Strange Mammals Read Online Free PDF Page B

apartment building; it was night now. Cool air leached past and bled into the humid darkness behind him. He stepped into the foyer and stabbed the up button for the elevator, hitting it on the third try. The doors opened, and he noticed the strange iron key he’d seen Lucas use, turned to the “on” position above the button for the ninth floor. On impulse, he touched the button for 9, an irrational feeling telling him that his wife wasn’t in their apartment. The image of Lucas kissing Diane’s knuckles rose in his mind, along with the man’s confident predatory smile.
    The doors slid open, not onto a hallway, but onto large anteroom. The dim light in the room looked as if it had been filtered through red cellophane, throwing even the most benign objects into a foreboding relief. Or it could have been that Winston’s brain had decided to compress all colors into scarlet duotone. He heard voices coming from somewhere further in the apartment, and followed the sound.
    The penthouse apartment apparently took up the entire top floor of the building. Winston walked through a living room decorated in fine art and expensive furniture, a rec room occupied by a snooker table and a large glass cage occupied by a sleeping ocelot, a home theater with a full-sized projection screen and thirty seats. Every dozen steps, his equilibrium would fail, and he would have to stand in place until the dizziness passed. After winding through room after room, following the vague murmurs of a male and female voice, Winston ended up in the bedroom.
    On the four-poster bed, completely naked, his wife Diane knelt on her hands and knees, taking it from behind from an equally nude Lucas. She’d always deflected the idea of that position when Winston had suggested it, preferring to see his face during sex. To the side of the bed, in a plush leather chair sat the rheumy guy from the U-Haul place, watching. A second leather chair was empty. The only sound in the room was the slap of flesh against flesh; Lucas wasn’t even breathing hard. On Diane’s face was an expression of utter bliss. The room was permeated with the smell of sweet honeysuckle and jasmine and apple blossoms.
    “Ah, Winston,” Lucas said with a relaxed grin. “About time you showed up. I was beginning to wonder. Have a seat. Enjoy the show. Don’t blink, or you might miss it.”
    Winston had the momentary dislocated feeling of hovering above his own body, watching his actions but unaware he was actually doing them. He shuffled over to the empty chair and settled into it, leaning back against the comfortable leather. A black cloud intruded into the corners of his vision, and the top of his skull buzzed, as if the seams that converged there were coming loose. His wife uttered a small cry of passion. Everything went dark, and Winston welcomed the oblivion.
    ~
    Winston woke up from his coma three weeks later. According to the doctor, he was very lucky to be alive. They hadn’t had to operate. When the nurse came in to check his IV and jab him in the ass with a syringe, she mentioned that Diane hadn’t left his side the whole time he was unconscious.
    Later that day, two detectives paid a visit, told him that he’d been found in the penthouse, sprawled out on the floor, his wallet missing, with a can of black spray paint in his hand. Scrawled over and over on every surface of the empty penthouse was the word GRENDEL. Did Winston know anything about that? He had to admit that he didn’t. Did he know what it might mean? Other than remembering the monster he’d read about in Beowulf back in high school, he could offer no opinion. Did they say the penthouse was empty? Yes. Not even furniture? No sir, no furnishings at all. But there was a man living there, Lucas something. They didn’t know anything about that, sir. What about the guy at the U-Haul place? The owner knows no one of that description, sir. Don’t leave the state for a few days, in case we have further