by Curran, Tim
Soon, the smell of roasting meat filled the room…
20
Louis stood there with Macy by his side, listening to the empty house.
They called out a few times and listened to their voices echo and die out. Louis had been in a lot of houses and it was funny how something as subtle and abstract as an echo could tell you things. Maybe it had something to do with sound waves and maybe it had something to do with some buried sixth sense we all carry within us. Regardless, he could tell that the Merchant house was empty…though that wasn’t exactly the word that was bouncing around in his head at that moment: unoccupied. As in, Louis, this house isn’t so much empty as unoccupied, if you can dig the subtle nuances of that.
He stood there, swallowing down a sour taste in his mouth. “Maybe she stepped out or something,” he suggested and wondered why he did not believe that anymore than Macy seemed to.
“No,” she said. “She’s always home now. She has a job, Mr. Shears, but she doesn’t go on until eight tonight.”
Louis was almost afraid to ask what that job was. The way Macy said it, not going on until eight, made it sound like Jillian had found a job stripping on stage. Thing was, his mind drew a blank when he tried to make small talk, so he just asked. “Oh yeah? Where’s your mom working these days?”
“She’s a cocktail waitress over at the Hair of the Dog,” Macy told him. “Do you know the Hair of the Dog, Mr. Shears?”
The way she said it, Louis just bet that she knew all about the Hair, as it was called locally. The Hair of the Dog was a sleezy bump-and-grind joint out on the highway that catered mostly to truckers and bikers and tough working class types from the mills and factories. Nice place. Louis had only been in there once with a couple guys for a bachelor party and they’d left pretty quick. They were worried the women there might kick their asses, let alone the men. As he recalled, the waitresses were all topless.
“Sure, nice place,” he lied.
Macy grunted. “You’re either a bad liar or you don’t get out much, Mr. Shears,” she told him. “No offense, but there’s nothing nice about a place like that.”
“I’m sorry, Macy.”
She shrugged. “Why? I gave up trying to babysit my mom years ago.”
There were things Louis could have said, but it was absolutely none of his business so he kept his mouth shut. Poor Macy. Such a good, sweet kid. She deserved better than Jillian. That was for sure.
They made a quick search of the main floor and Jillian was nowhere to be found. There were a couple overflowing ashtrays and empty beer cans on the kitchen counter, a sink filled with dirty dishes, the remains of a frozen pizza on the table with a couple flies mating on it, but that was about it. In the living room there was a basket of washing that had spilled over onto the floor, scattered magazines and newspapers with rings on them like they’d been used for coasters.
But no Jillian.
“This place is a dump, isn’t it?” Macy said, obviously embarrassed.
“No…I wouldn’t say that.”
“It is, too, Mr. Shears. Quit being nice about things. It’s not necessary. I know what everyone thinks about us. It’s no big deal. My mom is a lazy, drunken slob and a…a…well, I know what people say.”
“Who cares what they say?” Louis told her. “It’s nobody’s goddamn business but your own.”
“Thanks, Mr. Shears,” Macy said. “That was nice.”
“Quit calling me Mr. Shears. You make me feel like I should be walking with a cane. Call me Louis or I’ll start calling you Miss Merchant.”
Macy reddened. “Oh God, not that! Mr. Hamm at school calls me Little Miss Merchant all the time. It’s embarrassing, you know?”
Louis just smiled. “Hamm is still there?”
“Yes, and just as weird as ever.”
Mr. Hamm…dear God. Mr. Hamm had been there when Louis was in high school and he’d graduated twenty years before. Mr. Hamm was this large, very obese man who stood around in the hallways drumming his fingers on his impressive belly. Back then, Mr. Hamm had been partial to medieval forms of punishment if you acted up in his class. He’d make you stretch out your arms and balance a stack of textbooks in each hand until you thought you were going to drop or stand on one foot with your nose touching the blackboard. It was never anything violent like a ruler across your knucklesthat was Mr. Hengishbut it was just as painful after you were doing it for fifteen or twenty minutes.
Macy went and checked out the downstairs bedroom and bathroom while Louis took a turn through the dining room. Nothing, nothing.
“You know,” Macy said when she came back, “I feel really stupid. You don’t have to stay here, you can go home. I can handle this. I’ll just lock myself in.”
But Louis shook his head. “No, let’s stay together.”
“I was hoping you’d say that…Louis.” Macy looked around. “I have to clean this place up. What a dump. Well, I suppose we should look in the basement in case she fell down or something.”
Louis got a funny feeling when she said that. For reasons he did not understand properly and never would, he said, “I’ll check the basement. You go check upstairs. If she’s anywhere, she’s probably up there. I don’t think Jillian would like me just bursting into her bedroom.”
“Oh no, she’d hate that,” Macy said with all due sarcasm.
He watched her pad up the stairs and he went down the hallway to the cellar door. He opened it and started down the steps. He was worried about more than Jillian; Michelle should have been home by now. He’d looked out the upstairs windows twice and her car was not in the driveway. He pulled his cellphone out and dialed next door. No answer. Nothing but the answering machine kicking in. He called Michelle’s cell, but there was no answer there either. He wasn’t liking any of that a bit.
“Jillian?” he called out. “Are you around?”
He hadn’t been down the Merchant’s basement since the summer before. The pilot light had gone out on Jillian’s water heater and she had been waiting for him to get home from work, sitting out on the porch. He got it lit, all right, Jillian hanging over him the whole time, her tits bursting out of a halter top. He barely got out of there with his virtue intact. Jillian had cornered him at the dryer, on the stairs. He thought she was going to have her way with him on the washer. When he got home, of course, Michelle was waiting for him. He told her Jillian’s pilot light had gone out and Michelle had said, Oh, I’ll just bet. Did you get it lit for her, dear? Get everything burning high and hot again? You’re such a good little neighbor.
She had hounded him for weeks about that.
Louis went into the utility room where the washer and dryer, furnace and hot water heater were. No Jillian. There was a junk room and a furnished bar room, but she wasn’t there either. He called out for her a few times and just stood there, feeling…well, he wasn’t sure what he was feeling. Only that he did not like it. He did not like it at all. He was feeling what he’d felt when he’d first walked into the house, that something bad was building around him. Standing there, his guts twisting up, he felt like a kid standing in a deserted house on a dare. Waiting for the boogeys to come sliding out of the walls. It was like that. He did not know what to expect, but it was there, all around him, gathering strength and thickening in the air like poison.
“Jillian?” he said, his voice sounding very dry and very old.
There was one last room to check, a spare bedroom at the back.
It was where he had to go and exactly where he did not want to go. But he had to. Just go in there and get it done, get back upstairs to Macy, because honestly, he just did not like the idea of leaving the girl alone. Not with how things were. He walked over past the bar and to the doorway leading to the bedroom. There was no door, just a set of old plastic hippie beads hanging down. The kind of thing Greg Brady had in his bedroom…or had it been Davy Jones on The Monkees? Louis brushed them aside, smiling, remembering similar beads his sister had strung in her room. Ah, the
seventies.
As soon as he got in there, he stopped smiling. It did not seem to be a conscious effort on his part.
“Jillian?” he said.
The bedroom was long and narrow and ran the length of the back of the basement. It wasn’t a bedroom really, but more of storeroom where everything went that didn’t seem to have a place anywhere else. There were cardboard boxes stacked right up to the bare rafters overhead, stray pieces of furniture, racks of clothes with aisles in-between. It was dim in there, no window to the outside. Louis felt blindly along the walls until he found a switch. A single bank of fluorescent lights buzzed on overhead. Only one tube worked, the other dirty and flickering. It cast an uneven, surreal illumination, shadows jumping all around him.
Louis walked down the aisles of clothes that were hung from rods connected to the beams overhead. Lots of the clothes were Jillian’s and Macy’s, old coats and snowsuits and you name it, but much of it was men’s suits and jackets, a couple dusty overcoats. This must have been Macy’s father’s stuff. Jillian had never thrown any of it out, just relegated it to this rummage sale, this morgue of cast-offs.
Everything smelled moldy down there, like mothballs and rotting linen.
Louis moved down the rows of coats and dresses, brushing them with his fingers as he passed. He wasn’t even sure by that point why he was even bothering. All these clothes dangling around him, much of them in motion now from his brushing against them. Wild shadows creeping around.
“Well, I suppose you’re not here, Jillian,” he said.
He pushed on to the end, stepping over cartons of Macy’s baby clothes, boxes of old toys, a stool, his hands parting clothes as he went. Denim and corduroy and twill…and then his fingers touched something cool and rubbery at the same moment that his eyes caught sight of a hulking shape that did not belong. Yes, right there, tucked between a couple coats.
Louis let out a cry and stumbled back, falling right over a carton of toys.
Jillian was here, after all.
She was hanging there amongst the coats. She was naked, her flesh pale, her head cocked to the side from the noose encircling her throat. Her face was livid like a bruise, her eyes open, and her tongue dangling out thickly.
“Oh no,” Louis heard himself. “Oh, Jillian…not this…”
She’d tied clothesline rope around her throatand very tightly by the looks of itand tied off the rope around a roughhewn rafter above. Then she’d jumped off the stool and hanged herself, tucked neatly amongst the other hanging things.
Louis just stared up at her with a horror that was shocking and depthless, his eyes wide, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He wondered what it had been like, what had gone through her head. He was picturing her almost casually undressing, her mind filled with blackness. Maybe folding her clothes very carefully. Coming down here and tying off that rope, fastening it around her throat, maybe whistling the whole time.
Dear God.
But he would never know what she had done exactly or what she had thought and he was glad for this.
Jillian just hung there, swaying slightly from side to side, turning in a slow and lazy semicircle. What struck Louis the most was not her puffy and purple-blue face, but the fact that she was naked. Even in death, she was somehow sensual and well-proportioned like maybe wasn’t dead at all.
Louis did not look away from her.
For some reason, he did not dare.
The idea of taking his eyes off that hanging corpse was unthinkable. His belly rolling with nausea, his hand feeling oddly cold where he’d brushed hers, he backed away, finally finding his feet and dashing out of there.
“Louis?” Macy called.
Good God, he’d forgotten about her.
Louis stood in the barroom, looking from the dangling hippie beads that were still moving to the steps leading upstairs. He could hear Macy coming down them. He started to sweat, to panic. Okay, buddy boy, are you going to let Macy see her mother like this or are you going to move? There was no real choice in the matter. He went over to the stairs and stopped her before she got down there and got any fool ideas about looking around herself.
“She’s not down here,” he said, a little louder than he’d intended.
“Okay,” Macy said. “Okay.”
Taking her hand, he led her up the stairs and didn’t relax any until the cellar door was shut, hiding its sins in its dark belly. He stood there a moment, just breathing. Macy was staring at him. She looked concerned.
“Louis…you’re not…losing it, are you?”
He almost burst out laughing. “No, no, no.”
“You had me worried,” she said. “You sure you’re all right? You look a little green or something.”
Sure, he was green. Who wouldn’t have been? His stomach kept trying to crawl up the back of his throat like it wanted out, wanted to jump out his mouth and pirouette on the floor. He touched his face and it was cool, clammy, moist with sweat.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Macy said. “Please.”
Louis thought quick because he had to. “Um…it’s just closed-in spaces. I get kind of claustrophobic sometimes. It’s nothing.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. You were in the back bedroom, weren’t you? It’s creepy in there.”
It’s even worse now.
“Well,” he said, “Jillian’s gone. We’ll just have to wait for her. Maybe we should go to my house. Michelle should be home soon. Then we can figure out what we’re going to do.”
“Okay.”
Macy was easy with it and Louis had to wonder why.
Was it just the paranoia about what was going on in Greenlawn or was it something more? Was she feeling the badness in her own house just as he was? Good God, his mind was all mixed-up and he did not know what to do. Sometimes he stressed so easily. This time, it was understandable. He needed Michelle home. She would know what to do. She always knew what to do. What scared him most was the idea that she would never be coming home. That she was dead somewhere, perhaps swinging from a rafter like Jillian.
But that was just paranoia.
They crossed through the Merchant’s sideyard and climbed up on to Louis’ porch. Michelle’s car was still not in the driveway. Maybe that meant nothing, but he was beginning to think otherwise.
“When will she be home?” Macy asked.
But Louis could only shake his head. “I wish to God I knew…”
21
The smell of raw meat was overwhelming.
Mike Hack knew that he and his brother were supposed to find some nice young gee-gee, but the meat…oh God…such a wonderful odor. He had smelled it down the alley and traced it here. To this yard. Nothing had ever smelled this good before. He would have the meat. He must have the meat.
But wait.
Careful.
Remember what Mr. Chalmers said.
This is war.
This is survival.
Those other neighborhoods, they’re gonna try and take what we got, so we got to hit them first. We gotta take what they got. Their women, their food, their weapons.
Yes, caution was advisable. Next to him, sweating and grinding his teeth and breathing hard, Matt could barely contain himself. He wanted the meat, too. Mike put a hand on him, stayed him from diving over the hedges and taking what was offered.
Mike held a finger to his lips.
He saw—
A plate of raw meat slabs sitting on the picnic table. Raw, ready for grilling. He could smell the juice, the fat, the blood pooling on the plate.
The meat was unattended, except for a few flies. No one was around. On all fours, down low, smelling the earth and feeling he was part of it now like a worm tunneling through mulch, he crept forward into the yard. Matt was behind him. Still grinding his teeth. Still breathing hard.
Mike sniffed the air.
He scented the raw meat.
But something else, too, something that made him alert for danger: the scent trail of others. People were
near. Hunters like him, perhaps. Yes, he thought they must be. He could smell their passage in the yard as a wolf can smell a game trail: a gamey, vile musk.
It excited him.
Still on his hands and knees, fighting the very simple need to roll in the grass and scent himself, Mike crept forward. Past a kid’s pool. Around a swingset and a row of decorative peony trees. The meat was close now. Just a matter of reaching out for it.
Careful.
With Matt at his back, he sidled up to a little potting shed, lost himself in the cool fragrance of cedars. But the fragrance was not so strong that he did not scent the others and know they were near. Very near. He could smell their sweat, their heat, almost hear the thudding of their hearts and the rush of blood in their veins.
Where were they?
Matt made a moaning sound in his throat and jumped out of the shadowy protection of the cedars. He ran to the picnic table and grabbed a raw meat cutlet, shoving it in his mouth. He chewed and slurped, pink juice running down his chin. He made a squealing sound in his throat that was nearly orgasmic.
But then—
A woman and two naked girls came rushing out of the potting shed where they’d been waiting all along. Mad things with wild hair and grime-streaked faces. Their eyes were huge and staring, lips pulled back from teeth.
And Mike, his brain reeling and misfiring, recognized them.
Or who they had once been.
Kylie…Elissa…those girls are Kylie and Elissa Sinclair. And that’s their mom…Maddie, Maddie Sinclair.
This passed through his mind like a dying echo, but had no true substance and quickly faded.
Matt turned and kicked out at the woman, driving her back. But as he did so, one of the girls took a long-tined meat fork and stabbed him in the side. He let out a yelp of pain and turned to fight and the other girl slashed him across the throat with a knife.
No!
Mike jumped in, diving on the woman, trying to thumb out her eyes and get his teeth to her throat, but she threw him off. Threw him down. Kicked him and kicked him again until he rolled away, panting and stunned and breathless. She left him there and joined the two girls in goring Matt, taking him down, hunters to prey, slashing and cutting and stabbing him until he was a coiled up thing on the ground, raw and red-stained.