Interference

by S. L. LUCK

  I didn’t ask if you were interested, Eddie.

  He turned the handle to his room, entered, and quickly locked the door behind him. “Go to hell,” he said aloud, spinning his sharp old eyes around to ensure he was alone.

  Already there, and you will be too if you don’t listen to me. I have some birds that need caging, Pandora cooed. One Cardinal, two Cardinals, three Cardinals, four … better make it five and six or you’re out the door. Baby makes seven that’s not going to heaven. From beneath his bed and inside his closet and behind his bathroom door and in his head, her evil throat rang high with laughter, resounding off the walls like an eerie symphony. Ed’s bladder loosened. He hurried to the toilet, sure that the devil-woman was lurking behind the shower curtain, but she was not there.

  Unsteady on his feet, he clutched the safety railing on the vanity, then sat to urinate. “Help me, Lord,” he whispered to the ceiling.

  Pandora shrieked. The mirror shattered. Ed clamped his eyes shut as glass exploded on him, buffeting the exposed parts of his skin. He felt hot blood flow from a rupture above his eye. Leave Him out of this, Eddie. You can beg for forgiveness after you take care of the Cardinals. There’s a—

  NO! he refused, shucking his glass-covered clothes, then collected his robe from the door hook, all the while fighting the lunacy inside his head.

  There was a banging at his door. “Mr. Norman? Are you okay, Mr. Norman?” came Georgia’s voice from the hallway.

  The tiles in the bathroom began rattling. Cage my birds Eddie—

  NO! Ed raged inside himself.

  “Mr. Norman? Open the door Mr. Norman!”

  The ceiling panels started to vibrate. One of the boards crept open, then two, three, five, seven, until the black skeleton of the roof was disinterred, and Ed was staring up at the corpse of death itself, with no beginning and no end, but everything, everything, contained in a wet and masticating mouth. CAGE MY BIRDS! Pandora roared through the ceiling’s rotting teeth.

  Ed screamed.

  “Mr. Norman! I’m coming in!” Keys rattled in the door.

  “Dear Lord, I beg you to destroy my enemy…” Ed prayed to the Father of his past.

  The mouth’s black tongue snaked toward him. Cage my birds!

  “Dear Holy Lord, NO!” Ed shouted into the maw of evil.

  The door to Ed’s room banged open. At once, before Georgia’s small face cleared the barrier of the wood, the demon dissipated upward, the ceiling panels shifted back into place, and the tiles stopped rumbling.

  “Mr. Norman!” the glasses hanging from a string around Georgia’s neck swung wildly as she rushed to the bathroom door where Ed stood, trembling and bleeding. “My goodness! What happened?” She cast a confused glance at Ed’s mirror, which lay shattered over the floor. Georgia led him to his bed, where she tended to the cut above his eye.

  He said, “I must have closed the door a little too hard. By the time I got to the toilet, the mirror was coming down.” He glanced behind the nurse to the bathroom, where nothing but the broken glass was amiss.

  “I told those boys we needed a maintenance check in here, but they never listen to me.” She shook her head. “You know what this means, Eddie? It means those lazy butts owe you one. You want Sonja’s old room? They’re almost done the renos in there. They gave it a good update so it’s not so … like a hospital, I guess. TV’s built right into the wall, and it’s got a bigger kitchenette than the one you have. Loads of light. White and shiny cabinets. The waiting list is full, but with what they’ve done to you, I’m sure it’s yours if you want it. You want me to tell them?”

  Though he was sure Pandora would find him anywhere he went, the idea of extra space between himself and the body she inhabited sounded good to Ed. “I don’t want to upset anyone,” he said meekly to his favorite nurse, knowing she would insist.

  “Nonsense, Eddie. You deserve it. Plus, if anyone gets their knickers in a knot, I’ll just tell them I had the final say. Let them deal with me.” She snorted and pulled back from his face. “Well, now, it’s not as bad as it looks. Thank God for small miracles, huh, Eddie? Let me get you a Band-Aid, okay?” She patted his leg and glided out of the room.

  Alone, Ed expected the devil-woman to come terrorize him again, but he was relieved to find her absent. He waited for Georgia while the activities of the hallway rustled past his room. Residents were retiring to their beds for their after-breakfast naps or returning to the kitchen and common areas to continue their festival preparations. In the frame of his door, a tall, blond man carrying a bouquet of flowers appeared. The man stopped and turned to Ed. His beguiling face summoned no recognition on Ed’s part, but still Ed tipped his chin in a gesture of greeting.

  “One more over,” Ed heard Georgia say from the hallway. Then she was beside the man, ushering him over to Sylvia’s room.

  The man waved a bandaged hand to Ed, then he was gone. Waiting for Georgia, Ed was again troubled but not entirely sure why. He picked the last flecks of glass from his arms, thinking, considering, deconstructing the last few days until Georgia scurried in, bursting with gossip. She drew a Band-Aid and tube of ointment from her pocket and sat beside him on the bed.

  “You’d think everyone in this building’s on Flibbies they way they act around that man.”

  “Flibbies?” Ed asked, wincing as Georgia cleaned the cut above his eye.

  “Sorry, Eddie. Of course you wouldn’t know. Flibanserin, it’s like female Viagra. Get’s you all hot and bothered, if you know what I mean. I’m not on ‘em, but I know a few women who are, and they act just like the ones cooing over Mrs. Baker’s son. Practically foaming at the mouth like they’ve never seen a man. And at their ages,” she said, clicking her tongue against her teeth, then applied ointment to the bandage and stuck it above Ed’s eyebrow.

  “She’s got a son, then?” Ed asked.

  “A hot one, apparently. Not for my liking, though. I like a man with meat on his bones. My first husband was too skinny. Shouldn’a married him. It wasn’t until I met Martel that I got what I needed. Skinny boys want you to be skinny like they are, but you never will be, you know what I’m saying?” Ed didn’t know, but he nodded anyway. Georgia stood. “We’ll get the glass cleaned up right away; don’t try to clean it yourself, hear me?” She wagged a finger at him and pulled a broom from the closet, sweeping the glass into a pile just outside the bathroom door so he wouldn’t step on it in case he needed to use the washroom again. “Tell me something, Eddie,” Georgia said as she reached the door to the hallway. “Before I opened the door … it sounded like you were talking to someone in here. Am I hearing things, or did that actually happen? If you don’t tell me the truth, I’m going to watch you like a hawk to make sure you’re not going to go Frederic on me.”

  The reference to a former resident who had developed late-onset schizophrenia and begun conversing with his own feces drew a laugh from Ed. “While the conversation may be more scintillating than what a man usually gets around here, I haven’t gained any more friends, fortunately. I was praying the building wasn’t going to come down on me; maybe a little too loudly, though. I’m fine, Georgia. Promise.”

  “You can never pray too loud, Eddie,” Georgia said warmly. “Someone will be up here soon to take care of the bathroom, but I’ll let you rest. If you need anything, just give me a holler.” She closed the door.

  Briefly, he thought of taking an Ambien, but besides the fact it would make him drowsy for most of the day and he needed his wits about him at the fairgrounds, he figured Pandora wouldn’t let him sleep anyway. Had he been younger, Ed supposed he would have been afraid to sleep with the devil circling him, but with Bessie gone and little to keep him on the top side of the earth, he did not fear for his life. The opposite, in fact; he very much welcomed death—just not at the hands of the devil-woman. Bessie would have wanted him to fight, of course, and for her he would.

  Exhaustion crashing in on him, Ed pulled his blanket from its tight tuck under the mattre
ss and drew his legs onto the bed. He closed his eyes, waiting to be invaded. The trick of his situation was that even if she wasn’t around, Ed expected her to be—and so panic thrummed under his skin and made it impossible for him to relax. He turned onto his stomach, his side, his back, trying to will himself to sleep even if only for a few minutes, then sat up. The devil has a son, he reminded himself, wondering if the man knew what was inside his mother.

  29

  Ten feet away from where Ed Norman jittered on his bed, Troy entered his mother’s room. He had expected it to smell of piss, but instead it reeked of the rotting-rose smell of her overpowering perfume. Breathing from his mouth, he figured he preferred the piss to anything that smelled of the woman who’d birthed him. It reminded him of his childhood, when she would come at him like a gnat, trying to love him, trying to suffuse him with empathy and compassion and bear warmth where it could not exist.

  Satiated after his recent kill beside the river, Troy knew that optics required him to play the part of a good person, so here he was: if not a model citizen, a model son. The nursing staff shouldn’t have allowed him in her room, but Troy was born with a convincing face, and when she saw the flowers in his bandaged hands, the older female nurse practically threw herself over the counter to help him, leaning on him to direct him to his mother’s room. The pressure of the nurse’s breast against his arm left a sweat mark on his jacket, but it was a small price to pay for unfettered access to his mother’s new life. Hell, he could even drop the flowers and leave. The only thing that mattered was proof of his normality.

  He’d gone far down the hall by the time his Dark Friend told him to stop, then cranked his head to the bleeding old man sitting on a bed. Kill him, Troy. Kill him! his Dark Friend immediately instructed, and Troy felt the rare twang of repugnance emanating from his companion. What was it about this small man that his Dark Friend did not like? Of course, his Dark Friend liked nothing, loved no one; it was not in his nature, but his Dark Friend’s prudence as of late waned more often than Troy was comfortable. Haven’t you had enough? he sniped to his Dark Friend as the old man stared back at him. His insurrection was repaid with a tug at his stitches, and he grimaced before being pushed along by a not-so-gentle nurse who didn’t care what he looked like.

  “Your mother’s on her way. We called her down from the kitchen. She’ll just be a moment. Why don’t you get those flowers in a vase while you wait?” The small nurse gave him an unimpressed once-over as she nudged his mother’s open door with her hip. “Top cupboard to the left of the sink, but if it’s not there, just ask for one at the nursing desk.” Without waiting for Troy’s response, she swiveled on her heels and left him.

  Get her too, his Dark Friend said snidely, and Troy couldn’t help but smile to himself. He stepped inside his mother’s new home, noticing that he did not exist in her space. The pictures and figurines he’d earlier brought to the admissions administrator, more for his benefit than his mother’s, were dumped among chintzy yellowed doilies, books of gardening-themed crossword puzzles, and bottles of prescription medication. Nowhere were pictures of Troy as a child or as a teenager or as an adult, and that suited him just fine. No reason to pretend unless there was a good reason to. He found a vase where the snotty nurse said it would be and began filling it with water when his Dark Friend suddenly shrivelled inside him like a worm under a magnifying glass. Troy turned.

  “You’ve got the wrong room,” his mother said. The parts of Sylvia that still remained human regarded her offspring with a mixture of affection and indignation, though with the memory of him discarding her in the parking lot not two weeks earlier, the latter sentiment mostly overrode the first.

  “Am I that bad, Mother?” Troy frowned and turned off the tap. He put the flowers on the counter.

  “You’re not that good, Troy,” Sylvia said, and Troy noticed that while her speech had improved, her attitude had deteriorated.

  “You seem better. Was I so wrong to want that for you?”

  “You’re going back to Toronto then?”

  Troy threw his hands up. “Can’t a son visit his mother without a lecture?” Then, because she had shrunk away from him, he said, “No, Mother, I’m not going back yet. I’m taking care of the house like I told you, and I’ve got some work that might keep me here a while longer.”

  “Oh?” Sylvia drew two cups from the cupboard and set the kettle to boil, then she shuffled to the recliner. Looking at her son, she was overcome with the uncomfortable feeling that her life had been misspent.

  Meanwhile, Pandora released Sylvia and went to investigate whatever was inside her son. He’d always been an asshole, and so Pandora felt an invisible kinship with him—but now that she had killed Hattie and the two Searles children and taken a nice little bite out of the Cardinal boy, her injuries were beginning to heal and her perception again broadened. She was stronger; not quite her old self, but neither the emaciated, withered remnant she had been when Anabelle first scourged her power. That day in his mother’s kitchen when she was blocked from inspecting Troy, Pandora reasoned it was her deprivation that made her incapable of doing so. Now she saw her inability for what it was: another like herself. Her hackles rose high, expanding outward until the room was full of her might and the other inside Troy sizzled and retracted in on itself. The clamping of his insides caused Troy to squirm.

  “You’ve never had a case here before. Has something changed?” Sylvia asked. If he were a different son, she might have hoped for a more permanent return, but since her admission she had been unable to ignore the neglect many of her neighbors suffered from their families. It made her unwilling to force a relationship that just wasn’t there.

  Ignoring the pain in his side, Troy opened the cupboards until he found the strawberry tea his mother liked. He dropped a bag into each of the cups she’d taken out. “I’ve been retained by a local family,” he said vaguely.

  “Which family?”

  “Can’t say, Mother.”

  “I hear you’ve been spending time at the hospital.”

  “Don’t push, Mother.”

  Her son’s ventures around the city were almost impossible to conceal. Even in Southbridge, where women were far past their prime, exploits of the handsome lawyer found their way to Sylvia’s ears, no matter how she tried to avoid them.

  “It’s the electric girl, isn’t it?” she asked.

  Pandora turned to their conversation.

  “Is that what they’re calling her?” The kettle whistled and Troy went to grasp the handle, but the pressure pained his hand.

  Sylvia rose and took the kettle from him, frowning at the gauze wrapped around his palms. She poured water into their cups, leaving Troy’s on the counter, and carried hers back to the recliner where she extended her legs. After a time, she inquired about his hands.

  Dark Friend, limping inside him, urged Troy to leave, get away, rush anywhere else, but he took his cup and drank the hot liquid to soothe his cramps. “You always told me not to walk around the house in the dark. I supposed this is what I get for not listening to you. I tripped over that rug at the bottom of the stairs, and that picture of Lucy on the grass broke my fall.” His hands spread wide to pre-empt her worry. “The picture’s fine, just the glass is broken, but I’ve already got it in a frame shop so you should have it back in a week. Want me to bring it here?”

  “I’m not staying, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “I’ll put it where it was, then.”

  Like a foreign wind, a thought drifted through Sylvia’s mind and her blank eyes swept to the window. The late morning was still bleak and gray. “It’s boring in here. You’re so far away you didn’t know how busy I was before my stroke, but I was, Troy, I really was. I was learning to dance. Did you know that? There’s a ballroom group for seniors. I only went to a few classes, but it was fun. Oh, how we laughed.” She drummed her fingers on the side of her cup, her vacant face elsewhere. “I took up painting, too. They encourage us to do that
here, but it’s not the same, maybe because the people don’t change or that they do, I can’t figure it out, but it’s … I guess depressing is the right word.”

  “It’ll get better,” Troy said.

  “Will it, though? I wonder. I think if I had something to occupy my time, something that I loved, maybe, or even just something … I don’t know … interesting to do or think about, I could come to like it here.”

  Pain lanced his ribs, and Troy squeezed his abdomen to try and push it out; but his mother had just given him an opening, so he pressed on. “What are you suggesting?” he groaned.

  “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

  Troy had little time for her game, but like a good son who hadn’t just strangled and stabbed a nurse on the riverfront, he said, “No I won’t. Tell me what would make it better. We are on the same side, Mother. If you need anything from me, just ask it.”

  Sylvia twisted a button on her sweater. “Well, if I got the chance to meet the electric girl, I’d be the talk of the town around here.” She didn’t look at him as she spoke. Instead, she held her mug and twirled her button, a little more, a little more, until the fabric around it began bustling into a tight swirl. “Gossip is the first hobby of everyone around here and if I had something to talk about, I might consider staying. It’s a silly thought, I know.” Pandora maneuvered whimsy and hope into Sylvia’s face, resting her tongue while they waited for Troy’s incredulity to pass.

  Dark Friend’s feeble attempts to reach Troy did not succeed. Troy said, “You’ve never asked to meet a client before.”

  “You’ve never put me in a home until now.”

  “This, again?” Troy looked at the ceiling. He would do anything to escape his mother’s clutch on him, but given the current status of her health, his full emancipation required her to be attended to by anyone but himself. He did not want nor need to be dragged back to Garrett every time she fell or suffered a seizure or—God willing—a fatal episode of some sort. Until the latter happened, permanent placement was his only hope of severing their miserable tether to each other. Professional inappropriateness aside, however, he didn’t see an organic avenue where he could propose such an introduction, should he feel the need to extend his mother the courtesy. He said, “I can’t introduce you to my client, Mother. There are rules against that sort of thing. The family needs their privacy.”