Its roofline was a tortured soul, carved and gutted and pierced into things it should never have been. Two lights blazed in twin windows above a horrible pit of a door, their luminescence glowing purple against an otherwise colorless world.
Olive’s Accord moved through the gate and approached that hellish front door through no doing of her own. As the car slowed to a stop in front, the air inside became unbreathable, suddenly thick and too cloying to move in and out of her lungs. She threw herself from the car, trembling as her feet sunk into the black mud.
The infernal door opened with a hideous groan, like the sound of a hundred bones breaking under diseased skin. Olive could not avert her eyes. She heard the footsteps before she saw him, thousands of syringes dangling from both arms, Nicole, half-naked and chained at his side.
“I told you,” he said, each word taking the same amount of time to utter as the one that preceded it. “I told you you’d be sorry. Now come here and take your medicine...”
—
If Olive’s life had depended on it, and in a way it did, she could never have determined how many times, over how many days, Eddie flooded her veins with the beautifully noxious heroin. Her existence seemed to take on a dreamlike quality, and even the temperate ebbs and flows of her highs—temperate being the one factor that seemed to allude to Eddie never letting more than a few hours go by without visiting her in her dungeon dwelling—seemed blunted from being experienced in their absolute values. Rather, everything seemed hypnagogic, blurred, ambiguous.
That she was no longer taped to the chair hardly mattered, but the locked basement door and immovable windows were as severe a barrier to escape as any in her apathetic state. Eddie had bombarded Olive with such a constant stream of heroin, that her now natural state was now one of platitude. A prisoner held hostage via liquid handcuffs. Eddie could have left the door wide open and Olive would have lay placidly among the dirty comforters on the concrete floor, awaiting her next dose.
And on what was the seventh day of Olive’s captivity, he did just that. The door stood open on its hinges, the light from the upstairs forming a triangular spotlight on Olive, lying in the fetal position on a urine-stained rug. When she didn’t run off on her own accord, Eddie took to shouting at her like one would a tiresome dog, and finally, when there was still no movement from the thin form, he pulled her up, her stance that of a drunken sailor, and slogged her up the stairs, her bare, dirty feet bouncing off each step like a child dragging a Barbie doll behind her by the hair.
Upstairs, Eddie discovered that Olive was still too high to walk. He left her sleeping on the couch for a few hours while he played video games next to her, a frat boy waiting for his overly intoxicated coed to wake up and fulfill her end of their one-night stand bargain.
When she stirred, he scooped her up, deposited her onto the backseat of her car, and drove halfway to the clinic from his brother’s empty house.
—
Olive sat up, a reanimated corpse. Bride of Morphine. Her Accord idled on a deserted side street. Behind the wheel, Eddie had a cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other. A roach simmered in the ashtray. Comprehension fought through the fog for the first time in days. Understanding affected her gaunt features.
“Welcome back to the real world.” The wicked glee that had seemed to drive Eddie one week prior had been replaced by a grim resignation. “Go. Feel free to go straight to the cops, though I suspect you are of sound enough mind, even now, to realize that if you went to the police with your story, they would lock you up in the psych ward and throw away the key. You would look like the run-of-the-mill junkie, frantic and out of dope, but an imaginative one, desperate for sympathy, and maybe the fast track to a hard-to-come-by detox bed.”
Eddie puffed on his cigarette. “I have a hunch that there’s only one thing you’re interested in pursuing anyway.” He leaned over and retrieved something from the glove compartment.
“Here’s a little going away present from me to you. There’s enough cash here for one of two things. Gas, or cab money, to St. Elizabeth’s detox. Or... a bag of heroin. And in case you choose door number two, I have something else for you.” He reached over the center console into the backseat and dropped the cash and a piece of folded-up paper into her lap. “Dealer’s number, on me. They usually don’t accept new customers without a difficult and time-consuming interview process of sorts. But I was such a good customer this week that you are in luck.”
Eddie checked the rearview mirror before opening the door. Olive’s window was open, and when he leaned in and gestured for her to pick up the cash and number, the smoke from his cigarette met with the remnants of the previous exhale, giving Olive the impression that she was caught in some sort of smoke-tornado. She groped with listless fingers for the money, and tucked the notepaper in with the bills without discrimination.
Eddie opened her door and pulled her out by the shoulders. “Oopsie daisy,” he said. “Oh, I almost forgot. Here are your keys and your cell phone. I even charged it for you. Now you have everything you need to solve your little dilemma. If it can even be considered as such.”
He smiled a final, nasty smile at her as he pushed her toward the driver’s door. “My guess is that, if you even make it back to your cushy little counseling job at the clinic, you’ll be singing a slightly different tune. Having to make it through life with this monkey on your back, having to survive as a dope fiend, let’s see if you are so quick to judge, Miss Ahhllliiiveee.”
He pronounced her name like the over-the-counter pain reliever. Olive felt like she was listening to him from under water. Before she realized that his monologue was over, he had walked halfway up the block. Olive watched him disappear around Webster Avenue, one street up.
Her head spun. I could use some Aleve, she thought wildly, her brain grasping at nonsensical connections, nerve endings misfiring in confusing spurts and starts. No, I could use some...
She put her hands in her pockets and pulled out the wad of cash in one, and her cell phone in the other. I could go home, she thought. Go home and call a friend, or call Richard. Tell him what happened. Tell someone what happened. Or I could go to the hospital, be treated like any other individual who was the victim of violence. After all, I was kidnapped, attacked, assaulted.
She stopped moving, realizing she had spun in innumerable circles, pondering what to do. She squared her shoulders. Her jaw knotted into a tense ball of bouncing muscle.
Olive picked up her cell phone. She needed to call someone who would help her. She needed to call someone who would take care of her and her burdensome affliction.
She dialed.
A voice answered on the third ring. In as condensed a version as possible, she explained what had happened. The voice murmured in understanding. Said he would be right there. Olive hung up.
A gold minivan, pulled up to the opposite side of the street from where Olive sat, perched expectantly on the curb. As she approached the window, she saw the driver’s face register shock and dismay at her appearance. Olive bent toward the side mirror and surveyed her skeletal and bedraggled visage.
No matter, Olive thought. She was a short time away from being able to experience a heightened reality... where appearances did not matter.
“How much you want?” he asked her.
Olive reached her hand through the open window, and told the dealer to name his price.
—
Olive unlocked the door and let herself into the quiet room. She fidgeted with her shirt sleeve as she looked around, taking in the sights of her cozy office: a tapestry over one wall, potted plants, counseling textbooks, framed diplomas and motivational quotes. She opened a drawer to her left and pulled out a compact mirror, surveying her reflection again, the filthy collar of her blouse, after the week-long affair.
“Unreal,” she whispered out loud, struggling to believe that that dreamlike chain of events had actually happened. She sat for a few moments, taking slow, even breaths, before rising to slink
back across the room. Though her Accord had been the only car in the lot, she opened the door, and peeked down the hall. Satisfied the clinic was deserted, she returned to her desk.
She took another deep, drawn-out breath. When she let it out, she opened a second drawer, the one to her right, furthest from the door, furthest from the chair her patients sat in. Excavating the small, decorative box from the drawer’s depths, she unlatched it, and assembled the paraphernalia. She saw, with mild amusement, that the corner of a gram-baggie she had left on her desk during her session with Nicole still sat, undisturbed.
The phone call Olive had made had not been to the number on Eddie’s slip of paper, but to her own dealer, the one she’d had for the past two years. She remembered how she had feigned terror at the sight of the orange cap of the syringe in Eddie’s hand. Oh, she’d been scared at first, unsure of Eddie’s intentions. And she’d panicked when she’d been kidnapped in the midst of her errand, her drug run, after leaving the clinic that day, worried she’d be forced to kick dope while duct taped to a chair in a stranger’s basement.
But when she realized what Eddie had planned, the comical irony of it was almost too much to bear.
Poor, pathetic Eddie. He thought he was going to teach her a lesson. Make her take her medicine. Instead, he’d relieved her of the chore of having to finance her own habit for a week’s time. On her vacation, and indulging her with fire, as Eddie so fittingly called it, no less.
Her preparations complete, Olive expertly injected seventy cc’s into the basilic vein of the underside of her arm. She supposed that her surreptitiousness in vein choice prior to being held captive had contributed to Eddie’s ignorance of her true condition. That, as well as the diplomas, her overall appearance, her dress and demeanor.
She looked at the plaque on her wall and smiled.
Appearances could indeed, be deceiving.
LADY OF
THE FLIES
“When the leaves turn brown and the pumpkins grin,
And the trick-or-treaters knock and say, let me in,
Hide your cats and your dogs, whether big or small,
‘Cuz Pris-killa is coming to slay us all.”
Priscila Teasdale listened to the children sing their song as they skipped through the Gourd Falls Farm pumpkin patch, and raised a sickle in one catcher’s mitt-sized hand. In the other, she steadied a massive pumpkin, its stem thick as a man’s forearm and connected to a substantial length of vine. She tried to steady her thoughts, but this wasn’t as easy as controlling the gargantuan squash. She folded her six-foot frame at the waist, raised the blade with expert precision, and brought it down with a crack.
That’s a new one, she thought with regard to the catchy rhyme. Was it Stu, or one of his little girlfriends, that had come up with it? She didn’t ponder the question long. People were always saying things as if she wasn’t right there to hear them, forcing Priscila to conclude that she was as worthy of being seen as a street sign for a road that had washed away with last year’s rains.
Of course I’m harboring skeletons in my closet. She readied another pumpkin—this one the size of a large dog—for liberation from its snaking vine. Any woman who looks like me must have her share of skeletons, figurative or otherwise.
For a moment, the velvety feel of the vine against her fingers reminded her of the dogs, their prickly muzzles caressing her palm. She shook her head, dispelling the corporeal memory, and focused on the present.
She brought the sickle down, only to look up and find Nathan Hitcher staring at the dilapidated barn her crew would soon convert into a labyrinth of cotton spider webs and self-playing organs. He caught her eye before she could return to her task, and gestured for her to join him.
“Mornin’,” he said.
Priscila tipped an imaginary hat.
“How’re the preparations comin’?”
“They’re coming.”
“Good, good.” Nathan unscrewed an empty water bottle, spit a wad of chewing tobacco into it, and tossed it into a nearby wheelbarrow. “You’ve worked for my father for how long now?”
“Ten years.” What she didn’t say, was that it had been ten years since she’d walked out of her eleventh grade gym class and kept on walking. Walked despite the icy December air until she’d seen the sign for Seasonal Help Wanted; walked down the dirt path, into Hitcher’s office, and right into the position of Holiday Associate. She was chopping down Christmas trees and hauling them onto the main lot before the bell would have rung for final period.
Nathan sighed. “Every October, the fate of the farm is in the hands of a bunch of idiots I wouldn’t trust with a potato gun. Until now, my father has been on the scene. But this year…” He squinted in the sun.
Priscila, too, shut her eyes against the glare. She saw the black void of those sleepless nights in the weeks after Hitcher had announced the grand opening of the farm’s first annual Haunted House and Corn Maze, four years prior, nights she’d watched her inevitable departure from a Gourd Falls Farm that no longer needed her as clearly as if her ceiling had morphed into a movie screen. But she’d made herself useful, mowing the mile-long path through the cornfield and installing the stage sets for the maze’s main stops, and was tickled pink as the farm’s newborn pigs when Hitcher had appointed her head of the haunted construction crew.
“I know you’re quiet,” Nathan said, “and I know why you like to keep to yourself, but I have no idea what I’m doing, and I can’t let my father down. He may be sick, but it’ll kill him if I blow Halloween.” He wrung his hands, unblemished by the callouses that marred his father’s.
Priscila bit her lower lip hard, keeping the excitement from reshaping her mouth into a smile. She was unable to prevent the warm, butterfly wings of acceptance from beating against the walls of her heart.
“I need your experience if something goes wrong. Remember last year, when those hooligans set a cornstalk on fire? And those kids that hid on the property after we closed and decked the cornfield with a twenty-four pack of toilet paper rolls?”
Of course I remember. Priscila recalled the magazine-pretty girls who would pass through, their Adonisian boyfriends feigning boredom as actors with chainsaws and scythe-brandishing grim reapers menaced them, hiding sweaty hands in letter jacket pockets. Maybe someday I’ll have someone to walk through the maze with.
“I want to station you in the cornfield. You’d have a main base, but your primary responsibility would be to oversee the maze as a whole, so I’d want you to, well, essentially to walk the path.”
Nathan put a hand on her arm and looked at her until she met his gaze. “You wouldn’t have to interact with the guests. I mean that. You can yell or wave your arms to spook ‘em when they walk by. And you’d have to be in costume. But like I said, it’s just to make sure there’s no funny business and that everyone gets through this season unscathed, the farm included.” Nathan’s eyebrows furrowed with uncertainty. “It’s just an idea. If you’re not up for it, you can tell me. What do you think?”
Priscila hesitated, and Nathan quickly continued, “Look, I know what people say about you. So if you’re unsure because—”
“You mean if I’m unsure because they say that my farmhouse is a dead ringer for the one from the Texas Chainsaw movies? Or because people can’t decide if I’m a serial killer with dead bodies to hide or a child molester with stacks of pornography?”
Nathan flinched. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest that the things people say shouldn’t bother you. It’s just that, well, what I’m trying to say is... everyone knows that it was parvo that killed your dogs, not you. You have to stop beating yourself up. Who could have known it would spread so fast?”
While Nathan stammered, Priscila remembered the feel of her arms wrapped around the neck of her last, beloved dog. But I did kill one of them, she thought. At least, I think I did...
After the contagion had left her with a single surviving female, Priscila had grown ill herself. One morning, ha
ving missed a week of work, delirious and roiling in fever-soaked sheets, she awoke on the floor on top of the motionless animal, the flies buzzing mercilessly. She hadn’t been sure if the dog had been sick after all or if she had smothered the pitiable thing in the night.
Priscila shook the thought away, recalling instead the way kindly old Mr. Hitcher had given her a job all those years ago with hardly a question asked. This, coupled with the way Nathan had sought her out, the way he was, despite his obliviousness to the abuse she regularly endured, really seeing her...
Priscila felt needed for the first time since the dogs. She replied, “Whatever you need me to do.”
Nathan still looked tentative. “Are you sure? I need you to be really sure. I don’t want you to feel like you’re taking on too much responsibility. Not after—”
“I can do it.”
Nathan grinned, and pumped his fist. “Great. We’ll make this work, Priscila. I know we will.”
Priscila blushed and studied her dust-coated hands. In the wake of her excitement, the tune of the Pris-killa ditty faded from her mind.
The rest of the day was experienced in high-definition for all her private glee. After Priscila reshaped the path through the cornfield, she steered toward the storage shed to return the John Deere. As she exited the shed’s side door, she collided head-on with a short, dark-haired man.
She refrained from reaching out to right him, and was relieved when the man found his footing himself. Priscila waited for him to curse and hurl accusations, but when she looked up, the man—out of place in the dust and hayseed in his button-down shirt and shiny shoes—was smiling.
“I think I’m lost,” he said sheepishly. “I wanted to buy tickets for the maze thing this weekend for me and my friends.”
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked Page 10