Authors: Armando D. Muñoz
Hoarder (23 page)
“I’ll bet you killed your little Saffy,” Ian began. “Maybe it was an accident, maybe you sat on her, or your hoard fell on her like my friend Will. But it was your fault. I’m sure of it.”
“Cut,” Missy said, “the show is over. I don’t want this on camera. I want your crew to leave now.”
If only we could leave, you stupid bitch
, Ian thought as he stood. “I’ll leave, because I have no intention of being trapped in here for life like these poor souls,” he said as he moved his way over to the cobweb draped crib with Saffy’s skeleton inside.
Missy watched Ian suspiciously from her red beanbag. She leaned forward, about to rise and follow him, when a piercing pain from her back made her sit down again. She put a hand over the bloody pad on her back, which was dripping.
Once beside the crib, Ian turned to Missy. “I’m also going to release every miserable cat and call the police. You are going to lose your precious hoard, your horrible house, and your friends.
Missy’s House
is cancelled. I’ll see you on your next show,
Lockup
.”
From the confused look on Missy’s face,
Lockup
was a show she wasn’t familiar with.
Ian leaned into the crib and smashed Saffy’s brittle skeleton with his fist and camera. The bones disintegrated into bursts of dust. From the ease of the bones’ obliteration, he probably could have demolished them by blowing hard on them.
“NO!” Missy screamed. The pain of her stabbed back was forgotten as her adrenaline kicked in, and she launched up off of the red beanbag. She lunged for Ian, but stumbled on the floor of stuffed animals (it was Oliver the Octopus that provided the tripping tentacle). Missy fell forward and landed flat on her face, her impact fully cushioned.
A white plume of bone dust rose over the crib, nearly causing Ian to cough as he continued to pound the skeleton inside. Saffy was reduced to little more than small bone shards and a cloud, except for her skull. Adding to the desecration, Ian flipped the aged crib over. Even on a floor of furries, the crib was reduced to kindling.
As he engaged in the demolition of Saffy’s skeleton and her crib, Ian offered a mental apology to the baby. He held no ill will for poor Saffy, and he even doubted whether she had been born to Missy. It would come as no surprise if he found out that Saffy had been snatched out of another shopper’s cart because Missy found her too adorable and had to add her to her collection, which turned out to be pretty much the case.
The true facts of Saffy’s abduction wouldn’t become public knowledge until much later, after a lengthy investigation and DNA testing. And the baby’s original name was not Saffy, that was a girl’s name and this baby had been a boy.
It occurred to Ian that Missy’s husband was probably a fiction, like his father was a man seeking her courtship in her mind. Her husband was probably just another sad victim unfortunate to be handsome enough to tickle Missy’s loins.
“You don’t deserve any friends!” Ian screamed at her.
Missy pushed herself up onto her knees on her carpet of stuffies and corpses.
“I’ll kill you! You hurt my Saffy!”
As Missy climbed toward the shattered crib, Ian climbed toward the door. He shouted back at her, “Your little Saffy isn’t laughing anymore!”
When Missy reached the overturned crib, she broke the splintered boards apart to get to the baby’s bones beneath.
Ian noticed the many smiles of the stuffed animals he crawled over on his way to the door. Perhaps they were smiling because they would soon be free of this nightmare menagerie. He came upon a giant stuffed bear leg on his right, and saw the nearly four-foot bear it belonged to. Stacked on the lap, arms, shoulders, and head of the bear was a family of Puritan dolls made of porcelain.
Ian moved past the bear and turned back to it, grabbing the bear’s leg and giving it a hard yank. The bear was a fluffy obstacle in Missy’s path, but it was the collapsing glass dolls that would prove a better barrier. The porcelain Puritans cracked against each other and rolled off the big bear they had been mounted on for so many years.
With the crib obliterated, and with a few long splinters planted deep in Missy’s fingers, she picked up half of Saffy’s shattered skull, the biggest part of the baby that remained.
“My poor Saffy! What did that bad boy do to you!?”
Saffy was long past being able to answer Missy, had in fact died long before developing the ability to talk. Regardless, Saffy’s half skull spoke to Missy, at least in her mind.
“Kill the punk, mommy! Crush his skull like mine!” the half skull ordered in a high-pitched scream. Missy nodded, in tears.
“I will, Saffy! I will,” Missy, with all her heart, promised her daughter, who was really a dead, stolen infant boy, whom her heart had forgotten and would always deny.
“And get that bike back for me!” Saffy’s half skull ordered.
My bike!
Missy had momentarily forgotten the bike. Destroying Saffy and her crib was bad enough, but that bad boy and his scallywag friends had taken her favorite bike with those cool blue-striped handlebars out of her house! It wasn’t just her bike; it was going to be Saffy’s bike someday (never mind that nobody would ride it until the end of time if it remained in Missy’s house). In Missy’s mind, taking her bike was a transgression that was punishable by death.
Ian pushed up onto his feet when he was within a few steps of the door. He collided with one of the caked flypaper strips, and the gooey paper stuck to his face. He could see the little twitching fly legs between his eyes. He could smell the nutty adhesive and rotting bugs beside his nose. He could practically taste the gluey strip and its victims that ran down over his partly open lips.
Ian shifted hard to the side in the hope the flypaper would pull off of him. The strip broke off the ceiling instead, sticking firmly to his face. The flypaper was reluctant to let go of its biggest catch.
As Ian pinched the top of the flypaper strip and pulled it off of his face, he didn’t see Missy pick up the wooden bottom of the crib behind him.
With the flypaper removed, glue and bugs remained stuck in a diagonal line down Ian’s face. He flung the flypaper to the side, but the squirmy strip remained stuck to his fingers. Then came the blow to the back of his head as the thrown crib bottom hit him, and what he saw next was a blur as he pitched forward out of the Rot Room into the hallway.
Ian could just make out the forward leaning, three-foot tall dresser in the hall that he was falling toward. He tried to shift further right to avoid it. Ian’s forehead hit the top corner of the dresser, and after an explosion of stars, he saw and thought the same thing at the same time.
Nothing.
Ian fell to the side of the dresser as it pitched forward, all of the packed drawers falling out, spilling junk and vermin. The dresser hit a discarded walker before it, preventing a full forward collapse.
The sound of breaking glass inside the Rot Room brought Ian back to consciousness. The porcelain Puritans were breaking, their generations stomped on by a giant, which meant Missy was on the move his way.
Ian sat up quickly and his head spun so hard, he nearly fell backward. He steadied himself and touched his throbbing forehead at the point of impact. He winced at the raw agony and indentation there, and when he pulled his fingers back, they were smudged with blood. No surprise there, he had never hit his head that hard before, or knocked himself out. He even had a new term for it, a skull-cracker.
Next he touched the back of his head where he had first been hit, by what he had no idea. This point of impact didn’t feel as dented as his forehead, but he could feel a separation of skin and tissue, and when he pulled his fingers back, they were no longer smudged with blood, they were dripping with it.
Ian heard more glass breaking and a yelp from Missy. He grinned, knowing he had slowed her advance and injured her in the process.
The open door was right behind him, but he didn’t dare look back and waste one second to confirm what he already knew. Ian had only two options available to him now. Left or right.
Going down the hallway to his left would take him back to the living room and the house he knew, including the front door. Only escape was no longer the next part of Ian’s plan, and the tipped dresser with its extended drawers filled what little path there had been. Climbing over the tipped dresser was possible, but it wouldn’t be easy. Missy would probably step right over it.
To Ian’s right was the terrible bedroom with the skinned body that was not body shaped inside. But he remembered Missy speaking about another way out of that room that led down through the house, although he doubted the loop-de-loops she mentioned were real. It was the better option, only instead of a fallen dresser in his way, there was his dead brother.
Ian made his decision.
Missy stopped in her pursuit to pull a broken china doll arm out of her right palm. That was a real smarty, just like the poke in the back that Keith had given her in the other room. She threw the shard to the side, where it slid down out of sight between Ally the Alligator and Furry Turtle.
Missy felt bad for her broken dollies, and thought her room would feel empty without them mounted on Burly Bear. She also hoped the dollies didn’t hurt from their many broken limbs. At least with the money she’d get for
Missy’s House
, she could buy a whole village of porcelain Puritans. The only thing better than a family was more families. And Missy had the most family friendly house in the whole world. She had hundreds of happy families living under her roof.
Missy remembered Saffy and knew that was one thing she could not buy a replacement of. Saffy had been taken from her, again! Rage at Roland’s rotten boy got her back to crawling after him. He had broken Saffy’s bones, and she was going to break all of his bones in return. It was only fair.
He was also going to have to pay for the crib he broke apart. It was an antique! Missy considered her house a museum of antiques.
Roland’s boys were cute, she’d always thought so (just look at their father, it was no wonder), but they had both turned out to be like stubborn jawbreakers with sour centers. They were not only disrespectful and insulting to her immaculate house, they were making a mess everywhere they went. She would soon have to make sure both boys stayed put so they couldn’t run roughshod over all of her valuables anymore. She didn’t just lose Saffy tonight; she also lost Blue Cup! Chickin Grillins didn’t even carry Blue Cup anymore.
Because of those boys’ bad behavior, Missy was going to hold out on her womanly favors for Roland tonight, maybe for a while, at least until he got his boys back in order. It might also do good to give Roland a few punches to the face, to remind him to always mind her. Only she wouldn’t punch too hard, his skin was starting to feel awfully moist and soft underneath. Just hard enough to get her point across.
As Missy worked her way toward the door, she looked around at her dollies. They were all smiling and cheering her on.
Wendy the Bed-Wetter said, “
Get him, Missy! Get him!
”
Burly Bear shouted, “
Let me maul him! And eat him!
”
Despite her pulverized skull, Saffy yelled, “
Break all his bones for me, mommy!
”
Hanging from the ceiling and spinning on a string, Toots the Angel trumpeted, “
Kill him, Missy! Kill him!
”
As Missy continued her pursuit, she failed to notice the sanitary napkin had detached from the stab wound on her back. She was leaving a considerable trail of blood behind her, which was eagerly sopped up by the stuffies underneath.
The master bedroom held a bloodthirsty hoard, just like the rest of the house.
As Ian pushed up, he realized his hands were empty. He’d dropped the camera during his fall. He didn’t see it around him, and then he discovered it between his legs. He’d landed on it, and he would find that bruise later. The red light was no longer on, but he picked it up anyway and stashed it in his front hoodie pocket. He didn’t need to record anymore. He had more than enough evidence.
Ian reached the first obstacle in his escape, his brother. There was still something very important he had to give Keith. It was a promise.
“She’ll regret ever taking your bike, Keith.”
Ian had a much smaller cheering section than Missy, but he heard Keith loud and clear in his head. “
Kill that gluttonous bitch
.”
“I will. Love you, brother.”
I love you
was a sentiment Ian had rarely said to Keith, but he had no doubt that his brother had known it. Ian told himself he’d have to start saying it more often. He would always want to be a better brother.
Ian stepped carefully over Keith’s not yet room temperature body without disturbing it. A few steps beyond, Ian disappeared from view inside the back bedroom.
Fury entered the hallway first as the broken crib bottom was kicked in from the master bedroom. Missy stomped out and broke the crib bottom into pieces as she plowed over it. More of Saffy’s bone dust rose into the air.
Unlike her former passage through the hallway, where she hadn’t seen Keith as she passed over him, he got her attention now. He was part of that bad family of boys, and would be the recipient of her rage.
“I should have never dated your daddy,” Missy told Keith at her feet. The pain he had made in her back was really starting to irritate her, and she wanted to give some of that pain back.
Missy stomped on Keith’s head, onto his upturned cheek and temple, cracking his cranium in multiple places. Her second stomp went higher and managed to leave a dent in Keith’s skull. A third stomp broke the skull enough to release his brains.
“See how you like it!” Missy exclaimed. By the sixth stomp, the bottom of her shoe was coated in brains. Missy was stomping in revenge for Saffy, despite the fact that the one she was stomping on had never seen or known about her child. Missy often got confused like that.
Keith’s head was left nearly as separated as Saffy’s skull, only a lot wetter. Missy thought that was kind of funny, and then she saw something below that earned more of her anger.
Missy squatted and pulled the butcher knife out of Keith’s chest. Blood slowly drained out of the wound since Keith no longer had a pulse to propel it. She had been responsible for the knife’s placement inside him, but her fractured memory was that Keith had injured himself with the blade after playing with it. That was just the kind of trouble boys were always getting into.
“I told you to put this away!”
Missy took the butcher knife with her. She would have to put it away herself, although she might find another chest to plant it in first.
As Ian worked his way through the thin passageway at the back of the room, he noticed another swarm of flies ahead, as bad as the swarm in the Rot Room. Maybe worse, since no flypaper strips hung in this room to lessen their number.
When Ian reached the landing and discovered what Keith had found before him, he stated what he saw.
“Fucking shit.”
Ian regretted saying anything at all, since the air tasted like a dirty toilet.
If Ian had known the second path down was over a steep slope of shit bags, he would have crawled over the dresser in the hallway and gone the other way. These stairs made the ones in the basement and living room look like a cakewalk (these were a crapwalk). He tried to estimate how many shit bags were spread down below him and settled on innumerable.
It wasn’t just the dangerously slippery surface that worried Ian. There was also the stink, which was worse than the smelliest bathroom he had ever been in (at last summer’s Warped Tour, where every toilet in the stadium men’s room had been backed up), times one thousand. Ian feared the air ahead was so full of fecal matter it would be like wading through mud. Butt-mud. He feared he would choke on the air, pass out, and take a header down this enormous crapper.
Ian’s nose was forgotten as his ears took over, hearing Missy crashing through the bedroom behind him. Her voice boomed louder than the shouting on the television.
“Get up and help me, Tickles! He took our bike!”
Ian knew it was time to get to shit stepping. On Ian’s right was a crap-smeared railing, caked from top to bottom. Ian grabbed the railing tight and took slow steps down the slope, unable to see where the steps actually were. Each step produced an audible squish, and nearly every one caused a slip. The only thing that kept Ian from repeated disaster was his white-knuckle grip on the chunky brown railing. Many of the bags under Ian’s shoes burst with a wet pop, caking his shoes in whipped waste.
Ian noticed, as much as he didn’t want to, that the railing didn’t just have human waste on it, but also chunks of toilet paper. And the TP was transferring to his fingers. The railing was also crawling with vermin. A few roaches ran up Ian’s hand, leaving little brown footprints behind them.
The shit roaches also, regrettably, startled him. Ian instinctively let go of the railing to fling his arm out, sending the roaches flying. He nearly flew with them, realizing too late the mistake he’d made (the coward’s cootie dance again), and all because he’d been touched by dung bugs.
For Ian, the next few seconds seemed to slow down considerably. Every detail sharpened in his attempt to save himself.
Ian brought his right foot down hard, and only the heel of his shoe hit an unseen step before it slipped off. As Ian pitched forward, he saw the railing and knew if he didn’t get an iron grip on it within the next second, he would get to know exactly what a flushed turd felt like. And tasted like, too.
As Ian’s hand flew out, wide open to grip the railing, he saw a thick, seven-inch shit lying right where he was reaching. Ian grabbed the loaf for dear life. After breaking through the crusty shell, the inner cream squirted up between his fingers as they wrapped around the railing.
It was a sickening but successful grab, and it saved Ian from falling down the stairs. He let out a fecal flavored breath of relief and continued down. His mouth tasted like he was chewing Honey Bucket flavored Bubblicious.
When Ian reached the last dozen steps, the next thing that nearly made him lose his footing was Missy’s booming voice behind him.
“YOU!”
Ian gripped the railing, and the sticky crap on his hand acted as an adhesive. He looked back over his shoulder.
Missy stood at the top of the stairs, her face twisted in anger. Eager to catch the dirty bike stealer in her house, she started down without grabbing the railing that was coated in her own waste, since her right hand was occupied with the knife. On her first step, her left foot slipped, and in trying to catch herself, she overcorrected and pitched forward.
Missy fell onto her belly on the slope, in her good dress no less, and slid down like a fallen log over brown snow. The log screamed all the way down.
Ian knew he only had seconds before Missy rammed into him. He let go of the railing and let his feet carry him down, uncontrollably, his arms pin wheeling as he pitched forward. Missy’s scream followed at his heels.
Hitting the first floor landing at a run, Ian collided with a tall dresser that stood less than four feet from the bottom stair. The dresser tipped back until the top hit the wall behind it, a few feet back, stopping Ian’s fall. Dust, cobwebs, and knick-knacks of cute animals rained down around him.
Ian rolled to the right, off of the dresser as Missy launched head first off the slope. Missy’s face hit the lower dresser with a crunch, which could have been wood or bone, Ian couldn’t tell. Missy’s screaming had finally stopped. She was knocked out cold.
Ian saw that Missy had left a shit face print with a smear of blood in the middle on the bottom of the dresser, and he let out a triumphant laugh. “Ha!”
Ian turned away from Missy to find his way out of the alcove. He saw no way out.
Ian’s surroundings consisted of three tall dressers (one tipped), two rods of hanging clothes (one above the other), and three walls. There was one way out, the shitty staircase past Missy. It had been risky enough coming down, but it would be even worse climbing up.
“No!” Ian cried in denial.
Missy moaned, eyes closed, and remained on the floor in impact position. Ian saw her legs stir and knew he had only a few more seconds to get past her and start scaling Crap Mountain.
“Fuck that.” He’d find another way out, even if he had to climb the walls like a fly using the tacky shit on his fingers. Or maybe he’d find another patch of soft wall to punch his way through, made moist by years of diarrhea saturation.
In a growing panic, Ian turned away from Missy and looked more closely around the alcove, hoping to find a way out he might have missed at first glance. He squeezed around the tipped dresser and looked behind it. There was only a wall with garbage bags stacked against it.
Ian turned to the clothes hanging in two levels. He parted through the dusty, web draped wardrobe, all of it women’s, and saw more clothes hanging behind the first rods. It had to be an exceptionally tall and deep closet to hold so many racks of clothing.
Ian ducked into the closet and tried to push through the second rod of clothing, which was even more densely caked in webs. The dresses and shirts were so tightly packed, Ian doubted one more hanger could be added to the rod. Ian pushed harder into the garments and saw, much to his disbelief, another tightly packed rod of clothing behind it. He also glimpsed a few slivers of light above it.
Ian had found his way out of the alcove. He was in a corridor that had been transformed into a multilevel closet. He crouched down, finding it easier to duck through the bottom of the garments. The cobwebs that had long encased the wardrobe transferred to him. He felt the passage of little legs along the back of his neck, and something else crawled over his left ear. Whether the creepy-crawlies had six or eight legs, Ian couldn’t tell. The crawler he felt cross the back of his neck felt like it had a hundred legs. He forced himself not to care. He had a far larger two-legged threat close behind him. This whole house was her web, and he felt seized in it.
Ian took a moment to wipe off his poopy hands on a white dress. He hoped it was her wedding dress and she would put it on before she found his brown handprints, but he knew she would never get the chance to wear any of these clothes again. Even if he wasn’t planning to stop her and she lived to be one hundred years old, all of this clothing would stay untouched. Missy might claim that every item in her collections, every piece of her hoard, was cherished and necessary, but in reality most everything was neglected and forgotten. Missy had standard hoarder-vision.
Ian could see more of an alcove ahead after passing the fourth rod of clothing. There was only one more rod of wardrobe left to push through. A hand that was more bone then flesh hung under the final fashions, and Ian ducked beneath it with a shudder of disgust. The dead fashionista helped Ian by catching hold of some of the cobwebs on his cap.
Coming up out of the final rod of clothing, Ian vigorously shook his head to throw off the crawling stowaways. He got a good look at the small alcove he stood in.
Ian’s fear grew as he realized the only way out was behind him.