Brood

by Chase Novak

  They are both exhausted. Cynthia has had no sleep; Arthur has had but two hours. Their stomachs are sour; their breath is foul. Cynthia feels humiliated at having been treated as a criminal, and Arthur is starting to wonder how many good deeds he must do out of respect for his two old friends Alex and Leslie. The sister is a piece of work. There is something fanatical in her loneliness. It may be time to start billing her.

  There is a sawing sound everywhere. It is the rats—rats in the basement, rats in the attic, rats in the walls—gnawing on wood. They gnaw to file down their ceaselessly growing front teeth; otherwise, the teeth would grow right through their lips.

  “Rats,” Cynthia says in answer to Arthur’s questioning look.

  “You’ve got to get someone in here to get rid of them. It sounds as if they’re going to come right through the walls.”

  “I think they’re basically shy,” Cynthia says.

  “I’m sure,” says Arthur.

  Cynthia can sense the twins are not here, but it is a very large house and she must search through it, room by room. Arthur waits for her in the library. He comforts himself with a vision of breakfast to come. He checks his watch. Soon it will be six. He wonders if he is presentable enough to make the short walk over to the Regency and treat himself to the perverse but undeniable pleasure of spending on a cup of coffee roughly what a textile worker in Bangladesh is paid in a month. He is wearing a decent pair of shoes, though without socks. His slacks are wrinkled, his shirt has seen many hours of anxious duty, and there is a matter of personal hygiene, an innocent victim of his rude awakening. Yet the pols and the media types won’t be there yet, and he can take an out-of-the-way table. The omelet fines herbes! The mixed berries! The seven-grain toast. He idly tries to remember the last time he ate white bread—once upon a time, grain processed enough to make white bread was a luxury for the rich, but when it became affordable for everyone, the rich suddenly discovered that white bread was sliced suicide, and now they all preferred the denser, peasanty grains. Arthur knows this, and he knows it is absurd too. But, nevertheless, he wants his seven-grain toast and cannot imagine eating a slice of Silvercup, or whatever the potbellied masses were calling their tasteless pale loaves.

  “God damn it all to hell.”

  It is Cynthia’s voice, coming from the front hall. She sounds furious, which makes Arthur roll his eyes. He is somewhat surprised by how little sympathy he has for her. It all began with her getting into the wrong car at the Surrogate Court, and his irritation has increased by seeing this immense house and suspecting that good old-fashioned real estate greed is part of the reason she has been so gung-ho about adopting those weird little twins. But the true engine of his annoyance is her calling him from the precinct and interrupting his sleep. Sleep has become sacrosanct to Arthur; those dreamy hours on his French linen sheets is what he looks forward to all day long. And not only that; he needs eight hours, preferably nine, the way he needs oxygen. Nonetheless, he lifts himself out of his chair, groaning mightily. But before he makes it halfway across the library, Cynthia comes in, wiping her hands on her hips and shaking her head.

  “The door was wide open,” she says. “The hall is soaked.”

  “Didn’t you close it when we came in?” Arthur says.

  “I thought so. I don’t know… I guess not.”

  “Look here, Cynthia. I have to get going.” Arthur checks his Patek Philippe watch—he hopes never to tire of gazing at the simple beauty of the watch’s adorable little face. “I have a full day in front of me.” His smile is really no more than a show of teeth—he might as well be brandishing a rake.

  But she is frightened to have him leave, frightened to be alone in that house, and even more frightened by the possibility that she will not be alone.

  “Please don’t leave,” she says. She can barely look at him, so ashamed is she to be acting like this.

  The smile slowly disappears from his face—the rake is put away; the barn door slides shut. “I really must go. You’re a mother now, dear. It’s a difficult job, but you must do it. Carry on and keep your powder dry, as they say.”

  “Arthur—”

  “It’s okay, I’ll show myself out. You might want to lock the door behind me—we don’t want it…blowing open again.”

  He leaves quickly, and Cynthia bolts the door, wondering if she is locking trouble out or in.

  “Kids?” she calls in a tremulous voice. “Kids?”

  She is alone. And knows she is not. The knowledge brought to her by her eyes and her sense of logic is contradicted by that swirl of hunch and fear we call intuition. She knows she is not alone. She knows that in the next room, or upstairs, or up the next flight of stairs, or down in the cellar, someone (something?) lurks hungrily, motivated by only the basest evil.

  The house is too large. There are too many rooms. How lovely it would be to live in a little apartment, a box, where everything was in view at all times. You could keep the bathroom door open, and the single closet too. There should never be more rooms than people. Unoccupied space is a breeding ground for…she cannot even put into words what she fears.

  “Kids!” Her voice is full of urgency now. Even to her own ears, she sounds furious, slightly unhinged.

  She walks through the sloshy foyer. Someone is here. She cannot prove it, but really, in the end, she thinks, aren’t the most important things in life the things for which there is no rational explanation, the things we cannot prove?

  She is standing in front of the heavy wooden cellar door. It is locked, from the outside.

  That cellar has been nothing but the site of horror and catastrophe to Cynthia. The first time she walked down those steps, she discovered the hideous kennel/abattoir her sister and Alex maintained there, a place where dogs and cats, ferrets, squirrels, rabbits, and hamsters were fattened and devoured by the increasingly berserk masters of the house. And it was here that Cynthia stumbled upon the half-eaten, barely surviving Cuban man, who died—it was a mercy—in the hospital shortly after. She thought at the time she would never recover from the sight of him, but just as the memory of a slap recedes in the wake of a stab wound, and the stab wound seems less horrific, in fact almost tolerable, after you’ve been bombed, the memory of poor shredded Xavier Sardina, although it has not disappeared, has nevertheless been dimmed by the cloud bank of all that has happened since then—the chug-chug of those door locks in the Town Car, the bat in the toilet, the twins’ disappearance, and the moving carpet of twittering rats.

  And yet. The cellar must be checked—only this time, she will keep the door open and not venture down more than a step. Two at the most.

  She walks to the kitchen and fetches a flashlight, turns it on to make certain the batteries are fresh. The torch’s big moon face lights with a golden glow in the predawn shadows of this mansion. Oh! The mansion, the stately town house she once so envied and craved, this fortress, this crown jewel of the Upper East Side that Cynthia in her passion and her avarice was once so eager to call home—now she is trapped in this showcase, this emblem of a distant, terribly elegant age when masons fresh off the boat from Italy worked for next to nothing, when ruddy maids with lilting Irish brogues scurried and scoured for little more than room and board, and Twisdens of yore rested secure in their untaxed fortune.

  She unlocks the door. Standing at the head of the steep staircase, holding on to the doorjamb with one hand, as if a sudden wind might sweep her down and down and down into the depths below, Cynthia feels along the cool dampish wall, trying to locate the light switch, forgetting for a moment that the electricity was cut months ago. Then, gingerly, Cynthia puts one foot and then the other on the topmost step—she is like a hydrophobe on a diving board.

  “I know you’re down there,” she says in the most matter-of-fact tone she can muster.

  Her voice echoes faintly. But beyond that, all is silence. Even the rats are silent—or they have moved elsewhere.

  Fat chance.

  Cynthia waits, and th
en decides to try it one more time. After that, she will get out of there. Lock the door. And hope to God she will never have to step foot in there again.

  “All right, kids. Come on. I’m not mad. Okay?”

  She is sure she is not alone—but what she is not sure of is who is in the house with her. She calls for the twins because that is her best-case scenario. It’s the number one option, and number two is… is? Is what? A homeless person? Her sister’s ghost? A killer?

  “Kids?” She forces herself to take one more step down. She is still far from the bottom. She can still get out of there if she must.

  Unless, of course, the door slams shut.

  Which it does. With a deafening boom. No wind could have done that. No accident, nothing natural. It is a slam full of intention.

  As quickly as her frozen senses will allow, Cynthia lunges for the door, but as soon as she touches it, she hears the heavy brass lock plunging into its receiving chamber with a low click, like a neck being snapped. She turns the handle. Nothing. She shakes it. She pushes on the door. A crazy person is screaming, No, no, let me out, a totally batshit, out-of-control, shrieking hopeless woman, and it takes her a few moments to realize that the poor tormented woman is her herself.

  She pulls herself together with a few deep, steadying breaths. Think! Think! But she might as well be exhorting herself to fly or sing the role of Mimì in La Bohème. Where once there were thoughts, there is now bright light—a blinding white light. But wait! Through that white light a figure emerges, and when the figure is at the forefront of her consciousness she sees it wears a robe and has a long ghoulish face, not masculine, not feminine, not even entirely human, and it whispers, “You are going to die.”

  With renewed determination—strength born of panic, really—she tries to force her way through the closed door, as if her hands could break the lock.

  “Don’t do this,” she begs. “Don’t. Alley-Oop?” Just uttering the little pet name brings the girl into Cynthia’s senses, like the smell of rain. She stifles a sob. “Braveheart? Are you there?”

  She waits. And waits.

  Her phone! She can feel it in her back pocket, a resistant parallelogram of hard plastic. Her smartphone, her fucking brilliant phone. The police will be here in minutes—they sure as hell know the way. She reaches into her pocket, but all she finds there is an expired subway pass, her MetroCard, blue and yellow, with a black magnetic strip at the bottom. It’s no bulkier than the ace of hearts—how did she ever think it was her phone? Fear and the wild hope for rescue have deranged her senses. She throws the MetroCard down into the cellar, and it floats into the darkness. She closes her eyes, as if to quickly construct a levee against the rising flood of tears.

  She sits on the step, hoping that her next move will somehow present itself to her. Oddly, it feels better to keep her eyes closed. Her body aches. Exhaustion moves through her like a fever. She recalls reading something about hypothermia, how when the body’s temperature drops to potentially fatal levels, people are often seized by an almost uncontrollable desire to curl up and fall asleep, and those who do rarely awaken. Breathe in, breathe out. Find reasons to be grateful. Find reasons to hope. In. Out. She tells herself: Open your eyes. She does.

  But do not look at your watch. Don’t count the minutes.

  Time doesn’t matter.

  Remember that: It doesn’t matter.

  What doesn’t matter?

  Oh, right. Time.

  Someone will eventually come and let her out. Whoever is on the other side of the door, whoever has locked her in here, obviously does not want to kill her, or touch her, or harm her in any way.

  Who knows? He may be perfectly nice…whoever has done this.

  Her eyes flutter shut again, but she forces them open.

  Something is at the bottom of the stairs. It is not a corporeal body. It is just a texture, a kind of ripple in the darkness. It has no shape, no dimension. No smell. It makes no sound. It is just there.

  The stirrings of terror are in Cynthia’s heart. But mainly she is curious, intrigued. What is that?

  But no sooner does she ask herself that question than the darkened, indistinct blob of atmosphere begins to rush up the stairs as if propelled by a fierce wind. Cynthia brings her arm up to shield her face, but she cannot stop staring at whatever it is that comes toward her.

  It’s Alice! Little Alley-Oop, racing toward her like a funnel of demonic smoke. Her teeth are bared; her eyes are dull and pitiless. When she is a couple of feet away, she stops, lands on her feet two steps below Cynthia, and assumes her normal form: a little under sixty inches of seemingly normal human flesh, bone, and hair, dressed strangely…she is wearing a shapeless blue dress; her feet are in wobbly old woman’s shoes.

  And then a voice within Cynthia says, in a squeaky, almost hysterical tone: Idiot, if God had wanted you to have children, you woulda had ’em. So now look at you! Over your fool head, as usual.

  Whose voice is that?

  Not Alice’s, not little Alley-Oop’s. The ghostly little girl just stands there, smiling faintly, little wisps of smoke still drifting around her. But then, with the suddenness of a leopard that must strike quickly for its prey, the little girl grabs Cynthia by the wrist.

  “No!” Cynthia screams. In her terror and confusion, she momentarily loses her purchase on the stair, and she slides down three steps. Her vertebrae bang against the hard wood. And now that squeaking sound again. What is her mind telling her this time?

  Except it is not coming from within her. Like a night sky dazzling with little red stars, the eyes of fifty or more rats are closing in on her. The sound of their little pink feet scuttling on the wooden steps. They are as organized as an army, and in no great rush. Cynthia scrambles up and races to the door. She turns the handle. She doesn’t know why. The door is locked.

  Except now it isn’t. Thrown forward by her own momentum, she hurtles into the hall of the house, stumbling over her own feet. Quickly, she turns and slams the door behind her, locks it. She hears the rats scratching on the other side. Some are peeping peacefully, some are squeaking peevishly, and a few are actually screaming. The scream is like that of a terrified old woman.

  Driven by motherly instinct, she races to the second floor, and then to the third, to Alice’s and Adam’s rooms. Their beds are empty, but the closets are open, and the dressers are open too, each and every drawer. Someone has been here and grabbed half the clothes the twins own.

  Chapter 13

  Do you know why I’ve asked to see you?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “That’s funny. We’ve been sitting here for several minutes.”

  “I know.”

  “And yet you’ve shown no curiosity.”

  “I didn’t think it was my place. You asked to see me. Isn’t it up to you to say why?”

  “You’re a bit of a pain in the ass, aren’t you”—Cal Rogers, with his ferocious iron-gray crew cut, bulging forehead, and mouth as tiny and tight as an asterisk, makes something of a show of glancing at the folder on his desk—“Mr. Keswick. Dennis.”

  Dennis feels a little release of tension. That Rogers is pretending to have forgotten his name is definitely reassuring. If Rogers is stooping to little mind games, it means that he is uncertain—uncertain if Dennis has done anything wrong, uncertain about what he wants Dennis to do next.

  “I don’t think of myself as a pain in the A-double-S, sir,” Dennis says. He looks around Rogers’s grim little office. Other parts of this unacknowledged Borman and Davis facility are spotless and hypermodern, germ-free and airtight, with something of the spacecraft in its design and eerie remoteness from earthly life. But Rogers’s office is strictly middle management, windowless, with a faint odor of Fritos in the air and a desk that looks as if it had been acquired from some fly-by-night mortgage broker after the bursting of the latest real estate bubble.

  “How long have you been working for us, Dennis?” Rogers asks, folding his hands on the des
k and leaning forward, suddenly switching gears and perhaps hoping to appear friendly.

  “Not very long.”

  “Three months, yes?”

  “If you say so, Cal.”

  “And how long have you been with Borman?”

  “Let me tell you something here, Cal. To you, I’m…what? Muscle? A goon? You’ve got my résumé right there in front of you. Why don’t you look at the record of my education? If I had gotten a break here or there, maybe a little support on the old home front, I’d be back there running trials. Look at the transcripts, why don’t you?” Dennis knew he was going on at length here, knew he was probably turning the gas higher under the pot of hot water he was already in, but this was his great subject, the wound his mind kept circling: He could have been a real scientist rather than a fucking errand boy! “Chemistry, biochemistry, it’s all there. Do you think you and the rest of the smocks are doing something that only you, only the precious ones, the chosen ones, can do?”

  Rogers remains calm. He’s already been briefed—meaning warned—about Keswick, about his bitterness, the rage that rises out of him like methane. But Dennis is too valuable to let go; he delivers the live bodies that make the research possible.

  Rogers smiles, but that only incites Dennis more. “Medical school. There were a lot of med schools that would have accepted me. But it takes money, and I was broke. And it takes people who believe in you, and my parents did not give a you know what about me, and talking to them about education—you might just as well have told them you needed a hundred bucks to go out dancing with Tinker Bell.”

  “Well, you’re still a young man,” Rogers says. “Are you considering med school for your future?”

  “Too old, and you know it.”

  “You’re making a good salary now, Dennis. You must have some savings.”

  “I do all right.”