Carrigan’s Challenge by Ronnie Cassano

Carrigan’s Challenge by Ronnie Cassano

Everywhere I look I see blood. Final blood. The last drops oozing out of some poor bastard’s body. Scenes so grotesque I know they will haunt me forever. They leave an imprint on my mind, my soul. They grab me with their blood-black fingers and squeeze. The video monitors are all around me. Monitors on the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Color and black and white footage of some of the most brutal, vicious and cruel things a dark heart could imagine. I am surrounded by death. People shot in the head, stripped of their skin, dying in the streets. Animals treated in the worst possible ways. Dissections. Autopsies. Plain out-and-out murder. There is a single lens directly in front of me, buried between the video screens, no doubt allowing the old man to watch me squirm. The images in the kill room merge into one giant, bloody, non-stop picture show and I wonder how Carrigan was able to pull it off. Of course, I already know. The man’s got more money than God. He can do a lot with money like that. His kind of money can move mountains. His kind of money can buy souls. His kind of money can call out the Devil any time he wants to. One million dollars of Carrigan’s money can get me to spend twenty-four hours in a real panic room. A modern-day version of a haunted house. I keep repeating to myself You can do this, Eddie Munt. You can do this. Twenty-three more hours and your problems are solved. I think of Carrigan, and I curse the old man. I hope he’s enjoying this. One hour in and my heart’s already beating out of my chest.

                                                                & & &

His book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over 500 weeks, coming in just under The Road Less Traveled and What to Expect When You’re Expecting. It was the first and only book written by Theodore Conrad Carrigan, born Halloween day 1949, the oil and real estate magnate who made his first million before his twentieth birthday; his first billion before he turned thirty-five. The Known World as seen by Theodore Carrigan enjoyed a spot in the top ten of the prestigious list for nearly ten years. Ten years of people reading, re-reading, recommending, lending, borrowing and buying this edition and that – all for a book about watching people die.

I was with the Times as a city reporter for five years. I heard about the man and his book simply by keeping up with our list. Everyone keeps up with the list, even if they don’t read. And a book like Theodore Carrigan’s was pure water-cooler fodder, great breakroom chat. A book like his, occupying a spot at the top for so long, and changing an entire country, perhaps the world, only comes around once in a generation, if we’re lucky.

I knew what I knew about Theodore Carrigan simply by keeping my ears open and reading headlines at the newsstand. He had come from humble stock. A rural Oklahoma swineherd’s son, young Carrigan had grown up with a blade in his hand, his father making him slit throats at the tender age of seven. By the time he turned ten, young Teddy was bleeding 200-pound pigs before and after school without adult supervision. The future billionaire had become so adept at it, his father had him teach some of the hired help how to kill, skin and field-dress a hog, something Teddy could do in under twenty minutes. The family’s piggery was close to Muskogee where the meat was sold at market and enough money was earned to ensure the sole Carrigan child received a proper education from Oklahoma State in nearby Stillwater.

Young Teddy became adept at handling money after his father made him tend the family business at the hog markets. He majored in finance and received his undergraduate degree in just two years on the college’s accelerated program. He was the youngest student to ever do such and earned a bronze plaque in the College of Finance which still hangs there to this day. Young Teddy accomplished this while butchering hogs for his father on weekends. Far as I can tell, the lad had no social life whatsoever. It was all money and hogs and buckets of blood. Lots and lots of blood.

After his parents passed, Teddy Carrigan took the money that was left to him from the piggery and bought land all across Oklahoma, hoping to make enough from selling farm parcels to support himself without having to slit throats. But, for a while, and certainly for the foreseeable future, it seemed as though razors and swine would be his way of life, indefinitely.

And just when young Teddy thought he couldn’t be exposed to more slaughter…he was drafted into the Vietnam War.

In 1969, Private Teddy Carrigan entered the ranks at the tender age of nineteen. Though he was drafted, he opted out of a student deferment, wanting the chance to fight for his country. It was a time when leaders were seen as statesmen, and war was a necessity for the common good; anything to help Uncle Sam defeat that nasty communism. He was placed in the 2nd Battalion out of Fort Benning, Georgia, and from there went straight to the front line where young Teddy got a front-row view of what a .50-caliber machine gun could do to a tender young body. He had finally been able to make some real friends in the Army, and they were all taken from him in one epic pig slaughter of a war. Surveying the various killing fields, Teddy saw more insides than outsides, the kill-zone not all that dissimilar from the discards in the Carrigan piggery during butcher season. Before he stepped off that bloody field, young Teddy had learned two things: he saw life as a fragile imbalance that could tip the lever in your favor one second and against it the next, and there was no use getting close to anyone who could be taken from you in the blink of an eye by such a random God. He vowed never to love anyone and risk the chance of losing them ever again.

Carrigan would one day break that rule and live to regret it.

Teddy’s last day in-country, he saw the green, waterproof maildrop bag splash down in the Saigon River. The soldiers always longed for a little piece of home and eagerly awaited their name to be called and the familiar red and blue bordered envelopes to pass their way. Young Theodore Carrigan received a certified letter from an attorney tending to his family’s trust and assets while he was away at war. The letter stated that large reserves of oil had been found on Carrigan landholds in Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Kansas. Teddy, a few months away from his twentieth birthday, was officially a millionaire. His book details how Teddy read the letter, folded it, and placed it in his breast pocket. Then he lit a cigarette and enjoyed a warm can of Schlitz while he watched the white phosphorus smoke plumes blot the Saigon sky.

Theodore Carrigan completed his tour of duty and opted-out of reenlisting. Instead, he went home to Oklahoma, back to the family pig farm and fired all of his employees who had run his business while he sloshed through the killing fields of Vietnam. He paid them well, giving them severance packages that were unheard of for swineherd men. He got some pushback from his attorneys, the team of men who kept the family money well-invested while he was away, but in the end, they got paid well too and they shut their mouths as the last employees left the farm. After the parking lots were emptied and the doors had closed on two generations of swine herding, young Theodore went inside the pens and laced the feeders with sodium nitrite, a toxin used to control feral pig populations. He watched the pigs lay down and go to sleep for good as their red blood cells stopped delivering oxygen to their tissues. It must have been a sight to behold. The entirety of the Carrigan pig business all dying at once – all 500,000 of them.

In one twenty-four-hour period, Teddy rid himself of his bloody past and had taken a bold first step towards becoming the filthy rich oil and land magnate the world would come to know.

But, unfortunately for Teddy…blood has a memory.

Teddy didn’t have time to start enjoying his newfound wealth before the nightmares began to settle in. Visions of bodies torn apart by hellish gunfire; skin burned away to the bone; charred black meat with dogtags strewn across southeast Asia; babies shot from their mother’s breast, mid-suckle. Teddy would awaken on those dark nights drenched in sweat with the taste of blood in his mouth. He would finger his cheeks, trying to find where he’d bitten himself. But the blood he was tasting wasn’t his own. It was a sort of ghost blood from one of the bodies he’d seen butchered in-country. No amount of alcohol or hypnotics would get the taste out of his mouth. It only grew stronger. Teddy learned two things from his nightmares: he couldn’t escape the damage done by his past, and it was best to fight fire with fire.

That’s when Teddy began to seek out the atrocities that had begun to plague his sleeping hours.

Like a sort of exposure therapy, he decided to face his fears head-on. He began collecting reels and film footage of all manners of death – motor vehicle accidents, shark attacks, jumpers, hangings, fatal diseases, drownings, poisonings, animal attacks, Nazi executions, electric chairs and firing squads, blunt force trauma, kicked in the head by a horse, spontaneous human combustion, forces of nature, bombings, gunshot wounds. His collection grew and soon he had to build a special warehouse to hold all the film stock. Thousands of kills. Thousands of souls lost in the most Godless ways possible, but still, something was missing. Young, nouveau riche Theodore Carrigan vowed to never stop looking until he found something to finally stop his nightmares.

That’s when his book, The Known World, began to take shape. Theodore Carrigan chronicled his journey of going into some of the darkest corners of the globe in search of his little nightmarish films. He met with a Burmese warlord and paid $500,000 for his personal beheading video collection. He rendezvoused with back-alley smut peddlers in New York City who sold him 8MM films from the sixties that showed couples tortured and killed while having sex. He bought hundreds of clips of real snuff films unscrupulous Hollywood producers had planned on splicing into mainstream movies. He bought security footage from French slaughterhouses and abattoirs and winced when he watched the throats being cut, the videos hitting too close to home.

His manuscript documented global brutalisms Carrigan himself had witnessed – his own experiences in the Viet Nam war; beheadings in Afghanistan; firing squads in Cuba; Tutsi genocide in Rwanda; ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the crime scene photos of a whole cadre of serial killers, with special sections for the heads in Dahmer’s refrigerator and the young boys found under John Wayne Gacy’s crawlspace. He was proud of the fact he’d been able to procure original Polaroids of each. Carrigan never did mind spreading his money around; there were always hungry people willing to take it.

Carrigan interviewed every mob enforcer, underground assassin, human butcher, mercenary, contract killer, warlord, mafioso, war criminal, death squad leader, and serial killer he could gain access to. Their motives were different, but in the end, it came down to the fact they enjoyed what they did. Their black hearts pumped faster when they killed. It was a medicine they had to take nearly every day to survive. Like any other ailment, if they didn’t take their medicine, they didn’t feel well.

Carrigan found the act of killing didn’t move the needle much for him. He had killed men in Vietnam countless times, all in the name of preserving democracy. He barely got a rise out of pulling the trigger beyond the fleeting joy he experienced from knowing he had done his nation some good. Later, when the bad dreams came, those casual deaths were the least of his worries. His real pleasure, his real calm, came when he watched others facing the nightmare film footage. Their fear, and how they dealt with it, stirred something in Theodore Carrigan. The fright on the videos was nothing compared to the full-on fear in the faces of the people whom he allowed to view his growing personal death collection. That was what moved him. That was what kept his demons at bay. That was what persuaded Carrigan to write his immensely popular tome, a book about seeking out death and conquering the fear associated with it. It was something that, even now in his elder years, he would always be a student of, constantly on the hunt for more footage and more people to expose to it.

The Known World as seen by Theodore Carrigan had twenty publishers vying to produce the book, all without reading a single page. The Carrigan name and the subject matter commanded that much clout. It had been marketed in literary journals and bookstores globally and in the financial and trade journals that regularly featured articles and interviews from the man himself. Preorders for the first printing topped five million copies. It hit the shelves in February 2015 on Valentine’s Day, something Carrigan thought would make for good counter-marketing strategy, and the stores quickly sold out and couldn’t restock fast enough. The book unseated previous pillars of the best seller list like King, Patterson, Grisham, and Baldacci. With the advent of reality television, people were opting for fact over fiction. The book debuted in the top ten of the famous list its first week, then shot to number one and stayed there, daring anyone else to challenge it.

It stood as king of the hill for the next nine and a half years.

Then, Carrigan got the idea for the video room challenge. Wall-to-wall monitors showing his famous collection on loop reels, grotesque and in the buff. Death without its clothes on. Twenty-four hours. One million dollars. Open to all comers.

                                                                          & & &

I try to think of anything I can to take my mind off the pictures and videos playing out before me. I think of Clarissa – the real reason I’m doing this. I think of the operation I’ve put off for so many months simply because I don’t have the money. I think of how she must be suffering back home, waiting for me to come back with a fat wad of cash. Surgery ain’t cheap. But nothing is too good for my little girl, and Carrigan’s challenge will give me a way to pay for it. I think of her curled up in my arms or resting on my lap, while we sleep with the television on. She’s too good for me. I really don’t deserve her, but now she’s mine. She’s my responsibility and I aim to do right by her. Clarissa is as close to a real family as I’ve ever had. In a lot of ways, she saved me. Now it was my turn to save her.

                                                                          & & &

There had been many others before me, people trying to outlast Carrigan’s horrors for a chance at that big payday. A lawyer from Detroit that cardiac arrested at hour thirteen. A Brooklyn drug dealer who just made it to hour sixteen. A cocky soldier of fortune who said he had witnessed his own revulsions in Afghanistan – he tapped out with only two hours left to go. He was the closest anyone had come to taking some of Carrigan’s money. There had been others – a Japanese Yakuza, a welterweight prizefighter, a Crossfit instructor, even a female schoolteacher from Ohio. None of them had been able to make it to the half-time mark. An Amazon truck driver cried and shit himself after thirty minutes. So, the challenge stood, and Carrigan’s money sat, lonely as the sun.

The last time I saw Old Man Carrigan, it had been to discuss the challenge and agree on the terms of payment should I succeed. It sounded like a piece of cake. Spend twenty-four hours in a panic room watching different violent videos play out on monitors all around me. Complete the day without hitting the kill switch and walk out one million tax-free dollars richer. The idea, as he pitched it, was simple. Watch what he had to show me. That’s all. I would have to pass a complete physical prior to the viewings. If I witnessed something so traumatic that my system shut down, there would be a doctor on location should I need immediate medical attention. The thought of my bank account getting fatter went through my head.

I wasn’t so confident after our next round of negotiations.

My hands and legs would be bound to a custom-made chair, with only my index finger free and within range of the panic button. Intravenous fluids would be administered through an access line. EKG pads would be placed on my chest to monitor my heart the entire time I was in the room. A condom-catheter would be placed, and the bespoke throne would double as a commode should the continuous atrocities force me to lose control of my bowels. No bathroom breaks! And Carrigan made this quite clear, there would be no one to come in and clean me up. No interruptions. The videos would play for twenty-four hours or until I caved in and pressed the button. Shit-assed or not. There would be a single countdown clock for me to watch the hours trickle past: starting at 24 hours and ending with a 5…4…3…2…1 that would change my life forever.

There was a nagging in the back of my mind. So far, there wasn’t any reason not to try it. One million dollars is, after all, a pretty good incentive, no matter what you have to endure. Even if I had to tap out, it’d be worth a try for that much dough. There were stories of some of Carrigan’s challengers – one still recovering in a looney bin in Boston, another on constant suicide watch in Tulsa. They were ordinary people. I’d been a beat journalist, covering the everyday horror shows on the street. I could take it. My skin and my heart were made of steel. Then, old man Carrigan dropped the big one. The final, non-negotiable point.

The eye speculums.

Carrigan’s researchers had come up with a special harness that would fit around my head with two clips attached to keep the lids wide open for the duration of the challenge. Tubes affixed to the apparatus would drip lubricating drops into my eyes every two minutes to prevent drying and blindness. Carrigan wasn’t going to stand for a contestant simply keeping his eyes closed for twenty-four hours. If injury or infection ensued, or, God forbid, blindness, Carrigan’s contract promised to pay full healthcare benefits for the unfortunate contestant and their immediate family until death, whether they tapped out or finished the challenge. The pictures attached to the contract looked like something ancient and medieval – a smooth faceless mannequin head wearing the custom eye harness, the misery of the thing apparent even on such an emotionless object. The eye speculums were a non-starter for most. I thought of Clarissa, my sweet baby girl, and asked, ‘Where do I sign?’

                                                                          & & &

The scenes wouldn’t stop. The mangled metal of car wrecks. Plane crash footage with body parts on the roofs of houses and strewn about backyard lawns. Vivisection videos had me vowing to never eat meat again. Video screen after video screen playing over and over, loop reel after loop reel. The one small bit of respite I had from the gore show was the classical music playing over the entire horrific mess. The beautiful music of Bach and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Brahms. Symphonies of death provided the background music for the whole hellish opera. I wondered what fresh hell would accompany the next aria or chorus. I tried to focus on the beautiful music instead of the blood. The contrast made me think, by the end of this long night, should I win the day, sanity intact, I’d likely never listen to classical music again.

Before I could square this thought with the money that would be lining my pocket, the music stopped and sound bites from the gruesome videos rang out through the small panic room. People crying. People screaming. Animals screeching in pain. Death rattles. The sound of sucking chest wounds. Wet markets howling with life. Carrigan did this routinely, but not on a schedule. I never knew when the beautiful classics would stop, and the hellish screaming would start. Likewise, the sound bites would last for differing amounts of time, sometimes mere seconds, sometimes blasting on and on with no reprieve in sight. The countdown timer read: 15h:45m.

You can do this Eddie Munt! You can do this!

I found myself triggered into remembering past atrocities from my own life. A dear uncle killed in a three-car pile-up. A nephew’s hand swollen with rattlesnake bite. A bystander smeared across 42^nd street by a car veered out of control. I had experienced all these things living in the City of Dreams. My old man always said these things would toughen me up. My old man always said these things would make me stronger. I’d grown up thinking I was invincible, that the typical car wrecks and cancers of our lives couldn’t touch me. I could experience anything, endure anything, handle anything. Nothing life could throw my way would make me duck. Nothing could be so bad that I couldn’t fold it up and stuff it in my back pocket.

And then I met Theodore Carrigan.

It was at a dinner party for a retiring editor. Carrigan had friends in very influential places, including the New York Times, and he enjoyed good press whenever he could get it. The event was held at the River Café in Brooklyn, a part of DUMBO where I least expected to see a billionaire. “Eddie Munt, the risk-taker,” he said.

I had developed quite the reputation for what my editors had dubbed “suicide journalism”. I took the first photos of the ’77 blackout riots for my school newspaper. I wrote the asides for the Washington Heights riots in ’92 after becoming a full-fledged reporter for the Times. I interviewed some of the first responders running towards the Twin Towers on 9/11 when everyone else was running away. I camped out with the Occupy Wall Street nutjobs outside the Equitable Building in Lower Manhattan. Places where no sane person would’ve been caught dead. The Times staff called me the Indiana Jones of Journalism. Whenever shit hit the fan anywhere in the city, the editors called Eddie Munt because they knew they’d get good copy. But the real reason? I was a man whose shoes would be tough to fill should something go wrong, but not too many people would miss. And, I had remained matrimonially unaffiliated with only little Clarissa to take care of, a leftover from an old flame who managed to occupy the other side of my bed for a year and a half before we called it quits. We had brought Clarissa into our world together, and when she left me, she left her too. No worry. I wanted to take care of her. She was my little girl, and Eddie Munt doesn’t shy away from his responsibilities, big or small.

Standing before the great Theodore Carrigan, I felt insignificant; like the sum total of my career had only covered the hijinks of my junior-senior prom for my high school newspaper. I spoke, hoping he wouldn’t notice the quiver in my voice. “Mr. Carrigan. It’s an honor.” I was speaking down to him, as he was sitting in surely one of the most expensive wheelchairs ever built. I had read about the German-designed, custom-made, chair and how it was built to Carrigan’s specifics. It looked like a barely street-legal muscle car – independent suspension, flat-free tires and casters, super-responsive joystick controller, power motor with two back-ups, tilt-and-recline seating that might’ve taken the old man to the stratosphere and back. From my vantage point, he looked feeble, but I knew it was unwise to think that of him. He was a man who had walked the killing fields of Cambodia, after all. I had forgotten what had put him in that chair. Some neurodegenerative something or other; an illness they didn’t have a name for. As I took the full of him in, he manipulated his joystick with a bent and contracted hand and unseen motors began a slightly audible whirr. The wheelchair began to reform itself and maneuver the old man into a standing position. In seconds, Theodore Carrigan was standing taller than me, albeit strapped to the hotrod wheelchair like an old lunatic in a Transformer.

“The honor is all mine, Mr. Munt,” Carrigan whispered, his voice breathy from whatever disease was attacking his muscles. “I wonder if you’d do me the additional honor of reaching into my pocket?”

Even in a room full of people, talking to a billionaire who could hardly move, this sounded suspect. The surprise must have registered on my face because he put me at ease. “My breast pocket, if you will, Mr. Munt.”

I humored the old man and stuck my fingers into the breast pocket of his silk jacket, careful not to ruffle the pocket square. I retrieved a thin business card with a bright gold metal core and edging, African ebony wood middle, and gold engraving. The card simply stated:

                                                                 24 hours

                                             One Million Dollars

Instinctively, I turned the card over to reveal a final detail:

                                                                9 Raven Lane

The address was Carrigan’s; a Victorian castle he’d built in Hamilton County, the most rural part of upstate New York. Although it was only a little over an hour and a half drive from the state capital of Albany, it seemed more isolated and secluded. Old Man Carrigan had everything shipped in and built his refuge stone by stone from a dolomite quarry in Northern Italy. The Times had covered its construction, as several permits and building codes had to be skirted for the huge eyesore to go up. Everyone watching the story and the mansion’s construction got a good lesson in economics: Sometimes money doesn’t just talk, it screams.

The address 9 Raven Lane was the cherry on top. Carrigan was able to make and name the roads leading up to and around his castle. As his was the sole address on Raven Lane, why number it as he had? In their series of reports, The Times had done an in-depth look at the number 9. Numerology revered it as a symbol of spiritual growth; a number representing the completion of a cycle. Some cultures associated the number with luck and good fortune, others not so much. The Japanese feared it. Its pronunciation sounded like kurushimu, their word for “suffering”. To them, the number 9 was flawed and lacking, representing the end of a near-perfect cycle, but falling just short of a faultless 10. The number was seen as something that had to be endured to achieve perfection. The Times came up with several reasons the old man might number his address so, but there was only one they finally settled on: Enlightenment through risk-taking. When Carrigan threw out his challenge, this made more sense. You’d have to go through hell, but the pay-off would be worth it.

“You seem like the kind of man who might take up such a challenge, Mr. Munt.” Carrigan had a way of speaking easy truths.

Still holding the card, I admired its beauty. Like the old man who handed it to me, it looked like money. “Only a day?” I joked. But Carrigan didn’t laugh. He looked at me with a mix of sadness and disappointment in his eyes.

“Oh, I assure you, it’s so much more than that, Mr. Munt. It’s an opportunity for a man to look inside his soul and see what frightens him, confront it, and never have to worry about that fear, or any others for that matter, ever again. I’ve done it. Now, I want to give that gift to the world. It seems, in today’s society, so many are willing to live with what scares them. They become used to it, you see. Like an old coat they don’t want to throw away.” Briefly, I thought I saw Theodore Carrigan smile, a half-smile his corrupted muscles allowed him to have. “Are you willing, Mr. Munt?”

                                                                          & & &

A video played off to my right: a couple of gangbangers viciously shoot the sitting patrons of an outdoor café. Blood sprays on the nearby streets and drips off the Cinzano umbrellas. Averting my eyes as far left as possible reveals another video of similar thugs shooting into a crowd, then calmly walking up to a few downed party-goers and putting one in their brain. Video violence played all around me. The only reprieve I was afforded was every two minutes when the eye speculum dripped the lubrication into my eyes. For a moment I was blinded, but then the drops cleared, and my vision returned razor-sharp. The nightmares playing out before me were crisp and clear. Murder and more in 8K. Carrigan wanted absolute clarity for every shooting, stabbing, every car plowing into a crowd. I was surprised the son of a bitch hadn’t forced me to wear 3-D glasses.

I wondered what the old man was getting out of all this. Was this fun for him? Did it get him off? I envisioned Old Man Carrigan by himself in a mahogany-paneled office, sitting in his souped-up wheelchair before a huge television screen replaying my agony, a modern-day puppet-master straight out of a Poe short story.

I found myself trying to focus on the digital countdown clock nestled among all the video carnage. 11h:20m. Less than twelve hours of blood to go.

You can do this, Eddie Munt! You can do this!

I thought of little Clarissa at home. I hoped she was comfortable. I hoped the growing mass in her stomach wasn’t too unpleasant. Before I left, I made up her bed with fresh sheets and placed soft snacks where she could reach them. I even put the T.V. on her favorite station. She loved her nature shows and enjoyed watching healthy animals running loose in the wild, doing what they were supposed to be doing. As sick as my sweet girl was, I could tell she enjoyed this. I started talking to her inside my head, the same way I talked to her at home when I was putting her down to sleep for the night. Close your eyes, sweet girl. Daddy’s gonna go out and make that money to get you fixed. And, after that rock is out of your belly and you’re feeling better, I’ll take you to the park, let you run around with the kids. I’m gonna let you do what you’re supposed to be doing. I promise.

My girl didn’t stay in my head for long. I had just started to get some of the violent images shoved to the side when Old Man Carrigan sent another volley of atrocities across the ocean of monitors. One image played prominently on the largest screen in front of me, Carrigan’s way of ensuring I saw it. A pretty, young blonde woman and an equally handsome young man, both naked, tied to posts in what looked like a hollowed-out wheat field. They were being flogged with a barbed-wire cat o’ nine tails. Their assailant was an obese man wearing a black leather kilt and no shirt. A tattoo of an upside-down cross covered most of his back. A red devil mask hid his face, the horns spiraling up towards a heaven where he wasn’t welcome. Each strafe left less and less skin, and in only a few whips of the medieval instrument, whatever was left in my quivering stomach came up and out. After several heaves, my shirt was drenched in greenish bile specked with bloody clots, my own stomach bleeding along with the young couple on the screen. I tried squinting my tortured eyes, but the speculums only seemed to force them open more. I tried telling myself it wasn’t real. Special effects. Hollywood could do just about anything these days. A few gallons of stage blood and prosthetic body suits could fool anyone. Then, their abuser went to work on them with a hunting knife separating this from that and making their insides outsides, and the camera never cut away.

I had no more disbelief to suspend.

The countdown timer read: 8h:17m.

                                                                           & & &

As far as anyone knew, there had been one near-love in Carrigan’s life. Her name was Marisol, a beautiful Dominican woman whom he originally hired to clean his brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Carrigan had properties all over the world, specifically set up to accommodate his needs and he usually hired properly vetted, properly licensed, properly legal people to staff them. He kept an apartment in Manhattan so he could have a decent place to rest when he was in the city on business. Occasionally he’d spend weekends or even entire weeks there before going back to his Raven Lane seclusion. The story goes, when Marisol walked into the interview, Carrigan was smitten and hired her on the spot, no documents needed.

Pictures of her revealed her size to be a petite 5’4”, darkly tanned and chest heavy. She had crystal-green eyes that likely mesmerized the old man the second he looked into them. Within six months they were engaged. In another three months their wedding shocked the New York social scene. After all, an Oklahoma oil baron and a saucy Dominican housekeeper monopolizing Manhattan’s social events calendar was unheard of. But it happened nonetheless and within the year they were all the rage at parties, clubs, and events. Carrigan fit in elbow-to-elbow with the New York rich. Money attracts money. In due time, even Marisol was comfortable around the super-rich New Yorkers who had never known a day without a maid or a butler.

In those days Carrigan’s neurodegenerative disorder was merely nipping at his muscles and the old man was still able to get around. His progressive weakness had sent him to the finest neurologists in the city, even consulting with some of the elite medical doctors across the country and all over the world to give a name to the thing that had begun to siphon his strength away. He underwent tests, procedures, and biopsies, without a cure or even a definitive diagnosis. In the end, Carrigan continued to weaken until he found himself confined to a wheelchair, stricken with an unnamed disease that could care less about his wealth, his power, or his place in New York’s high society.

And all the while, Marisol had been at his side.

Her first fevers came in the summer of 1985, the same week Rock Hudson announced he had AIDS. By October, the actor was dead, and Marisol had lost thirty pounds she couldn’t afford to lose. Everyone knew what the disease could do, and how hamstringed even the brightest doctors were in treating it. Carrigan was able to keep Marisol out of the papers, employing a steady stream of physicians and surgeons to feed her an endless number of experimental pills and scrape away the odd lesions that festered all over her body, all after signing iron-clad NDAs. In the end, Carrigan’s money and influence could do nothing to save her. She took her last breath in a hospital bed on the eastern terrace of his upstate New York mansion, watching the sunrise. She weighed 58 pounds, less than a gunny sack of potatoes. Carrigan was furious at the medical science that had failed Marisol. But mostly he was furious at himself for taking a risk and having feelings for another human being. He had betrayed all the lessons Vietnam had taught him and he vowed to never go through that pain again. In his first interview after Marisol’s passing, Carrigan stated he’d rather see a hundred strangers killed than watch another Marisol die.

He kept his promise. He never remarried. And that part about watching a hundred strangers killed? He spent the rest of his life collecting videos that proved how serious he was.

                                                                                    & & &

I’ve lost the clock. Its face is black with red digital numbers, and I can’t find it. It’s moved. It’s not where it used to be. Then it hits me. I’m watching a wall in which everything is black and red. The clock is lost somewhere in this vast field of madness. Just for laughs Old Man Carrigan has cartoons and videos of old comedies playing in between the blood and guts: the Pink Panther opposite smeared car-wreck victims; Bugs Bunny alongside street café bombings; the Three Stooges doing their worst right next to slit-throats. He throws in brief images from horror movies too. Freddy Krueger’s glove; Jason Vorhees’ machete; Leatherface’s chainsaw. It becomes impossible to tell Hollywood from the real thing, and I can feel myself fracturing trying to distinguish the two. The eye speculum squirts drops in my eyes and I’m momentarily blinded. As my vision begins to come back, I see the mayhem again, but the images converge and confuse me. Porky Pig pushes an icepick through a man’s temple. Yosemite Sam jams teenagers into a woodchipper. Michael Myers drops an anvil on a roadrunner. The hemispheres of my brain have melted into one another and now there is no distinction. Comedy is horror and horror is comedy. I wonder if I can tell the two apart ever again.

Eight more hours of hell. Isn’t that what the clock read the last time I checked? God, that seems like ages ago. Surely, it’s almost time to end all of this. Carrigan has had his fun. He can go to bed tonight with a smile on his face, knowing he made me endure the unendurable. He won. He’s trying to change me; make me into a monster like him. It’ll never happen. In the end, I’ll be a rich man, and baby girl will get the surgery and care she needs. It’ll all be worth it. I’ll live out my days with killers in my head, but my wallet will be fat and my little girl happy. That kind of comfort is worth this kind of torture. He wants to make sure I don’t enjoy it. Old Man Carrigan wants to make sure I never see one day of happiness with his money. He wants me to be like one of those industrial machine accident victims he keeps flashing on the big screen, their innards smeared across the factory floor. Literally working their hearts out for nothing. But I’m stronger than that. I’ve seen my share of guts, Carrigan. Everything you’re showing me on these screens I can take and then some. Keep it coming, old man. Keep it coming.

Somewhere in the mangled mess, I see red digital numbers: 5h:15m. Beethoven’s Symphony No.5 blasts from the loudspeakers.

You’ve got this, Eddie Munt! You’ve got this!

After a minute or two of Beethoven, the classical music stops abruptly, and the sound of carnage fills the small panic room again. My mother and father appear on all of the screens, their bodies twisted inside the car Dad was driving in ’62 when they ran afoul of an 18-wheeler on the Bear Mountain bridge. They had dropped me off at Grandma’s and were going away for the weekend, just the two of them. I was barely two years old when the accident happened. Even without seeing their faces, I knew it was Mom and Dad. I’d seen the photos already. Got them from the state troopers. They photographed the crash scene for investigative and insurance purposes. It was a service they provided. Through my contacts at the Times, I was able to get copies downloaded to my phone. Black and white and grainy; the cameras in ‘62 were a long way from the resolution we enjoy on most phones today. I surrendered everything I brought with me to Carrigan’s mansion right before the challenge started. The photos were on my phone, and he hacked it. That son of a bitch. Sometimes money doesn’t just talk, it screams! I wanted to focus on that anger. It was better than seeing the images of my parents before me, their blood like black ink. But, Old Man Carrigan had other plans.

My parents’ ’69 Plymouth Fury, long and sleek, all right angles and whitewalls, was accordioned into a cube the size of a refrigerator. Occasionally, on one side or the other, an arm or tuft of hair could be seen. I recognized my dad’s wedding band on his hand, sticking straight out of the top like he was trying to free himself from the crush of the metal. My mom’s foot was stepping out from the bottom of the cube wearing a canvas lace-up, amazingly still white with only a few specks of blood to indicate anything terrible had happened at all. The heart-shaped port wine stain above her ankle was angled to the camera as if she were trying to make her identification easier.

Other photos showed the troopers prying my parents out of the crushed Plymouth, placing pieces of their bodies on the asphalt, trying to reconstruct them, casually like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. That day changed me forever and I realized I never wanted to see anything like that again. But I had put myself here. I made myself vulnerable and Carrigan had seized on it. The old bastard had made me watch the one thing that had broken me and could break me again.

The next thing that popped into my mind, as if a part of my brain was telling me to stay on point, was Clarissa. My sweet girl dying back home. I was broken, but she kept me going. It may have been too late for me. I feared my mind would be permanently dripped in blood for the rest of my days, but little Clarissa could still have a bright future. She could run in the backyard, enjoy her favorite meals, chase butterflies and chameleons, and stare out the window on a rainy day. She could still have a life.

Carrigan’s money had one more trick up its sleeve. The screens changed again and there was Little Clarissa. My sweet girl in her bed, curled up by my recliner. Clarissa playing with her ball, full of catnip. Clarissa tearing her scratching post to shreds. My baby jumping for a feather toy dangling from a wand I moved in my hand like a fishing pole. All pictures and videos I had on my phone, now in Carrigan’s possession. They were his now; his to do as he pleased.

My hand instinctively reaches for the panic button. I’m just able to angle my eyes down far enough to see it. A big, red button just an inch away from my right index finger. All I have to do is press it and the madness goes away. Give up and go home. Maybe sue the son of a bitch for violation of privacy. I open my hand as far as I can, stretch the muscles out. I’m determined to make a hard fist and slam it down on top of that god-damned button. I want to shatter it into a million pieces the way Carrigan is shattering me into a million pieces.

Then I see the red numbers again: 0h:59m.

Was I really less than an hour from realizing my dream and Clarissa’s future? My fist is balled up and ready to smash. It takes everything I have to resist sending that panic button straight to Hell and Theodore Carrigan with it. Now I’m shaking, fighting the urge to bring my suffering to an end. But the end of my suffering means the continuation of Clarissa’s. I perch on the brink, not knowing if I can live with myself either way. Then, out of the blue, Old Man Carrigan decides for me.

His disembodied voice replaces Beethoven and plays out over the loudspeakers. “Go on, Mr. Munt. Press the button. End the horror. I can tell you. Money is never a reason to do anything.”

In my fevered head, he sounds like he is standing right next to me. I strain my eyes, trying to see that Cadillac wheelchair of his, but all I see are more muted videos. Cattle slaughter. Mass graves. Bloated, floating bodies in rivers. The carnage continues. Carrigan’s not in the media room of course, but he is close. I can sense it.

“Carrigan!” I scream with my lungs, with my body, with my eyes. Every part of me yells out the bastard’s name.

“It’s okay, Mr. Munt. You have the distinction of making it further than anyone. Let that give you some comfort. Push the button, Mr. Munt. There will be no shame.”

I couldn’t see him but knew the old man was smiling. “Carrigan, you son of a bitch! My parents? My god-damn parents?”

Several of the screens change from their usual gore and show Old Man Carrigan’s lips up close, parting into a smile to show his yellowed teeth. “I am sorry for that, Mr. Munt. But you see…this is a challenge. The sad part is, you don’t remember the accident at all, do you? You don’t remember the ride to visit your grandmother, the loosely secured child seat you were riding in, the shining lights from that big rig that sent Mom and Dad into oblivion. The impact sent you past your parents and through the windshield. In the car seat, you must have ricocheted off the rig’s grill. You sailed into the safety of a side ditch just off the Bear Mountain bridge. The chair saved you, Mr. Munt, very much like the one you’re sitting in now may save you.”

I force my eyes to look down and see the seat I’m restrained in. For a split second, I find myself in the backseat of Mom and Dad’s ’69 Plymouth Fury. Mom and Dad up front, laughing, Dad not paying attention. The bright light overtakes the inside of the Plymouth like a spotlight. There is a jolting collision and then I’m airborne, flying with the chaos of the car crash behind me. I come to rest on a bed of soft grass. A new memory enters my mind. I see red strobe lights and hear loud sirens on the asphalt above the ditch. A newsman on the scene notices me wet and crying. Boy, had he found a story!

“No, Carrigan! That’s not what happened! That’s not what happened!”

Carrigan’s laughter sounds louder than any of the carnage videos or the classical music. “I’m sorry. Mr. Munt. You were very much with your parents when they exited this earth. No doubt you’ve remembered it a certain way all these years. The mind has a way of protecting itself from all kinds of evils, doesn’t it?”

“Carrigan!” All I can do is shout the old man’s name. My mind struggles for a coherent sentence and finds none. The speculum squirts drops in my eyes and once again I’m blinded for a moment. What was once a reprieve is now a curse as I fight the fog, trying to see every bit of Carrigan’s laughing mouth on the screens. As odd as it sounds, I don’t want to be left alone.

But I am. Carrigan’s mouth has disappeared. It had a job to do, and it did it. His mouth broke me. Stole the soul right out of my body with its sharpened incisors, its snarled canines. I have been left empty, my eyes a dying fire, my spirit broken. Even when I glimpse a peek at the red countdown numbers, 0h:05m, my heart feels nothing. I no longer have the ability to be happy or sad or mad or anxious. I had read that Hell isn’t a place of fire or brimstone, nor a place of endless suffering or pain. Hell is nothing. Hell is a vast emptiness where one has the overwhelming sense it can never, ever be filled. And the punchline? The nothingness of Hell mirrors the nothingness inside you after your soul has been taken. And you know, for all of eternity and beyond, you will never get your soul back. You are empty and can never be filled again.

Right now…I am in Hell.

One by one the video monitors go black. In synchrony, the little televised deaths disappear until there are no more car crashes, no more torn arms or legs, no more fly-specked swollen bodies, no more machete nightmares. The last image I see…parts Mom and Dad lying on the asphalt, half-covered by a bloodstained white sheet. Mom’s canvas lace-up is sticking out from under the covering. One of Dad’s legs still has on a penny loafer, the copper coin long since gone.

Then, all the screens go black.

The countdown clock displays 0h:0m. Carrigan plays Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture over the loudspeakers, signaling not my victory, but his. The automated restraints immediately release my arms and legs. The eye speculums spray my strained eyes one last time with a soothing, medicated spritz of water, and then they too are released from my aching head. For the first time in 24 hours, I can move. But I don’t spring forth from Carrigan’s chair right away. The past day has brought thoughts of squeezing the life from the already frail old man, but now I am the frail one. I try to move my arms and shake like an epileptic. All I want to do is kill Carrigan and I don’t have the strength to pinch an ant between my fingers.

“Congratulations, Mr. Munt. You made it.” Carrigan’s voice plays over the speakers as Tchaikovsky quiets down and the room momentarily falls silent again.

I can hear my heart trying to beat out of my chest.

 “I can’t be there in person. I’m sure you understand. Too many hands have gone for my throat in the past.”

With all of the courage I can muster, I somehow make myself stand. My legs shake like a sailor stepping on dry land after so many years at sea. I look down at my catheter bag, full of urine. Not once during Carrigan’s 24hr ordeal do I remember taking a piss. The commode I was sitting on is full. My bowels have emptied multiple times since starting Carrigan’s challenge and likewise, I don’t remember.

“You’re a rich man, Eddie Munt. Funds have already been wired to your account in the Caymans, as per our agreement. When you walk out of this house you will have one million dollars, tax-free, to spend as you wish.”

I take a step. I’m a child learning to walk for the first time. My legs are wobbly. Unsure. The condom catheter and the I.V. in my arm pull off of me and I never feel a thing.

“I hope this experience has changed you, Mr. Munt. There is value in suffering, you see? I’ve suffered and now, so have you. But we are both the better for it.”

I hear the steel panic room door open behind me. I start to hobble my way out of the room. There is a short corridor leading to the foyer, the greeting place of 9 Raven Lane where so many dignitaries have been received. A small table holds my belongings: clothes, wallet, car keys, phone. The massive front doors are already open and there is sunlight streaming in. It looks like Heaven itself is lighting my way.

Without thinking…I start to walk.

I walk out of Carrigan’s house. I walk down the long driveway leading to the edge of his property. I walk down the county road until I eventually hook up with the highway. My muscles are moving faster now, with purpose. My mind is filled with Carrigan’s images still playing out on those demon video screens. Occasionally Clarissa, my perfect little kitty, pops into my mind. But, with all the violence playing out in my head, I know saving her is a moot point. With a little luck, she’ll curl up in a ball in her bed of soft blankets and just…go to sleep.

I’m 100% relying on muscle memory at this point. I walk for hours, days. Cars and trucks honk at me – a naked, shit-assed man – waving me out of the way and off the road, but I am undeterred. I keep walking the highway until I get to the Bear Mountain bridge. I climb up the balustrades and look down at the icy river below. In a second, I am falling as Old Man Carrigan’s words repeat in my mind.

Congratulations, Mr. Munt. You made it.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Ronnie Cassano 2025