He let the landlady walk ahead of him to the driveway side of the house and point out an aluminum ladder already resting against the building, toward the rear.
“Margie Weeks’ son’s been scraping for me, but he don’t work so fast.”
Griffin nodded, still holding it together. “Just wondering,” he said, “why you didn’t tell me about the ladder beforehand.”
She shrugged. Scattered fresh cigarette ash. “You didn’t ask, so I thought you were a good climber. Hah.”
He gripped the ladder in both hands, dragged it across the building to the front, ignoring the sputtering woman’s comments regarding gouged siding.
Griffin braced the ladder against the balcony railing, turned and growled, “Go call the cops. Now.” Then he stomped his way up, the ladder shaking and groaning every step of the way, but he didn’t give a fuck. He dared it to spill him.
It didn’t.
At the top, he grabbed hold of the balcony railing and, with a final lunge—
Heard something. He replanted his feet on a rung of the wobbly ladder and watched the patch of blonde hair atop the figure approaching him on the balcony. Peering down at him. He almost lost it, one foot actually slipping from the rung.
Griffin could clearly see for the first time her delicate nose and overpainted dark eyes. Just a young woman with a face somewhat plainer than her body.
“Go away,” she said softly. Her voice just a voice, nothing familiar or eerie about it.
His sweat was turning the aluminum handholds to grease. “You’re not real,” he said quietly. “So get the fuck out of my way.”
She wasn’t expecting that, his phantom. A shadow passed over her face. It lengthened and her eyes grew darker.
“Patty already took you on and beat you,” he said. “And I know the truth. You’re not there. You’re here.” He tapped his temple with a finger and tugged his lips into an unfelt smile. His bladder felt heavy, groin tight. He grabbed hold of the balcony railing and prepared to swing his leg over. But stopped, distracted by background movement.
A man came forward now, though Griffin hadn’t seen him there before, and the French doors hadn’t opened. As recognition set in, Griffin knew he was in trouble. He’d fall off the ladder in a dead faint and the police would find him on top of the equally cold and still landlady, and wouldn’t that make a story?
“That face of yours, it looks like it’s approaching the boiling point again,” his father warned.
John Solloway ambled closer. Close enough to place a protective arm around the smirking blonde. “Watch how you talk to our little friend here, will you, son? You know how it is when you lose your temper. Women end up hurt. Remember your mother?”
Griffin shook his head. “Not real. None of it.”
The blonde smiled. She placed a cool hand over his clammy one on the balcony rail. It felt sensuous to the touch, nothing hallucinatory about it. Griffin felt his skin prickling.
“Not real?” she said, giggling. She tucked a finger under one of his and gently pried it off of the railing. Then another.
“That’s right,” his father said. Same soft, mournful eyes as when he’d lived. Eyes that could spark instantly to fury. “Don’t let your temper get the best of you this time, Griffin my boy.”
No, the old man was fucking with him once again. It was Dad who’d been the threat to Griffin’s mother, not him.
All of his body processes felt cold and sluggish, the blood slogging through his veins, his heart barely pulsing, lungs expanding and compressing like rusted machinery. His eyes couldn’t close even long enough to blink. He could only stare at his pale father, dead more than a year.
The old man leaned on the rail and smiled gently at his only son. “Make me proud of you, boy. Step right on down that ladder and let this poor girl be.”
Griffin smiled back at the nicest guy in the world—except when provoked. The old man had a real talent for laying the blame for his outbursts on whoever he felt had driven him to it. He wasn’t angry now, though. He’d never been more patient.
“All right, so I called them,” the landlady called up huffily. “The cops, they think I’m crazy with stories of pudgy men climbing ladders. Maybe they come, maybe they don’t. I did all I could and I’m not doing no more.”
Griffin forgot the height. He looked down upon the hefty woman with arms crossed, scowling up at him. Behind him, his father and the phantom blonde peered over the railing. Griffin adjusted his gaze from the ground to the balcony to the ground. The landlady looked bored.
“I know what you’re thinking,” his father said. “But you’ve got it all wrong.”
No he didn’t. He gave his father a pale smile. “The landlady, she hasn’t been to the church, has she? And she doesn’t have father and women issues. That’s why she can’t see you.”
“Griffin, I’m telling you—”
“No, I’m telling you, numbfuck.” God, it felt good talking to the father-thing like this. He deliberately let the years’ accumulation of anger wash over him until the ladder trembled with his rage. “Out of the way,” he bellowed as he plowed up and over the railing and fell in an exhausted heap to the balcony floor.
“What the hell?” he heard the landlady murmur.
Now he could see the father and the blonde for what they were. He watched eyes blacken, faces shift as if resettling over icebergs. Nostrils flared into black pits, mouths stretched but still couldn’t accommodate broadening jaws of teeth.
The things roared together, “YOU ARE NOT WANTED HERE.” Their voices no longer even mimicked human speech, but sounded like the grinding of hollow metal plates.
Griffin rose and stepped away from the creatures. His anger was gone again, expended. He spoke in a little voice, all he had left. “Eat me,” he said.
Still panting with exertion, he watched the creatures flicker, fade, melt away with twin snarls of ineffective rage.
He moved shakily to the French doors and prepared to face whatever he’d find on the other side.
Chapter Fifty-Four
When the pain came in white licks of fire delivered straight to his brain, he longed for the blackout of moments or hours before. If he could just close his eyes again maybe he could drift back to the blackout place without thought or pain or worry.
“Get up and get her, you fool.”
Laney, no doubt. Lovely Laney. The white pain jagged deeper and hotter into his sore brain. Even more irritating than his dead wife’s voice was the retching, hitching, wheezing, rasping, phlegmy sounds he heard in the background. He forced his eyes open, wiped away the red trickle disturbing his line of vision and saw the girl rising to her knees, snorting like an overexerted racehorse.
Oh good. He hadn’t been out that long after all.
He watched her gain her feet and stagger past him to the front door.
“Now,” his wife screamed and she must have been proud at the speed with which his arm shot out to grab the bitch by an ankle and tug her back to the ground.
He jerked himself to a seated position over her, but faster than he’d intended. The room reeled and he felt his last meal, whatever that might have been, prepare for a return engagement. Since he knew he was going to fall anyway, he made every effort to topple onto the upended girl, to seal her under him. Good plan except that she rolled away at the last instant so that he crashed facedown to the hard floor.
His nose throbbed like a motherfucker. Blinking away the blood still blotting his vision from a half-dozen sharp shards of porcelain from the lamp, he watched the girl make for the back of the apartment in a sort of cockroach crawl on all fours, quick and awkward.
Oh good. Now he could be all alone with his wife’s fury.
“I can’t fucking believe you,” she told him. “What do you think she weighs? One-thirty and she beats the shit out of you? Try to remember this–she gets away, you get the needle.”
Somehow he got to a wobbly standing position. Lethal injection, if it came to that, wou
ld come as a consequence of his following Laney’s instructions. She was conveniently forgetting that.
“Look at you, weaving like a drunk.”
She was right. It took every effort just to remain vertical against the back of the colorful couch. He wondered how steady Laney would be if she got conked on the head with a lamp. In fact, he wished he’d thought of that instead of a painless blast of carbon monoxide.
“I heard that,” she snarled, though he hadn’t voiced a word. “Get your attention back on the matter at hand and tell me what you intend to do.”
He’d get the cunt at the back of the apartment, of course. He’d had his moment of moral weakness, but not after she creased and slashed his scalp with the lamp. Now it was going to be a treat to wrap his fingers around that delicate throat.
“You’re going about it all wrong.”
“What do you suggest?” He let the sarcasm drip.
“Stop and think. Don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere.”
His dead wife sat on that bright couch, dangling one long leg over another. She wore the burgundy dress from that final night together in their garage. Is that what she’d been wearing all along?
“It’s just the kitchen back there,” she told him. “The door’s painted shut and they lost the key a long time ago.” Saying it as though it was common knowledge.
He suddenly became aware of an insistent dial tone and traced it to the house phone dangling at the end of its cord. He picked it up and cradled it.
“Now you’re thinking,” his wife said.
“Does she have a cell phone with her?” he asked.
“Yes. But she left it on overnight and forgot to recharge it.” Laney smiled as she said this.
So did Matthew. “Good,” he mumbled, taking teetering steps toward the kitchen.
“Sure, hon, why don’t you just chase her down that way. Then she can come around through the dining room doorway like a Keystone Kops routine, slip out the front door and tell the world.” Her tone making it apparent that he’d lost all of the admiration she’d shown him these last few moments.
He stopped to consider. It was taking him longer than usual to process information on account of his raging headache. But eventually he smiled while delicately reaching into his breast pocket and withdrawing a key. “Remember this? She won’t be leaving by way of the front door.”
Laney nodded. “Not bad.” Sounding impressed once more. But then she pointed to the front of the apartment and said, “What about those?”
The French doors stood wide open to the balcony, encouraging a slight breeze. Moving as quickly as his lacerated head would allow, he shut them and shot the bolts. It wouldn’t hold her forever, but it would slow her down and muffle her screams. He’d be right behind her.
Matthew steadied himself against the bright couch to make the room stop spinning. He enjoyed seeing four bloody spots drip from his face to form a Rorschach pattern on that bright, geometric pattern.
“Enough of this horseshit,” he said, rubbing the blood splotches deeper into the couch fabric.
The bitch was about to pay big time.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Melinda sucked in her breath behind him as Tim pulled on the closet door handle. It screeched open and she waited, as he did, for something to spring out at them. Nothing did. In fact, the calico tabby nesting in the dirty laundry on the floor looked quite content to remain where it was. It was the only cat he’d seen today that looked like it wasn’t trying to eat him. No wonder. The kitty was actually pudgy, if not downright fat. Well-fed and placid was how it struck Tim as he watched it watching Tim with lazy interest.
The reason for the calico’s unconcern was quite apparent. Its predatory instinct had been dulled by an overabundance of food source.
Tim backed away, shut the door calmly and puked on his shoes. He could hear Melinda’s breath rasping behind him, her only reaction to what she too had seen, so she was handling it better than he. Tim knew that, at random future moments with the lights out, he’d see the female cat, her belly pockmarked with teats, gnawing on the bloody kitten head sticking out of her mouth. He’d see the three tiny, picked-clean skeletons discarded like chicken bones at a picnic. He’d hear the crunching sounds as her teeth worked on…
He threw up again, but by now it consisted of little more than saliva strings. To counterbalance the suddenly spinning room, he plopped himself on the bed and gasped, “Jesus, we’ve got to get out of here.”
Got to get out. But it felt so good to close his eyes and not have to face teeth and claws. They were safe here, stashed away from all but one of the demon house cats, and that one wasn’t particularly hungry.
He felt a tugging sensation and opened one tired eye.
“Get up,” Melinda ordered, and he could tell that she’d fought off the shock of whatever it was they’d seen under the bedcovers. Maybe that’s how they had to survive this thing, one being strong while the other locked up with fear.
He stood as commanded and watched Melinda strip the bed. She handed the bedspread to Dolly and placed the top sheet, like a shroud, over the dazed but standing Germaine. The fitted sheet she tossed at Tim.
“Everyone, cover up tight,” she directed. She helped the sisters wrap themselves up like holy women at the foot of the Cross and motioned for Tim to do the same. On him, the effect would be more like David Duke at a Klan rally.
“What are you going to do?” he asked as she stood there without protection, her torn ankle dripping blood onto a braided rug.
“Don’t worry about me. I move better without anything.”
He smiled a sad smile. “Me too,” he said. Remembering how Griffin had called him self-absorbed, he wished his plump buddy could see him now. He tossed the sheet back at Melinda. “You take it. I’ll just tangle up and fall. Besides, I’ve got to be able to see clearly. We’ve got a long, treacherous walk ahead of us.”
Melinda opened her mouth to argue, but she must have seen the look in his eyes. “Okay,” she said quietly, and let him wrap her up tightly. Comically tight, under any other circumstance.
“This isn’t right,” Germaine said weakly. “Vincent isn’t going to like this.”
Vincent also wouldn’t like it when he visited the preacher man later that day, Tim thought, but kept it to himself. “Dolly, take hold of my hips like I’m a choo-choo train.”
“I’m not going,” Germaine said, louder this time.
Tim said, “Melinda, pull up the rear. Make sure Germaine is between you and Dolly.”
“Can we eat when we get there?” Dolly asked.
“Cheeseburgers till you shit pure beef,” Tim replied. “Are we all ready?” When a scratching came at the closed bedroom door he lost whatever degree of confidence he might have had. His throat dry and sore, he said, “All right, here we go.”
The first thing he did was kick a clear path down the hall. There’d been two feline sentries posted outside the bedroom door and both were caught off-guard by the sudden appearance of the swaddled humans. They loped crazily down the hall, squawking in pain and warning the others.
The way looked temporarily clear to the front of the house.
“Go,” Tim snapped. As he clasped Dolly’s pudgy fingers to his hips, some reckless instinct made him shout, “Whoo, whoo,” in a passable imitation of a steam-train whistle.
Dolly giggled, but it was a restrained sound, more like she was humoring him.
They hadn’t looked for shoes for the sisters, not that anyone could be blamed for not poking around in that horror house bedroom closet. Tim and Melinda managed to lug the women over the broken glass in the hallway without being attacked. At the foot of the staircase, the little train took a turn and proceeded into the living room.
The staircase. Such a natural site for launching an attack by air and yet he’d forgotten to be on the lookout. The diving shape resembled a flying squirrel with teeth.
Germaine shrieked, and the third car in the train crumpled to the g
round, a writhing heap that nearly brought the rest of the train down with her. Dolly yipped in panic and Tim watched the storm erupt on Germaine’s head as the frenzied, wailing cat tried to claw its way to the meat beneath the bedspread veil.
Melinda grabbed the animal and deep red gouges blossomed on both momentarily exposed forearms for her efforts. The cat used the top of Germaine’s head as a launching pad to spring straight for Melinda’s face.
She covered up in time, but the cat clung to her arms and made a strange, chittering sound as it tried to burrow between Melinda’s fingers to make a meal of her nose.
Tim grabbed the first object he saw, a fat Cleveland telephone directory on a phone stand. He whumped the cat as hard as he could with it, and watched it fall heavily to the ground. It landed on its back, its paws skittering in the air for traction like a dog dreaming of car chases. Finally, it found its feet and slunk from the scene of the crime.
“Come on,” Tim said. “Keep going, everyone.”
“Can’t.” Now it was Dolly, breathing heavily and holding up their progress. “Not going without Momma.”
She pointed to the stiff corpse in the La-Z-Boy while her sister screeched and dug at the top of her bedsheet-covered head for fangs that were no longer a threat.
Tim faced the badly scratched Melinda and said as loudly as he could to be heard over the pandemonium, “You take Germaine. I’ve got Dolly.”
He almost dropped the phonebook, but thought better of it as three of the snarling beasties faced them in butt-wobbling hunters’ crouches. He caught them by surprise—even surprised himself—by charging them first. Swinging the heavy book, he scattered them like bowling pins. His feet snarled up in wet newspaper sheets the Marberry women had scattered to soak up cat urine. When he raced back he found only two women waiting, hugging each other and looking like Muslim schoolgirls.
“Where’s Dolly?”
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