Hoarder (17 page)

Ian realized he had probably fallen far behind his brother. He couldn’t even hear Keith’s stab and slide anymore. Ian looked up.

Keith had not advanced a good distance above Ian. He had come down, very close. Too close. Keith wasn’t sliding, but his right shoe came down fast. The shoe didn’t land on Ian’s face, it landed on his right shoulder. Keith wasn’t kicking to hurt Ian, but he applied enough pressure to knock Ian off of his spot and send him sliding all the way down.

Keith didn’t wait around to see where Ian landed. He hauled his sliding ass up the slope with renewed urgency.

At the bottom, Ian looked up incredulous. “Wait!” Ian cried up.

“Get out!” Keith called back just before he crawled over the top lip of the staircase.

Ian didn’t want to argue, they had already shouted too much when they needed to be silent and not summon their foe. And that had been his stupid fault for shouting first, an emotional reaction. Ian didn’t feel bossed around by his brother, he felt betrayed. This was no longer about sibling rivalry. This was about Dani, and she might need them both. Keith had only one hand to help, while Ian had two.

Ian started his climb up the clothing for a second time. He increased his speed, which only made him slip and slide back more.

Chapter Twenty-One

Keith felt bad for forcing a separation with his brother, with a kick from above, but he didn’t regret his decision. Confronting Missy was something he had to do alone, and he didn’t want his brother to see their reunion play out. Keith did have a death wish, only the death he wished for was not his own.

Keith didn’t just fear that Ian would be traumatized by what he saw if he stuck around, he also feared for Ian’s safety. He saw stepping into this confrontation with Missy the same as if he were to jump the fence and trespass into the gorilla sanctuary at the zoo. They were already inside the gorillas’ cage, and the mean mother ape was ahead, possibly around the corner. If forced to choose between a face to face with Missy or a large gorilla, he would undoubtedly pick the primate. Gorillas could be mean, but they were predictable in their behavior and survival instincts. Missy was completely off her rocker and more dangerous due to her delusions and unpredictability.

Keith momentarily thought of Missy as a baby giant that had no idea her strength could hurt people. Humans were the giant’s playthings, and this giant broke her toys all the time. Her house was cluttered with the broken pieces.

Keith realized that Missy and the gorillas were startlingly alike in another way. They both liked to throw their shit all over the place, where they slept and where they ate. Marking their territory.

Once off the staircase, Keith was faced with the cluttered second floor corridor. He saw two open doors on the left, one closed door on the right, and an open door at the end, from which he could hear the sounds of another television cranked loud. Keith figured his best chance for finding Missy would be to follow the sounds of occupancy. Keith hurried ahead, giving only a quick, cursory glance into the two open doors on the left. He didn’t look long enough into the bathroom to see the hole in the floor that Dani had fallen through.

Keith had to hurry with his plan if he didn’t want Ian as a witness. He had shoed Ian away literally, with a shoe, but Keith expected the kid would scurry right back up the stairs in continued pursuit despite his order to get out. So he decided not to waste time checking the closed door on the right, and he passed it on his way to the open door at the end. Ian might only be a minute behind him, or less, and he wanted to get this ugly business over with before he lost his nerve. Once he removed Missy from the picture, from the land of the living, the worry would end, and they could work on freeing the cats and removing Will before torching the place.

The damage done to Keith’s nose kept him from noticing the particularly ripe smell that emanated from the back bedroom, and it kept him from noticing the new scent that had joined it, the coppery smell of freshly spilled blood, the smell of a slaughterhouse. Keith didn’t hesitate for a second in stomping over the threshold.

Keith came to a sudden stop in the back bedroom. He didn’t see Missy; he saw something far worse. Keith thought he should have taken his own advice to Ian and hightailed it out of the house. He had never seen such a horrible sight in all his life, and it paralyzed him.

Ninety-eight seconds after his brother had done the same, Ian climbed over the top lip of the slope into the upstairs corridor. He stood on the lopsided surface and studied his surroundings.

Keith was nowhere in sight.

“Damn it,” Ian said softly to himself.

Ian was correct in his earlier assessment of the upstairs climate. It was like an oven. He guessed the temperature had jumped another ten degrees from the hotbox below, maybe more. He felt uncomfortably damp all over: his face, his neck, his shirt and underarms, his under shorts. Maybe that was a good thing, the sweat might clean the poisons out of his pores. At least he didn’t smell his nervous sweat. The stench of Missy’s house was the dominant perfume.

Ian needed to cool off a bit, but he didn’t want to unzip his hoodie in here. He pushed his hoodie sleeves up over his elbows, and it provided a bit of relief. He accepted it and moved on.

There were four doors ahead of Ian. He’d check each one he passed until he found his brother. Keith had to be close. He just had to be quiet about it. Shouting for Keith was out.

Ian came upon the first open door on the left and looked inside. He figured the sparkling hoard within was a bedroom, one that looked like it belonged to a little girl. Which meant this was probably Missy’s room. Missy was far from little or a girl, but her mental state had her locked in a perpetual state of giddy childhood. This colorful chaos fit her personality.

Ian studied the room from the doorway. He could see the make-up table and the mirror where Missy put on her face. The leaning chair remained beside the table, but Dani’s corpse was no longer sitting on it. There was nobody visible inside.

Ian started to turn away from Missy’s bedroom when he spotted movement to the far left of the room. He turned back to investigate.

To the left was a mound of multi-colored blankets, which might have covered a bed. It was a mass of sheets, comforters, a spring flower bedspread, a wool blanket, and an electric blanket with a frayed power cord sticking up like an antenna. Sitting on top was a shit and glitter covered cage, and inside the cage was a hairless, shit and glitter covered cat. This cat slunk around its limited confines with its head down. The sight was pathetic, and it made Ian’s heart feel smothered with sharp edged, piercing glitter.

Ian wondered why there would be a cage on Missy’s unmade bed, if it were a bed. He saw pillows to the left of the cage, so his assumption was probably right. Little girls often slept with their stuffed animals or pets, and Missy was a big little girl. In Missy’s case, the pet had to be confined behind bars to prevent its escape.

“I hate cats,” Ian tried to convince himself. And it was partly true. Ian was more of a dog person. He had never met a dog he didn’t like. Cats, on the other hand, didn’t care if you liked them or not, they were much more critical and cold to the humans that harbored them. In Missy’s house, the kitty’s hate was more than justified. Regardless that he would never keep a cat as a pet, he couldn’t bear to see this sad creature, covered in celebratory glitter, suffer like this for one moment longer.

Putting his mission to find Keith and Dani on hold, just for a minute, Ian entered Missy’s bedroom and climbed the hoard to save a small animal that might die without him.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Keith ventured slowly forward in the back bedroom, trying to comprehend what he was seeing, as well as how to react to it without losing his wits. His initial, honest reaction was a coward’s response, to just spin where he stood and beat a fast retreat out of the room and Missy’s house. Who cared if his buddies laughed or teased him? They hadn’t seen what he was seeing. Only his buddies wouldn’t laugh because Will was dead downstairs, Dani had been heard screaming and was missing, and Ian would be at his heels in no time and also be a witness to this mind-shattering scene.

Keith had to keep his plan in motion and keep control in the face of this unimaginable horror. Loved ones were depending on him.

The shouting from the television briefly took Keith’s attention. The same host from the show downstairs was acting as a referee between two trailer park hussies in a hair pulling catfight over some skin and bones, toothless lothario who would make a prize to no woman. The warring ladies looked like mother and daughter, although both appeared prematurely aged due to the same diet as their crack head Casanova. It wasn’t the drama of this unfortunate threesome that briefly pulled Keith’s attention, it was the volume of their shrieking. The sound on this television had been cranked up, probably to its limit.

Keith looked back at the room’s sole occupant, who probably needed the TV cranked since the viewer had no ears that he could see. “Good God,” Keith mumbled under his breath. He could have shouted it and wouldn’t have been heard under the caterwauling from the cable program.

Tickles was on the sofa, helped back up by Missy’s assistance. It sat back into its previously peeled and still seeping upholstery of skin. On the left side that was most visible to Keith, there were around a dozen large Band-Aids taping Tickles back to its sofa-fused flesh.

Tickles was sitting au natural, although there was nothing natural about its body. The sheet that had covered Tickles’ nakedness had been discarded on the floor and was wet with blood. It was the amount of blood that alarmed Keith. Most of the sofa and the garbage piled, and flattened, before it were saturated with blood from Tickles’ peeling. It looked like a large pig had been skinned in this room, which Keith thought might not be very far from the truth. He just hoped that none of the spilled blood was Dani’s.

Keith had entered the room with the intent to kill, but his target had been Missy, not this person, this
thing
. He could only proceed with morbid curiosity. He did not try to hide himself or his knife from the room’s occupant.

This person was so preoccupied with the televised hussy tussle that it didn’t even notice Keith was approaching. Tickles had a pained grimace on its face, which was understandable considering the size of its injury. Only when Keith changed his direction, stepping almost directly before the TV, did Tickles discover it had a guest. Its grimace became a goonish grin.

“Ooo! Are you part of the camera crew?” Tickles asked excitedly.

Keith, like Dani before him, could not make a decision on this hoarder’s gender, even after it spoke. He took it a step further and didn’t think this hoarder was even human. It spoke English, but so did other monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein, Freddy, and Pinhead. Those guys had started as humans, but become monsters through horrible circumstances. This thing in front of Keith was going to have to prove its humanity to him.

Keith recognized one similarity between Missy and her mysterious oversize houseguest. Neither occupant had shown anger or surprise at his intrusion. In fact, he would have preferred they react with suspicion instead of this excitable acceptance. Missy’s house was the last place he wanted to feel welcomed.

Keith considered what Tickles had said, something about being part of a camera crew. Had Missy told it that? He looked down and saw his handheld camera sticking out of his front hoodie pocket, the red recording light on. Plus, he had the mini camera on his cap. Perhaps Tickles had recognized that, too. Keith figured he would proceed as he had with Missy, by validating this person’s, or creature’s crazy talk. The fact that this hoarder did not figure a stranger approaching with a knife was any kind of threat gave him an advantage. At least this thing had no intention of calling to Missy for help.

“Yeah. This is my camera.” Keith raised the butcher knife in his hand. Tickles didn’t appear to know the difference, and it tickled its massive titties in delight.

“Can you help me out, Hon?” Tickles asked.

Hon
was a term that Keith had been called before, and attributed mostly to women. It was the standard from his nearly ninety-year-old grandma Margaret when he was a tenth her age, and he recognized that she called everyone Hon, young and old, because remembering names was long past her. Hon was endearingly used by Susan, the hot elementary school nurse who had tended to his scrapes and bruises all too often in his mother’s opinion, and not often enough in his own. He was still called Hon by his silver haired neighbor and flaming homo Charlie, but he didn’t mind him using that word since Charlie was the coolest tenant in their building. He was a former hippie, still was actually, and his stories of attending the 1968 Democratic National Convention were a source of inspiration to him. Charlie knew how to stick it to
The Man
, in more ways than one Keith often joked. Charlie always laughed at that and agreed.

Tickles’ use of
Hon
was not enough of a signifier for Keith to guess its gender, assuming it even had one. Maybe it had two. Or three.

“Sure,” Keith replied. It was easy enough to make friends with this creature. Keith could not get that moniker for this hoarder out of his head. The program playing was tabloid television, but Keith knew he had really stepped into a creature feature.

“Closer,” Tickles hissed. Keith stepped forward. He was being drawn in, just like Dracula’s hypnotized victims stepped toward their un-maker. The butcher knife remained upheld, or his camera in this hoarder’s buried eyes.

Keith didn’t like the way its trunk legs spread wider as he stepped closer, revealing no genitals to speak of, only flaps and folds. That didn’t mean this creature couldn’t be male. He remembered watching the Smallest Penis Contest on
The Howard Stern Show
, a program that was also an influence in his rebellious development. A few of the unfortunate top contenders of that hilarious contest had junk that measured in the negative. They had innies. Male did not always mean a protuberance.

“That bucket down there. Can you get a cube and rub it on Tickles’ wound?” Tickles asked in a pleading voice.

Tickles! This thing calls itself Tickles!
Keith thought. The name didn’t carry the chill of Nosferatu or threat of Jigsaw, but the Blob and the Creeping Flesh were already taken. The name Tickles didn’t fit, and he wouldn’t entertain its usage. To him it would remain the
creature
, with an apology to the svelte Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Keith couldn’t make sense of the creature’s request, and then he saw where it was pointing. There was a tipped bucket before the sofa, filled with cubes of butter, speckled in blood.

“Butter,” Keith said disbelievingly. Was this creature putting him on? This felt like some other kind of reality show, the kind with a celebrity around the corner playing an elaborate prank. Only these scare tactics were no prank, he had too many injuries to count to believe that.

“It’s a salve, you know,” Tickles said, like Keith was stupid for not knowing that home remedy. “My back burns.”

Keith saw the seeping injury that circled Tickles’ backside that no amount of Band-Aids and butter was going to heal, and he bet it burned like a bitch. He looked back into the bucket and wondered if he should butter his butcher knife before putting it to use. This creature would probably like that. And toss some salt on the wound after for some added zest.

Tickles lunged forward and grabbed Keith’s broken wrist. Keith never thought that such a massive, immobile lump of flesh could move with such speed and force, which was why he was caught totally off guard. He pulled back instinctively and suffered the error of that move. He thought his wrist was going to completely shatter and his hand separate from his arm.

Tickles squealed, and damned if it wasn’t in delight. Keith thought that it squealed like a pig, which was partly right. He was dealing with a Were-Pig.

The bandages that connected Tickles to the sofa snapped off in rapid procession and Tickles’ back was once again separated from its skin. A few of the roaches that were trapped inside the skin ran for freedom onto the sofa. Other roaches remained on the open wound, their all-you-can-eat buffet unfinished.

The pain in Keith’s left wrist was too much for him to bear. He reacted the only way he could, with a strong swing of his butcher knife. He wasn’t surprised to discover that Tickles’ skin cut like butter.

A seven-inch gash was opened from the right to the left in what approximated for a neck on this creature. Keith’s guess was right, because the jugular was hit, releasing a jet spray of blood that Tickles began to gurgle on. It wouldn’t be calling him Hon again.

Tickles’ grip around Keith’s wrist tightened with such force he thought he might pass out from the pain. Then the blubbery hand that held him released its grip. Keith pulled away as Tickles’ hand kept clutching in spasms.

Keith struggled to step backward on the garbage packed floor, but he couldn’t stop looking before him. He had committed bloody murder, and it was a messy, ongoing process on ugly display before him. He could not turn away from what he had done. He had to learn whatever horrible lessons it had to teach him. The neck wound no longer sprayed, but released pulsing gouts of blood. The god-awful gurgling became a wheeze that got continually weaker. This was the worst reality of war, the drawn out battlefield casualties.

The blood dripping, death dealing butcher knife remained held up in front of Keith in a shaking hand. His shock had to be manifested in some fashion. He kept backing up, not toward the door, but in a straight line, taking him past the television that had just lost its most loyal viewer.

Keith heard a powerful wet splatter and felt a resurgence of fear. He knew the voiding of bowels was a cruel part of the death process, and he was expecting it. Only this wet splatter had not come from before him. Once he had passed the television and its front speakers, he regained some of his hearing. He was certain that this splatter had come from behind him on his right.

Keith took a step backward. A sliver of light appeared between what had at first appeared to be bookcases. Only these cases didn’t hold books. They held fast food bags, Styrofoam containers, drink cups, and dirty napkins, all emblazoned with familiar fast food logos.

Keith took a few more steps back and discovered a previously concealed passageway between the bookcases, leading into a room or corridor that remained just out of his view. He approached this secret corridor, his knife upheld.

Keith’s anger increased with every step. Missy had clobbered and smothered him and broken his wrist, and then this hidden hoarder had further shattered his wrist, with squealing glee. It was highly possible he’d never have normal use of that hand again.

He was the long overdue exterminator who was tasked with removing the home’s most destructive pests, the two hoarders that occupied it. He would feel no guilt for his actions tonight, he would only feel regret that he had brought his loved ones along.

There was a massive, floor shaking thump to Keith’s left, and he stopped to look at its source. Tickles had collapsed off of its perch, skinned for the second time. Its bloody back fat had coagulated into a quivering red jelly, and that was the only movement it had left. For Keith, this was when the creature returned to its human state, only in death. The way the Wolfman became a naked man again after taking a silver bullet.

Another forceful splatter turned Keith to the passageway. As he navigated toward it, he saw the bookcase on the left stood four feet further out than the right, with the width of the passageway between them almost three feet wide. When Keith stepped between the bookcases, he saw the source of the noise ahead and knew he would never be able to forget it.

Missy’s backside was turned toward him. Her over tight red dress was hitched up to her belly, and he recognized that she had changed since he’d seen her last. She was hunched over, looking like she was riding an invisible bike. Keith thought she should be riding the porcelain bus instead.

A plastic shopping bag was held open behind her, covering her ass. There came another noisome splatter, and the plastic bag ballooned out further.

Keith knew the reason for Missy’s explosive elimination. He had seen what she ate firsthand, and he himself had taken a big bite. He was even more revolted to think that this bowel blowing reaction to her diet probably occurred with regularity. He fully expected to have his own splattery session the next time he had to go.

Keith had to tear his eyes away from Missy’s shit show. He looked at his butcher knife and remembered his purpose, the only thing that mattered. His business with the blade.

Keith probably wouldn’t get a better chance to strike than now, while Missy was fully turned and occupied with her potty break off the pot. Keith thought he lucked out that Missy still had some modesty and found defecation a private matter, which was why she had moved into this passageway out of the other hoarder’s view.