Hoarder (14 page)

Despite what looked like a mortal injury, Tickles continued to squeal for Missy, pounding its fists against a floor that might not hold much longer beneath it.

Dani knew she didn’t have much time or many options left. Tickles’ blubbering would certainly have Missy on the move this way. She considered finding some fabric and stuffing it into Tickles’ mouth to silence it, and then she changed her mind. She wanted no more contact with this molesting mass. She didn’t even want to be within fondling distance.

Dani looked up at the nailed window she had attempted to reach earlier. She could search for something heavy to shatter the glass, but it wasn’t wise to remain in the room that Missy was being summoned to. She also wanted to avoid climbing up onto the sofa right above the XXXL human skin suit. She didn’t fancy the idea of falling and trying it on for size.

Decided, Dani hurried over the garbage on her way back to the hallway door. As she departed, the last thing she heard was not Tickles’ cries, or any further paternity test results. The final sounds to reach her were the meows from a cat food commercial, and the pitch from the announcer.

“Your kitty will come running back for more!”

Chapter Sixteen

Dani plowed her way back through the hallway hoard. The number of choices she had before her equaled the number of doors. As she came upon the nearly closed door of the mystery room, which she thought of as the indoor graveyard, she didn’t give it any real consideration. Despite the deepening crisis, she would exhaust the other options first.

Dani had never had such a strong intuition to avoid a bad place before, but she trusted it. If some primordial, self-preservation instinct was ringing alarm bells in her head, she would be wise to listen and act accordingly. Stop and retreat. The bathroom window was not a desired escape route either, was in fact rife for disaster and disease, but she had a third choice to consider. Dani had passed Missy’s bedroom earlier without going inside. Every bedroom had to have a window; she just had to find it.

From the bedroom doorway behind Dani came Tickles’ shout. “I hurt! My back burns!”

From the buried staircase ahead of Dani rose Missy’s reply, “I’m coming, honey-bunny!”

Dani increased her speed through the channel that wound through the hall. Rising up the slope ahead, Dani saw another baseball camera cap, like the ones she and her friends were wearing. She suspected Missy was wearing Will’s hat, but she couldn’t wait around to find out. Nor could she get to the bedroom door in time.

Dani slipped into the bathroom doorway and slid across the foul floor. She needed to find a hiding spot fast, at least until Missy made it to Tickles’ room, at which time she could duck out of the bathroom. With Missy out of her way, she could take the slide back downstairs and get out through the front door. That beat looking for a window in Missy’s room, an escape that would probably be nailed shut anyway.

But where could she hide in this exploded Honey Bucket? She saw the shower curtain, and thinking of the tub of turds with the fossilized cat behind it, she shook her head. That was not an option. The space between the toilet and the door was packed with dirty tissues and wipes, heaped higher than the toilet. On the other side of the toilet was the overflowing sink, which had a limited amount of dark space beneath it. It could hide her, if she cowered back far enough and Missy passed in the hallway fast enough without looking in. Good thing this old-fashioned sink didn’t have any cupboards beneath it, like all bathroom sinks she’d ever had.

Dani crouched down before the sink and saw it was dripping in several spots over the rim. Knowing that what was overfilling the sink was meant for the toilet, Dani pulled the hood over her head before she maneuvered underneath the basin.

As Dani turned her crouched body to face the door, she noticed that every shift of her feet caused a squelch from the wet floor beneath her. The tile didn’t only sound wet; it felt soft. The toes of her right foot began to feel wet, which wasn’t a surprise considering the hole-riddled, secondhand shoes she was wearing. They were her best athletic shoes, but they would be going into the garbage after tonight’s excursion. Only fire might be better for her shoes and clothing. From this point on, she would be reluctant to throw anything personal away in a dumpster, in the event a hoarder like Missy might dig through it and keep her no longer personals as their own.

Missy stomped in and out of view in the hallway as she responded to Tickles’ cries. “Quit your hollering! I’m almost there!” Missy yelled as she went by. She didn’t look into the bathroom.

Dani was relieved to see Missy pass by so quickly, but her relief was very short lived.

There was a wet snapping sound beneath her. She looked down and saw only the brown, soggy ground. Whatever she heard had to be under, or inside, the floor. She didn’t like the sound of it, because it was a sound she could also feel.

Dani forgot the floor as the conversation outside started. She looked desperately at the door, not even seeing the dripping brown sink water an inch in front of her face.

“What happened?!” Missy yelled at her housemate with annoyance. Dani wondered what relation Missy had with Tickles. Her tone was more befitting of a roommate or family member than a spouse, unless their relationship had gone as sour as everything in their refrigerator. Any family resemblance would be beyond her notice; Tickles didn’t even resemble its own species.

“I fell! That girl pulled me!” Tickles blubbered, in tears. To Dani they sounded like faux tears, for manipulation and not from pain. She was also personally offended that it was blaming her for its self-inflicted injury.

“What girl?!” Missy shouted back. Dani thought Missy sounded like she was in the hallway outside Tickles’ room. She didn’t dare move from her moist hiding spot yet.

“The girl filming my reality show!” Tickles shouted back. Dani realized that Missy and Tickles mirrored each other in another way. They shouted everything they said. That was to be expected considering they had to talk over noisy television shows that were nothing but shouting.

There was a wet crack that reverberated through the floor beneath Dani. She looked down and saw herself sinking into the sponge-like, water damaged boards. They were dissolving beneath her.

Dani decided to risk a face to face with Missy over staying under the slushy sink, but she wouldn’t get the chance. She gasped as she plunged straight down through the soaked ceiling to the first floor. Chunks of wet brown floor dropped with her. She also, regrettably, unleashed a scream.

Chapter Seventeen

Dani landed on her back on a wet pile of garbage. The fall wasn’t too far, since over half of the room was filled with more hoard. She was stunned and momentarily disoriented, but she considered herself lucky that she hadn’t been knocked unconscious. Somehow her camera cap had stayed on during the fall, and her handheld camera still jutted out of her front hoodie pocket. She really should consider a future as a combat photographer or documentarian in crisis situations.

The first thing Dani saw above was the black hole in the ceiling that she had dropped through, dripping brown water and darker brown mush which could either be floor or feces, they had the same smell and consistency. She turned her head to the side to avoid a foul facial from the draining bathroom above her. That simple head turn revealed her ultimate horror, the worst sight she had hoped to never see. A scream might have offered her a modicum of relief, but she couldn’t get enough air in to voice it after having it all knocked out of her.

Upon landing, Dani’s left hand had ripped through something that felt like a wet paper bag. That bag was actually a dead cat bloated with rot. Her hand had punched through the stomach, which was a slush of rotten innards and maggots. Despite its spoilage, the cat was instantly recognizable to her. It was Fiddlesticks. She even recognized the collar she had personally chosen for her cat, with his name engraved in the paw shaped tag.

“Fiddlesticks!” Dani cried out in horror.

Dani didn’t give a thought to Missy or the volume of her voice. Everything had become a spiraling nightmare down into a hoard of death. Dani pulled her hand out of her cat’s stomach. She saw more movement than just maggots; the intestines hanging from her hand were squirming. Whatever worms these were, Dani didn’t care to know, and she flung the ghoulish guts off of her hand with a shriek. Dani was finally like all of the other girls her age, and she realized she didn’t care. Sometimes you just had to give voice to your vulnerability. If it helped her cope, she saw no shame in it.

Dani had to turn her head away from her cat in order to get a grip on herself. She sat up on the bed of garbage to take in her surroundings.

No longer looking up at the ceiling, Dani didn’t see Missy looking down through the new hole in the bathroom floor. Missy did not look angrily at her surprise guest or the damage done to her house. She was curious, and surprised to see that Tickles was right. Missy’s head departed from the hole above Dani.

The room was nothing more than a massive garbage bin; there was no other visible theme or purpose to it. A mound of broken furniture blocked the door out, the last bulky additions to this room’s waste. Getting out meant moving a lot of furniture out of the way. At least there weren’t as many furnishings as the hallway that had been clogged end to end.

Dani looked to the other side and saw a large square of aluminum foil on the discolored outer wall. She thought if she were to peel the foil off, she would find a window underneath. Dani clambered quickly over the garbage, foil-bound, no longer hiding her noise. Missy wasn’t hiding her noise either, and Dani looked up as she heard Missy stomping overhead, likely through the second floor corridor.

Dani reached the foil patch on the wall, which was over three square feet in size. She peeled the foil in layers, ripping off long strips. It was like a present with never-ending gift-wrapping. Dani counted over a half dozen layers before she found what was beneath, a splintery board which sent one long sliver of wood deep into her right middle finger. The splinter gave no delay as Dani continued ripping foil. The splinter broke off in her finger, but that was okay because now it was out of the way. She could tweeze the rest out later.

Dani discovered the wood belonged to a 2x4 board, nailed horizontally. More tearing revealed more boards secured over the window with rusty nails on the ends. The window they covered was not visible.

“Fuck!” Dani cried out.

Dani grabbed the end of the board that was sticking out the most, and found it loose. She wiggled the board and pulled the rusty nails on one side, and then the other. She wrenched the 2x4 off of the window frame and threw it to the side the same way Missy discarded her garbage, with no thought to where it would land.

Behind the board, the window appeared to be painted black. Dani grabbed the next board down and was frustrated to find it gave no wiggle at all. The 2x4 was nailed down solid. Dani grabbed the bottom of the next board up, her fingers breaking webs in the dark space. A bloated black widow ran off a web and over Dani’s hand, and she didn’t bother to flick it off. Missy was the bigger black widow she was trying to escape.

The board above was nailed as solidly as the one beneath it. As she struggled to budge a board, Dani could hear the thumps of Missy coming down the staircase. Considering the stairs were so deeply buried beneath clothing, the bangs might have been coming from Missy’s hand slamming against the wall to aid her descent.

Dani gave up on the remaining boards, there was no way she was going to pry them loose by hand. She shook her head in denial, and in desperation for another idea.

“Shit!” Dani exclaimed. She’d dealt with and smelled far too much of it tonight. Couldn’t see get a break and a breath of fresh air?

Dani looked to the right of the window, where the wall was saturated with wet mold, running down from the ceiling beneath the leaking bathtub. A nearly two square foot section was sunken in with dark rot.

Dani remembered Ian’s fall against the basement wall, and how easily his hand had punched through the spoiled structure. She also remembered Ian’s claim that they should have dug through the wall instead of breaking the window to get in. What Ian had joked about, she now thought was her best chance at escape. She would dig her way out of Missy’s two-story coffin. And to think of how eager she was to get into this house earlier. How naïve she had been.

Dani grabbed onto the board she had discarded. Holding it near one end, careful of the rusty nails, she swung it at the collapsed center of the wall. The nails and board sank into the wall that was the consistency of soft serve ice cream. Pulling the board out, a newly liberated colony of pests fled their toppled tower.

Dani swung the board repeatedly into the wall, using the nails to peel softened wood and knock wet chunks loose. She didn’t have to remove the entire wall; she only had to make the hole big enough for her to crawl through, and small enough to prevent Missy’s passage.

Dani heard the door open behind her and knew who had come calling. She looked back anyway and saw Missy behind the tall furniture hoard inside the door, which blocked her entry.

“There you are! What are you doing?” Missy questioned from outside the door. Dani found Missy’s tone curiously soft, not at all the reaction she expected from a homeowner who had just found an intruder vandalizing her home. Dani didn’t care to make friends or conversation with Missy, who she knew as a klepto and a cat killer and who knew what worse things. Escape was all she wanted, and she wailed at the wall with her board.

Missy grabbed the first chair blocking her entrance and threw it behind her. “Don’t do that!” Missy yelled, ”You’re ruining my wall! You can use a door!”

Dani knew the wall was well ruined before she started widening the hole, but she wasn’t going to argue the point with Missy. She punched her 2x4 forward and it broke through the rotten outer wall. When she pulled the board back, she could see a glimpse of the yard outside through a ragged hole. The outdoors had never looked more appealing in her life. She had to get on the other side of this wasted wall, into the outside.

“Stay! I can make you a sandwich!” Missy called out to her new playmate. She grabbed onto a card table and yanked it out of the door, its removal triggering an avalanche of TV trays behind it. She tossed the TV trays aside, getting close to having enough space to gain entry into the room, which Missy considered storage and which Dani considered an indoor dump.

As the wet wall was chipped away, a rat leaped out of the hole, in attack for having its home obliterated. Dani didn’t know that this rat was also a protecting mother, with a nest of newborns within the wall.

Dani swung the board, impaling the rodent on the rusty nails at the end. Dani cringed at the rat’s death shriek, but the sound of thrown furniture behind her distressed her even more. It almost sounded like Missy was on the move within the room, but she could not spare a second to look back and confirm her fear.

Dani beat at the wall in overdrive with the rat impaled board. Flying along with the black mush were little rat babies, juicy balls of pink flesh that burst like tiny blood balloons when the board smashed into them. Dani noticed the nest she was wrecking and became nauseous, and then she didn’t care anymore because she could see a few square feet of the yard ahead of her. The hole in the wall was just big enough for her to fit through.

Dani tossed the board to the side with a shudder, revolted that the mother rat had been joined by a few of her babies on the impaling nails. She dove into the hole in the wall, pushing her upper half out of Missy’s house.

When Dani’s head was finally outside, she marveled at how delicious the outdoor air was. After being trapped in Missy’s house and smelling so much shit, piss, mold, rot, and gasses that had to be harmful to a healthy human, her first deep breath of fresh air brought her renewed clarity and strength.

The sweet, life-giving breath was wrenched out of her and her vision became a backwards blur as she was pulled roughly back into the house. Missy had a hold on both of Dani’s ankles, and she was pulling her in as she had moved the heavy furniture, very roughly.

Dani grabbed the side of the hole as she passed back through it, and the wet wall came apart in her hands. The hoard was then back in view beneath her. Missy exclaimed one word at her, and it was a plea.

“Wait!”

Dani had no intention of obeying Missy’s command, and she kicked her legs wildly. Missy could not keep hold of her thrashing guest, and she lost her grip on Dani’s left leg. That leg kicked back into Missy’s stomach (the sudden
OOMPH!
she heard from her captor was gratifying), and Dani’s right leg was freed.

Dani lunged toward the hole, not caring if her landing on the lawn was a hard one. Dani’s head did not make it back outside. Missy had a thick handful of the back of her hoodie.

“I said stay!” Missy ordered her disobedient guest.

Dani pulled away from Missy, but her shirt had been seized along with her hoodie in Missy’s vice-like grip. She could see the hole to the outside world so close, but unreachable.

Dani’s clothing was released for a fraction of a second, and then Missy’s hands seized the sides of her head. Calloused fingers wrapped around Dani’s face. Missy turned Dani’s head to the right.

Dani resisted Missy’s turning of her vision, but Missy’s control was complete. Dani’s head turned ninety degrees and then she heard a deep crack, kind of like the snap of wet wood earlier, but much louder since it came from inside of her. Still her eyes were turning, or being forcibly turned, and then Dani saw Missy face to face. That vision of Missy, looking satisfied at finally having control, froze in Dani’s mind before the image faded into a blinding light. That brightness flashed off like a broken bulb, and Dani never saw anything ever again.

What Dani’s eyes could no longer see, the camera on her cap continued to film in close-up. Missy’s satisfaction had turned to glee.

Missy let go of Dani’s head, and the dead teenager slumped down on the hoard before her. She thought the girl’s glassy eyes looked like pretty doll eyes.

“There! I told you not to leave yet. I want you to film me for a show, too!”

Missy could not believe her luck. It was almost like a party, having so many young people in her house again. It was a party for her, with cameras, which meant the whole world was invited.

Missy knew that her love of parties was in large part due to her lack of them growing up. Parties were fun, and her parents had not one fun bone between them. Growing up in this house had been such a lonely and dreary affair for her. No parties, no friends allowed inside to contaminate the house with their germs, not even one television, which she thought might be criminal for parents to deny a growing child.

The whole huge house had been practically bare growing up, with few furnishings, no art on the walls, and no toys for Missy to leave out and cause a clutter. In her opinion, the house had looked as bare as a mausoleum, and was about as much fun.