Charnel House (11 page)

“You say something?” Luis asked.

Garraty smiled and held up his beer. “Said we gotta knock these things out. Let this be a celebratory beer.”

“Don’t have to say dat twice, man.”

“
Toomey!
”

The creaking voice floated out of the dark kitchen, and the word was followed by a thump and the harsh clatter of a cascade of empty cans spilling onto the linoleum floor. In his mind’s eye, Garraty saw the dead boy reaching out with one cold hand to knock the trash over. A lone Pabst can skittered into view and bumped over the transition piece onto the carpet.
Nice try, Tooms, but I’m onto your games now.

“What was that?” Luis cried, his hand jerking spasmodically. Beer foamed over the lip of the can and dribbled down his olive fingers. He didn’t notice.

“You heard that?” Garraty asked, flummoxed. That distant floaty feeling in his head, so pleasant moments ago, now seemed to be keeping him from collecting his thoughts properly. How could Luis hear things in his imagination?

“Christ, Joe, a deaf person could have heard that!”

Garraty scrambled for a response, but his brain seemed mired in thick syrup. Luis began to rise, and he found his voice.

“Sit down, man. Sounds like the trashcan just tipped over. I’ll take care of it.”

“Wadded,” the dead boy in the kitchen said.

The strange voice grated on Garraty’s nerves. Right now, he wouldn’t mind killing the kid all over again. He might even enjoy it. “Let’s finish our beers.”

Luis reluctantly lowered himself to the couch, still eying the beer can lying just outside the doorway to the kitchen. “You got a rat problem,
esse
? I seen the damn things all around here, chewing through walls to get at food.”

Oh, I’ve got a pest alright, but it ain’t rats.
Garraty tittered. “Nah, never seen anything like that. I just put a little too much in the can and it got top-heavy. You know how shaky this damn trailer is. My big feet clomping across the floor probably started it rocking.”

This was better. The pistons upstairs all seemed to be firing again. Good. He had some shit to figure out.

Luis slurped beer foam off his fingers, mollified. His gaze drifted from the empty can on the floor to the ceiling over the kitchen doorway, looking for cracks. “I bring a level by here one day dis week and check dat floor. May need to jack it up a little to make it straight.”

“Sounds good,” Garraty said
,
but inside he was knotted up. If the kid had knocked over the trash could only mean one thing: he wasn’t a figment of Garraty’s imagination. But why hadn’t Luis seen or heard him? Hell, the boy was close enough to touch when they were outside, babbling his odd words, and just now he was in plain sight before he went into the kitchen to overturn the garbage can. And yet Luis had given no indication he knew of the boy’s presence. He was confused. Had his fabricated response to Luis been close to what actually happened? The trash
was
full. Maybe the vibrations in the floor really did do it.

Motion from across the room caught his eye. The boy had stepped out of the kitchen and into the front room. Luis didn’t notice, merely stared contemplatively at the can in his hand. The boy’s mud-stained sneaker came down on the empty Pabst can on the carpet and crushed one end flat. The sound was enormous in the quiet room. Garraty looked from the boy to Luis and back again. No response from his friend.
What the fuck?

“Jesus,” Garraty cried, pointing directly at the boy. “Look at the size of that spider!”

The boy regarded him through half-lidded eyes lined with crusted blood.

Luis looked up from his beer, blinking. He looked dopey.
Alcohol must be getting to him.

“Spider? Where?” He realized Garraty was pointing and turned his head to look. “I don’t see no spider, man.”

“On the floor, next to the beer can.”

Garraty waited for Luis to notice that the can had been crushed.

“Goddamn, how you see chit on dat dark-ass carpet?”

“You can’t see it? Right there?” Garraty gestured at the boy again. “The thing is the size of a half-dollar!”

The dead boy took a step toward them and something in his hand caught the light from the lamp, throwing a splash of white onto the ceiling. A blade. Garraty recognized the knife, of course, because it had come from the silverware drawer with the missing pull, right next to the ancient Kenmore dishwasher. The first weekend after Tina kicked him out, Garraty had done the yard-sale circuit in Decatur, looking for things with which to stock his meager kitchen. He had lucked out on an estate sale and picked up the set of knives for a buck because it was short one. The things were hideous, with pearled green plastic handles and copper rivets straight from the days of bell-bottoms and flared collars, but they did the job and were practically free. Now, as he saw the green handle jutting from the kid’s fist, Garraty felt something in his chest flutter.
Kid means to kill me right in front of Luis, and the man won’t see shit.

“Ain’ no spider over dere,” Luis said. His voice sounded thick, slurred. Garraty took his gaze off the knife long enough to glance at his friend. Luis’s eyes had taken the same half-lidded look as the boy’s, only they still shone with life. He tried to stand on shaky legs and almost fell back to the couch. A sloppy grin twisted his face into a caricature. “Need to go,
amigo
. Tink I had one too many.”

“Toomey,” the boy said, and began to shuffle toward Garraty, limping because he only wore one shoe. As he approached he brought the knife up, pointing it ahead of him like a spear. His arm, shattered when the Prius went over him, had nearly straightened, and he held the knife with a strong grip.

He isn’t here,
Garraty’s mind insisted.
He’s under the house, in the ground. Speaking of ground, stand yours. Your imagination can’t hurt you.

The boy moved around the end of the coffee table, as inexorable as the tide. Fear grew in Garraty like a malignant tumor, threatening to overtake him. Still, he kept his seat and watched the boy draw near. The air carried the oh-so-familiar stench of the shit that filled the boy’s jeans. Garraty covered his mouth with one hand and focused on not hurling. He’d done enough of that already.

Luis put his hands out to steady himself. “Chit, man, I tink you got a strong batch of dat stuff or somethin’. Feel like I been drinkin’ tequila.”

“Sure you don’t want to stay a little longer?” Garraty asked. He heard the strain in his voice, but Luis seemed not to notice.
Can’t hurt me. Can’t hurt me.
“We don’t have to drink.”

“Nah, man, I got to go sleep this chit off.” He staggered toward the door, still keeping his hands out for balance.

The boy reached him and slashed the knife at Garraty, and even though he saw it flay the skin of his left forearm open it didn’t hurt, not at first. Freshets of hot blood sprayed from the wound, soaking his shirt. Garraty kicked the boy in the gut, more out of reflex than conscious thought. The kid stumbled back a step or two, caught his balance, and came for him again.
He feels so
solid
,
the impartial voice in his head noted, and then the boy was slashing at him with the knife, this time carving a wide mouth across the back of his good hand. Garraty screamed and slapped at the blade, flinging a spray of blood over the dead boy. His arm felt like it had been dipped in acid.

“Whafuck?” Luis said, trying to turn around. He lost his balance and stumbled into the wall. “What you yellin’ for?”

The knife came up a third time and for Garraty that was the charm. He bawled with fear and scrambled away from the too-real figment of his imagination, blood pattering from his arm to the carpet in a hard rain. He leapt onto the coffee table to escape the shambling nightmare and it collapsed under him in a cacophony of splintering wood, dumping him unceremoniously to the brown carpet. The trailer shuddered on its supports.

“Wadded,” the boy said.

Garraty crabbed across the floor on his back, moaning and crying and bleeding, pieces of the broken table digging into his back.

“Chit,
amigo,
you hurt!” Luis cried. “Dat table fuck up your arm!”

From the dead boy: “Jew due.”

Luis lumbered toward the kitchen, holding out his arms like a man on a tightrope. “Put pressure on it, Joe, I get you some paper towels!”

Neither Garraty nor the boy paid the short man any mind. The boy shuffled across the remnants of the table, kicking them aside as he approached.
Figments can’t interact, can’t kick... can’t cut
Garraty’s mind jabbered. He wished he could shut it off.

“
Toomey!
” the boy insisted.

Luis hurried through the doorway into the kitchen, and sudden fluorescent light bathed the carpet in a white triangle that reached toward the walking corpse. “What de
fuuu—
”

Garraty heard the slick squeak of rubber soles on wet linoleum, a short grunt of surprise, and then something smashed into the floor hard enough to shake the trailer.
Goddamn thing’s going to collapse before the night is over.
The thought flittered through his mind like a darting insect. Twisting to look, he saw the curly thatch of Luis’s onyx hair through the doorway. He wasn’t moving. The brutal projector in Garraty’s head cued up a movie of his friend slipping in the puddle of vomit and going ass over teakettle like Charlie Chaplin in an old black-and-white film, only instead of ending with canned laughter this pratfall ended with a snapped neck.
I sets ‘em up and I knocks ‘em down. Let dem bones crack to a rockin’ laugh track.

“
Toomey!
” the dead boy muttered again, and plunged the green-handled knife into Garraty’s right calf.

He bellowed and kicked wildly with his other foot. The heel of his shoe connected solidly with the kid’s forehead, making a very satisfying
thwack.
The boy fell away from him.

Garraty rolled onto his belly and struggled to get to his feet. He was starting to feel lightheaded now.
Blood loss
, the clinician in his head told him.
Luis was right about putting pressure on it.
He cradled his arm and stepped over Luis into the kitchen, hoping he wasn’t straddling a corpse. There were cleaning towels in the utility closet. He’d get one in a minute. First, he wanted a way to deal with his problem. There was a bigger knife—a goddamn butcher knife so large it could have been stolen from the set of a horror movie—in the same drawer where the kid had gotten the one he stabbed Garraty with.

The trashcan lay on its side next to the fridge, empty beer cans scattered across the floor like dead soldiers on a battlefield. Garraty yanked the drawer open hard enough to completely pull it off the glides and it crashed to the linoleum. Silverware and Pabst empties flashed and flickered and spun away in a discordant jangle. The knife he wanted ended up most of the way under the refrigerator, the pointed end of its blade a shark fin gleaming among the dust bunnies. He dove for it, then turned to get the humming appliance at his back. Ready for an attack.

None came.

The only sounds Garraty heard were his own labored breathing and the
doopdoopdoop
of blood hitting the floor as it dripped from his dangling fingertips. Another wave of dizziness washed over him and he sagged against the refrigerator. He was going to pass out if he didn’t do something about the bleeding. Facing the doorway so he’d see the boy if he came back for another round, Garraty eased around the hulking white fridge until his back bumped into the utility room door. He reached around and pulled it open. The towels were on the shelf next to the basket where he kept his meager tool collection, and he looked away from the doorway long enough to snatch one from the stack.

He used the knife to separate the towel into two pieces. One he knotted around his right hand—
getting to be good at this
, his muse offered—and the other he simply folded in half and pressed over the gash on his left forearm. He was going to need stitches, lots of them, when this was over. The little fucker had gotten the best of him, that was for sure. He wouldn’t be so lucky again.

Garraty bent his left arm up and grabbed a handful of shirt at his shoulder. His bicep did a good job of holding the towel in place over the forearm wound, he thought. Enough for him to free up his right hand so he could fight if he had to. Bolts of pain shot through his arm and up his leg, keeping pace with his thundering heart.

He steeled his nerves. Maybe the kid would stay dead if he were killed a second time.

Luis lay in a sprawl on his back by the cabinets near the sink, mostly covering the puddle of blood-laced vomit. A thin crimson trickle ran from the ear Garraty could see, and his eyes were partly open, showing white. His chest rose and fell slowly, but rhythmically.
Good.
There was no sign of the dead boy beyond the doorway at his head.

“Luis,” Garraty said in a low voice. Watching the section of the front room visible to him.

Luis did not respond.