Other terrors, p.5
Other Terrors, page 5
“That’ll be enough.”
“Do you have a sample for the match?” He wanted a sample of the suspected victim’s blood to match it against, but of course she didn’t have that. Margaret Winston had been buried a long time ago.
This would put the whole thing to rest. Make things okay again with Mildred. Make Jane less resentful, less impatient with a difficult old lady.
She shook her head. “Blood type will be enough, thanks.”
Sunday she was back at Mildred’s house with boxes and trash bags. Her mother-in-law didn’t want to let her in, but Jane didn’t care. “It’s a fire hazard,” she said as she pushed her way in. “I can’t in good conscience let you live under these conditions.”
Mildred followed at Jane’s heels. “If Kevin were alive, he wouldn’t let you treat me like this.”
If Kevin were alive. The deputies who’d arrived on the scene that night told her it was an accident. Late night, slippery road. He lost control. She’d suspected that they were trying to spare her. Kevin—always a little sad, always a little guarded—had changed after his father’s death. Became deeply depressed. Refused to see a doctor.
In the months since Kevin’s death, Jane wondered why he’d done it. She wondered, too, how much of it was her fault. If they should’ve had children. If she should’ve done things differently. If there had been anything that would’ve made him happy.
She suspected not.
Unhappy children grew into unhappy adults. Another reason she resented Kevin’s parents. It might’ve even been safe to say she hated them for how they’d failed their son.
After Jane finished loading her truck, she went around to the back of the house. There, in front of the cellar door, was the collection of garden debris, planters and cherub statues made of cast concrete, glass bell jars for the garden. Each piece thick with dust and dirt, untouched for decades, except for the weather.
There was no brown ceramic owl. Jane wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed.
Jane went to her mother-in-law’s house every day after work. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She told herself that she was helping the old woman, taking care of something that should’ve been done a long time ago. Being the dutiful daughter-in-law that she was supposed to be.
She couldn’t lie to herself, however. Behind it was a niggling suspicion that she would find something—a clue to another crime buried in all that junk.
Or she was driving herself crazy, looking for a misdeed where none existed.
She couldn’t ignore the feeling she got from that bloodstained shirt, however.
The forensic technician called a week later. “It was human blood, all right. Type AB negative.”
Jane didn’t need to check the case files. She had memorized the medical examiner’s report.
Margaret Winston was AB negative. The rarest of blood types.
It was time to tackle the basement. There could be evidence of a dozen crimes hidden in the rubbish down there. God only knew how long it had been since the furnace had been serviced. Mildred had complained it was already acting up and it wasn’t even the start of cold weather. At the very least, for safety’s sake, Jane needed to clear a path to the furnace.
As she chipped away at the sea of rubbish, she realized it would take a dump truck to haul away all this stuff. And that was if Mildred would even let her. The old woman’s whining got worse every day. She threatened to change the locks or have her nephew come down from New York to stay with her. To keep Jane away, was more like it.
It was only a matter of time.
Boxes were stacked everywhere in the basement, on shelves, three-deep on the floor. Most held discarded supplies from the grocery store or Mildred’s old craft projects. But Jane saw potential evidence, too. Decades of bills and receipts. Road maps from family car trips taken in the 1980s. Seemingly every letter Mildred or Frank had ever received. So much dry kindling next to those volatile old chemicals.
Mildred came to the top of the stairs every hour, wringing her hands and demanding that Jane leave. She didn’t want Jane’s help. Insisted that Jane wasn’t helping.
Jane had just cleared a path to the furnace when she saw it sitting incongruously behind the furnace in a dark space that no light reached. The ceramic owl. Mildred had kept it like a trophy. Couldn’t get rid of it, even though it was evidence. Or maybe the decision to keep it had been Frank’s. Jane recognized it from the police record, where it had sat innocently in the background of a photograph of Margaret that Dan Winston had given to police.
“Why?” Jane hadn’t heard Mildred come down the stairs. She hadn’t thought the old woman capable of navigating those rickety steps. “Why couldn’t you wait until I was gone? Then you could tear the house apart all you wanted.” Mildred’s rheumy eyes blazed now. “It wasn’t like we didn’t think you’d find out one day. You’re the reason that Kevin is dead, you know that, don’t you? Once you joined the police force, he knew you’d find out eventually. He was so upset, but he couldn’t persuade you not to. Because you couldn’t be normal. Because you can’t leave well enough alone.”
I’m not the reason he killed himself, she wanted to say. He killed himself because he knew what you’d done. That you weren’t normal.
“We tried to talk Kevin out of marrying you. We told him you weren’t like us, that you wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t put family first . . . You were so selfish. But it was too late. You’d snared him by then, gotten your claws into him. My poor boy.”
There was such hate in the woman’s face. Jane could almost say she’d never seen it before, but that wasn’t true. It had always been there, just under the surface.
“I’m not going to let you destroy this family’s reputation.” The old woman bared her teeth like a dog and threw herself at Jane, tiny fists flailing. She fell—that wasn’t entirely true; Jane had stepped aside when the old woman lunged for her, but maybe a little push was involved too. Something she’d wanted to do for years. Mildred fell behind the furnace, beside the ceramic owl. She struggled, floundering to get up.
Jane rushed up the stairs and out of the basement, her head a jumble of thoughts.
. . . If Mildred didn’t confess, she would never be convicted. At best, she was an accessory.
. . . Even if the judge thought she was guilty, they’d never send a woman her age to jail.
. . . What else was hidden in the trash?
. . . Kevin would hate to see his parents’ names dragged through the mud.
. . . Kevin had known and couldn’t bear the idea of me knowing too.
. . . Places like this are firetraps.
She’d heard a woman in Baker had died in a house fire, trapped behind her husband’s junk. The husband had gone insane with grief afterward.
She was pretty sure Mildred would choose death over dishonor.
There was a box of matches on the mantel.
They lit so easily, like they had been waiting for someone to strike them.
The strange thing was—as Jane closed and locked the door behind her, the crackle of flames rising like a Greek chorus, affirming her decision—she’d never felt closer to Kevin’s family than she did at that moment.
She was almost one of them now.
Night Shopper
by Michael H. Hanson
Mother of Otherness, Eat me.
—Sylvia Plath
Skathi woke in the early afternoon to the pulsing notes of mind.in.a.box’s “Unforgiving World” bleeding from her radio alarm clock.
It looked like another day of ridiculous bragging and petty complaining on InstaBag’s Shopper Reddit page, certainly nothing new to Skathi, as she had been accessing this website for at least five years. The economy had dropped through the floor half a decade ago ever since the first of the seven successive Covid outbreaks, which cost Skathi her cushy desk job in Denver and had her immediately applying for Medicaid to cover costly medical bills. With the sudden drop in available middle-class jobs, InstaBag’s delivery service was one of the few unskilled wellsprings of available work that thousands of local laid-off office jockeys like Skathi had scrambled toward. And seeing as the totality of her vocational training consisted of nothing more than a bachelor’s degree in ontology and a master’s degree in noetic theory, she was lucky to get this stint.
“I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same,” Skathi thought with a smile. You certainly got that right, Mr. Wittgenstein.
As usual, she started her workday late in the afternoon to see if anything new had popped up in the biz.
The Reddit posts crawled up Skathi’s computer screen like the insistent wails of Colorado’s literary finest.
Sprint-n-Grab: “Christ, I hate Sprigs. Those fuckers can’t keep their frigging shelves stocked. They never have canned peaches. Don’t start me on their shitty produce section with its spoilt lettuce!”
Casual-Spendthrift: “Killed it today! Forty items from just two aisles at Krogers and a thirty-dollar tip. Hoo-Rah!”
Finger-Sticking-Good: “Asshole gave Minimal Tip! Motherfucker lives over twenty miles away, and I had to hit two separate stores to get her shit, and she gives me a microscopic tip! Is my name Ben Dover?”
Kristin-Stewarts-Taint: “InstaBag cut our profit margin again? The third time in five god damned years! Christ on a crutch if this ain’t the next best thing to slavery!”
Smash-N-Bag: “That’s right MoFos! I just cracked it on the Boulder County Total Speed Leaderboard yesterday! Read my stats and weep you fucking pussies!”
And so on, and so forth.
It was shaping up to be another steady night on the road as Skathi prepped a quick microwave meal of chicken and rice for herself, and a large bowl of raw ground chicken and bone for her apartment roommate, Maxine, a fifteen-year-old Maine coon house cat, a small monster that was over three feet in length nose to tail and weighed fourteen pounds even. They both wolfed their food down.
“You know, Maxine,” Skathi said to her cat, “it’s clear Hume was right on the money when he said ‘Custom is the great guide to human life.’”
The sun had gone down two hours earlier when Skathi got a New Batch Available alert on her iPhone. A special order from one of her regulars on a back road in Lafayette. Hustling out the door to her well-lit parking lot, she smiled at her ride. Skathi drove a vehicle that was both famous and infamous across Boulder County. Reaching for the door handle, she took in the sleek lines of the 1970 Plymouth Satellite she had spent over three months plating with rusted sheets of ochre-colored steel. At first glance, onlookers might think the car was a prop from a Mad Max film, but second closer looks took in the large number of different-sized, rusted industrial gears, at least three of them two feet in diameter, welded all over the exterior. With all this plus a working World War I trench periscope sticking out of the roof, and a small, solid bronze dirigible hood ornament, this tribute to the steampunk oeuvre was definitely a ride that no one could ever forget.
Pulling out of the parking lot, she slid in a CD containing her latest mix of drive music. Mary Lambert’s “Secrets,” an oldie but a goodie, started playing.
The first store Skathi hit in a dark corner of Louisville was one of several that she usually shopped at that were not on InstaBag’s official approved list of purchase locations. It was far from off-limits, though, as Skathi had properly vetted the store after filling out four separate tedious online forms with the establishment’s official contact phone number, email address, business tax number, and bank routing numbers. This was something she had done nearly a dozen times over the last two and a half years for a number of shady businesses, and it had opened the door to a steady stream of much-needed income that she never took for granted.
The building, which had no sign but whose customers called the Open Vein, was on the outskirts of Louisville, set among the ruins of some long-abandoned warehouses and the remaining foundations of a demolished canning factory. It was basically an ugly, two-story cement block with blackout windows and a single front door made of bulletproof glass and iron bars. Buzzed inside, Skathi quickly went to the rear refrigerator cabinets, snapped up five sealed plastic bags of product, and carried them to the cash register, where she immediately scanned them with her iPhone’s IB app before dropping them off on the checkout counter for purchase.
Ten minutes later, about halfway through Mika’s “Grace Kelly” blaring out of the rear speakers, Skathi turned off of Baseline Road in Lafayette onto an unnamed dirt road, which she followed for several hundred yards before it ended at a brand-new, beautiful custom cedar cabana home with two old-fashioned oil lamps hanging on either side of the large front door.
Skathi exited her vehicle and approached the front stoop. The evening had gotten cold quickly, and with her kicks, blue jeans, and a stylish Irish wool cardigan sweater she wore a green and blue silk and wool hijab to keep her head warm. It was the perfect attire for a chilly autumn night in Colorado. She pushed the doorbell button that formed the nose of the surrounding carving of a European lynx.
The door opened slowly, revealing a shadowed figure wrapped in a thick black robe.
“Here’s your Golden,” Skathi said with a smile, handing over five swishy plastic bags, “my UV-challenged friend.”
“Cute as always,” a deep male voice replied, taking the items and dropping a large wad of cash into Skathi’s extended hand. “And here’s a little something extra for you . . . off the books.”
“I feel guilty you give me such lavish tips, Mr. Tepes.”
“Nonsense, my dear,” he replied, only his dark piercing eyes coming into focus in the darkness just inside the front door. “Reliable delivery on such short notice is priceless. Now, before you leave, you owe me a philosophical quote, young lady.”
“We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming,” Skathi recited. “Ludwig Wittgenstein.”
“Wonderful,” Mr. Tepes said. “You are a jewel in the night, Skathi.”
“Well, thank you again,” Skathi said as she started to turn away, “and please feel free to ask for me at any hour via the InstaBag website. I aim to please! Good night.”
“Noapte bună!”
By the time she got back to the car, another three New Batch Available alerts scrolled across her iPhone, and she quickly calculated distance, available stores, the number of product items for each order, and the promised tip. In seconds, she accepted all three orders and accelerated her car back toward the streetlights of Lafayette. The sorrowful soft notes of Wolf Alice’s “Blush” blared loudly and Skathi started singing along with it.
Five minutes later, an SUV full of obviously drunken male teenagers, probably seniors, pulled out onto a mostly empty South Boulder Road and came abreast of Skathi. Hanging out the two passenger-side windows, the two boys, jocks from the look of them, one white and one Black, started shouting.
“Hey, sweetness,” the white one yelled, “ditch that piece of crap and hop into this prime real estate.”
“Come on, babe,” the other shouted. “It’s cool you’re a Muslim. We’re not prejudiced.”
Skathi was annoyed but did her best to look straight ahead and not give these children the time of day. True, she was only about ten years older than them, but their actions made that gap feel like one hundred years. The SUV pulled alarmingly closer to her. The white kid with red hair and pale skin suddenly frowned, then his jaw dropped and his eyes went wide.
“Oh shit,” he yelled. “Dudes, it’s a guy in drag! This ain’t no chick.”
“No way,” the Black teenager shouted, “and he’s white. Ain’t no Muslim at all. What’s up man, slumming on the main strip.”
Pulling up close to a traffic light that just turned yellow, Skathi slammed on the brakes and watched the truck full of bozos continue through and beyond while she waited at the red light. She breathed deep and let it out slowly.
The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy, Skathi thought.
She’d dealt with worse over the past year as a trans woman since she’d started the estrogen treatments and began wearing makeup, a wig, and women’s clothing semi-regularly.
More often than not, though, she was generally met with either indifference or simple curiosity in the vicinity of other people. It was usually just the occasional young man who hassled her. As for her regular Night Clients, they were surprisingly empathetic to her ongoing outward transformation, something that had originally surprised her and became a more welcome aspect of her job with each coming evening. Kristeen Young’s “Pearl of a Girl” started playing, and Skathi bobbed her head to the solid beat.
The next stop for Skathi was the meat department at Kroger in Boulder, where she picked up ten pounds of the warmest and freshest cut beef around. Ten minutes later, she pulled off onto a steep uphill fire road near the base of the far right of the Flat Irons as she sang along with the upbeat strains of Katy Perry’s “Firework.” Swerving back and forth around several species of deciduous trees, she eventually reached a decent-sized parking area (big enough to hold eight cars) situated right in front of a ten-foot-high cave whose front was an arch-shaped Victorian wall with red brick and front-facing gables laden with delicate vergeboards.
Skathi grabbed the door knocker, which was a wrought-iron sculpture of a sheep’s head, and pounded on solid oak for a full ten seconds. The door swung inward without notice, and a shadowed figure of a tall, slender woman with beautiful auburn hair that hung down to her knees stood in the doorway.
“Freshly chopped from the shop,” Skathi said with a smile as she handed the two large bags over, “dripping with juices as requested, Mrs. Neuri.”
“Meeting all the lupine standards, eh, Skathi,” Neuri replied. “Now spill it. You know you’re dying to tell me a new one.”
