Malus Domestica (25 page)

A long plastic marquee leaned sideways against the wall, a dingy white antique. A
RE
Y
OU
T
OO
C
OOL
FOR
S
CHOOL
?, it asked cheerfully, next to a cartoon coyote holding a glass with flames licking up out of it. D
RINK
F
IREWATER
S
ARSAPARILLA!

“Whhfffk.”

Joel’s head was pounding and drool ran up his cheeks, collecting on his forehead. When he tried to rub his face, he found that his hands were cuffed together, and the cuffs were chained to the floor.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

“Mmmmff.”

Cotton pressed against his tongue, and something tight was bound around his face and the back of his neck. He was wearing a gag.

Looking down (or up, as the case may be) he saw that he was hanging from the ceiling by chains around his ankles. All his clothes were gone except for his underwear, a blue cotton banana-hammock. Subterranean chill raised goosebumps on his naked thighs.

Jesus Christ, his worst sensationalist fears had come true—somebody he met on the internet for sex had abducted him.

Was Red a cannibal?

Oh God that’s it, ain’t it? Your cheap bitch ass gonna get ate up, just cause you don’t wanna buy your own steak.

He twisted and jerked, trying to see more of the room, trying to ignore the dripping water. Revolving slowly to the left, he saw that he wasn’t the only person hanging out, so to speak. A white guy, also dressed only in his Hanes, ankles chained to the ceiling. He was facing the wall, bruises all over his shoulders as if he’d been beaten unconscious.

“Hey,” said Joel through the gag,
hhnnngh.
Swaying his head from side to side, he swung his center of gravity back and forth, pulling on the chain around his cuffs. He managed to bump the guy with his shoulder, causing him to wobble and turn slowly on his chain.

When his fellow abductee-in-arms turned all the way around, Joel pissed his hammock.

The man was dead—
very
dead, his throat cut, his neck a slack grin stringy with red-black fibers, the white of his larynx glinting in the worktable’s light. A sheet of dried blood ran up his purple face, collecting on the top of his head, where it was dripping on the dark floor.

He’d been bled dry like a pig.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It rained, it rained, it rained all day

Til two little boys went out to play

To toss their ball around the yard, to toss their ball around

First they tossed it up too high

Then they tossed it too low

Then they tossed it in Ms Julie’s yard

Where no one was allowed to go, to go

Where no one was allowed to go

Ms Julie, she came to the door

All dressed in silk so fine

“Come in, come in, my dear little one

You shall have your ball again, again

You shall have your ball again.”

“Oh no, oh no, I can’t come in

Unless my playmate comes too

I’ve often heard of little ones

Who come in and never come out again,

Come in and never come out.”

First she showed him a diamond ring

And then she showed him her pearls

Then she showed him a big red apple

To entice the little boy in, boy in

To entice the little boy in.

She took him by his chubby fat hand

And led him down the hall

Where no one could hear his call, his call

Where no one could hear his call.

She pinned a napkin around his mouth

She pinned it with her own pin

And then she took a carving knife

And carved his little heart in, heart in

And carved his little heart in.

“Go lay a Bible by my head

With letters wrote so fine,

And if my playmate calls for me

Just tell him that I have died, have died

Just tell him that I have died.”

—Old Virginian folk song

S
ATURDAY

13

W
AYNE
P
ARKIN
WOKE
UP
in a cold, dark room under a too-thin blanket. After a moment of disoriented, delirious eyerolling, he concluded that he was in a hospital room. The only light came from the bathroom, seeping in around the hinge, giving shape to dark angles.

Someone was asleep in the chair next to the bed. Wayne shifted to that side and discovered Leon, sound asleep, his rumpled army-jacket folded up under his cheek.

As soon as he saw his father, something inside Wayne broke, a brittle eggshell crumpling deep inside of him, and tears sprang to his eyes. His throat burned with shame and embarrassment.
I bet I scared you so bad,
he thought, grimacing.
I am so sorry. I am so sorry I asked you to let me walk home.

“Daddy,” he said to the dim figure, but all that came out was a breathy squeal.

Leon snored.

Discouraged, Wayne lifted the covers and examined his left foot, the soft cotton sliding across his sensitive knee like the roughest burlap. There had been at least a tiny part of his mind that’d expected it to simply be gone—hacked off with a bonesaw and stapled shut, wound about with a bloodstained bandage. But other than tenderness and mild swelling, the extremity was present and accounted for. The bandage around his calf was tight but clean.

Too many horror movies.

He lay back down and again considered trying to rouse his father, but in the end he decided that it would be better to let him sleep. The ol’ man probably had a hard night, and without his patent-pending liquid courage, it must have been twice as hard.

Sitting up, he winced as his bladder ached. He had to pee so bad he was about to wet the bed.

Wayne grabbed his crotch (not quite the way Lawrence always did when he did his ‘pimp walk’, but close) and kneaded it in frustration as if he could keep himself from peeing by squeezing it shut.

A clamp on his finger radiated a feverish red light, and a wire ran from it to an outlet in the wall over his head. A pair of flatscreens mounted to the wall next to the bed displayed a whole litany of inscrutable numbers and the ever-familiar heartbeat line of an ECG.

The lightning-bolt of his heart booped slow and stately.

At first he was afraid that taking it off would set off some kind of chirping alarm, waking up the whole hospital and summoning a nurse…but when he screwed up his courage and pulled it from his finger, nothing happened except the glowing blue seismograph turned to a flat line and all the numbers disappeared.

He glanced at his sleeping father again and slid out of the bed. The floor was like ice under his left foot, searingly cold. Limping across the room, the boy went into the bathroom, closed the door, and pulled up his gown, pinning it with his neck.

If the suite floor had been cold, the tile in the bathroom was blistering-Arctic, and the light was the heart of a nuclear explosion.

Dark yellow urine arced out, directed quietly around the side of the bowl. Wayne flushed and opted to use the sanitizer foam from the dispenser on the wall instead of washing his hands. As he rubbed them together, his stomach gnarled up and growled, and he wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten lunch the day before. He was starving.

Back in the room, he found the trip to see a man about a dog hadn’t woken up his father. Luckily, the flush had been quiet: one ragged gulp and the water was clean again.

In a chair underneath the TV were his clothes and his shoes, and in one of his shoes was his mother’s wedding band. He slipped the cold chain around his neck. To his dismay, he saw that his jeans had been cut off, and now they were only denim rags.

Underneath the chair was a black gym bag. Wayne opened it and rooted around in it. Clothes. Probably his own.

He thought about putting something on, but the idea that he might need to stay in his gown for some reason or another made him reluctant, so he left it alone. He stood at the foot of his bed and watched his father sleep, still racked with shame.

I just know you been scared as hell all night. I’m so sorry. I had no idea there would be a snake in there.

Really, though, he was lying to himself.

Of course he’d been afraid of stumbling across a snake. It was why he’d hustled to get away from the weedy clown car, wasn’t it, all full of snaky-looking brush and sticks. But he’d just walked right on into that Gravitron, hadn’t he, without a care in the world.

And God in heaven! The bills would be astronomical, he just knew it.

On top of everything else, his dad was going to have to pay the hospital a kajillion dollars because Wayne was so stupid. He remembered reading about antivenin in Science class. The exotic names of the drugs had sounded so expensive.

This was my fault.
His hand instinctively went to the ring dangling against his chest. He felt puny, unworthy.
Raising the ring to his eye, he studied his father through the golden hoop.
I knew it was dangerous and I did it anyway. I am so stupid. I’m a stupid kid. A stupid baby. I deserve to be grounded. I deserve to be locked up in my cupola and never let out.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” he squeaked.

Leon just snored. A wooden door, like the kind you’d see in an old house, stood behind Leon’s chair, leading out of the room. Paint flaked from its surface.

Wayne blinked.

The ring dropped from his eye and the rusty door vanished.

Astonished, he shuffled over to where he’d seen it and put his hand against the wall. Cold cinderblock, painted gray, nothing else. Gently feeling the wall with both hands, Wayne searched for the door he’d seen, but there was no indication it’d been there at all—no doorframe, no knob, no nothin’.

He stepped back a pace and looked through the gold wedding-band monocle again.

There it was again, big as shit, and solid.

The doorframe was the green of grass, of frogs and avocados.

He stepped close and put his hand against it. Instead of the cold block wall, he pressed his palm to wood, rough and jagged with paint, as warm as if the sun were hitting it from the other side. The doorknob throbbed in his hand, hot but not painfully so, invitingly, radiating from within like the hood of a car on a sunny day.

He turned the knob. The latch disengaged with a click.

Wayne threw a glance over his shoulder. Leon was still asleep. Probably a sleeping pill—his father was given to using medication like Benadryl and Tylenol PM to knock himself out when he was having a bad night. And this definitely qualified as a ‘bad night’.

Opening the door, he wasn’t sure what he would find on the other side…but it sure wasn’t his own house.

Dark and deep, the Victorian at 1168 Underwood Road gaped before him. All he could see was a blotch of the floor and a bit of the wall, illuminated by a weak, aquatic light from above…but he’d seen this sight, at this angle, often enough in the last couple of days to recognize it. He was looking at the second-floor landing, from the perspective of the doorway that led up to the cupola.

Hunger still gnawed at his insides. Maybe…

Wayne glanced at his father again. He didn’t know what was going on, but if he’d been given some strange extra-dimensional superpower by being bitten by a snake, he ought to take advantage of it and duck into the house for a bowl of Fruity Pebbles. And with great power comes great responsibility, you know, so he’d grab Leon a couple of his energy bars while he was in there.

The snake. Was the snake radioactive? Gamma-ray snake?
Hmm. No,
he mused, peering through the wedding band.

Light coming in under the hospital suite door glinted on its gold surface. The ring was the power, not him. It had nothing to do with the snake. He let it drop to his chest, hanging from the necklace.

The door remained, still open, still revealing the interior of the Victorian. Steeling himself, Wayne stepped into the darkened house.

It eased shut behind him.
Click.

❂

Wayne’s heart leapt and he spun around, but the door was still there. He tried the doorknob. It wasn’t locked.

Relieved, he looked around the landing. Something was subtly off about the house, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He reached behind his back to pinch his gown shut and made his way down the stairs.

The foyer was quiet. A little table stood against the banister at the bottom, and on it was a black rotary telephone, something Wayne had only seen in old Hitchcock movies.
Why did Dad buy an old telephone?

As he thought about it, he realized what was different about the house.

The walls were supposed to be blue, dusky raincloud-blue…instead, they were green, the pale Fifties-green of spearmint gum and the floors at his old school in Chicago, the green that belonged with salmon-pink on the flank of a Cadillac convertible parked at a drive-in movie.

Wayne picked up the receiver and put it against his ear. No dialtone.

He stuck his finger in the rotary dial and turned it. The earpiece made a subtle
tikkatikkatikkatik
sound, but nothing else happened. Listening to the faint tappling, his eyes wandered over to the left and he noticed that the front door was a different color. Wayne hung up the phone and went over to check it out, his bare feet padding on the soft, intricate runner carpet.

The front door was white, the bottom chewed up by time and neglect, the paint coming off to uncover rusty metal. A placard in the middle said W
OMEN
.

A restroom door? Wayne’s hand found his face and he rubbed his forehead in confusion.

This was too strange. Time to get to the kitchen, get what he came for, and get back to the hospital. He would talk to Leon when he woke up later, and see what was going on, but for right now he just wanted to get something to eat and get off of his increasingly tender foot.

Wayne limped down the dark hallway and hooked right into the kitchen, stopping short.

A pale, dirty light filtered in through the window over the sink, like sunbeams coming through the scummy surface of a pond. This sickly glow drew the contours and corners of a black kitchen—black walls, black ceiling, the stove was black, the paint bubbling and peeling. He touched the stove, and his fingertip came away with a paste of damp soot.