Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  “What the hell are you saying?” Genevieve asked, and Anna flinched from the jagged tone of rage in her voice. “What were you thinking? You just went in there, by yourself, without a word to anyone? You didn’t—you don’t know if the guy’s a psycho or what, but you know there’s all kinds of shit wrong with the house, and you just walk in? What if you hadn’t come back? They could be cutting you into tiny pieces and serving you for hors d’oeuvres right now.”

  “They didn’t. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Something’s fucked here, something isn’t right.” Genevieve’s eyes were wide, her face pale in the dim room—almost panicky, Anna thought. “Aren’t you the one worried somebody’s going to get hurt all the time? What about us, huh—we’re worried, too!”

  “Mona’s got something that can help Karyn. That’s all that matters.”

  Genevieve shook her head. “You want to—to what? Take Karyn back there? Form some kind of alliance?”

  “No,” Anna said. She surveyed Gen’s face, then Nail’s. “I’m not getting Karyn near those people. I’m going to steal those toothpicks.”

  Chapter 21

  The street was dark, and it looked to Anna as though more of the streetlights had died even since the night before. All things considered, that was probably good. She looked down the street from the corner where it intersected with Ash, willing the Gorow place to become clear in the murk. It remained stubbornly hidden in a pocket of darkness.

  She looked at Genevieve. The other woman’s face was a sickly orange-yellow under the last streetlight for two hundred yards, and she was pushing at the stud in her bottom lip with her tongue.

  “You okay with this?” Anna asked. “I could go in alone.”

  “You’re not going in there alone.”

  Anna just nodded. The argument had been bitter back at the school—Nail had insisted that he be the one to go, and Genevieve had done the same, and it just wasn’t possible to take both. Not with Van Horn there. Genevieve had insisted, with fervor that bordered on panic, that Anna wasn’t going in without some occult support, period. After about an eternity of bickering, Nail had grudgingly conceded the point. Anna had taken more convincing, but she’d finally given in. Gen didn’t look so good, though, and that made Anna nervous.

  “If you’re gonna puke or something, you might want to sit this one out.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes! Jesus!”

  She let it drop and turned back to the street. There were a couple of ways she could go here, she thought, as she tallied up what she knew about the house. Yeah, there was an ADT sign out front, but that didn’t worry her much. There were a million ways around an alarm, for one thing. Probably more important, most people didn’t set their alarms when they were actually in the house. There was also the fact that nobody had paid the electric bill for some time, and the batteries wouldn’t have lasted forever. And last, what if it did go off? That might even be useful. Get everybody running one way while she and Gen went the other. Odds were good they didn’t have it police-monitored, and even if they did, again, so what? It might not be a bad thing for some cops to show up here. An odd thought struck her—what if she just called them? Tell them she heard a domestic disturbance or a gunshot. See what they flushed out.

  Yeah, and maybe get some cops killed. They got no idea what’s in there.

  Okay, so that hadn’t been one of her better ideas. What else did she know? Well, there was the alley approach. The problem there was that the alley saw more traffic than the street, and she didn’t want to get stuck back there.

  No, the right thing to do was something she’d never even contemplate at a normal place—go at it from the front. It was an utterly ludicrous, risky approach that would practically guarantee her getting caught on any street where the inhabitants didn’t seal themselves in their houses after nightfall. Here, she thought the chance of anyone seeing was slim, and the chance of them doing something about it if they did essentially nonexistent. She thought there was an approach that would keep her and Gen out of sight of the windows, for the most part, and she could even see how she’d get in—up the trellis, over the fence, and in through any window she could find. Cake.

  Nonetheless, her feet stayed planted right where they were. She checked down the street, thinking maybe she’d catch sight of someone before she committed herself to anything. No such luck. She wondered if she ought to head down the alley anyway, get a more thorough look at the other side of the house. There might be something better from that angle.

  She was stalling, she realized.

  Come on. This is what I do. She had actually lost track of the number of places she’d broken into. Big houses, little houses, apartments, movie studios, toolsheds, machine shops, museums, department stores, boutiques, gas stations, restaurants—too many to remember. When she was younger, she’d done it for kicks sometimes, between jobs, just to see if she could. Karyn had given her a hard time for taking extra risk, to which she’d always replied, “Thanks, Mom,” and gone right back to it. Compared to the usual business they got up to, taking a stroll through somebody’s living room while the owner was out wasn’t shit. No risk at all. The thrill had worn off, she supposed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d rifled through a nightstand or a desk to see what it said about the owner.

  Still stalling. Just move!

  She squeezed Genevieve’s hand, gave her a thin smile, and crossed into the neighborhood. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up as she imagined all the eyes of the neighborhood turning to her, but nothing moved. Locusts crunched underfoot, sending up the stink of decay.

  Anna and Genevieve passed in front of one house, then two, then a third. Nobody looked out the windows. Nobody opened a door to ask them if they were lost, or what they were doing here. Anna looked over her shoulder. Behind, the light across the street seemed dimmer, the receding exit of an endless tunnel.

  A squirrel dashed through one of the lawns, sending up a sound of dry rustling among the small insect corpses. Genevieve jumped.

  Anna sped up. Walking quickly now, too fast to pass for nonchalant, Genevieve almost jogging to keep up.

  The house came into view. Dark, as always. Windows curtained and impenetrable.

  Anna stopped in front of the next house over. The approach would be simple from here. The fence on the Gorow property blocked most of the ground-floor windows on the east side of the house, save one, and the curtains were pulled shut there. She led Genevieve up almost to the front door of the house on this lot and moved west, watching that single window. Once she reached the property, she hugged the fence—now she was hidden from view from the second-story windows as well. She didn’t feel hidden, though, and she had to fight an urge to stop, look around the neighborhood, and see if anyone was watching. This spot was incredibly exposed, the whole approach the antithesis to her m.o. Nonetheless, she didn’t slow. Once you were committed, second-guessing yourself was a good way to screw up.

  She gestured to Genevieve, who followed quickly, also keeping pressed to the fence. Don’t panic, she thought, willing the words to reach the other woman. Just keep coming.

  Genevieve reached her, and she set off again, this time with Gen close behind. They got to the house without any sirens going off, or anybody shooting at them, or the house opening up to vomit bat-winged horrors at them. This time, back pressed against the stucco, Anna did take a moment to check the neighborhood. As before, nothing gave any indication that there was human life on this street.

  “Sit tight a sec,” she whispered.

  Anna ducked under the window and went around to the front corner of the house. The vines weaving their way through the trellis were dead and withered, their leaves fallen to the ground. Easier climbing. She hung on to one of the crosswise pieces of wood and slowly gave it her full weight. Steady. She checked the top, remapping her route. From here, it would be a quick climb up, drop over the fence, and they could get in through the gro
und-floor windows in back. Should be no problem, if nobody was around.

  So quit thinking about it.

  She hauled herself up the trellis. Once the top of the fence was about waist-high, she leaned over and braced her hands on the top. Then she swung her body over and balanced there, one leg over the side and braced against the fence’s support pole.

  There wasn’t much to see in back. A swimming pool took up a third of the yard, as expected, and most of the rest was concrete and tile. A low flickering candlelight briefly lit up the window above her, but the bottom windows remained dark.

  Perched on top of the fence, she gestured to Genevieve.

  After a pause that seemed unduly long, Genevieve came over and started up the trellis.

  Was I that loud? Anna wondered.

  Once Genevieve got to the top, Anna helped her over, and the two of them dropped down to the other side of the fence.

  Anna pointed to the window. “Anything?”

  Genevieve took a white grease pencil from her backpack and drew a bunch of symbols on the window, a couple in each corner. There was some mumbling, and then she shrugged. “Don’t think so.”

  Anna listened for noises or voices coming through the window. When she heard nothing, she got the glass cutter from her pocket. She traced a quick, erratic circle with the cutter. There was no guaranteed quiet way to do this next part, at least not with the tools she’d thought to bring. She hit the glass with the fleshy part of her fist. The piece popped loose, fell inside, fluttering the curtains, and landed softly on a fold of excess curtain. Lucky. She’d half expected it to smash on the floor—probably not too loud, but still not good.

  With the hole there, it was easy to reach through and open the latch. Once that was done, she opened the window, holding her breath for the shriek of an alarm.

  Nothing.

  She grabbed the top of the bottom window frame through the hole and pulled. It stuck, then abruptly jerked free. She felt a sudden bite as the edge of the hole in the glass cut the back of her hand, but at least the window was open. She pushed it the rest of the way open. Then she slipped inside.

  Once she extricated herself from the curtains, she pulled them aside to get a good look at the room. The moonlight coming in through the window at least sketched the outlines of objects in the room—a set of chairs, a bulky black rectangle that was probably a dresser or cabinet of some kind, stacks of books, and, closer to the window, a pile of thick magazines that had to be the inevitable collection of hundreds or thousands of National Geographics. The air was thick with a musty unused smell, like an attic, underlaid with a wet, mildewy odor that made Anna wonder if water wasn’t leaking in somewhere. It wasn’t too different from most of the other residences she’d broken into, either for exploratory or business purposes. Just a room for storage of excess, useless shit.

  Genevieve crawled through the window behind her, sounding like somebody kicking a box full of wrenches down a flight of stairs.

  That’s not fair, Anna thought—but Christ, the woman was loud. This wasn’t her thing, Anna had to remember. Probably another good reason she shouldn’t be here, but it was too late to worry about that now.

  The walls of the room were too far away to see in the dimness. Anna walked through the piles of stuff, looking for anything that might be a door or a hatch, wishing that the moonlight were stronger or that there was a damn streetlight outside. God knew what she might run into up here. She imagined knocking over a crate of wineglasses or something like that. Even better than a straight-up alarm to get everybody running. She had a pair of Nail’s thermal-imaging goggles in her satchel, but everything in here was likely the same temperature, at least as far as the goggle resolution was concerned. Not to mention they wrecked her peripheral vision.

  “Stay close,” she murmured. Not really necessary, given that Genevieve had practically glued herself to Anna’s ass, but it couldn’t hurt.

  At the back end of the room, they found the door. She listened at it, heard nothing, and tried the knob.

  The stink hit her in the face, and she reflexively brought up a hand to cover her face. It didn’t help. The stench was so bad that even breathing through her mouth didn’t make a dent. It was overpowering, gut-churning, like the worst public outhouse she’d ever been in, only this wasn’t human waste. At least, not in the usual sense. It was meat, rotting meat, the smell so bad she could imagine hundreds of pounds, a whole side of beef, slick with gray-green slime, coated in flies, teeming with maggots.

  It was a human body. It had to be. What else?

  She opened the door wide and stared into the blackness. She couldn’t see a thing in there, not even vague outlines. Maybe her eyes hadn’t yet adjusted, but it wasn’t as though the moon had blazed down like a spotlight in the last room. She waited, hoping she was wrong. After a minute or more, the room had become no clearer. She couldn’t even tell how big it was. She imagined floundering through the room, feeling along the walls for a door, and stepping in the still-wet remains of a person. Or worse, pushing her questing hand into a hanging corpse. Why hanging? Why would they be hanging?

  She got out the goggles and tried them. Nothing but a black wash with vague suggestions of lines in it, devoid of context or sense. Back into the backpack with them.

  Fuck this. I need a light.

  “Come on,” she whispered. She pulled Genevieve into the room and pushed the door shut. “I’m going to turn on my flashlight.”

  “Okay.”

  She put her tiny key chain flashlight in her closed left fist and switched it on. Red light bloomed between her fingers, and her breath froze in her chest as she waited for somebody to shout.

  Nobody did, but while she waited, her eyes began to adjust. The edges and planes of the room acquired a soft definition. She was glad she hadn’t moved far from the door, since this room appeared to be just as much a mess as the previous one. She loosened her fist and let more light into the room. This room was twice as big as the last, and, as near as Anna could tell, done up in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Old. Massive dark trim along the edges of the walls and ceilings, dark wood cabinets—wainscoting, for Christ’s sake. A black rectangle blocked out a swath of the far wall. A painting, Anna guessed, probably of some foreboding old white dude with ridiculous facial hair. Boxes of useless shit were stacked in ragged rows between Anna and the door. She shone the light over them. A stack of LPs with some archaic fare by Peter, Paul and Mary on the top. A box of plates in varied pastel shades. She walked forward and found an aquarium full of animal skulls. Something moved, a spider or cockroach skittering back into the depths of an eye socket.

  “Fuck me,” Genevieve said. Anna nodded.

  At the door, Anna stopped again, trying to ignore the nagging sense that, at this rate, it would take days to get through the house. They’d have to find a place to hole up and sleep during the day. The thought made her queasy.

  She killed the light. No sound through the door, no light leaking around the edges. One more time with the goggles.

  She listened one more time. Hearing nothing but Genevieve’s breathing, she opened the door.

  Another pitch-dark room. The goggles would have told her if there was anybody here, would have lit up with their body heat, but again there was nothing. The faint click of the door latch echoed, suggesting a big space.

  She took a step and put her foot on something rough and slick. It squished. Carpet, she thought from the texture—a relief. But it was covered in something. Blood, rot, some gruesome bodily fluid she didn’t want to think about. She stared down, willing the scene to become clear. Nothing.

  Goggles off, light on.

  She was right—it was a big room. A big room with a staircase running up against the far wall, and in front of that—

  “Christ,” she muttered.

  “Tell me those aren’t bodies,” Genevieve whispered.

  What else could they be? Oblong shapes lay scattered at the base of the stairs, a dozen or more, all the right size
.

  “What happened?” Genevieve asked.

  “How should I know?” But they had to go up, so it was either keep fumbling through the house to find another staircase, or pick through the corpses. And besides, it would be a good idea to get a closer look, as much as she hated it. See if there was some indication of what had happened here.

  Anna took a step forward and Genevieve grabbed her shoulder. “What the hell is going on here?” Gen asked.

  “I told you, I don’t know. Let’s just get what we came for and get out, okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  They crossed the room slowly, more slowly than was warranted, Anna felt, but she couldn’t make herself go any faster. The darkness, usually her ally, now seemed to hide glaring, hateful eyes on all sides, and she felt funneled, pushed down a narrow tunnel of light toward the pile of bodies. She wanted to look away, wanted to keep scoping out the surroundings, keep watching for enemies. It was impossible. The light stayed fixed on the corpses.

  One on the end caught her eye, something seeming suddenly familiar about it. She tried to ignore the feeling, but her eye kept coming back to it. What was . . .

  “Blond dreadlocks,” she whispered. “Remember him?”

  “Yeah,” Genevieve said. “From Mendelsohn’s cult.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They reached the body, and now Anna had no doubt. She’d seen this man before, right at the beginning of Sobell’s first job. Oddly, she remembered him shopping for groceries. Pushing a cart back to a big SUV with some other guys, laughing as they loaded the back. Like they were in a college fraternity instead of a liar’s cult. Now he was lying on his side, dreadlocks draped across one outstretched arm. A small hole in his throat and a large one in the side of his face. Entry and exit wound, Anna thought, as she tried not to gag. He’d been here awhile. His skin had gone gray, and an erratic line of what looked like blue mold crept down from his hairline.