by Kirk Alex
“It’s dripping over there. Punch a hole below it. Wouldn’t that make more sense?”
“It’s ceramic tile. Lots harder to break up. That’s why I thought I’d try this part of the wall first.”
“You see where it got us.”
“How about if you shut the hell up?”
Pearleen felt exhausted, but there was no way she would so much as consider quitting—even though they really had no idea what the purpose of it was. Yes, something that appeared to be blood had dripped down from inside somewhere. So what? What did it mean? Crawl space? Possibly. Then what? Place to hide out—and wait him out until Olivia showed with Valley PD.
She plowed away at the cracked and cruddy tile with the cabinet door about a foot to the left of their earlier effort, poking holes in it, chipping away at it. She paused for a second to look at Stella who was not doing much at all but standing there and watching her work. Neither was the other one, come to think of it. Big mouth who liked to give orders like a Marine sergeant.
“It would be nice if I could get some help over here. Like sometime today.”
Lana handed a plank to Stella and she and Pearleen attacked the wall in tandem. Lana did what she could herself from where she stood on the rim of the tub. Stabbed at the wall above their heads with one of the other planks.
The drywall came apart. There was the insulation material, pink and cotton-like—or maybe steel wool-like—some of it soggy with black blood, two-by-four and additional drywall on the other side.
Soon enough the hole they had created was enough to peer through. There was what seemed to be a narrow storage corridor with a low ceiling, the ceiling itself consisting of wooden pallets, above which was a crawl space.
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They banged away at the wall until the opening to the storage corridor was potentially large enough to crawl through.
Lana was the first to attempt it. Got her left foot and then the rest of her leg and head through and something wet and sticky began to drip down on her. Blood or polluted water—or something else? It was like molasses or motor oil. Not certain. Wouldn’t have made any difference. She paused there, unable to move any further. They hadn’t made the opening wide enough.
She wiped at whatever the hell was on her face: dirt and stucco, and whatever the liquid was. Too dark to see clearly. Even with the aid of her cigarette lighter, it was too dark.
Pearleen asked what the problem was.
“What’s it look like? I’m stuck. Can’t see much, either.”
Lana squeezed the rest of the way through the opening and had to remain stooped, practically in a crouch, as the ceiling was low.
She held the lighter up, and could make out box springs and old and smelly and stained mattresses propped against the wall on the right. There were odds and ends of furniture, broken, old: end tables, cocktail tables with missing or broken legs, damaged and ancient phones, cassette players, stacks of porn magazines and newspapers, stacks of black-and-white glossies of past and present strippers and porn starlets, stacks and stacks of VHS hardcore pornography.
The corridor was approximately three feet wide and hardly five feet high. If she raised her head any higher she risked banging it against the ceiling.
More of the liquid came down through cracks in the skids the ceiling was made up of. When she turned to tell the others what she encountered about the corridor and the crawl space above, more of the liquid landed on her, practically drenching her features. It soon became evident what it was.
Stella sighed, when she saw Lana turn to wave them on.
“Blood. You’ve got blood all over your face.”
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Lana shrugged. It took her a moment to recover and deal with it. She took a quick, deep breath. Released it. “I don’t give a damn.” She wiped her face. “We’re getting the fuck out of here. Ain’t no way that sicko is putting his hands on me again.”
“I thought all they were after was some ‘lovin’, girlfriend. What’s the harm in it?”
Lana’s response to Pearl’s dig was a hard glare and a middle finger, then let it go. Having to remain stooped was tough enough to deal with. She turned sideways to make room for the others to enter the space. Moved up some to make room for them. It was cramped and that tight in here.
More blood dripped down from cracks in the boards in the ceiling. Stella and Pearleen followed suit, climbed through the opening in the bathroom wall.
The storage corridor was packed with so much junk and whatnot that it was a real challenge to keep moving: folded blankets, towels, all types of mirrors, bags of doorknobs, boxes of locks, planks, plywood, sheets of metal, containers of generic laundry soap and bleach, Liquid-Plumr, rat poison and mouse traps. There were moments and stretches here when the only way to get past was to turn sideways, even then it was a struggle to make progress.
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They stayed close to Lana, moving along the corridor, and they could hear Biggs and Marvin back there banging away at the bathroom door, pounding away, doing their best to knock it in.
The wall on their left was solid, professionally built, the wall on the right just as impossible, cinder blocks, what they could see of it past the furniture and junk, sheets of plasterboard, long planks left leaning haphazardly against it. Even if they could have kicked a hole in it somehow, penetrated it, it would have only taken them back into (generally) the same part of the basement they had just escaped from. What was the alternative? Had no answer, but kept rapping and/or kicking the wall on her left as she moved along it, hoping there was some sort of passageway they’d be able to take to freedom. Freak had a pit in his floor, secret storage corridor with all kinds of weird shit and junk, and a crawl space above. Would it be far-fetched to hope for a secret passage that would make escape possible?
So she alternated: either slapping at the wall with an open palm, or rapping at it with a hairbrush.
Pearleen suggested she keep moving.
“Yeah? Where to?”
“It don’t figure.” Stella was hunched over, looking about. “What’s the purpose?”
“You’re asking me? Ask the pervert. Ask him why he’s got a pit in the floor full of water, ask him why he’s got to kill chickens to get his pathetic dick up; while you’re at it, ask him what’s causing the stench and whose blood do I have on my face.”
Pearleen did not bother reacting to this. “If we could find something to defend ourselves with, maybe something to pry the bars off one of the windows.”
“Ain’t seen but one window, and that was the window in the john—and I’m not about to go back there and havta deal with him and his army of psychos. Besides, you didn’t see how thick that panel that come down over the window was. You’d have to pry that loose, get it off there, before you’d even have a chance at the bars on the outside.”
She gave the wall on the left a kick out of sheer frustration. Nothing hollow. Cinder block wall.
Stella asked what she was doing.
“Hoping for a miracle. Everything’s solid on this side. Was hoping for another corridor, secret storage space—to barricade ourselves in for a while. Like Pearl suggested: find something, anything, to fight with.”
The others followed her lead: whacked at it with open palms. The only thing loose were some of the boards overhead, some of the pallets, and dirt and whatnot was beginning to trickle from above.
By now more and more of the dark “liquid” had begun to drizzle on them. Stella was in tears.
“More blood. Dear God. I’ve got blood on me.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“He’s got a bunch of bodies stashed in the crawl space up there. Look at the blood.”
“You don’t know that, Stella, so knock it off!”
“I know it’s blood. It has to be.”
“Knock it off, damn you! I mean it. We have to show some balls if we want to get out of here.”
“Lana’s right.” Pearleen did her best to keep from trembling. It was bloo
d all right. Probably human. The limp female arm, covered in dry blood and dirt, that dropped down through a crack in the boards, dangling that way, only confirmed it.
One of the strippers, possibly Stella, accidentally bumped her head against a loose board and about a quart of crimson rained down on them, several pounds of entrails. Stella Martel was throwing up; the others practically there as well.
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They collected themselves. Took some doing. They managed, and reached a fork in the corridor and were able to stand straight in this area. The ceiling here was as high as the ceiling in the john and rest of the basement.
On their left was a large sheet of dirty and warped plywood propped against the wall and held in place this way by a single cinder block on the floor. The right passageway led to a door—on the other side of which was the basement, no doubt.
Where was there left to go now? Move on straight ahead? Once again, the ceiling was low, no higher than five feet, the corridor about as wide as the one behind them. More stained box springs and mattresses, old furniture, sheets of weathered plywood, old Magnavox sets with cracked screens and bent rabbit ears, turntables without covers, blankets and towels with embroidered names of motel chains they were filched from; books, lots of books in cardboard boxes with the names on their spines of the various public libraries and universities they were stolen from.
This section of the corridor was just as dark as the one they had left in back of them. Lana still had her “torch,” and Pearleen Bell had that gold cigarette lighter McCoy had given her in his office that time.
Lana’s lighter had gone out. She flicked it, to no avail. Blood and grime had rendered it ineffective. She tossed it aside.
Pearleen’s lighter was still functioning, no matter that the flickering flame was weak and provided far from sufficient illumination. Low on fluid by now? There was that possibility.
They shoved the piles and boxes of books out of the way, busted stereos and broken furniture and other junk, even a broken down, homemade coffin stained with crud and black blood.
There were things hanging from above, through the cracks in the crude, makeshift ceiling—and a couple of hundred pounds of putrefied limbs, a torso, and viscera poured down this time until they were drenched in it.
If the miasma that they had been exposed to earlier upstairs, as well as the other side of the basement and john had been sickening enough, this was far more potent and had them gagging and ultimately retching.
There was more debris raining down from above: teeth and eyeballs, tongues and fingers, rodents and night crawlers easily a foot long that they fought to get off of them. A headless corpse, possibly female, rotting, with enough rats clinging to it, dropped on them, followed by another—also with its head missing.
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Stella’s panic got the best of her and she fainted. Pearleen kept flicking her lighter in a dire need to produce a bit of light, and moved on ahead of Lana.
The ceiling, once again, was as high as the ceiling on the other side of the drywall, as high as the ceiling was in the bathroom. She rose. Stood straight.
There was a jail type cell at the other end and had a gate with wrought iron bars. Inside the cell was a cot against the left wall, above it a window, boarded up, like the window in the john. Looked like there was a panel above it, like the one back there in the bathroom. Just waiting to be triggered so that it would slam down over the window.
There was a mini refrigerator against the opposite wall, a potty, the kind a youngster might use. There were photographs taped to the wall above the mini fridge that she could not quite make out: of Biggs and someone. Woman possibly.
There were also vertical rows and rows of receipts taped to the wall.
Lana reached her. Stood there, taking in the jail cell and what was in it. She walked up to the gate to see if it would open—for the hell of it. There was a window up there, wasn’t there? Maybe they could give this one a real try, force the bars off and bust out.
Gate was locked. There went that notion. And there was nothing for them to do but turn around.
Ducking down, they made it back to where that dirty sheet of plywood was. Stella was just coming to. Pearleen helped. Sat her on the cinder block. Then asked her to stand up.
“Please. Get off the cinder block.”
Stella remained out of it. Groggy and dazed. Weak. Pearleen looked at Lana. “Something like this concrete cinder block is what I was talking about. If we could get inside that jail cell, push the refrigerator over to the window side—and shove the cinder block through the boards; bang away at the boards with it.”
“How would you get in the cell? You saw the gate. Gate is locked.”
“Use the cinder block the same way. Hit the bars, bend them back—and squeeze through. Then we work on the window.”
They helped Stella get to her feet, and the plywood tipped over, revealing a door.
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Pearleen’s lighter was too wet, too something. The bile, blood, slime and grime prevented it from functioning.
She wiped the gunk off. Rubbed the lighter against her blouse. Flicked it endlessly. Until at last a tiny, weak flame materialized.
Once Stella had adequately recovered, Pearleen gave her the lighter with instructions to hold it up and keep it going, while she and Lana lifted the cinder block and smashed at the door with it repeatedly until it gave, and they had created a portal wide enough to squeeze through.
They had no idea where this would take them, where it led. It had to lead somewhere—possibly, hopefully somewhere to keep safe long enough to figure out what to do.
Pearleen Bell got her lighter back from Stella Martel, and held it out through the opening in the door. It was a tunnel. Looked like it. A crudely fashioned one. Tunnel floor was dirt and puddles and planks. There was the occasional cinder block with chains locked to them that seemed to disappear beneath the planks and dirt. Strange creatures moved about: cockroaches, worms, rats. Some dirt from above trickled down from spaces in the planks and two by sixes that was the ceiling. The support posts, staggered at three- to four-foot intervals, were either four by fours and/or two by sixes. The ceiling itself, at six feet, was about a foot higher than the storage corridor ceiling. The walls were an amalgam of sheetrock, two-foot-by-six-foot plywood panels as well as thick planks about six feet in length. Sections of either wall also appeared to consist of wooden pallets. The rectangular panels had what looked like an aluminum handle at each end.
They helped Stella go through, then joined her.
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In hard hats and goggles, Biggs and Marvin made considerable progress by utilizing Norbert Fimple’s head (sans protective head gear) as a battering ram. And when Norbert could no longer stand it, Sassounian was there to volunteer: banged his practically hairless noggin against the bathroom door on his own. Managed to get it unhinged, and promptly passed out. Additional muscle was required still, as the dryer not only needed to be pushed back, but shoved aside.
Biggs was the first to enter the john. Saw the damage that had been done to his window, the planks that had been pried off. Then there was the cabinet below that the bitches hadn’t been able to leave alone. Had no respect whatsoever for other people’s property.
He glanced to his right. Did a double take. Floor was a mess. Wall above the tub had sustained the worst and costliest damage of all. Tub had plenty of rubble in it: tile fragments, stucco, dirt, chunks of drywall, blood.
Earthworms crawled about. Various rodents and cockroaches. Only Marvin failed to see any of his four-legged buddies among the debris. His primary concern.
“Where my homie’?”
“Your ‘homie’? Fuck your homie.”
Biggs surveyed the damage with his eyes and did not feel good about any of it. “It’ll take some doing to repair all this.”
“Them hoe’ sure knows about the tunnel now.”
“Figured that out all by yourself, did you, Brother Muck?
”
Marvin’s missing buddies were on his mind and he damned sure didn’t feel like responding; only as he did, it surprised even him. “Yeah, I did. Ain’t had no help that time neither, me.”
There was a four by four partially sticking out of the hole in the wall that Cecil yanked loose and probed under the crud and debris in the tub with. Shoved a degree of it aside, revealing one of Muck’s crushed rats. Marvin was beside himself.
“Psycho? Yo. That ain’t you. Don’t let it be you.”
“Why name a pet after a sissy?” Biggs tabulated in his head the work and money it would take to fix things up. “Why ‘Psycho’? Hollywood ditz is a sissy.”
“That don’t be why I give homie the name. Ain’t never even seen PSYCHO.”
“You never saw PSYCHO?”
“Never did. Lame boo-shit anyway.” Marvin didn’t want to discuss it. Had something else on his mind. “Yo. Don’t be dead. Psycho; don’t be gone.”
Biggs noticed something else behind the bowl. A tail? Rat’s tail? Beneath stucco rubble and whatnot. Stepped past Muck and shoved the crud aside with the two-by-four, revealing Marvin Muck’s other bosom buddy. Just as history as the one in the bathtub. Marvin was carrying on. All it did was irritate the bishop even more.
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Stella recovered, to the extent that full recovery was remotely possible.
They had no real idea where the tunnel would take them. Garage maybe? It was worth a try. Little choice but to risk it.
They helped Stella up, and walked along the creaky boards, dodging foot-long, water and slime-soaked rats with crimson-covered, glistening snouts. The odor was suffocating. Seemed to be much worse than a moment ago: a potent combination of raw sewage and decay, rodent droppings mixed in with the nausea-inducing stench of rotting flesh and lime powder that appeared to have been sprinkled throughout.