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  Elena Hearty

  Chapter 1

  The Basement

  Lenore stood at the entrance to apartment B14 as her host fumbled with the keys. All other doors along the basement hall appeared to have been boarded up or hastily filled with cement. A single lighting fixture flickered above, causing Lenore‘s shadow to dance against the wall. It looked like it was running.

  “Don't get many trick-or-treaters, huh?” she asked, eying three deadbolts on the door.

  Richard smiled as he wrestled another key from countless others on the ring. "Never had a trick-or-treater. B14 is sort of a misnomer, by the way. This place was built in 1907 and originally had 14 apartments to a floor. When my great-grandfather bought the building in 1920, he moved into this unit and started expanding as vacancies emerged. Now just about half the floor is this apartment, and the rest is filled with utilities. You'll see—my place about 4500 square feet, when it's all said and done."

  “So it's just you down here?” Lenore would later remember this moment with longing, as it was her last possible opportunity to escape.

  “Yep. Just me.” Richard turned the final deadbolt and opened the door. “Ladies first.”

  Eager to lay her eyes on the urban mansion, Lenore stepped into a sprawling foyer and was not disappointed. She marveled at marble floors and ornate ceilings as the door closed behind her, thinking that for someone who did not appear to be out of his late twenties, Richard had quite sophisticated taste. The interior design was distinctly art-deco, punctuated by eccentric touches, such as the bright orange coat rack on which she hung her jacket.

  “I'm impressed. This isn't what I was expecting. Not after the outside…” She stopped herself, not sure if she was being rude.

  Richard seemed too distracted to care. He cocked his head to the side as if straining to hear something and then brushed past Lenore on his way down the hall. Not knowing how else to respond, she followed his lead, and the sound of a woman crying emerged as she walked. Hadn’t Richard claimed to live alone? Her pulse quickened.

  Lenore turned the corner into a large parlor and jerked to a stop. Something was wrong. Richard leaned against a pool table, joking around with another man who appeared to be covered in blood. A disheveled girl cried loudly over a sopping mound of flesh in the center of the room; it still wore the clothes of a man.

  Ripped apart and badly mutilated, the corpse resembled something a tabby might leave at its master's doorstep. Taking a step back, Lenore could make out a trail of blood all over the floor and assumed that the victim must have struggled before expiring next to the coffee table. The girl wailing beside him would periodically lift the head in a hopeless attempt at revival.

  The lamentation of the mourner on the floor struck Richard and his blood covered friend as high comedy, every sob evoking a new string of ridicule. Richard facetiously suggested she try mouth to mouth resuscitation, which threw his companion into a peal of laughter. Neither man appeared to acknowledge Lenore's slim figure in the entryway; they were entirely too delighted with the harassment of the other woman to pay her any notice.

  Lenore took a few slow steps back into the hallway and sat on the ground. She needed to think. Whatever had happened to the man on the floor had not been an accident, and the reaction of the men in the parlor suggested indifference at best. No one was making any motion to call the police. She needed to get out of there as soon as possible.

  With stealthy deliberation, Lenore made her way back to the front door and tried the handle. It rotated, but the door did not open. The deadbolts had been turned with a key from the inside; Richard must have sealed her in the moment she walked through the door.

  A hand touched her shoulder. She jumped.

  “You weren‘t thinking about ditching us, were you? You just got here.” Richard stood grinning behind her.

  Lenore‘s mouth trembled. "Listen, I—I don't know what‘s going on, but it looks like you've got a lot to take care of right now. I can take a look at your record collection another time, ok? I'll—I'll email you tomorrow—is that cool?" Richard kept smiling but made no motion for the keys. "Please…I really don't know what's going on. I don't belong here."

  He grabbed her by the hand. “But Lenore, I think you do belong here. Let's head into my living room and we'll figure this whole messy situation out, what do you say?”

  She tried to wrestle free of his grasp but found this to be impossible. Eyes dashing wildly between Richard the door, Lenore realized that even if she were to break free, there was nowhere to go. Silently, she walked with him back to the living room, where Richard released her hand and turned his attention to the woman on the carpet.

  "Hey, Angela, why don't you come with me?"

  Angela’s face distorted into a terrified grimace. “NO! I want to stay with Lance.”

  “Lance isn't lookin' so hot, kiddo. C'mon and don't make a show of this. Let's go.”

  Angela sprang to her feet and ran to the other man in the room. “Please,” she said, clinging to him. “PLEASE. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Please don’t let him take me. Call Charles. WHERE’S CHARLES?” She screamed as Richard started moving toward her. “You can’t let him take me. Don’t do this. PLEASE.”

  Richard’s friend held Angela in his arms for a long moment and kissed her gently on the forehead. “So long, kiddo,” he whispered. Then he handed her to Richard, who carried the pleading woman out of the room and into the hallway. A door shut in the distance, and Lenore could hear muffled screaming on the other side.

  The blood covered man grinned at Lenore. “Rich asked me to entertain you while he talks to Angela.”

  She froze as he approached, clutching her purse to her chest like a shield.

  “I know what you need,” he said. “You need coffee. It's late. I'll bet I can figure out how to work the coffee machine if you give me a chance. I need to get a paper towel anyway.”

  He led Lenore to a sparsely stocked wet bar beside the pool table. When she got there, she planted herself on a stool and wrestled her oversized hobo bag onto the counter. She dug through its contents, swiftly producing a large bottle of pills, a pack of Marlboro Lights, and a disposable lighter. Lenore pulled a cigarette from the pack and attempted to light it several times before throwing her lighter down in exasperation.

  "Here, let me." A bloodstained hand lit her cigarette. "I'm Paul, by the way."

  Paul dampened a paper towel in the sink and began to wipe his face. The features revealed were average, with the exception of Paul's eyes. The deep creases around his lids suggested a playfulness and wisdom that made their wearer look kind, even when slathered in blood. Once cleaned off, it was evident that none of the blood on Paul had been his own. Aside from his crimson-stained polo and khakis, the only evidence of altercation was what appeared to be a deep burn on the back of his left hand.

  He discarded the towel and pondered the coffee machine in front of him as if it were an ancient Chinese puzzle box. "I feel like Angela pours the coffee in the top, right?" He removed the lid and winced as the scent of rancid coffee filled the room. "Hang on I'm going to wash this thing out….that's fucking filthy." Paul looked up at Lenore as he rinsed the pot. "You know, Rich is going to kill me for letting you smoke in here. He hates it when people stink up his apartment." As an afterthought, he reached behind the bar and set an empty glass on the counter to serve as an ashtray.

  “I—I can put it out if you like. I don’t want to make him mad…” No, she certainly did not want to make Richard mad.

  He smiled, taking an exaggerated breath. “Nah. Smells great in here to me.” Then, looking thoughtfully at the man on the floor, he grabbed another glass from underneath the bar. Leaving the water still running in the sink, he ran over to the body and filled the contai
ner to the top with blood, then walked back carefully so as not to spill the contents. He took a large sip and went back to scrubbing. “I know that's really rude of me and I shouldn't do that type of thing in front of you.”

  Lenore frowned at his drink. “Are you supposed to be some sort of vampire or something?”

  Paul turned off the water and began to dry the pot with a towel. “Something like that.” He grinned up at her. “You don't believe me, do you?”

  “Nope.”

  He motioned to the pills on the countertop. "What're those for?"

  “Anxiety. It's Xanax.” Lenore lifted the bottle to show him the label before pulling six pills from the container.

  “Jesus! Do you usually take that many?”

  “Nope.” She swallowed the pills dry.

  Paul opened several cabinets until he found one filled with coffee grinds. "Okay, we've got French vanilla, regular, bold…Jesus…how much of this shit did Angela own, anyway? What do you drink?"

  “Bold works for me.”

  He started the pot, which comfortably churned in the background. “You know, I knew you were on something,” he said, leaning over the counter and pointing to the bottle of pills. “You're way to calm to be totally sober. Most people with a dead body in the room would have thrown up by now, or would be freaking out pretty bad like Angela.”

  “I took four before I came here,” Lenore said. She thought it was the best decision she’d ever made.

  “So do you take them all the time, or just when there‘s a dead guy on the floor?”

  “All the time. I'm agoraphobic.”

  "You hate gay people?" Paul chuckled quietly at his own joke but got no response from Lenore. "I'm kidding. I know what agoraphobia is. You can't go outside, right? Like, you're scared of being out of your house?"

  "Yeah, that's pretty much it. I have to take Xanax every day to function, basically."

  “Jesus. I can't imagine. So what are you afraid of? Are you like afraid of diseases?”

  Lenore shook head. “It's not diseases, but if I tried to explain it to you it wouldn't make any sense.”

  Paul nodded understandingly. "Well, at least you've got medicine. Like, it hasn't stopped you from getting out of the house."

  “I‘m pretty sure I‘m going to regret leaving my house this evening.” She took a long drag on her cigarette.

  “You’ve got to open yourself up to new experiences,” he said, displaying his glass in front of her as an example. “I just realized you never told me your name.”

  “It's Lenore.”

  “Huh. You know you don't hear that one a lot anymore.”

  "My mother had this idea that you should give your children old-fashioned names. That way, they can't go out of style, something like that."

  “Any brothers or sisters? Any more interesting names?”

  “Just me,” she replied, expelling a large cloud of smoke.

  Paul nodded and polished off his glass. He held up one finger, motioning for her to wait while he ran back to the body for a refill. Lenore watched as he put one foot on the corpse’s chest in an effort to pump it for blood.

  "You know you're going to make yourself sick doing that," she said when he returned. "I think human beings can only drink so much blood before they throw up. That's why you put your head down when you have a nosebleed—you need to make sure you don't swallow anything."

  "Wow, I love the fact that you're on Xanax. This isn't freaking you out at all. I don't even feel bad about drinking in front of you anymore." He grabbed her pack of Marlboro Lights and pulled out a cigarette. "I'm going to steal a smoke from you. I haven't had one of these in a while."

  Paul practiced blowing smoke rings while Lenore's mind raced toward a plan of escape. She looked around the room and noted there were no windows in sight. Cell phone. If she could reach the phone in her purse without attracting Paul's attention, perhaps she could call for help. Would he become suspicious if she asked to use the bathroom and carried her purse inside? It was worth a try, and sooner rather than later.

  “Hey is there a bathroom around here that I can use?”

  “Yeah. There’s a bathroom down the hall to the left.”

  “Thanks.” Lenore grabbed her purse and headed out the door.

  “Hey! Leave that here!” She looked at her purse and thought for a moment that Paul was onto her scheme, but he was pointing to her lit cigarette instead. She extinguished it before leaving the room.

  Following Paul‘s directions, Lenore entered a small powder room and locked the door. She used the toilet and then ran the sink while fishing through her purse for her phone. Her heart sank when she pulled it out and saw there was no reception. Was there no reception in just the bathroom, or everywhere in the apartment? Lenore turned off the sink and walked back to the parlor, checking the phone in her purse every few feet for signs of service.

  The only evidence that Paul had moved at all while she was gone was a refilled glass on the countertop. He looked somewhat relieved upon her return, stating, “I thought for sure you were going to lock yourself in there and I'd have to come and get you.”

  She looked inside her purse again. Still no service.

  "Are you thinking about making a call?" His lips curled knowingly. "You can't get a signal in this basement. Sucks if you're expecting a ring. Hey, the coffee finished while you were away." He grabbed a cup from underneath the counter and filled it with light brown liquid. "You know what? I should have offered you something stronger." He turned around to ponder the modest assortment of liquor behind the bar. "You want me to make this Irish?"

  She nodded. Paul poured a generous amount of whiskey into her drink. He started nursing his own again.

  “Hey is there cream or sugar around here anywhere?”

  Paul hunted around the back shelves. "Oh, yeah—yeah I think it's…somewhere….right over….Aha! Found it." He produced a box filled with Splenda and a canister of non-dairy creamer. "Sorry, this is all I got. Angela was lactose intolerant and constantly on one of those sugar-free diets or whatever." He waved his hand dismissively.

  Stirring the powders into her cup like an expert alchemist, Lenore noted with some measure of disconcert that Paul had referred to Angela in the past tense. But none of that mattered now. The six Xanax were kicking in. Waves of calm spread throughout Lenore’s body, and she celebrated the tranquility with large sups of spiked coffee. Closing her eyes, she imagined herself falling back into a large leather sofa, and the name of that sofa was Xanax.

  She drowsily looked over at Paul. “So did you kill that guy?” It was an awkward question.

  Paul looked down at his bloodstained clothes and grinned. He was always grinning. "Yeah I messed up," he said, "but I'm not beating myself up about it. I didn't even know him. He was Angie's friend."

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, in a nutshell, he shouldn’t have been here and now he's dinner.”

  By Lenore's account, Paul had thrown back two glasses of blood and was working on a third. The vampire act was pretty convincing, she thought, and not just because Paul drank blood. There was something catlike in his movements, and when standing still he appeared not to breathe at all.

  Load screams emanated from down the hall. “What's going on in there?” she asked.

  Paul looked in the direction of the screams with evident disinterest. “Richard's chatting with Angela, that's all.”

  Lenore could now hear banging noises in addition to the screaming. “So how do you think that conversation is going?”

  Paul giggled. “Doesn't sound like it's going so well for Angela, does it?”

  Lenore finished her coffee, which had almost a full shot of liquor waiting for her at the bottom of the cup. There had to be a way to turn this situation around. She had to convince Paul to let her go but needed to present the idea to him in a way that did not sound desperate.

  “Any chance you've got the keys to the front door?”

  "There's an excellen
t chance I have the keys to the front door," he said slyly. "You thinking it's time to boogie?"

  “Yeah it's late and this has all been a bit much for me.”

  Paul shook his head. “I don't know why you're bothering asking me to let you out of here. I'm obviously not going to, and I think you already knew that.” There was a weary irritation in his voice.

  “Oh God, are you guys going to kill me?” Lenore immediately wished she could retract the question. So much for sounding calm.

  Paul bit his lower lip to stifle a grin. “That's the elephant in the room, isn't it? What do you think?”

  “I think if you weren't going to kill me you would have let me go by now,” she said, and as the words come out of her mouth, she knew they were true.

  Lenore’s Xanax patina was starting to crack. She opened her purse and started sifting around for more pills. Only two remained.

  “Jesus. You're going to take MORE pills? You just took SIX ten minutes ago! I don't think two more are going to make any difference at this point.”

  “What's it to you? If you really wanted to help me out you wouldn't be monitoring my dosage, you'd open the fucking door.”

  Two pills went down the hatch. Lenore’s hand trembled as she pulled another cigarette from her pack.

  Paul looked at her sympathetically and gave her a light. “You're right,” he said. “How did Rich talk you down here in the first place?” He grabbed her empty cup from the counter and started fixing Lenore another Irish coffee.

  “I was looking for old records and he posted an ad online. I meet him at a coffee shop a few blocks down and he told me he was bringing me here to show me his collection. We exchanged emails—I'm sure they'll trace that. Someone will come looking for me.”

  “I'm sure they will,” he said distantly. “You know what's funny? Rich actually owns a ton of old records.” Paul leaned over the counter and spoke to Lenore with confidential flair. “No offense, but most of the time if he brings someone in here, it's to kill them.” His brow furrowed. “But I’ll bet he was going to show it to you. I don’t think he was planning on killing you at all.”