Authors: Douglas F. Warrick
Stickhead stands up and the Bosch claps its hands. “Good!” it says. “Good, good, good, Danny–thing. Curiosities are a great passion of mine, yes?” It runs a finger down the dead guy’s purple cheek. “Stickhead is a favorite of mine, Danny–thing.” He sighs and his smile rots into a burlesque frown. “Believe me when I say, Danny–thing, that I am most bereaved that he has become vastly less curious as of late, yes?”
Silence, while the Bosch sighs and Danny once more reminds himself to blink. Then a wet smack as the Bosch claps one hand down on Stickhead’s shoulder and his wrought–iron grin reappears. “Not to worry! Stickhead serves his purpose, yes? Curiosities attract curiosities like quicksilver, my dear Danny–thing.”
Danny’s lungs refuse to function at all, and suddenly he’s reliving the first time he ever smoked pot. Over at Anthony Rigby’s house, those few seconds just after the first toke, he was sure he was going to choke on the smoke and die. And then, like now, he coughed, sucked in air, coughed again, and he was free and high and just shy of escaping from the world.
“After all, where would Stickhead be without you? Would he be merely Head? How absurd! You and I together, yes? We’ll call it a collaboration.”
Danny hears himself whisper, “The stick.” What beautiful sense all this is making. What perfect logic it has, in its own way. The window is a door and Danny’s broken stick, somehow, was the key. Oh, man, how perfect. “I was just fucking around,” he says, but his voice sounds strange to him, someone else’s voice, maybe the Danny he used to be getting flushed out, one normal logical word at a time. “It was sort of an accident.” He smiles.
“Tomorrow night, yes? Come to see me, Danny–thing.”
He wants to know more, he wants to pin the nasty Bosch thing against the wall and demand, yes, goddamn it,
demand
that he explain the circuitry of the psychopathic Halloween world that Danny always hoped and now knows exists. But he’s tired now. Suddenly so tired. And so heavy. Every part of him weighs a thousand pounds, and he feels like he is sinking into the face of the world as the eyes of the Bosch shine like ice and the shadows creep and the water washes over his fingers, still and stinking. Danny feels the drainage ditch oozing into darkness all around him, and he passes out against the concrete wall, beneath the swastikas and the pot–leaves and the names of unknown kids who never found their way out of this town.
§
…see Danny behind the dumpsters… he’s caked in mud and his hair is filthy and his feet make squelching sounds when he shifts his weight. He looks awful. He knows he does. Sneaking through the school parking lot on his way here, his reflection stared back at him in every car window. He feels like he’s shedding his skin.
He crouches back here, watches, waits. The dumpsters are behind the cafeteria and they smell over–sweet and rotten. He knows Adam will come here. Adam always comes here. Last year, Adam started smoking cigarettes because Danny started. Danny quit when he decided he wanted to spend more money on horror movies and pot than on a smoke that doesn’t even really get you high. Adam hadn’t. It was weird and uncharacteristic of him, but maybe Adam just had an addictive gene or something.
Or maybe he was just holding on to something that would differentiate the two of them, give him some power over himself. The thought bugs Danny, makes him feel bad. He shakes it away. Something
(We’ll call it a collaboration.)
is distracting him.
When Adam sneaks out of the cafeteria and pulls a pack of Camels from his pocket, Danny crouches lower, tries not to make any noise. And when Adam is close enough, Danny grabs his ankle.
Adam screams and whirls and looks down and for a second Danny sees absolutely no recognition in his eyes. Like Danny is a homeless kid, a derelict who wants to kill him, and Danny smiles at that. And Adam sees. And Adam knows.
“Jesus Christ, Danny?”
“In the flesh.”
“Where have you been? Your mom called my house!”
“Where do you think?”
The color drops out of Adam’s face. He closes his eyes. “No.”
“Yup.”
“No, no, Danny, Jesus, all night? Aw, Jesus,” and so on and so forth. Danny isn’t really listening anymore. Adam keeps talking, keeps going, just spouting nervous nonsense, and Danny isn’t really listening. Because something
(Curiosities attract curiosities like quicksilver.)
is distracting him.
He tells Adam to shut up, pulls him through the gap between the dumpsters, tells him everything. And when he’s finished, Adam is rocking back and forth on his heels, cradling his elbows in his palms. He says, “You didn’t see any of that.” He says, “That was… PTSD, or something.”
Something like anger flares inside him, but Danny’s too far gone to notice. That window — that door — and the light it shines, it has a way of drowning out anything else. “I did see it,” he says. “And I’m going back.”
Adam shakes his head. He lights his cigarette with shaking hands. “Fine. Have fun. Let me know how it goes.”
“You got to come, Adam. Please.”
Adam says, “Oh, fuck you, Danny,” but there’s no power in it. He’s almost crying again, those tiny spasmodic eyes all over the goddamned place, but never on Danny. Never. “I’m already a fucking… Jesus, I don’t know, I’m an accessory to… obstruction of justice, or something!”
“No, you’re not. Come with me. Tonight. Please.”
And when the tears slip down Adam’s cheeks and his shoulders slump and he takes a drag on his cigarette, Danny knows he’ll come even before he says so.
§
…see the boys… they’re silent. Sitting in the Volvo with the radio off. Adam’s window is open a little and a trail of blue cigarette smoke tracks out through the crack. The dull hum of the engine is almost everything to Danny. It’s the sound of the hunt, the sound of searching. It jars him when Adam starts talking.
“This is stupid…” he says, and the dull hum takes over again for a few minutes.
Adam laughs, but it’s as fake a laugh as Danny has ever heard. “This is so stupid…”
Danny wraps his fingers hard around the steering wheel.
“This is just so stupid…”
Danny says, “Shut up.” He says it in a voice he can barely claim as his own, dull and gentle in a terrible way. And Adam obeys.
These suburban streets are a cluster of well–lit gas stations and fast food restaurants bleeding into a smattering of faint streetlights and dark houses. When the final buzz–white oasis of the last gas station disappears behind them and the suburban canopy swallows the car, Danny holds his breath. He doesn’t blink. He twists the wheel to the left and to the right and he drives and he turns and when he parks at the end of the cul–de–sac, he doesn’t remember driving at all. The window is his beacon, and he follows its light.
A single streetlight at the crest of the dead–end buzzes and clicks, flairs and goes dead, comes back to life and starts over again.
Danny opens the door, looks at Adam, waits for him to do the same. “Come on.”
Adam looks like he’s going to vomit again.
Danny grits his teeth, forces a smile. The iron–fence smile of the Bosch beams back at him from behind the window. “Adam. Come on.”
Adam reaches blindly for the handle and yanks. He lets the door slide open and pulls himself out.
Danny walks to the steel barrier. Adam joins him. They look over it.
Black silt spills from the mouth of the concrete storm drain and on either side the slanted concrete partition reflects the breathless electric blue light of the moon into the sunken mud–angel where last night had been a bloated dead thing.
Adam says, “He’s not here anymore.”
“It’s here.”
“Someone found it. The police, probably. They took it away, and now we can go home.”
“Adam. Stop it.”
Danny vaults over the barrier. The old steel makes his hands feel filthy, and he wipes them on his jeans as he climbs down the slope and into the creek. He hears Adam scrambling down behind him.
Mud creeps up around Danny’s Converse sneakers when he hits the dark damp ground. The drainpipe stares like a huge empty eye socket, and beyond it the tunnel, the swastikas, the pot leaves. Branches shift overhead and their shadows lend false depth to this scar in the side of the world.
Another splash of mud. Adam standing with his own sneakers sole–deep in the creek bed. He looks around with his tiny eyes. He’s chewing on his bottom lip.
To Danny, this place seems darker now than it’s ever been, and wetter and somehow warmer. All the musty smells of drain water and rotten leaves are magnified. He steps around the narrow corridor of grass and concrete and sloppy earth. He stares into the brush each time the wind moves the leaves. “What time is it?”
Adam pulls his phone from his pocket. It casts a blue glow across his face. “Eight after.”
“Eight after what?”
“Eight after eleven.”
For the first time, Danny starts to doubt all of this. He starts to feel so stupid. And here’s Adam, Adam who he drags with him everywhere like a comfort blanket, staring at him like he’s crazy, like he’s scaring him, and goddamn it, where is the Bosch?
Adam says, “Dan? You okay?”
It happens so fast. So fast he doesn’t even know it’s happening until it’s already in motion. He’s screaming. Screaming words, screaming un–words, just screaming. He doesn’t know why. He just wants to scream until they come, until they come and take him from this fucking little town and put him where he belongs, in the secret wonderful adventure, the horror movie UnWorld, and he will scream. He will scream until he gets what he wants, he will… he will…
He goes light–headed, remembers to breathe, feels his feet slide in opposite directions. He falls sideways into the mud, feels his hip collide with the concrete slope. And he starts crying. Like he’s been hoping Adam wouldn’t. All the hope and anger and righteousness inside him compresses, turns to crumbling coal. Danny sits in the mud and cries. And Adam looks on, and no matter how much it hurts him, no matter how much it kills him that Adam can see him like this, naked and beaten and defeated, he doesn’t stop crying. He can’t stop. He says, “What time is it now?”
“Ten after.”
“I was so sure they were coming.”
“Of course they’re not coming,” says Adam. He sounds genuine. Sympathetic. “It was stupid to come down here.”
Danny stops crying, stands up. He turns halfway around, feels the potential pulsing in the muscles of his arms. He sneers, lifts his open palms to his chest, and pushes against Adam’s shoulders once, twice.
“Jesus, Danny! What the fuck?”
“Shut up, Adam! Shut up!” Over and over and over again, through the tears and the mud and the dark, “Shut up! Shut up!” Pushing, pushing, pushing, Adam falling back a step, getting scared, his little eyes wide and his mouth open. Adam closes his mouth, pushes Danny back. And Danny isn’t really surprised when he balls up his fist and drives it into Adam’s mouth. But he wishes he was.
Danny slumps back into the mud. And he and Adam are the same again, two scared little boys, weeping and wallowing in filth. Staring at each other through slit eyes, wiping away tears and trying, somehow, to still look angry.
Adam holds his jaw with one hand, says, “You’ve lost it.”
“You’re such a fag. You always were.”
“Danny, shut up.”
“I saved you. And you don’t even care. You want to just go back to being a fag like you always were before. Fine.”
“Danny, shut up, or I swear to God.”
“Oh, fuck you, Adam, you’ll what?” he sniffs. “You’ll cry?” Which sounds stupid now that he’s said it. They’re both crying. Both sitting in the mud. And he cries harder.
The air changes. The smells grow stronger. They feel it and freeze.
It begins as an itch in Danny’s ears, a hiss from somewhere he can’t find. It grows, a wet growl now.
A low roar.
A scream.
And a belch of dark water boils out of the drain pipe, spilling out over the creek bed. Both of them are washed by it.
There, floating face–down in the filthy water, oh, Danny knows who that is, welcomes him — it — him back with the widest smile he’s ever smiled, showers thank–yous at the window in his head.
Adam swears, sobs, screams, but Danny hardly notices. The suburban abattoir seeps away, a sentimental Kinkade painting doused with hissing vinegar and running down the easel in ruin. And beneath it, good old Hieronymus Bosch and his landscape of wonderful atrocities. No more Theresa Sales and her expectant looks in the back of his car, no more circular tours of the same broken streets, no more of Anthony Rigby’s bad pot or stolen cans of Natural Light. The window and the key, the door, the whole highway off into that marvelous UnWorld is here, thank god, it’s here, and Danny is so happy, so, so happy.
Stickhead stands up and the Bosch thing perches on its shoulder.
“What the fuck is that?” Adam’s voice, a cracked falsetto.
The Bosch, the Collector of Curiosities, smiles and sways and laughs, and says, “Danny–thing! You came to visit Stickhead, yes? Stickhead and myself, yes?”
Danny nods, aware of this creeping sort of fear at the back of his brain, drowning in the light of his favorite new window.
“What is it?” shrieks Adam again.
“Did you bring us another curiosity, Danny–thing? Is this one who screams curious too?”
“What’s going on?” Adam again, repeating himself, like a record, like a robot.
“Leave him alone,” Danny says. And not because he loves Adam. No. No, not anymore, this has gone beyond any of that sentimental shit, hasn’t it? Adam doesn’t deserve the UnWorld beyond the window. Adam deserves this evil little town, deserves to be infected with its awful normalcy. Take that, Adam. Take that.
The Bosch points at Adam. “It asks many questions.”
“He’s scared,” said Danny.
“Are you scared, Danny–thing?”
“Yes.”
Somewhere behind Danny, Adam is muttering, “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”
Danny smiles, kicks a spurt of wet mud at Adam. Adam cowers, stares.
“You are sure it is not curious?”
“He’s not,” says Danny and glances back at Adam. Poor Adam. He feels bad about this, bad about leaving him here to backslide into that lonely world of library lunches and locker room ass–kickings. But here comes that light from that window again, and all is right with the UnWorld. “He’s normal.”