Bad places #1

Influence.

Note: So this is something new I’m trying on for size. There might be some growing pains (and I’m not really loving that end note) but I’ve got some good ideas for the next few parts. And look! It’s a short one. For my regular guests—and I am very much looking at you, Liz— maybe skip this one. My girlfriend gave me the horrified face when I read her a paragraph I thought was really cooking and she is famously hard to get when it comes to horror— which tells me it’s not gonna be pretty.

Anyway. Enjoy?

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If you ask me, there’s no such thing as hauntings. The idea that you’d be forced to wander some place you died a gruesome death at is beyond laughable; it’s fucking cruel. I think of places like Verdun or Auschwitz, imagine hollow faces forced to roam the chutes of their erstwhile abattoirs, and try to figure out what kind of twisted force would want to add to their suffering. When your life’s cut short in violence, you’d expect compensation, not punishment. 

This date of a friend of mine once pointed out that most ghosts are confused or have done something terrible that keeps them tethered to this plane. All I could think to answer was that if true, the ghosts would outnumber the living twenty to one in this city. At least. Everybody laughed, except the guy. His face went all tight as he said I shouldn’t joke around about the afterlife. After a stunned second or two, it got another good laugh out of us before he stormed off. This city, man. It takes all kinds. 

That was their last date. Thank Christ. Well— you know what I mean.

Anyway, some years back I read an article about these so-called “haunted” places. The author theorised that what most people believe to be ghosts actually comes down to complicated physics, whereby past, present, and future have been crushed together like an empty soda can, continually playing out in the same space and time. Quantum superposition, he called it. An anomalous event powerful enough to send the needle skipping and create what we call a “bad place”.

I don’t know about all that either but I like it better than ghosts. And it’s hard to argue that there are places that put your hair up— even in a city like this, where the lights never go out. It’s not that you ever see anything— least, I don’t— and yet you know it as you walk through the door. The air inside just doesn’t feel right. The noise from the street sounds too far away. The light is all wrong. And you know, you know? 

A bad place. 

Buddy of mine is a homicide detective. He told me about this one place he got called up to on three separate occasions. Bad every single time. But I’ve never seen him as rattled as he was after the last one. Sitting across from me in our booth at the Irish, he was pale and quiet, his decade on the force hanging on his face like wet sheets on a clothesline. One of the officers puked in the hallway, he said. Damn near lost it himself.

The body had been in the middle of the living room, same as the others. Same exact spot, he said. He’d gone back to the crime scene photos from the other cases, just to make sure he wasn’t misremembering. But no. Four paces from the front door; three from the right wall. You could’ve put a ruler to it. 

He said the same thought went through his mind as it did the last time he was there: nice place, nice building, nice uptown neighbourhood. And he thinks, why? I mean, shit goes wrong everywhere but far less often in places like that. And when it does, it’s almost always some crime of passion, an act of spontaneous emotional combustion. More often than not about money. But not this kind of violence, drawn out in a way that spoke of deliberation and determination. Of lingering, debased pleasure.

The husband had still been there when he arrived, sitting on the couch beneath the framed pictures of the newlyweds, captured in better days. They’d held him to answer some preliminary questions but all he did was rub his fingers on his t-shirt, leaving red streaks on the white cotton. He didn’t even look up when my buddy snapped his fingers in front of his face. Just went on staring at his wife, eyes bugging out of his skull with horror, as if he hadn’t been the one who’d fastened the outline of her naked body to the floorboards with ninety-four twelve inch nails, her skin stretched and staked down like a tent. 

I watched my buddy down his beer in three long swallows, staring down into the foamy throat of his glass for a full minute and when he looked up, his eyes were filled with the scenes he’d spent the previous eight days searing into his mind.

It must’ve been hard, he said. The girl was young, all of twenty-nine. At the gym six out of every seven. He must’ve had a devil of a time pulling her skin out far enough, especially on the thighs and upper arms. But he’d managed. A drunken forest of steel trees, a fair few bent and crooked, ran around her, had sunken their diamond-tipped roots deep into the hardwood. The claw hammer lay on the ground by her head, on the spread veil of her long blonde hair. 

Funny thing? The neighbors called the cops because of the hammering. But nobody could recall hearing another sound coming from the apartment. No screams, no yelling. Fucking nothing but the banging of the hammer as he nailed her to the floor. Inside, the coffee table had been put aside; the carpet was rolled up nice and neat. Otherwise, everything was in order. No signs of a struggle, no broken fingernails, no scratches on the floor. 

At first they assumed she’d been drugged or knocked unconscious or something. But nope. Blood came back clean, no marks on her apart from those irregularly spaced red colons marching up and down the borders of her body after they finished prying her up. What a job that must’ve been, right?

It seems to suggest that she spread herself down on the floor of her own accord, volunteering herself to his grim handiwork. That’s what had my buddy spinning, that night at the Irish. The expression on her face hadn’t been one of pain or torment. Unseeing eyes stared up at the ceiling, calm and undisturbed, while a faint smile played around her lips. It chewed him up inside. I wonder, too. Did she see the hammer swing through her field of vision, hear him dig for the next nail? Did she feel the sharp point dig into her brow as he started on her crown of thorns?

I never saw him again after that. He dodges my calls. I don’t think we’re buddies anymore. 

I mean, can he blame me? Rent is a motherfucker in this city, you know. And it is a nice place.

With a little love, any place can become home. Even a bad one.