There was an uncomfortable moment of silence. Ian was surprised he was still being allowed to grill her. She appeared puzzled, like she didn’t know who or where she was. When her speech returned, she softly said, “You’re not making me look very good.”
That’s the point, Ian thought. He knew he was walking on a razor’s edge with Missy, and he also knew she needed a bit more coddling if he was going to proceed. He loved putting her in her place, but he also had to direct her a little more.
“It’s the diagnosis part of the show, so it’s part of the formula,” Ian informed her.
“Oh.”
Missy’s curious lack of emotion made Ian nervous, but he continued anyway. He had a lot left to say. This was his script.
“You have a big problem with stealing. You stole my brother’s bike, right off our porch. What gives you the right to take other people’s property?”
Missy didn’t answer Ian’s question, but she cooed about the bike. “It’s a pretty bike, with those cool blue stripes. I wanted it.”
Ian had to simplify his point for his dumb subject. “But it’s not yours.”
Ian saw both of Missy’s fists were clenching and unclenching in her lap.
“It is mine. I took it,” Missy corrected Ian, or so she thought.
“We took it back. My brother’s bike is out of your house. It’s not yours anymore,” Ian informed Missy for the first time.
Ironically, the one word that ignited in Missy’s mind in red neon was THIEVES!
Ian expected some protest from Missy. He should have expected what happened instead. Missy leaned forward on her beanbag and punched him in the chest. Her fist felt like lead, and it rattled his heartbeat. Ian fell back against a stuffed Beagle almost as big as he was and leaned right back forward.
Missy’s response had been severe, but it was not a surprise. In fact, Missy’s behavior completely fit the formula of the hoarding shows he had seen. The hoarders, driven to the point of cleaning their homes to avoid eviction, always acted out once the cleaning commenced. Even the nice looking old ladies turned into vicious shrews who would attack any loved one or stranger who dared to help by tossing out a piece of garbage that was inevitably invaluable to them. Ian’s intervention would never be welcomed, and he knew he was putting himself in the path of attack.
They faced each other in silence. Ian tried to catch his breath, which wasn’t easy after his heart had skipped a beat. Missy put her non-punching hand back behind her, to press on the sanitary napkin and lessen her growing ache.
“Don’t cross me,” Missy warned.
“Cross you? I’ll fucking kill you!” Ian said, but only in his head. He tempered his actual response to, “We’re just talking, remember. This isn’t a hitting show like Springer’s.” Ian didn’t add that he wished there was a big referee like Steve Wilkos between them to shield him from her attacks.
“I want my bike back,” Missy demanded.
Ian ignored her demand and continued his diagnosis. “Not only do you steal property, you steal animals, and people, and lives. You neglect your cats.”
“I do not!” Missy interrupted indignantly.
“Your cats are starving and diseased. They’re stuffed in shit covered cages they can’t move in. There are dead cats all over this house. Neglect is too kind a word. Cruelty fits better. I’m sure you beat your cats, too.”
“I would never!” Missy denied, and believed completely.
“You would, you just don’t see it. You keep hitting me, your director, and I don’t think you even realize you’re doing it. Did your stay in that horrible facility you mentioned have anything to do with violent tendencies?”
Missy’s fists clenched, unclenched, clenched, unclenched.
Ian could see Missy’s steam building, and knew another violent outburst was imminent, but he couldn’t stop now. There were too many pages of his script left to cover.
“That person up here, Tickles, is dead or dying, and you could care less. You’re only worried about getting more camera time. You’re a selfish sociopath.”
“I… I don’t know what that means,” Missy said.
“Then let me spell it out for you. You killed my father, and took him from his wife and kids, who loved him more than you ever could. He did not have eyes for your open thighs. He was probably going to issue you a citation, because the whole city wants your house condemned. And then you killed my brother and my friends. And all of these other people unfortunate enough to stumble upon Missy’s house.”
Missy stared at Ian without reply, trying to process all of the kid’s crazy talk. She was a woman rarely criticized, at least to her face, and she did not know how to process it.
Ian felt like he was on a roll, but he was jolted to a stop when he saw a corpse’s foot, nearly skeletal, sticking up out of the mound of stuffed animals behind Missy. The foot confirmed another ugly reality. He had already accepted that there were numerous dead cats hidden under the house’s hoard. Who knew how many human cadavers they had been climbing over all this time? Just as Missy had crawled over Will’s covered body without realizing it. Like a dog, Missy buried her bones. Except for the ones she kept out to play with.
“Who knows how many more bodies are buried under this hoard. I guess we’ll find out when this house is finally cleaned out, starting tomorrow.”
Missy looked around nervously, looking for an excuse. “I’m… I’ve had a hard time dealing with my baby’s death.”
Who could argue with a grieving mother? Ian could.
“I’ve had some hard losses, too, thanks to you, but it’s never made me want to live in a garbage dump and keep the company of corpses. And by the way, they’re not laughing. They’re screaming!”
Missy was jolted by Ian’s shout, and then she looked around at her human dolls, the Girl Scout, the Mormon missionaries, the pizza delivery guy. Their mouths (some just skeletal jaws) were all open and laughing in Missy’s mind, which meant Ian was out of his mind. It was the kind of joyful laughter that always confirmed to Missy that there was nowhere else in the world that these human dolls would rather be.
Ian also looked at the human dolls, including his father, and Dani, and those too bloated and rotten to read their faces. In Ian’s mind, they were in purgatory and they were screaming. His dad was screaming. Dani was screaming. Keith was screaming from the hallway. Will was screaming from downstairs.
It was too easy to go mad inside Missy’s house. The mix of death, mold, stench, neglect, and loneliness would probably drive Ian mad like Missy over time.
Seeing Missy put into prison would make him happy. Seeing Missy put in the grave might make him happier. But neither seemed punishment enough for what she had done to him and so many others. He knew a way to make her suffer, a way to pierce her vampire heart the way she had pierced his.
It was time for Ian to stop the screaming of his loved ones, no matter the cost. He was going to end it right now.
Right fucking now!
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I’ll bet you killed your little Saffy,” Ian began. “Maybe it was an accident, maybe you sat on her, or your hoard fell on her like my friend Will. But it was your fault. I’m sure of it.”
“Cut,” Missy said, “the show is over. I don’t want this on camera. I want your crew to leave now.”
If only we could leave, you stupid bitch, Ian thought as he stood. “I’ll leave, because I have no intention of being trapped in here for life like these poor souls,” he said as he moved his way over to the cobweb draped crib with Saffy’s skeleton inside.
Missy watched Ian suspiciously from her red beanbag. She leaned forward, about to rise and follow him, when a piercing pain from her back made her sit down again. She put a hand over the bloody pad on her back, which was dripping.
Once beside the crib, Ian turned to Missy. “I’m also going to release every miserable cat and call the police. You are going to lose your precious hoard, your horrible house, and your friends. Missy�
�s House is cancelled. I’ll see you on your next show, Lockup.”
From the confused look on Missy’s face, Lockup was a show she wasn’t familiar with.
Ian leaned into the crib and smashed Saffy’s brittle skeleton with his fist and camera. The bones disintegrated into bursts of dust. From the ease of the bones’ obliteration, he probably could have demolished them by blowing hard on them.
“NO!” Missy screamed. The pain of her stabbed back was forgotten as her adrenaline kicked in, and she launched up off of the red beanbag. She lunged for Ian, but stumbled on the floor of stuffed animals (it was Oliver the Octopus that provided the tripping tentacle). Missy fell forward and landed flat on her face, her impact fully cushioned.
A white plume of bone dust rose over the crib, nearly causing Ian to cough as he continued to pound the skeleton inside. Saffy was reduced to little more than small bone shards and a cloud, except for her skull. Adding to the desecration, Ian flipped the aged crib over. Even on a floor of furries, the crib was reduced to kindling.
As he engaged in the demolition of Saffy’s skeleton and her crib, Ian offered a mental apology to the baby. He held no ill will for poor Saffy, and he even doubted whether she had been born to Missy. It would come as no surprise if he found out that Saffy had been snatched out of another shopper’s cart because Missy found her too adorable and had to add her to her collection, which turned out to be pretty much the case.
The true facts of Saffy’s abduction wouldn’t become public knowledge until much later, after a lengthy investigation and DNA testing. And the baby’s original name was not Saffy, that was a girl’s name and this baby had been a boy.
It occurred to Ian that Missy’s husband was probably a fiction, like his father was a man seeking her courtship in her mind. Her husband was probably just another sad victim unfortunate to be handsome enough to tickle Missy’s loins.
“You don’t deserve any friends!” Ian screamed at her.
Missy pushed herself up onto her knees on her carpet of stuffies and corpses.
“I’ll kill you! You hurt my Saffy!”
As Missy climbed toward the shattered crib, Ian climbed toward the door. He shouted back at her, “Your little Saffy isn’t laughing anymore!”
When Missy reached the overturned crib, she broke the splintered boards apart to get to the baby’s bones beneath.
Ian noticed the many smiles of the stuffed animals he crawled over on his way to the door. Perhaps they were smiling because they would soon be free of this nightmare menagerie. He came upon a giant stuffed bear leg on his right, and saw the nearly four-foot bear it belonged to. Stacked on the lap, arms, shoulders, and head of the bear was a family of Puritan dolls made of porcelain.
Ian moved past the bear and turned back to it, grabbing the bear’s leg and giving it a hard yank. The bear was a fluffy obstacle in Missy’s path, but it was the collapsing glass dolls that would prove a better barrier. The porcelain Puritans cracked against each other and rolled off the big bear they had been mounted on for so many years.
With the crib obliterated, and with a few long splinters planted deep in Missy’s fingers, she picked up half of Saffy’s shattered skull, the biggest part of the baby that remained.
“My poor Saffy! What did that bad boy do to you!?”
Saffy was long past being able to answer Missy, had in fact died long before developing the ability to talk. Regardless, Saffy’s half skull spoke to Missy, at least in her mind.
“Kill the punk, mommy! Crush his skull like mine!” the half skull ordered in a high-pitched scream. Missy nodded, in tears.
“I will, Saffy! I will,” Missy, with all her heart, promised her daughter, who was really a dead, stolen infant boy, whom her heart had forgotten and would always deny.
“And get that bike back for me!” Saffy’s half skull ordered.
My bike! Missy had momentarily forgotten the bike. Destroying Saffy and her crib was bad enough, but that bad boy and his scallywag friends had taken her favorite bike with those cool blue-striped handlebars out of her house! It wasn’t just her bike; it was going to be Saffy’s bike someday (never mind that nobody would ride it until the end of time if it remained in Missy’s house). In Missy’s mind, taking her bike was a transgression that was punishable by death.
Ian pushed up onto his feet when he was within a few steps of the door. He collided with one of the caked flypaper strips, and the gooey paper stuck to his face. He could see the little twitching fly legs between his eyes. He could smell the nutty adhesive and rotting bugs beside his nose. He could practically taste the gluey strip and its victims that ran down over his partly open lips.
Ian shifted hard to the side in the hope the flypaper would pull off of him. The strip broke off the ceiling instead, sticking firmly to his face. The flypaper was reluctant to let go of its biggest catch.
As Ian pinched the top of the flypaper strip and pulled it off of his face, he didn’t see Missy pick up the wooden bottom of the crib behind him.
With the flypaper removed, glue and bugs remained stuck in a diagonal line down Ian’s face. He flung the flypaper to the side, but the squirmy strip remained stuck to his fingers. Then came the blow to the back of his head as the thrown crib bottom hit him, and what he saw next was a blur as he pitched forward out of the Rot Room into the hallway.
Ian could just make out the forward leaning, three-foot tall dresser in the hall that he was falling toward. He tried to shift further right to avoid it. Ian’s forehead hit the top corner of the dresser, and after an explosion of stars, he saw and thought the same thing at the same time.
Nothing.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ian fell to the side of the dresser as it pitched forward, all of the packed drawers falling out, spilling junk and vermin. The dresser hit a discarded walker before it, preventing a full forward collapse.
The sound of breaking glass inside the Rot Room brought Ian back to consciousness. The porcelain Puritans were breaking, their generations stomped on by a giant, which meant Missy was on the move his way.
Ian sat up quickly and his head spun so hard, he nearly fell backward. He steadied himself and touched his throbbing forehead at the point of impact. He winced at the raw agony and indentation there, and when he pulled his fingers back, they were smudged with blood. No surprise there, he had never hit his head that hard before, or knocked himself out. He even had a new term for it, a skull-cracker.
Next he touched the back of his head where he had first been hit, by what he had no idea. This point of impact didn’t feel as dented as his forehead, but he could feel a separation of skin and tissue, and when he pulled his fingers back, they were no longer smudged with blood, they were dripping with it.
Ian heard more glass breaking and a yelp from Missy. He grinned, knowing he had slowed her advance and injured her in the process.
The open door was right behind him, but he didn’t dare look back and waste one second to confirm what he already knew. Ian had only two options available to him now. Left or right.
Going down the hallway to his left would take him back to the living room and the house he knew, including the front door. Only escape was no longer the next part of Ian’s plan, and the tipped dresser with its extended drawers filled what little path there had been. Climbing over the tipped dresser was possible, but it wouldn’t be easy. Missy would probably step right over it.
To Ian’s right was the terrible bedroom with the skinned body that was not body shaped inside. But he remembered Missy speaking about another way out of that room that led down through the house, although he doubted the loop-de-loops she mentioned were real. It was the better option, only instead of a fallen dresser in his way, there was his dead brother.
Ian made his decision.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Missy stopped in her pursuit to pull a broken china doll arm out of her right palm. That was a real smarty, just like the poke in the back that Keith had given her in the other room. She threw the
shard to the side, where it slid down out of sight between Ally the Alligator and Furry Turtle.
Missy felt bad for her broken dollies, and thought her room would feel empty without them mounted on Burly Bear. She also hoped the dollies didn’t hurt from their many broken limbs. At least with the money she’d get for Missy’s House, she could buy a whole village of porcelain Puritans. The only thing better than a family was more families. And Missy had the most family friendly house in the whole world. She had hundreds of happy families living under her roof.
Missy remembered Saffy and knew that was one thing she could not buy a replacement of. Saffy had been taken from her, again! Rage at Roland’s rotten boy got her back to crawling after him. He had broken Saffy’s bones, and she was going to break all of his bones in return. It was only fair.
He was also going to have to pay for the crib he broke apart. It was an antique! Missy considered her house a museum of antiques.
Roland’s boys were cute, she’d always thought so (just look at their father, it was no wonder), but they had both turned out to be like stubborn jawbreakers with sour centers. They were not only disrespectful and insulting to her immaculate house, they were making a mess everywhere they went. She would soon have to make sure both boys stayed put so they couldn’t run roughshod over all of her valuables anymore. She didn’t just lose Saffy tonight; she also lost Blue Cup! Chickin Grillins didn’t even carry Blue Cup anymore.
Because of those boys’ bad behavior, Missy was going to hold out on her womanly favors for Roland tonight, maybe for a while, at least until he got his boys back in order. It might also do good to give Roland a few punches to the face, to remind him to always mind her. Only she wouldn’t punch too hard, his skin was starting to feel awfully moist and soft underneath. Just hard enough to get her point across.
As Missy worked her way toward the door, she looked around at her dollies. They were all smiling and cheering her on.
Hoarder Page 21