Mike thought the great room was a fine place for that also, he just wasn’t ready for upstairs yet, but he didn’t want to have to wrestle the king size mattress up there when he was ready.
“Upstairs. End of the hall,” he answered instead.
Within half an hour, the few things Mike had bought to transform his accommodations into something remotely homelike were now inside. Dana was sweating profusely, though it was the truck driver who kept wiping his forehead almost in sympathy of his partner.
Mike did want to give Dana a beer. The guy might be a little brusque but he was a hard worker. But if he gave one to Dana his diet Tab ruse would be exposed.
“Well, I guess we’re gonna get going,” the driver said as Mike signed off on the delivery form. The driver was lingering ever so slightly waiting for something, possibly a tip, Mike thought.
“Well, I appreciate you coming out here so quickly,” was all he offered.
The driver scowled. “I hope ragged strips of meat are ripped from your live, thrashing body,” the man said with a smile.
“What?” Mike said taking a step back, color draining from his face.
“He says that whatever time you have left on this earth he hopes is punctuated with great pain and misery,” Dana said.
“Get the fuck out!” Mike yelled throwing the papers he had signed at the driver’s chest.
“What the hell’s your problem, man?” the driver asked. “I just said that I hope your experience with Perry’s furniture was a good one.” A downward turn of the lips let Mike know this for the lie it was.
Menace oozed from Dana. Whatever had been thrashing in the woods had nothing on the behemoth now inside his house. Mike wanted to shrink and hide in the smallest hole he could. Instead he stood tall. If he was to die it would be fighting, not cowering.
“I asked you to leave,” he said with as much force as he could muster. He felt he fell extremely short.
“He axed us to leave,” Dana laughed, brown rotting teeth glowed dully from his smile.
Patches stood on the top of the staircase staring down, she meowed loudly and in an instant the moment passed.
“You have a nice day,” the driver said, clapping his partner across the shoulder and then they left.
It was all Mike could do to lock the door behind them and sit on the couch. Thankful that Dana had not gone any further than he had or Mike would have found himself on the floor as a permanent fixture.
“I think you just saved my life,” Mike told Patches as the cat hopped onto the couch with him. “Probably should have got a darker color.” Mike watched the trail of fur the cat was leaving behind.
“Jandilyn, I’m not sure I like this place,” Mike said as he finally stood up. Patches watched him but did not follow as Mike headed upstairs, twilight taking full hold of the region, the house now cast in long shadows.
Mike turned on the bedroom light and was mildly surprised to find the bed was made. He thanked Dana even though he was fairly certain the man hadn’t done it.
Mike wandered around the house for what remained of the day, notating a growing list of things he was going to need if he was going to make his time here… what? he asked himself—tolerable? Maybe. Enjoyable? Never. He didn’t think he would ever enjoy life again, not without Jandilyn—but wasn’t that why he was here now? He wondered how desperate he had to be to start hearing voices directing him. Patches was sitting at the door, pretending not to take notice of the new guardian of the house.
“You and me against the world, cat.” Patches walked away. “I’ll make sure to get you vegetarian cat food going forward, you little ingrate,” Mike said.
Mike debated about a shower but he had neither a curtain to stop the flow of water or a towel to dry off with. His contact with the movers had left him unnerved and it had also left an oily dirty residue upon his skin.
“How much water do those things really stop?” he asked as he stripped down. Mike enjoyed the openness of the shower, he also figured he would be able to see whatever was coming at him, although he wouldn’t be able to defend himself with much more than a travel size container of shampoo. And then the next unsettling thought came to the fore—what the hell did he have to defend himself against?
“I really should have kept driving to Alaska, I’m still too close to Cali,” he said as he shut the water off and stepped out into a burgeoning puddle of cold water pooled on the tile floor. He threw his dirty clothes on it in an attempt to soak up the majority of the spill. “I guess they stop more water than I thought.” He wrote, ‘shower curtain’ in bold letters on his list, but underlined the word ‘CLEAR’ three times as if he would need reminding.
“Well, it’s either laundry day tomorrow or clothes shopping,” he said as he put on an old pair of paint-stained shorts and a hole-riddled Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt Jandilyn had wanted to get rid of when they had moved in together. He had saved it from the trash twice, more so for the reaction she would give him when she saw him wearing it again.
“Oh, gross!” she had said. “I put that thing under the moldy potato salad from last week’s picnic—how did you find it? Did you even wash it, it smells like dirty diapers.”
“It does smell a little like dirty diapers.” Mike had laughed as he pulled the bottom of the shirt to his nose. “And if I get hungry I can even lick some of the old potato salad off the sleeve,” he’d said as he licked his left side.
“Come on, Mike! You kiss me with that mouth!” She had run away as Mike chased her. He had finally pinned her on the couch making sure to mash her face with the front of his shirt.
“Mike, I can’t breathe!” she had squealed as he tickled her.
He’d stopped and removed the shirt, replacing it with his lips. They had laughed as they kissed. She needn’t have worried about any smell emanating from Mike’s shirt as it was shorn quickly and the scene quickly dissolved into a sweet and tender love-making session.
Today’s Michael sat on the couch weeping, tears dropped heavily as he remembered the tenderness they had shared. “I can’t go on without you, Jandilyn!” he wailed.
A loud thumping upstairs pulled his thoughts from the past. His first thought was the cat, but he/she was sitting next to him. The knocking grew from a small child’s hand on an oak door to a hammer-wielding carpenter on a two-by-four. As soon as Mike stood to go see if his pipes were bursting, the sound ceased.
Mike went into the kitchen and checked the flow of water—it seemed fine. “Must be what happens when the water cools.” He doubted it, but what else could he say?
He spent the next few minutes going through the freezer to select which box of frozen grossness he wanted to eat for dinner. The Salisbury steak wannabe with hard-as-nails peas won out. Mike thought Patches’ beef and chicken medley looked much more appetizing than his steaming pile of food-like substance. The smell wafting up from his dinner was worse than his unwashed t-shirt had ever been.
Dark came fast in the middle of nowhere. With no television, Mike crawled into bed with a book he’d been trying to read for a month, but he kept forgetting where he had left off and found himself rereading the same paragraphs over and over.
“Wow, seven on a Friday, I sure am a party animal,” Mike said as he slid between the cool sheets. Patches hopped up onto the bed and looked at Mike as if to say ‘What took you so long?’
“Sorry, not all of us like to sleep eighteen hours a day,” he told her. “So you are a she,” he said as she turned her back to him. “I should have known with how fickle you are. I should have named you Mrs. Hollow, no, I’m sorry, I take it back. I kind of like you.”
Mike hadn’t got more than ten pages through what he was pretty sure he had already read when his head started to nod. He jerked awake when he felt something brush against his arm. “Fuck off, Patches,” he said sleepily. His head bolted up when he realized the cat was as far from him as she could be while staying on the bed and had not moved since she turned her tail on him.
“Ja
ndilyn, is that you?” he pleaded, nothing answered in return. Patches had turned her head and was eyeing Mike, but not quite. She was looking at something over his shoulder. She hissed once and leapt off the bed. Mike heard her rapidly descending the steps. “Was it something I said?” A cold breath of death kissed his ear.
He jumped out of bed, his skin goose-fleshed to the size of chicken eggs. If the mattress hadn’t been a king size he would have pulled it to the landing and thrown it over the balcony so he could sleep in the great room. As it was, he was exhausted and had to drive back into town and do a bunch of shopping the next day. He laid back down after a few moments, making sure to stay closer to the center of the bed, cat be damned. She would have to get over her aversion to him or she could stay on the couch downstairs, although he hoped she wouldn’t. She wasn’t much company but she was infinitely better than the alternative.
Mike tried to read, but again he did not know his place and really he didn’t care all that much. He tossed the book across the room and shut the light off next to his bed. The light from the bathroom was still on and it splayed into the bedroom, but he was fine with it at least tonight. At some point during the evening Mike awoke when something passed across the path of light that led from the bathroom to his face. His mind not fully engaged figured it was the cat, although she was pooled by his feet.
That morning Mike awoke with Patches less than an inch from his face and she was peering at him as if he were bathed in Eau de Mouse. “Not cool, cat,” Mike said, pulling back so he could focus on the feline. She hopped down and walked into the bathroom where, Mike had set up one of the two litter boxes, the other being next to the kitchen leading down a small hallway that led to a dining room he hadn’t done more than place some empty boxes in.
“That sounds like a good idea,” Mike said. “My bladder is gonna burst, you’d better hurry.” He rose out of bed. He was halfway across the room when he noticed the book he had discarded, his need for elimination all but forgotten. Three claw marks had been dragged down the front of it, shredding at least a quarter of the book all the way through. He desperately wanted to blame Patches but unless she turned into a werecat in the middle of the night, she didn’t have the size or the strength to do that kind of damage.
“Couldn’t get into it anyway,” Mike said to himself. He picked the book up, it felt preternaturally warm in his hand and he quickly deposited it in an empty box he was temporarily using as a trash bin. “I probably could have talked them down on the price,” Mike said to Patches as she hissed at him. “Sorry, I should know better than to bother you, especially when you’re busy.”
Mike gnawed on a piece of bread, staring out his kitchen window, not really taking in any sights, but it beat looking at the wall. He hadn’t realized what he was waiting for until Patches padded down the stairs. “You ready to go?” he asked as he put his sneakers on.
Patches hopped up into the Jeep and immediately curled up to sleep. “Rough day, cat?” Mike asked her. “I know you need a nap from your night of sleeping. Oh, to be a cat and not worry about anything.” His words couldn’t have been any more wrong, there was just no way he could have known that.
Mike needed a few more pieces of furniture, but he figured he’d make due for now. He had no desire to have his moving buddies come back, not unless he was armed. Speaking of which, he thought as he swung into a local sporting goods store.
“What is the best home defense weapon?” Mike asked the elderly clerk. The man could have called Jed ‘son’ and that thought brought another pang of longing.
“Having some problems out there at the old Granger homestead?” the man asked.
“What?” Mike stated and then he remembered seeing that name somewhere on the small encyclopedia of forms he had to sign when he bought the house. “How do you know?”
“Not much happens in this town I don’t know about. Name is Fred,” the clerk said, but he didn’t offer his hand which Mike found strange. “Did you know the previous owner went insane? Kept ranting and raving that something lived upstairs.”
“Did—” Mike gulped. “Did he kill his family in some gruesome way and then himself?”
Fred looked at him strangely. “Where you from? They might do that there, but this is a nice community, he just picked up his stuff and left.”
“Oh. Well, that’s a much better ending.”
“So you’re a writer,” Fred said more as a statement than a question.
“Some think so, but I’ve got enough critics who would argue the point.”
“That’s funny. You have a Washington driver’s license yet?”
Mike shook his head.
“I suggest a Walther p5, got a nice used one over here. But I can’t sell you any firearms without a valid in-state id. You could always get a taser.”
“Would that stop a bear?”
“Why would you want to be close enough to a bear to use a taser?” Fred asked. “Are you daft? Besides, you would have to go a lot deeper into the woods even more than you already are to come across one. You aren’t one of those Bigfoot kooks, are you? They’re always coming in here looking for supplies and nets as if a stupid butterfly net was going to snag him all up.” Fred mimicked an ensnared animal. “That is if there even was such an animal.”
“I haven’t thought about Bigfoot since I was ten, but now I guess I’ll be wondering if he’s going to venture into my yard, so thank you for that.”
“You want a net to catch him with? Got a whole wall full of them.”
“I’ll pass.”
“I can sell you a bow or a crossbow if you want—if that’ll make you feel a little better.”
Mike thought only a priest would be able to make him feel more secure, but yes, the crossbow did offer some piece of mind if only in his head. Mike bought the bow, a bunch of arrows a few other supplies and checked out.
Fred walked from around the cash register. “I’ll walk you out—about time for my smoke.”
Mike was going to inquire about the other patrons, but then he realized he was the only one in the store.
“My wife stops by from time to time, I used to smoke in the store but she said it made the merchandise stink like Camels and that paying customers didn’t want the added stink. I was going to argue with her and then I realized I hadn’t won a fight with her since Kennedy was in office and that was more because she passed out from the liquor than a win on my part.”
Mike laughed. He crossed the sidewalk and opened the passenger door to put his stuff in. “Thanks for the help,” Mike said after placing his stuff in the backseat. He turned to offer Fred a final wave, but Fred was fully fixated on Patches. The Camel he had been wanting to smoke was now rolling down the walkway.
“Where… where’d you get that cat?” His cigarette-less hand was pointing and shaking violently.
“She came out of the woods, she’s just a stray. You alright, Fred? Do you need an ambulance?” Mike approached the old man, fairly certain he was going to need to catch him.
Fred backed up into the store. “Get the fuck outta here,” he said, looking up at Mike. “You and that fucking cat get out of here!”
“Fred, what’s the matter?” Mike asked confused and not moving
“That cat’s dead!” Fred shrieked. “I ran it over fifteen fucking years ago!”
“Fred, she just looks the same, it can’t possibly be the same cat.”
“If she’s dead then that means you must be dead too! I’m not going to tell you again—get the fuck out of here!” Fred exclaimed, this time punctuating his point with the barrel of some heavy gauge weapon he had been wearing on his hip but was now alternating between pointing it at Mike’s head and Patches’ body.
Patches couldn’t have been any less concerned as she stretched her front paws on Mike’s seat, catching her claws on the material for good measure.
“Okay, Fred, I’m leaving put the damn cannon away.”
“If you get your license, don’t come back here,” Fre
d said as he stepped back into his shop and threw the lock. Still backing up, he fell into a canoe he had displayed.
Mike was shaking when he pulled away. “That went well, don’t you think?” Mike asked, his voice quavering.
Patches didn’t acknowledge him. She was busy looking back the way they had come. Mike tried for the rest of the day to forget the incident with the sporting goods owner but it just kept nagging him. He was on the long lonely road to his house before it began to slip away from his thoughts. “Home sweet home,” Mike said sourly.
He carried all the bags into the house. Patches didn’t help.
“Suppose you want some food now for all the hard work you’ve been doing today,” Mike said, bending down to pick up her bowl. As he rose he saw what had to be a practical joke. Written on the refrigerator door in what he had first assumed to be blood but turned out to be ketchup were the words ‘YOU SHOULD LEAVE.’
“I would have expected ‘GET OUT’, that seems like a much more forceful statement. Obviously, someone has a key to this place and is really trying to mess with my head, but for what reason? I don’t know anyone here. This isn’t going to end well!” Mike shouted, just in case whoever had let themselves in was still within ear shot. “I’m armed now. And I need that damn ketchup—have you seen what I’m eating?” Mike tried for levity he did not truly feel. And the words on the fridge felt more like a warning than a threat, but from whom and for what reason?
Mike unwrapped the new coffee maker he had purchased and brewed a large pot. He was enjoying sleep less and less even though it was an escape from the constant reminder of Jandilyn’s absence. He knew heartache, he thought his heart was going to strangle itself at the loss of his friends but the pain he felt now went deeper. His heart labored merely to beat, each pounding a confirmation, no an accusation, that he was alive and she was dead.
The cat had jumped up on the counter and was watching the strange brew percolate as if it contained the hidden meaning to life. When it was done, Mike dumped a fair measure of sugar and enough cream to turn the amber brown liquid to a soft shade of Irish white. He took the whole pot and a cup and headed for the front porch. He sat in an old rocker old man Granger had left behind in his haste to get away from a bank debt or bad demon, both of which shared the same initials.