Witness

"You think you can get away with this?! After all I've done for you?!"

"Ralph, no... Honey, please... p-put that away. I'm sorry. Just... c-calm down, and-"

"Don't you friggin' tell me to calm down, Lorraine!! I'm sick of this shit! I'm sick of you!!"

"Ralph, no!"

BANG!!

John's head snapped up with a gasp, sweat running off his face in rivers. His shaky, heaving breaths slowed and calmed as he sat back in his chair, smoothing his crisp, black curls out of his eyes. In front of him, his old typewriter was absolutely drenched. A moment later, when he felt the tears and snot rolling down his cheeks, he realized why.

He'd been crying in his sleep. Again.

Sucking up his snot and scrubbing his face with his sleeve, John hurried to clean up the mess with his handkerchief. This was happening way more often than usual. Maybe it was all the hours he'd been working lately, trying to get this story finished. He normally only had that dream when he was stressed to the gills. Even when he was a little kid, it would pop into his subconscious every now and again.

John couldn't count the number of times it replayed itself for him. Every detail was exactly the same: the scratchy gold carpet under his bare feet; the musty smell of mothballs and deeply ingrained sweat from the clothes hanging over his head; that narrow gap two inches in front of his nose... and the man and woman, screaming at each other on the other side of it.

This time, though, the dream unsettled him more than normal. Every detail was so crisp and vivid, like it was actually happening. And those names... he was sure he'd never heard them before. If he had, he never remembered them upon waking.

The strangest part was that John didn't even know anyone named Ralph and Lorraine. Nobody - not his parents, grandparents, or small army of aunts and uncles - had those names. Surely he must've heard them somewhere, though. There was no way his subconscious could just pull two names out of the ether at random. Was there?

John just rubbed his face with a heavy sigh, shaking his head to jostle those strange thoughts out of it. Mr. Bumley would kill him if this story wasn't ready for print within the next six hours. Normally, John could whip out a story like this with no problem at all. Nothing sold newspapers like guts, gore, and high crime, and John Cunningham was the Herald's go-to guy on the subject. For the past ten years, he'd cranked out story after shocking, horror-riddled story, polishing the police's details of the events into a Pulitzer-worthy narrative. From the moment this story crossed his desk, though, John found himself unnaturally at a loss for words.

Compared to some of the stuff he'd written about before, this story was relatively straightforward and hum-drum. According to the police reports, the main subject believed his house was being robbed in the middle of the night. In reality, it was his wife, coming home from a late night shift at the factory. The husband was too drunk to tell the difference, though, and as a result he accidentally shot her. Lucky for her, the drink affected his aim so severely that the bullet only grazed her arm. When officers arrived at the scene, both husband and wife required hospitalization due to his wife's retaliating with her umbrella.

As John lit a cigarette and leafed through the file on his desk again for inspiration, he saw it again: the photograph of the apartment complex where the incident occurred. John knew of the place by reputation only: the Spinster's Arms, a.k.a., the Four Seasons of Skid Row. Something about that place just seemed to stick in his craw, giving him the worst writer's block he'd had since the Stock Market crashed. A moment later, it hit him: maybe the focus of the story shouldn't be the husband and wife in question, but the Spinster's Arms itself.

Before he had the chance to change his mind, John hurried over to the newspaper's archive room. There were no shortages of stories about the Spinster's Arms, that much was true. Murders, break-ins, the odd electrical fire; that place had seen it all. There were even rumors that it had been used as both a brothel and a speakeasy in the past. The more John dug through the archives, the more inspired he seemed to get... until he came across one article from September 1912 that made the cigarette butt fall out of his mouth:

"Father Shot Dead At Spinster's Arms Apt.; Mother Charged, Young Son Left Orphaned."

John couldn't believe his eyes as he skimmed through the old piece. It was the names that haunted him most. Ralph W. Schmaltz was the deceased... apparently killed in cold blood by his wife, Lorraine. The details of the crime sent him into a spin, until he could hardly breathe or think. They'd been arguing in the back bedroom when it happened. The police found Lorraine sitting quietly on the bed with her husband's .22 revolver in her lap... and her three-year-old son, sobbing in the closet five feet away from his father's lifeless body.

"John? Hey, Johnny! You awake in there, or what?"

John leapt out of his skin and whirled around, blinking at the person who'd addressed him. It was Paulie, the typesetter, staring at John like he'd gone off his hinges. When he felt the warm trickles of moisture running down his cheek, John scrubbed his face with his hand and cleared his throat.

"Y-Yeah, I just... allergies," he muttered, rubbing his nose to hide a sniffle. "Say, Paul... you've worked at this paper a long time, right?"

"Since Cleveland's first term," the old timer joked. His sparkling brown eyes turned serious suddenly as they flicked to the article in John's hand. "What's it to ya?"

John hesitated a long second before turning the yellowed clipping out toward the sexagenarian. "Just curious," he said, "you don't remember this story by any chance... do you?"

Paulie lifted the reading glasses hanging from his neck back onto his nose, squinting at the nearly thirty-year-old article's headline. A moment later, he nodded slowly.

"At my age, it's hard to recall what I had for breakfast," he murmured, "...but that one stuck with me, yeah. Ol' Sam Hinkel wrote up the details, rest his soul. Never saw anything shake that man 'til this. Couldn't stop thinkin' about that poor kid. He had a boy roughly that age at the time."

John nodded, studying the date printed at the top of the article. "I can relate. This kid and I would be the same age today. Can't imagine what he must've gone through, seein' his old man bumped off by his old lady... in cold blood, no less."

"Ah, kids are more resilient than you think," Paulie shrugged, patting John on the shoulder. "You want my advice, son? Let sleeping ghosts lie. It's better for us all if we keep the past in the past."

John mumbled his agreement, moving to put the article back where he'd found it as Paulie shuffled off. At the last second, though, John folded it up and stuck it in his breast pocket instead. He knew he should've heeded Paulie's advice and just let it go. Something about it just kept nagging at him like an overbearing ex-wife. Long after he slapped together a mostly passable story for the morning edition, that article was still on John's mind. When his head finally hit the pillow that night, he had the dream again... only it was a little different than before.

He could see their faces this time.

Lorraine, tall, blonde, and full-figured, staring down the barrel of her husband's gun in pure terror. Begging him to put it down as tears flowed from her stunning blue eyes. Ralph, a hulking 6'3" brute with hair as red as his face, refused to back down, though. The odor of whiskey hung in the air, so sharp and strong it overpowered the stench of mothballs and sweat John was used to. Their voices were so loud, it shook the ugly peony patterned wallpaper surrounding the bedroom. Then, just like before-

BANG!!

John was so startled by the noise, he fell right out of bed. He didn't take time to think, or calm himself down like he usually did. Tears and snot still leaking down his face, he crawled on all fours over to the chair he'd left his clothes on. He didn't even know what he was looking for until the crinkled article was back in his hand.

It didn't make a drop of sense. He had no idea who these people were, yet they lived in his brain like they owned the place. There were no pictures of Lorraine or Ralph with the article, confusing him even further. The only image was of the Spinster's Arms itself, and a little boy being carried down the front steps in the arms of a police officer. It was nothing more than a pencil sketch, and not a very good one at that. Still, John felt inexplicably drawn to that small boy. And the building where he'd witnessed such a deep and scarring tragedy.

Although it was many hours before dawn, John couldn't stand it anymore. He had too many questions to count, and he was positive the Spinster's Arms had the answers. In record time, he'd gotten himself dressed and hurried outside. Vowing not to stop until he reached the Spinster's Arms.

Of course there were no cabs available at such an ungodly hour. The walk from his modest inner city digs to Skid Row was as long as it was punishing. He kept his head on a swivel and his hand gripped tight around the .45 in his coat pocket the entire time, just in case someone decided to jump out of an alley and pull a knife on him. After nearly two hours of pounding the pavement, John made it to his destination.

The old place looked even worse than it did in the photographs he'd been given; broken, boarded up windows, gutters held up by strips of dirty cloth and a prayer, crumbling brickwork stained with soot from previous fires. It was a miracle the place was still standing, and not a pile of rubble on the sidewalk. As he jogged up the steps to the front door, John's eye was immediately drawn to a sign tacked onto the peeling, warped wood:

"Condemned by City Housing Authority; Entry is strictly prohibited."

Frankly, the notice wasn't at all surprising. John figured the Spinster's Arms should've been condemned ages ago; this latest incident was probably the last straw, leading the city to such a decision at long last. Instinctively, he gave the doorknob a jiggle, fully expecting it to be locked. To his surprise, it turned with no problem at all. Given the place's dark and sordid history, he supposed the city hadn't bothered locking it up. No one in their right mind would be stupid enough to go poking around in there. John wasn't entirely sure he was in his right mind, though.

The inside was just as crummy as the outside. It looked like the place hadn't been redecorated since the late Edwardian Era, with its peach and olive green wallpaper and walnut furnishings. Even the carpeting on the stairs was well past its prime, faded and torn almost completely off in some areas. John paused and did a double-take at that carpet, kneeling to get a better look at it. It was a sickly, dirty yellow-brown, but something told him it had once been gold. Without thinking about it, he ran his fingertips over that short, hideously colored pile. The instant he felt its coarse, scratchy texture, he pulled his hand back as if he'd been burned.

It was exactly like the carpet in his dream.

Stowing away that unsettling realization for his own sanity, John dusted his hands on his slacks and continued on up the stairs. With every slow, creaking step, a new sensation bombarded his psyche at random: a woman's laughter... the warm, spicy aroma of fresh-baked snickerdoodles wafting down the hall... a friendly old man, pressing a peppermint candy into his palm...

When he got to the first landing, he had to sit down and cradle his spinning head. There were so many voices, overlapping one another; laughing, crying, whispering, screaming. The loudest by far belonged to Lorraine, echoing through the building's paper-thin walls and swirling around him like a warm blanket. Her voice was so clear... so tender.

"It's okay, Johnny... Momma's here. Momma's gonna make it all better."

John shook his head as hard as he could, trying to silence the strange, comforting voice. His mother was Miriam Cunningham, not Lorraine Schmaltz. He knew this for a fact. What was happening here? Were all those sleepless nights and brutal stories catching up to him? Had he really gone off his hinges after all? Or was there more to the story here?

Still desperate for answers, John didn't know what else to do except keep moving forward. With every step, he could see the Spinster's Arms changing around him. There were shadows dancing along the walls; the peeling wallpaper rolled back up into place again, shining in all its hideous, extremely dated glory; soft, floral perfume stuck deep in his nose, like it was embedded in every crack and crevice of the place. And those voices were growing louder every second.

John pressed both hands over his ears, trying to block out the deafening din. Just when he thought he'd go insane from the noise, a loud BANG overrode them all. In a snap, the Spinster's Arms fell silent again. That's when he realized he was standing in front of a door: Apartment 2D. Confirming what he already knew, John pulled the article out of his pocket with trembling hands. This was the place, alright: Ralph and Lorraine's humble, broken home. His hand turned the knob without him telling it to, and the old rotten door swung in with a mournful creak.

The moment he stepped inside, John couldn't breathe. The carpets... the white and pink peony wallpaper... every stick of furniture and light fixture... he'd seen it all before. Not in his dreams, but in real life. Instinct drove him further in, straight past the little galley-style kitchen and into the back bedroom. The linens on the bed were different, but the polished brass frame was exactly the way he'd seen it in his dreams. With his heart fit to burst from his chest, he padded over to the closet. It opened at the gentlest push, filling his nostrils with the scent of dust, sweat, and mothballs. There was something else there, too, that he never noticed in his dreams: the unmistakable stench of urine, soaked deep into the carpet.

John hit his knees and broke down in sobs, staring into that little closet. His hand found his lighter on its own and retrieved it from his trouser pocket. As soon as he flicked it on, he could see the image he knew was there, drawn on the closet's back wall in crayon: a stick figure family, with a yellow-haired mommy, a tall, angry redheaded daddy, and a small, very sad little boy. He couldn't stop weeping as he ran his fingers over it, remembering at long last.

He might've grown up to be John Cunningham... but he was born Little Johnny Schmaltz.

"...I'm sick of this shit! I'm sick of you!!"

"Ralph, no! Think of Johnny, please!"

"I don't give a damn about that little brat! He ain't even mine! I know he ain't! He's the sniveling, snot-nosed bastard son of a whore! Admit it!"

John pressed his back to the closet wall and drew his knees to his chest, covering his ears with a whimper. The voices were so loud... why was Daddy so angry? He was making Mommy cry. He hated to see Mommy cry.

"Better a bastard than the son of a lousy drunk who can't hold down a job to save his life!"

"What did you just say to me, you lyin' cheatin' tramp?!"

"Stop," John begged, his voice a desperate whisper through his sobs, "Daddy... s-stop it, please."

Daddy shoved Mommy onto the bed, and she kicked him in the stomach. That's when the gun fell onto the floor right in front of the closet. He knew he wasn't supposed to touch it, but he reached through the gap and picked it up anyway. That cold, blue steel revolver was heavy in his small hand, still slippery from when Daddy oiled it earlier that day. Mommy would be mad, but he had to do something. Daddy was going to hurt her. He wouldn't let Daddy hurt her ever again.

Seconds after John's finger tightened around the trigger, the overwhelming noises and sensations just stopped. He sat there in shock for another long minute, looking at the gun in his hand, before returning it to his coat pocket. Still in a bit of a daze, he crawled out of the closet on all fours. Choking on the thick dust, and the acrid tang of gunpowder hanging in the air. Someone surely would've heard that shot, so he had to get out of there lickety-split. Sure enough, a policeman came running around the corner within minutes of John scurrying down the building's front steps.

John didn't stick around to answer any of the officer's questions. Nobody had been hurt, and he'd rather not explain what he was doing in the Spinster's Arms. As he caught a taxi back home in the early, grey light of dawn, John couldn't help thinking that Paulie was right: he should've let sleeping ghosts lie.