11calls | (no subject)

You always had a feeling about the housekeeper. The housekeeper, it sounds like a bit like something from a gothic novel and you know it. Maddie Franks sounds to be about as far from Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers as you can get but you can’t stop thinking about her in a similar sort of way. Maybe it’s Wendy Hochman and how she defends the woman, or maybe it’s because you keep picturing the cherub that is Robbie Hochman as how Sebastian Torres might have been before he met ‘Tall Paul' and definitely Brother Edward and the kidnapping.

Before he was a creepy kid in a horror movie.

Nic, your boss and your best friend thinks you’re losing it. That you have to many nights of not sleeping from Strand’s ghost stories filling your head. Too many demons and the unsound and...well everything else and you’re just acting recklessly in his mind. On some days, you let yourself agree with him because this whole demon-shadow conspiracy-the advocate-playing a symphony to end the world is not how the world works. It shouldn’t be how the world works anyway. There shouldn’t a global conspiracy to infect kids with demons by opening the door for them. But you’d seen the signs and symbols that made it up before no the signs and sigils in various places, and you know the fear and terror they leave in your belly before you even know what they are for sure.

As you’re walking down the hall to the housekeeper’s apartment, you can hear Nic muttering about how this isn’t a smart decision in his matching Canadian voice, but it’s almost an after effect as your mind once again resets the groove of the sound of what happened on that baby monitor recording. A conversation (if one could call it that, really) hidden under a faulty timestamp and discovered by raw luck. Your stomach is in your throat as your hand grips your recorder so tightly that your knuckles are turning white and it feels like it’s the only thing that’s keeping you from being caught adrift in the fear of what your life has become.

Guttural words, sounds that don’t sound like any earthly language are there as that mental tape plays back, uttered by the housekeeper to the baby with a fiendish glee. The gurgle of the two year old sounds almost like he’s talking back to her, as she just says: “you like him don’t you? Shush, don’t let mommy hear you. You are going to love your new life, my boy!” And then the most disturbing line of all for someone who’s met Sebastian Torres, who saw where he was held, who sat across from Simon Reese in the institution where he was held for killing his parents when he asked her if she wanted to see him too.

“Serve him well!”

You’d done what you were supposed to: you called Wendy but the entire family was missing. The police were involved and now everything in your gut is telling you that you need to speak to Maddie Franks. Despite all of the men in your life, you know that you know your gut is right way more often than it's wrong. So, you bang on the door and it would be dead silent in response if it wasn’t for Nic’s I told you so tone going “doesn’t look like she’s home.”

Maybe it’s your gut, maybe it’s Nic’s voice but you reach for the door handle “what are you doing?” His voice is shocked before you respond in an tone that’s overly calm, fighting back at your own panic.

“It’s unlocked.”

“I can see it’s unlocked!” There’s worry in his voice worry for you, himself the show as he keeps talking, “Okay, um, before we perform a criminal act that we're probably going to admit to on the podcast, do you think we maybe should consider other... and she's going inside.”

Of course you’re going inside, you couldn’t not go inside, and it wasn’t as if you’re picking a lock, despite how Nic grumbles behind you about how this is someone’s house. This isn’t someone’s house. It’s the house of someone who fucked with a little kid, a kid whose family is now missing and you’re determined to get to the bottom of it.

But then the light you let in from the opened hallway door spills into the apartment. The inside of the place is trashed like so many movies that you’ve seen. Furniture is shattered and spilled everywhere, drawers are thrown open and their contents are all over the floor, and broken glass just winks at you in the light. Nic swears behind you, but you don’t. For some things, swears aren’t enough and this is one of them, especially as a wall that seems to be stained black in contrast with the familiar off-white that comes with apartments catches your eye and holds it.

There’s a moment where you can’t tell if the loud thrum of electric buzzing noises is coming from your brain or around you. You can’t slept, haven’t slept in a damn year and for a moment you can swear that the black of the wall is moving, shivering to come at you like the video in the Torres case, like the demons do in your nightmares, but then Nic flicks on the light switch, and you realize that the wall is moving and it’s not demons at all. Instead the black is red, the tacky and sticky color of drying blood in the darkness, and the things on it are hundred, or maybe thousands of flies.

Maybe because you couldn’t see it, it meant that your brain wasn’t accepting the signals from your nose, because they hit you then: it’s decay, copper and sticky and sweet and making your stomach roll like it did when a raccoon had died under the porch of the cabin your family sometimes rented, and you know that the metallic meat smell isn’t just blood. Acidic bile starts to climb your throat as you hear another sound other than Nic fumbling for his phone to call 911, other than the flies and the sound of your own blood in your ears.

It’s not even half a turn of your step, but what you see there changes everything. You’d been scared of ceiling fans since you’d watched Twin Peaks when you were way too damn young to see it, and now something else eclipsed it. Maddie Franks, the housekeeper who denied knowing anything about demons or sacred geometry or noises on the baby monitor or anything else that was wrong with the Hochman family was swinging from the ceiling fan by an orange extension cord, and she was dead.

She was dead, and somehow you can’t help but think that it’s entirely your own fault. If only you hadn't pushed her. If only, if only, if only