Bad Places #4

Clinging.

Smell is a time machine. A vortex to which random train of thought doesn’t compare. Sometimes I’m walking down the street I pass every day on my way to work and I catch a whiff of some mélange coming from the coffee shop and the years snap back like a rubber band until I’m back at my grandmother’s table in her shitty little apartment, sipping coffee and shooting the breeze. Passing the alley next to Jerome’s, the mouthwatering aroma of beef stew has me back east again, stuck in the town of my youth. It’s powerful. Roots that twist and hold fast. It happens before I even open my eyes and see the neon light pushing through the blinds, slicing up the deep shadows of the room. Then I’m sinking down, the sour earth of the past crumbling all around, spilling into my mouth and choking me. And I’m sixteen again, buried in the August heat.

They called it a bad place. Every town has one. Some spot the locals have named toxic. Malignant. It seems right to me that these are often houses. The lone one standing behind the gap-toothed fence, looming up from the overgrown yard. A relic frowning down with eyes that are dark or empty, clouded by grime or yellowed newspaper. Their faces always cracked and peeling. Skulls opened by foreign growths. Bones scoured and bleached by the elements. Ours was no different. A narrow-shouldered, dried-out husk skulking at the end of a long driveway nature had long erased, its worn visage a network of withering veins. The dirt road it was set along no longer served any purpose, except as a shortcut for those willing to take the risk of branches scratching up the paint job on their cars to shave maybe ten minutes of the drive up to the interstate, of which there weren’t many—even back then. It made it so the quiet lay as deep and thick as the encroaching woods.

It had visitors, of course. People are always drawn to these places. They come to stare up into their ravaged facades. To wander the dank, hollow chambers, where the pulse of life has ceased and turned to crumbling decay. It’s a contemplation that is frightening in its scope and weight. One they can’t stand for very long before it becomes a crush.

I can see it now, expanding towards me across the clearing of its dooryard, the nude branches of the vines worms spilling from the splintered holes of its windows. The black rectangle at the top of the short set of stairs is an open maw that stretches and yawns as it rushes through the grass. I put a hand across my eyes and tell myself there is no such thing. No such thing as a bad place. Only the damp, moth-eaten blanket of memory. What I glimpse beneath it is useless. The past doesn’t matter. Neither do ghosts. Nothing matters but the world and what it owes you.

I knew that even at sixteen, responding to the feelings with smirks and chuckles. Laughing out loud at the stories. True, my old man was something of a local history buff, so I knew there was nothing to the tales of murder and abuse. But I think I would’ve reacted the same way even if I hadn’t known the house’s last owners had been nothing more than a couple of deadbeats, unable to keep up with the mortgage payments. No murders, no suicides, no mysterious accidents. Just an eviction notice, after which the bums packed up their shit and shoved off. The only ghost that lingered was the hit the bank took on the house. Removed from town as it was, there was little interest in the property. Neglect had already set in under the care of its owner, progressed unabated as time went on. After the bank went belly-up, the deed got lost in the credit holding shuffle and ownership became as murky as the house’s bare rooms. There it remained, its slow death throwing a shadow larger than its life ever had.

It's stupid. But there’s value in quiet and isolation. Especially when you grow up in a small town, where the too-close houses and streets are straps on a teenager’s straitjacket. You need a place where you can breathe, let the wild, raving hormones out. If that place happens to be avoided like the plague, so much the better. I helped the others see that. And although it had its occasional revelers, the ruin became our clubhouse. We brought in discarded crates and chairs, drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Paged through smut and built fires in the hearth. Smashed holes in the walls with hammers while death metal poured from a cheap radio. I lost my virginity on a soiled mattress upstairs, panting into a girl’s face while spiders crept along the baseboards and the stair steps groaned and creaked. No ghosts. Just another member of the tribe, looking to cut loose, get out from under the world that wouldn’t give in to our need to stretch. To flex. I can’t feel bad about that.

But it will try. Whether it’s smoking a joint while feeding pages of an old porn rag to the flames or huffing shallow breaths and lies into the spill of blonde hair that smells of coconut and mildew. The world is always going to make you feel guilty. Make you feel ashamed about wanting space. Wanting more. Even if it’s in our nature. I never forced my freedom on anyone. They took it with willing and eager hands. All of them, including Brandon.

He’s still there, standing on the porch in memory, his eyes as hot as the August sun baking the street. I told him I wasn’t feeling it. Paddling our bikes a fucking mile and a half through the heat—no thanks. Besides, there was only me and him, afloat on summer’s stagnant water. Brandon was good for a laugh or two, but he was no main act.

Still, I invited him to stay. I’d just gotten some new games I told my parents were cheap secondhands. We could play some music. Watch some television.

The fat tub wasn’t interested in any of that. Just stood there, a sick grin on his punched-in face. “Just want to get up there and do some damage, you know?” Never mind the dark spots beneath his armpits and tits. Never mind the black hair in its eternal middle part already slick with sweat, showing the gleaming skin beneath. I wasn’t feeling it. Any of it. But I could see that there was no way I was going to pull the rest of my afternoon out of his damp sausage clutches. I sighed and told him to wait while I wrote a note for my folks, then we set off. Brandon in front, swerving his bike from left to right in lazy curves while I cursed him out in silence.

I can still taste the fried air. Just enough of it to take small bland sips while we rode. Sweat beaded on my neck, slid light fingertips down my ribcage. I was pissed, half-tempted to turn back. But we were almost at the woods and I figured it wouldn’t be so bad once we were in the woods. And I was right.

Until we got to the house.

I could feel it the moment I climbed the stairs to the door: a sickish heat radiating out from the wood, wafting out from its bowels. I shrank away from its furnace but Brandon pushed in, looked back through the hallway’s shadows at me. His voice sounded flat when he said: “You coming?”

“Man, it’s a fucking hotbox in there!”

“You can come back out after.”

I stared at him, half-buried in the house’s gloom. It lay too thick on his face, softening his contours. Almost as if he was fading into the drab background, about to be swallowed by the hallway shadows. The thought put my hair up. I was about to tell him to eat shit, when he said: “I’ve got some beer stashed.”

You gotta laugh about it, really.

Five sweltering minutes later I was sitting on one of the mattresses propped up against the flaking plaster, watching Brandon as he did his thing. The room was boiling hot. So was the beer in my hand. Sweat coated my skin, soaking my shirt and making it stick. After a few mouthfuls of warm piss, though, I found the laugh or two he was good for. But it was forced. We almost always came up to the woods in a group. Being here, just the two of us, left space I was eager to fill. Yet our sounds were struck down by the oppressive heat, crowded out by the stillness that had covered the empty rooms for longer than we’d been alive. The thought bugged me. So did the silence I felt pressing close behind Brandon’s antics. Even the empty can I chucked at him didn’t do much to lift my spirits. I found myself wishing we’d brought the radio. I found myself wishing I’d never come up here in the first place.

Ten minutes had come and gone by then. I could’ve gone—would have, if not for the sweat lodge temperatures that made getting up as unappealing as staying put. Another hot beer had appeared in my hand. I slugged down the cooked contents as Brandon slid down next to me. And by the time it went clattering across the dirt-covered floorboards, drowsiness had me in its grip. I had some panicked thought about heatstroke, wanted to tell Brandon that we couldn’t both fall asleep. But articulating it also felt like too much work and before long, I drifted off and fell asleep.

When I woke up, hours had passed. The light had shifted across the room, the bright gold now dulled to the deep red of the setting sun. Seeing it, I started and turned to Brandon and found myself staring into eyes of curdled milk.

Taking in his mottled, swollen face, I didn’t scream. Because right then, the smell hit me. A deep, explosive stench of putrefaction that made me clamp a hand across my nose and mouth. I began to shift on the mattress but Brandon’s body had slumped towards me sometime during—during. When I moved, a corner of skin on his forehead began to curl and before I knew it, half his face sloughed off with a wet peeling sound, exposing teeth and bony ridges pushing up through rotted meat that crawled with maggots. There were more of them on the piece of flesh that fell down on my hand.

Now I did scream, and again when his eye spilled from its socket. I scrambled back, my heels gritting in the dirt. What was left of Brandon slid down along the wall after me, the mattress pulling back his scalp along the gore-streaked orb of his skull. He landed in my lap.

For a few shocked seconds I sat there, my hands trembling up by my shoulders while I tried to push myself through the wall. Away from the thing nestled in my crotch. The back of my head sent flakes of plaster raining down as I craned my neck, desperate for air. The reek of it. Old blood and shit, twisted and melted into a dark, wet miasma that forced putrefied fingers down my nose and throat. I could hear the popcorn sound of maggots, and I knew I was covered with them, along with god only knew what else.

That broke the spell. I reached out with shaking hands and pushed at the corpse’s shoulder. Liquid lurched halfway up my throat when my fingers sank into the meat below the soiled t-shirt with unnatural ease. I clenched my teeth, pulled my legs out from under him. Trying to stand, my feet slid on the floorboards. I danced back on bent knees, sat down hard enough to send clouds of dust boiling in the dull red light.

I was up in a flash, brushing at the filth with revolted cries. I was still at it when the vomit came rushing up the drain with a deep glug and added the sour smell of regurgitated alcohol to the stench. I tried to straighten, but the next throatful was coming, spewed from my mouth and splashed on the floor.

When my stomach was empty, I stood bent over, gasping and spitting. My eyes slashed up again and again, sneaking peeks at the Brandon-thing lying on its side, the mottled skull teasing out of the tattered hoodie of its scalp. It was impossible to look at it for any length of time. My mind and my gaze beads of mercury. Spoiled meat sloughing off bone. I wanted nothing more than to get the fuck outta there, start clearing away the thoughts clinking off sanity’s light. But I knew I couldn’t. Not yet, anyway.

I don’t remember much of what happened afterwards. Just my own harsh breathing while tears of frustration burned in my eyes. That, and the smell, of course. You don’t forget a thing like that. I imagined it smoking from my clothes, my skin, leaving behind a trail of noxious blackish green as I rode back home, while the shadows of the trees dug in against the sunset with hopeless desperation. Even after I had snuck in and removed the clothes, taken shower after shower while my parents knocked on the door, it remained. Clinging to my scalded skin as much as the sight of Brandon’s skull slipping free from the prison of his spoiled flesh.

No one else seemed to notice. The news about his death struck fear in every parent’s heart, including my own. My mother kept wondering what could’ve happened. The old man kept squeezing my shoulder, a pained smile tugging at his lips. When they asked me how I was doing, I told them I didn’t know. Lying in bed in the dark and the heat, I went over it again and again, asking myself questions I didn’t know the answer to, while outside, the last remnants of summer stretched out into a nightmarish eternity. I told myself I was fine. It was all good.

And then it was.

I never did find out what the verdict was. Brandon’s funeral took place a scant week later. Closed casket, of course. The speed with which his body was released seemed to suggest that the local cops were as eager to bury the whole affair as I was. But for years afterwards, I kept wondering what had happened. Had the decomposition freaked them out? Or had there been not enough of him left to find the heroin I sold him?

I guess I’ll never know.

Nobody rolled on me. Secrets outweigh guilt, after all, nine times out of ten. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the need to bring it up every now and then. It’s just one of those things you want to toss into the circle when the mood is right, a monstrous shape beneath a sheet you’re tempted to expose to the gathered. Hoping that sharing it might loosen its hold, if only a little. But I couldn’t. The weight of secrets. There had obviously been something wrong with the product. Some disturbance in the chemical balance, speeding up the decomp. Either that or the heat, doing the work of weeks in a matter of hours. Either way, it was bad for business. Far as anyone knew, Brandon had been up there drinking beer and had some freak heart episode. He certainly had the disposition for it. Of course, most contributed his death to the house. Our bad place, lashing out.

I listened to the talk and was grateful for the house’s reputation for once, leading people away from any sort of serious speculation.

But it seemed that the house had finally caused enough of a stir. The police tape sealing off the driveway and the structure stayed in place for two months, after which a wrecking crew cut a destructive swath up the old dirt road. Over the course of four days, they levelled what decades of abandonment had left standing. A dump truck rode back and forth, carrying off the wreckage and when they were done, there was nothing left but a rutted dirt lot, speckled with wood chips. That, and the quiet. It collapsed into the void left by the house, buried what remained beneath its smooth, still surface.

If I had any doubts about the place, they were laid to rest in the wake of its destruction. Weeks turned into months and I was not startled from my sleep to see Brandon standing in the shadows of my bedroom, the remains of his face hanging from the back of his neck like a wrinkled rag. Dead is dead. What lingers is just the world trying to make you beat yourself up. Nothing to any of it. Apart from the shit he had put on me, dying like he did. Brandon had always been too stupid to cook it himself, too chickenshit to inject it into his fat-encrusted veins. It bugged me that I had been the one to slip that needle into his arm, that my thumb had pushed that half an inch into his vein. I hated him for it. Just like I hated the hit I took, watching plastic bubble and melt in the flames, shriveling back against powder I could no longer trust. It’s his fault I had to keep it up, just to cover the loss.

But it's life, you know? It’s life. The cost of living and all that shit. I never would’ve made it out of that stifling shit stain of a town without some hustle. Never would’ve been able to get my MBA and start a business straight out of college. Forget the six-figure income and the gorgeous women night after night. I can’t beat myself up about it. I won’t. You move on. Learn to deal. It’s a sad fact that you can get used to almost everything if you give it enough time. So long as you remember to be smart, it makes no difference.

No such thing as a bad place. Everything has a rational explanation, even if you can’t thing of one. I know that as sure as I recognise the stench of the past permeating this motel room, telling me that it’s happened again.