Anything Can Be Dangerous (26 page)

The babies kept crying. Or was it just
one?

Yes––one voice, not two. He wondered
whose throat the wailing had spawned from.

Someone was being bad. Someone was
being good.

He warmed the bottle in the microwave
for two minutes and forty-five seconds while looking at his warped
reflection in the kitchen window. His light brown hair was sticking
straight up on one side, his eyes were puffy and his five o’clock
shadow had become a three-day-old beard. He wasn’t extremely
overweight, but the way his fat bunched around his waistline was
far from attractive. He was thirty-eight years old but looked fifty
or more.

Probably not getting enough
sleep
, he assumed.

A bell rang. He opened the microwave
door and retrieved the formula. The bottle was too hot, way too
hot. Crazy hot. He tested it on his arm and felt the milky fluid
burn like liquid fire.

Good enough.

He opened the door to the basement,
walked down a rickety staircase, and clicked on a florescent light,
spooking a cockroach from its resting place. The roach scurried
across the wall in an arched line and Nicolas tried to catch it
between his finger and his thumb. He missed. The cockroach fell to
the floor. Its tiny legs hustled towards a crack in the wall and in
it went. The bug was gone.

Oh well
, he
thought.
Better luck next time.

The basement smelled bad, much worse
than the inside of the fridge. It smelled like piss, shit, sweat,
blood, and rot.

The crying was louder now, much
louder. If he had neighbors they’d complain for sure. This was a
nugget of information that didn’t sit well with Nicolas, not in the
slightest. Neighbors shouldn’t have to put up with such
nonsense.
It just wasn’t right.
If
he
lived next to a
noisy house he’d be seething in anger and out of his mind with
rage.

Nicolas walked through a room that
housed hundreds of shoes, countless jeans, shirts, socks,
underwear, hats, wallets, belts, watches, and coats. He opened a
cellar door and turned on another light.

The crying stopped
immediately.

He walked down a second staircase. It
only had nine stairs and none of them were very big. The unfinished
room at the base of the staircase had a very low ceiling. Walking
inside the room meant that you had to crouch down and tuck your
head into your shoulders like a turtle. The room was cold; it was
always cold. In the wintertime it was freezing. The walls were made
of rock and seemed permanently moist.

The smell of shit and piss was strong
now, strong enough to make a healthy man sick and a sick man pass
out.

And there she was: Cathy
Eldritch.

Cathy was thirty-one years old; her
birthday fell on New Years Eve. She was right where Nicolas had
left her… fourteen years ago––

Inside a cage.

2

Cathy Eldritch was naked and covered
in scars. Her ribcage stuck out from her skin and her muscles had
wilted to noodles. Her large and unsightly nipples were dry and
cracked, centering breasts that were non-existent. Her arms and
legs were nothing more then sticks, elbows, and knees. Her few
remaining teeth were black and rotting; her hair was long and
crawling with bugs. Below the pits that housed her bright and
sunken eyes––eyes that seemed far too alive and knowing, like Sun
Gods buried in an apocalyptic badland––her nose had become as thin
as a wafer and crusted with dehydrated wounds. Lips that were so
tragically withered and cracked made her look like a mummy, or a
living corpse, or like a horror story monster that needed to be
buried in the earth and forgotten, a ghoul that lurked in the
darkest corners of the most twisted and perverted minds. All of her
toes and three of her fingers had been amputated, proof she had
been a
bad girl
thirteen
times.

Nicolas named Cathy Eldritch: Kathy
the Kitten.

She was a trooper and he knew it;
nobody lasted fourteen years. It seemed damn near
impossible.

Nicolas Nehalem approached the wire
cage, which was nothing more than a modified, three-foot by
three-foot square. He smiled a strange and outlandish smile, laced
in twisted logic and perverted reason.

After opening a small door on the
right side of the pen, he dropped the bottle of formula inside. The
bottle rolled between two walls of wire and landed on the caged
floor.

Cathy couldn’t reach the bottle. Not
yet. Not until Nicolas released a lever that would unlock a small
door inside the coop.

“
What do you say, Kathy?”
He adjusted his glasses and slid a hand beneath his housecoat. He
began stroking himself calmly.

Cathy’s eyes were filled with
starvation and madness.

At one time she wanted to kill this
man, make him pay, make him bleed. She had despised him more than
anything else in the world. Now she only wanted her nightmare to be
over. She wanted to die. Not in theory, and not in some exaggerated
way that people say it but don’t really mean it. She wanted to die
for real. She wanted this life to end and whatever was waiting for
her on the other side to begin. And she was close,
so
close. She had been clinging to
death’s front door for as long as she could remember. All she had
to do was stop drinking the formula and she would cross over. All
she had to do was die. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She was
famished––and her hunger wouldn’t allow her mind to say no to the
bottle. She needed the bottle, the formula. And for this reason she
didn’t hate Nicolas. Not now. She hated herself for needing
him.

She said, “Thank you daddy. I love
you.”

“
Very well done,” Nicolas
replied, knowing she hated expressing her love. His voice sounded
calm, yet agitated; it always sounded agitated. “You’re a good baby
today, yes you are; yes you are.”

Nicolas wrinkled his nose playfully,
raised his shoulders and opened his housecoat so Cathy could see
his semi-erect penis. He released the lever on top of the
cage.

The bottle rolled another two
inches.

Cathy rammed a hand through the small
cage door and grabbed the formula; flies buzzed around her. She put
the bottle to her mouth and drank greedily, burning her mouth and
tongue. She hardly even noticed.

On the other side of the room were two
more cages. One was empty. It had been empty for three weeks. The
other cage had a young girl in it. The girl’s name was Olive
Thrift. She was fourteen years old, might have been Asian. At this
stage, it was hard to tell.

Nicolas named her Pumpkin.

Olive said, “Daddy, may I have a
bottle too? I’ve been very good lately. I didn’t cry tonight or
anything. Honest I didn’t.”

“
I’m sorry dear,” Nicolas
said, stepping away from Kathy the Kitten. “I only brought one
bottle with me. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

“
Oh.” Olive’s eyes slipped
down to the stumps on her hands. She only had three fingers left;
she didn’t want to lose them. A multi-legged insect walked across
her face and she swatted it away thoughtlessly. “Okay daddy. I
understand. I love you.”

“
I love you too, Pumpkin.
Have a nice night. I’ll see you tomorrow, or maybe the next
day.”

“
Daddy?”

“
Yes dear?”

“
Can I please have some
water? Both of my containers are empty.”

“
Mine are too,” Cathy
quickly announced. “Can you fill mine too?”

Nicolas approached Olive’s cage with
his housecoat wide open and his genitals exposed. He put his
knuckles to the wire.

Olive suspected that he would. He had
been doing that a lot lately. She figured it made him feel like
royalty.

She crawled toward Nicolas on her
mangled digits and knobby knees, closed her dark and cheerless eyes
and put her lips to the wire. Flies flew in circles around her. She
kissed his hand as gently as she could manage.

“
You’re a good little
Pumpkin,” Nicolas said. “Yes you are. And if you keep being a good
little girl I’ll never have to smash your face in with a
sledgehammer. Or set your cage on fire. Because you don’t want
that, do you? No. Of course not.”

Nicolas walked across the room,
smiling insanely. He lifted a hose from a hook on the wall, turned
a faucet, and approached Olive spewing hose-water where it fell. As
he stood over Olive’s cage, she held out two water jugs and he
filled them. He made his way to Cathy’s cage and poured water
inside her coop for a little more than twenty seconds. She was able
to fill one container and wet her hair before he dropped the hose
and turned the faucet off, deciding enough was enough.

At the top of the stairs he clicked
the light switch on and off, several times. He was tired. He hadn’t
been sleeping well plus he had to get up early. He had things to
do, although he couldn’t quite remember what those things
were.

“
Oh yeah,” he whispered. A
grin that could have given a slaughterhouse butcher nightmares
crept across his face like a spider on a corpse. “Now I
remember.”

Closing the cellar door, he thought he
heard a whimper.

Sounded like Pumpkin.

Pumpkin was a good girl; she was
trying. And that’s what counted most in his books: trying. He
hadn’t been forced to punish her lately, which was a nice change.
Not since the incident with Pauline Stupid-Head had he been forced
to perform one of his little operations. Not since he emptied the
third cage.

Thinking about Pauline’s empty cage
made him sad and lonely.

Empty cages need to be filled. Sure
they did. An empty cage was wrong; everybody with a lick of sense
knows
that
. But Nicolas was a
busy man, he had things on his mind and his work was never done.
The cage would have to wait.

Nicolas crawled into bed wearing his
housecoat. He lifted his cup from the nightstand, smiled at the
clown holding the balloon, and slowly emptied the cup’s contents on
the floor. Water splashed, creating a miniature lake where no lake
had once been. He named this lake, Lake Empty Cage. He wondered how
long the lake would last, and when he would be forced to make a new
one.

The clock beside him read 4:19
am.

It was late, too late for feeding
babies and making lakes. Maybe tomorrow he would punish Kathy the
Kitten for waking him––maybe, but maybe not. He wasn’t sure yet. He
would see how he felt in the morning.

* * *

Nicolas woke up early, went to the
kitchen and mixed another bottle of formula. He warmed it
perfectly, added a little chocolate and brought it to Olive; he
apologized for not giving her a bottle the night before.
Afterwards, he cleaned the basement and found each of his babies
something to read. He gave them fresh blankets, a rice-crispy
square, and a nice cup of coffee. Shortly after, he stepped inside
a closet, stripped naked, and screamed for twenty minutes while
pushing his fingers into his eyes.

Want to keep reading?

Check out the rest of the story
here:

JAMES ROY DALEY - TERROR TOWN

* * *

Preview of:

JAMES ROY DALEY - INTO HELL

1

Carrie Paige’s favorite duffle bag in
the whole wide world had a picture of Kermit the Frog on both
sides. The bag was black and cute and it said IT’S NOT EASY BEING
GREEN on the strap and Carrie thought it was the greatest thing she
had ever seen. She brought her bag into the backyard with her when
she was playing with her dolls, and she was planning on showing it
off on her first day of school, which was eleven days away. She was
excited.
Big kids go to
school
, her mother often told her.
Big kids go to school and little kids stay home
.
Eleven more sleeps and it would be official; she would be a big
kid. She was so excited she could hardly think.

Carrie reached into her Kermit bag and
shuffled through her important possessions. This included a flower
made of construction paper, playing cards, multicolored rocks, a
bag of marbles, a handful of crayons and a plastic horse with a
squished head.

The playing cards were
always
in her Kermit bag. If they
were out of the bag she had them spread around so she could see
every card at once. They were very special to her. She cherished
each and every one of them and as a result the cards looked like
hell.

Her favorite
boy
card was the one that said READY
FREDDIE.

Ready Freddie looked so adorable
sitting at the kitchen table with a knife in one hand and a fork in
the other that sometimes she kissed the card. Freddie had yellow
socks, a green bandana, and his tongue was sticking up from his
pencil-line lips suggesting that he couldn’t wait another minute to
eat.