Hoarder (3 page)

“I think I just turd my pants,” Ian admitted.

Keith was done with interruptions. “Let’s get what’s ours, and evidence, and get out. Before we get rabies.” Rabies had been on Keith’s mind since his wounding at these bushes last night. He didn’t want anyone to know the cat’s attack had also involved its teeth; bubbly feline saliva had mixed with his blood.

Keith tried to open the window, pushing up, then in. The window was locked and wouldn’t budge. Keith expected as much; he had tried the window the night before with the same result, right before he had been clawed. Will slipped off his backpack and unzipped it. He took out a crowbar and handed it to Keith.

Keith wedged the end of the crowbar beneath the window. He pried on the handle, but the window did not budge. Keith leaned toward the glass, looking down through the tear in the paper more closely. He noticed a revealing new detail.

“She nailed it shut.”

Keith zoomed in with his handheld camera. He focused in close-up on the heads of two bent, askew nails sticking up from the inside window frame. Dani and Will stuck out their cameras to film the same disturbing detail. Ian didn’t have a handheld camera to film, but he did add a suggestion.

“We can find another opening. The cats have to get in and out somewhere. I could squeeze through a doggie door.”

Keith shattered the basement window with a quick jab of the crowbar, also shattering his brother’s suggestion. He knocked out the glass around the frame and tore at the paper behind it. They were all hit with a blast of old, dusty air escaping from below. Dani equated it with a belch in the face from a sickly old man, her graceless grandfather in particular.

Ian looked around nervously from the noise. Not even the cats were watching. Ian looked up at the windows, which were covered and absent of eyes.

Keith handed the crowbar to Will, who put it into his backpack. Keith pulled his handheld camera back and leaned in through the shattered window frame. He wanted to look inside with his own eyes first, and the third eye attached to the bill of his cap.

Dani, Will, and Ian all leaned in around their leader, eager to know what else was inside. Keith was taking longer than expected, and his hesitation was heightening his friends’ suspense.

Keith was offended by the smell. The air below had been trapped without circulation for decades. However, it was Keith’s eyes that were assaulted the most. What he witnessed inside the basement was shocking, and although he thought he had planned everything down to the last detail, he had not planned for this. He had never seen anything like this in his life.

Keith feared that their mission was going to become terribly complicated, and fast. Suddenly, he couldn’t breathe.

Chapter Three

Ian leaned forward, intending to shake his brother’s shoulder, when Keith pulled out of the window. Keith sucked in a deep breath of fresh air, requiring it before he could address his friends. “We were wrong. She’s not a klepto. She’s a hoarder.”

The H-word set off a red alarm in Ian’s head. He had seen enough on the subject, thanks to cable television, to know that most hoarders suffered from a high level of crazy. Compulsive hoarding was classified as a serious mental disorder. Those shows were fascinating to him, plus they were high in gag inducing shock value, all the more disgusting in high definition.

Ian wondered what kind of hoard Missy’s house held. Did she collect random stuff and garbage, diving in dumpsters for her treasures? Maybe not, since she shopped at Will’s store regularly. Was she a collector of one certain thing, like artificial pigs or frogs or bikes? With a chill, he realized that she did collect cats, the live kind. Animal hoarders almost always indulged in animal cruelty, usually unknowingly. Ian suddenly had a disturbing image of the basement below covered in a furry carpet of rotting cat carcasses. He banished the image from his head, but not before he considered how that carpet might smell.

Despite the alarm that hoarding triggered, Ian felt a distinct excitement at seeing a hoard firsthand. The appeal of going inside Missy’s house was akin to a visit to an abandoned house in the woods, the kind that kids would dare each other to go into amid rumors of past deaths within its walls, in the hopes of finding a blood stain, or better yet, a stray skeleton.

“For real?” Ian asked his brother.

“It’s bad in there. Careful of the glass.” Ian could tell from Keith’s tone that his brother was not joking.

Keith moved aside and Dani, nearest him, moved in. Dani’s head entered the window frame, looked from left to right, and pulled out with a grimace, her nostrils flared. “Gag me. It smells in there. What is that?”

Ian was eager to see and smell for himself and offer Dani an answer. “Let me see.”

Dani scooted aside so Ian could move in. Ian took a deep breath, and then he stuck his head through the shattered window frame to see inside the lowest level of Missy’s house. It was a sight more vivid than the highest definition.

Ian looked inside Missy’s basement for less than twenty seconds, but the peculiar details he saw numbered in the thousands, and was numbing to his eyeballs. There was not one square inch of floor visible. Keith’s bike stood atop a few feet of refuse, mostly moist collapsed boxes and leaking garbage bags. Haphazardly thrown throughout the basement were over one dozen more bikes, maybe two dozen, from kid to adult sizes; overturned lawn chairs and patio furniture; garden tools, including rakes and hoes and shovels; a lawnmower lying bottom blade up; rusty scrap metal; empty animal cages, topping the bikes in number; a plastic Christmas tree with tinsel on the branches and Easter baskets spilling pink and green plastic grass; a broken plastic backyard play set and a punctured kiddy pool.

These were Ian’s first impressions of the basement’s contents, and had he looked longer, he would have picked up countless more curious details and patterns among the hoard. Witnessing this hoard wasn’t just hard on his eyes; it was an assault on all five of his senses. The smell was a noxious blend of too many horrible elements, like mold and sewage and spoiled meat. Unable to hold his breath, he opened his mouth and found the rotten air had an offensive, acrid taste. Ian’s throat, sinuses, and ears throbbed in tandem from the environment invading his system. Looking up into an exposed light bulb, he could see the swirling stew of particles choking the basement, and now aware of them, he could feel the terrible air caressing his skin like a diseased hand.

Words like
leprosy
,
e-coli
, and
ebola
flashed through Ian’s mind. The moment he would banish one disease, another one would fester to the surface. Goodbye
cholera
, hello
malaria
.

A white cat darted over some overturned furniture to Ian’s right, startling him before it disappeared behind more junk. Ian glanced up at the exposed pipes, broken and
repaired
with peeling tape and fabric. One broken pipe appeared to be wrapped with an extra large pair of lace panties, soiled with brown water that dripped down onto a pile of soggy, crumbling boxes.

Ian pulled his head out of the window, eagerly gulping in the refreshing outside air. His face was pinched with disgust. “It smells like toxic black mold, and sewage, too. There’s a pipe leaking brown stuff.”

Dani accepted Ian’s assessment; she had seen the basement for herself. Keith questioned his brother, “How do you know what toxic black mold smells like?”

“It’s all through the basement and boiler room at school,” Ian confessed.

Keith was caught by surprise. He had been going to that school years longer than Ian, but he had never explored its forbidden underground. Keith was kind of impressed that his kid brother had the cojones to go behind any closed door he wanted, regardless of the rules. Perhaps Ian was a good choice to have along on this expedition. Ian’s confession begged another question. “What were you doing in the boiler room?”

“Avoiding class, what else?”

“Let me see,” Will said eagerly. Ian moved away from the window as the biggest of the group moved in.

Will stuck his head though the window frame, looked around, and inhaled the atmosphere. He started to choke on the thick basement air and pulled out. “There’s mold and poop in there, but there’s something else. It smells like dead things, dead rats, or some kind of rotting meat.”

Ian didn’t like Will’s phrase
dead things
. Dani was more bothered by the word
rats
, and although Will had described them as dead, Dani knew they didn’t start out that way. Keith knew that dead things were inevitable in a hoard the size of Missy’s, and he only hoped that Fiddlesticks was not numbered among them.

Ian imagined being down inside the basement, within the hoard with its smothering air, and he came up with an alternative to Keith’s plan. “Why don’t you just lift your bike out and we’ll split?”

Before Keith could respond, Dani answered for him. “I want to go in. I saw a cat in there. Maybe Fiddlesticks’ in there.”

Ian accepted Dani’s answer, and he knew the others would, too. Dani was going in no matter what the group consensus was, and none of the guys wanted her inside this house without offering their protection.

Will could not contain his excitement. “I want to see this freak’s house now. Who knows how much of the town she’s stolen.”

Keith finally answered his brother, with irritation. “Just head back home. You can watch our videos later.”

Ian wasn’t given a chance to offer a retort. Mindful of any residue glass around the edges, Keith lowered himself feet first through the window frame and dropped out of sight into the basement below. Keith’s voice called up to them. “Dani next!”

Dani did not hesitate, following Keith’s lead and lowering herself into the basement, with the aid of Keith’s helping hands below. Dani’s eyes locked with Ian’s, and she dropped out of view.

Will moved ahead of Ian, eager to enter enemy territory. He dropped his backpack through the window first into Keith’s waiting hands. Then Will took the plunge with a cry of “Geronimo!”

Ian was the last to move up to the window frame. “I’m coming down.”

“Wait,” Keith called up to him, “take this first.”

The front tire of Keith’s bike rose up to the window. Ian took hold of the spokes and the striped handlebars, pulling the bike out of the basement. He leaned the bike against the bushes, out of sight from the street. Ian moved back to the window.

“Make room for me.”

“There isn’t room for us,” Keith called up.

“Too bad.”

Ian followed the others through the window into the dank, lowest level of Missy’s house.

Had Ian known what was going to transpire, and who was going to expire, in such a short amount of time, he would have put a stop to this mission. He could have simply told mom about his brother’s cockamamie plan, and gotten him grounded. That wouldn’t stop Keith, who would probably climb out his window in defiance. Ian could have stolen all of their bikes tonight, committing the same crime of which they were accusing Missy. Only Keith wouldn’t be stopped by lack of transportation; he would have walked the few miles in his stubbornness. Ian could have broken both of Keith’s ankles with a sledgehammer, now that would keep him from walking to Missy’s house, and that would have also been a mercy to them all.

As Ian lowered himself into the basement, he really had no idea how quickly the world could come crumbling down on top of them, like a cardboard box collapsing beneath a massive, unstable, twenty ton hoard.

Chapter Four

Keith’s hands grabbed onto Ian’s waist, helping him down onto the uneven, elevated floor of garbage. The ground gave another inch when Ian’s shoes landed on it. Keith, Dani, Will, and Ian stood cramped up against each other in the space previously occupied by Keith’s bike. They all looked around, stunned by their surroundings. They had already been swallowed by the hoard.

“I thought it smelled bad up there,” Ian began, and decided not to finish once he tasted the acrid air again.

“The air smells poisonous,” Will warned. He was no expert on the subject of toxic fumes, but he was convinced of it nevertheless. He trusted his instincts, and he wished he had the foresight to bring a gas mask, or four.

Dani found a flaw in Will’s warning. “It’s not poisonous to the cats, or Missy.”

Will did consider himself an expert on Missy, and he thought his theory stood. “She’s not exactly a picture of good health. I’ve seen her dripping sores up close.”

Ian found himself looking less at the hoard and more at the wasted structure that contained it. Simple contact with the hoard was enough to warp walls. There was not one inch of exposed wall or ceiling that was unaffected by discoloration, wetness, or mold saturation. More amazing still were the rotten holes in the soggy structure, creeping black fuzz growing out of them.

“There’s so much mold in here,” Ian stated.

“We won’t be here long enough to be affected,” Keith replied.

Ian thought his brother was wrong about that. Ian had felt the ill effects of this noxious atmosphere when he first stuck his head into the house and breathed it in. Granted, Ian knew he was sensitive and allergic to just about everything. But even a modest dose of poison was still poison. This was like getting limited exposure to radiation. You might not feel it now, but it could sure fuck you up in the future.

While the three seniors filmed the potentially stolen junk around them, viewing it more on their cameras’ flip screens, Ian continued his structural inspection. It wasn’t just the mold that posed a danger. He was surprised there were lights on down here, showing every stark detail of this garbage pit. The bare, hanging light bulbs had mold and webs on them, and one was hanging within splashing distance of a broken, dripping pipe. Missy’s place was a house fire waiting to happen, and Ian was highly uncomfortable being inside such a massive firetrap. Fire moved fast, but humans in the hoard could not. That’s why hoarder houses were so frequently condemned.

Keith didn’t consider the house that had Ian’s full attention; his focus was on its contents. He was still fuming over the theft of his bike, and he made sure he got footage of every bike held in this basement. He knew exactly how all of the other bike theft victims felt. It stung.

“Looks like every missing bike in the neighborhood can be traced back here. And missing toys.”

“She doesn’t have any kids. What would she need a bunch of toys for?” Dani questioned.

The answer was obvious to Will. “To play with. She talks in an annoying child’s voice, and has a matching IQ.” Will imitated Missy in a squealing girl’s pitch. “Oh lookie-loo! It sparkles! I’ll buy all of them!” Will waved his hands in enunciation, just as Missy did.

Dani spotted a white cat slinking across the basement. She was the first to step up and out of their pit, trying to forge a path through the hoard toward the animal. “Here, kitty,” Dani cooed.

Keith wished Dani had not stepped out first, since he thought he should lead, but he also knew there was no controlling her. Keith and Will stepped out of the pit and forged a different path through the basement hoard. Before Ian would follow, he had to inquire, “Where are we going?”

“Pussy hunt,” Will replied, “You’ll like it.”

Ian didn’t like anything inside this oppressive basement. Keith looked back at his brother and instructed him, “Follow me.”

Ian took a big step up to get out of the pit. The refuse he stepped onto collapsed with the shattering of hidden glass beneath. Ian pitched to the side, his right hand going out to brace against the wall.

Ian’s right palm hit the wet wood and punched right through it, his hand disappearing into the soggy structure up to his wrist.

“Aww fuck!”

Keith didn’t see Ian’s fall, but he responded immediately to his cry and reversed course.

Dani forgot about the white cat and turned along with Will.

Ian pulled his hand out of the wall, which had the consistency of black butter. Dozens of large cockroaches scurried out of the hole that Ian left behind. Ian’s hand was caked in black mold, wet wall mush, and more running roaches.

Revolted, Ian shook his hand, flinging off the wet rot and skittering vermin. He saw a mass exodus of cockroaches coming through the hole he had opened in the wall. Ian was their reluctant liberator, and he shivered. “Yuck!” was a simple word, but it was the only one that fit the situation.

Keith stopped backtracking when he saw his brother wasn’t injured. “You okay?”

“I’m doing great.” Ian flung more parasites off of his hand. Wherever they landed, they were quick to disappear into the nearest dark crevice. Worse than the roaches exiting the wall were the swirling particles of mold spores, or
hoard spores
as Ian thought of them, certain to set up camp inside of him.

Ian spotted a blanket caked in its own funkiness and bedbugs. He grabbed it to wipe off the muck, the little brown bugs scattering as their home was invaded by human hands.

“We didn’t need to break a window. We could have punched our way through the wall,” Ian observed.

“Be careful,” Keith instructed his brother. He hoped his younger sibling wouldn’t defy his instruction. He wasn’t trying to be a dick; he was genuinely concerned for Ian’s safety inside this house of collapsing crud.

Keith moved back into the path behind Will. Ian followed his brother. He didn’t want to play hero or comedian, move an object unnecessarily, and start an avalanche that would jeopardize their safety. He tried to follow his brother’s footsteps exactly.

Dani was relieved to see Ian on the move again behind the others, and she shifted back to resume her search for the white cat. She felt a sharp stab to the back of her neck, and she gasped. The guys turned to Dani as she spun around.

The open blades of hedge clippers stuck out of the hoard. Dani could see a bead of her blood on the tip of the dirty clipper blade she had backed into. She wondered if the tetanus shot she received in kindergarten would still protect her. In hindsight, she should have gotten a booster shot before attempting tonight’s mission.

“Don’t decapitate yourselves on these,” Dani warned the guys. She squeezed around the protruding clipper blades.

While Keith was concerned with the other bikes he saw, Ian focused on the overturned, dirt caked animal cages. All of their doors hung open.

“What’s she got all these cages for?” Ian wondered out loud as he came upon another one. Up close, he could see the cage wasn’t covered in dirt; it was coated with dried crap. With the knowledge came the smell, and it revolted him.

“They’re caked in excrement.”

“I thought I smelled dead poop in here,” Will added.

Dani grew angry from the observation. “Whatever was in them was abused.” She knew that any animal living in its own waste was living in neglect, and she didn’t understand how anyone could be so horrible as to allow it. The more she thought about it, the more outraged she grew, and to think of Fiddlesticks within one of those cages… Dani banished the thought.

Keith shifted his handheld camera from the bikes to the cruel cages that had captured the group’s attention. In his camera’s close-up, he noticed something worse than the caked crap. There were dried bloodstains and patches of fur on the bars, even a few scraps of flesh. Keith decided not to announce his discovery. He didn’t want to distress Dani any further. She would see it all on the tapes later anyway.

Keith understood that their discovery of the cages upped the stakes of their expedition, and the power of their footage. Being a thief was terrible and a personal outrage for the victims, he knew that all too well. But an animal abuser was offensive on a far deeper level, and once discovered, they could not be allowed to continue. Keith was concerned that they were going to find worse than wild cats and filthy cages before this exploration was over, and now they were obligated to document every horrid detail and use it to bring Missy down on charges of animal cruelty. Missy was going to lose her animals, her house, and her precious hoard when this was over, thanks to their anonymous videos.

Dani made her way into a thin culvert in the center of the basement. Will, Keith, and Ian squeezed into the space with her. Keith looked around for an exit and couldn’t find one. While he had planned for an invasion of this house, he had done so without a map or a floor plan.

“Where do we get out of here?” Keith asked.

They all looked over the piles of junk towering around them. Ian was the first to see it, and he pointed high to the northeast. “Up there.”

Over twenty feet high in the corner of the basement, atop a steep mountain of stuff, was a four-by-four foot opening, the upper half of an open door. The door itself had been long removed, probably to allow room for more storage.

Discovering the basement door so high made Ian realize how deep they really were. This basement was twice as low as any house basement needed to be. This was more like the multi-level boiler room beneath the school, only moldier. The sheer scale of Missy’s house made Ian feel exceptionally small, like one of the many rodents he shared this dwelling with. They were all interlopers inside Missy’s massive mansion.

“Where’s the stairs?” Will wondered aloud, since there were no stairs to be seen.

“They’ve been swallowed,” Ian responded, and he was right. The steep slope of refuse that led to the door was packed down tightly, like a rocky slide. The white cat Dani saw earlier darted out of hiding and bounded up the incline, disappearing through the half door into the house above.

Dani squeezed around the guys, but Will didn’t want her up front. “I’ll lead,” he said.

“No, my cat will run from all of you. I’ll lead.”

Dani led the guys through the shrinking culvert in the hoard. She hadn’t gone ten feet before she had to stop. The path ahead was just over two feet wide, and directly above it was a pipe generously dripping brown water.

“Maybe we can climb around it,” Dani suggested.

Dani saw three wooden chair legs sticking out to the right of the path. Dani grabbed onto the high shelf of a leaning, busted up armoire and stepped up onto a chair leg. The furniture pile took a startling shift, threatening to collapse on her and close the path.

Dani stepped back off of the chair leg and waited as the furniture settled. She knew climbing around the dripping pipe was no longer an option. A few drops of stink were better than a concussion or impalement.

“We have to go through it,” Dani stated.

Dani pulled up her hood, and three more hoods came up behind her. Dani leaned her head down as she squeezed past the dripping pipe, not wanting any wastewater to hit the spy cam on the bill of her cap. The top of her hoodie took a few drops of the foul fluid, which saturated into the fabric.

Will, Keith, and Ian squeezed through the path, also getting baptized by the hoard house holy water.

“That’s a sewer pipe,” Keith commented.

“Tastes like it,” Ian confirmed.

The path narrowed to just over a foot wide. Dani had to turn sideways to squeeze through the shrinking channel. Her knee bumped a loose bike tire, which shifted and caused a cardboard box wedged against the handlebars to shift down. The open box top faced Dani, revealing its long forgotten contents to her. She froze where she stood and Will bumped into her.

“Sorry. What is it?” Will asked.

“In the box.”

Will looked down over Dani’s shoulder. Inside the cardboard box he saw a web draped animal skeleton.

Ian and Keith could not see into the box from further back. “What is it?” Ian asked.

“Bones,” Will replied.

“A dead rat?”

“I hope not.”

Will spotted the handle of a broom and pulled it out of the hoard. The broom’s removal caused more junk to shift and a fresh plume of dust to rise. He turned the broom to hold the dusty brush end and fished into the cardboard box with the handle, puncturing the carcass. It was as easy as punching through brittle paper.

Will lifted the cat mummy out of the box for all to see. Dani filmed it with her handheld camera but not her cap cam, since her head was turned away.

“Is that Fiddlesticks?” Will had to ask.

“No, my cat would be fresher. I’m liking this lady less and less.”

Will got a whiff of the cat carcass, and it made his stomach lurch. He didn’t think that an animal this deep into decomposition could reek this badly, but there was the proof dangling in his face. Will flung the carcass into the hoard and tossed the broom after it.

The broom landed out of view, but their ears told them it triggered a chain reaction. They heard metal clang together, followed by wood banging against wood, followed by a long paper rip, followed by glass rolling against glass, followed by a half dozen thuds on the floor, followed by glass rolling on wood.