Bleed

by Ed Kurtz

  “It’s blood…Walt, it’s blood…”

  He seized her by the shoulders and guided her around the puddle into the bathroom. “Come on,” he whispered, “come on.”

  “Blood,” she repeated.

  In the bathroom, he gently stripped her down, tugging her shirt up over her head. Once she was naked, he twisted the cold steel handle in the tub all the way to HOT and plugged the drain. Amanda lowered herself down onto the toilet seat, patiently but trembling slightly. While the water surged out of the faucet, he returned to the hallway and stared at the bloody mess on both ceiling and floor. He was absolutely certain that he removed every bit of the animal’s remains from the attic, which left nothing to bleed out all over the place like this. Unless, he realized, something else had gone and died up there.

  Frustrated and exhausted, Walt groaned. He waited for the tub to fill, and when it did he tested the water. It was hot, but not so much that Amanda would balk. He took her by the hand, led her to the tub, and she stepped in. Once she was sliding down into the bath, he kissed her on the top of the head, carefully avoiding the bloody spots in her hair.

  “I’m going to look in the attic,” he said.

  “The attic? What for?”

  “To see what the damn problem is now.”

  She pouted. But he went to the hall and yanked the dangling rope for the attic’s ladder anyway. It jerked and shuttled out, clacking all the way down to the floor. A hot burst of musty air blasted him from above. He exhaled loudly and began the climb up.

  He was already perched on the first pair of rafters outside of the opening when it occurred to him that he forgot the flashlight.

  “Shit,” he grumbled.

  Walt paused, considering the necessity of climbing back down and searching for it. In the short time he had the house, he’d already spent an inordinate amount of time in the attic. He felt sure that he knew it backward and forward, even in the dark. It would be no problem getting over to the spot above the hallway; the only real concern left was what he found when he got there. But that wasn’t much of an issue for him. All he expected to find was another dead animal, a rat or a pigeon. Maybe a bat. Whatever the case, he would not need the flashlight for that. In fact, it might even be better without one—he wouldn’t have to see the poor, bloody thing in every awful, pathetic detail.

  Walt set forth, carefully taking the rafters one at a time. Sweat began beading at his hairline, developing into fat, salty droplets that spilled down his face. The summer had been bad enough without spending so much time in an unventilated hotbox like the attic.

  He knew he reached the spot when the insulation receded and the terrain under his feet turned to broken paneling. Pausing to catch his breath, he wiped his dripping face with his sleeve. The odor slammed his senses all at once. It was a warm, putrid smell, like bad hamburger meat left out in the sun. Whatever it was, it had to have been dead a long time to smell that bad.

  Which, he realized, was impossible. Only a couple of days had passed since he cleaned up the last one, that unidentifiable mass of blood and sinew. For something else to crawl up there, die, and then rot enough to stink this badly would take a lot longer than two days or so. He buried his nose and mouth in the crook of his elbow and pondered his next move. Whatever it was he’d have to get rid of it, but he now understood this to be a temporary solution. There was a larger problem than he previously saw, likely some manner of infestation. A deep growl rumbled in the back of his throat.

  This fucking house was getting to be more trouble than it was worth.

  Amanda called up from below. It sounded like she was at the foot of the ladder. He ignored her. He had a more pressing concern at hand.

  Bouncing on the balls of his feet, Walt reached out to the source of the fetid stench and sank his fingertips into something warm and wet. He gagged, fighting back the retching impulse triggered by the unanticipated contact. He wanted nothing more than to retract his hands, to get away from that awful odor, but instead he dug in deeper and tried to scoop up the soft, moist mass. It did not give. It seemed to be stuck to the panel. He pulled his hands back and frowned. A spackle knife would have been a welcomed tool just then, but he wasn’t sure he even owned one. Something else for his goddamned home improvement list.

  Grinding his jaws together he plunged his hands back into the mass, determined to dig it all up and get rid of it once and for all. This time, when Walt sank his fingers into the sticky substance, he felt it tighten around his digits. He let out a yelp and yanked his hands back again, but the mass on the panel would not relent. It held him tight, contracting like a baby boa until it hurt. Amanda called up again, yelling his name. She was a little closer now, probably climbing the ladder. In the moment he was distracted by her, the warm thing on the broken panel released him. Walt stumbled backwards and nearly fell between two rafters. He steadied himself in time, twisting into a spidery position to keep from falling through the ceiling.

  In the soft yellow glow of the attic’s opening, Amanda’s head popped into view. Her shiny wet hair lay flat on her head, framing the pale face that searched the darkness for some sign of him.

  “Don’t come up here!” Walt shouted from across the shadows.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he answered quickly. “It’s just dark. It’s dangerous.”“Are you done yet?”

  He wiggled his fingers and marveled at the hot, tingly sensation he felt. He then heard a slick, slithery noise beside him—the bloody lump on the panel, shifting and moving. The muscles in his back twinged.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m done for now.”

  He quickly scampered over the rafters to the ladder and almost knocked Amanda down in his rush to get back to the cooler floor below.

  “What was it?” she breathlessly asked.

  “Another dead animal. Rat, I guess.”

  She wrinkled her nose.

  “I guess I’ve got a nest of them up there,” he added.

  “Nasty.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he snarled.

  With that, he stalked back into the bedroom, walking right through the puddle on the floor and leaving red footprints between the hall and the bed. His hands and feet tacky with blood, he stretched out on top of the sheets, heaved a sigh, and drifted off with a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

  5

  Amanda slept on the couch, or at least tried to, in what little space it afforded such a typically restless sleeper. Though her mind attempted to rationalize Walt’s increasing irritability, impatience, and nervousness to the pressures of a new home and a new job, somehow it didn’t quite click. Now he’d gone to bed filthy with the gore and grue of the infested house practically all over him, and here she lay on his couch rather than with him. She’d have just gone home, but she was so tired. And so terribly worried about things she hadn’t yet begun to understand. So Amanda tried like hell to get a little shut-eye.

  But not five minutes after she closed her eyes she began to hear scratching and skittering coming from the ceiling. From the attic. It seemed to her that Walt was right—there were rats up there. And where there was one rat, there were fifty. She tried to block out the noise, but it was useless. Every time her mind let go and she started to drift off, she imagined the ceiling opening up and a torrent of screeching, clawing vermin pouring down on her.

  With a heavy sigh, she sat up and switched on the lamp. She was exhausted but unable to sleep, a terrible dilemma she knew too well from years of persistent insomnia. Instead she merely sat there for some time, glassily staring at the wall and breathing the stale air that seemed as old as the house itself. The skittering continued unabated. She pinched her brow, fighting back the anxiety that was tightening in her chest. Things between her and Walt had been strained, to say the least. There had always been minor arguments and disagreements, bad moods and the inevitable apologies that followed. But ever since he bought this damn house…

  A cockroach scrambled up the w
all in front of her. Amanda narrowed her eyes at it, feeling an odd sort of hate for the insect, as though she was channeling all of the anger and disquiet of the last several days and firing it like a laser at the roach. It made it halfway up the wall, turned, and then scrambled horizontally across the length of the room. Launching herself to her feet, she gave chase. Even if she consciously recognized the absurdity of her sheer hatred for the insignificant bug, she aimed to kill it all the same.

  At the end of the wall, a six-inch molding jutted out to separate the living room from the dining room. The cockroach crawled up and over it without slowing its pace and kept on across the dining room wall. Amanda scooped up one of her flats and hurried after it. Now the roach climbed up before turning away again, skirting the edge of the ceiling in a desperate escape. Amanda leapt up and smacked at it with her shoe, but she missed.

  “Bastard!” she hissed.

  She lost sight of it for a second, but the black blur in her peripheral vision sent her reeling back after it. The roach tried to climb down and under the molding toward the kitchen, teetered for a moment on two of its spiny legs, and then dropped to the floor with a quiet click. Amanda lunged for it, but the cockroach hit the ground running and skittered across the tiles toward the hallway beyond. The shoe slammed against a tile long after the roach had run off.

  In the hall she flicked the switch on, bathing the white walls with a sickly yellow light. The cockroach quickened its pace, frantic to evade it, and climbed upward in a zigzag pattern toward the ceiling. Amanda shopped short of lunging again; between her and the roach on the wall lay the widening red puddle on the hallway floor. But her eyes remained fixed to the fast, revolting creature. Up it went, its six tiny legs clicking against the textured wall. It reached the corner where two walls and the ceiling met and momentarily paused as if it were reviewing its options. Then a thin crimson strand shot out from the spot on the ceiling, seized the cockroach, and pulled it back into the stain.

  The insect struggled, wriggling spasmodically, but it could not break free. In an instant, the viscous blood enveloped the cockroach completely. Amanda heard a faint crunching sound, then nothing at all.

  Only silence, apart from the thump of her own heart.

  Dazed, she stared at the stain for several minutes while she tried to process what she had just seen. Contemplation, however, did her no good. She had no point of reference, no way to understand what just happened or how it was possible. If pressed, she could explain that a leaking blood stain reached out and ate a cockroach before her eyes. But that clearly made no sense at all.

  “Honey?”

  She jerked, startled. In the shadows of the bedroom, just beyond the scope of the hallway light, Walt stood naked.

  “What is it, sweetheart?” he asked quietly.

  Amanda froze, suddenly and inexplicably terrified of him.“Come to bed,” he said.

  Walt took a step forward and she could see he was still sticky with the blood from the hallway. She gagged.

  Before she could hear another word from him, Amanda was running for the front door in her bare feet.

  ***

  The door slammed shut and, half a minute later, Amanda’s car coughed to life outside. Walt shuffled over to the bedroom window, pulled back the curtain and peered out. All he could see were dim red tail-lights disappearing into the distance. For a moment, he almost believed he could feel the heat from those hazy red lights on his face. He wiped a slick swatch of sweat from his face with the palm of his hand and realized that it was only the house. As hot and humid as it was outside, the house acted like an incubator, making it that much worse inside. It was an old place, after all—nearly seventy years old, and with no central heat or air. He considered shopping around for a pair of window units in the morning, or maybe the day after that.

  Then he went back to bed.

  6

  The phone kept ringing. Walt had no machine, so the irritating noise just went on and on. Still, he had no intention of answering it. It was probably just that roofer again, angry as hell that he showed up at the agreed upon time and found no one home. The truth was that Walt was asleep—deeply asleep—but now he didn’t even want the roofer’s services anymore. It hardly ever rained in the summer around there anyway. And even when it did, it was not as though a little water ever hurt anybody. Why did everything have to be so perfect, so damned structured?

  On the other hand, it might also have been Amanda. Three days had come and gone since she went tearing out of the house in the middle of the night. He sat down on the edge of his bed and thought about three days without Amanda. If it was supposed to hurt or vex him, it didn’t. All he had done was wake up to the obnoxious clatter she was making at that ungodly hour. It was her own mental unbalance that made her react so strangely. If she wanted to talk to him about it—which he thought had better include a sincere apology—she knew where he lived.

  After thirteen rings, the house finally fell silent again. Silent apart from the wet sounds emanating from the hallway ceiling, at any rate.

  It started the day after Amanda’s bizarre departure. Walt was drifting in and out of sleep on the bed—he was just so damned tired these days—asleep enough to hazily dream but too awake to make any sense out of it. He tossed and turned and managed to kick the sheets off the bed, eventually snapping himself awake and calling it a draw. He did not see it at all, not at first, but he might have heard it. He certainly smelled it: that same rotten meat odor that permeated the attic. Stifling a retching gag as he had before, he slowly approached the doorway and peered up.

  The stain had widened substantially. It was easily a foot and a half across now, and it was thick and gluey. The dripping appeared to have stopped so that the blood—or whatever it was—stayed in place. But it pulsed and undulated like ripples in a pond, and there were several wiry strands dangling down from it. He counted seven ropey fibers in all and judged them to be uniform in length, about six inches. They were the same rusty dark red as the stain itself, but with barely visible pink and white threads twisted throughout each one, kind of like muscle tissue. He edged around it, careful not to pass directly beneath, until he was on the opposite end of the hall. From there he stared a while longer before withdrawing into the kitchen and retrieving a long pair of silver tongs from a drawer. When he returned to the end of the hall, he stretched his arm up at the strands until the tips of the tongs almost grazed them. The meaty strands pulled taut and shot at the tongs in unison, coiling around the rounded tips and wrenching them from Walt’s grasp. He gasped and watched in horror as the bloody sinews mauled the tongs, turning them one way and then another before suddenly releasing them. They dropped to the floor with a loud clang. Walt jumped; he could hardly believe his own eyes. All he could think to say was, “Fuck.”

  The dripping tendrils in the ceiling seemed to quiver in response.

  Despite his revulsion, Walt’s curiosity consumed him. He found the rope hanging from the white square at the other side of the hall, yanked it hard, and hurried up the steps that clattered down to him.

  The attic was an altogether different story.

  Where the warm, spongy mass had been the night before, there was now a red, veiny lump the size of a football. Around the base of the lump, tiny splinters jutted out at various angles. He hadn’t a clue what it was, but it was clear to him that it had successfully broken through the paneling.

  Perhaps more disturbing were the sundry animal corpses scattered around the throbbing thing. They were the rats he’d suspected of infesting his attic, but these rats were eaten away, dissolved down to their bones.

  It was no longer just a stain. It was a living entity.

  And it was feeding.

  7

  Squashed up on one end of the couch with his knees touching his chin and a can of Stroh’s in his left hand, Walt considered his options. His initial instinct, purely primordial and reactionary, was to try to kill it. He thought about poisoning it, cutting it, dropping a heavy weight
on it and burning it. Then another proclivity hailing from deep in his genes kicked in: fear. What if he tried to kill it, but failed? How would the thing react? Gruesome visions of the pulsing red creature in the attic taunted his mind, images of the thing flying into a rage, growing, whipping those awful, dripping tendrils at him.

  No, he decided he would not attempt to kill the thing in his attic. At least not yet.

  The next option that occurred to him was telling somebody. Not just anyone, but someone who could either identify the organism or at the very least take it to some laboratory far away from its present location. The university, or perhaps the government. Maybe, Walt wondered, he should just call 9-1-1. But that was no good, either. He had never placed much faith in the so-called authorities before, much less academia, and could see no reason to start now.

  That left Walt right where he started, puzzled and scared. He sucked down the last of his beer and crumpled the can in his fist. He took a deep breath, held it, and belched. The squirming mass on the ceiling erupted into a series of nauseating wet noises, like a bucket full of worms crawling over one another. Walt shivered, stood up, and grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter.

  ***

  Twenty miles or so northeast of Walt’s house was a small bar called Tiny’s. From door to door, one would have to travel down a twisting, two-lane country road for eight miles until it dunked down to the interstate, which went almost directly to the bar. Walt had never set foot in the place—in fact, he hadn’t been inside a dive bar since his college days—but he’d passed by enough times that the place registered in his memory when he decided on a drink.

  The sun was still out when he arrived, and there were scant customers inside. By the time business picked up and the jukebox started to swing, he was three sheets to the wind. He lost count of how many tall, frosty mugs of the house’s cheap-est tap he consumed up to that point, but it was sufficient to render him shit-faced. And, as men who are blotto have been doing since time immemorial, Walt was talking far too much, and much too loudly.