The Atrocity Artist

3.

The first night in the house is always disorienting. The urge to enter the small room at the top of the stairs is so strong Skad stops in the doorway. The boxes and random junk appear as a unified heap in the shadows cast by the window's thin light. His South End house has closets larger than this room. How had he and Ed shared it for all those years? It must've been like sharing a coffin.

It had been their own fighting jar.

The concept was the same at any rate. The closed space heightened aggression and stimulated conflict.

Skad resists the pull and proceeds down the hall to the other bedroom. Ice clicks against the side of his glass with each step. The room where his parents used to sleep takes up most of the floor, but the ceiling slopes at harsh angles making much of the space unfit for anything but crawling. His father built bureaus into the walls to take advantage of the useless area on its sides. These are the only original pieces of furniture left in the house. The rest is new, bought twenty years earlier.

He goes to the dormer and closes the drapes. The terrible new house is framed by the window, and it's lit up like a beacon washing the hill in its unnatural light. His hand yanks the heavy brocade across the view and shuts it out.

After placing his scotch on the nightstand, he sniffs the sheets to make sure Lil' Carol put fresh ones on as he asked. The fabric has no hint of staleness and he eases into bed. It's massive for the space and looks shoehorned in. His parents used a double. Hard to believe considering the size of his father.

Another fighting jar, he guesses.

The bed was the first thing on the truck to the dump when he took possession of the place. Even if the springs hadn't been worn out, it would've been too incestuous to sleep in. The king-sized colonial four-poster is more to his stature.

With a pillow against the oak headboard he smokes and drinks his single malt as he does every night before bed.

The painting on the wall opposite him depicts a shambling army. Men and women in rags, skin gray and sloughing off their bones march toward the perspective of the viewer. Television sets are scattered across the desolate landscape. The eyes of the horde mirror the tube screens and tendrils of electricity curl around their arms and hands.

He'd painted it for a series called: "Stay Tune for the Apocalypse." That was back in '82 or '83. He can't remember exactly which.

Maybe he'll start a new study while he's here. Use the concrete shit-box on the hill as inspiration. Show it in all its ghastly glory. He could give it the features of an insect. A giant bloatfly or a roach stinking up and eroding the world around it. He'll go through it room by sickening room. In the bedroom, bodies will be piled up like cordwood.

He stubs out the butt of his second cigarette and switches off the light. It's too early in the season for the night to be filled with croaking frogs and chirping crickets, so only the rippling of the lake overpowers the creaks and groans of the house. The walls and roof bristle around him, an animal settling down for sleep.

His mind goes back to nights long past, with him on the top bunk and Ed below. The room just fit the bed and a dresser. On it sat a ratty lamp with the silhouette of cowboys on the shade. It was old and battered. His mom must have found it at a garage sale or thrift store. It was the sole accommodation to boyhood their meager means afforded.

By the time he was fifteen, he was forced to curl up on the bed like a possum or else his feet and half his shins hung off the bottom. That was around when he started sleeping outside during the summer. Most of spring and fall too. One year, he went straight from thaw to the first frost. He slept by the lake in his Boy Scout tent with no bed but a groundsheet and an army surplus blanket that stank of mothballs.

If his joints weren't so goddamn achy he'd do it again.

It had been his first taste of freedom and it had been sweet, and he's been hooked ever since.

Freedom is the most addictive substance around as far as Skad's concerned. Life has been a constant search for that heady fix.

He remembers one night, the summer before college when he slept on the lawn instead of in the tent after a spat with Angeline. He'd passed out drunk, and his father found him in the morning not two feet from the walk. "Pitiful," was all he said before getting in his pickup and driving off to the paper mill. He had more to say about it later. He'd come home nearly as hammered as Skad had been. He was itching to talk to his no-good son and pound some sense into him.

It was the day Bobby Skadding died and Skad came into being.

Over the years, he tried everything to keep the big man off of him: run, beg, bargain, take it silently, and of course fight back. Nothing slowed the old man. Nothing sparked mercy. None of his efforts did anything. It was like trying to hold back a flood, outrun the wind, bargain with Grim Reaper.

That day, he did something new. He'd laughed.

With each blow he roared with mirth. The louder he laughed, the more his father's face turned red, until he looked as though he were about to keel over for good. Not since Mount Vesuvius's eruption had the planet seen such pent up rage. But through the pain of his broken nose and the blood in his eyes, Skad could feel the disrespect sucking the life from his father's marrow. The fight ebbed out of him, draining in a slow but inevitable leak.

Skad is woken from a pleasant doze by a shrill buzzing. The primordial ring of the kitchen phone is no less jarring for its familiarity. It stutters, drawing out the chime, beginning to fade, then starts over again, somehow louder.

It rings five times before he moves.

Swearing, he pulls himself from the bed and stumbles through the blackness down the hallway. He uses the banister on the stairs not trusting his feet to find the way. At the bottom, moonlight spotlights a painting of a grotesque figure with circuit board skin. It has its arm raised and is screaming into a gale of a storm.

But it's not the moon, it's the lights from the God-forsaken house on the hill.

He's going to complain about those fucking lights tomorrow.

Skad gets to the kitchen and wrenches the receiver from the rotary wall phone. It's the same phone he's been using since he was old enough to talk.

"What?" He spits all the displeasure of his soul into the word.

Static hisses, rising and falling, the non-noise of a seashell against an ear. He's about to expand on his first question. Perhaps say, "What the fuck do you want, you fucking piece of shit?" But a voice comes on and it stops him.

"Some men should die," it says, the crackle of static growing as if the syllables are shooting off flares of electricity. "Because they are already dead inside."

Part of him wants to call out, "Who the hell is this?" but he recognizes the voice. He stands there waiting for more, but nothing else is said and eventually a harsh warning alarm lets him know the phone has been off the hook too long.

The noise jolts him back to reality enough for him to hang up. In the dim light, the phone's beige plastic glows like pallid flesh. His breath is ragged and his pulse beats in his ears. Reality threatens to sink away and leave him stranded in the strange surrealness of the moment.

The words — the threat — had been spoken by his own voice.