Me and My Manny (18 page)
Authors: M.A. MacAfee
The idea of putting Wolf in handcuffs and leg irons had crossed my mind. But, on recalling Harry’s reaction to my rope trick, I knew he’d again accuse me of dabbling in deviance. That was all the straight-arrow Harry needed to pooh-pooh the notion that he had it right in the first place—a takeover really was in the works.
But when had it been initiated? When will it be completed? I went into the alcove and looked at the calendar on the wall over my desk. It was November, and the picture over the numbered days showed a bright moon beaming down on a snow-covered ground. Would it be many moon cycles, or a single moon cycle? Neither, if I could help it.
It was eleven in the morning and gray light spilled through the hallway window when I slipped on a sweater and pushed Wolf out of the apartment and into the elevator. Harry had left for the naval station at dawn, and one of our parking spaces was presently empty. With Wolf rolling in front of me, I guided him out of the elevator and across the subterranean garage to our storage locker adjacent our parking slots. I glanced around and seeing the area was deserted, I fished my key ring out of my pocket and slid the correct key into the padlock.
The padlock removed from the locker, I opened the big double doors. The space appeared the size of a large closet, about nine feet high, six feet long, and four feet wide. I had stored Wolf’s crate in the locker because I couldn’t fit it in the recycle Dumpster. Now as I took in its hefty construction with old-timey shipping labels, I was glad it was still intact. I had only to wipe away the cobwebs.
I then lifted the lid of my manny’s crate. Grunting under the strain, I elevated Wolf off his stand and carried him across my arms. Tilting forward, I dropped him into the crate and darn near fell in after him.
“Maximum security, Wolfie. I’d like to see you break out of this one,” I said as he sank into his shredded bed of packing material.
I crossed his hands on his chest, took a final look at his closed eyes, and lowered the lid. I hadn’t planned on sealing the crate. If my hunch was correct, Wolf would need the source of fresh air so that Harry didn’t suffocate.
After angling my manny’s wheelie-cart inside the locker, too, I shut the doors, secured the padlock, and turned to leave.
“Hello, Judy,” a voice echoed from the shadows.
I drew back and clapped my hand over my heart.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” Mrs. Crumble, hunched and gnarled, stepped from the distant darkness, pushing an old-fashioned wheelchair. “I saw the numbers over the elevator pass from the fourth floor to down here. That’s when it occurred to me. I really should get Mr. Crumble’s wheelchair out of my apartment. Seeing it empty everyday is so depressing.”
Touched by her loneliness, I offered to assist her, but absentminded as she was, she’d forgotten to bring the key to her padlock.
“Now where did I put it?” she wondered aloud when I told her she needed to fetch it.
While the old woman struggled with a lengthy senior moment, I suggested she contact me as soon as she found the key. If the wheelchair was too heavy for me when the time came, I doubted Harry would mind helping her stow it away.
On the second night of Wolf’s confinement, I was alone in the bedroom, listening to the rising wind. I moved toward the glass sliders and viewed the dim street below. Black branches on naked trees swayed, and the last of the yellow leaves swirled across the deserted sidewalks. The misty late autumn moon had risen, high in the night sky. From somewhere outside my front door, down the long, darkened stairwell and into the subterranean garage below, I imagined stirring sounds arising from a makeshift crypt.
My ears attuned to the shifting wind, I began to pick up a hint of heavy breathing from behind me. I turned away from the window, drawn by the rhythmic rise and fall of what sounded like respiration with faint snores.
In the living room, the figure of a man with his head bent forward sat in the leather recliner by the low burning lamp on the end table.
Though my breath caught, I managed to speak. “Harry, is that you?”
The figure pushed upward and stretched, causing its joints to crackle. “In the flesh,” sounded Harry’s voice. “I must have dozed off.”
“For a moment, I thought—”
From where I stood, I saw the silhouette of another figure, one that was at best only a parody of a man, sitting on the stool in the alcove off the kitchen. I felt shock as if I’d grabbed a live wire. From the outline of its turned-up nose and protruding ears, I could tell it was my manny. I glanced toward the bolted front door and spotted a thin trail of excelsior on the carpet, as well.
As I stood, a high-pitched voice with an Italian accent flickered through my head.
You can’t dump me that easily, girlie.
Harry peered at me. “The look on your face, you must have thought I was the boogeyman.”
Unsure if I interacted with Harry disguised as Wolf or with Wolf disguised as Harry, I offered an uneasy smile. The worst of it, the thing that Harry was becoming… the thing that was becoming Harry was not human.
I glanced into the kitchen then back at Harry in the living room. “Harry, did you recently put Wolf in the alcove?”
He gazed at me, and it seemed that the light in his brown eyes dulled. “Nope, I haven’t seen him all day.” A newspaper was open in front of him. He’d been working on a crossword puzzle.
My throat made a dry click when I swallowed. “Well, if you didn’t, and I didn’t, who did?”
“Who do you think?” Harry again bent toward his newspaper.
Now a vision of Wolfs uncanny escape skittered through my mind. The lid of his wooden crate creaked open. Enlivened, Wolf threw his spindly leg over the edge of the crate and clamped his stiff hands down on its sides. Upward he pushed himself, climbed out, and waited, facing the inside of the locked storage cabinet. Magically the padlock broke open, lifted up from its hasp, and dropped to the concrete floor of the garage with a merry clink.
I scraped up a bit of excelsior from the carpet, imagining it flaking off Wolfs dark blue sailor suit as he shuffled across the dim garage and climbed up the metal stairs of the fire escape. His wooden feet clunking step by step, rise after rise, he made his way around Mad Dog’s huge turds. Padlocks, heavy metal doors, not even deadbolts could keep Wolf from returning to finish off Harry.
The image fading, I realized how incorrect my thoughts about telekinesis had been. Wolf might have become animated, but the process has nothing to do with me. The power that moves Wolf is inexplicable, but when runs down, needs to be recharged. That’s the reason Harry now appears wiped out.
“Harry?” I shook the excelsior from my hand. “Has old lady Crumble called asking for help down in the storage area?”
He moved his head indicating she had not.
I allowed that Harry had gone down to the garage, released the manny, and forgotten that he had done it. But if I hadn’t told him that the manny was down there, he could not have known unless…unless he and Wolf were swapping thoughts, maybe even sharing the same brain.
“Well…she said she might.”
“Don’t tell me Crumble wants to rent the manny, too,” Harry said.
“She needs to store some things down in the garage. I told her you’d be glad to help.”
Nodding, Harry got to his feet, opened the sliders to the balcony, and drew in a lungful of fresh air. “It’s stuffy in here. For days, I’ve felt closed in.” He went into the bedroom and a minute later, I heard him draw back the shower curtain and turn on the faucet in the tub.
I stood in the cold draft, feeling awful that he was in the clutches of a horror I had unleashed. If Harry was possessed by a demon, then the demon had to be cast out of him, one way or another.
When Harry switched off the eleven o’clock news, he suggested I turn down the bedcovers while he flossed and brushed. On his way out of the room, he did a jerky little dance, and in the gesture, I saw Wolf.
I locked the front door, switched off the living room lamps, and headed for the bedroom too. As I passed Wolf still in the alcove, his face in the shifting shadows appeared to leap in and out of goofy expressions that more mocked than imitated Harry’s facial features.
Having myself already washed and brushed, I kicked off my slippers and crawled into bed. Soon after, Harry fresh from the shower hopped in next to me and snuggled closer.
“I know what you’re up to,” I said as he started fondling me.
“Showing you what a real man’s made of.”
Harry’s overtures worried me. We had at times considered having a baby, but in light of our present situation, I had to be wary. My mate’s seed—should it more pollinate than inseminate—could generate curious offspring.
“It’s not PMS, is it?” Harry watched me roll my fingers into my gut.
“No, it’s…Have you ever heard of those lumpy growths women sometimes get. They’re ugly little things that can have patches of hair, half-formed eyes, even a couple of crooked teeth.”
“A tumor? Are you telling me you’ve found a tumor?”
“Not yet. But I could if I got pregnant, except I’d more likely have a wooden puppet than some other mutation.”
Harry looked at me a long while. “I’m not gonna ask what this is about. I’ve fallen into too many of your loony traps.”
“It’s about Wolf,” I said, anyway. “We think we’re flesh-and-blood people, and he’s just a dummy, but it’s not true. He’s actually a—” I paused and lowered my voice. “A puppet master, sort of, and it’s my doing because I didn’t know what I was doing, making a pact with the Devil.”
“Huh?”
“Wolf is a body snatcher. He’s taking your life, like absorbing it, kind of like you suspected. Oh sure, he’s nice to your face, but you don’t know what he does behind your back. So we have to get rid of the thing that’s got a grip on him just like Errol Flynn’s ghost had to be ejected from the yacht he haunted.”
Harry slid the strap of my nightgown off my shoulder.
“What are you doing at a time like this?”
“Looking for the Devil’s mark.” He touched a spot on my bare back and kissed it. “And here.” He planted another kiss. “And here, there, and everywhere,” he said, repeating the act before sliding his hand down the front of my panties.
“I know what you’re looking for.”
“Did I find it?” His brows arched in devilish peaks.
“Definitely.” Just as I flounced around to face him, a thump similar to a closing door sounded in the hall. I shushed Harry and started to rise.
“Ignore it,” he said, pulling me back. “It’s probably just Wolf, heading out for a night on the town.”
The purpose of an exorcism is to restore the demonically afflicted to a state of normalcy—whatever that is. The practice dates back to the primordial past, a time of witch doctors and sorcery. Other religious devotees got into the act much later. Since no Holy Joe was on hand to assist me in my efforts to eject Wolf’s demon, I was obliged to go it alone.
While I as an amateur exorcist was free to put my own spin on everything, I still had to be careful. Ritualistic exorcism can be a perilous endeavor. If impossible things could happen to a possessed human being, they could happen to a wooden manikin. And I’d hate to see Wolf’s funny little blockhead spinning on his shoulders and his cute little mouth vomiting green twigs. The thought disturbed me almost as much as that of having termites crawling all over my apartment walls and finding myself flung from a fourth story window.
Yet I wasn’t worried. After all, the takeover that I was out to reverse did not involve demonic possession in the strictest sense. For that, Harry would have had to be demonic in his own right and, while he had his shortcomings, he was far from fiendish. When it came to Wolf, I felt the opposite applied. The portion of him that had set up housekeeping in Harry had to be at least a tad wicked in order to pull off such a peculiar revision. Since the invasion was in its early stages and far from complete, I felt confident that the entity I was dealing with was little more than a diminutive sprite.
The lower risk involved in showing Wolf’s occupant the door also afforded me the opportunity to employ paraphernalia of a lesser potency than the usual religious articles. Instead of holy water, a crucifix, and a bible, I settled for tap water, matches, salt, and a barf bag of course.
I dressed Wolf in an old sheet that I converted into a loose-fitting sackcloth worn as a sign of penitence. After carting him into my office in the alcove, I propped him on the stool in the corner, then arrayed the pertinent articles under a dim lamp on my desk.
“Hey, you in there,” I said to his demon. “This is your goodbye.” To my eyes, a woeful expression appeared superimposed on Wolf’s dopey face.
I sympathized yet still dipped my fingers into a bowl of tap water and sprinkled Wolf in the face. “I know you have issues. Nobody likes to be without a home,” I told Wolf’s demon. “But you can’t stay in there anymore than you can move back into Harry.”
Water droplets rolled down my manny’s cheeks like tears. While the image saddened me, I couldn’t be swayed.
I tossed a pinch of salt over my left shoulder to ward off bad luck and commenced. “Wolf’s insides are private property. Trespassing is illegal. So it’s best you just pull up stakes.”
My threats seemed to have no effect.
“Harry, is that you in there?” I said hoping to get somewhere in the more established form of exorcism. Nothing. “Honey, has a part of you taken up inside Wolf?” Again nothing. “You’ve got to move out. Before it’s too late. Before the rest of you moves in.”
Clear I was getting nowhere, I next lowered my head and addressed Wolfs belly, another attempt to reason with the manny’s freeloader.
“I think you’ve made a big mistake. My guess is you were looking for more sexually gratifying accommodations than what a manikin could offer.” That made sense to me, given demons preference for depravity. It also explained why it had been encouraging Wolf to filch my door key and sneak out late at night.
I sniffed the air, fortunately clear of demon flatulence I might have provoked during my endeavor to oust the evildoer. “You see, it’s like this. Wolf is not equipped for the action demons are accustomed to.”
Then I began to suspect that, in part coming from Harry, this particular demon was rather naïve. “Okay, you obviously don’t know the drill. It’s real simple. It’s time to hit the road.”
Having so far failed, I speculated that I could have misinterpreted the situation. What if I’d unwittingly initiated some tricky rite that could piss off Wolfs resident entity to where it shook furniture, spewed obscenities, and made a stink big enough to clear the building? Then there’s that stuff involving masturbatory implements, human excrement, and unimaginable perversions. If Wolf suddenly started writhing and jerking, if he began dropping the F-bomb and touching his omitted privates, I simply couldn’t handle it.
“You wouldn’t,” I exclaimed horrified. I was still staring at him, thunderstruck, when I heard a distant tapping. Uh-oh, I thought. It’s starting.
“Yoo-hoo, Judy? It’s me,” sounded the muffled words.
Oh my gosh! Wolf?
I clapped my hand over my mouth, stifling a scream. More banging and calling occurred outside the front door. Gradually, I realized it was Ruthie.
“Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she said, when I finally opened the door. She examined my face then craned her neck, looking over my shoulder. “I thought I heard voices.”
“The TV’s on, a spooky movie.” I waved toward the blank screen angled off the foyer, behind my back. “I hadn’t heard you till I shut it off.”
“I’m heading out for some ice cream. You need anything?”
Do I ever, I thought, but said, “I’m good, thanks for checking.”
“My pleasure,” she said, remaining anchored in place, examining my face as if it looked strange. “Must have been some movie.”
I let out a nervous laugh. “Scary, that’s for sure.” We then exchanged goodnights, and I quickly closed the door.