Feline protests resumed in the intercom that evening, and while these meows came in batches, something more accompanied them, though this aspect hovered below the domain of nameable thoughts. The murmuring cat created an odd echo: an echo that followed the contours of a house, if not precisely the house in which Liam slept.
Because the homesteader was never able to coax his phantom animal into domestication, or even produce physical evidence of its existence with open tins of tuna fish, his faith became that of an apostate, and his nocturnal visitor came to be regarded as a pest. He was confident in declaring this, and with the same confidence set off to Waverly Bean to use a pay phone the next morning.
An exterminator was called from a phonebook, and a woman arrived at his doorstep the same day. She bore an uncanny resemblance to the person in the posted flyer. Had the woman removed her advertisements for modeling in favor of a more reliable source of income? Liam, flabbergasted, suppressed an impulse to test a possible acquaintance, although her manner suggested nothing familiar existed between them.
She looked (ungracious by his judgment) more like a pallbearer, or morose real estate agent, than someone who crawled under houses professionally. For one thing, she wore unsuitable high heels. Whether because of these incongruities, or something else, the sylphlike woman carried an atmosphere about her, and cast it over the premises like a fisherman’s seine.
No pronouncement was offered on the house’s bare state, or on the static drizzling from the omnipresent intercom.
The client was compelled to volunteer, “Something lives in either my basement or my attic.”
“The same thing or different things?”
“The same, I think…”
“Mice?”
“Larger.”
“Raccoons?”
“Perhaps.”
The exterminator headed first to the pull-down attic stairs. “Are you in the habit of leaving these stairs in place?”
“They were like that when I moved in.”
The woman’s delicate shoe straps disappeared above the top step of the wooden ladder; her penlight was seen surveying roof timbers. “Birds…?” she called down.
Liam mumbled after this possibility.
The exterminator looked like a stick of charcoal while she turned pensively among other carbon shades. Her tread, which hitherto lacked a noteworthy feature, became, within the short span, uneven, as if she acquired a peg leg. When her feet again appeared below the attic hatch, she was missing a shoe. This development was only astonishing in that no mention of it was made by the loser of the item. Its loss did not especially incommode her.
On her return downstairs, she declared, “Something larger than a raccoon has occupied your attic.”
“Did you meet with it up there?” he asked earnestly in view of her changed appearance.
“Packages of uncooked ramen noodles litter the floor,” she described, “though in how their contents have been only partially consumed, the pattern suggests an unmethodical animal. At any rate, the foodstuff conceivably attracts infestation.”
The receiver of this news was stymied. “What manner of large animal uses an attic for its den, or merely samples packages of processed noodles?”
This question was fair; the exterminator smiled with misdirection and took her altered gait next to the basement. Here, after a shorter period, her light became stationary, likely from being set on something while something else was better examined. More time was spent here than a cramped cellar recommended, and no preliminary comment, such as made from the attic, was forthcoming. When she reappeared in the doorway, the client saw where she had left her pocket light behind.
“You forgot something,” he told her.
“I do not believe so,” she said, and closed the cellar door.
Before Liam could embellish his statement with pertinent facts, the woman asked, “Why was your furniture removed?”
“I have no furniture, unless you saw some decorating my invader’s den in the attic.”
“I saw no furniture in the attic,” she reported, “but several pieces are buried in your front yard.”
This report was met with gasping incredulity.
The exterminator walked out the front door and off the porch. When the homeowner caught up with her, his shoe (not hers) kicked an object sticking out of the ground. He was not unacquainted with the uneven terrain, and always assumed this protrusion to be the root of a removed tree. Owing to their shared concentration, a row of brass upholstery studs rose to simple detection. This was no part of a stump but, rather, the armrest of either a plush chair or sofa.
Liam had never noticed this detail. He knelt to loosen the dirt around the wooden support and detected faded threads of fabric. “I am more inclined to believe that hoarding termites buried this furniture here than my infirm aunt,” he concluded.
She offered a reprimand. “You have brought me here on a false pretense. You have summoned an exterminator when what you need is a paranormal investigator.”
Liam mildly laughed and responded, “Where does one find a paranormal investigator in South Dakota?”
The exterminator supplied a second business card, which was identical to her initial card except for listed business hours. “Do not call before six,” she advised.
Late that day, Liam was on the moment of returning to town to avail himself of the payphone, but was inspired (though dread was a better description of his state of mind) to test the phone in the sewing room. The time was 6:01 p.m. when he lifted the handset—it again possessed a dial tone. He called the number on the second business card, which went directly to voice mail.
At the conclusion of his message, a rap came to the front door. The woman walked in wearing the same clothes from earlier, except her ink pen had changed coat pockets. A full complement of flat sandals replaced the footwear of the afternoon, but her demeanor had not (in like manner) softened in the intervening hours.
“We cannot rule out the attic as the source of your problem,” she proclaimed authoritatively, “but the basement seems filled with unfinished business.”
Having circled the front room, the investigator stepped to the cellar door; the homeowner belatedly recalled the penlight still shining at the bottom of its stairs.
She did not take to these steps but urged the resident to draw closer to the door. When the two stood side by side, neither the penlight nor the cellar was mentioned. Instead, reference was made to something behind them, as if this object were a third person in the room who might eavesdrop.
“Your problem is connected to that box,” she concluded.
She spoke of the box that purportedly belonged his aunt, which he left, without further regard, sitting against the living room wall.
Instructions were simple. “Leave this door unfastened tonight. Cats like empty boxes.”
“Then it is a cat?” he complained. “You implied you were a paranormal investigator, but now we’re back to extermination.”
The professional repeated her instructions with queer assurance. “Cats like empty boxes.”
She turned toward the front door, about to leave, when the glint of a necklace sprang from the open collar of her white starch-pressed shirt. He could not understand her expression other than to resign it to a complicated history.
Little attention had been paid to the murmurings of his Greek chorus intercom during her visits, yet in considering the echo of his voice, he could not recall either her speech or tread being similarly amplified. This revelation (if he was not mistaken in supposing it) was left too late to be tested, as she was already on the porch and soon enough off it.
He watched her car poke down the dark road at a torpor. By appearance, she toyed with the idea of turning around on the narrow shoulder and coming back. The client did not know what he was professing when he stepped into his yard, but she saw him better.
By then she had reached a hill where sight of the road beyond it was cut off. Her foot remained on the brake pedal, even after her brake lights disappeared from view. The red tint lingered in reach of ditch lilies until a gust extinguished its flame.
Without producing a solid reason to do so, Liam dashed toward the road and up the graded slope. Lights from Waverly Bean were dim along a starless horizon. No car was anywhere between these markers and his lookout. Prairie dust, which needed little encouragement to become airborne, drifted nowhere across the unpaved byway. Further off, a sliver of black asphalt traced the plain for miles in both directions. His advantage in seeing was ten times the speed of any vehicle to flee it, but the exterminator was completely disappeared.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.