by Bryan Smith
GrimmAwakening
GrimmAwakening
PART TWO: BAD CRAZINESS
Midpoint
GRIMM AWAKENING
Bryan Smith
First Digital Edition
Copyright 2013, Bryan Smith
All Rights Reserved
www.bryansmith.info
Cover design copyright 2013 by Kristopher Rufty
http://lastkristontheleft.blogspot.com/
Formatting by Denise Brown
http://maydecemberpublications.com/
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
This digital edition of Grimm Awakening is for
Shell Scott and Serge A. Storms.
1.
Jack Grimm opened his eyes, blinked a few times to clear the bleariness, and stared down the barrel of a gun. The gun was his, and it was on a nightstand in what he guessed was a room in some seedy motel, a suspicion confirmed when he glanced beyond the gun and saw a faded hospitality card propped up next to a phone.
THE SUNDOWNER INN WELCOMES YOU, it read. WE HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR STAY!
Below that was a smaller line of text and the motel's phone number. Jack failed to recognize either the prefix or the area code.
He groaned and rolled onto his back. “Fuck me running,” he said to the cracks in the ceiling. “So I've done it again. Color me shocked.”
Blackout.
He had no idea where he was or how he had come to be in this particular snazzy joint—a sadly recurring theme in his life. Said life being that of a lush with a PI ticket and an always-loaded .45. He cast a quick glance around the room. The place was a dump, but he'd spent nights in scummier rooms than this. At least there didn't appear to be any rats crawling about. Or cockroaches the size of rats. Or any bodies, dead or otherwise, unlike that last time he'd come to in a strange room in a strange city. The still vivid memory of the dead prostitute's unseeing eyes and the needle dangling from the vein in her arm taunted him now, the way it did sooner or later damn near every morning. Waking up to a sight like that would prompt most guys to take a long look at their lives and maybe consider making some profound changes.
“But not me,” Jack said, resuming his stimulating conversation with the ceiling cracks. “No sir, all that changing-for-the-better-and-getting-healthy jazz just isn't for me. It's ever so much easier to stay down here in the gutter. And the gutter's really rather comfortable once you get used to it.”
A sigh. “Thanks for listening, guys.” The ceiling failed to acknowledge Jack's gratitude. Which had to count as a good thing. One night, in another room somewhere else, he'd had a long and quite disturbing conversation with a ceiling crack about the meaning of life, whiskey, and the nature of God. Someone, a prankster dope fiend most likely, had dosed his Maker's Mark double with a nasty hallucinogenic drug. He recalled the way the crack had rippled and expanded, the texture of the ceiling shifting and becoming malleable as that black line mimicked the movement of a human mouth.
He shuddered.
“Jesus.”
So many bad memories. So many bad mornings. Was it any wonder he drank so fucking much?
Jack swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. He patted the front of his shirt, found his cigarettes, and pulled the pack out of the pocket. He tapped a Lucky Strike out of the pack, wedged it into a corner of his mouth, and frowned, realizing he didn't know where the lighter was. It wasn't in any of his pockets. He glanced again at the nightstand and didn't see it there.
“Shit.”
The engraved silver Zippo was the one thing of his father's he still owned. His heart raced. Jack Grimm didn't care about too many things in this rotten life, but that Zippo meant the world to him. He had to find it. He stood and swayed on his feet for a time as the room spun. Once the wooziness faded, he commenced a frantic search of the room.
But he stopped looking for the lighter when he spied something else on the floor. Jack frowned and reached for the scrap of paper with the familiar handwriting scrawled across it.
2.
The handwriting was his. A note to himself, the kind he sometimes wrote to remember crucial things if he feared an impending blackout. The note said just two things.
YOU'RE IN HELL, his handwriting told him.
'Hell' was underlined.
Below that, FIND THE GIRL!
Jack grunted. “Oh, you're definitely in hell, Jackie boy, but hell's just a state of mind, isn't it? And in that case, I'm a lifelong resident of that stinking netherworld.”
Jack stuffed the note in a rear pocket of his trousers and resumed his search for the Zippo. He found it in the bathroom, where someone, presumably himself, had sat on the toilet and smoked for quite a long time. He deduced this from the large number of butts littering the floor. Another brilliant Jack Grimm insight, a dazzling display of the renowned deductive power that caused so many non-desperate people to come to him in a definitely not last-ditch effort to solve their problems.
The bit of self-deprecation was reflexive. Jack, in fact, did know he had a gift in that area. The whole solving mysteries thing. Much to the chagrin of the local law, he had, on multiple occasions, tracked down missing persons long ago given up as presumed floating in a river or stuffed in a crawlspace. Granted, his clientele tended to lack a certain something in the upward mobility department, but his reputation as an excellent detective was beyond dispute. He was a relentless investigator and he almost always produced results. It was why he had so many repeat customers. Typical scenario. Find a man's missing kid. Man is grateful, of course. And, oh, by the way, Mr. Grimm, I think maybe my wife is seeing a vampire on the side. Could you look into that for me?
Jack's answer was always the same.
Yes, I can help you...as long as you can pay my fee and expenses.
Jack lit the Lucky Strike, pocketed the Zippo, and extracted the cryptic note. He frowned as he read it again. “Yeah, okay, I'm in hell. That's a given. I'm a tortured fucking soul. Blah, blah, blah. But who's the dame?”
Jack walked out of the bathroom and lifted his gaze to the ceiling. The cracks maintained their silence. He sat on the edge of the bed again, his brow furrowing as he strove to penetrate the dark cloak enveloping his memories of the previous night. He knew from experience that if he could recall one detail, just grasp one thin, loose thread, he could unravel the whole thing.
He sat there a long time. The cloak remained unraveled. The last thing he could remember was heading out to the Sherlock Holmes Pub in the Elliston Place section of Nashville. Elliston Place was where he kept his office, which was on the third floor of a building that was within easy walking distance of several fine drinking establishments. This, of course, was by design.
So...the Sherlock Holmes Pub.
He drank there often, perhaps a bit more frequently than any of his other regular spots. Given his chosen profession, the name had an obvious appeal. Another reason was convenience—the pub was barely more than a block from the front door of his building. And, perhaps most importantly, the proprietors of the cozy British-style pub possessed an apparently bottomless level of patience with his tendency to drink himself into a blind, blithering stupor. Understandable, considering he'd once helped rid them of a particularly foul demon that had been preying upon their customers.
Stopping in at the Sherlock Holmes for a few had a funny way of turning into a few too many. Obviously that had happened again last night. Had he met anyone there this time? A customer, maybe? Or perhaps some old friend had wandered into the pub, bought him some drinks, and whisked him off
on some mad, whirlwind adventure that had, inexplicably, ended with him holed up in this dump?
Jack nodded. “Gotta call Andy.”
He reached for the phone, cradled the receiver between ear and shoulder, pressed '9' for an outside line, then punched in the mobile number for his oldest friend. Andy O'Day had been the guilty party last time and Jack was willing to bet he was to blame again.
But the call didn't go through. Instead a recording spoke in his ear. “You must first press '6' to dial an outside line,” the sultry and alluring female voice told him. Jack was so enthralled by the electric eroticism the voice embodied that the obvious oddity didn't register at first. The recording told him to hang up and try his call again. He meant to do that, but dialing an outside line was suddenly much further down his list of priorities. He was in the grip of a nearly overwhelming compulsion to deliberately misdial just to hear that luscious sound again.
Then he frowned. “Hey, wait...a '6'?”
Almost anywhere he'd ever used a phone in a non-residential setting, every motel, hotel, restaurant, topless bar, or other place of business, every damn one of them had required use of the number '9' to access an outside line.
Jack's frown deepened. Maybe he'd heard it wrong. He wasn't feeling his best, after all. He felt physically sluggish and his skull was in the grip of a relentless hangover throb. So he dialed '9' and Andy's number again. And he listened to the same recorded message again. He shivered with pleasure. The recorded voice so pulsed with erotic power that it was almost like a physical presence in the room, the sound of it like a feather or tongue gliding down the length of his spine and then roaming over every trembling inch of his body. He deliberately misdialed a few more times, then had to force himself to set the receiver on the cradle.
He looked again at the hospitality card and this time the possible significance of the area code registered. In parentheses in front of the motel's number was a single number repeated three times: (666).
Jack's eyes flicked back to the note.
YOU'RE IN HELL.
He laughed.
And laughed some more.
He kept laughing until the noise that emerged from his throat was like the cackling of a madman.
3.
Jack's body convulsed on the bed, but he was no longer laughing. The pain he tried to keep away with the booze was on him again, eating at his soul like a ravenous cancer of the spirit. He was assailed by memories of the past and the terrible knowledge of all the things he'd lost. He saw Mona, smiling, waving at him from a pier as he fished from a boat off the Florida coast. Mona, gone so long now. And he saw his father, the wise old professor teaching a little boy the proper way to throw a baseball during a break in his daily lessons on demonology. Dad, gone.
The mental agony was immense, more all-engulfing than he'd allowed it to be in some time. He knew of only two ways to end the suffering—suicide, or a large and immediate influx of alcohol. He turned his head to look again at the gun on the nightstand, and he gave the mercy of the bullet the most serious consideration he had in years.
It would be so easy. And it would solve so many things. He wouldn't have to bother with unraveling the mystery of his current baffling situation. Just the notion of attempting to solve so inexplicable a puzzle made him feel tired. It was then that he made his decision. He retrieved the gun from the nightstand and inserted the barrel in his mouth.
He began to exert pressure on the trigger. It was almost done. He could feel the relief sweeping through him. Just a little more pressure. He looked within himself for the courage to finish the act and found it.
He closed his eyes and made a silent apology to anyone who'd ever loved him.
Then he heard a voice say, “Don't do that, Jack.”
Jack's eyes fluttered open. His finger relaxed on the trigger and he removed the gun barrel from his mouth. He regarded it with queasy longing for a moment before returning the gun to the nightstand. Then he looked at the ghost sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room.
He sighed. “Didn't you once tell me something about a problem with traveling great distances? Like, how you really can't do it at fucking all? Your incorporeal essence diminishes the farther you get from the site of your death.”
The ghost shrugged. “What about it?”
Jack scowled. “How are you here, Harlan?”
Harlan Calhoun—rather, the thing that once was Harlan Calhoun—smiled. He was as handsome in death as he had been in life, with an easy grin and a mop of shaggy brown curls atop his head. “I was informed of your predicament by a mutual friend. Arrangements were made. Some favors were called in. Spells were cast and there was a lot in the way of chanting and some other mystic mumbo jumbo I don't actually understand. Basically, I received a kind of spiritual booster shot to keep my essence from dissipating. Also, we're talking about a transfer between realms, which isn't at all the same thing as traveling a great physical distance.” He smiled again. “Duh.”
Jack lit another cigarette and blew smoke into the middle of the room. “Great. Whatever. You're here. Why?”
Harlan leaned toward him. “Because our mutual friend--”
“We're talking about Andy, right?”
Harlan's smile faded. “We are, indeed. Andy is worried. He feels you're in a bad way mentally. That your depression is deepening.”
Jack exhaled more smoke. “Such a perceptive boy, our Andy.”
Harlan's expression darkened. “Yes. And I can see he had cause for concern. Jack, you weren't really about to bloody up this lovely room with the contents of your head—were you?”
Jack shrugged.
“Jack, you just can't do it.”
Jack glowered. “Yeah? Maybe you should tell me why that is. Because I need some serious convincing on that point, pal. The way I see it, pulling the plug on my miserable ass is the best way to go. Nothing would hurt anymore. I'm tired of hurting, Harlan.”
The ghost's dead eyes looked pained. Haunted. “You're wrong, you know. You'll still hurt. And the pain will be worse than ever. You'll have eternity to obsess over your life's regrets, but you'll never have a chance to set anything right. You're alive, Jack. Alive. Do you realize how precious life is? Every day you continue to draw breath is an extraordinary opportunity to make your grubby little corner of the world the tiniest bit better. Dead people can't do that. Look at me. I'm doomed to haunt a tiny piece of the earth forever, because, who knows, I wasn't quite good enough to get into heaven, or quite bad enough to warrant damnation. I'm visible only to a few people sensitive to hauntings. Can you imagine the loneliness, Jack? Can you imagine the pain?” His tone had grown harsh. “Think about that. Think about that long and hard before you ever put the barrel of a gun in your mouth again.”
Jack smirked.
Harlan began to look annoyed. “What is it?”
Jack chuckled. “'Long and hard'.”
Harlan stood up and shot him a middle finger. “Asshole. You go on and do whatever stupid damn thing it is you're gonna do. Kill yourself. What do I really care? Hell, maybe you'll be a ghost, too. We can hang out. Play ghost poker. Whatever. I've done what I can, man. I gotta be going.”
His image was fading—Jack could see the wall through his shimmering form.
“Later, Harlan.”
The ghost was gone and Jack was again alone in the room with the burden of his memories. His gaze went back to the gun. He sighed. Andy had gone to a lot of trouble to send Harlan to this place. There had to be a good reason for it. So Jack decided to put off killing himself for at least another day and set about finding out what that reason was.
He got up, strapped on his shoulder holster, holstered the gun, and shrugged on his jacket. Then he walked out of the motel room to get his first sober look at hell.
4.
Hell didn't much resemble anything Jack had ever envisioned. This wasn't some vast, fiery pit. This was more like...New Jersey. Or Gary, Indiana. Or somewhere else very ordinary in the heart of Am
erica. Jack's incredulous gaze swept up and down the street outside the Sundowner Inn as he stood in the motel's parking lot and smoked another Lucky Strike.
Jack scratched his head. “Where are all the hideous, leering demons? Where are all the strange, capering things in the shadows? What about the fucking lake of fire?”
A big 18-wheeler towing a tanker with a Texaco logo on the side rumbled by the motel, then disappeared around a street corner. A black prostitute wearing a platinum blonde wig, a halter top, and a miniscule skirt that looked molded to her prodigious ass like shiny cellophane hovered around a bus stop bench at the sidewalk. Not normally his type, but he still felt some lingering influence of the recorded phone voice. He considered buying some of her time to purge some of that, but his resolve returned as he reminded himself there were other things that must be done before he could tend to his surging libido. So he tore his gaze away from the prostitute and began to move toward the Sundowner Inn's front office.
But he sensed a fast-approaching disturbance of some type and stopped in his tracks. He turned around in time to see a long boat of an automotive relic, a fucking ragtop Edsel, come screeching around a street corner. Its rear end fishtailed, but the driver quickly and efficiently course corrected and the metal behemoth shot forward. Two men in suits and fedoras were leaning out of the vehicle's windows and aiming Tommy guns at the empty air behind them. The big car was close enough now that Jack could see the fat driver hunched over the steering wheel, a wisp of smoke curling from the stogie clenched between his gritted teeth.
The mystery of the daredevil gunmen was solved a moment later when two more cars came speeding around the same corner. These were white police cars, but they were moving too fast for Jack to make out the insignia on the doors. The fleeing gunmen opened fire the moment the cruisers appeared.
