Strange Mammals (3 page)

There was no one in front of the armoire.

“Win?” Diane said, cradling his head. “What is it? You’re trembling.”

“Nothing,” he said, lying back down. “It was nothing.” Diane rolled off and hugged him tight. Winston closed his eyes and breathed in her scent, the musky sweet smell she emitted after sex. He opened his eyes and looked back to the corner of the room, but apart from Diane’s armoire, it was empty.

~

Both of them slept in the next morning. Upon waking they snuggled and talked in low voices, finally getting out of bed around noon. Winston chalked up the vision the previous night to exhaustion and an overactive imagination, and thought no more about it. They had a quick lunch of salami, wedges of cheddar, and wheat crackers—thoughtfully placed in the welcome basket that had been left in the kitchen by the landlord—then got to work. After some more unpacking, and assembling both their computers in the office, he went downstairs to the U-Haul still parked outside to return it. Since the rental place was a walkable distance away, he told Diane not to bother following him in the Civic.

He drove the five minutes down Murphy Street to the U-Haul place, then turned off the engine and got out. The young guy at the counter wore a grease-stained shirt and was engrossed in a copy of the
Hemisphere Confidential Report
. Winston cleared his throat, and after several seconds, the guy put the broadsheet down and looked up. His eyes were yellow and rheumy, and his sparse brown hair was plastered to his skull with sweat.

“What kin I do fer ya?” he slurred. An invisible cloud of mint wafted over the counter, as if he’d been eating Altoids non-stop and was now sweating the aroma out of his pores.

“I just need to return this van,” Winston said. The U-Haul guy stared for a few moments before turning to look at the moving van outside.

“Ah-ight,” he said, and shambled in the direction of the back. “Gossum forms fer ya tasign.” He moved like an old man, shuffling his feet across the tiled floor instead of picking them up, his posture slightly stooped, though he looked only to be in his late twenties. Winston followed him into the back office and sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair. The rheumy U-Haul guy puttered around, looking under papers and moving aside boxes. “Knowiss roun dear somere.” He edged around Winston’s seat and Winston could hear a cardboard box being lifted and put back down.

“Ah,” the guy said. “Herewego.”

A blinding pain exploded behind Winston’s eyes as something hard smashed into the back of his head. As he fell to the floor, a wave of nausea rolled over him. He somehow fought the gorge rising in his throat, and heard footsteps hurrying away. The air sloshed heavily in his lungs, and his skull felt stuffed full of cotton. The spots in front of his eyes eventually faded away, and he was able to tell that his attacker was no longer there. He put a hand to the back of his head, and it came away bloody.

Winston got to his feet on shaky legs for three seconds before a powerful dizziness sent him crashing back down against boxes and papers. It took several more tries to stand up and lean against the wall. All the strength in his body had been sapped with the head-blow, and he wasn’t even sure he could walk back home. He made his way to the small prefab desk, using its surface for support, and picked up the phone to call Diane. The connection was dead.

He wanted more than anything to sit down, but he had the feeling that if he did, he might never get back up. He slapped himself hard to stay awake. He’d heard somewhere, perhaps in Boy Scouts, that you’re never supposed to let a concussion victim fall asleep. They could slip into a coma and die from a torn blood vessel. Winston breathed deeply, which seemed to help a little. He noticed the phone in his hand and put it to his ear. There was no dial tone, no static. The connection was dead. He returned the phone to its cradle.

Nausea surged over him again, and he vomited for what felt like a very long time. The sour aftertaste of bile lingered in his throat and nostrils. He thought he remembered seeing a water cooler in the reception area, but couldn’t be sure. He turned to look out the doorway, but his vision took slightly longer to catch up to him, as if in slow motion. Objects were multiplied, overlaid and onion-skinned, different layers wavering around and on top of each other. Nothing would stay in focus for long. Winston started to wonder if he had permanent brain damage. There was a telephone on the desk in front of him, but when he picked it up, the connection was dead.

He stood in the middle of the reception area. A sour taste filled his mouth, as if he had been vomiting, and he noticed a water fountain in the corner of the room. He moved slowly toward it, leaning on counters and racks of tires and shelves of New Car Smell. His skull throbbed with his heartbeat. He put a hand to the back of his head, and it came away bloody. After several long minutes, he reached the fountain and rinsed his mouth out with the coolest, sweetest water he had ever tasted. He drank greedily, washing the bilious taste away, then blinked his eyes.

He leaned against the U-Haul he had tried to return. The metal van had heated up in the afternoon sun, and was painfully hot against his skin. Winston pushed off from the van, and staggered out of the parking lot. At the chain-linked gate, he overbalanced on one side and went spilling into the fence. Traffic was almost non-existent on the road in front of him, and the cars that did pass ignored him. No one offered to help or call an ambulance. He slowly picked himself back up and headed in the direction of his new apartment. He blinked.

He was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, his back to a telephone pole, watching a fuliginous black cat chew on something small and dead. Winston leaned forward and retched again, splashing the front of his shoes and the back of the cat, which hurried a few feet away with its prey, then hissed loudly at him around the dead thing in its mouth. It stared at him for a moment longer, then slunk down the sidewalk. He blinked again.

Afternoon abruptly turned to evening. He was standing again. The Krispy Kreme across the street displayed
Hot Doughnuts Now
in orange neon from the front window, bathing the empty parking lot in sickly ochre. Diane must have been so worried by now; it should have taken him only twenty minutes to walk home, but it appeared that whole hours had gone missing. He blinked.

Winston stood in the entry door of his apartment building; it was night now. Cool air leached past and bled into the humid darkness behind him. He stepped into the foyer and stabbed the up button for the elevator, hitting it on the third try. The doors opened, and he noticed the strange iron key he’d seen Lucas use, turned to the “on” position above the button for the ninth floor. On impulse, he touched the button for 9, an irrational feeling telling him that his wife wasn’t in their apartment. The image of Lucas kissing Diane’s knuckles rose in his mind, along with the man’s confident predatory smile.

The doors slid open, not onto a hallway, but onto large anteroom. The dim light in the room looked as if it had been filtered through red cellophane, throwing even the most benign objects into a foreboding relief. Or it could have been that Winston’s brain had decided to compress all colors into scarlet duotone. He heard voices coming from somewhere further in the apartment, and followed the sound.

The penthouse apartment apparently took up the entire top floor of the building. Winston walked through a living room decorated in fine art and expensive furniture, a rec room occupied by a snooker table and a large glass cage occupied by a sleeping ocelot, a home theater with a full-sized projection screen and thirty seats. Every dozen steps, his equilibrium would fail, and he would have to stand in place until the dizziness passed. After winding through room after room, following the vague murmurs of a male and female voice, Winston ended up in the bedroom.

On the four-poster bed, completely naked, his wife Diane knelt on her hands and knees, taking it from behind from an equally nude Lucas. She’d always deflected the idea of that position when Winston had suggested it, preferring to see his face during sex. To the side of the bed, in a plush leather chair sat the rheumy guy from the U-Haul place, watching. A second leather chair was empty. The only sound in the room was the slap of flesh against flesh; Lucas wasn’t even breathing hard. On Diane’s face was an expression of utter bliss. The room was permeated with the smell of sweet honeysuckle and jasmine and apple blossoms.

“Ah, Winston,” Lucas said with a relaxed grin. “About time you showed up. I was beginning to wonder. Have a seat. Enjoy the show. Don’t blink, or you might miss it.”

Winston had the momentary dislocated feeling of hovering above his own body, watching his actions but unaware he was actually doing them. He shuffled over to the empty chair and settled into it, leaning back against the comfortable leather. A black cloud intruded into the corners of his vision, and the top of his skull buzzed, as if the seams that converged there were coming loose. His wife uttered a small cry of passion. Everything went dark, and Winston welcomed the oblivion.

~

Winston woke up from his coma three weeks later. According to the doctor, he was very lucky to be alive. They hadn’t had to operate. When the nurse came in to check his IV and jab him in the ass with a syringe, she mentioned that Diane hadn’t left his side the whole time he was unconscious.

Later that day, two detectives paid a visit, told him that he’d been found in the penthouse, sprawled out on the floor, his wallet missing, with a can of black spray paint in his hand. Scrawled over and over on every surface of the empty penthouse was the word GRENDEL. Did Winston know anything about that? He had to admit that he didn’t. Did he know what it might mean? Other than remembering the monster he’d read about in
Beowulf
back in high school, he could offer no opinion. Did they say the penthouse was empty? Yes. Not even furniture? No sir, no furnishings at all. But there was a man living there, Lucas something. They didn’t know anything about that, sir. What about the guy at the U-Haul place? The owner knows no one of that description, sir. Don’t leave the state for a few days, in case we have further questions.

Diane had waited at the foot of his bed while the police asked their questions, and resumed her seat next to him once they left. She held his hand and looked in his eyes, and Winston could see such pain there. Even as she smiled at him, tears tracked down her cheeks. He reached up and wiped a tear away with his thumb. “S’okay, Dee,” he said. “I’m all right.” At this, she leaned down to put her face on the bed, muffling her sobs with the blanket. Winston stroked her head and made reassuring sounds.

“Oh god, Win,” she said between hitching breaths. “I didn’t know where you were, what happened to you. I thought I’d lost you forever.” She raised her head and attempted a smile. “But you’re okay. You’re awake and all right and you’re here.”

“Tha’s right, hon. Right here.”

They kept him in the hospital for another week just to make sure he recovered. Diane came by every morning and every evening after working her receptionist temp job. At the end of the week, Winston had exhausted the crossword puzzles she’d brought him, and daytime television drove him up the wall; he was absolutely itching to leave. Diane didn’t say anything during the drive home. Winston was still a little woozy from being supine for a month, so she had to help him out of the car, up the elevator, and into the apartment. The coolness of air conditioning greeted him like an old friend. Despite the nurse’s statement, it appeared Diane had found the time to finish unpacking and decorate the apartment. On the wall above the sofa hung five of Winston’s favorite personal photographs, the center one taken of a laughing Diane during a picnic when they’d first started going out. He loved the unbridled happiness of her face in that photo, the bliss.

“I wanted to surprise you,” she said, looking expectantly at him as she helped him down to the couch.

“It looks great, Dee,” he said.

Diane smiled and couple of tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. She laughed nervously and quickly swiped them away. “Oh Win, I was so afraid you’d never wake up. I don’t think I could ever handle that. Do you remember anything at all about being in the penthouse?”

He shook his head. “The doctor said I must have been hallucinating after the guy at the U-Haul place hit me and took my wallet.” Winston rubbed his forehead at the headache that was starting there. The doctor said he’d probably have headaches for a few months. “It felt real to me, though. So the penthouse was empty?”

“Yeah. No sign that anyone had lived there in years.”

“So what happened to Lucas?”

“Lucas? Who’s that?”

Winston abruptly yawned. He leaned back against the couch and closed his eyes. “You know, the guy who was living up there. We drank his honey mead.”

“Win, you’ve been through a lot. Maybe you should take it easy. Are you hungry?” Diane asked. “Anything to drink?”

“No, I think I’ll just go to bed.”

She helped him into the bedroom and undressed him, pulled the sheets up to his chin. Though it was only afternoon, she undressed too and climbed in next to him. A small rumble of thunder sounded in the distance, and Diane wrapped an arm around him. Thunderstorms always made her more than a little amorous. She kissed his neck, and the fatigue dissolved away. He wanted to lie in bed with his wife, and touch her, and reaffirm that she was real. Winston leaned over and kissed her long and slow.

When they separated, she asked, “Do you want to?”

He nodded. A butterfly fluttered in his stomach, and he couldn’t help but picture her with Lucas. “From behind.”

She looked startled for a moment, and Winston was convinced more than ever that what he’d seen in the penthouse had been a mental fabrication, but then she smiled, a grin that went all the way to her ears, and said, “Okay.”