The Crimson Rain Report

By Samuel L Henton

Ethan Bar-Lev, Brodie Saunders and Harshul Khanna, we are the three of the most unlikely names to ever make a difference.
My friend Brodie wanted me to turn to God. My other friend Harshul wanted me to turn to drugs. I doubt Ill find my answers in religion or intoxication.

We are not a unified civilization. You are one or the other, a drug pusher or a religious preacher, and they despise one another.
When emotions have effect on the flesh, it's a tough life. I have my scars, badges of weakness. My nose rains crimson and my eye sockets swell when I become overwhelmed with sadness or other dark feelings.

People use drugs to protect them from themselves. It's not hard. Drugs are legal. Or should I say, they might as well be as it's bootlegged in broad day light, sold in the streets, law enforcement turn a blind eye, what else was the government supposed to do?

You know its amazing how people still hurt the people they love, even when they can see the damage they do

I caught my fiance cheating on me, whilst I was holding a piece of her decorative ornamental bamboo, I should have weaponized it, beaten the unfaithfulness out of her. But I didn't.

I soon find myself in the Catacombs, an island set up during the prohibition for soldiers to blow off steam. Now a mysterious celebrity hotspot, I end up there, mourning the loss of my unfaithful wife to be.

They say it's heaven on earth, but before I know it I'm swept away into a place outside of society, outside of sanity. Into the world of Crow I fall, the man who crafted heaven on earth, to lure her, to lure her to him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491892589

Samuel L Henton

My name is Samuel Luke Henton. I wrote this the year I turned nineteen. So no credentials, sorry, but don't let that put you off...

Book preview

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Acknowledgments:

     Dr. Judith Hudson AKA Granny Woodside

          Beth Chandler

               Lucy Dereham

                    Laura Snow

                         Rae Williamson &

                                   Ben Thomas

Every year, thousands of young adults, and adults alike, address their problems with self harm, drug abuse and religion. They feel they have no other choice. Empathemia is my way of showing others that there is a choice.

Chapter 1

What are you… . a bruiser or a bleeder? That was a common expression at the time. I would usually look to the floor and murmur ‘both’ when asked.

As a consequence of past events, people have been laughing at me. To my face, and behind my back. All for a problem I can’t fix.

Empathemia. I can’t control mine, along with a few others who share my existence. It’s everyone’s problem, but for me, it’s an exhausting one. What I wouldn’t give to be able to hide how I feel, and how I have felt. This bruising and bleeding when we feel like utter shit, and I mean overwhelming dark feelings, well mine got bad. I mean real bad. It was enough to push someone over the edge.

The body self harms itself with little to no warning, like being beaten with in an inch from your life by an invisible man. (Particularly round the face and torso for me, that’s where I get it real bad). I wish the human race had a choice when it came to self harm, but we don’t. Dark emotions manifest themselves into the open air. Pray you be able to control yours.

I’m an old man now, I look vaguely similar to my old self. A scar on my upper lip is hidden between the wrinkles. I keep noticing silver strands of hair in my peripheral vision and I bat them away like an angry kitten. I’m glad I’m this old though, if things kept going the way they did, I would have nearly laid down my own life at the hands of my own misery. Not a pretty thought, but the darker your outlook on life, the more pretty that thought becomes. What a joy I am, right?

My name is Ethan Bar-Lev, and I’m an old man. I don’t like saying my age, but I like being old. I have two homes. The one I am in now, being my estate in South Burlington, Vermont. It’s big, it’s warm in the winter, and cool in the summer. I stay here over the fall and the spring mostly. The rest of the time, I live on the top floor of the Alberta Building, in New York City. I don’t like to stay in one place too long. For safety purposes, I assure you.

I’m so nervous right now, so nervous at the thought of sounding stupid. I mean, I’m famous, but for something I claimed I did, but didn’t do. But technically, my little white lie (I use the word little loosely) changed a lot of things for the better.

As of the present, I’m now a man, in full control of myself, and all my faculties. I write this as a man of means, often described by drunken strangers, in a slurry kind of drunken way at functions as a ‘man of influence’. But before that, I was out of control, and heading for self-destruction, like most young men I suppose.

Before I explain myself, and what I did, I feel I should explain what the Catacombs were. Because not a lot of people will have heard of them. In a nutshell, some genius knuckle head Marines after World War Two took a tropical island, riddled with underground tunnels. (No one claimed it after the war, it originally belonged to the Japanese . . . I think . . .)

It was a paradise, a piece of Eden. So in fear of the prohibition coming back, they used it as an ‘off the books’ military outpost, somewhere to blow off steam.

It kinda stayed like that for a while.

Until a gang known as the LA Guerrilla Family (or just the Family) got their greasy hands all over it. They turned it into a hotspot for celebrities, a haven for politicians and a black hole for untested, illegal drugs and prostitutes. (A nice list of things to have in one place, right?)

Well, that’s where the majority of this story happens, and I happen to be main character. (It’s nice to meet you too)

I’ve had a lot of names. I was christened Ethan Bar-Lev, but in my earlier days I was known as ‘Peach Boy’ or just Pee. I’ve also been known as ‘Clean Bean’ for my lack of participation in narcotics. Briefly I was also known on a national level as ‘Bandit Bar-Lev’ for my . . . shall we say ‘defining moment’.

But before all that, I was just a normal person, born and bred in London, a strange little kid really. I guess because I let myself feel real emotion, the doctor always said I was a special case.

I am always reminded of my ‘special case characteristics’ from a small photograph I keep in my wallet. I still carry it today. When I left London, my mother gave me a small picture to keep with me. I also remember, as she handed it to me, her eyes as green as a fresh clover in spring, began welling up. No, they were not like fresh clovers, something with more atmosphere. I’d describe my mother’s eyes as more like the Aurora Borealis, anything sent their way was reflected right back at them in a terrific green way.

I don’t remember the photo being taken, I was too young. I’m stood in a pair of blue and white short pants that were held up by suspenders. She has just told me our dog had died. I was always one for being damaged by my experiences.

Empathemia . . . the bane of human existence. A man I knew once nearly found a cure, but he found other pursuits. I could just use a dictionary definition to define the retched word, but I’d rather use my own words.

An un-dignifying response of the human body to negative emotions. Anything unpleasant felt, in an awesome way, rips through flesh in a barbaric fashion. An overwhelming dark emotion, can put down a man worse than any manmade weapon. Sometimes it’s a nosebleed, alerting everyone around you to how you are feeling. Sometimes, only in rare cases . . . it can cut you down. Getting ‘cut down’ is something no man wants to happen, nothing screams weakness like being cut down. It simply means, that whatever negative emotion has a hold of you, it overwhelms you so much . . . your body . . . simply shuts down. Mainly to prevent grievous bodily harm, but waking up in the shabby hospital ward for ‘sensitive’ guys, who have been ‘cut down’, is a wake up call.

Now, as for the story in question, after what happened, I was asked to write a report. It was a report for an American agency, that dealt with high profile cases like my own, and was classified, for my eyes only. But when the opportunity came to get it in the eyes of the public, I jumped at the chance. But the report was brief, and contained little detail about what actually happened. It had the basic, boring facts in it, the dates and the times of certain events. It had names of people, a small background story to go with them, but I wanted to show the people more. I wanted to tell them the whole truth, I wanted to give them a story.

The report published in every single national newspaper was enough to get me sent to federal prison. (I’m saying ‘fuck the feds’, but they were real assholes to me). But it was enough for tens of thousands of people to march on Washington in my name. But it was never enough for me.

So this is it, originally code named The Crimson Rain, I have adapted it into The Crimson Rain Report, my first ever book. From my account and my point of view, for the first time.

But before I start from the beginning, there are a few things you need to know . . .

First of all, it was a dark time, for a lot of people. The first few bits of my story are dark, I’ll admit, it may not be a walk in the park. But I’ll get ya around chapter three or four . . .

Also about ten years or so ago when I was coming up, men of religion ruled one half of the population, and the other half was controlled by the gangs, and were fixated on where their next hit was coming from. It was hard if you didn’t fall into those two categories.

There was no room for the emotionally honest man. When emotions tear through the flesh like a hurricane, (I couldn’t be more precise about that analogy), and leave you withered with a bloody nose and a black eye, you either go to church to embrace it, or you ignore it with chemical compounds. Why can’t you accept it and move on? (Or do both, and go to God’s house looking like you dived headfirst into a pile of snow after running a marathon).

That’s what I did, I accepted it, and it didn’t bode too well for me. I would have dreams and memories of myself with ex-lovers, girls that meant something to me. I picture their faces as they say ‘it’s over’. I ask why, and then I wake up. I look down at my bed, and my bed sheets are covered in blood. The traumatic dreams would set me off, I would bleed in my sleep.

That’s how things used to be. Everyone was the same, they learn, they love, they feel, then bleed if it all went wrong. When that happened, for most it was either wake up early on a Sunday and side with the Big Man upstairs. Or stay up late on a Saturday and block it all out, because you can’t feel much when your brain doesn’t work. (I don’t recommend trying it, feeling nothing with fuzzy vision is a scary sensation).

Okay, I know what you’re thinking just about now, ‘who the fuck is this guy, and why is he telling me how he thinks the world works?’ (Sorry for the incoherent cursing . . . I have come to realise I use it for my image).

Well, this is not only a story, about love, drugs (how to use them, and how not to), religion and a happy ending. But an insight into the world of a man, who isn’t blessed with a lot. So a lot of stuff I did, it wasn’t technically legal, I mean you gotta hand it to me, I lived with a druggy and an over religious preacher.

(Plus, you throw a man onto an island ruled by a gang, inhabited by movie stars, pimps and whores, there ain’t a lot bunch of ways a guy can exist while abiding by the law).

For a while in New York, I lived in a shit box apartment with a man from Boston I found in a local newspaper, he was named Harshul Khanna (Haz for short). A nice fella, but he had a soft spot for drugs, or anything that would give his grasp on reality a good kicking.

Through him, I met Brodie Saunders, a Texan, who was Haz’s roommate at University. After the first year, Brodie dropped out, and joined the US Marine Corps. From there, he found God, and everything good in the world. The man could take another mans life away from half a mile, and recite the entire Bible to you. I don’t know which is more impressive.

It was shortly after Brodie left the Corps that everything for us went down hill, but thanks to Brodie, our lives were each changed in ways I didn’t know were good.

So yes, for a brief, red hot and shining moment my life collided with the free and the beautiful, the rich and the extravagant. But before all that, in the small spit of land I existed in, I was a nobody. I was like a fox being hunted by the hound. Everybody was a hound to me. Then there were the others in my life, the people who I co-existed with.

I always thought Brodie was like a lion trapped in the Coliseum. So big, so proud, with no fears. Harshul? Well, he was more of a nurturing mother who had lost her young. We were still all the same; we existed with little to no purpose.

New York City had slowly changed, the atmosphere was tense, but it was masked by the charm and wit of the unmarked men, but as a city it was pleasantly enigmatic.

There are seven billion people on this planet, seven billion people. I like to think that means seven billion variations of love. But there are also seven billion variations of hate to match.

It didn’t surprise me that by day the façade of humanity came down in deceptively dark corners of the city. The drug pushers and dealers were sons of bitches. Their ‘produce’ changed people, but not a lot of people were normal. If you weren’t converting someone to the Lord, you were selling them compounds to meet the Devil himself. (If you ever see a man talking to a dumpster claiming it’s the Devil, take a couple of paces back, some of the compounds did that).

Some people were genuine others were not. Some were introverted, and caved into themselves, withdrawn; others pretended like they didn’t know that empathy existed. Like it was an illusion that set us apart from the animal kingdom and that one day everyone would realize it. Then there were the people that could pass as artificial intelligence, the phrase ‘does not compute’ springs to mind, written large, bold letters as a headline.

The minority on the other hand, just like me; we solely believed that human emotion was the only thing that would save us from what we had become. You would not catch me in no church, and certainly not sampling something I bought off a man on a street corner. Or indeed on that note, sampling something I bought off a man on a street corner in a church.

No, I believe empathy and sympathy in this brittle world, was God’s gift so we could free ourselves. Feelings were not just chemical and electrical signals. They are so much more real than that.

In New York City, in my early twenties, some nights, sleep would be hard to find. Police helicopters patrolled the night skies like blind steely metallic ravens. Always looking for prey but never finding it. That is if they ever intended on finding the prey. No one was being arrested, if one dealer went down, two would take his place, and a police officer found dead soon after. If you were rich, you’d be hassled for a bribe, if you weren’t, you were left alone. It was a sickly simple system.

Huge black armoured trucks patrolled the streets. We were promised police presence, and that’s all we got. The foundations of the city were constructed from lies bound together by empty promises. Man after man would rise to office, preaching he would rid the streets of the vermin, only to be found months later to be dancing alongside them. Every single time, it was the same routine that echoed within the halls of politics.

The city belongs to the men of God and the men outside the law. It was a difficult time to be alive in New York City, She was dying, and I couldn’t stand it.

The papers never portrayed good news. Their devotion to scaring the general population into staying indoors was chilling at times. Organized crime had never been so organized.

Like trying to catch a hummingbird with your hands, the police were useless; the bad guys were just too good at what they did. It didn’t help that the moral compass of law enforcement was forever swirling in circles, like water draining into the sewers. Not that I feel the need to talk smack about police and politics like every other schmuck.

But I mean, you’d half expect the dealers to creep the streets looking for a sour deal with a half brained sucker. The shocking truth of it was that it was the opposite.

It was like stepping into a very real dream that was shared by all men who had no empathy for human kind, who thought in the form of profits and crunching numbers. They would not walk the streets, but they would strut, with long and proud bounds. Never alone, always working in packs, so that they could carry more contraband on their person.

They smiled at the elderly. They sold watered down whiskey for a nickel. They helped the mothers with their heavy loads of shopping. They had whores ranging from caked in mud, to the best money can buy. They winked at the girls in their summer dresses. They were all round model citizens on the outside. But that façade never lasted long, it was a front to fool the people who travelled here. Tourists visiting for a good time who had heard of the drugs swilling around the streets of the city like an open sewage system.

They souped up the drugs, they cooked up compounds that did funny things to the kid’s brains back then. They pumped the cities with new and untested drugs, like they were filling a balloon, but eventually, the pressure would become too much.

Not so bad if it were just a balloon, but I’m talking about a city of millions. You can cover yourself in saran wrap and pretend like it’s not happening. See no evil, do no evil.

But they took an already bloody world, and somehow filled it with more blood. It’s true what they used to say you know. You could do more damage to a human being without lifting a finger, than raising a fist. If you know how someone works, then you can put them under as much pain and suffering as you like.

Take a white pill and everything will be all right. ‘It’s good for you’ the shady men who are stood in the alley way would say to you as you fill their back pockets with your hard earned money.

What if I didn’t want to? You can turn to God, go to church, that helps people. Pray he gives you strength and walk hand in hand with his son Christ our saviour.

Well all right, I could do that. But I read too many books as a kid, and now I question things too much.

Where does a guy go, who can rarely pay his rent, use his drug free, fully functional brain go if he doesn’t follow the church?

If you were to ask me to describe the average New Yorker, at that particular time in, in my reality, in the state it was in. It would be the following;

White or immigrant, early to late twenties, sat in their bedroom.

Pale from lack of sunlight.

Slightly above average intelligence.

Slightly below average in work ethic, an underachiever.

Racist to one degree or another, nothing problematic. (Normally Palestinian on Israeli, or Polish on Russian, whatever you find more appealing, everybody is an immigrant anyhow).

Mild to strong addiction to some type of substance, with an abusive nature.

Or a strong blind faith.

A good sense of humour, most likely a defence mechanism.

Tough exterior, to prevent being cut down (also in reference to mild to strong drug addiction).

The only time I remember seeing the kind face of the city was leaving the MetLife Stadium and going to a nearby car lot to eat cold hotdogs and drink warm beers. I liked football, but I liked the after-match atmosphere more. There were families and couples laughing, enjoying game day.

For my friends and me it was hard to fit in there; we were an ugly piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Last time I was there, (years ago) the Giants trounced the Cowboys, I don’t even remember the score it was that long ago, even after everything that’s happened I still wouldn’t fit in there. I’ve always dreamed of taking my unborn kids there, wife in one hand and a cold one in the other. A simple dream, yet for some reason for me it was unobtainable.

Sometimes to this day I put on my lucky Giants cap take the bus to New Jersey and just sort of mingle with them all . . . pretend like I’m one of them. Especially if my flat mate is tuned out from the night before and sleeping off his critical condition, I’d take off, sometimes even go to Madison Square Garden. Big shades to cover my face and a tatty, old sport jacket . . . no one knows who you are, you’re just one of them.

That’s all in the past; nothing is how it used to be. Thanks to a report I wrote.

Chapter 2

It wasn’t a sunset. The sun was midway between midday and dusk but the sun’s light was as if a flaming beacon had been lit, and thrown far away from the city, far away and into the ocean beyond. The light gave everything a pleasant orange glow. I could tell the sunset later was going to set the sky on fire.

I had the best view in the house. I was on the roof with my feet dangling over the edge of a small abandoned café on the edge of Manhattan Island. ‘Karline Shore’s Paradise Café’. I sat on a small mound of moss. The whole building was only one storey, in a long triangular shape. The base was inland towards the other buildings, and the point stretched out towards the sea, like a giant arrow.

I was sat precariously on one side of the point, while my friend Harshul was round the corner slightly. He didn’t like to be called Harshul. His parents gave him a traditional Indian name, but he was born and bred state side, and so wanted a state side name to fit in. We called him Haz.

We were sharing a smoke, burning away the day. He was finishing off the last one of many. I was chewing on the non burnt end of a dead match stick. I was just glad to be out of work. I came for my share of the American dream. I had around seven notebooks, filled with stories and characters, scenarios and anecdotes. Still, I just couldn’t write a single darn thing. I always told myself that if anything was ever going to happen, it would have happened by now. So now I floated like an exhausted fish struggling upstream, heading back to where it was spawned.

So many ideas, and I never had the time or energy to write them. When I did, I was never happy with it. Nothing lasted more than a few hours before being deleted from my laptop. When I wasn’t staring at a blank screen, I was working in a bar.

I know what you’re thinking, how good is that?

Working in a bar in the city that never sleeps. Think of all the interesting people you must meet, all the people passing through from every corner of the planet, visiting the famous isle.

No, it was called O’Donoghue’s, and it served the needs of hard-working men of the city, the labourers, electricians, carpenters and builders who needed somewhere to escape from tourists. I worked in a bar serving those I called the ‘natives’. I never met anyone interesting. They were just guys shuffling about, looking for a drink, working ungodly hours to try and support their families as best they could.

Did you hear about your friend Dempsey? Haz asked me as he flicked the butt of his cigarette down to the floor below.

He was your friend, not mine . . .

Found dead in an alley . . . there was no emotion in his voice, just a casual tone that he always used. He had a Boston accent, which sounded strange coming from him, everyone, including me, expected an Indian accent.

What happened? I asked, trying to reflect his casual tone. I didn’t want him to think me a whimp. He didn’t reply at first. He just kind of swung his legs like a child on a swing in a park. I found myself drifting off from the conversation.

Someone was always dying that we knew, almost always from drugs. I began watching