"Yes, I get by with a little help from my friends." That's what Ringo said all those years ago. Then again, Ringo never had a friend like Cory Daniels.
I called Cory a friend through thick and thin for ten solid years, even when his actions seemed to suggest that he didn't share the sentiment. Our mutual admiration for the works of Stephen King may have been the only glue that held us together for so long. Personally, I thought the world of him...was I naive to believe that he felt the same way?
As I said, we'd been hanging together for quite some time, so I was more than disappointed when, after I'd moved out of our shared apartment to a nearby city, he stopped returning my phone calls. He never followed up on the numerous messages I left on his answering machine. It seemed as if he was never at home when I called. I'd get a busy signal, then I'd call back five minutes later...and get that goddamn answering machine with his stupid outgoing message. It was pretty obvious that he was screening his calls but I never got through the net.
After several months of this losing game of phone tag I decided to try and see the man in person. Maybe I could find out what the problem was by confronting him in person. Hopefully I could ascertain where the blame lay and possibly patch things up a bit.
I picked a Saturday afternoon for my endeavour, knowing the Cory would most likely be home around then. Having lived with him for so long I had a fairly good idea of his usual schedule.
Pulling up to the curb in front of the apartment, I was glad to see his car in the driveway. As I approached the door I could hear a television droning inside, the raucous sounds of a Dallas Cowboys football game. I felt sure that I'd caught him at home.
I knocked on the door and waited...
...and waited...
I knocked again...
...and waited some more.
I knocked harder---I was beginning to get pissed off, certain that he was in there, that he was deliberately refusing to open the door. I could still hear the football game playing out on the TV. It made me think of all the games we watched together, with him cheering those stupid Cowboys, understanding the intricacies of the game. I knew next to nothing about the game. I was only there because I enjoyed his company.
The more I thought about this, the madder I became. Anger swelled within me and rage shook me to my foundations. 'The bastard!', I thought, giving in to my dark side. I kicked the door in, determined to face that motherfucker down.
The first thing I noticed when the door hit the ground and I stepped into the house was a pungent odor. It was a foul, foul stench. Maybe he had left a couple of steaks out of the refrigerator for the last couple of days.
The apartment itself had changed very little since I'd vacated it. Cory had rearranged his furniture in such a way that it filled in the spaces that mine had previously occupied. But for the most part not much else had changed.
He wasn't in the front room.
Nor was he in the kitchen, the bathroom or his bedroom. The only other place he might have been would be my old bedroom. But why? What could he be doing in there?
I walked towards my old resting place, hoping to find Cory and wondering to what extent he had re-decorated it. Was the waterbed still there? The stack of girlie magazines I had left behind with it? Had he torn down the Dorothy Stratton poster that I hung on the wall when I first moved in? 'Why did I leave those things behind?' I thought, and it rankled me.
When I opened the door the rotten meat smell became even more powerful and a rush of flies, appetites sated, made a hasty escape from the putrid room. There were so many of them, I was temporarily blinded as they swarmed into my face on their way to greener pastures.
When the last of the flies had cleared away I saw, in a far corner, a pile of seven or eight human bodies, some decapitated, all decomposing, lying in a huge, gooey pool of blood.
On the wall there was a painting, the same crimson as the spilled gore, of an upside-down pentagram. An altar had been haphazardly constructed on the other side of the room. A few ancient looking books were stacked on a small shelf behind, sharing space with several wax candles that appeared to have been burned to the wick...I noted with some degree of disappointment that none of the tomes came from my cache of titty mags, which were nowhere to be found.
But the one thing that spooked me beyond reason was the goat. Curled up, resting peacefully, just an ordinary run-of-the-mill goat who just happened to be in a room filled with human carcasses and a bevy of tools used in satanic rituals.
The animal had heard me enter the room and was clumsily getting to his feet. The clatter of his hooves on the hardwood floor made it difficult, but he persisted. The sudden movement scared another horde of flies into a renewed burst of activity.
The goat seemed frightened of me.
In horror movies, when a character stumbles into a situation like the one I found myself in, he inevitably seems compelled to investigate further. At this point the audience is saying, or at least thinking, "GET OUT! TURN AROUND! RUN AS FAR AS YOU CAN RIGHT NOW, YOU FOOL!"
In the movies, curiosity always kills the cat. But this was no movie and I ain't no fool.
I looked into the goat's eyes and said, "Hi, Cory." Then I turned around and ran out of that demon's lair in record time.
Once in my car, pulling out of the parking lot with considerable speed, I stole one last look at the old homestead, where, as far as I knew, my best friend of the last ten years had been watching the Dallas Cowboys every weekend and ritually sacrificing human beings during the work week.
The goat was standing in the doorway when I left, as if to see me off.
I appreciated it's concern.
