Like an animal in search for food, I combed every square inch of the deli for even the slightest clue as to what the hell was going on, but found absolutely nothing, not a shred of evidence that would lead me to believe that someone had indeed broken into my deli.
Was it possible that someone had stowed away inside prior to closing? Maybe, but the probability of this scenario quickly melted away as I mentally ran through every step I took the prior evening to ensure the deli's security.
I wondered: could this all be some elaborate practical joke? After all, my employees had the keys. One of them could have come by in the middle of the night and staged the whole scenario. But to what motive? To scare me? Annoy me? Surely it would not prove any worth other than their dismissal.
I cleaned up the mess and tried to ignore what had once again happened, but with much difficulty. I went about my business that day, but my mind flitted elsewhere: on the mystery of the missing milk.
"Boss?"
Eddie stood leaning on a mop handle, an inquisitive look in his brown eyes.
"Yes, Eddie?"
"I have an idea. I think I know how we can find out about the missing milk."
I smiled. The thought of spending the night inside the deli had indeed crossed my mind, but I for one didn't wish to risk the safety of myself or any of the employees, especially if there was indeed an intruder at hand. It simply wasn't worth it, especially since the only thing missing were a few cartons of milk. And the police wouldn't stake it out either--there was no evidence of a break-in. "I don't think--"
"I have a friend," Eddie interrupted, eager to share his idea. "He just bought a new camcorder. He showed it to me yesterday, told me it can record on a videocassette for up to six hours. I asked him if he wouldn't mind me borrowing it for a night. He said it would be okay."
My heart started pounding.
"We could set it up on the deli counter," Eddie demonstrated, "facing the cooler. Let it run all night."
I walked over to Eddie, put a hand on his shoulder. "You're in the wrong business."
Eddie smiled. "I can be back with it in less than an hour."
I took the mop from him and did the floors myself.
Eddie did all the work, setting up the camcorder as if he had years of cinematography experience under his belt. We cleared two feet of counter space, the camcorder resting upon the stainless steel surface, lens facing the dairy cooler. I'd come to the assumption that based on the somewhat cool surface temperature of the cartons in the open cooler that morning, the milk had been disturbed sometime during the early morning hours, well after closing. The coating of condensation seconded this premise, and we programmed the timer to start at eleven and run the tape at its slowest speed, which would last six hours, through five AM.
Satisfied that all was in working order, I thanked Eddie up and down, then locked up for the night.
I stayed awake the entire night.
I arrived at the deli the next morning at five AM.
The cooler door was open, two cartons of milk on the floor. Looking inside, I saw more had been taken. Other cartons lay on their sides, tipped over on the steel shelving. A real mess. This time I didn't even clean it up. I hurried over to the camcorder instead; it was still running. The timer read 5:57, with the seconds ticking away. Three minutes left.
Whoever, or whatever took the missing milk, would be on the video.
By the time the camera finished recording, Eddie had arrived, four hours before his normal starting time. "I had to see, boss."
I needed a witness, just in case.
Minutes later we arrived at my house. I put on a pot of coffee and buttered up a couple of plain bagels that had just come out of the oven at the deli. Eddie handed me the tape and I put it in the VCR.
I hit play.
The scene was a familiar one, the dairy cooler at eye-level from the position behind the deli counter. Nothing special to see: egg cartons, juice, cream cheese, and the infamous milk cartons. The quality of the video wasn't great--grainy and surveillance-like--but it held enough of a picture that would allow me to catch the culprit in the act, if one indeed existed.
Anxious, I ran the tape in fast forward. The scene didn't change. I half expected to see Charlie or Greg mischievously tip-toeing in at some point to commit the ill-behaved deed. Actually, I was hoping this to be the case. But with discomfort, I knew in my heart that I'd find something else here on this video. Something I'd have trouble explaining.
After nearly twenty minutes of fast forwarding, something appeared.
I immediately stopped the tape, pressed paused, then rewound it until the exact moment it first appeared.
A wisp of fog, snaking in at the lower left corner.
It looked like the tip of a finger in this moment of freeze-frame, an illusory gray nail pointing up towards the cooler as if motioning in the direction to which it intended to travel. When I finally depressed the pause button, the tendril came to life, seeping into the picture in a near slow-motion fashion, pulling other flowing limbs behind it until they formed a soft blanket of mist framing the lower portion of the video. Soon slivers of fog broke off, rising from the body of mist, clouding the scene.
The tape ran for a few minutes and Eddie and I watched in absolute silence, our anxious breaths the only sounds in the room as the screen filled with fog.
All of a sudden we heard footsteps. They came from the videotape.
All this time I hadn't realized the tape also contained an audio portion. Shaking, I raised the volume on the television, then watched as the mystery of the missing milk slowly unraveled.
The footsteps grew louder, and then I could hear the swinging doors leading from the kitchen creak open and sway on their hinges. Once the doors ceased I heard the slow plodding of footsteps upon the tiles. The fog grew even thicker, nearly consuming the entire view, and I feared that I would not be able to see the culprit through the murky obstruction.
Then, a shadow appeared. A dark branch in the fog, emerging to grasp the cooler handle, pulling the door open. The fog swirled, billowing in a tiny chaos of circles, clearing just enough for me to see a slim, bony hand removing a milk carton from within, tipping over others.
I shuddered. Eddie and I remained silent, waiting, waiting, waiting...
The hand reached into the cooler one more time before it sank from sight, leaving the door ajar. The footsteps thudded, a thin-bodied shadow emerging, nearly floating across the scene back to the left towards the kitchen. I studied the grainy scene with great intensity, hoping for a glimpse of the intruder's face.
And then in just one flicker, in one fleeting moment of video, I saw it. The face. It lasted only briefly, but it was just enough to send shivers across my skin. I rewound the tape then pressed pause, freezing the eerie image of the milk thief on the screen.
It loomed through a brief clearing of fog, amidst the sudden emptiness: two dark, empty eyes, sunken cheeks, a wrinkled nose, a portion of a frown. The features of a woman whose age defied logic, a woman who looked older than time itself.
I pressed play, and then, with the fog, she was gone.
Eddie and I had become a team by default, and we both took the day off planning our next move, which seemed to be a challenging given: we would wait in the deli tonight for our mystery woman to show up. At the moment this seemed the only logical choice of action, a decision made, really, due to a lack of another viable alternative. But when the occasion finally rolled around after hours and hours of nervous anticipation, we realized that facing this intruder would be a difficult task to carry out, especially when poised in the dark, alone with all the ambiances of a place so unfamiliar during an otherwise unoccupied time. Intruder or no intruder, I had become increasingly uncomfortable with the situation. Eddie too, it seemed.
The hours passed: eleven, midnight, one AM. We shared coffees and whispered now and then about what we might say to her upon her arrival.
It didn't matter though. We could have practiced our
lines for weeks, and it still wouldn't have been an adequate preparation to calm the fears that struck us when she finally came to claim her milk.
Hiding behind the deli counter, we first heard the distant shuffle of footsteps emanating from the kitchen. We slowly peeked over the edge and noticed the silent approach of mist creeping along the floor. Then the shuffle grew into a not-too-distant plodding of heavy footsteps
...thump...thump...thump...
slapping the tiles of the kitchen floor.
Finally, the kitchen doors opened, a gray skeletal hand appearing around the edge of the frame. I heard a familiar creaking sound and wondered if it had come from the hinges on the door or the joints on the angular fingers of the reaching hand.
My breath soon escaped me, my heart clawing at my burning throat as the rest of her appeared: this horribly disheveled woman, her upper body nearly motionless as her heavy footfalls slowly carried her into the deli. She wore a threadbare dress, its once beautiful lacework now tattered and torn, dangling lazily like broken webs caught in a gentle breeze. The exposed skin on her hands and face bore a tone paler than parchment, thin wisps of hair dangling lifelessly from her scalp in loose tangled bunches. And then her face. That same horrible countenance I saw on the video: lost, desperate, cold and desolate. Terribly alone.
I fell paralyzed, realizing now that my fear would not allow me to confront this mystery woman. She was unearthly, ghastly, unapproachable. I watched unmoving as she gave a repeat performance of the scene on the video, retrieving her prize with the utter necessity of the vagrant she presumably was. She then exited the deli through the kitchen doors, taking the milk and her ghostly fog with her.
We scurried around to the front of the counter. I saw clumps of mud on the tile floor and I wondered why it hadn't been there before tonight. We pursued through the kitchen doors, Eddie in the lead. I took one quick glance back and noticed that the mud had vanished. My harried mind wondered if it had ever been there at all.
In the kitchen we saw the woman walking toward the delivery entrance. I yelled "hey," but she paid me no heed. She kept walking.
Right through the locked door.
I nearly fainted at the sight of her being there one moment, then completely gone the next. Eddie cowered back, grabbing my shirt sleeve, trembling like a wet puppy. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them, hoping I'd find her there in the kitchen just as she had been seconds ago.
The last of the fog seeped under the door after her.
I took out my keys, unlocked the door and raced into the rear parking lot. I could see the woman in the distance behind the wooden fence leading to the Old Grace Cemetery. She paced in the same fevered slumber, one plodding foot in front of the next, her hands in front of her holding two pints of milk. We pursued on foot, running after her, calling hey woman! and stop, thief! Anything that would dissuade her from moving further away. But she kept on moving, passing through the iron fencing of the graveyard with the same ease of the wisps of fog trailing behind her. I shuddered at the daunting sight, my legs turning weak on me.
We pursued, climbing over the fence, watching her gray dress billowing in the distance as we landed in the cemetery. Short of breath, our dragging footsteps slowed our pursuit.
Suddenly, the woman stopped, poised in front of a tombstone.
And then, she vanished.
I'd made up my mind as soon as I saw her disappear. Eddie and I retrieved the shovels from the basement of the deli and returned to the plot where she disappeared. I felt horribly uncomfortable taking this extreme course of action, but then what other explanation could I give myself for these nightmarish events? If I didn't pursue this matter further, I would undoubtedly spend the rest of my waking and sleeping life anguishing over this horrifying conundrum.
The tombstone was fairly new, and had been swathed with fresh flowers. The first line of the epitaph was visible through the mask of stems and petals:
Here Lies Our Beloved Daughter
In the partial moon's light, Eddie and I dug, his intrigue forcing him to become my willing partner in this macabre crime. It took us nearly two hours before we hit the coffin, another half hour to clear it free of the dirt.
I looked at what I'd done and wondered if I'd gone crazy.
It didn't matter. I had to know.
I hunkered down in the grave next to the coffin in a small depression I dug for myself to stand in. In the moments of silence that followed, shivers raced through my body, and I looked up to see Eddie standing in utter silence, trembling, waiting for me to lift the coffin's lid.
I wedged my fingers underneath....
...and stopped. I heard something. A noise. From within the coffin. A gentle scratching. Then, ever so slight, a whimper. Dear God, was this woman somehow alive?
I held my breath, then forced the lid open with my fingertips. Once I had a firm grip, I pulled it all the way up.
Fear. Cold. Anxiety. Dread. All those bad things and more joined forces to create an unexplainable, new emotion that thrust itself upon me in the moment I laid eyes in the coffin.
The woman, she sure as hell lay there. Utterly dead, her skin blanched and withered, a rictus grin of decay smiling up at me. Beside her, scattered alongside her head, arms, and feet, were at least a dozen empty milk cartons.
Clutching her lifeless breast was a naked newborn child, alive, its mouth sticky and stained with milk. It began to cry and I picked it up, handing it to Eddie before I quickly pulled myself out of the grave. I took one last look at the woman, her tooth-filled grin and empty eye sockets seeming to thank me for what I'd just done. We spent the next hour filling the grave, keeping our eyes on the infant as it lay in the grass, speaking to the night air.
Once our task had finally been completed, I picked up the baby and staggered from the site. But I then remembered something. I stopped and walked back to the tombstone. The flowers had fallen away, revealing the epitaph. I read it aloud:
Here Lies Our Beloved Daughter
Who Met Her Fate Too Soon
And To Her Grave She Brings Her Child
Six Months In The Womb
I swallowed a dry lump in my throat that tasted of soil, seeing the date of her death etched in stone, a date exactly three months ago. Nearly blinded by amazement, I made my way back to the deli where I fed the baby a bottle of warm, fresh milk.
Off the Hook
Fear and affliction nearly consumed Prescott Chase. He felt like a piece of chewed meat, ready to be spit out, stepped on. Trying to hide, he hid his face behind the frayed collar of his denim jacket, eyes darting from side to side in paranoid skirts. Quiet, clean-shaven, the stranger just ahead entered a seedy run-down tenement behind an unoccupied office building, a half mile west of Bloomsbury Square on Swan Place. Prescott followed, barely keeping pace, shrugging his shoulders in effort to fend off the determined nighttime winds.
For a moment he took his attention from the back of the stranger's head and stared down at the jagged impressions of his worn sneakers in the soppy trash on the cement floor. The scrunching sounds they made tossed eerie echoes about the silent hallway, adding unease to the cold chills permeating his frail, weathered body.
He peered back up, ran a trembling hand over his face and gripped his sore cheeks in restless examination of the numerous steel doors lining the dimly lit hallway. Shut, presumably bolted, their set permanence bisected the gray cinderblock walls with untrespassable accuracy. Distressed, his imagination contrived shadowed beings lurking just inches away behind each tiny peephole, deranged thoughts flitting in and out of their heads, diabolical sneers taunting him as if this place had suddenly become some polluted ward in an institution for the insane. As if he were being admitted as a sweet, freshman invalid.
The stranger's worn leather jacket crackled as he stepped deeper into the labyrinthine building, leading Prescott into a shaft drenched in darkness. Prescott's nerves flamed with anxiety. Bitter acid crawled along the walls of his intestines, sharp claws cleav
ing the inside of his skull, demanding pangs tearing at the nerve endings beneath his weathered skin.
Was this the onset of death? Absolutely, he thought. And it gets much worse than this too.
At the end of the unlighted hallway they arrived at a door. Prescott heard the faint metallic snap of a key slipping into a deadbolt. The lock popped and the stranger paced forward. Inside.
Prescott followed.
"Have a seat on the couch," the stranger asserted.
He was in a small studio flat that should have been left behind long ago for the rats and roaches. Paint chips serrated the walls like a peeling sunburn, a moldering rug buckled under his feet like a slithering serpent. At the center of the room a bar stool and beverage crate sat positioned in front of the hole-ridden couch. Lumps of yellow foam burst through the frayed fabric like scattered growths of fungi. The floor was a dusty graveyard for cigarette butts.
Prescott swallowed a dry lump in his throat, then did as he was told, and sat on the couch.
Minutes passed. He stared down at his trembling knees, compulsively running his thumbs across them as he waited. For a moment he considered slipping away but the stranger finally appeared holding two plastic cups filled with a clear brown liquid. He handed one to Prescott then sat on the bar stool opposite the couch.
The burly nameless man whom Prescott met a mere hour earlier at the underground rave on West Row slowly reached down into the crate between them and retrieved a small mirror. He placed it flat on his lap, reflection-side up. Prescott's mouth watered with utter relief as the man plucked a vial and blade from his shirt pocket and cut out four powdery white lines of cocaine atop the mirror. He placed a three-inch plastic straw he also retrieved from his pocket alongside the drugs, and offered the concoction to Prescott. One-handed, Prescott accepted it eagerly, like an unfed dog, staring at his own sunken reflection as he filled each nostril.
Dregs of Society Page 8