Nicolas named Cathy Eldritch: Kathy the Kitten.
She was a trooper and he knew it; nobody lasted fourteen years. It seemed damn near impossible.
Nicolas Nehalem approached the wire cage, which was nothing more than a modified, three-foot by three-foot square. He smiled a strange and outlandish smile, laced in twisted logic and perverted reason.
After opening a small door on the right side of the pen, he dropped the bottle of formula inside. The bottle rolled between two walls of wire and landed on the caged floor.
Cathy couldn’t reach the bottle. Not yet. Not until Nicolas released a lever that would unlock a small door inside the coop.
“What do you say, Kathy?” He adjusted his glasses and slid a hand beneath his housecoat. He began stroking himself calmly.
Cathy’s eyes were filled with starvation and madness.
At one time she wanted to kill this man, make him pay, make him bleed. She had despised him more than anything else in the world. Now she only wanted her nightmare to be over. She wanted to die. Not in theory, and not in some exaggerated way that people say it but don’t really mean it. She wanted to die for real. She wanted this life to end and whatever was waiting for her on the other side to begin. And she was close, so close. She had been clinging to death’s front door for as long as she could remember. All she had to do was stop drinking the formula and she would cross over. All she had to do was die. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She was famished––and her hunger wouldn’t allow her mind to say no to the bottle. She needed the bottle, the formula. And for this reason she didn’t hate Nicolas. Not now. She hated herself for needing him.
She said, “Thank you daddy. I love you.”
“Very well done,” Nicolas replied, knowing she hated expressing her love. His voice sounded calm, yet agitated; it always sounded agitated. “You’re a good baby today, yes you are; yes you are.”
Nicolas wrinkled his nose playfully, raised his shoulders and opened his housecoat so Cathy could see his semi-erect penis. He released the lever on top of the cage.
The bottle rolled another two inches.
Cathy rammed a hand through the small cage door and grabbed the formula; flies buzzed around her. She put the bottle to her mouth and drank greedily, burning her mouth and tongue. She hardly even noticed.
On the other side of the room were two more cages. One was empty. It had been empty for three weeks. The other cage had a young girl in it. The girl’s name was Olive Thrift. She was fourteen years old, might have been Asian. At this stage, it was hard to tell.
Nicolas named her Pumpkin.
Olive said, “Daddy, may I have a bottle too? I’ve been very good lately. I didn’t cry tonight or anything. Honest I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry dear,” Nicolas said, stepping away from Kathy the Kitten. “I only brought one bottle with me. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“Oh.” Olive’s eyes slipped down to the stumps on her hands. She only had three fingers left; she didn’t want to lose them. A multi-legged insect walked across her face and she swatted it away thoughtlessly. “Okay daddy. I understand. I love you.”
“I love you too, Pumpkin. Have a nice night. I’ll see you tomorrow, or maybe the next day.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes dear?”
“Can I please have some water? Both of my containers are empty.”
“Mine are too,” Cathy quickly announced. “Can you fill mine too?”
Nicolas approached Olive’s cage with his housecoat wide open and his genitals exposed. He put his knuckles to the wire.
Olive suspected that he would. He had been doing that a lot lately. She figured it made him feel like royalty.
She crawled toward Nicolas on her mangled digits and knobby knees, closed her dark and cheerless eyes and put her lips to the wire. Flies flew in circles around her. She kissed his hand as gently as she could manage.
“You’re a good little Pumpkin,” Nicolas said. “Yes you are. And if you keep being a good little girl I’ll never have to smash your face in with a sledgehammer. Or set your cage on fire. Because you don’t want that, do you? No. Of course not.”
Nicolas walked across the room, smiling insanely. He lifted a hose from a hook on the wall, turned a faucet, and approached Olive spewing hose-water where it fell. As he stood over Olive’s cage, she held out two water jugs and he filled them. He made his way to Cathy’s cage and poured water inside her coop for a little more than twenty seconds. She was able to fill one container and wet her hair before he dropped the hose and turned the faucet off, deciding enough was enough.
At the top of the stairs he clicked the light switch on and off, several times. He was tired. He hadn’t been sleeping well plus he had to get up early. He had things to do, although he couldn’t quite remember what those things were.
“Oh yeah,” he whispered. A grin that could have given a slaughterhouse butcher nightmares crept across his face like a spider on a corpse. “Now I remember.”
Closing the cellar door, he thought he heard a whimper.
Sounded like Pumpkin.
Pumpkin was a good girl; she was trying. And that’s what counted most in his books: trying. He hadn’t been forced to punish her lately, which was a nice change. Not since the incident with Pauline Stupid-Head had he been forced to perform one of his little operations. Not since he emptied the third cage.
Thinking about Pauline’s empty cage made him sad and lonely.
Empty cages need to be filled. Sure they did. An empty cage was wrong; everybody with a lick of sense knows that. But Nicolas was a busy man, he had things on his mind and his work was never done. The cage would have to wait.
Nicolas crawled into bed wearing his housecoat. He lifted his cup from the nightstand, smiled at the clown holding the balloon, and slowly emptied the cup’s contents on the floor. Water splashed, creating a miniature lake where no lake had once been. He named this lake, Lake Empty Cage. He wondered how long the lake would last, and when he would be forced to make a new one.
The clock beside him read 4:19 am.
It was late, too late for feeding babies and making lakes. Maybe tomorrow he would punish Kathy the Kitten for waking him––maybe, but maybe not. He wasn’t sure yet. He would see how he felt in the morning.
∞∞Θ∞∞
Nicolas woke up early, went to the kitchen and mixed another bottle of formula. He warmed it perfectly, added a little chocolate and brought it to Olive; he apologized for not giving her a bottle the night before. Afterwards, he cleaned the basement and found each of his babies something to read. He gave them fresh blankets, a rice-crispy square, and a nice cup of coffee. Shortly after, he stepped inside a closet, stripped naked, and screamed for twenty minutes while pushing his fingers into his eyes.
∞∞Θ∞∞
∞Θ∞
~~~~ CHAPTER TWO: JUNE 1ST, MONDAY AFTERNOON
1
His hands were bleeding. Not much, but some––right around his knuckles and the tips of his fingers. The wounds were starting to feel bad, and as the day wore on he figured the irritation would grow increasingly worse. He had a scrape on his knee that hurt when he touched it and a bruise on his shin that ached constantly. His hair had become wild, soiled with dirt, dust and sweat. He was shirtless; his shoulders and chest glistened. His slim waistline and impressive abdominal muscles were swollen from his efforts. The blue jeans that clung to his body were beyond dirty, and even when the pants were ‘fresh from the drawer’ clean they looked dirty. They always looked dirty. The jeans were a special pair that were set aside for times like this: grubby times, labor times, times when getting filth up to your eyeballs and annoying cuts in your hands were an expected part of the program.
Dan McGee was his name.
Daniel; named after a wise and honorable prophet whose faith in God had protected him in the Lion’s Den. This fact was not kept in the forefront of Dan’s thinking, but it was ironic. At least now it was, now that he was standing
at the mouth of precarious exploration.
He was at the cottage.
Cottage.
Truth be told, the place looked more like a house built next to a lake. It was a summer home really, but Dan considered it a cottage. He wasn’t sure why. The building, located just outside Cloven Rock, had two floors, not including the basement. It had a full kitchen, two bathrooms, four bedrooms, a laundry room, and a deck that was large enough to accommodate seventy-five people or more. It also had a garage and an attic. The building was secluded, but not completely secluded. It was one of three cottages built together on a small, fat peninsula. There were no others for a quarter-mile in either direction. And now, as Daniel McGee discovered, his summer home had something else. Something he never knew about until just this minute, something interesting and almost certainly hazardous.
Dan cleared his throat and walked across the dusty room.
The floor was littered with tools: hammers and saws, drills and screwdrivers, crowbars and wrenches and everything else he needed. Some of it was piled around an open toolbox; some was scattered about.
He stepped past three rolls of thirty-year-old carpet and lifted a bottle of water from where he left it, next to the rotting pickets on the warped and rickety staircase. He drank two swallows quickly, poured water into his free hand, and slapped it onto his face, cleaning himself slightly. Still feeling dirty, he poured a splash of water over his head. The water wasn’t cold but it was refreshing, which was exactly what he wanted. After returning the bottle to its home on the stairs he ran his fingers through his sopping hair and took a deep breath.
He was excited. That was the truth of it.
He felt energized.
Six hours earlier the basement was loaded with junk: Boxes of clothing from years gone by, old furniture, unloved artwork, boring books, unwanted appliances, out of date electronics, rusted tools, VHS tapes, pointless sporting equipment, photographs that meant nothing, corroded machinery, unfashionable clothing; the list went on and on.
He cleared it all out.
The photographs and tools were put away. The rest of the stuff went into garbage bags and charity bins. The bags were thrown next to the garage. The bins were placed in the hallway, close to the exit. Once the basement had been cleared, he unhinged a door, knocked down a pair of walls, removed some baseboards, and pulled out the carpet. The sub-floor beneath the carpet was moldy and rotten. He lifted half of it, exposing the concrete floor beneath.
That’s when he made his discovery.
Dan licked his lips.
He was alone, and had gotten a fair amount finished so far. If his wife had been with him his accomplishments would have been cut in half. He would have been subjected to a twenty-minute debate regarding every worn-out pair of shoes. Dan hated that. Working was hard enough without dealing with a committee, and that’s what Sandra seemed to be at times like this. A committee. She was a good woman, no question. The girl was an intelligent sweetheart. She had the face of a model and a body that could make a Playboy photographer hot under the collar and hard under the zipper. But at times like this, look out. Everything was a discussion. Everything was questioned. That’s why Dan took the week off work; he wanted to get to the cottage a few days sooner than Sandra and get things done.
If he had known that he would never see her again––never even talk to her again––he would have done things differently. But he didn’t know. He figured he’d enjoy a few days on his own and life would continue on, just like before.
He was wrong.
Dan approached this thing he had uncovered beneath the carpet, still rubbing his chin.
It was a door, a trapdoor in the floor.
Its size: two and a half feet by two and a half feet, give or take a few inches. Looked like that famous cellar door in the Evil Dead movies, without the medieval chains strapping it down. It had a small hole you could slide fingers into, which seemed to be the handle. The hinges were rusted brown and the unstained wood was faded, knotted, and looked almost grey in color.
Dan put his fingers into the slot and pulled.
The door was heavier than it looked so Dan repositioned himself into a sturdier pose and tried his luck again, putting more muscle into it this time. The door unlatched. He opened it slowly. Hinges screeched and squeaked. A dull metal casing was exposed and a nasty, stale odor crept into the room. Once the door was at a ninety-degree angle, a dark hole in the floor came into Dan’s line of vision; it looked like an open throat in the earth.
Muscles straining, Dan grunted, but the hard part was over. He let go of the handle and stepped back. Gravity pulled the door the other way and the trapdoor stopped in the air with a CLINK.
He wondered why.
Walking around the opening he found his answer: there was a chain. It connected the door to the floor. The chain was old, rusted and thick––not quite medieval, but still fifty years past its prime. It had big one-inch loops and seemed perfectly suited to chain Cujo to his doghouse.
Daniel looked down the dark hole, somewhat amazed. There was a ladder attached to one of the four walls. A dusty light switch sat next to it.
Pit, he thought. Is that what this is? A pit? Why is there a pit in my basement? And what’s down there? Anything good? Anything valuable?
Dan smiled.
Valuable. He liked the sound of that.
Crouching down, he flicked the light switch on.
Nothing happened.
He tried again.
Still, nothing happened.
After walking around the opening several times, Dan thought about the cottage. He figured it to be a hundred and some odd years old. What if the previous owners were hiding treasures? Or what if the previous owners didn’t even know the pit was there, and the items in the cellar (assuming there were items in the cellar) were not worth a few hundred bucks, or few thousand, but a few million? Was it possible? Could he be standing at the brink of incredible fortune?
Dan’s eyes narrowed.
Sure it was possible. Anything was possible. Building a dream house with Popsicle sticks was possible, but was it likely? Was the cellar loaded with gold and silver artifacts from Kings and Queens a hundred years dead? No, of course not. Not here. Not in Cloven Rock. The basement was probably filled with rats, dirt, spiders, and dust… and a large bucket filled to the brim with sweet fuck all.
Still, the pit was an interesting find.
An interesting find indeed.
2
Dan headed upstairs with his mind racing. He entered the kitchen and snagged a beer from the fridge. The ice-cold Corona was delicious, even without the taste of lime. He drank half the bottle and washed his hands and face in the kitchen sink. Being so dirty, he needed to do more. He needed a long shower and a wardrobe change but technically he wasn’t finished working. The sub-floor was only half pulled up, rolls of carpet were leaning in the corner near the staircase, and he hadn’t even begun yanking the ceiling down. All said, he was only half finished today’s job. Still, the work portion of the day seemed to have ended, or if nothing else, put on hold.
He kept thinking about the pit.
What was down there?
Dan threw on an old and faded t-shirt, one of his favorites. He thought it was cool looking and it fit like a glove. The shirt had a drawing of a demon with its wings spread wide and it said BLACK SABBATH in long gothic letters. In a smaller font near the bottom of the shirt, below the demon’s evil grin, it said 666 - HEAVEN & HELL. It was a throwback item, a reminder of a time in his life when he didn’t care about insurance policies, the stock exchange, real estate, investment funds, and all the other things that helped him turn his quarters into dollars, his assets into prosperity, and his wealth into his own personally restricted freedom.
He stepped outside with his Corona in hand, gazing into the sky. The heat from the sun was beginning to ease and the wind was blowing mildly. Looking at his watch, he contemplated his next move.
It was a little after four-thirty
. He was hungry and would soon need food. But that wasn’t a concern, not yet anyhow. Up until this point the plan was this: finish gutting the basement and go into town for dinner. But was that still the plan, or had things changed? His predicament was simple yet he didn’t know what to do.
Dan walked across the gravel driveway and opened the garage door. Sunlight entered the space. He spotted a flashlight sitting on his workbench and couldn’t help thinking it was just what he needed.
As he picked it off the bench, something else caught his attention: a kerosene lantern. It was old, red, and slightly rusty. He wondered if it would come in handy.
Sure, he thought. Might as well grab it, just in case.
He lifted the lantern from a hook on the wall and shook it back and forth. Kerosene swished inside; the lantern seemed about half full.
“Good enough,” he whispered.
He finished his beer and sat the bottle on a bench. He left the garage with the flashlight in one hand and the lantern in the other. Once he was in the kitchen he clicked the flashlight on and off, insuring that it worked. He opened the fridge, snagged another beer, cracked it, and drank. A moment later he lit the lantern with a wooden match. At first the lantern didn’t work; the wick was dry and stubborn. But after a bit of fiddling and manual persuasion the lantern worked just fine.
Terror Town Page 2
