by Ed Kurtz
“Lucky me,” Walt said.
***
“If it were me,” he said cheerfully, “it’d be Brunswick stew. Oh, with fresh cornbread, too. But for you, my friend…”
The red, dripping jaws clamped down on the rabbit’s neck, sending a crimson spray splashing against the wall.
“…you can have it rare. A rare hare. Ha, ha.”
He grinned broadly as the young rabbit ceased its struggling and the mouth sucked at its bloody tendons and the soft, juicy organs beneath them. As he watched it feed, the round knob beside the creature’s eye split open, finally revealing the other one. He saw that both irises were the same pale blue.
He also realized that among the thing’s many writhing tendrils, two of them had grown thicker. These two did not wriggle as much as the others, a disability caused by the development of bony joints in the middle. At the ends of the two jointed limbs were several knobby appendages, red and pudgy, like skinless baby fingers. They wiggled, trying to find purchase in the rabbit’s blood-matted fur.
Walt stared and smiled with his mouth open.
“My God,” he rasped. “Would you look at that?”
Ignoring his wonder entirely, the feasting creature paused in its gorging long enough to moan with pleasure.
11
“You look like you need a drink,” Nora said, a little too loud.
An old, blue-haired woman in the cooking section shot her a nasty look. Nora smiled.
“It’s ten-thirty in the morning,” Amanda reminded her.
“Well, I didn’t mean right now. Unless it’s that bad. Sometimes you really do need a stiff drink first thing.”
“I sincerely hope you’re joking.”
Nora laughed and nudged Amanda with her hip.
“Come off it—I went to college with you, remember? I’ve seen you chug two liters of PBR through a surgical tube, and in your matching red underwear, no less.”
The blue-hair resumed her disapproving stare. Amanda turned white, the blood having drained out of her face.
“Keep it down, will you please?”
“You sure had a full dance card that night, I’ll tell you.”
“With shockingly little supervisory guidance from you, as I recall.”
“Hey, my card didn’t look too shabby, either. I swapped so much spit that night, a cheek swab would have driven the lab tech crazy.”
Amanda wrinkled her nose.
“You’re repulsive.”
“I do try.”
“Have you had a blood test lately?”
“Why, are you afraid of catching something?”
Amanda shot her a cool glance.
“You’re fired.”
“At last!” Nora said. “I can finally get some damn peace and quiet!”
The blue-hair snorted with discontent and shuffled out of the store. Amanda and Nora watched her go and then looked at one another.
“Think she was going to buy anything?” Amanda asked.
“I don’t know. She looked pretty cheap to me.”
“How do you think she gets that particular shade of blue, anyway?”
“A hundred and fifty years of trial and error, I guess.”
Amanda erupted into laughter. Nora tittered as she picked up a clipboard from under the cash register and prepared to log in that week’s new arrivals.
“Okie dokie,” she said, “let’s see how many erotic vampire novels we’ve got today.”
“Only three this time,” Amanda called as Nora moved toward the back room. “I already checked.”
As Nora vanished, Amanda heard a dramatic groan reverberate throughout the store. She shook her head, inwardly echoing the sentiment. A moment later, the phone beside the cash register rang.
“In the Reads, this is Amanda.”
“You lied,” Nora growled through the receiver. “There’s four of ‘em.”
“One of those is a back order.”
“Are you serious? That’s a customer we don’t need.”
“We need every customer, you snob. Besides, how is that junk any worse than the porn you read with shirtless studs in kilts on the covers?”
“Because I like that junk.”
“Of course. Is that all?”
“Still waiting on an answer about that drink.”
Amanda rolled her eyes for no one’s benefit but her own and sighed into the phone.
“When?”
“Tonight, natch. After work.”
“Where?”
“Why not Tiny’s?”
“What, that dive off the interstate? Are you out of your mind?”
“Kidding, ‘Manda, kidding. Jeez, lighten up, would you?”
“Not going to Tiny’s.”
“I said I was kidding, didn’t I?”
“Fine,” Amanda said. She was losing patience with the constant joking. Often it could go on all day and she would just keep laughing along with it, but not right now. “Where, then?”
“La Jolla’s?”
“Okay. La Jolla’s.”
“Excellent. Oh, and Amanda?”
“What?”
“She arched her back when Sebastian sank his fangs into the soft, white flesh of her neck. ‘Make me,’ Rebecca moaned. ‘Make me like you, my love.’”
“Hanging up now.”
The receiver cracked an echo across the store.
***
Feeling grateful that he only had the one, Walt dumped his telephone in the kitchen wastebasket immediately after unplugging it. His most recent phone bill went in right after it. He might have phoned the telephone company and cancelled the service, but that would have required time on the phone, speaking to some disembodied voice that couldn’t give any more of a damn about him than he could about it. Besides, the damned thing had been ringing night and day. It couldn’t possibly have always been Amanda. Surely she had neither the time nor the inclination to ring Walt thirty times a day. He presumed a small percentage of the calls had come from telemarketers, while others almost certainly originated from the school, or from his mortgage company, or from one of his egregiously disagreeable relatives. His spinster aunt, Janet, or his sister, Sarah. He didn’t want to speak with any of them. He did not want to speak with anyone at all.
The only thing Walt wanted to do was build up enough courage to climb up into the attic to assess the state of things from that side of the ceiling.
The creature—which he had come to think of as his roommate—was getting testy with him. He tried to empathize; after all, he didn’t know anybody who didn’t get a little grouchy when their bellies were grumbling. But the roommate’s belly (wherever that was) was always grumbling. Nothing sated it. When it finished with the rabbit, it let the teeth-scarred bones drop to the floor one by one before launching into that awful, ear-splitting screeching again. It wanted more. Needed more. Walt was not at all sure how to proceed.
On the one hand, he wondered how and why he should feel responsible for the thing’s well-being. He hadn’t put it there; he hadn’t even invited it. It was Walt’s house, he paid for it. Any other unanticipated visitor of another species would have been met with a stomping heel, a spray of poison or a call to the nearest exterminator. Conversely, he’d already begun to take care of his new roommate. It was a ball in motion, rolled down the infinite hill by his own hand and initiative. At this point, how could he possibly stop? That would be too much like taking in a stray dog and then suddenly refusing to feed it. Cruel. Inhumane, even. No, Walt was responsible for it now, whether he liked it or not. It was practically a binding agreement.
He started pacing, unconsciously wringing his hands like a worried mother. He crossed the length of the kitchen, doubled back and rounded the living room into the dining room.
Then he returned and did it all over again, all the while thinking about his relationship with the roommate. At first, he labeled it symbiotic, but that was not exactly right. In symbiosis, both organisms stood to benefit mutually from the exchange, where
as Walt could determine no particular gain to be had. It wasn’t truly parasitic, either; although the creature certainly seemed the parasite to him, he recognized that it had been his own choice to begin feeding the thing in the first place. In the end, Walt decided that his relationship with the roommate was rather more akin to a hermit crab and its shell—a relationship in which one of the parties is significantly helped while the other is neither helped nor harmed.
Commensalism. That was it.
Although pedantically naming the biological type of bond he shared with the thing on the ceiling did nothing with regard to allaying his fears and doubts, Walt felt better for having done so. Reenergized, he strode back to the hallway and peered up at the thing. It pulsed and wiggled, per usual. It searched the immediate area with its wide, blue eyes. And all but two of its tendrils seemed to be retracting into its main mass—all but the two that were beginning to look like arms.
“You’re growing up,” he said to it.
Ahhhhhg, it replied.
Walt curled his lip, caught between fascination and disgust. He then decided it was time to have a look in the attic.
***
La Jolla’s was a sprawling bar and restaurant in the so-called warehouse district, just on the periphery of what passed for a downtown. It had no parking of its own, just perpetually unavailable street parking, so Amanda and Nora arrived in a taxi. They presented their respective drivers’ licenses to the indifferent doorman, shuffled inside and worked through the crowd to the bar. Top 40 hits pounded from the speakers built into the walls and ceiling, rending conversation nearly impossible. Nora had to scream her choice of drink at the bartender.
“Two Fuck Faces!” she yelled as loud as she could.
Amanda blanched. Noting this, Nora gave her a wink and a coy smile. The multi-pierced bartender nodded and got to work. A few moments later, she presented two double shot glasses filled to the rims with dark liquid, a thin green straw floating in each of them. Nora slapped a credit card on the bar, told the girl to keep it open, and grabbed the drinks. Amanda took hers and followed as Nora cut through the dense throng of drunks and college kids.
When they reached the back patio, Amanda wobbled her head. The music was significantly quieter there, but her ears continued to throb from the ridiculous volume inside. Nora selected a well-weathered picnic table perpendicular to the surrounding green fence and sat down. Amanda followed suit.
“A third Wild Turkey, a third Jack, and a third dark rum,” Nora said as she held up her glass. “Three fluid ounces of throat-burning, ass-kicking delight.”
She took a sip, gasped and then let out a roar.
“Yow! Knock your socks off, sister.”
Amanda glared suspicious at hers.
“No chaser?”
“Don’t be such a pansy.”
Amanda frowned and raised the glass to her lips. After her initial sip, her eyes bulged and began watering up.
“God in heaven!” she gasped.
“Good, huh?”
“Good? What the hell is your definition of good?”
“This,” Nora replied.
She then dumped what remained in her shot glass down her throat. Amanda gawked.
“Good for what ails ya,” Nora said. “So, what ails ya?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? I figure it’s gotta be Walt, so what’s up his ass? Or yours? What’s the scoop?”
Amanda dug a crumpled pack of Benson & Hedges out of the front pocket of her jeans and lit one up. She drew long and hard at the filter, sucked the smoke deep into her lungs and then tilted her head back to blow it up into the air.
“I’m not altogether sure,” she said at length.
“I knew it. What’d he do, stick it where it don’t belong?”
“I’m not even going to ask what you mean by that. And no, he’s just…”
“Just what?”
“Strange, I guess.”
“He’s always sounded strange to me.”
“I’d have to start at the beginning.”
“Then why don’t you do that?”
“Because I didn’t figure on an interrogation when you invited me out for drinks, that’s why.”
Nora arched an eyebrow and pursed her lips.
“Gimme one of those,” she said as she seized Amanda’s pack of cigarettes.
Nora lit the cigarette, but she only smoked superficially, drawing a little into her mouth before blowing it out again. A social smoker.
“It’s too weird,” Amanda said quietly between drags.
Nora furrowed her brow and then gently placed a hand over Amanda’s.
“Tell me,” Nora said.
Amanda puffed out her cheeks.
“He’s got this new house, you know?”
“Sure, the Gablefront cottage. You told me.”
“Right. Well. Just after he moved in, we find this dark stain on the ceiling, on the hallway ceiling. Maybe about so big.” She made a ring with both hands, estimating the original size of the stain.
“Okay,” Nora said. “Water damage?”
“That’s what we thought. But he had a plumber out and everything, there was no leakage, not there anyway. It definitely wasn’t a water stain, but it kept getting bigger. Getting worse.
“Eventually, it was dripping all over the floor. Thick, red gunk. Really nasty. And no matter where he looked, he couldn’t find the source. He checked the attic, dug up the paneling and everything. It didn’t come from anywhere. It was just there.”
Amanda paused to suck down the last of her cigarette. She stubbed it out in the black plastic ashtray on the picnic table, then fished another one from the pack and lit it.
“Are you fixing to tell me you broke up over a leak?”
“We’re not broken up. At least, I don’t think we are.”
“Okay,” Nora said with a flourish of her hand. “Continue.”
“Walt was getting sort of…I don’t know, distant, I guess is the word. Daydreamy, kind of off in his own world. And the stain kept getting bigger. Bigger and more gross—and the worse it got, the less he seemed to care about it.”
“You’ve never lived with a guy. I’ve got three brothers, babe. Their dog could shit on the living room rug and the bastards still need to be told to clean it up.”
“Not Walt. He’s a tidy guy, really. Everything has its place. Maybe he’s even a little anal retentive. But that thing up there, he was definitely more interested in it than repulsed. Then, the last night I stayed with him, I saw it…”
Here she trailed off, bringing her brows into a tight knit and staring at the red glow at the tip of her cigarette.
“Saw it what? Spit it out.”
“It ate a roach, Nora. It actually reached out and ate a roach. I don’t know what that thing is, but it’s alive.”
“Nasty.”
“This from a chick who plays with spiders.”
“Spiders aren’t nasty. But that is.”
“It had, I don’t know, tentacles, sort of. Thin, wiggly little things.”
She shuddered. Nora screwed up her face and narrowed her eyes.
“Tubifex,” she said plainly.
“What?”
“Hundred bucks says its tubifex. It’s a worm. A while back, some city workers found something in the sewer over in North Carolina, pretty much exactly like what you’re talking about. A huge, pulsing red mass just clinging to the walls of the sewer. Of course, everybody freaks out, calls it a monster. But it was just a worm colony.”
“A worm colony?”
“Yup. Still kind of gross, but perfectly ordinary. Walt’s got himself a pretty old house, I gather. Loads of mold, decaying wood, shit like that. Even without a leak those old houses tend to be pretty damp. I’ll bet those little wormies are just snug as a bug in a rug in there.”
“But it reached out and grabbed that cockroach, Nora.”
“Worms, babe.”
“Worms eat roaches
?”
“Hell if I know. Maybe it only looked that way. Maybe the roach just got caught in the mass.”
“Maybe,” Amanda said uncertainly.
“Hundred bucks says it is. And here you’re all heartsick over a bunch of dumb worms.”
“You forgot about his attitude,” Amanda reminded her.
“Did you—gee, I dunno— talk to him about that?”
“I screamed and ran out of the house after the thing with the roach.”
Nora stared at her with wide eyes and an open mouth.
“You’re an idiot.”
“I’m an idiot.”
“A colossal idiot.”
“Huge.”
Amanda’s throat constricted, but she laughed in spite of it.
“Worms, you say.”
“Probably a hundred thousand of ‘em, yeah.”
“I thought…”
“You thought it was a monster, and that it was controlling Walt’s mind! ”
Nora wiggled her fingers at Amanda and whistled the theme from The Twilight Zone. Amanda slapped at her.
“Oh, goddamnit,” she croaked.
Nora smiled sweetly at her and stood up from the table.
“I’m going to go get another round. You can figure out how to fix this while I’m gone, all right?”
“Just no more Fuck Face for me.”
“Two Gorilla Farts, coming up!” cried Nora as she marched back into the bar.
Amanda shook her head and crushed her half-smoked cigarette in the tray. Worms, she thought ruefully. What have I done?
For the time being, she had forgotten what Walt said about the rats.
***
The face was vaguely human, but not quite. Humanoid. It had eyes, part of a nose—a bony septum, at least. There was a mouth full of teeth that looked longer, closer together. And, of course, the tiny, stubby fingers that perpetually wiggled at the ends of its nascent arms. All of it still dripping, ever dripping, from its blood red surface.
The mouth had been rhythmically opening and closing for some time now. Initially, Walt assumed it was conveying its insatiable appetite, a fact for which he needed no reminding. Taken from another perspective, however, it also looked as though the creature was trying to speak. If he were a lip-reader, Walt might have determined the thing was attempting to say ba, ba, ba.