by Ed Kurtz
“Walt? Are you okay?”
“Fine,” he called down. “Just ruining my new house is all.”
She furrowed her brow, unaware of the way she was anxiously bouncing on her heels. Another loud crack sounded from above, startling her. She jumped back, staring at the ceiling as a narrow fissure formed from one end of the dripping stain to the other. Flecks of paint and fiberglass drifted down between thick, red drops.
Then Walt screamed.
Amanda sucked in a lungful of air and scampered up the steps. Launching herself up onto the rafters, she peered through the darkness at the lone glow of Walt’s flashlight across the attic from where she crouched.
“Walt? Walt!”
“I’m fine,” he groaned. “I was just…Jesus, I feel dumb.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t come over here!” he yelled. “It’s too dark, you might lose your footing and fall right through the ceiling.”
“What made you cry out like that?”
“Some kind of animal. A rat, probably. I don’t know how it got in between here, but man is it a mess.”
Disregarding his concern for her safety, she reached a foot out in the darkness and felt her way from one rafter to the next. He grunted disapprovingly at her when she reached him, but shone the light on the spot in question all the same.
“Look.”
On the flaky drywall was a sticky red mass of bloody flesh. Amanda gagged first at the sight of it, and then at its fetid odor. Strands of black hair were matted into the fleshy pulp, but not as though it had grown from the mass, and not quite just stuck to it, either. It resembled no living creature she’d ever seen.
“Whatever it is…was…it got crushed between the ceiling and the paneling up here. For the life of me I can’t see how, but you can see it as well as me…”
“Jesus.”
“I reckon it was a lot bigger than this, on account of all the blood that seeped through. Probably ants or cockroaches…”
“Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”
Fighting the vomit at the back of her throat, she scrabbled back over the rafters, found the opening in the floor, and hurried down the ladder. Walt just shook his head and whipped his T-shirt off, using it to scrape the bloody mess up with one side and give it a cursory wipe down with the other. He felt enormously relieved—not only had he finally pinpointed the origin of his stain trouble, he also managed to avoid doing too much damage to the ceiling. There was some, to be sure, but nothing he couldn’t fix himself in the span of an afternoon. That much, he decided, could wait.
With his wadded up shirt in tow, heavy and squelchy with the pulp he’d scraped up into it, he descended the steps, pushed the folding ladder back up into the attic, and grinned triumphantly at Amanda.
“Aren’t you proud of yourself,” she said.
“I most definitely am,” he beamed.
He strode off toward the back door to dump the wasted shirt in the outside garbage.
Halfway out the door, he turned back and shouted into the house, “This is why I own!”
***
Amanda went home that night. There was no argument, no fussing. She merely yawned and stretched like a cat before declaring how tired she was. Then she left. There had been no understanding between them that she would have stayed, implicit or otherwise, but Walt felt vaguely dejected about it all the same. It was not a particularly big house, but it was too big for just him. (Soon, he thought.) After the awkward experience in the attic, a terrible loneliness began weighing down on him. His logical side understood that everything was going to be okay, but this was not sufficiently communicated to his irrational, emotional side. And the more he thought about it, the more he obsessed over it, the emptier he felt inside.
He cleaned up the wet, gory mess on the ceiling one more time, tossed the rag into the bucket and left the bucket outside the back door. The roofer was supposed to return in the morning, so while he did his thing, Walt figured on finishing up the baseboards before turning his attention to the walls. While planning, he wandered into the kitchen to pour a glass of water from the tap. Halfway into the kitchen he observed a fat black cockroach skitter across the tiles and halt a few inches from his left foot. Walt sneered at the shiny insect. He then lifted his leg and crushed the cockroach under the ball of his foot, spattering the tiles with the insect’s yellow guts.
He wiped the goo against the right leg of his sweatpants, and then shed the pants and his bathrobe on the hallway floor, and he went to bed.
Exhausted, his mind queerly frazzled, he forgot entirely about the water.
4
He awoke in a cold sweat. If he’d had a nightmare, he couldn’t remember it. It was still pitch black in the house.
“Shit.”
He glanced at his watch, which was supposed to glow in the dark, but it was far too dim for him to determine the positions of the hands. Walt resolved to get up and go into the kitchen to have a look at the digital clock on the stove when the knocker fell against the front door in a rapid, almost desperate pattern. He jumped, then grimaced. He couldn’t have gotten more than a couple hours’ sleep and now someone was pounding on his door in the middle of the night. Ignoring it for the moment, he continued into the kitchen; he still wanted to know the time so that he could throw it in the face of whoever was out there slamming the knocker as if their life depended on it.
Squinting through the hazy blur of his sleep deprived vision, he eventually saw that the clock read 7:25, which made no sense. At half past seven in the morning, in the middle of summer, it was never still dark. The clock had to be wrong. Either that, or it was almost seven-thirty at night. Which would mean…
The incessant pounding kept on.
“All right, all right!” Walt roared.
He stamped across the house, twisted the deadbolt and threw the door open to find his girlfriend standing on the porch.
“Amanda?”
“Were you asleep?”
“Of course I was asleep. It’s barely past seven and I never get up until eight when I’m off. You know that.”
“Walt, it’s seven-thirty PM. Have you been asleep since last night?”
“I,” he began, blinking. “Have I…?”
Scrunching up his face he pondered hard on that deceptively simple question. Had he been asleep for the better part of eighteen hours? It was possible, but he couldn’t see why he would have. Still, he could not remember anything past going to bed after the adventure with that damned stain. And the cockroach; he remembered that, too. Now Walt hoped that he slept through an entire day. Otherwise, he’d lost time he should have remembered.
Amanda gently placed her hand on his chest and smiled weakly.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure,” he said, almost too quietly to hear.
His throat hurt, scratchy and dry. He turned back for the kitchen, intent on getting a glass of water before anything else. Amanda followed him in and shut the door behind her.
“You don’t sound one hundred percent,” she said. “You don’t look it, either.”
He filled a glass from the tap and swallowed all of it without taking a breath. Exhaling loudly, he said, “I feel about twenty percent right now.”
“Should I put some coffee on?”
Saying nothing, he concentrated only on refilling his glass. She nodded and got to work on the coffee maker, dumping grounds into a filter and waiting for him to wrap up with the faucet so she could fill the carafe. Once the machine got to gurgling and dripping into the pot, she leaned up against the counter and looked lovingly, and with noticeable concern, at Walt. He had streams of drool-infused water running down his chin and chest. His face was prickly with stubble and his hair was a tussled, greasy mess. She had never seen him in such a state, although probably only because they had not yet chosen to live together—an old-fashioned decision mostly belonging to Walt which she respected but found outdated. Once they did, she mused, she supposed they would see a lot of o
ne another’s down and dirty humanity. Still, he looked like hell—she couldn’t deny that much—so she reached out to lay her hand on his forehead to see if he had a temperature. He jumped and moved back, spilling more water all over himself and the floor.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said with a sheepish smile.
“It…it’s okay,” he stammered. “Maybe I’m a little under the weather. I’m going to lie down on the sofa.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
Wiping off his face with the sleeve of his bathrobe, he stumbled out to the living room and collapsed onto the sofa. Within seconds, he was lightly snoring.
Amanda stayed and watched him sleep for a short while before rising to pace the house, her anxiety resurfacing at the quiet and the shadows.
***
An hour into Walt’s second consecutive slumber, Amanda polished off the coffee she made and went into the dining room where his belongings remained packed up. One stray box on the floor was labeled books, and she decided to open that one up. Feeling a little bit like a kid at Christmas, she commenced taking the books out of the box one at a time, examining each of them closely and looking for one that might be good to read until Walt woke up again. She found Hawthorne and Cooper, Waugh and Dickens and the ubiquitous volumes of Melville. There were also dusty volumes of Wells and Verne in there, and a dozen paperback novels by Philip K. Dick. She found books on religion, books on atheism, and an art book filled with macabre erotica she would never have expected to find among her otherwise staid boyfriend’s belongings. She wrinkled her nose at that one as she set it on the floor. Finally, near the bottom of the box, she extracted a thin volume of Lord Dunsany stories that promised weird tales of forgotten gods and elves and ghosts. Satisfied, she returned the rest of the books to the box and went back to chair by the couch upon which Walt deeply slept.
For a while, Amanda was content with silently reading and intermittently sipping her coffee. When the coffee had run its course, she got up to use the bathroom. Walt was still quietly snoring, having not moved a centimeter from his original position. She was worried for him, but she smiled and kissed him lightly on the forehead. He still didn’t feel too hot, and she didn’t think he was running a temperature. He slept on, and she padded off to the bathroom. She wondered how well he’d care for her when the tables turned and she was the one under the weather. Men are such babies, she thought, and smiled.
Groping blindly in the darkness, she eventually found a switch in the hallway and flipped it. The bright bulb in the fixture above her flared on, forcing her eyes to narrow to slits. As she became accustomed to the light, she gaped at the ceiling.
“God,” she whispered.
Walt hadn’t bothered to clean that horrible stain up at all. Worse, Amanda thought, she would be damned if it hadn’t gotten bigger.
A lot bigger.
***
Walt slept through the rest of the night and woke up just before six in the morning. Discounting the few minutes of wakefulness at seven-thirty, he had managed to sleep almost twenty-nine hours straight. He was a firecracker, too. When Amanda awoke on the uncomfortable chair beside the sofa, it was to the sound of measured scratching; Walt had already removed most of the wallpaper in the house and was well on his way to repairing every hole, dent, crack and scratch. She rubbed her eyes and yawned loudly before shakily rising to her feet.
“How long you been up?” she mumbled.
“A few hours. Got a lot of work done.”
“Well, that’s good.”
She yawned again and dipped a hand into her purse. Coming back with a crumpled pack of cigarettes, she awkwardly blew an unnoticed kiss to him and staggered out to the porch for a smoke. In front of the house, the back door of Walt’s hatchback hung open, and she could see the piles of supplies inside. Shingles and lumber and baseboards, boxes of nails and can after can of white paint. She thought white was a bit unimaginative, but it was his house. He could paint it magenta if he liked, though a nice mint green would suit her fine.
She smoked the cigarette down to the filter, stubbed it out on the front lawn, and carried it back into the house to throw away. Her mouth felt fuzzy and tasted awful, so after she deposited the spent butt in the kitchen trash, she made a beeline for the bathroom.
There, she noticed the dripping stain on the ceiling, and the sticky puddle on the floor.
“Oh, Walt.”
“What?” he called out from the dining room.
“You still haven’t taken care of this nasty mess,” she shouted back.
“What mess?”
“The… blood. On the ceiling.”
“That? Of course I did. Cleaned that up last night. Or, no—the night before last. I keep forgetting I was in a coma there for a while.” He let out a weak laugh.
“It’s still here, Walt. And it’s all over the floor.”
Without waiting for a reply, she stepped over the noxious puddle and into the bathroom. That stain was getting to be a thorn in her paw. Who could just let something like that go? It was absolutely revolting, and worse still it was unsanitary. There was no telling what manner of vermin had gotten crushed to death up in the attic, nor what disgusting diseases it may have been carrying. She was tempted to clean it up herself, but some primordial maternal instinct kicked in that reproved her for it. No, she mustn’t clean it up. If she did, what would Walt learn?
Chrissake, Amanda, he’s a grown-ass man.
Besides, it was his house. He could crap on the floor if he felt like it. She just wouldn’t want anything to do with him if he did. So what did she want with a guy who left animal blood all over the place? She sneered as she squeezed a dollop of toothpaste out onto Walt’s toothbrush. The tube was neatly rolled up, squeezed from the bottom as he always did. He was a neat and conscientious guy. Or at least he always had been until now.
When she reemerged from the bathroom, she found him on all fours, cleaning up the floor with yet another dirty dishrag. He glanced up at her with wide, puppy-dog eyes and smiled like a kid caught stealing a cookie.
“I swear to God I thought I’d cleaned this up,” he said.
“Maybe you dreamed it.”
“I guess so. I’m sorry.”
He sounded sincere, which was enough to make her feel downright terrible. Minutes ago she was reconsidering the welfare of their relationship, and over what? A misunderstanding, that was all. She felt like an utter bitch, and she told him so.
“Baloney,” he said. “It’s just crazy around here, is all. New house, new job coming up. It’s all mine, but really, what’s mine is yours. Right?”
“Right,” she smiled. “Fucking A, that’s right.”
She guided him up by his armpits and planted a hard kiss on his mouth. Walt kissed her back with just as much force and substance, which went a long way toward making her feel better about the whole thing.
“What do you want for lunch?” he asked.
***
With the mess cleaned up and most of the visible interior repairs done, Walt and Amanda decided to call it a day. They showered together, made love, and ate turkey sandwiches on the floor of the dining room while they opened up boxes. The vast preponderance of Walt’s belongings consisted of hundreds of books, for which he had more space than before, but not by much.
“I’m getting you bookshelves for Christmas,” she remarked upon seeing the overwhelming number of volumes coming out of the boxes.
“Great,” he said. “I’ll need something like twenty of them.”
He smiled furtively then, thinking about what he had already gotten for her: three princess-cut diamonds, one and half carats in total, set in a fourteen-carat white gold band. The ring cost more than three grand, and he was nowhere near paying it off, but he figured it would pay him back in spades. Amanda was worth it. She was worth more, even. Much, much more.
“What are you grinning about?”
He shook off the reverie and shot a coy look at her.
“Damn good turkey sandwich,” he said.
In the late afternoon, his new dining room was no longer stacked to the ceiling with boxes—it was stacked to the ceiling with books. The rest of the boxes, no more than twelve in total, contained a few pots and pans, sundry knick-knacks he was happy to keep boxed up, and the record collection he never listened to. All of these could wait. They assembled the frame for the bed, smoothed out the bed sheets, and then collectively collapsed on top of it all with a united sigh. For a while, Walt remained still, listening to the rhythm of her soft breathing. Before he knew it, he was drifting toward that clumsy, watery place between sleep and consciousness.
Amanda shrieked.
Jolted, Walt shot up and searched for her. She was in the hallway, pressed up against the wall with her hands splayed out like claws.
“What happened?” he blurted.
“Goddamnit it’s all over me!” she screamed.
Walt threw his legs over the side of the bed and hurried over to her. He stopped just shy of the red, viscous puddle on the floor between them. His face twisted in disgust, and when he dragged his eyes from the mess on the floor up to Amanda, he saw that her white T-shirt was dotted with sanguine splotches. Worse, it had gotten in her hair and dripped down onto her cheek and chin. Dumbstruck, he looked from her to the floor, back to her, and then up at the ceiling. Sure enough, the stain had returned. There was no trace of the shellac or the paint they had slathered up there. There was only the nebulous reddish-brown patch on the ceiling, dripping down like a leaky faucet.
“What in hell?”
Amanda was trembling, her eyes wide and mouth hanging open.