Peeps (7 page)

She shook her head slowly. “Not a clue.”

The elevator slid open on the seventh floor. The doors stirred the air, and I caught something under the cigarettes and alcohol on their breath, an animal smell that cut through even the jasmine. For a moment, I smelled fear.

Morgan’s name had scared them.

The other four piled out efficiently, still in silence, but leather-jacket girl held her ground, one fingertip squashed white against the OPEN DOOR button. She was staring at me like I was someone she half recognized, thinking hard. Maybe she was trying to figure out why I set her prey hackles on fire.

I wanted to drop my eyes to the floor, sending a classic signal from Mammal Behavior 101:
I don’t want to fight you
. Humans can be touchy when they feel threatened by us, and I didn’t want her telling the doorman I had snuck in behind them.

But I held her gaze, my eyes captured.

“Guess I’ll just go, then.” I settled back against the elevator wall.

“Yeah, sure.” She took one step back out of the elevator, still staring.

The doors began to slide closed, but at the last second her hand shot through. There was a binging sound as her leather-clad forearm was squeezed; then the doors jumped back.

“Got a minute, dude?” she asked. “Maybe there’s something you can explain for me.”

 

Apartment 701 was full of déjà vu.

The long, narrow living room had a half kitchen at one end. At the other, glass doors looked out onto a tiny balcony, the river, and the ghostly lights of New Jersey. Two more doors led to a bathroom and a small bedroom.

A classic upscale Manhattan one-bedroom apartment, but the devil was in the details: the stainless steel fridge, sliding dimmers instead of regular light switches, fancy brass handles on the doors—everything was sending waves of recognition through me.

“Did she live here?” I asked.

“Morgan? Hell, no,” the girl said, slipping off her leather jacket and tossing it onto a chair. The other four kept their coats on, I noticed. Their expressions reminded me of people at a party right after the cops turn the lights on, their buzz thoroughly killed. “She lived down the hall.”

I nodded. All the apartments in the building must have looked pretty much the same. “So you know her?”

She shook her head.

“Lace moved in after,” one of the boys volunteered. The rest of them gave him a
Shut up!
look.

“After what?” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“Come on, Lace,” the boy said. “You’re going to show him the thing, aren’t you? That’s why you asked him in, right?”

“Roger, why don’t you call for the pizza?” Lace said sharply.

He retreated to the kitchen muttering. I heard the manic beeps of speed-dialing, then Roger specifying extra cheese in a wounded tone.

The rest of us had filtered into the living room. Lace’s three other friends took seats, still keeping their coats on.

“How well do you know Morgan?” Lace asked. She and I remained standing, as if faced off against each other, but out of the confines of the elevator, her smell was more diffuse, and I found it easier not to stare so maniacally.

To distract myself I cataloged the furniture: urban rescue, musty couches and other cast-offs, a coffee table held up by a pair of wooden produce boxes. The tattered decor didn’t go with the sanded floorboards or the million-dollar views.

“Don’t know her that well, really,” I said. She frowned, so I added, “But we’re related. Cousins.”

Kind of a fib, I know. But our
parasites
are related, after all. That has to count for something.

Lace nodded slowly. “You’re related, but you don’t know where she lives?”

“She’s hard to find sometimes.” I shrugged, like it was no big deal. “My name’s Cal, by the way.”

“Lace, short for Lacey. Look, Cal, I never met this girl. She disappeared before I got here.”

“Disappeared?”

“Moved out.”

“Oh. How long ago was that?”

“I got in here at the beginning of March. She’d already been gone a month, as far as anyone knows. She was the weird one, according to the other people in the building.”

“
The
weird one?”

“The weirdest on the seventh floor,” she said. “They were all kind of strange, people tell me.”

“The whole floor was strange?”

Lace just shrugged.

I raised an eyebrow. New Yorkers don’t usually bond with their neighbors, not enough to gossip about former tenants—unless, of course, there are some
really
good stories to tell. I wondered what Lace had heard.

But my instincts told me to back off for the moment. The five of them were still twitchy, and there was something Lace didn’t want to say in front of the others. I could smell her indecision, tinged with a weird sort of embarrassment. She wanted something from me.

I opened my hands, like I had nothing to hide. “In the elevator, you said you had a question?”

Lace bit her lip, having a long, slow think. Then she sighed and sat down in the center of the couch. The other two girls scrunched into its corners to make room for her.

“Yeah, maybe there’s something you can tell me, dude.” She swallowed and lowered her voice. “Why am I only paying a thousand bucks a month for this place?”

 

When the shocked silence finally broke, the others were appalled.

“You told me sixteen hundred when I stayed here!” Roger screamed through the kitchen doorway.

Lace rolled her eyes at him. “That was just so you’d pay your long-distance bill. It’s not like
you
were paying any rent!”

“A thousand? That’s
all
?” said one of the girls, sitting bolt upright on the couch. “But you’ve got a
doorman
!”

Hell hath no fury like New Yorkers in someone else’s cheap apartment. And what with the elevator, the doorman in his marble lobby, and those sunset views across the river, I reckoned the place should be about three thousand a month at least. Or maybe four? So far out of my league I wouldn’t even know.

“I take it this isn’t a rent-control thing?” I said.

Lace shook her head. “They just built this place last year. I’m only the second tenant in my apartment, like everyone else on the seventh floor. We all moved in around the same time.”

“You mean all the first tenants moved out
together
?” I asked.

“From all four apartments on the seventh floor. Yeah.”

“A thousand bucks?” Roger said. “Wow. That makes me feel a
lot
better about the thing.”

“Shut
up
about the thing!” Lace said. She looked at me, rolled her eyes again. “It never made any sense. I spent all last winter sleeping on my sister’s couch in Brooklyn, trying to find a place to stay closer to school. But everything in Manhattan was too expensive, and I was
way
over roommates.”

“Hey, thanks a lot,” Roger said.

Lace ignored him. “But then my sister’s super says he’s got a line on this building they’re trying to fill up fast. A whole floor of people totally skipped out on their rent, and they want new tenants right away. So it’s cheap. Way cheap.” Her voice trailed off.

“You sound unhappy,” I said. “Why’s that?”

“We only signed up to finish the previous tenants’ leases,” she said. “There’s only a couple of months left. Everyone on seven’s talking about how they’re going to raise the rent, push us out one by one.”

I shrugged. “So how can I help you?”

“You know more than you’re saying, dude,” she said flatly.

The certainty in her eyes silenced me—I didn’t deny it, and Lace nodded slowly, positive now I wasn’t some long-lost cousin.

“Something happened here,” Lace said. “Something the landlords wanted to cover up. I
need
to know what it was.”

“Why?”

“Because I need leverage.” She leaned forward on the couch, fingers gripping the cushions with white-knuckled strength. “I’m
not
going back to my sister’s couch!”

Like I said: hell hath no fury.

I held up my hands in surrender. To get anything more out of her, I was going to have to give her some of the truth, but I needed time to get my story straight.

“Okay. I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “But first . . . show me the thing.”

She smiled. “I was going to anyway.”

“The thing is
so
cool,” Roger said.

 

They’d done this before.

Without being told, the other two women turned off the lamps at either end of the couch. Roger flicked off the kitchen light and came through, sitting cross-legged in front of the white expanse of wall, almost like it was a TV screen.

It was dark now, the room glowing with dim orange from distant Jersey streetlights, accented by a bluish strip of night-light from under the bathroom door.

The other guy got out of his chair, scraping it out of our way, turning around to get his own view of the blank white wall.

“Is this a slide show?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Roger said, giggling and hugging his knees. “Fire up the projector, Lace.”

She grunted, rooting around under the coffee table and pulling out a fat candle and a pack of matches. She crossed the room carefully in the darkness and knelt beside the blank wall, setting the candle against the baseboard.

“Farther away,” Roger said.

“Shut
up
,” Lace countered. “I’ve done this more than you have.”

The match flared in her hand, and she put it to the candle’s wick. Just before the scent of sandalwood overpowered my nostrils, I detected the human smell of nervous anticipation.

The wall flickered like an empty movie screen, little peaks of stucco casting elongated shadows, like miniature mountains at sunset. The mottled texture of the wall became exaggerated, and my peep vision sharpened in the gloom, recording every imperfection. I could see the hurried, uneven paths that the rollers had followed up and down when the wall had been painted.

“What am I looking at?” I asked. “A bad paint job?”

“I told you,” Roger said. “Move it
out
a little.”

Lace growled but slid the candle farther from the wall.

The words appeared. . . .

They glowed faintly through the shadows, their edges indistinct. A slightly darker layer of paint showed through the top coat, as often happens when landlords don’t bother with primer.

Like when they’re in a big rush.

The wall said:

I crossed to the wall. The darker layer was less noticeable up close. I ran my fingertips across the letters. The cheap water-based paint felt as dry as a piece of chalk.

With one fingernail, I incised a curved mark in the paint, about the size of a fully grown hookworm. The dark color showed through a little more clearly there.

I brought my fingertip to my nose and sniffed.

“Dude, that’s weird,” Roger said.

“Smell is the most sensitive of our senses, Roger,” I said. But I didn’t mention the substance humans are most sensitive to: ethyl mercaptan, the odorant that gives rotten meat its particular tang. Your nose can detect one four-billionth of a gram of it in a single breath of air.

My nose is about ten times better.

I also didn’t mention to Roger that my one little sniff had made me certain of something—the words had been painted in blood.

It turned out to be more than blood, though. As I incised the wall again with my steel-hard fingernails, breathing in the substances preserved under the hasty coat of paint, I caught a whole range of tissues from the human body. The iron tang of blood was joined by the mealy smell of ground bone, the saltiness of muscle, the flat scent of liver, and the ethyl mercaptan effluence of skin tissues.

I believe the layman’s term is
gristle
.

There were other, sharper smells mixed in—chemical agents used to clean away the message. By the time they’d found it, though, the blood must have already soaked deep into the plaster, where it still clung tenaciously. They had painted it over, but the letters remained.

I mean, really:
water-based
paint? What
is
it with New York landlords?

“What the hell are you doing?” Lace said softly.

I turned and saw that they were all sitting there wide-eyed. I tend to forget how normal humans are made uncomfortable by the sniffing thing.

“Well . . . ” I started, searching for a good excuse among the dregs of rum in my system. What was I going to say?

The buzzer sounded.

“Pizza’s here!” Roger cried, jumping up and running to the door.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

For some reason, I was starving.

ANTS
have this religion, and it’s caused by slimeballs.

It all starts with a tiny creature called
Dicrocoelium dendriticum
—though even parasite geeks don’t bother saying that out loud. We just call them “lancet flukes.”

Like a lot of parasites, these flukes start out in a stomach. Stomachs are the most popular organs of final hosts, you may have noticed. Well, duh—there’s
food
in them. In this case, we’re talking about the stomach of a cow.

When the infected cow makes a cow pie, as we say in Texas, a passel of lancet fluke eggs winds up in the pasture. A snail comes along and eats some of the cow pie, because that’s what snails do. Now the snail is infected. The fluke eggs hatch inside the unlucky snail’s belly and then start to drill their way out through its skin.

Fortunately for the snail, it has a way to protect itself: slime.

The sliminess of the snail’s skin lubricates the flukes as they drill their way out, and the snail survives their exit. By the time the flukes escape, they’re entirely encased in a slimeball, unable to move. They’ll never mess with any snails again, that’s for sure.