BACHELOR PAD: By David Massengill
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010You probably shouldn’t be doing this, Anna told herself as she backed her old convertible into an inconspicuous parking spot near her boyfriend’s townhouse. But what better way to surprise Charles than sneaking into his place on Valentine’s Day?
She fetched her bag of decorations and a vase of red tulips from the passenger seat and then checked her reflection in the rear view mirror. She patted her new blonde dye job and puckered her glossy lips. Still a sexy catch, she decided, and still marry-able at 37.
Charles was 40 and a cardiologist at the hospital across the street from Anna’s flower shop. They’d been dating for two months, and they first met when Charles bought lilies for his wife’s gravesite.
Now he’s finally allowing the dead to rest, Anna thought with a smile as she approached Charles’s modern, rectangular abode. Just when Anna had started suspecting that Charles would never stop mentioning the pretty, sharp, and incredibly athletic Sheryl, he suggested that Anna and he consider cohabitating. “I feel like I’m getting ready to let Sheryl go,” Charles said as they walked around the lake last weekend.
Charles had never invited Anna to his place, so she was thrilled to see a key turn in the lock and the door open. Anna had swiped Charles’s keys during his last sleepover. She had copies made at a hardware store before he awoke to her kiss and her eggs benedict breakfast.
I’ll start with the kitchen, Anna thought, passing through the front hallway and past a living room. Charles had denied Anna’s pleas to see his home by claiming that the place was “just a barely furnished bachelor pad.” Anna agreed with his assessment. No pictures hung from the beige walls, and the living room only contained a black leather couch and recliner chair—both of which had plastic coverings. Anna was startled by the hand sanitizer dispensers attached to various walls in the house, but she shrugged and told herself, He’s a doctor, and maybe he’s got slight OCD. Who doesn’t?
Anna heard a thumping sound upstairs, and she froze in the doorway to the kitchen. She feared that Charles might have come home from work early. She glanced out one window and saw bare trees bending in the wind. She decided that winter weather had caused the noise.
Anna was as energetic as Mother Nature as she transformed the kitchen from a bare, chilly room into a festive space that would spark Valentine’s Day passion. She covered the cabinets with sticky paper hearts, lined the counter with ornate chocolates, and placed subtly phallic candles on the small dining table. She was searching drawers for a lighter when she found a thick stack of papers resembling medical records. On the upper right-hand corner of each page was the name SHERYL EVANSTON.
Disappointment crept into Anna’s heart, yet she tried to shoo it away by thinking, It takes time to get someone out of your head, Anna. You took at least a year to stop obsessing about your exes, and they were all asses.
Suddenly desiring a drink, Anna glanced around the kitchen for alcohol. She thought she spotted a bottle of spirits above the stove, but it turned out to be a bottle of anesthesia. She went to the refrigerator with a hope for beer and, upon opening the door, stepped back with a cry of revulsion.
Inside the mostly empty refrigerator was a Tupperware bowl containing various clumps of long, black hair attached to bits of skin.
Immediately nauseous, Anna had to find a toilet. Her quest brought her upstairs. During the ascent, she tried to rationalize her gory find. Maybe Charles was storing patients’ hair at home because the hospital didn’t have room? All of Anna’s suggestions seemed ludicrous, and by the time she finished climbing she’d made her deduction: The doctor she’d fallen in love with was seriously sick.
Anna easily found the bathroom because it was the only room with an open door. She flipped the light switch and kneeled by the toilet to vomit. But what she glimpsed next distracted her from her nausea. A large, metallic object that looked like a battery was lodged between the toilet and the bathtub. A pair of cables ran from the object to behind the closed shower curtain.
Now more curious than horrified, Anna straightened her back and pulled on the curtain. She saw that the cables ended in some kind of blue jelly filling the tub. Even weirder was the deep imprint in the jelly, as if someone had recently been lying in the tub.
Anna covered her mouth with her hand and whimpered, “Who the hell-”
The furious footsteps in the hallway sounded quickly—so quickly, in fact, that Anna didn’t have time to turn her body all the way around to face the scowling, hideous woman who charged into the bathroom.
Dressed only in underwear, the woman had gray skin and white-edged sores covering most of her body. The orbs of her narrowed eyes were yellow, and the red, oozing spots on her scalp revealed where some of her curling black locks had come out.
Anna tried to scream, but one of the woman’s scabby hands covered her mouth. Just before the woman dunked her head under the blue jelly, Anna heard the front door shut and Charles’s voice downstairs.
“Sheryl, honey?” he called. “Today’s the day we have our serious talk.”
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©2010 David Massengill
