“You have everything I want,” he replied, and with bone-grinding strides, he advanced on her.
***
Myrinda’s mother had told her once that animals were not safe to touch when they were feeding. When she had asked her mother why, the reply had been that they didn’t like being caught off guard, for one. More importantly, they didn’t like anyone potentially threatening their food source. Myrinda found this to be true in an ornery cat named Socks she’d once rescued from a shelter. The cat wouldn’t come to her, would swat at her if she tried to pet it, and chewed holes through just about everything not made of metal. They were quirks Myrinda found tolerable if not vaguely endearing. But when it came to feedings, Socks would hunker over his food dish with the desperate, protective air of a starved prisoner. If startled while eating, he’d look up with his lip raised in a fanged snarl, his eyes narrowed to concentrated points of hate. If touched—Myrinda had learned this the hard way—he’d emit this crazed yowl, his fur spiked to make him look meaner. He’d bite and claw in a fury that genuinely seemed reactionary rather than driven by spite. That cat had died suddenly, the vet attributing it to expansion and subsequent rupturing in his stomach. Whether that was brought on by a tumor in his gut or poisoned food from the crazy asshole who’d lived next door, Myrinda couldn’t say. But she couldn’t help remembering all those meals Socks had so possessively defended, as if his stomach ruled him. In the end, it hadn’t been enough.
Myrinda had seen that look in people in the years that followed—not often, but she had seen it from time to time. The type of hunger itself varied, but she had come to find that behind it was invariably the fear of some kind of loss. If she were to be honest, she supposed a part of her could understand that fear, and the backlash of violent desperation that drove people to protect and hold onto that which they were most afraid of losing.
She never would have expected to see that look on the face of Aggie Roesler, but that’s how Myrinda found the old woman late that next morning, crouched against the cement walls in a corner formed by two perpendicular dryers in the basement laundry facilities. The floral housecoat she wore was torn at one shoulder, with dark smears like haphazardly dragged fingerprints streaking toward her breast. She wore only one slipper, its fuzziness matted and specked with flecks of dark brown. Her fingernails were torn and dirty, the cuticle beds crusted with more of the dark substance. It wasn’t quite the right color for blood, but it was close. Myrinda couldn’t see any injuries to account for blood, either, which wasn’t much of a relief; she had obviously been badly hurt; no visible external injuries could mean Aggie was injured worse than she looked.
Aside from a lock drenched in a thick, congealed glop of the dark-colored substance and plastered to Aggie’s forehead, soft wisps of her hair floated away from her scalp, forming a soft halo in the slant of sun that came in through a high window above the dryer. Wide eyed and clutching her trembling roundness with tensed arms, she mumbled and hummed to herself, occasionally trailing off and shaking her head violently as if expelling thoughts or images uncomfortably lodged there. The deliberateness of her low-spoken syllables, though, suggested a mantra, their repetition either to help her remember or to convince herself of something. She looked very much like a woman trying to hold on to the last of something.
Myrinda approached her with light, cautious steps “Oh my God, Aggie, are you okay? What happened?” Crouching beside her, Myrinda gently touched her arm. Aggie flinched as if she had been pinched, the murmured syllables snapping off. She closed her eyes and shook her head.
“It’s okay,” Myrinda told her. “Shhh, it’s okay. Aggie, I’m here. Everything’s okay. Can you tell me what happened?”
“It’s a wound,” Aggie said, her voice trembling on the edge between fear and hysterical giggling. She repeated herself, pronouncing “wound” as a two-syllable word—“wooo-nnnd.” Her eyes seemed to wink out, gazing beyond the space over Myrinda’s shoulder.
“Where? A wound? Are you hurt? I don’t—”
Aggie gave an impatient shake of the head, waving off the younger woman. “A wound that bleeds over—bleeds up from the ground. If you were to find the place, the exact spot, and put your hand through, it would come out on the other side, in another world, an alternate herespace which is really nothing like here at all. In the other world, idiot gods rule, and insanity is the norm. There’s no sense or symmetry or logic or physics—to them, over there, our unarguable rules are the stuff of wild dreams. To them, life is chaos, indifference to responsibility, to rhyme or reason.”
“To who? Who are you talking about?”
Aggie leaned in closer, a darting glance sweeping the otherwise empty laundry room. “You’re a good girl. Good girl. You need to know. I—I can see them. I can. I didn’t want to say, but I see them because they really exist. They, who come from there, who reach through with their slippery, slender bodies, oozing up from the wound. Their lunacy pollutes. It gets in the air we breathe, the water we drink and bathe in and wash our hair in and wash our clothes with and brew tea with...everywhere, everywhere. It gets inside, that other alien place, and the alien things that breathe and writhe and slither through. It poisons us. It sickens us. And the sickness is contagious.”
Her voice had dropped to a low and lilting spillover of words that conveyed an urgency to Myrinda. She rubbed her arms, chilled all over, and leaned away from Aggie. She needed distance, both physically and mentally, from the old woman and her overlarge eyes and thinning wisps of hair and her vague smell of bleach and flowers. Crouching so close to her was making Myrinda feel suffocated. The old woman was in shock or sick, maybe. Whatever had happened, Aggie needed a hospital.
“Don’t you see?” Those overlarge eyes filled with tears. “Don’t you see what they’ve done? Building an asylum on top of such a place...and all those poor crazy souls leaking their own human kind of crazy on top of it, their dementias and psychoses and neuroses and disorders. This place, the very land on which they poured the cement foundations of this, this—” she gestured around them helplessly, seemingly at a loss for what else to say. The tears flowed down her soft, overblushed cheeks, drawing faint lines in her face powder. Myrinda put a hand on her shoulder, and she flinched under the touch.
“Aggie—I think maybe we ought to get you upstairs. You don’t look well, you’re clearly agitated, and I think—”
“Of course I’m agitated,” Aggie said, pushing the words out through a matter-of-fact impatience. She dabbed at her eyes with the side of her finger. “Of course. We’ve made it worse. Not you and me, maybe, but somebody. Somebody pulled open the wound, set the blood flowing fresh again.”
Myrinda nodded at her, murmuring soothing agreements as she led Aggie to the elevator.
Suddenly Aggie’s whole body went rigid and she cried out, jerking from Myrinda’s arms.
“Aggie?” Myrinda cried out, catching the old woman awkwardly in her arms and lowering her to the floor. “Aggie, what’s wrong?”
The old woman shook violently, her legs spasming and her hands clenching into fists. Her eyes rolled back until only the whites showed beneath half-closed lids. A hum came from deep inside Aggie’s throat, a low, ugly, animal sound. And it was spreading—that’s what it sounded like to Myrinda at least, that the sound was not so much growing in volume but picking up reception inside Aggie’s chest, her skull, her stomach, even her hands and feet.
A gut instinct compelled Myrinda to back away from the old woman, who was now not just shaking and humming but somehow vibrating; everything in her bones, everything in her flesh screamed to her to escape that terrible alien internal buzz, that flesh-jarring shiver that held Aggie in its grip.
As Myrinda watched, thin, dark pink lines began to form around Aggie’s neck, wrists, and ankles. It looked as if invisible fishing line were wrapping tighter and tighter around her, biting into her flesh, but Myrinda could see nothing to cause the seams. They strained a moment, waxy and tight, before indenting into tiny
furrows, and then with small popping sounds, began to fill with blood. Similar lines began to form across her face, and from the looks of the blood lines taking shape on her housecoat, they also crisscrossed her body.
“Aggie! Oh my God, Aggie!” Myrinda fluttered helplessly nearby, still afraid to touch her, to stand too close to that awful hum. “Aggie, we need to get you some help—”
Aggie’s eyes grew wide and for a moment, the hum grew louder. Then she broke apart at the seams, the pieces sliding away from each other wetly. Myrinda screamed. The bisected pieces of her chest rose once and fell like two halves of a gourd, then lay still. The wide eyes grew glassy. The hum faded. The pieces of her didn’t bleed, and somehow, that made the sight of her carved up like that more horrible.
Myrinda backed away. A helpless sound lodged in her throat. It tried to be a word, a call for help, but it failed. She glanced at her basket of untouched laundry, then back at the stairway behind her. She couldn’t quite bring herself to look fully on the pieces of flesh that used to be the nice old lady from across the hall.
She bolted from the laundry room and took the stairs two at a time, her head a tornado of confused thoughts. What could have possibly cut her up like that? She’d been—well, not exactly fine, but physically whole, at the very least, less than ten minutes before. Or had she been? Was it possible that whatever cut her had been so thin, like fishing wire maybe, that she’d managed to hold herself together inside and out, at least for a while? She frowned, shaking her head. That was absurd. She wouldn’t have been able to talk, to breathe. No, whatever happened to the old lady had begun after the convulsions. Myrinda had never heard of convulsions strong enough to create flesh-rending vibrations, but then, she was no doctor. Maybe.... It didn’t seem right, either, though.
It had looked like something had diced her up right in front of Myrinda. Something invisible, precise, deadly. Something that hummed. Something that had been so very close to Myrinda that it was a wonder it hadn’t sheared off layers of her own skin.
She reached the first floor, her heart pounding and her mouth dry with the heaviness of her breath.
“It’s a wound....”
She crossed the lobby to Mrs. Sunderman’s apartment and banged on the door. Seconds ticked by with no sound from the apartment. Impatient, she pounded on the door again. “Mrs. Sunderman? There’s been an accident,” she called. She pounded again, her voice cracking with tears. “Please, Mrs. Sunderman. I need help. Mrs. Roesler’s...she’s dead. Please, call 911!” With each phrase, she paused, listening for some sign of the landlady. No sounds of movement or life beyond the door.
She huffed, turning to the elevator. Her cell phone was upstairs. She’d just call 911 herself.
The elevator doors opened almost immediately, and she was thankful for that. As she rode up to her floor, she burst into tears. Every muscle in her body was tensed, thrumming with fear and urgency.
Almost humming. She shuddered at the thought, crying harder.
The elevator doors opened and she ran to her apartment and into the kitchen, grabbing her cell phone off the charger on the counter. She dialed 911.
In the basement laundry room, the pieces of Agatha Roesler cooled, their perfectly severed edges unshrivelled and painted with unspilled blood, and in the silence where the hum had been, frenzied whispering of a half-nonsense language echoed between the cement walls.
SEVEN
Derek held a protective arm around Myrinda as she gave Officer Rusker, a husky, middle-aged man with a thin shock of brown hair, her statement. Around them on the grounds, police moved with quiet, purposeful efficiency. Two uniformed officers relegated their curious neighbors, some of whom Myrinda recognized by sight, to the parking lot. Others moved in and out of the lobby, conferred quietly with the uniformed CSIs and EMTs. Flashing lights from the three police cars and the ambulance in the parking lot behind the onlookers twirled red and blue against the wall of the apartments.
She told Rusker about finding Aggie in the basement and how she had seemed terrified, even hurt, how she had rambled incoherently about nameless threats and poison, and how when she tried to get her to her feet and back to the elevator, she had begun to convulse.
Myrinda stopped short of telling Rusker what she had seen next. There was no conceivable way she could explain how a woman had literally come apart in bloodless chunks. The thought of it, let alone any verbalization of it, made her sick to her stomach. So instead, she told Rusker it was when Aggie had begun to shake uncontrollably that she had gone for help, first to Mrs. Sunderman’s apartment, and then back to her own for the cell phone.
“Was there anyone else in the laundry room with you and Mrs. Roesler?” Rusker asked.
Myrinda shook her head. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“No one on the stairs? Lurking in the lobby, maybe?”
“No, no one.”
Rusker took notes, nodding. “You said she was scared of someone?”
“Someone...something,” Myrinda shrugged beneath Derek’s arm. “I don’t know. She wasn’t very clear.”
“Woman her age, could have been dementia. She might very well have gotten herself worked up into an aneurism.”
Myrinda frowned, confused. “An aneurism could do all that?”
“That’s the preliminary guess, although we can’t be sure until the autopsy, of course. Yeah, right now we’re assuming dementia. Hallucinations, maybe that drove her to cut herself like that. Drove her to near hysteria, gave herself a brain aneurism—”
“Cut herself?” Myrinda couldn’t imagine an 80 year old woman cutting herself clean through to pieces like that. The woman had been diced alive, for God’s sake. Couldn’t they see that? No brain aneurism she’d ever heard of could cause that.
“There were superficial flesh wounds when we found her. Nothing serious, just scratches on her face, her arms and legs. Like she’d been clawing at herself. You mentioned she seemed hurt, that there was blood on her clothing?”
“Yes....” Myrinda was barely aware she’d spoken out loud. Scratches? Scratches?! Just what had she seen down in that basement...or thought she’d seen?
“Maybe from a prior convulsion, like the one you said you witnessed.” An uncomfortable pause followed that Rusker finally broke with a clearing of the throat. “Well thanks again, ma’am. Here’s my card if you remember anything else or just need to reach me. I appreciate your time.”
Myrinda took it in fingers that had grown numb and nodded. Two men wheeled out a gurney on which a long black bag had been laid. Its contours indicated something the size of an intact Aggie Roesler lay inside.
“You okay, baby?” Derek asked once the officer had moved on to a hush-toned conversation with three men in suits. He watched them watch him with a well-practiced unperturbed cool.
“I’d like to go inside now,” she said. “Lay down a bit. I’m not feeling well.”
“Of course, baby-girl. I got you. Everything’s going to be okay.” He pulled her into a quick, tight hug, kissed the top of her head, and guided her toward the lobby door.
***
Wayne pulled into a mess of flashing red-blue lights, anxious onlookers, and a body bag being loaded from a gurney into the back of an ambulance.
“What the—?” He put the car into park and got out, trotting over to the nearest uniformed policeman, a young kid maybe a year on the force if that, who ushered him back to the crowd.
“What’s going on?”
“Please sir,” the young officer told him. “We need you to stand over there with the others.”
“What happened? Is that...is that someone from the apartments?”
“Please sir, we would appreciate your cooperation in standing over there with the other tenants of the apartment building.”
An older man with an unshaved jaw going gray, a football-player build, and the stance and presence of a cop himself, stood off to one side with a husky, dark-haired officer holding a small notepad. The former he recognized from
the building; Wayne thought his name was Carson or Larson. The latter was an on-scene police officer. He watched them a while, gesturing casually with their hands and leaning in toward each other to talk in hushed tones. Then he scanned the crowd for the landlady. He couldn’t imagine that busybody Mrs. Sunderman letting such a hub-bub go down on the grounds of her precious building without being all up in cops’ faces, demanding answers. Strangely, though, she was nowhere to be seen.
Wayne watched as a uniformed officer emerged from the lobby and crossed over to the husky cop and Carson/Larson. The officer said something, shook his head, and gestured back toward the lobby. The other two men looked off in that direction. Finally, Larson/Carson returned to a small group of onlookers near Wayne.
“What’s going on?” a thin woman with severe features asked him. Her bony arms were crossed over her chest as if to self-comfort, but Wayne noticed she curtly yanked one from the grasp of a paunchy, dark-haired man next to her, ostensibly her husband, when he reached out to her.
The tenant who struck Wayne as a police officer (Wayne felt sure he’d seen the name somewhere as Larson) shook his head. “Sunderman. They can’t find her. She’s not in the apartment, and when they tried her cell, one of the uniforms—the patrol cops over there—heard ringing coming from inside the apartment.”
“What about the old woman?” the paunchy man asked.
“They’re not sure what happened, exactly. Stroke, aneurism. Maybe something with fits, given her injuries.”
“What do you mean?” The woman’s bony hand fluttered to her thin chest.
“Cuts,” Larson told her, gesturing across his face and chest. “Scratches. In fact, they think—” he stopped, his attention suddenly fixed on something off-center from the front entrance of the building. Wayne followed his gaze to a small cluster of tenants he didn’t recognize. They were ostensibly from the first floor, none of the faces familiar in the slightest. Nothing about any of them struck Wayne as particularly attention-worthy. Wayne glanced at Larson, then back at the cluster of tenants. He put them in their early seventies, their slight stoops from latent muscle-ache and dry grayness of face and hair reminding him of his parents. Their clothes, faded from overwashing and drying, hung loose around their chicken skin arms and legs, tight over their softening midsections. They were, so far as he could tell, unremarkable. Well...except that maybe they seemed less shaken than impatient. He frowned. That was the way of people up in New England, Wayne had discovered. Patient impatience. Polite exasperation. It got under his skin in general, and more so now in the face of a poor old lady’s death. What was so important, waiting for them back in the building? Their L.L. Bean catalogs and Jeopardy? A sudden heat rush of anger flared in their direction, and he found himself imagining them trying to flip through their magazines with the shredded flesh of bloody wrist stumps slapping wetly against the pages, or watching TV with blackened, hollow sockets where their eyes had been....
Chaos Page 8
