Hoarder (21 page)

Missy plowed out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Ian stopped in the doorway behind her, wanting to watch her encounter with Keith from a distance. He feared her reunion with her victim could refuel the murderous rage that had made her plant a knife in Keith’s chest in the first place.

When Missy reached Keith’s corpse sprawled across her path, she stepped over him without looking down. Her right heel hit Keith’s shoulder, jostling the body. Ian had expected a reaction from Missy, but not this. Keith was nothing more than additional garbage on Missy’s floor to climb over.

Missy’s disrespect for the dead added more fuel to the simmering anger that Ian was struggling to keep contained. It would come out, explosively and violently, he knew that now, he just had to unleash it at the right time. Ian had finally assumed his brother’s final mission, to take Missy out.

Ian followed Missy into the hall, and took great care not to disturb his brother’s body as he stepped over him. He flinched when he heard the clamor of a box falling over ahead. From the jingling inside the box, it was obvious the box contained glass, and the glass was long broken. Missy was knocking things over in her excitement to reach the master bedroom and her most valuable collection. For somebody who loved her stuff as much as she claimed, Ian found it ironic how much abuse she heaped on her treasures.

Missy stopped before the entrance to the master bedroom and turned eagerly to Ian. He should have figured; she was standing before the cracked door to the Rot Room that he had been so deeply reluctant to enter earlier.

It also figured that Missy’s most prized collection, dolls, would be supremely creepy en masse. Most of Missy’s collections rated high in the creep factor, from her clown pictures to her cat cages to her shit samples.

As Ian approached Missy, the noxious smell emanating from the cracked door started to affect him again. His breathing slowed, so he could take in less of the air he thought might be poisonous. The hair on the back of his neck stood up in alarm. Gooseflesh broke out on Ian’s arms despite the stuffy heat. Ian had to force his legs to continue toward Missy and her destination.

“You’re a lucky guy, Chad. I rarely share my friends with anyone.”

Ian didn’t want to remind Missy that she was also sharing her friends with her show’s audience.
Missy’s House
would never make it to airing, but the world would know the shocking truth of Missy’s collections once this night was through. Ian would make sure of that.

Missy pushed open the door to the master bedroom and climbed up into it. Ian followed her in with his camera leading him. The flip screen had acted as a minor shield to the horrors before, but it had no shielding effect now.

The Rot Room really was a poison place, and if Ian got out with serious mental scars alone, he would consider himself lucky. He also hoped that Missy would not be following him out. He would do it for Keith and Will and any others who had not survived their encounters with Missy. He suspected there were many.

Chapter Twenty-Five

After climbing up a few feet of soft cushioning, Ian stopped beside Missy to behold her favorite collection. First his eyes were drawn above it, at the dozens of curling flypaper strips hanging from the mold saturated ceiling. The strips were completely caked with dead flies and other flying insects, and some not so dead. Despite the many strips, the room was abuzz with hundreds of fat flies, providing a low static sound. The flies were so plentiful and busy buzzing about, Ian couldn’t go two seconds without one flying into his face. It was like walking through rain with wings.

Ian covered his nose with his left forearm. What was making the flies so hungry was making his nostrils ache and sending his stomach into cartwheels.

Missy didn’t so much enter the room as make a grand entrance. She threw her arms out in a wide welcome, nearly backhanding Ian beside her. He jerked his head back, avoiding impact by inches. Missy exclaimed, “Hello friends!”

Ian looked around at Missy’s friends. Her doll collection numbered in the high hundreds. They were piled against every wall so their eyes faced the room’s center, at any visitors. Dolls were stacked on top of each other up to the ceiling. The dolls spanned all sizes, from miniature to Barbie-size to life-size, as well as ages, from baby dolls to elderly. Some dolls didn’t look so happy to be dolls, stuck with an eternity of grimacing, but the majority of them were smiling.

Ian looked down at the center of the room, which was a sea of stuffed animals. Most of the stuffies were grinning, chosen to feed Missy’s endless glee. Ian spotted two shiny beanbags ahead, one red, one blue, like islands in a furry sea.

Ian found the room, with its countless eyes and toothy grins, even creepier than he had anticipated. He had always been unsettled by too many false smiles, which he remembered from both the church services during his youth and watching the last Republican National Convention on CNN. So many smiles, but they were the kind that could not be trusted, because those smiles could bite.

Dolls alone could not be responsible for the rot that Ian smelled. There had to be something within or underneath the collection responsible for the reek, and the flies. One particularly bloated fly bumped between Ian’s eyes, and he fixed his vision on it, determined to follow it back to its fetid food source.

The fat fly did a lazy corkscrew to the left, heading to one of the life-size dolls. The fly alighted on the nose of a teenage girl whose head was twisted to the side at a fatally extreme angle. It was Dani.

Ian wanted to cry out, to scream and attack the monster named Missy beside him, but he was simply paralyzed by the sight of his unrequited love sitting nearby, embraced by dolls in death. He hadn’t thought anything could sting worse than seeing his brother’s murder before him, and yet this did. He wasn’t mad at just the madder woman who had killed his loved ones. He harbored hate for the squalid location where their lives had ended. He didn’t know which was the bigger vampire, Missy or Missy’s house.

Now that Ian had discovered a body in the doll collection, he could see the corpses that were buried within. Many of the human sized dolls were real humans. There had to be over a dozen, and further inspection made him double that number. The corpses, like the dolls, looked toward the room’s visitors, at least the ones with eyes remaining did.

The bodies ranged in age, and in freshness, from the newly dead like Dani, who couldn’t have even cooled since Ian had seen her last, to mummies and skeletons with little flesh left. The worst of the bodies was bloated and blackened with rot, liquefying and roiling with maggots. The age and gender of that rot bag were indefinable.

Each body that Ian saw, he wondered who they were and what had brought them into Missy’s path and wrath. He saw a spoiling pizza delivery guy, whose skin resembled the greasy cheese of a pizza. A stainless steel fork stuck out of the delivery guy’s left eye. Perhaps he hadn’t delivered Missy’s long devoured pizza in thirty minutes or less.

Between two supremely freaky life-size girl dolls in their 1920s Sunday best dresses was a mummified Girl Scout in her uniform, empty Girl Scout Cookies boxes in her lap. Perhaps this forever young girl had run out of Do-Si-Dos, Caramel deLites, or whatever Missy’s favorite cookie was and had paid the ultimate price.

Missy saw Ian gawking at the Girl Scout and became boastful.

“Look, she’s laughing!”

The Girl Scout’s face was frozen in a silent scream, and adding an additional dash of horror, Ian saw a cookie in her gaping mouth. It looked like a half eaten Samoas. The cookie moved and Ian looked away before he could see what it really was.

Ian looked upon a gaggle of keystone cop dolls, which sat against a dead policeman in uniform. All cops were covered in cobwebs and mold. The policeman was big, bigger than Missy, and Ian hoped he had put up a good fight. Only the clothes iron sticking out of his caved in skull revealed how the fight had ended.

Ian spotted a five-foot tall, lit up, plastic praying Jesus. Sitting to the right of the electric savior were two Mormon missionaries in their uniforms. Both were no longer in need of their garments. There was no need for modesty when there was no more flesh left to hide. There were Mormon tracts in the skeletons’ laps. Perhaps Missy hadn’t been down to buying the B.S. they were selling. Ian certainly couldn’t see Missy embracing any religion that placed women in a subservient position, in other words, most religions.

It occurred to Ian that all of these victims were people that had likely encountered Missy at her front door. Those with something to sell, whether pizza or prophecy, and city officials, with orders to enforce. They wouldn’t have been prepared for the mad woman and the hoard she was hiding, and protecting. Except for the cop, none of the victims would have been armed or expecting to fight for their lives on an ordinary suburban porch on any given morning, afternoon, or evening.

Ian wondered how many trick-or-treaters might have been snared over the years, and then he realized he was looking at one. Across the room was a tall skeleton doll that was actually a kid’s plastic Halloween costume and mask set. Flies flew in and out of the mask’s dark, empty eyes, giving away the meaty center.

Ian looked nearer, at a wooden crib on his left. He took a few careful steps over stuffed animals and pillows so he could look down inside.

Lying in the crib, on a dusty pink blanket spotted with rat droppings, were a baby skeleton and a rattle. Ian’s first thought was that a newborn was not a victim that could come knocking on Missy’s front door.

A sob turned Ian back to the star of the show. Missy had gone from happy-happy to sad-sad in a flash. She was not a good actress, and he doubted she could cry on cue. These sobs sounded heartfelt, if that horrible black beating organ inside her chest could be called a heart. To Ian, it was an engine of hate.

Missy looked into the crib with a tilted head, grabbed onto the wooden rim with one hand, and let her tears run off her cheeks and drop onto the baby skeleton’s blanket. Ian bet that crib blanket had been sopping up her tears for years and years.

“That’s my little Saffy. She was ten months old when crib death claimed her from me. That was twenty years ago, right after I got out of that horrible facility. We hadn’t been married all that long. But after Saffy died, my husband left…”

Missy’s eyes looked out of the crib and gave a cautious glance at a male mummy across the room. She had no tears for him. Ian assumed that the mummy was her former husband. For this married couple, death did not part. The deceased husband was just added to his wife’s collection.

“And that’s when I started to shop and buy new friends,” Missy finished.

Shopping and stealing were two completely different things, but Ian knew Missy couldn’t tell the difference. The end result was all she saw, more possessions in her house. Plus, you couldn’t buy or steal friends. Some people did, that was the cruel reality of human history, but they were considered human traffickers, slaveholders, kidnappers, or killers. Missy was the worst kind of criminal, and it was justified as harmless collecting in her mind.

Missy inhaled deeply over the crib, savoring Saffy’s scent. “It still smells like her.”

Ian had to suppress a mad laugh.
Yeah, it smells like dead people
, he also suppressed adding.

With her painful, personal story told, Missy finally looked at the one she was addressing it to. Ian wore a look of sympathy. Luckily, he was a better actor than she was.

“I’m sorry,” Ian consoled her.

Missy appeared touched by Ian’s concern. As she wiped away her tears, Ian went over Missy’s tall tale in his head. He didn’t think she was lying directly, she probably believed every word she said. But her brief hard history had some glaring omissions, and he expected any original truth had been twisted in her mind to justify her current state, and the state of her house. A hoarder’s history of hardships always became an excuse for their disorderly living conditions.

Ian was glad that Missy had been so forthcoming with him and his camera. He wanted his brother and friends’ killer to confess herself while she was still alive to do so. He hoped she wouldn’t be around much longer. She did not deserve to live, not after she had snuffed out so much life in one night, and all of these other lives over the years. She might have an idea she was a serial hoarder, but she probably had no clue she was a serial killer.

The severity of Missy’s crimes against humanity and other mammals made Ian reconsider burning her house down. There were too many families missing loved ones who needed to know the dark secrets that Missy’s house hid. All of this filth and waste was crucial evidence. It would provide a lot of painful closure, but that was better than never finding out a missing loved one’s fate. Ian knew that all too well.

Missy’s house of horrors had to remain standing until all investigations were complete. Only then could the structure be razed, like Ariel Castro’s dungeon house in Cleveland. Ian wanted to be among the surviving families who would be here to cheer on the wrecking ball. He only hoped it would happen soon, before the decades of spoilage, leaking sewer pipes, and blood of the innocents turned the ground rotten, uninhabitable, and haunted.

Most interesting about Missy’s condensed history was her slip about her stay in a horrible facility. Ian was sure it had been a horrible experience for her. There was no facility that would let you keep a hoard in a cell.

Missy looked back down into the crib with calm acceptance, and a small smile touched her lips.

“It’s okay now. I still have Saffy, she just stopped growing.”

Just like her dolls
, Ian thought, except people decomposed much faster. Ian saw another cadaver beyond the crib, encircled by prince dolls. It was a city code inspector with a clipboard in his lap. He was well spoiled, a dripping feast for the flies.

Ian knew just how long dead this cadaver was, six months and five days.

“Dad,” Ian barely managed to voice. No other words would come, and no other word mattered more.

Ian took back every horrible name he had called his father since his disappearance. There had been thousands, and he had meant every one. Cussing him out for his absence had been his and Keith’s way of coping. They had always seen their father as a deserter. He was big and strong, curiously distant, and a loner despite the large family he had created for himself. While they knew it was a possibility, they had never truly believed him to be a homicide victim. His bank account, holding many thousands, had been cleaned out the night of his vanishing, enough to run and start a new life elsewhere.

Now it all made so much shattering sense, and he wished he had considered this possibility sooner. His father had never been one to bring his work home with him, and it was never a topic of discussion around the dinner table. But Ian knew enough about his father’s duties as a senior city code enforcement officer to know that he delivered citations and condemned notices to non-code compliant home and business owners. And who was more in need of being condemned than Missy Wormwood? His father’s job had unfortunately brought him right onto Missy’s killing grounds, her front porch. And it was no wonder he had incurred Missy’s wrath. It had been his job to make Missy remove the one thing she cared about most in the world, her hoard.

Ian’s emotions spun in a cyclone, building a fury inside of him. Now he was becoming the human tornado, and he welcomed it.

Ian wasn’t sure how long he had been staring at his rotting father. He was already in shock from his discovery of Dani, and the deaths of his brother and Will. Too many major shocks, too fast. Who could blame him for going a bit mad in the aftermath of so many grim discoveries? Grief was understandable, but he could not afford it. He was in mortal danger, and had momentarily lost sight and thought of the murderer beside him.

Ian turned to Missy, too fast, giving away his fear of her.

Missy looked at Ian with something like love. Or maybe she saw him as lunch.

“Thanks for your concern, Ian.”

Ian froze. He wasn’t Chad anymore. She knew more than he expected. She was no longer playing a charade, so neither would he.

“You know my name?”

“Yeah, I know you and Keith are Roland’s boys.”

Ian was deeply offended to hear his father’s name spill out of her disgusting, roach reeking mouth.