As Ronnie finished her pizza, Calvin stared at the television, but he wasn’t watching the program so much as seeing through it, his mind mingling in the dark depths of uncertainty, the refreshing feeling his long sleep provided him with seemingly diminishing as he drank post-pizza beer and felt the carbonation mingle with chewed up dough in his gut.
Some sitcom rerun was on TV, perhaps Seinfeld or Scrubs, he really couldn’t tell, or even remember, and when he did try to focus on the show, all he saw were corpses and laugh tracks replaced with low moaning voices of the damned. From within the television the corpses looked at Calvin as if he owed them something, as if he were responsible for their deaths, and though he knew it was all a figment of his imagination, it was terrifying.
Calvin stood robotically and went to the bathroom. Inside, he rubbed his eyes and face and sighed. Something was wrong with him. He was off-balanced, as if suffering a terrible hangover that left him groggy and disoriented. The refreshing feeling after his nap seemed to have dwindled away leaving him exhausted all over again like coming down after an energy drink spike.
Something was terribly wrong, and though he should have pinpointed the Museum of Death and Mr. Ghastly as the culprits for his oncoming madness, he was searching elsewhere to point his blaming finger.
Calvin’s thigh itched. He scratched the itch, but it intensified and then something in his pocket moved. He could feel it through the fabric of his denim pants, something square and firm almost like a piece of hard plastic or thin metal.
Calvin slapped the foreign object, but that seemed to anger it, which became clear when it began undulating furiously beneath the fabric of his jeans. Calvin quickly unbuttoned his pants and slid them off, kicking them into the corner where the bathtub met the wall.
His mind flashed images of scorpions and exotic spiders, but the shape of the object wasn’t that of any type of arachnid Calvin knew of. There was nothing logical that he could think of in that shape and size that would be able to move.
The pants began to stir ever so slightly. Whatever it was, Calvin was going to have to face it because he couldn’t come out of the bathroom without his pants on and try to explain to Ronnie what the hell was going on. She was already teetering on the notion that he might be losing his mind after finding him sitting up on the edge of his bed asleep with his eyes open. If he went running out of the bathroom right now in his boxers she’d lose her shit.
From the furls of denim came something familiar, inching like a caterpillar. It was the Polaroid Mr. Ghastly gave him. It made its way across the bathroom floor, slinking along in an arch, black back facing up, and flipped itself over at Calvin’s feet like a puppy looking for a belly rub, proudly exposing the butchered woman.
Calvin expelled the breath he’d been holding. A sick smile surfaced on his face as he knelt down to retrieve the photo. He had forgotten all about it. He held up the Polaroid, momentarily retreating to a miserable, foggy void filled with the massacred woman in all her glory staring dead-eyed at him in black and white.
The faint sound of canned sitcom laughter on the television dissolved. The drab white walls of the bathroom and the glossy surfaces of the toilet, tub and sink had blended together into a blissful white nothingness. The only shadows, the only black and gray was the image of the mutilated woman, the blood on her hacked up body like chocolate syrup. Isn’t that what they used in Night of the Living Dead? Chocolate syrup for the blood?
The woman’s body moved in the white void, as if seeking a more comfortable position than that she had died in, the chocolaty blood smeared across her pale skin. Calvin’s stomach grumbled. Where only a moment ago he was busting at the seams with pizza and beer, he now felt a pang of hunger. More than anything, at that moment, he wanted to lick the syrupy blood from the corpse. He wanted to taste it. Would it taste coppery or chocolaty?
A knock rattled the bathroom door, jarring Calvin from the great big white nothing he had retreated into.
“You okay,” came Ronnie’s voice through the door.
Calvin clutched the photo defensively as if she had walked in on him and he didn’t want her to see the dead woman, didn’t want her to snatch the photo and send it through a paper shredder.
“Uh, not f-feeling well,” he stammered. “Stomach’s acting up. I’ll be out in little bit.”
“Do you want some Tums or Peptol Bismol or something?”
The Polaroid pulsated in his hands like a living thing. The feeling of it beating like a heart simultaneously repulsed and exhilarated him.
“No, I’ll be alright,” said Calvin.
“Okay.”
After enough time to convince him that she had gone back to the couch, Calvin looked at the Polaroid again, assuring himself that it hadn’t somehow been altered. He put on his pants and then put the Polaroid back into his pocket where his fingers brushed against something. He pulled out a wrinkled crumple of papers. Two of them. One was the invitation to the Museum of Death that Mr. Ghastly had given him. The other was the flyer he grabbed off the wall in the Death’s Door room last night.
Calvin unfolded what turned out to be some kind of sign-up sheet with an illustration of Mr. Ghastly looking like a living dead Uncle Sam. His pointing finger was all rotten and bony. The top said: WE WANT YOU! The bottom said: TO BE A GOREHOUND, beneath which was smaller print that, at a closer look, proved to be a sort of pledge with a blank line for a signature.
Calvin whispered one word. “Weird.”
He pocketed the flyer snug against the Polaroid and exited the bathroom after flushing the toilet to make it look like he had actually used it.
Calvin did everything he could to banish all thoughts of gorehounds and dead bodies and spent the rest of the night with Ronnie.
They watched a movie and ate junk food. At times the actors in the movie looked like reanimated corpses, only they weren’t watching a zombie film—they weren’t even watching a horror film. Calvin didn’t let it get to him. When he did, all he had to do was put his hand on the Polaroid in his pocket. It would breathe and he would feel better.
At the end of the night it was quite obvious that Ronnie wanted to stay over. Normally Calvin wouldn’t have second-guessed a night with Ronnie, but he was in no mood for it. That meant he would have to tell her that she needed to go home, and that could lead to problems. He couldn’t remember ever telling her that she had to go home. Spending the night together, making love in his bed, those were the great nights. Waking up together and fixing bacon and eggs, those were good mornings.
“I’m bushed,” said Calvin, yawning.
“I could stay here—”
“I don’t know. I really do need to catch up on sleep after my night shift. I have to go to work tomorrow anyway, you know?”
Ronnie nodded, but she couldn’t hide the disappointment on her face. That was a look that only a week ago would have melted Calvin’s heart, a look that he would have heeded to in a heartbeat, but not tonight.
Tonight he had a date with death.
Calvin stood up. “I’ll call you after work tomorrow, ‘kay?”
Ronnie stood, her eyes searching the couch and the floor for her purse. She looked confused, which was exactly what Calvin didn’t want to happen, but there was nothing he could do about it. The deeper urge growing like cancer in his psyche told him that he needed to watch the video. Couldn’t get to sleep without it. Had to get sleep too, and how could he get sleep if he didn’t watch the video, and how could he watch the video if Ronnie stuck around?