Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Each man awoke in icy darkness,
The stone eroded and dull.
H ands clawed at my ankles in the dark. I was dragged backward over uneven wooden boards through a narrow crevice. The edges grated at the sides of my body, pulling my dress to my hips as I battled to the land of the waking.
Light erupted, and I shielded my eyes from the harsh glare. My mind surged to catch up with each gasping breath.
I was flat on my back on the floor of my apartment bedroom. Light blared in through the single window, a burning contrast to the dark elevator shaft.
“She’s been living here rent-free,” a shrill voice declared. A wet cough followed.
I sat, pushing my linen dress down. “Rent is due today. You’ll get it.”
My senses kicked in. They’d pulled me from the elevator shaft . I whirled in panic to look at the small hole in the wall and at the trunk upturned on the ground by my cot. They’d found me. They’d found Mother.
Mouth drying, I turned a horror-filled gaze on the occupants in the room.
Two law enforcement officers. The landlady.
I scrambled to stand and backed up until I covered the hole in the wall. As if that would stop them from investigating when they’d just yanked me from it. Had they seen Mother? “What do you want? I'm not late on my payments. Rent is due today.”
I willed my mother to stay silent. Sometimes she moaned nonsense in a medicine haze.
“Today?” the landlady screeched. “Rent was due three weeks ago.”
Three weeks ago. I hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but at most, I’d slept a matter of hours. There didn’t seem to be a plausible reason for them to have burst in like this, and how on earth did they find our hiding spot? I held my stance in front of the hole. I had to deter them from checking inside the shaft. They’d missed Mother once, but they wouldn’t miss her a second time.
“Get out of the way,” a law enforcement agent growled. He wrinkled his nose and went as far as to hold an arm over his nose and mouth as he approached me.
When I didn’t move, he shoved me toward his partner, who gripped both of my upper arms.
I blurted, “I couldn’t pay rent, so I decided to hide in there.”
My voice went unheard in the chaos.
“You owe me three weeks of rent and more for the stench.” The landlady lunged forward and slapped me, clawing at my cheek with her cracked, yellowed nails.
“Get back,” snarled the man holding me.
She darted him a look and scuttled away, throwing me a vicious smirk as blood dribbled over my jaw and down my neck.
The first agent cursed. “Hole’s too small to see properly. There’s something dead in there for sure.”
I stopped breathing.
He glared over his shoulder. “Did you have an animal in there with you? Food?”
Mother.
“The stench is filling my building.” The landlady cut in. “I’ve got complaints the length of my arm. Demands for discounted rent. I won’t have it! She needs to pay up.”
The stench. Three weeks.
The man holding me gagged.
I croaked, “What month is it?” When no one answered, I repeated my question in a louder voice.
“July,” the landlady sneered. “You won’t get out of this, so don’t cry insanity. Three weeks to the day, and three weeks you will pay.”
I spoke over my shoulder to the gagging man. “It’s been three weeks?”
The first agent cursed louder. “It’s July. Now shut your trap.” He kicked at the wall to widen the hole into the shaft, ignoring the whining protests of the landlady.
July.
I’d lost my job in June.
Three weeks.
My gaze returned to the hole as if dragged back in the same manner I’d left it. Fearful, horrible reluctance choked me.
I didn’t want to know.
“Please release my arm,” I asked softly. “I won’t do anything.”
The gagging man surprised me by obliging. Maybe there were benefits to stinking like death.
I lifted my cleaning apron to my nose and sniffed. Bile rose in my throat at the stench, leaving a burning trail behind. Rot, decay.
Dread pitted in my stomach. Doom lurched in my heart.
The agent shoved through the larger hole, and I strode to the wall, then stopped. I couldn’t quite find the strength to crawl inside when I knew what would be in there.
“There’s a body,” the agent shouted. Nothing could mask the sound of his horror. “There’s a rotting body in here, Jace!”
That got the second agent moving again. I was shoved face-first against the wall, and my arm cranked high between my shoulder blades.
“Who is it?” the agent hissed in my ear as the first one staggered free of the rotting prison where my mother had withered and died.
My mother is dead.
I was spun around and shoved against the wall again. The agents shouted in my face, and the landlady’s gleeful gaze popped in and out of view between their blurred features.
My mother was dead.
She’d died as I rested beside her. She’d rotted as I rested beside her for three weeks. Only the stench of her decay had alerted others to hunt us down.
My mother is dead. She was gone, but I’d been with her the whole time. I hadn’t thought that was a fear of mine, for her to be alone at her end, but I sagged with relief that wasn’t the case. I’d been with her, as close as could be. I’d kept her company even as she’d decayed beyond the gates of death. I shouldn’t be comforted by something so abhorrent to others.
Yet I was. She hadn’t been alone for a second.
Except now my mother was gone, and I’d lost three weeks of my life, and the difficulties of my current situation were overwhelming, to say the least.
“Who was working with you?” screamed one of the agents.
I focused on him. “No one.”
“What did you say?”
I said louder, “No one.”
“Who brought you food?”
“No one.”
He scoffed. “You’re telling me you haven’t eaten in three weeks and you’re still healthy as an ox?”
Ox.
My brows drew together. I’d forgotten the skeleton crew and their terrifying skull. I’d forgotten how Ox’s eyes had drowned me, and I’d lost my memories for a time.
He’d done something to me. I knew it suddenly. Why else would I sleep for three weeks on the exact day I’d interacted with him? He’d done something, and I’d slept through my mother’s death and decay.
“Why am I not weak?” I whispered. Why am I not dead? They were right. I shouldn’t feel rested and capable of a full day’s work.
Unless this was a sick joke. Unless it wasn’t July.
The cloying smell of my mother’s body reminded me otherwise.
“You’re coming to the agency,” number one snarled.
“Yes,” I replied. “I suppose that will happen now.”
He jerked me forward a step, and the agents pressed in on each side.
“Wait,” I cried out. “I must say goodbye to my mother.”
There was a lull as everyone put together that I spoke of the body in the elevator shaft.
“Your mother?” shrieked the landlady. “Your mother is dead, girl.”
The agents exchanged a look, and one of them left my side. He pushed the top of a briefcase open and withdrew a folder. He flicked through the papers within. “Perantiqua, born in the pens. Raised across the city. Mother, deceased nine months ago.”
All three looked at the hole in the wall. I felt them calculating and deciding that, no, a body wouldn’t smell like that after nine months.
“Your mother had a stroke,” the landlady said.
I nodded. “She didn’t die. I hid her here. I took care of her.”
My words were incriminating, but I didn’t much care about anything except saying goodbye to my mother. Explaining this situation was beyond me and maybe beyond anyone. Best to have closure and to be free of the burden of a lie. The agency of Vitale wouldn’t evict me into the hostile, uninhabitable desert for hiding my mother, but they would evict me for murder if I left them to connect the dots alone.
“You’ll see I speak truth with an autopsy, but I would like to say goodbye to my mother. Might I do that?”
The agents released me as the landlady gaped. Part of me wanted to as well. They’d gone from shouting in my face to gifting a kindness.
I staggered to the wall before they changed their minds.
Mother. Did it matter that I was asleep for her death if I’d been curled next to her? Had she tried to wake me for more medicine to no avail and then died? Had she choked on pain before a spasm locked her heart rigid?
The agents didn’t stop me crawling into the elevator shaft, and I ignored the reek of decay to shuffle closer to the burlap mattress. I reached a hand out in the dark to find her head. Bowing my face in grief, I stroked her hair, then sucked in a breath when a clump of hair came away.
Pressing down the urge to crawl out of the elevator shaft, I wiggled my fingers until the strands fell free instead.
I had to see her. I didn’t want to. I had to. Stretching across the mattress, I flipped the cover off the pipe to the outside.
Soft light trickled in.
I sat back, and only then did I look.
I didn’t know what I saw. A dead body, I supposed. Suspended in denial, I wasn’t really here or there. This eaten-away shell once contained my mother, but she wasn’t inside any longer, and her shell—as it turned out—had not been her at all. She’d been the magic within, the hopes and dreams and purpose. That magic hadn’t died in an elevator shaft.
I smiled at the pipe to the outside, imagining I’d freed her and that she’d drift forever around Vitale. Or better yet, that the outside world was not unavailable and forbidden to her in death as it was to all of us in life. She would be wild and free as in olden days. I could suppose her off on a great adventure.
I replaced the clump of hair I’d pulled off her skull and then pushed away her bedcovers. I didn’t want either agent to handle her shell, though I would need help to carry her from the building. Oddly, neither agent hurried me along, though I could hear the landlady snipping at them.
I spread the bedcover flat on the floor and crouched beside the mattress to consider how best to transfer her across. Would she fall apart? My insides shuddered at the thought, but a strange sight made me squint.
The soft light beamed on the middle of her body, or where that part of her body should have been. Instead, her toilet cloths were visible. The top of her body ended, then there was a gap before her legs began. Her toilet cloths were clean, which meant she must’ve died almost immediately after I’d changed them and certainly before her next dose of medicine. That was a relief indeed. She’d died within hours of our last conversation.
But where was her pelvis?
My thoughts stuttered over that, and my throat worked. I wasn’t familiar with dead bodies, but surely a rotting body should have a pelvis still.
“Where is she?” a cold voice asked from the bedroom.
Hands clawed at my ankles. My face smacked on floorboards as I was dragged front first over uneven wood planks through the larger hole.
In my room again, I rolled over and lay flat on my back, arms stretched over the floor as I gazed at the ceiling.
Her pelvis was gone.
I’d slept for three weeks and felt fine.
A man crouched in front of the hole in the wall, and I flopped my head to look at him when he inhaled deeply.
The man was Stag. I should wonder why he was here, but I wasn’t myself given current events, and perhaps I didn’t care much to know the reason.
I could see that the stench of decay made him more curious than revolted. He didn’t gag, and he didn’t cover his mouth. Stag peered into the elevator shaft to where my mother’s body was uncovered.
He glanced at me, and our gazes locked.
They locked and held, and only the undeniable horrors reflected in his look made me glance away. His gaze had told me that my mother was dead. That she was rotting. That locking myself in with her body appeared odd and terrible. His eyes had confirmed that my mother’s body was disjointed, another thing quite odd and terrible because the assumption was that I’d cuddled a rotting corpse and taken bits of her away.
“Yes,” I said in response, then I stared at the ceiling again. “Do you think you can arrange her a little nicer on the blanket I laid out? If I could get your help carrying her to…”
I didn’t know where dead bodies went. Where did dead bodies go?
He glanced back across the room. At Ox and Sand Cat? I lifted my head to confirm they were there, then let my head thump down again.
Men in threes, I steer clear of thee.
But I hadn’t.
And now it was too late.