Hoarder Read online

  Keith started into Missy’s yard, and Will, Dani, and Ian followed him. Keith stayed close to the unruly hedge, keeping their advance cloaked in the shadows. Once they were beside the house, Keith led the others across to the walls, keeping them out of the open as they headed back.

  Ian looked at the covered windows beside him. The next window he passed was covered with heavy curtains. A gray cat sat on the windowsill, so still Ian thought it might be a fake. The cat’s eyes followed him, proving it had life. Ian was disturbed to know they were being watched, even if the eyes were feline. Missy’s house was filled with kitty spies. Ian was also disturbed by the unhealthy look of the cat. All of its bones could be counted beneath its gray, nearly hairless skin. Ian didn’t stick around long enough to add them up.

  Keith looked back at the three he was leading. “Over here.” Keith passed a few untrimmed bushes against the house and stopped on the other side. Will, Dani, and Ian stopped beside him, and they all looked down at a rectangular basement window.

  Brown construction paper was taped over the inside of the window, glowing from the basement light behind it. The kids crouched down in a line before the low window, filming it without obstructing each other’s lenses. Near the bottom of the window, there was a seven-inch tear in the construction paper, the result of weather and wear, with a flap hanging down.

  “There it is,” Keith said as he filmed through the gap in the window covering. His crew leaned in with their cameras, looking at the limited interior through their viewfinders.

  Through the tear in the construction paper, the blue striped handlebars of a bike were visible in the basement below. The clutter around the bike was indiscernible from their limited vantage point.

  “My stolen bike. Disappeared off my porch twelve days ago,” Keith announced with satisfaction that his friends could see it for themselves. Dani saw the handlebars, but she was not familiar with Keith’s bike, so she had to ask the obvious. “You sure it’s yours?”

  Keith wasn’t bothered by Dani’s doubt; he welcomed her questions, whereas he was annoyed by his brother’s inquiries. “The stripes on the handlebars, my dad did those. That was the last gift I got from him before he split.”

  “I thought you hated your dad, for running off on you guys,” Will said.

  Hate was too soft of a word for how Keith felt about his father. Words like father, dad, or even his name Roland were not terms that he would attribute to the man now. In Keith’s mind, he was only Asshole, or Coward, or Selfish, Loveless Motherfucker, names that started with a capitol letter. He could think of a hundred other derogatory names for the man who had gone to work six months ago and decided to never come home. No note, no goodbyes, nothing but a secret new start for himself and endless questioning grief for his family. So Will was right, but it was hate Keith felt entitled to harbor. His brother and mother were entitled, too, but whether they chose hate or forgiveness, he didn’t know.

  “I do,” Keith replied, “but it’s my history, not hers. And I’m taking it back.”

  Dani chimed in again. “Why not report it to the police instead of breaking and entering?” Ian nodded in agreement with her.

  “How do I tell them I found it here? By creeping in her bushes?” Keith questioned in answer. Everyone understood the necessary risk.

  “What led you here?” Dani was curious to know.

  Keith’s mission at Missy’s house had begun as schoolhouse rumor, coming from a trusted source. “When I put out the word my bike was swiped, Megan told me in the library she saw Missy walk by the week before last, pushing a bike with blue stripes. A day I was also at school while my bike was on our porch. She has a car. What does she need my bike for?”

  Nobody had a good reason they could think of. Will offered a theory anyway. “She uses them for toothpicks.”

  Keith thought that was funny, but he wouldn’t laugh and make light of their dangerous situation. He felt responsible for his friends, and he would even be fine if there was desertion among the ranks. He felt inclined to offer an out to doubtful Dani with sincerity. “I’ll understand, Dani, if you don’t want to go through with this.”

  Keith had not noticed that Dani was even more grim and committed to this recon mission. “Oh, I want to. I have to.”

  Ian could tell Dani was not saying that out of bravado. “What did you lose?” he inquired.

  “Fiddlesticks, my cat. Six weeks ago,” Dani said, and it still wounded her to say it. Ian winced at her pain. He knew Dani had been grieving for many weeks over her lost cat. Only now did he connect that unfortunate event to their current location, and the idea that her cat might have been snatched shocked him. A cat was worse to lose than a bike because a cat was warm-blooded and reliant on its owner. Keith might miss his bike, but the bike would never miss him back.

  Keith added fuel to Dani’s fear. “She’s a crazy cat lady, too. I’ve seen a bunch of them on her property. Wild, feral cats. One of them clawed me last night.”

  Ian thought of the emaciated kitty spy in the window they had passed and knew his brother was right. Keith held up his left hand for proof. There was a white bandage on top, saturated with blood in the center.

  Ian had been doubtful of Keith’s initial explanation for the hand dressing this morning, that it was the result of slamming his hand in his locker door. That was the kind of clumsy move that Keith might make, but he knew his brother hadn’t been wearing a bandage after school yesterday. Now he knew the reason for his brother’s lie, and considered it justified.

  Will did not want Dani to get her hopes up, since he had painful, personal experience with this in his youth. He would always remember lil’ Sheba, the Shih Tzu who had split the first and only time he had left the front gate open when he was eight years old. He’d always wondered what had happened to that lil’ shithead, and he equated the feeling with the pain Keith harbored from his father, to a much lesser degree, of course. “Cats run away, Dani. All animals do.”

  “Fiddlesticks was fat, he couldn’t run anywhere. I think somebody lifted him off our porch.” Dani’s conviction that Missy was the culprit stemmed from proximity; Dani lived on the same street as Keith, and thieves often revisited areas they knew were good for raiding.

  Ian was inclined to believe in Dani’s suspicion. Missy had a well-deserved reputation among young and old alike. Her behavior had raised her to the level of neighborhood legend, the lady most likely to be seen as the local Boogeywoman by the little ones and that insufferable bitch by any adults unfortunate enough to have crossed her path. “She gets around. Kids in my class have stories about her taking things,” Ian added to the legend.

  Will had his own stories to tell, far more than his current company, about the neighborhood witch. “She shoplifts, too. She’s the town klepto.”

  “She ever take anything from you?” Ian asked Will.

  Will nodded. “Yeah, my virginity. That was her in that dark room at the farm party.”

  Nobody laughed out loud, but they all found that funny, even Ian, who was the only one of the group who had not been at that legendary party. Dani belted Will in the arm playfully. They all needed a laugh, and Will could always be counted on to cut the tension at just the right moment.

  There was a rustling nearby, in the bushes to the left of Dani. “Shhh,” Dani instructed the guys.

  Everyone stood still and silent. They heard more rustling, relocated to the bushes to the left of Ian. Ian looked over as branches began to shake. A gray haired cat leapt out of the bush, claws out, with a hiss of attack. Ian dodged the feral feline by an inch. An inch more than his brother had.

  “Shit!” Ian exclaimed. Apparently, Missy’s kitty spies also acted as a clawed security force. They would do well to keep on guard for this threat. Hopefully, Dani’s cat Fiddlesticks had not been indoctrinated into Missy’s violent kitty cult.

  Ian watched the cat run off toward the back of Missy’s house. Will slapped Ian on the back, startling him a second time. “Almost had your fir
st shave there, Squirt.” Ian flipped Will off, but he smirked while doing it.

  “I think I just turd my pants,” Ian admitted.

  Keith was done with interruptions. “Let’s get what’s ours, and evidence, and get out. Before we get rabies.” Rabies had been on Keith’s mind since his wounding at these bushes last night. He didn’t want anyone to know the cat’s attack had also involved its teeth; bubbly feline saliva had mixed with his blood.

  Keith tried to open the window, pushing up, then in. The window was locked and wouldn’t budge. Keith expected as much; he had tried the window the night before with the same result, right before he had been clawed. Will slipped off his backpack and unzipped it. He took out a crowbar and handed it to Keith.

  Keith wedged the end of the crowbar beneath the window. He pried on the handle, but the window did not budge. Keith leaned toward the glass, looking down through the tear in the paper more closely. He noticed a revealing new detail.

  “She nailed it shut.”

  Keith zoomed in with his handheld camera. He focused in close-up on the heads of two bent, askew nails sticking up from the inside window frame. Dani and Will stuck out their cameras to film the same disturbing detail. Ian didn’t have a handheld camera to film, but he did add a suggestion.

  “We can find another opening. The cats have to get in and out somewhere. I could squeeze through a doggie door.”

  Keith shattered the basement window with a quick jab of the crowbar, also shattering his brother’s suggestion. He knocked out the glass around the frame and tore at the paper behind it. They were all hit with a blast of old, dusty air escaping from below. Dani equated it with a belch in the face from a sickly old man, her graceless grandfather in particular.

  Ian looked around nervously from the noise. Not even the cats were watching. Ian looked up at the windows, which were covered and absent of eyes.

  Keith handed the crowbar to Will, who put it into his backpack. Keith pulled his handheld camera back and leaned in through the shattered window frame. He wanted to look inside with his own eyes first, and the third eye attached to the bill of his cap.

  Dani, Will, and Ian all leaned in around their leader, eager to know what else was inside. Keith was taking longer than expected, and his hesitation was heightening his friends’ suspense.

  Keith was offended by the smell. The air below had been trapped without circulation for decades. However, it was Keith’s eyes that were assaulted the most. What he witnessed inside the basement was shocking, and although he thought he had planned everything down to the last detail, he had not planned for this. He had never seen anything like this in his life.

  Keith feared that their mission was going to become terribly complicated, and fast. Suddenly, he couldn’t breathe.

  Chapter Three

  Ian leaned forward, intending to shake his brother’s shoulder, when Keith pulled out of the window. Keith sucked in a deep breath of fresh air, requiring it before he could address his friends. “We were wrong. She’s not a klepto. She’s a hoarder.”

  The H-word set off a red alarm in Ian’s head. He had seen enough on the subject, thanks to cable television, to know that most hoarders suffered from a high level of crazy. Compulsive hoarding was classified as a serious mental disorder. Those shows were fascinating to him, plus they were high in gag inducing shock value, all the more disgusting in high definition.

  Ian wondered what kind of hoard Missy’s house held. Did she collect random stuff and garbage, diving in dumpsters for her treasures? Maybe not, since she shopped at Will’s store regularly. Was she a collector of one certain thing, like artificial pigs or frogs or bikes? With a chill, he realized that she did collect cats, the live kind. Animal hoarders almost always indulged in animal cruelty, usually unknowingly. Ian suddenly had a disturbing image of the basement below covered in a furry carpet of rotting cat carcasses. He banished the image from his head, but not before he considered how that carpet might smell.

  Despite the alarm that hoarding triggered, Ian felt a distinct excitement at seeing a hoard firsthand. The appeal of going inside Missy’s house was akin to a visit to an abandoned house in the woods, the kind that kids would dare each other to go into amid rumors of past deaths within its walls, in the hopes of finding a blood stain, or better yet, a stray skeleton.

  “For real?” Ian asked his brother.

  “It’s bad in there. Careful of the glass.” Ian could tell from Keith’s tone that his brother was not joking.

  Keith moved aside and Dani, nearest him, moved in. Dani’s head entered the window frame, looked from left to right, and pulled out with a grimace, her nostrils flared. “Gag me. It smells in there. What is that?”

  Ian was eager to see and smell for himself and offer Dani an answer. “Let me see.”

  Dani scooted aside so Ian could move in. Ian took a deep breath, and then he stuck his head through the shattered window frame to see inside the lowest level of Missy’s house. It was a sight more vivid than the highest definition.

  Ian looked inside Missy’s basement for less than twenty seconds, but the peculiar details he saw numbered in the thousands, and was numbing to his eyeballs. There was not one square inch of floor visible. Keith’s bike stood atop a few feet of refuse, mostly moist collapsed boxes and leaking garbage bags. Haphazardly thrown throughout the basement were over one dozen more bikes, maybe two dozen, from kid to adult sizes; overturned lawn chairs and patio furniture; garden tools, including rakes and hoes and shovels; a lawnmower lying bottom blade up; rusty scrap metal; empty animal cages, topping the bikes in number; a plastic Christmas tree with tinsel on the branches and Easter baskets spilling pink and green plastic grass; a broken plastic backyard play set and a punctured kiddy pool.

  These were Ian’s first impressions of the basement’s contents, and had he looked longer, he would have picked up countless more curious details and patterns among the hoard. Witnessing this hoard wasn’t just hard on his eyes; it was an assault on all five of his senses. The smell was a noxious blend of too many horrible elements, like mold and sewage and spoiled meat. Unable to hold his breath, he opened his mouth and found the rotten air had an offensive, acrid taste. Ian’s throat, sinuses, and ears throbbed in tandem from the environment invading his system. Looking up into an exposed light bulb, he could see the swirling stew of particles choking the basement, and now aware of them, he could feel the terrible air caressing his skin like a diseased hand.

  Words like leprosy, e-coli, and ebola flashed through Ian’s mind. The moment he would banish one disease, another one would fester to the surface. Goodbye cholera, hello malaria.

  A white cat darted over some overturned furniture to Ian’s right, startling him before it disappeared behind more junk. Ian glanced up at the exposed pipes, broken and repaired with peeling tape and fabric. One broken pipe appeared to be wrapped with an extra large pair of lace panties, soiled with brown water that dripped down onto a pile of soggy, crumbling boxes.

  Ian pulled his head out of the window, eagerly gulping in the refreshing outside air. His face was pinched with disgust. “It smells like toxic black mold, and sewage, too. There’s a pipe leaking brown stuff.”

  Dani accepted Ian’s assessment; she had seen the basement for herself. Keith questioned his brother, “How do you know what toxic black mold smells like?”

  “It’s all through the basement and boiler room at school,” Ian confessed.

  Keith was caught by surprise. He had been going to that school years longer than Ian, but he had never explored its forbidden underground. Keith was kind of impressed that his kid brother had the cojones to go behind any closed door he wanted, regardless of the rules. Perhaps Ian was a good choice to have along on this expedition. Ian’s confession begged another question. “What were you doing in the boiler room?”

  “Avoiding class, what else?”

  “Let me see,” Will said eagerly. Ian moved away from the window as the biggest of the group moved in.

  Will stuc
k his head though the window frame, looked around, and inhaled the atmosphere. He started to choke on the thick basement air and pulled out. “There’s mold and poop in there, but there’s something else. It smells like dead things, dead rats, or some kind of rotting meat.”

  Ian didn’t like Will’s phrase dead things. Dani was more bothered by the word rats, and although Will had described them as dead, Dani knew they didn’t start out that way. Keith knew that dead things were inevitable in a hoard the size of Missy’s, and he only hoped that Fiddlesticks was not numbered among them.

  Ian imagined being down inside the basement, within the hoard with its smothering air, and he came up with an alternative to Keith’s plan. “Why don’t you just lift your bike out and we’ll split?”

  Before Keith could respond, Dani answered for him. “I want to go in. I saw a cat in there. Maybe Fiddlesticks’ in there.”

  Ian accepted Dani’s answer, and he knew the others would, too. Dani was going in no matter what the group consensus was, and none of the guys wanted her inside this house without offering their protection.

  Will could not contain his excitement. “I want to see this freak’s house now. Who knows how much of the town she’s stolen.”

  Keith finally answered his brother, with irritation. “Just head back home. You can watch our videos later.”

  Ian wasn’t given a chance to offer a retort. Mindful of any residue glass around the edges, Keith lowered himself feet first through the window frame and dropped out of sight into the basement below. Keith’s voice called up to them. “Dani next!”

  Dani did not hesitate, following Keith’s lead and lowering herself into the basement, with the aid of Keith’s helping hands below. Dani’s eyes locked with Ian’s, and she dropped out of view.

  Will moved ahead of Ian, eager to enter enemy territory. He dropped his backpack through the window first into Keith’s waiting hands. Then Will took the plunge with a cry of “Geronimo!”