Incall Only - Must Have Flesh- Chapter 4

The possibility that I was entering a crime scene and not an elaborate Halloween prank became more and more plausible the further Ian and I ventured into Dr. V’s house. I paused for a moment and listened. The sound of a television was coming from somewhere on the second floor, seemingly the only potential sign of life. My son was close behind me and I could hear his breath filter in and out of the sweatshirt.

The idea that I was taking Ian into a dangerous situation had also occurred to me, but I was much more comfortable with the thought that he might see something graphic than I was with him waiting outside alone. There were too many possibilities out there and if he were with me, I could send him for help if I found the doctor or his son in need of medical attention.

I would take the lead, I reasoned, and if I found anything worthy of a visit from the Medical Examiner I would shield my son from the view and usher him from the house.

In the foyer, I had three choices. The livingroom to my left, a room that appeared to be Dr. V’s home office to my right, or to continue down the corridor to the kitchen in the back.

I felt Ian’s hand on my shoulder. “Before we go anywhere..” He left me long enough to gently close the front door and place the wooden chair in front of it. At first I thought he was blocking it, but when he removed a small round mirror from the foyer wall and placed it upright on the seat and against the chair back, I realized that he was creating a make-shift early warning device. Anyone coming in behind us would be unaware of the chair and send the mirror crashing to the ground. Anyone trying to leave would be impeded by it and probably in enough of a hurry to disregard the mirror in moving the chair. Either way, if we were somewhere else in the house, we would be alerted to any guests.

“Good call.” I agreed. “Lock the door and shut the outside light off.” I’m not psychic, by any stretch of the imagination but I consider myself a receiver of sorts. A reader of vibes. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I can predict whether a client who contacts me for a first appointment will actually show. More often than not, the compulsion to call a friend will result in finding out good or bad news that I am the first to hear.

In this case, I felt that something was terribly wrong here but for some reason resisting a call the police. “They won’t know what to do” the inner voice whispered. Newsflash to my inner vibe-o-meter…neither did I. What I did know was that I didn’t want to risk the involvement of any innocent trick-or-treaters.
A circle of moisture was gathering on Ian’s sweatshirt where it covered his mouth and nose.

“Stay close.” I reached back for his hand and for the first time in years, he let me take it. “Keep looking back. If I tell you not to look at something, don’t look at it. If I tell you to run, run. ”

“If you tell me to get down, get down. I get it” In a former life, I can totally see my son as a swashbuckler or a gladiator. Into the belly of the beast without much thought as to the consequences.

In recent months, I’ve seen some improvement in that respect, whereas in the past a damsel in distress would take the form of an ailing vacuum cleaner or overflowing coffeemaker. He would take it apart with every intention of diagnosing the problem.

Soon however, some other interesting tidbit of a promise of an idea would send him off in another direction and my vacuum cleaner would still be in pieces on the living room rug, surrounded by the very flotsam and jetsam I needed to use it to clean up. The Mr. Coffee, a performance art piece of neo-modernistic coffee culture.
Now, appliances in need of repair were dismantled, diagnosed, fixed if possible and reassembled with a minimum of leftover parts so I’m sure my logical, base-covering approach was making him slowly bleed out from the sheer torture of not. Doing. Anything.

“Mom, it stinks in here and to tell you the truth, my breath isn’t much better, so can we do this?.”

“Pushy, pushy.” I turned back toward the hallway and advanced toward the living room. A tall lamp in the corner shed warm light on a brown leather couch, a Persian rug woven in mostly maroons and browns, a wall of books, and an entertainment center. The television, stereo system, and game console that inhabited the center weren’t in use, which was just as well considering that there wasn’t a soul to entertain.

Backing out, we crossed the hall to the doctor’s office which was inhabited by a desk I recognized from an Ikea catalog, another wall of books, and several black and white photographs of the doctor, his son, and a woman I had never seen before. Judging by the intimacy of the poses and smiles, I assumed that this woman was the doctors wife.

The laptop on the desk had reverted to the standard Windows screensaver and I hit the button. The wiggling Windows logo was replaced with what appeared to be Dr. V’s Yahoo-based internet mailbox. Open on the screen was an e-mail.

Dearest:
Tonight is Halloween. Sanje is trick-or-treating with his friend from school and I am here handing out candy while I complete some lab reports. There are so many more questions than answers. Each day we are closer. I hope that your mother is soon well and that you can return to us here, my beloved. Sanje asks me every day if today

That’s were it ended. Dr. V had been interrupted in the middle of an e-mail, presumably to answer the knock of a child seeking candy. The twinge of guilt I felt for reading the e-mail was outweighed by my growing concern for Sanje and his father.

“Yeaowl.”

“Fuck!” Ian jumped, and his sudden startle translated to me. I whirled to find that a cat had joined us. Sheepishly, Ian turned from the cat to my questioning face. “Sorry.”

“You bet you are.”

“Mom-“

“Mom, nothing. You will not use that kind of lang-“

Reminiscent of a springtime cat copulation operetta, another cry came from somewhere in the house and judging by the tortie’s hackles, it was not feline in origin. The cat turned and hissed at the open door and ran between Ian’s legs, taking up his stance behind something larger than he was.

“That’s not good.” I whispered.

“Did you hear where it came from?”

“Uh-huh.” Under the green makeup, my son’s face had paled to an ashen gray I had only seen once before as the precursor to a stomach flu so virulent that it had had me searching the house for a Ouija board one Mother’s Day weekend. He met my eyes and slowly raised one finger toward the ceiling. The dull thud of something hard hitting the carpet above filtered through the ceiling roughly two feet from where Ian was pointing.

I swallowed, the task more difficult than I remember it being. “Do they have more than one cat?” I asked hopefully.

“I didn’t even know they had this one.” His swallow sounding as difficult as mine. “We have to go up there don’t we?”

“You can wait down here.”

“No!”

“Okay, then.” We left the office just as we had found it, and began the slow climb up the steps to the bedrooms. Another carpet muffled thump stopped us in our tracks.

“What are we doing?” My son asked as if he had caught himself putting the cereal in the refrigerator and the milk in the cupboard.

“We’re going upstairs.”

“Without any weapons? What…we’re going to throw Twizzlers?” He had a point. From under the stairwell, Ian extracted a broom and with three deft spins, removed the sweeping part from the handle. In the kitchen, I opened drawers and closed them again until I found what I was looking for. The four-pronged turkey lifter.

Armed, we again began the ascent. Slowly, step by step, listening for movement or Gof forbid, the unearthly noise we had heard previously. The cat chose to remain downstairs, but watched our progress with what I imagined was look that translated into the Willy Wonka Disciplines Tom Teevee-esque “Wait. Don’t. Stop”

We reached the top step uneventfully and rounded the corner of the railing in silence. Waiting. Watching. Listening. The door to the room directly above the study stood half-open and the familiar frenetic chatter of a Ron Popeil infomercial drifted out into the hallway.

At any given moment, there are 19 things going on in my head. Some of these things are as mundane as a list for a future shopping trip but some of them take on a life of their own and filibuster any hope of getting to sleep before midnight or one a.m. Therefore, my knowledge of the paid programming available to me after Jay Leno is extensive. Ron Popeil is as familiar to me as my neighbors, but I will pass on the availability of a set of kitchen knives that never need sharpening if, on another channel, the Vacuum Sealer is showcased.

“Set It And Forget it!” the studio audience chanted. I adjusted the turkey lifter in my hand so that the prongs pointed backward, ready to stab. What? I didn’t know. In my peripheral vision, Ian choked up on his broomstick staff.