Hoarder (11 page)

Missy looked around and found an overturned fountain drink with the lid and straw intact. She grabbed the cup and slurped the mystery liquid until she reached the hateful bubbling at the bottom. It was never enough.

Missy tossed the empty cup to the side, where all garbage went, its proper place, and looked down at Keith. She realized that she had just called him Keith even though he had told her his name was Steve.

Now she knew exactly who this silly goose was, and she could hardly wait until after his naptime to ask him why he had fibbed to her.

Chapter Thirteen

Dani’s climb toward the hidden hallway was slowed by her need to be quiet. There was silence coming from the kitchen, and that worried her more than hearing Missy’s grating, shouting voice. She knew one wrong step could set off another collapse of potential death dealing dominoes or reveal her whereabouts to the heinous homeowner. She could not let that happen. The cats needed to be saved, and Will’s death needed to be avenged.

As Dani came upon the hallway, her hopes were soured, and all she could say was what she smelled. “Shit.”

The hallway looked long, at least thirty feet, and every foot was packed tight with furniture. Dani saw sofas, bookcases, tables, chairs, a walker, and a grade school desk, and that’s just what she could see up front. She did see light coming from the other side, so the hallway led somewhere, and there were a few crawlspaces visible.

Dani thought somebody as thin and slight as her or Ian might possibly get through this stuffed tunnel, but Missy could never follow through. She had to give it a try.

Dani grabbed onto the nearest chair leg and gave it a tug. As the chair shifted out of place, a table fell down behind it to fill the void, and suddenly every piece of furniture up front was shifting, one crawlspace collapsing. Worse yet was the sound of wood banging on wood. She hoped it wasn’t heard in the kitchen, but there was little hope of that.

“No way.”

Dani turned back to the living room, defeated. She heard banging from the kitchen. It sounded like Missy was on the move.

Dani’s defeat became panic, which was better because it urged her into motion. She looked around the living room with intense concentration. Perhaps she had missed something, or maybe she could find a better hiding spot as Missy passed through.

Dani thought of the basement, which had also seemed without an exit at first. They had found a hidden staircase, and she realized that’s what was missing. From outside, Missy’s house stood two towering stories or more, so where were the stairs to the second floor? The staircase in most houses was located in the living room.

Dani’s eyes picked out levels in the hoard ahead and a path clarified before her eyes, like a blurry image coming into focus. Her way out of this room would be a way further into the house.

Across the room from Dani was a mountain of clothing that appeared to reach the ceiling, and the peak disappeared into a dark hole. Similar to the basement, the stairs to the second floor had been swallowed by the hoard, which in this room was the hamper of the house.

Dani was immediately on the move toward the slope. Perhaps upstairs would lead to some other staircase or exit, even a second floor window that she could jump out of.

Dani heard more noise from the kitchen, what sounded like pots and pans banging together, closer than before. Dani stopped her advance to take a look back. She knew one bad step forward without her eyes on her path could trigger a fatal collision.

Missy was not yet in sight. The next noise sounded like the kicking of a cage, coming from the dining room. Missy was definitely heading in Dani’s direction.

Dani continued to climb toward the slope of clothing. She hurried as fast as she could over the shifting hoard, no longer caring about making noise. She came upon another cat in a cage, the prisoner moving to the front bars and meowing for release. Dani could not spare the few seconds to open the cage door and free it, and it broke her heart.

“Sorry,” Dani said as she passed the cage. She promised herself she would come back later and make sure this cat received its release. She just had to get out of Missy’s sight to make that happen. She had to free herself from Missy’s cage first.

When Dani reached the bottom of the hidden staircase, she looked to the top and saw this slope was just as steep as the basement stairs, only more slippery with its carpet of loose clothing. She momentarily wondered whether Missy’s habit of burying her staircases was a symptom of her hoarding, or something more nefarious, like hiding escape routes from trapped people. Dani looked back again.

A box tumbled from the dining room into the living room, presaging Missy’s arrival. Considering the living room was a few feet higher than the dining room, the box must have been propelled by Missy’s fist.

Dani began her crawl up the clothing slope. The surface was just as unstable as she feared, causing her to slip repeatedly. Missy’s voice boomed behind her in the living room.

“I’m so thirsty!”

Every few steps Dani climbed she slid back one, not that any steps were visible beneath her. Her speed made her sloppy, but she gained elevation, the top lip of the clothing slide closing in distance. Dani risked a glance down to the side, and she could see Missy’s lower half climbing over the living room hoard, likely heading for her nest. Dani looked back up at her destination and did not slow until she crawled over the top edge.

Dani stood and observed the corridor before her. The long hallway had two doors on the left, one door on the right, and an open door at the end. Dani was not the least bit surprised to find this corridor as packed with junk as every room beneath her.

Missy climbed down into her nest. She fished through the plastic bags from tonight’s aborted shopping excursion (due to that horrible Mrs.
Cunt
-ter, she thought with a giggle but would never dare say aloud, because she was a classy lady) until she found what she was looking for, a two-liter bottle of Freshie’s Fruit Punch.

“I love my Red!” Missy exclaimed as she took a seat.

Missy broke the seal and unscrewed the cap, tossing it aside. There would be no need to recap this bottle; she was thirsty. Missy chugged, and chugged, and chugged some more. A thin line of fruit punch ran down her chin, and her tongue followed in an attempt to catch every escaping drop. The drops that got away did a suicide plunge off of her chin and splattered on the jutting rocks of her breasts, staining the fabric of her shirt in bright red splotches. Her shirt bore the evidence of many prior food and drink suicides.

Missy let loose a juicy (and fruity) belch as she tossed the bottle aside into her ever filling nest. She looked instinctively up at the spot where her TV was supposed to be, and she was disappointed that she’d have to wait until the next Late Bird Sale to get the lowest television purchase price. That was a long wait, so maybe she’d have to borrow the one currently in use upstairs. It was so quiet and boring downstairs without one.

Luckily, she wouldn’t be bored for long. Once her boyfriend was finished with his nap, he’d come find her and they would play. But she wouldn’t be surprised if he asked her for something to eat first.

Once Ian could no longer hear any conversation from the kitchen, followed by Missy’s bulldozer style departure back into the house, he dropped down off the basement high beam onto a slippery slope.

The recently disturbed slide of garbage shifted beneath his feet, as he’d feared it might. His decision to land facing the basement doorway proved to be a bad one as he fell backwards, landing hard on his back. He started to slide down head first, unable to see what was in his path.

The top of Ian’s head hit the edge of a cardboard box, and his right shoulder clipped the sharp edge of the fallen radiator that was delicately balanced on the cracked table edge. Ian’s hands could not stop his slide, so he cupped them over the back of his head to prevent any more cranial damage. It also kept his camera cap on as he slid. He knew this would make some awesome footage.

Unbalanced by Ian’s passage, the radiator began to roll down the remainder of the slope.

Ian reached the bottom of the slide headfirst. He sat up and saw he had seconds to live. The cartwheeling radiator was coming down right on top of him. The metal box hit a fallen hat rack that was sticking out over the path. Miraculously, the hat rack stopped the radiator’s descent. It looked like a toothpick holding up a boulder.

Ian looked stunned at the radiator balancing above him, and then he noticed the hat rack was starting to bow downward.

Ian rolled his body to the left as the hat rack snapped. The radiator finished its fall and landed where Ian had stopped moments before.

Ian looked at the radiator and the plume of dust that was rising around it. He counted his blessings, since this radiator was a lot heavier than the television that had killed Will. He and his friends had been inside Missy’s house for less than an hour, and death by hoard had been nipping at their heels the entire time. How was Missy able to survive in this death trap, year after year, decade after decade? Her luck was disgusting.

Ian hoped that the rolling radiator would not draw Missy’s attention and bring her back, but he had a feeling Missy heard only what she wanted to hear. Fortunately for him, house disrepair didn’t seem very high on her list of concerns.

Ian was faced with a critical decision. Exit the basement window as Keith had ordered him, by word and later by the waving of his hand, or venture back up the unsafe slide into the house to help him out, should he need it. He really didn’t need to think about it. They were brothers, after all.

Chapter Fourteen

Dani journeyed through the upstairs hallway. There was a thin channel that snaked like a creek from side to side that Dani twisted her way through. She thought her best bet for getting out of this house was to find an upstairs window and climb out. She could manage a second story drop. She was not afraid of heights, and she was good at climbing and gymnastics. A landing roll on the lawn would not hurt her, at least not much.

Dani hoped she could find a window. She remembered seeing many when they first approached the house, and they had all been covered. During her downstairs journey from the kitchen to dining room to living room, she could not recall seeing one window. Dani realized that Missy didn’t just cover her windows; she kept them hidden from view on the inside.

Dani came upon the first doorway on the left. As she looked into the room, she noticed that the door was stuck in the open position by the hoard on each side. Privacy did not appear to be an issue inside Missy’s house.

Dani figured that the room she was looking into was Missy’s bedroom. It held the most sparkling and colorful hoard in the house. It was an even split between the room of an adolescent girl and a landfill. There were unicorns and rainbows and everything was sprinkled in colored glitter and confetti, including the trash. There were no windows visible inside, even though Dani was sure the room had to have one. The hoard climbed so high against every wall, a window could be anywhere. She’d come back and search for a window only if she came upon no other options.

Dani continued through the corridor, coming upon the second door on the left, which was also wedged open. She knew what room it was before she looked inside, cupping a hand over her nose to lessen the stench. When she did stop in the doorway, she was appalled to a new level. This made the most heinous Honey Bucket she had ever been in (at a skateboarding competition, which made sense –
boys
) look like a model of cleanliness in comparison.

This was perhaps the darkest room of the house, cast in a dim, brown shade, and looking up, Dani saw that the light bulb was covered in crap. The whole ceiling looked like it had been on the receiving end of explosive diarrhea. She didn’t know how that could be possible, but obviously it was. The sink held a stagnant soup, filled to overflowing. Bugs backstroked in the chunky stew. The floor was covered with a carpet of used toilet paper and maxi-pads. The shower curtain was thankfully closed, concealing who knew what horrors behind it. The water stained and mold streaked shower curtain had more than a few brown handprints on it. Even the mirror on the wall had shit stains in the center, right where the looker’s face should be. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most shit-faced of them all?

Dani tried to ignore the room’s most sickening centerpiece, the toilet. Her eyes kept passing over it without really seeing it. And then her eyes fell on a cage sitting atop the toilet tank. There was a cat inside of it, its white fur slathered in brown, just like every other surface of the bathroom.

Dani knew she couldn’t save every cat at the moment, her own immediate escape was mandatory, but there was no way she could live with herself if she didn’t free this cat covered in its keeper’s feces. Dani turned her head back, took a deep breath of the hallway air, which wasn’t very fresh either, and then she entered the bathroom.

Dani slipped more than stepped toward the toilet. The gruesome details of her destination could no longer be avoided. The toilet had a mountain of shit rising out of it, the top over four feet above the bowl. It was almost like a hard brown volcano with runny brown lava going down the sides. A Styrofoam hamburger container stuck out of the middle, indicating where much of the mountain originated.

When the cage was close enough, Dani carefully reached over the toilet bowl to unlatch the door. The latch was crusty and harder to open than the others. She had to jiggle the latch to get the crap to crack, and that sent a flurry of cockroaches scurrying over the toilet tank and up the wall. How long could this cat have been in this cage, that the lock could corrode this much? Dani didn’t really need an answer to that question, she was mad enough already.

The lock on the cage finally disengaged, and with the crumbling of crap, Dani pulled the cage door open. The cat was desperate for freedom and leapt out. Its back legs hit the top of the toilet bowl lid, knocking it toward the mound of shit.

Dani took a quick step back and slipped, eager to get far enough away in case shit mountain avalanched toward her.

The toilet lid hit the waste and stopped. The mound was solidified and could not be easily moved from the bowl it rose from. Dozens more cockroaches scattered from the back of the lid around the front and down the shitty slope.

Dani was revolted but relieved. At least she hadn’t been hit with waste. She looked at the cat as it ran out of the bathroom, trailing toilet paper from both of its back paws. She intended to follow it, but her eyes turned to the bathtub. She looked above the shower curtain and saw the top edge of a thin window. She had to investigate it. This could be her escape hatch.

Dani slid over the TP and maxi-pads toward the bathtub. She now knew altogether too much about Missy’s feminine hygiene, such as the severity of her flow (excessive). Dani stopped before the tub and grabbed a non-soiled edge of the shower curtain, which hung outside instead of inside the basin. Her fingers broke the cobwebs that connected the curtain to the wall, proof that the tub had long been off limits. She yanked the stiff curtain open and found out why.

The bathtub was filled to the brim with excrement. It appeared that once the toilet had overfilled, the tub had taken over as the crapper. The turds had clogged the drain, and no amount of Draino was going to open up the pipe. This waste remained wet in the center, while dry and cracked on the edges. A mummified, screeching cat was half submerged in the waste like a fossil stuck in the tar pits.

Dani wrenched her disbelieving eyes away from the cat carcass as she remembered her reason for pulling open the shower curtain. She looked up at the thin window, only about a foot and a half wide and two feet tall. Now that the whole window was revealed, she was disappointed to discover boards nailed over it. The window looked just big enough to squeeze through, if she could remove the boards. In order to reach and pry them off, she would have to stand in fifty plus gallons of Missy’s waste. There was no way around it, and there was no way she was going to do it. There had to be other windows upstairs that weren’t situated over a sewer.

Dani looked at the cat corpse and wondered how horrible it must have been to die in this fecal sludge. She began to retch. She was surprised she hadn’t started retching earlier.

Dani yanked the shower curtain closed, but she knew the image of what lay beyond it would be seared into her mind for life. She turned away and hurried out of the bathroom with an arm over her lower face.

Dani stopped in the hallway and gulped in the stale but considerably less putrid air. She couldn’t stop thinking of the cat’s frozen scream, and she wished it was Missy stuck in her shit pit for eternity. It was what she deserved. “Fucking cat killer,” she seethed.

Dani’s rage and desire to bring Missy to justice got her moving again. She squeezed through the path, which took her to the one door on the right side of the hallway. This door was not wide open like all the others; it was cracked open only a few inches. Dani could not see what lay inside, although if she had to bet, she’d put her money on more hoard.

Dani pushed on the door and it started to open without resistance, which made it unlike any other door in the house. Maybe there was something special about this room that required concealment and easy entrance. The door opened half a foot, and that’s when the smell hit her. This was worse than the moldy basement, worse than the rancid refrigerator, and worse than the sea of shit in the bathroom. What the smell was, Dani couldn’t say and didn’t want to guess, but it disturbed her so deeply she chickened out.

Dani was normally not one to turn down a dare or get frightened off. Her hanging around with boys all the time had thickened her skin. It wasn’t the absence of the guys that made Dani lose her bravery. It was something deeper, a survival instinct that made her shut the door. If she had to describe the smell, the only words that might fit would be
graveyard gas
. She knew for a fact that there was death behind the door, and she was not willing to face it.

“No way.” Dani realized that she had spoken without thought to her volume, and she looked back down the hallway to make sure she wasn’t being followed. Missy wasn’t there, and that wasn’t a surprise. Noise would have announced her arrival. It was time to get moving again.

Dani continued her trek through the corridor toward the open door at the end. She glanced down to watch her footing and saw a chunk of soiled toilet paper stuck to her ankle, much like the cat that had escaped the bathroom before her. She had to stop and get rid of this bathroom tagalong. Dani stepped up to a dresser, and she ran her ankle against an edge until the crappy wad found another surface to stick to.

An extended, wheezing cough came out of the open door at the end of the hall, making Dani yelp in surprise. She didn’t think it could be Missy, unless Missy had a hidden, alternate route upstairs she hadn’t discovered yet. The voice that followed the cough made her gasp.

“Who’s there?!”

The voice that came from the back room was definitely not Missy’s. The tone had a genderless quality to it. She could also hear the low voices from a familiar television program, possibly the same one that had been broadcasting downstairs when the TV fell and…

Dani broke the thought. She knew the questioning voice was not from the television; it was louder than that. The voice also shared the quality of those coughs, sickly. Despite Will and Keith’s assurances, Missy’s house did have a second occupant, a hidden hoarder.

Dani quickly weighed her options. She could retreat the way she came, but that would take her back to where, and who, she had escaped from. She could retreat to the bathroom window, but there was no guarantee that she could get the boards off, assuming she didn’t drown in the La Missy Shit Pits first. There was also that mystery room she hadn’t entered, but that was not among the options she was willing to consider.

The voice ahead called out again, and made Dani’s decision for her.

“I need help!”

Dani pegged the voice as that of an invalid. She’d had enough experience to learn their tonal quality during the years her grandmother had been in a nursing home before she died. Grammy’s originally lilting voice had grown deeper as she had deteriorated, becoming genderless as well. There was also an innate weakness she recognized in invalids’ voices, and she heard it in the mystery speaker ahead of her.

A distressing thought occurred to Dani. What if the speaker, the invalid, needed help because he or she was being kept prisoner inside Missy’s house, just like the cats? Could there be a huge cage ahead with a person locked inside, underfed, dehydrated, and soiled in his/her own waste? Dani’s mission so far had been all about avoiding detection. Now here she was, about to reveal herself to offer help to someone who might need it.

Dani didn’t want to call out in response, since she still had to avoid Missy. She walked forward, and the closer she got to the room, the worse the smell became. She waved away the odor and some accompanying flies, but neither could be shooed. She could pinpoint some of the stench as feces, but it wasn’t the same smell as the bathroom, or any of the previous rooms. Every room inside Missy’s house seemed to have its own distinct stink. Vomitus variety was the rank spice of Missy’s life.

“Help me!” the hidden person called.

Dani stopped before entering the room. She pulled the handheld camera out of her pocket. She had a feeling that whatever lied ahead would require documentation.

Dani stepped into the room at the end of the hallway. First she saw the television atop a food waste packed stand. Sure enough, it was tuned to the same trash talk show that had been playing downstairs. Missy’s mysterious housemate appeared to share the same taste in entertainment. Unless this person couldn’t change the channel and was forced to watch what Missy wanted them to.

When Dani saw the occupant across the room, facing the TV, she immediately regretted her decision. She should have decided on another plan of escape. Even the scary graveyard room that had turned her feet around at the threshold would have been a better choice than this. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, and opened them fresh to verify her vision, and what she saw didn’t change.

Dani thought
Oh my God I’m so stupid! What is it? WHAT IS IT!?