Hoarder (24 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

Missy moaned as she used the tipped dresser to pull herself up. She could already tell that everything on the shelves had been moved out of place, thanks to that bad boy. Bad boys deserved a spanking, and she couldn’t wait to tenderize this bad boy’s bottom, one swat for every item in her house he had moved out of place. Followed by a thousand more for taking her favorite bike.

Once Missy was on her feet, she looked down at her dress. It looked like her entire front side had been covered in chocolate frosting. She couldn’t see that her face was equally frosted, but she figured her sexy make-up job was probably messed up. It wasn’t enough of a bother for her to wipe her face off.

What did capture Missy’s attention was the cool new cap she had been wearing for the last hour, at her feet. She picked it up and pulled it back onto her head. The addition of this one accessory pleased her and made her forget all about her full face and body butt-mud treatment.

Missy put one hand to her back and the other to her face as she took an inventory of her injuries. Her bruised face and nose were hollering louder than the hot jab in her back. She would have to take a few aspirin soon. She would have gobbled down a few dry ones if she had them on her, which was her favorite method for taking aspirin since she liked the chalky taste. Unfortunately, her aspirin bottle was down in her hidey-hole, a few rooms away.

Missy knew she had to get moving, she didn’t want that boy to get too far ahead of her. She had seen him disappear into her clothing, which made her worry more. She wouldn’t put it past him to rearrange some of her hangers of fine attire to confuse her. That was just the kind of thing that delinquents did for fun. She would have to talk to Roland later and tell him to get better control of his boys. He was the man of the house, after all. She thought Roland might be neglecting his fatherly duties lately.

She would forgive him though, the next time she sat on his face.

Missy remembered the knife she had been holding at the top of the stairs, the one she had to unfairly take back to the kitchen herself. Looking around, she didn’t see the knife anywhere on the landing. She looked up the stairs and saw the blade a few feet from the top, stabbed into a waste bag, which was bleeding its viscous contents as a result.

The knife was too far up the stairs to bother getting now. She’d have to pick it up the next time she visited Tickles in the back bedroom. Just another inconvenience on a night that had been full of them, starting with the fire at the store that no good Cutter bitch had started. Honestly, if she had known how much annoyance everything was going to be, she never would have allowed the production crew into her house in the first place. If there was any good to come from this, it was that they had gotten so much good footage of her, they would have to turn tonight’s episode into a two-parter. That would mean twice the money.

Missy turned to the clothing to follow Ian, saw something out of the corner of her eye, and turned back to the tipped dresser. There was something of critical importance that had to be dealt with, even more critical than the delinquent director running rampant through her house. There was an overturned glass jar on one of the shelves, and all of the colored pens that had been held inside had spilled out, lying in a chaotic pile like pick up sticks.

Missy picked up every pen, returned them to the jar, tip down, organized from lightest colors on the left to darkest on the right, set the full jar upright, and then she resumed the chase.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ian was realizing far too late that the deeper he went into the house, the denser the hoard got. Missy had mentioned the other path that went through the house, but that was apparently just another one of her delusions. A rat could get through this path with ease, but Missy sure couldn’t. Ian didn’t think he could either.

The alcove he stood in was more the size of a closet. He could take no more than two steps in any direction. There was a corridor in front of him, nearly thirty feet long, and every foot of it was crammed with furniture, stacked topsy-turvy. Ian didn’t know this was the same corridor that had stopped Dani on the other side earlier.

Ian looked back at the hanging clothes, afraid that Missy would burst through them at any moment, as Boogeymen and Boogeywomen do.

Ian reconsidered the stuffed hallway. The furniture was packed in tight, but it was not packed solid. There were crawlspaces visible through the corridor. Ian had done his fair share of climbing and crawling through perilous locations, including that black mold spotted boiler room at school. He considered himself good at it, and could see himself practicing parkour in the future. Of course, if he wanted a future, he had to get outside of Missy’s house.

The corridor ahead could prove to be a death trap just as the living room had been for Will, but retreating back and facing Missy seemed a far less desirable way to die. Besides, he refused to give Missy the satisfaction of doing the same thing to him she had done to his father, brother, and friends.

It was time for Ian to act as a rat and crawl through Missy’s maze. Ian hoisted himself up to the widest channel available, just over two-feet long and a foot and a half tall, between a hutch and a desk stacked on top. He squirmed his way into the furniture hoard.

Ian bumped his head on the bottom of the desk and the whole house of heavy wooden cards shifted with alarming scraping and squealing sounds. Ian continued even quicker, making himself as light as possible. Light as a feather, don’t get squished by a hoard.

Ian slipped off of the hutch into a hole just big enough for him to get back onto his feet. He had a refrigerator on his left, an upended sofa on his right, and a seven-foot tall dresser directly in front of him. There looked to be maybe a foot of space between the top of the dresser and the mold saturated ceiling. It was the only space available.

Ian climbed the dresser and was startled by a cat lying on top. He quickly realized the animal was dead. He couldn’t be squeamish now, and he squeezed into the space on top, sliding over it as ceiling mold smeared onto his backside. Passing the cat corpse, Ian couldn’t help but feel sympathy for it. What a horrible fate to perish in this dark and lonely crawlspace. Ian had seen enough dead cats at this point to knit that terrible tapestry of cat carcasses he had imagined earlier.

Slithering through this slim space, Ian didn’t notice a closed door to his right. The handle would have been inaccessible even if he had spotted the door. And good thing, too, because this long abandoned downstairs bathroom was so full of ancient shit that the trapped air would be noxious to any human or animal that inhaled it. Better that Ian didn’t know the horrors that lurked just a few feet away, beyond a door that had not opened once in twenty-two years.

When Ian dropped down on the other side of the dresser, he was faced with a taller dresser that left about an inch on top, a crawlspace for creepy-crawlies only. Ian saw a small opening to his far left, but he would have to uncomfortably squeeze sideways and climb over a rickety card table to get there.

When Ian got on top of the card table, Missy’s booming voice startled him into sitting up, and he knocked his head on the back of a high packed wooden rocker.

“Get off my furniture!” Missy screamed from the alcove. “They’re antiques!”

Ian looked back toward the voice. He saw mostly furniture, but he could see slivers of Missy’s face and an arm beyond the not so movables. With relief, he knew there was no way she could pursue through the channels he had slithered through.

Missy pulled a chair out from the furniture hoard and threw it behind her. She pulled out the desk on top of the hutch next and tossed it behind her like it weighed next to nothing. That’s when the furniture before Missy began to rearrange itself.

Ian could hardly believe it. She was going to move the entire hoard to get to him. He felt the card table beneath him wobble, and then it collapsed, unable to hold his weight any longer.

Ian went down three feet with the falling table, and Missy disappeared from his view. The chairs and tables around him shifted and threatened to entomb him. Ian didn’t wait to find out if they would, and he squeezed toward the next visible crawlspace.

The small alcove was quickly piled with overturned furniture, as Missy kept filling the limited space she was leaving in her wake. She grabbed a coffee table, breaking a leg off the heirloom as she yanked it out of the hall, and breaking it more when she threw it behind her. Missy was too angry with Ian for crawling on her furniture to notice she was the one destroying her precious antiques.

Ian could see the end of the hallway just ten feet away. To get there, he had to get down on his belly and squirm underneath a bed frame supporting all manner of furniture. The ground was carpeted with shockingly huge rat droppings (maybe they were raccoon droppings), dense dust bunnies, and broken glass.

Ian slithered over the mess without hesitation. A few cuts on his hands and stink nuggets up his nose were better than a hutch falling on his head. He could hear banging and breaking behind him as Missy the one woman moving crew emptied the hallway. He didn’t dare waste a moment to look back at her, not that he could turn his head in the cramped underpass if he wanted to.

Ian squirmed his way out of the hallway and crawled up onto the elevated living room hoard. He finally allowed himself a moment to look back.

Ian could see glimpses of Missy behind her high-stacked stuff. She was a third of the way through the hallway. At the speed she was unpacking, he had maybe two minutes before she reached him. She looked like a giant kaiju to him, tearing down buildings as the giant monster closed in on a power plant.

Power
. His monstrous image of Missy gave him an idea. He looked instinctively to the left and found the weapon he was looking for. It wouldn’t kill the giant monster named Missy, but it might immobilize her temporarily.

Ian reached over and flipped down the switch to the hallway light.

The bulb inside the hallway went out, plunging the furniture hoard into darkness. Missy’s screams of outright terror were immediate.

“No! Turn on the light! Turn it on!”

Missy backed out of the hallway until she bumped into her relocated furnishings. She started to throw everything back, working her way slowly toward the alcove. As she threw a chair back, she threw her voice at Ian.

“How dare you!”

“Afraid of what’s lurking in the dark? You should be!”

“Ooo!”

Missy threw more furniture out of her way, breaking it if it sped up the process. Ian had reduced the big monster to a frightened child trying to flee the dark. An unnaturally massive and strong child, like Godzilla Junior.

Ian didn’t wait around to watch Missy get out. There was a chance she had a light switch on her side, but that was fine. Plunging her into the dark had turned her around and bought him more time, and he’d been able to prey on her fears in the process, a psychological blow. His weapon of darkness had delivered sufficient damage.

Ian climbed around the nest, unsure what his next move should be. The front door was not an option. He could not run away with the fight unfinished. A weapon would be wise, and while he could grab blunt objects all over the place, he’d prefer a big knife, one even bigger than the blade Missy had used on his brother. Missy should pay with the same anguish that Keith had perished by. With a chill, Ian realized that Keith had chosen the knife that had eventually taken him out.

That decided it for him. Ian would make the kitchen his destination. This was going to be a knife fight.

On the far side of the nest, Ian looked back at the hallway. The banging furniture had stopped, and the hallway light remained off, which meant there wasn’t a second switch or one was inaccessible. Missy had broken through her first barricade. The closet wouldn’t take her long to get through, but getting back up that shit sack staircase, he hoped she’d slip and get flushed again.

Ian climbed in the direction of the dining room and was faced with the tilted, crushed pizza box and the shrouded lump of Will’s hidden body. Will offered encouragement, even in death.

“
Keep it up, Squirt. Make her pay
,” Will said in Ian’s head.

“I will, Will,” Ian promised.

Ian spotted Will’s fallen backpack, and he grabbed it, slinging it over his shoulder. The drive with their collected footage was inside, and Ian wanted control of it, to edit, release, or destroy as he saw fit. Other cameras of theirs might be left behind, but the footage was not stored on them.

Ian looked up as he heard heavy footsteps cross the floor above him. The stomps released puffs of black spores from the moldy ceiling, showing Missy’s path. Ian turned his head down, not wanting to get those spores in his eyes.

Movement near the staircase made Ian spin. It was another cat, circling inside its cramped cage. The cat’s tail was short, with a jagged, bloody wound at the end, having been shaved off by the corroded bars of the cage due to its incessant circling.

Ian would not let the cat suffer in captivity for one more minute, so he headed toward it, despite it being in the opposite direction of the kitchen, and near the slide that Missy would soon be coming down.

Ian felt a kinship with every trapped animal inside Missy’s house. He was their liberator. Whether they were alive or dead, they deserved freedom.

Ian reached the cage and opened the door, but he didn’t wait for the cat to take its leave. As Ian turned away, one of Missy’s random, throwaway possessions caught his attention. It was a dirty white TV tray with a floral border design. A giant glob of ketchup remained in one corner. The condiment looked wet, not yet fossilized.

Ian thought the tray would be perfect for serving justice.