The Girl in the Attic

by Ed Gorman

  Low-hanging elm leaves made shadowy patterns on the silent street. Down at the corner a stop light flashed yellow. The cars parked at the curb looked like weary beasts.

  Even through his rubber-soled shoes, Hanratty could feel the day's heat still trapped in the pavement. He flipped his cigarette into the gutter.

  A gray tabby cat moved sullenly out of his way as Hanratty entered the alley behind the hotel.

  Above a two-story warehouse, the full moon hung round and cloud-wisped, casting deep shadows between the trash cans and the stoops.

  When he got to the hotel, Hanratty paused, looking up at it. No glow came from the attic floor, nor any screams. He wondered, as he wondered several times a day, almost like a priest with nagging doubts about his faith, if this were all real . . . if he truly believed Carlotta's story.

  He thought of the tapes he'd heard. Then he shrugged and went over to the back door of the hotel.

  He took the silver key out of his pocket and let himself in.

  2

  Bethel had the phone cradled between jaw and shoulder while her fingers nimbly painted the plump toes of her right foot.

  "All I'm saying," she told her best friend Judy, who had just finished with her last john for the night, "is that things might change for me." She sounded coy, as if she might know the secret of immortality but would rather not reveal it.

  "Well, some friend you are," Judy said.

  Bethel liked to irritate Judy—to make her jealous to make her angry. She did that with her wigs. Judy's wigs looked like shit, like wet dead animals draped over her Polish head. In contrast, Bethel's seemed natural and snug.

  "Let's just say that if I told you, I'd be getting myself in some deep trouble."

  As she spoke, she looked at the plain white number ten envelope that One Eye had left behind. It had four crisp one-hundred-dollar bills inside.

  Given what he'd told her, there would soon be many more where those had come from.

  Many more.

  "I'd better go now," Bethel said. She'd fulfilled her mission—to stir Judy up, to let Judy know that, as usual, Bethel was one step ahead of her.

  "You really not goin' to tell me, hon?"

  " 'Fraid I can't, hon," Bethel said, and hung up. Judy always called her "hon," and Bethel hated that.

  She stared at the envelope again.

  Then she thought of where One Eye would be—probably in the hotel right now, working his way up to the attic, where he said he'd be able to find everything . . .

  Everything that was going to make each of them very wealthy . . .

  3

  Hanratty had just reached the door leading to the attic when he heard the scream.

  Two things registered immediately: that the door (which Carlotta had told him would be closed) stood open, and that the scream died suddenly, as if the victim had just been knocked unconscious.

  He had to fight an impulse to stand still and try to gather himself. He'd planned on sneaking into and out of the hotel without anybody knowing he was here. Then—

  The scream again.

  He stood at the bottom of steps made silver with moonlight. Dust and cobwebs caused him to sneeze; he possessed troublesome allergies.

  He put a hand on the railing and started the long climb up, holding his flashlight like a club. God only knew what he was going to find up here.

  He started up.

  Halfway there, he saw the trail of darkness that dripped down the steps as if it were water over a fall.

  He had no doubt about what it was.

  He gulped, then continued on up.

  He wasn't sure when he first heard the crying. It was so quiet that at first he couldn't tell what it was at all.

  The steps creaked beneath him. The handrail gave him a sliver. The liquid dropping from to step began to drip like a leaky faucet.

  By the time he reached the top of the steps, he recognized the crying for what it was.

  He glanced around. At first everything looked fine. What with the dress forms and the big trunks and the stacks of cardboard boxes, the attic resembled any other attic.

  Then he saw where the moonlight fell through the skylight into a circle on the dusty wooden floor.

  And he saw the pieces of flesh that, if put back together, would have been a man.

  A head, ragged and bloody where neck had been cleaved from shoulders, sat a few feet from the torso. The man had had only one good eye. It stared at Hanratty now.

  Near Hanratty's foot was a hand. It lay palm up, fingers clawing the air.

  Then Hanratty stared at the torso itself: there was an ax buried deep in the chest.

  It was then that the young girl walked from the shadows into the circle of moonlight.

  She wore a t-shirt and panties, as if she'd just been wakened from her bed. He recognized her as the daughter of the woman who'd checked in this afternoon.

  Without a word, without even seeming to be aware of him, the girl went over to the torso, bent over, and tried to pull the ax free from the chest cavity.

  She had to use all her strength to pull it, wiping at her sweaty face with bloody hands.

  But it wasn't only her hands that were bloody.

  She looked as if she'd just spent a day working in a slaughter house. Blood was splattered everywhere—over her face, her arms, her legs. One part of her Maroon 5 t-shirt was soaked with blood.

  All Hanratty could do was watch.

  She took the ax and hurled it into the shadows outside the circle of light.

  Then she went over to the edge of the circle where an old-fashioned stand-up phone stood and picked up the receiver.

  He heard her mutter something—it was more of a whisper, really—and she was just starting to cry again when Hanratty heard feet pounding up the stairs.

  "Jamie! Jamie!" cried a woman hysterically.

  There were two of them. The girl's mother and Carleton Edmonds, the owner of the hotel.

  When they reached the top of the steps, they did what Hanratty had done: looked eastward instead of westward.

  Then they saw the carnage and Jamie holding the phone with her bloody hands.

  Even in the gloom, the madness in Jamie's blood-streaked face was easy to see.

  Edmonds caught Sally just as she started to faint.

  TUESDAY

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1

  There were the smells of bacon and eggs and strawberry jam and freshly made toast. Sally knew she was supposed to eat it, but somehow she couldn't.

  On her left hip was a pinprick of pain where something had been done to her, she couldn't remember exactly what.

  She knew that she'd screamed until her throat hurt.

  That was when they gave her the injection. There were the smells of bacon and eggs and strawberry jam and freshly made toast . . .

  And even if her stomach hadn't tightened at the prospect of these things, Sally still wouldn't have had the strength to reach up for them to the woman who held them out somewhere in the misty area above the bed in which Sally lay . . .

  2

  "I assume a man like yourself is familiar with the laws against breaking and entering."

  During his stay in Haversham, Hanratty had seen Police Chief Kenneth Stevens many times. With his tanned face and gray crew cut and PIONEER SEED cap, he might easily have been mistaken for one of the farmers in the area. He even had some snuff stuck down between his lip and jaw. The snuff made him seem older than his forty-some-odd years. Now, sitting in Stevens' office, Hanratty noticed something else—the degrees on the wall, including a Masters from the State University in criminology. The degrees looked slightly out of place in a room that resembled a museum set arranged to give the impression of a lawman's office in 1900, complete with a county map covering one wall, a roll top desk, and a moose head jutting out from a place next to the window.

  "Mr. Hanratty?"

  "I'm sorry. What did you say? I guess I'm a little tired after last night."

  Hanra
tty wasn't exaggerating not only had he not had any sleep, he was still unnerved by what he'd seen. He'd been in Iraq; he'd covered some of the early skirmishes in El Salvador, where government troops and insurgents alike had seemed to be possessed by demons; but he'd never seen anything quite like last night.

  Especially when you considered that it had all been committed by a thirteen-year-old girl.

  "I asked if you were familiar with the laws against breaking and entering."

  "I am."

  "Then you realize I could arrest you."

  "Yes."

  Stevens sat behind his desk, framed by miniatures of the state flag and the national flag. He might be corny, Hanratty thought, but he was anything but stupid.

  "Let me ask you a personal question."

  "All right," Hanratty said.

  "If I did arrest you for breaking and entering, then Judge Needham would likely set bail at five thousand dollars. Could you raise that kind of money?"

  Hanratty knew better than to make himself vulnerable. "Probably."

  Stevens stared at him. "Why is it I don't believe you, Mr. Hanratty?"

  "I don't know."

  "Maybe it's because of the rooming house you're living in."

  "It's all right there."

  "It may be all right there, Mr. Hanratty, but it's damned unlikely that a man who could raise five thousand dollars bail money—or even ten per cent of it, for that matter—would choose to live in a place like that."

  "I guess I see what you mean."

  Wryly, Stevens said, "That's very astute of you, Mr. Hanratty." He leaned forward over his desk. "Now, Mr. Hanratty, I want you to tell me just exactly what the hell you were doing in that hotel last night."

  Hanratty started to speak.

  Stevens raised his hand for silence. "And if I'm not satisfied with what you tell me, Mr. Hanratty, then I'm going to charge you with breaking and entering for sure, and I'm going to tell Judge Needham—who's just about the crabbiest son of a bitch I've ever known—that you're a wild-eyed, dangerous criminal, and he's going to set bond at fifty thousand dollars. Then, Mr. Hanratty, then, as you well know, you can kiss your ass goodbye."

  Hanratty decided now would be a wonderful time to start telling the lawman everything he knew. And fast.

  3

  The smells were back: bacon, eggs, strawberry jam, toast.

  This time, she was able to sit up, even to reach out; even to take the fork and put a bite of fluffy golden scrambled egg between her lips.

  Then her mind flashed back to last night and Jamie.

  She let the breakfast plate clatter to the floor. She started screaming.

  The nurse ran out the door desperately in search of a doctor.

  The screaming only got worse.

  4

  Haversham was the county seat, and as such, it had the biggest hospital in the area. There was even talk that within five years, open-heart surgery would be performed here, quite a feat for a rural mid-western hospital to which kidney stones were still a big deal. Manning General had another distinction. To the casual eye, the four-story place looked ordinary enough, except for the top floor. There, thick black steel bars were on the windows, and just beneath these were grates of iron mesh.

  Here were the mentally ill. Given the drugs now available, and the easy access most people had to therapists, fewer required hospitalization for mental problems these days (except for addictions of various types); so those on the fourth floor got, and deserved, the reputation of being the most violent sort . . . those who really needed hospitalization.

  Past the iron meshing, down a sterile green corridor, around a corner the nursing station lay.

  In a room scarcely a hundred feet away, where a large section of one-way glass looked in on a much bigger room, stood a twenty-eight-year-old doctor and a twenty-four-year-old nurse.

  They were making out . . . and not in any casual way, either.

  To look at them—the way their hands slid over each other's bodies; the way their hips ground; the way he seemed to be trying to jam his tongue down her throat—you'd have thought that neither of them had had an orgasm for maybe six or seven months. The facts were just the opposite. They'd just had several hours of prolonged passion the night before she'd had fourteen orgasms (that she'd known of, anyway), and he'd had six: on the couch, floor, bed, shower wall, and veranda of his apartment.

  The doctor's name was Hector Gonzalez. He was from Chicago, but he hadn't done especially well with his boards, so he was interning here in the boondocks. Gonzalez didn't lack for brains, but for gumption. As a friend of his had once put it, Hector hadn't majored in medicine; he'd majored in bodies.

  The woman's name was Brenda Carlyle, and she wasn't a nurse—not exactly. She was a nurse's aide, thanks to a two-year degree she'd gotten from the local community hospital. But because she came from a family that had never had a college graduate, her kin called her a nurse anyway, and anybody who didn't like it could go to blazes. Brenda, who was very much in love with Dr. Gonzalez, had only one problem: her fiancé, Kevin Olsen. Kevin had been fine until the good doctor had introduced her to a nice, comfortable, middle-class existence of reading books, and going to respectable movies—ones that didn't star Jason Statham or Matt Damon—and whispering pleasantries in her ear while they made love (instead of pleading, as Kevin did, "C'mon Brenda, lemme put it in your ass").

  She was fucking gaga over the guy, even if her dad did call him a "spic" and her mother wondered if Brenda could get fat the way Mexican girls seemed to just by hanging around with a Mexican.

  Her thoughts were interrupted when Brenda opened her eyes and peeked over Dr. Gonzalez's shoulder into the one-way mirror.

  On the other side sat Jamie Baines, the girl the police had brought in early this morning, the girl who had chopped One Eye apart with an ax.

  Brenda pushed away from Gonzalez and said, "Hector! Look!"

  Stunned out of his lust, paralyzed for a moment, all Gonzalez could do was stare at the young girl on the other side of the glass: she stood next to her bed, ripping up sheets with a strength and ferocity that Gonzalez knew he himself could never duplicate.

  While they'd been making out, supposedly observing the girl (Gonzalez was damn good at psychology, so the hospital administrator had put him in charge of Jamie Baines), she'd been destroying her hospital room. Everything was a shambles.

  "I've got to get in there," Gonzalez said. He was six-two, swarthy, handsome in a way that neither made women distrust him nor men resent him, and occasionally quite capable of excellent medicine.

  He ran out of the observation room and down the hall to Jamie's room.

  He opened the door carefully.

  He'd gotten it open just far enough to stick his head inside when she hit him head-on with the pink flower vase.

  It was a dangerous business. At the least you could get cut. At the worst, you could get a concussion.

  He was fortunate: he just got cut.

  "Jamie," he said, "Jamie, I need to talk to you." He put a thin hand to his head to push some of the blood from his eye. He already had a headache.

  He pushed the door open further, and went in. Now she cowered in the corner of the white room. He could see that she'd urinated all over herself. Her blue eyes managed to be both wild and empty.

  "Do you remember me? Dr. Gonzalez? We talked this morning."

  Jamie looked up at him and said, "She's my friend."

  "Who's your friend?"

  "You know."

  "No, I don't."

  "She didn't like One Eye."

  "Who didn't like One Eye?"

  "My friend."

  "Who's your friend?"

  Then Jamie fell silent.

  Gonzalez went over and sat on the edge of the bed. He could smell that Jamie had had a bowel movement on the sheets sometime recently.

  He looked down at her, and a terrible, helpless pity overcame him. From his days in the barrio, he remembered youngsters like this—one
s who couldn't stand up to the pressures of existence and simply flipped out. There were different ways of doing it. You put an ice pick in your brutal father's forehead while he slept; or you got your older brother's zip gun and shot dead the bully who called you "fatty" or "faggot" or "spic"; or first you did one of those things and then you withdrew, utterly.

  Ever beyond reach of another human mind again.

  As he looked down at Jamie, he knew that that was what she was doing now: withdrawing, possibly forever.

  "Jamie," he urged, wondering what horrible series of events had pushed her to do what she'd done to One Eye last night.

  Perhaps nobody would ever know.

  "Jamie," he said again.

  Then he heard quiet crying. He looked up and saw the pretty face of Brenda Carlyle, her red curls contrasted with her white uniform, standing in the doorway. "God, I feel so sorry for her," Brenda said.

  5

  After the sedative had been administered, Gonzalez looked down at the attractive woman and asked, "Do you remember me?"

  She just stared at him.

  "I'm Dr. Gonzalez. We spoke earlier this morning."

  Still there was no recognition in the woman's eyes.

  "I want to help you," he said.

  Still there was nothing.

  He pulled a green plastic chair up next to the bed and sat down.

  He looked out at the cloudless blue sky. During the past seven months here he'd meant to find out where the fishing was good. In one of the drab little Chamber of Commerce brochures about Haversham he'd read of Fenton Lake. He planned to go there on such a day as this. But it would have to wait.

  "I need to ask you some questions about your daughter."

  For the first time, a dim semblance of recognition shone in the woman's lovely brown eyes, eyes made even darker by the pale flesh of her face. Ordinarily, she would look like a high-fashion model just past her prime. Now she resembled a beautiful woman whom death was calling.