Ronnie put on her bra and panties in rigid jerks, silent. It was the silence that hurt. Calvin had seen this side of her as recently as the time a few weeks ago when he showed her the image of a dead man on his computer. If he couldn’t calm her down before she left his apartment she would give him the silent treatment for a day or two, and he didn’t want that. Anything but that.
You’ve got Death’s Door II, said a voice in his mind. Not Ghastly’s, but some other voice equally persuasive.
“I’m sorry,” Calvin said lamely. He hated when that squeaky child-like quality reflected his insecurities.
She’d pulled her pants on and was now smoothing the wrinkles out of her shirt. “I don’t know where you’re coming up with this stuff, Cal. The past few weeks have been great in many ways, but there’s this other part that I don’t understand. Now I’m just baffled, because you’ve never done anything like that to me. And I’m kind of pissed. I told you to stop. Do you realize that? You were hurting me.”
Calvin hung his head. “I’m sorry.” He truly was. At this desperate moment he was sorry for a lot of things. Sorry he’d shown her the dead man pic, sorry he’d gone to the Museum of Death, sorry he’d gone to the Hall of Hell, sorry he’d met Hazel.
“I’m going to go,” said Ronnie.
Calvin lifted his head. She was standing there staring at him with glassy, piteous eyes. It was better than anger. He knew that if she left like this they would speak tomorrow and he would be able to smooth things out much the way she had smoothed the wrinkles out of her shirt.
Calvin got out of bed and pulled on a pair of boxers. His mind struggled with asking her to stay and letting her go, battling like the flickering visions of her death-side and her life-side.
You don’t like the life side and you know it.
“I’ll walk you to the door,” said Calvin.
He stood, but Ronnie didn’t move. Her stare was relentless, as if trying to optically examine his brain.
“Who is she?” Ronnie said. “Is it Celia?”
Calvin’s face dropped. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re so different in bed. I was talking to a girlfriend and she said that when a guy changes in bed so drastically that means he’s cheating.”
“What? Are you kidding me?”
“No. I’m dead serious. Who is it?”
“No one. I’m not cheating. You know me. You know I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“I thought you wouldn’t do that, but what do I know. Maybe Celia likes it rough.”
Calvin sighed. “Please, stop it with the Celia shit. She’s a fucking whore. That you think I would have anything to do with her hurts.”
“Then who is it?”
“No one. You have to believe me.”
“Then what’s going on? Something isn’t right.”
Calvin thought for the right words to ease her mind. “You said the past few weeks have been good, right? Well, they have been good, so why all this cheating stuff. I can’t make sense of it.”
“This whole fascination with my neck and the way you touch me in bed. It’s not like you.”
“Well, it is me. You know I’m not the cheating type.”
Keep pushing it and I might turn into the cheating type.
“All I’m saying,” he went on, “is that things have been good, so let’s not mess it up, ’kay?”
Ronnie stared into the carpet like she was trying to see into the apartment below. After a tense moment, she nodded, wrapped her arms around Calvin and they shared a big, strong hug.
“I love you, Cal,” she said into his ear. Her voiced cracked, sounded close to tears. “Please, don’t do me wrong. I couldn’t take it.”
He whispered back, “I love you too, and I’ll never do you wrong.”
Chapter Thirteen
After Ronnie left his house, Calvin threw himself onto his couch and let out an exhaustive sigh.
He wouldn’t go as far as saying he thought he was losing his mind, but something startling was happening to his psyche. The frightening part was that Ronnie recognized something was wrong.
After weeks of becoming completely accustomed to going through life with some absurdist view of a living zombie apocalypse, Calvin had become quite comfortable in his new skin. Just before Ronnie came over he had been reflecting on how wary he was about Celia since she didn’t look like everyone else. Things seemed to have been flipped upside down and now the normal people, the ones who looked lively, appeared to be abstractions, freaks, weirdos.
The man Hazel had been walking with, he too looked healthy and alive, and Calvin didn’t like that.
He now wondered if somehow he’d been bamboozled into some dark belief system, and how far would he go? It must have had something to do with Mr. Ghastly, but he couldn’t figure out how. It wasn’t as if he’d been injected with a serum that altered his brain, manipulating his thoughts, but he couldn’t think of another explanation.
He’d seen a glimpse of the alive Ronnie, the real Ronnie. He’d had a simultaneous pang of revulsion and comfort and for a second there he realized how sick his mind had become, how perverted his fantasies had devolved, and how he was losing himself.
Suddenly the idea of watching Death’s Door II, something that would have been a balm for any mental wounds and reservations, was as distasteful as drinking the juice from the bottom of a garbage bag.
Perhaps what Calvin needed was a good night sleep. When was the last time he slept well? Just about every night since… since the Hall of Hell. Those weren’t sleepless nights (Calvin had been feeling particularly pert in the mornings, regardless of how advanced a state of degeneration the world around him appeared to suffer), and all thanks to what? Thanks to Death’s Door II?
He didn’t want the video on. Not tonight.
Calvin turned off the TV in the living room and made his way to bed.
Soon after falling asleep the VHS tape sticking out of the VCR was sucked into the machine. The display said PLAY and the TV came to life… or death.
Chapter Fourteen
Calvin woke refreshed, but if he expected to see the sunshine morning everyone else saw, he was mistaken.
He stretched, walked into the living room and turned on the TV. That was about as automatic as taking a piss in the morning, if not more so. Morning news was a great way to break through the haze of a good night sleep—that and a cup of coffee.
The skies as seen through the Madison Avenue-facing window were gray and dreary, but Calvin figured it was probably a beautiful day in everyone else’s eyes. He sipped his coffee and stared out the window. Corpses shuffled along the street. Trees devoid of leaves stood like organic skeletal masses of twigs and branches. Cars lined the sidewalks in rusted heaps. Buildings of chipping paint and cracked stucco housed the souls of the damned.
Something on the news caught his attention: “… The identification of the body. At this point there are no suspects. The police have told the media that this is an ongoing murder investigation. Anyone who has any information is urged to call Crime Stoppers. You can remain anonymous.”
They weren’t releasing the identity of the murder victim, but there was an aerial shot of Balboa Park, footage from yesterday, that showed a body bag lying in a small canyon.
The same canyon Calvin had watched Hazel lead some guy into.
No, she couldn’t have.
Or could she?
Calvin made toast and poured a glass of spoiled orange juice dotted with floaters of mold. His mind swarmed with images of murder and death the way a catchy song does when you get a nasty earworm. The thought of Hazel killing the man in the canyon should have been terrifying, yet Calvin found a sickening sense of comfort and wonder. Had she done it? If so, did she enjoy it?