Malevolent (31 page)

He continued up, but slower. Would Patty be there?

He had to stop again to consider this question. Probably, since she wouldn’t necessarily trust Tim to leave his hands off of her things. But so what? They had no issues with each other. Shouldn’t, anyway. Still, his eyes bore into the closed door at the top of the stairs as if he could see right through it to the ex-girlfriend. He wondered why that made him so tingly, so nervous. His hands were sweaty, his heart tripping unreliably.

It was this damn steep staircase, of course. He brushed aside all other thoughts and finished his trek up.

He knocked. Yes, there was definitely activity in there. A man’s voice and thudding, crashing footsteps. Sounded like they were breaking more than they were packing. He knocked again, louder. Twisted the knob.

Locked. Wasn’t that a little unusual for moving day?

Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t noticed Tim’s blue van anywhere. Just that canary-yellow Beetle.

“Hello,” he shouted, feeling ridiculous. He sighed, drew his sore-knuckled hand back for another try.

“That you making all the racket?”

He spun and found the owner of the voice to be glaring up at him from the bottom of the stairwell. She was this sudden, sun-blocking shadow with hair piled high and a dress that hung loose as the robes of some biblical character. Griffin said nothing, just stared at her with eyes wide and mouth open.

“Yes, I’m talking to you,” the woman said, her words thick stabs of Iron Curtain phrasing. “More crashing, more loud voices, glass breaking. And I remember when it used to be so quiet here.”

She looked past him at the closed second-floor entry door, so he did the same.

“Used to be, he played the music too loud, but I pound the ceiling, music stop. Now—hah!” She threw up her hands. “You know these people?” she both asked and accused.

Griffin nodded meekly as he took the stairs down. He was a little afraid of the big woman, but it seemed impolite to discuss Tim and Patty within earshot of them. “I’m expected,” he said, hoping it was all he was going to need to divulge.

She stepped aside, but not much, so he could join her at ground level. She held a lit cigarette somewhere within the generous folds of her flowing dress, and now she brought it to her red mouth and sucked it to heated brightness while she studied him.

She winked, making Griffin’s heart pound even faster, until he saw it was merely a reaction to the smoke curling along one side of her face. “So, you’re such a good friend, how come you’re down here and they’re up there, hah?”

Good question.

Griffin stepped back and sized up the front of the chocolate building like he might find answers in the architecture. “They must be too busy to hear me knocking.”

“Yes, I suppose so. As noisy as that girl’s been these last few days, she must be very busy. So you’re a friend of Patty’s.”

“Tim’s,” he replied quickly. What did she—this landlady, presumably, who knocked on ceilings—mean about the noise?

Her mouth turned up in a lazy smirk that left just enough room for a lungful of smoke to leak out. “Ah, friend of Tim, but you visit when Tim’s away. How interesting.”

“He told me to be here at seven,” Griffin shot back defensively.

Okay, so Tim was late returning. Would he have expected punctuality from the guy? But who owned the Beetle? He put the question to the landlady.

“Very curious,” she murmured. She tapped a cigarette ash in her hand and deposited it on the ground, scattering it like grass seed. “The little yellow car belongs to Matthew the mailman, but why is he here so long? That, I’d like to know, like you.”

Matthew the Mailman? Sounded like the title of a politically incorrect children’s book.
Hi, I’m Matthew the Mailman. Meet my friends Peter the Plumber, Nancy the Nurse and Sally the Secretary.

“You said something earlier about broken glass and loud footsteps,” he coaxed.

The woman winked her smoked-up eye again, tapped another load of ash onto her palm and tossed it. “Of Tim, I’d expect anything. Music, parties, drugs. But Patty, she was the quiet one.” She glared up at the chocolate-brown and sooty-white front of the building. “But yesterday I hear commotion not to be believed. The poor girl has been throwing furniture, cracking my window.”

She studied Griffin with crocodile concern. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this if you’re a good friend of Patty’s.”

Of course you are
. Griffin shook off the apology. “So the loud voices and broken glass, you’re talking about happened yesterday,” he said, remembering Tim relating Patty’s bizarre experience.

“Not just,” the landlady snapped. “Today, more of the same. It’s as I’m trying to tell you, young man. So loud, and when I pound on the ceiling for them to stop, there’s no stopping. I tell you, I’m about ready to call the police.”

“Yes,” Griffin said. “That’s exactly what you’ll do. Is there another way up there?”

“Well…a back door, of course, this being no firetrap I own here.”

“Good. Hurry and call the cops while I—”

“But I happen to know they keep back door locked.”

“Do you have another key?”

The landlady’s face twisted into something hard to read. “They might have mentioned something about the door being painted shut, I don’t remember.”

Great. Back door sealed shut. Griffin twitched as he heard a sound from the face of the building and followed it to the balcony doors being slammed shut. He could just see a shadowy figure beyond the curtain over the French door, and hear the figure fiddling with a lock.

Huh?

Now Griffin found himself staring at the two wooden posts, one on either end, holding the downstairs porch and upstairs balcony to the face of the building. Both posts were ringed by two matching concrete ledges. For decorative purposes, Griffin supposed. When he was ten he would have been able to scramble up a post using the porch rail, the two ledges, the balcony railing and whatever else he found on the way up. Take him thirty seconds flat—when he was ten.

“Shit,” he grumbled.

“What’s shit?”

It was the fact that he knew what he was going to do, and wasn’t happy about it as he stood on a geranium pot.

Chapter Fifty-Two

The scream faded. Tim’s scream. If he’d had time to study his surroundings, he would have given more thought to the buzzing he’d heard as they broke in. He’d have become sooner aware of the flies circumnavigating the scene. But even now it was difficult to give them his full attention, fully distracted as he was by the stiffening corpse in the rocking chair under the swarm.

“It’s all right, Tim, she’s dead,” Melinda said calmly. Suddenly the expert on what’s all right and what’s not.

It still didn’t look too right to Tim.

The odor of death, just one ingredient in the horror house’s stew of bad odors, suddenly overpowered him. He had to get out of there, but he just kept staring.

The woman’s face was gray, mummified in the heat into an expression of dull surprise. There was sudden movement as a gray cat emerged from the back of the woman’s skull. At least he thought it was gray, though the fur was wet and mottled with dark substances Tim didn’t want to think about.

The next scream, Tim was glad to know, came from the lungs of the ever-so-cool Detective Dillon. If he’d been less smug at the moment, he might have immediately noticed the cause of her loud reaction. The slim, darkly mottled cat now perched on the dead old lady’s scrawny shoulder was in the process of leaping.

“No, Puffy, no,” squawked the apparently retarded sister of the fetal ball.

Puffy
. He was about to be eviscerated by a cat named Puffy.

Its teeth and fur still glistening with brain matter, it was hot on the trail of even fresher meat. Puffy made a four-point landing on Tim’s shoulder and stabbed its teeth into an earlobe.

Tim was smacked in the side of his face with a wet newspaper that hurt like hell and carried the acidic sting of cat piss, but it dislodged the thing from his cheek.

The retarded woman beamed at her handiwork. “She gotcha good,” she said. “But I got her good too. You got anything to eat?”

No time for a reply. He turned, holding his torn and dripping ear, to discover why Melinda and the other woman were yelling. Melinda had brought the injured Germaine Marberry to her feet and was supporting her against her hip like she was about to help a drunk walk it off. Fully occupied that way, neither woman could do anything but raise a ruckus when the three cats sprang at them in a frontal wedge.

Tim charged to the rescue, stomping and snarling and driving the cats to partial retreat. He grabbed the mentally handicapped younger sister with one arm and bumped and steered the other two into something resembling a column behind him. He maneuvered them around the carcass on the chair, but brought his column up short several feet from the front door.

Two cats stood watch near the glass-shard clutter. He watched a silver-gray tom lick its lips clean of old lady entrails. Two more scrawny felines joined the blockade of extended claws and rigid, wasted muscles. Tim wondered what those unblinking eyes saw as they stared down the ragged party.

Dinner
.

“Back up,” he ordered.

“We can’t leave. Vincent won’t allow it,” Germaine said as though talking to herself while leaning heavily on Melinda. Except for a couple weak screams, this was the first Tim had heard from her.

“Don’t listen to her,” the other Marberry woman said. “He’s a bad man, Vincent.”

Smarter than she seemed.

Two more cats—no, three now—cut off any hope of retreat into the dining room alcove.

Tim shuffled the women down a short hallway alongside the staircase, blanching at the sight of wallpaper that had been slashed into long strips that hung to the floor. When a paw swiped at his hair from an overhead perch on a step, he picked up his pace. They passed two doors down that dark back hall, one on either side.

“Watch it,” Tim ordered as they were forced to sidestep broken glass and scattered photo frames.

At the end of the hall, they found a narrow kitchen doorway and a phalanx of glaring cats.

Tim and Melinda exchanged glances. “Back up,” he said, prodding his party into reverse.

Of the two doors he’d barely glanced at in passing, Tim chose the wrong one first. The cramped bath would never hold the four of them. Melinda, still half dragging the older sister, looked bogged down and drained. Tim would have taken Germaine from her—she didn’t look very heavy—but he needed to remain unencumbered for hand-to-paw combat.

“Try the other door,” he said.

Melinda yelped. “Goddamn cat, it’s got my ankle.”

The black cat—unlucky indeed—pounced a second time at the torn flesh. In a blinding flash, the retarded sister reached down, scooped up the savage fur ball and dashed it off a wall. The cat made a wobbly recovery and stumbled out of sight.

The woman held out her hands, beaming. “See? No scratch. That’s how I saved Germaine.”

“Thanks, Dolly,” Melinda said, voice strained.

Tim pushed the women into the next room, the only other choice, hoping he wasn’t springing another trap on them. A quick scan of the small bedroom revealing nothing of immediate concern, he slammed the door and leaned against it, panting.

“We won’t be here for long,” he wheezed. “We need to collect our wits and find a safe way out of the house. The window, maybe.”

A quick glance in that direction told him to think elsewhere. An air conditioning unit was a tight fit in the window. He’d need tools and more strength and time than he figured he had in order to remove it.

His injured forearm had stopped bleeding, but he’d knocked it against a door or wall, restarting the flow. His earlobe throbbed. His lungs felt like they were battening down the hatches against all the cat hair. He sneezed, rubbed snot on his shirt and tried to think.

He hadn’t gotten far when Melinda started making hitching and gulping sounds that made Tim not want to look where her attention was riveted. He wheeled anyway, and caught sight of a still figure in the bed, a slightly squirming lump covered in bedsheets.
 
The image faded in and out of sight like an out-of-range television signal. Tim could also weakly make out the peaceful gurgle of life support machinery and see, ever so faintly, the feeding tubes snaking under the covers.
 
He glanced at Melinda, and found her eyes wide in terror. She croaked a single word. It sounded like
Mom
, and Tim was struck with the notion that her demon had grown so strong that its essence had now leaked to him. He grabbed her as she started to fall.
 

“Did you see it?” she asked as she rubbed her breast and buried her head in his shoulder.
 

“Yes,” he whispered. He encircled
 
her waist and held her tight. It felt good, felt right. He didn’t want to let go.

“No, Germaine, don’t do that,” Dolly cried.

Her sister had lowered herself to the bed and was pulling herself back into the curled ball, the shape they’d found her in on the dining room floor. At the sound of Dolly’s voice, Melinda stepped away from Tim. She sat on the bed next to Germaine and rested a hand gently on her bony hip.