by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
“Keep this whole shebang on the down low and give me a shout if y’all have any symptoms,” she instructed.
“Symptoms?” I asked. “Are you a doctor or a detective?”
She winked one of those perfectly skilled winks that only talk show hosts can manage. “If you gotta ask, you don’t need to know!” Then she left with three other guys, also in black suits.
Ezra’s body was cremated without my family’s permission by a funeral director I didn’t hire. His obituary, which I did not write, attributed his death to a tragic accident caused by his mental condition.
I called Ms. Cassavetes repeatedly, asking whether Ezra had murdered those bodies in his locker, and what her capacity was in the investigation. She never got back to me. But I’ve been a reporter for almost twenty years, and I’ve got friends. The beat cops at the Twenty-Sixth Precinct tracked down his sealed files. Turns out, that boiler room locker contained the dismembered remains of three recently missing homeless men. Though they’ve been identified as former residents of the East Side Shelter, no one has informed their families.
“I’ve just read the autopsy reports,” I tell my boss. “Ezra didn’t act alone. Three separate bite diameters were found on the bodies.”
“Let’s hold off,” Tom answers. “One of our board members lives at Six Forty Park. You know how these rich guys hate scandal.”
I wait. We both know the unspoken: I could take this story someplace else. “Okay, all right, yeah yeah. If I get a hallelujah from the top, it goes in the metro section. Two parts, five thousand words.”
“Metro? You’re kidding.”
“How do I know you’ll crack it without raining a libel suit on the whole company?” Tom asks. “Give me something airtight. If you can manage that, I’ll make it page one.”
“Done,” I say. “Just give me two weeks. I’ll turn in the Red Hook teamsters’ article today and I can work on the Astor family for the style section concurrent.”
“Concurrent?” Tom asks.
“Contemporaneously.”
Tom chuckles. He’s dumber and happier than I am. He’s divorced too, and sees his kids every other weekend. It’s like he climbed into a time machine and traveled back to 1980. “Aren’t you a thesaurus?” he asks.
“Yes,” I agree. “Because I’m a writer.”
“One week,” Tom says.
I’m about to argue this point when my brood starts squawking. “I waaant it! Sharing is caaaaring!” four-year-old Lisa shrills.
I’m calling from a two-bedroom apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. By this stage in my life, I’d expected a classic six in Manhattan. But my one and only publishing deal happened ten years ago, and the book in question, about mafia ties to the Ground Zero clean-up crew in Staten Island, sold less than five hundred copies. In case you don’t know, five hundred copies is abysmal. I’m the Walter Mondale of true crime reporting.
“Help me! Daaaaddy! It’s still my turn!” six-year-old Elaine screams so loud you’d think the little one was dousing her with lye. They’re in their bedroom, where I’ve bribed them with rug-ruining Play-Doh so long as they stay quiet for the duration of this call.
“Daaaaddy!” they both shout.
“Who is that? Your kids? Why aren’t they in school?” Tom asks.
“It’s Columbus Day. I’ve got to hang up.”
I burst into the girls’ cramped bedroom. All the toys are on the floor, along with the Frozen bed sheets and pillows. They’ve made a nest. My bare foot lands on a Playmobil policeman.
“Goddamn you!” I mutter as I hop to a naked twin mattress to inspect the damage.
“Bad!” nervous Elaine shouts at the offending Playmobil cop.
“You’re all bad,” I snap.
Little Lisa hurls herself against the nest floor. She’s naked except for a homemade Batman utility belt, her chubby bottom pricked with dimples. “I hate bad!” she mumbles through a pillow.
Elaine slaps her own face hard enough to leave a mark. “Bad! Bad! Bad!”
Then they’re both bawling, literally scream-crying, which they turn into a competition to be loudest. “Bad! Bad! Bad! OOOOOOhhhh! Daaaaddy!”
“Calm down!” I yell. “Shut up!”
Rookie mistake. My fury fuels their hysteria. “Ooooooh!” they scream, even louder. The neighbors down below start banging. What do they use to reach the ceiling? A broom?
“You’re not bad! I’m just depressed!” I shout.
Curious, Elaine stops screaming. Like always, Lisa follows. My nervous system flowers in gratitude. “What’s depressed?” Elaine asks.
“Frustrated. Stymied. Horribly unhappy. I need to finish some calls and then I’ll take you to the park.”
Recovering so quickly that I wonder if she’s been playing me for a sap, Elaine leaps from the floor, grinning wide. “And get pink donuts?”
“No.”
“ICE CREAM?” Lisa shrieks, her Weeble-wobble-shaped body shivering with crazy joy.
“I’ll take you to the park and that’s it and you’ll like it and you’ll say thank you!”
“Thank you!” Elaine says.
“You’re a bad guy and I won’t say thank you, never! Never!” says Lisa.
“Hug your bad guy!” I tell her.
Elaine dives into my arms. “Dad,” she moans, blissed out and starstruck with love. She’s always needed extra affection and never been able to ask for it. “Daddy-dad-dadda. Googy-ga-gagga.”
Giggling, Lisa follows. Group hug. “My rug rats,” I say. “I’m over the moon for you.”
They climb my shoulders and flop around, shoving their naked bottoms in my face, bouncing on the bed. Everybody’s laughing, even me.
Moments like this are great. For lots of people, they’re what life is all about. But for me, they’re also pretty fucking oppressive.
—
After we put the kids to bed that night, Daisy and I split a bottle of Chimay. I’m horny, so I try to get things started by rubbing her feet with my good hand. “I hate my job,” she says. “I miss the kids. I even miss you.”
“Don’t go overboard.”
“It’s true,” she says. “I miss you.”
I press my thumb inside her plantar fascia until she purrs. “This story might be the thing. I watched the elevator footage today. It’s bizarre. This old woman and this ten-year-old kid from the building really do seem to think they’re possessed. I can’t imagine I won’t get more features if I crack this story.”
“I hope so,” she says. “I’d love to quit the bank.”
“Yeah.” I listen for blame in her voice but can’t find it.
She took the job so we could stop struggling, but it meant giving up on her novel about star-crossed werewolf teenagers in lust. When I read the first chapter, I told her I liked it. This was a lie. It’s crap. Then again, I’m having a hard time supporting other people’s dreams lately. Probably it’s because my book agent dropped me and I haven’t had sex in more than three months. For a while, I jerked off in the shower. Now I just dry fantasize about pliant women with kooky senses of humor and large libidos—young Daisys, basically.
“How about another Chimay in the bath? I’ll suck your toes…,” I say. “Dais?” She’s already asleep, her cheek mushed up against the side of the gray Ikea couch.
—
I press record. “Can you state your name?” I ask.
Margaret Brooks’s mouth is her most prominent feature. It juts, horselike. She’s a Hungarian immigrant turned 1950s pinup girl who married rich, raised two kids, and has reached the grand age of ninety-three. From the looks of her morphine-brown IV drip, she won’t see ninety-four.
“I have many names,” Margaret wheezes from her antique wooden wheelchair.
The receiving salon of this classic seven is decorated in 1940s postwar boom: vintage New Yorker covers in brass frames; a silver tea service; a Tiffany lamp; a Playbill signed by Maria Callas; geometric furniture built to last. Bartók is playing on a restored phonograph—an ee
rie string piece. There’s not a speck of dust or grime, as if the entire room is sprayed daily with a fire hose and then oven baked.
“Would you mind itemizing those names?”
“Pshaw! You’re not interested in us! You only like pret-ty young things,” Margaret rasps. “The younger the better.”
“I’m the father of girls. That’s not a funny joke to me,” I say.
“Huhssss,” Margaret laugh-wheezes, slapping her scarecrow knees. “Huhssss!”
“What’s so funny?”
She bares her giant horse teeth. They’re way too big for her face. “Eat my cock!”
Margaret’s granddaughter Minnie, who’s been on the couch playing iPhone Zombie Tetris since answering the door, looks up at last. “I just love kids. I wish I had ’em. Cutie little babies! But the clock is ticking, you know? I’m gonna be thirty-five.”
I nod. She’s at least forty.
“Still,” Minnie says as she reaches across the couch to hand her red-eyed grandmother a bottle of Visine, “you should know I’d definitely make a good step-mommy. I’m super nice and I’m okay with not being the most loved.”
“Well, you never know. Mr. Right could be waiting for you right now, on a park bench outside Hooters,” I say. Then I summon a photo of Ezra on my phone. “Do you recognize this man?”
Margaret flashes a teasing grin. “It’s you.”
“It’s my brother, the former elevator operator of this building.”
“Sure looks like you!” Minnie chimes as she snaps the phone out of my hand.
“He stabbed himself in the basement of this building,” I say.
“Ezra Wright,” Margaret says, leaning forward, her voice low with the import of a secret. My heart races because I think I’m going to learn something. “I knew him…Bad brea-th! Huhssss! Huhssss!”
Minnie, meanwhile, squirrels my phone down the front of her electric blue Lycra jog tights.
“I noticed that you and Ezra rode the elevator together, sometimes all night. What did you talk about?” I ask.
“The pigs,” Margaret says.
“Pigs?”
Margaret points to her head with a liver-spotted finger. “They’re cunny pink on the inside too.”
I turn to Minnie. “Can I have my phone?”
She sticks out her tongue and squirms it around like a snail loose from its shell. “Can I have your number?”
I ought to be polite for the sake of the story, but this is gross. “My brother died, lady. They found three bodies in the basement of your building and nobody gives a damn. Give me my phone!”
Minnie’s mouth makes a lip-gloss-greasy O. She peels the phone from her pants and chucks it at my head.
I catch it. “Thank you from the rock bottom of my heart.”
“I hate you!” Minnie cries as she runs into the kitchen. Her giant backside shakes unevenly, as if her ass cheeks are fighting.
Margaret bursts into donkey-bray laughter.
I look out the window, wishing it were open. There’s a view of the Park Avenue Armory outside. Guys in hard hats walk the roof, clawing back hundred-year-old slates so they can tier its hulking interior with condos. “We both know you’re not really possessed,” I say. “You just want to clear your conscience before you die. That’s why you agreed to this interview. So clear it.”
Margaret’s laughter slows. She rubs the tape over her IV needle, which is yellow with age. It can’t have been changed in days.
“I’ve seen the footage. I know you and some kid—Lucas Novo—were in the basement with my brother around the time those homeless men disappeared down there. The autopsy reports show an adult set of gums with a two-and-a-half-inch diameter. Not teeth; gums. I’d say you’re wearing your husband’s dentures today—that you don’t actually have teeth. Funny coincidence, isn’t it?”
Margaret tongues the roof of her mouth. Click! Her giant dentures unlock. Bright red blood trickles out the sides of her mouth, where the edges have bitten her skin. She uses her index finger and thumb to put them back so she can talk. “You’ve got some dark secrets yourself,” she says. “So don’t cast stones.”
Minnie’s back. She’s drying her eyes with a cherry-embroidered handkerchief. I try to smile like I’m happy to see her. “When did this possession begin?” I call to the doorway where she’s standing.
“About three months ago, Gray-Grady.”
“What was she like before?”
Minnie frowns, and I can see that she’s pretty like her grandmother used to be. A Lauren Bacall–type gone to seed. Her eyes are sleepy lidded; her heart-shaped face clean and symmetrical. “The devil didn’t change her. Gawd, she probably changed the devil. Did you know my grampa died ’cause she fed him old meat? Scrombrotoxin, the lawyers called it.”
“I read that,” I say. “Why do you think she was acquitted of his murder?”
Minnie laughs a worldly, bitter laugh. “My mom and uncle died of stomach cancer—a whole lifetime of bad food she made them eat. You could call that murder too. But if you sent everybody to jail for killing the people they’re supposed to love, the streets would be pretty empty.
“Anyway, here’s what you need to know,” she went on. “Bad people are easy to possess—that’s why, when the demons excaped, they went to my grandma first. It’s the nice guys the devil has to work on, you know? Your brother was real nice.”
“Was he?” I ask.
Minnie grins. “You-know. You-know,” she sing-songs.
I check the time. This interview began nine minutes ago. I’m screamingly uncomfortable. “A polite suggestion: you both need psychiatrists. Now, Minnie, on the phone you mentioned that your grandmother writes runes. They’re these pre-Christian letters that look like knobby sticks. My brother Sharpied your boiler room with them. May I see Margaret’s?”
Margaret yanks out her dentures. Her whole face sags as if sucked inside the vacuum of her mouth. “Ignore the idiot! I’ll phfow you!” She spins down the hall, morphine IV skating along behind. There’s a glue trap stuck to one of her wheels, so the sound goes roll-scat! roll-scat!
Minnie and I scurry after. Roll-scat! roll-scat! We pass doors on the left and right, all closed. Margaret throws open the last door at the very end, then signals for Minnie to help her turn around and head back. The stink brings water to my eyes and I’m reminded of the boiler room. I feel for a light. My fingers come back gritty.
“Clappy-clap, Grady-Gray!” Minnie calls.
I clap. The grit on my hands dusts the dark.
“You have to clap twice, fast, you silly billy!”
I clap twice, fast. The hall and bedroom lights flick on.
“My god,” I say. I wipe my shit-crummy fingers against my khakis and gag. The runes cover most of the walls and the ceiling just over Margaret’s king-sized bed. Like Ezra’s, they’re written backward as a means of cursing their reader with bad luck. Unlike Ezra’s, they’re written in excrement.
I search the room. It’s gross. Hand over mouth (and then spitting, because I’ve forgotten that my hand is filthy), I open the closet last. Along the doorjamb, she’s drawn a row of shit eyes:
One of them looks especially familiar. It looks like it belongs to Ezra. To me. Something slithers. I look at that eye for a long time.
—
When I come back out, the den where we’ve been conducting the interview is dark. My stitched hand aches, alternately burning and numb under its gauze bandage.
“Hello?” I call.
Scrape! Margaret crouches beside her wooden chair, knees wide to reveal girdle-tight medical support socks and a thatch of gray pubic hair. I don’t know what she’s doing at first; I only get that same feeling I had with Ezra in the basement—that’s she not a person. That something hard and unknown has shoved itself inside her skin. Then I realize—she’s carving the floor with a human tooth.
I panic and get turned around. Minnie’s in the kitchen, drinking iced tea straight from a plastic gallon-sized Lipton’s jug. He
r mouth encircles the entire thing, tongue lunging in and out, fellating it.
When she sees me, she puts down the jug and squares her shoulders. “Silas Burns, you dirty girl killer! Nice to see you. But where are my manners? May I offer you some cold tea?”
“Who’s Silas Burns?”
“Nobody! I didn’t say anything, you crazy! Shut up and have some tea!”
“Oh. Well. No, thank you. I’ll be taking my leave now.”
She swipes crumbs from the top of her jog bra. “Did you know? It’s super-hard for them to find that perfect kind of fit—somebody nice and smart and I guess the word for it is “ambitious”—somebody like you or Dan Khan, that they can live in for a long time. It ought to be a partnership. Like in your case, you’d get famous, and in return they’d get good press. Or for me, I’d fuck anybody they wanted. And I’d get babies.” She laughs and looks out the window behind me, her expression far away. “Little itty-bitty babies that loved me no matter what.”
“You can’t live like this,” I say.
Daintily and for show, Minnie dabs her mouth with her sleeve. “Isn’t it just awful, Grady-Gray? I weeaaally need your help.”
That’s when I notice that the counters are blanketed with bagged foods—Pirate’s Booty, Cheetos, Pringles, frozen burritos, jelly beans, coffee cakes, donuts, soda bread—all picked over and riddled with finger holes and saliva-darkened teeth impressions.
“There are services for people like you,” I say.
Minnie’s fingers glisten slimy yellow with Entenmann’s coffee cake. “You got me all wet,” she giggles, because she’s so punny.
I get the feeling she’s referring to something specific. That’s when I realize with a nightmarish kind of horror that my pipes are raw. I’ve recently ejaculated. But where? When?
She comes toward me. I walk backward into the guest salon where the old lady squats. Margaret’s free hand has crawled up, rubbing between her legs. The exit is just to the side and through the servant’s hall. But they’ve shut all the doors and it’s gotten so dark. Everything feels closed in and wrong.
“Grady?” she asks.
Did I sleep with this awful woman—Minnie Brooks? Have I cheated on my wife?
