by Edward Lee
She stalled, staring.
Next to the large sink, more brooms and mops stood in the closet, but something else stood there as well:
A figure.
A shadow that only looked half-formed. “Salut,” it said in a faraway voice.
Sergeant Perschy felt woozy, yet she drew her service pistol and aimed. “This is a restricted—”
“No, no,” whispered the voice in a gentle accent. “To really see what you need to know…you must look.”
Perschy gulped, gun hand wavering. Something forced her to stare at the figure’s eyes, which were merely darker holes in the shadowed patchwork that gave it shape. It was the shape of a woman.
“So…Look,” it said.
When Perschy looked, her own eyes closed, and it was then that she began to see.
“Alas, poor love…”
Perschy saw two men in shabby clothes. One sat at a dirty table, counting pieces of crack cocaine from a considerable heap. The other man was raping an unconscious woman on a linoleum floor scarred by cigarette burns. The scene ensued in a queer silence. When the man on the floor was finished, he stood up with a confident smile, rebuckling dirty jeans. Clipped to his belt was an NYPD detective’s shield. “To hell with health and dental. Now that’s what I call a great employment benefit.”
The man at the table laughed. “Where else can we get paid, get laid, and walk with crack money all at the same time?” He scooped the pile of crack into a plastic bag. “Shit, the Kings will lay five or six hundred bucks on us for this.” And then he grinned up.
It was Tony.
“Good deal.” The other man nudged the unconscious girl with his foot. Her pasty breasts wobbled. “Say, you still dating that sweat-hog blonde?”
Tony chuckled. “Shit, I’m living with her, man, at her place. The slob is so in love with me she pays all the bills and all I’ve gotta do is pop her a few times a week and whisper sweet nothings.”
“Classy guy.”
“I save a big kick with her paying the rent. In this city? What I save there, plus what I make reselling the dope we rip off these fly-by-nights, I’ve got some big, big money sitting in a numbered account. Offshore, man. No names. My retirement’ll be set. You have a numbered account?”
“Naw.”
“Look into it. You get interest instead of letting your haul sit in a shoe box. Trust me, every cop needs a numbered account.”
“You mean every crooked cop,” the other detective laughed.
“Well…yeah!”
Tony stood up. The other guy pointed to the girl on the floor. “You want another piece before we split?”
“No, I’m set.” Tony got a quarter from his pocket, and flipped. “Call it.”
“Tails,” the other guy said.
The coin landed tails.
“Damn,” Tony bellyached. “That’s three in a row you’ve won.”
“Tough luck, my man. But look at it this way. You’re really making the city a better place. Have fun.”
Tony tore the cord out of a shabby lamp and wrapped it around the girl’s neck. He tightened it hard, kneeing her chest while she flipped and flopped. Her face turned bright red. He waited a few more minutes until he was confident she was dead.
“Ready when you are.”
“Hey,” Tony said. “Since I offed the hose-bag, you drive.”
“You got a deal. What do you say we go Mexican?—”
—and then Sergeant Perschy’s eyes snapped back open, full of tears. Her lower lip quivered. Her hands shook.
Now the shadow seemed bolder, details of a strong but pretty face showing through her murk. Dark-rose nipples and creamy white rings of breasts showed now, as though edging out from a pool of petroleum. The eyes, though, were just blacker holes, and as she spoke, twin white needlelike teeth augmented her grin.
“For when you look, you see the truth,” the accented voice fluttered like finch wings. “The truth you’ve always known…”
Sergeant Perschy put her service weapon to her head.
“No, no, not yet, my soiled sister,” fluttered the voice. “Very few receive the honor of what you are about to witness.”
Perschy’s gun hand lowered. When she reached into her pocket, she blinked, and in the space of that blink saw a stone room with glassless windows, a gorgeous forest beyond. In the room sat a sturdy man at a heavy wood table. He was dunking bread into a bowl of blood, then eating the bread with gusto, muttering prayers. Though the prayers were in another language, Perschy understood that the words were prayers not to God, but to the Devil. The man wore shining chain mail augmented by jeweled leather. When the bread was gone, he drank from the bowl.
Perschy’s mind seemed to glitter the darkest radiance. From her pocket she withdrew her key ring.
Scab came out of the stall. She offered her cuffed wrists and let Perschy unlock them. Then she calmly removed her transport garments and approached the closet.
Vernon and Taylor scrambled when they heard the single shot. They both had their guns out when they hit the door and stepped into the consternation of the hallway. “Watch for exits!” someone shouted. “Watch the doors!”
“Good thing we’re wearing our vests, huh?” Taylor forced the scary point. Neither of them were. “Anybody see a perp?”
Probably some Al-Qaeda wannabe, Vernon thought. Got fired from his mailman job so now he’s going to kill infidels. But then his guts sank when someone else shouted, “One of the bathrooms it sounded like!”
“Men’s room’s clear!”
Five cops three-pointed into the women’s room. First, silence. Then three walked out, guns lowered, faces blanched.
Please, no, Vernon thought and entered as if stepping into a morgue.
The image of all that blood struck him like a sudden bellow. A veritable scarlet pool shined over a great portion of the tile floor. In the pool’s farthest perimeter lay Sergeant Perschy, looking up at the ceiling with wide, dead eyes. She appeared to have been shot directly in the Adam’s apple at a hard upward angle, for a plume of cranial matter that grimly reminded Vernon of lasagna flared behind her head. Her service weapon lay to her left. Later forensic analysis would determine that she’d committed suicide.
Vernon’s eyes followed the rest of the blood to its alternate source: the homeless arrestee known as Scab. It took Vernon’s powers of cogitation several moments to even conceive what had happened to her, but when he did so, he realized it was a treatment of something he’d seen before.
Scab sat in a grotesque squat, pallidly naked, head craned upward and mouth strained open. She sat impaled on a broomstick whose end had been hastily sharpened. Vernon could only guess how she’d achieved this exotic act of self-termination. She must’ve sharpened the handle, climbed up on the top of the stall, and then lowered herself down. Her body weight did the rest …
The broomstick entered her body at the vagina, and exited out her mouth.
Everyone simply stared.
“No way they didn’t do a body-cavity search at the lockup,” one of the cops said. “How’d she sharpen the broomstick?”
Vernon felt wobbly on his feet, but inadvertently noticed a key ring lying in the pool of darkening blood. “Right there,” he said.
“Perschy’s keys,” another cop said. There was a penknife connected to the ring, the blade opened.
“And God knows what this crazy shit is,” one cop said as he opened the door to the stall that Scab had probably been using to relieve herself. Fingered in blood were these words: TARA ROMANEASCA, TARA FLAESC ROMANAE. TARA FLAESC WALLKYA. “The fuck’s that?”
“Look here, Inspector,” observed the other uniform. “Perschy must’ve died before the girl.”
Vernon nodded, just now noticing some bare footprints in blood skirting most of the pool. “I guess Sergeant Perschy killed herself, then the prisoner walked over to get her key ring.”
“Yeah,” Taylor said, “but how do you explain this?”
Taylor pointed to
more footprints closer to the impalement, where Scab’s prints logically ended.
Another set of bare footprints had tracked back through Scab’s blood and led into the custodial closet, where they disappeared.
“That’s just great,” Vernon intoned. His voice echoed. “Two different sets of bare footprints in the room, but only one person with no shoes on. Yeah. That’s just fuckin’ great…”
(II)
“Cristina?” A smiling face: youthful, handsome, short dark hair and insightful eyes focused through the haze. “I’m Dr. Stein. Paul called me over to have a look at you.”
“Hi, honey.” Paul’s voice, just beyond. Cristina felt her hand squeezed. Only seconds transpired between her waking and her recollection of what happened last night. At once, her heart raced.
“My, God. Paul. A woman was in the house last night.” Now her vision had cleared. She trembled. “She attacked me in the basement.”
Paul and the doctor fell silent, just as Cristina noticed that Jess and Britt were there, too. They all stood around Cristina’s bed, faces drawn by concern. Sunlight poured in through the plush, parted drapes. She could see the clock; it was past noon.
“There was no one in the house, Cristina,” Britt said. “It’s like what we were talking about yesterday.”
“But there was!” Cristina exclaimed and leaned up.
Dr. Stein was putting away a blood-pressure cuff. “Just calm down, and take it easy today. You’re in perfect health, Cristina. There’s nothing to worry about. You simply suffered from an hysteria-related shock.”
Cristina wouldn’t be deterred. I know what I saw. “Doctor, if there wasn’t someone else in this house last night, then I’m not in perfect health. It means I’m hallucinating—”
“Um-hmm,” Dr. Stein agreed.
Britt and Jess cast Stein an alarmed look.
“Honey,” Paul said softly. “Let Dr. Stein explain. See, you were hallucinating last night, and I may have been, too.”
Britt cut in, “Paul, what are you talking about? Hallucinosis is serious.”
“A temporary symptom. I’ve seen it before,” Dr. Stein told them.
“It’s all about the basement, Cristina,” Paul added.
Cristina’s mind swam. She remembered full well what had happened down there. She’d originally dismissed the voices she’d heard, and maybe they had, indeed, been from the condos. But…
The woman, she thought. “I think my mind…added things, the power of suggestion and all that. Some of it, sure—I can agree it was imagined.” She recalled Paul coming forward in the basement but after a blink he’d changed—into a nude woman. More imagination from the stress of her dreams and her work stress had added a nun’s wimple to the intruder…and fangs. “But I didn’t imagine all of it. I know I didn’t. There was a woman. In the basement last night, and she—” But she couldn’t say the rest, probably not even to Britt if alone with her. This woman had molested her sexually, and the worst part was several fibers of her being, which lay low beneath her terror, had enjoyed it. “I’m just…certain there was someone there,” she finished.
But the doctor seemed perfectly content. “Cristina, when Paul showed where he’d found you last night, I noticed it right away. Your basement is full of mold—water molds, slime molds, New York City has hundreds of cases per year of persons being stricken by symptoms of mold toxicity. Do you know how many wet, dark basements there are in this city? It happens all the time, especially to contractors.”
Cristina contemplated the words. “Mold toxicity.”
“Yes,” the doctor asserted. “Sporadic exposure rarely causes serious long-term symptoms, but the temporary symptoms can be quite profound, especially in poorly vented areas.”
“Such as every friggin’ basement in Manhattan,” Jess commented. “Hell, when I first moved to the city, I had to drop some large coin getting the mold cleaned out of my damn closets in the Village.”
“Symptoms can cause mild fever, respiratory irritation, and varying degrees of hallucinosis,” the doctor went on. “In particular, myxomycetes molds produce airborne spores that in many cases lead to hallucinatory effects as well as paranoia. I’m not a mycologist but the blackish molds I noticed growing in your basement look like the same strain.”
Paranoia, too? Cristina couldn’t deny it. “All of a sudden your explanation sounds very reasonable.”
“I even felt woozy when I was bringing you up from there last night,” Paul told her. “It explains everything, honey, and like the doctor said, it’s not that serious.”
Jess was pinching his goatee. “Hey, Paul, remember Jack Molina we went to school with? He represented a landlord against a multiple-tenant class-action suit put up by Gogh and Michaels. The landlord was renting moldy basement apartments, and most of the tenants were getting sick as dogs and started seeing things.”
“Right,” Paul recalled. “But it turns out the landlord fudged the city health codes so he wouldn’t have to pay the cleaning fees. Molina lost his ass.”
“Well, Molina didn’t, but his client sure as hell did. Molina still snagged four-fifty per billing hour anyway.”
Jess and Paul erupted in laughter.
“Lawyers,” Britt complained. “What a jolly bunch.”
Dr. Stein wrote several prescriptions. “So that’s it in a nutshell, Cristina. You’ll be fine. But don’t go in the basement again until you get a bonded contractor to get rid of that mold. For the next few days, take this mild antibiotic; it’ll help clear any spores that might still be lodged in your upper respiratory tract. And also a mild sedative in case you have trouble sleeping.” He turned to Paul. “If headache or fever persist beyond forty-eight hours, have her in to see me.”
“Will do, Doctor.”
Stein bade his farewell, leaving Cristina feeling quite relieved but also foolish now as she lay in bed past noon surrounded by the people closest to her.
“Well there you have it,” Jess said.
“Mold spores,” Britt said. “It can give you a pretty good trip, I guess.”
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Cristina admitted. “Not only was I convinced that a woman had broken into the house but…”
“But what?” Paul asked.
“I can’t say it because you’d think I was loony.”
“Come on,” Britt egged.
Cristina smiled at her own embarrassment. “The woman was a vampire.”
Everybody laughed. “You’re loony,” Paul said, “but I still love you.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s a riot,” Britt said. “Last night you thought the Noxious Nun was in your basement!”
“It seems so. Blame my subconscious mind.”
“Just so long as you’re all right,” Paul said. “But until further notice, the basement’s off-limits.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I don’t need any more experiences like that.”
“Just the same,” Britt asked, “how are you feeling?”
“Like an ass, but aside from that and being a little tired, I feel all right.”
“Come on, everybody, let’s clear out of here so she can get dressed,” Britt ordered.
“Jess and I have to get back to the office anyway,” Paul said. “But if you need anything, call.”
“Thanks, honey,” Cristina bid and kissed him.
As Britt herded them out, she said, “I’ll hang around a while. We can go get lunch.”
“Great. I’m starved.”
The door didn’t quite close all the way. As Cristina dressed she could hear everyone talking in the foyer.
“Mystery of the day solved,” Jess joked. “Mold in the basement. Say, Paul. You ought to sue the diocese for selling you contaminated property!”
Paul and Jess roared laughter.
Cristina shook her head, and continued to spruce herself up. In the closet, though, some of her dresses seemed to be disarranged, as if they’d been rehung in haste. One hanger was empty. Was something missing? Stop
imagining things, she ordered herself. Next, in the bathroom, she was brushing her hair when something unconscious caught her eye.
What …
There, in the mirror’s reflection. Cristina turned very slowly and saw that the Noxious Nun figure Bruno had given her was sitting on a vanity shelf behind her. The figure’s fanged smile seemed to harass her, the toy-sized bowl of blood held as if it were being offered to her.
Cristina was certain she’d taken the figure upstairs a day or so ago, to display it with her other figurines.
She had absolutely no recollection of bringing it back down here.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
(I)
What to do, what to do? Rollin fretted. He sat in the chancel of his own empty church, not praying so much as worrying. Last night, from his window at the Ketchum Hotel, he’d seen enough to spark an escalating dread. Through his voyeur’s binoculars, not only had he witnessed Cristina Nichols masturbating unabashed—twice—he’d seen at least one other woman in the house, and—
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that woman before …
One of those homeless girls who’d always seemed to gravitate toward the house. Another thing he’d noted over time was this: it had been going on for almost a year, as though the house might be preparing them for something, coaching them. Like the house has recruited its own attendants, he abstracted.
Rollin only knew what he had been warned.
If it’s true…what in God’s name can I do about it, especially if I don’t even have access to the house anymore?
The priest errantly touched his ring. After Cristina Nichols had left, Rollin identified the woman he had seen in the studio window as one he often saw scrounging the streets, a dilapidated urchin still carrying around a ghost of a long-faded prettiness. Pink, bulky glasses, blondish hair, an orange halter top lately, he thought. Who is she? And those other ones she runs about with? At least they appeared better nourished than when he first began to notice them. He could only imagine who might be manipulating them…