I will never forget what that house felt like; even from the street, you could sense the death that had soaked into its walls and floors. And once inside, that death got on your own skin, as well.
And it was so cold. I don’t think I’ve ever been that cold in my life. I couldn’t stop shaking the whole time we were in there.
I don’t know if it’s possible to put into words how it feels to mop up a puddle of blood and tissue that used to be a human being. Sometimes I still have nightmares about it.
Brennert wound up going into the nuthouse for a few weeks after that night. After we graduated, he kept on working for Davies until Davies decided to retire to Florida. Brennert bought the company from him. It said an awful lot about Brennert’s character that he hired me right on the spot when I came looking for work after both college and my marriage (in that order) didn’t work out. We never talk about that night. I guess we can still smell that cold, cold death on each other. Like I could smell it now. Hence the rod of iron inside me.
Since I couldn’t just stand there—it seemed like there were shadows in every corner trying to move in around me—I heeded Dobbs’ advice and took a walking tour of the place.
Altogether, Miss Driscoll had 17 tracks of various sizes mounted throughout her apartment—though the track in the bathroom, a small, simple oval, was a battery-operated child’s version of what engulfed the rest of the place. She had arranged the larger tracks to create aisles so that she could move easily between rooms. I couldn’t help but wonder at her fascination with these things.
And then thought of her loneliness.
Everything told you that this wasn’t just a hobby with this woman, it was an obsession, something she’d fostered to fill the holes in her life. Dobbs might have found this interesting in a weird sort of way, but the more I moved from room to room, seeing the details she’d added to each setup (tiny bits of trash spilling from a trash can at a rest stop; the tired, road-weary expressions on the peoples’ faces; a vending machine with an Out Of Order sign taped to its front), the more it all struck me as frighteningly sad. A lot of care had gone into the construction and maintenance of these tracks, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been her way of avoiding her loneliness.
It was in the guest bedroom that I first began to notice the trashed cars and tiny memorial wreaths set among the HO-scale buildings. The trashed cars were bad enough—how she’d manage to crumple some of these like she had was beyond me, but damn if they didn’t look like the real thing—but it was the miniature wreaths and crosses that really started to unnerve me. You’ve seen the real thing, I’m sure: drive for any length of time on any stretch of highway through any state, and you’ll pass them; sad little shrines—some homemade, others bought from florist shops—left behind by family members and friends to mark the place where someone they loved died in an automobile accident. Crosses and hearts seem to be the two most popular shapes, usually constructed of wire mesh covered in plastic flowers or plastic white lace to make the shape stand out, ribbons hand-tied all around to flutter in the breeze as if that silent activity was meant to fill the world with movements the dead could no longer make for themselves…and always, in the center of these memorials, staring out at passing cars whose drivers never return the eye contact, are the photographs, the faces of those who will never again see a new place, a different road, or a light in the window waiting for them at journey’s end.
Yes, give me a mondo case of the willies and I turn into a half-assed poet.
All of the tiny wreaths and crosses that were set at various points around the tracks had even tinier photographs in their centers.
And each one was numbered on the back.
I got out of there, found myself in the suddenly too-small hallway, and without thinking about it walked through the nearest doorway—
—and right into Miss Driscoll’s bedroom.
To this day I don’t know why I didn’t just turn around and leave once I realized where I was. I could have just waited in the living room for Dobbs to come back, but I guess morbid curiosity got the better of me.
The thing is, her body was the last thing I noticed.
Expensive tract lighting ran alongside opposite sides of the room, giving the place the too-bright look of a department store; if you wanted to make sure you kept yourself awake at night, this was the way to do it. There were two table-mounted tracks in here, and they were even more intricate than the others—one of them was a four-lane triple-tiered job that must have taken days to set up. There was a computer that had an LCD flat-screen monitor bigger than my television. Pages torn from what looked like a few dozen road and highway atlases were taped to the walls, the windows, and her dresser mirror. The pages sparkled under the harsh lighting, and it was only as I moved closer to a few of them that I saw why: the maps were decorated with dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of small foil stars, each roughly the size of my thumb nail. (Remember those little stars that your kindergarten teacher would stick on your drawings when you got an “A”? Yeah, those.) They were all over these maps; some of the stars were silver, some of them were blue, but most of them were gold. And each one had a hand-written number in its center. Out in the hallway, a shadow moved near the door. “Fred?” I called out. Nothing. My imagination. My nerves.
I was getting jumpy. Jumpier.
Stepping back, I moved to the side in an effort to avoid bumping into one of the tracks and in the process banged my hip into the back of the desk chair, that in turn rolled forward, hit the keyboard tray, and woke the machine from Sleep mode.
There were two images displayed side by side on the screen: one was the schematic of an HO-track configuration; the second was a map of the I-71 loop in Columbus.
There were the same shape. I knew this because I’d just seen it.
It was behind me.
I turned to look at the second table-mounted track and, sure enough, eight mashed cars had been set aside, and seven small memorials had been placed at the spot where the accident had occurred.
Not being one whose grasp of the obvious will ever be called keen, I looked back at the computer screen, then again at the track, then once more at the computer.
Which is when I finally noticed the stack of files beside the desk.
Another shadow, this one bulkier than the last, moved in the periphery of my vision. I stomped to the doorway and looked in every direction but saw no further movement.
“Fred? Goddammit, c’mon, this isn’t funny.”
No answer. No sound.
Checking my watch, I saw that Dobbs had been gone only three minutes. It felt like I’d been alone in here for hours.