Marredbury Episode 8
Being an HOA President comes with additional responsibilities in Marredbury
Marredbury is a serial anthology, a combination of a larger narrative and a short story collection. If you missed an episodes of Marredbury, check out the table of contents.
For paid subscribers, you can find the audio version here. Upgrade to paid to receive a collection of my short stories in audio verions.
And thank you to everyone for your patience with this episode! With a brief break last month, I am recharged and ready for the last SIX episodes of Marredbury. I can’t believe we’re over halfway done!
Episode 8
President of the HOA
Paul Figueroa woke each morning at five am. He often wished he could sleep in like he used to. If he slept in later, he could stay up later, maybe even read more than a few pages of his Zane Greys. But those days were long behind him, and a full bladder drove him out of bed.
The mask on his face shifted as he sat up. Oxygen seeped through the loosened suction and tank air gushed around his face. With a firm grip on the tank’s handle, he dragged himself and the damn contraption to the bathroom. The need to relieve himself grew more urgent as he started moving. He shouldn’t have had that glass of water so close to bed, but his mouth had been so dry.
The sun rose an hour later. Those who prattled on about sunrises were morons who didn’t have to see it every day. The sun rose in the morning and set at night. It was the same as Paul making himself a cup of coffee each morning and taking a shit thirty minutes later. What was so special about it?
His slippered feet stuck and peeled away from the floor with each step as he carried cream and sugar to the counter. The tea kettle buzzed with heated water. Paul poured the cream. His wrist trembled with the weight and it splashed on the counter. He wiped it with his free hand, flinging drops on the filthy floor. The cleaners would be coming tomorrow. He didn’t care, never did really. The only reason he kept a clean house was to keep Lorraine happy, and she’d been gone for almost fifteen years.
He took his steaming mug onto the front porch. Might as well watch the sun rise. It was still better than whatever crap was on TV. The crisp morning air ached in his joints. He stepped onto the porch and settled into the creaking wooden chair. He placed his mug on the matching table and groaned as his body settled against the stiff chair back.
The sky warmed with the first sun rays. They peaked over the roofs of his neighbors across the street, splattering the leaves on the trees. Each tree was manicured to perfection, the streets swept clean, the sidewalk unburdened by overgrown lawns. Paul exhaled slowly, taking in his neighborhood. What would his neighbors do without him harping on them to cut their grass or move their oil leaking cars off the street? What would they do when a phenomenon burst a bush into flames or flooded a basement and the neighbor’s yard?
Paul’s own yard was made up of patches of grass and a half alive shrub by the front steps. All within HOA regulations, of course. He wouldn’t be a hypocrite. The gardeners arrived at the end of the week. He’d talk to them about replanting some grass. Spring was coming and it was supposed to rain. Lorraine always loved a lush yard.
He removed his mask and took his first sip from the mug, the sweetness coating his mouth. The sky had turned a shining blue now, the dark mounds of his neighbor’s plants reformed into clear leaves and branches.
He frowned.
Agatha Cohen’s rugs were still hanging over her porch. They’d been there for a week, and he’d asked her to take them down two days ago. Was this woman trying to cause trouble? He’d send her an official notice from the HOA if he had to, but that would mean that he’d have to go to the office, type it up, and mail it. It would take half of his day. Why couldn’t the woman just take the rugs down?
He took Mondays off of his President of the HOA duties because weekends were busy. Neighbors did their yard work and ran their errands on the weekends. Fines were paid, dues needed submitting, notices sent out. Most of the association worked day jobs and could only go in to help on the weekends and Paul wasn’t about to take on extra work because he was the only retired member. He was president, but that didn’t mean he should cover for everyone else.
And he didn’t ask for anyone to come in extra days to help with his campaign. Flyers printed, door to door walks to drop off vote pamphlets. They would be voting for elected positions in the association on Thursday. Paul had been working his ass off to keep his name as a top contender for his fifth term in office. His whole body ached. He was tired when he woke up and exhausted when he went to bed. He had worked his people to bone over the weekend, but not today. On Monday, he rested. It was going to be a long week, and he didn’t have time to deal with Aggie Cohen’s damn rugs.
His coffee had gone cold. Paul grunted as he stood up. He still needed to shower and get dressed. The rest of the world would be awake in a couple hours and Paul needed to get those rugs taken care of before he went back to the office tomorrow.
He knocked on Aggie’s door a few minutes after eight. It may still be early, but Aggie had a kid, a daughter. Kids get up early, from what Paul recalled of friends’ kids.
His hip throbbed. Paul positioned his oxygen tank closer to his foot, away from the edge of the porch. Frustration made his feet hurt. He heard the faint sound of footsteps from inside.
“Morning.” He stood up straighter. Aggie stood in her open door in sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt. Her hair was tied back in a loose ponytail. The way the small hairs frizzed around her forehead reminded Paul of Lorraine in the mornings, before she had her cup of coffee and woke up enough to fix her hair. “I hope I’m not disturbing you too early.”
“No.” Aggie’s gaze flicked to the rugs hanging on the railing behind Paul. “I’m sorry, I know I said I’d bring the rugs down, but I had to wash them again.”
We can’t have them on your porch. The words perched on his tongue, the lecture, the scolding. Wash them again? Was her kid sick or something?
They appeared to be ordinary enough area rugs. A bit worn in places, the whites not as bright. Two of them, one large rectangle that he imagined went in their sitting or dining room, and a longer rug for a hallway. Both matched in design, flowers mingled with blues and greens.
Aggie appeared like she might cry. She pressed her lips together, dry and cracked. Paul noticed the dark circles under her eyes and the way her fingers trembled. He exhaled slowly, fogging up the mask attached to his face. How had he not seen it before? He should have known.
“How many times have you washed the rugs, Aggie?” He softened his voice and leaned closer to her, hoping she would invite him in.
She shrugged. “I lost count.” Her voice cracked as she fought the onslaught of tears.
“Tell me about it.” Paul took a step toward her. She moved aside, gesturing for him to come in. “Is your coffee hot?”
They sat at a small kitchen table. The fridge hummed behind Paul. Aggie’s knee bounced under the table beside him. He kept a firm grip on his coffee to keep it from jostling and spilling over.
“It started last week. I probably should have called earlier, but Justin’s gone on a business trip and I guess I was just hoping it would just go away. I mean it’s crazy. It can’t be real.”
Except it was. The denial that hummed through Marredbury fascinated Paul. Perhaps acceptance came with age. You’d think after their first paranormal experience, his neighbors would stop talking themselves out of the phenomenons. Of course, there could be a logical explanation. That’s what the scientists down the street were determined to prove.
Paul’s no scientist, what does he know.
He knows that strange things happen in Marredbury, and that ignoring the problem didn’t make it go away. Anyone could figure that out, and those who couldn’t were just dense.
Aggie brushed her palms over her hair, calming the frizz momentarily before they jumped back to attention. She tugged on her shirt, wiped her hands across her legs. When she rested them on the table, Paul caught one and held it. She looked at him with wide eyes and flushed cheeks.
Dense or scared. Lorraine had taught him that. People get scared and need help.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said.
“I sent Cassie to stay with my sister. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I have no idea what to do, but Cassie couldn’t stay here.”
She clung to his wrinkled hand, hers clammy and warm against his dry and cool skin.
She looked to the ceiling and Paul followed her gaze. He hadn’t noticed it before. Above their heads was a large stain, a dark brown that he had grown all too familiar with. Dried blood. So much of it on the kitchen ceiling.
“It’s happening upstairs,” Aggie started. “The floors bleed. They bleed in the Cassie’s room and down the hall. There’s so much blood. Where is it coming from?”
Bleeding floors. That was a new one. Paul sat back and studied the stain over his head.
Aggie continued. “I clean it up. Nothing happens for a day, and then the blood comes back. It soaks the rugs each time.”
Paul stared hard at the stain. It darkened and he blinked quickly to rest his eyes.
Aggie continued. “I don’t know why I put them back a third time. It had been two days. I thought it had just gone away. I must be stupid.”
“Not stupid, scared.” Paul mumbled.
“What?” Aggie leaned closer to him. His mask muffled his words.
The stain continued to darken. It wasn’t just Paul’s old eyes. He should have known better. His eyes were strong as ever. His hips were giving out, his lungs shot to hell, but his eyes were sharp. He’d fallen into the denial trap, just like his neighbors. The stain darkened in the middle, the brown color warming to the deep red of blood. The ceiling appeared to be drooping under some weight, until the center point slipped past the paint and plaster. One single round drop of blood. Paul’s ears weren’t giving out either. He heard the unmistakable sound plunk as the blood landed on the table.
They stared at the small red splatter. Aggie inhaled sharply.
Paul couldn’t be happier. How often had he gone to a neighbor in distress only to be forced to wait for the strange phenomenon to show up? How many middle of the night phone calls woke him up, panicked voices on the other line needing their HOA president to take care of their neighborhood? The activity in Marredbury usually appeared between one and three am. At least this issue gave them the courtesy of waiting for a decent hour.
Paul led the way upstairs. As he stepped into the hallway, the light dimmed. All the doors had been closed on either side, but the blood was seeping between the crevices of the floor boards and flowed freely through the space, unhindered by the rugs. He stepped through the mess, careful not to slip. He gripped the handle of his oxygen tank until his bones ached and scoured the floor for the bloody origins. The trail disappeared under the third door on his right.
“That’s Cassie’s room,” Aggie whispered. She pressed her body against the opposite wall, her heels lifted off the ground, so only her toes were submerged in the red mess on the floor. Shock drained the color from her face and Paul assumed the mess hadn’t been this bad before. The amount of blood now soaking into his loafers would require him to buy new ones, again.
He opened the door. The smell of iron burned, hanging in the air so thick he could taste it. He cranked up the flow of oxygen to his mask, but the thick scent still burned his eyes. The daughter’s name was displayed across one wall, a desk and drawers pressed against it below. The rolling doors of the closet sat open, revealing the disorganized mess of a young child’s possessions, plastic toys, stuffed animals, disarrayed clothes. Below, blood coated every inch of floor space. It leaked into the closet and pooled before the unmade twin sized bed against the window opposite them. Like a geyser, the blood spewed from that point, a kind of whoosh sounding as it pulsed from the floor beneath.
Aggie whimpered and shoved past Paul in a rush into the room. She gathered the stuffed animals and clothes littering the floor into her arms, all of her daughter’s possessions. Objects pressed tight against her chest. She stared wide eyed at the mess. Paul followed her gaze to the bedspread tossed over the side of the bed. The corner of it dipped into the geyser, staining the soft pink fabric a deep red.
Aggie tossed the clothing and stuffed animals onto the bed and yanked at the bedspread. She dropped to her hands and knees and attempted to wipe up the mess. The fabric of the bedspread grew heavy as it soaked up the blood. Aggie grunted as she lifted it. The blood lapped at her knees and splashed across her face. Her arms became drenched up to her elbows.
From the doorway, Paul studied the room. Children’s drawings were hung on the walls above the bed. LED lights had been tacked up around the ceiling. Nothing told him what caused the blood.
The bedspread had absorbed all of the mess it could so Aggie lugged it to her side. She sat on her knees in the middle of the mess, her gaze on Paul pleading for help.
“Go to the start of it.” Paul gestured to the seeping floorboards.
Aggie knelt over the geyser pulsing before her daughter’s bed and smeared the mess with her hands until she exposed the floorboards.
“Can you get under the floorboards?” Paul asked.
She pressed a palm against the crevice and the blood seeped between her fingers, then she grunted and sat up straighter, smearing her bloody hand across her clothes before snatching a lamp of the bedside table beside her.
She yanked the plug out, causing a small spark from the outlet. Burnt wires now mingled with the scent of iron. Paul took a step back, not that it would help if the spark traveled through the rolling mess of the floor. Did electricity travel through blood like it did water?
Aggie slammed the bottom of the lamp against the floor boards. She raised it again and pressed the sharp corner into the blood leaking crevice. Each hit against the floor created a spray of blood. The splatter sprayed across the room and speckled Paul’s trousers and sweater. He let her continue her attack to the floor, curious what waited beneath the floor boards. She gritted her teeth and struck the floor again and again.
“Just stop. Just stop.” The words slipped between her frustration. “Just stop. Just stop.”
Dripping in blood, her blows to the floor weakened. Paul stepped into the room and pressed a hand to her shoulder as she raised the lamp once again. Her chest heaved. Her arms quaked. She peered up at Paul, blood sitting between the hairs of her eyelashes, the whites of her eyes glowing against the contrast of the thick liquid coating of her face. She lowered her arms and let the lamp drop onto the floor. Paul leaned on the handle of his oxygen tank.
“It’s destroyed her room.” Her voice cracked. “Why is this happening?”
Closer to the origins of the mess now, Paul turned his gaze to the chipped and scratched floorboards. Blood continued to seep through the space between the boards, a steady trickle that nestled into the damage Aggie had just caused.
“Can you lift that?” Paul gestured to the tilting board.
Aggie wedged her fingers around the corner of the board and jerked. She pushed and tugged, wiggling the board from its place. As she lifted it, the blood dripped into the dark space beneath. The flow slowed to a trickle. Aggie freed the board from its place and dumped it behind her. It bounced off Paul’s oxygen tank and landed with a smack onto the wet floor.
Aggie reached her hand into the darkness and retrieved a doll, about a foot tall with the sweet face of a little girl. The lips had been scratched at and it’s hair twisted and yanked, leaving a few bald spots that exposed the dotted plastic underneath. Aggie held the doll before her. Her mouth hung open as she took in the destruction. Paul extended his hand, a request for the doll, and Aggie handed it over without a word. Then, she reached into the space again, this time pulling out a diary. Like the doll, it hadn’t been touched by the blood. The cover read Top Secret, the pale pink crumpled and creased with use.
Aggie sat back on her heels and opened the journal. For a while, only the sound of pages turning disrupted the quiet in the room. The trickle of blood stopped, though the scent still remained thick in the air. As Aggie read, Paul shuffled around her and leaned over the bed to open the window. The cool morning breeze gushed past the curtains, washing Paul with fresh air. He inhaled deeply. Aggie sniffed.
He looked down at her. Her bloodied fingers had stained the pages of the journal. Large, round handwriting of a child filled the pages. She flicked through them and stopped at a later entry. Another sniff and she wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her tears cleared a trail down her cheeks.
The blood no longer poured across the floor and Paul understood that after cleaning up a fourth time, it wouldn’t happen again.
Aggie flipped back to the beginning. Paul caught a glimpse of the first page: This diary belongs to: Iris Burgess. He sighed. Thirty years ago. How had he forgotten the Burgesses had lived in this house, right up to the point their kid went missing.
He cleared his throat.
Aggie closed the book and stood up. With the journal between white knuckles, she faced Paul.
“These caused the bleeding, right?” she gestured to the doll with the journal.
“I think that’s a safe assumption.”
She offered him the child’s diary and Paul accepted. He’d have to give this evidence over to police.
Aggie walked him out of the room. She closed the door behind her and continued down the hallway, no longer clinging to the wall, but stepping freely through the blood. As they approached the stairs, she stayed a couple steps in front of Paul, ensuring that the now slick wheels of his oxygen tank didn’t go out from under him. His feet squelched with each step. They each left a trail of the prints down the stairs and to the door.
Paul stopped at the front door. He glanced at the rugs again and then back to Aggie. “What are you going to do?”
“I think I’ve stayed here long enough.” Aggie stepped passed Paul and gathered the rugs off the porch railing. “It’s time we moved on.”
Paul inhaled slowly. He ran his thumb up and down the spine of the journal. He couldn’t blame her, just as he couldn’t blame Lorraine when she had enough of his strange town, but the bitterness crept up in the back of his throat. Leaving was the easy way out and Paul new that he’d be the one that would have to get that mess upstairs cleaned up after Aggie Cohen cleared out.
He gave her one last nod and left. It was a thankless job being president of the HOA, but no one else would do it right. No one else braved bleeding floorboards to ensure that the front porches remained presentable.
Paul checked the road before crossing. His campaign came to mind again. He hadn’t been able to rest on his day off so far. He still had to make a trip to the police station. After, he might as well get some work done before lunch.
Thank you for reading. Stay tuned next month for the next installment. Things are really starting to heat up in Marredbury!
If you are enjoying this series, please share with a friend. Your voice brings new readers.
This was delightfully eerie and intriguing!