Brood

by Chase Novak

  Cynthia sits on the sofa, pulls her phone out, and stares at it, as if to intimidate it into ringing. Fat chance. She stands after a few moments and returns to the windows, where she hopelessly scours the street for signs of the twins.

  She hears a door slam shut. It’s coming from the second floor—possibly the third. The house is tricky in how it transmits sound. But what in the hell is that exterminator doing up there? He belongs down in the cellar with the rest of them.

  Cynthia goes to the foot of the stairs, cocks her head, listens. She can hear the expensive whoosh of the air conditioners pushing cool air out of the house’s forty-two vents. Silence from upstairs. Until…

  Footsteps. Running. Fast. And then stopping.

  “Hello?” she calls up. Hearing her own voice infuriates her. “Hello”? What is that supposed to mean? Why do I say “Hello” when I mean “Come down here this instant”?

  Holding on to her anger, a lifesaver in a sea of confusion, she walks loudly up the steps, hoping the soles of her shoes will communicate her irritation and her seriousness. Three-quarters of the way up, just as the staircase takes its gentle westward swoop, she stops, listens again. Silence. Her heart begins to beat harder. Something is not right about all this…

  She makes her way to the second-floor hallway and goes from room to room, looking for the solitary rogue exterminator. She steps inside her bedroom. The walk-in closet door is open—she is certain she did not leave it like that; she never has and never would. She is afraid to approach it. Maybe it would be better—wiser, safer, saner—to just go downstairs and pretend none of this is happening. Or, better yet, register her concern with the Spanish man with the polished fenders of hair and let him deal with it.

  Yet something compels her to see for herself. She looks around her bedroom for something with which to arm herself, but everything here is soft, useless—blouses, pillows, shawls, skirts, scarves. It is as if, despite all the evidence, mountains of it, centuries’ worth, she still fundamentally believes a woman is safe in her own boudoir. Wait. There is something. A silver candlestick — an old one, with a Colonial provenance, possibly forged by Paul Revere himself, now holding a handmade taper and standing on Cynthia’s bedside table.

  She wraps her hand around the candlestick’s cool silver shaft, draping one finger over the node so as to give her downward blow a bit more force should she find this creep in her closet. With her free hand—though, strictly speaking, no part of her body is “free,” all of her has been colonized by fear, dread, and confusion—she opens the closet door to its fullest and stands there for a moment, her heart shuddering, her bowels watery, waiting for the fiend to emerge.

  But all is stillness. She reaches in, groping for the light switch. Ready for something unseen and unspeakable to touch her. At last, she locates the switch, and the closet light blinks on. The closet itself was built for someone with four hundred changes of clothes and is now largely empty. At the very back of it, however, there is a darkness, a lump of…something. Slowly, she approaches it, the candlestick raised above her head should she need to strike. The closer she gets to the mass, the less light she has. Her heart is climbing a ladder made of fear on its way to her throat.

  She hears a voice, a squeak, a whimper, saying, “Mommy.” It takes her a moment to realize the voice is hers.

  The mass at the back of the closet is a painter’s drop cloth, left behind when the workers were getting the place spick-and-span for Cynthia and the twins’ new lives. Impatiently, she kicks the drop cloth to one side. Beneath it, to her horror, is a nesting mother rat and her ten little thumb-size kittens, or pups, or whatever the fuck you’re supposed to call those fetal little creatures that are somehow able to project both utter helplessness and insatiable carnivorous mayhem. She is too sickened to scream. Her fear of rats is starting to dull—she supposes that’s a good thing. Maybe the only good thing that has come from this whole ordeal. She toes the canvas back over the rat family and retreats from the closet.

  By the time she is back on the main floor, the men are emerging from the cellar.

  The foreman approaches her, wiping cobwebs and dust from his forearms with a beige-and-blue handkerchief. “We will return tomorrow to check on the traps,” he says.

  There is something regal in his Spanish accent, and it lends a sense of dignity and even some pageantry to everything he says. Ah! Tomorrow! The fabled ceremonial checking of the traps! Flanking him are younger exterminators, one rotund with a failed mustache, the other lanky, wearing round, rimless eyeglasses. These were the three men who arrived originally—but where is the fourth?

  “Are you leaving now?” Cynthia asks.

  “Yes,” the foreman says, his Y a J. In fact, he is striding quickly toward the front door, his crew in tow.

  “There’s someone else here,” Cynthia says.

  But the foreman is already on his phone to the home office, informing them he is done here and is on his way to a fast-food restaurant near Times Square.

  “Excuse me?” Cynthia calls out.

  The foreman turns, looks at her, his brows knotted, his head cocked to one side.

  “You’re leaving someone behind,” she says. “There’s someone still here.”

  “No, madame. Three come in, and one, two, three, we leave.”

  Chapter 21

  The rains come suddenly and with furious force, startling and overwhelming. The sky is a vast suppurating wound. Thunder pounds out its chaotic rhythms. Pedestrians, most of them, scurry for cover as if in mortal terror—though a few seem to take this deluge as a relief from the oppressive New York summer heat.

  But to Cynthia, the tumult of the storm is primarily an impediment to hearing possible footsteps in her house. Even when she moves away from the windows, the noise from the thunder and rain overwhelms her.

  She walks toward the kitchen, passing on her way the door to the cellar. She opens it a crack, moves her ear close, and listens. Snap! Snap!

  It’s the sound of rat traps tripping, the sound of rat necks breaking.

  Shivering with revulsion, she closes the door, locks it. If that fourth exterminator is lurking down there, he can stay there until his pals return in the morning.

  Except this: She knows he’s not down there.

  He’s upstairs. In one of a dozen rooms.

  There’s only one thing to do. Call the police. She pulls out her phone, notices the battery is waning. She dials a 9, a 1…and that is as far as she can get without second thoughts. (The road to ruin is paved with second thoughts.) Is she really going to call the cops and tell them there’s a rogue exterminator somewhere inside her house? The cops are probably getting sick of her. And if anyone ever wants to make a case for taking the kids away from her—legal adoption or not, she nevertheless feels her right to parent them, to adore and protect them, is subject to question, subject even to sudden intervention—having the police arrive and incidentally note that once again Adam and Alice are on the loose and once again Cynthia has no idea where they are, that will surely be entered into a ledger somewhere.

  Nevertheless, her finger hovers over that final 1. She waits, waits. And turns the phone off to preserve the battery. In the kitchen, the German knives are stored in a wedge of butcher block, with slots cut out for a dozen knives, a perfect fit for each, from the paring knife to the cleaver. She pulls out a black-handled Wüsthof carving knife with an eight-inch blade. She grips it so tightly, her hand aches from the pressure. After all these years in her own skin, she is learning something brand-new about herself: She is capable of true violence. There is a limit, and she has hit it. Morality, compassion, even cowardice—they have all been rendered obsolete by the sheer unadorned animal instinct to survive. She will not run and she will not beg. There is a crazy man in her house. Her house! Her children’s house! And she will kill this guy if he is here and makes even the slightest approach toward her. She will stab him in the chest, and if that does not kill him, she will pull the knife out and stab him
a second time.

  But meanwhile: Where is he?

  In fact, Dennis is on the third floor, sitting on the edge of Adam’s bed. He glances around the boy’s room, trying to somehow guess from the look of things where he might be.

  Think. Think. He rubs his forehead, closes his eyes. His brain is broken. He can think about sex, food, water, the temperature in the room; he can listen for sounds. But anything other than the most immediate and needful things is beyond him right now. Dimly, he knows it’s the Zoom. Or is it? He’s not sure. He’s not sure if he’s even taken any today. Or when. Or…wait. If. When. Isn’t there another category? Something not if and not when. Oh, heck, it eludes him. His thoughts are starlight upon dark water. He tries to scoop them up and they disappear.

  While he tries to remember if he’s already taken his dose, he pops open another vial and downs it. This little batch is particularly salty, with a flabby kind of undertaste. Maybe it’s gone bad. He has a dim memory of someone at the lab mentioning something or other about those things, the square things, you plug them in and whatever you put inside of them gets cold. Refrigerators! He has a dim memory of someone, one of the smocks, saying that samples from the feral urchins were meant to be refrigerated. And Dennis is pretty sure that refrigerators are what you use to refrigerate. In fact, he is sure of it. A shiver of pleasure goes through him, a long ripple of well-being. He grabs Adam’s pillow and presses it against his face, breathes in the scalpy scent of the little boy. He parts his knees, wider and wider, and rubs himself, gently at first and then with real vigor. Holy moly, does that ever feel good!

  Cynthia has turned the lights on downstairs and she stands now at the window, holding the knife, the point down, watching the rain lashing the roofs of parked cars. The wind is outrageous. Puddles have formed, and as the rain pounds into the standing water, drops like ball bearings rise up and fall again. Those who have umbrellas have mostly seen them turned inside out, and they try to hold on to them, staggering sideways.

  Oh, please, oh, please, let them come home.

  The windows are clouding over and she rubs a circle clear, turning the world outside into a Renaissance tondo. The rain falls on the wicked and the innocent, the rich and the poor, the old and the young. In seconds, the cleared circle starts to shrink, and she rubs her open hand on the glass again, convinced that any moment she will see them, her darlings. With the darkness on one side of the window and the lamps bright on the other, she can see the room she’s in reflected in the glass. The fireplace, the chandelier, the paintings, the corridor…

  But wait. A flash of something.

  Someone.

  Moving.

  Gasping, she turns around, holds the knife in front of her as if to begin a fencing match. But the fear—which she thought she had completely under control—comes back with such annihilating force that her hands shake and she drops the knife. It falls point down and sticks into the fringe of the red-and-blue Sarouk on the floor. Quickly, she crouches, pulls the knife up, grips it again, and surveys everything she can see from that position, hunched over like a desperate creature, breathing through her mouth, daring whoever is there to make a move and hoping against all hope that her eyes were somehow playing tricks on her and that no one is there.

  Wouldn’t that be something? If this was all simply a matter of confusion? And that last exterminator, whoever he was, had come by simply to have a quick look around and was finished and gone before the other three emerged from the cellar? Why is that not possible? Doesn’t it make more sense than what she has been thinking—that there is a man lurking somewhere in this house, this too-big house with too many rooms, too many doors, too many staircases, and far too many bad memories?

  Slowly, she gets up. The change displaces her blood and she feels a sudden inchoate alarm, as if she were in an elevator whose cable has snapped. “Whoa,” she says. She shakes her head, rights herself.

  She walks down the center hall, past the cellar door. She makes it a point not to even glance at it. She walks through the dining room, with its dark yellow walls, it’s soft beige carpet, its oval mahogany table large enough for a dinner party of eighteen, though she has only four chairs.

  Oh, this house used to have such exquisite furnishings, every detail just so, back in the day, before Alex Twisden and poor Leslie went mad… Most everything they owned was either destroyed or hastily put to auction. Heartbreaking, irretrievable loss.

  So Cynthia has been waiting for the right chairs. She has extremely refined and specific taste re chairs.

  It all seems so foolish now…

  She stops, looks at the chairs, shakes her head.

  And at that very instant, a hand wraps around her ankle.

  She manages one word, a sound, really: “Hey!”

  It’s a piece of good luck, and those children of the wild who were given religious instruction while they still lived with their parents go so far as to think it’s more than luck—it’s divine intervention. The storm has emptied Pelham Bay Park. The wild children don’t mind getting wet—in fact, some of them are energized by the rain. They clown around. They chase each other. They dash, climb, wrestle, and wait for the pack to be complete. They come in twos, threes, fours, and fives. Rodolfo has climbed a tree; he can see who is arriving and can scan the park for dangers.

  And then there is the greatest moment they have ever known. Four of the wild ones who have been in captivity appear. They are bandaged and look weak, unhappy, exhausted, and pale. But they are here—against all odds, they are here. A huge wild cheer goes up at the sight of them, and they rise to the occasion by joining hands and lifting their entwined fists high in the air, like a circus act absorbing the hurrahs under the big top.

  “Bless us!” Rodolfo hollers from his perch in a sycamore.

  “And them’s like us!” shout the others.

  Cynthia hits the floor, and she hits it hard—so hard that her head bounces up a few inches, comes to the limit of what the neck will allow, and crashes down a second time. Consciousness has not vanished but it is severely compromised, and she tries to blink the world back into focus—reality bulges and deflates like the throat of a croaking bullfrog. A presence…something looms above her.

  It is the fourth exterminator. She knew it. She knew all along he was still in the house. But it’s strange; having her worst fear confirmed fills her not so much with terror as with an awful, crushing sadness. The end of life, once a distant speck on the far horizon, once an abstraction, is all of a sudden hard upon her. And all her love of life, of the sweet world we live in, with its ten thousand pleasures and boundless beauty, all of it comes surging forward in a maelstrom of love and regret. It’s over. Her flicker of light on the river of time. No time to say good-bye, no time to sum it up. Oh—after all this, to have to end it in pain! She no longer has it in her to fight. Or to take flight. In all of the most sudden of suddens, she is at the very end of what she can do. She raises her hands, not to defend herself, not to fight, but merely to cover her eyes.

  She feels his hands on her. They are clammy, cold. His breath comes in excited little bursts and he is grabbing at her legs, her feet. He tears her shoes off. Even the noise of her shoes hitting the floor fills her with the pain of departure—it’s another thing she will never experience again. Who knew that life in its every plangent detail could be so precious?

  Oh no. She feels his tongue on the bottom of her foot. And then she feels the tip of it exploring the concave of her instep.

  “Oh, boy, oh, boy,” the man burbles.

  Though her mind has surrendered, her body rebels, and she tries to yank her foot out of his grasp. But he has her. His grip is sure and tight. This is not how she wants to end. Not writhing. Be still, she tells herself. Breathe…

  She hears the front door open.

  “Mom?” a voice calls out.

  Alley-Oop?

  “We’re home!”

  Adam.

  “Kids!” Cynthia hollers as loudly as she can. “Kids
!”

  They are running, and the man who is assaulting her does not have even a moment to tell them, Stay back! Nor does he have a moment to protect himself. Or run.

  The world again is something she wants to see. Cynthia uncovers her eyes, turns her head. And there they are: her children! Racing toward her. Adam upright.

  Alice on all fours.

  And now they are airborne.

  And now the man has dropped her leg and is raising his arms to cover his face.

  And now he is screaming in terror.

  And now they land on him, Alice striking at his neck, Adam barreling into him from below.

  And now the exterminator is being exterminated.

  Cynthia rolls away from them and scrambles to her feet. I’m alive!

  But it does not take long for her relief to turn to revulsion.

  “Kids!” she screams. “Stop, stop, enough. Enough!”

  They are eviscerating him. The exterminator is no longer struggling, no longer shouting and screaming or waving his arms, no longer kicking, no longer doing anything to save his life or even to extend it another moment.

  There is blood on the floor.

  Cynthia continues to scream at the twins, continues to beg them. But they do not listen to her. They cannot really hear her. They are utterly—and tragically—keyed into a higher authority. They are obeying the commands of their own deepest, truest nature.

  Cynthia falls to her knees.

  “Please, please,” she cries. “Oh, please…”

  For a moment, she seems to have gotten Adam’s attention. He turns toward her, his head cocked, his eyes curious, a piece of Dennis Keswick’s flesh hanging from his mouth, blood coursing down his chin.

  “Adam. Baby. Please. You have to stop.”