Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  And then, without waiting for Rose to respond, he ducked back through the tiny door.

  * * *

  The strangest part wasn’t that the dog could speak. It was that—while it was happening, at least—Rose didn’t find it strange at all.

  The first thing Jack said when he came into the kitchen was: “Would you mind freshening the water in the bowl?”

  There was a dog bowl sitting on a mat beside the refrigerator, half-full of water. Rose took it to the sink, rinsed it out, refilled it, and set it back on the mat. Then she sat in her chair again and watched Jack lap at the water. When he was finished, he lay down beside the bowl, facing her. He’d managed to clean most of the blood from his muzzle, and Rose was thankful for this. She’d found a Diet Coke in the otherwise almost completely empty refrigerator, and she sat clutching the can in her hands, feeling grateful for the chill against her palms—there was something soothing about the sensation, something grounding. She’d been sitting here for the past five minutes, waiting for the dog to appear, and wishing that she’d never posted her ad on Craigslist, wishing this, and then wishing it again, and then again, which was a pointless expenditure of energy, she knew, and a stupid thing to waste a wish on.

  “Where do you live?” Jack asked.

  “In New Jersey,” Rose said.

  “With roommates?”

  Rose shook her head. “At my mother’s. In her basement.”

  “That’s good,” Jack said. “That’s very good. So moving in here won’t be a problem?”

  Rose just stared at him. I’m talking to a dog, she thought. I killed a man, and now I’m talking to his dog. She felt exhausted suddenly, and dizzy to the point of nausea. She thought she was about to faint, so she bent forward and placed her head between her knees. It helped, but not a lot.

  Jack made a noise—it sounded like a sigh. “I know this is probably quite confusing for you, but if we can just focus on the basics, I’m confident you’ll soon find your bearings.”

  “How do you know how to speak?” Rose asked, without raising her head.

  Jack ignored the question. “It might feel uncomfortable for you to acknowledge this, but you’re not really in a position of power here. And the sooner you come to grips with that fact, the sooner we’ll sort everything out. There’s a body in the back room. A body with a knife wound to the throat. Your fingerprints are on the knife. Are you with me this far?”

  Rose could feel the dog watching her, waiting for her to lift her head and look at him. She didn’t move.

  Jack seemed to take her silence as an affirmation. “Would you like to know what would happen if you were to run away? Zeus and Millie and I would eventually get hungry. We’d start to bark and whimper and howl, and soon enough one of the neighbors would call the landlord, and the landlord would call the police, and the door would be broken down. And the body would be found. And the knife. And your fingerprints. And inside the back room? Other bodies. I think you’d be startled to learn how many. Now, you could certainly try to tell the police: ‘I didn’t kill those girls. Daniel did.’ But then they’ll ask how you came to know this. And you’ll say that his dog—”

  Rose lifted her head from her lap. “Who’s Daniel?”

  “The young man you stabbed in the throat.”

  “He said his name was Patrick.”

  “What did you tell him your name was?”

  Rose dropped her head back between her knees.

  “You’re a Jersey girl,” Jack said. “Isn’t this what you’ve always dreamed of? A Manhattan apartment?”

  “How can you talk?” Rose asked again.

  Once more Jack ignored the question. “You don’t have to worry about the body. Zeus and I are taking care of it. Millie will handle the blood on the floor and walls—I think you’ll be surprised at how clean she can get things with that tiny tongue of hers. The mattress and pillows are lined with plastic—Millie will lick them as good as new. It’s really only the sheets that are ever a problem. Daniel used to tie them up in a Hefty bag—double bag it. There’s a chute beside the elevator; it leads straight down to the building’s incinerator. Just drop the bags in, and it will be like he never even existed.”

  Rose lifted her head again. “What about his family? His friends?”

  “Daniel was a guy who spent the past seven months luring young women to his apartment, so that he could handcuff them to his bed, and kill them. Does that sound like someone with a close-knit social network?”

  Rose was silent. She was thinking about all the people Daniel must’ve come into contact with as he moved through his days: his boss, his—

  Jack seemed to guess her chain of thought: “He worked at a copy shop in midtown. They’ll call once, maybe twice. When they don’t get an answer, they’ll hire someone new. In three weeks, they’ll have forgotten Daniel’s name.”

  “He said he was a lawyer.”

  Rose wouldn’t have guessed a dog could smile, but that was what Jack did now. Not with his lips, of course—it was just an upward slant of his tail, a tilt of his head, and the way his ears lifted slightly—but it communicated the same amusement that a smile would have. It was a funny thing to see a dog do—almost more extraordinary than his talking. “You’ll find new sheets in the hall closet,” he said. “Daniel bought them in bulk. The keys are on a hook by the door, along with the leashes. Zeus and I usually like to go out first thing in the morning—around eight or so. Millie sleeps late; she goes out around noon, and then again together with me at six PM—that’s when you’ll take us to the dog run, over by the river. The last walk is for Zeus and Millie, around midnight. How does that sound?”

  Rose shook her head. “I can’t—”

  “Of course you can. You don’t have a choice.”

  Jack got up and walked over to Rose. He rested his head on her knee. He could talk, but he was still a dog. He looked up at her with that adorable white patch over his eye, and gave a slow wag of his tail. Rose’s hand lifted toward him, reflexively; she only stopped herself from petting him at the last instant. Jack offered her another one of his smiles. “I know it must be a lot to absorb. We’re asking you to change your whole life. But consider this: maybe it will be a change for the better. There’s a bankcard on the table by the front door. The code is six-three-eight-four. I don’t know what the exact balance is at the moment, but it should be enough to live on for quite some time, if you’re frugal. You could take a course or two, if you liked. Lay the groundwork for a career. You’d have the freedom to do that, living here. It can be a win-win situation, if you only embrace it with the right attitude.”

  Rose tried to imagine the life he was proposing. Four walks a day with the dogs. A bankcard that wasn’t hers. Resuming her dental hygiene studies. Nights spent sleeping in the bed where she’d killed Patrick. Or Daniel, rather. And where Daniel had killed some as-yet-unknowable number of young women. Whose bones, Rose assumed, must be lying in the back room, picked clean by the—

  “What should we call you?” Jack asked.

  “Rose.” She spoke without thinking, and she realized as soon as she’d said the word that it implied a degree of consent.

  “You can’t imagine how tired we were of him, Rose.”

  “Who?”

  “Daniel. The cologne … did you smell the cologne? We asked him to stop with it—again and again, we asked. But he wouldn’t listen. And Millie, well—you’ll see what I mean soon enough—Millie can be difficult in her way. But Daniel had no patience with her. He started to lock her in the hall closet for long periods, and we couldn’t accept that sort of behavior, could we? So we decided to find a replacement. And as soon as you walked through the door, we were certain you were the one. You have a kind smile. Has anyone ever told you this? And you smell nice. Do you eat bacon, Rose? Because there’s a bacon-y smell to your skin. We all noticed it, right from the start.”

  Rose stared down at the dog. Her hand kept wanting to touch his head, and finally she surrendered to the te
mptation. She scratched him behind the ears. Jack shut his eyes with pleasure. “How can you talk?” she asked again.

  “It’s something with the apartment. Out on the street, we’re just like any other dogs.”

  “But your vocabulary? The phrases you use? Like ‘win-win’? How do you know that?’

  It wasn’t just smiling; Jack could shrug too—a lift of his shoulder, a downward tilt of his head. He did it now. “We watch a lot of TV.”

  “The others can talk, too?”

  “Zeus doesn’t like to. But he can, if he wants.”

  “And Millie?”

  “You’ll see. She likes it maybe a little too much.”

  Rose could still call the police. She could walk back to the bedroom, fetch her cell phone, and dial 911. She considered doing this for a few seconds, and then found herself thinking about the bankcard Jack had mentioned. It was difficult to keep from wondering how much money might be in the account.

  “One step at a time,” Jack said. “That’s always the easiest way, isn’t it? Start with the sheets. Bag them, throw them out. Then take Zeus and me for a quick walk. By the time we get back, Millie will have cleaned the mattress. You can put fresh sheets on the bed. And then, well, you’ll see. It will start to feel like home in no time.”

  * * *

  There was still a lot of blood on the bedroom floor, so Rose spent the first night on the couch in the little family room, just off the kitchen. She kept waking and staring into the darkness, at the shadowy skeleton of the plastic lawn chair across the room, at the TV hanging on the wall, and the empty bookshelf beside it, and wondering where she was—wondering and then remembering, not just where she was, but what had happened. In the morning, her back hurt from the couch’s lumpy cushions, and she showered until her fingertips started to wrinkle, and she thought: I can’t do this, I’m going home, I don’t care what happens. But when she climbed out of the shower, Jack was sitting on the mat beside the tub, and Zeus was in the hallway, pacing back and forth, and she realized that they needed to go outside for their morning walk, so she dressed, and leashed the two dogs, and took them around the block. And then she was hungry, but there wasn’t any food in the apartment, and she only had four dollars in her wallet, so she took the bankcard from the table beside the front door, and went to the bank on the corner, and punched in six-three-eight-four at the ATM. The card had a woman’s name on it: Tabitha O’Rourke. Rose didn’t want to wonder too long who this woman might be, or how Jack had come to know the PIN for her account, which had a balance of … whoa … just over nineteen thousand dollars.

  Rose withdrew twenty dollars, then immediately thought better of this sum, reinserted the bankcard, and took out two hundred more. She bought some groceries at Fairway and carried them back to the apartment. She made a grilled cheese sandwich, and ate an apple, and took Millie out, and then she came back and sat on the couch with Jack at her feet, and it wasn’t that bad, really, not at all. And Rose thought to herself: Okay, maybe one more night.

  Jack looked up at her from his place on the rug, and he did that thing that was just like a smile.

  The next day, Rose took a train out to New Jersey and brought back a suitcase’s worth of clothes. She left a note for her mother on the kitchen table, saying she was going to be in the city for a while, dog-sitting for a friend. She spent the evening cleaning the kitchen, and then she used the bankcard to withdraw another hundred dollars, and she bought more food and filled the fridge with it.

  A week passed.

  Millie finished licking up all the blood in the bedroom—Jack was right; she did a remarkable job—and Rose took to sleeping there. It wasn’t nearly as creepy to spend the night in the bed as she’d feared, and the mattress was much more comfortable than the couch’s misshapen cushions.

  Jack and Millie liked to watch TV in the evening. Rose would sit on the couch with the two dogs, one on either side. Jack often dozed, only half-attending to the screen, but Millie watched with a tense alertness that Rose found a little unsettling. Zeus never took part in these evenings. He spent most of his time hidden in the rear room. He would emerge for his two walks every day, and then trot back down the hallway as soon as they returned, squeezing his big body through the swinging panel that had been cut into the door. All three of the dogs slept in the back room. Rose assumed there still must be some meat left on Daniel’s body, and that this was what the dogs were sustaining themselves on, because Jack would prod her to refresh the water bowl, but he hadn’t asked her to buy them any food yet. She kept waiting for him to do this.

  One morning, Rose woke early, just before dawn, with a full bladder, and after she used the toilet, she crept down the hall to the rear room, and crouched in front of the door, and quietly pushed open the wooden panel, and tried to peek inside. The room was very dim—there didn’t appear to be a window—and she could sense more than see the three dogs. It was hard to tell what else was inside the room. There was that smell again: a not-good smell. Rose had a vague sense of tumbled objects—bones, she supposed, though she couldn’t be certain—and then she heard the beginning of a growl, low and threatening, as much vibration as actual sound, and she dropped the panel back into place, and retreated quickly to her bedroom.

  Rose assumed it must’ve been Zeus who’d done the growling, because Zeus didn’t appear to like her very much. He had a sullen and aloof demeanor; perhaps it was just Rose’s impression, but he seemed to make a conscious effort to avoid her gaze. Millie was the opposite—it was difficult to get away from her. And, unlike Zeus, she talked. Jesus, how she talked: she never seemed to shut up. Her days were a continuous outpouring of substance-less chatter. She had obsessions, and she shared them liberally. There were TV shows she’d seen over the years, repetitively, and now she liked to recount their plotlines, complete not only with long excerpts of dialogue, but also with Millie’s elaborate analyses of their characters’ actions. Friday Night Lights. The Brady Bunch. Melrose Place (the original—Rose made the mistake of mentioning the remake, and the next seven hours were consumed by Millie’s criticisms of it). As the World Turns. Sex and the City. The Flintstones. Seinfeld. Gilligan’s Island. The list appeared to be endless. Rose wouldn’t have thought it would be possible to fill entire days talking about this sort of thing, but apparently it was quite easy. She took to carrying her iPod around the house, to block out Millie’s voice.

  And Jack? Jack was her favorite.

  In the mornings, before Millie was awake, and with Zeus still hiding in the back room, Rose and Jack would have the apartment to themselves. Jack would curl up on the couch beside Rose while she drank her first cup of coffee, or he’d lie on the mat beside the tub while she showered, or he’d sit on the still unmade bed and watch as she dressed. He called her “Girl.” As in: “You need a new pair of tennis shoes, Girl. Those are completely worn out.” Or: “You realize what time it is, Girl? Aren’t you going to be late?” Or: “Let Millie choose the channel, Girl.” Outside the apartment, walking around the neighborhood, he was just a normal dog. But what a beauty! With his lean, muscular frame, his silky coat, and that white patch over his eye … people would turn to watch them pass. They called out to Rose: “Gorgeous dog!” And whenever this happened—almost every afternoon, in other words—Rose would wish that it was just her and Jack living together in New York, that there was no Zeus, and no Millie, and no back room full of bones. She’d wish, too, that Jack couldn’t talk, and that she hadn’t stabbed Daniel, and that she didn’t have to lie awake at night and wonder what had happened to Tabitha O’Rourke. But what she’d wish more than anything else—what she’d wish, and then wish again, and then wish once more, three times for luck—was that her life didn’t feel so much like a bomb, ticking its way down toward boom.

  One morning, in the shower, she thought of something that she probably should’ve considered much earlier. “What about the rent?” she asked.

  Jack was in his usual spot, on the mat beside the tub, licking his paws clean
. “What about it?”

  “Don’t I need to pay it?”

  “It’s deducted from the bank every month—automatically.”

  Rose wiped the water from her eyes, stuck her head out from behind the shower curtain, and peered down at the dog. There was a lot of money in Tabitha O’Rourke’s account, but not so much that a New York rent wouldn’t rapidly erode its balance. “From the same account as the bankcard?”

  It wasn’t just smiling and shrugging; Jack knew how to shake his head, too. This particular gesture he managed just like a human would. He did it now. “A different one.”

  “Daniel’s?”

  Another shake of that bony skull: “It belongs to someone who lived here before Daniel.”

  Rose ducked her head back behind the curtain, immersed it under the showerhead’s torrent of warm water. She didn’t ask: Who? Because then, when she’d received an answer, she’d need to ask: What happened to her? And Rose didn’t want to ask that question.

  There was something pleasantly narcotizing about her daily routine in the apartment. She woke just after seven, and made herself a cup of coffee, and showered, and dressed, and took Jack and Zeus for their morning walk. Then she ate breakfast, and ran whatever errands needed to be run, and came back around noon to take Millie for her first walk of the day. Sometimes, if the weather was nice, she’d sit on a bench alongside the park, with Millie in her lap—enjoying the silence that came from being outside the mysterious domain of the apartment, and wondering if the words still filled Millie’s tiny head even as they sat there in such blissful quiet, if the dog was sifting through the hundred and fifty episodes of The Twilight Zone that she’d memorized, or analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the various guest stars who’d appeared on Fantasy Island over the years. Then it was home for lunch, and sometimes a nap, or sometimes—when Rose was feeling ambitious—a yoga class at the tiny gym just down the block. At six PM, she took Jack and Millie to the dog park. This was her favorite part of the day. She’d throw a tennis ball for Jack, and Jack would fetch the ball, then drop it at her feet, and wait for her to throw it again, and again, and again, his body quivering with pleasure in this activity, again, and again, and again, until Rose’s shoulder began to ache with the exertion. That was when things could feel almost normal to Rose, at dusk in the dog park, with the ball bouncing down the gentle incline toward the river, and Jack sprinting away in pursuit.