Featuring the art of Ryan Kacsandy
The rookie pounds on the door; no answer. Smash and I exchange glances as we scan the downstairs units. Nothing, not a sound.
“They said 3B, right?” asks the lieutenant.
“Yeah,” I reply, my unease growing. “3B.”
The house is a 3-unit maze of cheap renovations, a fire trap waiting to happen. We take mental notes. It’s all we can do before our instincts are lost in the smoke if we ever have to come back and it’s on fire.
A concerned neighbor approaches us, his worry etched across his face. “Hey, I own this house. Is something wrong? Do I need to open it?”
“Yeah,” I nod. “We need to check out 3B.”
“Okay, okay,” he says, his voice trembling. “I'll grab my keys.”
He disappears into the neighboring house and swiftly returns with a set of keys. We follow him up the exterior stairs to the second-floor back door. The b must have meant back, not bottom. The key turns, but the chain lock holds firm.
“Fire department!” Smash yells, pounding on the door.
There is no response from within.
“Break the lock,” the owner says.
Smash drops his shoulder into the door and shoves it open, shattering the chain lock. We move in, greeted by the kitchen’s warm, stale air. Three guys in the living room look up, their faces a mix of dazed confusion and guilt. We head right, down a narrow hallway that leads to a bedroom, and find a man frantically trying to revive a girl lying naked on the bed.
“All right, let's get her on the floor,” Smash directs.
The girl is strikingly attractive, barely touched by the spiral she’s falling into. She looks so much like Ophelia that I have to remind myself it can’t be her. Same lips, same delicate curves, even the tattoos in all the right places.
“Can we get something to cover her up?” Smash asks.
The blanket they throw at us isn’t enough to cover her. I glance back at the guys in the living room. They are shifting nervously. I don’t want to know what was happening before we got here. The cops are walking in now, so they can worry about that.
We carry her down the stairs and load her into the ambulance. The doors close, and I watch as it disappears into the distance, and I can’t help but wonder who she was before this, what she might have been.
The tones hit again, and we’re gone.
The house sits back from the road. The driveway, once filled with gravel, is now mostly dirt. I can feel an unsettling chill before I even reach the porch.
The paint peeled away long ago, leaving the wood around the windows swollen from years of rain and neglect.
Most of the windowpanes are cracked, caked with grime that holds them frozen in place. Except for one: on the second floor, a bedroom window is open. The red curtain, which is a blanket, pulses slowly with the breeze.
I smell the house before I even enter.
The front screen door hangs slightly open, swinging lazily when the wind picks up, creaking on its rusted hinges. When I step inside, it hits me like a brick wall: the overwhelming stench of stale cigarettes, rotting food, and the unmistakable odor of urine, old urine. No matter how many times I walk into places like this, I never get used to it. It takes a minute to readjust. Still, it’s better than a rotting body, bloated and swelling and covered in maggots before it’s found weeks later.
Dirty clothes litter the floor. They absorb my footsteps, silencing any life that may have once existed here, any sound of happiness. Greasy handprints smear the walls, holding down the wallpaper that isn’t peeling. The rest curls away, trying desperately to escape from the things it’s seen.
Shadows dance along the floorboards from the flickering light in the hallway. I can feel the devil in the distorted shadows that creep alongside me as I walk.
I kneel beside the man on the floor. His chest is bare, his skin stretched tight over ribs that jut out like the cage of a starving animal. The wasted body of addiction. His long black hair is tangled and matted, streaked with gray that makes him look older than he is. His beard is patchy and clings to his sunken cheeks.
We work him, pressing life back into this broken shell of a man. When he finally gasps for air, I notice the children.
They’re huddled together in the corner. Wide-eyed, pale faces blended with fear, muted with hope. They’re young, too young to have seen this much. Their eyes tell me stories that shouldn’t belong to anyone their age; they dart between their father on the floor and myself.
A girl clutches a blue bunny, its fur matted and frayed. She can’t be older than seven. Her clothes are stained and too small, the sleeves riding up on her thin arms.
Two boys and another girl stand close to her, their arms wrapped protectively around each other. A woman slouches in an armchair, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She’s indifferent to the chaos around her. Her hair is cut short and uneven, framing her face in a way that makes her look permanently angry.
She sneers at me, blowing smoke in my direction. “How long is this gonna take?” she snaps, her voice sharp and impatient, more annoyed than concerned. When I don’t answer, she snaps again, louder. “Hey! Don’t ignore me. How long is this gonna take?”
Before I can respond, the cops burst in.
“Sit down,” one of them says, pointing at her. “We’re not doing this again.”
She sits back, licking her lips, her eyes glinting with something dark and depraved. When she laughs, it’s a low rasp that makes the children flinch.
That’s when I know.
I’ve done these children no favors.
The old man groans, mumbling about a cigarette. I glance at the kids and watch the hope drain from their eyes and back into the hell I’ve helped return them to.
The girl with the bunny stares at me, her eyes pleading for something I can’t give.
I’ve failed her.
I’ve failed them all.
***
The girl from 3B is slowly fading. Her once-attractive appearance is deteriorating daily under the crushing grip of addiction. The drugs have control of her. Each time we respond to her, she is much less like the person we found before, and there are always fewer people there for the party. The drugs are merciless, and it’s a battle she’s losing, one hit at a time.
Sleep has become an enemy, a realm where the horrors haunt my thoughts.
They manifest in cruel detail. I can’t avoid it forever. Just delay the inevitable. As the night stretches on, I cling to wakefulness, but my eyelids grow heavy, each blink a fight against the darkness. I know what is coming, and there is no escape. The nightmare descends, tearing through the fragile walls of my mind.
I wake drenched in sweat, disoriented by the lingering fear that clings to me. A noise is coming from the locker room. I walk quietly in the dark through the bunk room and slowly push open the doors. I lean around a locker, and fear grips me.
His eyes are closed, sewn shut, an X stitched across both eyes, like there’s something he’s refusing to see. The stitches are fresh, and the skin swells around the threads.
Puzzle pieces and numbers are randomly tattooed around his skull. His teeth are exposed and clenched together. His legs look like a decrepit crab, and they are all that exists below the neck.
He’s ramming his head over and over into my locker, each hit sending shocks through me.
He stops. Slowly, his head turns toward me, and I freeze. He knows I’m here.
He comes after me, his legs scurrying across the floor, scraping closer, the sound crawling under my skin.
I stumble backward, spinning into the bunkroom and diving onto my bed. He follows, his legs dragging him beneath my bunk. I press my back against the wall, trying to yell for Murph, but no words come out. He’s sleeping in the next bunk, unaware of what is happening.
I can hear him beneath me. He’s climbing, clawing up the blanket, inching closer.
The tones go off, and the room explodes with sound, jolting me awake. A train roars outside, its rumble matching the slam of the locker over and over.
I lie in a cold sweat, trying to make sense of what just happened as he fades into the recesses of my troubled mind.
What the hell is wrong with me?
Coholic is an attempt to make sense of trauma, identity, and what remains when everything else burns away.
This miniseries pulls excerpts from the full-length novel.
EPISODE 1: Born Into Fire | EPISODE 2: We Are All Broken | EPISODE 3: Bonded By Fire |
Episode 4: I Wanted to Go Back
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