“I don’t know,” he said, his head turned from her. “I... Christ, you can’t think with it. I feel like I’m back in Argonne.”
He had to lean backward, palms resting on the floor.
“What is it you saw back there?” Penny asked, pointing behind the oven.
But he kept shaking his head, breathing into the front of his undershirt, pulled up.
After a minute, both of them breathing hard, he reached up and turned the knob on the front of the oven door.
“I smell it,” Penny said, stepping back. “Don’t you?”
“That pilot light,” he said, covering his face, breathing raspily. “It’s gotta be out.”
His knees sliding on the linoleum, he inched back toward the oven, white and glowing.
“Are you... are you going to open it?”
He looked at her, his face pale and his mouth stretched like a piece of rubber.
“I’m going to,” he said. “We need to light it.”
But he didn’t stir. There was a feeling of something, that door open like a black maw, and neither of them could move.
Penny turned, hearing a knock at the door.
When she turned back around, she gasped.
Benny’s head and shoulders were inside the oven, his voice making the most terrible sound, like a cat, its neck caught in a trap.
“Get out,” Penny said, no matter how silly it sounded. “Get out!”
Pitching forward, she leaned down and grabbed for him, tugging at his trousers, yanking him back.
Stumbling, they both rose to their feet, Penny nearly huddling against the kitchen wall, its cherry-sprigged paper.
Turning, he took her arms hard, pressing himself against her, pressing Penny against the wall.
She could smell him, and his skin was clammy and goose-quilled.
His mouth pressed against her neck roughly and she could feel his teeth, his hands on her hips. Something had changed, and she’d missed it.
“But this is what you want, isn’t it, honey?” the whisper came, his mouth over her ear. “It’s all you’ve ever wanted.”
“No, no, no,” she said, and found herself crying. “And you don’t like girls. You don’t like girls.”
“I like everybody,” he said, his palm on her chest, hand heel hard.
And she lifted her head and looked at him, and he was Larry.
She knew he was Larry.
Larry.
Until he became Benny again, mustache and grin, but fear in that grin still.
“I’m sorry, Penny,” he said, stepping back. “I’m flattered, but I don’t go that way.”
“What?” she said, looking down, seeing her fingers clamped on his trouser waist. “Oh. Oh.”
Back at Number Three, they both drank from tall tumblers, breathing hungrily.
“You shouldn’t go back in there,” Benny said. “We need to call the gas company in the morning.”
Mr. Flant said she could stay on their sofa that night, if they could make room under all the old newspapers.
“You shouldn’t have looked in there,” he said to Benny, shaking his head. “The oven. It’s like whistling in a cemetery.”
A towel wrapped around his shoulders, Benny was shivering. He was so white.
“I didn’t see anything,” he kept saying. “I didn’t see a goddamned thing.”
She was dreaming.
“You took my book!”
In the dream she’d risen from Mr. Flant’s sofa, slick with sweat, and opened the door. Although nearly midnight, the courtyard was mysteriously bright, all the plants gaudy and pungent.
Wait. Had someone said something?
“Larry gave it to me!”
Penny’s body was moving so slowly, like she was caught in molasses.
The door to Number Four was open, and Mrs. Stahl was emerging from it, something red in her hand.
“You took it while I slept, didn’t you? Sneak thief! Thieving whore!”
When Mrs. Stahl began charging at her, her robe billowing like great scarlet wings, Penny thought she was still dreaming.
“Stop,” Penny said, but the woman was so close.
It had to be a dream, and in dreams you can do anything, so Penny raised her arms high, clamping down on those scarlet wings as they came toward her.
The book slid from her pocket, and both of them grappled for it, but Penny was faster, grabbing it and pushing back, pressing the volume against the old woman’s neck until she stumbled, heels tangling.
It had to be a dream because Mrs. Stahl was so weak, weaker than any murderess could possibly be, her body like that of a yarn doll, limp and flailing.
There was a flurry of elbows, clawing hands, the fat golden beetle ring on Mrs. Stahl’s gnarled hand against Penny’s face.
Then, with one hard jerk, the old woman fell to the ground with such ease, her head clacking against the courtyard tiles.
The rat-a-tat-tat of blood from her mouth, her ear.
“Penny!” A voice came from behind her. It was Mr. Flant, standing in his doorway, hand to his mouth.
“Penny, what did you do?”
Her expression when she’d faced Mr. Flant must have been meaningful, because he had immediately retreated inside his bungalow, the door locking with a click.
But it was time anyway. Of that she felt sure.
Walking into Number Four, she almost felt herself smiling.
One by one, she removed all the tacks from her makeshift kitchen door, letting the towel drop onto her forearm.
The kitchen was dark, and smelled as it never had. No apricots, no jasmine, and no gas. Instead, the tinny smell of must, wallpaper paste, rusty water.
Moving slowly, purposefully, she walked directly to the oven, the moonlight striking it. White and monstrous, a glowing smear.
Its door shut.
Cold to the touch.
Kneeling down, she crawled behind it, to the spot Benny had been struck by.
What’s this? he’d said.
As in a dream, which this had to be, she knew what to do, her palm sliding along the cherry-sprig wallpaper down by the baseboard.
She saw the spot, the wallpaper gaping at its seam, seeming to breathe. Inhale, exhale.
Penny’s hand went there, pulling back, the paper glue dried to fine dust under her hand.
She was remembering Mrs. Stahl. I put up fresh wallpaper over every square inch after it happened. I covered everything with wallpaper.
What did she think she would see, breathing hard, her knees creaking and her forehead pushed against the wall?
The paper did not come off cleanly, came off in pieces, strands, like her hair after the dose Mr. D. passed to her, making her sick for weeks.
A patch of wall exposed, she saw the series of gashes, one after the next, as if someone had jabbed a knife into the plaster. A hunting knife. Though there seemed a pattern, a hieroglyphics.
Squinting, the kitchen so dark she couldn’t see.
Reaching up to the oven, she grabbed for a kitchen match.
Leaning close, the match lit, she could see a faint scrawl etched deep.
The little men come out of the walls. I cut off
their heads every night. My mind is gone.
Tonight, I end my life.
I hope you find this.
Goodbye.
Penny leaned forward, pressed her palm on the words.
This is what mattered most, nothing else.
“Oh, Larry,” she said, her voice catching with grateful tears. “I see them too.”
The sound that followed was the loudest she’d ever heard, the fire sweeping up her face.
The detective stood in the center of the courtyard, next to a banana tree with its top shorn off, a smoldering slab of wood, the front door to the blackened bungalow on the ground in front of him.