I never could have been a weatherman. Not that there is anything wrong with being a meteorologist, mind you, I just don’t know if I could deal with the green screen. Every day, they wave their well-manicured and over-rehearsed hands at a neon green panel of wall and hope the viewers get the big picture. Plus, the are wrong all the time. I sometimes think they have a lot in common with pay-per-call psychics except your local but with better special effects.
The other thing that drives me up the wall about the weather dude (They are all dudes here, maybe it’s not a dude where you are. Work with me.) is that he stalls for what seems like ages. Instead of telling you what you want to know (50% chance of rain tomorrow folks) they tease it for the entire length of the newscast. They lie to you to keep you interested. “Coming up after the break, Jimbo Jones with tomorrow’s forecast.” Twenty minutes later they get around to telling you what you could find out by looking out the window.
Well, I’m going to play weatherman for a bit. At least the cloying, drag-out-the-important-parts-to-keep-people-interested part. I won’t tell you if it’s going to snow tomorrow (OK, it won’t snow tomorrow, happy?) but I will tease you with just enough info to keep you interested (hopefully). I have a little story that is too long to be published in most formats and too short to be a novel. So, you get to read it in little-bitty chunks. Lucky you! We’re going to call this ‘Terror Tuesdays’ because the story is a bit scary and I’m planning on publishing the new parts on Tuesdays.
Harvey Milquet and The Thing In The Attic
There was just no easy way to get them all. No matter how much Harvey Milquet would trim, pluck and yank till his eyes watered, every morning he would find yet another wire-thick black hair curling out of one of his nostrils; a sick feeling burbling in his gut telling him that he spent the previous day oblivious to the friendly hair that waved at his co-workers every time he exhaled.
He craned his neck until the muscles in his throat were overstretched, but he still couldn’t get a good view. The tweezers did the bulk of the job better than the fancy trimmer equipped with an LED light on the end that he had purchased at the Sharper Image a few years earlier while shopping for a gift for his mother’s third anniversary of her fourth marriage. But the little twirling blades, like a boring tick hunting for a blood-meal, dug into the side of his nose. The bleeding was so bad he had to pack his left nostril with cotton balls for two days and suffered from sporadic and inopportune nose-bleeds for months. That’s when Daryl, his cubicle pod-mate, had started calling him ‘Drippy’.
Swiveling his head around again to try to get a better angle Harvey still couldn’t quite get a good view of those last few hairs that hid in the tiny folds of his cavernous, bean-shaped nostrils. So he took the scissors with the look-likes-gold-but-tarnishes-likes-cheap-tin handles and the gracefully curved blades and slid them, slowly, into his right nostril toward the tip of his nose where the last hairs hid like a hundred jack-in-the boxes. The cold metal felt sharp in his nose and he couldn’t help but think of lawnmower cutting through thick grass as he slowly opened the handles and squeezed them closed again. Stubs of hair fluttered into the sink. Pushing the blades a little higher and opening the handles even wider he heard the soft flik-flik-flik of metal against nostril hair.
A flash of pain danced from the tip of his nose and sparked through his face. His embarrassingly high-pitched wail rang against the tiled walls as he put his hand to his nose and bowed to the sink. He sat there for a few seconds; letting the warm pain ease. Like paint splatters on an artists canvas, drops of richly-colored blood were already working their way between his fingers. They plinked against the pure-white porcelain sink, leaving long, tentacle-like streams as they hurried to the drain.
With one hand stemming the flow, he reached behind him to find the box of tissues on the salmon colored shelves that were obviously designed to accentuate the deeper shade of pink of the tiles on the walls and floor. He mashed a few sheets of Kleenex into a ball with one hand and winced as he slid it into his nostril. He looked in the mirror to see how much blood was on his face but was more shocked by how utterly pathetic he looked. A quick splash of cold water was enough to clean the residue off before wave of nausea tickled the back of his tongue.
Maybe he’d call in sick. He wasn’t feeling up to it today but he hadn’t felt like working for the past few months. Being a Sales Account Associate had become just a thing to take up time between sleeping and eating. Maybe he could run by his mom’s house later that afternoon. She’d make him cheese pancakes and they’d talk about the weather and how her new medication is affecting her gastrointestinal problems. It would be inane and predictable but it wouldn’t be the office and she wouldn’t call him ‘Drippy’.
The wooziness surged again and now he was worrying about massive blood loss. Recalling something he learned as a Boy Scout, Harvey lay down on the tile floor and raised his legs at an awkward angle. He wasn’t sure what good it would do but he thought it had something to do with not passing out or stemming the blood flowing from his face. The floor was too cold, so he inched his way to the hall where he could bleed to death a little more comfortably.
That’s when he saw it, obscured beneath layers of paint was the impression of a small and forgotten door. He had never looked for an attic but, now that he saw the door, it made sense; the house had once been part of medical complex that had tottered on the border between neglect and dereliction for decades until most of the tottering buildings were torn down to make room for progress. A mini-mall and a large, low-income apartment complex sprouted in it’s place. The grounds-keeper’s home was the last remaining structure and, decades later, a young couple purchased the house. They threw some aluminum siding on the outside and wood paneling on the inside and rented it to whoever could cough up the $550 a month.
They had no love for the place; there were switches to lights that no longer existed and boxes of disintegrating books the renters hadn’t bothered to remove from the basement. During the summer months, water seeped through the surrounding ground and made snake-like streams across the basement floor to a loud and dying sump pump. From June to late August the basement smelled like a soggy mushroom. Anything left down there would soon be blotted with black mold.
The four sides of the little door on the ceiling were nearly invisible except for dabbled stains where the moisture had snuck through and forced the dust and muck to accumulate around the edges of the wood. It looked like the same mold from the basement had found its way from below during a particularly wet summer that had blossomed briefly and then faded away; leaving a trace of its former self around the trap door.
With a little sniffle, Harvey knew he needed more Kleenex so he sat up, steadied himself against the bathroom doorway and made his way back to the sink.
The idea that this little door had somehow escaped Harvey’s attention during the 15 years he had lived there — it had been his home since his second step-father had kicked him out of his mother’s home — made him feel like he had been sitting on, or under, a goldmine.
Thoughts of untold treasures locked away in ancient trunks filled his mind and he almost didn’t give a thought to dark red trickle still coming out of his nose. With his nostril firmly repacked, Harvey walked to the kitchen and grabbed a chair from under the table.
Harvey perched himself on the so-fantastically-outdated-its-almost-trendy-again chair and examined the shape of the door under the time-yellowed paint. He knew he was risking his security deposit but his curiosity was drawing him up to the room over his head and not even the thought of his $75 dollar deposit could stop it’s magnetic pull.
He took the butter knife he had retrieved from the kitchen and sunk it through the thin crust of paint with a muffled click. With a little wiggle, the blade dove deeper; Harvey’s hand rested against the ceiling. A little pressure pushed it down the length of one side, paint peeling outward in curves and falling chips. He did the same on two more sides of the door but on the last side, his knife stopped short on something hard. Harvey tossed his knife to the floor and pressed both palms on the door.
In the furthest corner of his mind, where unreasonable and dark fears hide, something crept forward and tickled his neck. An unmistakable itch burned between his shoulder blades; the kind of itch that can only be scratched by turning and running away. But it was an unfounded fear, he convinced himself. The kind you get when you’re home alone with the power out, groping through the darkness in search of a light switch. Just then, you become sure that something is lurking in the darkness inches behind you with a massive gaping jaw and a sincere desire to swallow you whole. But there never is any such beast in the shadows. It’s always just that strange part of the brain that creates monsters out of nothing but the dark.
Pressing up, Harvey felt the door give an inch as clumps of gray, twisted dust tumbled down and bouncing off the chair. They almost disappeared as they settled on the once-gloriously-fashionable faded taupe carpet. The itch in his soul stood his neck-hair on end again, but he pressed harder. A loud WARUMPF sounded as the wood and paint gave way to Harvey’s hands. More bundles of dust and dead bug parts spilled down the opening and Harvey fought the desire to swat them away. The door still rested on his palms but now he could see up into the void. He pushed the door further until he heard the hinges protest. The door stood open, resting on something above.
He stuck a hand up to reach for the bare wood but his hand jerked away of it’s own volition. Collecting himself, he craned upward and saw nothing of consequence; piles of dust and a thick protruding darkness. He raised both hands this time, resting them on the edge of the opening. After a short breath, he leaned forward, shifting his weight from the chair to his jittery hands that promptly failed him.
In one quick motion, his fingers slipped and his body pulled him backward. He plummeted for a half a breath and struck the chair. One shoulder landed squarely on the flower-patterned seat, knocking the wind out of him and launching the blood-soaked ball of tissue down the hall like a crimson spit-ball. The impact bounced him off the chair toward the wall where he collided with the paisley wallpaper and collapsed on the floor. The fall had started with an embarrassingly high-pitched squeal that had morphed into a long and dwindling whine as he lay there, dust bunnies twirling down from above.
He gathered himself up, winced to the bathroom, and thumbed more tissue into his nose. The blood-soaked ball of tissue paper in the hall left a red, arching streak on the wallpaper and choppy ring on the floor where it landed.
Perched on top of his rather impressive collection of outdated and unused phone books, Harvey teetered on the chair again. He heard the decades-old plastic chair covering flex and crackle. He reached up and placed his hands on the edge of the wooden floor of the attic to tested his weight against his grip. Then it came again, that invisible fingers that tickled him between his shoulder blades and danced down his spine. He shook it off, and let his curiosity replace the dull dread.
Tune in next week for the next installment.
