lived in such a place though, especial y not the beautiful wel groomed Clark Kent look-alike. But this was where he'd met him for their little rendezvous just a few nights before. He rang the doorbel a few more times without an answer. Then he pushed on the front door and it swung open easily, revealing the same dusty old lobby where he and Joe had exchanged flesh and blood for sweat and semen. It was empty and looked like it had been that way since before Frank was born.
'Hel o?' Frank cal ed out softly and heard only his voice echoing through the dank stagnant air. The place smel ed like a damp moldy basement.
Frank crept cautiously inside and closed the door behind him. The oppressive darkness that swooped in on him, choking al light from the room, panicked him. Without the glare of the streetlights outside it was total blackness. A chil of dread scurried over Frank's flesh, raising goose bumps, as the old building seemed to swal ow him in one great gulp. Frank quickly swung the front door open again to let a little light in. Even with the faint light creeping in from the street, Frank had a difficult time navigating his way to the stairs. There was no way he was going to risk climbing into the building's rickety old elevator and getting stuck inside. From the way this place looked it would be decades before anyone found him.
He remembered what apartment Joe had told him to ring and began making his way up the stairs toward it. The alcohol coursing through his bloodstream had made him a little braver than normal, along with the fact that he was as much addicted to the adrenaline rush of fear and pain as he was to that of orgasm. Stil, he jumped at every sound as he crept his way up the darkened stairway toward the apartment on the fifth floor.
'Joe! Joe, are you up there?' He was cal ing out mostly for the reassurance of hearing his own voice echo back at him, the one familiar sound in this tomb of squeaking stairs and rats. When he reached the fifth floor he stuck his head out and was assaulted by the odor of urine, fecal matter, and decay. Again he wondered if anyone but a few stray cats, some rats, and perhaps a dog or two, lived in this place. He could see some of the hippies who wandered up and down Haight Street begging for change and reeking of marijuana and patchouli oil living in a place like this, but Joe would have been horribly out of place. Perhaps this was just the place where he took his lovers (To murder and eat? What was that sickening smel?) to fuck.
Frank nearly ran down the hal to room
510. He skidded to a stop just outside the room in which his dream lover was supposed to reside, surprised to find the door open.
'Joe? Are you in there?'
There was no response except for a loud thump from somewhere deeper inside the dingy sparselyfurnished apartment.
Frank crept in and surveyed the apartment. It looked like a jail cel. There was only one lamp, a smal eighteeninch television and VCR atop a milk crate, two folding chairs, a table, and the paintings.
The wal s were lined with acrylic paintings of figures bathed in red. Frank moved closer to them and realized that the figures in the paintings were not just bathed in red. They were bleeding.
Slowly his eyes began to make sense of the chaos on the canvases. The pink and tans represented human flesh. Meat opened up so that the muscle and sinews showed through the skin. The white was bone. And the red was obviously blood. The paintings looked like people turned inside out. And there were pieces missing from them. Some were missing legs or arms. Some were obviously women without breasts. Some had no heads. Some had heads with no faces. Many were of men or women with their sex organs removed. In the place of each anatomical omission was a ragged hole, bleeding down the canvas.
Frank heard the loud bump again. It was coming from the bedroom.
'Joe? Are you okay in there? It's me. Frank.'
Frank pushed open the door, saw the woman who was now handcuffed by her wrists and ankles with duct tape wrapped around her mouth. He looked down at her breasts and could see the
Band-Aids over her nipples. Whatever had happened, the panic in the woman's eyes told him that it had not been consensual.
There was a slight trickle of blood from a smal cut on her forehead, presumably from where she had fal en off the bed.
Her ankle cuffs were stil attached to a chain in the ceiling that would have made it impossible for her to move more than a few feet from the bed. She was flopping around, trying to get to her feet, and when she noticed the diminutive little man standing there her eyes began pleading with him for help. She held her wrists out and shook them at him, imploring him to remove the handcuffs, but he had no key and was beginning to fear for his own safety. The best thing for him to do, he reasoned, would be to get the hel out of there and cal the cops. He started to back out of the room and the woman's pleas became more insistent. She shook her hands violently at him and pounded her feet on the floor. Her eyes began to tear up with frustration as Frank scuttled backward out of the bedroom. The more panicked she became the greater Frank's resolve grew that he was definitely in the wrong place and in danger of getting far worse than he had bargained for if he didn't leave now.
Frank's eyes darted from the woman to a painting that sat on the floor outside the bedroom. This one was larger than the rest and it was of a voluptuous woman chained up on a bed like this one. Only the woman in the picture had no breasts at al and her chest was opened up like a rose in bloom.
This was the only painting where the face was rendered clearly. It was almost ultrarealistic, like a snapshot. And it was obviously the woman on the bed. The same wounded eyes. The same dimpled cheeks. Only the woman in the painting was screaming in some twisted marriage of pain, terror, and ecstasy. It was a powerful image. Frank wondered if the woman had seen it. It was what her future would be if Frank didn't come back with help. The smel of death and decay was now omnipresent and seemed to rise like a warning siren, singeing the hair on his nostrils and tel ing him to get out.
'I'11 get help. I'l be back. I promise,' Frank said, speaking both to the woman on the bed and the one in the painting. The present and the probable future.
His eyes drifted away from hers, trying to avoid her silent pleas, and as they swept the rest of the apartment he suddenly recognized himself in one of the paintings. This one was even worse than the rest. It was painted in mostly whites and reds. Bones and blood. Almost al the flesh had been completely re moved. Only the face remained, the eyes staring heavenward as if in rapture, the mouth slack as if in the aftermath of orgasm. Frank's legs trembled and threatened to buckle.
Chapter Twenty-three
Joe had just left to get gas in the van when he spotted Frank in his rearview mirror, crossing Folsom Street, heading for the front door of his apartment building. He was instantly enraged by the intrusion. He had given the little man a chance to walk away from this yet here he had come, sticking his nose back into Joe's business, begging to be murdered. He had heard of deer that would bare their throats to the wolf when they became old or sick, seeming to long for the predator's jaws at their jugular to end the misery of their lives. Long pigs apparently had the same fatal instincts.
Circling the block rather than risking a dangerous U-turn in the middle of
Folsom Street, Joe felt his adrenaline pulse and his heart rate quicken. The monster was awakening. By the time he made it back to the front of his building Frank was nowhere to be found and the front door was wide open. Joe punched the dashboard so hard that it cracked.
'Shit!' he roared as he pul ed the van to a halt and dashed out onto the sidewalk and into the building.
The lobby was empty. Frank must have taken the stairs up to the top floor, looking for him. Joe punched the button for the elevator and waited impatiently for it to descend. His mind went over different scenarios for Frank's destruction and disposal. Joe smiled when he noticed that he had gotten an erection. Perhaps this would be just what he needed to tide him over for the long trip to Seattle. Another fresh kil to snack on. He stepped into the elevator and rode it to the top floor, pacing impatiently, anxious for the kil . The doors whooshed open and Joe stepped out into the hal way, in time to see Frank backing slowly out of his apartment with a trembling hand clutching his mouth and the other thrust out in front of him as if to ward off an attack. Yet the one thing in that building in any condition to attack him wasn't in the apartment but in the hal way behind him.
Joe charged him, sprinting down the hal at ful speed with his head low and his arms outstretched as if
