The Fiend

Injected, snorted, sniffed or smoked, heroin usually brings the same results – addiction.
Some are saved by visits to rehab, along with extensive meetings and counseling. Others, including many who are very young, find themselves unable to escape the spiral of self-destruction that results from their addiction. Heroin causes thousands of deaths a year and will continue to do so until the labs are shut down and destroyed, and the pushers – those grotesque bits of slime that give worms a bad name – are no longer allowed to slither down our streets.

***

Blake Tarhan pulled his new Ford Explorer up to curb just as the bell at Public School 132 announced the end of the day’s final class. “Just in time,” he said as he put the SUV into park. He turned to see the front doors of the school swing open, releasing a horde of kids. “My clientele,” he thought to himself, licking his lips.

He cherished the moment as he watched the faces of the boys and girls streaming out of the building. He loved the innocent looks on those faces. It meant the kids wearing those looks were vulnerable and susceptible to his wares. And that spelled money – money to buy this hot vehicle, money to buy cool clothes, money to do whatever he wanted. Every face he saw rushing out of the building looked to him like a big wad of hundred-dollar bills. Oh, how he loved those fresh, innocent, gullible kids.

Two of them – a boy and a girl, neither more than 13 – were walking in his direction, surreptitiously sharing a cigarette. Blake motioned them over. “Hey!” he called. “Could I talk to you for a minute?”

The children stopped about ten feet away. “What is it, Mister?” the boy asked.

“I see you guys are smokers. You know that’s a nasty habit considering the price you pay for cigarettes. I’ll tell you what, I got a better deal. Hop in here and I’ll let you try something free.”

The two kids walked slowly over to the vehicle. “What do you have?” the girl asked, somewhat timidly.

“Something you’re just gonna love,” said Blake. “Come around to the other side.” He reached over and opened the passenger-side door, and the two young people walked around the SUV and got in beside him. “If you like it,” he said, “I’ll be here tomorrow and you can get some more. Tomorrow it will cost you a little, of course. But today, it’s free. Nothing to lose. Nothing at all.” Except your bodies and minds and souls to me, he thought.

A few minutes later the two kids were getting out of the Explorer, and Blake knew he had another couple of fish on his line. They would be back tomorrow. And the next day, and the next. And they wouldn’t be off his line until they either checked into a rehab facility or were found dead in some alley.

Gloating about his “catches of the day,” Blake pulled out and made his way down the boulevard. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror and admired his new $150 pair of sunglasses. “Cool,” he murmured. “I am looking cool.”

It was time to catch up with his sales force, so he began making his rounds on the boulevard and nearby streets. There he saw one of his dealers, stopping to collect money and issue more drugs. Business as usual. When he had left, the dealer retreated to a crack den or the sewers below, out of sight from everyday life and right into fantasyland.

Just as Blake was crossing over onto the east side of the city, he passed a young girl he thought he recognized. “Isn’t that Sparrow?” he said aloud to himself. He slowed down and checked the mirror. “Yeah, it’s Sparrow – but she looks different.” He pulled over and waited for the girl to walk by, thinking about when he had first met her two years ago. Sparrow had been only fourteen then, very smart, a beautiful young girl with the complexion of a hand-painted porcelain doll. But Blake had managed to get her onto his hook, and the drugs – as with so many others – had taken over every aspect of Sparrow’s life. First she had turned to stealing to support her habit, then to prostitution. Eventually she had gotten to the point where she would do anything to satisfy her need. Her once-smooth skin had become ravaged by track marks and collapsed veins, her white teeth scuffed and chipped, her lovely blonde hair a breeding ground for lice and other tiny insects infesting her scalp.

I haven’t seen or heard from her in a couple of months, he thought. There’s no way she could have cleaned up that fast. She looks just the same as she did before I introduced her to drugs. At that moment the young girl passed by his passenger-side window. She glanced at Blake; her eyes fixed on his, and nodded as if in agreement to something. Then she turned her head and continued walking.

“Sparrow!” Blake called to her as he got out of the SUV, but the girl was turning the corner. He ran to where she had turned, but she was gone.

Shaking his head, he started back to his vehicle, but then saw, across the street, a young man who looked just like Darrin, another of his young victims. “What the hell!” Blake muttered to himself. “That can’t be Darrin. He was killed last month."

Darrin had been another statistic of the boulevard and of Blake’s web of drugs. The fact that the boy had suffered child abuse as a youngster hadn’t helped matters. In fact, it had probably doomed him from the start, preventing him from getting a chance to see and experience, as a child, the wonders and enjoyments of life. It had been easy for Blake to seduce the boy into his little world at the age of twelve, and by his thirteenth birthday he was dead, raped and shot in the head by a john.

It couldn’t be Darrin, Blake thought, yet the boy’s features – his face, his size, the way he walked – all seemed identical to those of Darrin. Not everything was the same, though: the scars were gone, and instead of the usual baggy jeans and t-shirt, the boy was sporting a suit and tie. And there was no sign of a gunshot wound whatsoever. No, it can’t be, Blake thought. Yet the resemblance was uncanny, and as the boy continued down the street, Blake found himself following him, needing to know for sure.

The boy descended a staircase leading to the subway, and Blake followed. When he got to the bottom he saw that although it was late afternoon and the trains should be packed, there were no people waiting on the platform, no sound of trains, no sound at all. And there was the boy who looked so much like Darrin leaping down off the platform and onto the tracks, walking into the darkness of a tunnel that stood at right angles to the underground railway.

Blake jumped down too, but had taken only a few steps before he realized the boy wasn’t the only one entering what seemed to be a catacomb. Though he couldn’t see their faces, there must have been twelve or fifteen other figures walking – almost gliding – into the tunnel behind Darrin.

Cautiously, Blake followed them, but after a moment the boy and the others seemed to disappear into the darkness ahead, Blake found himself alone, with only a few dim yellow lights to interrupt the gloom. He continued walking and could smell the foul odor of urine that he knew must have been left by the homeless people and the addicts who came here to escape the elements of the world above. Unexpectedly, the yellow lights burned out, and Blake was now totally blind to his surroundings.

The heavy moans came first, familiar ones to Blake, the kind he had often heard from customers as they suffered for a fix. Then balls of white light started to appear all around him, and terror gripped him as the moans turned to voices, haunting and desperate: “Blake,” they said. “Blake. It hurts Blake. Help us Blake.”

Blake stood frozen as the white balls began to slowly take on the form of faces: There was Sparrow’s face, and Darrin’s, and a dozen more all around him – all faces of his young victims, the children, young and fresh and innocent, who he had corrupted and who had died so that he would be able to buy the things he wanted and convince himself how cool he was.

Blake started to scream as unseen hands started to probe his body, and then he felt needles penetrating his skin in a dozen places. He felt his veins filling up with the same fluid he bestowed onto others, his muscular frame losing strength and form with each injection. There was pain everywhere, his eyes, arms and legs now riddled with bloody nooks and crannies.

Blake was soon too weak to stand as the drugs did their deadly work quickly, and he fell and lay on the ground as the white lights made their way up and through the darkness. He closed his eyes and vaguely wished that he would be taking the same path.

Police treated the death of Blake Tarhan as a homicide: a forced drug overdose they called it. His body had been consumed by heroin, with multiple syringes found at the scene. It would be a tough case for detectives to solve, however, for there was a great mystery associated with those syringes – of all the prints they lifted from the dirty needles, they couldn’t find one set that didn’t belong to someone who wasn’t deceased.