He looked around and spotted Bell and Nina together on the other side of the room. They were kneeling, facing each other, holding hands and staring, enraptured, into each other’s eyes. Nina’s gun was on the floor beside her, forgotten.
Walter jumped, startled when he heard another reverberating crash, this time coming from behind the left-hand wall, from the house next door. It sounded as if someone had knocked a television set off its stand. The floor actually shook with the impact.
It was followed by a shattering of glass. Bell and Nina didn’t seem to notice.
“Belly,” Walter said. Excited agitation obliterated any tactful desire to leave the two of them alone in their clearly intimate moment. “Belly!” He reached out and shook Bell’s shoulder. “I saw the gate! Just for a fleeting moment. But now the majority of the hallucinogenic effects have dissipated, other than a lingering audio component that sounds like screams and crashes.”
“Crashes?” Bell shook his head, as if he’d just been woken up from a deep sleep. “I hear that, too.” This puzzled Walter, for he felt none of the empathic link.
Nina also shook her head, looking down and quickly letting go of Bell’s hands, flushing crimson with embarrassment.
“How peculiar,” Walter said. “Our minds failed to sync up telepathically this time, and yet we are sharing this minor auditory...”
Another resounding howl of human misery. Nina leapt to her feet, gun in hand.
“Jesus,” she said. “That sounds like Mrs. Baumgartner! She and her husband live in the basement flat next door!”
The howl came again from the neighboring house. Actually it was more like crying now, ongoing sobs that ebbed and flowed like a tide.
“You hear it, too?” Walter asked.
“Of course I do,” she snapped. “It’s real!”
“It sounds as if someone has been hurt,” Bell said. “We’d better see what’s happened.”
14
Once they were outside, they realized that night had fallen while they were tripping. Nina led them down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door onto a wooden porch that looked out over a wild, overgrown yard. There was a locked and rusty gate between Nina’s yard and the one next door, and she unlocked it with a small key.
The yard next door was nicer, better kept, and full of robust rhododendrons and camellias, as well as a small leggy patch of pumpkin vines with only a single, softball sized pumpkin. There was a large mossy birdbath guarded by several stone bunnies in various poses.
A set of concrete steps led down to the door of the basement apartment. As they stood there, anguished wails continued to come from within.
The phosphorescent lushness of the bougainvillea that crowded the doorway and the way Nina’s knock caused light to flash in the corners of Walter’s eyes let him know that he had not yet fully come down from the trip. The cries from within the apartment were also unnaturally intensified, seeming to bore their way into the soft tissue of his hypersensitive brain, like hungry maggots.
He shook his head to escape the image.
“Mrs. Baumgartner!” Nina called. “What happened? Are you okay?”
The wailing stopped, replaced by a faint, papery voice with an old country accent.
“Help me. Please, God help me...”
Nina tried the door. It was unlocked. She pushed through it into a neat little kitchen that smelled like a jarring combination of onions and cloying rose-scented air-freshener. Walter wrinkled his nose at the warring odors.
The room was decorated in porcelain kitsch. Milkmaids and bakers and sad-eyed praying children. Cows with strangely human smiles on their bovine faces, and dapper pigs in waistcoats. The sound of canned television laughter came from further into the apartment.
“Mrs. Baumgartner?” Nina called. “Where are you?”
Another sob instead of a reply, and Walter and Bell tiptoed behind Nina as she crept through the dim kitchen and then into a narrow, cluttered dining room that lay beyond.
They all had to turn sideways to inch past the massive antique table that filled the entire room. There was one single place setting at the far end, with a small, neatly folded pile of papers and clipped coupons beside it. The rest of the table was covered with another platoon of ceramic figurines, all rallying around a giant gaudy centerpiece of plastic fruit and candles that had never been lit.
At the open archway to the living room, Nina stopped and gasped, then stepped back involuntarily into Bell. He took her shoulders and looked around her into the room.
“What...” Bell whispered. “What happened?”
Walter came forward and peered around them.
“My God.” He winced and turned his head.
The living room was as clean but cluttered as the kitchen and dining room had been, with too many doily-covered end tables, overstuffed velvet chairs, and a coffee table crowded with glass dishes full of ribbon candy and butter mints. There was a brown floral couch with a single pillow and a crocheted afghan, as if someone had made their bed there. A black-and-white TV was nattering away, some kind of a game show.
Here the scent of fake roses was underscored with the bright iron reek of blood.
In the center of the room sat an old man in a wheelchair. He was as scrawny and helpless as a baby bird, his frail, wrinkled neck barely up to the job of supporting his large, bald head. He wore oversized blue pajamas, a threadbare plaid bathrobe, and a bulky, hand-knitted scarf. His skinny, coat-hanger shoulders were stooped, his hands tucked under a faded yellow blanket on his lap.
The old man was staring with wild, jittery eyes at a small, plump woman in a floral dress and pink cardigan, who lay cowering against the baseboard near a birdcage. She looked as if she had been mauled by a tiger. Her face, her hands, her forearms, and shoulders all had deep, ragged gashes in them, some nearly to the bone, all seeping blood into her already crimson-soaked clothes.
She looked up at Nina with terrified eyes.
“Help me,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Mrs. Baumgartner!” Nina crossed the living room and knelt by the old woman, calling orders over her shoulder like a field medic. “Walter, Bell, make sure Mr. Baumgartner is okay and then check the rest of the apartment. Whoever did this may still be here. Then call an ambulance and bring me any first aid stuff you can find.”
Walter and Bell glanced at each other, neither one relishing the idea of being the brave hero who found the escaped tiger in the bedroom. Finally Bell pulled a sturdy walking stick from a stand near the front door and started for the archway that led to the bathroom and bedroom. Walter went over to the wheelchair and put a gentle hand on the old man’s knife-blade shoulder.
“Are you okay, Mr. Baumgartner?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”
“It’s me,” the old man hollered, his voice shrill and cracking. The suddenness of it caused Walter to pull his hand back involuntarily. “Me! It’s me! It’s me! It’s me!”
Clearly the poor old fellow was suffering from some kind of dementia, but he seemed to be more or less unharmed. Walter left him and went to check the front door. It was locked, chained from the inside. He grabbed a pink, floral print umbrella as a sorry excuse for a weapon and followed Bell into the bedroom.
There was nothing. The room contained a single hospital-style bed with metal rails on each side, a motley assortment of outdated medical equipment, an army of pill bottles, and a bulky stainless steel bedpan.
The bathroom had a shower with a yellowing plastic stool and a thick, blue rubber mat stuck to the tile floor by suction cups. On the toilet tank was a copy of Reader’s Digest and a doll with a crocheted pink-and-white dress that hid an extra roll of toilet paper. There was no tiger. No intruder. No signs of a break-in.