by Ed Kurtz
The taxi arrived twenty-five minutes later. Walt considered himself fortunate that he did not get stuck with a chatty driver. The ride to Mill Street was blissfully quiet.
The girl in the pet shop was small and mousy-looking, with her curly black hair stuffed clumsily into a bun on top. She stared at Walt without expression when he came in, raising her eyebrows solicitously. He smiled and nodded, striding across the store and examining the sundry animals for sale.
The place smelled strongly of cedar chips and disinfectant. The front of the store was taken up by squawking birds and a dozen different types of rodents—rats, gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs, and even a chinchilla. As Walt moved to the back of the store, the species turned largely reptilian, although there was a fair number of tarantulas and scorpions on the wall, as well. He looked around and sighed. No normal pets, just exotic ones. And there wasn’t enough time to look at another shop. He crooked his mouth to one side and walked over to the shopgirl.
“How much for the guinea pigs?”
“Fifteen each.”
He slid his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and peeked inside.
“I’ll take three.”
“All right,” the girl said, starting to brighten up a bit.
“What do you need for supplies? Not all of these cages come with water bottles…”
Walt reached out and touched her shoulder.
“I don’t need all that extra stuff,” he said. “Just the animals, okay?”
The girl’s brow sank over her eyes.
“Get the hell out of my shop,” she said.
Walt leaned back and grimaced at her.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Piss off. I mean it.”
“Do you normally chase paying customers out of your place of business, or just me?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, prick. Anyone who wants to buy ‘just the animals’ and nothing to actually take care of them is up to no damn good. I’ve seen it before and it’s heartbreaking. If you’re not out of here in five seconds I’m calling the police.”
“The police? For trying to buy some fucking guinea pigs?”
“Four seconds.”
“This is outrageous.”
“Three seconds.”
“Go ahead and call them. I’m eager to hear what they say to you about this.”
“Two seconds. I’m not messing around.”
Walt’s right hand curled into a tight fist. The girl flashed a smug grin at him.
“And that’s one. Hang around and wait for them, if you like.”
She marched over to the front counter, pulled a phone up from underneath it and began dialing.
“I’ve got a cab waiting,” he said in a quiet rage.
He stalked out of the shop and got back into the running taxi. As the vehicle drove off, he could see the girl hanging the phone up and smiling triumphantly.
Walt seethed all the way back to the house.
***
The hatchback sat crooked in the driveway when the cab dropped him off. The front end of the car was caved in, a perfect fit for the big oak he slammed into. He shook his head at the ruins of his car, wondering what to do about it and how he was going to afford it. So much of his reserves had already been poured into the house, leaving scant cash for unforeseen events like a totaled car. He walked a circle around it, studying the damage and silently cursing himself for having had the accident in the first place. At least he could still live in a house with a hundred holes in the roof. And one very peculiar hole in the ceiling.
Walt turned toward the porch and took a few steps before a high-pitched mewling attracted his attention. He paused, turned around and narrowed his eyes at the tree line at the edge of his property. Although he couldn’t see them from where he stood, he knew that the black cat was feeding her kittens in the woods again.
He slowly walked over to the trees.
***
The mouth twisted and puckered. It looked as though it was trying to speak, or maybe kiss. Walt hadn’t noticed anything resembling teeth in it before, but he could now see small white nubs protruding at various angles beneath the sopping lips. Above the mouth, a chunk of pink cartilage jutted out of the sticky mass. The beginnings of a nose.
For a moment, he stared at it. Faces didn’t form this way, layer by layer, from the inside out. But this one seemed to. He tilted his head to one side, studying it. Fascinated. Then a gnarled flap of bumpy flesh darted out from between the lips. Its tongue.
A cardboard box marked books sat at Walt’s feet, its original content was now stacked neatly in the dining room. The box wiggled. A weak, quiet squeak emanated from within. He sneered at it, and then he regarded the deep crimson scratch on the back of his right hand. Mama had done that, enraged at the theft of her baby. Walt hadn’t expected the cat to strike out like that, but the animal turned out to be feral. She had no trust for human beings and, as Walt clearly demonstrated, she had no reason to. Nonetheless, he managed to snatch the tiny kitten by the scruff of its neck and get away with no more than the one injury.
He opened the box and reached inside, seizing the crying kitten by the loose skin on the back of its neck. The tongue above him lashed about, dripping blood-infused saliva on Walt’s face and shoulders.
“You’re hungry,” he said, not expecting it to hear or understand him. It had no ears, after all.
The mouth stretched open a little wider, cracking audibly. Walt lifted the kitten higher. A lump of red, veiny flesh wobbled in the mass, splitting apart to reveal a bloodshot eye. Walt gasped.
“Christ,” he said, titling his head to get a better look at the solitary, roaming eye. The iris was a very pale blue. “Can you see?”
He waved the screeching cat back and forth beneath the eye, and the eye followed it intently. The mouth slavered, the tongue licked the lips with anticipation. When Walt lifted the struggling animal higher still, the wriggling strands shot at it and rapidly coiled around the kitten’s neck and legs. One of the strands dug into the fresh scratch on his hand, too. Walt cried out in pain and jerked his hand free.
“Watch it!” he snarled.
If the creature on the ceiling understood him, it paid him no mind. It was far too occupied with the thrashing kitten in its grasp, pulling it close enough for that grotesque mouth to bite into its belly. The cat gave a chilling shriek as its abdomen was torn open by the gnawing teeth. Walt swallowed hard and looked away. Blood splashed on the floor behind him and he heard a loud crunch. When he looked back, the kitten was mangled.
The mouth greedily sucked at the fluids and viscera that seeped out of the split belly.
“Jesus Christ.”
The eye revolved to stare at him while the blunt teeth tore into the remains of the kitten.
10
Amanda shivered as she stirred the can-shaped chunk of condensed soup into the milk that surrounded it. Her apartment felt cold. Cold and dark and strangely foreign. In the last few weeks, she’d spent little time in her own place. There was a time when Walt came over at least once a week, before the house. Before it. Mostly they went to his old place, or just out. She even joked with Nora that the one-bedroom walk-up served more as a storage unit for her stuff than anything else. After all, most nights she slept at Walt’s. With Walt. But not tonight. Not the last few nights.
When the orange goop finally began to blend with the milk, she gave the concoction another whirl with the whisk before stealing away to the short hallway between the bathroom and bedroom. There was no light in the hall, so she had to turn on the bathroom light to illuminate the controls for the central heat and air. She almost always kept it off when she was not at home, and since her apartment was buried in the building with other units on top and both sides, it tended to get pretty chilly when the sun went down. She squinted in the dim light emanating from the bathroom, peering closely at the black and gray readout on the control unit. 62 degrees. Even the number gave her goosebumps. She flipped open the cov
er, played with the overly complicated network of buttons for several seconds, and finally convinced the damned thing to settle on a comfortable 71.
The soup on the stovetop had come to a boil during her two-minute absence.
“Shit,” she grunted, seizing the pot by the handle. She quickly moved it to a cool burner, but it was too late. Her lunch-for-breakfast was ruined.
Her bottom lip quivering, she began to weep. Anyone would have thought she was nuts had they observed the spectacle; who breaks down over a ruined can of seventy-nine cent soup? But it was so much more than that. The soup was just the last straw, the one that broke her proverbial camel’s back. And that camel was named Walt.
She dropped the pot in the sink with a resounding clang. Wiping her eyes, she weighed the pros and cons of giving him a call just to see how he was doing. Maybe, she thought, they would both end up apologizing and before long her blubbering would transform into relieved laughter. But even as she found herself dialing his number, she greatly doubted that would be the case.
The line whirred its soft ring once, twice, and then three times. Immediately after the fourth, she heard a click. Then silence.
“Walt?”
No response came from the other end. But she was nearly certain she could hear soft breathing coming through the receiver.
“Walt? Are you there?”
The breathing got louder, as though he knew he was caught and was not bothering to attempt silence any longer.
“I…I can hear you, Walt. Aren’t you going to say anything?”
A short burst of air hit the line, a grunt forced through it. Like a mean little laugh. Heh.
The line went dead after that. She dropped the receiver and hung it back on the hook. She remained in the kitchen, staring at the wall with her arms hanging limp at her sides. She felt fairly certain that this was the end, that she had been unceremoniously dumped. As much as that pained her—and it pained her plenty—it was not the primary source of her hurt and confusion. It was the manner with which Walt did it, the coldness and total lack of kindness. That was not the same man with whom Amanda fell in love, the man who loved books and kids and got all giddy whenever he waxed poetic about their future together. Marriage had never come up explicitly, but there was always that knowing sparkle in his eyes when he slyly hinted at it. She didn’t doubt that a proposal was just around the corner, at least not before he moved into that house.
That awful house. With that even more awful thing living in it. Growing in it.
Amanda shuddered, recalling the nightmarish sight of the puddle hungrily sucking up that cockroach and devouring it completely. At that point, the nasty thing was twice as big as it was when Walt first discovered it. There was no telling how much it had grown since then. Or what it hungered for now.
The back of her throat burned from the bile that worked up from her stomach. In her mind, she pictured shoving a flaming torch at the thing, burning it up and being done with it. Maybe then Walt might come back to the land of the living. Even if he still wanted to call it quits, he would at least return to being the same gentle Walt he had always been, before he moved into his new home in the boondocks.
“Yeah, sure,” she muttered, shaking her head.
She couldn’t exactly see herself bursting into the house like some comic book superheroine with a torch clutched in her fist, screaming, Out of the way, Walt! It’s that thing or me!
It was stupid. She hung her head, jamming her chin into her breastbone.
She didn’t know what to do.
***
The broad, open expanse of the field stretched from the end of Walt’s property to a line of trees at least a quarter of a mile away. Broken wooden nubs protruded from the dry earth in intervals all around the expanse, rotting vestiges of what had once been a fence. Whoever owned the huge parcel of land now had let it go to seed; it was overgrown with tall yellow grass and thick tangles of weeds. In the week that passed since he brought the first box inside the house, Walt had yet to see a single living soul set foot there. In his mind, it was practically his.
Having slept most of the night—save for that irritating call from Amanda—he was fresh and ready to go when he set out in the first hour of sunlight. He wore his rarely used pair of beige hiking boots and carried a fire iron in his right hand. He would have preferred one of those litter pokers the convicts used on the interstate to collect all the garbage, but he had high hopes for the heavy metal instrument. A field like that was bound to be rife with all manners of creeping and crawling critters; snakes and moles and rabbits and such. Food for the hungry mouth on the ceiling.
He strode carefully into the field, his boots crushing the deep growth underneath. Around him birds chirped and cackled. Something cut a rapid path through the grass several yards in front of him, too far away to do anything about it. Despite the early morning, it was already hot enough to break a sweat. The scent of his own perspiration fused with the strong, pungent odor of the rain-starved grass and the weeds that choked it. It smelled like summer, like camping. Walt smiled at the sensation as he moved further into the field.
When he was a quarter of the way across, it occurred to him that his plan of attack was not a particularly good one. No matter how quietly he tried to move, his boots still clomped and rustled through the undergrowth. No wild animal in the world was likely to miss his approach.
He stopped when he reached the middle of the field and slumped his shoulders. This simply wasn’t going to work. At the very least, he was going to need to set some traps—something else he didn’t know anything about. If he was serious about netting some game, he figured a gun might also be a good idea. Something with a small caliber, like a .22. But he didn’t want to blow any of the little creatures to smithereens. Whatever he did, the damned fire poker was a ridiculous idea from the start. Hunting small game was not akin to sneaking up on a burglar. Walt blew a short burst of air through his nostrils and groaned. There had to be better options.
And, of course, he’d already ruined the pet shop in town for a resource. The hippie bitch who ran the place was likely to chase him out of there with a broom if he tried stepping foot in there again. He shouldn’t have been so single-minded in his approach. He should have been aware of how it was going to look if he treated that little excursion like what it really was: grocery shopping. But then, hindsight was 20/20, for whatever the hell that was worth.
The creature—if one could accurately call it that—was clearly satisfied with the kitten. It fed on the poor thing for the better part of an hour before letting its decimated remains drop to the floor. It was a beneficial meal, too; in the day since that feast, the thing on the ceiling had grown appreciably. It covered more surface area, but more interesting was the small, knobby bulge beside its one probing eye. Soon enough, it was going to be blessed with three-dimensional vision. That would require sustained sustenance though, and Walt just didn’t have the heart to steal another kitten from the black cat in the woods. The thought of it made his stomach flip.
In the interim, after Amanda’s unwelcome phone call had wakened him, he attempted a different tack. By then the thing started to let out irritating screeching sounds, like a dying magpie or something. It was hungry again and, Walt presumed, demanding more meat. So he went back into the kitchen, opened up the refrigerator, and searched for something that would suffice. What he settled on was a half-pound of rump steak that he planned to grill in the next day or two. After extracting the cold, red slab from the fridge and peeling away the plastic, he brought it to the hallway and held it up with both hands like some ancient priest offering a sacrifice to its raging deity.
The tendrils went wild when the lone eyeball caught sight of the meat, wriggling and stretching out toward it. The mouth stretched open, and from within its dark pit came the probing tongue, dripping with saliva.
Ahhhhhg, it went.
Walt stepped back at the sound of the unexpected moan. His scalp tingled and the muscles in his back bunch
ed. All the same, he maintained his supplicant pose, the meat held high in the air. The shiny red strands poked and prodded at the surface of the cool, marbled slab. They seemed uncertain, but the slavering mouth would not be denied. The strands dug into the meat and coiled around it, snatching it out of Walt’s hands. They retracted, yanking the steak toward its mouth. The tongue slapped against the meat and licked it from one end to the other. Then the short, nubby teeth sank into the offering. Walt smiled nervously.
The mouth then snapped open and shrieked. It let go of the meat as though it was on fire, letting it fall to the dirty hardwood floor with a resounding smack. Walt jumped back and gaped. The mouth went on shrieking while the tendrils furiously writhed and snapped. Dead meat was never going to sate the ravenous creature on the ceiling.
Hence the fire poker and hiking boots. But that, too, was turning out to be a wash. Walt moaned with exasperation as he resolved to tread back through the brush and weeds to his own property. He slashed at the grass with the heavy iron poker along the way, imagining that it was a machete and he was some intrepid pulp magazine explorer in the humid jungles of deepest, darkest Africa.
The reverie came to an abrupt end at the sound of a high-pitched squeal. He actually hit something.
Stunned, he knelt down in the tall grass and parted the growth where the end of the poker last struck. There lay a small brown rabbit, hardly bigger than the kitten, moving in desperate, rapid circles on its side. Walt stared at the suffering creature, noting the blood in its fur and the awkward way its leg twisted and jutted backward.
“Huh,” he said. “Must have broken it.”
He grinned abashedly. In an odd sort of way, he felt pity for the rabbit. He hadn’t meant to strike it, even if he had come into the field for that very purpose in the first place. Still, there was nothing else for it, now. A wild rabbit with a broken back leg was as good as dead, anyway.
He seized the shivering animal by the scruff of its neck, just as he had seized the kitten before it. He raised it up until it was eye-level with him. Its mouth hung open and its glossy black eyes glared at him with horror.
