Roy tried to calm him with words, but Billy didn’t stop screaming until an angel dropped from the sky and tore into him.
Roy remained, untouched on the cross, amid the writhing bodies on the shore of the damned.
He waited for some sign of his atonement, but only night came, and then day, and then the long afternoon set in.
Chosen
1
When it was over, he remembered the picture.
Because of living in the big city all his life, his first-hand knowledge of nature had come mostly from television documentaries and whatever he could recall from high school biology class.
But he’d forgotten about the picture all those years.
The caterpillar, its skin green and translucent and wet.
The wasp.
The bumps beneath the caterpillar’s skin.
The caption: “As paralysis sets in, the wasp has proven her superior power.”
He remembered what he thought, too, of the picture: that in some awful way it radiated a beauty beyond conscience.
This was what he kept coming back to, later, when it was over, in his mind. Not his emotional life or his education or even his work, but that picture from a book he’d seen at the public library when he was only nine or ten. How, even in his forties, it could come back to him with so strong a memory.
2
Rob Arlington awoke one morning and thought he felt something on his hand. He brushed at it but saw nothing there. A sensation left over from a dream, perhaps. He took a quick shower, crawled into his suit (he was so tired from being up late the night before), and grabbed his briefcase on his way out the door. It wasn’t that he was late for work, it was just that for the fifteen years of his life that he had lived alone, he hated it. Not life, not work, not his loves and losses, but just the fact of knowing he was alone in the morning, that, at his age (forty), there was no one human being who shared his home with him.
The hallway, when he stepped into it, was hospital green, and smelled of paint. He locked his door, then thought he heard a noise from inside it. As if something were moving around in the kitchen. He looked at his door: to open or not? Could be just an echo from another apartment. Glancing down the hall, he saw, just this side of the fire doors, the super, papers in one hand, a dripping paintbrush in the other.
“Exterminator comes on Thursday,” the super said. He was taping notes to doors; he came up to Rob and slapped a note to his door. The super, with his fat glasses and balding pate with its twin sprays of hair, looked like a large worker ant going about its business. Rob shot him a friendly grin—never hurts to be on good terms with management—and lifted the note off his door. It read: “Exterminator, Thursday, 10 a.m.”
He wadded the noted up.
“I don’t want the exterminator,” Rob said, still vaguely listening for the thing that might be moving around in his kitchen. Was it a rat?
“You don’t got roaches?” The super, his glasses magnifying his small button eyes to enormous disks of glare, thrust out his lower lip in a middle-aged pout that meant disagreement. “Everybody in New York’s got roaches.”
“None that I’ve noticed,” Rob lied. Of course he had roaches, but he also didn’t like the idea of the super and his wife going into his apartment, looking through his things. He already had evidence of their last visit when he’d been on a business trip to California, how they’d gotten in and used his tea kettle. He’d known it was the super, or perhaps Fanny, his wife, because they’d left behind a set of skeleton keys, which Rob returned to them hoping that embarrassment would be enough incentive to keep them from going through their tenants’ homes again. “Look,” Rob told him, “I’ve been fogging.”
“You been what?”
“Fogging the apartment. I buy these foggers—you know—and it kills them. I don’t have roaches. Or spiders, for that matter.”
Then 6C opened her door. She was clunky and large, like an old piano, with hair in her eyes from just washing, and an enormous towel wrapped around her middle, barely keeping her breasts bound up. “I don’t want one either,” she said. “A bug killer. Don’t let him into my place. Let me chance being beloved of the flies, but I don’t want no bug killer coming through my place. I like my privacy.”
The super looked at her, then back at Rob. “Pretty soon, everybody’s gonna tell me they got no roaches. Why in hell’d I call up the exterminator if suddenly nobody’s got no roaches?”
The woman in the doorway glanced at Rob. Her eyes were wide and glassy, like she’d just had great sex and was now a zombie. She was not pretty, but still looked freshly plucked, which, to a man of Rob’s years was just this side of alluring. She was less overweight than stocky, and her skin was pale from staying inside too much. When the super had gone on down the hall, through the fire doors, she said, “Do you really fog?”
She’d been eavesdropping at her door, he figured. “No,” he said, “I just don’t like the nosy couple going into my apartment without me around.”
She let slip a smile and blushed, as if she’d just dropped an edge of her towel. “They do anyway. I’m here all day, and I see them. They go through all our apartments. All except mine. ‘Cause I’m here all the time.”
Then she drew herself back through the doorway, hands clutching the door and frame, as if her legs weren’t quite strong enough. She seemed to drag them with her, one after the other.
On the weekend, Maggie came up. When she and Rob lay after the Great Event, him feeling sticky, and her feeling exhausted, he mentioned meeting the neighbor for the first time. Maggie said, “I’ve talked to her on the elevator. She seems nice. It’s too bad about the accident, but I guess we all get smashed about once or twice before life is up.”
He moved his arm around, because the back of her head seemed to cut into it at an uncomfortable angle. “She get hit by a car or something?” Remembering his neighbor’s legs, how she barely moved them.
“She told me she’s agoraphobic. Stays in all the time. Lives on disability. Sad little thing.”
“Sad hefty thing. How the hell does she afford that apartment on disability?”
“That’s not nice, the hefty part. It’s her grandfather’s old apartment—he had it since the building was built in 1906. He knew the Lonsdale family, in fact, when they were designing the place. And she’s sweet, even if she is strange. She’s only thirty-four—can you believe it? It’s life that’s aged her—in that apartment, all her grandparents’ things around, antiques, and dark windows, and old shiny floors, she just sits there and collects her checks and… well, ages.
“Like a cheese left too long under glass,” he joked. “She claims she’s beloved of flies.”
Maggie was beginning to look stern; she didn’t tolerate disparaging remarks about women. “Oh, stop it. She’s had a terrible life. She worked at a grocer’s, but her back bent or something. And then she finally works up the courage to get out, into the marketplace, as it were. She went out one day, she told me, to see her mother, who’s in Brooklyn, and when she was coming up from the subway, two men took her purse and pushed her down the steps. Twenty steps, she said. She woke up in the hospital, and couldn’t move for three months. She’s only been back in her place maybe two weeks. She said she had terrible nightmares in the hospital. She’s scared of people, I think.”
“No wonder I never see her. You heard all this in the elevator?”
“You’d be amazed how much information she can fit in between the fifth and second floors.” Maggie paused and looked at the wall beside the bed. “You don’t think she can hear us, do you?”
“Not unless she has a glass to the wall. Hey,” Rob said, rapping his knuckles along the wall, “no spying.”
Somewhere beyond the wall, the sound of shattering glass.
Then, after Maggie left at eleven, he took the elevator to the basement, the weekend’s laundry in the machine, and counted quarters out. He thought he heard a noise. Figuring it was a mouse, he ignored it. There we
re cracks in the lower parts of the walls, right where wall met floor, all along the basement. He had seen fat roaches run into these hidey-holes when he’d flicked the laundry room lights on. Always gave him the creeps; but they’re only bugs, he told himself.
He put his quarters in the machine and switched it on. He leaned against it, listening to the gentle humming as water sprayed down on his clothes. Rob always took a book with him when he did his laundry—and he never left the room while his wash was going, because the one time he did, his clothes had been taken out in mid-cycle and left on the dusty cement floor. At some point in his reading, above the sound of the machine, he heard a series of ticks, like a loud clock ticking. Assuming the laundry had set the machine off balance, he opened it; rearranged the soaked clothing; closed the lid. But the ticking continued. He lifted the machine lid again, and while it turned off, the ticking kept going. He identified the area of ticking as one of the cracks along the wall. Then he thought it might be coming from over by the trash bin, down the hallway—sometimes the noises in the shafts echoed through the basement. He walked down the narrow, dimly lit hall, its greenish light humming as if about to extinguish from unpaid utilities, and looked around the trash.
Something was tapping from inside one of the disposal shafts. Rob hesitated at first wondering if a very large and angry rat might be inside it but the tapping continued, and seemed too steady to be a rat. He went and lifted the hatch up—
Something living, wriggling, wrapped in gauze and surgical tape, dropped. He instinctively caught it because he saw a bit of pink, like a human hand, from an undone section of the gauze and he knew as he caught it that it was a baby.
3
He had the sense to call the police before he unwrapped the gauze, and was spared the sight of the dead infant.
“I think it was alive when I found it,” he said. “I felt movement. Not for very long, though.”
The officer, named Gage, shook his head. “Nope, she wasn’t alive when you found her, Mr. Arlington. She’d been dead at least a half hour.”
“I heard tapping. I think the baby was moving.”
“It wasn’t the baby,” the officer told him.
The next morning, he read about it in the Daily News.
“Must be a slow week,” he told one of his coworkers. In the paper they detailed the story: newborn baby, wrapped in gauze, skin chewed up by roaches, apartments under investigation, related to similar cases of babies left in Dumpsters and thrown down sewer drains, left in parks wrapped in old newspapers, covered with ants or flies or roaches or whatever scavenger insect had lucked into finding the fresh meat. There was his name: Rob Arlington. Advertising man. There was the building: The Lonsdale, Central Park West, where they refused to let the most famous rock stars live, even the ones who could pay the rent. It had another picture, older, of a man in his fifties, in the style of the turn of the century, a stern-looking man with a Rasputin beard and glaring eyes. The caption read: “The Original Lonsdale Scandal of 1917. Horace Grubb and his Theory of Nature.” But nothing in the brief article elaborated on this photograph.
Maggie came by that night with wine and fresh salmon. “I thought you could use some cheering up,” she said, whisking past him in the doorway with her packages. She smelled like gardenia, which he loved, and wore a bustier under a short jacket, a translucent skirt, and boots. He knew she would seduce him so that he would feel better, and he loved her for the thought.
“You heard,” he said.
“Yep. Did you actually talk to the News?”
“What do you think?”
She didn’t answer; he realized that he sounded grouchy. She opened the kitchen drawers in search of the corkscrew.
“It’s in the basket on the fridge,” he said. “My guess is some poor bastard junior reporter is stuck down at the precinct waiting for the dirt on a rape or riot, and he looks at the schedule of events and sees a baby-in-a-dumpster story. My name’s right there. He can’t file the story he’s after ‘cause nothing’s in on it. So he ties this in with all those other dead babies left out to die stories and voila—an urban legend begins. With my name attached to the most recent one. The Man Who Found A Dead Infant In The Laundry Room Of The Famous Lonsdale Apartments Right Off Central Park West.”
“You’re a star,” she said, pouring the Merlot into two glasses.
“I didn’t know about the bugs, about how they’d been… doing that to the baby’s skin,” he said, shivering a little, going over to her, taking the wine, reaching around her back with his free hand, between the jacket and her skin. “You smell good. Like a garden of earthly delights.”
“Yeah, I’ve been gargling with cologne. It’s not too strong?”
“Not at all,” he said, smiling, loving her little insecurities because they made her seem less perfect, more human. He drew back, sipped wine, rotated his head around to relieve tension in his neck. “God, Maggie, a baby. They said it was less than a day old.”
“It’s a rough place, this world,” she said, and drew him to her. “You ever wanted a baby, Robby?”
He almost was going to cry, thinking of the dead thing in his arms, whatever brief and terrible life it had to endure; but he held back. Kissed her with gentleness. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Someday I want a baby, but—don’t get that fearful bachelor look—not yet, and probably not from you, unless you play your cards right.”
After dinner they watched television, and as he lay on the couch with her, he saw a roach on the wall. He picked up his shoe and threw it across the room, but missed it. The shoe made two loud thuds as it hit the wall and then the floor.
A few seconds later, the phone rang. He leaned over her head (“massive hair,” he murmured, “like a scalp jungle”) and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“Six D?”
He didn’t recognize the woman’s voice.
“Who’s this?”
“Six C. Your neighbor. I got your number from the super. You all right? I heard a noise.”
“Oh, hello. Yes. I lobbed a shoe at the wall.” She seemed to accept this explanation.
Maggie looked up at him, her eyebrows knitting.
He shrugged and mouthed: Nextdoor neighbor.
The woman on the line said, “It scared me. After all the news.”
“Oh,” he said.
“It was you who found it,” she said.
He felt drained. “Yeah.”
“Were they hurt?”
Rob pulled his ear from the phone and looked at it. What the hell?
“Was what hurt? You mean, the baby?”
But she’d hung up the phone.
“My neighbor lady is spooky indeed,” he said as he rested the phone back in its cradle.
After midnight, he had a craving for frozen yogurt. There was this place down on the corner that made the best cappuccino nonfat yogurt, a favorite spot of his. So, while Maggie slept, naked except for her panties, her breasts creamy and lovely above her small, indented belly, her dark hair obscuring one side of her face, he slipped on his jeans and tucked his cotton shirt in, stepped into his shoes, and tiptoed out of the apartment. He forgot to lock the apartment from the inside; so he stuck the key (three strikes and you’re out, bubba, he thought as he finally got the sucker in the keyhole on the fourth try) into the door on the outside, and turned it so it was locked twice over. Never be too sure, even in a building like the Lonsdale, seventeen hundred a month for a junior one bedroom, even if you’ve been here for ten years, he thought. Babies in the garbage chute, roaches on the wall, anything can happen. He was a little drunk from the wine, and the thought of frozen yogurt, even with the October coolness outside, sobered him a bit; by the time he got to the elevator, he was standing up straight and wiped the grin of requited lust from his face.
He had to stand in line behind six others, all frozen yogurt fiends like himself, and by the time he’d gotten up to make his order, he decided on the largest size possible. He got two plasti
c spoons, and tasted the treat on the walk back to the apartment. He fiddled with his pockets, because he couldn’t locate the keys. Had he left them upstairs? Damn it. He’d have to wake Maggie up after all. He buzzed the apartment. Three times. The last one, a long sustained buzz. Finally, she picked up the intercom.
Her voice was sleepy. “Rob?”
He giggled, high on Merlot and frozen yogurt. “Hey, sweetie pie, I locked myself out getting some dessert for the one I love and me.”
As if she couldn’t hear him, she asked again, “Rob?” She was still waking up, he could tell. He looked at the small black plastic of the intercom as if he could maybe see her through it if he concentrated. “Is it you?” she asked.
He pressed the button on his side. “Yeah, yeah, I got melting yogurt, Maggie, and I’m starting to feel a draft.”
“Rob?” she asked again, weakly, and it sounded, for just a second, like she wasn’t sleepy at all but about to pass out. About to cry, or something — something almost whimpery and breathless. Not like sleepiness at all.
And then he remembered: He’d left the keys in the door to the apartment.
Don’t panic, he thought.
Pressed the button. “Maggie? You okay? Buzz me in, okay?”
He let go of the button.
Waiting for her buzzer. The intercom finally got pushed, but there was just the ch-ch-ch sound of dead air.
He pressed the button for the super. “It’s Rob Arlington, Six D. I left my keys inside.”
The super, ever vigilant, buzzed him in with no further identification required.
Rob ran to the elevator, and, luckily, it was on the first floor. He got on and pressed Six. The elevator gave its characteristic lurch. He realized that he was clutching the cup of frozen yogurt so tightly that it was all twisted, with dripping cappuccino yogurt spreading down his hand. He dropped it in the elevator. When he reached the sixth floor, he sprinted down the hall, tried the door. No keys. Locked. He rapped on it several times. “Maggie? Maggie! Maggie!”
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 47