He would’ve liked to have gotten Hazel’s phone number when they met. It wasn’t as if he could call her and blatantly ask if she had been involved, yet he felt they had shared something that night at the Hall of Hell that he could never have shared with Ronnie or even Celia if he felt inclined to talk to that slut about anything more substantial than the weather.
Calvin was reminded that the man Hazel had been walking with was similar to Celia in that he’d looked perfectly normal, alive. That was why the urge to follow her had been so strong yesterday. Had she been walking with a corpse he might not have thought anything about it. He might not have even noticed her if it hadn’t been for the healthy breathing man in her company.
That brought up another question. Thinking back, Calvin wasn’t sure what state Hazel had been in. She hadn’t appeared as dead as so many others he came into contact with, not like Ronnie with the gaping gash on her neck the beautiful array of stab wounds. Pale, yes, but hadn’t Hazel been a perfectly gothic shade of pale when he met her? Some people died from natural causes or strangulation or overdose, something that doesn’t leave distinguishable marks.
In the bathroom Calvin examined his face in the mirror. He looked alive, but seeing his own face didn’t cause him the same queasy feeling of disgust as seeing Celia’s or the guy Hazel was with yesterday. What he saw in the mirror was what he’d always seen in the mirror. Well, almost. There were subtle differences. Not physical; something deeper. Something in his eyes that wasn’t there before, a vacancy as if the eyes that stared back had seen things no one should ever have to witness. Eyes that battle-scarred soldiers come home with. Eyes of a remorseful murderer. Derelict eyes.
Calvin exited the bathroom figuring he would finish his orange juice and have a shower before heading out—not that he was sure where he was going—when he realized that Death’s Door II was playing on the television in the living room.
A mix of shock and comfort spread throughout his body like the gut warming sensation of straight whiskey. He paused, witness to a body burned like a barbequed chicken leg that had fallen on the charcoal. A faint whispering tickled the back of his mind like the very renderings of some lost soul searching its way to what lies beyond. Calvin couldn’t recognize the voice for it was too soft and too far in the recess of his consciousness—a hoarse whisper of broken glass, inaudible yet soothing.
He downed the juice and pushed back the realization that there was no way Death’s Door II could be playing on this television when the only VCR he owned was hooked up to the television in his bedroom.
Minor detail.
Hardly worth losing sleep over.
The sandpaper whisperings told him so.
Calvin left the house with the TV on, figuring that even if he turned it off, the video would play until it was damn well ready to stop. Let it play. Let it fill his apartment with death.
To Calvin’s relief, Celia wasn’t sitting in the green plastic chair. He didn’t want to have to deal with her smart-ass quips and sultry confrontations. A whore is a whore is a whore, he thought as he descended the stairs.
“Been some complaints about noise,” said Mr. Fingers, startling Calvin from his disjointed thoughts.
“Huh?”
Mr. Fingers stood in the doorway of his apartment on the first floor, wrapped in a blood-red bathrobe. His face was thick and splotched with sores. He looked like a walking disease.
“Complaints,” said Fingers.
“Not my apartment. I don’t even play music loud.”
“Well, someone is.”
“The apartment across from me, they’re always having parties. They treat that place like a frat house.”
Mr. Fingers shifted his gaze to the landing, but he couldn’t see the apartment in question, not that seeing it right then would have confirmed anything. Butterfingers huffed and mumbled and then retreated into his apartment.
It was typical for Mr. Fingers to watch the courtyard and find something to bitch and complain about. If anything, he was an equal opportunity complainer. Everyone got a taste of ol’ Butterfingers. Even that little old lady in 4A. Harmless old thing was chewed out one day for propping the gate open so she could bring her groceries in without having to fumble around for her key when she had to make multiple trips to her car. By the tongue-lashing she got you would have thought that she’d been luring young boys into her apartment with candy and showing them stag films in her living room.
Calvin took the bus on Madison and then transferred onto the trolley at the El Cajon transit station. The trolley was moderately filled with a variety of people ranging from suicide cases to sickly pale cadavers. The odor was noxious like the corpses had been standing around in the sun before stepping onto the trolley car. Calvin breathed it in. The rancid reek hit his nostrils with an almost burning intensity, and then, like ripping open a piece of limburger cheese, he began to consider the nuances of the trolley’s putrescence. Had he been an aficionado, he would have considered what wine would have gone well with something so ripe.
As Calvin traveled through San Diego on his way downtown where he would catch a bus to Balboa Park, he considered his motivations. Why Balboa Park? That was the scene of the crime, and it would be swarming with police and CSI peeps. No way he was getting close to the canyon. What was he going there for anyway? Did he really think he was going to find Hazel there?
Fat chance.
Instead, Calvin hopped off the trolley downtown. The first thing he saw was a pair of cops hovering over a body that was slumped over a separate pair of tracks. The cops were perfectly rotten. The guy on the tracks, however, had that distinctly alive look, though he was clearly in an advanced state of inebriation or perhaps a drug frenzy that had come to a crashing end leaving the poor bastard in a dangerous position just north of a coma.
Another homeless man whose face was more skull than flesh got right up in Calvin’s face and asked, “You spare a buck? Need a trolley ticket, man. I’ll take whatever you got.”
His breath was foul, and not in a decomposition sort of way. It was like malt liquor and cat shit.
“Naw,” said Calvin. “Sorry, man.”
“No change,” insisted Skull Face.
“Who has change these days. Everyone uses a debit card.” Not like you’re gonna scrounge up enough money for a face transplant or something. Calvin chuckled.
After making his way through the bastions of bums and beggars, Calvin walked the big city streets without a destination in mind. The sounds of traffic and police sirens, sidewalk cafes and lunchtime bars almost blocked out the whispering, but its tiny shards thrashed though Calvin’s mind.
After wandering for an hour or so he found himself on a familiar street. By the time he saw the Museum of Death sign there was only a split second to make the connection before he took notice that someone had just gone down the very stairs where he had his initial confrontation with Mr. Ghastly.
Picking up speed, Calvin crossed the one-way street, eyes never averting from the stairway entrance to the Museum. Whoever that was, Calvin wasn’t going to let him out of his sight. He was sure it wasn’t Mr. Ghastly. The figure wasn’t as tall, and Ghastly didn’t strike Calvin as the type to go slinking around like that. Ghastly didn’t seem like the type that saw much daylight.
By the time Calvin made it to the stairwell, no one was there, which meant that the person who descended the stairs had gone inside.