GARGOYLES, chapter 2

Chapter II



                   The next afternoon, Scott Lang arrives back at “Snowy White Cleaners” to pick up his hat and coat. 
                   “Hey, Penny, how are you doing?  Were you guys able to get my hat and coat clean?  Is it ready yet?”
                   “Hi Scott, how are you?  Yeah, it took some doing but we finally got it clean.  By the way, were you hurt or something?  Were you involved in an accident?  There must have been some accident!  There sure was a lot of blood on your coat.  Tell me what happened!” remarked Penny. 
                   “Blood?  What are you talking about?  That wasn’t blood, it was red paint!  It couldn’t have been blood.  I was not in an accident nor was I near any accidents.  It was my usual boring, semi comatose commute into the office.”
                   “Scott”, Penny stood there with her hands on her hips, “we are professionals here, we have seen it all and believe me when I say we have seen it all and that was blood!  You better believe we know the difference.  You might have thought it was paint, but we cleaned it and it was blood!  Strange though, I wonder how it got on your clothes?  There was quite a bit.”
                   Scott proceeded to tell Penny what happened yesterday after he left the train station on the way to work.  “I am telling you Penny it had to come from that old building.  It couldn’t be blood though some one would have died losing that much blood.”  Scott thought about what he just said and shuddered.
                   “Will you go to the police? Maybe you should go talk to them.”
                         “I don’t know.  Right now I’m going to go home now and think about this.  What would I tell them?  I’m not even sure where it came from, what happened, I’m not sure of anything.  They would think I’m crazy.”
                   Scott leaves the cleaning store and heads home.  On the walk home, he wonders about the blood.  Did it come from that roof, or maybe he leaned up against it on the subway.  Things do happen on the subway all the time.  Either way it bothered him the whole walk home,
he pulled his coat tighter as he thought about it.  It was REALLY bothering him.  So much so, that he could not fall asleep that night.  At about 2:00 a.m., after hours of tossing and turning he decides to drive into Manhattan, to check out the old building.  Maybe when he gets there he would be able to figure out what happened.
                   As he gets dressed, he wonders what he is doing and why?  What will he do when he gets there?  What will he do if he finds more blood, or maybe………a body?  He decides that this may not be the smartest thing he has ever done, but decides to go anyway.
                   As he pulls onto the entrance ramp to the Belt Parkway he wonders what the hell he is doing.  Maybe he should just go to the police.  But what would he tell them?  “They would surely think I’m deranged,” he mumbles.  He decides to keep going and take a look himself.  The parkway is empty at this hour, so is the Brooklyn bridge.  He reaches his destination in less than 40 minutes.  As he turns the corner onto Pearl Street he notices how especially dark and lonely the block looks at this hour.
                   “Jeez, this is a pretty scary looking block at this hour.  This is like Dawn of the Dead scary!”  He chuckles to himself, “listen to me, what a wimp!  The big bad investigator.”
                   Scott parks the car on the corner on the opposite side of the street.  He decides to sit in the car for a little while and just watch and listen.  But there is no one around.  No cars, no people.  You don’t see many people at 3:00 in the morning even on a Saturday night down here!  After awhile he decides to get out and stretch his legs.  “I think I will take a look around.”  The street is small and narrow.  The street lamps were all out so that it was dark and eerie.  The first thing that hits Scott is the quiet.  There are no sounds of any type.  No cars passing, no people walking, or even pigeons, not even the rats scurrying from garbage to garbage.  But garbage there is plenty of.  Both sides of the street are littered with garbage.  Old broken furniture, black plastic garbage bags, some old file cabinets.  The wind was still blowing, pushing loose garbage down the street.  In fact this is the only sound to be heard.  He starts to walk up the block slowly looking for any clues to what may have happened on Friday morning.  ‘Thank goodness it finally stopped raining’, thought Scott.  ‘I’m glad the wind has died down a little too.  Now it’s only a tornado’, he chuckles at this thought.  He pauses in the same approximate spot where he had stopped on Friday morning and looks up, but it is dark and he does not see anything.  He looks around the sidewalk but doesn’t see anything, no evidence of any paint splattering.  ‘The rain could have washed any blood or paint away by now.  The way it was raining it would have scrubbed clean the sidewalk and any evidence would have been washed into the sewers’, he thinks.  As he walks down the block he notices that every building was boarded up.  There were no street level stores still in business.  It was a very small block with only 3 buildings on one side and 2 on the other.  None were occupied.  Most of the glass was broken and large sheets of plywood covered the openings.  “I think this block has always been deserted,” he mutters to himself.  “This block looks like it was nuked.  Like something out of a video game.”
                   On the way back to the car he pauses again near the building entrance.  He examines a door that seems to be ajar ever so slightly.  He thinks to himself that he could probably open it if he tried, but there are 2x4s nailed across the entrance.  He decides not to try to enter the building.  It could be unsafe structurally and besides it would be trespassing.  “The last thing I need is to be arrested for trespassing.”  He slowly backs up to the curb and looks up at the roof.  It seems to be only 4 or 5 floors, but in the dark he cannot be sure and sees nothing.  All of a sudden he thinks that he hears something and freezes.  He moves back towards the building and presses his body against the wall to try and hide.  Straining his hearing, trying to pick out any sounds he could recognize, but he does not hear any sounds again.  The hair on the back of his neck was standing straight up. 
                   A feeling of intense fear comes over him.  His initial thought is to run to the car and gun it!  To get away from here as quickly as he can and to never come back!  But after a few seconds that seem like an eternity he relaxes and then turns to go back to his car but hesitates.  The feeling that overcame him just moments ago is beginning to subside.  He starts toward the car.  But halfway to the car he spins around and looks up at the building.  His gaze falls on the old abandoned building.  The hair on the back of his neck is standing up again.  A feeling of being watched comes over him, and suddenly he is hit by that same sense of fear, but he does not understand why.  An irrational fear grips him like a vice and sucks the very air from his lungs.  He hurries, almost running back to the car.  He unlocks the door and jumps in and quickly relocks the doors.  Once in the car he calms down and laughs to himself.
                   ‘Get hold of yourself, Scott.  There is nothing out there!’
                    He starts the car to head home but decides to sit and wait for a while.  ‘Let’s just wait a little while and see if anything turns up.’  Scott wonders about that feeling of being watched, ’What was that about?’ but shrugs it off.  After awhile he turns the car off and soon he falls asleep.  He wakes up suddenly and while rubbing the sleep from his eyes he notices it is 6:36.  It takes a few minutes for him to realize where he is as well as what day it is.  “Damn, it’s a good thing it’s Sunday.”  He gets out of the car to stretch, and takes another long look down the block towards the building.  “Some detective I would make, sleeping on the job”, he mutters and then laughs.  Slowly walking back to the building, Scott scans the roof tops.  Now that it is light out he can plainly see the roof line.  Seeing nothing he starts to check the sidewalk for any red spots.  ‘These could be what I’m looking for,’ thought Scott as he found some faded looking red spots on the concrete. “Did not see these in the dark, but what do I do now?  I could go to the police and say WHAT?’  Scott continues walking down the block but sees nothing else.  He turns and walks back to the car.
                   Scott slips back behind the wheel of his car and starts it up.  He guns the engine once and slips the transmission into drive and heads for home.  As he pulls away from Pearl Street he thinks of everything that occurred last night.  He smiles as he remembers the feeling of fear that hit him.  But then starts to wonder why or where it came from.  ‘Were those real blood spots on the sidewalk or just some paint stains?’ The highway and bridge were still empty and Scott reaches his apartment back in Canarsie in less then 45 minutes.