by John Mimms
With a good degree of discomfort, Debbie walked to the driver’s door. She opened it and fished a small bottle of Germ-X out of the console. She squirted a generous portion into her hands as the bottle made a loud farting noise. She then rigorously rubbed her hands together, taking care to cover every square inch.
“Thank God for cootie cream,” she muttered.
Debbie was squeamish about germs; some might even say it bordered on phobia. If she knew what Jeff’s assessment of her had been, she would have agreed with the squeamish part. Maybe not the hot part though. She didn’t feel hot standing there with a bruised butt and ego, not to mention potential animal poop and kid bogies on her hands. Why she was interested in paranormal research, she didn’t know for sure.
Debbie wiped the remnants of her Germ-X on her shirt. She gazed back over the roof of her car at the Chilton house. The light from the street lamp behind her and the waving branches created a bizarre shadow play on the old house, giving the appearance of someone walking back and forth in the upstairs windows.
One final thought crossed Debbie’s mind before she got in her car and drove home, a thought she wished had been left untapped. Those trees, those ancient oak trees, had stood since before the Civil War. The things they had seen over the years. If these trees could talk, they could tell the tale of a horrible day. The day when the agonized screams of the Chilton family echoed off their trunks, chilling their branches in an icy wind. Before the trees could whisper their terrible yarn, she got in her car and headed home.
Yes, she did wonder what attracted her to paranormal research. Was it a matter of simple curiosity or something deeper? Debbie did not know, at least not consciously.
The conscious and subconscious mind is separated by a metaphorical gulf in our brains. Some are as narrow as a stream and others as vast as an ocean. Sometimes all it takes is one small catalyst to begin to build a bridge between the two.
Debbie’s answer lay on the distant shore of her subconscious. It waited for the bridge, waited for discovery, and it waited to give resolve to unexplained emptiness.
She reached home and entered the front door. Lily danced with joy at her arrival, jumping, wagging her tail, and lolling her slobbery tongue. Debbie deposited a leftover slice of pepperoni pizza into the happy canine’s bowl and then let her out back to take care of business. A few minutes later, she let the dog back in and retired to the bedroom. She soon changed into her standard sleeping attire of panties and T-shirt. Lily took a few nibbles of pizza and joined her at the foot of the bed. Debbie lay back on her pillow with her dog nestled at her feet. She soon drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 5
DEBBIE AWOKE WITH A shriek. She lashed out with her hands as the thin line between sleep and wake shattered. Lily jumped from her nest of covers, staring in bewilderment. Debbie sat up, her heart hammering in her ears. She gasped for air.
At the moment of waking, she knew the dream. It hung as vivid in her mind as her own name. However, with each passing second, it retreated into the dark abyss of her mind ... the home of forgotten nightmares.
Debbie’s heart continued to race. Sweat outlined her entire body like a chalk drawing at a murder scene. She pulled back matted tangles of sweat soaked hair from her brow and ears. Her digital clock read 3 AM. Throwing the covers back and sliding her legs over the side of the bed, she realized something didn’t feel right. She reached down and touched her panties. Debbie quickly withdrew her hand when she felt the liquid warmth.
“My God,” she whispered. “I haven’t done that since I was six.”
A surreal image of little girl in pink pajamas flashed through her head. The terrified girl had lost control of her bladder.
“Who is it? It couldn’t be me?” she wondered aloud.
Debbie had no sooner asked the question when the image retreated into her mind, joining its cousin, the nightmare, in obscurity.
She got up and removed her soaked T-shirt and panties. She threw them on the bed and then yanked the sheets up before carrying the bundle of sullied laundry to the utility room. Wearing only her birthday suit, she crammed the bundle in the washing machine, added detergent, and then started the load.
Debbie returned to the bedroom and retrieved a fresh pair of panties and T-shirt from her dresser. She placed them on the vanity and then entered the bathroom. She took a perfunctory shower, spending the next several minutes weeping under the steaming water. Once the warm water began to turn cold, she got out and dried herself. Debbie reached through the door and grabbed her fresh sleeping garments and then proceeded to get dressed. While stepping into her panties, she backed against the cold bathroom wall. She squealed in pain when her bruised butt reminded her of her fall. She began to cry again.
When she exited the bathroom, she caught Lily on the bed sniffing at the soaked mattress. She snatched her before she could ‘reclaim’ her territory.
“What a crappy night,” she said, scratching her pooch’s head.
Debbie carried Lily to the utility room. She moved her water and food dish inside and then closed the door. She was not going to take the chance of having her mattress further violated. She grabbed several old towels from the dirty clothes and laid them over the mattress to soak up the urine. She would give it a proper cleaning in the morning.
Debbie retrieved a spare blanket and pillow from the linen closet. She spread them out on the living room couch. Exhaustion overwhelmed her and she soon drifted off to sleep, oblivious to Lily’s faint scratching and whimpering.
PAC HAD A FULL NIGHT’S sleep, but woke in his usual grumpy mood. His irritability intensified because it was seven o’clock on a Saturday morning and someone was calling him.
“Hello!” he huffed, snatching the phone off the nightstand.
“Pac, this is Roy Ellis,” the voice on the other end said. “Derek called in sick today; we need you to cover his shift at the store.”
“What if I’m sick?” Pac growled.
“Are you?” Roy asked.
There was a long silence.
“Pac, I know you want to be a store manager and nothing looks better on your record then helping out when needed.”
Pac sighed.
“All right, give me an hour. I haven’t been up long.”
This wasn’t true; he was still very much entrenched in bed. In fact, he thought it was going to take a pry bar and forklift to get him out.
“Thanks Pac, I’ll let them know you are coming.”
“Yep,” he replied, and then slammed down the phone.
Pac did not get up immediately. He lay there staring at the wall and listening to the distant drone of four wheelers racing through the woods. After he cursed Cornucopia Savers, he turned his attention to the revving four-wheeler engines.
“Damned rednecks,” he muttered.
He hated rednecks, hated them with a passion. Maybe it was because they were the ones who always seemed to wind up on television after a natural disaster. Perhaps it was because of their complete disregard of good taste. Most likely, it was being a redneck had come to glorify brilliant underachievement and stupidity. They were a drain on society, forcing him to pay more taxes to fund their stupidity and laziness.
Pac pulled himself out of bed and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom. He showered, got dressed, and then threw a sausage biscuit into the microwave. With his normal hours at the store, he wasn’t used to getting up before ten o’clock. Taking the biscuit with him, he made his usual daily inspection of the other side of the duplex. His blood boiled once again.
Trudging to his car, he stopped and observed the Romney/Ryan sticker on the bumper.
“Really should think about removing it,” he thought. After all, the election was a while ago.
Pac peeled out, throwing dust and rock. He felt the need for speed this morning, but it was hard to be Richard Petty in a four-cylinder sedan. He tore down the country road and arrived at work before eight o’clock.
To his pleasant surprise, they adju
sted schedules to where he only had to stay until noon. At least his whole Saturday wasn’t shot to hell. Today was his mother’s birthday. He had promised to spend a couple of hours with her and bring her favorite meal, General Taos’s Spicy Chicken.
He called in the order to Bang-Bang China a few minutes before leaving work. He was not a huge fan of Chinese food, but he always got a kick out of going there. A cute Chinese lady worked the pick-up window. She spoke very broken English and Pac anxiously waited for the punch line when he picked up his orders. “Here food. You pay now.”
“I pay now!” Pac grinned, handing her the money before maneuvering the cardboard box through his window.
This was where his amusement ended for the day. He hated going to see his mother. He didn’t hate his mother, he hated the treatment he always received on every visit.
She and his father had divorced when he was very young. He has not seen or heard from him since. Pac had a brother who was two years younger. Being thrust into the overwhelming world of single parenthood was not easy for their mother. She was strict and overbearing, causing Pac and his brother to despise her. Pac’s brother, Jack, had gotten away when he was eighteen. He joined the Army and never came home. Pac thought he was in Asia somewhere now, Japan or some such place. This was where his last letter had come from almost two years ago.
Nothing Pac or his brother ever did was good enough. For Pac, it seemed to get worse as he got older. There was always some new perceived deficiency in her eldest son to serve as the focal point of her next browbeating. Her eyes seemed haunted every time she looked at him. The revolting stare got worse as he got older.
Per the proclamation of his mother, Rosie Pacheco, the Army is a nowhere gig. It would only get you killed. She also complained because Pac had pissed away his psychology degree bouncing from job to job at different grocery stores.
“Why don’t you go to work for Wal-Mart?” she always asked. “They have a future and benefits.”
What she did not know was he had worked for Wal-Mart. He worked there for six whole weeks, which was the normal length of time between visits with his mother. He quit because he got sick of being bossed around by ‘punk ass’ college kids.
Rosie wanted what was best for her sons, although she was lousy at articulating it. To the boys, it sounded like resentment. To make matters worse, she had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s a little over a year earlier. Things would never get better.
Pac reached his mother’s mobile home in the Happy Acres trailer park twenty minutes later. This was the cherry on top of the banana split of why he hated visiting his mother. She lived in redneck hell.
He stared next door for a few moments before getting out of the car. The neighbors to the right had an inflatable swimming pool. A dozen or so bare butted toddlers splashed in the water. A heavyset woman sat in a lawn chair a few feet away. She wore rollers in her hair and dangled a cigarette out of her mouth. She cursed and screamed at the naked future trailer trash, administering an occasional random smack on the fanny with a fly swatter.
Pac shook his head. He got out of the car and retrieved the Chinese lunch stinking up the interior.
As he walked to the door, he noticed a man with a single tooth watching him from the porch of a trailer across the road. Between the man’s appearance and vacant eyes, Pac could have sworn he heard banjo music playing somewhere.
Pac knocked on his mother’s door.
“Who the hell is it?” an agitated female voice rasped.
“It’s me, Mom,” Pac said.
“Who the hell is me? I don’t know you! Get your ass out of here before I call the cops!”
“I’ve got your Chinese food, Mom,” Pac announced tauntingly.
Pac had no sooner gotten the sentence out of his mouth when he heard footsteps clambering towards the door.
The trailer door flew open, almost knocking the box out of Pac’s hand. A slender woman stood there, regarding him with excitement. She was in her early fifties, but appeared much older. Her long, stringy, brown hair was streaked with gray. Age lines ringed her mouth and eyes, giving the appearance of three small spider webs on her face. She was barefoot and wearing gray sweat pants with a T-shirt reading: ‘Jesus Loves You, Everyone Else thinks you’re an asshole.’
“Well, the shirt could have been worse,” Pac thought. She had an extensive collection and most of them were an exercise in tackiness.
“Mikey?” she asked with narrowed eyes.
“Yeah, Mom, it’s me,” Pac said.
“You workin’ at Wal-Mart yet?” she asked, craning her neck to peer into the box.
“No, Mom, I brought you lunch.”
Her eyes widened a little and her nostrils flared as if trying to catch a faint scent. She turned and retreated into the trailer, leaving the door standing open. Pac took this as her invitation to come inside. As he closed the door behind him, a putrid smell slapped him in the face.
“What the hell is that?” he mumbled. “A backed-up toilet?”
They dined on a flimsy card table in the center of the small and untidy kitchen. Not a word passed between them as they ate. Rosie shoveled heaping mounds of General Tao’s chicken into her furrowed mouth. Pac picked at his lunch as if it had maggots crawling in it. The smell in the house didn’t make this hard to envision. He was very hungry, but he had no appetite. These visits were always stressful, but the smell made it worse.
After several long minutes of repressing the urge to vomit, Pac carried his plate of half-eaten lunch to the washboard. When he peered into the sink, he vomited. He couldn’t help it.
Rosie remained oblivious to her ill son. She continued shoveling food as if it was her last meal on Earth.
When Pac finished, he leaned against the counter dripping with cold sweat. He groped for a paper towel and then wiped sweat from his brow and spittle from his mouth. Pac needed to get some air.
“I’ll be back in a second, Mom,” he said, choking back chunks of vomit stuck in his throat.
She ignored him as she attacked a second helping.
Pac opened the door and went outside. He slumped down on the steps and rested his head in his hands.
“Good Christ,” was the only phrase he could articulate. He repeated it over and over through cupped hands, inhaling his vomit staunched breath. As unpleasant as this was, it was better than what was in the sink.
After several long moments, he felt he had composed himself enough to go back inside. He knew he was going to have to deal with his mother. But, even worse, he would have to deal with what floated in the sink. The thing now baptized in his regurgitated lunch.
Chapter 6
HE RETURNED TO THE kitchen to find his mother with her plate held in front of her face, licking the last residue of soy sauce like a hungry dog.
Irony weighed heavy on Pac’s mind as he spoke to his mother.
“Mom, do you have a dog?”
Her head shot up.
“Mikey? You found him?” she asked, sauce dripping from her chin.
“Found who, Mom?”
She stared at him for several moments and then replied in a sarcastic tone.
“My dog, Mikey.”
“Are you referring to me, or did you name your dog Mikey?”
“Well of course I named my dog Mikey. I obviously didn’t get it right the first time. I had to have a Mikey around who’s worth a damn.”
She had finally brought out her verbal blade and slashed.
“Mikey is worth a damn and he doesn’t look like your father.” She said with a roll of her eyes. She gazed out the window and finished with, “like you do.”
In an instant, his mother’s growing antipathy towards him as he got older clicked like the final tumbler in a safe. His mother despised him because he resembled his father.
His mother’s disease often dragged confusion in its wake; but lying is not a part of the modus operandi. In fact, it often reveals long buried truths.
Pac felt hurt and anger
coursing through his veins like competing poisons racing for his heart. He grasped the back of the chair and squeezed hard. His fingernails dug into the wood, making moon shaped crescents in the cheap bargain store finish.
“When was the last time you saw Mikey?” Pac asked through clinched teeth.
“Last time I saw him I was giving him a bath,” she said, gesturing at the sink. “I haven’t seen my cute little Chihuahua pup since. Gladys Fulmer, she lives a couple doors down, her dog had a litter. She gave me one for an early birthday present.”
“That soupy, hairy mess could have been a Chihuahua,” Pac thought.
But how long had it been in there? My God, she filled the sink up to wash the dog, and then forgot about it. It must have been just deep enough...
His thought trailed off before switching to another. How the hell could she not have smelled it?
“I guess it’s the old frog in a pot rule, slowly turning up the heat until it boils to death, unaware until it was too late,” Pac thought. She had gradually gotten used to the odor as the putrefaction advanced.
“Mom, why don’t you go outside and call for Mikey. I think I may have seen him. I’ll clean up lunch and then we can visit.”
Rosie jumped to her feet and plodded to the door. Once she was outside and he heard her calling for the poor pooch, he thought about the best way to deal with the situation.
Pac went to the bathroom and found a jar of Vick’s vapor rub in the medicine cabinet. He spread some on a hand towel and tied it over his nose and mouth. He then found a garbage bag, dust pan, and plunger in the hall closet. He removed the half-filled bag from the trash can and replaced it with the new one. After setting it in front of the sink, he scooped most of the solid remains with the dust pan and flopped them into the trash can.
Once bone, hair, and residual organs were removed, he wedged the sink stopper up with the edge of the dust pan. There was a deep gurgling followed by bubbles. To his relief, the bubbles were soon replaced by a sucking whirlpool as festering dog soup disappeared down the drain.