|
|
Tina Malty was fed up. She'd had enough. Done. Finished. At thirteen, Tina was through with pleasing her parents, with being the "good girl", with straight A's and glowing progress reports. How could she be expected to care about any of that? She was at the bottom of the social ladder because of all those things.
Only five more years, she used to tell herself. Five more years and then you can leave these...these losers behind. Just five more years, then college and a career that will make them all jealous because you'll be rich and famous and...
And so what? She plodded glumly into the cold night. If I leave them all behind, they'll never know how wonderful and successful I'll be. If I leave them all now, I can find people who think I'm wonderful today.
That's all Tina wanted: acceptance. More than that, she wanted the constant ache to go away.
Walking through Cutter's Wood, she hoped that was all behind her.
Tina was running away, running to a new start somewhere far from the South Heights. She knew that the city limit was at the other end of the Wood and beyond that, the main highway. And freedom.
It was pitch dark among the thick growth: brush that concealed any paths and tall, thick trees. Though Tina had heard tales about the Cutter House, none crossed her mind. Not at first. Not until the House made itself known.
As she neared the place, head down and only subconsciously aware of her surroundings, something tickled at the back of her head. Like an itch or something crawling. On the inside.
Hutch Cutter owned the place when it was new, more than a century ago. Some said he came from the Upper Peninsula, that he'd been born in a winter wood near Lake Superior. Cutter's grandmother was kin to his grandfather. The children of said union, Nathan and Eugenia, were set at different poles, each far from center.
The contractions of Cutter's birth frightened Eugenia. Heavy with child and seized by wave after wave of pain, she fled into the woods.
Nathan, grinning, watched her go.
Eugenia emerged at the lakeshore and was felled by the baby's coming. Alone in the gray morning, the young woman gave birth on a bed of thick frost. Tiny floes ran with her blood down an incline to the icy water of Superior.
Cutter's mother wrapped him in the skirt of her long dress, leaving her legs and belly exposed. She held him close, kissed his forehead. The long, silvery rays of afternoon sun kissed her goodby.
Nathan watched it all from a few feet away, still grinning. When it was over, he roughly retrieved his son. Nathan stared at the newborn with empty eyes. He tucked the baby into his long, heavy coat and returned home.
That was the story. It was how folks explained Hutch Cutter's nastiness and the reason he lived alone in the Wood. Some of it might even be true.
Other owners had come and gone since then, their own bizarre stories painting the Cutter House. Twelve years ago, the house had its last owner: Alex Eckart.
Eckart worked for a tool and dye company in Taylor, just the other side of the railroad tracks. His mistress lived two miles further south and also worked for the company. Everyone in the South Heights seemed to know about the affair. Everyone except Ebbie.
On one of the rare evenings that Alex was home for dinner, Ebbie prepared a special dinner: leg of lamb, herb-baked redskin potatoes, mixed greens, a bucket of gasoline under the counter, and candles lit throughout the house. That night, Ebbie confronted her husband. While Alex bathed her in empty words, Ebbie strode to the counter and heaved the bucket over her head, letting the pungent liquid wash away his lies. She seized one of the candles. The romantic setting suddenly glowed warm orange as Ebbie Eckart donned a billowing, fieruy cloak.
Spurred into action by his wife's terrible screams, Alex tried to dowse the flames with the tablecloth. It was the same one they'd used on their honeymoon. The one they'd laid on the damp ground their first morning as man and wife. The one that they'd always used for picnics since that day because it was plastic.
Ebbie's screams were stifled as the red-checkered tablecloth melted and formed itself around her burning body.
Within a year of losing his wife, Alex Eckart was convicted of embezzlement. His possessions were seized. The house was sealed.
The house was alone again. It had secrets. Stories that the good people of the South Heights didn't know. It kept those very close.
The tickling sensation expanded, sending chills down Tina's spine and prickling attentiveness to the rest of her. Before her, the house punched a hole in the shadows. Moonlight was scarce, barely touching the white exterior with a dim and ghostly radiance and falling into the darkness of paneless windows. It wasn't the warm glow of habitation that made Tina aware of the small structure. It was the smell.
Someone was baking.
Mrs. McGinney's place was a couple miles east. She was blind and had Alzheimer's, and her kids had recently put her in a Home. Tina didn't think anyone was staying there. She couldn't remember exactly what her mom and dad had said about it. Something like it was up for sale and maybe Mrs. McGinney's daughter, the one who still wasn't married (she could hear her mother's voice, "...still isn't married"), maybe she was living there now. Tina wondered if she'd be able to smell someone baking from so far. Even so, the aroma was fresh and near. It was warm.
The Lamperts (Chuck, Sue, the triplets Michael, Junior, Mark, the cats Whiskers and Tweety, and their Doby-Shephard, Marmaduke) lived even further on the north side. Tina didn't know the hour but she was fairly certain none of them would be fiddling in the kitchen. Mrs. Lampert wasn't the cake and cookies and bake sales kind of mom (more the Jim Beam and Coca Cola kind) and Mr. Lampert's culinary interests were limited to sandwiches and microwave meals.
The highway was west and the train tracks were south.
Who was baking?
Heady gingerbread
(Nana's gingerbread cake)
came from the Cutter House. It was such a friendly scent, comforting. Tina ached for comfort, had been dry of it for so long. She was cold and hungry, and her loneliness grew heavier with every step she took.
The front door was open.
That door was never open. It had a deadbolt lock with a plate on the outside and a keyhole on the inside. Alex Eckart once had that key but it had been confiscated along with everything else.
(Nana's gingerbread.)
Tina went inside.
It was dark but not as dark as it should have been. Tina expected to find the disgusting interior decorating of vandals and vagrants. No graffiti, however, filled the empty geometry where pictures once hung. No stained mattress occupied a corner of the living room. No butts from cigarettes: foreign, domestic, or other. No cans or bottles. Nothing.
Except a cold that had nothing to do with the weather and an emptiness that would not let go.
Tina crossed the room to the kitchen, still following that
(Oh, Nana)
wonderful aroma. The shadows seemed restless in there, trees swaying in the wind. If only the gasping winter breeze was strong enough to make them dance. If only there was enough moonlight.
Tina heard clacking bowls and clanking utensils, running water, the slow shushing thump of something thick being mixed in a large bowl.
She smelled chocolate chip cookies, with cinnamon and the slightly bitter waft of walnuts. They were Tina's favorite and her mother's specialty. No one made them like Mom; no one, to Tina's mind, could have gotten that smell just right.
"Hello?" Tina called, nearly choking on her own voice. It seemed too loud, even as the last syllable faded and died in her throat.
The cookies were done. She was wrapped in the brown scent of cooked sugar and butter and chocolate. Standing on the threshold, she was kissed by a soothing warmth that did not pass beyond. Her face and arms, hands clutched beneath her chin, luxuriated in sweet-scented welcome while her back shivered with cold.
Tina crossed into the kitchen.
Cupboards, a sink and window, and an oven spanned the room to her left. Some of the cupboard doors were missing, and the gaping shelves were bare of even dust or cobwebs. Water dripped from a crooked faucet, fat rusty drops the color of old blood. The oven was an older model like the one in Nana's basement, the one she used in the summer when it was too hot upstairs to cook or on holidays when she had to run two ovens to feed everyone. The one that had a twisted coat hanger to keep the door shut. This one was not Nana's.
It gleamed.
It waited.
It was hungry.
And it had a name. Tina would soon discover many things she could not possibly know. Like the name of the thing in the Cutter House and the sound of its voice.
She stood in front of the oven, hands outstretched as though before a campfire. Tears puddled in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks, once pink from cold and now blushing from heat. Her heart both withered and bloomed a bouquet of loneliness, sadness, and misery.
Under all those delicious smells (chocolate cake, Nana's gingerbread, Mom's cookies, pumpkin pie, apple cobbler), like a yellow fog near Tina's feet, was the clammy odor of a dying sea. It was the sickly-sweet stench of burnt meat, which she couldn't know (but did) was the porcine aroma of human flesh set aflame, perhaps by an angry and depressed housewife. She couldn't know this but the walls whispered to her, the dancing shadows whispered, and Tina knew many horrible things.
Another odor lingered at the level of the baseboards: rusty and dark like the water still dripping from a dry, nearly decapitated faucet; rusty and dark like old blood. It was the same heavy odor that drifted from the biohazard receptacles and soiled linen bins in emergency rooms. More, it was the bottom layer of decades of leaves fallen on neglected graves
(couldn't know but did)
the blackened fruits dropped from sickly trees at the edge of a poisoned creek
(couldn't know)
the stench of a gangrenous limb
(could not)
the cloying reek of something lying without slumber or redemption
(should not)
on the swampy edge of that same creek, beneath the blackened fruit, dispatched by the avengers of its victims but left unburied
(should)
left to stare at the sky through worm-eaten cores, to witness the ascension of innocent spirits whose earthly lives the thing-once human-had shredded and devoured
(not)
the wet stench of corruption from its shriveled yet still-beating heart, the fetid air of its breath inhaled from Elsewhere and exhaled amid rot
(but did).
Tina Malty wept. Those delicious aromas, the ones so reminiscent of childhood, of being loved (not those other ones, those bad smells), were thick about her head and she could almost forget the roiling nausea instigated by the fog on the floor. It began to feel as though she hadn't eaten in days. She'd been hungry all her life: for food, for affection. Or so the pleasant scents suggested. This was where Tina belonged, right here in Hutch Cutter's kitchen. She was accepted here. She was wanted.
Behind her, someone was sharpening a knife. At the chock of a blade biting into wood
(a carving knife, butcher's knife, butcher's block)
Tina spun around.
Nothing.
No one.
The groaning slam of the heavy oven door made Tina jump, hands once more locked beneath her chin.
A sigh of cool air, smooth and rich with freshly turned earth, brushed her cheek. The door to her right
(the basement, locked tight like the front door)
winked slyly at her.
From the oven
(it has a name; don't say it, don't even think it)
a moist sound like a large tongue-too big for even the largest mouth-unrolling and smacking against lips. Thick ropes of
(not spit, not spit)
clear viscous fluid hung from the oven door's hinged corners.
A yellow glow touched the corner of her eye. The basement door was open further, its eye no longer a wink but a malignant gaze. The loamy currents rising from that now illuminated throat brought the clattering of dishes and the clinking of glasses. A low murmur seeped up, the buzzing of voices gathered for
(a feast)
...gathered together.
The heat from the oven intensified, causing sweat to bead and mingle with the last of Tina's tears. Knuckles white below her gray face, she watched a red light puddle into the dark oven. It wasn't precisely like seeing and whatever filled the oven was not exactly a light. It was more like a fine mist that did not quite touch the blackness and which her mind, in default, perceived as red.
Tina's cheeks began to hurt and the fragrance of her shampoo drifted down haphazardly.
The basement door, wide open, glared at her: a sickly yellow eye.
The oven
(oh,
drooled while the not-mist crept out like a slow mortal vomitus.
"Mom," Tina rasped.
"Mommy," she croaked.
Onward poured the not-mist.
(Should not, could not, did...did know what it was...did know its name...)
"MommyMommyMommy," came her litany.
(DID DID DID)
The breath from whatever didn't live in the basement rose and swept over her.
The not-mist came.
"Mom! Mom! Mom!" Tina's voice grew stronger. It hit the walls and fell back on her.
The not-mist
(don't say its name...don't think it)
was stronger.
"MOM!"
Tina Malty was fed up.
"MOM!"
She'd had enough.
"MOM!"
Done. Finished.
"MOM! MOM! MOM!"
Tina wanted to run home. She pulled one step away,
