Hoarder (18 page)

Keith stepped ahead as gently as he could, trying to avoid the crinkle of garbage underfoot. The crinkle from Missy’s plastic bag was louder.

As Keith came closer to Missy, her surroundings widened. He recognized that she was standing on a landing before a second staircase going down to the first floor. He could hear her grunting, trying to force the last of her meal out, and then she ended with a sigh.

Missy stood up and removed the bag, fully exposing her dirty rump to Keith. He held in a retch. With one hand Missy pulled her dress down. Keith could not help but notice that she had not cleaned herself afterward, and she wasn’t wearing panties. More fun facts to add to the Missy files.

Keith picked up his pace and inevitably increased the noise of his approach. Missy might turn around any second. Noisier steps that were faster were a risk he had to take. He needed the ability to strike first. A few more seconds and all this fear could be over.

And then the fire could start. Keith longed to smell Missy’s house in cinders. When Keith was eight and his brother six, their parents had taken them on a precautionary tour of a neighborhood house that had been destroyed by a kitchen fire. Only the kitchen and part of the dining room had been charred, but it was enough to render the entire house a total loss. Keith had been confused when they had toured the kids’ rooms upstairs, which looked relatively okay. He remembered most vividly the big teddy bear that had been abandoned. Its fur had a soft layer of soot on it, but that could be washed off, Keith emphatically told his parents. The soot could be cleaned, but the charred smell of the house that permeated the bear’s every stitch could not, his father had explained. Keith had complete recall of that memory’s smell and could not wait to be the cause of it here.

It was a bittersweet memory, but it had been a good lesson that his asshole, abandoning father had taught him with that tour. Keith would never be a firebug; he feared and respected the element. Its use would be required just this one time. Burning the village was a valid tactic when trying to win a war.

Missy was making noise of her own, tying the top of her piping hot poop bag into a knot. Her dirty fingers got a bit dirtier in the process. She did not hear the footsteps coming behind her.

Missy tossed the bag down the stairs. Instead of clothes, these stairs were carpeted in crap bags. As the front staircase was the hamper of the house, the back staircase was the open septic tank. Her number twos had to go somewhere since her toilet had long ago grown a stool volcano.

Keith rushed out of the passageway and onto the landing, the butcher knife held straight out before him. The blade stabbed five inches deep into Missy’s back left side. This stab was nothing like the slash of Tickles’ soft neck. The blade encountered much resistance and required far more force to get in. He could feel the puncture of tough flesh, the resistance of strong muscle, and the scraping against bones, which were probably her ribs.

Keith shuddered with revulsion and let the handle go. He stepped back from his horrible handiwork. In her tight red dress, Missy almost looked like a stabbed, hanging slab of beef.

Only this slab wasn’t dead. Missy turned around and regarded Keith with annoyance.

“Oh, you. Let me guess, you’d like a sandwich now.”

Keith stared at Missy with utter disbelief. He expected her to fall, he expected her to scream, he expected her to just fucking die already. He had not expected this, the threat of another sandwich.

“I stabbed you,” Keith stated matter-of-factly.

Missy gave Keith a sly look, like he was pulling her leg. Keith looked down at her left side, indicating to her with his eyes the general location of her injury. Missy felt around her abdomen until her hand located the blade embedded in her back. Her fingers wrapped around the handle and slid the knife effortlessly out.

Keith stared at Missy with his mouth agape. How could she not feel that? She should have been screaming bloody murder, namely her own. Yet she didn’t seem to know she had been mortally wounded. Did she not feel pain? Did her poisonous diet make her immune to mortality? Keith was starting to think of Missy like he thought of the other hoarder. She was a creature, too, since creatures were far harder to kill than humans.

“I thought I felt a poke. Thought it was my fibro flaring up again,” Missy said. She held up the knife and looked at the bloody tip with disappointment. “You’re all kinds of trouble, aren’t you? It’s almost not worth having you Hollywood types messing up my house.”

Keith looked at the tip of the blade and was a bit reassured to see that her blood was red, not zombie black or alien green.

“You’re bleeding,” Keith said with a seriousness that he hoped would transfer to Missy. Keith looked down toward her wound, hoping she would tend to its severity with urgency.

Missy didn’t care to address or dress her wound. She looked at Keith with irritation.

“We have a rule here in Wormwood Manor, no knives leave the kitchen. People get hurt that way, you know.”

She has got to be fucking kidding!
Keith thought. He’d seen knives throughout the hoard in practically every room of the house. Kitchen knives, butter knives, the back bedroom had literally hundreds of plastic knives. Did she seriously not see knives everywhere, because he sure as fuck did. Keith looked up at Missy to tell her and he saw a knife. His butcher knife. It was making a fast arc down toward him.

Missy plunged the knife into the center of Keith’s chest, about four inches in. She didn’t want to go too deep and hurt him.

Keith felt like he had just received the ultimate punch to his chest, and to his heart, worse than his worst wipeout ever, where he had landed on the top edge of his skateboard and broken two ribs near his sternum. Keith looked down at the handle of the blade sticking out of him and knew this was a lot more serious than any skateboard wipeout.

“Now you take that knife back down and put it in the kitchen where it belongs,” Missy instructed him.

Keith turned around and followed Missy’s order. That was awful nice of him. She’d forgive him his goof-up. She was really starting to like him again. Truth be told, she never really stopped. They were an item, after all.

Keith kept his eyes on his stumbling feet as they took him back into the bedroom, the beginning of the long trek downstairs. Looking at his feet, he was also looking at the knife, and the blood that was making his hoodie glisten.

Keith had no intention of following Missy’s order. He would defy her to the end. The kitchen was not where he was going, the front door was. He knew he needed serious help, and fast. Removing the blade the way Missy had would most likely lead to his bleeding out and death. Leaving it in didn’t feel like such a good idea either, since the blade seemed to be increasing steadily in temperature inside of him. It could start burning so hot he might not be able to stop himself. His hand could revolt and pull the knife out in an attempt to put out the fire.

Keith retraced his steps through the television room, past the television, past the no longer moving bloody mass on the floor. The further Keith went, the harder his struggle with things like walking, equilibrium, breathing, and consciousness became. He was no longer thinking in coherent sentences, just random words and repetitive phrases. As Keith came upon the bedroom door, he thought
Wormwood Manor must escape Wormwood WormWOOD! Out! OUT!

Missy remained on the landing of the second staircase as she explored the damage Keith had done. Her fingers found the stab wound in her back, but she was more concerned with the tear in her dress.

“He tore my good dress. I should tear his pants,” Missy reasoned. That would only be fair.

Missy pulled her fingers back and saw they were smudged with fresh blood. It was her most favorite shade of red, only better because it was shiny.

“It don’t hurt, so it can’t be all that bad,” Missy told herself, and then she shouted out, “Tickles, you used up all my Band-Aids!”

Missy made a mental note to get more Band-Aids on her trip to the Mega-Mart next Tuesday. That was a long time to wait for bandages. Luckily, Missy was a firm believer in recycling. Why, she could probably find a makeshift bandage right where she stood. She put her resourcefulness to the test and looked around. It took her all of five seconds.

“Ha!” Missy exclaimed. She was always right.

Missy crouched and picked up a sanitary napkin that looked like it had been recycled already, many times over the years. She reached around and pressed the clotted cotton pad to her still bleeding stab wound. She pressed it hard until there was a twinge of pain that made her wince.

That Keith had left a real smarty on her. After holding the pad in place for a few moments, she let it go. The unsanitary napkin remained stuck to her stab wound, sucking up her blood like a leech.

Missy thought she might not need to buy those Band-Aids after all, although if they were on sale she might not be able to help herself. She would have to find a needle and thread as well to fix the rip that bad boy had left in her good dress.

Only finding a needle in a hoard was harder than a haystack, and Missy’s promise to sew her clothing would never come to fruition. She had never sown a stitch in her life. But in Missy’s mind, she always sewed her damaged clothing and returned them to perfection. Her intent always procured the desired results.

Chapter Twenty-Three

After setting glitter cat free, Ian vacated Missy’s bedroom and continued up the hall. His exposed forearms were itchy where they had crawled over the covers of Missy’s bed, on blankets he assumed had never been cleaned. There were a million things under Missy’s roof, but a working washer and dryer were obviously not among them. Looking at his forearms, he was alarmed by the hives and redness that had quickly taken root on his delicate skin. He wasn’t surprised that his body should react with such a severe rash anywhere he was caressed by Missy’s rotten things.

The brown lit bathroom only got the most cursory glance as Ian held his breath and hurried past, before he could get a rancid lungful of fecal air. 2000 Flushes wasn’t going to fix Missy’s bathroom, but 2000 matches might.

Ian approached the cracked door on the right and had much the same reaction as Dani before him. He saw the doorknob and hesitated in opening it. The smell that came from the room was different than the others, although it contained traces of many stinks he had already encountered, old standbys like spoilage, mold, and shit. Somehow this room’s reek was worse than all of those. Nearing the crack in the door was like getting a whiff of bleach and ammonia intermingled. It smelled dangerous, a poisonous cocktail.

Ian christened this mystery room the
Rot Room
. His every cell revolted at opening that door, but Ian had a mission to get through. Dani or Keith could be behind that door, so the room could not be avoided. All he had to do was open the door and look inside. He wouldn’t have to enter the noxious interior if his friends didn’t need his assistance.

Ian looked over his shoulder, took a deep breath, and reached for the doorknob.

A falling box from the end of the hallway grabbed Ian’s attention. The door to the Rot Room was abandoned.

Somebody was in the room at the end of the hallway, and Ian approached to find out who it was. He heard talking, the pitching of products from a commercial sponsor. No live voices. Still, it hadn’t been a professional pitchman who knocked over that box. He could see light shifting on the hoard through the door. Whether that was the television’s reflection or somebody’s shadow, he wasn’t sure.

Ian clutched his kitchen knife tightly as he counted down his steps to the open door: three, two…

Ian didn’t finish his count, since Keith stepped into the doorway before him. The handle of the butcher knife sticking out of Keith’s chest was less than two feet from him. What Ian heard at that moment was cruel and surreal, the thunderous applause of a studio audience behind his brother, cheering him on. Ian looked from the knife handle up to Keith’s face, his eyes already filling with tears.

Ian forgot all about keeping quiet and inconspicuous, and his emotion was let loose in heart-wrenching shouts.

“Keith! No!”

Keith looked directly into his brother’s eyes, but the connection wasn’t entirely there. Ian saw no recognition at all. When Keith spoke, he could have been addressing a stranger, or his reflection in a mirror.

“She took my bike.” Keith’s voice sounded watery, but it wasn’t water that was steadily filling his lungs, it was his blood.

Keith stepped around Ian into the hall, their arms brushing together in the cramped corridor. He remained on mortally wounded autopilot, and escape from Wormwood Manor through the front door was his final goal for tonight’s rapidly deteriorating mission. Unlike his trek across the bedroom, where he watched his every step as his blood pattered on his shoes, Keith’s eyes remained level with Ian’s eye line, even after he passed him.

Keith’s singular mission to escape made him forget the reality of crossing the hoard; you had to watch every step. Keith stumbled on the garbage underfoot and fell forward. Ian turned in time to see his brother land on his chest, shoving the butcher knife in deeper. Keith’s last thought was of his killer, his location, and his final state:
Wormwood
.

Ian was not one for screaming. In fact, his shock had a silencing effect. Ian’s jaw dropped, his breath hitched in his chest, and he froze.

Keith had one last movement left in him. He rolled onto his side on the garbage packed floor, pulling his knees up and his upper half down in a primal return to the fetal position, as though he wanted to exit the world in the same pose he’d entered it in.

When he rolled, Keith’s handheld camera slipped out of his front pocket and filmed in close-up the mess on the floor.

Ian couldn’t speak, couldn’t even breathe, until he heard movement, the shifting of garbage, in the room behind him. He knew he had only seconds, and he knew there was nothing he could do to help his dying brother at his feet. But he could help his legacy. Ian squatted and grabbed Keith’s fallen camera. He let it continue recording.

Ian heard heavy steps in the doorway behind him and felt a blast of hot breath on the back of his neck that smelled really bad, which was not a surprise. Ian turned, knife in one hand, Keith’s camera in the other, and stood face to face with Missy for the first time.

She was way too close for his comfort.