. The alleys were short, some no more than a few feet, and the construction offered no options in direction. The entire thing seemed to have been created as an obstacle rather than a real puzzle.
Left. Right. Forward. Left. Claustrophobia clenched my neck and chest as I squeezed through a particularly tight gap and had to suck in my chest and belly to proceed. The two walls sandwiched me uncomfortably, and the way ahead, visible in the glow of my phone screen, appeared narrower still, but longer than the other halls. Halfway along this path, the wall against which my chest was pressed ended, and I paused, taking deep breaths, expanding my chest as much as I could as if surfacing from a dangerously deep dive. Then dry fingers touched my neck, and a rasping sob blew foul breath over my face. My body responded by lurching back, but it had nowhere to go. The sob came again and I lifted the phone over my head to cast light on whoever faced me.
Standing in a niche of the corridor, like a corpse in a cheap coffin, was the pale, emaciated boy. A sorrowful grimace twisted his mouth, and frightened white eyes bulged from grim, dark sockets. My heart kicked in my chest. My hands shook.
“It’ll be okay,” I whispered.
“Wherss Pilip? I nee Pilip. He juss leff me.”
Pity and disgust wove together behind my eyes. I wanted to help this ill young man, but I also wanted to be far from him. I repeated my assurance and then scuttled away from the chilling sight as quickly as I could manage.
After several more turns, which might have amounted to only a handful of seconds but felt interminably longer, my trembling body emerged into a chamber, and I saw Zach, and I saw all of the beautiful monsters.
Weak, piss-yellow light fell from an exposed, ancient bulb in the center of the chamber. Soft moans and gentle hisses of air punctuated the stillness of the room, which stank of fermenting sweat, human waste, and another foul odor I could only describe as diseased. Saint Andrew’s crosses, six in all, had been lined up on either side of a central aisle, like a display at a national S&M competition. The heavy, black beams canted forward, supported by the walls and by brackets affixed to the concrete floor. On the far end of the room, a skeletal youth, wearing fouled and sagging white briefs, faced the corner, arms straight at his sides. Three of the crosses were in use, with young men draped over them, inclined on the crossbeams and facing the walls, spread-eagled. One kid was completely naked, his muscular back and ass appearing healthy and vital, particularly in contrast to the shrunken bodies of his peers; a Latino kid wore baggy jeans that barely managed to clutch the curve of his hips; and the other, Zach, wore black slacks, the same pants he’d worn the night he’d found his way to my apartment building. His intoxicated gaze was fixed in my direction, but I knew he wasn’t seeing me, wasn’t seeing anything in this miserable chamber. He swam in open-eyed dream, a blissful smile on his lips.
Standing at the feet of the occupied crosses were the monsters. These creatures—alien or demon—suggested the shape of slender men, with four appendages approximating the location of arms and legs, but that’s where their resemblance to my species ended. Their hides were sleek and a color of yellow-gold, shimmering yet murky, like a rainbow shade reflected in motor oil and frayed like unevenly stacked cloth with folds and tails of ragged edges overlapping all along the form. Round silver eyes, circled by streaks of black and crimson, peered from high on the smooth, golden plane of their faces. Their heads, like nuns’ habits, flared at the brow and long triangular flaps of skin draped down their backs. These flaps rippled and snapped, and from beneath them, silken tendrils of the same uncommon gold connected the creatures to the young men on the crosses, affixing high on the nape of the men’s necks, just above the hairline.
The sobbing boy from the maze emerged behind me, and when his hands pushed against my back, ushering me out of his way, I yelped in fear and scurried to the corner. His sobbing done, he shuffled along the aisle and took his place on one of the unoccupied crosses, leaning against the beams and all but collapsing. He lifted his arms and slid his hands through two leather straps, and he waited, but only for a moment. One of the golden monsters appeared from a black nook in the wall and took its place behind the emaciated youth, and the triangular flap hanging from its head rippled as if caught in a gentle wind, and the thread-thin tendrils snaked out and across the distance separating the creature from the kid. The boy sighed, and a smile broke across his cracked lips. He closed his eyes, and he sighed again, and the monster sighed with him.
What I witnessed was some perverse symbiosis, though the exact nature of the exchange was indeter
minable. The boys received an opiate from the monsters, this much was clear, but I hadn’t a clue what the creatures extracted in exchange, and it didn’t matter. The young men were dying, wasting away while consumed in euphoria. Eventually thirst or starvation would end their narcotic dreams.
With no understanding of these creatures or their capabilities, I was uncertain how to proceed. They had seen me enter the room. At some point since finding this chamber, each one of them had glanced in my direction, fixing me with their silver eyes, only to return to their tasks. They exhibited no aggression toward me, no interest at all. I might have just walked through them and murdered each in turn if I’d have had a weapon of any kind, but even if I’d had a weapon and sufficient knowledge of their anatomy to pursue a violent course, I was, initially, too frightened and dumbstruck to move.
Eventually I tried to use my phone but found no signal in the chamber. My motion again drew the attention of the golden creatures, and again they dismissed me after perfunctory glances.
Only when the monster at Zach’s cross withdrew its filament connections and moved away did I summon the will to step deeper into the room. My heart kicked against my sternum, harder and faster with each step. The creatures again turned their eyes to me, watching my labored steps, and when I crept into the aisle between two of them, my head grew so light I thought I might topple over. Pausing and breathing deeply, I waited until Zach emitted a soft moan. The sound broke my paralysis, and I was able to continue toward him.
With Zach face-down, inclined away, I had to press against the wall for him to see me. I asked if he could hear me, asked if he was okay. Each question I posed earned a guttural, incomprehensible response. I repeated the questions several times. Then Zach recognized my voice, and he whispered, “Raw-ee?”
“I’m here. Can you move? Can you walk?”
“Happy,” he muttered. “Povince is bootifuh. Thanks fo taking me.”
Povince? “Do you mean Provincetown?”
His response was unexpectedly clear, though his eyes were unfocused and wore scrims of euphoric absence. “So happy. Never been so happy. They let me stay there, and they share my joy.”
“What do you mean? Zach, what are you talking about?”
But he closed his eyes, exhausted, and began to breathe shallowly. I tried to wake him, speaking his name and gently slapping his cheek, but he was in a deep, inescapable sleep. I checked on the beautiful monsters, but none of them showed interest in my actions. They carried on with their tasks, drugging the young men for a purpose I didn’t understand. I thought to carry Zach out of there, drag him through the narrow maze and into the street and back to my apartment, where I’d watch him and care for him and chain him down if necessary to keep him from ever returning to this place, but I didn’t notice the creature emerging from its alcove, nor did I see it gliding in our direction. Wholly unaware of the monster, I struggled to remove Zach’s hand from the leather strap holding it, and the monster took up its position behind me, and its filament-thin tendrils reached out and burrowed into my skin.
…And the scent of fresh cinnamon rolls woke me, and then the aroma of the ocean crept in with the sweetness. The bed was so comfortable, I didn’t want to open my eyes, but he was walking down the hall, and he hummed lightly, and it was the Birthday Song he was humming, so I opened my eyes and remembered I was in Provincetown to celebrate my birthday, and the man passing from the hall into the bedroom and carrying the tray laden with a carafe of coffee and a plate full of fresh, gooey rolls, and a small vase with a single rose was the most handsome man I’d ever met, and I loved him, and I had never been happier in my life.
*
I woke on the street, dazed, standing on the sidewalk facing a sign that read Lawyer. The word made no sense to me. Where had it come from? How had I gotten from Provincetown to this hard, ugly place where the scent of the ocean could not permeate the stench of so many people and their garbage and their machines? A thorough depression enveloped me, and everything hurt. My head throbbed, as if I’d been struck by a hammer. Each muscle in my body had a particular misery it shared with the others in a chorus of crying nerve endings. Even the blood sluggishly oozing through my veins felt as if it carried shards of glass on its tide.
*
The next time I woke, I was lying in a hospital bed. A television jutted from the wall before me. Daylight streamed through a window. I blinked, and it was night. I blinked again and the pale pink light of morning bathed the floor. The cycle started over again, and another day passed before I could open my eyes and make sense of the room, and the nurses, and the doctor.
They told me I had been admitted with a double concussion, a broken arm, a sprained ankle, and two cracked ribs. Further, they told me I was lucky. A secretary from a law office had stepped outside for a cigarette and found me sprawled at the bottom of a concrete staircase, bleeding from the head. That happened three days before the kindly polar bear of a doctor smiled down at me and said, “Gotta watch that first step. It’s a doozy.”
*
When I felt capable of speaking clearly I called the police and reported suspicious, possibly drug related, activity at the supposedly vacant shop on Ninety-third Street. I never heard back, never saw a word about it in the paper. No exposé on the cavern of monsters. No word of an investigation. No mention of Zach.
I imagine he ended up in the river or perhaps hauled away to some distant burial ground where all of the once-pretty bodies were secreted and left to rot.
Throughout the early days of my recovery, pain medication pulped my thoughts and fueled both paranoia and nightmares. During that time I imagined returning to the hollow and setting fire to the place, blocking the doors so that flames devoured the monsters and purged their grotesque den. In more lucid moments I considered the businesses on the street level, the apartment buildings, and the young men below, enraptured and possibly incapacitated, and arson vanished as a solution. Alternate plans—equally violent and equally impossible—swam through my opiate imaginings and disintegrated when my thoughts cleared.
I even thought to confront Lincoln Schon with a paranoid supposition: that he and men like him used that place and those creatures to rid themselves of unwanted companions. Once they were no longer pleasing—too cloying, too brash, too independent, too old—the young men were sent away, directed to the hollow and blissfully euthanized. And I thought of the call he’d made, threatening to throw out Zach’s belongings, and it could have been false, as a means to throw off suspicion should I or anyone else come to him with questions. But the only thing I could hope to gain from such a confrontation was confirmation of my suspicions, and likely an untimely end myself.
When I wasn’t entertaining myself with myriad conspiracies and horrors, occasional moments of doubt punctuated my recovery. I thought how impossible, how ridiculous, that place and what I’d witnessed there were, but these were transient respites, instances of denial, far too brief.
One afternoon, a month after I was discovered at the bottom of the concrete staircase, I found myself drawn back to Ninety-third Street. Arm in a sling and my system clear of painkillers, I stood on the far corner and eyed the Lawyer sign across the intersection. A part of me ached to return to the hollow, and it had nothing to do with violence or bringing an end to the hateful place. I wanted the fantasy.
But fantasy is the wrong word, suggesting phantom memories with no more substance than dream. Visiting Provincetown through the creature’s narcotic influence was tantamount to reliving the experience, not remembering it. The steam from the coffee warmed my upper lip; its smooth flavor excited my tongue. I felt the man with me—his mouth and his hands and his body—and every act possessed genuine intensity and physical authenticity. I could taste and smell and feel the details of my surroundings, including the absolute pleasure infusing every moment of that day.
And I wanted to relive the best day of my life, until the end of my life. The best day. Before so much serrated history. Before Zach.
<
br /> In the hollow, attached to the beautiful monsters, we had both returned to Provincetown, and I had been Zach’s companion. He hadn’t been mine.
The day I experienced—the best day of my life—was my thirty-second birthday, which happened to fall only two days after a major promotion at the office and one month after I’d started dating a man named Aaron, a man I fell so completely in love with I denied the reality of his nature for nearly four years. The trip I’d arranged with Zach was meant to recreate a beautiful memory, meant to recall a happier time when I’d had a younger heart.
Day after day, I returned to the corner and struggled, and often enough I imagined it was only a matter of time before I descended those concrete stairs and returned to Provincetown and happiness: joy without suspicion; pleasure without fear. A few fucking moments of love.
By the time Zach and I had found one another, I’d fallen from romanticism and lived as a weary victim of nostalgia. The relationship we’d shared had done nothing to change that; it wasn’t his fault. Not really. Each partner, each date, each trick, had left his mark on me. Lies and disappointments, arguments and indifference inflicted tiny wounds that, over time, amounted to severe and irreversible damage. Scraped. Gouged. Excavated. And the greater the hurt, the more men I invited in to sustain it. I was as guilty as I was innocent, inflicting the pain I’d endured, winning the games I’d once lost. But regardless of blame, whether deserved or not, life had left my heart hollow, and the hollow ached to be filled.
The Zealous Advocate
Carsen Taite
