Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Whatever that thing was, it was blocking the sure and safe way out of there, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to run toward it.

  He felt sick and sweaty all over, in spite of the chill. He stood slowly, quietly, clicking off the flashlight. His breath came in puffs too thin to make him feel like he was getting enough air.

  The dragging was much closer now, though with the acoustics down there, it was hard to tell how close. He took a few steps back, doing his best to mute the sound of his shoes against the gravelly floor. Terror pulsed in hot-cold flashes across his skin and deep in his gut, threatening to double him over in gut-clenching spasms to vomit.

  He wished he had a gun, a knife, even a rock to throw. The pocket flashlight was little comfort.

  The thing dragged itself forward. Banged the pipe.

  He closed his eyes, fought off tears, fought off the scream building in his throat. He imagined something like the girl, dragging its jagged bone-shattered stumps across the rough floor of the tunnel, leaving viscous green stains mixed with dead blood trailing behind it. He saw in his mind the hand-less stump of its arm sliding along the pipe, the wrist bone slamming against it, the vibrations carrying its desire to play with him, its hunger to hurt him, down the pipe’s length like some sick children’s game of telephone.

  It dragged forward another step. Banged the pipe. This time, a high-pitched giggle, drowned quickly in a wet gurgle, carried across the stagnant air between them.

  He took another step back, and another. His legs felt like dead weights he had to drag, too, his own feet useless. The rest of him felt numb, the hot-cold panic drawing sweat from his skin. Every part of him thrummed with terror. He could imagine the black stringy hair of the girl-thing that had never been a girl, clumped with dirt and blood, falling away in clumps that curled like dead black snakes at its jagged ankles. The scarred gray flesh he imagined falling away too, clumps of a masker’s clay muddied with whatever touched and stuck to it. These chunks of pseudo-flesh, he saw with stomach-turning clarity in his mind, would fall to the pavement like the decaying fat of rotting steaks, sizzling on the tunnel floor as if dropped into a pan, before melting away into little grease spots.

  They were more alien thoughts—he recognized that now—but no less accurate for being so. It was showing him what it was, making him see in the dark.

  It dragged forward. Banged the pipe. Both he and the Jerry-voice screamed silently in unison, willing the rest of his body to run.

  The eyes of the thing, pits filled with the kind of lightlessness collected only at the very bottoms of underground chasms, spread like stain, engulfing the entire face, the neck, the body. It was becoming what it truly was; his mind saw it, and tried to reject such a shape.

  “Wayne,” it said with the last of the faked human elements in its throat, and sheer blinding-white panic finally launched him into a jackrabbit bolt—away from it, away from the door into the length of tunnel, away from that terrible voice on the verge of hysterical laughter, that voice that knew his name.

  He stumbled as he ran, too scared to look back. He didn’t need to. Over the clamor of his steps, he heard the drag-bang pattern of the thing’s movements behind him become just drags, and those in turn pick up frequency until the thing behind him was sprinting. He could hear its jaws opening the expanse of its face, a gaping rip, a chasm, then snapping shut like a bear trap.

  He fumbled to turn the flashlight back on, but he dropped it, his feet sending it spinning off into the dark. He swore and kept running. His heart thudded, dry and painful in his chest, forcing him to gasp for air. With each inhale, he felt like he was sucking up the madness around him, taking it into his body. He could almost feel it dilute his bloodstream.

  A pulse of blue light shocked him into near blindness for a second. He cried out. His foot caught something solid and painful, pitching him forward onto the ground. He scrabbled over the concrete, his feet kicking out behind him, his mind searching frantically for the commands that would get his body up, get it moving again.

  A loud bang against the pipes made him flinch. He rolled over onto his back, his breath lodged in his throat.

  The blue light pulsed again, and for just a second, in its glow, he saw the blurred head of the thing towering over him, its vertical, needle-lined mouth working open and closed. Wayne screamed. Then the blue light winked out, plunging them both back into blackness.

  TWELVE

  The sticky note Larson found on his fridge two days after his partial amputation startled him. He’d been taking it easy since that night, cognizant somewhere in the back of his head that the ball was in his court, so to speak. The woman in 2C had issued initiatives in her curtains, and now it was up to him to put those initiatives into action. In his opinion, he had started off on a high note, as draining as it had been. He hadn’t expected communication so soon. Not yet.

  The morning after had been rough. His stomach full of whiskey-rot, his head pounding and slightly dazed, he’d stumbled to the bathroom to change the bandage on his mangled hand. That had been painful, almost as painful as the cutting had been. Blood, which had leaked through to form a large, irregular stain on the couch, had made the bandage stiff, and it adhered to the wound like a second skin. Pulling it off ripped open what messy black clotting had sealed the wound, and his hand began to bleed fresh, dark red blood again. His middle finger was bruised around the base knuckle and up the side, and the raw edges of his palm, wrist, and the back of his hand were a waxy red bordering on purple.

  He let the blood patter into the bathroom sink while with his good hand, he fumbled in the medicine cabinet for some Aleve. He had some trouble getting the safety cap off with one hand and dropped the bottle so that the little blue ovals spilled across the sink and into the bloody basin. Slowly, he replaced each, one at a time, until three remained. He picked those up and swallowed them dry. They stuck in his throat, so he ran the water, cupped a palmful and brought it to his lips to wash them down.

  After rinsing his damaged hand, he wrapped it in clean bandages, pulling it just tighter than was comfortable. Immediately, the layers of bandage took on a reddish tint that spread along the length of his hand but did not quite bleed all the way through. He grunted, satisfied, and went to make himself some greasy eggs to quell the roiling in his stomach.

  He’d survived that morning, and the rest of that day. Two days later, the bleeding had mostly stopped. The pain had, for a while, receded but then returned with a vengeance. The way his middle finger had swollen and was intensely painful to the touch made him wonder if the wound had become infected.

  Still, he believed he had survived the worst of it. He’d noticed that the little bag was gone from in front of the door to 2C, and felt confident that she had retrieved and approved of his gift. At first, he thought the little yellow sticky might be a thank you note. Maybe her need for proof of undying devotion was simple, and the other missives of the curtains were no longer necessary. All this crossed his hazy mind while he crossed the kitchen to the fridge. He reached for the note, realized his left hand was in no shape to do something as taxing as hold something, and switched hands.

  There were only three lines written on the note, in that same script he’d come to think of as belonging to the woman of 2C. It read:

  Keep going.

  Take it all back.

  I’m waiting for you.

  So it was a note of encouragement, then. Just as good, almost. She was thinking of him and was pleased. He’d passed the first test. She had faith he’d pass the others. That’s why she wrote that she was waiting for him. He had to keep going.

  He crawled into his bed to sleep off his hangover first. He wanted a clear head to plan his next move. Besides, he was feeling dizzy either from the pain or the blood loss, and couldn’t quite remember what else the curtains had told him to do.

  When Larson woke again, late afternoon had cast its blue-gray shadows and orange highlights through the bedroom window. The thunder in his head had quie
ted to a dull roar and his vision was clear again. His hand still throbbed, but he could deal with that. It was time to start thinking about his next move.

  With his bandaged hand thrust uncomfortably into the pocket of his overcoat, he made his way once again to a spot beneath the window of 2C and studied the curtains. The messages remained unchanged. Flipping open a notepad, he balanced it on his left wrist while he took notes with his right hand. Then he put notepad, pen, and bad hand all back in the same pocket, wincing from the pain. Even the lightest brush against the tender side of his hand sent screaming fireworks of pain up his arm lately. He’d have to douse it with Hydrogen Peroxide or slather it with Neosporin or something when he got back to the apartment.

  Right now, though, he had work to do.

  The curtains had suggested he do a very specific favor for a neighbor, one who didn’t fully understand all the angles and layers and dimensions of the language which gave Larson purpose and direction these days.

  Larson wasn’t sure exactly what this particular request had to do with his woman in 2C, but he didn’t question it. He’d done similar tasks before, and always to effect a necessary outcome. He didn’t think of it as planting evidence so much as guiding an investigation to its obvious, inevitable, and absolutely true conclusion. Maybe this was a test of his empathy or his humanity, to see whether he’d help his fellow man. He got the impression from the messages in the curtains that what he was doing was necessary, at any rate.

  It was quiet when he made his way out into the hallway. He paused, listening for movement in the other apartments. There was little more than the occasional muted thump or indistinct syllable. He felt pretty confident that he could move about undisturbed. He didn’t even think Mrs. Sunderman would pose a problem. No one had seen or heard from her in a while, not that it was unusual. It was Larson’s experience that she made herself scarce until rent time. And if there was a problem with a clogged drain, a loud or leaky pipe, or an appliance not up to snuff, well then, she was a phantom.

  He glanced at the closed door of 2C, with its brownish smear at the threshold. He wanted more than anything to just open the door and take her up in his arms, to carry her to the bed and make love to her, to hold her through the night. He crossed the hallway and tried the knob. The door was locked. He’d expected that. It would remain locked to him until he’d proved he was worthy of opening it.

  Other apartment doors, he knew, would not be locked. It was time to focus on them.

  Outside apartment 2G, he paused again, listening. He was pretty sure no one lived there. He tried the knob and the door opened.

  The apartment was vacant. It mirrored the same configuration as his own. The smooth, unmarred white walls, the new carpet and hardwood, the gleaming fixtures in the kitchen and bathroom all sat ready for a new tenant. Mrs. Sunderman’s empties were, evidently, a pride and joy. He wandered the empty rooms, searching for some clue to what he was meant to take from the apartment. He found nothing in his room-by-room sweep—no boxes, no papers, not even an inspection notice. The kitchen cabinets and drawers were empty. So was the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. He even shined a penlight into the vents from the Swiss Army collection on his key chain. Nothing.

  He’d just begun to think that maybe he was wrong about what this test was supposed to prove when he re-entered the den area and saw the box. He was sure it hadn’t been there during his first pass through the room.

  He frowned, and just below the surface of his conscious mind, something moved. It didn’t happen often, dragged down in the depths of his mind as it so often was by alcohol, depression, anger, and the desperate desire inside him to win over his woman. When it did happen, it made him think of fingers struggling to claw out of a dirt grave. He wasn’t sure if those fingers meant to convey something he needed to unearth, or something he needed to keep buried. Either way, it never lasted long enough for him to dwell on it.

  He crossed the room and bent down in front of the box. It was mummified by packing tape. A large white label pressed to the top read Detective Jack Larson. He got out his pen knife from the same Swiss Army set on his key chain and sliced through both sides of tape and then down the center. His bad hand throbbed beneath the bandage as if reminded of its own cuts.

  The contents of the box surprised him. He supposed he was supposed to get creative. No simple plan of leaving strategically placed journals or file folders, no slipping extramarital love letters under a door or putting drugs into a car glove box. No guns or knives or even ice picks to wipe prints off of. He seemed to be tasked with planting evidence of something else.

  There was a key; he recognized it as one of the set Mrs. Sunderman gave the new tenants. This one fit the 2A storage bin’s lock. There was a bifolded paper he discovered to be a life insurance policy on a man named Wycoff for quite a hefty sum, naming as beneficiary his neighbor’s wife. There was also a small gray paper envelope with the words “Roots, Water Hemlock” scrawled in the same script he had grown so familiar with from the sticky notes.

  Larson put all these things into his pockets and rose unsteadily. His head felt continually stuffed with cotton now, his vision dimming if he got up too fast or turned his head suddenly. He figured that had more to do with the constant flow of booze in his system than because of any infection in his hand, but hell, he wasn’t a doctor. He didn’t think any of it was life-threatening, and that was all that mattered. He was still strong enough and whole enough to get the job done. His head, his hand, all of the little things could be taken care of later.

  He closed the door of 2G softly behind him. He thought he heard a click like a lock falling into place, but he didn’t bother to check. He walked briskly to 2A, doing his best to keep his footsteps light and quiet. He found the door to that apartment unlocked as well, and he let himself inside.

  The apartment was tastefully furnished, a testament to upper middle-class security and comfort. It was empty; he knew it would be. The man worked from 8 to 6 or thereabouts. The wife no longer worked, but community event planning seemed to keep her from the apartment for the better part of most afternoons. He stood in the den, contemplating how best to incorporate the items from 2G. Too obvious, and either the wife would find them or the husband would discount them as harmless coincidence. Too subtle, and the husband might not put the clues together. He surveyed the den. The overstuffed recliner with the crumbs on the cushion and the remotes lined up in a caddy beside it on an end table seemed most likely to be the husband’s chair. He dropped the key between the remotes in the caddy. The desk in the far corner of the room seemed like a good place to drop off the copy of the insurance policy; he slipped it into a side drawer, atop some banking papers. The envelope with the poison in it (Larson realized there was no less sinister a use for a packet of water hemlock roots) presented a trickier problem. The couple had struck him as pretty traditional the one time he’d spoken to them out in the parking lot. It was more likely that the kitchen was the wife’s domain, so planting the water hemlock behind the spices or with the tea bags might alert the wrong person to the suggestion of murder. The envelope needed to look like something in the wife’s possession without really interfering with any of her regularly used things. A jewelry box, maybe, or a hatbox in the back of a closet? He didn’t know either nearly well enough to even take a stab at where the husband might search to discover his wife’s possible secrets.

  An idea occurred to him, and he smiled to himself.

  When Larson returned to his apartment, his whole body ached. His hand pounded blood in painful splinters down his arm. His head swam, and with it, his vision. At first he didn’t see it—another sticky note waiting on the television. He shuffled to the television and bent down, forcing his eyes to focus.

  Instead of words, he found a neat little heart in the center of the paper. Smiling, he snatched it up in his good hand, crushing it close to his chest as he flopped onto the couch. He was asleep within minutes, the note crumpled in his fist.

  He drea
mt of the woman in 2C. In the dream, the door to her apartment was open and a bright light spilled from within to the hallway. He entered the light and felt safe. He dreamt her apartment was decorated with fine furniture, sensuous fabrics, warm and sweet-smelling. She stood in the center of the den, clothed only in silks that draped and swayed with their own life. She was so beautiful. Her arms reached out to him, beckoning. Her lips and eyes were hungry for him. He pulled her close and she took his hands, both of them, and slid them over her body. She was so soft, so smooth. He dreamed of taking her to the bedroom, of kissing her, of being inside her.

  It was the last good dream he had.

  ***

  It never really occurred to Hal that the fight with Eda that day had anything to do with thoughts or feelings other than his own. He was, for the most part, a reasonable, practical man, not given over to wanderings of the imagination. In his mind, the upside-down commercial man’s appearance in his life was more likely a result of his own internal workings (or misfirings), rather than the other way around.

  During the periods of time at work where no problem needed to be solved, the idea that Eda had been unfaithful vaguely irritated him, but not so much as it would have decades ago. What bothered him far more was the idea that she had been unfaithful because she thought she was better than him—and thought her lover was, as well.

  He had looked up the name “Gerald Wycoff” on the Internet and had found a few pages’ worth of articles relating to his moderately successful political career. These he found of little interest beyond the fact that they proved him to be the kind of man Eda had always tried to ingratiate herself to. Next, he had searched images, looking for even the briefest glimpse of him with Eda. He found none, and supposed that made sense. A man in Wycoff’s position would have cloaked himself in discretion, would have known precisely how to carry on any number of political or personal affairs below the radar of the media and out of the public eye. Even gossip columns where his name came up focused on his sketchy finagling of financial records and community funds rather than any romantic liaisons with women other than his wife. He did finally find a mention of Eda in an article detailing his campaign committee’s efforts to get him reelected, but it was just that—a brief mention of her fundraising efforts. In the accompanying picture, she was standing next to him. Leaning into him more like, he thought. And she was smiling and waving, just as Wycoff was. But the picture didn’t really confirm or dispel the notion of an affair between them. Also, there was a brief article about his support of a particular corporation’s efforts to demolish the Bridgehaven Asylum and make room for modern apartment housing; evidently Eda had been on that committee, too. That surprised Hal. Eda had been the one to suggest a move from their somewhat rickety Arbor Street one-bedroom ranch house to the new apartment building on the hill, but Hal had chalked up her discovery of the place to her religious reading of the local news, her keen eye for opportunity, and her juggernaut desire to move up in the world. He hadn’t realized she’d had any hand whatsoever in seeing the asylum torn down and the land cleared, against the fervent wishes of the historical society, so that the very apartment building in which they lived could be built. It was yet another thing he didn’t know about her. It made her seem all the more conniving to him. Eda had a plan for life which she intended to execute, with or without him. Maybe her political and community work put her in a position to cash in on favors (Eda would never suffer owing anyone anything if she could help it). Maybe she had more power to pull strings and manipulate circumstances than he had ever imagined. Hal was starting to believe that if he got in her way, she just might have the power to steamroll right over him. Maybe Wycoff had made that possible. For that, Hal felt a sudden and intense surge of hate for him.