Hoarder Read online

  “No, they would have heard us by now,” Keith replied. Ian felt uncertainty at Keith’s answer. Ian knew that the hoard absorbed heat. Perhaps it did the same with sound. He considered voicing his doubt, but he was too late.

  Dani stepped up nearly three feet onto the next unstable surface. Will stood behind her, ready to help if she needed it. She didn’t, and Will wasn’t surprised. Ian thought he would go last, which was his permanent place, but Keith stepped aside and let Ian go third. Keith’s reason for standing back was the same as Will’s. He wanted to be in a more helpful spot in case his brother needed assistance, which of course he didn’t.

  Keith followed Ian up, and thought it was ironic that he had started this mission with the intent to always lead, and here he was bringing up the rear. Keith didn’t mind, so long as his changed position brought added safety to the crew.

  Had any of them known what was in store for them in the room they had entered, they would have aborted their noble cause and backtracked out of the house. They would have crawled back the way they had come if that’s what it took.

  The good thing about living with regret was at least you were still alive to enjoy it.

  Chapter Eight

  The four invaders in Missy’s house needed a minute to study the living room before they could cross it. Keith’s head tilted up and he noticed this room had an unnaturally high ceiling, which made for a more majestic mess. The higher the walls, the higher the hoard.

  Since Ian had first stuck his head inside Missy’s house, he knew that she was what the experts called a level five hoarder. Apparently, five was the highest level that hoarders could be graded. Ian didn’t think that was right. Even Hell had seven levels. With what Ian was now faced with, he considered Missy a level fifty hoarder.

  How does one become an expert on hoarders anyway, Ian wondered. The high-risk journey so far through Missy’s house was hands-on education, he reasoned. He hadn’t earned a merit badge here; he’d earned a degree. His diagnosis of Missy’s exceedingly high hoarder level stood. His remedy would be a lit match, but only after all of the cats were cleared from the premises.

  Ian realized that the stink in this room was the worst yet, and had been worsening with every room they passed through. The basement was noxious with dust, decay, and mold, while the kitchen was a smothering sea of food rot. The smell that dominated the living room was shit, and not just from vermin and cats. This was worse than the leaky sewer pipe in the basement, this was much more pungent. The solids were worse than the soups.

  Ian couldn’t see any shit from where he stood, which meant that the irregular ground ahead would be full of stinky surprises. He felt his eyes starting to burn, and he recognized a growing scent of ammonia, the likely culprit. He was right, but he didn’t know that the source was the exceedingly high concentration of cat urine. It was so bad that he feared if he stayed in this room long enough, the ammonia would burn his trachea and lungs.

  The label living room hadn’t occurred to Keith as he observed their latest lair. He saw this as the entertainment center of Missy’s house. He would have thought entertainment hub, but hub implied some degree of technology, and this was strictly a low-fi affair.

  Among the modern media, the kind that required electricity, were innumerable VHS tapes and vinyl records, in piles and towers. Keith was amazed by one leaning stack of VHS cassettes that had to be over fifteen feet high. Upon closer inspection, they looked held together by a sticky combination of rat splat and spider webs. Missy’s music included mounds of cassette and eight track tapes, piled by the hundreds, maybe by the thousands. He noticed a lot of crooners, like Johnny Mathis, Rod Stewart, and Elvis. The kind of guys that get horny old broads wet, he crassly thought. Some of the audio and videocassettes had all of the tape from the inside coiled in tangled blobs on the outside. Missy was not willing to let a good song or movie go, whether it was playable or not.

  Keith also took notice of the modern gadgets that were missing. Missy had not yet reached the DVD or computer age. If she ever got on the Internet, Keith thought she would hoard Likes and become addicted to online shopping. And her house would fill up even faster.

  Haphazardly mixed in with the media were the broken media players. Dead televisions numbered in the dozens, a few which had their screens shattered. More than a few TVs had their broken antennae replaced with crooked foil facsimiles. Keith was amused to see one hollowed out TV filled with emptied out TV dinner trays. It was an anti-commercial, the ugly waste of modern convenience.

  The foil dinner trays also raised the question of where she cooked them. There certainly hadn’t been an oven accessible or even visible in the kitchen. She must have a microwave or toaster oven hidden somewhere. He expected every instant meal she cooked was a house fire waiting to happen. And he certainly hadn’t seen any fire extinguishers.

  Keith spotted dozens of record players, radios, boom boxes, VCRs, and random speakers, never a pair. Keith didn’t know what an eight-track player looked like, but he knew they were numbered in this low-tech graveyard. Rabbit ears rose out of the hoard like metallic weeds.

  Dani saw enough reading material to fill a whole new wing at the public library. There were countless collapsed stacks of newspapers and magazines, many of the stacks covered in a white, crystallized substance. It almost looked like a sugar glaze, but there was nothing sweet about it. Dani knew it was the corrosive residue left by dried cat piss. A stubborn tabby she’d had three years ago had frequently left a similar glaze on her bedposts, her shoes, and her cherished hardcover Harry Potter collection. Dani thought that cat had been a pissy critic, and no tears were shed when he ran away. Fiddlesticks hadn’t liked him anyway.

  Missy might be cruel and dumb, Dani thought, but at least she was a reader. The towering bookcases that lined the walls were spilling books into mounds before them, the majority paperbacks. Predominate genres were romance and youth, and it was obvious Missy had a soft spot for big cartoon books with happy animals on their covers. There were a great many grins on display. She saw toys and board games spread out for playing, but they looked never played with. The cockroaches crawling over a checkerboard were playing an altogether different game.

  What struck Will as he studied the living room was the familiarity of the garbage, because he sold so much of it at work. This was Missy’s Mega-Mart. He knew the covers of the tabloids from the news racks he stocked, the brand names of the clothing they sold, and the food and drink containers like those Freshie’s Fruit Punch bottles that were exclusive to his chain. Will was familiar with these products when they were new and prettied for purchase. Seeing the mass trashing of it all, being stomped on and reduced to piles of waste, was offensive to him, and depressing that his hard work led to this.

  Will’s attention was drawn to the shouting and fighting. Audience cheering and laughter greeted the fighting, and seemed to encourage it.

  The verbal sparring came from high atop the tallest, forward leaning bookcase, from a nineteen-inch television with a round knob for turning the channels. Considering how high the television sat, he figured the channel was never changed. The television could not be easy to reach, and it appeared pre-remote control. The TV seemed to be held in place on the tilted shelf by cobwebs alone.

  Will was not surprised that the television was tuned to a Springer-like show featuring feuds between families and lovers. The kind of program where the audience screamed in bloodlust at trailer park hussies and baby daddies in denial. Will now understood where Missy got her bossiness and bitchiness. He could imagine Missy’s power shopping accompanied by an audience chanting her name in unison, in encouragement. Only with Missy there would be no baby daddies.

  Will had another question about the television’s curious placement atop the bookcase. There were no chairs to sit and watch it, nowhere to sit in this room at all. He thought the programming was annoying, but at least it wasn’t a channel of sermons. He did not know Missy to be a God-fearing woman, which was a minor relief
. Missy might be crazy, but she wasn’t crazy for Christ. She seemed to worship the almighty dollar, the same dollars it was his job to count. Hers was a dirty God.

  Dani did not see the living room as the next level of a Hell hoard, or as Missy’s entertainment center, or a department store dumpster. Dani only saw the cages, dozens of them. This was a temple of suffering, a concentration camp for cats. She felt she was in a hungry lion’s mouth.

  Will was the first to voice an observation about the room. “Have you noticed, she has every light in the house on.”

  “All the better to see her lovely stuff,” Keith said. Keith was partly correct in figuring that it wasn’t enough for Missy to just buy or steal her possessions, she had to have them on constant display, in the light for her delight. This room was lit with many high-set frosted white light sconces that had turned yellow, with brown splotches that looked like bulb burns. Each light sconce was filled with over an inch of dead flies. Now that he’d seen them, he thought he could smell them, long roasted flies.

  Ian offered his own theory. “Maybe she’s afraid of the dark.” Will always talked about how Missy acted, like a little kid, and a lot of little kids were afraid of the dark. He had been, until he reached the mature age of seven.

  Dani aimed her camera at a far off cage. Keith saw Dani getting to business and he followed her lead.

  “Every cat,” Dani said.

  “That’s the plan,” Keith confirmed.

  The four fanned out through the hoard on their search and rescue mission. In their eagerness to film and open the cages, none of them bothered to open a door or window. All of the windows were blocked from view by dressers or other obstructions, and the front door was out of sight, in a foyer that held its own high hoard.

  None of them actually walked through the room, it was just not possible. They had to brace at least one hand against objects for balance and frequently needed to be on all fours to climb over the constantly shifting surface.

  As she worked toward a cage, Dani came upon a stack of newspapers that was entirely shredded. She knew that a machine was not responsible for the shredding, rats were. Dani gave the rats’ nest a wide berth, since she knew its occupants wouldn’t hesitate to protect their home by long tooth and contaminated claw.

  Keith was the first to reach a cage in the living room, perched on a pile of garbage bags. He got down on one knee on the slope of bags to reach it. His knee immediately became wet, his pants saturated by some stagnant soup leaking from the sack. Marked by the muck, the pungent smell of the mystery liquid would follow his every step, just as the stink of sewer pipe water (water, right) on his hoodie followed him still.

  The cat inside the cage had a lame ear and a gummy eye. Keith opened the cage door and the cat cowered inside. He didn’t wait for it, leaving for the next rescue. Only after the horrible human had moved away did the scared cat venture out of its inhumane enclosure.

  Ian reached a cage atop a pile of busted TVs. Inside was a restless white cat with black paws, excited by new company. The latch to the door of this cage was coated in cat feces, but Ian didn’t hesitate to grab it. He did hesitate when he discovered the feces were fresh. Ian pulled the cage door open and turned to wipe his fingers off on top of a TV shell as the cat took leave of its prison. Not all of the rescues were scaredy cats, some were eager to greet their liberators.

  As Ian cleaned off his fingers, he spotted movement beside him in the dark, hollow shell of a television that had its screen busted out. He saw a flash of brown fur.

  “Come out, cat,” Ian encouraged the animal.

  A well-fed rat leapt out of the broken television with a defiant squeak. At least Ian figured it was a rat from the sound it made, since it was more the size of a Dachshund. Ian fell back against a towering stack of newspapers, causing its collapse, which in turn released a swarm of silverfish. Ian righted himself as the black pawed cat darted past him in pursuit of the juicy rat. The chase disappeared into the room’s rubble.

  “Don’t pet the kitties,” Keith advised.

  Ian looked at his brother, trying to come up with a comeback to his quip. He could see the sly grin threatening to break on his brother’s face, and he wanted to encourage it. They all needed a laugh to ease the heavy atmosphere over their heads caused by the heavier hoard under their feet.

  Keith saw the rat reappear out of the garbage, coming his way. He took an instinctive step back, but there was no ground behind him to step onto.

  Ian saw the sudden shock on Keith’s face as he fell straight down out of view.

  “Keith!”

  Ian was the only one who saw his brother disappear, and he crawled over the hoard toward him. Dani and Will followed in Ian’s direction, alarmed that their leader had so quickly vanished.

  Keith’s voice rose from the sea of garbage. “I fell in her nest!”

  Ian found the hole that his brother had fallen into, and he got down on his hands and knees to look over the edge. Keith had called it a nest, but the size made Ian think it was more of a crater. The hole was mostly circular, and at least a dozen feet wide and over seven feet deep.

  Keith turned in a circle to get footage of what was held in the hole of this human packrat. The bottom was piled with blankets and clothing and circled with cushions. Littered over the soft surfaces were discarded soda cups and food wrappers. Interspersed with the food waste were plastic grocery bags, many filled with a brown substance and tied in knots at the top. Keith also spotted countless water bottles filled to varying degrees with various shades of lemonade. He saw one bottle without a cap beside him and got a good whiff. He was wrong about the bottles’ contents. They were filled with Missy’s Lady Lemonade, bottled at the source, and they were long past the expiration (expulsion) date.

  Keith looked up and saw that the tilted television on the bookcase across the room was in the perfect spot for viewing inside Missy’s nest. The many human poo-bags and pee-bottles around him now made sense. Missy might miss the results of a particularly scandalous paternity test if she had to climb out of her nest to make waste, and it didn’t look like her television had a pause or rewind function.

  Ian extended a hand down to his brother, who took it, helping to haul him out. Will and Dani arrived at the edge and looked down in amazement.

  “The Vulture’s nest,” Will announced. Only there were no eggs inside this nest, just bird turds. He was nauseous to notice that most of the tied off waste bags were emblazoned with the Mega-Mart logo. He had probably packed some of those bags with her groceries. The bags were partially transparent and light brown, recently packed with dark brown. Despite being tied off, Will could smell their contents, and he had to fight an urge to hurl. He also knew that the Mega-Mart bags were notoriously thin and prone to rip easily.

  “Did you have a snack while you were down there?” Ian asked Keith.

  “She has bags of her shit down there, right next to her dinner plates. You want some crap on a cracker?”

  “No thanks, I’m cutting back.”

  Missy’s nest didn’t hold any cages or cats, so it was abandoned. They crawled toward separate cages.

  Dani reached the next imprisoned cat. What she saw through the bars was heartbreaking, but it wasn’t a surprise. The cat shivered in fear at the sight of her. Its fur was missing in patches, the exposed skin covered in sores. Whatever diseases afflicted these cats Dani hoped would spread to their caretaker, not that Missy took any care of her pets. She realized those sores could be bug bites, and that was somehow even worse, that these hungry cats provided the food for the overfed pests that could pass through the bars of the cages.

  Dani opened the cage and extended a hand to the sick animal inside. Claws swiped at her. Dani was prepared for that reaction and had her hand out of the cage quickly.

  “I’d hate humans, too.”

  Dani went in search of the next cage. She heard the unobserved animal escape its confines behind her, and she was relieved to know it had claimed its liberation.


  Will spotted another cat trapped in a cage high above his head. This cage was on the top shelf of the teetering bookcase, right below the television. With his height, he figured he was the one responsible for the high level rescues. How the television, with its warring families, or the cage, with its restless feline, could remain where they were while everything else had fallen off of the shelves was a mystery to him. Perhaps they had extra adhesive holding them up, as in an extra layer of rat and cat turds.

  Will stepped up onto the pile of garbage bags against the base of the leaning bookcase. He failed to consider that those bags were the only things keeping the bookcase from collapsing. Will didn’t see the subtle shifts in the one hundred eighty-five pounds of stained oak towering over him.

  Will didn’t need to hoist Ian to reach the door and open this cage. He let the cage door fall open and turned away as the cat leaped out to the hoard below. Hearing a scraping sound beside him, Will looked up as dust drifted down into his eyes. He could hear but not see a studio audience laughing above him.

  The cage had shifted from the feline’s speedy exit, cracking the ancient crap that had kept the metal pen glued in place (Will had been correct on that count). With the seal broken, the cage let gravity have its way, and it slid off of the high shelf.

  Ian, Keith, and Dani all heard the noise and spun toward it, eager to avoid the next potential avalanche.

  Will flinched back while trying to keep his feet solid on the slope of slippery garbage sacks. The sliding cage caught on a hanging black power cord. The cord pulled taut and gave a jerk to the antique television on top. The cobwebs that had held it in place for years burst into dust. The studio audience pitched off of the top ledge.

  Will looked up, and he registered that the audience on the screen coming down at him were actually jeering, probably at him to move out…

  The television screen, which was flesh blistering hot due to its constant use, smashed into Will’s upturned face. The jeering stopped the moment the screen shattered with a resounding pop. He heard a crunch of bones all too loudly, since they were inside his head, likely his nose or teeth, if he was lucky.