A KILLER'S ESSENCE is now out in trade paperback, and is currently in film development from
Braven Films. Here's the first chapter.
CHAPTER 1
Back in 1972 I was seven years old and always tagging
along after my older brother, Mike. This was back before the attention you have today on
child abductions and pedophiles—that evil existed, shit, it has probably always
existed, but it wasn’t on TV or the news much, if at all. You didn’t have CNN
and the Internet to focus on it twenty-four seven, and as a result a lot of
parents didn’t think about it. Back then it wasn’t all that unusual for a
seven-year-old and a bunch of ten-year-olds to spend their afternoons hanging
around their Brooklyn neighborhood unsupervised. And that was what Mike
and his friends and I used to do, at least when he and his friends couldn’t
shake me, and I was a tough little bugger to shake back then, just as I am now.
This one afternoon it was just Mike
and me. We had just spent a half hour in Bob’s Drugstore thumbing through the
comic books until the owner got fed up with us and told us to buy something or
leave. Mike spent a dime on a Sky Bar candy bar. He broke off the
caramel piece for me, and we left anyway. While we were walking past the fish
market a man came out and offered us five bucks to clean up the backroom. Mike
wanted that five bucks, but something about the man made me grab onto Mike’s
arm and pull him back while shouting “No!” repeatedly as if I were demon
possessed. Mike looked at me as if I was nuts, and I thought he was
going to punch me, but that wouldn’t have stopped me from what I was doing. A
couple of older men from the neighborhood wandered over to see what the
commotion was about, and the man from the fish market started to look nervous.
He told us to forget it and he went back into his store.
“What’d you do that for, Stan?” Mike
demanded, his narrow face taut and angry. “Five bucks! You know what we
could’ve bought for five bucks? Are you stupid?”
At this point I was crying. I couldn’t explain to him why I
did what I did. I couldn’t say it out loud. I couldn’t have him think I was
even nuttier than he already thought I was. Anyway, all I wanted was for us to
get away from there, so I kept pulling on his arm, using every ounce of
strength I had to drag us away from that store. One of the neighborhood men
gave me a concerned look and told Mike
that he should take his little brother home. Mike
looked pissed, but he did what the man asked him to. All the way home he kept
asking what was wrong with me.
Later at dinner Mike
told our folks what had happened and how I cost us five bucks. Pop asked why I
did what I did, but I couldn’t explain it to him. He shook his head,
disappointed-like, and gave me a lecture about the value of money, but left it
at that.
The next night while we were eating dinner, Mr.
Lombardi from down the hall knocked on our door. Chucky
Wilson, who was a year older than Mike,
hadn’t come home yet from school and he wanted to know if either Mike
or I had seen him or knew anything. We didn’t. He looked tired as he apologized
for interrupting our dinner. Pop asked him if they needed any more help looking
for Chucky. Mr. Lombardi thought about it, but shook his head and told
Pop to finish his dinner and if they still hadn’t found Chucky in
another hour he’d let Pop know. After Mr.
Lombardi left I told Pop that Chucky was with that man from the fish market.
“What?”
“That man from the fish market must’ve promised Chucky five
bucks also. That’s where Chucky is!”
“Stan, quit talking nonsense,” Mom said.
“I’m not! I’ll bet anything that’s where Chucky is!”
“Stop it now!” Pop ordered. “Christ, I don’t know how you
get these ideas.”
None of us had much of an appetite after that, Mike
and me mostly pushing our food around our plates and Pop staring off into
space. After a while of that he got up and left the table and then the
apartment. He didn’t bother saying anything to Mom
about where he was going. She looked like she was fighting hard to keep from
crying.
It turned out that Pop collected other men from the
neighborhood and they visited the fish market. They broke into the store and
found the man who had offered Mike and me five bucks. He was in the back room chopping up
what was left of Chucky. I didn’t learn that part until recently, but that’s what
they found. It was days after that when Pop asked me how I knew where Chucky
would be. I couldn’t explain it to him, so I shrugged and told him I just knew.
For years I had convinced myself that none of that happened.
That it was a dream I once had, or maybe a story I heard, or something from a
movie or TV show that I saw as a kid. After meeting Zachary Lynch, I started
remembering more about that day back when I was a seven-year-old kid and
thinking that maybe it wasn’t just a dream. I found the old newspaper stories
about that man in the fish market and what he did to Chucky
Wilson, and then dug out the police reports. My pop
had died when I was twenty and Mom is in no shape these days to remember anything, but I
talked with Mike and he confirmed what happened. All those years we never
talked about it, both of us pretending it never happened.
“What did you see that day, Stan?” he asked.
I shook my head and told him I didn’t know, and from the
look on his face he seemed relieved to hear that. The fact is I did see
something. When that man came out of the fish market wearing his stained apron
over a pair of dirty khakis and even dirtier T-shirt, for a moment I didn’t see
a man but something ghoulish, something from out of a nightmare. It only lasted
a second, if that, and then he turned back into a balding and scrawny
middle-aged man, but for that moment I saw something else.
Later, after talking with Mike, I sat quietly and remembered
everything I could about that day and wrote it all down. After all those years
I finally accepted what I saw. I still have never told anyone about this other
than Zachary Lynch, and he’s the only person I know who would possibly
understand.
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