by Sarah Lotz
I almost puked when I went into his unit the first time. Shit, man, it stank. Don’t know how to describe it, guess you could say it was kinda like a mix of rotten fish and meat. It was hot and dark in there, too–the curtains were drawn and the A.C. wasn’t on. I was like, what the fuck? Then I saw something moving in the corner of the room–this large shadow–and it looked like it was heading straight for me. I couldn’t take in what I was seeing at first, then I realised it was a massive fucking lizard. I yelled and Neville laughed like crazy. He was waiting for my reaction. Told me to chill, said, ‘Don’t worry, that’s just George.’ All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there, but I was trying not to be a pussy, you know? I asked Neville what the fuck he was doing with a thing like that in the apartment and he just shrugged, said he had three of the fucking things–monitors from Africa or whatever–and that most of the time he let them run around, rather than keep them in their cages or aquariums. He said they were really intelligent, ‘Clever as pigs or dogs.’ I asked him if they were dangerous and he showed me this jagged scar on his wrist. ‘Big flap of skin came off it,’ he said, and you could tell he was proud of it. ‘But they’re usually cool if you treat them right.’ I asked him what they ate, and he was like, ‘Baby rats. Live ones. Get them from a wholesaler.’ Imagine that being your job, huh, baby rat merchant? He went into this whole spiel about how some people were against feeding rodents to monitors, and all that time I just watched that thing. Willing it not to get too close to me. That wasn’t all, he kept his snake collection and his spiders in his bedroom. Aquariums everywhere. Went on and on about how tarantulas make the best pets. Later, they said he was an animal hoarder.
Couple of days after Black Thursday, he knocked on my door, told me he was going out of town. Most of his work was LA-based, but occasionally he’d have to go further afield. That was the first time he asked me to check on his ‘buddies’. ‘I stock ’em up before I go,’ he said. He could be gone for as long as three days and they’d be fine. He asked me to check on their water levels and swore the monitors would be locked up tight. He was usually cagey about his assignments, but this time he told me where he was going, as there was a chance he’d get himself in deep shit.
He said he’d called in a favour to get on one of the charter helicopters, planned on heading to Miami, to that hospital where they’d taken Bobby Small, see if he could get a shot of the kid. Said he had to do it fast, the kid was being taken back to NYC soon.
I asked him how in the hell he thought he was going to get anywhere near there–from what I’d seen on the news, security at that hospital was tight–but he just smiled. He said he specialised in this kind of thing.
He was only gone three days, so I didn’t need to go into his place after all. I saw him climbing out of a cab just as I was getting home from my shift. He looked like crap. Really shaken, like he was sick or something. I asked him if he was cool, and if he’d managed to get a picture of the kid. He didn’t answer me and he looked so bad I asked him in for a drink. He came right over, didn’t even go into his own place to check on the reptiles. You could see he wanted to talk, but couldn’t get the words out. I poured him a shot and he knocked it back, and then I gave him a beer because I’d run out of hard liquor. He downed his beer and asked me for another. He downed that too.
The liquor helped, and slowly he told me what he’d done. I thought he was going to say that he’d disguised himself as a porter or something to get into that hospital, maybe sneaked in through the morgue, B-movie style. But it was worse. Clever. But worse. He’d moved into a hotel just down from the hospital, had this whole cover story and fake ID and accent that he’d used before–a UK businessman in Miami for a conference. He said he’d done the same thing when Klint Maestro, the lead singer of the Space Cowboys, OD-ed. That’s how come he got the shots of Klint looking all wasted in his hospital gown. It was easy. He just took extra insulin to make himself go hypo. I didn’t even know he was an insulin-dependent diabetic, well, why would I? He collapsed at the bar and let the barman or whoever know that he needed to be taken to the nearest hospital. Then he passed out.
In Casualty they put him on a drip, and in order to get admitted, he pretended to have an epileptic fit. He could’ve died, but he said it wasn’t the first time he’d done it, and he always kept a couple of little baggies of sugar in his sock to sort him out. It was his modus operandi kind of thing. Said it was a bitch to move around in that condition (they’d given him valium after the fit and he still felt like shit after making himself hypo).
I asked him if he managed to get to where the kid was and he was like, nah, it was a bust. Said he couldn’t get anywhere near Bobby’s ward, security was too tight.
But when they found his camera later, it showed he’d managed to get into the kid’s room after all. There’s a shot of Bobby sitting up in bed, and he’s smiling straight at the camera, as if he was posing for a family shot or whatever. You must’ve seen it. Someone from the coroner’s office leaked it. Kinda creeped me out.
He turned down a third beer and said, ‘There’s no point, Stevie. There’s no point to any of this.’
I was like, ‘Any of what?’
He acted like he hadn’t heard me. I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. Then he left.
I kinda got wrapped up in work after that. That puke virus was going around, and it seemed everyone at work was off sick. I was working double shifts and dead on my feet half the time. It was only later that I realised it had to have been a week since I’d run into Neville.
Then, one of the guys who lived in the section on the other side of Neville’s place, Mr Patinkin, asked me for the super’s number, said there was a problem with the drains. Said he thought maybe the smell was coming from Neville’s place.
I guess I knew right then something was up. I went down, knocked on the door. I could hear the faint sound of the TV, nothing else. I still had the key, but I wish to Christ I’d called the cops straight off. Mr Patinkin came with me. He needed trauma counselling afterwards; I still get nightmares. It was dark in there, but I could see Neville from the front door, sitting slumped against the wall, legs outstretched. His shape didn’t look right. That’s because there were bits missing.
They said he died of an insulin overdose, but the autopsy showed that he might not have been completely dead when they started to… you know.
It was big news, ‘Man eaten alive by pet lizards and spiders’. There was this whole story going around that the tarantulas had spun webs all over his body and were nesting inside his chest cavity. Bullshit. Far as I could tell, the spiders were still all in their spiderariums or whatever you call them. It was the monitor lizards who ate him.
Funny that he became the news. What do you call it? Ironic. There were even guys like him sneaking round the apartment trying to get a photo. The story pushed all that stuff about the The Three miracle children off the front page for a day. Later on it all got dredged up again when that preacher guy went on about it being another sign of the apocalypse or whatever–the animals turning on humans.
The only way I can deal with it is to think that maybe that’s how Neville would have wanted to go. He loved those fucking lizards.
PART TWO
CONSPIRACY
JANUARY–FEBRUARY
A former follower of Pastor Len Vorhees’s Church of the Redeemer, Reba Louise Neilson describes herself as ‘Pamela May Donald’s closest friend’. She still lives in Sannah County, South Texas, where she is the coordinator of the local Christian Women’s Preppers’ Centre. She is adamant that she was never a member of Pastor Vorhees’s Pamelist sect and agreed to talk to me in order ‘to let people know that there are good people living here who never wanted anything bad to happen to those children’. I spoke to Reba on a number of occasions via phone in June and July 2012, and collated our conversations into several accounts.
Stephenie told me about it first. She was crying on the phone, couldn’t hardly get her words out. �
��It’s Pam, Reba,’ she said when I finally got her to calm down. ‘She was on that plane that crashed.’
I told her not to be silly, that Pam was in Japan visiting her daughter, she wasn’t in Florida. ‘Not that plane, Reba. The Japanese one. It’s on the news now.’ Well, my heart just about plummeted into my feet. I’d heard about the crash in Japan of course, as well as the one in that unpronounceable place in Africa, and the plane full of English tourists that crashed into the sea in Europe, but I hadn’t for a minute thought Pam was on it. The whole thing was just terrible. For a while there, it was as if all the planes in the world were dropping out of the sky. The Fox anchors would be reporting on a crash, then they’d flinch and say: ‘And we’ve just heard another plane has gone down…’ My husband Lorne said it was like a never-ending punchline.
I asked Stephenie if she’d told Pastor Len, and she said she’d tried the ranch but Kendra had been vague as usual about when he’d be back, and he wasn’t answering his cellular phone. I hung up and ran into the den to see the news for myself. Behind Melinda Stewart (she’s my favourite Fox anchor, the kind of woman you can imagine getting coffee with, you know?) were two huge photographs, one of Pam and one of that little Jewish boy who survived the Florida crash. I didn’t like to think what Pam would have said about her photo, which must’ve been from her passport and looked for all the world like a mug shot. I hate to say it, but her hair was a mess. Along the bottom of the screen, they kept repeating the words: ‘526 killed in Japanese Sun Air disaster. Sole American on board named as Texan native Pamela May Donald.’
I just sat there, Elspeth, staring at that photograph, reading those words until it finally hit me that Pam really was gone. That nice investigator man, Ace somebody, from that air crash show Lorne likes, came on the line from Florida and said that it was too early to be sure, but it didn’t look like terrorism was involved or anything like that. Melinda asked him if he thought the crashes might have been caused by environmental factors or maybe ‘an act of God’. I didn’t like that, I can tell you, Elspeth! Implying that our Lord had nothing better to do than bat planes out of the air. It’s the Antichrist who would have had a hand in that. I couldn’t move for the longest time, then they showed an overhead shot of a house that looked familiar. And then I realised it was Pam’s house, only it looked smaller from the air. It was then I remembered Jim, Pam’s husband.
I never had much to do with Jim. The way Pam used to speak about him, with a kind of hushed awe, you’d think he was a six-foot giant, but in the flesh he’s not much taller than I am. I don’t like to say this, but I always suspected him of being free with his fists. We never saw bruises on Pam or anything like that. But it was just strange, her acting so cowed all the time. My Lorne, if he even raised his voice to me… Well, I do believe the man is the head of the household of course, but it’s a mutual respect thing, y’know? Still, no one deserves to go through what that man went through, and I knew we had to do something to help him.
Lorne was out back, doing the inventory on the canned fruit and reorganising our dried goods. ‘You can never be too careful’ is what he says, not with those solar flares and globalisation and super storms everyone’s talking about, and no way were we going to be caught unawares. Who knows when Jesus will call us up to join him? I told him what had happened, that Pam had been on that Jap plane. Him and Jim worked together at the B&P plant, and I said he should go over and see if Jim needed anything. He was reluctant–they weren’t close, they worked in different sections–but he went all the same. I thought I’d better stay home, make sure everyone else knew.
I called Pastor Len on his cellphone first; it went straight to voicemail but I left a message. He called me right back and I could tell by the way his voice was shaking that he’d only just heard the news. Pam and I had been members of what he called his ‘inner circle’ for the longest time. Before Pastor Len and Kendra came to Sannah County–we’re talking, oh, fifteen years ago now–I was a member of the New Revelation church over in Denham. It meant a half-hour drive every Sunday and Wednesday for Bible study too, because no way was I going to worship with the Episcopalians, not with their liberal views on the homosexual element.
So you can imagine how cheered I was when Pastor Len arrived in town and took over the old Lutheran church that had been standing empty for the longest time. Back then, I hadn’t heard his radio show. It was his billboards that caught my eye at first. He knew how to attract attention to the Lord’s work! Every week he’d put up a banner with a different message: ‘Like to gamble? Well, the devil deals in souls’; ‘God doesn’t believe in atheists, therefore atheists don’t exist’ were two of my favourites. The only one I didn’t care for showed a picture of a Bible with one of those antennas old cellphones used to have coming out of its top and ‘App for saving your soul,’ which I thought was a little too cutesy. Pastor Len’s congregation was small at first and that’s where I really got to know Pam, although I’d seen her at PTA meetings of course–her Joanie was older than my two. We didn’t always see eye to eye on everything, but no one could say she wasn’t a good Christian woman.
Pastor Len said he’d organised a prayer circle for Pam’s soul the following evening, and, as Kendra was down with one of her headaches, he asked me to call around and tell the Bible study group. Then Lorne came huffing into the house saying that Jim’s place was surrounded by TV news trucks and reporters and there was no answer from inside the house. Well, of course, I told all of this to Pastor Len, who said it was our Christian duty to help Jim in his time of need, even though he wasn’t a member of the church. Pam had always been a bit tight-lipped about that. My Lorne came with me every Sunday, although he didn’t join the Bible study group or the healing prayer circle, and it must have been just terrible for Pam knowing that her husband would be left behind on earth to face the wrath of the Antichrist and burn in hell for all eternity.
Then I set to wondering if Pam’s daughter Joanie would be coming home. She hadn’t been back for two years; there’d been some trouble between her and Jim a while back when she was still at college. He didn’t approve of this boyfriend she had. A Mexican. Or half Mexican, I think he was. Caused a rift right through the family. And I know that hurt Pam. She’d always look wistful when I spoke about my grandchildren. Both of my girls got married straight out of school and settled just minutes away from me. That’s why Pam went to Japan. She missed Joanie something awful.
It was getting late, so Pastor Len said we should go and see Jim early the next morning. Oh, he looked smart when he picked me up at eight the next day! I’ll never forget that, Elspeth. A suit and a red silk tie. But then he always did care about his appearance before he let the devil in. It feels wrong to say this, but I wish I could say the same about Kendra. She and Pastor Len didn’t look like they belonged with each other. She was skinny as a rake and always looked washed-out and dowdy.
I was surprised Kendra came with us that day; she usually has some sort of excuse. I wouldn’t say she was snooty… she just kept her distance, this vague smile on her face, had trouble with her nerves. Is it true that she ended up in one of them places, those… asylums? They don’t call them that any more, do they? Institutions, that’s the word I was fishing for! I can’t help but think that it’s a real blessing they never had children. At least they didn’t get to witness the pain of their mother giving in to her weak mind. I guess it was the gossip about Pastor Len and his fancy woman that sent her over the edge–but let me make it clear, Elspeth, no way, whatever I may think about what he did later, do I give any credence to those rumours.
After a quick prayer, we shot straight over to Pam and Jim’s place. It’s out on Seven Souls road, and the press was lined all the way along it, reporters and those camera people standing outside the gate, smoking and jabbering. Oh glory, I said to Pastor Len, how are we going to get up into Pam’s driveway?
But Pastor Len said we were on Jesus’ business and no one was going to stop us doing our Christian duty. Wh
en we pulled up next to the gate, a swarm of reporters came rushing up to us, saying things like, ‘Are you friends of Pam? How do you feel about what’s happened?’ They were taking pictures and filming and I knew right then what those poor celebrities must go through all the time.
‘How do you think we feel?’ I said to a young woman wearing too much mascara who was the pushiest of the bunch. Pastor Len gave me a look as if to say, let me do the talking, but they needed to be put in their place. Pastor Len told them that we were on a mission to help Pam’s husband in his time of need, and that he’d come out to give them a statement as soon as we’d ensured Jim was coping. This seemed to appease them, and they drew back to their media vans.
The curtains were drawn and we banged on the front door but there was no answer. Pastor Len went round back to the yard, but he said it was the same story. Then I remembered that Pam kept a spare key under the plant pot next to the back door just in case she ever locked herself out, so that’s how we got in.
Oh, the smell! Just about slapped you in the face. Kendra went white, it was so bad. And then Snookie yipped and came running down the passageway towards us. Pam would have near had a heart attack if she’d seen her kitchen like that. She’d only been gone two days, but you’d swear a bomb had hit it. Broken glass all over the counter and a cigarette butt dumped in one of Pam’s mother’s best china cups. And Jim couldn’t have let Snookie out once, there were what my Lorne calls doggy landmines all over Pam’s good linoleum. I have to be honest here, Elspeth, as I believe in always speaking the truth, but none of us really liked that dog. Even if Pam bathed her a hundred times a day, she always smelled just awful. And her eyes always had this film over them. But Pam doted on her, and seeing her sniffing at our shoes and looking up at us all hopeful that one of us was Pam… well, it near broke my heart.
