BLEED
by Ed Kurtz
©2012 Abattoir Press/Redrum Horror
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Also by Ed Kurtz
Sawbones
The Tombs: Sawbones Book Two
Catch My Killer! (The First Sam Truman Mystery)
1923
Papa comes back at night. Three days he’s been gone and she is beginning to see a glimmer of hope that he’d never come home. Everything would be just fine if he didn’t. Agnes is old enough and in just a few more years she will be, too. Without Papa around the time will fly like a hawk. But he comes back in the moonlight, the darktime when Papa gets dark thoughts to do dark things. She hears him come into the house, the creaking hinges on the door and the groaning floorboards as he pounds loudly through the house. He grumbles and moans and sings a little ditty he makes up as he goes along. “Ah’ma teach ‘at girl ev’rything Ah know, as soon as Ah finish this drink…Ah’ma open ‘nother bottle and take a drink, as soon as Ah teach that girl…” The words come out wet and syrupy as though the liquor has filled him up too much and now it’s bubbling up out of him. He sounds maybe a little happy, but that’s the worst time. He never does anything as bad as when he’s feeling good. Anger only makes him sulk and drink and go to sleep. Feeling good makes him visit in the darktime, all reassuring whispers and scratchy, sandpapery hands. Still singing and crashing around the house in the dark, he must be feeling good. She shudders and pulls the quilt up to her chin. Her eyes bulge despite the blackness in the room. Beside her Agnes does not stir at all. She’s dead to the world, long inured to Papa’s darktime fumblings and doubtlessly relieved that she was no longer the only one. In the hall he stumbles over some timber and tools, the supplies he’s collected or stolen to build his attic. Wood scrapes against wood and an iron instrument clangs sonorously. Papa shouts and curses. She holds her breath, listening. Maybe he’ll grow too angry for what he came to do. Maybe he’ll turn mad and drink some more, kick a hole in the wall and black out on the floor. Please god, please. Make Papa madder than he’s ever been before. Make Papa forget all about darktime and Agnes and me. She squeezes her eyes shut until they are replaced by small pink mounds of wrinkled skin, begging the Lord to intercede, but she expects nothing in response. God does not listen to her, never has. A thousand times she beseeched the almighty to strike the foul old lush dead, take him out of this world and out of their lives. Surely no loving and personal god would suffer a sinner like him to live. In her heart, she was sure she heard god laugh at her request. Suffer like Job, he jibed her. Suffer and be saved. She does not want to suffer. Not anymore. “Ah’ma teach ‘at girl… ev’rything…Ah’ma teach…” Oh no. Papa is not angry at all. He is happy as a pig in shit. Papa is both the pig and the shit. Tears squeeze out of the corners of her eyes and she sinks further down under the quilt. She moans Agnes’ name. The older girl fails to respond. Is she still asleep in spite of all this racket? Or is she deliberately ignoring the miserable, terrified child beside her? Agnes! Agnes! A hundred thousand darktime nightmares have turned out this way, with Papa on the prowl and Agnes frozen or dead and unable to help her. This is no nightmare, though. This is the real thing and it is darktime now and Papa’s black sinister shadow is looming in the doorway, leering at her with tiny too-far-apart eyes that glint in the gray moonlight coming in through the window. She shuts her eyes and remembers Agnes telling her to play dead if she ever comes across a bear in the woods. Just play dead, just play dead, just like Papa was a grizzly come to gobble me up. She doesn’t open them even when she hears the heavy, shuffling steps stagger into the bedroom, compounded by the chilling jangle of Papa’s belt buckle unfastening and clanging against his leg. “Gunna teach ‘at girl…gunna teach her good…” Her behind contracts as her spine sends a shockwave shiver up to her shoulders. But her eyes remain closed. No sense in opening them up anyhow; it’s dark as a pocket in here. She waits for him, for the bed to sink down on one side with a sickening squeal, for the coarse sandpaper hands to start their business. She hears the springs squeal, but she feels nothing at all. Agnes stirs. Moans softly. Papa lets out a gurgly chuckle, sounds like he’s drowning in his own spit. Agnes! Oh, Agnes, poor Agnes! Pulling into a tighter ball, her knees touching her chin, she trembles and cries but is careful to not make a sound. Papa might hear. He might change his mind. Got to let him take it out on Agnes, leave me be for one night just one night of peace please god just one night. Her brain reels. Guilt fills her up, sours her stomach and leaves a nasty taste on her tongue. It is not right to wish that kind of thing on her sister, not Agnes who takes care of me just fine when Papa’s away who’d be the best Mama she ever knew if only Papa would go away and never come back round again. Huffing, snuffling. Papa grunts like a hog. Agnes sniffs. She wants to scream. But she is quiet as a mouse when she slips out of bed and pads softly out of the bedroom, through the hall, into the kitchen. Even here she hears the horror in the bedroom. Huff, huff, huff. Grunt, grunt, grunt. The pig and the shit. She climbs up onto a chair, steps higher yet onto the table. She can reach the ironware from up here. Old and rusty, mostly. Mama’s old Dutch oven, belonged to great grandmammy, and the griddle and the pots and the big black skillet. That is the one she wants. She needs both hands to get it down from the sixteen penny nail in the wall and it’s heavier than sin but she gets it and carries it carefully, quietly back down to the floor. Clutching the cold iron to her chest, she pads back to the bedroom, frowning at the nauseating, soul-crushing noises she walks toward. But she needs the noise, needs it find them. Him. She follows it, rounding her own narrow bed until her hip bumps Agnes’. The thin, soiled mattress shakes and quivers. She feels the heel of Papa’s boot brush her side. With a grunt of her own she heaves the massive skillet, hoists it over her head. It is only the work of a moment to send it crashing back down—its own weight does most of the work. She expects it to ring out like a bell but there is only a dull crack as the heavy edge sinks into Papa’s skull like it was nothing but pudding. He does not even cry out. She let the skillet drop out of her hands and it bangs loudly on the floor, cracking the wood. Agnes screams. She presses her body against her sister’s and the tears flow. Agnes is splattered with Papa’s blood and hard bits of bone.
It is done.
SUMMER
The Stain on the Ceiling
Chapter One
The house was a fixer-upper, at least in Walt’s eyes. It was a gable front house—a cottage, really, due to its single story—that the realtor claimed was built in 1930. There were ornamental brackets on almost all of the doors and windows and a small crawlspace attic under the sharply angled roof. Upon seeing the house for the first time, Walt immediately fell in love with the double-hung sash windows and their clapboard siding. It was all just so quaint and lovely and perfect for his needs. The realtor, a dowdy schoolmarm sort of woman, had not even tried to skirt the truth of the house’s less than ideal condition. The walls needed patching, the moldy wallpaper had to be stripped, and all of the rotted baseboards were going to have to be replaced. Both bathrooms suffered from leaky toilet seals that had all but annihilated the subfloors, which needed to be ripped out and completely resurfaced. There was no carpeting in the house—another selling point for Walt—but the hardwood floors were terribly scratched with deep, dark grooves cut into the wood everywhere he looked. That would require refinishing.
And that was just the interior; the roof was another can of worms altogether.
Nonetheless, Walt was inspired by the work that lay ahead of him, and he got the house for a song. By the time the school year began in late August, he figured he would be well on his way to having the place right where he wanted it. By Christmas morning, when he finally got around to unburdening himself of the secrecy of the diamond ring in his sock drawer, Walt thought the house would be in perfect shape for a young couple with modest family ambitions.
Things were looking up.
Walt moved in on a Tuesday. The apartment in which he lived for the last three years had become crowded with his growing catalogue of belongings, but the square footage of the house far exceeded that of his former residence. Now he had space to spare and, as he looked at it, space to fill. For the time being, he simply unloaded box after box from the truck he rented, stacking them against the walls of the dining room. With the exception of his meager furniture—a bed, a sofa, and a small antique writing desk—the entirely of his worldly possessions fit into that single room. He smiled at the hoard, imagining where everything would end up and what odds and ends he would need to pick up in order to fill the gaps. It was exciting.
In the meantime, he hopped into his aging hatchback and drove to the hardware store in town, stopping at a burger joint en route. In his head he had a massive list of repairs and the supplies needed to make them, but he was far from overwhelmed by it. Rather, with every tube of caulk or foot of baseboard he set in the rolling cart, he felt more and more like the real live grown-up he never thought he would actually become. While he pushed the cart up one aisle and down the next, he conceived of every minute detail of his life for the next year or so. For some, he realized, this would be an anathema. But for Walt it was terrific; he knew he was going spend the remainder of the summer working on the house, begin his new career as a ninth grade English teacher in the fall, and with a little luck, complete his short story collection before the end of the calendar year. Then, on Christmas Eve, he would present the ring to Amanda (to which she would almost certainly say yes), and the spring would be taken up with plans for their eventual wedding.
Walt practically danced to the register to pay for his overfilled cartful of supplies, pushed them out to his hatchback in the parking lot, and then drove home, unaware of his own joyful humming along the way. By dusk, he had already ripped out every inch of baseboard with his brand new crowbar. He replaced most of it before midnight, but he underestimated the amount needed. Another trip to the hardware store would be needed in the morning; he made a mental note of it.
Now he was finally wearing down. He located the box marked kitchen among the stacks in the dining room, unpacked his coffee maker for the morning, and then dragged himself to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He meant to assemble the bed frame earlier, but he had not gotten around to it. He was not about to fool around with it now, though—he was just going to have to sleep on an unraised mattress. No big deal.
The final task of the day was to shut off all the lights in the house before turning in. Half of Walt’s lamps remained packed up, so that was not much of a job at all. He got the kitchen light, the lamp on the dining room floor where he had run out of baseboard, and the glaring overhead light in the living room. He made another mental note to replace that bulb with a lower wattage. Walt then shuffled down the short hallway leading to his bedroom, where he switched on the small rice paper lamp he had plugged in beside the bed. He figured on reading a little M. R. James until his eyelids grew heavy and then call it a day. So he crawled beneath the sheets and fluffed the pillows and took in the musty smell of his new, old house. It was then that he first noticed it: in the hall, just beyond the bedroom door, there was a tiny brown stain on the ceiling.
The stain was barely visible in the dim light of the rice paper lamp, but he could make it out well enough. No bigger than his own fist, it was splotchy and the color of rust. Water damage, he considered, due to the leaky roof. Another mental note for the pile, he thought.
By then he was too tired to focus on reading. Walt switched the lamp off and was asleep in minutes.
Chapter Two
The roof had more holes than Walt bargained for. Most were tiny; scattered dots of morning light sneaking in from above. Hail damage was a distinct possibility, but he bet on nothing more than pure age and neglect as the culprit for the constellations of miniscule chinks in his castle’s armor. A few of the holes, however, were startling sizeable, big enough for a child to crawl through. If there was a problem with nine year old cat burglars in the neighborhood, he was in trouble. Barring that, he was going to have to address the issue before the next rainfall.
The attic was small and stuffy, the hot, suffocating air ripe with the odor of mildew and mold. The pink insulation on the attic floor had gone almost white with age and it was spongy from the moisture let in by the holes. That was also going to have to go. Looking back up at the roof, he could detect no sign of flashing having been installed. No one had ever taken steps to waterproof the roof at all, from the looks of it. He pursed his lips and sighed. This one was beyond his ken as a home-improver. He was going to have to call in a contractor.
In the meantime, he aimed his flashlight at the attic floor. He challenged his memory to recall the house’s floor plan so that he could determine what was underneath each patch of mold insulation and every supporting beam. Although by no means picture perfect, Walt’s memory was good enough for the task at hand. He was standing directly over the guest bathroom by his reckoning, which put the hallway outside the master bedroom on the other side of the attic. Gingerly, he stepped on the sideways beams until he traversed the unventilated space. On that side, most of the cottony insulation was missing, taken up and away by some previous owner and never replaced. He decided there was a good ten by ten area of naked rafters and warped board flooring in that part of the attic. There were a couple of pinkish rolls of insulation jammed into a nearby corner, but these too were damaged beyond usefulness by the moisture. Another item for the shopping list that would not die.
Walt smiled and shrugged, perfectly happy in the role of the hardworking homeowner. The smile diminished, however, upon looking closer at the bare floor before him. This was indeed the part of the attic just above his bedroom and its adjacent hallway, but there was no water damage of any kind. He glanced up, and to his puzzlement discovered that the roof there was intact. His mystery stain continued to baffle him.
Back in the kitchen, Walt plugged his phone into the jack on the wall and began flipping through the yellow pages in search of a roofer. He chose the first one with a cute ad (it featured a cartoon roofer with the crack of his ass peeking out of his pants) and arranged for an estimate the next day. Things were moving along.
Feeling satisfied with his efforts, he poured a glass of ice water and ambled out to the front porch. He sat on the steps and enjoyed the clean, warm summer air. It contrasted nicely with the cold water in his glass.
The nearest house to his new property was several acres away, far enough that he could not see it for all the intervening trees. He did not own all of the land leading up to that neighbor’s border—whoever he or she was—rather, some conglomerate laid claim to it and was holding on to the land with tight, greedy fists. Someday, the realtor had confided to him, people from all over the state would be moving here in droves, sucking up every square inch of this land for their respective retirement villas. A good deal of money was going to be made. He narrowed his eyes and peered into the dense woods beyond the edge of his property, trying to imagine old people in bright colored clothes laying down Astroturf on their backyards and yelling at the mailman. The thought elicited a chuckle.
When he got up from the steps to dump the remaining ice cubes in the grass, Walt heard a soft panoply of desperate mewling. He padded across his dry, overgrown lawn and gazed into the woods. There, on a sunlit patch of dead leaves and twigs, he saw a black cat on her side with five anxious kittens struggling at her teats. He brought his brows together and smiled awkwardly at the tableau, wondering if these animals belonged to anyone or not. Clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, he walked back to the porch and went inside.
In the afternoon, he situated a step ladder directly beneath the ceiling stain and climbed up with a bleach-soaked scrub brush in his hand. He scrubbed at the spot until his arm started to feel sore, then he switched hands and scrubbed some more until that arm got sore, too. The bristles on the brush had turned dark brown, but the stain itself did not appear to have changed at all. He knitted his brow at it and stepped back down to the floor. More serious measures were necessary here, but it was just going to have to wait. Walt needed to get ready for dinner with Amanda.
Walt and Amanda’s first date, two and half years ago, was at a small Cajun restaurant on Markham called Louisiana Joe’s. The place had since changed hands, and now a slightly fancier dining spot took its place. The new joint was called Maggie’s, and that was where Walt met Amanda just after sunset.
He had asked her to go ahead and get a table, but she was seated on the long polyurethane divan in the waiting area when he arrived. Her curly brown hair was done up with only a few wild spirals cascading down the back of her neck and framing her freckled elfin face. She wore a dark blue dress Walt had never seen before; it looked elegant and it flowed down her small frame like a waterfall. He felt underdressed when he saw her, strangely self-conscious for a man nearly ready to propose. But Amanda just did that to him—she made him feel like he did not deserve her, like he won the lottery every day for almost three years straight. She smiled sweetly when he came into the restaurant. He returned the smile and accepted a peck on his cheek.
“It’s changed a bit, hasn’t it?” she said.
“A bit,” Walt agreed.
“What do you suppose it’ll be like in another three years?”
“Too rich for me, I’m sure.”
“Don’t be cheap, dear.”
“You haven’t seen the house yet. It’s going to cost me a bundle before I’m done. Hope you like ramen.”
“Love it.”
“Then I do believe everything’s going to be all right.”
Amanda giggled, effectively ruining the playacting but Walt did not mind. On a list of things that made life worth living, Amanda’s unique and infectious giggle was easily in the top five.
In a moment, a college-aged kid in a starched white shirt collected a pair of menus and led them to a small, round table in the middle of the restaurant. They ordered mid-priced wine, white asparagus in sabayon sauce, and then they each had Fillet de Poisson. They ate and talked and laughed a little too loud, judging by the looks some of their fellow diners occasionally shot at them. When they finished eating, Walt paid the check and they walked hand-in-hand out to the parking lot where Amanda lit up a cigarette. Walt frowned.
“Just give me until New Year’s,” she said between drags. “It’s a psychological thing, I think. Quitting on New Year’s, I mean.”
“You said that last year, as I recall,” Walt complained.
“And I may say it again next year, but you can’t say I’m not trying.”
Walt screwed up his mouth and sighed. He hated that Amanda smoked, but she smoked when they met and he felt more than a little uncomfortable trying to change her. He only wanted her to be healthy. He also wanted to never smell that stale cigarette smell in his bed ever again. Still, he was loathe to ruin the mood of an otherwise terrific evening, so he let it go. Recognizing this, Amanda smiled and gave his hand a squeeze.
“Let’s have a look at that house,” she said softly.
“Oh, not yet,” Walt protested. “It’s a shambles, really. I want to get the place fixed up before you see it.”
“You were a shambles the first time I saw you and that turned out all right.”
“Funny.”
“Come on. It’s a hot night, and I just can’t see sweating through the night for no good reason.”
“You’d rather be sweating for a good reason,” he inferred.
“You got that right, pal.”
Walt felt a shiver rock his body. He had not expected the evening to end like this, but now that events were turning that way he could not object. Amanda gave a coy grin and planted a lingering kiss on Walt’s lips.
“I’ll follow you in my car,” she whispered.
Amanda wandered the house while Walt made coffee. He listened to her heels click-clacking on the hardwood floors. He liked the sound. He hoped to hear a great deal more of it.
“You did this baseboarding yourself?” she called out from the dining room.
“Sure,” Walt called back as the coffee maker started to drip. “I’m a regular Bob Vila.”
Amanda laughed. “That so?”
“I am a man of many talents. I’ve even made coffee all by myself.”
She click-clacked her way into the kitchen.
“I’m speechless,” she said. “How did I ever get so lucky?”
“You must have been a saint in a previous life.”
“I must have been twenty saints,” she said, leaning into Walt for a deep kiss. Then she gave a soft moan and said, “Make that a hundred.”
“I hope it’s paying off.”
“In spades,” she said.
Walt regretfully released himself from her grip and collected two mugs from the cupboard. As he did so, Amanda reached into an open box on the counter and pulled out two dusty wine glasses, both of them stuffed with tissue paper.
“Got any wine?”
“I just made coffee.”
Amanda gave a crooked smile and arched one eyebrow. Walt smiled back, melting inside.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a bottle of brunello. Will that work?”
Amanda thrust the glasses at Walt and said, “Fill ‘er up.”
After Walt rinsed the glasses and poured the wine, they took their glasses and wandered hand in hand to the dining room. They sat among the piles and stacks of books while Amanda sipped at the crimson fluid and Walt watched her adoringly.
“Have you read all of these?” Amanda asked as she grabbed a random book from the nearest stack. It was Martin Chuzzlewit.
“No, not all. My reading list is miles long. I buy them faster than I can read them, I’m afraid.”
“This one?”
“Sure. I’ve read all of Dickens. Until some mysterious, heretofore unknown manuscript appears, anyway.”
“Any good?”
“My dear,” Walt said, putting on a condescending, professorial tone. “There is no such beast as subpar Dickens.”
Amanda set the book down on the hardwood floor and turned her narrowed eyes back to the stack.
“Hmm,” she said, searching.
She then reached for another volume, settling on a dog-eared copy of Tom Jones as she tipped her glass and dumped its contents all over Martin Chuzzlewit.
“Uh-oh,” Walt said as he leaned forward to take Amanda’s glass.
She looked down at the fruits of her clumsiness and yelped.
“Oh, shit.”
“You’ve stained my Chuzzlewit.”
“Oh, shit,” she said again.
“And that’s not even a euphemism.”
“I can’t believe it. I’m such an idiot!”
“Not at all,” Walt assured her. He gently took the volume and held it up between forefinger and thumb. Red wine dripped from the leaves like blood from a wound.
“Oh, man,” Amanda moaned. “Good news is, your lady just so happens to own a bookstore.”
“Don’t worry about it…”
“Shut it. I’m ordering a brand spanking new copy first thing tomorrow. I’ll even be sure to get some super academic notated edition, better than this poor mess.”
“For God’s sake, don’t do that.”
“Why not? I’ve got a distributor’s discount.”
“Print’s too small.”
Amanda laughed.
“You’re shitting me.”
“Have you ever tried reading one of those things? You’d go cross-eyed!”
“All right, then I’ll order a large print edition. And a magnifying glass.”
Walt smirked.
“You’re a dear girl,” he said in a shaky, ancient voice.
“How about some butterscotch candy, too? Would grandpa like that?”
“I’d like some of your candy, my dear!”
Walt tucked his lips over his teeth and smacked them in a parody of an elderly letch.
“You dirty old man,” Amanda purred.
She then laid a hand over his and kissed his neck.
“Grandpa likes,” Walt whispered. Amanda giggled.
“Chuzzlewit can wait,” she cooed.
“Yes,” Walt agreed. “I suppose it can.”
He gently set the cups on the counter and let Amanda lead him by the hand toward the bedroom.
They made love fast and furiously. It only lasted ten minutes, but they climaxed simultaneously. Afterward, Walt and Amanda lay side by side on the unraised mattress, breathing hard and fast in harmonic union. When her breath began to slow down to a normal rhythm, Amanda rolled onto her side and said, “Now, how about that coffee?”
Walt took his black, Amanda added loads of milk and sugar. Cups in hand and dressed only in bathrobes, they retired to the front porch. They sipped at their coffee and Amanda chain-smoked, but Walt did not say a word about it. Instead, he waxed philosophic about the impressionable young minds he hoped to mold in the coming years, wondering out loud how many kids per year he might be able to turn onto Dickens or Conrad or even—fingers crossed—Emily Dickinson. In the long run, he hoped to include some of the macabre writers like Poe and Blackwood, but Walt had no intention to press his luck the first year in. The tight-assed parents in the PTA could get a little touchy about that sort of thing, so he aimed at ingratiating himself to them first. Amanda absently commented that it sounded like a good plan.
They turned in a little after one in the morning. Walt slept six hours and might have slept a little longer still had the racket in the hallway not woken him. He cracked open his bleary eyes and struggled to focus until he eventually made out the shape of Amanda standing on the stepstool.
“What’re you doin?” he slurred.
“Putting shellac on this stain. Ought to seal it up. Then you can paint over it.”
“Oh,” Walt said.
“But don’t let it go. If there’s a leaky pipe or something, this is only going to be a stopgap solution.”
“Yes, dear.”
“I might put a stain sealer on it, too. So it doesn’t show through the paint.”
“That stuff smells awful.”
“How do you think I like it up here? You’re ten feet away from it.”
“If you were a hundred saints,” Walt said, sitting up, “then I was a thousand.”
“There,” Amanda said as she descended the three steps back to the floor. “Give a couple hours and then put on the sealant if you’ve got some. I’ll paint it for you tonight, if you want. Got to go to work now, though.”
“All right, but don’t wear yourself out.”
Amanda pulled her jacket over her shoulders and arched an eyebrow.
“Why? You got some strenuous activities planned?”
“Yeah—I need you to patch my roof, too.”
Amanda stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry at Walt. He returned the gesture in kind and then Amanda click-clacked across the house and out the front door. Walt lay back on the mattress and grinned with total satisfaction while he listened to Amanda’s car rattle to life and then pull away from the house. And, a few minutes later, he was asleep again; dead to the world.
Chapter Three
Walt awoke to a rhythmic noise, persistent and loud. He scrunched up his face and glanced at his watch. It was noon. Planting his hands on the mattress, he hoisted himself up and listened closely. It was a sort of dripping sound. Drip, drip, drip. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with the balls of his fists, Walt peered into the hall and saw the source of the irritating noise.
The stain on the ceiling had spread, and now it was dripping down to the hardwood floor below, forming a small, reddish-brown puddle.
“Damn it,” he groaned.
He got out of bed, stepped into a pair of gray sweatpants, and staggered to the doorway to peer up at the stain. The shellac held, but the relentless stain had simply spread out around it, forming a rusty doughnut on the ceiling. Whatever the source of the leak, the shellac was not going to solve the problem. Walt let out a frustrated grunt and padded out into the hall, careful to avoid stepping in the puddle on the floor. His sleep-addled mind ran through a chronological list of duties, starting with making and drinking at least half a pot of coffee. After that, he silently admitted to himself with a heavy sigh, he would have to call a plumber.
So much for do it yourself.
The plumber—a bone thin man of about sixty with hair in his ears—clambered up the ladder to the attic and called down for Walt to hand up his toolbox. Walt followed, curious to see what the old guy would find. In the end, after the floor was torn out and the paneling and ceiling joist were exposed, no obvious leaking was found. The old plumber sat back on the rafters and scratched his head.
“Now that’s odd,” he said.
“What’s odd about it?” Walt asked.
“No pipes here. None at all. Drywall’s fine. Sturdy, intact. Blocking’s fine, too. Nothing on any side leaked at all. But look here.”
The plumber leaned over the hole in the attic floor, pointing his flashlight down at the paneling. In the center of the knotty wood panel, between the joists and the squared off blocking beams, there was a faint brown spot.
“Ain’t that about the strangest thing I ever saw,” the plumber remarked.
“What is it?”
“It’s your stain, is what it is. ‘Cept this is pushing through from the other side, instead of the other way ‘round. Like if your house was upside-down.”
“Upside-down,” Walt dumbly repeated.
“Search me,” the plumber went on. “All’s I can tell you is maybe somebody’s playing tricks on you. Having a bit of fun.”
“Fun,” Walt mumbled. “Sure.”
“If I was you, I’d just clean up my ceiling, paint it over, and watch who I let in my house.”
Walt smiled and thanked the old guy for his advice. He purposefully neglected to inform the plumber that the only person he had ever let in the house was Amanda. And that was after he first noticed the stain.
Nevertheless, Walt slapped a twenty dollar bill in the plumber’s palm, despite the gray old man’s protest that he hadn’t really done anything, and set to painting the rust-colored circle on the hallway ceiling. It was the work of five minutes and when it was done Walt gazed up at the newly white area and smiled. Walt then retreated into his bedroom where he began undressing for a shower. Once he was completely naked, the doorbell jangled.
“Christ,” he grumbled, pulling the sweatpants back up and simultaneously reaching for his ratty old REO Speedwagon tee shirt.
He shuffled across the house, bisecting the shafts of sunlight that knifed in from the windows. Walt then opened the front door, stared at the impatient looking man on his front porch for a moment, and inwardly cursed himself for having forgotten all about the roofer.
“You been having a go at it yourself?” the roofer asked upon seeing the attic steps still pulled down to the floor.
“No, I just had a plumber in.”
The roofer raised his eyebrows.
“It’s a fixer-upper,” Walt said.
“I’m gonna have a look. Might take a little while to assess your situation.”
Walt nodded and informed the man that he was going to take a shower. He felt a little weird saying it, worried that the roofer might misconstrue that little tidbit of information as a creepy sort of come-on, but if he did he failed to show it. So the roofer set to roofing, and Walt vanished into the bathroom. He ran a near-scalding hot shower, stood under it until his skin turned red, and then toweled off in the steam-filled room. No one had ever installed a ventilation fan in there, which would inevitably lead to mold or worse. Then again, Walt thought, he could always take the time to wipe down the mirror and walls after a shower and save himself the time and cost. Slipping into his terrycloth bathrobe, he resolved to worry about it later. Much later. One thing at a time, he reminded himself.
He could hear the roofer moving around in the attic, stepping on creaking rafters and talking to himself. Walt glanced up at the ceiling then, and a gasp got caught in his throat.
The stain had bled through both the shellac and the paint. It was bigger than ever, now spread out over an area of ceiling at least a foot in radius. And it was dripping all over Walt’s bathrobe.
He dabbed at a thick red droplet on his should with the pad of his finger. He smelled it. It was vaguely metallic; rusty, just as he suspected.
“What the hell?”
Presently the roofer stamped down the ladder steps from the attic above, his tool belt jangling against his hips.
“Good news is I can do the job,” he said before stepping off the ladder. “But it won’t be cheap.”
“Do it,” Walt said as he wiped his finger on the front of his robe. “I can’t stand the leaks anymore.”
Amanda gazed up at the stain with equal measures of wonder and disgust. Walt had long since wiped both ceiling and floor with a dirty rag, but the stain went on dripping still. Now there was a plastic bucket on the floor, directly beneath the stain, catching every splashing drop.
“And there’s no leaks?”
“Not up there, there isn’t.”
“Then what’s between the drywall and the paneling?”
“Nothing. They’re pressed right up against each other.”
“Have you looked? I mean, have you actually pried them apart?”
“That would tear up the ceiling. And then I’d have to pay someone else to fix something else.”
“Yeah, but if it’s between that and the stain that never dies…”
Walt let out a discontented breath and sagged his shoulders.
Amanda said, “This is why I rent.”
“Hand me that flashlight,” Walt said as he started to climb the fold-down ladder.
“Are you going up there right now?”
“No time like the present.”
“But it’s past ten at night!”
“It’s driving me crazy. Seriously. Flashlight?”
Amanda crooked her mouth to one side and passed the flashlight up to him. A second later, he disappeared into the attic.
For reasons unclear to her, Amanda began feeling nervous as soon as Walt was out of view. She did not believe any harm could possibly come to him up there, but something about the weird stain unnerved her. On the one hand, she hoped Walt determined its cause right away, so that it would be over and done with and they could both move onto more imperative issues. On the other hand, however, she could almost feel a desperate cry building up in her chest, bellowing out to insist he come back down right this instant. Instead, she just stood there, gazing up at the dark square in the ceiling into which Walt had vanished. Then, after a minute or two, there was creaking and scraping, following by a grunt and a loud crack.
“Walt? Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Walt called down. “Just ruining my new house is all.”
Amanda furrowed her brow, unaware of the way she was anxiously bouncing on her heels. Another loud crack sounded from above, startling her. She jumped back, staring at the ceiling as the narrow fissure formed from one end of the dripping stain to the other. Flecks of paints and fiberglass floated down between fat, red drops.
Then Walt screamed.
Amanda sucked in a lungful of air and scampered up the steps into the attic. Launching herself up onto the rafters, she peered through the darkness at the lone glow of Walt’s flashlight across the attic from where she crouched.
“Walt? Walt!”
“I’m fine,” he groaned. “I was just…Jesus, I feel dumb.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t come over here!” Walt yelled. “It’s too dark, you might lose your footing and fall right through the ceiling.
“What made you cry out like that?”
“Some kind of animal. A rat, probably. I don’t know how it got in between here, but man is it a mess.”
Disregarding Walt’s concern for her safety, Amanda reached a foot out in the darkness and felt her way from one rafter to the next, gradually traversing the attic toward him. He grunted disapprovingly at her when she reached him, but shone the light on the spot in question all the same.
“Look.”
On the flaky drywall that lay on the other side of the paneling Walt had torn up was a sticky red mass of bloody flesh. Amanda gagged first at the sight of it, and then at its fetid odor. Strands of black hair were matted into the fleshy pulp, but other than that it resembled no living creature at all.
“Whatever it is…was…it got crushed between the ceiling and the paneling up here. For the life of me I can’t see how, but you can see it as well as me…”
“Jesus,” Amanda croaked.
“I reckon it was a lot bigger than this, on account of all the blood that seeped through. Probably ants or cockroaches…”
“Stop,” Amanda interjected. “Just stop.”
Fighting back the bilious threat of vomit at the back of her throat, she scrabbled back over the rafters, found the opening in the floor, and hurried down the ladder. Walt just shook his head and whipped his tee shirt off, with which he scraped the bloody mess up with one side and gave it a cursory wipe down with the other. He felt enormously relieved—not only had he finally pinpointed the origin of his stain trouble, he also managed to avoid doing too much damage to the ceiling. There was some, to be sure, but nothing he couldn’t fix himself in the span of an afternoon.
That much, Walt decided, could wait.
So, his wadded up tee shirt in tow, he descended the steps, pushed the folding ladder back up into the attic, and grinned triumphantly at Amanda.
“Aren’t you proud of yourself,” she said.
The comment was not without an edge.
“I most definitely am,” Walt said, beaming.
He strode off toward the back door in order to dump the wasted shirt in the outside garbage.
Halfway out the door, he turned back and shouted into the house, “This is why I own!”
Amanda went home that night. There was no argument, no fussing. She merely yawned and stretched like a cat before declaring how tired she was. Then she left. There had been no understanding between them that she would have stayed, implicit or otherwise, but Walt felt vaguely sad about it all the same. It was not a particularly big house, but it was, Walt thought, too big for just him. Accordingly, and in light of the awkward experience through which he had just suffered, a terrible loneliness was beginning to weigh down on him. His logical side understood that everything was going to be okay, but this was not sufficiently communicated to his irrational, emotional side. And the more he thought about it, the more he obsessed over it, the emptier he felt inside.
Walt cleaned up the wet, gory mess on the ceiling one more time, tossed the rag into the bucket and left the bucket outside the back door. The roofer was supposed to return in the morning, so while he did his thing, Walt figured on finishing up the baseboards before turning his attention to the walls. While planning thus, he wandered into the kitchen to pour a glass of water from the tap. Halfway into the kitchen he observed a fat black cockroach skitter across the tiles and halt a few inches from his left foot. Walt sneered at the shiny insect. He then lifted his leg and crushed the cockroach under the ball of his foot, spattering the tiles with the insect’s yellow guts.
He wiped the bottom of his foot against the right leg of his sweatpants, shed the pants on the floor, and went to bed. He forgot entirely about the water.
Chapter Four
Walt awoke in a cold sweat. If he had a nightmare, he could not remember it. It was still dark, which elicited a grouchy curse from him.
“Shit.”
He glanced at his watch, which was supposed to glow in the dark, but it was far too dim for him to determine the positions of the hands. He resolved to get up and go into the kitchen to have a look at the digital clock on the stove when the door knocker fell against the front door in a rapid, almost desperate pattern. Walt frowned. He could not have gotten more than a couple hours’ sleep and now someone was pounding on his door in the middle of the night. He continued into the kitchen; he still wanted to know the time so that he could throw it in the face of whoever was out there slamming the door knocker as if their life depended on it.
He peered at the clock, squinting through the hazy blur of his sleep deprived vision. The clock read 7:25.
That did not make sense. At half past seven in the morning, in the middle of summer, it was never still dark. The clock had to be wrong. Either that, or it was almost seven thirty at night. Which would mean…
The incessant pounding kept on.
“All right, all right!” Walt roared.
He stamped across the house, twisted the deadbolt and threw the door open to reveal Amanda standing on the front porch.
“Amanda?”
“Were you asleep?” she asked innocently.
“Of course I was asleep. It’s barely past seven and I never get up until eight when I’m off. You know that.”
“Walt, it’s seven-thirty PM. Have you been asleep since last night?”
“Have I…?”
Walt scrunched up his face and pondered hard on that deceptively simple question. Had he been asleep for the better part of eighteen hours? It was possible, but he could not see why it should be the case. Still, he could not remember anything past going to bed after the adventure with that damned stain. And the cockroach; he remembered that, too. Now Walt hoped that he slept almost an entire day. Otherwise, he had lost a day he should have remembered.
Amanda gently placed her hand on Walt’s chest and smiled weakly.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure,” he said almost too quietly to hear.
His throat hurt. It was scratchy and dry. He turned back for the kitchen, intent on getting a glass of water before anything else. Amanda followed him in and shut the door behind her.
“You don’t sound one hundred percent,” she said. “You don’t look it, either.”
Walt filled a glass from the tap and swallowed all of it without taking a breath. Then he exhaled loudly and said, “I feel about twenty percent right now.”
“Should I put some coffee on?”
Walt said nothing, concentrating only on refilling his glass. Amanda sighed and got to work on the coffee maker, filling a filter with grounds and waiting for Walt to finish with the faucet so she could fill the carafe. Once the machine got to gurgling and dripping into the pot, she leaned up against the counter and looked lovingly at Walt. He had streams of drool-infused water running down his chin and chest. His face was prickly with stubble and his hair a tussled, greasy mess. She had never seen him in such a state, although probably only because they had not yet chosen to live together. After they did, she inwardly mused, she supposed they would see a lot of one another’s down and dirty humanity. Still, Walt looked like hell. She could not deny that much. So she reached out to set the back of her hand on his forehead to see if he had a temperature. Walt jumped and moved back, spilling more water all over himself and the floor.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said with a sheepish smile.
“It…it’s okay,” he stammered in reply. “Maybe I’m a little under the weather. I’m going to lie down on the sofa.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
Wiping off his face with the sleeve of his bathrobe, Walt stumbled out to the living room and collapsed onto the sofa. Within seconds, he was lightly snoring.
Amanda stayed and watched him sleep.
An hour into Walt’s second consecutive slumber, Amanda polished off the coffee she made and went into the dining room where his belongings remained packed up in stacks of boxes. One stray box on the floor was labeled Books, and she decided to open that one up. Feeling a little bit like a kid at Christmas, Amanda commenced taking the books out of the box one at a time, examining each of them closely and looking for one that might be good to read until Walt woke up again. She found Hawthorne and Cooper, Waugh and Dickens and the ubiquitous collections of Emily Dickinson. There were also dusty volumes of Wells and Verne in there, and a dozen paperback novels by Philip K. Dick. She found books on religion, books on atheism, and an art book filled with macabre erotica she would never had expected to find among Walt’s belongings. She wrinkled her nose at that one as she set it on the floor. Finally, near the bottom of the box, Amanda extracted a thin volume of Lord Dunsany stories that promised weird tales of forgotten gods and elves and ghosts. Satisfied, she returned the rest of the books to the box and went back to chair by the couch on which Walt was so deeply sleeping.
For a while Amanda was content with silently reading and intermittently sipping her coffee. After a while, when the coffee had run its course, she got up to use the bathroom. Walt was still quietly snoring, having not moved a centimeter from his original position. She was worried for him, but she smiled and kissed him lightly on the forehead. He slept on, and she padded off to the bathroom.
Groping blindly in the darkness, Amanda eventually found a switch in the hallway and flipped it. The bright bulb in the fixture above her flared on, forcing her to narrow her eyes. Then, as she became accustomed to the light, Amanda gaped at the ceiling, a few feet away from the light fixture.
“God,” she whispered to herself.
Walt had not bothered to clean that horrible stain up at all. Worse, Amanda thought she would be damned if it had not gotten bigger.
Walt slept through the rest of the night and woke up just before six in the morning. Discounting the few minutes of wakefulness at seven-thirty, he had managed to sleep almost twenty-nine hours straight. He was a firecracker, too. When Amanda awoke on the uncomfortable chair beside the sofa, it was to the sound of measured scratching; Walt had already removed most of the wallpaper in the house and was well on his way to repairing every hole, dent, crack and scratch. She rubbed her eyes and yawned loudly before shakily rising to her feet.
“How long you been up?” she mumbled.
“A few hours. Got a lot of work done.”
“Well, that’s good.”
She yawned again and dipped a hand into her purse. Coming back with a crumpled pack of cigarettes, she awkwardly blew an unnoticed kiss to Walt and staggered out to the front porch for a smoke. In front of the house the back door of Walt’s hatchback hung open, and Amanda could see the piles of supplies inside. Shingles and lumber and baseboards, boxes of nails and can after can of white paint. She thought white was a bit unimaginative, but it was his house. He could paint it black if he liked.
She smoked the cigarette down to the filter, stubbed it out on the front lawn, and carried it back into the house to throw away. Her mouth felt fuzzy and tasted awful, so after she deposited the spent butt in the kitchen trash, she made a beeline for the bathroom.
There, she noticed the dripping stain on the ceiling, and the sticky puddle on the floor.
“Oh, Walt.”
“What?” he called out from the dining room.
“You still haven’t taken care of this nasty mess,” she shouted back.
“What mess?”
“The….blood. On the ceiling.”
“Oh, that? Of course I did. Cleaned that up last night. Or, no—the night before last. I keep forgetting I was in a coma there for a while.”
He let out a weak laugh.
“Well it’s still here, Walt. And it’s all over the floor.”
Without waiting for a reply, she stepped over the noxious puddle and into the bathroom. Walt said something, but she could not make it out. She might have asked him to repeat himself, but she opted to shut the door and turn the faucet on, instead. That stain was getting to be a thorn in her paw. Who could just let something like that go? It was absolutely revolting, and worse that that it was unsanitary. There was no telling what manner of vermin had gotten crushed to death up in the attic, nor what dreadful diseases it may have been carrying. She was tempted to clean it up herself, but some primordial maternal instinct kicked in that reproved her for such a though. No, she mustn’t clean it up. If she did, what would Walt learn?
Besides, it was his house. He could crap on the floor if it suited him. She just would not want anything to do with him if he did. So what did Amanda want with a guy who left animal blood all over the place? She sneered as she squeezed a dollop of toothpaste out onto Walt’s toothbrush. At least the man took great care of his teeth, she thought.
When she reemerged from the bathroom, Amanda found Walt on all fours, cleaning up the floor with yet another dirty dishrag. He glanced up at her with wide, puppy-dog eyes and smiled like a kid caught stealing a cookie.
“I swear to god I thought I’d cleaned this up,” he said.
“Maybe you dreamed it.”
“I guess so. I’m sorry.”
He sounded sincere, which was enough to make Amanda feel downright terrible. Minutes ago she was reconsidering the welfare of their relationship, and over what? A misunderstanding, that was all. She felt like an utter bitch, and she told Walt so.
“Baloney,” Walt said. “It’s just crazy around here, is all. New house, new job coming up. It’s all mine, but really, what’s mine is yours. Right?”
“Right,” Amanda said with tears welling up in her eyes. “Fucking A, that’s right.”
She guided Walt up by his armpits and planted a hard kiss on his mouth. Walt kissed her back with just as much force and substance, which went a long way toward making Amanda feel better about the whole thing. When they released one another, Walt wiped a tear off her cheek with his finger and smiled.
“What do you want for lunch?” he asked happily.
With the mess cleaned up and most of the more visible interior repairs done, Walt and Amanda decided to call it a day. They showered together, made love, and ate turkey sandwiches on the floor of the dining room while they opened up boxes. The vast preponderance of Walt’s belongings consisted of books, hundreds and hundreds of them, for which he had next to no storage space.
“I’m getting you bookshelves for Christmas,” Amanda remarked upon seeing the overwhelming number of volumes coming out of the boxes.
“Great,” Walt said. “I’ll need something like twenty of them.”
He smiled surreptitiously then, thinking about what he had already gotten for her: three princess-cut diamonds, one and half carats in total, set in a fourteen carat white gold band. The ring cost more than three grand, and Walt was nowhere near paying it off yet, but he figured it would pay him back in spades. Amanda was worth it. She was worth more, even. Much, much more.
“What are you grinning about?”
He shook off the reverie and shot a coy look at her.
“Damn good turkey sandwich,” he said.
In the late afternoon, Walt’s new dining room was no longer stacked to the ceiling with boxes—it was stacked to the ceiling with books. The rest of the boxes, no more than twelve in total, contained a few pots and pans, sundry knick-knacks he was happy to keep boxed up, and the record collection he never listened to. All of these could wait. Walt and Amanda assembled the frame for the bed, smoothed out the bed sheets, and then collectively collapsed on top of it all with a united sigh. For a while, Walt remained still, listening to the rhythm of Amanda’s breathing. Before he knew it, he was drifting toward that clumsy, watery place between sleep and consciousness.
Amanda shrieked.
Jolted, Walt shot up and searched for her. She was in the hallway, pressed up against the wall with her hands splayed out like claws.
“What happened?” Walt blurted.
“Goddamnit it’s all over me!” she cried.
Walt threw his legs over the side of the bed and hurried over to her. He stopped just shy of the red, viscous puddle on the floor between them. His face twisted in disgust, and when his dragged his eyes from the mess on the floor up to Amanda, he saw that her white tee shirt was spattered with sanguine splotches. Worse, it had gotten in her hair and dripped down onto her face. Walt was dumbstruck. He looked from her to the floor, back to her, and then up at the ceiling. Sure enough, the stain had returned. There was no trace of the shellac or the paint he had slathered up there. There was only the nebulous reddish-brown patch on the ceiling, dripping down like a leaky faucet.
“What in hell?”
Amanda was trembling, her eyes wide and mouth hanging open.
“It’s blood….Walt, it’s blood…”