Spiked

by Mark Arsenault

  There was no front door—just another tall sheet of plywood, attached crooked to the doorframe by two brass hinges. A V-shaped chunk was missing from the board about halfway up, opposite the hinges. The wood was brighter around the damaged section, not aged gray like the rest. Somebody had recently smashed off a padlock fixture.

  Three great granite steps led to the porch. Eddie climbed them, and then pulled the makeshift door. The hinges groaned. Eddie gasped at the sound and clenched his free hand into a fist. It was a fight-or-flight instinct, in case he had to throw a punch before he could run. But nobody was there. There was a damp smoky smell inside, like from an old campfire.

  Bizarre graffiti covered the walls of the narrow hallway behind the door, a dozen grotesque caricatures, each as tall as Eddie, drawn in black and red, as if Van Gogh had painted an acid trip on Easter Island. The bodies of the figures were stick frames, skinny and twisted. Their giant, elongated heads were warped and lumpy. They had gaping mouths full of jagged teeth, and their eyes were rotated half a turn, so that they watched Eddie vertically. Each head had a gushing red wound.

  Eddie reached in and touched the painting closest to the door. Red paint, still tacky, came off onto his fingertip. The heat from his walk through the Acre drained away and he shivered. Fear kissed his cheek.

  He saw a large room at the end of the hall. Dim yellow sunlight fought through dust on the windows. There was a dirty sofa down there. It might have been white once. A wool blanket was neatly folded and laid over the sofa back. There were soda bottles and brightly colored fast food wrappers on the floor, and a shopping cart on its side.

  Eddie stuck his head in the door and listened. If there was anything to hear, the rap music blaring down the street swallowed up the sound. Eddie closed the plywood, turned away down the steps and blew hot breath into his cupped hands. The police would want to know about this place, and about the woman from the rooftop and the wake.

  He stopped to think.

  If the woman with the red mittens was there, and if she knew something about the case, the cops would sit on it for a week, and then call a press conference. Channel Eight would send Boden and he’d lead the six-o’clock broadcast from these granite steps. Eddie would have the story in the next day’s paper, one news cycle later.

  Eddie blew a long cone of frozen breath. He climbed the steps again and pulled open the door. Let them all read about this place in The Empire.

  The house had no heat, but at least no wind. Eddie inched down the hallway, past the giant painted heads. The rotten floorboards had an unnerving, creaky spring to them.

  The room at the end of the hall was once a parlor. There was a tile fireplace at one end, though the mantle had been pried away. Black ash was spread in a half-circle around the fire pit, like somebody had cleaned the pit by kicking ash into the room. At the other end of the parlor, grand wooden stairs curved up to the second floor. Spindle rods stuck up from a few of the steps, where once had rested a banister.

  There were a dozen more giant graffiti heads here. Most resembled the ones in the hallway. But one was much larger, stretching from the floor to the ten-foot ceiling. Its eyes were black circles, the size of manholes. Its body was stubby and meatier than the rest. The head had a pair of horns curling up, like a ram’s. Both arms ended in pistols in the place of hands. Squiggly hand-painted letters, like those on signs at Cambodian markets around the neighborhood, spelled things that Eddie could not understand.

  If you measured art by its effect on the viewer, this decrepit house was a masterpiece. The painted figure stole Eddie’s breath like hands around his throat. His eyes passed from the horns to the guns and settled on the big black saucers. They were more like holes than eyes, burned out by something they had witnessed.

  He kicked through the trash. Nothing. And then through the fireplace ash. He discovered a stain on the floor. Blood?

  There was a noise, a light bump above him. Eddie looked to the ceiling. Puffs of white dust dropped from a crack in the plaster. Somebody was walking across the room above.

  Fear joined Eddie in the parlor.

  He inspected the stairs. Fresh footsteps had swept a track through the dust, up the center of the staircase. Eddie held his breath and rested a foot upon the first stair. He let the breath out and eased his weight up. The stair moaned. Eddie grimaced and froze in place. To his ear, he might as well have stepped on bagpipes. He fought the urge to run.

  Thirty seconds passed.

  Nothing happened.

  Eddie took another step. That stair didn’t complain.

  Up the stairs and out of sight, somebody—a man—spoke out loud. It sounded like chanting. Eddie couldn’t make out the words, just the rhythm. The cadence seemed to repeat itself. It didn’t come any closer so he waited, listening. It repeated over and over, as if the voice was stuck on the same line in a song or poem.

  Fear brushed her chapped lips over the little hairs at the top of Eddie’s spine.

  Eddie decided on a plan. He would see what was up there, and run if anybody saw him, right to the cops. He tried to ignore Gordon Phife’s voice in his head, quoting from the movie Tremors: “Running’s not a plan. Running’s what you do when a plan fails.”

  The voice covered any noise from the stairs, and Eddie hurried on his toes up twelve more steps to a darkened hallway with dirty white walls. He peeked around the corner. An open doorway at the end of the long hall glowed red. From the top of the stairs, the voice was clear. It was low and raspy, repeating a short chant, maybe a sentence or two, in a language Eddie did not understand; certainly not Spanish, probably something Southeast Asian. He tried to memorize the chant phonetically.

  Too fast. I’ll never remember this.

  Eddie pulled out his cell phone and dialed The Empire. He punched in his own extension. It rang four times, and then transferred to voice mail. He waited for the beep, and then held the phone toward the red-lit room. He let the chant repeat twice, and then broke the connection.

  The phone grew slick in his sweaty hand. He squeezed it and edged closer to the voice. Halfway down the hall, he could see a sliver of the room. There, on a knee-high pile of newspaper by the door, was a pair of red mittens.

  Edging closer, he peered from darkness into the red light.

  The Cambodian woman stood with her back to Eddie, in front of a round kitchen table draped in newspaper. The chanting continued from deeper in the room, out of Eddie’s view. Above the table, strung on a wire, hung two small battery lanterns. They were wrapped in red plastic tape. To the right of the table stood an easel. It displayed a large black-and-white photograph Eddie had never seen before, but recognized in an instant.

  It was a picture of Danny Nowlin.

  The photo measured about fourteen inches diagonally, and was of poor quality. The pixels were too big, like it had been enlarged from a smaller print without the negative. Danny sat alone in the picture, a posed smile on his face.

  The chanting stopped and the woman stepped aside. On a square of white handkerchief at the center of the table rested Nowlin’s reddish ponytail. She had stolen it, stolen it from the wake in front of everyone. Stunned, Eddie fixated on the lock of hair.

  When he glanced to the woman again, she was staring back at him.

  That’s when Fear nestled up behind him and raked her razor red nails over his Adam’s apple. Eddie tried to swallow the lump in his throat. It went down like a fistful of bobby pins.

  The woman was still. Her expression said nothing. They both waited, waited. Good God, she’s beautiful—

  Bzzzzzzz.

  “Hey!” Eddie yelped. The telephone in his fist was ringing. Not now Gordie!

  A man’s voice called out.

  Eddie spun and ran with abandon, thundering down the hall.

  The man yelled again. The language was a mystery to Eddie, but he understood the angry tone. Heavy footsteps pounded after him. Running seemed like a fine plan after all. Nobody could ca
tch him, not with the lead he had.

  Shadows flickered on the wall above the stairs. He thought he smelled smoke.

  Then he heard a piercing crack, and the squeal of old eight-penny nails tearing from place. The floor rushed up at him and Eddie fought for balance. His right foot plunged through a broken floorboard, straight through thin ceiling slats and plaster, and then into space. His chest crashed to the floor and there was another loud crack.

  The blow knocked the wind out of him. Pain crackled up his spine like electricity along a ragged wire. A scream stuck fast inside the vacuum of his empty lungs. Eddie clawed wildly at the floorboards, and then fell through them. He thrashed in the air, grabbing for something solid in the debris, and then instinctively wrapped his arms around his head and waited for the parlor floor.

  Chapter 8

  Eddie woke to purring.

  He listened a while and decided this was not a cat’s purr, which goes in and out like a man sawing wood. This purr held steady. A motor, he thought. Powerful, and in perfect tune. He felt a swaying, like being below decks on the ferry to Nantucket, but not so predictable.

  He thought to open his eyes. And then realized they were open and everything was black. He was on his right side. His knees were pulled up to his chin. Eddie’s hip ached and his head felt magnetized to the floor. His cheek pressed into scratchy carpeting, and he tasted blood. His left hand was sticky and there was grit between the fingers. He reached up and felt the ceiling, very cold, just above his head.

  His concussed brain correctly reasoned that this was the trunk of a car. But it could not decide if this was where he should be. And then the world phased back out.

  A low grunt came next. It was a self-satisfied noise after a tough job done well.

  Eddie was weightless, floating in space, arms stretched out like Superman.

  It was so quiet out here.

  The crash rattled back some of his senses. A low crack echoed once, and an icy shock bit into his flesh. Eddie lifted his head from water and silently gasped. He had landed face-down on milky ice. A section of ice had broken off under his weight and had dipped below the water. It bobbed back to the surface like a raft, with Eddie on board.

  He recognized the walls of a mill canal on either side of him. A spiked wrought-iron fence ran along the top of the wall. Parts of the Worthen Canal had such a fence, he recalled. That canal flowed through low-income housing along the western edge of the Acre, into an industrial area, and then under the street where the police had found Danny.

  On the ice, a few inches from Eddie’s face, a rat was posed on the spot it had died. Its greasy gray hair looked brittle, like glass. Its pink tail snaked out under a coating of ice. The rat had stopped here long enough for its tail to become frozen in place. Why would it stop? Maybe for a last meal before a death struggle against its own tail. How long did it suffer?

  Eddie was still.

  A harsh whisper from above said, “If you tried all day, could you be any more stupid? It’s floating away on the goddam ice.”

  “Must you use the name of our Lord that way?” said another voice.

  “Shut up. Get a rock.”

  Eddie thought about General VonKatz. The cat could drink from the drip in the tub. And he could live hungry for a week, couldn’t he? Longer, maybe. Somebody would check the house by then. Melissa would remember him. Eddie thought about the General’s last ear infection. He wouldn’t take his pills. Eddie had crushed them into some gravy and added catnip to hide the medicine smell. Would anybody think of that?

  Something splashed beside his head.

  Eddie hadn’t the strength to swim. And even if he did, the water was too cold, the walls of the canal too sheer. To slip off the ice would be to drown. He tried to fuse himself to the ice with his will. Shivers shook blood from Eddie’s head. The red droplets ran like bugs on the wet ice.

  There was a bigger splash. The ice wobbled. An archway of rough stone appeared above him.

  “You missed again, you idiot,” said a voice. “Now it’s floating under the bridge.”

  “Forget it,” the other voice answered. “It’ll sink before it comes out the other side.”

  Two car doors slammed and an engine purred off.

  Eddie clung to the ice a while. It seemed a long time.

  He thought about the Red Sox. If they could just add one decent starting pitcher this off-season, and one infielder who could run. He thought about Nowlin, floating face down in this canal with no ice under him. He thought about Bruno, his barber, dialing Eddie because the dive team was scrambling. Eddie’s mind heard his phone ringing with the barber’s tip. But nobody would answer it.

  There was no more pain, not from his hip, nor the cold, not from the wounds that had bloodied his hands. Eddie was glad to be feeling better. His shivering went away. There was no sound beyond his own breath, so soft and calm, like a sleeping child without grown-up worries.

  He studied the rat. Its eyelids were open and the eyes frozen white.

  My eyes are brown. He was glad to be feeling better.

  Chapter 9

  “Hey Gab! Help me—this one is alive. Get him up.”

  “God, Leo, what a mess.”

  Hands pulled at Eddie. He saw two blurry faces.

  “Put the shawl over him.”

  “Eew! Look at that rat.”

  The hands passed Eddie around. They stretched him into a cross—arms out to the side. His face flopped forward; the ground passed under his feet. Eddie’s shoes scuffed on the asphalt. The heads under his armpits wheezed and coughed as they carried him. Eddie smelled foul breath; these heads were rotting from the inside out. His shoes knocked against railroad tracks. The rails were polished like silver and they reflected the moonlight. The head under Eddie’s right arm yelled out, “Kent? Snake? Get over here.”

  “Kent’s on the nod—he’s long gone,” called another voice. “Did you get the stuff?”

  “Yes, and something else.”

  “Jesus—where’d he come from?”

  The railroad tracks were gone. Now there was dry grass below his feet. Then Eddie’s nose was in the grass and he smelled oil. The hands took him up a steep hill.

  “Just lay him on his back and drag him along the ledge. Watch for the ice—do not lose him.”

  They rolled him, and suddenly the night stars appeared. Eddie recognized Orion the hunter. He tried to tell them that the Egyptians built the Great Pyramids in a line with Orion’s belt. But it came out in a gurgle.

  “Easy, man,” a voice said.

  Silhouettes passed over Eddie. They hid the starlight like black holes.

  They moved him in small steps, grunting as they dragged him and panting when they rested. Soon Eddie was under rows of great steel beams, rusted orange and lit by flickering light. The place smelled like a campfire. A truck rumbled overhead. Above the beams, there was a concrete ceiling. They had taken him under a bridge.

  “Take his clothes off.” The woman’s voice was low and throaty.

  Hands pulled at Eddie’s belt. The man undressing him had curly black hair like steel wool, and a gray stubble beard. Shadows filled his deep eye sockets and the hollows in his cheeks.

  Eddie struggled to ask them, who are you?

  “Can’t understand a word you’re saying,” the woman said.

  Eddie watched her in the campfire light. She spread out a blanket and sat on it. Her light hair hung limp to her shoulders. Dainty brown eyebrows seemed out of place on her ashen face, which was pockmarked by little scars. She pulled a faded pink sweatshirt over her head and exposed her breasts, which sagged into ovals. She undid her jeans and slid them off. Her legs were skinny, the color of buttermilk.

  The man dragged Eddie to the blanket. Eddie’s clothes were piled on the ground.

  “Got to raise your core temperature or you’ll die,” the woman said.

  She pressed her body against his and the man wrapped the blanket aroun
d them. He spread another blanket over the first one. It smelled like piss.

  The fire heated Eddie’s face. Another man, bald with a reptile skin tattoo around his neck, stoked the flames with hunks of a broken rocking chair. The bridge rattled under the traffic.

  Soon Eddie began to shiver again, and pain seeped back into his hip and his head. His shakes grew violent. The woman slid an arm over his chest and squeezed. “Don’t fight it,” she whispered. “That’s your life coming back.”

  A fire engine howled across the bridge. She waited for the siren to pass, and then said to the man with curly hair, “Leo, honey, fix the spike for me, would you? I’m starving for it.”

  He smiled, saying, “Already done the cooking.” From inside his soiled wool overcoat, he produced a syringe. He pulled off the safety cap and inspected the needle in the fire’s light. He flicked it twice with a finger. “It is ready, Luv.”

  Chapter 10

  Eddie woke alone to the bustle of the morning commute clattering across the bridge overhead. His hip ached. A lump on the back of his skull throbbed when he rolled over on it. He was stiff from sleeping on cement. The cold air had tempered overnight to something more seasonable, maybe forty degrees. The sun blazed brightly outside the shadow of the bridge.

  He lay wrapped in blankets on a cramped ledge, the size of an average living room, which jutted out from a concrete bridge abutment. Nine parallel steel I-beams, five feet overhead, carried the bridge to another abutment, maybe fifty feet away.

  All sorts of trash was strewn around the ledge: empty soup cans, cat food boxes, fast food and cigarette wrappers. Old clothes, dirty sheets and blankets were in piles. A yellow plastic milk crate nearby held coffee mugs, cutlery, two long white candles, a bottle of lemon juice and a handful of new syringes wrapped in plastic.