Hoarder

by Armando D. Muñoz

  Ian hoped that the rolling radiator would not draw Missy’s attention and bring her back, but he had a feeling Missy heard only what she wanted to hear. Fortunately for him, house disrepair didn’t seem very high on her list of concerns.

  Ian was faced with a critical decision. Exit the basement window as Keith had ordered him, by word and later by the waving of his hand, or venture back up the unsafe slide into the house to help him out, should he need it. He really didn’t need to think about it. They were brothers, after all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dani journeyed through the upstairs hallway. There was a thin channel that snaked like a creek from side to side that Dani twisted her way through. She thought her best bet for getting out of this house was to find an upstairs window and climb out. She could manage a second story drop. She was not afraid of heights, and she was good at climbing and gymnastics. A landing roll on the lawn would not hurt her, at least not much.

  Dani hoped she could find a window. She remembered seeing many when they first approached the house, and they had all been covered. During her downstairs journey from the kitchen to dining room to living room, she could not recall seeing one window. Dani realized that Missy didn’t just cover her windows; she kept them hidden from view on the inside.

  Dani came upon the first doorway on the left. As she looked into the room, she noticed that the door was stuck in the open position by the hoard on each side. Privacy did not appear to be an issue inside Missy’s house.

  Dani figured that the room she was looking into was Missy’s bedroom. It held the most sparkling and colorful hoard in the house. It was an even split between the room of an adolescent girl and a landfill. There were unicorns and rainbows and everything was sprinkled in colored glitter and confetti, including the trash. There were no windows visible inside, even though Dani was sure the room had to have one. The hoard climbed so high against every wall, a window could be anywhere. She’d come back and search for a window only if she came upon no other options.

  Dani continued through the corridor, coming upon the second door on the left, which was also wedged open. She knew what room it was before she looked inside, cupping a hand over her nose to lessen the stench. When she did stop in the doorway, she was appalled to a new level. This made the most heinous Honey Bucket she had ever been in (at a skateboarding competition, which made sense – boys) look like a model of cleanliness in comparison.

  This was perhaps the darkest room of the house, cast in a dim, brown shade, and looking up, Dani saw that the light bulb was covered in crap. The whole ceiling looked like it had been on the receiving end of explosive diarrhea. She didn’t know how that could be possible, but obviously it was. The sink held a stagnant soup, filled to overflowing. Bugs backstroked in the chunky stew. The floor was covered with a carpet of used toilet paper and maxi-pads. The shower curtain was thankfully closed, concealing who knew what horrors behind it. The water stained and mold streaked shower curtain had more than a few brown handprints on it. Even the mirror on the wall had shit stains in the center, right where the looker’s face should be. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most shit-faced of them all?

  Dani tried to ignore the room’s most sickening centerpiece, the toilet. Her eyes kept passing over it without really seeing it. And then her eyes fell on a cage sitting atop the toilet tank. There was a cat inside of it, its white fur slathered in brown, just like every other surface of the bathroom.

  Dani knew she couldn’t save every cat at the moment, her own immediate escape was mandatory, but there was no way she could live with herself if she didn’t free this cat covered in its keeper’s feces. Dani turned her head back, took a deep breath of the hallway air, which wasn’t very fresh either, and then she entered the bathroom.

  Dani slipped more than stepped toward the toilet. The gruesome details of her destination could no longer be avoided. The toilet had a mountain of shit rising out of it, the top over four feet above the bowl. It was almost like a hard brown volcano with runny brown lava going down the sides. A Styrofoam hamburger container stuck out of the middle, indicating where much of the mountain originated.

  When the cage was close enough, Dani carefully reached over the toilet bowl to unlatch the door. The latch was crusty and harder to open than the others. She had to jiggle the latch to get the crap to crack, and that sent a flurry of cockroaches scurrying over the toilet tank and up the wall. How long could this cat have been in this cage, that the lock could corrode this much? Dani didn’t really need an answer to that question, she was mad enough already.

  The lock on the cage finally disengaged, and with the crumbling of crap, Dani pulled the cage door open. The cat was desperate for freedom and leapt out. Its back legs hit the top of the toilet bowl lid, knocking it toward the mound of shit.

  Dani took a quick step back and slipped, eager to get far enough away in case shit mountain avalanched toward her.

  The toilet lid hit the waste and stopped. The mound was solidified and could not be easily moved from the bowl it rose from. Dozens more cockroaches scattered from the back of the lid around the front and down the shitty slope.

  Dani was revolted but relieved. At least she hadn’t been hit with waste. She looked at the cat as it ran out of the bathroom, trailing toilet paper from both of its back paws. She intended to follow it, but her eyes turned to the bathtub. She looked above the shower curtain and saw the top edge of a thin window. She had to investigate it. This could be her escape hatch.

  Dani slid over the TP and maxi-pads toward the bathtub. She now knew altogether too much about Missy’s feminine hygiene, such as the severity of her flow (excessive). Dani stopped before the tub and grabbed a non-soiled edge of the shower curtain, which hung outside instead of inside the basin. Her fingers broke the cobwebs that connected the curtain to the wall, proof that the tub had long been off limits. She yanked the stiff curtain open and found out why.

  The bathtub was filled to the brim with excrement. It appeared that once the toilet had overfilled, the tub had taken over as the crapper. The turds had clogged the drain, and no amount of Draino was going to open up the pipe. This waste remained wet in the center, while dry and cracked on the edges. A mummified, screeching cat was half submerged in the waste like a fossil stuck in the tar pits.

  Dani wrenched her disbelieving eyes away from the cat carcass as she remembered her reason for pulling open the shower curtain. She looked up at the thin window, only about a foot and a half wide and two feet tall. Now that the whole window was revealed, she was disappointed to discover boards nailed over it. The window looked just big enough to squeeze through, if she could remove the boards. In order to reach and pry them off, she would have to stand in fifty plus gallons of Missy’s waste. There was no way around it, and there was no way she was going to do it. There had to be other windows upstairs that weren’t situated over a sewer.

  Dani looked at the cat corpse and wondered how horrible it must have been to die in this fecal sludge. She began to retch. She was surprised she hadn’t started retching earlier.

  Dani yanked the shower curtain closed, but she knew the image of what lay beyond it would be seared into her mind for life. She turned away and hurried out of the bathroom with an arm over her lower face.

  Dani stopped in the hallway and gulped in the stale but considerably less putrid air. She couldn’t stop thinking of the cat’s frozen scream, and she wished it was Missy stuck in her shit pit for eternity. It was what she deserved. “Fucking cat killer,” she seethed.

  Dani’s rage and desire to bring Missy to justice got her moving again. She squeezed through the path, which took her to the one door on the right side of the hallway. This door was not wide open like all the others; it was cracked open only a few inches. Dani could not see what lay inside, although if she had to bet, she’d put her money on more hoard.

  Dani pushed on the door and it started to open without resistance, which made it unlike any other door in the house. Maybe there was somethin
g special about this room that required concealment and easy entrance. The door opened half a foot, and that’s when the smell hit her. This was worse than the moldy basement, worse than the rancid refrigerator, and worse than the sea of shit in the bathroom. What the smell was, Dani couldn’t say and didn’t want to guess, but it disturbed her so deeply she chickened out.

  Dani was normally not one to turn down a dare or get frightened off. Her hanging around with boys all the time had thickened her skin. It wasn’t the absence of the guys that made Dani lose her bravery. It was something deeper, a survival instinct that made her shut the door. If she had to describe the smell, the only words that might fit would be graveyard gas. She knew for a fact that there was death behind the door, and she was not willing to face it.

  “No way.” Dani realized that she had spoken without thought to her volume, and she looked back down the hallway to make sure she wasn’t being followed. Missy wasn’t there, and that wasn’t a surprise. Noise would have announced her arrival. It was time to get moving again.

  Dani continued her trek through the corridor toward the open door at the end. She glanced down to watch her footing and saw a chunk of soiled toilet paper stuck to her ankle, much like the cat that had escaped the bathroom before her. She had to stop and get rid of this bathroom tagalong. Dani stepped up to a dresser, and she ran her ankle against an edge until the crappy wad found another surface to stick to.

  An extended, wheezing cough came out of the open door at the end of the hall, making Dani yelp in surprise. She didn’t think it could be Missy, unless Missy had a hidden, alternate route upstairs she hadn’t discovered yet. The voice that followed the cough made her gasp.

  “Who’s there?!”

  The voice that came from the back room was definitely not Missy’s. The tone had a genderless quality to it. She could also hear the low voices from a familiar television program, possibly the same one that had been broadcasting downstairs when the TV fell and…

  Dani broke the thought. She knew the questioning voice was not from the television; it was louder than that. The voice also shared the quality of those coughs, sickly. Despite Will and Keith’s assurances, Missy’s house did have a second occupant, a hidden hoarder.

  Dani quickly weighed her options. She could retreat the way she came, but that would take her back to where, and who, she had escaped from. She could retreat to the bathroom window, but there was no guarantee that she could get the boards off, assuming she didn’t drown in the La Missy Shit Pits first. There was also that mystery room she hadn’t entered, but that was not among the options she was willing to consider.

  The voice ahead called out again, and made Dani’s decision for her.

  “I need help!”

  Dani pegged the voice as that of an invalid. She’d had enough experience to learn their tonal quality during the years her grandmother had been in a nursing home before she died. Grammy’s originally lilting voice had grown deeper as she had deteriorated, becoming genderless as well. There was also an innate weakness she recognized in invalids’ voices, and she heard it in the mystery speaker ahead of her.

  A distressing thought occurred to Dani. What if the speaker, the invalid, needed help because he or she was being kept prisoner inside Missy’s house, just like the cats? Could there be a huge cage ahead with a person locked inside, underfed, dehydrated, and soiled in his/her own waste? Dani’s mission so far had been all about avoiding detection. Now here she was, about to reveal herself to offer help to someone who might need it.

  Dani didn’t want to call out in response, since she still had to avoid Missy. She walked forward, and the closer she got to the room, the worse the smell became. She waved away the odor and some accompanying flies, but neither could be shooed. She could pinpoint some of the stench as feces, but it wasn’t the same smell as the bathroom, or any of the previous rooms. Every room inside Missy’s house seemed to have its own distinct stink. Vomitus variety was the rank spice of Missy’s life.

  “Help me!” the hidden person called.

  Dani stopped before entering the room. She pulled the handheld camera out of her pocket. She had a feeling that whatever lied ahead would require documentation.

  Dani stepped into the room at the end of the hallway. First she saw the television atop a food waste packed stand. Sure enough, it was tuned to the same trash talk show that had been playing downstairs. Missy’s mysterious housemate appeared to share the same taste in entertainment. Unless this person couldn’t change the channel and was forced to watch what Missy wanted them to.

  When Dani saw the occupant across the room, facing the TV, she immediately regretted her decision. She should have decided on another plan of escape. Even the scary graveyard room that had turned her feet around at the threshold would have been a better choice than this. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, and opened them fresh to verify her vision, and what she saw didn’t change.

  Dani thought Oh my God I’m so stupid! What is it? WHAT IS IT!?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dani was a strong girl. She was used to the rough realities of life, and while she might not like the bad things, she could deal with them. Reality wasn’t always nice or fair, but it was reliable. The person that she saw in the bedroom stretched her idea of reality past the acceptance point. That uncertainty made her feel like she was walking through a nightmare, where reality was lost and monsters lurked. That’s what Dani thought she was looking at. A monster.

  Panic flooded Dani’s system fast, and she had to fight it off in order to keep control and not do something she might regret. Like scream. She was a tough girl in life, but in her nightmares she ran and screamed from the scaries, like any young girl would.

  The trashy talk show that provided a constant stream of shouting broke through Dani’s panic, and she seized on it. This monster was a person, like she often saw on a different kind of reality show that she watched on other, more educational channels (or so they purported of their sensational programming). Shows like The Guy With the 125 Pound Scrotum. Or The Man Who Lost His Face To A Monkey. Or The Woman With Six Uteruses On the Outside, that had been a particularly memorable episode. If she could just remember that this monst… this person in front of her was just like the unfortunates on those shock ailment shows, she could deal with it.

  Sitting on a giant sofa with an abnormally wide seat (perhaps it was a sofa bed, she couldn’t tell) against a mold-covered wall was the second hoarder, who appeared as genderless as its voice. Dani safely assumed this person was a hoarder, since this room was as much of a garbage dump as the rest of the house. This hoarder’s thin and stringy brown hair was long, unkempt, and gummed together with food. There was some squiggly chin and mole hair on its face, but not enough to signify gender.

  What made this hoarder so grotesque was its sheer size. Dani wondered if there was a size category beyond morbidly obese. This hoarder had to be one thousand pounds, and then Dani thought that might be a gross underestimate. Too large for clothes, this hoarder had only a torn, food and human waste stained sheet covering its lap. The exposed legs ended in thick trunks, the toes and feet likely long lost to diabetic amputation.

  What disturbed Dani the most was the hoarder’s face, mainly because it was so hard to locate. The head blended into the body in a way that was more slug than human. The hoarder’s tiny, beady eyes were barely visible in the folds of facial flesh, and they were looking right at Dani. The nose was just not visible from across the room. The hoarder’s mouth was nearly indiscernible among the many folds, but one of those folds was turned up at each end. Dani thought this hoarder just might be grinning.

  Dani grinned back and had to suppress a mad laugh. She felt like she was looking at a close relative of Jabba the Hut. What she felt was no longer fear, it was disgust. She also felt disgust at herself, in the event this person could not help its obese condition. She thought it possible that she was interacting with a thousand pound tumor. She should feel pity for it.

  “I thou
ght I heard voices! Is Missy throwing another party?” the hoarder asked excitedly. Dani knew this hoarder liked a party, she could tell by the way it was wiggling its wide fingers. Even the fingers had folds of fat, which wiggled as well.

  “Yes,” Dani replied. So be it, let this be a party. A party was better than a crisis.

  Dani stepped closer to the hoarder, closing the proximity primarily so they could lower their voices. This hoarder’s booming voice might draw Missy, whose party Dani had not been formally invited to.

  “What’s your name, pretty girl?” it blubbered in lieu of language.

  “Sally,” Dani lied, “What’s yours?”

  “Tickles! My name is Tickles Honey Boo-Boo!”

  Dani could not tell if the hoarder was being genuine or not with the name, but it didn’t matter. Tickles Honey Boo-Boo it was, or Tickles for short. Dani found it appropriate that Tickles’ name in no way tipped her off to its gender.

  Tickles lived up to its name, tickling its exposed, jiggling breasts, another non-gender signifier due to Tickles’ size. The nipples were not the size of pepperonis; they were more the size of mini-pizzas.

  “You got a video camera?” Tickles asked.

  In her initial shock, Dani had forgotten that she was filming with her handheld camera. She thought that her footage might make for a great freak of the week reality show, the kind she was guilty of enjoying. She might have to change the title, though. Tickles Honey Boo-Boo might incur a lawsuit.

  “Yeah,” Dani admitted. It was too late to hide the camera now.

  “Oh goodie-goodie! I always told Missy I’m gonna be on TV! I could have my own show! Am I TV material or what?”

  Or what! Dani thought but did not say. Dani looked at the tawdry television program and back at Tickles, who was posing and puckering like a spoiled beauty queen. Tickles had its own unique version of a duck face, but it looked less like a duck and more like a seal. Dani considered a title for their show. The Person Swallowed By Their Skin might be a good one.