Loochie heard the window squeaking as it moved up an inch, two inches. But then it stopped. Now there was another sound. The woman out there grunted. A moment later Loochie thought she saw a mouse pop out from the bottom of the security gate. She hopped back and gasped. She almost peed herself. But it wasn’t a mouse. It was worse than that. Something was wiggling right between one of the gaps in the gate.
One long pointer finger poked its way into the kitchen.
Loochie hissed at it as if it were a rat. She stood straight and stiffened. The long finger, as cadaverously gray as the woman’s face, wriggled and poked as if it were clearing a clog in a drain. Loochie couldn’t understand what the woman had planned. She couldn’t squeeze her whole body through that hole, could she? This couldn’t really be happening! But then Louis’s voice played in her ears, an unwelcome bit of wisdom. Being young doesn’t protect you. Horrors come for kids, too.
Loochie didn’t waste time. She could grab a knife from the drawer by the kitchen sink. She could try to chop off this woman’s finger if she kept sticking it through. If that didn’t work she could lock herself in the bathroom and call her mother. Then the police. Then the army. Loochie was so busy forming a plan that she didn’t pay attention to the security gate. So it took a moment before she realized the finger had disappeared, pulled back out, and now something blue was being stuffed through one of the small gaps in the gate’s grillwork.
It was a blue knit cap.
Sunny’s blue knit cap.
Sunny’s cap, with the blue pompoms. The whole thing was crammed through the small space. Finally it fell to the kitchen floor with a faint plop. Loochie stared at it. It almost felt like she was staring at one of Sunny’s organs, lying on the floor.
My friend, Loochie thought. What did you do to my friend?
Forget fear, Loochie couldn’t control herself. She shook the gate with rage. But she lost her voice when she looked through the grillwork again. The woman had turned her head to look directly into the window. The woman locked eyes with Loochie.
Now that she had Loochie’s attention the woman scooched backward on the fire escape. Loochie could see her more clearly, from shoulders up. Loochie now understood why the woman’s breathing had sounded so strained, so strange. The woman’s lower jaw was missing. She had a scalp and a forehead, two ears, two eyes, a nose and cheeks, an upper lip, and her top row of teeth. But the bottom of her face was gone. No lower jaw. No tongue. As if all that had just rotted off. Loochie felt the urge to vomit again. Her own mouth hurt suddenly. It was because Loochie was clenching her jaw tightly with disgust.
The woman stayed still on the fire escape, watching Loochie intently. Each time she exhaled her throat pulsed and a faint wave of spit spilled from the gap between her neck and the roof of her mouth. The spit splattered down onto the dingy floral white nightdress she wore. The fabric on her chest showed so many spots that had been wet and dried. It looked like this woman had been wearing those clothes for decades. Since the eighties, maybe.
“Kroons,” Loochie said quietly.
Now Loochie even tasted the vomit in her mouth, her nasal passage burned, too, but she swallowed the vomit back down. Which was disgusting. The woman out there didn’t shift her gaze and Loochie felt almost hypnotized. She couldn’t look away. Was there a challenge or a threat in the stare?
But there was the cap on the floor. Don’t forget Sunny’s cap. Her friend’s cap.
Her friend. Her friend. Her friend.
“Where’s Sunny?” Loochie said, her face pressed up to the security gate. She wished she didn’t sound so scared.
The woman raised her hand, pointing up.
Loochie knew what this meant: “6-D,” she whispered.
With that the woman stood. Loochie could see even more of her. The nightdress came down to the woman’s knees. It looked so old that it was a wonder it had remained intact. As ragged as a mummy’s wrappings. She wore cheap, very worn flip-flops.
The woman, the Kroon, walked up the fire escape stairs slowly. Her slippers clapped against the bottoms of her feet as she climbed up to the fifth-floor landing. In a few moments Loochie couldn’t see her anymore. Loochie listened to the sound of the slippers as the woman kept climbing, back up to the sixth floor. Loochie didn’t move, couldn’t move, until the sound of the slippers was gone.
Finally she pulled the blue cap off the floor. She cradled it as if it were Sunny’s head. But Loochie didn’t waste much time with that. She set the cap down on the kitchen table gently. Louis said nobody ever left 6D, but she wasn’t going to give up on Sunny just like that. She had to at least try to save her best friend.
5
Loochie unlatched the security gate and rolled it back. She opened the window and climbed out. She didn’t even notice that she’d left Sunny’s piece of still half-frozen cake—the Carvel Flying Saucer—sitting out on a plate. She was outside, on the fire escape again, moving so quickly that she didn’t even realize she still had on her mother’s wig until she was on the fifth floor and happened to see herself reflected in the kitchen window of Sunny’s apartment. She saw herself and almost gasped. She looked crazy, but she didn’t care. Then she realized that the security gate had been opened and she could see inside. Sunny’s grandmother sat in the kitchen. In the seat Sunny had been using not even an hour before.
Sunny’s grandmother had no other name that Loochie was aware of. She was, simply, “Sunny’s grandmother.” That’s how Loochie addressed the woman whenever they met on the elevator or walking down Colden Street. And Sunny’s grandmother seemed to recognize Loochie about half the time, maybe a little less. It was hard to say because the woman only ever seemed to wear one expression. The same expression whether morning or night, cloudy or sunny days. Sunny’s grandmother always looked as though she was about to spit.
The old woman’s mouth was always closed, lips pursed tight, a slight frown always on her lips, as if she had considered any and all things known to the world and found every single one of them wanting. She was a small woman with wide shoulders and an even wider back, though her legs were short and fantastically skinny. Was there any other way to say this? The woman looked very much, in her face and her figure, like a toad. And to Loochie she seemed as unknowable.
Loochie saw this woman now, sitting in the kitchen, in the chair right by the window—in Sunny’s chair—but the old woman hadn’t noticed her. This was because Sunny’s grandmother was bent forward, her small, wide hands on her knees, and she was crying.
At least she seemed to be crying. The posture was correct. Sunny’s grandmother leaned so far forward that her head almost touched her thighs. Her head trembled and her shoulders shook. It was worse than crying. It was like the old woman’s body was breaking down. Loochie didn’t see any tears, but the old woman’s whole face sagged with grief. The old woman sat alone, in a chair that was still warm, and she was coming close to shattering.
This, just as much as the evidence of the blue knit cap, was how Loochie truly came to believe that Sunny had been snatched by the Kroons. Maybe Sunny’s grandmother had heard, and believed, the same rule as Louis: Nobody leaves 6D. Maybe Loochie was seeing the old woman giving up all hope. Her granddaughter was gone. Loochie wanted to tap the glass now and explain. Sunny wasn’t lost. Not yet.
But such a thing would be impossible to explain. For starters, Sunny’s grandmother didn’t speak English and Loochie couldn’t speak Cantonese. The only solution to the grandmother’s grief would be to bring her granddaughter back safe. And that’s exactly what Loochie Gardner planned to do. She climbed again.
As she scurried from the fifth floor to the sixth she figured her first problem would be how to get the kitchen window of 6D open from the outside. But if the Kroon could do it to her then she could return the favor. No problem. As Loochie reached the sixth floor she felt fired up. She felt sure. So she wasn’t prepared to find 6D’s window already open.
And one of the Kroons standing right inside.
&
nbsp; It was a man. He grunted, almost seemed to bark like an angry dog as soon as Loochie appeared before him. She saw him in silhouette as the sunlight filtered into the apartment. He was thin and tall and his head had a funny shape. The top left side of his head seemed to be missing. But a second later she realized it was just caved in.
… and half his skull was just gone. It was like a pit …
He was standing there, as if he’d been looking out at the neighborhood and she happened to stumble into his view. Her shock acted like a spray of cold water on her. She shivered and froze, but the man in the window didn’t.
The man grabbed the front of her sweater.
The man pulled her inside.
Her shins scraped the windowsill, but she was too shocked to feel the pain.
She was inside and he held her up with two hands and she didn’t know what to do.
His hands were under her armpits. She weighed seventy-three pounds but he held her up like she was a puppy. Before she could do anything he yanked at her sneakers. Her pulled off the right one, then the left. The sneakers thumped on the floor. He held her up with one hand now and the other hand dug into her back pockets. He grabbed her belt buckle and tugged at it. Then her belt came off. He dropped it to the floor, too. What was he going to do to her?
A new fear, a deeper fear, thundered in her belly, her thighs, and she whipped her body like a feral cat. She hissed and she spat and finally the man seemed to be having trouble keeping hold of her. She bucked and swung her arms wildly and finally broke free from the man’s grip. She dropped to the dirty floor just like her sneakers and belt.
She scrambled backward in the kitchen. The floor was filthy. Bits of paper—newspaper, torn envelopes, old tissue and toilet paper—and bottle caps, old soda cans, straws and candy wrappers, dirt and the husks of dead roaches, crumbly opaque roach eggs. The room smelled terrible, like the parts of Flushing Meadows Park where boys pissed when they couldn’t bother to use a bathroom. A smell that made her nose sting. Her palms felt bitten when they came down against the ridges of bottle caps. Soda cans rattled as her flailing legs kicked them away. She looked up at the man who’d pulled her in.
For the first time in her life Loochie thought she might faint. The feeling was so new to her that she didn’t even understand what was happening. Her head felt like it was filled with bees. Her chest, her lungs, were getting tighter. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think. To see this man, this thing, above her. It wasn’t even like the one she’d seen through the security gate in the kitchen. At least then there’d been a window, a gate, between them. Now they were both in the same room. Nothing between her and him. Between her and Pit. He’d tried to get Louis in a stairwell two decades earlier and now here he was, coming for her. Nothing could deter him.
But then he stopped for a moment, as if the thought of catching Loochie had been interrupted by another, more powerful, urge. He stood still and scanned the ground, like he was looking for something he’d dropped and for a moment it was as if Loochie wasn’t even there. Then the impulse seemed to pass and he looked up, focused on Loochie again. Coming for her again.
But he wasn’t the only one.
Pit lumbered toward her, moving across the bombed-out kitchen, and then Loochie heard a second round of grunting and another figure rushed out of the room to her right, the one that corresponded to her mother’s bedroom. It barreled out and smashed right into Pit, sending both to the floor. It was another male. The pair yelped and growled at each other, as if they’d lost the power of human speech long ago.
The Kroons snapped at each other and tussled. The new male slammed Pit’s head against the floor. Pit raised his head immediately and bit into this other one’s shoulder. It screeched as Pit bit a second time. Loochie gasped at the ferocity of their fighting. Both of them looked at Loochie quickly and then attacked each other again. They were fighting over her. She didn’t want to still be there, on the floor, when one of them won.
The room felt like some nightmare version of her place. The layout of the kitchen was the same as hers. The oven went against the wall adjacent to the window. The fridge against the wall behind her. The same space where cabinets ran along the wall beside the fridge. Identical. But here the oven was gone. A gas hose ran out from the wall but was attached to nothing. The fridge was still here but its doors had been torn off, the racks inside gone, too. Garbage bags were piled inside. They dripped a sour yellow liquid, gave off a smell of rotten milk or meat, the worst odor in this place yet. The kitchen cabinets were there but all the drawers had come out long ago, and the remaining cabinet doors hung at odd angles. It was like her place but not her place, a nightmare version, and she wanted to escape.
She could just go right back out the kitchen window, she thought. Climb out onto the fire escape and make her way back down to her place. Be back inside and leave the Kroons behind and never think of them again.
But what would happen to Sunny if she did?
That was the terrible part. Of course Sunny would be abandoned. Left to whatever fate the Kroons had in store for her. Maybe Louis was right and they would burn her body. Maybe she’d be alive when they did it. But her urge to flee was even stronger than her concern. Just get away! That’s what she was screaming in her head. It was cowardly to consider—saving herself and sacrificing her best friend—but consider it Loochie did. And she might even have done it, too, if the two male Kroons weren’t in a heap right before the kitchen window. They screeched and gnashed at each other. Loochie had no choice but to make a different move.
If this place really was laid out like her apartment then the room to her right would be the same as her mother’s bedroom. No exits in there, only windows that offered a six-story drop.
She’d have to cut left. First thing she’d see was the bathroom but there was no point hiding in there. If these things could bash each other with such force they could surely smash through the bathroom door. Next there would be a room just like her bedroom, but that also offered no escape. She would have to go into the living room and from there she could at least try the front door. Maybe Louis was wrong about how it had been boarded up, or how securely. Maybe she could get it open. Or, her second choice, she could try climbing out the windows in the living room. The building’s air-conditioners ran in a straight line down each floor. They came preinstalled, not sitting in the window but actually embedded in the walls. They looked like a series of pegs sticking out the front of the building. As insane as it seemed, she might sneak out the window and make her way down from one to the next. It would be like the climbing wall in gym class. Even if she only made it down one floor she could break the window to Sunny’s apartment and get in. Those were her only choices. A scary plan, but at least it was a plan.
First she had to leave this damn kitchen.
Loochie felt the dirt and garbage on the floor through her socks. She worried about stepping on broken glass. But forget about getting her sneakers again. The Kroons were fighting right beside them and she wasn’t going to risk getting closer.
That girl ran.
She fled the kitchen and passed the bathroom. The door was shut and she didn’t bother trying to open it.
Loochie slowed in front of the second bedroom. Her bedroom. The door here was dirty and hung by only the bottom hinge. The door was shut, the room was dark, but from inside Loochie heard the flapping of wings. Dozens of small wings. Or could it be hundreds? As if all the pigeons in Queens had come to this apartment, to that decrepit room, to roost. At least she hoped they were pigeons in there. She couldn’t see. But if she’d had any thoughts of hiding out in that room she let them go.
She ran down the little walkway and entered the living room. She heard a cracking sound. It was wood splintering. The living room wall was coming apart. Small pieces of it splintered, something bashing at it from the other side. A grunting sound came through the wall and a terrible crash. A piece of the living room wall shattered. A hole appeared. She could see into the kitch
en. Pit was on the other side. He peered through the hole, which was the size of a pizza pie. He scanned for Loochie. When he saw her he jerked his head backward and his face disappeared from the hole. He was coming around, coming after her.
Loochie sprinted through the living room. She was looking for the front door. But the faster she ran the more distance she needed to cover. She was in her stocking feet but the floor felt cool and wet. Loochie looked down. She was standing in grass.
She looked around, trying to get her bearings. She was in a park. She looked back confused. She was standing in a field of patchy grass. She saw trees in the distance. She looked up and instead of the ceiling she saw an overcast, gray sky. Behind the cloud cover there was a hazy sun the color of phlegm.
She was in a park.
But, to make it even more confusing, she could still see the living room wall that Pit had smashed through. And through that hole she could still see the horrible kitchen. She was in a park inside 6D. Her hands trembled and her chest clutched up again. She didn’t understand. How could this be? It couldn’t.
From where she stood she could see the walkway she’d just run through. Pit came rushing out a second later. He shot straight toward her. He, too, was running through the grass. Seeing him in the half-dead grass made her believe what she was seeing more. If he was in it then she really was too. He came straight at her. He picked up speed. If he reached her he would tear the skin right off her bones just like he’d snatched the sneakers off her feet. She had to move, but to where? The only choice seemed to be to go deeper into this impossible place.
A line of trees was visible to the north. There was nowhere else she might hope to hide. She took off in that direction. Loochie was fast. The fear helped speed her up. As she moved toward the trees she was filled with a sense of familiarity. Just as she’d recognized the layout of the kitchen, she felt she knew this park intimately, too. But how, exactly, she couldn’t say.
Lucretia and the Kroons Page 4
