Piercing the Darkness: A Charity Horror Anthology for the Children's Literacy Initiative

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Fucking cockroaches…

  — | — | —

  TRAPS

  F. PAUL WILSON

  Skippy Super Chunk peanut butter worked best.

  Hank smeared it on the pedals of the four traps he’d bought. Victors. Something about the way the big red V in their logo formed itself around the shape of a mouse’s head gave him a feeling that they knew what they were about.

  Not that he took any pleasure in killing mice. He may not have had the bumper sticker, but he most certainly did brake for animals. He didn’t like killing anything. Even ants. Live and let live was fine with him, but he drew the line at the threshold of his house. They could live long and prosper out there, he would live in here. When they came inside, it was war.

  He’d had a few in the basement of their last house and caught them all with Skippy-baited Victors. But he always felt guilty when he found one of the little things dead in the trap, so frail and harmless-looking with its white underbelly and little pink feet and tail. The eyes were always the worst—shiny black and guileless, wide open and looking at him, almost saying, Why? I don't eat much.

  Hank knew he could be a real sentimental jerk at times.

  He consoled himself with the knowledge that the mouse didn't feel any pain in the trap. Better than those warfarin poisons where they crawl off to their nest and slowly bleed to death. With a trap, the instant the nibbling mouse disturbs the baited pedal, wham! the bow snaps down and breaks its neck. It's on its way to mouse heaven before it knows what hit it.

  Hank was doing this on the sly. Gloria wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink if she thought there were mice overhead in the ceiling. And the twins, God, they’d want to catch them and make them pets and give them names. With the trip to Disney World just three days off, all they could talk about was Mickey and Minnie. They’d never forgive him for killing a mouse. Best to set the traps before they came home in the afternoon and dispose of the little carcasses in the morning after everyone was gone. Luckily, this was his slack season and he had some time at home to take care of it.

  He wondered how the mice were getting in. He knew they were up there because he’d heard them last night. Something had awakened him at about 2:30 this morning—a noise, a bad dream, he didn’t remember what—and as he was lying there spooned against Gloria he heard little claws scraping on the other side of the ceiling. It sounded like two or three of them under the insulation, clawing on the plasterboard, making themselves a winter home. He was ticked. This was a brand new two-story colonial, just built, barely lived in for six months, and already they had uninvited guests. And in the attic no less.

  Well, they were in a woodsy area and it was fall, the time of year when woodsy things start looking for winter quarters. He wished them all a safe and warm winter. But not in this house.

  Before setting the traps, he fitted a bolt on the attic door. The house had one of those swing-down contraptions in the hall ceiling right outside their bedroom. It had a pull-cord on this side and a folding ladder on the upper side. The twins had been fascinated with it since they moved in. The attic had always been off-limits to them, but you never knew. He had visions of one of them pulling the ladder down, climbing up there, and touching one of the traps. Instant broken finger. So he screwed a little sliding bolt in place to head off that trauma at the pass.

  He took the four traps up to the attic and gingerly set the bows. As he stood on the ladder and spaced them out on the particle board flooring around the opening, he noticed an odd odor. The few times he had been up here before the attic had been filled with the clean smell of plywood and kiln-dried fir studs. Now there was a sour tint to the air. Vaguely unpleasant. Mouse b-o? He didn’t know. He just knew that something about it didn’t set well with him.

  He returned to the second floor, bolted the ceiling door closed, and hit the switch that turned off the attic light. Everything was set, and well before Gloria and the girls got home.

  ««—»»

  Kate crawled into Hank's lap as he leaned back in the recliner and watched the six o’clock Eyewitness News. She was holding her well-thumbed “Mickey’s book.” As soon as Kim saw her, she ran in from the kitchen like a shot.

  So with his two pale blonde seven-year old darlings snuggled up against him, Hank opened up “Mickey’s book” for the nightly ritual of the past two weeks. Not a book actually, just a brochure touting all the park’s attractions. But it had become a Holy Book of sorts for the twins and they never tired of paging through it. This had to be their twentieth guided tour in as many days and their blue eyes were just as wide and full of wonder this time as the first.

  Only three days to go before they headed for Newark Airport and the 747 that would take them south to Orlando.

  Hank had come to see Disney World as a religious experience for seven-year olds. Moslems had Mecca, Catholics had the Vatican, Japanese had Mount Fuji. Kids had Disney World on the East Coast and Disneyland on the West. Katie and Kim would start out on their first pilgrimage Thanksgiving morning.

  He hugged them closer, absorbing their excitement. This was what life was all about. And he was determined to show them the best time of their lives. The sky was the limit. Any ride, any attraction, he didn't care how many times they wanted to go on it, he’d take them. Four days of fantasy at Mickey’s Place with no real-world intrusions. No Times, no Daily News, no Eyewitness Special Reports, no background noise about wars or floods or muggings or bombings…or mousetraps.

  Nothing about mousetraps.

  ««—»»

  The snap of the trap woke Hank with a start. It was faint, muffled by the intervening plasterboard and insulation. He must have been subconsciously attuned for it, because he heard it and Gloria didn’t.

  He checked the clock—12:42—and tried to go back to sleep. Hopefully, that was the end of that.

  He was just dozing back off when a second trap sprang with a muffled snap. Two of them. Sounded like he had a popular attic.

  He didn’t know when he got to sleep again. It took a while.

  ««—»»

  When Hank had the house to himself again the next morning, he unbolted the ceiling door, pulled it down, and unfolded the ladder. Half way up, he hesitated. This wasn’t going to be pleasant. He knew when he stuck his head up through that opening he’d be eye-level with the attic floor—and with the dead mice. Those shiny reproachful little black eyes…

  He took a deep breath and stepped up a couple of rungs.

  Yes, two of the traps had been sprung and two sets of little black eyes were staring at him. Eyes and little else. At first he thought it was a trick of the light, of the angle, but as he hurried the rest of the way up, he saw it was true.

  The heads were still in the traps, but the bodies were gone. Little bits of gray fur were scattered here and there, but that was it. Sort of gave him the creeps. Something had eaten the dead mice. Something bigger than a mouse. A discomforting thought.

  And that odor was worse. He still couldn't identify it, but it was taking on a stomach-turning quality.

  He decided it was time for an inspection tour of the grounds. His home was being invaded. He wanted to know how.

  He found the little buggers’ route of invasion on the south side of the house. He had two heating-cooling zones inside, with one unit in the basement and one in the attic. The compressor-blowers for both were outside on the south side. The hoses to the upstairs unit ran up the side of the house to the attic through an aluminum leader.

  That was how they were getting in.

  There wasn’t much space in the leader, but a mouse can squeeze through the tiniest opening. The rule of thumb—as all mouse experts knew—was that if it can get its head through, the rest of the body can follow. They were crawling into the leader, climbing up along the hoses inside, and following them into the attic. Simple.

  But what had eaten them?

  Up above the spot where the hoses ran through the siding, he noticed the triangular gable vent hanging free o
n its right side. Something had pulled it loose. As he watched, a squirrel poked its head out, looked at him, then scurried up onto the roof. It ran a few feet along the edge, jumped onto an overhanging oak branch, and disappeared into the reddening leaves.

  Great! He was collecting a regular menagerie up there!

  So much for the joys of a wooded lot. Gloria and he had chosen this semi-rural development because they liked the seclusion of an acre lot and the safety for the twins of living on a cul-de-sac. They both had grown up in New Jersey, and Toms River seemed like as good a place as any to raise kids. The house was expensive but they were a two-income family—she a teacher and he a CPA—so they went for it.

  So far, theirs was the only house completed in this section, although two new foundations had just started. It would be nice to have neighbors. Until recently, the only other building in sight had been a deserted stone church of unknown age and long-forgotten denomination a few hundred yards south of here. The belfry of that old building had concerned him for a while—bats, you know. Very high rabies rate. But he spoke to the workmen when they bulldozed it down last week to start another cul-de-sac, and they told him they hadn’t seen a single bat. Lots of animal droppings up there, but no bats.

  He wondered: Would a squirrel eat a couple of dead mice? He thought they only ate nuts and berries. Maybe this one was a carnivore. Didn’t matter. One way or another, something had to be done about that gable vent. He went to get the ladder.

  ««—»»

  He had everything taken care of by the time Gloria and the girls got home from their respective schools.

  He’d tacked the gable vent back into place. He couldn’t see how that squirrel had pulled it free, but it wouldn’t get it out now. He also plugged up the upper and lower ends of the hose leader with an aerosol foam insulation he picked up at Home Depot. It occurred to him as he watched the mustard-colored gunk harden into a solid Styrofoam plug that he was cutting off the mouse exit as well as the mouse entryway. Hopefully they were all out for the day. When they came back they’d be locked out and would have to go somewhere else. And even more hopefully, the squirrel hadn’t left a friend in the attic behind the resecured gable vent.

  ««—»»

  Hank hardly slept at all that night. He kept listening for the snap of a trap, hoping he wouldn’t hear it, yet waiting for it. Hours passed. The last time he remembered seeing on the clock radio LED was 3:34. He must have fallen asleep after that.

  Dawn was just starting to bleach out the night when the snap came. He came wide awake with the sound. The clock said 5:10. But the noise didn’t end with that single snap. Whatever was up there began to thrash. He could hear the wooden base of the trap slapping against the attic flooring. Something bigger than a mouse, maybe a squirrel, was caught but still alive. He heard another snap and a squeal of pain. God, it was alive and hurt! His stomach turned.

  Gloria rolled over and sat up, a silhouette in the growing light. She was still nine-tenths asleep.

  Suddenly the attic went still.

  He patted her arm and told her to lie down and go back to sleep.

  She did. He couldn’t.

  ««—»»

  He approached the attic door with dread. He did not want to go up there. What if it was still alive? What if it was weak and paralyzed but still breathing? He’d have to kill it. He didn’t know if he could do that. But he’d have to. It would be the only humane thing to do. How? Drown it? Smother it in a plastic bag? He began to sweat.

  This was crazy. He was wimping out over a rodent in his attic. Enough already! He flipped the attic light switch, slipped the bolt, and pulled on the cord. The door angled down on its hinges.

  But it didn’t come down alone. Something came with it, flying right at his face.

  He yelled like a fool in a funhouse and batted it away. Then he saw what it was: one of the mousetraps. At first glance it looked empty, but when he went to pick it up, he saw what was in it and almost tossed his cookies.

  A furry little forearm, no longer than the last two bones on his pinkie finger, was caught under the bow. It looked like it once might have been attached to a squirrel, but now it ended in a ragged bloody stump where it had been chewed off just below the shoulder.

  Where the hell was the rest of it?

  Visions of the squirrel chewing off its own arm swam around him until he remembered that auto-amputation only occurred with arresting traps, the kind that were chained down. Animals had been known to chew off a limb to escape those. The squirrel could have dragged the mousetrap with it.

  But it hadn’t.

  Hank stood at the halfway point on those steps a long while. He finally decided he had wasted enough time. He clenched his teeth, told himself it was dead, and poked his head up. He started and almost fell off the stairs when he turned his head and found the squirrel’s tail only two inches from his nose. It was caught in the bow of another trap—the second snap he had heard this morning. But there was no body attached.

  This was getting a bit gory. He couldn’t buy a squirrel chewing off its arm and then its tail. If anything, it would drag the tail trap after it until it got stuck someplace.

  Nope. Something had eaten it. Something that didn’t smell too good, because the attic was really beginning to stink.

  He ducked down the ladder, grabbed the flashlight he always kept in the night table, then hurried back up to the attic. Light from the single bulb over the opening in the attic floor didn’t reach very far. And even with daylight filtering in through the gable vents, there were lots of dark spots. He wanted the flashlight so he could get a good look along the inside of the eaves and into all the corners.

  He searched carefully, and as he moved through the attic he had a vague sense of another presence, a faint awareness of something else here, a tantalizing hint of furtive movement just out of his range of vision.

  He shook it off. The closeness up here, the poor lighting, the missing animal carcasses—it had all set his imagination in motion. He gave the attic a thorough going over and found nothing but a few droppings. Big droppings. Bigger than something a mouse or squirrel would leave. Maybe possum-sized. Or raccoon-sized.

  Was that the answer? A possum or a coon? He didn’t know much about them, but he’d seen them around in the woods, and he knew every time he put turkey or chicken scraps in the garbage, something would get the lid off the trash can and tear the Hefty bag apart until every last piece of meat was gone. Raccoons were notorious for that. If they'd eat leftover chicken, why not dead mice and squirrels?

  Made sense to him. But how was it getting in? A check of the gable vent he'd resecured yesterday gave him the answer. It had been pulled free again. Well, he’d fix that right now.

  He went down to his workshop and got a hammer and some heavy nails. He felt pretty good as he pounded them into the edges of the vent, securing it from the inside. He knew what he was up against now and knew something that big would be easy to keep out. No raccoon or possum was going to pull this vent free again. And just to be sure, he went over to the north side and reinforced the gable vent there.

  That was it. His house was his own again.

  ««—»»

  Wednesday night was chaotic. Excitement ran at a fever pitch with the twins packing their own little suitcases full of stuffed animals and placing them by the front door so they’d be all set to go first thing in the morning.

  Hank helped Gloria with the final packing of the big suitcases and they both fell into bed around midnight. He had little trouble getting off to sleep. There probably weren’t any mice left, there weren’t any squirrels, and he was sure no raccoon or possum was getting in tonight. So why stay awake listening?

  The snap of a trap woke him around 3:30. No thrashing, no slapping, just the snap. Another mouse. A second trap went off ten minutes later. Then a third. Damn! He waited. The fourth and final trap sprang at 4:00 a.m.

  Hank lay tense and rigid in bed and wondered what to do. Everybody would be up a
t first light, just an hour or so from now, getting ready for the drive to Newark Airport. He couldn’t leave those mouse carcasses up there all the time they were away—they’d rot and the whole house would be stinking by the time they got back.

  He slipped out of bed as carefully as he could, hoping the movement wouldn’t awaken Gloria. She didn’t budge. He grabbed the flashlight and closed the bedroom door behind him on his way out.

  He didn’t waste any time. He had to get up there and get rid of the dead mice before the girls woke up. These damn animals were really getting on his nerves. He slid the bolt, pulled down the door, and hurried up.

  Hank stood on the ladder and gaped at the traps. All four had been sprung but lay empty on the flooring around him, the peanut butter untouched. No mice heads, no bits of fur. What could have tripped them without getting caught? It was almost like a game.

  He looked around warily. He was standing in a narrow cone of light. The rest of the attic was dark. Very dark. The sense of something else up here with him was very strong now. So was the odor. It was worse than ever.

  Imagination again.

  He waved the flashlight around quickly but saw no scurrying or lurking shapes along the eaves or in the corners. He made a second sweep, more slowly this time, more careful. He crouched and moved all along the edges, bumping his head now and again on a rafter, his flashlight held ahead of him like a gun.

  Finally, when he was satisfied nothing of any size was lurking about, he checked the gable vent.

  It had been yanked loose again. Some of the nails had pulled free, and those that hadn’t had ripped through the vent’s plastic edge.