Ed kurtz, p.6
Ed Kurtz, page 6
“Two seconds. I’m not messing around.”
Walt’s right hand curled into a tight fist. The girl flashed a smug grin at him.
“And that’s one. Hang around and wait for them, if you like.”
She marched over the front counter, pulled a phone up from underneath it and began dialing.
“I’ve got a cab waiting,” Walt said in a quiet rage.
He stalked out of the shop and got back into the running taxi. As the taxi rolled away, he could see the girl hanging the phone up and smiling triumphantly. Walt seethed all the way back to the house.
The hatchback sat crooked in the driveway when the cab dropped Walt off. The front end of the car was caved in, a perfect fit for the big oak he slammed into. He shook his head at the ruins of his car, wondering what to do about it and how he was going to afford it. So much of his reserves had already been poured into the house, leaving scant cash for unforeseen events like a totaled car. He walked a circle around it, studying the damage and silently cursing himself for having had the accident in the first place. At least he could still live in a house with a hundred holes in the roof. And one very peculiar hole in the ceiling.
Walt turned toward the porch and took a few steps before a high-pitched mewling attracted his attention. He paused, turned around and narrowed his eyes at the tree line at the edge of his property. Although he could not see them from where he stood, Walt knew that the black cat was feeding her kittens in the woods again.
He slowly walked over to the trees.
The mouth, such as it was, twisted and puckered. It looked as though it were trying to speak, or maybe kiss. Walt had not noticed anything resembling teeth in it before, but he could now see small white nubs protruding at various angles beneath the wet, sopping lips. Above the mouth, a chunk of pink cartilage jutted out of the sticky mass. The beginnings of a nose.
Walt stared at it for a moment. Then a gnarled flap of bumpy flesh darted out from between the lips. Its tongue, he realized.
At Walt’s feet was a cardboard box, on top of which the word BOOKS was written in permanent marker. All of the books that had been in the box were now stacked neatly in the dining room. The box wiggled. A weak, quiet squeak emanated from within. Walt sneered at it, and then he sneered at the deep crimson scratch on the back of his right hand. Mama had done that, enraged at the theft of her baby. Walt had not expected the cat to strike out like that, but the animal turned out to be feral. She had no trust for human beings and, as Walt clearly demonstrated, she had no reason to. Nonetheless, he managed to snatch the tiny kitten by the scruff of its neck and get away with no more than the one injury.
Now Walt opened the box and reached inside, again seizing the crying kitten by the loose skin on the back of its neck. The tongue above him lashed about, dripping blood-infused saliva on Walt’s face and shoulders.
“You’re hungry,” he said, not expecting it to hear or understand him. It had no ears.
The mouth stretched open a little wider, cracking audibly. Walt lifted the kitten higher. A lump of red, veiny flesh wobbled in the mass, splitting apart to reveal a bloodshot eye. Walt gasped.
“Christ,” he said, titling his head to get a better look at the solitary, roaming eye. “Can you see?”
He waved the screeching cat back and forth beneath the eye, and the eye followed it intently. The mouth slavered, the tongue licking the lips with anticipation. When Walt lifted the struggling animal higher still, the wriggling strands shot at it and rapidly coiled around the cat’s neck and legs. One of the strands dug into the fresh scratch on his hand, too. Walt cried out in pain and jerked his hand free.
“Watch it!” he screamed.
If the creature on the ceiling understood him, it paid him no mind. It was far too occupied with the thrashing kitten in its grasp, pulling it close enough for that grotesque mouth to bite into its belly. The cat gave a chilling shriek as its abdomen was torn open by the gnawing teeth. Walt swallowed hard and looked away. Blood splashed on the floor behind him and he heard a loud crunch. When he looked back, the kitten was mangled, dead.
The mouth greedily sucked at the fluids that seeped out of the split belly.
“Jesus Christ,” Walt groaned.
The eye appeared to stare at Walt while the blunt teeth tore into the kitten.
Chapter Ten
Amanda shivered as she stirred the can-shaped chunk of condensed soup into the milk that surrounded it. Her apartment felt cold. Cold and dark and strangely foreign. In the last few weeks, Amanda had spent little time in her own place. She even joked with Nora that the one-bedroom walk-up served more as a storage unit for her stuff than anything else. After all, most nights she slept at Walt’s. With Walt. But not tonight.
When the orange goop finally began to blend with the milk, Amanda gave the concoction another whirl with the whisk before stealing away to the short hallway between the bathroom and bedroom. There was no light in the hall, so she had to turn on the bathroom light to illuminate the controls for the central heat and air. Amanda almost always kept it off when she was not at home, and since her apartment was buried in the building with other units on top and both sides, it tended to get pretty chilly when the sun went down. She squinted in the dim light emanating from the bathroom, peering closely at the black and gray readout on the control unit. 62 degrees. Even the number made her skin raise with goosebumps. She flipped open the cover, played with the overly complicated network of buttons for several seconds, and finally convinced the thing to get working toward a comfortable 71.
The soup on the stovetop had come to a boil during her two minute absence.
“Shit,” Amanda grunted.
She seized the pot by the handle, quickly moving it to a cool burner, but it was too late. She ruined the soup.
Her bottom lip quivering, tears spilled out of Amanda’s eyes and she began to loudly weep. Anyone would have thought she was nuts had they observed the spectacle; who breaks down over a ruined can of seventy-nine cent soup? It was, of course, much more than that. The soup was just the last straw, the one that broke her proverbial camel’s back. And that camel was named Walt.
Amanda dropped the pot in the sink with a resounding clang. Wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her pullover, she weighed the pros and cons of giving Walt a call. Just to see how he was doing. Maybe, Amanda thought, they would both end up apologizing and before long her blubbering would transform into relieved laughter. But even as she found herself dialing his number, she greatly doubted that this would be the case.
The line purred its soft ring once, twice, and then three times. Immediately after the fourth, Amanda heard a loud click. Then silence.
“Walt?”
No response came from the other end. Still, Amanda was almost certain she could hear soft breathing coming through the receiver.
“Walt? Are you there?”
The breathing got louder, as though he knew he was caught and was not bothering to attempt silence any longer.
“I. I can hear you, Walt. Are you going to say anything?”
A short burst of air hit the line, a grunt forced through it. Like a mean little laugh. Heh.
The line went dead after that. Her eyes bulging with disbelief, Amanda slowly raised the receiver and hung it back on the hooks. She remained in the kitchen for several minutes, staring at the wall with her arms hanging limp at her sides. She felt fairly certain that this was the end, that she had been unceremoniously dumped. As much as that pained her—and it pained her plenty—it was not the primary source of her hurt and confusion. It was the manner with which Walt did it, the coldness and total lack of kindness. That was not the same Walt with whom Amanda fell in love, the Walt who loved books and kids and got all giddy whenever he waxed poetic about their future together, the English teacher and his dear, sweet girl. Marriage had never come up explicitly, but there was always that knowing sparkle in Walt’s eyes when he slyly hinted at it. Amanda did not doubt that a proposal was just around the corner, at least not before he moved into that house.
That awful house. With that even more awful thing living in it. Growing in it.
Amanda shuddered, recalling the nightmarish sight of the gelatinous puddle hungrily sucking up that
cockroach and devouring it completely. At that point, the nasty thing was twice as big as it was when Walt first discovered it. There was no telling how much it had grown since then. Or what it hungered for now.
The back of her throat burned from the bile that lurched up from her stomach. In her mind, Amanda pictured shoving a flaming torch at the thing, burning it up and being done with it. Maybe then Walt might come back to the land of the living. Even if he still wanted to call it quits, he would at least return to being the same gentle Walt he had always been, before he moved into his new home in the boondocks.
“Yeah, sure,” she muttered, shaking her head.
Amanda could not exactly see herself bursting into the house like some comic book superheroine with a torch clutched in her fist, screaming Out of the way, Walt! It’s that thing or me!
It was stupid. Amanda hung her head, jamming her chin into her breastbone.
She did not know what to do.
The broad, open expanse of the field stretched from the end of Walt’s property to a line of trees at least a quarter of a mile away. Broken wooden nubs protruded from the dry earth in intermittent intervals all around the field, rotting vestiges of what had once been a fence, long ago. Whoever owned the huge parcel of land now had let it go to seed; it was overgrown with tall yellow grass and thick tangles of weeds. In the week that passed since he brought the first box inside the house, Walt had yet to see a single living soul set foot on the field. To his mind, it was practically his.
Having slept most of the night, save for that irritating call from Amanda, Walt was fresh and ready to go when he set out for the field in the first hour of sunlight. He wore his rarely used pair of beige hiking boots and carried an iron fire poker in his right hand. He would have preferred one of those litter pokers the convicts used on the interstate median to collect all the garbage, but he had high hopes for the heavy metal instrument. A field like that was bound to be rife with all manners of creeping and crawling critters; snakes and moles and rabbits and such. Food for the hungry mouth on the ceiling.
He strode slowly and carefully into the field, his boots crushing the deep growth underneath as he waded through it. Above and around him some birds chirped while others cackled. Something cut a rapid path through the grass several yards in front of him, too far away to do anything about it. Despite the hour, it was already hot enough for Walt to break a sweat. The scent of his own perspiration mixed with the strong, pungent odor of the rain-starved grass and the weeds that choked it. It smelled like summer, like camping. Walt smiled at the sensation as he moved further into the field.
When he was a quarter of the way across, it occurred to Walt that his plan of attack was not a particularly good one. No matter how quietly he tried to move, his boots still clomped and rustled loudly through the undergrowth. No wild animal in the world was likely to miss his approach. Walt felt like the worst predator in history.
He stopped when he reached the middle of the field and sighed heavily. This simply was not going to work. At the very least, Walt was going to need to set some traps, something else he did not know anything about. If he was really serious about netting some game, he figured a gun might also be a good idea. Something with a small caliber, like a .22. He did not want to blow any of the little creatures to smithereens. At any rate, whatever he did the damned fire poker was a ridiculous idea from the start. Hunting small game was not akin to sneaking up on a burglar. Walt blew a short burst of air through his nostrils and groaned. There had to be better options.
Of course, Walt had already ruined the pet shop in town for a resource. The hippie bitch who ran the place was likely to chase him out of there with a broom if he tried stepping foot in there again. He should not have been so single-minded in his approach. He should have been aware of how it was going to look if he treated that little excursion like what it really was—grocery shopping. But then, hindsight was 20/20, for whatever the hell that was worth.
The creature—if one could accurately call it that— had clearly been satisfied with the kitten. It fed on the poor, squealing thing for the better part of an hour before letting its decimated, pulpy remains drop to the floor. It had been a beneficial meal, too; in the day since that feast the thing on the ceiling had grown appreciably. It covered more surface area, for one thing, but more interesting was the small, knobby bulge beside its one probing eye. Soon enough, it was going to be blessed with three-dimensional vision. Naturally that would require sustained sustenance, though. And Walt just didn’t have the heart to steal another kitten from the black cat in the woods. The thought of it alone made his stomach flip.
In the interim, after Amanda’s unwelcome phone call had wakened him, Walt had attempted a different tack. By then the thing had started to let out irritating screeching sounds, like a dying grackle or something. It was hungry again and, Walt presumed, demanding more meat. So he went back into the kitchen, opened up the refrigerator, and searched for something that would suffice. What he settled on was a half pound of beef rump steak that he planned to grill in the next day or two. After extracting the cold, red slab from the fridge and peeling away the plastic, he brought it to the hallway and held it up with both hands like some ancient priest offering a sacrifice to its raging deity.
The tendrils went wild when the lone eyeball caught sight of the meat, wriggling and stretching out toward it. The mouth stretched open, and from within its dark pit came the probing tongue, dripping with saliva.
Ahhhhhg, it went.
Walt stepped back, then. He was afraid. The eerie moan was not expected, and now his arms and hands were trembling. All the same, he maintained his supplicant pose, the meat held high in the air. The shiny red strands poked and prodded at the surface of the cool, marbled slab. They seemed uncertain, but the slavering mouth would not be denied. The strands dug into the soft meat and coiled around it, snatching it out of Walt’s hands. They retracted, yanking the rump steak toward the mouth. The tongue slapped against the meat and licked it from one end to the other. Then the short, nubby teeth sank into the offering. Walt smiled nervously.
The mouth then snapped open and shrieked. It let go of the meat as though it was on fire, letting it fall to the dirty hardwood floor with a resounding smack. Walt jumped back and gaped. The mouth went on shrieking while the tendrils furiously writhed and snapped. The experiment was a colossal failure. Dead meat was never going to sate the ravenous creature on the ceiling.
Hence the fire poker and hiking boots. But that, too, was turning out to be a wash. Walt moaned with exasperation as he resolved to tread back through the brush and weeds to his own property. He slashed at the grass with the heavy iron poker along the way, imagining that it was a machete and he was some intrepid pulp magazine explorer in the humid jungles of deepest, darkest Africa.
The reverie came to an abrupt end at the sound of a high-pitched squeal. Walt actually hit something.
Stunned, he knelt down in the tall, dry grass and parted the growth where the end of the poker last struck. There lay a small brown rabbit, hardly bigger than a kit, moving in desperate, rapid circles on its side. Walt stared at the suffering creature, noting the blood in its fur and the awkward way its back leg twisted and jutted backward.
“Huh,” he said. “Must have broken it.”
He grinned abashedly. In an odd sort of way, he felt pity for the rabbit. He had not meant to strike it, even if he had come into the field for that very purpose in the first place. Still, there was nothing else for it, now. A wild rabbit with a broken back leg was as good as dead, anyway.
Walt seized the shivering animal by the scruff of its neck, just as he had seized the kitten before it. He raised it up until it was eye-level with him. Its mouth hung open and its glossy black eyes glared at Walt with horror.
“Lucky me,” Walt said.
“If it were me,” Walt said cheerily, “it’d be Brunswick stew. Oh, with fresh cornbread, too. But for you, my friend.”
The red, dripping jaws clamped down on the rabbit’s neck, sending a crimson spray splashing against the wall.
“.you can have it rare. A rare hare. Ha, ha.”
Walt grinned broadly as the young rabbit ceased its struggling and the mouth sucked at its bloody tendons and the soft, juicy organs beneath them. As he watched it feed, the round knob beside the creature’s eye split open, finally revealing its second eye. It was only then that Walt realized that the irises were both pale blue.
He also realized that among the thing’s many writhing tendrils, two of them had grown thicker. These two did not wriggle as much as the others, a disability caused by the development of bony joints in the middle. At the ends of the two jointed limbs were several knobby appendages, red and pudgy, like baby fingers with no skin on them. The fingers wiggled, trying to find purchase in the rabbit’s blood-matted fur.
Walt stared and smiled with his mouth open.
“My god,” he rasped. “Would you look at that?” Ignoring his wonder entirely, the feasting creature paused in its gorging long enough to moan with pleasure.
Chapter Eleven
“You look like you need a drink,” Nora said a little too loud.
A blue-haired old woman in the cooking session shot her a nasty look. Nora just smiled at her.
“It’s ten-thirty in the morning,” Amanda reminded her.
“Well, I didn’t mean right now. Unless it’s that bad, anyway. Sometimes you really do need a stiff drink first thing.”
“I sincerely hope you’re joking.”
Nora laughed and nudged Amanda with her hip.
“Come off it—I went to college with you, remember? I’ve seen you chug two liters of PBR through a surgical tube, and in your matching red underwear, no less.”
