Hoarder

by Armando D. Muñoz

  “You sure are,” Dani agreed, to Tickles’ delight.

  Tickles picked a peeled cube of butter out of a metal bucket on the sofa. Dani saw about a dozen more peeled cubes inside the pail. Tickles’ cube was dipped into a bag of sugar leaning against the bucket. The confection made curly-cues through the air on its way into Tickles’ mouth. Half of the cube was devoured in one drooling bite.

  Dani tried to hide her revulsion at Tickles’ messy eating, but it wasn’t really possible. The image of a blob of flesh eating a cube of butter almost slipped her back into nightmare territory. She focused on her camera and folded out the flip screen. Somehow it was easier to accept the image through a digital filter, and it gave her a job to focus on. She was a documentarian.

  As Dani advanced closer, she zoomed in on Tickles’ eating. The flip screen was filled with the image of fleshy folds opening wide with butter stretching between them, and butter coating considerably rotten teeth.

  Dani no longer felt pity for this person. This was not the victim of a runaway tumor or ailment. Its overgrown state was the result of its insatiable appetites, gluttony with extra butter on top. Dani felt justified in her disgust.

  Tickles dipped the second half of the butter cube into the bag of sugar, swirling it around to get all sides covered. The cube spilled sugar as it was pulled out of the bag. Tickles looked at the cube, drooling butter, and in a surprising display of generosity, held the confection out to Dani.

  “Want some of my sweet stick?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Tickles squealed and appeared overjoyed that she had declined, and the remaining sweet stick did a flying corkscrew into its maw.

  As Tickles ate, oblivious to Dani, she moved the zoom over its massive body, at folds of flesh messy with food, fuzz, and even – Oh God! – cobwebs. The sea of skin was spotted with sores and crawling with cockroaches. Tickles didn’t appear to notice the roaches, or just didn’t care. Perhaps Tickles didn’t even feel them. Circulation and numbness had to be part of Tickles’ many problems. She also noticed that where Tickles’ trunk legs ended, the skin was course and peeling in dry patches, another symptom of bad circulation and neglect.

  Seeing Tickles in such bliss, Dani wondered why she had been called into the room, and risked revealing herself, in the first place.

  “You were calling for help.”

  “I need help! I dropped my remote, and I can’t find it!”

  Dani could not believe she had been so easily deceived into this trivial rescue. Her disgust toward this hoarder was growing. Tickles seemed like the perfect roommate for Missy. They were equally greedy and gross.

  Dani looked below Tickles’ trunk legs, and lying on top of a carpet of fast food refuse was the missing remote control. It was the oversize kind with big buttons usually used by the elderly or the sight impaired.

  “It’s right at your…” don’t say feet! “It’s right below you,” Dani corrected herself.

  “I can’t reach it,” Tickles said in the most annoying, whiny voice Dani had ever heard, where the final two letter word was drawn out like it was a dozen letters long.

  Tickles, to its credit, did try to reach forward, but only its arms and stub legs had any real movement. Tickles’ massive blob of a body could not move forward off of the rotted sofa fabric.

  Dani was having a dark realization concerning Tickles’ immobility, and she zoomed in closer with her camera to investigate her suspicion. She cringed as she viewed the details through her flip screen.

  Tickles was not just sitting on the sofa; Tickles had absorbed the sofa. Wherever Tickles’ skin met the upholstery, they were fused together by a natural glue of hair and excrement, pressed into each other by so much weight and time. Only Tickles’ arms and trunk legs remained mobile. Even its neck and the back of its head were fused to its seat. Tickles could barely move its head out of the forward position, which explained why the television was directly opposite the sofa on an even sight line.

  As Tickles tried to lean forward, flesh and fabric pulled together as one. The bond looked strong, and it wasn’t clear to Dani whether the skin or sofa would tear first.

  Dani found herself past the point of fearing Tickles. This person was not going to chase or harm her. Revolting, for sure, but Dani felt that Tickles was more pathetic than anything else. What kind of life was living in one room, in one spot, immobilized in a cocoon of your own waste? A pathetic life was what it was. What bewildered her most was that this being seemed to live in a state of constant elation and delusional TV land make-believe. Tickles’ mind mimicked the rest of it; it was a useless pile of dumb jelly.

  As uniquely grotesque as the sight was, Dani knew that Tickles was not alone in its condition. She remembered a similar story on one of those freaky reality shows she enjoyed so much, one titled The Man Who Grew Into His Bed. A massive man had melded with his mattress, through a new skin of hair and shit, and they had to break down a wall to get him out, and when they tried to pull the man off of the bed, he had… Dani banished the shock ending of that episode. What she was dealing with now was bad enough.

  The ruined sheet covering Tickles’ lap was jostled loose by its reaching hands, and it slid over its left trunk and piled beside the remote. Fully exposed, Tickles’ gender remained elusive. The folds of flesh hid any genitals. It giggled at its nakedness, but Dani did not giggle back. Tickles was actually flirting, making goo-goo eyes and wiggling to accentuate its countless curves. “Oo, oo,” Tickles cooed.

  Tickles gave up the struggle to reach the remote. The effort had exhausted and pained it. Sweat ran down its grimacing… face? It was all grimace.

  “I can’t. Can you get it for me please, sweetie-pie? I need to turn this up.”

  Dani scanned the walls for windows. The only visible window was directly above the sofa that Tickles was fused to. She couldn’t believe that she hadn’t noticed it before. The window was completely covered, as they all were, this one with newspapers that appeared to be glued over each other.

  A disturbing detail above the window caught Dani’s attention. Over the black mold were wide streaks of a viscous brown and gray substance, running down from the ceiling all the way to the window. Dani knew it wasn’t a fungus. It was bat guano, and evidence that those winged pests held high residence inside Missy’s house. The attic above them could no longer hold the weight of the waste. She could even smell the guano, an all-new offensive reek. The word RABIES! flashed in her mind, and she worried for Keith and the hand injury he had received yesterday. Rabies could conceivably be rampant within the house. It might explain Missy’s sores and insanity. Could a human survive with rabies long term? The rabies issue brought up another anxiety. If the disease were rampant within the house, how many of the rescues would have to be put down?

  Dani knew what she had to do. So what if she got a bit of rabid bat guano in her hair? Dani looked down from the window and into Tickles’ deep-set eyes. “Sure, I’ll get it for you,” she replied.

  Tickles excitedly looked from the TV to Dani to the TV again. Dani slowly approached Tickles, surprised that she had lost its attention already to the tawdry rerun. She needed to use that to her advantage.

  “They gonna reveal the baby daddy!” Tickles announced. Dani shared none of Tickles’ enthusiasm, not that Tickles noticed.

  Dani squatted to grab the remote, which was covered in food and boogers. She did not hesitate to touch it. Her plan required it, and she’d touched worse things in this house already. One of Tickles’ trunk legs darted at her, brushing against her face. The cracked skin felt like sandpaper against her cheek, and she hoped it didn’t contain a fungus that would make her face corrode in the same manner. Dani pushed away with the remote, Tickles’ trunks waving at her. Tickles laughed (at least Dani assumed that the sputtering wheeze it made was a laugh) until it saw the remote in her hands.

  “Here! Give it to me!” Tickles demanded.

  Dani not only denied Tickles the object it desired, she used the r
emote against it. Dani turned, stuck the remote out toward the TV, and hit the volume button down until the television was silent.

  “No! What are you doing?” it squealed in outrage. Tickles might be weak under its flabby flesh, but it was strong in emotion and vocal projection, enough to make Dani wince.

  Oh, the horror! Dani thought. Now we might never find out the results of the paternity test!

  “Answer one question first, then you can have it,” Dani said. It was the one and only question she had for Tickles, and like Missy, it would be the thing upon which it would be judged. “The cats in this house, are they yours or Missy’s?”

  “They’re both of ours! The happy cats of Wormwood manor! Now gimme!”

  Tickles’ outstretched fingers wiggled and jiggled for the remote.

  Dani seethed, and could only get one word out with her venom. “Happy.”

  Dani thought of every cat she had seen in this house. Not one of them was happy. Cats living and dying in squalor, prone to disease and bad breeding, imprisoned in cruel cages, and worst of all, starving. All of them starving. All while this person ate butter by the bucketful. She found herself surprised that the cats had not turned mutinous to their captor and eaten Tickles alive. The cats could have feasted for a month before they got to the bones.

  Dani used the remote to taunt Tickles, waving it just out of its reach. Tickles whined with the exertion of reaching and more from the disappointment of the spoiled program. Dani tossed the remote onto the far right end of the sofa, out of Tickles’ reach.

  “No! This is my favorite part!”

  As Tickles reached over for the remote, the flesh and fabric stretched again, far more than before. It appeared to Dani that something might rip if Tickles reached any further. She looked up at the window again, her way out.

  “Gimme it! The baby daddy!” Tickles squealed, and then something did rip. Dani was distracted from her destination by the sound. She looked over as the situation, and Tickles, unfolded.

  The far right corner of Tickles’ shoulder had opened up at the seam where sofa met skin. The wound gaped open, a foot long. The blood was not immediate; it had a lot of fat to travel through first.

  Having gained a few inches toward the remote, Tickles heaved to the side even harder. Tickles’ only pain was in missing the program. The wound tore in two directions, down the right edge of its back, and across the top, on its way to Tickles’ left shoulder (there was no shoulder blade visible). Tickles gained nearly a foot toward the remote from the peeling. All of its hard work was going to pay off.

  Dani gaped as she saw Tickles’ back peeling open before her, the wound appearing like a slice of cheese peeled off the block from the corner. Tickles’ skinned back was a mass of quivering adipose with blood slowly seeping through. There were no muscles or bone visible, just jiggling jelly. The peeled skin was the new upholstery on the sofa. The hair and shit had finally become stronger than flesh.

  This is what Dani had remembered and forcefully forgotten earlier, only it could never really be forgotten. This was The Man Who Grew Into His Bed all over again, where the rescuers had skinned the guy alive in their disastrous attempt at removing the man from his mattress. The difference this time was, the skinner was also the skinned.

  Dani tore her eyes away from the distraction, that’s all it was. She had to forget this live reality horror show and get moving. Dani stepped up onto the left side of the sofa as Tickles was distracted right beside her. She kicked the bucket of butter cubes out of her way. The cubes did not spill out; they stuck together in one greasy clump inside the pail.

  “Gimme!” Tickles cried. The loosening of Tickles’ flesh got it within inches of the remote control. Tickles had probably not moved so far in months, if not years. Despite the growing injury, which appeared to bring it no pain, Tickles leaned further. The left seam down Tickles’ back opened up, tearing down as far as the right. Tickles gained more inches over the couch as its ass began to rip off with the skin of its back. Now that the flesh was torn, the wounds were all too easy to widen, like perforated paper. Tickles didn’t seem to notice.

  Dani glanced down at the wet, ripping sounds. She was repulsed to see the wide sheet of bloody meat that was the new upholstery already crawling with bugs eager for a taste.

  Dani tore her eyes away from the shed skin as she tried to get a good step up. The top edge of the sofa was so stuffed with garbage, she couldn’t find a foothold, and she had to scoot trash away with her shoe to find a spot. Among the vermin that went scattering, she was most surprised by the centipedes, which were crawling over her shoe.

  Dani grabbed onto the window frame, which had its own stash of garbage. She knocked empty soda cans and cups out of her way. She got splashed by a few of the falling drinks, and barely noticed. Dani’s tolerance for exposure to yucky stuff had risen exponentially in the last hour, and getting a splash of stale soda with fuzz on top was really the least of her worries.

  With both of her shoes planted atop the back of the sofa, Dani reached further for the window latch, disengaging it and lifting the handle. The window would not budge. Dani noticed that Tickles’ wailing had stopped.

  Dani pushed harder, and then severe disappointment made her stop. She spotted over one dozen long, rusty nails pounded into the window frame, much like the basement window they had broken through.

  Dani noted Tickles’ silence and was not surprised. The Man Who Grew Into His Bed had featured a grim denouement; the subject had not survived his painful predicament. Nor was she saddened at this. There would be no tears from her for this living, soon to be non-living, human Sloth.

  Dani had nothing on her hard enough to bust out the window, except for her camera. She needed the camera to work, and the footage inside to sink Missy, so it was not a useful option. She’d have to get down and find something else, perhaps the pail of butter cubes. She knew it was metal and would make a good battering ram. That was when Dani heard the rising applause and commotion, followed by a proclamation.

  “You are NOT the father!”

  Dani realized she hadn’t thrown the remote control far enough. Two hands the size of hams seized Dani around the waist. Dani was pulled off the back of the sofa down onto Tickles’ massive, naked lap. Dani recognized that Tickles was sitting back in its peeled backside, and she thought with horror of the bugs that must be trapped and burrowing inside its skin.

  “Coochie-coochie the coochie!” Tickles squealed in delight.

  Dani gasped as Tickles tickled her body in overdrive with bloated, Bratwurst-sized fingers. Once the gasp was out, she could not get air back in, and hysteria set in. Dani hated getting tickled, absolutely hated it, and she had always set fear into anyone that tried to get his or her wiggly fingers on her. Except for Ian, she had let him get away with it, if only because she had started it by tickling him.

  What Tickles was doing went far beyond its name, what it was doing to Dani was a violation. Its assaulting fingers kept wrapping around her breasts, yanking on them. Dani had never experienced a sexual assault like this before, and the shock made her ability to take a much-needed breath even harder. If she had enough air, she would have certainly been screaming, regardless that it might draw Missy’s attention. A painful cramp seized her stomach as she tried to fold in on herself.

  Tickles’ assault on Dani got worse once its hands spread, one clamping over her crotch, the other over her face. Tickles’ fingers were trying to probe into every orifice they could find. Dani crossed her legs and tried to twist her crotch away. One of Tickles’ fingers probed into her left ear, and then another finger slipped into her mouth. Dani chomped on the fleshy digit hard, and this injury Tickles did feel. The hand pulled back from her face and returned to her chest, since her breasts weren’t likely to bite back.

  As Dani struggled on Tickles’ lap, she realized she had grossly underestimated this hoarder’s danger and desires. How often did Tickles have company besides Missy? She thought probably never, despite Tickles’
talk of Missy’s parties. To have such a pretty young thing as herself in its vicinity, it didn’t really matter if Tickles was a man or woman; to it she was a juicy plaything to be seized and fondled. Only Tickles seemed like the type to break all of its toys. She feared she would be eaten alive, smothered, tickled to death, or worst of all, locked in a cage she couldn’t get out of.

  Tickles giggled and drooled madly as it played its favorite game, coochie-coochie the coochie. The handheld camera smashed into what Dani approximated was Tickles’ face, but that didn’t stop its laughing. Dani hit Tickles’ face again and again with her camera, and Tickles just kept jiggling and giggling. Tickles didn’t even bleed from the new lacerations it received. She had to wonder whether Tickles could even bruise under all that fat.

  Dani’s free hand grabbed for another weapon and came upon the open bag of sugar. She flung the bag at Tickles’ face. Tickles cried out in surprise, and it was a cry of delight. The sugar barely reached Tickles’ deep-set eyes, and it stuck generously to the drool around its mouth. Tickles’ tongue poked out between its non-lips but was not long enough to lick the sugar off.

  “Yummy!” Tickles cried as it relentlessly tickled its prey.

  Tortured by the tickling, Dani realized that she had neither the size nor strength to harm this half-ton hoarder. It had been partially skinned and still posed a mortal threat. Her flailing left hand hit the overturned bucket, and she changed her plan.

  Dani pocketed her camera as she thrashed, remembering she had to keep it protected. Dani’s hand dove into the bucket and closed around a cube of butter. She shoved the cube at Tickles, smearing some of it over its face before sticking the cube into its mouth.

  Tickles was all too happy to be fed by its guest. It let Dani go so it could finish shoving the cube into its hungry hole, and then it sucked on its buttery fingers.

  Dani rolled off of Tickles’ lap and landed before its trunk legs, which waved above her. She pushed up and stepped forward, but she was jerked right back. Dani twisted to look over her shoulder.