“I killed her.” Anne’s hands flew to her mouth.
“She was trying to let my guts out with that knife. You were defending me.”
“I just wanted to stop her. I just wanted to hit her on the head and knock her out, I didn’t want to kill her.”
I pulled her close, but she was rigid in my arms. Her eyes were wide over the tops of her fingers covering her mouth and nose. I blame TV and movies for this kind of shit. According to them, everyone has a nice ‘off’ button in the back of their heads, safe as pie. Konk ‘em on the noggin, and they wake up a little while later with nothing worse than a headache.
The reality is that people are damn hard to render unconscious, and even if you manage it, it’s going to be for seconds unless you do some major damage. The jaw, the temple, sudden blows to the side of the neck, those things can work if you know what you’re doing, or if you get lucky.
But hitting people in the back of the skull with a blunt object? That’s a different story. That kind of thing is in the same class as a stabbing or a shooting. I would imagine that an elderly woman, even one as spry as Mrs. Eaton, would have a skull like an eggshell.
“Anne. Look at me.” I looked into her eyes and watched them focus on me. “She was insane. There was no way to stop her from killing the both of us outside of using a hell of a lot of force. If you hadn’t done it, I would have. She wasn’t going to stop until someone was dead.”
She pulled away from me and wrapped her arms around her stomach. “That sounds like an excuse. I just killed someone. The reason why doesn’t change the fact that I did it. I’m a murderer now. I can never go back to who I was two minutes ago.”
Guilt and regret turned to acid in my stomach. I had known that sooner or later, this journey would diminish and stain her, hurting her in every way that matters. And I knew it was just going to get worse from here.
She needed a minute to pull herself together, so I looked around the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty. The pantry was empty. There was no trash can, and the dishes in the cabinets were dusty from disuse. If it wasn’t for the candles and the smell of baking cookies, I’d swear no one had lived here for years.
I walked over to the oven. It was set to a hundred and fifty degrees, pretty low for baking. I pulled the door open and found a pan with several candle jars on it. The labels on the candle jars said Sugar Cookie. I guess that’s easier than baking cookies all day.
My hand was hurting like a son of a bitch, so I forced myself to open my fist. The congealed blood cracked as my fingers uncurled, revealed a long, deep slice across my palm. It was bad. I could see white tendons glistening down inside the meat. I tore a strip off of the bottom of my shirt, wrapped it a couple of times around my hand and tied it off. I tore off another piece to use as a rag.
By the time I had started wiping our prints off of everything I could think of, Anne had stopped staring into space and started helping me. When we were done, she followed me to the closed door to the rest of the house.
“Why don’t you stay here. I’ll look for the piece.”
“I don’t want to stay in here with … with the body. I’ll help you look.”
The kitchen had two doors, one leading to the living room where we had entered the house, and another one that was closed, situated on the opposite wall from the kitchen sink. I walked over to it, being careful not to leave footprints in the spilled coffee, and put my hand on the knob and listened.
A faint odor came through the door, cutting through the thick, cloying scent of cinnamon and cookies in the kitchen. It smelled like rotting garbage. I didn’t hear anything on the other side, so I turned the knob and pushed the door open. I had to fight not to gag when the smell washed over me. I heard Anne encounter the smell a second later. I hoped she wouldn’t throw up on my back.
The hallway was dark, so I flipped the switch next to the door. To my surprise, it came on. The hallway ran about thirty feet, and then made a left turn out of sight. There were two open doorways, one on either side of the hallway, and on the far wall at the end where the hallway turned, there was a closed door.
The floor was covered with what must have been several years worth of pizza boxes, Chinese food cartons, empty bottles of all kinds, and other unrecognizable garbage. A path through the foot-high mounds meandered down the corridor of filth. Roaches crawled brazenly across fetid hills of old food and rotting cardboard despite the light.
I looked behind me, into the kitchen. Except for the mess we made, it was neat as a pin. Anne followed my gaze. “How could she live like this? She obviously knew it was wrong, or she wouldn’t have hidden it from visitors.”
“I doubt she cared. I think the front of the house was just part of her disguise, like the pink sweater and the cookies.”
We moved into the hallway.
Just because there was a path with less garbage in it didn’t mean it was clean. Slowly congealing fluids from the rotting food on either side had soaked the carpet, leaving it sticky, black, and occasionally crunchy when stepping on an unfortunate cockroach that hadn’t had the strength to pull free.
There were entrances to two bedrooms in the middle of the hallway, one to either side. The doors were open, and the rooms were empty of furniture. In the center of each was another pile of garbage, but the floor near the walls was mostly clear. I would imagine that was because Georgia had needed the room to walk, as she circled the room drawing endlessly on the walls.
The room on the right was full of faces. Two faces to be exact, mine and Piotr’s. The right wall had a five-foot-high drawing of my face, sketched out with a green marker in crude strokes. I wore an expression of furious ecstasy with my mouth stretched wide, as though to I was about to swallow the viewer. The eyes bulged with gleeful anger. It was the face of ravening, devouring insanity.
That portrait reached me. I understood it. Over the years I’ve come close to losing control, just hovering over the abyss and choosing not to let go. Not because it was wrong to cave in the skull of some mouth breather, but because of the consequences. My father used to tell me that a righteous man follows the Lord because he fears his wrath. I never thought that made a good man. It was understanding that driving a screwdriver into somebody’s eye was the wrong thing to do in the first place that made you a good person. I’m not a good person.
I could feel the emotion contorting the face on the wall, and I could understand it, and even be tempted by it a little. Just a little. The release and the freedom of it. I wasn’t looking at a twisted mockery of myself, I was looking at a secret temptation, drawn by someone who knew me better than I want to know myself. I may not be a good man, but I’ll die before I give in, and that’s close enough for me.
The other wall was a portrait on the same scale, drawn with a black marker. The face was turned upward, lips parted slightly and eyes closed, eyebrows arched skyward. It was the face of a supplicant and a martyr. It was the beatific calm of the willing victim.
That expression on that particular face was disorienting. Piotr was a butcher. He was violent, aggressive, and crafty. He bled out hundreds of living people for his charnel pit, suspended shrieking from chains in rows with no regard for age or sex or race. The expression bothered me more when both portraits were taken together. They faced each other across the room on opposite walls. I was ravening madness, lunging at Piotr, who was waiting, ecstatic, to be devoured. It made the hair stand up all over my body.
The wall between them, the one opposite the door, was made up of dozens of smaller portraits, each one a mixture of features from the larger ones. Here, my lunatic eyes over Piotr’s slack mouth. There my gaping maw snaring out of his beatific face. In one my face shared an eye from each of us in the center, with smaller mouths covering the rest of the head. This wall made me the most uncomfortable, implying some kind of interchangeable intimacy between us that was obscene.
Anne stared up at my portrait, meeting its eyes with her own. “Is this a picture of your past, or your future?”
“Neither, I hope.”
“Me, too.” She turned and gestured at the other giant face. “Who’s your victim, here?”
“That’s Piotr, the guy that we were chasing in Warsaw. I’ve only spent maybe ten minutes with the man, but I’ll never forget his face. It was his pit full of blood that Henry pulled me out of.”
“Georgia seems to think he’s the good guy here.”
“She also thought I’d look better with my insides on her kitchen floor. Fuck Georgia.” I stood next to Anne, looking up at Piotr’s face. “You know, I’m the only person in our squad to have ever actually laid eyes on Piotr. We were alone when I spoke to him up in that control room. Everyone else was down on the ground. Even Henry doesn’t know what he looks like, and Frank sure as hell didn’t.”
“Maybe he visited her?”
“And left her alive with the altar piece? I doubt it.”
I stepped back out into the hallway, finding the moldering garbage almost comforting in its forthright existence. Anne followed me to the next room.
It also featured walls covered with drawings, but this time they were crowded so close together that frequently the edges overlapped, creating an impenetrable crosshatch on two of the four walls. The other two walls were more sparsely filled, as if the artist has simply picked a blank spot at random to start drawing every time.
Each picture was fairly small, maybe a foot across, and without borders. The subjects seemed random, and more often than not, innocuous, drawn as though looking through the eyes of the observer. There was a coffee cup on a counter with a hand extending into the picture about to grasp the handle. Next to it was an empty parking lot in front of a boarded-up storefront. A sign in the window proclaimed “OPEN.”
My eyes wandered from wall to wall, skipping from image to image. Most of them were bland and pointless. A hand pulling open a door. A bird. A view out of a car window, looking at field. Some of them were weren’t. There was a body, facedown in a bedroom with a dark stain spreading around the head, a dismembered dog on a kitchen table, and horribly, a knife pointed directly back into the center of the picture, two hands wrapped around the handle.
“Abe.” I turned away from the jumble of mesmerizing images and went to Anne, who was kneeling down and staring hard at a picture near the floor. “Look at this.”
It was a picture of a bathroom, looking into a mirror. A woman was leaning forward and putting on makeup. Her face was indistinct, being a small part of a small picture, but the shape of the features were there, if not the details.
“That’s from my dream. I dreamed I was that girl, putting on my makeup, in that bathroom. This is it exactly.” She stood up and turned her back on the sketch. “Is this what I have to look forward to? Being driven more and more insane by my dreams until I’m wallowing in garbage and trying to chop people up in my kitchen?”
“Well, at least you’ll bake a good candle.”
“That’s not helping.”
I hunkered down next to her and took her hand. “I think you and Georgia probably shared a certain sensitivity, but that’s all. Just because you can hear the music doesn’t mean you have to dance.”
“I hope you’re right.”
I helped her to her feet. “Me, too. Nobody likes a stabby roommate.”
The door at the end of the hallway turned out to be a bathroom. At some point the toilet had gotten plugged up, but that hadn’t stopped Georgia from using it. Looking at the sink, it appeared that she had resorted to mashing stuff down the drain towards the end. We pulled the door closed and prayed that we didn’t have to return to search.
Moving around the left bend brought us to the final door in the house, also closed. I put one hand on the knob. “Has to be her bedroom. Ready?” Anne nodded, and I pushed it open. The door swung open without resistance, indicating a lack of garbage on the floor, or at least along the door’s path. Beyond the entrance was only blackness. The odor coming from the room was that of stale, sour sweat.
Anne peered around me. “Turn on the light.”
“I’d have to feel around on the wall for the switch.”
“You are a huge baby. Move.” She pushed past me. I could hear the swish of her hand sliding around on the wall, and then the lights came on.
The floor of the room was stripped down to bare concrete. Strips of carpet tacks still adorned the edges of the floor next to the walls, and there was old blood staining most of them, coating the short nails and the pale wooden strips they were embedded in. Bloody footprints adorned the concrete around these spots, as if Georgia had trod on the carpet tacks and then kept walking around unconcerned.
Candles were stuck into the remains of other candles on the floor in a ragged circle around the dirty mattress in the center of the room. A plastic disposable lighter lay next to the mattress, a shockingly cheerful pink artifact from the outside world. The mattress was sagging, lacked sheets, and was covered in overlapping urine stains in the middle. At the head of it was the pewter gray arc of the altar piece. The twin spikes were shoved downward through the mattress where a person’s head would be, leaving the hard crescent as a pillow.
Anne made a face. “She slept on it? Jesus.”
“Well, that explains all the pee.”
“I’m not touching it.” She pushed me. “You get it.”
I bent over the bed and grasped it in one hand. As usual, it felt oily and squirmy under my fingers, only this time the sensation was more intense. I pulled and it slid easily out of the mattress. Holding it made me feel queasy.
“It’s more, I don’t know, active or something than the one we’re carrying. Put it in your purse, I don’t want to carry it.”
“It’s not going to fit in my purse, it’s like two feet long! Just hold it.” She was looking around the room at the walls. “What do you think all of this is?” The walls and ceiling were completely covered in long wavy lines, all the way to the floor. I shrugged.
“I don’t know, just looks like a bunch of curvy lines to me.”
“It must mean something. Look how clean this room is. And look at the candles. This room was important to her, like a shrine.” She peered closely at the lines. “This was done very carefully. See how the lines go over and under each other, but never break? Each one of these goes all the way up to the middle of the ceiling.” She chewed absently on one finger for a minute. “Light the candles.”
“Why?”
“I want to see what it looked like to her when she was in here. She wasn’t using the overhead light, she was using the candles and laying down on the mattress looking up. Let’s see what she saw.”
I started lighting the candles. “You can lie down on that mattress if you want, but I’m trying to cut back on rolling around in other people’s urine.”
Once the candles were lit, Anne flicked off the light switch. The room was suffused in swaying, amber light. Our shadows multiplied and convulsed on the walls.
“We have to get on the floor. She wouldn’t have been seeing all these shadows. Just lay next to the mattress.”
The smell of the mattress was unbelievable when I lay down next to it. If anything, the acrid stench of old sweat was worse than the ammonia of the urine. I put my head down on the concrete and looked up at the ceiling. And then I forgot about the smell.
They weren’t individual lines, they were pairs of lines. They started close together and parallel at the ceiling and eventually came together at a point near the floor, forming a long worm or tentacle. They passed over and under each other with no space between in an endless cascade that went all the way around the room without a break.
Each was painstakingly complete, from ceiling to floor, no matter how many twisting loops or dips into the mass it followed. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them writhed in the wavering candlelight, forming a slithering cascade all around us. In the center of the ceiling they originated out of a solid black area around the light fixture, colored in completely with marker. We were in a vast, wormy maw. And it was swallowing everything.