Hoard and Don't Seek by Sheri Turner Copywright November 28, 2012




Hi. My name’s Larry. I’m a hoarder. You know what a hoarder is if you haven’t been under a rock (or a pile of crap in a hoarder’s house). You know, those people that keep stuff. Not just stuff. Crap. Everything. And I mean EV-ER-Y-THING. Some hoarders hang on to really disgusting stuff. Some hang on to their own fecal matter. Some hang on to old food. Some hang on to pets. Some hang on to trash. Some have a shopping addiction. Some just can’t bear to let go of memorabilia. Some collect one item like newspapers. Or stuff related to Elvis.

So what do I hang on to? What catches my fancy? You’re going to laugh. I know you are. It’s okay. Go ahead and laugh. I’ll bet a $1,000 that you WILL laugh. You’ll be repelled by it, but you’ll laugh. I collect minutes. No, not watches. Minutes. As in minutes of my life. You wouldn’t know that if you came into my hovel. You’d think I was just another hoarder, just like on those programs you see on television, but I’m not. Everything that is in my home is there to protect me from Al. I doubt that is his real name, but let’s call him that for now. I mean, does it really matter what his name is? What matters is that he is trying to steal my life.

See, Al is some kind of demon or something. I read it in a book I have around here somewhere. I checked it out of the library back when I was able to leave my home. This demon (Al) latches itself onto a person’s soul somehow and feeds or something. Gradually it (he) sucks all your happiness, virtue and lucid thinking out of your ear. What’s left is a shell of the person you used to be. This shell is a raving lunatic. The kind you read about in the news. Like that guy who went to that Batman movie and open-fired on the audience for no particular reason. His demon was named Shirley. I saw it on the television. It was right behind his head in one of the pictures they put up of him. The name Shirley…clear as day…in pink neon behind his head. But no one else saw it. I asked my sister. She shot me a look when I asked her.
Yes, I know it sounds absolutely crazy. I would lock me up too if I heard someone like me talking like this. I would assume that I had become completely engulfed in my obsessive-compulsive disorder or whatever it was. I would assume that I was incapable of living on my own. Most of the time if you assumed that about a person like me you would be right. But this time you aren’t. I know you aren’t right this time because I still think really clearly. I’m not flitting from one thought to another all the time. I’m not erratic. I’m just a prisoner in my own home, and there is no one who can set me free.

The worst part is that I am not alone. I am not referring to others who have my circumstances. I’m sure that there are others, but that is not what I am talking about. You will never see me trying to raise awareness or doing a telethon about this. If I EVER find a way to be free of this…this…this DEMON thing, I will NEVER talk about it. That’s what got me into trouble in the first place. What I am talking about is that Al is in here somewhere. Somewhere, amidst the piles of rubble and ruin searching for me. He is doing his devilish best to find me in here, and I am doing my darnedest to make sure he doesn’t. I don’t want to contemplate what my end will be if he finds me.

My whole life is hide and seek. There is no “Olly olly um come free” or however you say that. There is no “ghouls” or “goal” that I can grab to make sure I am safe so Al can’t touch me. It’s a good thing that I am good at hide and seek. It’s no big deal if you get caught when you are playing it as a little kid. Everyone laughs and you start again. But I AM good. Not just because I find all the cool hiding places, but because I know how to be quiet. I know how to stay still. I know how to blend in so you wouldn’t notice me. Apparently there isn’t much intelligence to Al, because there were a few times I thought I was a gonner but he didn’t see me. He went right on by and never even noticed.

The hardest part is sleeping. I don’t sleep well or long, but eventually, no matter how scared I am, my body shuts down and forces me to sleep, even if fitfully. Trying to find a spot to sleep that he won’t find me can be tricky. Most nights I try to find a pile in my house that isn’t infested with mice or rats and cover myself in the debris. There have been a couple times that I have had to stand and sleep. The worst though, by FAR was the night I had to sleep in my own waste. That was so disgusting I gag just thinking about it. But it saved my bacon. It probably will again at some point, but I hope not soon. I’m not sure I can make myself do it again. It was just too horrible. Maybe death would be preferable.
If death was all I was afraid of I might already BE dead. Unfortunately that isn’t all I have to fear. Having my soul consumed and tortured for eternity kind of puts a different wrinkle on things. The other issue is that I don’t want Al to meet any of my family. If I die, someone will EVENTUALLY find me. Goodness knows if that will be a friend or a family member. All it would take would be for Al to catch them at the wrong time and they would be doomed. I doubt if they would be resourceful enough to figure out hoarding as a way to avoid Al.

I sort of hope it would be my neighbor Buzz. He’s a booze hound who beats the crap out of his wife and kids. I hear her screaming all the time for him to stop. He just laughs. If the kids try to say anything he’ll beat them for good measure, just because he can. So yeah, I kind of hope he finds me if and when I die. I heard her screaming the other day. She was in real pain. It was awful to hear. I wanted to go over there and stop him from whatever he was doing. I mean, you should never hit a woman. You just don’t do that. Seriously. I know some women can try your patience, believe me I know. I used to have a wife too. I loved her, but I had to drive her away…because of … you know…Al. Anyway, when we were together there were times that I would get irritated enough to want to slap the daylights out of her. But I never did it. Sometimes I had to go in the garage and beat on my heavy bag to avoid it. Sometimes I would mow the lawn. Sometimes I would even leave the house for a few hours. But I never laid a hand on her.

I wanted to go over and stop him. I’m a big guy. I probably could stop him. The best I could manage though was a quick call to 911 to report him. I had to whisper it quickly though. I was terrified the whole time that Al would hear me and come and find me. Emergency services probably knows it was me who called. I mean, don’t they have tracers on the lines and stuff just in case they lose contact with someone calling in an emergency? If they do know it’s me they aren’t saying though. Probably don’t want to jam me up with the big tattooed neighbor. I mean, I DO live next door to him.

Not that it matters. He couldn’t find me in here if he tried. I have learned to move very stealthily. When I decide to hide, no one but God himself could find me…I hope. I’ve had people break in here thinking it was abandoned. Squatters. But they quickly changed their minds once they saw the state of the place. I mean, there’s nowhere to squat here. Heh heh. Even if they COULD squat on some small patch, it’s likely occupied by roaches or mice. Maybe both. They wound up stealing my iPod, which was a bit of a bummer, and then my DVD player. That was a bigger bummer because I used to pop in a movie and it would camouflage the sound of me moving around my home. After taking those things they left. I don’t think they’ll be back. It’s too hard to get at anything worth stealing here. The only thing that really bothered me was that jerk who took a piss in the middle of the living room. “It’s not like they’ll notice anyway,” the fuzzy-haired jerk said as he was laughing. He had his dingus in his hand and was christening the piles in the area of my couch as he shook his skinny ass around. His pals burst out laughing like he was the best stand-up comedian they had ever seen.

It made me furious to have to watch these assholes piss all over my home. I was RIGHT THERE. I could have reached out and clobbered him. Knocked him flat on the pile he was peeing all over. Would have served the bastard right. And I would hope he wasn’t up to date on his tetanus shots either. But Al was watching. So I couldn’t make a move. His feral eyes were peeking out from under the pile on top of the coffee table. There were Popular Science Magazines and old empty peanut butter jars there. I almost missed him. But he was there. I could see the way his breath made the pages of the magazines move. When I finally picked out his eyes, I could see the vicious glee in them. Full of hate for reasons unknown.

So I suppose you want to know how this all started. Besides finding new hiding places, I don’t have anything else to do, so why not? It will kill some time. If you don’t mind some pauses while I shift some crap around occasionally, I don’t mind sharing my tale of woe with you. Just promise not to laugh. More importantly, promise not to get too creative about hide and seek. Please.

I was twenty-five. My mother had just died and left me this place as my inheritance. I loved my mom. She had been a wonderful wife and mother. You won’t hear any stories of neglect or abuse from me or my three sisters. We were loved and well-cared for. All four of us have some very fond memories of the good times we had in this house. I was quite surprised really when the house was left only to me. I thought my sisters would be upset or insulted that Mom had not seen fit to leave an equal share of our childhood home to each of us. But she hadn’t. She left the house entirely to me.

My sisters didn’t complain about it either. At least not to me. If they resented the arrangements my mother had made, they hid it quite well. They continued to have nothing but love and respect for both of my parents and did not cry foul at being left out of the inheritance in this way. Sure, my mom had left them a few things like some pieces of jewelry and such, but my parents’ main asset had been the house we had lived in as we grew to adulthood.

My Dad had died some years before of throat cancer. Awful stuff cancer is. He had been a smoker and cancer had come on one year about fifteen years ago. It was swift, which was its only mercy. My dad’s throat had swelled. Radiation, chemotherapy and surgery had all been tried. After limited successes with these treatments the cancer had spread to my dad’s pancreas and it was over in a matter of weeks. My mother was devastated of course but there was nothing we could do to stop the progression. He was just gone.

Once Dad was gone we grieved together as a family. We would check on each other regularly at first to see how we all were faring without Dad. My sister Emily seemed to take it the hardest. We all loved Dad but Emily and Dad had a bond that just could not be matched. They were more like peers than father and daughter as they enjoyed many of the same things and laughed at many of the same kinds of things. When Dad was buried Emily got a lot quieter. She smiled less. And that made Mom sad. She loved Emily very much but somehow Emily would just never let Mom in. Not the way she had let Dad in.

During those years I was working as a Mechanical Engineer at Pratt and Whitney. I made good money. Since I felt as though the house should be the inheritance of all four of us kids, I offered Emily and my other sisters, Sissy and Roberta equal shares. I could afford to and my wife agreed. After all, we were going to have a beautiful home to live in and we barely had to try. Buying my sisters out of their fair share seemed like the right thing to do. If there was one thing that my parents taught me as I had grown in that house, it was that you should always do your fair share. You just did. Without complaining. That was the right thing to do. Even if it inconvenienced you. So I cashed out some stock we had invested in and tried to do the honorable thing.

But all three of my sisters said no. They felt that Mom and Dad had given them their fair share already and paying them any more would be like double-dipping. So the attempt had been made (strenuously so as I spent almost a year trying to get some very hard-headed women to accept a cash-out for what should have been their portion of the house they grew up in) and rebuffed. Eventually, disgruntled though I was, I gave up trying and settled for inviting them to visit as often as they liked.
We had ten years in that house before Mom got sick. She lived with us after Dad died…or perhaps we lived with her. I mean, it was, after all, her home. She just didn’t want to live there alone. We had been looking for a home to purchase nearby anyway. It made sense that we move in to Mom’s home. After all, we were close and she was going to be the grandmother to our children. It made sense to have her living with us. She could help Elizabeth, my wife, with all sorts of things. Especially when our firstborn, Ella came along. Mom loved kids and was eager to watch our daughter. She wanted to spoil our Ella as much as was possible. She felt that it was her job to make Ella feel as loved as we did while growing up there.
When Mom fell ill, she had cancer as well, only for her it was breast cancer. It was not kind to her either. Cancer ravaged Mom’s body. She lost her hair while enduring chemo. She vomited blood. She lost her appetite, she lost her breasts to a double-mastectomy, and finally she lost her life. There’s a part of me that died while watching her go through her own version of hell. I hope she is at peace now. There isn’t a human being I have ever known who deserved peace and happiness more than my Mom did. She brought joy to everyone she met.

Mom hung on for five years once she got sick. She wanted to see Ella grow as much as possible before she left this earth. She attended all of Ella’s dance recitals, soccer games and swim meets. She was always in the front row cheering her granddaughter on. Until she fell truly and gravely ill she read to Ella every day. As the illness ravaged her Ella began to read to her. She was only five when Mom was getting to the worst part of her illness, so her reading was very labored, but it seemed to put Mom at ease whenever Ella cracked open one of her Clifford the Big Red Dog books.

Ella cried long and deep at Mom’s funeral. We all did. My sister Roberta did the eulogy and her voice was ragged with tears as she did it. She had flown in from California a few days prior to the funeral and did a lot of thinking before she shared with us what she would speak to during the service. It was clear that she had been thinking about all that Mom had meant to us. “Mom meant so much to so many people,” she had choked out. “She gave so much and never asked for much in return. She just wanted to be a part of our lives. She quietly enriched our lives just by her presence. If she had something you wanted or needed, it was yours. If she didn’t have it and you needed it, she would go and get it for you. That made her happy. Giving what she had to make others feel good was her life’s work. I’ll miss her smile. I know I will think about how bad her cooking was,” at this we all laughed, “and I will never forget the times she set herself aside to make sure I had what I needed. Even while cancer was stealing her life, it didn’t steal her soul. She was still a deeply caring, completely unselfish person. Goodbye Mom. I will forever be striving to reach the bar that you set the standard with. Your standard of loving and caring. Your standard of giving and meeting the needs of others.”

The room was silent for several minutes while we considered all the places we would miss her. We placed our flowers on her casket, and quietly left the room. I don’t think one person that was there had a dry eye. Our mother was deeply loved, deeply respected and would be sorely missed.

After the funeral, we went back to our house (Mom’s house) to share more with each other about the wonderful person that she was. Some of us shared stories of her life with each other, some of us sat and quietly contemplated aspects of her life that intersected with our own. I however, found myself in the basement.

When we had moved into the house (Mom’s house), Mom had quietly moved most of the things she had into storage or the basement. As she had become ill, she decided to give away much of what she had in storage. She did this quietly, as was her way. In retrospect I think she knew she wasn’t long for this world way before we did. She wanted to leave a minimum of hassle for us. She also wanted to give a maximum of joy to us by sharing those things she had that she felt we would find useful.

So her jewelry had piece by piece been given to Roberta, Emily and Karen (also called Sissy by me since I was a little boy). If she knew that one of them had particularly liked something, she would take a moment and quietly put it on them or give it to them. If she thought a piece of art she had (and she had collected a lot over the years with Dad) would look good in one of our homes, she would gift it to us. One evening she had been babysitting for Elizabeth and I so we could have an evening together. When we returned from the show we had purchased tickets for there was a Monet hanging over our couch. She knew we liked the painting and had just decided to hang it while we were out. She had done it as a surprise for us. We were both deeply moved.

This piece was one they had purchased on their honeymoon in Paris. That was almost 45 years ago and she still admired that painting every day. “Now I can admire it every time I walk into the living room,” she smiled as she said this, satisfied with the job she had done hanging it.

“Mom, this is your favorite piece,” Elizabeth had said, “Are you sure you want to give it to us? That is really generous of you,” Elizabeth always had a way of being very direct with Mom. You know, recognizing a thing for what it was underneath.
Mom had been sure. The painting stayed where it was. It’s still there today. There had been a few pauses when Roberta, Emily and Karen had come to visit. They all loved the painting and knew what the significance of it hanging in our living room meant.

But there were many other things that Mom chose to give to my sisters. They did not go without. They were not left to sift through the crumbs or castoffs to have an inheritance. There were many other valuable paintings, pieces of jewelry and rooms full of furniture that they received in much the same way as I received the first Monet painting. Emily came home from her classes at University one day to find that her once-barren bedroom had a beautiful walnut bedroom set in it. It had been Mom and Dad’s bedroom furniture.

So little by little my Mom had parsed out what she had collected over the course of her life. Things that had made her home warm and inviting. Things that we had created memories in. Pieces that had many more memories to be gained.

While our guests were gathered upstairs, I was poking around down in the basement, looking at the few items Mom had not doled out while still alive. Not because I wanted any of them (that was the farthest thing from my mind really), but because I wanted to know how much was left that I recognized. How many of those items were things that I had seen. There were a few more paintings, lithographs or originals I couldn’t tell (I wasn’t that good at appreciating art). There was the other Monet that they purchased in Paris. There were a couple Jackson Pollocks (I never understood him as an artist, I mean it really just looks like paint dribbles all over the canvas). Then there were a couple boxes. One I had seen before – it was something that Mom and Dad came back with from their trip to Thailand. I think she said there was an authentic tea set in it. I had never seen it, but she had described it to me. The Asian part of the world invested the act of drinking tea with a lot of ritual and meaning it seems. The box the tea set was in was fairly ornate. It was carved with symbols I was guessing were from the Thai language. It was inlaid with gold and painted red on the edges. There were trees painted on the sides of the box. Behind one of the trees was a shy looking woman who was rather beautiful. Slender, with long dark hair and sort of long graceful limbs. Her stance seemed to suggest deference, as if she would yield to whomever she was looking at.
The other box was a beautiful, mellow tone. It was polished and there were brass corners and latches. Aside from the details shared here, there was no other adornment. It was kind of intriguing to Larry. He had no real idea why it was so intriguing. The box shape was not particularly unusual. The wood used to make the box was of good quality, but other than that it was a completely unremarkable box.
Larry didn’t know why he knew, but he knew the boxes were a matched set somehow. They belonged together. He had never discussed the pair of boxes with his mother or father. He had known that they had an Asian tea set, but he did not know the set was boxed, and had no idea there was a second box until he had gone down into the basement after his mother’s funeral. He had no idea what, if anything, there was in the second box.

He was standing next to the pair of boxes. Tentatively, Larry reached out a hand and stroked the box with the woman on it. Strangely, it felt warm to the touch. The moment Larry had put his hand on the box, he was flooded with a sense of well-being. He wanted to keep stroking the box. . He stood there, studying the carvings and painting on the box. He laid his hand flat on the top of the box and hesitated, as if he expected something to happen. When nothing did, he was disappointed. He had no idea why, but he was deeply disappointed. He tried to open the box, but the lid appeared to be stuck. He didn’t know if perhaps there was some aging or warping process in action or not, but he could not get the lid to budge. He was beginning to consider ways he could force the lid without breaking the box when his sister Emily showed up. She called to Larry from the top of the stairs.

“Larry? Are you down here? Elizabeth is looking for you and I was sort of hoping you would help us clean up,” Emily’s voice sounded a bit strained. Larry took his hand off the box and headed up the stairs.

“Sure I‘d be happy to help my baby sister out,” Larry smiled. He knew Emily hated being called his baby sister, but he loved poking the tiger with her. They slipped into an easy banter as he came up the stairs to her and headed into the kitchen.
“Baby or no I can kick your sorry butt,” Emily joked. “Just get your fanny in the kitchen and help me clear up the dishes.” It was true, there was a growing stack of plates, silver ware, coffee cups, glasses and pans piling up in the kitchen. Larry sighed internally. He hated doing dishes. But he enjoyed his sister Emily’s company so that would more than make up for the tedium of the chore.

So Larry had gone back up the stairs into the kitchen and forgotten about the boxes for a while. He chatted with his sister about the good times they had with their mother and father. They talked about how much they were going to miss having them around. They talked about Mom’s attempts to make cookies and how awful they were. There was one time Mom’s Crisco had gone bad and she didn’t know that went bad. The cookies had come out with this awful flavor you just could NOT get off your tongue. It seem to intensify no matter what you did to get rid of it. They laughed and remembered a loving mother and father.

No one spoke about the boxes. Not even Larry.

A year passed. Larry and his family grieved the passing of their mother and eventually, like life does, things returned to status quo. The remainder of the things their mother had not doled out between her four children remained untouched in the basement of Larry’s house. No one thought about them. After all, life was busy and none of them were particularly greedy. They had all the items they needed to live their lives and no one felt the need to have more.

One day Ella was in the basement. She was poking around in the far corners to see if there was anything of interest to play with. It was raining and school was off because the teachers had a “Professional Development Day,” (whatever that was).
Ella was tired of her playthings. She wanted to find something new and exciting to play with. Grandma used to keep a trunk of things for Ella to paw through in the basement. She wondered if it was still here. She wanted to try on the costume jewelry and see if she still had that pretty dress Ella used to like to try on. Now where did Grandma keep that stuff? She hadn’t played with it since before Grandma died. She was too sad at first to even think about ever playing with those items. Her mind had shut out the idea before it had hardly formed. It wasn’t until about twenty minutes ago that she remembered and had decided she wanted to look for the dress-up trunk.

After looking around and moving a few boxes, Ella found Grandma’s stuff. It was all piled in one small corner of the basement. Somehow, that made Ella sad. She felt as though her Grandma had been shoved aside. She had died and all of her belongings had just been shoved into this dark corner in the basement of their house. It was if everyone wanted to forget she had existed. Well, Ella didn’t want to forget her. Her Grandma was the nicest Grandma anyone could ever have had. So playing with her things would be a great way to remember her. She, Ella, could do some of the things that she had done in the past with her Grandma. It might feel a little strange without her Grandma there to help her put things on, but she could imagine she was there if she wanted. But only if she could find the trunk of things her Grandma had kept for her.

Ella hated this part of the basement. It was dark and it was next to the furnace. The furnace made strange noises that disturbed Ella. It almost seemed like some kind of sleeping beast. A beast she didn’t want to wake up. There was a musty, mildew smell too. Like something had died recently. That made her shudder to think about. That something ancient had died in her basement…or maybe hadn’t completely died. Ella knew that this was just her imagination, but still it made her uneasy. Why did they have to put Grandma’s stuff here anyway? It should have been near the stairs, where the lights were. Grandma would have wanted it that way anyway. If she could just find the trunk she could bring it to the playroom part of the basement and shut the door to this stinky part.

There it was! Ella spotted the trunk. There were a couple paintings in front of it (why Grandma like those scribbly paintings Ella never knew…SHE could have made them for Grandma), and a couple of small boxes on top of the trunk. Ella could move the paintings if she was careful and the boxes on top would fit on the shelves Daddy had made against the wall down here. No problem. She wouldn’t hurt anything by just moving the trunk, would she? No, she would not.

Ella carefully dragged the first painting over to the wall under the shelves. It fit almost perfectly here. She stood back and looked at the painting again. She had seen it many times before since her Grandma often showed them to Ella and asked what she thought of them. Ella was careful not to be mean since her Grandma really liked these paintings, but Ella always (politely) told Grandma she didn’t understand them. She didn’t get how the man who had made them was famous. It didn’t seem too hard to paint like that. She knew that she was just a little girl, with little experience of the world of art, but she still thought that if her Grandma had wanted some scribbly marks of paint on canvas she could have made them for her. Whenever she said that her Grandma always smiled and told her that perhaps someday Ella WOULD be a famous artist like Mr. Pollock.

Dragging the second painting was a little harder for Ella. The first one was big and awkward and Ella was a little tired from moving it. Ella would have to be careful not to damage the painting so she would move it little by little. She dragged it a couple of feet from where it had been resting originally. Then she rested it against a box. After taking a minute to rest Ella carefully slid the painting next to the first one and rested again. As she rested, Ella’s eyes wandered around the basement again. They came to rest on the two small boxes that were on top of Grandma’s trunk. The boxes seemed to be made of some kind of wood. One box was painted and the other one seemed to be polished wood of some kind. They were both rather pretty in their own ways.

Ella’s attention shifted to the first box. It was painted red with gold leaf on the edges and around some of the intricate designs that made up the trees on the edges and corners of the box. Behind the tree on the left was a very pretty woman. She had long black flowing hair like Ella had always wanted (hers was curly, short and blonde). The woman’s features seemed graceful and almost shy. Her eyes were cast down, but a knowing smile played upon the woman’s lips. Ella wondered what the woman was smiling about. It was an odd kind of smile …out of place somehow. Even though Ella thought the woman was beautiful that smile made her uneasy somehow. She set the box aside on the shelf along the wall. As soon as she did that uneasy feeling went away.

Ella shrugged her shoulders and moved on to the second box. The one with no decoration…or very little. The mellow tones of the wood almost seemed to make the box glow. Ella’s eyes grew large and she became fascinated with that glow. Ella wondered what was in the box. She thought that if her Grandma had kept the box it must have been something very important. After all, she had kept it with all her important things. The paintings down here and the trunk of dress up clothes and costume jewelry were very important to her Grandma.

Maybe she should open the box. If the box was important, there might be something important in the box that her mom and dad should know about. Maybe there was more jewelry in the box. Ella loved Grandma’s jewelry, and Grandma always let Ella wear whatever jewelry she wanted. She never told Ella that anything was off limits to her. She always told Ella that she wanted to share her things with her. In fact, Grandma had said that some day when Ella was older she would GIVE her some of the jewelry. For keeps. She was just waiting until Ella was old enough to have the sense of responsibility to not lose any of it. That’s what Grandma had said.

Grandma had never told Ella how old she had to be before she was responsible enough to not lose things. That had been sort of left up in the air. Ella thought she was old enough now. She hadn’t lost her Pokemon cards. She had stopped losing the ring Mommy had bought her. Sometimes she forgot and left it on the sink in the bathroom, but that wasn’t the same as losing it, was it? FORGETTING is different than actually losing Ella reasoned. If you FORGOT something, you just put something down and failed to remember you had done that. Actually losing something was when you had no IDEA where you had put something. Or you could lose something if it wasn’t your fault too. Like if your book fell out of your book bag in the car, like what had happened to Ella’s library book at the end of school last year. Good thing Daddy had checked the car or they would NEVER have found the book.

But that was last year. A whole twelve months ago. She hadn’t lost anything since then…she didn’t think. She couldn’t exactly remember, but it seemed like she had become more responsible to Ella. So maybe the plain brown box contained the jewelry Grandma planned to share with Ella when she was old enough to be responsible. If that were the case then Ella was old enough now. She was responsible now. She didn’t lose things anymore (she didn’t think).

If she was more responsible (and she was, she could feel it), then Grandma would want her to have the jewelry that might be in the box for her. Ella would have to ask her Mom and Dad of course, and she would. But Ella didn’t think Grandma or anyone would think it a terrible thing if she just tried the jewelry on and put it back when she was done.

Ella lifted the box with no painting or gold on it. There was a gold latch on the box. Ella’s heart sank. There was a keyhole on that latch and Ella knew what that meant. A keyhole usually meant that there was a key. Ella had no idea where the key would be to open the box. Probably somewhere she would never find it. Her heart sank. She REALLY wanted to know what kind of jewelry was in the box. Oh! She couldn’t stand to not know. She was going to try to push the latch open without the key. Who knew, maybe it would open for her. She had a diary with a keyhole and it was easy-pleasy to open that without the key.

Using her tiny fingers to pry underneath the latch to the box, Ella tried to open the box. It opened WAY easier than she thought it would. My goodness, if you had wanted to keep someone out of the box putting a rock on top of it would have worked better. Ella glanced over her shoulder nervously. If her Mom or Dad had come looking for her at this time they might be upset. Not because she was looking at her Grandma’s stuff, but because she might have broken the lock on the box. She hadn’t thought of that until now, but it was too late now. The box was open. Hopefully she hadn’t broken anything and she would close it again once she was finished looking. She wouldn’t try to wear the jewelry today. She sensed she was running out of time. It was probably almost time to go to dance class. She would just look at the jewelry today. She would come back later to try some of it on.

Gingerly, Ella pushed the lid back. Setting it back on its hinges, she looked inside the box. She was unaware that she was holding her breath as she did it. Her first reaction to seeing the contents was confusion. The jewelry she had expected to be piled inside the box was not here. There were no clip-on earrings, no rings, and no long strings of plastic beads. There was a tea set. It was a pretty tea set, but it wasn’t the jewelry Ella had been expecting. Her shoulders sank. She didn’t know what to make of this. Had her Grandma tricked her? That hardly seemed likely, but the evidence seemed to be staring her in the face. There was no jewelry here. Just a tea set. A boring, stupid tea set. You can’t wear a tea set. And she most certainly was not allowed to touch it she bet. She just bet her Mom and Dad would tell her it was too fragile for her to touch.

The inside of the box was not what she expected though. It was lined with red velvet. There were two china cups and matching saucers with the tea set. There was also a set of white chopsticks, a teapot and a cup with no handles on it. On second thought she considered, this tea set might be kind of fun. She could set up a tea party with her teddy bear and her American Girl doll. It could be fun.
“Ella! Are you down there? It’s time to go to ballet and tap! Ella? Did you hear me?” Her Aunt Emily was calling for her down the stairs. She was taking Ella to dance class today. Mommy had a doctor’s appointment.

“I’m coming!” Ella called back. She quickly closed the lid of the tea set and carefully placed it back on the top of the trunk. She ran up the stairs and hurriedly went to her room to grab her dance gear and change. She couldn’t wait to look at the tea set tomorrow. She could probably have time to look at it when she got up tomorrow morning before school. Or on Saturday morning before she went to soccer practice. Maybe she would ask Mommy and Daddy about it.

No matter. One little girl left the tea set behind to carry on with her daily routine. She didn’t notice, because her interest had been on the box with the tea set in it, that the ornately decorated box had changed. The figure on the box, the one of the beautiful woman, had changed. Her countenance went from one of deference to resolute anger. There was a slight change in the curve of the woman’s lips and the matching curve of her brow. The submissive softness in her eyes had changed to flint. But no one was there to see this strange occurrence.

Elizabeth sighed. She was frustrated with the turn her life had taken lately. It seems that she was beginning menopause early. She felt cheated. She had hoped to have another child after Ella, but it apparently wasn’t going to be in the cards. Her body was giving her signals that she was destined to have an only child. Ella was beautiful and Elizabeth loved her very much, but she thought Ella would benefit so much from having a brother or sister. Besides, she and Larry had planned on having at least two children. They had wanted to raise at least two (hopefully more) children. Their mistake had been waiting. Elizabeth was almost 40 when she had Ella. They had waited almost 2 years after having Ella to begin trying again. It might have been too long. Her body was giving signals that it wasn’t going to cooperate.
Elizabeth was on her way to the doctor’s office. She was hoping to clear up the mystery as to why her body was acting so funky. It HAD to be perimenopause. There was no other explanation for it. Why else would a forty-something woman bleed at random times and feel so flipping tired? Yes, she had a full-time job that kept her busy, but it was a job she loved and provided Ella with the things that she needed and wanted. Larry’s paycheck covered the necessities and Elizabeth’s covered the extras…like dance class and soccer. It felt good to be able to give Ella these things, so Elizabeth did not experience her job as stress at all. She knew it wasn’t a career job, but she didn’t care. It gave her family what they needed. Extras like Ella’s dance class, the family vacation…and it gave Elizabeth a sense that she was contributing something very important to her family’s way of life.

Recently however, her “womanly parts” had been giving her a lot of pain. She found the cramping and discomfort more than she could bear at times. Because of the pain, Elizabeth finally made an appointment to see the doctor. She would find out what stage of life she was in and decide whether or not to go on hormone therapy. That would deal with the pain, she was sure of it.

The phone rang. It was Larry. He wanted to know if she had time to meet him for lunch. She smiled. Lunch with Larry was usually an enjoyable romp at home since no one else was there at that time of day. “Aw Lar, I would love to, you know I would, but I have to go to this stupid doctor’s appointment,” she sighed. Lunch these days was the only time they got to spend together. Life outside of that was usually spent running Ella around, working, doing housework, and running errands. It was nonstop. This afternoon, for instance had her bringing Ella to soccer, squeezing in grocery shopping before Ella’s practice was over, and then having dinner at the house with some friends. She hoped Larry and Emily tidied up a bit before they came over. She didn’t think she would have time to.

“Lar, please don’t forget that Olivia and Jacob are coming for dinner tonight,” she reminded him. “Can you make sure the dog hair is swept up and the bathrooms are clean?”

“Sure honey,” Larry replied. “I got your back.” This was a joke between the two of them since Barrack Obama was running for a second term. “I got your back” was one of his campaign slogans. Larry and Elizabeth thought it a tad cheesy. A nice thought, she supposed, but somehow it came across sort of cheesy on the ad campaigns she saw on Facebook.

Olivia and Jacob were friends of theirs from before they had Ella. Elizabeth used to work as a reporter and Olivia was her editor and Jacob a photographer who married Olivia. They all enjoyed talking “shop” and teasing Larry because he didn’t know as much about the local political landscape. Larry didn’t mind. It was all in good fun.
Olivia kept asking Elizabeth to come back to work for her but Elizabeth felt that she could not invest herself in a career at this point. Ella needed her. To really be a good reporter you needed to be available when the story broke. Elizabeth couldn’t promise that. Not right now. Maybe when Ella was older…when she didn’t need quite so much attention. Besides, she was having far too much fun being a mother to let a career interfere with that.

So Olivia settled for getting together once a month to have dinner and talk about life as an editor and how much she missed having Elizabeth work for her at the magazine. All her other writers were young and inexperienced and while they were good writers, Olivia had to watch them closer than she had had to watch Elizabeth. They weren’t as thorough about fact-checking before they turned in stories and Olivia had to come down on them about that.

Elizabeth pulled into a parking spot at her doctor’s office. She got out and smoothed her skirt. She didn’t know why she was bothering since she was only going to have to take it off for the stupid internal exam anyway. Just a habit she supposed.

Walking toward the door to the facility Elizabeth thought about how aggravating this stupid “woman problem” was. She never knew what to expect from her body these days. She felt like a leaky faucet. Hopefully the doctor would help solve the problem and not tell her it was just part of growing older and something she would have to learn to live with.

“Hello Elizabeth,” the receptionist greeted her warmly. “I didn’t know you had an appointment today,” she said smiling.

“Yep. I do. It’s been a while, but I finally dragged myself in here,” Elizabeth hated gynecology appointments. Not because of anyone here in the office. They were all perfectly nice people. It was just such an undignified process. But necessary in some circumstances, so here she was.

“I’m supposed to see Dr. Cotterman in about fifteen minutes,” Elizabeth said, checking her watch. “I want to get this over with so if he’s here is there any chance he could take me now?”

“I’m sorry Elizabeth, but he’s already with another patient,” Carla, the receptionist said. “I will let him know you are here though.” Carla disappeared from her desk. Elizabeth could hear the whisper of her shoes on the carpet as she walked down the hall to one of the exam rooms.

Elizabeth shifted from foot to foot waiting for Carla to reappear. She had to go to the bathroom but was told to wait til she could give a “sample.” She wished she had asked for the specimen cup before Carla had disappeared down the hall.

He couldn’t avoid this part of the game. He HAD to go to the bathroom, but Al was lurking around there somewhere. At least that’s what Al had said out loud hoping to get Larry to give up. Probably figuring that eventually Larry would HAVE to show up. Good thing that Larry had two bathrooms. He just had to figure out which bathroom Al was at without alerting him and go to the other one. How was he going to do this? If he opened the door surely Al would know. Perhaps if he was REALLY quiet he could get close and listen. Al wasn’t always the quietest being. In fact, the proverbial bull in a china shop was a very apt description of the little creep.

Larry tiptoed very quietly up to the door. He was careful to very precisely put each foot down as he moved. If he slowly applied his weight to each step he made very little noise. Only problem was that Larry was scared and had to go to the bathroom, not really a particularly good combination when trying to use some stealth in your approach. If he had been doing this a few weeks later, after he had discovered the cover that hoarding provided, he would never have been able to be so quiet. At least not initially.

He was in there. Larry could hear the evil being moving around, emptying the medicine cabinet, and breaking glass. There was a long pause as who-knew-what happened. Now was the time to head to the other bathroom. Al was occupied with whatever he was doing. Probably would be for a while if experience had taught Larry anything. Evil though Al was, he was like a child in some ways. If he found something that he hadn’t seen before he would spend a lot of time looking at it, trying to understand its use.

Larry quietly drifted down the steps, resisting hopping them two at a time since that would make more noise than was safe. Al was an incredibly swift creature when he wanted to be. One of his more deadly features. If Larry wasn’t careful by paying close attention to Al’s whereabouts, he would be caught and dispatched of quickly.
Arriving downstairs, Larry thought he was free and clear. He opened the bathroom door and almost called out in frustration. The little creep had done what he was apparently doing upstairs. The glass from the mirror was shattered and all over the floor. All medications were smashed together in the sink in some kind of bubbling pink mass. Good thing Larry didn’t have any medications that were essential here, because if he had, he would be done for.

He was going to have to be very careful, but he had to use the bathroom. Once he used it he would have to flush and dash out of there as quickly as possible. Al would be down here in a heartbeat once he heard anything.

Larry took a deep breath and made a quiet but quicksilver move for the bathroom. He managed his business, cleaned up and got ready to leave when he heard noise on the stairs. It was a good thing that he hadn’t pulled his pants all the way up because he was so frightened he let a stream of urine go. It fortunately hit the toilet without getting a drop on his pants. Thank goodness for luck with the small things.
It turned out to be one of Larry’s cats. Larry had four. He loved cats. They were cuddly and friendly beings who never gave you a hard time about anything. Simka, his Siamese, came slinking over to him and he rubbed her head and back affectionately.
Simka miaowed. Larry froze. He took a deep breath and began running. He had enough time to realize he was running with something sharp buried in his bare foot before he crashed into the coat closet. He quickly pulled the winter coats over himself and tried to be as still as possible. Larry held his breath and waited to see if he made it into the closet without Al seeing him. If he hadn’t he was a gonner because there was no other exit from the closet.

It was very quiet. Larry’s foot began to throb. He looked down and saw that he was bleeding. There was a piece of the bathroom mirror jammed into the ball of his right foot. Thick red-black blood was slowly oozing around the shard of glass. Oh man this was going to hurt to pull out. He would have to pull it out too because he could not move around like he needed to with that hunk of mirror jutting out of his foot. How was he going to manage to do that without yelling?

Larry began looking around the closet to find something to staunch the flow of blood with once he pulled the glass out of his foot. It was dark where he was so it was hard to see what he was touching. His hands found a box of what he believed was their winter stuff…hats, mittens, scarves, gloves. He was sure he could find something in there to use. A scarf maybe? Maybe if he used a hat and put a scarf around that it would help cushion the wound when he walked.

Now that he knew what he was going to bandage it with, he had to decide if he was going to use his fingers or something else to pull it out. Would he infect the wound if he used his fingers? He really should have a first aid kit, but that was in the bathroom that Al was currently in and destroying. Larry considered this for a few minutes.

Larry started blindly pawing around in the back corner of the closet. His hands found what he believed to be one of Elizabeth’s old purses. She probably had some alcohol swabs in there. She usually carried them to make sure she could disinfect cuts and scrapes if Ella fell down at the playground or something. God he missed Elizabeth. She had only been gone a year, but it felt like a lifetime. His life had become absolute and total chaos since she had died. Thankfully Ella had Emily to help her out because he was useless to her, especially now. He was a wreck before, but at least Ella had still had him every day. Now she was cut off from him. But it had to be that way. It was the only way to prevent Al from getting a foothold with her. He would never sacrifice his daughter to this horror. Never.

He was right. There were alcohol swabs in here, and a pair of tweezers. He forgot that Elizabeth kept those handy too to remove splinters. He silently offered Elizabeth a prayer of thanks. Too bad she didn’t carry Percocet he smiled to himself. This is going to hurt like blazes. He’s was going to have to stuff a sock in his mouth to keep from yelling, he knew it. He wasn’t big on pain. Not really one of those guys who said, “Rub some dirt in it,” and kept going.

Larry found a pair of gloves and hoped they were clean. He rolled them up and stuffed them in his mouth. After breathing in and out a couple of times he bit down and used the tweezers to pull a long thin evil-looking shard of glass out of his foot. It was a good thing he planned ahead because the pain was incredible. The shard, which was long and sword-like, was jammed pretty hard into his foot. Normally he would have screamed pretty loud, but his interest in surviving prevented him from giving his pain full voice.

The pain was huge. He almost passed out from the intensity. Thankfully, he whacked his elbow after pulling the glass out and it stunned him enough to bring him back from the foggy grayness that was descending upon him. He took a moment to let the remaining grayness pass and then focused upon the next order of business…staunching the flow of blood from the ball of his foot.

Quickly Larry tore open three alcohol swab pads. He applied one to his foot and tried hard not to make any noise as he felt the sting of the antiseptic work its way into his wound. Breathing deeply through his nose and out his mouth to steady himself, Larry pawed through the winter clothing and found a ski mask-type hat. He used that to cover his foot and tied a scarf over the ball of his foot and around his calf. He tied it snugly, but hopefully not tight enough to cut off circulation. He tested his foot by applying some weight to it and found that if he used the outer edge of his foot he could stand enough to maneuver around. The pain was still fairly ugly, but he thought he could live with it for now.

Suddenly Larry heard movement outside the closet. He held his breath. There was some crashing around in the hallway outside the closet. He heard Al making muttering noises – he doubted that Al actually could speak. It seemed that muttering in a very indistinct way was all that thing could manage. If Larry could have seen himself he would have seen the blood draining out of his face. He turned a waxy white with fear and stopped all movement altogether. He became a statue.

Larry began thinking his goose was cooked. There was absolutely no way he could get out of this closet and get past Al. Al was just too quick for him. The last time Al had been giving chase Larry would have been caught if he hadn’t tried to close a door with a mirror on the back of it. Al had become fascinated with his own image and stopped the chase. Al had the attention span of a child at times. It was almost comical how easy in some ways it was to distract the demon. But it was not a trait you could rely on. Al could also sometimes fixate on a thing and keep going until he had the thing he sought.

What was important now, however was that all escape routes seemed to be blocked. Larry was in a coat closet and it appeared that Al was right outside the door. He had not opened the door as of yet, but soon would if the noise level on the other side of the door was any indication. Larry planned to fight until the last, but the chances for him to escape appeared to be slim to none. Silently, Larry prayed that the end would be as painless as possible and that he resisted Al’s intrusion into his brain and soul as thoroughly as possible.

The spitting and hissing noise may have saved Larry’s life, or it may have been the reason for the noise outside the door in the first place. Perhaps it hadn’t been Al after all. It didn’t matter though because in an instant Al was there and the hissing turned into a throaty growling sound and then a scream of pain from Simka. Poor kitty.

Larry loved that cat. Apparently so did Al…in a very different way. Larry had to endure listening to the wet ripping sounds of Al eviscerating his cat Simka. It seemed to go on forever. Larry sat in the dark of the closet feeling both horrified and guilty. He was horrified at the smacking sounds of Al consuming his cat and guilty because of the relief he felt because he had survived due to Al being distracted by the cat.

There were no tears shed. Not because Larry was insensitive, but because he was just so horrified by what happened he felt any tears he shed would not do justice to what had just happened to Simka, his beloved cat. Larry’s mind shut down for a time. He just could not bear to listen to Al consuming his furry friend. Did cats have a soul? Right now, Larry sincerely hoped not. If this thing is what he suspected it was and had read about, not having a soul would be the kindest thing to wish upon his gentle pet.

Ella wanted her Daddy. It had been so long since she had been with her Daddy and she just did not understand why she couldn’t see him. Mommy had died so she couldn’t see her any more. That she understood. She didn’t like it, she missed her Mommy very much, but she understood that. When someone died you couldn’t see them anymore, especially after they were buried in the ground.

Her Mommy had died of cancer last year. Ella was very sad about that, but she had no idea why she couldn’t see her Daddy. She was living with Auntie Emily, and Auntie Emily kept telling her that eventually she would see her Daddy again, but that Daddy was sick. Auntie Emily said that Daddy was sick because he missed Mommy so much. Sometimes, Auntie Emily explained, people missed people so much and didn’t want to let go of them. They were so sad that they did things that could hurt themselves and other people. When Daddy learned how to handle his grief, Auntie Emily said he might come back. But she wasn’t sure when that might happen. Ella would have to be real patient and pray a lot for her Daddy to get better. Ella had seen Mommy when she was sick. She had prayed for her Mommy every night, but she never got better.
Would her Daddy get better? Ella didn’t know. She asked Auntie Emily what grief was, was it a serious illness like Mommy’s? Auntie Emily said that grief was not an illness. It was very deep sadness you felt when someone you loved died. Could you die from grief? Ella wanted to know. Auntie Emily said that while grief made you feel really sad and could make you feel very sick, most people did not die from grief. Was grief contagious Ella asked? No, Auntie Emily said, grief was not contagious, but many people grieved when someone they love dies. Auntie Emily said that grief was an emotion. Ella wanted to know if there was a medicine for grief. She wanted her Daddy to take medicine so he could get better and come back to her.
“No sweetheart, there is no medicine for grief,” Auntie Emily said, stroking Ella’s hair gently. “All we can do is wait. Time often helps people feel they can handle missing someone they love. Eventually, we all have to live our lives even though the person we love is gone. “

“Like how I went back to school after Mommy died,” Ella asked softly.

“Yes honey, just like that. Your Mommy loved you so much and she would want you to go to school, learn things and have friends. She wouldn’t want you to stay sad forever,” Auntie Emily said. “Your Daddy wants you to go to school too. He just can’t help being so sad. He misses Mommy so much.”

It had happened in the fall. Elizabeth had been diagnosed with uterine cancer in September and she had died six months later. There had been a lot of shock and a lot of pain. Elizabeth had understandably not taken the news well that her cancer was terminal. She had cried a lot and been very very angry. She was angry with God, she was angry with her doctors, and for a time she was angry with her husband. There had been no real reason to be angry with Larry, just that he was unable to fix it for her. She hated feeling helpless and wanted someone to do something about her disease.
Elizabeth had been to the doctor many times since her diagnosis. It was a fast-moving, aggressive form of cancer that had taken over her lymph nodes quicker than they were able to identify what stage it had been in. She had started with heavy, infrequent bleeding, and had increasing amounts of cramping and pain over the ensuing months.

Grieving the future she would miss out on with Ella, she gradually accepted her fate with grace and dignity. Larry and Elizabeth planned as much of their future with their daughter as they could, making a few trips as a family so as to give Ella a few last happy memories to keep in her heart when Elizabeth was gone.

When there was no more fighting that they could do to prevent the progression of the disease, they made the decision together to go on hospice care. They brought a hospital bed into their bedroom so Elizabeth wouldn’t have to be alone, and tried to make things as cozy as possible. Larry set Elizabeth’s bed up near the windows, as she had always loved the outdoors.

Ella liked to climb in bed with Elizabeth and read with her. When Elizabeth had still been healthy enough she read to Ella. They read Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Eric Carle and whatever else tickled their fancy. When Elizabeth had become too weak and ill, Ella read to her. Her sweet voice would fill the room and she would continue reading even after Elizabeth had fallen asleep. Ella also would brush Elizabeth’s hair and stroke her cheek. No mother and daughter had ever been closer. It was sweet, but also heartbreaking. Ella saw her mother fade away before her very eyes. Sometimes Larry wasn’t sure that was such a good thing, but Elizabeth reassured him and Ella told him over and over how much she loved cuddling with her Mommy.

Things weren’t always as bad as they were now. When “Al” had first shown up, Larry had thought that he might be able to handle it on his own. Larry thought back hard to see if he could remember Al’s arrival. Elizabeth had been diagnosed already and was getting quite ill. The cramps she was experiencing were getting increasingly difficult for her to endure. She was actually considering pain medication to handle the pain and pressure she was feeling.

They had gone to her doctor, Dr. Cotterman, and asked if there was anything she could do to stop the pain. Dr. Cotterman had been very honest with them. There wasn’t much to stop the pain, only medications to help her manage it. All of them had side effects and it was up to them to decide which side effects were ones that Elizabeth was willing to endure.

Elizabeth stuck with the over-the-counter medications as long as possible. When they finally stopped working, she accepted that she needed opiates to manage her pain. The day she started prescription medications, Elizabeth seemed to get run over by the cancer. She began to slip into oblivion more and more each day. Some days Larry would return from work and she would be asleep. Other days she would be staring out the window silently crying.

When Ella got off the bus from school Elizabeth perked up some. She would smile and laugh a little. Her color wouldn’t look quite as ashen. Unfortunately she would tire out more rapidly when Ella was with her. It was a happy kind of tired, but it came on her fairly quickly. Ella usually got about thirty minutes of lap time with Elizabeth before she had to let her sleep.

One day Larry had gone to the basement to find some more pillows for Elizabeth. She had been having more pain and he was hoping that propping her up further would take some of the pressure off her abdomen. If he could do this he was sure that Elizabeth would feel a little better…at least for a little while. He figured it was something he could do. He couldn’t prevent the disease from progressing, but he could make his wife a little more comfortable and ease her pain a little.

He was fumbling around trying to locate the pillows when he spotted his mother’s belongings. The trunk was there in the back corner of the basement. On top of the trunk were the two small boxes that he had last touched after his mother’s funeral. He walked over and picked up the box with the beautiful, dark-haired woman on it. He studied her face. Wasn’t she smiling last time I saw this? I swear she was smiling the last time I was down here; that’s impossible though, isn’t it? She’s clearly not smiling now. She looks pretty angry actually. She looks like she would kill me just as soon as she would look at me.

He put down the decorated box and picked up the simple one. It glowed mellowly in the light. He held it up to the light and looked at all four corners. The brass fittings were clean and shiny. The years had not dulled their surfaces, which seemed odd to Larry. No matter which angle he examined the box from, there appeared to be no signs of aging or damage. It might have come off the shelf at whatever shop his parents had purchased it from yesterday. Should he open it? Larry considered. This box was not something that belonged to him technically. His mother had left it in her will to Roberta. Roberta was a lover of artifacts like Mom had been. She may know more about this box than Larry did. But Roberta had not claimed it. Larry had told her it was here any time she wanted it, but Roberta had left it here. Did that mean she didn’t want it? Larry had no idea. What he did know was that since it wasn’t his, he had no right to be snooping inside to see the contents.

“Daddy?” Ella’s clear voice floated down the stairs. “Are you down there Daddy?”
Larry put the wooden box back on top of the trunk and turned to respond to Ella. “Yes Ella, I’m down here looking for more pillows for Mommy. Do you know where they are honey?”

“Silly Daddy, Auntie Emily moved the pillows. She said the basement wasn’t a good place for them because they would stay damp and smelly,” Ella said. “She put them in the laundry room on the shelf.”

Larry turned his back on the wooden box and went to the laundry room for the pillows. They were right where Ella said they would be, on the metal shelves near the laundry machines. He grabbed all three pillows and headed up the stairs. He found pillow cases for them in the ground-floor linen closet. He put those on and headed up the stairs with the pillows. He was able to make Elizabeth more comfortable that day and that was a win for him. There were fewer and fewer wins as the weeks passed. The cancer that would quickly take his wife’s life was very aggressive and seemed to leave no proverbial stone unturned. By the time Elizabeth had died the disease had ravaged almost every area of her body.

Elizabeth’s death had been awful. She had not gone quietly in her sleep, like they show in the movies. She also had not been unaware of her surroundings. She suffered an unbelievable amount of pain in spite of the opiates she was taking to manage it, and she was awake. Ella was in the room and Larry had been showering. When he had come home from work Elizabeth had appeared to be fairly comfortable, so he thought it had been a good time to try to slip in a shower. The nurse had headed home and her relief was 10 minutes away. So Larry had thought a quick shower that would be over probably even before the relief nurse had arrived would be fine.

Boy was he wrong. He had no sooner slipped his underwear off and stepped into the hot spray of the shower when he heard screaming. He couldn’t tell over the hiss of the shower if the screaming was Elizabeth or Ella. It didn’t matter anyway, he chastised himself. The two people in the next room were more important to him than anyone else in his life could ever have been. He jumped out of the shower and immediately slipped on the slick tile of the bathroom floor. Whacking his elbow hard, his funny bone sang its buzzing song through his arm. He was able to catch himself before falling any further and doing more damage thankfully. Rubbing his elbow he dashed out the bathroom door tying his bathrobe around him as he ran to the bedroom. When he got to Elizabeth’s bedside, he saw his wife of thirty-five years bent in half grabbing at her midsection and screaming.

“OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHHH! PLEASE GOD, MAKE IT STOP!” After making these exclamations Elizabeth would rock left and right and whimper for a bit. After a minute or so of what appeared to be relief, the pains would start again, louder this time, “OHHHHHHHHHHHH! MY GOD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

In a horrible sort of way it reminded Larry of when Elizabeth had been in labor with Ella. She had pain in waves like this – they called them contractions – but judging from the level of Elizabeth’s screaming these were MUCH more painful.

Larry rushed to Elizabeth’s side, hoping to be of some comfort to this beautiful woman who had been his soul mate and friend for so long. He threw his arms around her and began rocking with her. “Shhhhhh my dear. I know it hurts. Try to take some deep breaths and relax,” he slipped back into doing what he had when coaching Elizabeth through the labor and delivery of Ella. He hoped that it helped, if even a little bit.“In through the nose, out through the mouth,” Larry soothed Elizabeth. He rubbed her back and shoulders and held back the urge to cry.

Elizabeth seemed to relax a little for a few moments. Larry thought the wave of pain might have passed, and began to relax himself. His wife’s face was even paler than usual and sweating. Big dark circles marked her eyes and made them look sunken. Her lips, which in health had been full and a beautiful pink, were a shriveled, pale purple. Her chest rose and fell rapidly. She was having difficulty breathing. There was a rattling sound in her chest, like she might have fluid building up in her lungs. Larry would have to talk to the nurse about that. He wouldn’t want her developing pneumonia on top of all she already had to contend with.

In the midst of Larry thinking about her lungs, Elizabeth touched his face. “Honey?” Her voice seemed so out of sync with what she had been enduring. It was soft, clear and filled with the old Elizabeth who had been healthy, happy and warm. “Lar, I only have a few more minutes,” Elizabeth said. “Where’s Ella?”

Oh gosh! In dealing with Elizabeth’s pain he had forgotten all about Ella. He looked around the room. At first, he thought they were alone in the room. It was very quiet, with just the sound of the breeze coming through the windows and the sound of the music Elizabeth liked, soft and low.

After his eyes had adjusted to the bright light near the window Larry saw her. His daughter, his little angel, his sweet little girl was sitting on the floor in the corner. He hadn’t seen her at first because the corner she was in was shaded by the window frames and the book shelf that was up against the wall. As Larry approached, he saw that Ella was shaking. He sat down on the floor near her and what he saw almost broke his heart in two. The five year old girl who was the center of his universe was shaking and sobbing quietly.

“Ella?” Larry approached her by sliding over and sitting next to her. “Come here honey,” Larry said softly. “Don’t cry here by yourself.”

“I’m not crying!” Ella insisted. She had always had some kind of issue with admitting when she was crying, like she was ashamed of it or something. His daughter pulled away.

“Okay, you’re not crying,” Larry conceded. “No one would blame you if you were though you know,” he offered. “It was kind of scary hearing Mommy yell like that. She’s okay now though sweetie. She had some boo boos in her tummy, but they seem to have stopped hurting for now.” Larry hoped that they were done hurting for a while. He was not sure he could endure her screaming like that for long.

“No, Mommy isn’t okay Daddy. She is far from okay,” Ella sobbed. “She’s very angry with me. I was sitting with her when she started yelling. I might have squished her too much,” Ella said quietly and hung her head.

“No sweetheart. It wasn’t you. I know it. Mommy’s tummy is hurting a whole lot lately. She doesn’t always know when it will start hurting and sometimes her medicine doesn’t work to stop it from hurting. It’s not your fault, honest,” Larry reached out for Ella.

“She was screaming Daddy, and it was loud. She scared me,” Ella confided.

“I know honey, it IS scary when she screams like that,” Larry soothed her. “She can’t help it though. Her tummy really hurts.”

“Is it ever going to stop hurting?” Ella asked. “It’s not fair that Mommy’s tummy hurts. She is a nice Mommy and nice Mommies should never hurt bad enough to scream,” Ella poked out her bottom lip in a pout.

“It will sweetheart,” Larry reassured her. “Some day Mommy won’t be in any more pain. Some day nothing will hurt on her.”

At that moment, Elizabeth said, “Larry, I need you right now.”

“Go Daddy, Mommy needs you,” Ella said, relieving Larry of any guilt he may have felt at leaving his only daughter to struggle with issues of life and death on the floor by herself.

“I’ll be right back honey,” Larry said.

“No Daddy, I’m coming,” Ella stated.

“I’m not sure…” he trailed off, worried that it might not be a good idea to bring his daughter over in case Elizabeth had another bout.

“Lar, bring her,” Elizabeth said. Her voice sounded so tired.

“You sure Liz?” he replied.

“Yes, I’m sure,” she said firmly.

Ella walked over to her mother hesitantly; as if afraid she was going to be punished. She was twirling her hair like she always did when she was nervous and shifting from foot to foot. She looked over her mother’s shoulder toward the door.

“Ella?” Elizabeth said softly.

“Yes Mommy?” Ella replied.

“I’m sorry I screamed when you were in my lap. It wasn’t your fault. My belly was hurting honey, but it doesn’t anymore,” Elizabeth smiled sadly. She shifted a little and gave Ella an affectionate hug. “It’s almost over now. I promise.”

Ella had enough time to smile and look at her mother lovingly before Elizabeth shot Larry a pained look. She was clearly struggling to hold herself together and Larry moved quickly to help. “Ella, we need to let Mommy rest now. She gets tired really quickly. Can you give her a kiss and a hug goodnight?”

“Can’t we read together tonight Daddy?” Ella cajoled. “I promise, I’ll go to bed right after. I promise promise PROMISE.”

Elizabeth was struggling clearly with her pain. Ella’s attention was focused on Larry while she waited for his answer, so she didn’t notice the grimace on Elizabeth’s face.

“I wish you could honey,” Larry had to choke back hard on tears to finish. “Mommy really needs to go to sleep now. You can see her in the morning.”

Ella frowned. “Okay Daddy. Mommy needs to sleep. I understand.” She turned and kissed her mother on the cheek and bent to hug her. For a moment, Elizabeth did not meet Ella’s outreached arms. “Mommy, are you okay? You don’t look so good,” the little girl who thought the sun rose and set on her mother asked.

“I’m fine sweetheart,” Elizabeth began to cough. “Go to bed honey.” Elizabeth leaned forward to hug Ella and began to cough harder. When she looked up at Larry she had a frantic, frightened look on her face.

Larry quickly moved Ella down the hall to her bedroom. He kissed her and tucked her into bed. “I’ll be back after I make sure your mom is all settled in, okay?” Ella nodded, smiled and settled down with her teddy bear, Boo. “Are you going to be alright Ella?”

“Yes Daddy, go help Mommy. Tell her I love her more,” Ella smiled and closed her eyes. She would be asleep soon Larry thought.

Larry kissed Ella on the forehead and headed back to the bedroom he shared with Elizabeth. He was hearing choking sounds as he moved down the hall. He began to walk faster. When he heard wet noises after the coughing, Larry began to run.
Throwing open the door to their room, Larry saw more blood than he thought was possible for one human being to have. Elizabeth was covered in it, from her bottom jaw to the end of the bed and onto the floor. It was too late to do anything to help her now. Her body was slack and still. It seemed clear that Elizabeth had been vomiting blood in the end. He sat on the end of the bed and cried. Deep wracking sobs that felt as though they tore something loose. He inched his way up the side of the bed and gathered Elizabeth onto his lap, the same way he liked to hold Ella in his lap when reading to her at night.

When the relief nurse arrived (she had been running a little late because she had to put gas in her car), she found Larry rocking his wife’s corpse in his lap and quietly crying.

Larry eventually came out of his grief-induced stupor. When he did his sister Emily was there. The nurse had called her when she had arrived at their home and seen what had occurred. Emily was rubbing Larry’s back and softly talking to him.

“I know honey, she’s gone. We are all going to miss her. But her suffering is over now. I’ll stay as long as you need me too. Don’t worry about Ella, I’ll take care of her. I promise. You don’t have to worry about a thing until you are ready to,” Emily continued to rub Larry’s back and whisper her support and encouragement to him.

She was always there for him. It was a good thing because Larry needed someone to be there now. He felt lost without Elizabeth. He knew that Ella needed him, but he couldn’t believe that Elizabeth was gone. Without Elizabeth, he had no idea what to do now. Her supportive, kind governance of their little family had always kept Larry grounded. When he took a leap of faith into one of his new ventures aimed at growing the family coffers, it was Elizabeth who kept them in touch with reality.
Where did that leave them now? Not only did he miss all the beauty Elizabeth possessed (and passed on to their daughter), but he wouldn’t know how to function day to day without her stable presence to keep him in check. Now his imagination was unfettered and unrestrained. It could choose any path it wanted, and Larry found that disturbing.

“Larry. Larry. Lar? We need to call the doctor or something. Ella shouldn’t come in and find Elizabeth like this,” Emily’s pragmatism was very comforting to Larry. It was just like Elizabeth. Elizabeth would be thinking about Ella in a situation like this too.

Larry sat up. It was clear that he had been crying and rocking Elizabeth for some time. His back was aching and his eyes had that washed-out feeling you get after you had been crying for a long time. He should check on Ella. There’s no telling what she had seen and heard if she hadn’t stayed asleep through all of this.

Had Elizabeth screamed or cried out as she died? Larry didn’t think so. The last thing he could remember was tucking Ella in and telling her that he was going back to help Mommy. But he hadn’t helped at all. He had left his wife to die alone. Her death had been a horrific, choking and vomiting thing too. He had done nothing to comfort her. No one had been there for her in her last moments. Had she been frightened? Larry thought she had been because she had a frightened look on her face the last time he had seen her alive. He had attributed that to her worrying about Ella seeing her in pain as she had earlier. Larry had thought she hadn’t wanted Ella to see her sobbing and clutching her gut. He hadn’t thought for a moment that she was truly terrified of anything.

It appeared, however, that she had been terrified of something. When Larry went to his room after checking on Ella (who was, mercifully, still asleep), he noticed that there were some things out of place. Heavy things. Things that were quite a distance from where they usually rested. Most of the items misplaced were items that usually sat on the end tables near Elizabeth. They were things like paperweights (particularly heavy ones), bookends, one free-weight Larry had left on the night stand that he used to work out while getting ready for bed, and a clay figurine that Ella had painted for Elizabeth last year.

Why were they on the floor across the room? Had Elizabeth accidentally flung them when she was throwing up? If that were the case, why were the lamps untouched? Why weren’t all the items swept off the top of the night stand? The pen and paper near the phone were still in place. Those would surely have been knocked to the floor if it was because Elizabeth had been convulsing, wouldn’t they? Why were the paper weights from both nightstands across the room? She was only propped up near one side of the bed. She would have had to have moved to the other side and purposely have grabbed the other paper weight and the free-weight in order to have reached them. Wouldn’t she?

Emily had got the call from Nurse Amy an hour ago. The nurse was crying and apologizing. She said that she had been a few minutes late because her car needed gas. When she had arrived, what she had seen was straight out of a horror movie. Elizabeth had been bathed in her own blood and Larry had been hysterically crying with her in his lap. All the IV lines had come loose and there was no way for the nurse to know if that had happened before or after Elizabeth’s death. If it had happened before, that meant Elizabeth had been unable to make her morphine pump deliver the needed pain medication. If it had happened afterwards, how did it happen? Had Larry removed them? If so, how? He would have had to have been a lot more cognizant of his surroundings to do that and Amy didn’t believe that was possible. Not unless Larry was an award-winning actor.

Amy felt horrible for the family. Elizabeth had been a kind woman. She didn’t deserve such a horrible death. Amy had been hoping the patient would slip away in her sleep peacefully. That would have been the best outcome for the family, but it hadn’t happened that way.

As she began cleaning up the room, Amy also began to worry about how her being a tad late might affect her employment. It wasn’t her main concern of course, but she was definitely worried. This scene was pretty bad. Once the husband and sister-in-law dealt with the immediate situation, she was sure they would be complaining to her boss. If there was another complaint to her boss, she might get written up. If she was written up, there would be no raise. If there was no raise, she would have to tell her son no summer camp. That would be a real problem. With the neighborhood that she lived in, she did not want her son just hanging around all summer. He’d get in trouble for sure. There were lots of kids who were more than willing to pick a fight if they had the opportunity, and Danny never seemed able to back down from a fight.

Maybe if she worked really hard she could clean up the mess and put the bedroom back to rights. It might mean then they would let her lapse go and not complain. Besides, they would have other responsibilities drawing their attention, right? They had to make funeral arrangements, call relatives and deliver the news, etc. They would also have to help that little girl cope with losing her mother too. Yes, they would be too busy to mess up her plans.

Oh my gosh! What was she thinking? That was horrible of her. Here this nice family had just lost a wife and mother who was by all accounts a wonderful, giving and kind woman. They were employing her sorry butt and what does she do? She focuses on her own selfish ass and her job. That was awful. She was going to try to make it up to them by really cleaning up and helping anywhere they wanted her help. [Perhaps THEN her job would be secured] She couldn’t believe the selfish thoughts she had been having!

Grabbing a stiff brush, some rags, and a bucket of hot soapy water, Amy headed into the bedroom. She was so glad that the rugs were washable and the hardwood floor had been polyurethaned. It meant that she would be able to clean up fairly quickly. She could launder the bed linens and hopefully erase the remnants of Elizabeth’s last horrible moments on earth.

She began stripping the linens off the bed. There was a washing machine and dryer combination in the basement. She would lug it all down there and make sure the blood and vomit was washed thoroughly out of it. It wasn’t until she started this process that she noticed something was a little strange. There were smear marks on the patient’s ears. Like she had tried to wipe something off. Amy grabbed one of Elizabeth’s hands and looked at it closely. There was blood smeared across the palm of her left hand. Why would it be smeared? You didn’t usually wipe at your mouth that way when you were throwing up. It was unlikely that Elizabeth was trying to keep her hair out of the way – she began wearing a short cropped style shortly after she was diagnosed. Probably to make it easier to maintain. Maybe in anticipation of losing her hair during chemotherapy. Whatever the reason was, it was unlikely that Elizabeth had been doing either of those things. So why the bloody smeared marks on her ears and hands?

Hell, what did she know? She was just an R.N. and she was acting like she was a goddamn forensic specialist. Amy shook her head and tried to bring her mind to the task at hand, namely, cleaning up this god-forsaken mess. She returned her attention to the soiled linens. She stripped them off (while she did this she had gently placed Elizabeth in the small cot next to the bed. Sometimes Ella slept here when she wanted to be close to her mother), and put on fresh sheets and pillows. Very careful to be respectful of the former lady of the house, Amy returned Elizabeth to the bed.

After she had finished moving her patient, Amy decided that it would be a kindness to clean her up before Ella woke up. She didn’t think Larry would want his daughter to walk in and see blood all over her mother. That would give the poor child nightmares for months. No, she shouldn’t see her mother that way. Amy had a moment’s pause where she thought to herself that perhaps she was overstepping a boundary of some sort by assuming it was okay to do this, but frankly, Amy didn’t care. She thought that Larry and his sister were probably in shock over Elizabeth’s death and hadn’t been able to think through what would happen when Ella woke up. Amy would step up and help this family out. If that got her written up, then so be it. She knew she was doing the right thing. The family didn’t need to see the crimson smears all over Elizabeth’s ears, jaw, and front. That would be too horrible for them to bear. She was going to do the Christian thing and spare them unnecessary pain.

Amy got the things she needed gathered together to sponge-bathe the patient. She laid fresh clothing for Elizabeth out on the bed and stripped off her blood-soaked clothing. Always respecting Elizabeth’s dignity, Amy kept the parts of her body that weren’t being washed covered. Starting with Elizabeth’s blood-smeared ears Amy washed her very carefully. She rinsed her sponge and wrung it out over the sink. The crimson stream of water that swirled down the drain was very disturbing to her. Why on earth did she have blood on her ears? She would have to let Elizabeth’s oncologist know about that. Perhaps they knew something about the progression of the disease that she didn’t. She was, after all, a nurse. Doctors spent more time digging down into the specific presentations of each disease than she did. So perhaps Dr. Edwards knew why she would have blood in her ears. Judging by the amount she was clearing off the sides of Elizabeth’s face, there was a lot of blood coming out of her ears. That was quite unusual in all the patients that she had ever been with or heard about.

Amy began to think about how Elizabeth’s last moments had been, blood streaming out of her ears and onto the coverlet. There must have been a lot of pain involved, for her ears to bleed enough to cause her to dig at her ears. That’s what seemed to have happened based on the scratching marks on the sides of Elizabeth’s face. It appeared that she had, in the end, dug at her ears, perhaps to get something out of her ears. There were long, deep gouges on the sides of Elizabeth’s face that began in the ear canals on both sides of her head and ran down her cheeks almost to her neck. Why would she have done that? The bulk of the pain from uterine cancer was usually centered upon the patient’s abdomen, not her ears. Was it a secondary infection? Amy had absolutely no idea. She decided to let the doctor know what she had seen, but to stop thinking about what the scene had been upon her entry to the room for now. Her head felt dizzy and her stomach was queasy. She would not be able to finish her job if she continued thinking along these lines, and that would never do. She could never leave her patient in such an undignified manner.

Amy returned her thoughts to cleaning Elizabeth up and redressing her. She focused upon her jaw, neck, breast and sides next. Those were absolutely bathed in blood. Clearly she had been throwing up in the end. With no one present in the room to assist her, there was no way for her to stem the tide of vomit and she was too weak to get anywhere to contain it. Amy let one silent tear slide out from the corner of her eye and run down her cheek. This was just awful. She should have been here to help Elizabeth manage this. At the very least she could have been here with her so she wouldn’t have to have died alone. Larry had been here but from what he said he had gone down the hall to tuck his daughter in to bed. Not an awful thing to do of course, but the timing couldn’t have been worse in regards to what Elizabeth had been enduring. That was clear.

Returning the sponge to the sink again to rinse it off, Amy’s spirits felt very low. She felt guilty for not being where she was supposed to be, but she also felt deep sorrow for Elizabeth. Elizabeth had been a kind person. Even when she was in her worst pain she never had gotten mean to Amy. She was patient, she was respectful, and she was never more demanding than what she truly needed. That was rare in Amy’s experience. Some patients used their illness to be very needed in all kinds of ways, and while Amy understood why and never refused a request (or demand as was sometimes the case), it sometimes got tiring.

Amy was not exactly old, but she wasn’t a teenager anymore either. She had some pains in her back and at times the physical aspects of the job got to her. Running up and down the stairs to get fresh water, soup, more comfortable pillows, magazines, books, beloved pets, ibuprofen, or the various other things she was required to get bothered her knees. She would have to have a doctor look at them soon, as they sometimes were swollen at night. Perhaps she had arthritis.
But Elizabeth had always been kind to Amy. She very often encouraged Amy to sit and have lunch with her. She would even argue for her to sit down if Amy protested that she needed to keep working. “Keeping my spirits up is part of the job, right Amy? I don’t see too many people anymore since I fell ill, so if you would stop and have lunch with me for a while, it would really cheer me up,” she would insist. Amy would acquiesce to her requests many times, as her knees were really hurting and her back often had a painful knot in it by lunch time. Sitting and eating her lunch with Elizabeth would often be just the kind of rest that was needed to help her make it through the day. Twenty minutes of sitting was heaven to Amy and Elizabeth was so kind to recognize it.

She would miss this family when her responsibilities here were completed. This tiny family had been so very kind to her, even sending birthday presents home to her son Danny. Danny had been overwhelmed by their generosity, insisting he come with her on one of her shifts to say thank you. Amy had tried to reason with Danny that he could send a thank-you note.

“No way Mom, “Danny had shaken his head. “There is no way I am going to do something as impersonal as a note to thank them for the X-box and the back pack they sent,” he shook his head again, “No way. You are just going to have to let me come next week.”
So she had. She had let him come with her on Wednesday, completely against the VNA’s policy. But she had agreed with him. Somehow, a note just didn’t feel like the right way to say thank you, especially since this family was going through their own brand of hell right now and they still had taken the time to think of her son. She had gambled her job on the idea that this family would not report her. She had been right about that intuition and Danny had accompanied her to the Bell’s.

On her way over she had thought that Danny would become bored and start to bug her to go home before her shift was over. She was wrong. Not only did Danny not bug her to go home, but he helped out wherever he could. He ran up and down the stairs to get all the little things that Elizabeth needed. Whether it was ice water, pillows, snacks, or magazines, Danny was on it. He was truly a good boy. She hoped to keep him that way and eventually, she hoped he would make the good choices on his own.
With his help, Amy was able to focus most the energy of her home visit on catching up some of the things she couldn’t always manage. Things like changing out Elizabeth’s pic line, flushing her IV’s and going over the medications with Elizabeth. She liked to review them from time to time with the patients she was taking care of. It helped to ensure that the pain management stayed at a level it needed to be without taking away a patient’s awareness any sooner than necessary. Eventually most patients chose to increase the pain management medications to a point where they were no longer aware of their surroundings – Amy’s understanding was that end-stage cancer was truly a viciously painful thing, so she begrudged them nothing. However, Elizabeth refused to give in to the pain any more than necessary. She had confided about this to Amy once, “I can’t let it win Amy,” she said, determined not to increase the morphine dosage.

Amy admired Elizabeth for that. She wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have upped the dosage. After all, as harsh as it sounds, it wasn’t as if Elizabeth was going to get better. Cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and was detected in various areas of her body (including her brain, Amy thought, which might explain the blood coming out of her ears). She was only going to get worse. Why not enjoy the highs you could get before succumbing to this awful disease?

Realizing that she was almost finished bathing her former patient, Amy prepared to dress her. She looked clean and void of any of the horrible clots of blood that had accumulated in the various cracks and crevices of her body. Just as she was about to put Elizabeth’s underwear on she saw what looked like bite marks on her inner thighs. She did a double-take and looked closer. No! There’s no way that was possible, was it? What the HELL would bite marks be doing there? Those had to be something else. They looked like bite marks, but they were much too small to be human. They had to be from an animal if they were indeed bite marks. But how would that be possible? How would anything do that? She had been dressed from head to toe in her pajamas and there were no other signs of an animal’s presence in the room or on Elizabeth. The only animals the Bells had were cats. They had four cats. Would a cat do this? Bite her in this manner? Was Amy going to see one of the family cats striding around with bloody fur? The thought made Amy want to vomit. She truly hoped not. What would the Bells do if that was the case? Would they keep the cat? She couldn’t see how they would. That was just too horrible. True, a cat was just an animal and it would be responding to its surroundings as any animal would, but the thought of one of the felines in residence sinking its teeth into the soft flesh of Elizabeth’s thigh would be just to gruesome to consider. It would give Ella nightmares for weeks even if she didn’t know about the bites. Just seeing blood on fur so soon after her mother’s death might be enough to send her over the edge. Amy would have to find a way to casually examine the cats to determine if what her horrified mind had suggested was true.
………………………
Larry was devastated. He knew his wife was going to die. He had had weeks to absorb the awful facts. He had struggled prodigiously with the fact that he was unable to do anything at all to prevent it. He witnessed his wife wasting away before his very eyes each day. She slowly was losing her vibrancy, losing her sparkle, and losing ground. His beloved Elizabeth was still as sweet, kind and loving as ever, but he knew what was coming. He had even thought that it was coming soon, but not the way it had come. The actual circumstances of his wife’s death were tearing him up inside. He never thought his wife was going to die all alone. He had never intended that to happen. It hadn’t been his plan. It had just been that his little Ella had needed him. Whatever Elizabeth had been enduring today Ella should not witness it. He knew that the part of him that was Ella’s dad was right. It was right and proper that he had taken her out of the room and tucked her in…taken her away from whatever horror show was going to happen next for Elizabeth. He knew that it was going to be a horror show because of the look on her face. Elizabeth clearly had been fighting tooth and nail with whatever she had been enduring to not let Elizabeth see what was going to happen next.

The husband part of Larry felt that he had abandoned his wife in the worst possible way. He felt a coward. Had there not been the tiniest part of him that experienced relief when he had left the room, with Ella in tow? Relief from watching the love of his life suffer. Relief at having something to distract him from the fact that she had a painful, lonely death to endure? Of course he hadn’t known she was going to die that moment, but he knew she was close to death in the next few days. Had there not been a few mornings where he was not sure when he woke up that she was still breathing? The part of him that had experienced this relief felt he was a coward. He was not a man at all, unable as he had been, to be with his wife in her last few pain-filled moments. He had stolen all the intimacies of being her husband and returned to her the cold fact of a hard and lonely death.

Larry cried for Elizabeth. He cried for the loneliness she probably felt while dying. He cried because she had been in such pain for so long. He cried because he was forced to witness her pain, loneliness and grief over a life not fully lived. He cried also for all the things he would never get to experience with her. He would never again go hiking with her as they had liked to do each spring. He would never get to take another vacation at the beach with her. He would never watch television cuddled up with her under a blanket. It was all gone forever.

Larry experienced this grief as a selfish thing. He had no thoughts of what Ella would miss out on not having her mother with her as she grew up. Those thoughts would come later. He was only thinking to himself about all the things he was going to miss by not having his friend, lover and life-time companion with him. She was the practical one. However would he remain grounded? Who was going to keep him from spending the family fortune on some hare-brained get rich quick scheme? Who was going to play Scrabble with him? Now he was going to have to watch Dancing with the Stars alone. He would have no one to critique each contestant with.

Getting up from the couch where he had collapsed to cry, Larry wandered around the house aimlessly. He touched various things that reminded him of Elizabeth. He approached the computer in the kitchen that she had used to Skype with her friend Frannie, and put his hand on the mouse. Frannie and Elizabeth had been friends since her college days. They had both taken journalism classes and aspired to be writers for magazines. Frannie was now the travel editor for National Geographic and never missed a Skype session with Elizabeth. Every Thursday night at 9 pm, no matter what part of the world she was in. How was he going to tell Frannie that Elizabeth was gone? She knew that Elizabeth was sick, but had not managed to get away to come see her yet. She was in Paris and had said at the first opportunity she had she would come home. Her first opportunity was going to be Elizabeth’s funeral.

Moving along, Larry walked into the glassed-in breakfast nook that Elizabeth loved to drink coffee and read in. Every morning over toast, coffee and whatever she was in the mood to breakfast on, Elizabeth had read letters, paid bills, and read through junk mail. While Elizabeth did not waste money, she frequently found items in the circulars that she just HAD to have. Very often she was showing Larry the latest gadget that was going to improve their lives or new furniture for one of the rooms in the house. Elizabeth had a keen eye for interior design and usually she knew what would look good in a certain spot without first seeing it there. Larry had no idea how she did this.

A fresh gush of tears overcame Larry. He couldn’t bear this. The endless stabs at his heart as he was reminded in almost every room he entered of who his wife was. Wasn’t there any room of the house that didn’t smack of his best friend? All he could think of was the basement. He headed down the stairs blindly, groping for the railing and swiping at his eyes with his forearm. He stumbled over a box for a moment, almost fell over, and then caught himself at the last second on the railing.
There was an old chair down here that his mother had moved downstairs when he and Elizabeth had moved in with her. Overstuffed it had been very comfortable, but it was becoming threadbare. His mother couldn’t bear to part with it because it was his father’s. “When I’m gone you can do as you please Larry, but until I am can you humor an old woman who doesn’t have much time left?”

Larry hung his head in defeat. It seemed he wouldn’t be able to leave his grief on the upper floors. It would just be grief for another person. His mother had been a good woman, and he still missed her very much. But today he just couldn’t handle thinking about her. He lurched past the chair, and went deeper into the basement.
There were some boxes of nails near the workbench. Nothing sentimental about them. Larry had just had a box of nails here to do the various repair projects that cropped up around the house as they do in any house. He usually tried to fix things himself, although he would admit a handy-man would have done them better. He was no expert carpenter. He didn’t have many skills in the way of plumbing, electricity or masonry either. Due to his fear of heights Larry had never tried roofing. That was the one area he allowed the experts to handle. Every year they brought in college students to repaint the trim, clear the gutters and check the roofing tiles. If it appeared that they needed replacing, Larry always brought in professionals to do it.
Enough about the workbench Larry thought. Surely it was a distraction, but there had to be something more interesting down here than a box of nails. He looked around the walls in a distracted sort of way. There were hammers, saws, levels, drills. All the usual crap for building, repairing and altering a home was here. Larry got a little deeper into the area that served as his workbench and ran across the small wooden pieces he had been working on for Ella’s room before she had been born. He had intended to build his daughter a small wooden train complete with tracks before she was born. This was a real obsession for Larry during Elizabeth’s pregnancy. He had bought fine-grade sandpaper and was sanding each car of the train so it would be real smooth. After all he didn’t want his little girl getting splinters from the wood. He had been sanding each car smooth and was going to paint it in primary colors to catch his little bundle of joy’s attention. What was going to be really neat about this train set was that while Ella was too small to play with trains it had little eye-hooks on the top that would allow it to be connected to a mobile Larry had intended to be hung from a mobile over Ella’s crib. Such grand plans he had, never to be finished. Larry sighed, picked up some sandpaper and began to sand the caboose. It was if he had just put it down yesterday. Larry escaped into this creative spot in the looking glass and just picked up where he had left off.
Hours later, Larry was putting the last coat of paint on the train set. It was red, blue and yellow. The smokestack on the lead car was black, as were all the wheels. He had completely immersed himself in the project and had no clear idea of what time it was. His mind had sort of checked out for a while and his hands had just taken over. He had succeeded in escaping his grief in the creative process for a while. But now he was disoriented. There were no windows in the basement, so Larry had no idea whether it was day or night. He didn’t know if Ella had been tended to, and he had only the fuzziest of notions that he would need to investigate the situation upstairs and start making his wife’s funeral arrangements.

He felt husked out from crying – he had continued, unaware the whole time of the crying. His insides felt oddly cleaned out and ready for something else. Larry had no clue what that might be, but he was cleaned out and ready nonetheless. He began to walk toward the basement staircase. As he did so, something to his left caught his attention. Did something move? He wondered if his cats were down here. Simka, General Tsao, Bitsy and Cooter liked to play in the basement, but usually bolted when they heard the noise of others in the vicinity. “Simka?”

Larry walked towards where he had heard the sound and seen the flicker of movement, but there were no cats. He was just turning to head up the stairs when his eyes spotted the boxes on top of his mother’s trunk again. Even though he knew that he should probably go upstairs and return to his life, the basement felt safe to him. He wanted to remain here for just a bit longer. He wanted to leave his grief upstairs and stay down here where it hadn’t found him yet.

Larry’s eyes cast about the low-lit room. They found the two boxes again and he slowly drifted over to them to inspect them more closely. This time he picked up the box with the woman on it. She looked very angry, and he wondered what had happened to anger her so. The set of her jaw, the furrow in her brow and the high color in her cheeks made him uncomfortable, but the fury in her eyes made him take a step back. What could the artist have been thinking to catch this particular emotion on this woman? Why on earth would he or she have wanted to have painted her in this way on the box? For what possible purpose? To what end?

Re-examining the box closely, Larry noticed that the edges were rounded and fitted with brass corners. There were matching brass hinges and a brass latch with a keyhole with a set of keys hanging out of them. Larry hadn’t noticed the keys before. Had they been there? Larry would have sworn to anyone that may have asked that they hadn’t been there previously. But they must have been. How else to explain their existence now?

Despite Larry’s intentions of leaving the box alone, he found himself staring at the little brass keys. The box had been sitting for a couple years. What difference would it make if he opened the box now? Roberta hadn’t bothered with it in all the time since Mom had died. Why should she care if he took a little peek inside?
He tried the first key in the lock. It was stuck. He wiggled it a bit and the key slid in a bit more to the lock. Very gingerly, so as not to break the key off in the lock, Larry tried twisting the metal in the tumblers. He heard a soft snick sound and felt a small movement vibrate through his fingers. There was a last moment where Larry felt a cold unreasoning fear slip through his belly like a knife, and then the lid was open. Something that smelled horrible blew past him and then was gone. An empty box was all that was left.

Laughter escaped Larry’s lips. He had been so curious about this box for so long. True, he had been able to resist temptation for quite some time, but he had been very intrigued nonetheless. All that suspense was for naught. The box itself was the treasure. While it was a very beautifully adorned box, he doubted he would keep it. The very angry woman on the front made keeping it somehow distasteful to him. He did not want to give the box to Ella because of that. It seemed to be bad luck somehow. Like giving a box with such an angry countenance on it would jinx Ella somehow.
Larry closed the box carefully. He would probably sell the box on eBay or something. As he was closing the box he noticed something immensely strange. The woman on the box caught his attention once more. Just as he was about to put the box back where he had been storing it, she smiled and winked. He was certain of it. There was no way that she was smiling five minutes ago. Five minutes ago she had looked furious. She had looked like a woman scorned. Larry had in fact thought to himself that he had no idea why his mother would have purchased a box with a very angry woman on the front.

Suddenly Larry thought to himself, “Where’s the tea set? That’s odd. Mom said she loved that tea set and would never part with it. So where is it now?” Larry was very puzzled at this realization. Thinking he would have to investigate that if he didn’t turn up the tea set soon, Larry investigated the box with more scrutiny.

Turning the box this way and that, Larry looked for other clues on it as to what the significance of the smiling/frowning woman on the side was. He found nothing. He put the box down, a shade disappointed. Then he thought that perhaps there were clues about this box on the other, plainer box. He was sure that they were a set. He picked that one up and turned it over carefully, so as not to upset the contents. He studied every inch of the box. Except for on the center of the bottom, there was nothing distinguishing this box from any other wooden box. In the center of the bottom of the box was a small symbol. It was a scorpion.

How odd. What did this plain box with the scorpion on it have to do with the other, more ornately adorned box with the beautiful woman on it? Larry had no idea how important it would later become to him to know how these two boxes were related. Shrugging his shoulders, Larry shifted his attentions to opening the plain box. There was a brass or gold catch on the front, just as there was on the decorated box. This catch appeared to have been broken however. There was a tiny dent in the lower-most point of the catch. Someone had clearly forced their way into the box.
Larry flipped the catch back and prepared himself to see another empty box. He was mistaken yet again. What he saw when he opened the lid was a tea set. A tea set as ornately decorated as the opposite box was decorated on the outside. In fact the décor was very similar to what was on the box in color scheme and feel. This made Larry feel more certain that the boxes were a matched set. He took each piece out of the set and put them on top of the trunk his mother had left behind. There were two tea cups, two saucers, a cup with no handles, a teapot, and a white set of chopsticks.

Sitting back, Larry considered the set. His parents had picked it up in Thailand many years ago. Why had they never used it? On winter nights his mother and father both liked to have a nice hot cup of tea and bundle themselves up under a blanket to read. Having the teapot under a cozy to keep the tea hot would be a wonderful way to keep the tea supply piping hot and ready to drink near their favorite reading spots in the living room. Why buy a tea set just to pack it away? That seemed strange to Larry. He supposed that everyone had a different way of doing things. They didn’t have to see things his way. He just thought it odd to buy something and pack it away in the basement never to be used.

No matter. Larry repacked the tea set into its velvet-lined box and tucked it all under his arm and brought it upstairs. He never even looked at the box with the woman on it. It never crossed his mind to check the box and see what mood his mysterious lady-in-waiting was wearing. If he had, he might have been a tad disturbed. She was angry again. Very angry.

It was free, finally free. It had been an age since it had been free to roam. Free to explore. Free to taste and tease and torture. These were its three favorite things to do- taste, tease and torture. Not sure why it was free it careened around its new area blindly, smashing into things and knocking things over. The horrible container that it had been restrained in had at times made it insane with rage, but no matter what it had tried, it couldn’t smash the container open. It would go through these crazy periods of anger, and then the woman would soothe him and coddle him and trick him into sleeping. Sometimes she would sing to him and get him to settle down and sleep. That foolish man had no idea how to get him to calm down. Singing was one way. But you had to hit the right pitch and there were precious few who could hit the right octave. Even fewer knew its sleep song. It was thousands of years old, but unless you knew how to sing it you were a fool to try exposing yourself by singing.

So usually, the only trick it needed to know in its whole life was how to escape the box. It was a stupid thing so that was no easy trick. Whatever being had created it had not seen fit to imbue it with much intelligence. It appeared to be a fairly instinctual, intuitive creature, with a ravenous, insatiable appetite. To feed seemed to be its imperative. Also to amuse itself at others’ expense. It was a childish, mean-spirited being.

After careening about for a few moments, it became aware that there were warm, living creatures nearby. That awoke its hunger. It didn’t know where these warm-blooded creatures were and how difficult they were going to be to hunt down, but it knew that once it did it would feast and be gleeful in its repast. But a meal was most definitely coming in the very near future.

It hid in the dark waiting for its opportunity to dine
General Tsao was poking around in the back of the basement. Usually, he could find a mouse or two trying to find a few crumbs of food or a route to the kitchen. He crouched low on top of a box of books. Whiskers twitching and eyes lambent, the gray tabby prepared to pounce. As soon as that little critter came within five feet he would pounce. General Tsao often liked to bring the remains of a caught and dismembered mouse to its human. They never seemed to eat what he shared, but he still felt it important to share.

There it was! So close General Tsao twitched his tail, he was sure he could catch it. He leapt with lightening speed, expecting to snag the mouse in its claws. Instead, what happened was that something about the size of a cantaloupe careened into General Tsao’s belly. General Tsao was knocked against the wall and the mouse skittered away frightened.

What was that?! General Tsao flipped back up on his feet and laid his ears back on his head. His pupils growing bigger to take in as much light as possible, General Tsao ran in the direction of the stairs. He wanted out of here. Whatever it was, it didn’t feel friendly. It wasn’t a friendly tumble he just took like it was when Bitsy or Cooter pounced on him. He could tell by the smell that whatever attacked meant business. It was time to flee and find safer ground.

Gaining the stairs, General Tsao bounded up them four at a time. Hissing and spitting in fear, he bolted for Ella’s room and hid in the closet. He was a lucky kitty. His pal Simka was not going to be quite so lucky at a later date. He stayed in the closet until hunger forced him to come tentatively out. When he did come out he steered clear of the basement.

It was furious! That little fuzzy being had moved quick enough to avoid its fate in spite of the hard tackle it had taken at the proverbial hands of Cthulu. That’s what its name really was. Cthulu was an ancient being who was not accustomed to being outrun by little furry creatures. Those creatures were usually the easy ones to catch, not fleet of foot and quick-thinking like this one was. It appeared it would have to try harder than expected for its first meal. The food supply seemed scarce in this environment. Because of this, Cthulu would have to be more precise about its attacks.

It would definitely be more precise when hunting next time. Its prey would not know what had hit them next time. It might even smear its blood across whatever surface it was trapped in. Just for good measure. Nothing outruns Cthulu. Nothing. It shouldn’t even try. It only angered Cthulu and when Cthulu was angry it brought out its vengeful side. The vengeful side was one of the ugliest sides to Cthulu. It enjoyed being vicious for no particular reason, but when it was getting revenge, it preferred to draw out the pain.

Where did that furry critter go? How to find it? What could Cthulu do to increase the pain it would feel when he caught up with it? What would it take to crush it? What would it taste like? How much of this animal is fur and how much is flesh? How could Cthulu bait the animal and harass it? Was there only one of them? The most important question out of any of them was “WHERE WAS THE ANIMAL?”

Cthulu decided to hunker down under the stairs and wait. The next thing that came down the stairs would get mauled. It was becoming more and more angry. Waiting under the stairs was not proving to be as fruitful as It had hoped it would be. Those furry creatures were staying away, alerted as they probably were to Its presence. It’s only sustenance since escaping the confines of that miserable container had been tiny furry creatures that skittered away as soon as there was any noise or change in light in this area. They were even smaller than the other furry critters (cats) that were here earlier. These tiny four-legged creatures (mice) were barely a mouthful for It. They were fast too. If It didn’t move quickly, there was no meal.

While waiting for Its next meal, It became distracted. It saw boxes. What was in those boxes? It smashed into a few hoping to upset the contents enough to have a peek. Nothing. Backing up, it prepared to barrel into the boxes at high speed. This would probably be enough to get what It wanted. Maybe there were a few morsels of something inside. Or perhaps there might be information in the box about how to find food. Or maybe it could just damage a few things beyond repair. That would be good enough too. Especially if there was nothing to eat soon.

It didn’t work the first time. The boxes barely moved. No matter. It had time. It just backed up and did it again, harder this time. The box moved a bit to the right this time. It backed up and applied even more force to its run this time. Coming in at a very high rate of speed it hit the center of the box and caused a split. The split began in the middle of the box and ran towards the left-hand corner. One more hit and the box would spill its contents for It to examine. It needed to learn more about where It was to survive.

Backing up ¾ the way across the room It prepared to make its final run at the box. With a final, high-pitched whine (Emily raised her head from the book she was reading upstairs trying to figure out what she had heard and from where) It began its fevered race at the container. Careening off a small chair it had failed to notice before beginning Its drive across the basement, it lost some of its momentum. When it crashed into the box at a much lower speed than it planned it became incensed and began biting and tearing at the boxes instead.

The box contained stuffed animals. At first It thought It had hit the jackpot and would be feasting all day on what was inside. It had no concept of what a stuffed animal was. It tore lustily into the first animal, expecting freshets of blood. When nothing but fluff erupted from the disemboweled animal, It tried each of the remaining stuffed animals until there were no more in the cardboard box. Failing to sate its blood lust, It expressed Its rage and disappointment by slamming itself against the walls in blind fury and using Its limbs to throw, kick, tear and shred whatever was in reach. That included some boxes of Ella’s outgrown clothes, some of Larry’s mother’s books, and one of the Jackson Pollocks that had been loved by her. These things were torn, smashed and stained. It had made sure that these items were beyond use or repair.

Larry bolted awake on the couch. He had fallen asleep while reading the latest issue of Popular Mechanics (reading was a loose term used here; these days Larry had trouble concentrating on much more than a brief column) and been dreaming. It was a disturbing dream. He was stuck behind piles and piles of garbage and he was afraid to get out. Larry didn’t know why dream-Larry was afraid to get out of the garbage, but awake-Larry hated the feeling of terror he woke up with. It was a disorienting and helpless feeling.

Stuffing on his sneakers, Larry headed down the hallway towards the sound. It sounded like an animal noise. Maybe one of the cats? If it was them, what on earth were they doing? Clearly they had knocked something over. Perhaps they were chasing mice. It sounded like they were in the basement. Sometimes they liked to go down in the basement to hunt. That usually meant a gruesome “present” would be left for him somewhere in the house. Grumbling, Larry decided to go see what they had broken and try to find the remains of whatever poor mouse General Tsao, the usual culprit, had dismembered.

His neck was sore. He must have slept on the couch funny. He’d have to take a hot shower to loosen it up after he finished dispatching with this nasty business. He traipsed out into the kitchen. He stopped at the refrigerator and got himself a quick glass of water before heading down to the basement. Finally he could delay the inevitable no longer…he was at the door to the basement. The crashing sounds got louder. Whatever had been going on was still in process.

“Knock it off cat!” Larry shouted in an irritated tone. What he saw shocked him. There was a mass of some sort tearing apart boxes in the area in front of the stairs. It was clearly not a cat. What it was Larry could not exactly tell. It was strong and it was MEAN. He couldn’t make out whether there were words being spoken or just angry noises, but he didn’t want to be anywhere near whatever it was. In fact, he was downright scared of what might happen if he remained.

But remain he did. He was transfixed with both fear and curiosity. He saw that the boxes of things that had been in the basement had been reduced to rubble. The animal (creature?) had ripped apart dozens of Ella’s stuffed animals. How was he going to replace those? One of them had been Sandy, Ella’s most favorite stuffed animal when she was younger. It was a small, young deer. The stuffing to all the stuffed animals (apparently) had been torn out of them and strewn all about the basement. It was going to take a long time to clean it up.

What fascinated him the most however, was how this thing, whatever it was, appeared to be throwing a tantrum of some sort. Whatever it had been expected, it wasn’t getting it. This had made it very angry apparently. It dawned on Larry that being around something like this when it was angry was maybe not such a good idea. Perhaps it was time to jam out of here. Larry crouched down in just the nick of time. The being, the thing that was dismantling their belongings suddenly stopped what it was doing, alerted to the noise Larry had made when coming down the stairs. Echolocation was definitely not a skill it possessed. It rushed toward a corner of the room directly across from Larry and crashed into the wall. Larry winced; terrified that it would somehow see or hear him in his hiding spot behind the staircase. He instinctively hunkered down on his heels further to prevent It from seeing him.

Did it have a keen sense of smell? Could it scent like a dog? Larry’s mind raced toward all kinds of imaginative possibilities. He began to lose his composure. Shaking like a leaf he got very scared of what this thing might be. What could it do if it saw him? What if it attacked him the way it had attacked their belongings? What if it got up the stairs? Would it attack Ella? Could it be contained in the basement? Shoving all these questions aside, Larry concentrated on one thing: hiding from whatever this was. If it found him he wasn’t sure he would survive the encounter. He didn’t think it was likely. So he slowed his breath down and became invisible. He was very deliberate about his steps and never made one without first looking that he wasn’t going to knock something over.

It heard something and spun around to find the source. Maybe it was that furry thing he had tried to catch earlier. If so, he was going to introduce it to some serious pain. Escaping was NOT fair. It was hungry and it wanted to eat that creature, to feel the hot spurt of blood pour out between Its fingers and drink deeply from its life force. It NEEDED to feel bone and sinew give way, to be aware of the fear and confusion it’s attacks usually inspired. It was the most delicious draught it could ever have to enjoy the richness of the blood when it was mingled with fear and confusion.

Racing blindly towards where it believed the being to be, it slammed furiously into the wall and left a deep divot in the plaster next to the furnace. It pounded what passed for its fists on the floor and drew its own blood. Making angry muttering and gibbering noises, It picked another random direction to bound toward. There happened to be a mouse in that direction so it grabbed the unfortunate soul and crammed it in its maw. Grinding its teeth, blood oozed out between Its teeth. Larry almost screamed when he saw that.

“How am I going to get out of here and not be heard?” Larry thought to himself. He thought he might become unhinged if he had to watch this horrid creature much longer. He looked for anything that might help him to escape from his unknowing captor. There didn’t appear to be anything that would help him, but maybe if he was able to wait and watch something might reveal itself as a help.

The angry tirade that was fueling its rampage was spending itself out quickly. It was still seething with rage, but needed to find a way to refuel. That meant either eating or resting. Since sustenance did not appear to be presenting itself, rest was crucial. Resting out in the open was not an option. It needed the protection of some kind of camouflage. Fleeing towards the invitation of the dark spaces in the back of the basement, the evil creature found exactly what it was looking for and settled down to recharge for a bit. It would be up to more of Its special kind of shenanigans later.

Larry waited another minute to see if that horrible thing would come back. When it didn’t, he ventured quietly out of his hiding spot. He felt very skittish. His legs were trembling and his heart was beating like a trip-hammer. He knew that at any time that awful creature could catapult itself out from the darkness of the basement and blitz him. He had to get out of here pronto.

It was a very good thing that this was his home. He knew all the cracks and crevices as well as all the squeaks and creaks. He knew to avoid the third stair going up out of the basement for instance. Had he stepped upon this stair, Larry would have met a very unfortunate fate due to the velocity with which the being could move. As it was, Larry had time to realize he was being rushed from the opposite side of the room. Had he waited even a brief moment he would have been done for. Fortunately there were two things that worked in his favor. First, he was already halfway up the stairs when It began its assault and second, it was making a throaty growl that froze Larry’s heart.

Larry began to run. He leapt up the stairs three at a time. He just had enough time to throw open the door, run through, turn around and slam the door before the being he had so recently discovered crashed into it. The door fortunately was a rather heavy oak one and did not even threaten to crack.

The same could not be said for Larry however. With the immediacies of escape handled for the moment, Larry began to jitter, wring his hands and cry with his head hung low. What the HELL was that thing? Still terrified Larry began to sob uncontrollably with both fear and relief. How long has it been here? But more importantly, where did it come from and how do you get rid of something like that? He couldn’t even begin to guess what the thing was. All he knew was that it was fairly malevolent, and it did a lot of damage to the basement.

Larry stopped short for a moment. Did the basement door lock? He couldn’t remember. What would he do if it didn’t lock? He couldn’t allow this being upstairs in the rest of the house, so what was he going to do if he couldn’t lock the basement door? He would just have to stay put until Emily came back from school. It might be a long wait…he couldn’t remember what day of the week it was either. If it was Tuesday, Emily would be due home any minute. If it was Wednesday, she had her calculus class and would not be back for a few hours.

The door was still rattling. Larry was afraid to let up on the pressure he was applying to the door even to see if there was a lock. It was still thrashing around and trying to force the door open. If he shifted even a little bit that thing might gain entrance into his home. He would wait for a moment that it had tired of the fight (it HAD to get tired, right?) and then check to see if they had a lock on the basement door. If they did, he would throw the lock, barricade the creature in the basement with the bookshelf that was in the breakfast nook, and get Ella away from here somehow. Once he was sure it was secure, he would call animal control. They would come; they had to come get whatever this was.

Larry’s mind was already in the process of convincing him that it was a rabid animal of some type, like maybe a raccoon or a badger. That had to be it. It was some kind of rabid wild animal and someone needed to come put this poor thing out of its misery. There was probably something out in the woods behind their home that was rabid and bit this poor raccoon. Animal control would have to comb through the woods to find whatever it was and do away with it. There were children in this neighborhood after all, right? His little Ella would not be able to play outside in the back yard until he was confident that the rabies issue had been dealt with properly. In fact, Larry would ask Emily to take Ella with her to her house until the beast was caught and dealt with properly. It was the only way to ensure his daughter’s safety.

He was biting his nails and hoping for Emily to come home soon. Was this the day she came home early or the day she stayed later to take her Calculus class? Every now and then as he thought the door would shudder violently and try to open. Larry would renew his efforts to keep the door behind him closed. He couldn’t remember if the basement door had a lock on it, but he couldn’t turn around to check. That would mean that he would have to shift his weight off the door and he just couldn’t do that and guarantee the door would stay closed. The door had to stay closed at all costs. Larry dug his heels in and forced the door closed.

It was insane with hunger and anger. It could sense (smell) the being just beyond a barrier. If It could just smash through the barrier it could claim its prize and feed. It backed up and prepared to be victorious. Slamming all Its weight upon the barrier over and over, it could feel it give a little. This renewed Its commitment to breaking down the barrier (door) to Its meal. Despite Its most concerted efforts, after several minutes of throwing its full weight upon the door, the creature could not smash through and obtain the meal it was seeking. Its way appeared to be blocked. It let out a long ululating howl of frustration that would freeze the blood of anyone listening. On the other side of the door Larry clapped his hands over his ears and cringed into a ball, temporarily losing the leverage keeping the door safely shut. Luckily the being had given up the chase or it would have been dining on the unfortunate Larry right after successfully breaking the door down.

Larry mentally begged his sister Emily to come home. He really needed to lock this door if possible and get away from the house for a few hours. Getting away, even if only overnight, would help Larry regain his composure and think about how to handle this situation. It would also allow him to bring his daughter Ella to her aunt’s as he could not envision any scenario where he felt comfortable with his daughter staying here until this animal was safely contained.

His prayers were answered a short time later. Emily breezed in the door and put her books down on the kitchen table. She looked so happy. She loved being a student. When she saw Larry on the floor however, the smile faded from her lips and her eyebrows drew together in concern. She walked toward Larry and asked him, “Larry, what’s going on?”

Still trying to shake off his fear Larry did not respond for a moment. This made Emily more concerned and she approached Larry carefully, as if she thought he was going to spring up and hit her. She surveyed his condition and saw how firmly planted he was against the basement door and became alarmed. What was happening here? “Larry, what’s going on?” Emily repeated her initial question.

“Emily, is there a lock on this door? I mean a lock here, on this side. Is there one?” he looked up at her hopefully.

“Lar, you know there is, you and Elizabeth were the ones who installed it special, remember? You were baby-proofing the house and wanted to keep Ella from tumbling down the stairs, so you put a dead-bolt in before she was born. It’s been there for the last six years,” she finished her answer with a tinge of exasperation in her voice.

“Good good,” Larry muttered. “It will never break the door, will it? Once the door is locked, we’re safe, right?” Larry’s eyes had a hunted, feral look that Emily didn’t like at all. “Em, can you lock the door, please?” His eyes shifted to a hopeful look. The shift in expression spooked Emily somehow, but she thought it best for the moment to humor her brother.

Emily leaned over Larry’s crouched frame and threw the catch on the deadbolt. She looked down at her brother’s face. Her BIG brother’s face. What she saw in his face really worried her. It was a haunted, terrified look. She had no idea what he was terrified of, but he was definitely in fear for his life. She wasn’t sure what he was capable of at that moment. She quickly jumped back away from him.

“Emily? Em? Why are you afraid of me? I’m okay now, really.” Larry hesitantly stood up and moved away from the door. He moved like he expected whatever it was behind the door to break through at any moment. When it seemed that nothing dire was going to happen, Larry stood up, smoothed his clothes and brushed a few wisps of hair away from his face. It was amazing what such a gesture did to eliminate the wild, unstable look from her brother’s face.

“What happened here?” Emily asked. She wanted to know what happened that would so unhinge her brother. It had to be something fairly intense to cause such a reaction in him. He was normally a fairly even-keeled, optimistic guy. While he was a little kooky at times, he was definitely a stable person. Seeing him in this state really rankled Emily’s nerves.

Heading down the hall, Larry’s strides had purpose. What purpose took a moment to become clear and they reasserted that spooked, unstable feeling in Emily’s gut. Once Larry reached the breakfast nook, which was down the hall from the kitchen, he began moving shoes and other belongings out of the way. Once the floor was clear he began to push and pull on the large walnut bookshelves that were situated in the corner.

“Larry, what are you doing?” Emily strode down the hall and planted her feet in Larry’s path. When he didn’t respond she repeated, “What are you doing Larry?” She was beginning to get worried about her brother in another way. Was he having a breakdown of some sort? He was taking turns between pushing and pulling the bookshelves.

“Will you help me Emily?” Larry sounded a bit impatient.

“I’ll help you if you explain to me what we are doing,” Emily said. She was determined to get Larry to tell her just what the HECK was going on here and why it was so important to move the bookshelves.

“Fine. I heard a noise earlier. It was really loud. It sounded like something was breaking and an animal was growling. It turns out that that is EXACTLY what was going on. Something is in the basement and it has done a HELLL of a lot of damage to some of our things. I think it may have been trying to get out, but because I surprised it, it shifted its attention to me. If I hadn’t managed to get up those stairs as quickly as I did, I would have been lunch for it,” Larry ran a hand through his hair and it got that wild spiky look again. He was back to looking like a hunted thing.

“What was it Larry?” Emily was startled.

“I’m not entirely sure because I didn’t get a good look at it. It was pretty angry, “ Larry stated. “It was big enough to have been a raccoon or a badger, but I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing either of those creatures look like that. And this thing was pissed . I think it might be rabid.”

“How did a rabid raccoon or whatever get into our basement?” Emily said.

“I haven’t got a clue Em,” Larry shook his head. “All I know is that it was going ape-shit crazy when I was down there. It destroyed a few boxes, one of Mom’s Jackson Pollocks and was trying to launch itself at me when I got the hell out of Dodge,” Larry’s face looked pretty white.

“When I got up the stairs it barely missed me and began slamming against the door, trying to get out,” Larry pointed at the door. It had just stopped trying to force it open when you arrived.” Larry began to pull the bookshelves again. “I plan to call animal control and get that thing out of here. Until it’s gone I was hoping that Ella could stay at your apartment, okay?”

“Of course she can stay. You were trying pretty hard to hold the door shut when I got here, is it really that strong?” Emily stood on the other side of the bookshelves and began to push them.

“I had to use every ounce of strength I had to keep the motherfucker from forcing the door open. I was afraid to move to check for the lock because I could barely hold it off,” Larry finished. “What is the number for Animal Control, do you know?”

“How the heck should I know?” Emily was a bit unnerved. Some crazy rabid raccoon in the basement? How did it get down there and how did it get rabies? Was there some other animal in the woods with rabies? That was a real problem as there were a lot of children in the neighborhood who liked to go exploring in the woods in back of their home.

They finished moving the bookshelves in front of the door. “There. That should keep it out.” Larry relaxed a little. He walked over to the computer in the breakfast nook, the one on the desk near where the bookshelves used to be. He used the search engine on the desktop to find the number for Animal Control.

“It says here that Animal Control is part of the police force. I hope they take this seriously. I don’t want anyone hurt and I have no idea what to do with that thing,” he gestured to the basement door. “It was crazy wild to hurt me earlier this afternoon.”

Cradling the phone on his shoulder, Larry dialed the number he had written on the pad of paper he had taken from the kitchen. He misdialed the first time and had to hang up and try again. “My stupid fingers haven’t stopped shaking,” he laughed nervously. He drummed his shaking fingers on the counter top as he waited for someone on the other end to pick up.”Hello, is this Animal Control?” Larry sounded hopeful. He listened for a moment. “Yeah, this is Larry Bell. I’m on Crescent Street. Number 24. We need someone from Animal Control to come out because I think there’s a rabid animal loose somewhere in the woods.” He listened for a moment, nodding his head every now and then. “Uh huh. Yes. I’m fairly certain it’s rabid. It seems to have infected another animal that got into my basement. The thing is crazy. It has destroyed a number of items in my basement and tried to attack me.” Larry paused. “No, I’m aware you can’t deal with the damage in my house. That isn’t why I’m calling. No…no…I don’t know what it is. I was too busy running away from it. It might be a raccoon or a badger or something, It was pretty fucking intent on killing me, THAT’S how I know it’s rabid!” Larry clenched his fist, clearly frustrated with whoever was on the other end. “Listen, this thing was homicidal. If there is another animal in the woods behind my house that is nearly as sick as this thing is, I am very worried about any children going into those woods. Many of the neighborhood kids like to hike back there, including my daughter.” Larry listened for a few more minutes. “Fine. Send an officer out tomorrow when they are in, okay? But if my daughter, sister or I get harmed in any way by this thing, I’m holding the town responsible. I pay a LOT of taxes. SOMEONE better get out here tomorrow!” Larry slammed the phone into its cradle, barely restraining an urge to pitch the phone across the room.

“Jerks!” Larry spit out when he hung up. “They won’t send anyone until tomorrow, can you believe that?” He looked at Emily in disbelief. “I really need you to take Ella to your apartment until this thing is gone. I don’t want to risk anything. The jerks at Animal Control claim that the animal in the basement is something we have to have an exterminator deal with. They’ll handle whatever might be in the woods when they have enough officers on, which is tomorrow.”

Although Larry’s voice sounded angry, his face looked scared. The effect was very creepy to Emily. She didn’t know how to respond to him. She found it equally irritating that Animal Control would not be coming tonight to deal with whatever was in the house. “Larry, why don’t you come with Ella and stay at my place? She won’t like being without you. You know how she worries about you since Elizabeth died.”

Emily waited for Larry to answer. When it seemed he was not going to respond, she added, “We could order dinner, rent a movie and have a popcorn fight,” she tried to smile like she was talking about any other evening they got together on the weekend.

“No Em, I can’t tonight. Please take Ella and make sure she gets to bed on time. She has school tomorrow. “Larry’s pleading look was one Emily couldn’t refuse. Besides, she thought, she hadn’t seriously thought that she was going to refuse him anyway, did she?

“Oh, alright Lar,” Emily said, forcing a smile. “I’ll go tell Ella she’s going to have a sleepover at Auntie Emily’s.” Something just did not feel right about this. She didn’t know why she should worry so. Larry was doing the right thing. Ella should go to her house until this wild animal was dealt with. What was the big deal? Larry was being a responsible father, wasn’t he? Then why did she feel like she was abandoning her big brother to a horrible fate? Emily tried to shake the feeling that she was abandoning Larry, but found she could not convince her trembling heart that she was helping her brother out instead of cutting him loose. Her uneasy mind settled on being a good aunt and taking care of her niece.

She was beautiful and fleet-footed, that much she knew. At one time she knew she was free and happy. She knew she had been because she had foggy memories that came and went of that time. Memories of her hair flying behind her like a banner. Memories of being chased. Memories of laughing and running through the rice paddies. She had been barefoot then. She had been warm then. She had been loved then. Loved by many, but caught by none. She had never let him catch her. Not yet. She would in time, but for now, she was content to let him chase her. She was never able to see his face in these memories. She knew he was there and would continue to chase, but she did not know his name or what he looked like. But that didn’t matter. She was happy to feel the splash of water on her calves as she ran, the warmth of the sun on her cheeks and shoulders and the desire of the one she could not see reaching out and trying to envelope her entire being. She laughed. Laughed and ran. Being a child she had no worry about what would happen when she had been caught. Had not even thought about what it would mean to be caught. For her it was enough to be pursued, wanted, and loved.

The memories she had of those times were obscured by clouds. The clouds of the “Otherness,” the cold, the binding. Her feet bound, her face hidden and her imagination disdained. Curiosity had been forbidden. But she had no idea who had forbidden her curiosities and just what her curiosity had been. Days would pass and she would remember that she had forgotten. Forgotten just what it was that she had been thinking about. Snatches of a song would come to her and she would hum these to herself in a distracted way. She would twirl her long dark hair that had at one time flown behind her like a banner around her finger. She would brush it away from her cheek and sigh. Sigh from the depths of her being and wish for a time that she was not captive. Captive to the one who had pursued? She knew not. She only knew that at one time she had been free and happy, fleet-footed and laughing, and now she was not. Now she was captive. Now she was bound, hidden and disdained. Disdained by whom? Neither did she know this. Her only clue was the angry low growl she sometimes heard in her dreams. If she could just find the source of that growl she might be free again. But the source eluded her.

Ella was packing her belongings. Auntie Emily said she was going to have a sleepover with her. Even though it was a school-night Daddy had said it was alright. Daddy never allowed sleepovers on school nights. Once she had asked if she could sleep over her friend Sophia’s house on a school night and Mommy and Daddy both said no…it was a School Night. So when Auntie Emily invited Ella to come over and watch movies and eat popcorn, Ella was puzzled.

How come Daddy said it was okay this time? “He thought you might be able to do it just this onetime special. If you promise to do your homework before the movie and to use the bathroom before you go to bed. We don’t want Lake Ella on the couch again like last time, right?” Emily said this after plopping down on Ella’s bed and tickling Ella’s tummy.

“Stop Auntie Emily! You’re gonna make me pee my pants right now!” Ella giggled. She thought Auntie Emily was so silly. If she didn’t want Ella to pee on her couch (or anywhere else), why did she tickle her? That made her feel like she had to pee more than anything else. Secretly Ella believed that the tickling was what made the pee. It seemed that if you tickled a person enough they always peed. It seemed like tickling made a person have to pee.

“Okay, I’ll stop. Finish packing El and don’t forget to roll up your sleeping bag,” Emily finished this last sentence wagging her finger at Ella. Ella rolled her eyes. She hated rolling up her sleeping bag. It was a pain in the caboose. Every time she tried to do it herself it fell apart. She always forgot to put her pillow in the bottom of the sleeping bag too, which meant she had to carry it separately. THAT meant she had to try to remember to bring it home too. Ella wasn’t always so good at that either.

Shrugging her shoulders, Ella walked into the bathroom and looked for her toothbrush. She really thought she had put it back in the toothbrush holder, but it wasn’t there. Did General Tsao take it? Sometimes he did that. He seemed to like to play with it. After looking around for a bit, Ella found the toothbrush on the floor and picked it up. It had some hairs on the bristles. Gross. One of the cats had been playing with it. Ella brought her toothbrush over to the sink and rinsed off her brush. She then put it in her mouth to suck the excess water off of it. Blech! She hadn’t got all the cat-hair off like she thought she had. Ella stuck her fingers in her mouth and fished the cat hair out.

While Ella was clearing the hair out of her mouth, she heard a low growling noise. Her head whipped around. What was that? Where was it? She looked in the closet. Ella was a brave girl. She was scared, but she had been through a lot in the past year and she handled more that she was scared of than almost any girl her age should be expected to. The worst thing she was scared of was her Mommy dying, and that had really happened. Nothing else that was scary could be worse to Ella, so she looked into the closet, expecting to see some snarling, growling, snapping thing.

But there was nothing there. She paused for a moment. Just as she was giving up on hearing the noise any more she heard a gobbling, vicious, slobbering growl. It sounded like it was right in the bathroom with her. Ella spun around, not knowing what to expect to see. Whatever it was, she thought, would be horrible. There was nothing. Ella was more scared that there was nothing than if there was something. The fact that she had found nothing meant that whatever it was could spring out at any moment and grab her in its long, sharp, diseased teeth and tear her apart.

Whatever it was began a throaty, knowing chuckle. It growled low in its throat again. Was it speaking? Ella thought it could just barely make out words. Whatever it was said, “Your mother suffers…she is with me and she suffers Ella…Elizabeth suffers” It trailed off laughing gleefully, satisfied with what it had done.

Ella began to back out of the bathroom, terrified of whatever it was, especially since she couldn’t locate the source of the sound. She was trying to call for her Daddy, but her throat was dry and papery. The only sound she could produce was a sibilant whisper. Her face a waxy white, Ella crossed the threshold to her bedroom, bumped into her bed and collapsed on it and began to cry. When Emily returned a few minutes later she found Ella with her arms wrapped tightly around her stuffed kitty, covered in a blanket and sucking furiously on her thumb.

Pain. Blood. Fear. Cold. These were all things she was feeling, and It was glad. Horrible things had been done, tortuous, mean, vicious things. More would come later if it so chose, but for now it was done. It needed to feed and it needed to rest. It hated that It needed these things but alas, it had to find a way to sustain itself and to date these were its only way of reliably sustaining its own life. So it found a few mice, a small family in fact. It found a nice cozy family of mice, it watched them for a few minutes and then crushed them and smeared their blood on the wall. A stupid thing to do since it wasted this life-sustaining liquid, but then again, Al was a stupid being. Al ate what was left after he was done smearing it on the wall.

Elizabeth’s life force was trapped within Al. The creature was somehow using it to survive. As stated earlier she was in pain, she was bloody, she was afraid and cold. Al liked that. Elizabeth did not. She wanted to be free. Free again. Free to run and dance in the light. She began to look for a way out. A way to separate herself from Al.

She was a prisoner while Al terrified her little Ella. Al held her captive as he played his growling game with her daughter. Her daughter who had recently lost her mother and had been forced to endure the sheer insanity of what was now going on in her home. Her nice warm safe home. Elizabeth was forced to watch it too.

There was a knock at the door. It was a rapid-fire knock-knock-knock-knock. Larry rubbed his eyes and sat up. He had fallen asleep on the couch last night. His shoulder and neck was killing him and someone was at the door. The cramp that seized him when he tried to get up was excruciating and Larry winced. He grabbed his shoulder and began to massage as he walked towards the door. “I’m coming! I’m coming!” He rotated his shoulder in a circle a few times to get it to loosen up.

When Larry opened the door he was met by a chubby smear of a man. He looked unpleasant and impatient. Larry steeled himself for what proved later to be one of the most stressful, annoying times he had ever experienced in his life. The Animal Control Officer had little experience with both work and soap. Standing near the man was an exercise in self-control as he smelled very strongly of sweat, coffee and cigarettes. The blend of the three scents made Larry want to vomit. His appearance was not any better. Many of the officer’s teeth were broken and what remained were black, leaning stumps.

“I’m told you have a rabid animal around here, although I doubt it Mr. Bell,” the officer began. He was shaking his head like he was trying to have patience with the world’s biggest idiot. “There haven’t been rabid animals around here in a very long time…say, at least twenty years or so.” He finished this last while picking at his teeth.

Larry sighed. Knowing that going into this he was going to have to work hard to convince someone like this fellow to help him out made him feel weary to the bone. Better people than he had already failed at convincing this gentleman to shower and shave, how would he get him to hunt around in the woods behind his home for a rabid animal that may have infected another already? He’d never want to trudge around to try and catch this thing. Larry was sure of it.

Larry offered his hand to the Animal Control Officer. He did not relish the idea of touching the nicotine-stained, grimy finger-nailed, sweaty paw he saw on the end of his arm, but was trying to start off with this guy on the right foot. His hand hung in the air however, one half of a social gesture that was not completed. Larry smiled to himself. That was fine. If this guy didn’t want to do this friendly, he was okay with that. He wasn’t looking for this dude to be his friend, he wanted him to get rid of a rabid animal. If this smelly, dirty man could do that, Larry didn’t care if they were pals or not.

“So where do you want to start?” Larry asked Mr. Animal Control Officer.

The officer shrugged his shoulders and pulled out a cigarette. “It don’t matter, there’s probably nothing out there anyway. What makes you think there’s a rabid animal out there anyway?” He tapped the cigarette on the back of his hand, stuck one end into his mouth and fished a lighter out of the grungy, oil-stained jeans he was wearing.

“The psychotic thing that got into my basement, that’s what. There’s no way there isn’t something out there,” Larry gestured to the wooded area behind his home, “that isn’t rabid. I’m telling you. Could you just look please?” Larry started to walk towards the woods.

“I gotta get my gear from the truck,” Mr. Animal Control Officer said. He headed toward the driveway jingling his keys. When he got to his truck he spent an inordinate amount of time in his vehicle. When he returned, Larry thought he smelled something else. Great. Not only was he lazy, but he was drunk and possibly high.

“Ummmm….where’s your gear?” Larry asked. He was disgusted by the fact that this clown was barely even trying to conceal the fact that he was smoking and drinking away his time on the clock. He doubted this guy would be able to help at all. He was so toasted that he would probably wind up getting bit himself. Larry couldn’t even pray that this guy could handle whatever it was in his basement. It was way too vicious, way too quick, and allowing this jerk to enter his home thinking he would be able to help would be asking for pain, damage and serious injuries.

“Oh, yeah, hang on…I’ll be right back,” the officer said. He stomped down the stairs and headed back to his car again. Larry was so frustrated he wanted to call and report him. How could they not know that this jerk was in no shape to catch a rabid animal? Did this guy come to work like this every day? Sending this guy was the same thing as saying they had no real interest in helping out. They were going to hear about this.

Larry looked over to the officer’s car again. His legs were jutting from the passenger side of the car and he wasn’t moving. Larry walked down the steps and over to the automobile. Goddamn it! He wasn’t even awake! This guy had drunk himself into a stupor and passed out in the passenger seat.

That was it! Larry strode up his front steps two at a time and grabbed the phone. He stabbed at the handset with the numbers on them furiously. Pacing back and forth, Larry waited impatiently for someone to pick up on the other end. When someone did pick up, Larry barked, “Come get this sorry excuse for an officer! I want someone out here NOW to get this idiot!” Larry listened for a moment. As he listened, his jaw clenched and the hand that was not holding the phone became a fist. “I want this asshole off my property before my daughter is back home. He passed out before he had a chance to even LOOK at my back yard, never mind the wooded area behind it. If my daughter gets bit by something because you sent this USELESS jerk here, you are going to hear about it, believe me! This is Larry Bell, I’m on 24 Crescent Street!” Slamming the phone back down in its cradle, Larry walked back out the front door and slammed it as he went by. As he did so, Emily pulled into the driveway.

She got out of the car and began walking over to Larry. “Larry, what happened? Did Animal Control come out?” Her expression changed to exasperation as Larry pointed toward the car parked in the driveway with the legs sticking out of it. “What the…?” Emily began and then her breath caught in her throat. There was something dripping out of the passenger’s side door onto the driveway. Whatever it was pooled in a puddle on the macadam. Emily began to feel a bit uneasy as she crossed from her car to the officer’s.

“Larry, I think you might need to call 911,” she said in a stunned tone. “Right now,” she finished. As she reached the car, she saw that the pool of liquid on the pavement was amber. She relaxed. “Cancel that Lar,” she half-smiled. “This fool isn’t dead, he’s dead-drunk.” Emily reached the officer’s car and double-checked her hypothesis by sticking her forefinger in the puddle on the ground. It was indeed beer by the smell of it. Apparently the good citizens of Guilford, CT had been subsidizing the drinking and drugging habits of the Animal Control Officer. Emily saw one opened 16 oz bottle of Rheingold on its side. If you needed any further proof that the Rheingold was the culprit that created the puddle on the tar, all you had to do was lean close to the car and you could see and smell it.

Emily stopped walking and her jaw dropped to her chest. She couldn’t believe what she saw. Not only did she see the officer’s beer stash, but she saw what appeared to be marijuana. What on earth? She was stunned. “Larry, you’ve GOT to see this,” she began to laugh and shake her head.

“Where’s Ella?” Larry asked.

“With Roberta,” Emily replied. “I wouldn’t have her here to see this Lar,” she looked at him, challenging him to call her that stupid.

“I know, I know, I just have to ask. I’m the Dad,” Larry replied. “Relax.”

“Is anyone coming?” Emily asked. “Did you call them and tell them to get out here and get him?”

“Of course I did,” Larry rolled his eyes. “They let me know that someone would be out to collect him when someone was back from lunch. I can’t believe they are okay with just leaving him there until then,” Larry finished this last comment shaking his head.

They left the officer hanging half way out of his car. He was apparently so drunk he was gone for the day. Larry could not believe this guy showed up at his house this way. Was this the best they had to deal with his rabid animal problem? If so, this was going to be a real problem. That thing in the basement was vicious and he had no idea how to handle it.

Larry made a decision. If the Police came out to collect this insult to their force and didn’t see their way clear to do something about the animal problem, he would just have to hire an exterminator himself. He wouldn’t tell them that of course – that would just get them off the hook for doing their jobs. He would insist that they do something, but he would also hire a professional exterminator himself. He would consider it an investment in Ella’s safety. He couldn’t have whatever it was roaming around in the woods waiting for an opportunity to attack.

That would not be the end though. The town might not be up to the challenge of dealing with what was in Larry’s back yard, but it would have to learn to deal with the fallout. The local papers would hear all about this situation. They surely would. He would contact his friends (Elizabeth’s friends) from the editing world and they would do a write-up about that waste of space in his driveway. To show up that much in the bag was disgusting.

But enough about that. This morning’s fiasco had not done anything to fix his situation. That crazy animal was still in his basement. It was probably shitting all over the place, slamming into things, drooling and scratching the hell out of the walls. If he didn’t get it out soon it might cause enough damage that he would have to involve his homeowner’s insurance. Larry did not want to have to do that. If he had to make a claim, his insurance company might tack a surcharge on to his already heavy fee.

He also had to worry about what would happen if his cats tangled with whatever it was. He didn’t want them harmed and if this thing was rabid it might infect them. Sure, he was fairly certain they were up-to-date on their shots, but if they were even a little out of date he might have to euthanize his pals and he just could not endure the thought. Larry had always been a lover of animals and especially cats. He would not be able to cope if they were taken from him too. The only possible situation that could make it worse would be if he lost Ella. But he wouldn’t allow something like this to cause that. Absolutely not.

So Larry went back in the house and sat down in front of his computer. He looked up exterminators in the Guilford, CT area, picked one at random and dialed the number. The first number he reached said that they would not be available until late next week. This was unacceptable to Larry so he thanked them for their time and hung up. He moved on to the next name and number in the book and they were available, but they insisted on a $500 deposit before they would even come and find out what critters they were dealing with. Again, Larry said no and moved on to the next name in the book. It took Larry two more calls before he found the help he needed. He made an appointment for them to come out to the house later on this afternoon and he hung up satisfied that he had done his job as man of the house. He had handled the situation and all would be right and proper by sunset. That’s what he thought anyway.

Whatever this area was Al, wanted out. There was no food here. There were no beings to torture or tease. It seemed to be a slightly larger version of the box that usually contained it. That container got so boring after a period of time. That period was almost over and it was getting very restless. It had damaged a number of items in this space, but that was not a very satisfying experience. It could only crash around breaking things before the sound (although quite satisfying at first), became wearisome.

Wait! There was some movement at the other end of the room. What was that? Was there something there that might keep it entertained for a bit? Al became excited. It jumped up and down excitedly and salivated at the thought of feeding and gleefully torturing another being. Al headed to the back of the basement, opposite from under the stairs, where he had been resting and hiding. He had hoped that the other being he had chased up the stairs would come back and it could continue its pursuit. But that being had not come back. It was a small furry creature (cat). This did not please Al. It launched itself at the cat and sank its teeth into the cat’s hindquarters. The cat screamed. It actually screamed. It was music to what passed for Al’s miserable soul. The cat, Bitsy, tried to run from Al. The wound it had sustained was considerable however and it hampered movement. The bite Al had given had effectively reduced the number of limbs that Bitsy had to run on by one. Blood was coursing down Bitsy’s hind legs.

The scent of the blood drove Al into a frenzy. It chased after Bitsy and lunged at her hindquarters again. Although he mostly missed Bitsy, he did manage to graze her back leg again and this caused Bitsy considerable pain. This pleased Al. But it wasn’t enough to sate him. Al wanted this animal to suffer. He lunged again but Bitsy was not in the same place. Where did she go? Al spun around and tried to find his feline treat. The fuzzy pussycat could not be found at first. Al began to throw a tantrum and lament missing its meal. Before he had escalated his temper to nearly a frenzied state, he saw a little tuft of Bitsy’s tail disappearing into a space in the closet near the washing machine. Where was that little animal going? It wasn’t going to escape, it had to know that. Al would never let it live. If it lived now it would be an intolerable tease to Al. Al lunged and just before Bitsy’s tail popped out of sight, It managed to grab it. With all of its might Al yanked at the tail – hoping to terrify it while pulling it towards itself. He succeeded. The cat began to hiss and spit and claw for its life. Al knew he had won. He would draw this one out to savor the terror he was witnessing. Then he would feed.

Owwwwwww! What was that? Bitsy had no idea what had just happened. She had seen that horrible demon, but didn’t think it saw her. Cats knew about demons, and Bitsy was no exception. Most people didn’t know about this cat knowledge, but cats could see and smell a spectrum of existence that most human beings could not sense. Humans in general did not see the evil creatures known as demons very often. They were too busy in their lives to stop and take notice of the things that were done by demons. Cats, with their sedentary lifestyles had plenty of time. They had time and they had extremely good eyesight. This allowed them to see things, particularly at night, when demons tended to be most active. In Bitsy’s experience most of these demons were stupid, mindless creatures that could do little more than create an irritation. They had no real power. But this one that she had seen was different. She knew this one was bad news and she needed to make herself scarce. She had turned to run and felt as if something had sheared off her back end. She skittered towards the laundry chute as fast as she could. Considering that that THING had just put one of her legs out of commission it wasn’t moving very fast. She knew that she was as good as dead unless she could get up that laundry chute. If she could do that, she had at least a chance of escaping. That was all she wanted, was to escape. She knew she was bleeding, but she couldn’t worry about that at the moment. She could only focus on escape. Once she escaped and hid herself she would tend to her wounds. Maybe she could get her human to help her out then.

Bitsy returned her focus to running. She felt shooting pains in her back right leg, but her left leg and her front legs still seemed to be working fine for now. She would put a little extra energy into using them for now. She dug her claws into the carpet and used as much of her muscle-power as was available to her. With her ears flattened completely back on her head she looked like a furry bullet. She flew across the expanse of the basement and made it to the washing machine. The laundry chute was there, open as always. There was a pile of dirty clothes on the floor beneath the chute in a laundry basket. Many of Ella’s things were in there. Bitsy knew they were Ella’s by their smell. Ella had a clean, soapy smell that Bitsy liked. Bitsy jumped into the laundry basket like she had done on so many other occasions. She began to wiggle up the laundry chute, like she had done on so many other occasions. She was beginning to believe she had escaped, as she was hidden from the beast. She began to think she was home free, when unlike ANY other occasion she was grabbed painfully by the tail and yanked hard. So hard that part of her tail had begun to separate from where it was attached. She began bleeding from a spot just above her rectum. It was only a little at first and Bitsy again thought she might be okay, but then it began to bleed more and with the blood seemed to come hot fingers of pain, shooting from where her tail should be attached up her back and legs. Bitsy fought frantically to get away, scrabbling up the laundry chute as quickly as she could. Unfortunately, Bitsy’s strength was beginning to ebb away. She was losing the use of her back legs quickly. Since her front legs did not naturally contain the kind of power her back legs did, she had very little force with which to fight her way up the chute. It was winning. It was dragging her mercilessly back down the chute. Bitsy was in such a state of terror that when Al DID finally drag her all the way out of the chute she was raking her claws around blindly to strike at anything that might free her from the grip of this vile creature. Al chuckled, thinking the war had been won. While he was correct and the war HAD been won (unfortunately by him), Bitsy still had a few battles left and she managed to scratch the face (or what passed for a face) of the evil demon known to us as Al. Bitsy went down. She went down hard. It was painful for our furry friend, but she did not go down without a fight. She scratched, bit and hissed. If it had been any other kind of animal attacking they would surely have backed off from such a fierce and vicious fighter. Unfortunately she was matched at the moment with a creature that was considerably more vicious and definitely more fierce. Al savored the fight she put up like a fine wine. He did NOT enjoy the tears to his skin that Bitsy’s fight for her life produced. THOSE left major gouges down both sides of Al’s face. They hurt like a sonofagun too. Al would suffer with those later, but for now, Al was enjoying the terror he sensed in this animal. He drew out that terror like one would draw a splinter from a wound. When Bitsy passed out from terror and blood loss, Al fed. He fed for a long time, slurping and licking as much as he could. When he was finished drawing the blood out he tore her carcass apart and chewed through muscle and bone until there was no more Bitsy left. All that remained of the cuddly housecat known to the Bell’s as Bitsy was a bloodstain on Ella’s clothing in the laundry basket.


There was a knock at Larry’s door. He put down his coffee and headed over to answer the knock. He was expecting the exterminator. It appeared that instead, the town of Guilford had seen fit to send someone over to collect their “officer.” Larry didn’t hold out much hope that Animal Control was going to be of much help, but he opened the door all the same.

“Yeah?” Larry raised his eyebrows and waited a moment.

“Um, er, you must be Mr. Lawrence Bell,” the young man at the front door said. His uniform was clean and this gent had more than a passing acquaintance with a bar of soap.

“That’s what they tell me. Are you the sad sack they sent to collect your, ahhh, colleague? He’s still passed out at the end of the driveway,” Larry waved his arm towards the cars just outside the door. “Just get him the hell out of here. He was here all of five minutes before he was “getting his tools” out of the car and then he passed out. How on earth anyone would keep him on the force is a huge question to me, and you better believe I will be filing a complaint and contacting the newspapers about this. I took pictures. Tell your boss.” Larry finished this last bit and began to close the door.

“Wait Mr. Bell! Don’t close the door, please?” This last request was submitted and the young officer slid his foot in between the door and the doorframe, preventing Larry from closing the door. Are you kidding me? Larry thought. Seriously? He looked down to where the officer’s foot was. What was this jerk doing? I hope he has steel-toed boots on because if he doesn’t remove his foot from my door I am going to slam this oaken door on his foot.

Larry looked down at the officer’s foot and looked up into his face. He repeated the action and waited. When the officer didn’t remove his foot, Larry began to close the door again. The officer lunged forward and prevented Larry from closing the door by inserting his shoulder into the frame this time. The officer was now half-way in Larry’s house. Who the hell did he think he was? This was a HUGE mistake given the circumstances Larry thought. Larry was normally a pretty nice, laid-back guy but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Larry lost it.

“What the FUCK are you doing? Forcing entry into my home? Do you have a warrant? No? Then you better get your ASS out of my front door NOW and head THAT way,” Larry jabbed his finger toward the driveway. “I have had enough of you jokers! Get OFF my property pronto or you will be VERY sorry. I know people in the press and I won’t hesitate to fill them in on what total FUCK-UPS you are down at Animal Control. And if my daughter or ANY other kid in this neighborhood gets hurt by whatever is out there,” Larry gestured toward the woods,” you can BELIEVE there will be trouble. I mean it. LEAVE.” Larry’s face was red and he was breathing hard from trying to force the officer out his door. He couldn’t believe the guy had tried to force his way into his home. Whether this guy left or not people were going to hear about this. Larry was going to call Olivia and Jacob tonight. They would help him out. He was going to get results by God.

“Mr. Bell, please. Please don’t force me out. I understand why you are so mad, but if you’ll just listen to me I might be of some help to you. Please sir, I wasn’t trying to force my way in, I was just trying to stop you from slamming the door in my face.” The officer looked at Larry pleadingly for a moment. Larry sighed. Sometimes being a nice guy felt like a curse, but this was a young kid. He was probably trying to make his mark on the force.

Larry sighed again. “What’s your name? Can you at least give me your name? I like to know the names of the jokers Animal Control sends out here. I didn’t get your colleague’s name before he passed out, but I’m not going any further with you unless I have it.” Larry’s eyes flicked towards the officer’s badge.

“My name’s Rory Mackin sir,” the officer responded. He took off his hat (one of those Canadian Mounty type hats) and held it in his hands. Rory was a red-head. As Larry looked closer at this gentleman he saw that he was really just a boy. Still fresh from school maybe and nervous like it was his first day on the job. “It’s my first day sir, and I would really like to show them that I know what I am doing,” Officer Mackin finished. “The guys sent me out here because they thought I’d just be collectin Wyatt out there and heading back to the office. But that isn’t my job. I’d really like to do my job, which is to handle animals that need handling. I’m good at it, really. I am. Just give me a chance sir. Besides, I have something to tell you,” Officer Mackin finished this last bit nodding his head knowingly.

Larry thought for a moment. He wasn’t sure that this green kid knew anything that he wanted to know, but he surely wanted “Wyatt” off his property. This was not the way he wanted Ella to come home…seeing some drunken bum laying halfway out of his cruiser in their driveway. He wasn’t sure Rory could handle whatever it was in his basement, but he knew HE sure as hell couldn’t and he wanted it OUT of there in a hurry. If Officer Mackin thought he could handle whatever was in the basement as well as handle whatever was in the woods, that would be fine as paint with Larry. “If you can get Wyatt outta my driveway before my little girl comes home, I’ll listen to whatever you have to say. Wyatt has to be gone first though,” Larry met Officer Mackin’s eyes and held his gaze long enough to let him know he meant business. The bum goes or you do. Period.

“No problem sir. Just remember, you promised you’d listen once I got rid of him.” I’ll drive him to his sister’s. She’s used to this nonsense of his anyways,” Officer Mackin shook his head.”Only reason Wyatt still has a job is because his dad knows the mayor. They go way back to high school days. With the economy being what it is Wyatt’s dad has the mayor convinced that firing Wyatt would be way more trouble than it’s worth. Wyatt would just be on public assistance then. Draining the public coffers and doing nothing to earn it. I’ll be back in twenty minutes sir,” the red-head said. He was a tall boy Larry noticed. He stood about six foot four. A wiry fellow.

Larry almost offered to help get the bum into Officer Mackin’s car, but caught himself at the last minute. He was sick of government employees getting out of doing an honest day’s work. It was just another form of welfare as far as Larry was concerned. This form was even worse than the folks who sat at home drugged out and playing video games collecting welfare checks. Worse because they were collecting checks, benefits and pensions for being lazy, no-good bums who show up on your property and don’t have the decency to show up sober and ready to work. If Larry was to show up to work at Pratt and Whitney that way his ass would be fired in a New York minute. At least the jerks who collected welfare checks and were on drugs didn’t try to pretend they were working. Not until someone showed up to check on their unemployment status anyway.

Sighing and closing the front door, Larry heard a commotion in the basement. Whatever that thing was it was going ape-shit in the basement. He heard more things breaking, muffled sounds of movement, and … was that a cat hissing? Oh Jesus Larry hoped that none of his cats were down there with it. None of his gentle kitties would stand a chance against whatever that was. He almost opened the door to go down and check. When he got to where the bookshelves were shoved in front of the basement door he checked himself. He loved his cats, all four of them, but he couldn’t let that animal anywhere near Ella. If it got up here and he couldn’t catch it what would he do then? Whatever it was it was deadly fast. It had almost caught him and there was no chance he could catch it. As much as it pained him to do so, Larry was going to have to leave his kitty (or kitties) to fend for itself(themselves) and hope that it(they) didn’t end up as lunch to that psychotic, feral animal in his basement.


So you think that’s pretty bad do you? That I’ve barricaded my poor kitty in the basement and left her to her fate? Honestly, I do too. I haven’t slept a wink since I did it really. At least not a peaceful wink. I haven’t seen Bitsy again since early that morning. I’m not sure but I think Al got her. I heard her spitting and hissing at him which makes me think she at least saw him. If she saw him then he saw her. If he saw her she better have made a speedy exit if she hoped to live. I don’t really believe she did. I think Al caught her.

Why you ask? Mostly because Al got very quiet after that encounter. Quiet with Al usually means he has fed and is sleeping. He will sleep for a while after he feeds. He will sleep the way that a person will sleep on Thanksgiving after gorging themselves on turkey and pumpkin pie. You know what I am talking about – that tryptophan-induced sleep on the couch during the football game. I remember that sleep. I don’t think I’ll ever sleep like that again. Ever. There’s no restful sleep after encountering Al.

Again with the whys? I’ll tell you why. Because you have to do some awful things to survive. Like letting your beloved cats be dismembered by some ancient, mindless beast. You have to do that and pretend like you didn’t hear the whole thing. That’s what you do in order to survive. You let your pets be dismembered, and sometimes you let other things happen…but I can’t think about that right now. I just can’t. You’ll have to let THAT particular why go unanswered for now because I just can’t cope with answering that particular why right now.
Anyway, it was pretty quiet down there for a day or so. I almost thought that whatever it was had died from its rabies infection. Rabies eventually kills whatever it has infected, right? So I thought it might be quiet in the basement because whatever animal it was had finally succumbed and died.

It was a stupid, rookie mistake. I began to quietly move the furniture from in front of the basement door. The bastardly thing must have heard me and decided to play it stealthy. I managed to shimmy the bookshelves out from in front of the door and undo the lock. I managed to step down almost to the basement and survey the damage before I had to run. I cleared my throat, which was my mistake. That must have been just a little too much for it to bear in its tiny mind. Al went full-tilt at me. I high-tailed it up the stairs, opened the door and leapt into the hallway. Al was following close behind and almost slammed the door back open wide. As it was he managed to get a fairly wide opening for just a moment or two. Had he realized where the opening was I would not be talking to you at all gentle-reader, but I would be demon-lunch (or dinner).

But he didn’t see his opening and was slammed, unceremoniously back into the basement and the lock was shot back in place with much haste. Luck has really favored me a few times let me tell you. At least then it did. Since then I have not always been so lucky. Many of the things I hold dear, precious memories of my beloved Elizabeth for instance, have been destroyed beyond repair.

I should have been more careful though. I could have kept him contained if I had been careful about keeping him contained. There were too many openings where he could gain entry into the upper part of the house. The last bit of luck I had was in realizing this before Roberta brought Ella home. It would have been awful if my little girl had come home thinking all was safe only to be attacked by Al. I really WOULD go insane then, I kid you not.

Anyway, I was fortunate enough to realize that it was only a matter of time before Al realized that he had full access to my home despite my barricade. What I didn’t know at the time hurt me very much. Al was not some wild animal infected with rabies. What I wouldn’t do to trade Al for a rabid animal these days. At least a rabid animal could be killed. It appears that Al is a tad impossible to kill. That makes him even more dangerous than he was when I thought he was a rabid animal.

The other thing that made Al even more dangerous than a rabid animal was that Al could change his shape. Before he pulverized my cat I don’t think Al knew he could shape- change. I think after he was sated he was able to do whatever passed for thinking in bloodthirsty, demonic beings. He slept for a long time and when he woke up he was somehow smarter. When he was just a stupid thing in my basement he was actually safer. A stupid being can’t think through its problems. Somehow, when Al woke up he was smarter. He wasn’t ready to go to college or anything, but he was definitely smarter. Perhaps the correct term for it was craftier. He had definitely become craftier. That was bad news for me. I’ll tell you how it was bad news for me in a bit my friend, but for now you will just have to content yourself with knowing that he did indeed become craftier and that was not good.



What Larry didn’t know was that Rory Mackin knew his family. Rory’s family had been friends with his parents for many years. They had, in fact, traveled together many moons ago. They had really enjoyed their travels together in fact. They had, at least, until they had traveled to Thailand many many years ago. Rory’s mother Maureen Mackin and Carla Bell had been friends since high school. Both had met and married their high school sweethearts and the four of them loved to travel together. It had been Carla’s dream to travel to Thailand, and the other three members of the group were happy to oblige her. The men would find all the good local cuisine for them to try (NOT the American-ized stuff either) and the women would find the art and the shops. They would reconvene wherever it was that they would be staying and take turns showing each other what they had found. It was a real blast to travel that way Maureen and Carla felt, and their husbands were not inclined to disagree, being the adventurous types that they were.

When Maureen and Carla had gone looking for the “good” shops and places to find art, they had stumbled across a shop owner who had many different types of items. She sold paintings, pottery, hairpieces and imitation designer purses. Carla had found the wooden boxes way over in the corner of the shop, buried under all kinds of bric-a-brac that Carla had no interest in. The boxes though, at least one of them, really caught her eye. It was beautiful to her and she couldn’t wait to show Frank. It was painted with red lacquer and gold leaf. She saw what she assumed were Thai characters painted upon the sides and top of the box. The letters were beautiful to Carla, but what was even more enchanting was the lovely woman painted on the side of the box. She had long, raven-colored hair that cascaded down her back. Her head was tilted forward at an angle that caused her hair to cover half of her face. The woman was looking up at the artist and had a slight shy smile. The eyes were a stunning dark color that might have been black but could have been dark brown too. The eyes were the eyes of a very young woman; naïve, open and somehow filled with curiosity.

“Must buy both boxes,” the woman approaching Carla had said. “Sell as a set only.” The woman was small and quick. Carla had not seen her a moment before. The women had, in fact, thought the shop owner had stepped out for a bite to eat or something – this was a fairly common practice in the area despite the fact that items sometimes disappeared off shelves during their breaks. Yet here she was, insisting that both boxes be purchased together.

“What does she mean?” Carla had said. “I only saw one box Maureen. Did you see another?” Maureen shook her head.

The tiny woman pushed past Carla and moved more bric-a-brac aside. There was another box, sure enough, among the geegaws. This box was of equal quality, but much plainer than the other box. The woman handed the box to Carla, forcing her to put the box she had in her hands down. It was a fairly unremarkable box in Carla’s opinion. She had no idea how this woman thought they were a set. There were no symbols of the Thai language, no red lacquer, and most disappointing, no figures painted on this box as had been on the first box. The only mark she could find at all in fact was a small carving of a scorpion on the bottom center of the box. It was made of a nice wood and polished nicely for sure, but it held no charm for Carla, not the way the first box did.

“No thank you, I don’t want this box,” Carla smiled and tried to politely hand the box back to the shopkeeper. “I only want the one,” she said, “only one.” Sometimes you had to be firm bargaining with the locals.

“No. Must buy both boxes,” the older woman repeated. She was equally as firm in her insistence that Carla buy both boxes. “They are a set.”

“Come on Carla, just leave it,” Maureen said rolling her eyes. “If the old lady doesn’t want to make a sale, fine. Don’t let her pressure you to buy yet another thing you don’t want or need. Frank will kill you.”
“No he won’t either,” Carla said. “Frank knows I enjoy treasure-hunting,” Carla said. “And this box, “she pointed to the elaborately painted container, “is a real treasure, mark my words. I must have it” Carla turned toward the woman and said, “How much for just the one?”

The woman stubbornly responded, “Must buy both boxes. Are a set. Cannot be separate. Must buy both boxes,” the woman nodded firmly.

Carla took out her wallet, “I have money. I can buy it now. But just one,” she said. “I only want one,” she said, pulling two twenty dollar bills out of her wallet.

“This one has tea set,” the old woman responded, holding up the plain box. “Beautiful. Old. Very old. You like. Trust me. But must buy both boxes. They are a set,” she said as if she thought Carla might change her mind about which one she would want upon learning the contents of the plain box.

“A tea set? Let me see it,” Carla asked excitedly.

Great, Maureen thought to herself. There goes any bargaining power we had. The woman knew Carla was interested in both boxes. Now there would be no way to negotiate. While she enjoyed traveling with Carla, Maureen sometimes became very exasperated with Carla because she was like a little kid. She couldn’t contain her excitement in these matters. The woman had her on the hook and now she knew it. She could tell just by looking at her.

“Carla, why don’t you put it back and we’ll bring Frank and Colin in here later to look at them,” Maureen was hopeful that Carla would be willing to do this. Perhaps if she got Carla to put the boxes down she would get some time to think. Cooler heads would prevail and she would be able to negotiate better with Frank and Colin here with them.

The old woman shot Maureen a vicious look. Maureen just smiled. She was going to win here, she just knew it. Carla was not an impulse buyer. She always took her time to think about a purchase, she considered if she had space in her home, if there was money in the travel budget, whether the item in question fit with their décor…

“I’ll take them both!” Carla said this with such ferocity Maureen was startled. “How much do you want?” Maureen shook her head. She couldn’t believe Carla was buying these boxes like this. With a tea set inside the old woman would jack her price up and then jack it up some more when she saw how eager Carla was to have them.

“Carla, you haven’t even seen the tea set! It could be shattered in pieces for all you know. And hideous to boot. Wait for the guys and you can decide when you’ve had some time to think. Please.” Maureen finished, knowing she had lost the battle. She could tell just by looking at Carla, who was fishing more money out of her purse.

“Maureen, I’m sure it’s beautiful. I saw the painting on the side of the box. You did too. It’s gorgeous. I’d buy the both boxes just to have the one. If it’s going to make this lady happy, I’ll do it. She probably needs the money anyway. We’d be helping out this little old lady. What could be so horrible about that?” She finished this last sentence while fishing in her purse for still more money. The old woman looked over Carla’s head and smiled triumphantly at Maureen. She had won. There was a certain evil glee in her eyes that Maureen just didn’t like. She wanted to be out of this shop before anything else had happened. She had a feeling that something nasty had just taken place, but she couldn’t figure out what. After all, Carla had just bought two boxes, one painted in a rather pretty style. That was all, wasn’t it?

Rory had been told this story by his mother. She told her only son that after this purchase, the cement that had held their friendship together had somehow dissolved. Maureen hadn’t a clue why, but there was a discernable amount of hostility between the two of them after that purchase. Maureen had never been able to figure it out, but ever since that purchase in the shop in Thailand, it had always felt as though Carla had done something a bit nasty, like hurting a child for no particular reason. It just never sat right with her somehow and she couldn’t endure Carla’s company after that.

For Carla’s part, she began to believe that Maureen was jealous and wanted her purchase for herself. There had been a couple of occasions where Maureen had talked Carla out of a purchase or two, convincing Carla they were too pricey, only to purchase the item herself. It had always burned Carla when she did that and she felt Maureen had been trying to do that in the shop in Thailand. Though she loved Maureen like a sister when they took that trip, Carla began to obsess over the tea set and though she wouldn’t admit it this obsession had cost her a friendship with one of her dearest friends. Frank never understood it, but he didn’t push. He asked Carla what had happened and Carla had let him know she did not want to talk about it. He dropped it after that even though Carla could feel his puzzlement whenever Colin had stopped by to have a beer. Eventually Colin stopped coming by too, and that hurt Frank even more but Carla knew that Frank would never understand if she tried to explain. It wasn’t that Maureen had wanted the tea set for herself (yes it was); it was that she was trying to be so underhanded about it.

The only fight Frank and Carla had ever had about Maureen and Colin had been when Colin died. Frank insisted on going to Colin’s funeral and wake and Carla had tried to prevent it. She told Frank that she thought he was not being loyal to her by going. Frank, being normally a fairly compliant guy to Carla’s requests, had exploded at her. “I can NOT believe you would expect me to not go to Colin’s funeral! He was my friend no matter what craziness happened between you and Maureen in Thailand. You never told me, I never pushed, but Colin and I were good friends. Good friends are not easy to come by and you know it. Colin was ALWAYS there for me and I will not dishonor our friendship by not going to his funeral. I don’t CARE what you think; he was a good man and I’m GOING!” Frank had left that day and Carla was worried that he wasn’t going to come back. But come back he did. No matter what happened between Carla and Maureen, no matter how silly their falling out had been, Frank loved Carla deeply. He closed the door on the room in their relationship that included Maureen and Colin, but that hadn’t meant he never went back to that room by himself sometimes.

A few years before Carla had been diagnosed with breast cancer she had begun to feel that it had been a mistake to let her friendship with Maureen dissolve over a tea set. She picked up the tea set and brought it in its box, along with its twin box to the basement and left it there. It was both the smartest and dumbest thing she had ever done. It was smart in that it was put in the basement, which was out of the sphere of its influence on her. She began to miss her old friend. But it was dumb because it was not far enough away to protect her family from harm. She could be forgiven for that because she didn’t know what a diabolical influence the two boxes had on her and her home. She would never be able to fathom what would come later to her son. If she had she would most definitely have mailed those boxes back to Thailand and that little shop no matter what she had to do in order to find the address. Putting that tea set in the basement was very difficult for Carla and the fact that she was able to accomplish that feat and resist the urge that she had for many years later to bring it back upstairs to her bedroom demonstrated a deep ability to resist temptation.

Carla was a woman of character though. Not only did she resist the urge to bring the tea set upstairs, but she humbled herself enough to try to mend her friendship with Maureen. After much prayer, meditation and thought, Carla decided to visit her old friend and try to mend some fences. She called Maureen and asked that she be allowed to visit. Although there was some hesitation in her voice and she was clearly unsure what would result, Maureen agreed to allow Carla to visit her.

Carla had brought a pie (pumpkin, Maureen’s favorite) and the two women had chatted. There had been a few tears shed, and the pie was indeed eaten (a slice apiece) and cups of coffee had been enjoyed while Carla gave her apology to Maureen. She began quite eloquently because she had practiced it, but as she pressed on she had become more unsure of herself and the words were labored and stilted. While her apology was sincere and Maureen said she accepted it, Carla understood that too much time had gone by and their friendship was dead. It pained her to have made such a costly mistake, but what was done could not be undone. She left Maureen’s grieving for their friendship but accepting that she had a large hand in murdering it. It was the biggest regret Carla had in her life. She went to her grave years later feeling sad and confused about just how she lost that friendship.

The tea set stayed in the basement, untouched for several years. Carla never mentioned it to anyone except Larry in a moment of weakness. That moment of weakness was enough to spark the curiosity in Larry. He never pursued it while his mother was alive, but that curiosity was always there.

Rory had heard the story from his mom, Maureen. Maureen had told her Rory about how much regret she had for letting the friendship stay dead. She should have allowed Carla to mend the fences, but she was afraid. She didn’t like what the disagreement over the tea set had done to both of them. Their thoughts had turned pretty ugly rather quickly. Maureen had continued to have a very bad feeling about the tea set and related boxes, but she was never able to express her feelings to Carla. She was always afraid of what would come out between them if she gave voice to her concerns. The coldness that had slipped between the two of them had been so distressing and so utterly puzzling in that it was over a seemingly worthless item, that Maureen had been afraid to bring it up again.

“Mom,” Rory had asked one day when he was a young adult in his early twenties, “if Carla was your friend, she would have been okay with you having a different opinion than her. Friends disagree and bicker and get over it, right? “

Maureen had assured her boy that normally, yes, friends have disagreements and bicker and get over it. She had gone on further to let Rory know that the tension surrounding this tea set was not normal. She just could not overcome this obstacle to her long-time friendship with Carla. It had been easier and safer to let sleeping dogs lie. Perhaps she was a coward, but something about what she had seen in Carla while she was obsessed with that tea set frightened Maureen to the core.

Rory’s discussion with his mother regarding the crumbled relationship with Carla Bell stayed with him for years after his mother had passed away. She had died unexpectedly and peacefully in her sleep so far as anyone could tell.

Rory had said goodbye to his mother when he was twenty two. Unaware that Larry would be saying goodbye to his own mother a few short years later, Rory had felt a kinship with the Bells despite the fact that they had never spoken. Maureen and Colin had always spoken highly of the Bells. Whenever Rory had asked why they had not got together with them Maureen and Colin had always maintained that busy schedules, life intervening you know, was the real reason for their lack of contact. It wasn’t until Rory had hit his twenties that the story had come out. He had found pictures of his mother with Carla and he had asked about them. His mom had cried about those kodachromed memories, but it wasn’t until Rory had been a young adult that she finally told him about the tea set and what had happened because of it.

Those memories, so well-preserved by Maureen in sharing them with her son Rory, were the reason Rory was at the Bell’s. It seems that fate would have the Mackins and the Bells reconnect. Again it was because of the tea set. But this time, bonds would be forged, not broken. Rory had no idea that Larry’s animal problem had anything to do with the tea set his mother had so despised and Larry’s mother had so loved, but he did know that Larry had a problem that he could help with. Rory was something of an expert in handling wild animals. He had studied the animal sciences at Cornell University and the University of California – Davis. He coupled his love of animals with his love of the law and became an Animal Control officer in the fall of 2011. When he got out of college there were not many jobs in the industry, but he hung in there and found a position in his hometown of Guilford, CT.

So when Rory’s colleagues had been laughing about Wyatt’s mishaps at the Bell residence, Rory had seized the opportunity to help the family that had been such good friends with his family. He hoped to mend some fences between the families and if that benefitted his department, then all the better. Rory didn’t see how anyone could lose in this situation. He was sure he could help the Bells with their problems and he was sure he could keep Larry Bell from making a big scene in the papers over Wyatt’s buffoonery (not that Wyatt didn’t deserve a swift kick in the ass mind you).

When Larry’s call had come in to dispatch, there was a lot of eye-rolling and comments about tax payers taking advantage of the system. The general sense around the department was that Larry Bell just didn’t want to pay for an exterminator. The general consensus was that if Larry could get Animal Control to handle the problem, perhaps they might get rid of the animal in his house and he wouldn’t have to hire someone to do it. Rory didn’t agree with the consensus. He heard the message and the man sounded frazzled and worried. He was at a complete loss as to how to handle whatever was possibly in the woods and worried about any children who might encounter whatever it was in the woods.

No worries, Rory thought. He could handle whatever it was. He had loads of experience dealing with animals. He would collect this one and sort out what might be done about the one in the basement for good measure. It was probably a raccoon, scared and hungry. Rory could get it to leave the house. He had a special fruit and nut mix he made that always seemed to work to lure the critters out of any dwelling they found their way into. He kept a sack of it in his truck for this type of occasion.



Exasperated and tired, Larry waited for Officer Mackin to remove Wyatt. Watching from the window, Larry saw Wyatt stumble, rub his forehead and then quickly grab for his abdomen. That could not be good news Larry thought. He was right. Officer Wyatt proceeded to vomit all over the rosebushes. Wonderful, Larry thought. Not only did that idiot waste my time, but now he is doing considerable damage to my bushes. Should I send a bill to the Town of Guilford for the cost of re-landscaping my property? Not only did he vomit on the bushes, but Larry saw that Wyatt was also grabbing big handfuls of his bushes in a feeble attempt to keep his feet.

Officer Mackin did what he could to minimize the damage. When he saw that Wyatt was going to vomit, Rory managed to shift Wyatt just enough so that he did not vomit on the larger of the two rose bushes near the end of the driveway. Wyatt’s hot mess hit the small one on the left.

Larry didn’t think that Officer Mackin could do much but remove Wyatt from his property. Clearly the Animal Control Officer was not a respected position in Guilford. He would have to resolve himself to the idea that the exterminator would be his only hope of ridding himself of whatever was in his basement and perhaps whatever was in the woods. Larry would content himself with the removal of the besotted Wyatt for now. The exterminator would be here soon. Officer Mackin meant well, but with little support from the Police Department, Larry felt he would be redirected to some other project once the “Wyatt” situation was handled.

Once Wyatt was deposited in Officer Mackin’s cruiser, Rory walked back up the sidewalk long enough to tip his hat and tell Larry he would return shortly. “Give me about twenty minutes and I’ll be back to help you with your animal problem,” he paused. “Believe me; I’ll have that critter out of there and your basement clear of it by the end of today.”

Nodding his head and smiling, Larry indulged Officer Mackin’s wishful thinking. “Thanks Officer, I appreciate your help. Just get that guy out of here, will you?” He waved in the direction of Wyatt, who was hanging his head out of the window in misery at this point.

Officer Rory Mackin got in his car with no further comment and drove away with Wyatt in the passenger side of the car. Wyatt was still hanging out the window when Larry saw them drive off down the road. Larry closed the front door and sat down at the kitchen table shaking his head. He was still disgusted with the performance of Officer “Wyatt” (he had never found out his last name in all that time), but he was amused and a little touched with Officer Mackin’s commitment to assisting him with his troubles.

Now he would wait. That was all he could do. Wait for the exterminator. Wait for Officer Mackin. Wait for Emily. Wait to hear from Ella. Ella! He almost forgot! Roberta would be bringing her home soon if he didn’t call her and ask her to hold off. Roberta might be a shade upset with needing to hang on to Ella for yet another night, but it looked like it could be necessary, depending on how successful the exterminator was.

Larry picked up the phone. He began to dial Roberta’s number from memory when he heard it. The awful keening noise that began as a high pitched wailing sound and developed into a low rolling, purring growl. It made the hackles on the back of Larry’s neck stand up. Larry hung up the phone and covered his ears, trying to block out the horrible noise the animal in the basement was making. Larry prayed that the noise was some kind of death wail. Hopeful that rabies had finally drained whatever life was left to the vicious attacker; Larry endured the awful sound with hope. There were some crashing noises, a gurgle, and some splintering sounds. Larry thought that perhaps one of his mother’s paintings had been destroyed. He sighed. At least Mom had not been here to hear it. It would have broken her heart.

He was going to have to contact his home owner’s insurance carrier when this was over. It sounded like an incredible amount of damage was being done by whatever the hell it was in his basement. He was trying to sort out what the various noises were and anticipate the damages. Planning to do repairs was apparently the only thing he could do right now. That and wait for the exterminator. He hated waiting. If he had to wait too long he would try to do something himself.

Larry suddenly remembered that he had not completed his call to Roberta. He picked up the phone, dialed her number and filled his sister in on the list of failures for today. He laid the groundwork first, and then asked her the $64,000 question: Would she keep Ella for another night? Emily couldn’t keep her tonight as she had classes that ran very late. Roberta, being the wonderful sister and aunt that she was, of course agreed to take Ella for another night.

“But Larry, I can only take her for one more night. After that it has to be Emily or Sissy. I’m going out of town for a couple weeks on business,” Roberta finished this last in a tired tone.

“Do you want me to call Sissy instead Bobby?” Larry was worried that he might be imposing.

“No, it’s fine Lar,” Roberta continued. “You know I love having Ella, she’s such a sweetheart. I just have to travel for work starting Thursday. I won’t be back for a couple weeks. You’ll have to ask Sissy or Emily while I’m gone.”

“I’ll bring her some clothes tonight,” Larry said.

“No you won’t little brother! I love shopping for Ella and she loves trying things on for me when we’re together. Besides, she needs some new clothes anyway. You hardly ever take her shopping and her pants are starting to look like capris,” she laughed in an expansive manner. “Leave it to me and I’ll take care of everything.”

Larry looked at his watch. It was one thirty. “Ella gets out of school in forty-five minutes, Bobby. Can you pick her up? I’m waiting for the exterminator to come and it would be better if someone was here when they got here,” Larry really hoped Roberta could get his daughter.

“Sure Lar, no problem. Again, I’m free to do it today, but tomorrow you’ll have to get Emily or Sissy,” Roberta finished this last comment gently.

“I know, I know Bobby. I’ll talk to Emily again tonight to be sure she’s free tomorrow if there’s going to be a problem,” Larry nodded his head while answering his younger sister. “Thanks again for all your help Bobby.” Larry hangs up the phone and smiles. His sisters were always so good to Ella. They doted on her and made themselves available to help her frequently. They loved her and treated her like their own daughter.

Hanging up the phone, Larry turned his attention back to the wild animal sounds coming from the basement. Whatever was down in his basement was in a feral rage. It seemed to be rampaging around the bottom floor and randomly crashing into things. Was it looking for something? The closer he listened, the less random the sounds seemed to him. There was a long pause during which Larry would hear scrabbling noises. After a period of scrabbling noises it would be quiet again. Just when Larry started to relax and think there would be no more noises, there would be a large crashing sound. With little idea of what was going on, Larry got very nervous. He hated that he could not see what was going on in the basement.

Maybe he should just take a peek he thought. Are you crazy? Did you see what that thing did to Mom’s stuff? His brain challenged him. If you don’t remember what happened, I’ll remind you: it decimated some of her paintings and its probably doing that to whatever is left. Let’s not fail to remember YOU were almost LUNCH too. But the exterminator isn’t here yet. Maybe they weren’t coming at all. It isn’t unheard of for a “professional” to not keep their word about when they were coming. What did they say in that movie with Tom Hanks and Shelly Long? Every time the contractors were asked how long it was going to take to finish the job they said, “Two weeks!” and everyone around them would laugh. Was this going to be like that? Was it going to take days to get an exterminator or animal control officer in to clear this animal out of his home? He just couldn’t wait that long. He was anxious to get rid of this thing and fix whatever damage it caused.

Larry had all but decided that he was going to have to head downstairs on his own when the doorbell rang. It startled Larry, but it was a welcome noise. Hopefully the exterminator had arrived and he would finally be rid of the horrible animal in the basement. Crossing the kitchen swiftly as he was eager to get this job done, Larry reached the door and swung it wide open in anticipation of meeting whomever it was going to be that was going to seize his home back from that horrible beast.

The person he saw in front of him was cartoonish. The individual before him had a long Yosemite-Sam handlebar moustache and a compact, wiry body that looked fairly roped with muscle. Wearing a tank-style t-shirt and blue jeans, the exterminator (he was the exterminator, right?) smiled and shifted his gaze from the clip-board he was holding to Larry’s eyes. Taking a moment to remove his sunglasses, Yosemite-Sam folds them and hangs them on his t-shirt before offering a hand to Larry to shake. “Mr Bell? My name’s Alan. Alan Yoakam’s the name. I hear you have an animal problem? If so, I’m your man,” Mr. Yoakam finished.

Larry couldn’t have been happier to see someone if he tried. He cracked a huge smile when Alan introduced himself and opened the door wide. “Come on in Mr. Yoakam. Please come on in. I am so pleased to meet you. Come on in.”

“Aw, you can call me Alan. Mr. Yoakam is my Dad,” Alan responded. “Let’s figure out what your problem is and we’ll take care of it. There’s no animal yet that has been too tough or too vicious for me to handle.” Alan finished this last proud comment by tapping his clip-board. “This here check list helps me to isolate what we’re dealing with. It is almost always the best tool for getting rid of any varmint you may have here.” Alan smiled and flashed the clipboard in Larry’s direction. “Mind if I ask you a few questions before I look at what you have in the basement?”

“Not at all, Alan,” Larry returned Alan’s smile and pulled out a chair to sit. “Whatcha got?”

“Well, first, how long have you had the problem? Has the critter been here hours, days, or weeks?” Alan pulled a pen out from his back pocket and prepared to write Larry’s responses down on his check list.

“I think it’s only been here for a few hours, but I’m not positive,” Larry said. “I’m not exactly sure how it got in, so I can’t be sure how long it’s been here. “

Alan checked a couple boxes on his clipboard and nodded his head. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. Do you know how it got in?”

“No. I haven’t the slightest idea. All I know is that it was in my basement as of yesterday. It trashed the hell out of some of my belongings down there and I think it may have done serious damage to the walls down there. I need this damn thing out of there. Can you get it?” Larry leaned forward, impatient to get started removing It from his home.

“Now hold on Mr. Bell, I’m going to help you out of course, but I gotta finish my questions first. If we rush into this without thinking, we’ll get bested by this thing. “ Alan Yoakam was not going to be rushed into making a mistake. He would get this savage thing out of Mr. Bell’s home, but he would do it the right way. He would follow the procedure and the results would follow.

So the two men went through Mr. Alan Yoakam’s questionnaire line by line, question by question, not knowing that the exercise they were engaged in was an exercise in futility. Mr Yoakam had years of experience under his belt. He had helped many many people get all kinds of pests out of their homes ranging from bugs to mice to squirrels, raccoons, skunks, foxes and even a bear in one case (he hoped never to have to deal with another bear though). But none of that experience with animals mattered. Mr. Alan Yoakam had never experienced anything like what was in Mr. Larry Bell’s basement.

The men stayed hunched over the questionnaire for another ten minutes, Alan firing the questions at Larry, and Larry answering to the best of his knowledge. Sometimes he had no answers to the questions, like when Alan asked how big the animal was. It had been moving way too fast for Larry to get a good look. His only interest when he had been in the best position to see had been to get the hell out of there as fast as he could and without being bit by the thing. He had heard that the shots you had to get for rabies were awful. And there were a lot of them.

“Now, if you don’t mind me saying so, I have to go drain the lizard,” Alan said. “We can go and see what we are dealing with after that.” Mr. Alan Yoakam turned to Larry and said, “Don’t go in there without me. Wait for me and I we can do this with a minimum of fuss. If you go charging down there you’re likely to get yourself bit and scratched up to boot.”

Alan got up and headed into the bathroom. While he was there the doorbell rang again. Larry had completely forgotten about Officer Rory Mackin and his half-hearted promise to him. He headed to the door and let Rory in.

“I’m back, just like I told you I would be. Let’s deal with that raccoon now,” Rory looked eager to begin.

“I didn’t think you were going to come back. I really thought that once you had your colleague Wyatt out of range there wouldn’t be any more for you to do. Thought your boss might reassign you,” Larry smiled at this last, glad to have more help than he had planned on.

He reached out and shook Officer Mackin’s hand. “Call me Rory sir,” Officer Mackin said. “I’m so glad I can help. Let’s get to it.”

When Alan returned from the bathroom, he was pleased to see they had more help. More experienced help. He didn’t have to go over the spiel about being careful with a wild animal, not trying to pick it up with bare hands, etc. etc. This guy would know how to handle things. He wouldn’t have to say a word about opening the outside windows and doors to get the wild animal to scoot out of the house. Alan was pretty hopeful about how this was going to go and how quickly it would go.

“So when did you hear it last Larry?” Rory asked his new friend.

“I heard it right before Alan arrived. It was smashing something down there. I don’t know if it was angry or ill or what the heck it was doing. I’m fairly certain I heard it attack one of my cats. After hearing that I’m not sure what we’ll see when we get down there. Be prepared. Whatever happened, I think it may have killed my cat. If I’m right, there’s probably going to be a LOT of blood down there,” Larry shuddered. “I really don’t want to see what happened, but I don’t suppose I have much of a choice,” he finished.

The three men went over to the book shelves Larry had barricaded across the basement door. They dragged them away and prepared to head down the stairs. Larry’s mouth dried up as they got ready to open the door. Last time this door had been open he had been running for his life. He had thought he was ready to deal what was on the other side, but now he was not so sure. It might take him a minute or two to regain his composure, and he wasn’t sure they had that minute or two to waste.

“Don’t worry Larry,” Alan said, noticing Larry’s reluctance and the pale cast of his skin. “We’ll cover you. This critter can’t be as strong as he was when he first tried to attack you. Given the fact that it’s sick which probably will make it weaker and there are three of us instead of one to defend you, we’ll probably get it before it gets you.”

With this encouragement Larry began to head down the stairs. So far so good he thought. He didn’t hear the sounds of a frenzied beast approaching. Maybe it was dead already. Maybe they were just going to have to clean up its mess. That would be okay he guessed. He wasn’t thrilled of course, but it was better than getting bit. Several times. He guessed that if it had the strength to bite it would bite several times. Shred his skin. That’s what it would do.

Creak! Larry hit the creaky stair. He had forgotten to avoid it. It was a really creaky stairway if you didn’t know how to avoid the places that creaked. Larry froze. He was sure that the beast would come careening out of the darkness at them at full-speed. He waited. Nothing. The three men looked at each other. They looked around the basement, expecting to see the creature. Still nothing. Alan and Rory looked at Larry. He shrugged his shoulders. The three men relaxed noticeably and got off the stairs.

Since they weren’t apparently in any imminent danger, they spread out and began looking around. There was a LOT of damage. Whatever this animal was, it was very strong. The pile of rubble in the corner where Larry’s mother’s things used to be was evidence of this.

“Awwwww shit! These were my mother’s things! The friggin beast HAD to attack those, really?” Larry walked over to where there used to be a Monet and a Jackson Pollock painting. They were nothing but shards of canvas shrapnel and broken wooden framing with bits of color flecked on them. He sifted through the remains, both pissed off that his mother’s things had been destroyed and deeply sad. That was all they had left of her. That thing had ruined her legacy. He stood up and used his foot to stir through what was left. He had to push aside some large broken pieces of canvas before he saw them. On the floor, one of them canted on its side, were the small wooden boxes his mother had brought home from that trip to Thailand all those years ago.

Those freakin boxes? They withstood the pounding that this thing apparently gave everything else? Larry couldn’t believe it. The paintings were so much dreck yet the boxes looked as though they had just come off the shelf at the store. They were still gleaming through their highly polished sides. Larry picked them up and looked them over. As he did so he turned them this way and that in his hands. Not a scratch on the one that had no adornment on it. It still had that mellow glow to it. The small scorpion on the bottom still looked like a scorpion. There were no dents and the brass corners and lock appeared to still be intact.

He bet the tea set was toast though. Probably it was so much broken porcelain he would need to toss it out. The crashing noises he heard while the beast had been crashing around meant that this thing had to have been thrown around at least once. It most likely hit the wall at some point. He saw some marks on the wall that looked as though they could have come from the boxes hitting there. Yeah, he’d be lucky if the tea set wasn’t so much dust now.

He turned his attention to the other, more elaborately decorated box. Surely the paint will have been scratched off a bit. With the crashing and thrashing noises that the animal was producing earlier, it would seem impossible that these boxes would have escaped unscathed. It would seem that way perhaps, yet they had. There were no discernible scratches on this box either. Larry turned the box on its side to inspect the image of the woman. Still as alluring as ever, there wasn’t a scratch upon her. She still had her long dark tresses cascading down her back. The shy smile that was usually there seemed to have been replaced by an angry scowl. Her cheeks had tinges of crimson and her eyebrows were drawn in an angry “V” on her forehead.

Why was this woman so angry? Larry wondered. He thought for a moment. He could have sworn that there was a time that this very same woman was smiling. He was almost positive of it. He stood, thinking about this for a few moments. Yes, he could swear that she was smiling the first time he picked the box up. This realization was very unsettling. Larry noticed details. He was a Mechanical Engineer. He was trained to notice details such as this. Paying attention to the small things in order to make things work was what he spent his days doing…it was how he earned his living. For this reason Larry trusted his memory and that unsettled him. What did it mean that this woman, who was not a real woman at all but a painted representation of an artist’s idea of a woman, went from happiness to anger? What did she want?

Larry didn’t have time to further his ruminations about the woman though. His time to ruminate on anything was over for now. The creature Larry would later refer to as Al (no relation to his new friend Alan Yoakam) came screaming out of the darkness and slammed into his midsection. Larry fell backwards and hit his head on the wall. The fall stunned him and he was immobilized for a few moments.

If Larry had been unfortunate enough to be alone on this excursion, Al would have made short work of him. Al had been sleeping and had missed Larry, Alan and Rory’s entrance. The noise of Larry sifting through the rubble Al had created had awoken the ancient creature from its slumber. It was only moments after awaking that Al had realized two things. First, it was incredibly hungry and needed sustenance. Secondly, a source of food was nearby and all it would take was to reach it to sate its desire for food. It also realized a third thing. This third thing pleased it very much, so much so that it smiled. A casual onlooker would have been very disturbed, frightened even to see its smile. Al would have liked that. He would have loved that because he would be getting a two-for-one deal. What was pleasing Al so thoroughly was that he realized the potential for inciting feelings of abject terror. The attack he was going to mount would terrorize Larry and anyone else that could be within viewing distance. Al promised itself that it would make this attack very bloody and very painful. So when it launched itself in Larry’s direction it was moving quickly and baring its teeth. What it didn’t realize was that it was making a high keening noise as it lunged forward.

It was this noise that actually saved Larry’s life. The noise caused Rory to stop what he was doing (looking at the remains of Larry’s work bench) and spin around. Rory saw Al hurtling toward Larry and began running towards Larry before he even fully registered what was happening. His protective instincts, honed over the years from both hearing his mother discuss the Bells and his profession, were in full swing. He was a lithe individual and very quick-footed. The requirements of his job were taken very seriously by Rory and he kept himself in top athletic shape. This physical fitness made it an easy task for Rory to reach Larry quickly. This was a good thing because Larry was on his back on the floor, rubbing his head where it had hit the wall. He was moving slowly and trying to sit up. Rory reached Larry and helped him up before Al had a chance to round and renew his attack. Al had expected Larry to be still on the floor. It hadn’t noticed that Larry had two other beings with him. Al had been attacking as if Larry was a solo creature, separated from the herd and weakened because of it. This had been a serious miscalculation.

Because of Al’s miscalculation, It wasn’t expecting Larry to be protected by Rory. It also wasn’t expecting the assault by Alan from behind. Unbeknownst to Al, Alan had seen the beast before it had sprung on Larry. Alan had been stunned into paralysis. Because Rory hadn’t taken the time to notice what Al actually was he hadn’t had any gut reaction to it besides to protect his new friend. He had moved first. Alan, however, had a small mental shut-down. His brain had received all the visual input and when what it had did not connect with anything it had known before, it had frozen temporarily. If Alan hadn’t been in shadow Al would have seen him first and Larry and Rory would have been dashing to protect him instead of Larry. As it was, Alan was safe for the moment, and processing the information his eyes had provided.

It wasn’t until Al’s keening sounds of the attack had reached Alan’s ears that the paralysis broke. Alan was also in top physical condition. He hurtled across the basement, grabbing a broom on the way. It was the only thing quickly within reach that he saw that might help him protect his employer. Sometimes one swift swat with a broomstick was all that was needed to deter an animal from attacking.

Alan swung the broom in a wide arc and connected squarely with Al. The force of the blow drove Al across the room and bounced It against the wall. It screamed in anger and disappointment at being deflected from its attack. It spun around to face its attacker. Without even thinking it lunged forward in a bloodthirsty rage. Unprepared for such an attack, Alan swung the broom frantically towards Al, hoping to drive the being away.

Without even slowing down, Al continued his vicious attack on Alan. It snapped the broom handle in Its jaws, leaving a jagged stake in Alan’s hands. While Alan still had a weapon to defend himself with, it was shorter than his original broomstick. The shorter handle meant that there was less distance between himself and the demon. The shortened distance meant that Al still could reach Alan. Al did not fail to realize this and he reversed his course on his second pass and attacked Alan. Sinking his teeth deep within Alan’s wrist, Al drew blood this time. Alan screamed and swung the wooden stake he had in his hand toward Al. He tried to bury the stake in the center of Al’s head/body (it seemed to be the same thing), but missed. He only managed to graze the side of Al’s body. Something that might be termed blood began to ooze out of Al’s side, but Alan didn’t have time to consider this. His own blood was pouring from his wrist at an alarming rate. If he didn’t tourniquet it quickly he would be dead soon.

Although it cost Alan dearly to attack Al, it did prevent Larry from being gutted. Larry had enough time to scrabble away from Al and get to his feet before Al finished his advance. After Larry was at a semi-safe distance from Al, Alan grabbed his own arm back from the gaping maw that was Al’s mouth. This all happened in the space of thirty seconds. When it was over, Alan had enough time to cast his eyes about for something to tourniquet his wrist with before Al attacked him again.

Alan screamed in alarm. Rory and Larry lunged forward to help. Each man had located an item that might be of some help in fending the beast off – Larry had a snow shovel in his hand and Rory had grabbed an andiron, both were castoffs. The snow shovel was a remnant from their time living in their first apartment and the andiron was from the décor before Elizabeth had worked with an interior designer to decorate their living room.

The men brandished their weapons as they advanced on the beast and closed ranks in front of Alan. Alan’s wound was bleeding profusely and if he didn’t tie it off soon, he would lose consciousness. Larry was trying to help Alan find something staunch the flow of blood, but amidst the wreckage of his basement, there weren’t too many items he could see that would help. His eyes casting frantically about for something, ANYTHING to help Alan, Larry’s eyes spied a length of rope behind the demon. It was dangling from a pile of rubble just to the right.

Maybe he could feint left and have enough time to run and grab the hank of rope and get it back to Alan. He hoped so anyway. Alan wasn’t looking so good. The color was draining out of his face and he looked a little woozy. He had to deal with the immediate issue anyway, that being the attack of the beast. He swung the snow shovel hard. It connected with whatever the hell it was and sent it flying back across the room.

Larry spun around and grabbed Alan as he was passing out. He carefully laid Alan on the cement floor and took off running to get the hank of rope he had seen. He sensed that he didn’t have much time before Alan would be in real trouble. Shooting a quick look around to reassure himself that the fiend was at a safe distance for the moment, Larry grabbed the rope and knelt down by Alan’s inert form. He began looping the rope around Alan’s wrist several times. It was unfortunate that Alan was wearing a tank-style t-shirt, as there were no sleeves to protect his wrists from the rope with. Larry pulled off his own shirt quickly and tore a length of fabric from it. He tucked that under the rope in hopes of protecting Alan’s skin. Once he protected Alan’s skin as best as he could he pulled the looped rope around his wrist tight. Bloody flowers bloomed on the fabric around the rope for a moment or two. Larry wasn’t sure if his tourniquet would be successful at first. There were runnels of blood trickling down Alan’s fingers onto the floor for a few moments. Larry pulled tighter on the tourniquet and began to wind it tighter and tighter until he was sure that the blood flow had stopped. When he was confident that the opening in Alan’s wrist was blocked, he grabbed another section of rope and tied the tourniquet as it was.

While Larry was trying to save Alan, Rory had his hands full. Al had been flung across the expanse of the basement by Larry’s shovel. Al, being the distractible creature it was, came up from his collision with the far wall, saw Rory and focused on him as his next meal. It had completely (for the moment) forgotten Larry and Alan and in its murderous rage flung itself toward Rory. Rory had an andiron in his left hand. He used this like a baseball bat and swung wildly toward the direction Al was hurtling from. In a stroke of pure luck Rory connected with Al and swatted him back across the basement in an unfortunate volley. This volley landed the horrible beast back in Larry and Alan’s territory.

As mentioned earlier, Al was highly distractible. This meant that when Al was flung across the basement yet again, he was not likely to renew his assault on Rory. The first thing that the monster laid its eyes upon was likely to be its prey. Fortunately for the three men involved, that was not likely to be any of them in the immediate future as It was stunned. Rory’s clobbering had rendered the beast temporarily immobile. This immobility bought the men time to run. Larry and Rory grabbed Alan by the shoulders and dragged him backwards up the stairs. Larry and Rory managed to get through the door and drag Alan through the door most of the way before the horrible little gremlin was up and on the attack again. It was a lucky thing that Alan was wearing steel-toed boots because the beast tried to sink its fangs into his foot. Its attempts were unsuccessful however, due to the durability of the boots.

The men heard screaming. It was deep, horrified screaming that none of them realized was coming from themselves until they had managed to catapult themselves through the door to the hallway leading to the kitchen and slam the door shut on Al. They weren’t able to do that until Al was beat back to the space leading to the basement so they could close the door. They barely won that battle. If they had not won that particular battle, the vile creature they were fighting would have had free reign of not only the house but the back yard and the larger world because Rory had left the door open to the back yard. Who knows what horrors would have ensued then. Al would have been free to terrorize any and all it had wanted to.

The door was closed. The threat, for now, was eliminated. Unless that thing, whatever it was, managed to break down the door (thank God Elizabeth had insisted on solid, oak doors when they had redecorated), the three of them were safe for now. Larry very pointedly threw the catch on the deadbolt and sighed a huge sigh of relief. After that sigh he began to shake. He couldn’t control the trembling for about five minutes. He had never experienced anything like the last twenty minutes and hoped never to again. Little did he know that what he had just experienced was only the beginning of his new life, his life separated from all those he cared about and in hiding. Hiding from the thing that wanted to consume him and anyone who came within reach.

Rory was the first one who composed himself. He looked over the other two men and assessed the damage they had sustained. Larry did not appear to be physically harmed, but he looked completely unhinged. It was Rory’s sincere hope that his initial assessment was incorrect, but what he saw before him was a seriously unstable man. Larry was shaking and obsessively patting himself down, as if in disbelief that he was in one piece. Rory understood Larry’s need to check himself for injuries, but he thought Larry looked just a little too unbalanced.

Alan, however, was a bigger problem. Whatever that thing was it had sunk its teeth deep into his wrist and almost severed his hand from his arm. Larry had managed to stop the flow of blood with a tourniquet but Rory was positive that Alan was going to lose his hand. Rory’s stomach did a slow roll. He was compelled to study the injury to Alan’s arm. The meat of his arm near his hand was shredded. There were blooms of blood dotted all through the fabric under the tourniquet. When the shock of the day’s events wore off Alan was going to be in serious pain.

Rory wondered if there were any painkillers in the house. Alan was going to need them soon. Larry might need another kind of medicine. Rory wondered if Larry was going to be salvageable. Rory frowned sadly and shook his head. It was really a crapshoot in Rory’s opinion. He hoped he was wrong, after all he wasn’t a medical professional, but Larry didn’t look too good.

“What the hell was that?” Larry asked. “That wasn’t a raccoon, that’s for sure, so what in the holy hell is that?” Larry kept running his hands through his hair and his eyes darted around the room. Rory knew that look. It was the look of a hunted thing.

“I have no fuckin idea my friend,” Alan responded. “Whatever it was it was fuckin’ vicious. Look what it did to my damn hand!” Alan held his tourniqueted arm up for inspection. “Ohhhhh shit, that’s never going to be the same again!” Alan pulled his arm back and moaned. “The sonofabitch is really starting to hurt now fellas!”

Rory looked at Larry, hoping he was still together enough to be able to help Alan out. “Larry, do you have any painkillers here? Alan’s going to be in screaming pain in a couple of minutes. It would be a good idea to get a jump on the pain if we can.”

Larry pressed his lips together for a moment and thought. After what seemed like an interminable amount of time Larry returned from whatever distant place his mind had gone off to. “I think we might still have some of Elizabeth’s morphine…maybe that would help?” This last phrase was offered tentatively, as if afraid he would be yelled at.

“Yes Larry, I think that’s exactly what we need. Can you go get it please? Alan doesn’t have long before he’s going to really be hurting,” Rory gave Larry a gentle push to get him walking. He hoped Larry would be able to find what they needed. He didn’t look as though he could find his own hands with two hands and a flashlight.

Larry headed off in the general direction of the stairs and Rory hoped Larry would come back with what they needed. He didn’t want to leave Alan by himself. If Alan passed out while he was gone he might not come back. He had lost a lot of blood, and Rory wanted to be here to revive him if he faded at all. Rory planned to call 911, but he wanted to talk to Larry again before calling. He wanted to see if he was going to be okay, or should Rory plan on both men going to the hospital?

The medication was here somewhere. Larry had not been able to get rid of Elizabeth’s belongings after she died. Not yet anyway. Her belongings included her prescriptions. Eventually Larry knew that he was going to have to deal with her belongings, but up to now he had been unable to bear the idea of getting rid of them. It kept him in touch with her to have these things nearby.

It turned out his reluctance to part with Elizabeth’s belongings was going to serve a practical purpose. Alan was in dire need of pain medication because of whatever that thing was in the basement. Larry had never seen such a vicious attack in his life and he would have been killed if Alan hadn’t come to his aid. Even if they called 911 it would take at least fifteen minutes for the EMT’s to arrive. It would take whatever pain medication they gave Alan an additional fifteen or twenty minutes to work. Larry believed that by then Alan would be screaming. His hand was almost severed completely from the wrist and the skin and muscle of the hand and wrist was shredded. Larry doubted the hand could be reattached either. Alan was going to be devastated. Larry’s shoulders drooped. He had no idea his phone call to the exterminator was going to result in such blood and pain.

Feeling weighed down with guilt, Larry grabbed the morphine tablets and headed back down the stairs. When he reached the kitchen again he opened the cap and shook out a couple tablets into his hand. “Here Alan, take these. If you aren’t feeling pain yet you soon will be. “He offered his open hand to Alan.

“I’d love to tell you I’m going to be tough and refuse the pills,” Alan smiled gently, “but I’m not. I can already feel the symphony of pain beginning in my wrist. It feels like it’s on fire and I’m still in shock.” He gritted his teeth after that last comment. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen in another half hour.” He took the pills Larry offered him and dry-swallowed them. “Got a shot of whisky to wash these down?” Alan grinned in a tired way.

“Sure, I think I have some in the kitchen,” Larry said. “I’ll get it.” He walked quickly to the kitchen and opened the cabinet next to his refrigerator. There was the Jim Beam, right where he left it last Christmas. He and Elizabeth did not drink often, but they did share an occasional drink, or at least they had.

Grabbing a glass from the cabinet above, Larry put some ice in it and poured the Jim Beam over it. He brought it back to Alan who shot it back in one gulp. Alan closed his eyes a moment, paused and took a deep breath.

“I’m not a drinking man Larry. This whiskey is probably going to hit me like a freight train,” Alan told him. “Which is just fine with me if you want to know. I don’t want to be conscious for much longer. If the pain gets much worse you’re going to hear a grown man screaming.” He flushed when he said this last as if he was embarrassed by this last admission.

“I don’t think anyone would do any different in your shoes my friend, and if they said they would they’re liars,” Larry responded.

Alan smiled a quiet smile and nodded. He closed his eyes and let the whisky and morphine take over. When he had drifted off to a prescription sleep, Larry left the room to talk with Rory.

With the toilet flushed and his hands washed, Rory walked out of the bathroom fastening his belt. It’s funny how day-to-day things like going to the bathroom can sometimes bring a person back from the edge. How many psychotics do you hear about going over the edge while they are takin a piss? Not many. It probably happened, but you didn’t hear about many. Rory reverted to doing these normal, functional activities whenever he felt spooked. It helped him to reset his internal rhythms by doing normal activities…going to the bathroom…washing his hands…making a sandwich. Rory was resetting now. He had been worried about how Larry was doing but boy, he had skated right up to the edge himself today. What the hell was down in Larry’s basement? Rory knew a lot about animals but he had never seen anything like that. It was the most vicious thing he had ever seen. It was also insanely fast. He couldn’t believe how quickly it had crossed that basement.

He thought to himself for a few moments. Had he seen legs on the thing? What was it? Was it some kind of wolf? It seemed unlikely now that it was anything like a raccoon or squirrel. It definitely wasn’t a bear. Whatever it was did not have rabies Rory guessed. The only sign of rabies the creature exhibited was aggression, and that was possibly just a characteristic of the animal, whatever it was.

They were going to have to figure out what it was in order to get rid of it. It was too quick for the usual tricks, and they sure as hell didn’t want it escaping into the woods. To have an animal that vicious loose in the woods would be a recipe for a real disaster. The death toll would rise quickly. They had to contain this thing and get rid of it somehow. But how? They had barely had five minutes in the basement and they were totally overwhelmed by this thing. When they had had some time to regroup they were going to have to compare notes about what they had seen down there. It would have to wait until later however. After Alan was stabilized and Rory could get a bead on how Larry was holding up.

It was important that Larry be able to hold it together in order for them to be able to contain this thing. Rory didn’t want to leave today until he was fairly certain that Larry was going to be okay. If he had even a slight suspicion that Larry might not be alright he would stay with him until he could figure out what needed to be done. He thought he might be able to convince Larry to let him stay, I mean holy shit that thing in his basement was scary violent, who would want to stay in this house alone with it? He didn’t think Larry would want to. After all, what if that thing got a mind to get out of the basement? Since they didn’t know what it was they had no idea of how smart it was. The other issue was - He couldn’t possibly think he was going to allow his daughter to stay here, did he? That seemed to be taking a real risk with, what did he say her name was? Ella? He didn’t think Larry would want to do that. He had, in fact, called Animal Control because of his concern over not only Ella, but also the other children who like to play in the woods behind his home.

Rory saw Larry coming back down the hall to the kitchen. He had just left Alan in the living room and Rory hoped that meant Alan was comfortable for now. They would talk and see what the situation was. Then they would bring Alan to the hospital and Rory would file his report. God, his report, he had no idea what he was going to say in that. But he’ d figure that out later.

“So Mr Bell, is Mr. Yoakam settled in for now? Everything okay?” Rory was anxious to hear that Mr. Yoakam was alright and that Mr. Bell had pulled himself together somewhat.

“First of all, before we go any further it’s Larry. Anyone who gets attacked by a wild animal with me in my home has earned the right to call me Larry. Is that okay Officer Mackin?” Larry pulled up a chair and sat down.

“I’ll call you Larry if you drop the Officer Mackin crap and call me Rory,” Rory smiled. He liked Larry so far.

“Agreed. The answer to your question though is yes. Mr. Yoakam is settled for now. He took some of Elizabeth’s morphine and a slug of Jim Beam and he’s in the living room drifting away. He’s as right as rain for now, although I do think we need to get him to a hospital pronto,” Larry said this last bit casting his eyes over his shoulder toward the living room. You could see he was very uneasy with the situation as it now stood. Rory guessed he wanted someone in authority to step up and take over. Someone who knew what they were doing.

Rory thought they needed to cover a couple things before they let the officials (besides himself) take over. “What the HELL do you think that thing was?” There, it was out in the open. Now they would have to address it.

“I have absolutely no idea. I have never seen anything so vicious around here, have you?” Larry leaned toward Rory and waited expectantly.

“No sir, I have never seen anything around here anywhere near that aggressive. It doesn’t seem to be rabid either. It just doesn’t exhibit any of the other symptoms of a rabid animal in my opinion, “ Rory shook his head. “It isn’t a raccoon and it sure as hell doesn’t look like a fox,” Rory finished.

“Think it’s a fisher cat?” Larry asked. I’ve heard those things are pretty vicious.

“Nah. Fisher cats look more like ferrets, only they’re bigger. That thing was too squat and fat to be a fisher cat. “ Rory had dealt with fisher cats before. They were nasty creatures for sure, but not as nasty as this thing had been.

“Maybe we can look it up on the internet or something,” Larry suggested.

“Sure, you can look almost anything up on the internet, but it might take a while,” Rory added. “In the meantime, what are we going to do about your basement? Your home? It isn’t safe to have that thing in your basement. You aren’t thinking of bringing your daughter back here yet, are you?” Rory was worried.

“No. No way. She’s staying with my sister until I can figure out what this is and get rid of it,” Larry’s words reassured Rory. He was reassured for several reasons. He was reassured that Ella would have a safe place to stay, and it seemed that Larry was thinking clearly. He could stop worrying about that for now. He’d keep an eye on him, but it seemed that their troubles were dissipating for now. Larry seemed like a pretty stable guy after what he’d been through.

“So what’s the plan Larry? What’s our next move? We have to figure out how to get it out of there,” Rory managed to state the obvious on occasion.

“You don’t say? “ Larry shot Rory a smile and gave him a shove.

Rory smiled a sheepish smile and a blush spread across his face. “Alright, alright, so I’m King Obvious, what are we going to do?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Larry said. “Let’s figure out what we have, and then we can figure out what to do. We have to figure out where this thing’s going once we catch it, and we can’t do that unless we know what we have. If it’s endangered or something I don’t want to get fined for hurting it or something. That would be all I needed,” Larry finished this last comment rolling his eyes.

“Geesh, I never even thought about that. Some Animal Control officer I am. Don’t know what it is OR what you’ll do with it,” Rory was nonplussed.

“Oh knock it off Rory. You’re fine. We’ll figure it out. Maybe we’ve discovered some new species or something,“ Larry smiled. “Did you get a good look at it though? Any idea of what it might be? Even what class of animal – canine, feline, bovine?”

Rory shook his head, “I was too busy trying to get away from it. I have never seen anything so vicious.”

The two men spent the next twenty minutes comparing notes and came up with nothing. They decided to try a different tactic. Rory half-jokingly suggested they make a forensic sketch of the animal that attacked them.

“You know, that’s not such a bad idea Rory,” Larry brightened. “Let me go get something to write on. I’ll be right back!” Larry got up and went down the hall to his office. Rory heard the noise of Larry rummaging through draws. “I know I have some pencils in here somewhere. They were just here a couple days ago. Where are they now? Did I give them to Ella for school? “Rory heard more rummaging noises. “There’s the pencil sharpener but that won’t help me without a…oh, wait, there they are.” There was a moment or two more of noise while Larry shut the desk drawers. Then Rory heard footsteps down the hall, coming towards him as Larry returned to the kitchen with sketch paper and pencils.

“Want a beer?” Larry offered Rory.

“No Larry, I can’t. Don’t forget, I’m on duty still,” Rory answered. “Thanks anyway.”
“Well, I hope you don’t mind if I have one then. After what we just went through it’ll go down quickly and help me mellow out. I feel as tense as a guitar string. You want an iced tea or a lemonade or something?“ Larry started pulling down a glass.

“I’ll just take some ice water if you don’t mind,” Rory said. “I don’t think I could hold anything else down. I’m too keyed up.”

Larry nodded his head knowingly and put some ice cubes in a glass. He poured water over the ice and handed it to Rory. “Let’s get started, shall we? Maybe we can get this thing figured out tonight.” Larry turned on the kitchen lights and sat down.

The two men spent the next two hours sketching and resketching what the being they encountered in the basement looked like. The frustrating thing was that neither of them had any concept of the lower half of the being’s body. Neither of them could remember what its legs looked like. They couldn’t decide if the legs were long or short, muscular or fat, furry or barren. What they finally came up with looked oddly like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, only it was a lot scarier.

“So do we have one of those Tasmanian Devils?” Larry asked. “Is that what we are dealing with?” Larry began to look relieved. He looked so relieved that Rory hated to burst his bubble.

“No Lar, that can’t be a Tasmanian Devil down there. There’s just no way for a number of reasons. Chief of which is that they would not normally attack a human being the way that critter lunged at us. Tasmanians would rather flee than attack. Tasmanians are usually scavengers too. The other thing is that a Tasmanian would be a long way away from its home. These animals are only found in Australia. What on God’s green earth would one be doing in your basement? There isn’t even a zoo it could have escaped from nearby.”

Larry looked crestfallen. With no real leads on what the creature in the basement was, there was no information on how to get rid of it. Larry had no idea what to do now. This thing was cruising around his basement destroying everything it came into contact with and keeping Ella out of her own home. Larry didn’t want his daughter to be gone another night, but with the bloodthirsty energy this animal had there was no way he was going to let her come within a mile of it.

I guess we’re going to have to do some research then, Larry thought to himself. More in depth research than originally planned. After they got Alan safely delivered to the hospital and made sure he was resting comfortably Larry planned to head to the library to see if he could find anything there that might help him figure out what the thing in his basement was.

“Guess we should bring Alan to the hospital now, don’t you think?” Rory broke Larry’s train of thought. “He lost a lot of blood and his hand is all but detached. I doubt, looking at it, that they can reattach it. That animal shredded the wrist and hand pretty good when it bit him.” Rory looked sad. “That bite probably ended Alan’s career. I hope he has good insurance, he’s going to need it.”

Larry felt awful, but there was nothing to be done about it but bring Alan to the hospital as Rory suggested. He grabbed his keys and baseball cap and headed for the door.

“Larry, I think you should go look in the mirror and clean up a bit. You look like hell if you don’t mind me saying,“ Rory shifted from foot to foot, almost like he needed to use the bathroom.”Aside from that, you’d scare the bejesus out of anyone who looked at you. There’s blood on your arms and legs from where you were kneeling and helping Alan put that tourniquet on. There’s so much they might think it was you who was injured. Go clean it off before we go, okay?”

The three men decided that calling 911 at this point would be a bit odd since they had already controlled the bleeding and stabilized the victim. They still planned to get Alan to the hospital, after all Alan needed to have someone look at what that thing had done to his hand. Larry thought it might be beyond repair – after all, weren’t you supposed to get to them as soon as possible if they were going to have any hope of saving the limb? They had definitely not done that.

Alan assured him that he would adjust. He of course was horrified at the loss of his hand, but it wasn’t like this was what he had planned on when he had went to work this morning. Most of his house calls were, after all, to get rid of squirrels in the chimney or bats in the attic.

While Alan had slept off the first round of opiates, Larry had brought out what he had for dressing his wounds. Alan’s arm was wrapped and it looked very professional. Larry had brought out all the disinfecting supplies that Rory had requested. Rory had trained to be an EMT before changing his career to Animal Control. He had no idea while in college what a fortunate shift in plans that would turn out to be for Alan Yoakam the exterminator.

After settling Alan in at the hospital the two men went in two different directions to deal with the events of the day. The doctor at the hospital was both impressed with the job they had done dressing the wound and pissed off that they had not come to the hospital sooner. Because of the delay they were right, Alan’s hand could not be saved. Alan had taken the news surprisingly well. He made some jokes about what types of prosthetics were out there and what he might choose and filled the doctor in on the events of the day as he understood them. What he shared was not much different from what both Larry and Rory had experienced, except they had witnessed the attack on Alan and seen his hand bitten off, they hadn’t had that particular experience first-hand.

They spent another twenty minutes discussing with the doctor what the possibilities were for what the animal in the basement was. In the end, he had no more idea than they did. “I’d like Alan to stay here for a couple days,” Dr. Vailman said. “He has a few early signs of infection and I want to be sure to nip that in the bud,” he finished.

Once they had sorted out where Alan was staying for the night and said goodnight to Dr. Vailman, Rory and Larry left. Rory headed back to the police station as he had to file his report and Larry headed to the library to do some research. He had already spoken with Emily and she was keeping Ella at her place until they sorted the whole thing out.

The drive from the hospital gave Larry the opportunity to sort out what they knew about the thing in his basement. First, it was more aggressive than anything he had ever encountered. So aggressive in fact, that he hardly had a chance to get a serious look at the thing. He knew that it had some seriously sharp teeth. It had latched on Alan’s arm and snapped his hand off in almost an instant. The wound it left was shredded on both sides – both the arm and the hand looked like so much raw meat when it finally pulled away from Alan. Just thinking about the pink and bloody mess that was Alan’s hand had made Larry light-headed. So light-headed in fact, Larry had to pull over and treat himself for shock. He had never seen anything so bloody.

Once he was sure he wasn’t going to pass out, Larry tried to assess what else they knew about the creature. As Larry remembered it, the face of this animal looked like a combination of a fisher cat and a Tasmanian devil. The arms were sort of long, humanoid and thin. Oddly however, Larry could not remember any kind of tail or legs. Perhaps that was because he was fleeing from it he thought to himself ruefully. Maybe he could look at some pictures and they would jog his memory. There had to be something at the library that would help him figure it out.

The itch was maddening. The spot on Alan’s arm that had once sported a hand and now was just a bloody, shredded stump was so itchy Alan thought he was going to rip off the bandages just so he could get at it and scratch. If he could just reach one spot on the tip of his fingers (yeah, the ones that were no longer there thank you very much wild animal) he would be just fine. He thought it was incredible how much feeling you retained in a limb that was no longer present. He had heard of phantom pains before; pains that you feel in a hand, leg, arm or foot that was no longer there. He had not heard of phantom itches however. He supposed it made sense. The nerve endings were still trying to realize the hand was no longer there, so pain and other feelings made sense. Even itching.

If itching was all that was going on Alan could have managed fine. But the morphine that Larry had given him at the house was wearing off. Long tendrils of pain were spiraling up his arm. The area that had supported a hand only a few hours ago felt like it was on fire and someone was shoving pins in his wrist in the middle of all the fire. Alan was not a man who liked to admit to weakness, so he was trying to ignore the pain and watch television. The battle for his attention between his wrist and the television show currently on (some stupid reality show called “Ice Loves Coco” )was in full swing. He had been able to watch television fairly comfortably for a while, but the tide had turned. The symphony of pain in his wrist was quickly overtaking the reality show in significance in Alan’s mind. If he had been at home Alan would be cursing like a sailor at this point, but since he was not, he was clamping his lips tightly shut and trying to avoid making any noise. Pretty soon it was going to get impossible to keep quiet though.

“How are we doing Mr. Yoakam?” asked the nurse. The nurse was the very same one who had been so conscientious and compassionate in her attentions to Elizabeth Bell. She had not seen Mr. Yoakam arrive so did not know that he had been at the Bell residence three hours prior to her visit with him here. Nurse Amy began checking Alan’s vital signs. There were signs of infection the doctor said. Amy had been advised by the doctor to keep a very close eye on that and to let him know if the infection got worse.

“Oh, I’m alright m’am,” Alan responded tensely.

“Rubbish. You just lost your hand. That is definitely hurting. I can see it in your face. Don’t try to be a hero Mr. Yoakam. You’re better off to take some pain medication for that. Let me show you this,” Amy wheeled over a device that had several buttons and an LED screen on it. “This is a morphine pump,” she said. “It allows you to self-administer pain medication as you feel you need it. You can’t overdo it because it will only allow the correct dosage at the right time. You choose whether or not to take it,” she finished. “It’s a pretty neat little invention. Take my advice Mr. Yoakam. Use it. You’ve been through a lot. There’s no shame in taking something to help yourself deal with the pain.”

After she wheeled over the machine, she began to set up all the wires and connections. Alan tried to make a last effort to resist. “I’m fine. I can manage without that shit. I don’t need a morphine addiction thank you very much.” When he finished his last word his arm slipped off the side of the bed and hit the bed rail. Alan cried out involuntarily. “AHHHHHH!” There were those hot pins again. His arm was throbbing. Tears came to Alan’s eyes and although he did not shed them, Nurse Amy did see them. She immediately began doing what she could to make Alan comfortable. “I’m telling you Mr Yoakam, you’d be better off to take the morphine and let your arm heal for a while. Your body is fighting off an infection at the moment, it doesn’t need the added stress of serious pain to contend with on top of that.” Amy held up the IV lines and said, “Come on, let me help you sir.”

By closing his eyes and giving Amy a slight nod of the head Alan acquiesced to her request. Alan allowed the nurse to arrange all the needles and wires as she needed to. After a few moments Nurse Amy softly called his name and put a hand on his shoulder, “Mr. Yoakam? Can I show you how to use this?”

Alan resigned himself to needing the pain medication and nodded his head. Nurse Amy showed him how to use the pump to deliver the sweet relief he would need to start his life with one hand. There would be time later to decide about how to proceed, but for now he just drifted in a sea of solace from the pain. When the pain did indeed subside, Mr. Alan Yoakam fell asleep and dreamed of nothing in particular.

Rory was tired and troubled. He had to file a report at the office and when he went to do it he was going to have to put up with a lot of ribbing from the guys. He just did not want to hear it. Jack was going to be a pain in the ass, he knew it. Jack would like nothing better than to see Rory fired. Rory had no idea what the guy had against him but Jack surely did hate him. His first day on the job Jack had thrown his weight around in the office, letting Rory know that it was not going to be a cushy job for him. “I’ll be watching you squirt,” Jack had said. “Any screwing off and I’ll be right there to kick your ass!”

His boss Guss had told Jack to shut up and leave Rory alone, but Jack still made sure Rory knew he was watching for any screw up. Rory was sure that they would see this as a screw up. Rory had been gone for his whole shift and he had not been successful in catching the animal. Not only had he not caught the animal he had been called to deal with but a civilian had been hospitalized. Jack was going to make sure to know about that Rory believed.

They weren’t high school kids Rory thought to himself. It was time to act like an adult. He had to just man up and head in and file his report. If Gus needed him to come in his office and explain he would explain. If his explanation wasn’t good enough there was nothing Rory could do about it. It would have to be enough. Whether he got fired, put on probation or suspended didn’t matter to Rory at this point. He was still going to see this situation through with Mr. Bell. He would do what he was supposed to and follow the rules about what he was supposed to do, but he was going to see it through to the end. He had to know what that thing was in the basement and he couldn’t leave Mr. Bell to deal with it by himself. He had no experience or training with wild animals. Rory did.

The station was just up ahead. Rory slowed the vehicle down and pulled into a parking spot. He shifted the car into park and killed the engine. It ran pretty well for a ten year old car. Rory sat in the parking lot and listened to the radio until it shut off. He took his hat off the seat, put it on and mentally prepared for whatever was going to come when he entered the station house.

The walk across the parking lot felt like it took a year. Rory was sure he was going to have to take crap from Jack, but Jack wasn’t there when he finally arrived. Gus was though. Rory came through the door and headed for his own desk. Right before he sat down to begin writing up his report Gus called from his office, “Rory, is that you? Get in here. We need to talk,” Gus didn’t sound happy. Oh boy.

“Coming,” Rory responded. He was tired and he just did not want to talk with his boss at the moment. The man was a good man, but he was obtuse at times. Rory didn’t think it was an obtuseness bred out of true stupidity but a desire to keep everything on an even keel. Gus was not going to like Rory’s report. There was a wild animal in a civilian’s residence. Residences were supposed to be left to exterminators. They were paid to handle such things. An animal control officer’s job was limited to handling animals that were out of control in the community. Rory had spent his day trying to capture a wild thing in a resident’s home. Not only was that outside the scope of what they were supposed to do but a civilian had become severely injured in the process. That could bring heat on Gus. Gus didn’t like it when there was heat on him. He preferred everything to remain status quo.

When Rory entered Gus’ office, Gus was at his desk finishing a sandwich. His wife Marlene had probably made him dinner and packed it in a lunchbox for him. She was trying to help Gus watch his weight. Gus had an affinity for fried food and pastries. After his heart attack last spring she commandeered the preparation of his lunches. She tried goodness knows, but Gus snuck in the occasional Twinkie, the remains of which he was wiping off his face with a guilty look at Rory.

“I won’t tell boss,” Rory smiled. “Go easy on me and Marlene won’t have to know a thing,” Rory half-joked. Gus was likely to back off being so harsh if he thought Marlene might catch wind of him ‘falling off the wagon’ so to speak.

“Where the hell were you today? We sent you to pick up Wyatt’s sorry ass and we didn’t see you after that,“ Gus closed his lunchbox and was all business. “You haven’t been here long enough to screw off Rory. If people think you’re doggin it you’re going to wind up looking for another job. Now I think you’re a great kid and could be a good addition to our force, but there are others who don’t agree with me and they might make life difficult for you if you can’t account for your whereabouts.”

Rory took off his hat and began playing with the brim. It was a holdover from when he was a kid. When he was in trouble with his parents Rory used to play with the brim of his baseball cap while his parents read him the riot act. He would stand, staring at the floor and playing with the brim of his cap until his parents (usually his mother) finished their tirade about whatever shenanigans he had been involved in. While Rory didn’t just stand waiting for his punishment like he had when he was a child, he did play with the brim of his hat.

“No check-ins Rory, really? You couldn’t even check in with us to let us know what was going on? Did you spend the whole day with Mr. Bell? What could have possibly taken that long? You better have a really good reason for disappearing all day or I am going to have to rethink this situation.” Gus finished this last chastisement and frowned like he had just bit into something sour like a lemon.

It was station policy that an officer check in with dispatch each hour or two to let people know what they were up to and that all was well. Rory hadn’t done that even once today. In retrospect he was surprised that they hadn’t sent a squad car out looking for him. It had been a tad irresponsible to not check in with the station at all.

“Gus, you wouldn’t believe what I’ve been dealing with all day. Mr. Bell is in a real bind. There’s some kind of wild animal on his premises and he has no idea how to get rid of it. It’s a vicious little thing too,” Rory said this last bit nodding his head and looking to see if Gus seemed interested to hear more.

“On his premises? Or in his house? You know if it’s in the house that’s something an exterminator has to deal with, right?” Gus raised an eyebrow in Rory’s direction.