Sketched Page 13

  Had he misjudged their doses? It was possible, but he doubted it. Despite his mother’s constant instance that he was ‘sloppy’, he’d made a concerted effort to have everything well prepared this time.

  Despite the fact that Mother had been slowly poisoning him with her clever little digitalis solution for almost half a decade, he had clear memories of when the drug finally cleared out of his system. It had been beautiful, like emerging from a pool of water. Suddenly everything had become clear again. He was breathing real oxygen, his lungs expanding regularly in his chest. How fantastic it had felt when he was able to move his limbs again. He had concentrated so hard and when he was finally able to grab, he had to stop himself from weeping with delight.

  And how he had grabbed.

  Mother had fallen down the stairs, her bony leg snapping as easily as a dried twig when she finally landed in the foyer. Their gardener had found her, dropping his daily delivery of freshly harvested foxglove onto the floor in his shock. An ambulance had come and bustling crowds of strangers had filled the house briefly as they collected his sainted mother and rushed her off to a private room at Dixon Memorial.

  If they had climbed to the fourth floor, they would’ve found him. If they had bothered to look, they would’ve unlocked Kingston’s door and discovered his unconscious body. Neatly tucked into a bed, he had barely left in five years his body had been full of the same filthy tubes that had plumbed his father’s dying body decades earlier. The curiously absent Entler heir, skirting the edge of death with his bedsore ridden body pumped with poison.

  That little trip to the hospital was the worst thing that could’ve happened to her.

  His fingers were still numb when she got home but he had made them work. He begged them to hold onto the collar of his mother’s cardigan tight enough to bring her close. He willed them to gain purchase on the ridiculous flossy scarves she always tied around her neck. He commanded them to grip her throat, the saggy skin reverberating with her screams as he squeezed every last drop of her wasted life from her.

  He worked a fuck of a lot harder than these spoiled bitches did to get out of the digitalis haze and do something, he could tell you.

  When the plump teenager’s head hit the bumper, it made enough of a thunk to pull whatever remained of her mother out of unconsciousness.

  Sprawled on the loading dock concrete, Agatha Stone raised her head. In the unflattering industrial light, Kingston could clearly make out her heavy-handed highlights. She looked like a skunk, for Christ’s sake.

  Her face, without her consciousness to hold it up, looked slack and ugly.

  “Jennifer,” she gargled. Kingston marveled at motherhood. Really? Could the sound of her own child’s head thunking against aluminum awaken her protective instinct enough to pull her out of such a powerful haze?

  “Oh, she’s fine,” he hissed, impatiently. He dragged Jennifer’s body to the flatbed cart that waited for the two of them.

  When Entler department store had transitioned to ‘do-it-yourself’ service in the nineties, his father had had to invest in different shopping carts to allow for the ungainly packaging that ensued. He had obsessed over it at the time, saying that it took the elegance from the Entler name. He had even blamed his wife for continually trying to interfere with his business, railing against her constant pressure to cut costs at every turn.

  Now, he looked at the broad, low carts and felt relief. Thank god his mother had been so cheap. There was no way he could’ve carried his new companions all the way through the store without help. He simply didn’t have the strength. His dieting regime was really taking it out of him.

  In the damp of the loading dock, he hooked his arms under the younger girls’ fleshy pits. With a few grunts, he pulled her forward, flopping her hideously under maintained body on to the cart’s rails. She made a strange wheezing sound when dropped her, the force of her fat against the steel pushing the breath from her unconscious body.

  Her mother would be that much easier to move. After he’d killed the husband, dragging Agatha’s tiny little body through the house had been effortless. It was if her bones were filled with air. Unlike her awkward mound of a child, Kingston practically bounced her like a balloon down the stairs and into his van.

  “Nicely done ladies,” Kingston announced after he’d stacked Agatha’s mumbling form onto her daughter. He watched as Agatha coughed out a lump of thick foam from her throat. Her head drooped down as the poison dragged her back into unconsciousness. “Ready to continue on, I suppose?”

  The loading dock of the Entler department store hadn’t been used in years. It was rusted wherever there was metal and crumbling where there was stone. Teenagers and disgruntled ex-employees, too drunk or incompetent to make real change had marked the once flawless brickwork on the back of the building with obscenities and gang tags.

  Pushing the cart of limp female limbs up the ramp and into the yawning mouth of the receiving dock, Kingston felt the quiet weight of being the only living thing in that area for years. Dust was piled upon dust. This world had been left to rot.

  Kingston looked down at the two women on his cart as he dutifully pushed them through the tangled back halls and storage rooms. Their limbs were knotted together; indistinguishable folds of flesh and bone woven in and out of each other. Their mouths were both open, deeply sickened by the injections he had administered earlier.

  He smiled to himself. So pretty. The mother particularly. Her arms and legs were ideal. Starved with the kind of rigorous self-control that was tragically underappreciated, they were intertwined gracefully between the heavier, mole dappled limbs of her daughter. She was going to be so much fun.

  Kingston allowed the women’s mess of legs to push through the doors that led into the department store proper. The younger one’s thighs waved with the pressure, the excess fat beneath wobbling under the skin like tsunamis of laziness. He watched the bulbous shiver of Jennifer’s stunned flesh.

  Disgusting pig.

  Rolling the mother and daughter team into the entranceway of the department store, he reveled in the sound of the creaking wheels against the uneven flooring.

  “Oh, my.” He couldn’t help himself. “Do you hear that squeak? The way that one little sound carries all the way up to the rest of the store? I swear.” He took a deep breath, his eyes fluttering behind closed lids. “I swear that back in the day, that noise would’ve been lost. So many people used to come here.” He paused in the center of the foyer, where the two grand staircases rose like the corroded arteries of a broken heart on either side of the massive room. “Back when the Entler name meant something.”

  There was a weak groan from the pile of limbs on the cart before him. His elegant forehead still sticky with sweat he leaned forward trying to decipher who was waking up.

  “That’s the thing about digitalis. Foxglove they call it. Which I think is rather adorable, don’t you? I like to imagine the little fox paws slipping inside of the blossoms.”

  He squinted down, trying to make out the mother’s face where it was practically buried beneath her daughter’s acne ridden body.

  “It knocks you out, muscle paralysis, hallucinations the whole thing, but the time it stays in the system? Not so impressive.”

  He raised his head upward to where the multiple stories of the Entler Department store looked down over identical banisters, floor by immeasurable floor. He watched as a pigeon fluttered across one of the highest spots, its wings causing the rainy light to flicker as it crossed the broken stained-glass dome at the top.

  “That’s why I have to get you sorted out before it fully wears off.”

  Jennifer made a disgraceful grunting noise. Kingston watched her face flicker until a sliver of iris appeared. She was awake. He had misjudged how much she would need to keep her in a placid world of semi-death. Somehow this horse of a girl had managed to drag herself out.

  The noises she made were grotesque and totally uncalled for.

  Kingston took a de
ep breath, watching the saliva drip off the girl’s full lips as she struggled into full consciousness.

  “I guess I misjudged your size,” he sighed. With a heave, he pushed the cart across the empty hall. The cart’s wheels bounced against the large “E.D.” logo embedded in the floor.

  Jennifer’s eyes opened fully. First, they revealed milky whites and then as she struggled against the toxins in her system, her pupils emerged.

  “What the fu….” she began. Her lips worked around the words like they were wooden blocks in her mouth.

  “Right? What the fuck indeed.” Rather than feeling intimidated by the girl’s wakefulness, Kingston was invigorated. He smiled down at her hazy eyes.

  Jennifer moved her thick head to the side. When she turned to the right, Kingston could still make out the vomit dried onto her cheek.

  “Where are we?” she burbled with more than a little difficulty. He could tell she was really giving her all. As if her life depended on it, which it certainly didn’t. “What’s going on?”

  They had arrived at the large bank of elevators that stood beneath the main stairs like attending servants. Kingston was delighted when the large button on the elevator glowed as he touched it. He had worked hard the last few days preparing everything for this evening. Whether it was nights stalking through suburban alleys or days spent fiddling with rat chewed wiring, he had ensured that nothing would go amiss. There was nothing more distressing than a setback. Setbacks were sloppy.

  The elevators had presented a challenge to him, if he was pressed to admit. He’d made a mess of the wiring box in the control room. At some point, he’d even thought he heard one of the elevators in the industrial back portion of the building come to life. He’d managed to make it work though, however loudly his mother’s voice had screamed in his head. He left the wiring looking more like a multicolored steel wool pad than anything else, but damn it, it had worked.

  The elevator doors opened, dividing the Entler family crest as it did so. Kingston could practically hear the rust crack. He pushed the lump of drugged flesh on his cart into the elevator.

  The doors closed with a whine and thunk.

  “Forty-second floor, domestic necessities and living essentials.” Jennifer watched his teeth glow like phosphorescence in the low light of the elevator. Despite the nauseated, heavy weight behind her face, she struggled upward. She found a cool space on the bars that wasn’t occupied by her mother’s body and hoisted herself up. There was no anger in her captor’s eyes. Rather, he cocked his head to the side and examined her like he might an unusual comestible, deciding whether to devour or discard.

  “Where?” It was the only thing she could think of. Her mind had been reduced to nothing but interrogative pronouns, her thought process so dulled behind whatever the smiling skeleton had given her. “Where?”

  “Entler Department Store,” he said. His voice, emerging from the reed thin hollow of his throat was deceptively calm. “Dixon’s finest. Foundation of my family’s millions and purveyors of the best quality American made products and European specialties.” He removed a stubby key from his pocket and turned to the elaborate control panel beside the closed doors. He inserted the key and with a bit of effort, twisted it to the side. He punched the forty-second-floor button and smiled again, obviously pleased with himself.

  They lurched upward, the sound of chains and ropes groaning as they moved.

  Kingston looked around the small space proudly. The walls were mirrored and like the rest of the store, it was festooned with art deco touches, even the elevator buttons were elaborately designed. Kingston watched as Jennifer’s fleshy face gaped around at the reflections of herself on all sides. He had seen cats waking up from sedation who had more sense than this girl.

  “I really should’ve upped your dose, I guess. I mean, look at the size of you.” He chuckled to himself. “Your mom woke up for a bit but by the looks of her now, I’m guessing she will be out for a while. But you? I probably should’ve doubled the dose at least.”

  Jennifer looked down at where the lower half of her body was still entangled with her mother. Kingston could see the numbness behind her eyes from the digitalis injection wearing off by the second. He watched her expression as she was finally able to distinguish her mother’s face from among the mass of their bodies, holding his breath as he waited for her delicious panic to set in.

  “What did you do?” Jennifer asked. Her voice was muddy, her mind still not fully able to control her body. He could see the dry pink of her tongue flopping around as she attempted to yell at him. She looked up at him, anger and fear making her uglier than ever. “You fucker! What did you do to my mother?!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Kingston failed at suppressing a chuckle. “That was too much. It takes a while for the stuff to wear off. Seriously, I know you were trying to sound tough, and I think I heard the word ‘fuck’ in there, but beyond that, total gibberish.”

  Jennifer sobbed. She tried to kick her legs out from where her mother lay on top of her but they wouldn’t respond. She could feel the dead weight of them, just like she could feel her tongue lolling in her mouth, but could only barely make them move.

  Her mind seemed to be just as atrophied. She could recall going to sleep, or at least telling her parents that’s what she was doing. The last thing she remembered was the feeling of her nightly binge pouring out of her throat before almost immediately passing out, shaking, ashamed and satisfied.

  But now, she was naked except for the oversized t-shirt she fell asleep in, trapped in an elevator that stank like rotten wood and piss with a man she had never seen before. Some emaciated lunatic was preparing to push them around a condemned building like they were last season’s unsold merchandise.

  And then what?

  Her arms had become too weak to hold her up and she gave up on moving her legs. She fell back onto the cart, the bars banging against her head. Her eyes, aching and burning from whatever poison he’d given her watched him as he grinned down at her.

  The arch of numbers above the door that had been individually glowing as they followed their ascent stopped at forty-two. There was a warped dinging noise that caused the man to grin wider. He was so pleased, his face beaming with excitement and pride like a child conducting a VIP tour of his bedroom.

  “Here we are! Final destination reached.”

  The doors wheezed open slowly, revealing a wide, empty expanse. Kingston turned the key in the opposite direction, the click echoing out into the silence before them.

  “Better lock this down. This is a private party only, you see. No riffraff. I’d hate to have unexpected guests.” He set his jaw and gave the cart a good yank backward, the cables of muscle in his arms tightening as the cart lumbered outward.

  It was cold in the room. Jennifer could feel the chilly air moving in the high ceilings above her, swooping down from holes in the roof that let in light from the night sky. There was the papery whistle of wings as birds in the distance were unsettled by the noise of the elevator shutting behind them. Kingston followed Jennifer’s gaze to the holes in the ceiling. His clicked his tongue and began to pull them into the dark.

  “It’s a tragedy, isn’t it? Letting such a beautiful building as this fall apart? Of course, most beautiful buildings in this city have been left to die, haven’t they? I’d like to blame my family for that, like everyone else but really, you shut down a couple of factories and move them overseas and an entire city goes to pieces? Whose fault is that?” His voice echoed in the room, resounding off what remained of the walls and pillars that they moved through. The cart rumbled unevenly against the water damaged floor as he pulled them deeper and deeper. He had planned this. Jennifer’s stomach was a brick of fear that only became heavier as they passed under the flood lamps that he had set up intermittently through the cavernous room. He turned back to her as they passed by one, leering at her in the spotlight. “I say blame the city that decided to put all its eggs in one basket, don’t you?”

/>   Jennifer was finding it easier to focus by the minute. Her brain, now clear from the fear building inside of her, was whirring as she tried to take in the details of everything they passed. He’d already openly told her where they were, she knew what floor they were on and despite the fact that her legs and arms were still incredibly weak, she could make out the steady rise and fall of her mother’s breathing body beneath her. That was three things in her favor.

  Kingston continued his monologue, his strangely crooning voice sometimes sounding as if it were coming from all around her, sneaking up to her ear from the moist dark they traveled through between the lights.

  “I don’t know if you remember, but this floor really used to be something else. The fantastical 42nd floor. My father wanted it all set up like the ideal family home with bedrooms you could lie down in, living rooms you could relax in and kitchens you could eat in. It was like a wonderland for me when I was little. The perfect American domestic dream. I used to fantasize about sneaking in here overnight and choosing the best bedroom to sleep in, watching television all night, eating snacks in the silence.”