THE DUSTER IDLED on the curb, belching exhaust from its rust-dappled muffler. Its engine rang with the audible clatter of pistons. They set the whole car to shaking like a hyperactive child confined to a school desk ten minutes before the final bell. Iman’s leg jiggled in sympathy until Brian’s hand settled on her thigh.
“Which one?” he asked. Iman pointed to a bungalow three down from the corner, a squat brick house with white trim. Its freshly asphalted driveway and crisp, unweathered shingles hinted at quiet prosperity, though the grass had grown too long and a thicket of dandelions and creeping Charlie besieged the front garden.
“Thanks for driving me,” Iman said.
“Yeah, well, what’s a B and E without a getaway car, right?” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “You nervous?”
Iman ran her tongue over the roof of her mouth. Her saliva had taken on the pliant tackiness of wood glue. “No way. Check it out.” She held up her hand and gave it an exaggerated shake, partly for comic effect and partly to hide the very real tremors rippling through her fingers. “Solid as a rock.”
“You don’t have to do this, you know. Avondale Dairy Bar’s only about ten minutes from here. We could grab sundaes and call it an afternoon.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“I don’t think a little temptation is such a bad thing, under the circumstances.”
Iman ran her fingers along the wisp of hair at the back of his neck, smiling at the faint quiver of his jaw. “Thanks for trying. But I need to do this.”
He nodded as if expecting this answer. “If I see him come home, I’ll honk the horn.”
“I think that’d just draw his attention, hun. He won’t come home, trust me. I’ll be fine.”
“Said the protagonist in every movie like this ever.”
“Tell you what. If you see someone pull into the driveway, text me.” In truth, she’d most likely hear the car pull in before the message had even arrived, but having a plan seemed to put Brian at ease. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and set it on the dashboard, ready for action. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.” She tried to think of something else to say that suited the circumstances and realised that unless she got it over with, she’d keep nattering forever. With a decisive nod aimed at no one in particular, she stepped out of the car and slammed the door behind her.
Iman had been to Professor Motes’ house only once, when she’d come to talk over her decisions on a stack of term papers she’d helped him grade. This had been before his mini sabbatical and subsequent metamorphosis into an irascible loner, and he’d invited her in for a drink and a chat while the papers sat ignored on the counter. She’d seen little more than his living room—clean, sparsely furnished, tasteful paintings and indigenous folk art dotting the walls—yet even this small knowledge of the house’s geography comforted her. She understood why vampire lore held that creatures of the night required invitation to enter a dwelling, but upon receiving it could come and go at their leisure. A sense of fractional ownership accompanied the return to a known place, as of a foot slipped into a doorway, preventing it from closing all the way. It was a foolish thought but a powerful one, and if she hadn’t been here before, she wasn’t certain she’d be able to slide the key in the lock, as she did now.
The tumblers sounded loud as a gunshot in Iman’s overclocked ears. She wasted no time getting inside, performing a pantomime of a woman who had every right to go where she was going, in case some nosy neighbour was peeking through his blinds at her.
The threshold crossed, her heart slowed from a gallop to a trot. Motes lived alone and his car was gone, leaving no logical reason why the house would be anything but empty. A reasonable assumption, though a tiny saboteur taking residence in the deepest folds of Iman’s brain gleefully poked holes in it. What if he has a houseguest? What if he lent his car to a friend? What if it’s at the shop? All possible, though given Motes’ recent attitude, a houseguest seemed highly unlikely. And he had his classes, she knew that for a fact. What if they got cancelled?
Shut up, she hissed silently. Then, aloud: “Hello? Professor? You home?” It seemed prudent to announce herself just in case he or someone else was home. That way she couldn’t be accused of sneaking around. The fact that she’d unlocked the door and had absolutely no story to support her presence occurred to her a few seconds later. As such, the silence that greeted her question was more than welcome.
She went to the living room first, perhaps because it was the only room she knew. It was much as she remembered it, only less clean. Pizza boxes lolled across the coffee table, pools of grease saturating the corrugated cardboard. Scabs of tomato sauce clotted in the warp and weft of a Turkish rug. The whole place felt unwashed and unvacuumed, the smell of it rank and itchy in her nostrils. She sneezed, coating her fingers in snot.
“Ugh,” she said. Another reason to be glad of her solitude.
She found the bathroom next, seeking to clean herself up. Her hand paused over the tap. A red stain discoloured the porcelain basin. Similar stains speckled the tile floor and the rim of the bathtub. But the stains, ominous as they were, weren’t what caught her attention. Stranger, in its way, was the hair. It covered the tub like a furry grey moss, locks of it glued in damp clumps to the shower walls and carpeting the tub’s sleek bottom. Between the blood and the fur, it looked like Motes had tried to shave a large and disgruntled dog and had at least partially succeeded, earning himself a few less than playful nips for his efforts.
The main section of the house described a loop, from entrance to living room to dining room. A hallway branched off to the bedrooms, but Iman left them for now and continued along the circle to the kitchen. Drifts of dirty dishes spilled over the sink and onto the counter. A halo of flies circled the overflowing garbage. The smell of rotting food and sour water hung heavy. Iman tamped the pile down with a wad of paper towel and shut the stainless steel lid. She knew how foolish it was to mess with these things while poring uninvited through someone’s house, but she couldn’t help herself. She might be here a while, and the smell was bringing tears to her eyes.
The kitchen table was conspicuously free of clutter, save for a pencil and a stack of papers bound with a paper clamp. Greasy thumbprints dotted the cover, and multicoloured tags erupted erratically from the margins. She flipped through the pages, which depicted photocopies of a handwritten manuscript. Motes’ jottings brambled the margins, and dark pencil strokes slashed underlines beneath various sentences. She tried to read a few of them, but after scrutinizing the scraggly lettering, she realised the whole thing was written in French.
She checked the first few pages for publishing info and found nothing. The thing seemed to be just a diary, and an old one. Iman’s academic radar prickled. This was different than the books she’d checked out from the library. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d find in an indexed search. Motes had sought it out deliberately. The question was, why? Flipping back to the cover, she jotted down the title on a bit of scrap paper she nicked from the garbage: Le voyage de Lucien Chevalier, coureur des bois, dans le bouclier de Nouveau France, 1621-1625.
At the end of the kitchen, opposite the back entrance, stood a door unlike the others in the house. It was built to a different dimension, about half as wide as it was tall, giving it a bulky, broad-shouldered cast. Unlike modern interior doors made from thin sheets of wooden laminate glued to a hollow frame, these boards were solid oak and bound with strips of iron. Stranger still was the mechanism beside it: an automatic feeder standing astride an upended bucket. The chute that normally led to the pet’s bowl had been lengthened with several feet of PVC pipe halved lengthwise, forming a crude slide that led from the device’s mouth to the foot of the door, where a sudden curve funneled it to the half-inch crack between where the oak boards ended and the kitchen tile began.
Brow furrowed, Iman opened the feeder’s reservoir, expecting to see several inches of dry kibble piled inside it. Instead she found nothing but an empty plastic chamber. Whatever the machine was meant to dispense, it was gone. She scoured the floor to see what it might have been, which was when she spotted the trail of fur leading away from the door. Iman bent down and grabbed a tuft of it, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. It was downy and soft, a smoky grey that shone like polished steel where it caught the sunlight.
The various bits of evidence began to assemble themselves in her mind. Could Professor Motes be sheltering a wild animal of some kind, a coyote maybe, or a bobcat? Something distempered and a little dangerous, the sort of thing that might molt all over the place and leave you scratched up, poorly rested, and more than a little irritable?
Maybe even something big enough to tear a guy apart in a strip club parking lot?
Stop it, she thought, scolding whatever malicious voice inside her head had spoken. You’re being paranoid.
No bodies this time, so no worries, the voice replied.
Bending down, she cocked her ear to the gap at the bottom of the door and waited for a sound—growling, scratching, the restless shift of limbs or tail—that might clue her in to the room’s strange inhabitant. She heard nothing, save the soft hum of the refrigerator motor and the distant putter of cars.
Leave it, Iman. It’s a wild animal, for goodness’ sake. But curiosity’s splinter sank in deep. If she was going to remove it, she’d have to get right in and dig it out. Just a peek.Whatever it is, it’s probably sleeping.
The doorknob turned. Iman eased the door open a crack and peered into the gloom. A rank, sour odour unfurled through the doorway. At the first whiff Iman nearly slammed the door shut, but curiosity stayed her hand. Just a peek, she thought again.
Inch by inch, the door swung open into darkness. Iman strained her ears, searching for a hungry growl or the rustle of something large and deadly readying itself to pounce. She heard nothing save for the faint squeak of the door’s fat steel hinges. Gradually her eyes adjusted. Wooden stairs led down to a concrete floor, a drain dimpling its approximate center. No animal presented itself, predatory or otherwise, though Iman could only see a narrow sliver of the basement, as the stairwell walls served as blinders to either side.
“Hello?” she called, feeling foolish but not knowing what else to do. “Anything down there?” She waited several seconds without response. “I’m not going to hurt you!” Oh, good one, Iman. I’m sure the poor thing’s gasping with relief.
With the door open the smell grew stronger, wrinkling her nose and settling in an almost palpable film on the back of her throat. It stank of compost after heavy rainfall, of meat gone bad.
As she had in the car, Iman realised that she could stand here forever, balanced on the threshold between advance and retreat, weighing hypotheticals with all the pompous conjecture of philosophers debating over angels and pinheads. There was either something down there or there wasn’t. She could go downstairs and know for sure, or she could turn around and wonder. The former option threatened a sting of fear, the latter an ache of uncertainty. She could rip the bandage off, or leave it on while the skin beneath it turned wrinkly and fish-belly white.
With a final shove of resolve, Iman darted halfway down the steps, crouching to see around the stairwell walls while retaining some semblance of cover from them.
The room was tiny, maybe ten feet square, and low-ceilinged enough to make a tall man stoop. Its concrete walls radiated a late autumn chill, sinking needles of gooseflesh into Iman’s exposed forearms. This was clearly no basement but a cold cellar, though what food it once held had either been carted away or rotted into nothingness. The room was bare save for the ruins of a few wooden shelves smashed to kindling.
The door swung gently shut behind her. Iman thrust a fist against her chest, bracing her ribs against the frantic battery of her heart. Her mind wobbled on the precipice of panic. She nudged it backward to safety and waited for her racing heart to resume a more relaxed pace.
Two small windows tucked against the ceiling provided the room’s only light. Heavy iron bars divided the light into even strips. Iman hadn’t thought to seek out a light switch, and even if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered; the lone bulb affixed to the ceiling had shattered, leaving a jagged stump of glass. Shadows covered the floor like a great rumpled blanket, its dank folds forming pockets where anything could hide. But despite the poor visibility, Iman could sense she was alone. She felt it like a vacuum in her chest, a sucking emptiness pulling inward on the rest of her. Something had been living down here, but that something was gone. The knowledge should have comforted her, but it didn’t.
A drift of straw piled waist-high in the corner behind the stairs. The floor around it was damp and discoloured, shallow puddles of unknown fluid lying in stagnant pools where the concrete had set unevenly. Iman approached the pile, putting her certainty in her solitude to the test. An itch wormed up her nostrils and down the back of her throat. It settled in her lungs, heavy as wet wool. She coughed into a closed fist and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. Whatever had been down here, it shed like a bastard.
She prodded the straw with her toe. Her hay fever was even worse than her pet allergies, and she knew she’d pay dearly for every stalk that so much as brushed her skin. The dampness gave everything a mouldy, foetid odour, but at least it kept the finer fibres from wafting up her nose in a histaminic cloud. She waded knee-deep in the stack. Her foot struck something hard and light. She probed her toe into the thicket more slowly, brushing the straw aside when she rediscovered whatever she’d kicked. Bending down, she grabbed the object and pulled it into the light.
It rose long and pale and limp in the middle. The end nearest her concluded in a node of fur and gristle, the far end in a blossom of thorny protrusions mossy with residual hair. A thin band of connective tissue joined foreleg to aft.
The severed leg fell from Iman’s fingers. She clutched fruitlessly at air, unsure where the leg had gone. Her fingers were numb, the sensation of gripping oddly absent. She staggered backwards and her heels caught on something solid. The straw broke her fall somewhat, but her tailbone still struck the concrete with a painful jolt. She kicked herself clear of whatever had tripped her. Her escape caused the straw to shift, unearthing the head and ribs of an adult deer. Flesh, skin, and organs had all been stripped away from the neck down, leaving only scraps of tendon and cartilage clinging to the bones. The head, by contrast, was undisturbed, save for the lower jaw, which had been torn free. Its tongue lolled limp and obscene from its cavernous throat, its eyes glossy as the buttons on a dead man’s suit.
I don’t want to be here anymore. The thought landed in the center of her mind: a plain declarative sentence, almost childlike in its simplicity. She’d seen what she needed to see—though what it told her was an open question—and she could ponder it at her leisure at home, in bed, with the lights on and the blinds shut and the door locked tight.
Iman scrambled up the stairs. Let Motes keep his wolf or his bear or his goddamned fucking wolverine, whatever monster he’d wrangled up that had managed to strip that deer so clean it hardly stank. He was welcome to it, as far as she was concerned. Let him lose a hand feeding the damn thing.
She reached the top of the stairs, hand hovering inches from the doorknob, and stopped cold. A pocket drought struck her mouth, leeching every drop of moisture from lips to throat.
Nicks and gouges marred the door from top to bottom. Not an inch of grain was left unscarred. But set atop the patina of splinters ran deep slashes in a crude but conscious pattern. They shrieked their plea in letters a foot high and eight inches across: LET ME OUT.
Iman couldn’t possibly agree more. He’s insane, she thought simply. I’m in an insane man’s house right now, uninvited.
She turned the knob, pulled, and met sudden and intractable resistance. The door didn’t budge. She tried again, leaning backward to hang her whole weight against the door. Still nothing. She spied the chunky latch set a few inches above the knob, its empty keyhole leering at her. Understanding hit her like a cudgel to the temple, nearly spilling her down the stairs. She braced herself against the stairwell, sliding her hand along an unfinished rafter. Splinters dug into the meat of her palm. She would feel these only later, musing over exactly when and how she’d gotten them.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh no oh no oh no.” The words looped back on one another, a Mobius strip of anguish. She shoved her hands into her hair, raking her fingers against the roots and pulling until the pain wrung tears from her eyes. The sensation dragged her back into the present.
Her hand fell to her pocket and felt the bulge there with a flash of triumph. Her phone! She pulled it free, nearly dropped it, and keyed out a text to Brian. It took several tries, her trembling thumbs sloppy on the tiny touchpad, but she eventually managed it and hit send.
Help! Locked in cellar! Come inside and find door in kitchen. ASAP Please!!!!!!!
A response pinged back a few seconds later: on it.
Relief embraced her, balmy as bathwater. Thank goodness for sweet, sensible Brian. She’d no doubt earned some teasing from him over the next few weeks, but she’d take it gladly in exchange for an escape from this creepy subterranean kennel. Her phone rumbled against her palm, signalling a new text from Brian.
Front door wont open. Did u lock it behind u?!?
Iman felt as if she’d stepped from her nice warm tub into a pool of ice water. She threw her mind back to the front hallway, pictured every movement of her body during those first few steps. Could she really have locked the door? Why would she do that? She always locked her apartment door out of habit, but this was a different house with a different latch.
A door’s a door, dummy. Do you remember consciously deciding not to lock it? No, she didn’t. She bit her lower lip hard enough to leave imprints in her skin. Her phone chirped out a fresh text.
U need me to break in?
YES!!! She typed. Her thumb poised over the send button, hung there a moment, and touched down on the backspace instead. She composed a fresh message: not yet. A break-in was a last-ditch option. At best it would tip off Motes that someone had been snooping around his house, which was hardly a good feeling. At worst, she and Brian could wind up in jail. Neighbours weren’t all that likely to call the cops over a girl with a key entering Motes’ house through the front door, but she suspected they’d react very differently to a young Asian man smashing his way through a window.
“Okay, Iman,” she said. “Think. Think think think.” Fingers drumming on her thighs, she scanned the room for possible escape. There wasn’t much to go on. The windows were heavily barred, the door too solid to kick down, the lock a steel fist wrapped tight around the latch. Any tools Motes might have stored down here were long gone, leaving nothing but a few lengths of splintery wood from the broken shelves.
And a deer carcass, a sardonic voice in her head chimed in. Don’t forget that!
Kneeling down, Iman brought her eyes level with the gap at the bottom of the door. A veldt of shed fur stretched across the room, fading to bare tile at the far edges. She scanned the fur for foreign objects, expecting no surprises. Her mind turned to its next plan when a glint of metal caught her eye. She torqued her head from side to side, straining for a better view, but the object remained mostly hidden, visible only as a winkle of silvery light three or so feet from the door.
Wishful thinking, Iman, the voice chastised. A key, just lying there?
It was a lot to hope for, sure. But it wasn’t impossible. Whatever strange shit had gone on in this cellar, the place wasn’t built as a dungeon. Motes hadn’t locked anyone down here to act out some slasher flick B-roll looping through the murky caverns of his psyche. The lock was on the wrong side of the door, for one thing, and there was no body, no restraints, no sign of struggle. Someone was down here and got out. How? The simplest explanation was that they had a key, or that they received one at the right time. The automatic feeder started to make a lot more sense. Motes could load it, come downstairs, do . . . whatever the hell it was he did down here, and wait for the key to come sliding down the chute the next morning. But what did he do with it then? It didn’t go back in the feeder. Did he pocket it? Hang it on a keyring? Or did it slip through his fingers, landing amongst the dirt and dander littering the kitchen floor?
Only one way to find out.
Iman reached for the object, wedging her arm into the gap under the door. It fit up to her wrist. Further effort yielded maybe half an inch, and even that was hard-won, the oaken planks digging gashes into her forearm. She needed a longer reach.
She rifled through the smashed remains of the shelves, hoping for a narrow strip of timber that could function as a makeshift arm. But the damage to the wood had been thorough, and every piece she turned up was either too fat or too stumpy. Pipes ran along the ceiling, partially visible where the plaster had rotted away, but she’d never get one free without a wrench or a hacksaw. Iman could see only one other option. Stifling a shudder, she returned to the pile of straw and picked up the deer’s severed leg. The joint sagged limply, the frayed bit of tendon that bound foreleg to aft grinding against the broken socket. Iman swallowed the bile rising up her throat and carried the leg up the stairs, holding it as far away from her body as possible. The naked bone felt slick and awful and strangely alive against her fingers. She slipped the leg beneath the door. It fit easily, but its ruined knee made a direct approach impossible. With every stab forward the leg folded back on itself, abrading the gristly binding still further. A few more twists and it would snap, leaving Iman with a tibia too short to do the job.
With a delicate flick of her wrist, Iman whipped the leg to the side, careful not to overshoot and rip it in two. She brought it around in a smooth arc, her eyes pinned to the small glitter of metal amidst the fur. When the leg eclipsed the object, she began to reel it back, agonizing over each inch. Her wrist worked back and forth, making minute adjustments as the leg slid through the carpet of fur. She positioned the hoof directly over the object and paused. This was where it all counted. Slowly, slowly, she trawled the leg along the tile floor, raising it slightly to put more weight on the hoof. The object snagged on the hoof’s rigid tip. It slid along with it for half a foot before slipping free. The hair around it parted as Iman pulled the leg back the rest of the way, allowing her a clear view for the first time. It was definitely a key.
Sweat settled over Iman’s palms, slickening her grip. She wiped them on her jeans and cast the leg a second time, overshooting in her excitement. The hoof skittered over the tile, ploughing up drifts of dirt and fur. Iman bent the leg slightly, nestling the key in the hollow of its broken knee, and let the full length of its calf drag over it, bringing to bear every inch of friction at her disposal. The key slid towards her in short bursts before catching on the grouted furrows between tiles or slipping off to one side or another. At each derailment Iman would carefully adjust the leg, working in serpentine patterns to keep the key centered. Eventually she ran out of leg and found the key a tantalizing eight inches from the door. A quick swipe with the deer’s foreleg brought it within reach of her fingers.
Iman clutched the key in both hands. She traced her thumb over its teeth, their peaks and valleys dimpling her skin. Never before had she been so aware of something, so alert to its properties of mass and shape and texture. She tried to fit it in the lock, panicked when it wouldn’t go, turned it right side up, and slid it home. The tumblers rattled within their metal chassis. Light washed over her as the door swung open. She blinked it back, shielding her eyes behind the crux of her elbow. It took every ounce of restraint she possessed not to dart out the nearest exit—to leap through a window if necessary—and keep running until her lungs burst.
She slipped off her left shoe and wedged it beneath the door. Satisfied it couldn’t swing shut, she hobbled down the steps and tossed the deer leg into the pile of straw. Back upstairs, she unwedged her shoe and shut the door behind her, listening for the sharp click of its lock engaging. She dropped the key where she’d found it, kicked some fur around to hide the more obvious drag marks, and left through the front door, being sure to lock it behind her.
Brian paced up and down the front lawn, checking windows and tugging experimentally on a trellis. His head whipped around at the sound of the front door closing. He ran up to Iman and threw his arms around her, making an even bigger spectacle of himself than he doubtless already had. Iman couldn’t have cared less who was watching. She hugged him back fiercely.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I guess so, yeah.”
Brian’s Adam’s apple bobbed once up and down. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “What the hell happened in there?”
Iman warded the question off with a raised hand. “Not now. Sorry, but I can’t. Soon, okay?”
“Yeah, sure. Okay.” His arms fell to his sides. “So, uh, what do you want to do now? Do you need anything?”
Iman chewed the corner of her lip. The answer, absurd as it was, came to her without prompting. “You still up for Avondale Dairy Bar?”