by Ronald Malfi
By the time he turned onto Columbus Court, it was just after ten o’clock. He was starving—the last thing he’d eaten was an apple with peanut butter around noon—and his mood hadn’t changed much since getting his bumper nudged on the beltway. When he heard his cell phone chime, he groaned and fumbled it out of his jacket pocket. It was a text from Kathy, asking where he was. When he glanced back up, the pale shape of a man, illuminated by the Bronco’s headlights, filled his windshield.
David simultaneously jerked the wheel and jumped on the brake. Had he been driving a less weighty vehicle, the thing would have fishtailed or simply plowed into the man. But the Bronco was a sturdy ride, and it shuddered to a stop in the middle of the street.
“Holy shit.” The words wheezed out of him in sour notes, as if he were a punctured accordion. He spun around in his seat, craning his neck to glimpse the pale figure through the side window. David didn’t think he’d struck the man—he was still standing, after all—but he couldn’t be positive. The damn fool had appeared out of nowhere.
David climbed out of the Bronco, his sweat-dampened shirt growing chill in the cold night. He hustled around to the rear of the Bronco and saw the man still standing there, now tinted red in the glow of the Bronco’s taillights.
It was Deke Carmody, clad in nothing but a pair of threadbare boxer shorts. Deke’s ample gut spilled over the boxers’ waistband, a runway of black hair rising from his navel and fanning out across his heavy, sagging breasts. His feet were bare, and as David stared at him, Deke took a shuffling step toward him through a puddle of black water.
“Deke, what the hell are you doing out here?”
“That you, David?”
“Look at you.” David approached him, touched the man on one shoulder. Deke’s flesh was cold, wet, and knobby with goose bumps. The feel of it made David recoil, and he was quick to withdraw his hand. “What’s going on here, Deke?”
Deke blinked at him, as if to clear his vision. There was muddled confusion in his eyes. David wondered if Deke was in shock from having nearly been run over.
“Hey, David.” Deke broke into a wide smile. The sight of it chilled David further. “How you been?”
“Deke, man, why are you standing out here in the middle of the night in your underwear?”
Deke glanced down. His bare feet shuffled around in the puddle. His toes were practically blue. When he looked up and met David’s eyes again, there was still no clarity there.
“Come on,” David said, grasping Deke high on one forearm; it seemed his fingers sank too easily into the pliable flesh. “First thing, let’s get you inside.”
“Oh,” Deke said. “Okay, David.”
David led Deke up the walk of the man’s house. When he reached out and grasped the doorknob, he found the knob wouldn’t turn.
“Christ. Door’s locked, Deke. You locked yourself out. In your undies, no less.”
“Side door’s unlocked, I think,” Deke said.
“Let’s go see,” David said. Still clutching Deke’s forearm, he went around the side of the house and found the side door was, in fact, unlocked. And not just unlocked—open. David glanced at Deke again, hoping to ascertain some semblance of normalcy behind the man’s eerie, vacuous stare. But Deke Carmody’s eyes were like two dead headlamps. It was like some vital fuse had burned out inside of him.
“Go on,” David said, urging him toward the doorway. “Get in.”
Deke shuffled inside and David followed. The lights were off, and David felt along one wall for the switch. When he found it, he flipped it on, and the single bulb over the kitchen sink winked on. Deke quit shuffling and stared up at the naked bulb as if in awe.
Unmarried and without children, Deke Carmody lived alone. The house was the domicile of a lifelong bachelor, complete with dirty dishes stacked in the sink and the smell of burnt coffee in the air. But as David looked around, he saw that things had been changed, and in a way that set him on alert. David’s first thought was that Deke’s house had been burglarized . . . but on closer inspection, he realized that no burglar would bother doing the things to Deke’s house that David was observing. Kitchen chairs, for instance, hadn’t simply been knocked to the floor; instead, they were stacked on the kitchen table. The sight of them was jarring. When he turned around, he saw that all the cupboard doors stood open. Boxes of cereal and canned goods had been arranged in careful pyramids on the countertops. David couldn’t help himself—he thought of poltergeists and exorcisms.
“What’s been going on here, Deke?”
“You know,” Deke muttered, shuffling out of the kitchen and into the living room. He said no more.
David heard noises in the adjoining room. It was the TV, showing the rerun of some eighties sitcom.
“Sit down,” David said, beckoning Deke over to an upholstered armchair.
Deke sat without protest. In fact, he was smiling at David. Practically beaming.
That smile is worse than the blank look in his eyes, David thought. What the hell is wrong with him?
“I’ll be right back,” David said, and hurried down the hall. In the bathroom, he found a towel on a hook behind the door. He brought it to Deke, draping it over the big man’s broad shoulders.
“Thanks, David.”
“You want to tell me what the heck you were doing out there?”
Deke laughed. It was a nervous, tittering sound that should have come from a smaller person. “Damnedest thing. I guess I was sleepwalking.”
“Sleepwalking.”
“Used to do it a lot when I was a boy,” Deke said. “And again in my early twenties. It’s brought on by stress, you know. Doctors told me so.”
Ellie had suffered the occasional bout of somnambulism when she was four or five. It was eerie—David had once caught her ambling past him in the hallway in the middle of the night, which had scared the shit out of him but hadn’t woken the girl—but as eerie as it was, it seemed a quirk befitting of a young child. Deke was in his fifties. The thought of him roving around his house—Christ, the goddamn street—in his sleep was more than just unnerving.
“Is this a common occurrence?” David asked.
“The sleepwalking?”
“You wander around outside in your underwear regularly, or is this a special occasion?”
“For me?”
“Of course for you. Who else would I be talking about?”
“I don’t know.” Deke’s eyebrows arched and his mouth curled into what could only be described as a playful frown. “There could be other things here, too.”
David frowned. “What do you mean?” He looked around, noting that the walls were all bare and there were picture frames on the floor. A rug had been rolled up into a tube and set against the jamb of the front door in the foyer. The gauzy curtains hanging over the windows were all tied together in knots.
“What have you been up to in here, Deke?”
“I don’t know if it’s something new,” Deke said, and it took David a moment or two to realize he was answering David’s previous question. “If I’ve been doing it for a while, I’ve been asleep and wouldn’t know.” And then he laughed—a great bassoon blast that caused David’s toes to curl in his shoes.
“Are you on any medication?”
“Cholesterol meds,” Deke said. “Nexium for my ’flux.”
“Anything heavier?”
This time, Deke’s scowl was genuine. “I look like a drug addict to you, David?”
“I’m just trying to help. I almost ran you over out there. I can’t say I like the idea of you wandering around the neighborhood in a daze every night. And your house . . .”
“What about it?” Deke said, glancing around. If he recognized the unusualness of the place, his face did not register it.
“You got any liquor in the house?”
“You want a drink, buddy?”
“No,” David said. There was a credenza against one wall, a few bottles of vodka and bourbon on it. None were open, and he
couldn’t see any used glasses. “I mean, have you been drinking?”
Deke waved a hand at him. Don’t be silly, his expression said. Some of the old Deke was filtering back into his features now. His eyes looked less dead than they had just moments ago.
“Why don’t you get to bed and I’ll lock up on my way out,” David suggested. For some reason, he was growing increasingly uncomfortable about being in Deke’s house. Coupled with that discomfort was the feeling that he was overlooking something very obvious—and very important—and that feeling was setting him on edge.
“Okay, boss. Whatever you say.” Deke got up from the armchair in a huff—it seemed to take great effort—and handed David the towel. His rounded gut glistened with rainwater. “I got some long johns around here someplace,” he said, pausing to peer behind the TV.
“You keep your long johns behind the television?” David said.
Deke stood upright, as if suddenly considering the absurdity of it all. When he turned to look at David, his eyes were unfocused again.
“Maybe I should call for an ambulance,” David suggested.
“Do it and I’ll brain you. I’m no invalid.” Deke’s voice had gone deadly serious.
“Something’s off with you.”
“Who the hell asked you to come in here, anyway?” There was real malice behind Deke’s words, enough to make David consider bolting from the house right then and there. It was as if some switch had been flipped, instantly altering Deke’s personality.
Drugs, David thought . . . although he had never known Deke Carmody to abuse narcotics. Alcohol, maybe, but not drugs. What else could it be?
Deke slammed a palm against the TV and the screen went dead. Then he turned and grinned idiotically at David. The large man opened his mouth, presumably to say something, but nothing came out. Instead, he liberated a fart that sounded like a trumpet blare, sustaining it for a good five seconds.
“Jesus Christ,” David said, too stunned to show emotion.
“Go home,” Deke said, turning around. “You shouldn’t be here.” He ambled down the darkened hallway toward his bedroom, his hands dangling limply at his sides, the canvas of his broad, pallid back speckled with pimples and reddish striations. Like a ghost fading into a fog bank, Deke Carmody vanished into the darkness at the far end of the hallway.
David stood there in the living room for perhaps thirty seconds, listening to the grunting sounds of Deke climbing into his bed. Almost instantly the man began snoring.
David went to one of the windows and untied the curtains. They fell away from the pane, only to reveal a series of carpentry nails that had been pounded into the sill. The sight caused a thick lump to form at the back of David’s throat. He went to the next window, untied the curtains, and found a similar display of carpentry nails there, too.
Go home. You shouldn’t be here.
David returned to the bathroom, hung the towel back on the hook, and was about to turn and leave when he happened to glance down into the toilet. What he saw there caused him to freeze—and not solely in a halt of his movements, but he could literally feel his entire body suddenly grow cold.
The toilet bowl was filled with blood.
Not just a little bit, and not the superficial hue of a flesh wound or a nosebleed diluted in water. The blood in the bowl was the startling Christmas red of arterial blood, and as David stared at it, he thought he could see small clumps of fibrous material in it. There were spatters on the seat and some reddish spray down the side of the toilet tank. A few bright stars stood out sharply on the ecru tiles. One particular spill had been smeared by David’s own shoe, most likely when he had first come in here to get the towel; he had inadvertently left a shoe print of blood on the pale green bath mat. His gaze levitated until he saw splotches of blood in the sink, too. Crimson droplets littered the countertop. The mirror was speckled with red teardrops.
How had he missed all this just moments ago? Had he been so focused on helping Deke that he had just overlooked it all? Given the condition of the bathroom, it seemed impossible.
He wanted to wash his face and hands—just looking at all that blood, not to mention the blackish clumps floating in it, made him feel unclean—but he wouldn’t touch this sink. Instead, he went down the hall, into the kitchen, and scrubbed himself at the kitchen sink, where there was nothing more ominous than dirty dishes and empty glasses in the basin.
He considered going against Deke’s wishes and calling 911 after all. He could request paramedics come out and take a look at Deke. Would they examine the blood, too? Deke hadn’t looked hurt—he certainly hadn’t been bleeding from anywhere that David could see—but that blood had come from somewhere.
In the end, he decided not to call. Instead, he checked in on Deke before leaving the house. The big man lay like a beached whale on his mattress, one pasty leg dangling over the side of the bed. His snores were immense, thunderous rumblings. For a moment, David considered flipping on the lights . . . but he feared what that light might reveal of Deke’s bedroom. Before he could chase the thought away, he imagined Deke sprawled out across a mattress sodden and black with blood, carpentry nails driven into the hardwood floor like booby traps.
“Deke?” It came out in a whisper.
Deke’s only response was a guttural snort.
“Okay,” David said. “Good night.”
He left the house, thumbing the lock on the side door before pulling it closed behind him. The hunger he’d felt for hours had fled, leaving in its wake a sickening hollowness. He knew that when he went to sleep that night, he would see that bloody stew floating in Deke’s toilet behind his eyelids. All of a sudden, the thing with the geese seemed trivial.
When he got home, Kathy met him in the foyer. In a pair of gold silk pajamas and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she was already made up for bed.
“Where’ve you been?”
“I stopped at Deke Carmody’s house,” he said, stepping out of his shoes. “I caught him wandering around outside in his underwear.”
“What?”
She followed him into the bedroom, and he told her what had happened as he undressed. Once he finished, he said, “What do you think? Should I call someone? Paramedics?”
“Maybe it’s cancer.”
“What is?”
“All the blood,” Kathy said. “He could be sick.”
“Maybe. But what about the other stuff? The condition of his house and the nails in the windowsills?”
“Early stages of dementia?” Kathy suggested.
“Since when?”
“It’s just a guess.”
“I don’t feel good about this. Not at all. I should call an ambulance or something.”
“If he asked you not to call, then you should respect that.”
He considered this for perhaps five seconds.
Kathy said, “Maybe he’s going through some medical issue and doesn’t want anyone to know. You just happened to find him—”
“Standing outside in his underwear, yeah,” David finished.
“Does he have any family that you know of? Someone we could call?”
“I have no idea. Even if I knew that he did, I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with anyone.”
Kathy sighed. “I’m just not sure what to tell you except that, for now, you should respect his wishes and not call anyone.”
“Yeah,” David said, though he wasn’t sure he actually agreed.
“It’s probably an illness. When was the last time you were over at his house?”
“Not for a while.”
“Isn’t he on disability?”
“For falling off scaffolding at a construction site,” David said. “Nothing to do with cancer. Or dementia or anything like that.” Or with a bowlful of blood, was what he wanted to say. “It was so weird, Kath.”
“Then go check on him first thing in the morning. But if the man doesn’t want you prying into his private business, you have to respect that.”
“Do I? I’ve got no responsibility beyond that?”
“No.”
“Even if it is dementia and he doesn’t know what’s good for him? And that he might be putting himself in harm and not even realizing it?”
“You’re hypothesizing. Talk to him tomorrow and figure things out then. He might have a clearer head by then and be ready to talk to you. You’ll have a better picture of what you’re dealing with, too, and can make an informed decision.”
“Spoken like a true therapist,” he said, exhausted.
“That’s what I am,” she said. “Wait till you get my bill.”
He smiled at her. “Okay. You’re right.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I was,” he said. “Now, not so much.”
“I was going to go to bed. Would you rather I stay up with you for a while?”
“No, hon. Get some sleep.” He kissed her forehead.
In the kitchen, he began to fix himself a turkey sandwich, but then thought of the geese, and decided to go for some ham and cheese on white bread. It wasn’t that he was hungry, but he knew he had to eat something. After the first bite, his hunger returned, and he not only devoured the whole sandwich, but a handful of Doritos and a Coke, too. Just as he finished, Ellie appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Hey, Little Spoon,” he said, getting up from the table. “What are you doing up so late?”
“Bad dream,” she said.
“Monsters?”
Solemnly, Ellie nodded.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s tuck you back in.”
The bedsheets were in a ball at the foot of the bed, the comforter on the floor. As Ellie climbed into bed, David gathered up the blankets, then tucked Ellie beneath them. He smoothed back the hair from her forehead, then planted a kiss there.
“You were there,” she said. “In my nightmare.”
“Was I the hero who saved the day?”
She shook her head. “No. You were crying. You were screaming, Daddy.”