How can you have any sleep if you don’t watch the video? YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY SLEEP IF YOU DON’T WATCH THE VIDEO!
Ronnie took off after another few minutes of awkward conversation. Calvin promised to call her after work and she solemnly nodded. They shared a passionless kiss at the door that was perhaps a bit too forced, and then she was on her way home.
After Ronnie was gone Calvin methodically closed the house down, shutting windows and turning off lights as if he were going to bed. In his room he took the flyers out of his pocket and placed them on the nightstand. He then took out the Polaroid and slipped it beneath his pillow like a kid does with a tooth in hopes of a silver dollar from the tooth fairy. It vibrated softly in his fingertips as he stashed it there. It was a comforting kind of vibration much like a cat’s purring.
Calvin turned on his television. He was about to push in the tape sticking out of his VCR when he noticed a label on the oblong edge where, were it a real movie, the title would have been. It was a plain white sticker that said, in rigid sharpie pen: Death’s Door II.
He drew his hand away. A pang of fear crept over him for he hadn’t written that on the video—It wasn’t even his handwriting—and that meant someone had been in his room.
The window was open, but he was on the second floor. He often left the bedroom window open. It wasn’t as if someone was going to slap an extension ladder against the front wall of the building and climb up. That kind of brazen action on Madison Avenue would have a number of police calls in no time.
Unless the intruder was wearing a uniform and looked like a tradesman or something.
No, that was crazy. There was no way someone sneaked into Calvin apartment while he slept, and certainly no way Ronnie could have, or even would have done something like this.
Just push the tape in, said Mr. Ghastly through the ethers and into Calvin’s mind. Enjoy.
How can you have any sleep of you don’t watch the movie?
Calvin did as he was told.
PART TWO
The Museum of Death
Chapter Ten
In the following weeks Calvin must have watched Death’s Door II at least a hundred times. He watched it every night while going to bed, every morning when he woke, as soon as he got home from work each day, and whenever else he could squeeze it in, which was pretty much whenever Ronnie wasn’t around.
She would have been around a lot more, but Calvin was quick with a lie and weaved tales of working late, pulling night shifts, meeting with his uncle at the junkyard to try and scrape something together for him to drive. That actually made Ronnie kind of happy. She was growing tired of having to pick him up every time they went out. She once complained that it felt as if she were courting him when it should have been the other way around.
Thing about them being apart more was that when they were together things were fresh and there seemed to be a stronger connection between them. Even Calvin felt it. It was undeniable, palpable even. There was this electricity when Ronnie came around. For her, it was a tingling that radiated from her heart outward. For Calvin it was something altogether different. What he felt was brought on by something more powerful than love. Or perhaps it was love, a developing, burgeoning love for something deeper and darker than that which two people share exclusively with one another.
Calvin was beginning to fall in love with death.
Watching the Death’s Door videos had become as tame as reading Dr. Seuss books. Sometimes, while in that hazy state of mind, as sleep was beginning to sweep over him, it felt as if he were floating in a sea of corpses. The ones from the videos. The ones from so many grisly websites he’d been viewing on his smartphone during lunch breaks at work.
What caused the newfound connection with Ronnie was what she was becoming, or at least what Calvin perceived of her.
With every passing day he witnessed the world decaying around him. Trees drooped as if suffering from spontaneous drought, some of them long dead and leafless, naked branches reaching for the gray sky. The sun was almost moonlike, which at first had been terrifying, but he became used to it the way he became used to the hoards of dead people he interacted with on a daily basis.
Ronnie was dead in the best possible way. Her throat was slit all jagged like someone had taken an old knife, one that had rusted so badly the metal started braking away, and ripped it across her neck. It was a glorious wound all plastered up with dried black blood. Her face was unblemished. Pale, yes, like the belly of a fish and teaming with tiny purple veins like paper-thin octopus tentacles. Her lips were so deeply purple it almost looked as if Ronnie was into the goth scene or like maybe she spent her nights sleeping on a slab in the morgue.
The first time Calvin saw her like this his heart lurched as if it was being yanked by a string. He let her into his apartment and looked into eyes as milky and cataract as a butchered animal in a Bangladesh bazaar. She once had green eyes if he remembered correctly, but they could never have dazzled the way they did now.
That night they made love for the first time in a week. What he saw when he took off her clothes sealed the deal. Even better than the gash across her neck were the many stab wounds that covered her body like absurd blemishes. And then there was her stomach. She had been eviscerated. Her guts were hanging out in the most sexy way. Like her neck wound, the exposed innards were crusted over in a glossy film of blood and plasma somewhat resembling something from an effects prop warehouse, something that couldn’t possibly be real.
At first it was hard to go on with life in a regular manner when everything around Calvin was dead, and being in bed with Ronnie and her magnificent wounds was a test of fortitude. He wanted to finger the dried guts like teasing her labia before intercourse. He wanted to ease his fingers inside of her belly and feel the moist warmth of her insides, to twist her intestines between his fingers. He thought of other things he wanted to do with the slit in her neck, but she didn’t see what he saw. No one saw what he saw and to finger her entrails or flick his tongue in the stab wounds would appear to be the actions of a crazy man.
It was a few weeks after the Hall of Hell, as Calvin became comfortable living in a world of death, that he noticed something strange—well, strange for a man turned on by the vision of his girlfriend’s mutilated corpse.
Everyone Calvin came into contact with was a walking corpse, all in their own personal death, however Celia across the hall was as she had always been.
Calvin remembered seeing her in an active state of decay several weeks back. It was but a glimpse and it had frightened him at the time, but now that Celia was the only one who looked alive, she kind of startled him.
Chapter Eleven
Ronnie found a parking spot right in front of Calvin’s apartment building. Not always an easy feat on a street as busy as Madison. She put the car in park and pulled the emergency brake.
She sure hoped Calvin would get a car from his uncle soon. It wasn’t so much that she was getting tired of having to pick him up when they went out, but that she disliked the reversal of roles. Times were a changing and so were traditional relationship roles, but Ronnie had a streak of the old fashioned in her. She liked the idea of a man taking charge, paying for dinner, and treating her like a lady. She thanked a guy for opening a door for her—It was a respectful gesture—and yet there were so-called feminists who detested such actions. Just a few weeks ago Calvin told her about opening a door for a woman who was walking out of the post office just as he was walking in. He said that she scowled and said, “I can open the door myself, thank you very much.”