Free Shattered by Jay Bonansinga Page B

doors.
    Henry walked the length of the corridor until he reached unit 213. One more glance over his shoulder. Something rattled in the distance, a muffled thump somewhere hundreds of yards away. There were others somewhere on the property. Henry would have to be careful. He fiddled with the padlock, and finally got the vertical door to rise.
    The odor of ammonia and quicklime greeted him. He squeezed into the pitch-dark cell and lowered the door behind him for privacy. He pulled a string that dangled by his face. A bare incandescent bulb shone down from the low ceiling, illuminating the battered road cases containing his cameras, his beloved surgical instruments, a tattered Barcalounger armchair, canisters of film, unopened bottles of chemicals, boxes of pornography, and his vast collection of old yellowed Polaroids.
    The pictures lined the walls, showing countless pairs of terrified human eyes in extreme close-ups, horrorstricken, forced open by makeshift retractors.
    He went over to the miniature refrigerator in the corner, knelt down, and opened it. He put the human eyeballs on the bottom shelf, right next to the Mason jar filled with other eyeballs floating in formaldehyde. There were other souvenirs in there as well: some eyelids in a Tupperware container, one of them still sporting its long fake lashes, and a tiny gray tendril of tissue that Henry believed was an optic nerve.
    The pièce de résistance was a gray, egg-shaped organ extracted from a victim’s skull, lovingly sealed in a pickle jar, suspended in mineral oil. Henry was convinced the organ was the occipital lobe, the part of the brain that records, calibrates, and interprets visual information. The human camera. This little piece of neurological anatomy fascinated Henry so profoundly it was almost erotic.
    In fact, at this very moment, Henry felt the urge to look at the thing…so he pushed aside the other souvenirs and carefully pulled the pickle jar from the back of the shelf. He held it up to the light, and he shoved his free hand down the front of his pants.
    He was just beginning to masturbate when he heard the noise out in the corridor.
    It came from far away, through the walls, from the depths of the building, a familiar squeak and maybe a yelp. The telltale sounds of other doors opening. It made Henry jump slightly. He wrestled his erection back into his pants, then put the jar back in the fridge.
    Henry cautiously raised his door—the rusty pulleys screaming—and he peered around the corner of his unit. In either direction, beyond the fluorescent tubes, the corridor stretched into shadows. Henry looked around. To his left was the entrance. Nothing moving there. But to his right, maybe fifty yards or so away, at the far end of the hall, glowed a dull orange light. It reflected off a spray-paint-ravaged door, where the corridor made a ninety-degree turn.
    Somebody was in the adjacent wing.
    Swallowing his panic, Henry stepped into the hall, carefully lowering and locking the door to his unit. He took a deep breath and started toward the light.
    As he approached the bend, he heard other noises. Some he recognized. Some he didn’t. There came a low, intermittent buzzing noise drifting through the silence, and the low, distant drone of voices. Henry turned the corner and saw the slum section stretching as far as he could see. The slum section had earned its moniker for obvious reasons, but most tenants preferred to simply call it the wing.
    Henry stopped and gaped.
    He had seen this corridor before, in all its ragged, squalid pathos—the trash drifting against the walls, and the endless rows of discount storage units with their cheap particleboard doors resembling some hellish dormitory—but he had never seen it this crowded.
    Crowding every other doorway, it seemed, was a silhouette of a nodding junkie, or a zoned-out prostitute, or some poor obese welfare mother with her barefoot urchins scurrying around her. Times were