Hoarder

by Armando D. Muñoz

  The projectile splattered on Ian’s chin. He stood frozen in the path of her rancid shockwave scream.

  “You! What have you done!?”

  Ian looked down as the glob of French fries dropped off his chin. He considered her question, what had he done? He had stepped back onto garbage. That’s all there was to step onto, there certainly wasn’t any floor to walk on. Ian had no idea what his transgression had been.

  Looking down, Ian didn’t see the impact coming. Missy’s fist rammed into his stomach with bruising force, perhaps enough force to rupture something inside. If she had hit a little higher, she would have certainly broken his ribs. Ian stumbled back breathless, stepping on another fast food bag, which ruptured and set the refuse and a rodent inside free. He also dropped the kitchen knife that he had been hiding behind his back. The camera he thankfully held. He thought it might be his most valuable tool for saving himself.

  Ian had looked away from Missy for only a few seconds and had been caught totally off guard. She had lived up to her legend. She was as powerful as an MMA fighter. Ian knew his limitations, that he was skinny, short, and lacking muscles. He didn’t want to go three rounds in the ring with Missy. His brother hadn’t survived round two with her, and Keith was a lot stronger than he was.

  “What did I do?!” Ian shouted. Now he was asking for direction, but he need to know right away what he had done wrong, so he wouldn’t do it again and get served another one of Missy’s knuckle sandwiches.

  Missy crouched before Ian and picked up the blue Styrofoam cup that had been flattened by his shoe. She shook the ruptured cup at Ian, and now it was spittle she was spraying into his face.

  “This was part of a set of collectible cups, red, white, and blue, released last July at Chickin Grillins! The red one is over there and the white one is over there!”

  Missy pointed in the direction of her red cup as she spoke, then turned her pointing finger in the opposite direction for her white cup. Ian quickly followed her finger but saw all color cups in all directions. He couldn’t pick out her multi-colored Chickin Grillins’ cups among the clutter if his life depended on it, which unfortunately it might. He did not think it would help him to point out that most of the cheap cups in her collection were already broken and crushed. Pointing that fact out might get him hurt.

  Ian didn’t doubt that Missy knew exactly what cups she was pointing at. She probably knew the layout of all of her garbage. Only where Missy saw sparkling china, Ian saw dusty turds. Part of her legend was that she spent all of her time in her house, except for her weekly terror shopping sprees and neighborhood porch raiding missions. She was always with her precious hoard. She was in love with every rotten square foot of it, and knew it all intimately.

  “Now the set has lost a third of its value!” Missy seethed in Ian’s face. The broken cup was crushed further in Missy’s hand, and Ian saw her other hand clench into a fist. What he thought he was really seeing was a human tornado building before him.

  Ian could not proceed with fear, he had to summon confidence and gain control of his star again. Not an easy task knowing his dead brother was lying outside the door, another victim destroyed and discarded by this human tornado.

  “But that’s the price, remember? And you can buy ten sets of these cups with the money you’re making as a reality TV star.”

  Missy’s fists stopped clenching. Ian could see her struggling with the concept, and then accepting his pitch, even though pay negotiations had never been a part of their discussion. Missy was instantly accepting of her mega-fame and fortune. And then her face soured again, into a kind of profound sadness. When she spoke, it was in the voice of a sniveling child.

  “But Red Cup and White Cup will be lonely without Blue Cup.”

  Ian had at first felt like he was matching wits with a cunning killer, and now he had to reason with her like a spoiled child. Missy was no criminal mastermind, but she was a lethal danger in her dumbness.

  “You can buy more blue cups,” Ian assured her.

  Ian said the right thing, as Missy’s childlike sadness evaporated, and he was faced with a woman who looked like she had just won the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, one who just might hug him to death in her excitement, or pop him like a celebratory balloon. Between her muscular thighs.

  “I can!” Missy exclaimed in agreement. The loneliness of Red Cup and White Cup had been completely forgotten. “Buying is what I do best, and bargains are my specialty. You know I never buy only one, of anything! I can’t, because then that one thing would be lonely and sad, and I don’t want any sad-sads in Missy’s house!”

  Too late for that, Ian wanted to say. With Keith and Will dead, Ian definitely qualified as a sad-sad in Missy’s house. He suddenly wanted to teach Missy the true definition of things.

  “What about your cats? Are they friends?” Ian asked.

  “Of course they’re friends! But I’m besties with Booger-Snots, Albino Kitty, and Nigger-Toes.” Missy said the second part in a conspiratorial whisper to Ian, his camera, and the home audience. This was a secret only to her feline friends.

  Ian was glad he hadn’t made a face when she rattled off the name Nigger-Toes. Missy’s House had just earned its first broadcast bleep. She might not consider the N-word a bad word, but her ignorance did not excuse its use. Ian remembered freeing a white cat with black paws earlier in the living room and figured he had already met Nigger-Toes. Ian was happy he had freed one of Missy’s besties. The rescued cat would not only benefit from a better diet, but also a new name outside of this house.

  “Some of the cats I’ve seen are thin, and in small cages. They look sad-sad,” Ian informed her.

  Missy gave Ian a look like he was crazy, then shared that look with his camera with a shake of her head, knowing the audience would be as exasperated with him as she was.

  “Oh no! Are you kidding? My house is like the Hilton for cats! They get to eat people food, and there’s lots of mice-ies for them to play with. All the cats in town want to be at Missy’s house!”

  Ian thought Dani’s cat Fiddlesticks might disagree. He spotted the movement of cockroaches swarming over a half eaten cheeseburger, exploring between the bun and patty. He nodded at the fattening feeding ground.

  “I’ve noticed a few cockroaches. Are they friends?” Ian inquired.

  Missy’s jaw dropped in offense before she vociferously replied, “Oh no no no! I don’t have roaches. Only dirty people got roaches, and I keep my house clean.”

  Ian knew that Missy lived in a state of constant denial, but how could she deny what was directly in front of her? He nodded at the cockroaches on the cheeseburger again. “What are those?”

  “Duh!” Missy exclaimed, throwing her head back and rolling her eyes up to the heavens, asking salvation for the fool boy before her. “Those are baby butterflies, you big silly! Their wings haven’t grown out yet. You can eat them, you know. They’re full of protein.” Missy’s dietary advice was delivered in a softer register for her audience, a secret recipe shared among close friends.

  To emphasize her point, Missy plucked up one of her baby butterflies and popped it into her mouth. Ian could hear the crunch of the juicy morsel between her teeth. Ian thought Missy was on the wrong TV show, she would win Fear Factor in a heartbeat with an appetite like that. The roach eating made him ill, but he put on a smile for Missy’s sake. She was eating bugs to impress him, or anyone. It was such a pathetic sight, her desperation for acceptance.

  “You want to meet them?” Missy asked.

  “Meet who?”

  “My friends.”

  “I’ve met your cats.”

  “Not my cats. My favorite collection in the whole house! My dolls! They have the biggest room to themselves, the master bedroom. You have to meet them!”

  As Missy moved around Ian, she reached out to seize his left wrist. He pulled his arm away from her, and her heavy hand clenched only air. She was on a mission to show off her favorite collection, and she w
alked on without him, expecting him to follow. She was heading for the hallway door, and his brother’s body beyond it, exactly where he wanted to keep her from going.

  “Is there another way we can go?” Ian asked.

  “Yes, but why go all the way through the house, up and down and loop-de-loop, when the room is right over here? Come on!”

  Missy waved Ian on and didn’t wait for him. Ian followed reluctantly. He gave another glance at the massive, skinned body on the floor and wondered if Tickles qualified as one of Missy’s friends.

  Following Missy, Ian noticed for the first time that the lower back of Missy’s red dress was glistening wet with the same color. He spotted the tear in her dress and the pad of bloody cotton stuck on it, which looked like a sanitary napkin to him (he vetoed that guess even though he had guessed correctly).

  With his brother newly dead, Ian figured Missy’s fresh wound could not be mere coincidence. He hoped his brother had driven the knife, or whatever weapon was responsible for Missy’s injury, deep, and taken satisfaction in her wounding.

  Missy plowed out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Ian stopped in the doorway behind her, wanting to watch her encounter with Keith from a distance. He feared her reunion with her victim could refuel the murderous rage that had made her plant a knife in Keith’s chest in the first place.

  When Missy reached Keith’s corpse sprawled across her path, she stepped over him without looking down. Her right heel hit Keith’s shoulder, jostling the body. Ian had expected a reaction from Missy, but not this. Keith was nothing more than additional garbage on Missy’s floor to climb over.

  Missy’s disrespect for the dead added more fuel to the simmering anger that Ian was struggling to keep contained. It would come out, explosively and violently, he knew that now, he just had to unleash it at the right time. Ian had finally assumed his brother’s final mission, to take Missy out.

  Ian followed Missy into the hall, and took great care not to disturb his brother’s body as he stepped over him. He flinched when he heard the clamor of a box falling over ahead. From the jingling inside the box, it was obvious the box contained glass, and the glass was long broken. Missy was knocking things over in her excitement to reach the master bedroom and her most valuable collection. For somebody who loved her stuff as much as she claimed, Ian found it ironic how much abuse she heaped on her treasures.

  Missy stopped before the entrance to the master bedroom and turned eagerly to Ian. He should have figured; she was standing before the cracked door to the Rot Room that he had been so deeply reluctant to enter earlier.

  It also figured that Missy’s most prized collection, dolls, would be supremely creepy en masse. Most of Missy’s collections rated high in the creep factor, from her clown pictures to her cat cages to her shit samples.

  As Ian approached Missy, the noxious smell emanating from the cracked door started to affect him again. His breathing slowed, so he could take in less of the air he thought might be poisonous. The hair on the back of his neck stood up in alarm. Gooseflesh broke out on Ian’s arms despite the stuffy heat. Ian had to force his legs to continue toward Missy and her destination.

  “You’re a lucky guy, Chad. I rarely share my friends with anyone.”

  Ian didn’t want to remind Missy that she was also sharing her friends with her show’s audience. Missy’s House would never make it to airing, but the world would know the shocking truth of Missy’s collections once this night was through. Ian would make sure of that.

  Missy pushed open the door to the master bedroom and climbed up into it. Ian followed her in with his camera leading him. The flip screen had acted as a minor shield to the horrors before, but it had no shielding effect now.

  The Rot Room really was a poison place, and if Ian got out with serious mental scars alone, he would consider himself lucky. He also hoped that Missy would not be following him out. He would do it for Keith and Will and any others who had not survived their encounters with Missy. He suspected there were many.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  After climbing up a few feet of soft cushioning, Ian stopped beside Missy to behold her favorite collection. First his eyes were drawn above it, at the dozens of curling flypaper strips hanging from the mold saturated ceiling. The strips were completely caked with dead flies and other flying insects, and some not so dead. Despite the many strips, the room was abuzz with hundreds of fat flies, providing a low static sound. The flies were so plentiful and busy buzzing about, Ian couldn’t go two seconds without one flying into his face. It was like walking through rain with wings.

  Ian covered his nose with his left forearm. What was making the flies so hungry was making his nostrils ache and sending his stomach into cartwheels.

  Missy didn’t so much enter the room as make a grand entrance. She threw her arms out in a wide welcome, nearly backhanding Ian beside her. He jerked his head back, avoiding impact by inches. Missy exclaimed, “Hello friends!”

  Ian looked around at Missy’s friends. Her doll collection numbered in the high hundreds. They were piled against every wall so their eyes faced the room’s center, at any visitors. Dolls were stacked on top of each other up to the ceiling. The dolls spanned all sizes, from miniature to Barbie-size to life-size, as well as ages, from baby dolls to elderly. Some dolls didn’t look so happy to be dolls, stuck with an eternity of grimacing, but the majority of them were smiling.

  Ian looked down at the center of the room, which was a sea of stuffed animals. Most of the stuffies were grinning, chosen to feed Missy’s endless glee. Ian spotted two shiny beanbags ahead, one red, one blue, like islands in a furry sea.

  Ian found the room, with its countless eyes and toothy grins, even creepier than he had anticipated. He had always been unsettled by too many false smiles, which he remembered from both the church services during his youth and watching the last Republican National Convention on CNN. So many smiles, but they were the kind that could not be trusted, because those smiles could bite.

  Dolls alone could not be responsible for the rot that Ian smelled. There had to be something within or underneath the collection responsible for the reek, and the flies. One particularly bloated fly bumped between Ian’s eyes, and he fixed his vision on it, determined to follow it back to its fetid food source.

  The fat fly did a lazy corkscrew to the left, heading to one of the life-size dolls. The fly alighted on the nose of a teenage girl whose head was twisted to the side at a fatally extreme angle. It was Dani.

  Ian wanted to cry out, to scream and attack the monster named Missy beside him, but he was simply paralyzed by the sight of his unrequited love sitting nearby, embraced by dolls in death. He hadn’t thought anything could sting worse than seeing his brother’s murder before him, and yet this did. He wasn’t mad at just the madder woman who had killed his loved ones. He harbored hate for the squalid location where their lives had ended. He didn’t know which was the bigger vampire, Missy or Missy’s house.

  Now that Ian had discovered a body in the doll collection, he could see the corpses that were buried within. Many of the human sized dolls were real humans. There had to be over a dozen, and further inspection made him double that number. The corpses, like the dolls, looked toward the room’s visitors, at least the ones with eyes remaining did.

  The bodies ranged in age, and in freshness, from the newly dead like Dani, who couldn’t have even cooled since Ian had seen her last, to mummies and skeletons with little flesh left. The worst of the bodies was bloated and blackened with rot, liquefying and roiling with maggots. The age and gender of that rot bag were indefinable.

  Each body that Ian saw, he wondered who they were and what had brought them into Missy’s path and wrath. He saw a spoiling pizza delivery guy, whose skin resembled the greasy cheese of a pizza. A stainless steel fork stuck out of the delivery guy’s left eye. Perhaps he hadn’t delivered Missy’s long devoured pizza in thirty minutes or less.

  Between two supremely freaky life-size girl dolls in their 1
920s Sunday best dresses was a mummified Girl Scout in her uniform, empty Girl Scout Cookies boxes in her lap. Perhaps this forever young girl had run out of Do-Si-Dos, Caramel deLites, or whatever Missy’s favorite cookie was and had paid the ultimate price.

  Missy saw Ian gawking at the Girl Scout and became boastful.

  “Look, she’s laughing!”

  The Girl Scout’s face was frozen in a silent scream, and adding an additional dash of horror, Ian saw a cookie in her gaping mouth. It looked like a half eaten Samoas. The cookie moved and Ian looked away before he could see what it really was.

  Ian looked upon a gaggle of keystone cop dolls, which sat against a dead policeman in uniform. All cops were covered in cobwebs and mold. The policeman was big, bigger than Missy, and Ian hoped he had put up a good fight. Only the clothes iron sticking out of his caved in skull revealed how the fight had ended.

  Ian spotted a five-foot tall, lit up, plastic praying Jesus. Sitting to the right of the electric savior were two Mormon missionaries in their uniforms. Both were no longer in need of their garments. There was no need for modesty when there was no more flesh left to hide. There were Mormon tracts in the skeletons’ laps. Perhaps Missy hadn’t been down to buying the B.S. they were selling. Ian certainly couldn’t see Missy embracing any religion that placed women in a subservient position, in other words, most religions.

  It occurred to Ian that all of these victims were people that had likely encountered Missy at her front door. Those with something to sell, whether pizza or prophecy, and city officials, with orders to enforce. They wouldn’t have been prepared for the mad woman and the hoard she was hiding, and protecting. Except for the cop, none of the victims would have been armed or expecting to fight for their lives on an ordinary suburban porch on any given morning, afternoon, or evening.

  Ian wondered how many trick-or-treaters might have been snared over the years, and then he realized he was looking at one. Across the room was a tall skeleton doll that was actually a kid’s plastic Halloween costume and mask set. Flies flew in and out of the mask’s dark, empty eyes, giving away the meaty center.