“Stefanie for short. Doc said you were comin'. Please, come in.”
A mildly rancid odor greeted Mira as she entered the house and a tinge of cigar smoke mixed with fried tuna fish laced the air.
“I’ll just head back on over to my chair here.” Stefanie invited Mira to have a seat. “Pardon the fish. Hope you’re not allergic.”
Mira glanced at the dry bones on the white ceramic plate on the side table. “No, ma’am. I‘m fine.”
“Gotta ask ‘cause my niece in Lauderdale been allergic to fish since she was a tot. Even the smell does somethin’ to her.”
“So, how have you been?” Mira asked. “Doctor Barns said you’ve had some challenges lately with your knees…”
“Not lately, I dare say! More like for twenty years. Yup. My arthritis seems to have gotten worse, along with my high blood pressure, diabetes and chronic acid reflux. Don’t know what I done anybody for them to feel the need to put a curse on my old hide.” She giggled nervously. A phlegmy cough rattled in her throat.
“Well, I’m here to take care of that knee pain for you. I understand you recently got some of your prescriptions filled for the other ailments.”
“Uh huh.” She grimaced. “One of these good days, I'mma flush all that rat poison down the toilet and if it gon rip, let it rip. Once my ole knees work fine enough for me to get 'round this ole house, that’s all that matters. I’ll continue to take them pain shots for as long as I live though; no doubt about it. Goin’ on seventy-nine strong when August seventeenth turn 'round. Lived most of them years medicine-free in spite of everything that’s been goin’ on.”
“That’s really…commendable, ma’am.” Mira felt slightly awkward.
“Should probably kick myself for listenin’ to good, ole Doc there tellin' me to take the blasted pills or I'll soon enough cop out. Now, most of the time I feel like a zombie. Know what I mean?”
Mira nodded affirmatively. “Oh, well… should we get started then?”
There was no denying that Stefanie was long-winded.
“Whenever you good and ready.”
Mira got up and grabbed her medical bag. “You mind if I rest it here on the table for a few minutes?”
“Go right ahead,” Stefanie replied.
Mira unzipped it and pulled out her stethoscope.
“Where you goin’ with that? Where’s the pain needle?”
“It’s right here.” Mira chuckled. “I just want to conduct a quick examination first, if you don’t mind and check your blood pressure.”
“Doc usually would check my pressure, but he don’t normally come with that thing, so I had to ask. Know what I mean?”
“I know.”
After the brief check-up, Mira stooped over and cautiously injected the medication into each of Stefanie's knees. Although the discomfort was written all over her face, Stefanie didn’t make a peep. She was as tough as nails.
“Are you all right?” Mira asked, putting away her tools.
“Rosey. Just rosey.” Stefanie looked constipated.
“Great! Well…”
“Yeah, yeah. I know the drill. Been through it a dozen times at least.” She watched Mira zip up her bag and thought this was the perfect time. “Um… young lady…”
“Yes?” Mira tossed a strand of hair away from her face.
“You lived around these parts long?”
“Most of my life; I grew up here.”
“So, you heard about them?”
Mira suddenly had a flashback. She could hear Doc's subtle warning loud and clear. “I’m sorry. Who?”
“Them ole people,” Stefanie answered.
Mira wasn’t expecting that. “Old people?”
“Doc didn’t tell you?”
She cleared her throat. “No.”
Stefanie beckoned her closer with a shriveled index finger. With great hesitance, Mira leaned in.
“The ole people from when that city went under; they’re here.”
Mira was afraid to ask. “What city? Went under where?”
“The ocean, young lady. They went from dry land straight under the ocean!”
Stefanie’s eyes were gleaming with excitement and sheer amazement as she went on.
“Mrs. Brussels, I really must be going now.”
“Oh, no! Don’t go yet! You haven’t heard the story. I mean, it’s not a story. It actually happened in real life. Not a thing about it made up. Sit down a minute. Let me tell you all about it.”
Mira’s attempt to interject was muffled by Stefanie’s insistence that she listened. Deciding to sit down and indulge the old lady for a short while, she was sure Doctor Barns hadn’t lied – this lady was a nutcase; although he never quite used that term.
“And one of ‘em showed me where it was and entrusted it to me for safekeepin’, I suppose. Wanna see it?”
“What did you say it was again?” Mira asked.
“An artifact. A real artifact. The scientific name for it is Cicroid. Yeah, I think that’s it. Anyway, it’s for sure an artifact straight from one of them ole people.” She turned slightly as a fat cat made its way on the sofa beside her, gently pressing its head against her outer thigh. “Fritz! Fritz! Get in here!” Stefanie yelled.
“This here’s fifteen-year-old Francesca,” she told Mira, referring to the cat.
“She’s beautiful and very healthy-looking.” Mira smiled.
“It’s surprisin' you’d say that, you bein' a doctor and all! Your field cannot be nutrition. Healthy-lookin’ in your words, young lady, means FAT!”
“No, I didn’t mean it that way…”
“I have no qualms with anyone callin' a spade a spade. Francesca’s a lovely pet, but she’s lazy. All she does is eat! Eat! Eat! And sleep! Sleep! Sleep!”
A man easily in his fifties despite his rugged facial features and straggly auburn hair, descended the stairway which was situated smack dab in the center of the living room.
“Young lady, this here is Fritz. He takes care of everything around here that I pretty much got trouble takin’ care of on my own. More like my personal dish-washing handyman, you know?”
“Pleasure meetin’ you, miss.” Fritz quickly gave a salute.
“The pleasure’s mine,” Mira replied.
“Fritz lives right here with me, Drufus and Francesca. All four of us is one big, lovin’ family.”
Mira's curiosity was running away with her. She wondered if Stefanie could be having romantic relations with this guy who was so much younger than she was. Then again, she realized nothing Stefanie had said alluded to that.
“Fritz, grab my house keys, will ya? I need to get inside that basement.”
“Sure thing.” He started to walk off.
“Better yet, since these ole knees just got stabbed by this pretty young lady, bring up that treasure from the ole people outta my chest down there in the basement.”
Shock worked its way across Fritz’s face. “You mean you want me to bring it… out here?”
“’Course. Where else?!” Stefanie’s arms flew up hopelessly in the air as if Fritz’s subtle stupidity had dominated what was left of his intelligence.
Fritz made his way toward a bedroom on the left side of the hallway, then disappeared around the kitchen with a ring of about fifteen keys jingling in his hand.
He arrived at a solid, white door with a rusty padlock affixed to it. Fingering the keys, he selected the one with a triangular insignia on the bow, inserted it carefully and did a good push before the door creaked open. He remembered just four months or so earlier he had to use a tire wrench to force it ajar after already unlocking it. The door tended to jam at the frame if it hadn’t been opened in a while.
He reached for the overhead light – a simple bulb attached by a wire protruding from the ceiling. Stefanie had to see that Rob, her husband’s old pal who was an electrician move the wire from the bottom of the basement over to the top of the stairs near by the door after Fritz had tumbled down the unsteady flight o
f stairs more than once. Apparently, sufficient light hadn’t been emitted from the kitchen to cover the whole stairway in the basement to prevent Fritz from one day breaking his neck to get down there.
Each step toward the bottom creaked as Fritz felt the shaky boards under his feet. “Keep tellin’ her to buy the wood so I could fix this death trap”, he murmured.
The basement was a large space consisting mainly of the late Mr. Brussel's old toolboxes and material he used as a contractor. On one side stood a few pickaxes, shovels, rakes and the like. And nearby were three rickety wheelbarrows alongside bags of hardened cement which he never got to use since that sudden massive heart attack took him; old floor tiles, about two dozen boxes of roof shingles neatly stacked one on top of the other, and a small soda crate full of bagged nails in all shapes and sizes on a shelf directly above the wheelbarrows.
Off in another corner of the room were multiple sheets of plywood. Some were moldy from an occasional leak in the bedroom above the basement which Stefanie allowed Fritz to patch every so often until a heavy squall of rain undid his tidy work again. Fritz had moved the plywood twice and once almost suffered a similar fate to Mr. Brussels when a skinny brown snake showed up after he’d moved one of the sheets of plywood. Though wanting to dart right out of there as he detested those bloody reptilians, he knew he couldn’t go running to Stefanie for help, so had to toughen up and handle it like a man. He rushed over and grabbed one of the rustiest cutlasses a couple of feet away and chapped that creepy intruder to bits. He did so with fury as if he was attacking in self-defense. In his mind, he was. Never mind that the snake was of an innocuous breed. The poor slithering guy had been more afraid of Fritz before he went berserk and hacked him to death. Fritz took pride bagging the wriggling body parts into a trash bag and discarding them outside. He was the man! No one could have told him any different that day. He’d shown that stupid snake who was boss!
There over to the left of the room sat that mahogany, twelve inches wide, three feet long and a foot and a half deep box Stefanie had sent him to. It resembled one of those treasure chests you’d see in a pirate's movie and it had a strange eagle and python insignia on the lid. Fritz felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as he reluctantly proceeded over to it with the ring of keys. Stooping down in front, he couldn’t ignore the odd sensation he got everytime he opened that thing and the uncanny one he got when he as much as touched the artifact inside. “Lord, help me and keep me strong I pray,” he quietly uttered.
His hands trembled as he fingered the smallest key on the bunch and moments later, he inserted it into the rectangular box. Suddenly, his heart was pounding away to the point he could feel the palpitation in his throat. Anxiety had crept in and was now overwhelming him, but just as in the case of that frigging snake, he was the man and nothing was going to have him run out of that basement like a screaming girl despite how much his brain yelled for him at that instant to do so. No, Fritz Worrell was no punk. His dad always said he was as he was coming up, but in the back of his mind he was determined to show that wife and child-beating alcoholic that he was better than what he thought he was. That buck-teethed son of his was something special and he knew it because Doreen Worrell made sure to drill that into his young head every single day. He realized years later as an adult what his mom had been doing: She was hammering positive thoughts into her only child to drown out all the negative words his dead-beat father Bill had made it a point to hurl at him up until he moved out of that tiny, concrete miserable dwelling at age sixteen, right after Doreen died. He knows what it’s like to fend for himself and tough it out. Living on the streets was not foreign to him and the old man probably said to himself “I told ya so; told ya the boy wouldn’t 'mount to nothin.” But as time went on, young Fritz pulled up those worn-out bootstraps of his, got himself a job as a maintenance worker down at the local community college under the able apprenticeship of veteran handyman George Ricardo and hasn’t looked back ever since. Let dead-beat Bill put that in his pipe and smoke it! When he ‘kicked the bucket’ years later from cancer of the lungs having smoked seven to eight packs a day, Fritz didn’t attend the funeral. He always regretted that, but held the thought near that he couldn’t change the past, so no use crying over spilled milk. What’s done is done.
He raised the lid of the box as far back as it could go which was at a clean ninety-degree angle. Only two items were inside: a small shoe box containing some of Stefanie’s old family photos, deeds and other personal papers which he never dared to rummage through, convinced the old woman had eyes at the back of her head and would know if he as much as touched that shoe box. And a bronze object about nine inches long shaped like a dagger with a large round, bumpy head. The bumpy parts of the circular head were situated at least five centimeters apart and were like small half-squares at the edge of the frame. In the circle were a series of teeth-like marks deeply indented into the bronze metal, but those teeth-like images were not scattered about willy-nilly. They formed neat, circular patterns within the head. As Fritz carefully grabbed hold of it, it made that slight glow in the middle where the teeth had formed a flattened axis. The glow was the scary part for Fritz as it seemed to cause a strange vibration throughout his body. He’d told Stefanie about it, but she said he was talking hogwash because she didn’t quite get that same sensation when it glowed. But Fritz knew he wasn’t talking out of his head because right at that very moment, he felt that weird sensation again; it made him feel like he wasn’t quite… himself.
He hurried up the flight of stairs anxious to relieve himself of it, at least until he had to put it back.
“Goodness gracious! Why in the world you pourin' sweat like that!” Stefanie asked as Fritz re-emerged. “Look like you ran a marathon!”
Mira wondered about the same thing. Fritz was sweating profusely as if he had to dig outside in the scorching heat for that thing he was holding in his right hand.
“Here you go, Miss Stefanie. Give me a holler when you want me to put it back.” Then he hurried outside through the front door as if he couldn’t escape fast enough.
“Come take a look, young lady,” Stefanie started. “See here what I told ya. It’s the artifact from them ole people. See how it glowin' right there?”
“What is it?” Mira asked. “I mean, what does it do?”
Gently rubbing the stem of it as if it were her baby, Stefanie said, “I ain't sure yet. No one told me. I know it has special powers though.”
Mira wasn’t bought on that special powers thing. For all she knew, this so-called artifact could’ve been picked up in a toy store and charged up with miniature batteries. “Do you mind if I take a look at it?”
Stefanie hesitated initially, then relented on the basis that at least this stranger seemed to be showing some interest, unlike everyone else she had bothered showing it to. And for some reason, unknown even to Stefanie, she never let them touch it. “Okay, but be very careful with it. It’s not as light as it looks.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll be careful.”
Stefanie was right. The object held quite a bit of weight for its size. Mira searched every part of it for that miniature battery compartment she was sure was there, but she couldn’t find one. It was perfectly smooth all over other than for that circular head area with the strange teeth indentations.
“You not gon find any battery cage,” Stefanie remarked, as if reading her mind.
Moving her pinky along the area of the teeth marks, Mira was suddenly overcome with a sinking feeling as if being pulled under a massive wave of water. As a multitude of colorful lights invaded her brain, she literally felt herself drowning. Feeling her very soul separating from her body, she mustered enough energy to hand the wretched thing back to Stefanie, almost dropping it in the process. Concerned, Stefanie tried to get up, but her knees were still gathering their strength. “What on earth's wrong, Doc? What happen to you?”
Still standing, but clearly a bit disorientated, Mira felt her way to the nearest chai
r and sat down.
“You all right now?” Stefanie pressed.
“I'm fine.” She felt her insides gradually calming.
“You don’t look fine!”
Mira cleared her throat. “I am. Really. I gotta go.” She reached for her belongings.
“But don’t you wanna hear more about how I got this? And what one of the ole people said to me?”
“I’m sorry. I just have to go now. I’ll update Dr. Barns on your progress. Take care of yourself, Mrs. Brussels.” She carefully got up and headed for the door, simultaneously remembering Fritz’s eagerness to get on the other side of it.
“Very well then,” Stefanie replied. “I wish I could see you out.”
“No problem. I’ll shut the door behind me.”
Stefanie watched as Mira hurried outside. She knew she had felt something, but had no idea what. A grin surfaced as a sense of accomplishment rose in her spirit. Finally, someone had been affected by the artifact. That is, someone other than Fritz. Maybe his cockamamie story wasn’t hogwash after all.
Mira fumbled a moment before getting the key into the knob.
“You felt it too, didn’t ya?” Fritz said behind her as she opened the car door. He was standing approximately ten feet away on the grass next to the little outdoor fountain.
Mira didn’t answer, but got into the car, threw her stuff on the seat and started the ignition. Relieved that she was no longer disoriented, she gave Fritz one last glance before she reversed out of the yard and sped down the street.
* * * *
He heard Stefanie calling and with a deep sigh, Fritz headed into the house. He knew exactly what she wanted.
“Time to put it back,” she said with a creepy smile on her face.
He went over and retrieved it. “Yes, Miss Stefanie.”
As he turned the bend in the kitchen, Fritz upped his speed to the basement and hurried down the creaky stairs. The whole time his heart was racing like before; he couldn’t wait to get that thing in its box and get the hell out of there – as far away from it as he possibly could. Goodness knows how many times he’d dreamt about it glowing -- that weird cream-colored beam that appeared to be dancing in a wickedly seductive manner, then the dream would suddenly shift and he would see something else he believed was truly a sight for sore eyes.
The Cornelius Saga Boxed Set Page 36