Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Mr. Larson, I don’t think I follow you.”

  Larson pulled a gun from his pocket.

  Myrinda’s eyes grew wide. “Oh! Oh no, Mr. Larson, please! Don’t—”

  “I tried to take it all back, and I failed,” he said wearily.

  “Please don’t do—”

  Larson pulled the trigger and a halo spray of red and gray spattered the wall behind him. Myrinda screamed as his body jerked and then slumped. The gun fell from his limp hand. Her hands shook as she clamped them over her mouth. Her breathing, even around the hands, was deep and ragged and she was afraid if she didn’t hold it in, she’d scream again and again and never stop screaming.

  She turned away from Larson’s body and ran out into the hallway, where sobs exploded from her chest. She ran to her phone and called 911, and explained what Larson had done. The dispatcher asked her a series of questions, and she hung up. Then she went to the bedroom and stared out the window for what seemed like several very long hours.

  Myrinda wanted to sleep. Every part of her body strained to hold her up. Her head felt light with exhaustion, and she couldn’t focus. A mind deprived of sleep, after all, was like clay that could be molded any way that amused. She wanted sleep, but she knew the chaotic ones wouldn’t let her. Too much was going on. She could hear things through the walls, for one. The damn idiots in 2G. She heard banging, doors slamming all over that apartment, and something that sounded a lot like dozens of fingers scratching on the wall, the same as she’d heard in 2C. Whoever was staying there had obviously moved apartments just before what Larson did, because aside from him, there had been no sign of anyone living in that apartment.

  She thought she could hear voices periodically, and from the timbre of them, she supposed they came from the television. She didn’t have the strength to stand up, let alone go tell them to be quiet, and frankly, she was a little afraid of who she’d be confronting if she tried to make it stop. So the banging of pipes went on and on. Pipes and doors and scratching fingers that sounded set up to go all night long. It was the kind of stuff that could drive a person crazy. She knew Derek worried she was stressed, but how could she not be? If she flinched a little at noises now and then in her waking life, or seemed a little oversensitive and jumpy, who could blame her, really?

  Derek wasn’t home to hear it. He thought that apartment was empty, but obviously, he didn’t know what he was talking about. Of course there were people staying in 2G. Who else could be making noises like that? Rats, for God’s sake?

  She wished she could shut them all up so she could hear what the chaotic ones were saying. From the Old Ward, she heard the strains of their voices chattering and laughing. After a moment, through the tears, she started laughing, too.

  FOURTEEN

  Derek returned home to the blue-red-blue flashing lights of two police cars, an ambulance, and a stretcher carrying a black-bagged figure out of the front lobby.

  “Uh, excuse me,” he said to one of the police officers overseeing the scene, “what happened?”

  “Suicide,” the policeman replied, then moved to enter the lobby. Derek stopped him again, his unease ratcheting up to alarm. Myrinda had been off, but she wouldn’t—

  “Is it a woman?” he asked.

  “Do you live in this building?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I live in apartment 2E with my girlfriend, Myrinda. She isn’t—?”

  “Myrinda Giavelli?”

  “Yes. Why?” Derek looked from the cop to the EMT standing between him and the stretcher. He was truly afraid for Myrinda. How could he have left her?

  The EMT exchanged glances with the policeman, who nodded. Then he said, “Your girlfriend was the one who called 911. One of your neighbors, a Mr. Larson—she found him in 2C. He shot himself.”

  “Oh, God,” Derek muttered, and jogged into the lobby toward the elevator. The policeman called after him to wait, but Derek ignored him. The elevator cars opened. He stepped inside and pressed the button for the second floor. The doors closed and the elevator started to rise.

  Then it stopped mid-floor.

  “What the—? Oh come on, man. Not now.” Derek tapped the “2” button a couple of times, but nothing happened. “Shit.” He was about to push the red alarm button when a voice close to his ear, just behind his shoulder, said, “Leave her, Derek.” He jumped, wheeling around. Obviously, there was no one behind him. No one had been in the elevator when he got on, and no one had gotten on with him. So what the hell?

  From somewhere in the car came the same low, humorless chuckling he’d heard in the bathroom. His gaze darted around the car, and for a second, even less than a second, he thought he saw a wide, vertical mouth set in an eyeless, mottled, misshapen head in the reflection of the elevator’s shiny interior. He blinked, though, and it was gone.

  “Fuck this shit,” he muttered to himself, and turned to the call button. Just then, the elevator car lurched and began its ascent. When the doors opened, he ran to the apartment, as much to get away from the oppressive little box as to get to Myrinda.

  The door was unlocked and opened a crack.

  It wasn’t a good sign. Derek shook his head, swearing to himself. He never should have left her alone. She wasn’t well—he could see that. He thought maybe she was hearing or even seeing things. She certainly believed things that couldn’t be true...could they?

  He thought of the chuckling and the blood in the bathroom. He’d thought it was Myrinda, but it couldn’t have been. He knew what he’d seen, what he’d heard. But the next morning, he’d looked into the waste basket for the bloody wad of toilet paper. He’d been surprised to find it wasn’t. Something else was there, though, curved over an empty toilet paper roll and sitting snugly against a crumpled tissue, was a finger. It was gray, slightly pointed at the tip, the nail bed wet and devoid of a nail.

  “Geezus!” He’d flinched from its obvious grotesquerie, its misplacement among the normal things of his everyday life with Myrinda. But what made him sick around the edges was that it was just like Myrinda described, just like what she saw coming out of the vents.

  And if they both were seeing these phantom fingers, then it couldn’t be just some stress-induced hallucination on her part.

  And what about what he had just seen in the elevator? What the fuck had that been all about?

  Maybe she had reason to believe what Aggie told her. Maybe they both did.

  “Myrinda?” He went into the apartment. He felt apprehensive, wanting to find her, to see she was okay and yet afraid that if he did, he’d find....

  What? What did he think would be there? A Myrinda he didn’t know? Or one of her wound-monsters?

  “Talk to me, babygirl. Where are you?”

  “In here.” Her voice was an echo, a shade of itself, coming from the bedroom.

  He found her sitting on the bed, rocking a little. She was staring out the window.

  “Babygirl, what happened? The EMTs downstairs said you found Larson, that he committed suicide? What’s going on?” It wasn’t lost on him that this was the second death in their apartment building that she had been witness to. At best, it was a terrible case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—twice.

  She turned to face him, and he felt the bottom of his stomach drop out. The shadows beneath her eyes, the gauntness of her cheeks...she looked broken to him. His beautiful girl, his partner in crime. Oh God, what happened to her? He rushed to the bed to sit next to her and took her face in his hands. He couldn’t lose her. He wouldn’t. Not many things scared Derek Moore, but losing the love of his life topped that short list.

  “Myrinda,” he said softly. “What happened?”

  “They got him,” she said.

  “Who? Who got him. The EMTs said—”

  “The chaotic ones. They made him...hurt himself. Badly. He thought they tricked him. He killed himself.” She cupped the hand that touched her face with her own. “They told me. I can hear them sometimes, out there in the Old Ward. They hurt Agg
ie, and then they took Mrs. Sunderman and threw her into the abyss, and then they made Mr. Larson kill himself. There are others. 1D. 1C. 2A. 1F. 2F.” She gave him a sad smile. “They couldn’t let go and just be free.”

  Derek slumped a little, feeling defeated. “What are they?” he finally asked. He wasn’t sure he ought to be entertaining her ideas, but...well, there was the finger in the bathroom. The blood. The laughing. The deaths. The elevator. “What the hell are they?”

  She glanced at the window. “They are chaos. Wild abandon. Insanity. Psychosis. Sociopathy. Their world is a black chasm steeped in madness. It’s all they know. It’s all they are. They call themselves hinshing. I don’t know what it means. I don’t even know if that’s how you say it out loud. But that’s what it sounds like in their language in my head.”

  “Are they...talking to you now?”

  She shook her head. “They’re off playing. Pretending to be other things.”

  “Look, baby, we have to get out of here.

  “No!” she jerked out of his grasp as if he were on fire. “No, we can’t! They need us! They’re going to make us free. It’ll be different with us, Derek. They promised. They’ll take all the worry away. We’ll never have to worry about dying or getting sick or—”

  “Stop. Just stop it. Myrinda, listen to yourself. Do you hear what you’re saying?”

  Myrinda stared at him, perplexed.

  “Baby, whatever these things are, they’re hurting you. They’re changing you. You’ve got to be able to see that, can’t you?”

  Myrinda looked down at herself, her face a fixed but sincere expression of confusion.

  “They’re making you sick, just like they made Aggie sick, and Mr. Larson.”

  “Just like Wayne?” she asked. She sounded small.

  “Uh, yeah, just like Wayne.” He had no idea who Wayne was, but if he was in this building, it was very possible he was as bad off as Myrinda.

  She sighed. Tears filled her eyes. “I’m tired of worrying. Tired of being judged and—and caring that I’m being judged. I want a home to be proud of and a family to love. I want peace of mind.”

  Derek hurt for her. He wanted those things too—even more so for her. He loved her and her happiness meant the world to him. He wanted to take her into his arms and stroke her hair, to tell her everything would be okay, that he’d make it okay. But he was going to lose her if he couldn’t get through to her. People were dying all around them in that building. Myrinda believed these hinshing were responsible. She also believed they were tied to the Bridgewood Estates apartments. That meant the best plan for her mental and physical well-being was to get her far the hell away from there.

  “Myrinda, do you love me?

  Her eyes reflected pain. “You know I do.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Of course.”

  Derek nodded. “Then you need to hear what I’m saying. You and I are not safe here. We have to leave, maybe for a little while, maybe for longer. We need to be better, first. Stronger. Then we can have all those things you wanted.”

  She frowned, the tears finally spilling down her cheeks. In her eyes, he saw a change. She was back a little, at least enough to trust him, to resign herself to his plan.

  “I’m scared,” she said. “What if they won’t let me leave?”

  “They’ll have to go through me,” he said.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  Bewildered, he shook his head. “What? Why tomorrow? Why not now?”

  “I need one more night in my bed. Please, Derek. Just give me that.” Her voice pleaded. Her eyes searched his. “Please.”

  He knew it was a bad idea, but he gave in. He had always had a tough time saying no to her. One more night couldn’t hurt, could it? He sure as hell hoped not. He helped her out of her clothes and handed her a nightgown, which she slipped into like an obedient child. He changed to sweat pants and climbed into bed with her.

  With his arm protectively around her, his chest pressed to her back, he whispered that he loved her and that he would keep her safe. She was asleep in seconds. He drifted off not long after, and his sleep was long, deep, and dreamless, unbroken until when he turned over and felt the empty space beside him. He immediately sat up in the pre-dawn darkness. “Myrinda?”

  Derek checked the bathroom, swung out into the hall, checked the kitchen and den. He opened the front door and looked up and down the hallway. There was no sign of her.

  Myrinda was gone.

  ***

  The irony of the police and EMTs swarming the building on the night he’d planned to kill Eda was not lost on Hal. They were there a good 45 minutes. The upside-down commercial man had told him earlier in the evening that the old cop was going to shoot himself, and so it was a perfect night for him to get rid of Eda.

  At first, he’d balked at the idea if for no other reason than because his committing a murder with cops around seemed absurd. What if they stuck around, knocking door to door to investigate the guy’s death? What if they came back to peruse the crime scene?

  The commercial man dismissed all of that. He explained that it was perfect, like getting away with speeding on a highway because a cop had already pulled someone over. Hal would be working, essentially, under a cloak of invisibility. He’d be invincible. If he waited until just after they left, just as everything was settling down for the night, then he’d be operating in the one window where police would be least likely, for any reason, to be there. They would already have their hands full with processing a late-night suicide. Even they wouldn’t think of returning to the same building that night.

  The upside-down commercial man had a way of making everything sound reasonable.

  Eda was already asleep; she had, in fact, been asleep long before the police arrived. He’d seen to that. He’d ground up some sleeping pills to a powder and slipped it in her iced tea, which she drank black, cool, and bitter anyway. Why she chose to drink something unpleasant-tasting with dinner and caffeinated so close to her usual bedtime was another thing he didn’t understand about her.

  When Hal asked her where she’d gone that night he’d discovered her intent to get rid of him, Eda had told him (with a marked degree of disdain, he’d thought) that as usual, he didn’t listen to anything she said. She said she’d already told him all about the cooking class she was taking at the community center. She told him it had run late, and that she’d found him asleep in his chair when she got home and thought it better not to wake him.

  She was lying. He felt it with every fiber of his being. He didn’t know where she was, but he was sure she’d never told him about any class.

  It was no matter. Hal was done with her and her lying. After tonight, there would be no more Eda. No more worries. There would only be Hal and the rest of his blessedly quiet, judgment-free future.

  In the night that rushed to fill the vacuum left by the police’s and ambulance’s departure, Hal almost skipped across the parking lot. The key to the storage bins was in his pocket. He had a partial erection from the excitement of thinking about what he was going to do.

  The storage bins were actually little more than chicken-wire cages wrapped around 2x4s. These bins stood along the back wall of the garage units which lined the parking lot. For a couple hundred extra a month, tenants could rent a garage space for their car as well. Hal knew that someone in the building owned a ’68 Chevy Chevelle, and another (possibly the same tenant) owned a ’57 Ford Fairlane. Both were kept under canvas covers. Hal thought that his renting an apartment at Bridgewood was evidence enough that he couldn’t afford to breathe on either of those kinds of cars, but hey, however people spent their funny money was no big thing to him. He had his storage unit to keep all the holiday decoration boxes, a tacky patterned couch that Eda’s parents had given them so generously right off the goddamn garage sale driveway, and the extra vacuum that he swore didn’t work and she swore they couldn’t throw out. Her gardening paraphernalia was stuffed in there, too—the terraco
tta pots, the potting soil, the little shovels. And his axe.

  He turned the key in the storage bin lock and it clicked. Pocketing the key, he pulled the creaking slab of a door open and stepped into the gloom inside. The axe was laying on top of an old Farmer’s Fresh produce crate in which Eda had packed the barbeque supplies. In the dim light of the storage unit, the blade looked a dull gray, its wooden handle worn. He’d kept the edge of the blade still sharp, though. The axe was old, like him—old, but sturdy and useful. Old but reliable. Like him. An extension of his arm, in a way. There could be no other tool to use. He imagined for a moment the feel of the smooth wood in his hand, the sharp end of the blade buried in Eda’s head above her right eye. He allowed himself a small smile.

  He didn’t pick up the axe; the handle somehow slid into his hand. Suddenly, he was holding it, heaving it above his head, flooded with confidence and conviction that its heftiness provided.

  Hal turned and walked out of the storage bin without bothering to relock or even close its door. As he passed the Ford Fairlane, he dragged the sharp edge lightly across the length of the quarter panel, just enough to leave a long scratch flanked to either side by tiny curlicues of paint. The faint whine of steel against metal made him smile even bigger.

  He slammed the garage door down behind him and crossed the parking lot in the darkness. No one else was around. Nearly all the windows of the surrounding apartments were dark. His anonymity, the delightful secrecy of his whereabouts and intentions as he strode toward the lobby cloaked in the night, made him feel powerful. He giggled. The axe handle felt warm in his hand.

  The lobby was empty and dark. As he got into the elevator and the doors slid closed, he stood with axe in hand and a content expression on his face. From the corner of his eye, he noticed a scrawl written on one of the steel panels in dark blue marker which read I tried to take it all back.