Into Painfreak Read online

  It’s an early, dreary night, the rain threatening and promising but providing no relief from the miasma of the day, when Henry wanders down a familiar path and discovers something unfamiliar. He’s drawn to this alley, lane, whatever you might call it, possibly because of some past life, some fragment of memory thrashing in his underneaths, so he walks it often. He knows every lamppost, every storefront window, every flake of rust on the iron bars in front of the glass. Only the spiders change their webs every night. True workers, those. They know their own lives. Eat, fuck, spin. There’s an appeal. Henry’s heart, the twisted tumor in his chest, aches at the concept of such certainty of purpose. But not tonight. Tonight, he pauses to stare down the offshoot of an alley, through the murk and beyond the fogs—summoned by his mind and eyes?—at a doorway he’s never seen before.

  Never is too big a word. He’s seen all sorts of doors, and this one scratches the insides of his skull. It doesn’t belong here. This whole alley has clawed its way from hell to impose itself on Henry’s otherwise mundane evening stroll.

  He knows it’s not a stroll. He clings to the word anyhow.

  Henry sneers at the door. His ribs vibrate as his heart attempts to escape. He doesn’t often use his voice, not to its fullest extent. He typically leaves words unspoken, forgets their meaning, leaves them to wither to dust in the crevasses of his mind. But tonight, he finds his full volume—not a yell or a shout, but nothing like his usual murmurings and mutterings. He states, with authority, “Take your vile atrocities, your arduous and onerous and odorous perversions, and burn.” He spits at the cement in front of his feet. He won’t take that first step. He feels contempt, not fear, and he hasn’t got the slightest idea why.

  He turns from the door and leaves, hurries with the rest of his walk, retreats to his home under a bridge, a sanctuary of cold cement like a mausoleum. There’s room for one, for Henry and no one else, but there’s a woman nearby, an ugly woman he’s shared food with before. In this life, everyone suffers from varying degrees of ugly. Hers isn’t an unattractive homeliness, and his passions have been stirred. He meets her eyes, perhaps the first eyes he’s ever met—blue like an angel’s eyes, nothing street about them—and says, “Share my bed tonight.” It’s an invitation.

  She grunts. It’s assent. It allows for a brief shared ascension from the horrors of ceaseless plodding monotony. A shared moment approximating the euphoric heavens.

  Life, Henry thinks, belongs to those who are living. He’s a revenant, a ghost of himself, a neglected sack of blood and bones. He changes his routines, scraps with other nameless vagrants and transients, witnesses different pigeons alighting on different statues in different parks. This isn’t change. This isn’t real. In another life, not another world but the time before, under the guise of a more appropriate name not ripped shamelessly from bricks, perhaps he had lived in a suite of bedrooms with satin sheets and innumerable women dripping pearls and silks, an infinite supply of cash and never even the echo of a hunger craving.

  Oh, there would have been other hungers, just not the kind that twisted his guts and impelled him to thievery and murder—a ceaseless need for more of something. European paintings? Caviar and cigars? Paramours and doxies? Something stirs inside, something deep—almost a recollection, almost a reflection. Once upon a time, even Henry himself could look into a mirror and see a man, straight and tall, powerful and confident and even feared, immaculately dressed and smelling of Bulgari.

  He doesn’t like to dream of what might have been.

  What made him abdicate? Why would he run?

  He kills the rising memory. Slits its throat. Strangles it as it bleeds. He doesn’t want it, doesn’t need it, doesn’t care in the least. In his life, there are no deadlines. There’s no complacency. There’s nothing but the relentless struggle to wake up full of breath just one more day. Henry is slave to no calendar and no clock.

  Yet he counts days. Two, three, six before he returns to the familiar paths he’s carved into his life. The spiders and their webs in the iron bars, windows that obscure rather than reveal, crooked steps on the fractured sidewalk, faded yellow lights. And still the door, the alley, insinuated into the course of his nights like it belonged, demanding his attention, requiring his submission.

  Henry was not a man who submitted easily to anything. Not in this lifetime, not in any other. “Haunt me at your own peril,” he warned the door. Then he spit again, and turned and left.

  The door plagued him. It interfered with his thoughts, with his rhythms, with his dreams. He and the ugly woman rutted and howled and raised ghosts from their graves. He had never felt so vibrant, but they were seeking something—different things. Whatever she sought didn’t matter; Henry reached for the impossible, the unattainable, the unimaginable, and the divine. He cried when it was over, and shoved her away, and shouted into the dark at gods and demons alike. As if sex of any sort could save him. It was too late for salvation. Too late for mercy. He needed to hurt someone or something, so he punched at the walls of his hole until he cracked the cement and his knuckles, until the red of his blood mixed with the gray dust, until the faintest echo of pain reached across the chasm of numbness he had excavated around himself.

  He found words, just a few, to mutter at himself. “Henry,” his assumed name, “you ignorant slug, you ill-meant sliver of offal, you wretched donkey.” He sighed deep. This wasn’t a life for sighing. Such luxuries were reserved for the prosperous and the literati. He threw out one more description, an afterthought, the truest of them all: “Henry, you faint coward.”

  He counted three more days. He didn’t like counting days. There were implications to counting. He wasn’t in a position to amass anything, certainly not days, and he wasn’t too keen on the idea of countdown. As though the future promised any alterations in the direction of his life. His future was set, not merely engraved in stone but soldered in steel: disease, decay, and death. The same that awaited everyone, affluent and destitute alike. The inescapable rigors of mortality.

  The woman tried to talk sense into him as though she were capable of such a miracle. “You’re marked,” she told him, “by devils or saints, I don’t know.” He found her words useless. He dismissed her, but she refused to leave. “I will give you all you need.”

  “Woman,” he said, using it as both title and curse, “you lack the carnal intricacies of common tourists. Your mind flutters like a damn butterfly, from discontent to dispassion to disdain. Have I taught you nothing?”

  But he had, in fact, taught her nothing, and he fell through displeasure to contempt. He strangled the woman in her sleep. It was a mercy to them both.

  Henry returned to the door.

  He spit on the ground in front of him and waited and spit again. Finally, he crossed the line he’d set, arching his back so that he could stride. He intended to strike terror into hearts. He intended to achieve nirvana. To find his own personal rapture, and to inflict it upon willing if misguided collaborators. It wasn’t just sex; it had never been just sex. He took a deep, sumptuous breath, as though he had some right to it, before pushing through the door.

  A wall of muscle under a bald cranium sneered down at him hungrily, as though Henry might just be his best chance for supper. An Asian man, short and thin, eyed him from the shadows. Henry lifted his left arm, out of habit or practice or memory, to show the mark unseen outside the dominion of Painfreak.

  “Welcome back,” the Asian man said. They parted to allow Henry down the long corridor. The sounds of heavy bass and constant drums, the screams of delight and pleasure and pain, the scents of whiskey and masculinity, the allure of his favorite type of woman, all rose to meet him.

  He shrugged out of the guise of Henry, that life of denial and desperation, and inhaled the ghost of himself. His shadow recognized him before he did. Before descending to the club, before falling back into that dreadful decadence—where he, of all people, saw things that would shatter angels—he whispered, “Painfreak, you magnificent p
it, Abram is returned.”

  | — | — |

  The Night Sitter

  ————

  Edward Lee

  Jessica would discover the details of the entire matter only when the matter had ended. But what it began with was the SD card—

  —and what she’d seen on it, what they’d done to that woman’s head.

  ««—»»

  The client’s name was Roulet, Edmund Roulet. She’d met him one night web-camming; hence, the reason she thought of him as a “client,” though nothing sexual had ever transpired between them. He hadn’t asked for a show, or for her to masturbate with any one of her toys. No dirty talk, no “Have you been a bad boy?” He hadn’t even jerked off. Instead, he’d only talked to her for a few moments—“Ah, I see from your profile that you’re from Florida, so am I.”—“Really?”—“Two years of college and a CNA certificate? Impressive.”—“Oh, no car? But you do have a driver’s license—that’s great.” He was feeling around for something. Why would a webcam enthusiast care about her education and her driver’s license?

  He’d turned his own cam on so she could see his face, and this Mr. Roulet’s face didn’t really reflect the face of a cam-site denizen. He could’ve been a retired college professor: white hair a bit disheveled, bald spot, spectacles, and a white beard to which the attention of some scissors would be a service. But there was no look of the perv about him, nothing resembling a typified Dirty Old Man.

  “What do you want to see?” she asked. “I like you, let me give you an eye-party,” this, of course, because webcamming paid by the minute. “Wanna pussy-show? Around the World? I’ve got some big toys too. I can even fist myself.”

  But none of this would do. Mr. Roulet had another motive for being on Jessica’s link, and what it boiled down to was this: “I’d like to offer you a job, Jessica, a night job, which should present no problem since most cam-girls are nocturnal.”

  A night job? “I’m listening,” she said, suspicious.

  “I’ll pay $500 a night for you to house-sit for me, every night, from dusk till dawn. I offer free room and board we well, if you’d prefer. The only additional duties will be to take out the garbage, retrieve my mail, and run errands for me in the car.”

  I don’t know, Jessica thought. “Did you mean $500 a week?”

  “No, no. Per night. I’ll have an auxiliary bank account you’ll have ATM access to, or I can transfer your pay each night to your own bank account, a recharge card, PayPal, whatever you’d prefer.”

  She put it point-blank. “It sounds too good to be true, Edmund.”

  “Please, if you will. Mr. Roulet. And please know that this is not in any way a sexual proposition—”

  Yeah, right, she thought, not that sex would’ve been any obstacle. Jessica, by the way, was very inclined to transactional arrangements.

  “—in fact, you’ll very rarely even see me,” his pixelated image went on. “I merely want an attractive young woman to sit up at night while I’m asleep.” He paused, typing something. “Tell you what. I’ll send my address to your profile contact, and how about this?”

  The little counter at the bottom of the screen registered only two minutes so far. The site fee was two dollars per minute, but she only got half of that, and there was her total earned so far, showing on the screen: $2.00. This has got to be pure bullshit, she reasoned, but then more numerals appeared on screen: TIP: $500.00

  “I’ve just sent you a $500 tip,” he went on. “I’ll expect you at noon. Take a cab or have a friend drop you off, whatever. And if I don’t see you tomorrow, I’ll take it that you simply don’t want the job, but you may keep the tip with my compliments.”

  “Uh,” she said. “Wow.”

  He showed her a big, genuine smile. “It’s been a distinct pleasure talking to you, Jessica, and I do hope I shall see you tomorrow. So, until then, or if not, I bid you a very good night.”

  Mr. Roulet signed off.

  ««—»»

  All that anyone had ever deduced about Mr. Roulet was that he was something of a sybaritic recluse, this judged by the always-full recycle bin of very expensive Scotch bottles and steady deliveries from gourmet restaurants. He lived unknown and to himself; in fact, he hadn’t been seen by any neighbors for quite some time. The constant presence of a new luxury sedan in his driveway only reinforced the consensus that he was a man of private wealth in spite of the incongruence of the physical state of his old eyesore of a house and untended yard. Neighbors regularly spied empty bottles of Macallan 21-Year-Old Fine, Glenmorangie Quarter Century, and Glenfiddich 30, all hundreds per bottle. The proprietor of the nearest liquor store claimed that every two weeks an attractive woman driving Roulet’s sedan would purchase one bottle of Remy Martin Louis XIII cognac for $2800.

  So. The never-seen Mr. Roulet had something of a drinking problem to accentuate his agoraphobia.

  He did, however, insist on the constant employment of a live-in house attendant/night-sitter, who was always a young woman of provocative appearance, and that made talk. But all anyone got out of them was that they rarely even saw Mr. Roulet in the house and that they obtained his supplies and house-sat and nothing else. In other words, even though some of these young ladies did indeed embrace leanings toward prostitution, no such activities had ever been requested of them from the curious Mr. Roulet.

  ««—»»

  Jessica arrived just before noon, via taxi, at the address furnished last night. The cab fare was $62.00 but she only need pay the driver twelve due to his overzealous suggestion that she could reduce the meter by fifty dollars if she were willing to apply her mouth to a certain part of his body. About this, Jessica had no qualms.

  Even before she’d checked out, she knew should would be accepting the room and board offer from Mr. Roulet. Sight unseen or not, she couldn’t stand her squalid drug-infested motel, and she was very weary of having to bend over for the manager (a back-door man) any time she was short on her rent, which was often. The police were now running stings on Backpage, and web-camming was bottoming out. She simply couldn’t make ends meet. Why had her CNA accreditation not rescued her from such seedy circles? Wouldn’t such a professional certificate enable to her secure respectable employment? Well, the answer is not far to seek. The only thing there were more of in Florida than old people were mosquitoes and certified nursing assistants. That fact along with a drug bust and a six-month stay care of the county department of corrections, did little to brighten the quality of her employability.

  Moving into the house of a perfect stranger she’d met online might not strike one as a sensible decision but, one, desperate situations called for desperate actions and, two, she had nothing to lose in giving it a shot. Mr. Roulet wasn’t serial-killer material, was he? Strike when the iron is hot, her departed mother used to tell her as a child, which Jessica guessed was an axiom suggesting that one should never hesitate when presented with an opportunity. Well, the iron could scarcely get hotter than $500 a night for sitting on her ass. And if the entire gig turned out to be a sham, she’d walk out.

  At any rate, here she was, at Mr. Roulet’s house.

  And what a house it was. A fuckin’ dump, she observed, bags in hand as the cabbie departed. Mr. Roulet’s abode was a one-story salt-box with an untrimmed yard and short palm trees half-concealing it. The new black BMW sitting there presented still more oddity. And in the blue recycle bin, atop untold scotch bottles, sat an empty 224-gram tin of Kaluga-Malossol caviar. This is REALLY fucked up, she thought but, strange as it might seem, she was rather at home with that. Typically, everything in Jessica’s life was fucked up.

  The drab front door presented a bizarre dull-brass knocker of a blank face: just two empty eyes, no nose, no mouth. After a shiver, she rapped on it, and the door opened, creaking in a manner that seemed appropriate of such a place and situation.

  But here all that was ominous ceased, as Mr. Roulet revealed himself to be an amiable and seemingly harmless subject of study
. The gray-haired and -bearded face she’d conversed with last night sat atop the body of a taller than average, obese man, past middle age. The 300-pound frame wore baggy slacks with suspenders, a huge short-sleeved white shirt, and Bruno Mali shoes. His eyes beamed, like a grandfather’s upon the entry of a granddaughter. “How delightful to meet you in person, Jessica. I’m so happy you’ve come, and happier still that, seeing you’ve brought your luggage, you’ve decided to stay. A wise choice. Why pay rent somewhere else when you can live here for free?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I plan to save as much money as possible so I can go back to school.”

  “How wonderful to encounter a young woman with goals,” he said. “However, before we go on, we must take care of this one preliminary,” and he proffered her a plastic cup with some powder on the bottom. Jessica knew what it was immediately.

  “I’ll need you to urinate in that,” he told her. “Please understand that I never stereotype people but I must consider the statistical probability. Many girls who web-cam and engage in parallel professions have a proclivity towards drug addiction. I simply can’t have that here, and I hope you’re not offended.”

  Jessica chuckled and raised her jeans skirt, beneath which no panties were evident. “I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Roulet. I’ve taken many a piss test in my time. No offense taken.”

  He seemed startled. “Um, well, you can do it in the bathroom, for goodness sake.”

  “I’d rather do it in front of you, sir. That way you’ll know I’m for real. Every piss test I’ve taken I’ve had to do in front of a bull-dyke prison nurse. Lots of girls would sneak someone else’s urine in in condoms. I appreciate this opportunity you’re giving me, sir. I don’t want you to have any doubts,” and, here, she parted her legs and peed unabashed into the cup.