by Ed Kurtz
“She is. I know she is. She’d have turned up by now, someplace. Even if she just ran off with some guy. My sister did that, see? She just disappeared one night and my mom, she cried for two weeks. A policeman told my dad she was probably dead, but then she ran outta money and called from Tennessee.”
“There you go. Your sister was fine.”
“Not really. The guy beat the shit outta her.”
“Alice…”
“Sorry.”
“I wouldn’t worry so much. You should be focusing on your studies, getting good marks. Making friends and having sleepovers, things like that.”
Alice grinned sheepishly.
“You don’t know very much about teenage girls, do you, Mr. Blackmore?”
He leaned back in his chair, studying Alice’s grinning face with a quizzical look.
“I’m fat,” she said frankly. “I haven’t got any friends.”
Walt wanted to scream. This was getting out of control. He signed on to bore teenagers about Dickens and Shakespeare and (God willing) Chaucer, not to listen to their whiny perspectives on how the world was constantly turning against them. But he didn’t scream. He folded his arms on top of the desk and said, “You’re not fat, Alice.” (She was.)
“And besides, no one is exempt from friendships.”
“I was right. You’re hopeless with girls.”
“Haven’t you got anything for third period?” he asked impatiently.
“Study hall. In the cafeteria, for God’s sakes.”
“Then you’d better get going.” He pointed at the clock on the wall. “You’re already late.”
Awkwardly, Alice turned to one side. She looked at the clock.
“Right,” she said softly. And then, as she passed into the dirty, ill-lit hallway, she whispered, “Farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my childhood…”
With that, she was gone. He smirked. At least one kid had managed to read the damn book after all. Still, he could not have been more relieved at her departure. All those stupid questions, as though he was not bombarded with them enough on topics that actually mattered. What happened to Miss Stuben? Was she dead? Christ, no she’s not dead, he would’ve liked to shout at her. What use would she be then?
Realizing that he was sneering, he flattened his mouth and returned his eyes to the indecipherable mess on the desk. He turned the cover over and grimaced at the first page of the booklet. It was still chicken scratch, but he could make out the solitary sentence the student had managed to write in the course of an hour: Pips a fagot.
Marking the inside cover with a thick red F, Walt moved on to the next bluebook.
19
She awoke to the terrifyingly familiar odor of musty wool and fiberglass, the attic’s copious insulation. Together with the nauseating coppery smell of the pod, it never let Amanda forget where she was. Not for one second.
She blinked, taking in the dim, dusty place where she’d been for the last few weeks. A narrow streak of sunlight filtered in through the broken slats of a vent where the roof made an inverted V. The light was soft and white, but everything else was bathed in brown shadows. She could hardly tell that the wispy layers of insulation were at all pink.
Reaching down to her ankle, she slipped her forefinger between the scabby skin and the cool steel shackle. The shackle was U-shaped with a thick pin through the stems, a lot like a halyard shackle but big enough to fit around her thin ankle. Walt had banged the clevis down on either side of the pin with the same bloody hammer that started the whole nightmarish ordeal. Margaret had one just like it.
They were both tethered to one of the attic’s support beams. Five feet of steel cable connected the shackles to the posts, allowing them barely enough room to use the bedpan Walt provided without any sense of privacy. Not that the women required any privacy from one another. Margaret rarely ever spoke, but Amanda understood that a bond had developed between them all the same. They were sisters-in-arms, fellow sufferers in the same hellish agony. The only person in the world who could possibly comprehend Amanda’s plight was Margaret, and vice versa. Accordingly, she made up her mind before the end of the first week that she would not leave that house without her. If she got out of there—no matter what might happen—Margaret was coming too. She would rather die than leave Margaret alone to deal with that monster. Either of them, the creature or Walt.
Where the skin around her ankle wasn’t scabbed, it was pink and raw. An inveterately violent sleeper, she had yet to train herself to remain still at night, or whenever she slept, to prevent this kind of damage. Naturally Walt showed up with a bottle of peroxide or some Neosporin every few days, and applied it as gently and caringly as he could.
Good old Walt. He was going to get his. Eventually. Somehow.
Margaret stirred. Sometimes it was difficult for Amanda to determine her level of consciousness. She spent about half the time floating somewhere in between sleep and wakefulness, the other half dead asleep. There were only brief windows wherein the shell-shocked woman was entirely cognizant of her surroundings and situation, and even then she didn’t usually feel much like talking. Walt and his monster had really done a number on her. She had the same worn down raw spots and crimson-black scabs on her shackled ankle, but that was the least of her worries.
She was the one with all the cuts.
At first, he cut her every day. Not always the same time of day, but at some point between dawn and midnight, Walt climbed up the attic stairs with an art scalpel (a #16 according to its package), a plastic bowl and a first aid kit. As soon as the stairs shuttered down, Margaret would begin whimpering. She knew the pain was about to come, and she knew how weak she was going to be after Walt took her blood.
He started with her arms, making two-inch incisions that covered the top of her left forearm, then her right, and then he moved on to the undersides. Two weeks went by like that, cutting and squeezing and draining the blood into that little bowl. After a while, Margaret’s arms were a mess, covered with a dense network of furrowed scabs and leaking wounds. So Walt moved on to her legs. By that time he had ceased bothering to dress her again when he was done; he just kept her in her bra and panties. And, of course, the various bandages that mummified her arms, legs and, eventually, her torso as well; all of which started out white, but now the gauze and her undergarments were stained red and brown. Margaret was in bad shape.
And she was getting weaker all the time. He was taking too much.
Amanda demanded—and later begged—that he split the bloodletting between them. Even after he’d diminished the regularity of the cutting to every other day, and then every few days, Margaret was fading away.
“Cut me, you bastard,” Amanda cried. Later, it devolved into, “Walt, please. I’ve got plenty you can have. Give her a break.”
But he wasn’t having any of that.
“I’m not cutting you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I love you.”
Amanda cried when he said that. Not because she believed him, and certainly not because she felt the same way. She wept because there was no denying it anymore. Walt was crazy. Certifiably bugfuck nuts.
Margaret lifted her head, cracking her eyelids open to narrow, watery slits. Her shoulders lurched and she tried to hoist herself up on one elbow. It didn’t work, so she lay back down.
“Good morning, Margaret.”
That had started as an attempt at dark humor. Amanda would say good morning and Margaret, when she answered at all, would say oh, sure or nice day for it, something like that. One morning she just cried. Now Amanda meant it as a beacon of hope, as though by wishing her fellow captive a good morning and actually meaning it, there might really be a good morning on the horizon.
Today, Margaret only moaned.
As if by way of response, the pod gurgled. Amanda felt a shudder that terminated somewhere in the back of her throat. It just hung there, threatening to trigger her gag reflex and force her to vomit.
She remembered when she first saw it, in the summer. It looked like a gigantic rotten egg then; so red it seemed black in the shadows. Repulsive, like century eggs, a Chinese delicacy she’d encountered in San Francisco, all putrid brown jelly on the outside and dark green bilge in the center. Since it had grown, however, the pod had taken on the appearance of an immense amniotic sac, translucent when the sunlight shone on it and filled with burbling black fluid.
Within the sac, floating in the dark liquid, was something else. Stalks, like marsh reeds, wriggling inside. Sometimes they poked the walls of the sac, forming a veiny, fleshy tent. But they did not do that anymore. Now the two thick stalks only moved back and forth, kicking like legs.
They probably were legs. It only made sense. Walt’s horrid new friend was growing, and all with the help of Margaret’s blood. Even he likely did not know where it was going to lead, what it would eventually become, or how much more of Margaret it was going to take.
“I thought it was worms,” Amanda said quietly. Funny, she thought. I haven’t told her that yet.
“W…worms?” Margaret murmured.
“Fucking Nora,” Amanda cryptically replied.
Why hadn’t she come looking for her? Perhaps she had, and Amanda was unaware. But she could always hear Walt down there, lumbering around, talking to himself, talking to it. Surely she would have heard any visitors. Nora, the police, anybody at all. Anything other than blood, blood, more blood!
She glanced over at Margaret. Her eyes were closed, her chest rising and falling in the rhythm of sleep. In that way, she was fortunate; the blood-loss weakness permitted her a sort of escape unknown to Amanda. How odd, how awful, she realized, to dream of that kind of mindlessness. Yet still, she envied Margaret for it.
Soon, Walt would return. Yank the stairs down, climb on up. It had been a few days since he last cut into Margaret, she was probably about due. There was never going to be enough. Not until Margaret was dead. And perhaps not even then.
Perhaps he’d bring food. Amanda couldn’t quite tell how long it had been since he last brought something—peanut butter sandwiches on stale white bread. Fucking prison food, for what were they but prisoners?
Amanda wrapped her arms around her bent knees and dropped her face between them.
“I hate you, Walt,” she muttered between choking sobs.
20
Dry brown seed pods crunched under Sarah’s feet as she walked the length of the parking lot from the convenience store to her car. The store was hedged in by tall Sweetgum trees, their green five-pointed leaves having died and fallen, leaving only the multitude of their spiky pods behind. She recalled their omnipresence back home, when she and Walt were small kids, making slingshots out of dry branches and rubber bands and firing the thorny projectiles at one another in the backyard. Walt called them monkey balls. Sarah preferred bommyknockers. They smelled sweet and fragrant in the spring, when they were green and fresh. Now, as an adult, they were nothing more than a minor annoyance, exploding with almost every step she took but otherwise entirely insignificant.
She carried a paper cup of gas station coffee, which was bitter with a weird aftertaste like pencil shavings. She didn’t mind, as long as it did its job and kept her alert for what remained of her drive to Walt’s middle-of-nowhere burg. Once she slid back into the driver’s seat she took a sip and burned her upper lip. It was going to have to wait. Maybe it would be cool enough by the time she hit Mount Pleasant. Setting the cup in the cup holder ahead of the gear stick, she snatched the map from the passenger seat and unfolded it to her current position. As far as she could tell there were still a good two hundred and fifty miles to go. If she stayed on course and didn’t stop more than once or twice, she might make it before dark.
She returned the map to the empty seat, started the car and stretched the seatbelt across her torso. The radio was worthless out there and she hadn’t brought any tapes. It was going to be a long, quiet drive. Just Sarah and the hum of the engine and her own morbid thoughts.
Momma’s dying and Walt doesn’t even care.
Her mouth curled up into a sneer as she backed up into the street.
He’ll start caring when the will’s read.
She turned the wheel, got herself in line with the crumbly road.
I don’t even know why I’m doing this. Who the hell moves away to a smaller town, anyway?
She’d kept up enough through family to keep tabs on her brother, but even that was more than she wanted to do with him. Sarah hit the gas and sped west, to a place she’d never been and never wanted to go.
21
Walt shut the door of the rental car the insurance set him up with, saw that it hadn’t closed all the way and bumped it with his rump. He glanced at the house, its angled roof pointing up. Alone in all the world but for the naked branches of a thousand trees silhouetted against the gray, featureless sky. A single black grackle flapped overhead, its oily wings silent against the cold autumn air.
Walt sighed and it came out in a white puff. He was not really alone in there. But for all the seething hate that seeped out of the attic he might as well have been. Even the insatiate beast, still hanging, dripping from the hallway ceiling, showed him nothing approaching affection, much less appreciation. Perhaps still bitter about the business with the hammer. But hadn’t he more than made up for that by now? Surely he’d harvested ten gallons or more from that insufferable Stuben woman. (Was she dead? Hell no, she’s not dead.) Still, all it did was moan and demand more, more, more.
Most of the time, he ended up angry with himself, wondering why he bothered. Just destroy the thing and be done with it.
But, on occasion, he marveled at how fast it healed from the hammer attack, and how increasingly human it looked.
The arms filled out, lithe and muscular. The fingers no longer stubby, grotesque little knobs, but thin and long. And those piercing, startling eyes.
In a strange sort of way, she was almost beautiful.
It. It was beautiful. Briefcase in tow, he traversed the gravel path to the porch, climbed the steps, jammed the key into the lock. Inside, all was blissfully silent. No whimpering, screaming, or moaning. He smiled and gently shut the door behind him. If this kept up, he might even get to finish grading those awful essays. Maybe get some reading in.
“Guhhhh!”
He shook his head, the soft smile melting into a grimace. He didn’t think he was going to get off that easy. It was just waking up, he could tell. And it always woke up hungry, like a newborn baby screaming its fucking head off.
He wished it really would scream its head off.
“Gahhh! Wah…Wah….WALT!”
“Yeah…”
“WALT!!”
He let the briefcase drop to the floor. One corner struck the hardwood and chipped it, leaving a whitish, triangular indent.“Shit,” he hissed.
“WALT! WAAALT!”
“I heard you! I’m coming! For Christ’s sake!”
Walt groaned, an animal growl deep in his throat. The container in the refrigerator still had a little blood left in it, but he knew it was getting low. He doubted there was enough to quiet the creature, much less satisfy it.
He was going to have to bleed her. Tonight.
“Goddamnit.”
Jerking his head to one side, he heard his neck crack. It felt good. He jerked it the other way, but it failed to crack that time. The last of the evening’s luxuries.
“Bloodbloodbloodbloodblood,” the thing jabbered from the hallway.
Walt crossed the kitchen, opened the fridge and extracted the plastic container. Only the shallowest bit of Margaret’s thick, dark blood remained. He took it with him to the hallway and flipped on the bathroom light.
“Bloodbloodbloodbloodblood…”
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it.”
“Waaalt…”
“I’m here. I’ve got it.”
He popped the lid off and looked into the creature’s eyes. Its face was so much clearer n
ow, so much more human. It still had no skin, but its head was full and round, replete with an aquiline nose and a slender, angular chin. It smiled broadly and genuinely when their eyes met, flashing two rows of straight, white teeth.
“Waaalt,” it said through clenched jaws.
“You look terribly like a hungry old dog,” he said.
“Not niiice.”
“Only quoting. Dickens said it, not me.”
“Dickens not niiice.”
“It’s been said. Here.” He held up the plastic container and it accepted it with bloody hands. “I know it’s not much.”
“More.”
“I’ll get you more.”
“Maaaargaret.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Give me Maaaargaret.”
“I mean to. But I’ve got to bleed her first.”
“Blood cow,” it said with a creaky laugh.
Walt’s face clouded. Only rarely did it advance an attempt at humor, but it was always chilling when it happened. The measured, throaty laughing did nothing to allay the unpleasantness of it. While he recoiled, backing away into the kitchen, the creature shoved its dripping face into the bowl, lapping the blood up from within.
He was readying his instruments when the bowl hit the floor and skidded off into the dining room.
“Bring her,” it said.
“Working on it,” Walt impatiently replied.
“NO!” it bellowed.
He raised his eyebrows and turned to look at it.
“What do you want?” he shouted back.
“HER!”
“I told you, I’m working on it!”
“NO MORE BLOOD! FLESH! MEAT! MEEEEEAT!”
Craning its neck to face him directly, the thing resumed its clenched-teeth grin. Its eyes bulged wide and its nostrils flared. Walt leaned back on the island counter, afraid that his knees might give out at any moment.
“Oh my God,” he rasped. What have I done?
***
It didn’t take long for its head to heal from the blows of Walt’s hammer, and as soon as the teeth grew back it started to talk. Nonsense words to begin with—baby talk. Then, the same as before: blood and more. When it was sated, it was silent. That was not often.