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Somewhen in the mid 1980s of a mid-size city that was situated somewhere in, roughly, the western third of the continental United States was a rundown residential hotel known as the Paradise Arms. The Paradise Arms was, curiously, a wooden building, and after some eighty years of operation, had some curious issues with the foundation, the plumbing, the wiring, the carpet, and just about everything else. There was not a level surface to be found within the building and, seen from the outside, it looked as though the architectural plans had been drawn up by a lonely third grader who didn’t have a ruler. Or Edward Hopper with astigmatism. Take your pick.
It was a bit of a miracle that the building hadn’t caught fire yet. No one was more surprised at this fact than the residents of the Paradise Arms.
Correction, one person was more surprised than the residents. It was Floyd Earnshaw, the new building manager.
It was a new job for Floyd. He’d been attracted to the old building at first because, being named Floyd, he often felt like he was a man living in the wrong time. He was too young to have been named after Pink Floyd and old enough to sincerely hope he hadn’t been named after Floyd the barber from the Andy Griffith Show.
Floyd had been hired on after the old building manager had suddenly vacated the position after an attempted murder on the premises. He’d not only vacated the position, but also the city, and the contents of the cash box in which a significant portion of that month’s rent had been collected.
Some people know when to cut and run, thought Floyd.
After accepting the job, Floyd met a few of the residents, and immediately took to wondering if he might not have made a huge mistake. It became obvious that the second floor’s studio apartments, with the communal bathrooms down the hall, were the sorts of places intravenous drug users liked to spend their final days.
The apartments on the first floor were no picnic, either. Floyd had the distinct impression that the income of at least one of the first floor residents was largely made up of the proceeds from selling drugs to the people upstairs.
And then there were the dedicated drunks. At least you always knew where they stood. Or leaned. Or vomited. Because they were usually quite loud about it.
The more Floyd thought about his new work environment, the more he thought he could go for a drink himself. It was half past two. So far that day, he’d unstopped two toilets and, temporarily, solved the riddle of one leaky gas stove. There was a bar nearby, and he could surely sneak away for a half hour, but what he’d really like to do is sneak off to a bar quite far away. For that, he’d have to wait another two and a half hours and hope against hope that he wouldn’t have to call for emergency services to collect yet another junky nodded out in the upstairs hallway.
Floyd was absolutely surprised that his predecessor hadn’t just finished the job and torched the place when he left town with the cash. If that man had any sense of dignity, the building would be a pile of ash and charred timbers and, therefore, not a place in which Floyd could take a job and watch as his will to live left his body breath by breath, drop by beaded drop of sweat.
It was 2:35 and Floyd was debating tracking down the source of a periodic and troubling smell that had been haunting the office. Or he could work on sorting and filing the pile of rental agreements that had been haphazardly strewn about the desk by his predecessor. But that seemed too much like actual work for the last third of the day. Plus, if he took to sorting the paperwork, he might accidentally uncover the source of the smell. If he was going to tackle the smell, he was going to do it intentionally, and with the proper protective equipment, and he really wasn’t in the mood to suit up.
So Floyd waited for the phone to ring. It wouldn’t. Service had been disconnected as the old building manager hadn’t paid the phone bill in four months. But Floyd didn’t know that. He hadn’t even bothered to check for a dial tone because the receiver appeared to be coated in grease of some sort.
Maybe the phone wouldn’t ring.
At 2:37, Floyd no longer had to wonder what he’d do if the phone actually rang, as that is when Queequeg Fugit shoved open the door and stepped into the office.
“Welcome to the Paradise Arms,” said Floyd. “Affordable urban living at an affordable price.”
“Can it,” said Queequeg. “I live here.”
“Oh, right,” said Floyd. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m new.”
“No kidding,” said Queequeg. “I need you to check the lost and found for something.”
“The lost and found?” Floyd didn’t know anything about the Paradise Arms’ place for lost and found items. It hadn’t been shown to him on his 20 minute orientation. And, honestly, with all the abandoned items of clothing and household goods in the hallway, on the steps, and in the laundry room, it was hard to imagine there was any point in gathering them up to deposit in any location other than the dumpster. “I don’t know where that is.”
“Figures,” said Queequeg. “Bottom drawer of the left-hand filing cabinet.”
Floyd turned to check the drawer and stopped short. It was definitely where the smell was coming from. He was sure of it.
“Come on,” said Queequeg. “I’m in a hurry.”
Floyd came up with a perfectly procedural reason to stall.
“Can you describe the item you are looking for?”
“It’s a key,” said Queequeg. “A big old skeleton key with a butterfly motif on the handle end.”
“Ah,” said Floyd. “That’s a specific description.”
“So hurry up with the checking, please. I’ve got a pressing engagement.”
That was about as much stalling as Floyd felt he could reasonably get away with. He made a second, official approach for the lost and found drawer. The smell was definitely coming from it. It was a smell somewhat reminiscent of the untended grease trap from a restaurant where he once worked as a busboy.
He opened the drawer.
The smell was definitely coming from within.
Floyd gingerly probed contents of the drawer, a heap of sunglasses, wallets, handkerchiefs and socks. Socks? Really?
“I’m afraid I don’t see any keys,” said Floyd.
“You’re not even looking,” said Queequeg. “Stir it up a bit.”
Floyd thought about stirring through the lost and found drawer and wondered if they made rubber gloves of the sort that were long enough that they’d cover his entire body. It wasn’t just the smell anymore. It was the look of some of those socks that was really putting him off.
“Um,” said Floyd, “I don’t suppose you’d like to take a look for yourself.”
“Step aside.”
Queequeg approached the drawer, looked at the density of items that had been packed in over some unquantifiable period of time. It appeared as though the lost and found had never been purged on any sort of regular basis, if at all. Queequeg tested the contents and discovered that, below the topmost layer, geological forces were already in the process of fusing the assorted plush animals, hearing aids, and toenail clippers into some obscene new form of igneous rock as the very lower levels of the drawer slowly found themselves becoming something resembling some distant generation’s fossil fuel source.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a rotten sandwich in there,” said Floyd.
“That ain’t the half of it.”
“Queequeg considered the drawer for a moment. Then he pulled it open as far as it would go before the catch held it in place. He stood up and positioned himself to one side of the drawer, swung his body side to side as a bull readying to charge, then delivered a swift kick.
The drawer pulled loose from the cabinet and scattered its contents across the office floor.
“Hey, now,” Floyd protested.
He would have protested more, but what he saw among the flotsam and jetsam of the lost and found drawer gave him pause. More accurately, it gave him full stop with a side of vertigo.
The old man’s key was there, for certain. There was no mistaking the old fashioned skeleton key with the stylized butterfly handle. There was also no mistaking that it was still firmly clenched within a maggot eaten fist and an accompanying bit of forearm. The maggots, it seemed, were still having quite a go of it, which means the hand couldn’t have been in the drawer for much longer than Floyd’s short tenure at the Paradise Arms.
Queequeg set his booted foot down on the wrist and extracted the key from the cold, dead grip that held it. He offered a mumbled word of thanks as he took the key and left.
Floyd needed to take several more moments.
A hand.
A stinking severed hand.
In the lost and found drawer.
Soon he’d be able to actually form a complete sentence. And then he’d have a decent chance at making a proper call to the police. But for the time being all he could handle was stunned stares and sentence fragments.
A certain indistinctly unmeasurable amount of time passed before a voice intruded into Floyd’s semi-catatonia.
“Excuse me.”
Floyd looked up to see a head at the door. The head was attached to the rest of a man, but it was hard to think of the entire assemblage as a whole. The head was so large that the body seemed to be more of an accessory, rather than an integral part of the outfit. Also, there was a distinct bluish glow coming from the head’s delineating features, the eyebrows, the ears, the bridge of the nose, the goatee that really didn’t seem to belong on a beach ball like that.
“Are you the building, manager?”
Words were coming back to Floyd. He felt a bit of an endorphin rush as he felt the exact right words fall out of his mouth.
“No, actually,” he said. “I was looking for him myself.”
Floyd sidled around the giant blue head and out the door. And so Floyd Earnshaw ejected himself from Paradise.