by David C. Pinnt
If I were to lay blame I guess I’d put it on the warrant from Tulsa.
Drunk and disorderly I’ll own up to that, but assault and battery? Battery my ass. That bouncer beat me ‘til I pissed myself and I didn’t get but one good shot on him.
So I had that plus the two other theft convictions and my PD said I’d be looking at serious time. Off I went, jumped bail and ended up out here in Crescent Falls, met up with Lester.
But a warrant, fugitive felon. That’s serious stuff. So no matter what had happened to Lester I couldn’t go to the cops, you see. Lester might have been a partner and a friend but I wasn’t going to get myself locked up on his account.
He wouldn’t have done it for me.
Not that Lester’ll be doing much of anything now, I suppose.
It was a sweet deal for a while. Lester, he was clean and caught onto a job driving one of those airport shuttle vans. I know eventually the police would have figured it out, but I’d planned to be long gone by then.
The way it worked, Lester picked people up from their houses and took them to the airport. Cheaper than a taxi, and a hell of a lot cheaper than airport parking.
Lester could talk them up. It’s funny, people leaving for long vacations will set their burglar alarms, stop the paper, set light timers, all that. But some stranger driving them to the airport asks “So, where you folks going?” and they’ll blurt “To the Caribbean, to Italy—we won’t be back for two weeks, for a month.”
Too easy, right? Drop the folks off at the airport and call me up. Depending on the neighborhood I could go back there that afternoon, or the two of us in the night.
In broad daylight, well, it’s hard to believe what people will look past if you’re dressed right, a pressed shirt, pens in the pocket, and a clipboard—you can’t forget the clipboard. Walk all over a person’s property if you’re carrying a clipboard, checking things off while you’re looking around. Most of the time, if the neighbors even notice you, they’re just pulling their blinds and hoping you don’t come over to inspect something at their house.
So Lester called me up.
“A live one, bro,” he said. The van radio blared in the background. I grabbed a pen and paper and scribbled the address as he spoke. “A couple, I don’t know, they’re older but not old you know? ‘Europe,’ they said, ‘four weeks’,” he giggled. “It’s right off Seventh, one those old Victorians.”
I knew why he laughed. Those houses, they aren’t built for keeping people out. Made in a simpler time, coal chutes into the basements, root cellars with stairs going back up to the kitchens, old double-hung windows. Might as well give us a key. If they did have a burglar alarm it was externally wired, easy to spot. You wouldn’t believe it unless you’re in my area of work, but half the time, if you get in a house and an alarm’s blinking, somewhere within about five feet of the alarm panel is a post-it note with the alarm code written on it.
I don’t know about people sometime.
“Together? Tonight?” I didn’t want to talk too much on the cell phone. Like maybe we’re in the middle of some major crime investigation.
“Shit, Drew, its Seventh Avenue. People wandering up and down all day. You go now, check things out. They’re gone for a while dude, we could clean that place out.” He hung up.
The chamber of commerce brochures say Seventh Avenue is the oldest continuous residential neighborhood in Crescent Falls. Massive, sprawling houses built in the late 1800’s by what had passed in that town for high society, the bankers, mine barons, who knows? Giant elms lined both sides of the street, heaving up the sidewalk and leaving some of the only shade to be found on a hot June day.
I had my workshirt on, clipboard in my hand.
Lester was right. A lot of those Victorians had been restored in the past dozen years, turrets and gingerbread, lead-paned stained-glass windows, bursting with carefully landscaped yards. People ambled up and down the sidewalks, some I’m sure coming north from the shopping district, others pausing to take in the houses.
No one noticed another pedestrian.
What I’m getting at is Seventh Avenue isn’t like the new subdivisions where you get the stink-eye wandering around on foot.
I parked my Vespa a few blocks over and headed out.
The house was big, of course, three stories and a cupola climbing to the right. It didn’t stand out, not run-down like a few at the northern extreme and not a show place like many of the others. Just a house. The paint and shingles had faded but could probably go another year. Curtains drawn on the upper stories, the front windows set back in the deeply shaded porch. I walked past it once, turned the corner at Fairfield and came up through the alley.
Another nice touch with these houses, the garages had been added as an afterthought. They faced into the alleys, usually with a door opening to a small back yard, private. The windows in the back were small and set low. Why would you want to look into an alley?
The gravel crunched underfoot and I slipped through the back gate, walking straight for the house, because, hey, I had a clipboard, right? I fiddled with the gas meter for a second, just in case any of the neighbors had looked over, then on to the back door, official. The glass in the door and the kitchen window was old, distorting the interior like looking through an aquarium, but I couldn’t see any contacts on the glass, any wiring stretching down the inside sill. They didn’t even have an alarm.
To one side of the back door was a dog door, the kind with the magnetic flap that sealed as it came back down. It was good sized, but not Great-Dane big. I bent down to take a closer look. There hadn’t been any dog-shit or toys in the back yard. It looked like the owner had installed it backward–the hard panel to keep the door closed was on the outside instead of the inside. Surely if they’d left a dog in the house, even if the neighbors were going to feed it, they would have left the flap open. No one would trap their dog inside even with a little fenced yard. They must have taken the dog to a kennel and had that flap in there to keep out stray cats.
I eased the panel up with my toe and laid it on the porch. My shoulder blades twitched just a little as if one of the neighbors was watching, but a glance showed the back porch was pretty well screened. Tipping open the dog flap I let out a low whistle, but didn’t hear any paws scrambling through the house, agitated barks. I could have shimmied through the dog door but it was only the work of a few seconds to pop the back lock with a celluloid wallet calendar.
Thank you, Sure-State Insurance.
Inside, the house was a little more run-down than I had thought, the floor could have been refinished and some daffodil yellow wallpaper peeled just above the splashboard. But still, it was on Seventh Avenue. Hard to be broke and live there. I took a couple more steps into the kitchen, wrinkling my nose. A few flies buzzed over the sink and lying on the enamel were what must have been some kind of table scraps, gristle, and still-red strings of meat, turning brown on the edges. The kitchen was hot and the scraps put out their own little cloud. Jesus, wouldn’t you have cleaned up before going on vacation?
Or maybe they had a cleaning lady come in, but looking around the kitchen I doubted that. Small rings of grease surrounded the gas burners, dust bunnies gathered under the cabinets. Not wholesale slobs, but certainly not anyone with a regular cleaning service.
In this line of work you quickly develop a certain feel for an empty house. Even if the occupants are dead to the world, passed out on the far side of the house, or maybe they’ve heard you and are behind the closet door clutching a baseball bat, there’s a something, a pent-up energy in a house with another person, or even a pet, in it. Like the air slipping from their mouths maybe vibrates the little hairs on my arms. On the other hand, an empty house feels different, relaxed, and open to me, my flashlight, and grab bag.
I don’t know. It’s just something you get a feel for.
But I felt neither as I stood in that kitchen. There was no one in the house, I knew that, would have bet my left nut on that, still… it was like the house itself watched me. Through the galley doors a dining room opened onto a parlor, green-hued panes of light on the carpet and dust spiraling slowly. What I heard was nothing, not a sound, not a stealthy step on the stair, or a door creaking closed.
Just nothing, like the whole place was holding its breath to see what I’d do.
Even the flies stopped their foray. I walked to the sink, tennis shoes squeaking on the floor, in relief—for just a moment I thought I’d gone deaf. That whole half of the kitchen reeked—who’d just leave that there? I could see an argument when they got back—“You were supposed to clean it out. No—I took the garbage out—you were going to clean the sink.”
The flies moved again and I stopped. For a heartbeat the room swelled around me. On the scratched porcelain, in the pile of gristle and strings of heat-browned flesh, was what could only be the end of a thumb, the nail bed split, cuticle shredded, but a thumb no doubt. Nothing else looked like that, I guess, except maybe a toe.
But really, was that any better?
I stood there, time unmoving. The flies landed, took wing, landed again—must be good. The thumb, my gaze zeroed in again like it was under a microscope. It hadn’t been cut. The end lay ragged, shredded.
Chewed, the word popped into my mind unbidden. Not the comforting word I’d hoped.
Details in the kitchen sprang out, was that wallpaper peeling or had it been scratched away? And scuff marks on the linoleum–booted heels drumming on the floor? From the cupboard under the sink, where there might be a garbage can, a thick runnel of dried liquid had seeped out and into a tiny puddle on the floor, dark–black almost.
If this was a horror movie and I was the eighteen-year-old blonde co-ed, I guess that would have been the part where I decided to go upstairs and take a shower. Look myself over in the mirror, or something. But of course this was real life and I did what only seems sensible but never happens in those movies.
I got the fuck out of there.
In a real hurry, barely shutting the door, and crossing the yard in three great strides, power-walking out of the alley. Not running but certainly moving a lot faster than the other gawkers.
I found my Vespa and got the hell home.
***
“A thumb? You’re high, dude,” Lester flipped his orange dreadlocks over one shoulder, Adam’s apple trilling up and down. He was annoyed but I didn’t care.
“Not high,” I tipped a half-open Coors at him. “Getting drunk. Right now. Not there yet, though.” I had dropped the Vespa outside the stairs to my cave-dark basement apartment, texted Lester “no go” two or three times, and began drinking, knowing he would show up sooner or later. There were five empty cans stacked by my own sink—no thumbs in there, I’d checked.
Lester scratched at a massive pimple rising at the edge of his jaw-line. His pale skin glowed in the half-light filtering down in my windows and his eyes were streaked and bloodshot—the ritual post-work bong hit on the way over.
“Dude, I took those two to the airport. They weren’t the Munsters or anything. Normal people and she wore some flash you know. That house—we could clean the whole thing out like movers before they get back. We’re talking real money here.”
I finished off the beer. “A thumb,” I said again, “like some kind of li’l’ smoky there in the sink.” The beer sloshed heavily in my stomach.
“Bullshit, man” Lester’s finger wandered down from the pimple and scratched along one arm. “It’s the best one I’ve seen for a while.” His eye darted around the apartment. “I’m getting into a jam, Drew,” he paused as if calling me something other than bro, dude, or man, conveyed the gravity of the situation.
Amateurs.
I had thought I could bring Lester up right and I surely needed the contacts from his job, but it was breaking a cardinal rule, getting involved with amateurs. If it wasn’t for that warrant hanging there I could have flown a little higher above the radar.
“Look, you don’t go making more trouble than you need in this business. I don’t know what the hell that was all about. I just know its hinky.” I lurched out of the recliner and weaved into the kitchen. Careful half-steps, five beers, no food. I couldn’t think about food. Every time I closed my eyes I saw those flies circling, circling. “Let’s say I made the whole thing up,” In the kitchen I hesitated, hand on the refrigerator handle. There was more beer, the other half of the twelve pack. But the cold coffee looked good too, sitting there from this morning.
I poured some into a chipped mug and turned around. “I made the whole thing up—why would I do that? Why would my mind do that? There’s something hinky there—maybe I wasn’t seeing it up top. But I picked up something. Spooked myself. It’s a no-go.”
Even in the beer haze I could have mouthed Lester’s next words along with him. “Don’t really need you anyhow. I could just do it myself.” Dappled red crept out of his collar, flaming his cheeks. “I know a couple of guys. Couple of guys would go in for something like this. Bro, you’re not the only game in town. Big-shot. Hiding out here, letting me take all the risk.”
I shook my head, took a sip of coffee. “You could do that. I’m a little drunk right now, Lester, or we might be having a different kind of conversation about your manners. But remember,” His eyes widened as I talked, maybe thinking he’d crossed a line. “I’ll be sober sometime. You can go and do this, but you’ll probably fuck it up. My name comes into it anywhere, from you or whatever pin-head friends you’re considering, well, I don’t know what exactly to tell you.”
I let him close the door on his way out and settled back into the recliner.
***
The more I sat and sipped coffee, the more I sobered up. The sun sank, my already gloomy place turned pitch black, and I thought about what I’d done wrong, aside from hooking up with a zero like Lester. They got pinched and I knew it would be all of 10 minutes before he started talking to the detective about how he’d really gotten into this.
No. That wasn’t all of it.
I replayed the scene again and again, the hush of the kitchen, flies buzzing lazy and fat and that thumb just laying there. I knew what I had seen. That feeling of the house watching me. Jesus. The fifth or sixth time, I remembered the crash, the clattering of the clip-board hitting the linoleum. Sure, I’d had gloves on in the house, but I’d been carrying the clip-board around all afternoon without them. You weren’t going to wear gloves on such a fine day. People would notice.
I knew I’d left the clip-board, but I got up and puttered around the apartment anyway, hoping I’d see it.
Lester, even if he did clear out the house, wouldn’t notice it, would leave it laying there on the floor. Cops laughing about stupid criminals, like the guy writing his hold-up note on the back of his own account’s deposit slip.
The beer was wearing off and I was thinking little more clearly, but good Lord was I tired.
“I have to go,” I said to the empty room a sour backsplash of warm beer and stale coffee in my throat. “Should I go tonight?” Not that I expected an answer, but maybe I could talk myself out of it.
Instead, I pulled on a Levi jacket and grabbed my helmet. Flipped open the phone and dialed Lester—if I had caught him, well I guess I would have offered up some half-assed apology—tried to keep him out of the house, at least for tonight. Of course he didn’t answer—maybe sucking down another bowl, getting up his courage. I hoped anyway. “Lester,” I tried to sound cheery, my old self. “Look man, sorry. I’m a little uptight. Don’t go over there with anyone else, all right? Hang tight and wait for me.”
I slipped gloves and a flashlight into my pockets. No need to take my tools—I already knew the door could be popped. Up top it was still twilight. The leaves etched black against a sky streaked with pink to the west. I breathed in deep. The air smelled sweet, pure. Summertime.
The cell-phone chirped and I spied Lester’s number.
I yanked off the helmet, letting it spin on the sidewalk. “Lester—man I’m glad I caught you…” I trailed off when he didn’t answer. A tinny noise scratched through the earpiece, thumping and scrabbling and the phone blinked off “22 Seconds” the read-out glowed blue and faded.
The phone buzzed again. “YOU HAVE A NEW TEXT FROM LESTER”.
I tapped it open.
“HLP”.
Nothing else.
“Well, shit,” If there was trouble, I didn’t have anything more lethal than a steak knife in the apartment. I didn’t even know for sure he was at the house, but, really where else could he be?
The beer was only a dim memory and rancid film in the back of my throat. I tugged the helmet back on and dumped the scooter over the curb, its engine wheezing to get up to thirty-five, the exhaust farting behind me on my way back to Seventh Avenue.
***
I cut the motor before turning into the alley and pushed the scooter up by hand. No sense waking up the neighbors. The house was dark as I cruised by its front, the porch shrouded in shadow. I spied the first real problem immediately. Lester, or one of his pin-head buddies, had forced the hasps off the garage door, twisted metal lying in the alley, a crowbar leaning near the fence. The doors weren’t quite shut and with my eye to the crack I saw he had backed his van into the garage, jimmied open the door leading to the yard.
What an idiot.
Anyone taking their garbage out in the morning would know the house had been broken into. The idea was to give yourself at least until the owner got back from vacation. Of course who was the more stupid, Lester, or me for bringing him into this? I leaned the Vespa into the shadows, not about to roll back the garage door, slipped on my gloves, and grabbed the crowbar. It felt good to have something solid in my hands, but I’m not really a fighter.
The yard pressed in heavily, much more secluded than this afternoon. Hard to believe there were houses on either side of the fence. The few windows reflected frost-like in the starlight. At the foot of the porch I realized I must have left the back door unlocked in my earlier flight. No one had taken a crow-bar to it.
I eased the door open, “Lester?” my voice cracked, unbidden. Of course there was no answer and streetlights out front didn’t reach to the back of the house. I flicked on the flashlight, fingers crowded around the lens, and let only a thin slit of light out, played it across the room.
Jesus.
I had pinned the crowbar between my elbow and ribs to shade the flashlight, but I quickly snatched it back in my left hand. The light beam wavered and flickered across the kitchen.
A plasma TV, a big one, lay face down on the floor next to a lumpy pillow case, probably jewelry, maybe silverware.
Blood, blood everywhere, puddled on the linoleum, splashed across the breakfast nook table, wicking up into the pillow case in thin tendrils. Blood and tiny bits of flesh splattered across the cupboards, a thick smear dwindling back into the parlor. A crumpled flannel shirt sleeve had caught near the door jamb, threads splayed out like a broken cobweb.
I’d never seen Lester in a flannel shirt but I remember at least one of his bong-huffing friends with one, over the faded t-shirt, wool cap, a whole grunge milieu twenty years late. The clipboard lay by the sink. The reason I was here.
Edging around the kitchen, the thick, metallic scent of the blood hit my nostrils and that was it for the beer and coffee, coming out in a great whoop and splashing over the television and countertop. I fumbled for the clipboard, struggling to hold it along with the light and crowbar
A quick thump sounded somewhere deeper in the house and I shot the light up crazily, wavering back and forth in the gloom.
“Lester?”
A sharp click-click, like a dog with too-long claws walking along the hardwood floors above my head. The sound moved away from me, but I knew it was making for the stairway, back down into the drawing room, parlor, whatever the hell they called it.
“Down here. Oh, Christ, dude, down here” Lester’s voice wafted up on my right, the root cellar, a heavily painted door, old brass knob turning open as I swung the light from the front room and that horrible clattering on the stairs, half-quiet now and I thought it must be on the carpeted runner. Four bloody streaks stretched across the cellar door, smeared fingers of someone closing it behind them. I had missed them, fixated on the television and the gruesome ruin of the kitchen.
The door cracked open and Lester stuck his head around the jamb. “God, Drew,” snot bubbles popped in his nostrils and his freckles stood livid on his pale skin, the pimple on his jaw a bright flaming volcano. He stretched his hand out, gory stumps of his ring and little fingers twitching, red drops hitting the floor. “I didn’t think you—” he broke off, eyes wide.
From the parlor came a wet, sucking sound, someone stepping in something sticky, tacky, and pulling their foot free. I turned my head just a fraction, catching pale movement in the doorway—small no taller than my knee, and Lester’s truncated hand clamped down on my wrist. He put one foot in the kitchen and still held the cellar door with his free hand.
“Fuck, dude, it’s right there!”
He yanked me forward and onto the steps. I stumbled once, twice, trying to catch myself before breaking my neck, dropping the clipboard, flashlight and the crowbar, hands splaying against the rough sandstone walls and then sudden blackness as Lester slammed the cellar door shut.
Blindly, I snagged the handrail somewhere near the bottommost stair, twisting and holding tight. A great weight banged into the door from the kitchen. There was a slobbering breath and scrabbling against the linoleum and somewhere in the darkness Lester whimpered, “Oh, Christ man. Oh Christ.” Snot sucked back into his nose.
I took a deep breath and coughed–the air in the cellar was a fetid mixture of urine, damp earth and rotting meat. Somewhere above came a gunshot crack of wood.
“Hold up, Lester,” the flashlight cast a thin glow beneath one of the stairs, winking feebly, and I got my hand around it, shook it to life. At the top of the rough wooden stairs Lester hunched forward, his right hand clutching at the doorknob, knuckles white. He held his left under his right armpit, staunching his wounded hand, his yellow Shuttle Xpress shirt swathed in blood. The door shook in its frame as the weight hit it again and I clearly heard a chuffing snort at the door, something breathed deep along the gap in the sill. Lester held tight to the doorknob, his eyes red-rimmed in the flashlight’s beam. “I don’t know if it can turn the knob, dude. It’s rattled it a few times.” Again something thumped into the door and the old wood creaked. “I’m not taking any chances.” Lester rubbed the dangling snot from his nose onto his shoulder in quick shrug like a three year old.
I stepped up, keeping the light on him. From the gap beneath the door came the whuffling sniff again and three black claws slid under the door, ran back and forth bare inches from his leg. They were impossibly sharp, glinting in the yellow light.
“Lester?”
He laughed, a reedy whistle. “Hinky? Isn’t that what you said, Bro? Hinky I guess that’ll do.”
I kept the light on the doorsill and the claws stretched forward, three pale fingers, the skin loose and sallow like it was melting from the bone, slipped through the opening and the door rattled in its frame. The claw tips gouged into the wood.
“Who the fuck keeps something like that in their house?” Lester’s voice rose, frantic. He kept a firm hand on the doorknob and twisted on the stairs, kicking one tennis shoe at the fingers. They pulled back and, again, that snuffling at the bottom the door, smelling us
“What is it?”
Lester snorted again, mucus covering his upper lip. “We—I, I didn’t see it. Stu and me…after you pulled the plug—we came down here.” His words ran together, breathless and he rocked back and forth still holding the door. “The house it was still open, you know, the back door. It was like a candy store. I hauled a bunch of shit out to the van, a blu-ray, a couple of laptops, jewelry you know and Stu was loading stuff up. I don’t know what all he had. And he’s like ‘Bro—a plasma.’ He’d unbolted it from a wall but couldn’t carry it by himself. I was ready to go dude—there was enough. I’m helping him carry it out of the kitchen and I got my back to Stu and then the TV just dropped and it had hold of my arm, I couldn’t even see it, just skin, gray skin, and its screeching and biting at my arm and I turn around and Stu’s down, man, just on the ground with half his throat open…”
He coughed and swayed on the steps. “I ran down. It jumped off me and I got down here. Wrong door though, wasn’t it? I could hear it, eating at Stu, even through the wood.”
He stopped. “I dropped my phone. It’s down there somewhere, but I can’t let it come in, can’t let go of the door.” He was crying now, openly. “I didn’t think you’d come. We’ve gotta’ call the cops or something, we got to get rescued.”
Even then, I guess I didn’t want to put too much thought into what slavered on the other side of the door. Not a dog, certainly. Some kind of ape? Maybe they kept a baboon or mandrill. I remember reading those were nasty animals, all teeth and muscle.
There was that warrant. Hard time—I just couldn’t see myself doing it. I call the police or whatever and it doesn’t matter there’s a half-eaten pothead in the living room. What they know is I’ve got two priors for B & E, on the run, a string of break-ins in Crescent Falls over the last few months.
If only, maybe one less beer that night in Tulsa, and things would all be different.
So I lied, God help me.
God help Lester, I guess.
I climbed a few more steps, holding the light on Lester. Made a show of patting at my pockets. “Don’t have my phone. Probably lost it when you yanked me down the stairs. We have got to get out of here on our own, man. We can drop an anonymous call or something about Stu.” The butcher-shop smell in the basement filled my nose as I neared the top of the stairs. “What’s down here?”
Above Lester’s shoulder was a light switch, bloody smears where he’d tried to flip it with his mutilated hand. His eyes followed the beam. “Doesn’t work, man.” The claws were no longer under the door and, more ominously, the thing wasn’t throwing itself at the wood, but I could hear it, tip-tapping along the edges of the door, shallow panting. Was it going to grab the knob?
“Go find my phone then. It’s down there somewhere. I’m not letting go of this knob.” He sniffled. “Don’t know why it’s still hanging around. That back door was open. Why ain’t it out in the neighborhood, chowing down?”
I turned, swinging the light, thinking I’d have to make a show of looking for Lester’s phone, maybe accidently step on it. The yellow beam swept around the cellar, “Well, Christ, Lester, I think we’re in its den.”
Bones.
The cellar wasn’t big, maybe twenty feet to a side, a water heater, tendrils of rust inching their way up the sides, a silent furnace. Everywhere, bones, piled into the corners of the cellar, thigh bones cracked lengthwise, the marrow long ago licked clean, skulls shattered like eggshells, hollow sockets tipping back and forth in the light, here and there a glint of a filling in an unhinged mandible I don’t know how many skulls, twenty? Thirty?
They were disarticulated, lying in rough piles and my gorge rose again as I thought of myself making a tidy stack of sparerib bones during dinner or the aftermath of a bucket of fried chicken piled in the center of the table. Strings of gristle still clung here and there and one corner of the cellar’s dirt floor was piled high with mounded droppings, adding to the stink swimming around my head.
How had this happened? Hadn’t anyone missed them?
“Hang on there, Lester,” At the bottom of the stairs lay the crowbar and that damned clipboard that had brought me into this whole mess. I wedged it into my pants at the small of my back and picked up the crowbar, fooling myself, I guess. The stench at floor level was overpowering, a butcher shop and kennel roiled together, and I breathed shallowly, mouth open.
Above, the thing hit the door again, a good one that made Lester scream and shift down one step. The white paint in the center of the door cracked like a seam from top to bottom. “You got to hurry bro.” His voice was weaker, “Phone’s got to be down there somewhere.”
I ran the light along the edges of the cellar until I spotted where a wooden bin had sat long ago, under a pair of shattered ribcages and a dismantled pelvis. Playing the light upward I could see the coal chute climbed at fairly steep angle, but it was as wide as my shoulders, the wooden walls smooth and streaked black. Most of these old houses had coal chutes, but they were usually boarded up against cats, squirrels, rats or whatever.
I suppose I should have just shimmied up that chute, leaving Lester covered in blood and snot at the top of the stairs.
Really—I was only back in this house because of him and his moronic friend. I had warned him and no one would have given that clipboard a second look if the house hadn’t been jobbed.
But instead, there I was. I wouldn’t have blamed myself for leaving him behind to be shit out on that dirt floor.
That’s not what I did, though I still wasn’t going to bring the police down if I could help it.
I shined the light back at him. “Don’t see the phone Lester, but we’re getting out of here anyway.” Behind him the door rocked back and forth on its hinges. I took the crowbar to a portion of the banister, the ancient nails screeched out of the wood and I ended up with a piece of 2×4 five or six feet long. The creature slammed into the door again as I climbed the stairs. The crack running down the door’s central panel split even further. Lester’s breath whistled in and out of his lungs like an asthmatic. Yellow pus crusted the corners of his eyes but his hand still clutched at the door knob.
“I’m going around you here, buddy,” I trapped the flashlight between chin and shoulder and wedged the piece of wood behind the doorknob, down against the stairs and against the threshold, hemming the cellar door closed. The thing must have sensed me, as it crashed into the door again, widening the split in the wood to a few inches. In the spinning flashlight beam a sliver of misshapen face pressed against the fissure, pale flesh and yellowed snaggled teeth, one eye shining a reflective red. A tongue, warty and fissured like a piece of beef jerky, passed across the teeth, touched the splintered edges of the door.
“Now, Lester, right now.”
I hooked him under the arm and yanked him off the stairs, the door shaking behind me. Lester wobbled and flopped, his head lolling and feet shuffling. His entire right side pressed sticky and warm, the blood draining from his mauled hand and forearm. In the darkness, more wood split away as the thing tore at the door. We stopped under the coal-chute and Lester fell to his knees. I wanted to send him up first, push him along, but there was no way he could have lifted the trap-door at the top of the chute.
“I’m so sorry, dude,” Lester’s lip hardly moved. “Should have listened to you.”
“Yeah, you should have,” I pressed the flashlight into his right hand. You’re going to have to come up after me. Can you do it? Use your elbows and knees, press against the side of the chute. It’s not that steep and not too far. Can you do it?”
He nodded and swayed to his feet. I clenched the crowbar hard and levered myself into the coal chute, bracing against the slick wood. As I wriggled upward I looked beneath my arm and Lester was behind me, pulling himself into the shaft. Somewhere in the blackness wood cracked and shattered and there was a hollow clattering that had to be the broken railing toppling down the stairs.
The chute was no more than ten feet long and I groped with the crowbar ahead of me, sweat oozing from my scalp, running into my eyes. The light wavered back and forth over my shoulder as Lester kept himself moving. The bar tapped against the trap door, metal on metal. I pushed and it moved just a fraction, but it was closed from the outside. Beneath us came that chuffing breath, a skittering in the dark. Lester’s hand touched my ankle, ran up the back of my leg, shoving at me.
I wedged the corner of the bar into the slight crack at the chute’s entrance, under the trapdoor, and heaved, there was hardly room to turn the bar sideways and I pulled, torquing my body over, knuckles scraping against the wood walls. Lester’s left hand flapped at my belt and he was crying again when something snapped on the far side of the trap door and the crowbar shot from my fingers. I lunged upward, banging my head on the metal as I shoved it open and took a great chestful of the sweet night air.
I scrambled out on the side of the house, near the back porch, and turned reaching down for Lester, his face a pale blotch in the starry light. I grabbed his right hand at the same time his eyes widened and his legs thumped against the wooden shaft’s walls.
“Oh, oh,” Lester’s last words were barely above a whisper and he was wrenched out of my gloved grasp so quickly it seemed he’d vanished, his left hand leaving a gory trail along the coal chute shaft. A quick clatter in the darkness below me and one gurgling hiss, the sound of flesh rending.
I fell away into the yard and slammed the trapdoor closed but it caught on the remnants of the rusted bolt. To one side a scattering of garden tools leaned against the house, a hoe, two bow rakes, a shovel. I snatched up one of the rakes and wedged its tines into the twisted hasp at the edge of the trapdoor, stomping on the wooden handle.
Would it hold?
I’d no idea but it might give me time enough.
As I leaned down to check my handiwork, the thing hit the trapdoor hard from beneath, banging it against the rake. It sniffed mightily against the seal of the door and two sets of claws pried themselves out. Tatters of skin and tiny yellow threads from Lester’s shirt gummed against the claws and the pale fingers. I brought the crowbar around fast and hard, smashing down on the talons. The iron reverberated in my hands, followed by a whistling, breathy shriek, not loud, but pitched high, and I swung again but the claws dropped beneath the trap-door.
“Bastard.”
My gloves had ripped away the knuckles, the flesh lacerated beneath them.
What a cock-up. If not for that warrant back in Tulsa—no reason I’d even be out here in this crappy little town.
My hand was on the back gate when I heard the unmistakable sound of the dog door flapping open in the still night air. For the briefest instant I remembered this afternoon, wondering why the dog door would have been shut from the outside, and lifting the panel away, leaning it against the wall. The warrant, the clipboard, now the dog door, another in the long list of shit bringing me to this point. I could just see the edge of the porch from the back gate, the bulk of the garage in my way, as the creature moved from the shadows into the color-draining starlight.
Well, it wasn’t a baboon.
It squatted no taller than the porch railing, thick hind legs and splayed feet with those same needle-tipped claws. The thing leaned forward on much longer arms, knotted muscle swelling in the shoulders and forearms. No neck to speak of, with a small domed head set squarely on the shoulders. Its skin lay in flabby pale folds, hanging down between arms and haunches, like those flying squirrels or something.
It sniffed deeply, turning its head from side to side and I could catch it features moving from shadow to light. Wide set eyes bugging out, a flattened nose, barely two holes in the center of its head, and that broad, lipless mouth, the yellowed teeth gnashing like gears. Stubby, cauliflower ears pinned back against it skull. Its jaw and forearms were clotted dark, Lester I guess, and maybe Stu. Its stomach swelled out, pendulous, touching the floorboards, engorged.
The slight breeze blew from the northeast, toward me, or I guess it would have already been across the yard. The thing’s scent, below that stink of fresh blood and spilt viscera, was cloying, sweet, like apples left to rot in the orchards through the winter.
I suppose I could have stood there, frozen, ‘til dawn, but my nerve broke when it slung itself off the steps, rolling sideways on short, bowed legs.
I hit the gate latch and ran for the Vespa, grabbing up the scooter’s handlebars with the crowbar still held awkwardly in my left hand. I pelted down the gravel alley, footsteps too loud to tell if I was being followed, thumbing the starter again and again, until the damn machine finally woke up with a cough and a lurch and I hopped on, careening out onto Fairfield. I put the throttle wide open before glancing back, and there it was, loping right behind, its stomach wagging from side to side and ropes of saliva flying from that gaping mouth.
I swung the crowbar wildly, thrashing behind me and felt it connect hard before it was wrenched out of my fingers.
I had the Vespa pegged when I looked back again. The thing hobbled a block behind me with one forearm up high against its chest. I didn’t see the crowbar and tried to coax just a little more from the Vespa.
***
Home was three or four miles away and I left the scooter lying on the curb, dropped into my apartment, shot the deadbolt, and vomited again on the floor. In relief this time I guess.
I was going to have to call somebody, tell them about Lester. I don’t have a landline in this crappy little place and my cell is one of those prepaid things. I could wipe it down and toss it out, no one the wiser, before I got the hell out of Crescent Falls.
In the theme of things, when I pulled the phone from my pocket I could already feel the crunched plastic casing, flip-top hanging loose. Must have crushed it climbing up the coal chute.
I had my hand on the door when I heard that stealthy tap-tap again, razored claws moving back and forth and the snorting, whistling breath of something seeking my scent through the wood. Something hungry. No other way out of the apartment than the barred window just to one side of the door and I didn’t see that happening
For the briefest instant my thoughts turned back to that night in Tulsa. I could have waved away those last two beers, the last round of shots.
And where might things have gone from there?
About the Author
David Pinnt works for the federal government and lives in a suburb of Denver, Colorado with his lovely wife and myriad children and animals. In his spare time (what there is of it) he tries to write high-end literary fiction; however the end result is always something much like the story you’ve just read. Go figure. His fiction is also appearing this year in Arkham Tales and the Permuted Press anthology The World is Dead. He keeps a sporadically updated blog at: (http://dcpinnt.livejournal.com/).
©2009 David Pinnt
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