The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller (7 page)

“Ahhhh...it’s a woman isn’t it?” Paul asked, shaking his head. “It’s always a woman that brings out the worst in a fine young lad…shaking up the quiet sureness, the certainty, the solid
knowing
that is the very core and center of a man.”

Martin listened in amazement, transfixed as always in his presence, wondering once again how Paul always knew exactly what was bothering him. Had he been spying on him? No. He just knew. If it had anything to with pain, he knew.

“You want it back, don’t you?” Paul continued with a wink. “You want to know again for certain what is what and which way to go and how to get there. You want to take away all that gray and get back to good clean old black and white again. Don’t you, boy?”

The word “boy” cut into Martin like a knife. He gulped on it, and the big back slap that punctuated Paul’s question, but he couldn’t help but answer.

“Yes,” he said, surprising himself by how much he meant it.

Paul sighed a great big Paul sigh. Endlessly tired and endlessly amused at the folly of it all. “Come back,” he whispered, his tongue darting out to lick the chapped corner of his lips. “Come back and make the world the way it used to be.”

Martin looked away. Silent. Numb. Aching. He ached for the lost blankness within himself. He ached for…

Paul cut him off before his thoughts could trace the echoes of Rose’s smiling face. “Are ya comin’ or not boy? I don’t have all day,” he grunted, standing up slowly.

Martin closed his eyes, grateful for the sunshine and the red warmth of his glowing closed eyelids. Then an image of Rose elbowed its way back into his brain and with it came another cascade of raw unfiltered emotions: joy, hope, lust, anger, fear and finally…panic. He opened his eyes. Paul was standing directly in front of him, blocking the sun from his face.

Martin shivered inside the long dark shadow. He closed his eyes one last time and the silence in his head told him what he had to do, what he had to learn all over again, from the man who taught him how.

How to stop feeling.

Rose was standing in front of a sign that screamed WE BUY GOLD! in foot-tall red letters.
Good
. She certainly wanted to sell some. She couldn’t wait to go shopping, but first she needed to unload the loot she’d been lugging around in her backpack.

“Feels like a pair of bricks,” she groaned, hitching the strap higher on her shoulder, adjusting the weight as she stared at the sign. The sign was in the window of one of those WE BUY GOLD! jewelry stores on 47th Street in the so-called diamond district.

Diamond district, flower district, transvestite hooker meat-packing district. How strange and stupid it seemed, all these little stores, clustered together on the same street, fighting toe to toe in some kind of crazy medieval marketplace. They all looked the same. How were you supposed to pick one out? What criteria did you use? The size of the sign? “Fuck it,” she said, opening the door, “I need to get to the fabric district.”

It took about twenty minutes to conclude the transaction. She had come prepared. She knew the current price of gold ($393.75 per troy ounce as of 4/4/96) and weighed the bag to the milligram on a scale one of her co-workers used for selling crystal methedrine (3807.065 grams). The jeweler’s scale was a bit off and she calmly informed him of his error. “You’re light,” she said. A big racket ensued, but when the dust settled she left with $48,195 dollars and 23 cents.

I watched it all from the sidewalk. When she left the store, I followed behind from a safe distance until she ducked into the Rockefeller Center subway entrance. As I saw her bobbing head disappear, I picked up the pace, running down the stairs after her like I was chasing Alice down the rabbit hole.

Rose adjusted her backpack, practically skipping down the stairs. Cash was so much lighter than gold. She looked at her watch and smiled. There was plenty of time to make it downtown before the fabric stores closed.

I got into the same crowded car with her, at the other end but still within eyesight.

Just when I thought this was getting too easy, she looked right at me. I avoided the direct eye contact, letting my eyes drift around the passengers near her instead. I saw her do the same, her mind visibly busy, trying to figure out where she had seen me before.

Bitch!
Sure my hair was longer and I had a three-day growth of stubble, but still! Even so, I didn’t actually want her to recognize me, not yet anyway. I got more and more nervous, until I watched her shrug and go back to the typical zombie state of all subway riders, reading Dr. Zizmore’s ad for dermabrasion.

I was so preoccupied I almost lost Rose as she exited at Broadway. I trudged up the stairs after her, not so enthusiastic anymore. As I emerged on the street, the afternoon glow had settled in, the sky bathed in silky golds and blue velvets. My eyes found a solitary bird hovering between the old brick towers. I glanced back down and saw Rose moving away at a fast clip toward the dingy storefronts below Canal Street. I knew I had to catch up fast, but first I had to steal one last look at that lonely bird.

My eyes searched and searched, but I couldn’t find it.

Hell is a lot like death, not at all what you’re expecting, always much worse because it’s real. You can smell Hell before you see it. It smells like rotten meat left on the kitchen counter for a week. Like a rat that died inside the walls. Like a toilet that hasn’t been flushed in a week. It smells like Paul’s apartment.

When Martin opened the door, the first thing he noticed was the stench. He once read that the sense of smell was more effective at triggering memories than any of the other senses. Martin had tested it out on his various belongings and discovered this hypothesis was so consistently correct that he promptly scrubbed, soaked, washed and practically sandblasted everything he owned until the scents were blessedly neutralized.

He closed the door behind him and wrinkled his nose, the scent instantly transporting him back to his first visit here. He could picture it perfectly, walking up the stairs behind Paul, waiting as he pushed the door open. And then…that smell.

Martin tried to shake off the memory. Paul smiled and put his hand on Martin’s shoulder. He hugged him warmly, then led him down another hallway away from the big bright room.

It got darker and darker as they walked.

Paul occupied the whole top floor of the old condemned building. None of the other squatters living there made much of a fuss when he took it all for himself. Understandably. He had restructured many of the inside walls so the interior was a giant rambling maze of gloom. Well, someone had done it. Martin found it difficult to imagine Paul doing any real physical labor, although he could clearly picture him gleefully smashing through the drywall with a sledgehammer.

They kept walking, making a few turns here and there, until the sight of a dim light ahead triggered another memory of a previous journey through the pitch-black maze. He was alone. Walking in total darkness. Suddenly, there was a light up ahead, leading to a door, no, not a door, a wall that opened like a door into a room filled with candles and…

Martin was jarred from his memory by the grip of Paul’s hand on his shoulder. The light they were approaching came from a normal-sized door, only a few more steps ahead. Paul squeezed his hand more tightly and led him into a small room, lit by a single dim bulb hanging naked from the ceiling at the end of a long black cord. The bulb hovered weakly over a round wooden table, unadorned except for a carpenter’s hammer and a thick steel nail about six inches long. “Let’s make ourselves comfortable,” Paul said, waving his hand at two large oak chairs. “Getting hungry?”

“Yes,” Martin said, his eyes drifting to the hammer.

Paul’s face turned to stone the instant Martin broke eye contact with him. Martin waited for the explosion, but none came. Instead, Paul’s face brightened and he rubbed his hands together shouting, “Me too! I could eat a horse!”

Martin heard some thumping noises and a muffled rustle directly behind his chair. He kept looking into the smiling face across the table, the light above casting long shadows into the sockets of his twinkling eyes. He wasn’t about to turn away again to see where the thumping came from.

Paul stood. His face was changing again…to the dead mask. Martin called it the “dead mask” the first time he saw it. He never said it to Paul’s face, but even if he had, Paul probably would have liked it, so apt was the description. It was a true mask, perfect in its utter emptiness, a mask you can’t argue with or plead with for mercy, because there was nothing behind it.

So pure. So empty. So dead.

Paul wore the dead mask like he was floating in heaven. He looked at Martin for a long time, enjoying the stillness around them. When he spoke, it was in a dull whisper that tolled like an old church bell. “What has become of you, Martin? Are you like other men?”

“No,” Martin said.

“Other men don’t have the power you have. The fierce clarity. The absolute commitment. The unshakable will. Do they, boy?”

“No,” Martin said.

“Other men get all bogged down with feelings…love and fear and pain clouding their proper judgment, sapping away their strength. You don’t have feelings like they do. You don’t whine and cry every time a little pain gets in the way.
Do you, boy?”

“No,” Martin said.

“Why, I could nail your hand to this table and you wouldn’t budge an inch, would you, my brave, strong lad?”

“No,” Martin gulped.

And so he did.

There wasn’t much blood on the table, just enough to create soft little red pools in the cracks and gouges. Martin breathed deeply and tasted copper in the air. He breathed again and caught a whiff of ozone mingling with the smell of his own sweet life.

Time was moving slow. Tick-tock. The pain was phenomenal, even for Martin. He breathed slower and less deeply, taking shallow gulps as he struggled to lower his heart rate and move to the place where Paul had brought him so many times, a place where everything was equal and pain was just another word, another sound in his head fighting for attention.

They sat across from each other for what seemed like an eternity, neither one making a sound. Martin battled within himself, fighting to stop fighting, to sink like a stone to the bottom of the sea. Bit by bit, he drifted down, losing form and substance until the voice of pain began to whisper instead of scream. The pain was still there but it wasn’t “pain” anymore. It was just another nameless feeling he didn’t understand or have to obey. Down, down, down, he floated, further into himself where all the pulses and demands of skin and flesh and bone became a single chorus, until at last he settled on the ocean floor.

He rested there, breathing slowly, deeply. He was safe now, if only for a moment. Then he began to remember.

Rats. Martin shivered in bed all night thinking about them. As soon as the sun came up, he would be going hunting for the first time in his young life. He was seven years old. The big man living with him and Momma for the past few months had been talking about it all week, telling Martin how much fun they were going to have.

They weren’t going to the cool green forest across the wheat field behind the house. They were going to the town dump. To shoot rats. Martin was terrified.