He heard a noise, and glanced to his right.
The woman in 6C stood there, in a navy blue bathrobe. “She left.”
“What do you mean she left?”
“She knocked on my door about ten minutes ago. She told me she had to go home, and she didn’t know where you went off to. Here,” the woman held her hand out, “she just left a second ago.”
In her hand, his keys.
He looked at her, at the keys. “I just talked with her on the intercom. I came up on the elevator. I would’ve seen her.”
The woman seemed annoyed. “She comes banging on my door at God knows what hour and tells me you left the keys in the door and then we hear the buzzer go off and she goes back to the apartment, and mister, I can’t tell you what else she did, because I came back inside kinda pissed off that I now gotta wait up for you ’cause your girlfriend wants to split. If she takes the stairs or something, it ain’t my business. She’s a nice lady, seems like, but I can’t read her mind. You want these or what?” she asked, finally tossing the keys to him. As she stepped back inside her apartment, he noticed the light blue bruises,like polka dots on her pink legs.
Maggie’s answering machine picked up for three days, and then he stopped calling. He dropped by her place one night with flowers, but she didn’t answer the door. Even though the lights were out in her apartment, he sensed that she was standing behind the door, looking through the peephole.
Then, on Monday morning, she called.
“It’s me.”
“Jesus, Maggie, I’ve been worried sick. What happened to you?”
“What do you mean, what happened to me? What happened to you?”
“I went out for some yogurt. You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”
Silence on the line.
“Something frightened me.”
“What?”
“Oh, Rob,” she sounded close to tears, “I can’t talk about it. Not like this.”
“Will you meet me somewhere? Cafe Veronese?” He heard her slow breaths, as if she needed to calm down.
She whispered, “Okay. After work. Six.”
When they met, she moved away as he tried to give her a friendly hug. Her eyes were circled with darkness, and bloodshot. Her lips were chapped. Something about her skin was shiny, as if she had a fever. They sat at a booth in the back, and she, uncharacteristically, withdrew a cigarette from her purse and lit it. “I didn’t know where you went. The door was wide open. The lights were off. Someone was inside with me. I knew it wasn’t you.”
He noticed that she kept glancing down at her fingers; and then he knew why. She was afraid to look him in the face.
He said nothing.
“I was just about naked, and scared. I reached for my jacket, but…it…it grabbed my arm.”
“A man,” he said.
She shook her head.
“A woman?”
Maggie laughed once, bitterly. “None of the above. It crawled up my arm.”
He looked at her face, thinking it was a joke. “It was a bug?”
She glanced up, saw his grin. “Fuck you,” she said.
“Sorry. But you got scared by a bug?”
“It wasn’t just a bug, Robert. I knew I couldn’t talk to you.”
He sipped his coffee, she smoked her Camel. Her fingertips were yellow-brown from smoking.
As if suddenly inspired, she rolled the sleeve of her sweater up and thrust her arm under his face.
Dark bruises, in a diamond pattern.
He touched along them and felt thin blisters.
“It attacked me,” she said.
“Jesus,” he gasped, “Maggie, you’ve got to see a doctor. This isn’t just some bug.”
“Exactly,” she said, triumphant. Tears shone like jewels in her eyes. “It’s like a disease. It feels like a disease. It’s taking me with it. Whatever it is. Inside me. It did something. But this,” she nodded toward the diamond bruise, “this was only where it held me. The others…”
“Others?”
Maggie’s expression turned again to stone. “You don’t believe me.”
He said nothing.
She said, “They opened me up.”
4
“She doing okay?”
Rob was checking his mailbox. He glanced around the corner, and there was the woman from 6C. It was eight o’clock, and he had walked Maggie home, put her to bed with a stiff drink, made her promise to see a doctor in the morning, and then walked home. He was hoping to just go to bed early, himself.
The woman said, “Your girl. I heard from the super she got attacked. He said it was a spider from South America or something. He started talking exterminating again—sounded like Adolf Hitler, you ask me.”
“Better,” he said, “she’s doing better. I haven’t talked with her since Monday, though. I think maybe she just needs to be alone for a while.”
“You think she imagined it, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“She seemed nice. I don’t think she’d make it up. I mean, I seen spiders big as birds at the museum. She doesn’t seem like the lying type, your girl.”
“I didn’t say that. Something definitely happened.”
“You was thinking it, though. Hard for guys to deal with things like that, I don’t know why, happens every day in this city—bugs and thugs. You probably don’t believe about the gators in the sewer, but I know two cleaning women who swear by them. Guys, they never believe it till it hits them butt first in the face. But you ain’t like that, right? You half believe her, don’t you?” The woman gave a hopeful smile. “I got attacked in the subway three months ago. My hip still ain’t too good. You give me a choice between getting bit by a spider or jumped by a hoodlum, I choose spiders every time.”
He managed a smile.
“My name’s Celeste. Celeste Pratt. We talk a lot in halls and junk, but we never been introduced.” She extended her beefy arm. She’d dressed all in black, which somehow brightened her face. “I didn’t know she got bit that night. I’m sorry I ragged on you so much. I was tired. Friends?”
He nodded. “Sure.”
“Glad to hear she’s doing better. You think it was a black widow or something?”
“I don’t know. She won’t see a doctor.”
“I don’t like doctors neither,” Celeste said, shaking her head. “I believe in homeopathy and stuff like that. The mind, Rob. The power of the mind. And nature. It’s weird to believe in nature when you live in a city like this, ain’t it? But I always lived here, all my life, and you look for nature where you can find it. The law of nature, way I see it, is we got to sometimes give ourselves up to it, like we’re part of this big system, and your legs—like, say, mine—get bashed, but you just let the pain of healing take over, you let nature run its course. It’s like Grubb’s Nature Theory, about survival and adaptation. Know what I mean? You tell your girlfriend I hope she gets better, okay? Do that for me? She’s always been so nice and friendly to me, I hate to see nice people get hurt, but in this city, you know, it happens every day, but better some spider or something instead of a guy with a butterfly knife, right?”
Rob stared at her as if he could not quite believe she existed. He blinked twice.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, then headed for the elevator. Celeste got on with him and smiled, but didn’t volunteer another river of conversation. On their floor, he let her off first, then got off, stood just on the other side of the elevator door, and watched Celeste go to her apartment.
When she had put her key in the lock and turned it, he said, “Excuse me, Celeste.”
She turned to him, beaming.
“Downstairs, did you mention something about someone named Grubb?”
“Grubb’s Nature Theory. Yes.”
“Is that Horace Grubb?”
She nodded, blushing.
“My grandfather,” she said.
5
Celeste invited him into her apartment to show him her grandfather’s books. Rob accepted out of curiosity, as much to see the large apartment as the texts.
The apartment had three bedrooms, “although it was once this entire floor, a fourteen-room affair, but it was divided up in late ’29, when everyone with anything lost it. My grandmother, she was from New Orleans. She redecorated like crazy,” Celeste pointed out the French touches, “and the apartment, what’s left of it, is pretty much the way she wanted it. She was off the deep end, you ask me. ‘Course, she ruined the floor, the beautiful wood floor, what with her wheelchair scraping along. It’s why I got all these fancy carpets and runners all over the place, to cover up the damage. My mother never wanted to live here ever since she married back in ’48, but Grammy left it to me. Who else? She knew I’d take the right kind of care of it. But I ain’t much of a housekeeper. The bedrooms, you should see, all disaster areas—I do all my crap in them—but, here, come over here, we can have a nice martini at the window.”
She led him to the kitchen, which was dark like the rest of the place; the floors were thick with layers of dust and crumbs, as if she never cleaned up after herself; the windows were painted black, supposedly because her grandmother, at the end of her life, could not handle light because of eye problems. Celeste pressed a small latch to the left of the pane, then pushed open the larger of two windows.
The view was of the nearby park, shrouded in night, and was not blocked by the Cavanaugh Building, as it was from Rob’s small apartment
After making the martinis, Celeste sat down opposite him and raised her glass. He clinked his to hers and sipped. Strong.
He said, “I saw a picture of your grandfather. In the papers.”
She rolled her eyes and flapped her hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Oh, God, my grandfather, twice as nuts as Grammy, and all that business. Grampy’s book was called De Naturis and it basically was nothing but his theory, which always sounds loony-tuney in the light of day. Oh, right, right, you want to know about it, don’t you? It was like something about how man’s role in Nature was to be a farmer. That kind of thing. We ain’t here to control nobody’s nature, he said, but ‘cause we got to do stuff, ease the birth he said, so nature can keep on keeping on, or something like that”
“How’d he get in trouble over that?”
“Different time, you know, back then, nobody liked the message. World War One just started, and it had something to do with soldiers going to France, and some papers Grampy gave out. He got attacked. Terrible. Would’ve killed him, too. Things worked out eventually. But it made the news here for about ten minutes before the war took over. Grammy used to tell the story like he was some kind of saint. Which he most definitely was not. Put the Lonsdale on the map, though.”
“Was he anti-war?”
“Oh, no,” she said, her breath strong and gin-soaked, “not by a long shot. He loved war, he said, ‘cause it meant more human flesh got put in the ground, which was good for crops. Crazy I know. Genius but crazy. He believed the best use of human beings was as compost or incubators. Imagine thinking that. But is sold newspapers. And his book. But that’s really where the trouble was, in his big fat mouth. He thought dead people was the best food nature’s got. He had people, you know, who agreed with him, listened to him and stuff. Wrote a lot of pamphlets. They called themselves Grubbites. He was definitely a class-A weirdo. He wasn’t a cannibal or nothing like that, even though they all thought he was. Got arrested five times, just for causing a ruckus. He was a…what do you call it?”
“Misanthrope?”
“Yeah, in a big-ass way.” She drank down the rest of her martini and went to get another. Her back to him, she said, “Maybe something different, too. He had this whole spiritual side to him, like he believed there was a god in everything alive. Trees. Birds. Even the air.”
“Sort of a pagan transcendentalist then,” Rob said.
She was drinking her martini at the sink, half turned to him, looking out the window.
“Everything. Even unto the smallest,” she whispered.
Rob noticed that a trail of ants running from a crack near the top of the kitchen wall, all the way down beneath the sink. No wonder she leaves crumbs and scraps everywhere.
Celeste was watching the ants, as well, but made no move to kill them. As he followed the trail from its highest point he noticed that the ants went down to the corner of the shelf at the sink and trooped across shiny tile to within an inch of her hand.
6
He lay in bed that night with a reading light on. He thought about Maggie, about her gardenia smell, a garden of earthly delights—and somehow this reminded him of the ants in Celeste’s apartment, for he wondered what kind of urban garden they made their nest in. Finally, he turned out the light and fell asleep.
He awoke sometime in the night hearing the sound of a woman moaning from nearby.
Through the wall.
Celeste. Having a very loud nightmare. The moaning continued, escalating to muffled cries, and he guessed it was not nightmare but a private pleasure. He heard the humming buzz of what could only have been a vibrator, and he thought: good for her.
Strangely, it aroused him, and the more he listened, the less aware he was of his own left hand slipping down beneath the elastic of his Jockey shorts.
Just as he was closing his eyes, dreaming about a faceless but beautiful woman, the moaning from the other side of the wall turned into a scream.
He threw on his bathrobe and dashed to the hall, but by the time he knocked on Celeste’s door, it was silent. The hallway light flickered and buzzed; the bulbs would need replacing. He stood there, looking around at the other apartments, wondering if anyone else had heard the woman’s scream. He started knocking again, and this time he heard her moving around, as if drunk, knocking things over as she made her way to the door. Maybe she’d had another martini or two after he’d left; she’d certainly gulped them down fast enough.
He saw her shadow beneath the space between the floor and the door. She was standing on the other side of the door, looking through the peephole at him.
“Celeste? Are you all right?”
She must’ve been scraping her nails on the door.
“Celeste?”
The shadow beneath the door vanished; he heard noises as she moved back down the corridor.
From within the apartment, the chime, of a clock.
Two a.m.
He turned to go back to his apartment, shaking his head. Had he imagined the scream? Was it a cry of pleasure?
As he climbed back into bed, he thought he heard the buzzing of her vibrator again, just at the wall. A little louder than before. He closed his eyes, wondering if he should investigate further. Maybe she’d just tripped on something and screamed, maybe she was drunk, maybe she didn’t even scream with pain, maybe it was the way she climaxed —who the hell knew?
He was asleep, probably dreaming, but he imagined that an enormous cockroach was riding Celeste’s ass, its feelers stroking the back of her neck, and its face turning slowly to look at Rob as it diddled his neighbor, its face all brown and callused, with flecks of dirt across the broad platform between its eyes, and its eyes looking just like the Rasputin eyes of Horace Grubb.
The phone rang, both in the dream and out of it; in the dream, Rob went running down a long corridor in search of the phone; in reality, he awoke with a groan and reached to the table by the bed.
“Hello?”
He heard static on the line.
Then: “Help me.”
A woman’s voice.
Its very weakness shocked him awake.
“Celeste?”
“Help me,” she said, and then a sound like high-pitched humming, like the Vienna Boys Choir humming one note without taking a single breath. The hum filled the phone, and it felt like a needle thrust in his ear.
He dropped the receiver.
7
The door to 6C was open.
The sun
was still not quite up, although the honkings and screechings of morning traffic had already begun outside.
Her apartment was lit with red lights, like a bordello, and he thought of Celeste’s grandmother decorating the place with her New Orleans touches. The furniture seemed bloodied by the light, and it made him queasy as he walked through the front hallway. He had a sense that there was movement all around him, just on the periphery of his vision, but every time he glanced at the red-shrouded furnishings, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
The phone, off its hook, lay in the kitchen.
A smell, too, like clothes that had been sweated in and discarded on a heap to rot for months. The window that had formerly held the view of the park was blackened over with dark cellophane.
Again, he sensed a slithery movement, and scanned the floor, but saw nothing. He glanced down the slim hallway that led to the three bedrooms.
“Celeste?” he asked.
A sudden noise, as of someone rushing to a door and throwing herself against it, sliding down to the floor. Sobbing. Muffled, as if a mouth were taped over.
His first instinct was to walk back to the door, go to his apartment, and call the police.
He took one step back, and stood still when he heard another sound: a repetitive vibrating sound, like monks chanting aum over and over.
But it was a woman; it sounded like a synthesis of a woman and a machine, for the vibration of her voice seemed to increase beyond what a human might be able to, and he felt the vibrations in the floor and walls.
Someone threw herself at the door again.
Door Number Three.
He could not bring himself to turn around and run for cover.
He recognized the voice. It was Maggie’s, humming louder. It made him want to cover his ears.
Then it was as if he were being swept along with a tide, for he found himself moving toward that door, that dark red-stained door, moving smoothly straight forward, moving his feet, not one after another, but together, as if he were in a dream and not in contact with the ground at all. His heart was beating like a vibrating drum; or it was not his heart, but her humming; his mouth had dried up; he swallowed dryness.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 48
