Chapter 3-Hell Week
Rob Carleton was having a bad, bad week. It seemed to the baffled, bewildered musician that everything that could go wrong in his life, had. It had started with those birds, and his neighbor’s unexpected backbone when he’d gone over there to complain - and it had only gone downhill from there. It was as though some malicious deity was out to get him! Saturday evening he’d driven to his latest gig, and for some reason his car had started to smell like old socks. Very old, very nasty socks. He’d been gagging before he’d reached the bar, and had heaved his guts all over the parking lot before going inside. His bandmates had asked him why he was so pale, and Rob had told them that something he’d eaten hadn’t sat well with him.
The stink hadn’t gone away. And even though he’d torn his car apart looking for whatever had been left under the seat or the dash that was causing the stink, he never found anything. He was not only baffled; he was queasy every time he drove his car now. Even rolling down the windows only helped a little – at least it kept him from choking to death, anyway. And that wasn’t the only smell that was driving him nuts.
Sunday his bandmates had come over to hang out in his backyard, to work on their new song. Rob had sat down on his favorite chair, only to spring up holding his nose and cursing when the thick smell of shit had invaded his nostrils. His bandmates had been able to smell it as well, but not as badly as he could. He’d searched all around his chair to see if something had snuck into his yard and had left a large dump under his chair, but like his car there was nothing that he could see. And that smell didn’t go away, either. They were now practicing exclusively in the garage, because he couldn’t stand to be anywhere near his favorite chair.
His neighbor was driving him crazy, too. Not only had the birdfeeder and bath caused havoc in his sleeping schedule, but they’d been joined by at least four large metal wind chimes. Rob wanted to go over there and bawl the guy out, but Thomas would most likely just threaten to call the police on him again. So he’d bought earplugs, and he wore them when he had to sleep during the day, but they didn’t block out all sounds. He could still hear the faint ringing of the wind chimes, and that distant metallic din would wake him from a sound sleep when he least expected it. Why the hell had his uptight neighbor decided to put all of that shit in his yard now? It was as though he were in on the conspiracy that the universe had going to make Rob Carleton as miserable as humanly possible.
Somewhere in the middle of the week, Rob had been horrified to discover that the sheet music for the new song that he’d written had been partially eaten. Searching around, he’d realized to his shock that his house seemed to have been invaded by an army of mice. Where they’d come from he had no idea, they were just suddenly EVERYWHERE. Any food left out was attacked, he kept finding his clothes with ragged edges, and any paper left around got nibbled too. Which meant that he’d lost a lot of music, since he seldom remembered to put it away where the mice couldn’t get at it.
Frantic, about to tear his hair out, Rob had gone to the humane society and had adopted a cat. He'd chosen a really cool-looking beast, a lean tuxedo cat with a glossy black coat and a white bib on her chest. She had four white mittens on her paws, and a pair of green-and-gold eyes that had given him an evil look when he'd first seen her in the cage. He'd paid the fee to adopt her, and had also bought her tags. He'd decided to call her Aretha, after the singer Aretha Franklin. She'd turned out to be a wise purchase, as she took to hunting with a vengeance. The mice were no match for the devil cat, who slaughtered them happily at every turn. The only thing that Rob didn’t like about that was the fact that Aretha had started bringing the bodies into his room, and piling them next to the bed while he slept. He’d stepped on several corpses already, much to his disgust and horror.
Still, the cat was the best part of his hideous week. She wasn’t exactly friendly, but once she’d relaxed and accepted him as her new slave (that’s all that humans were to cats, as any cat owner knows) Aretha had deigned to sleep at the end of his bed near his feet. And he could sometimes stroke her glossy black coat or gently scratch her white bib, although when she decided she was done she’d growl and slash at him. His fingers had bloody scratches on them from her form of ‘love’. Still, damned if the cat hadn’t somehow made him like her, in spite of her devilish behavior. Without Aretha, in fact, his week would have been completely intolerable instead of just really, really horrible.
But the cap on his week came when he heard the doorbell ring on Friday. The rocker was still in bed, and he rolled out of it cursing when he heard the noise. Rob staggered down the hallway, yanking the door open to reveal a pinch-faced person in a suit standing there eyeballing his half-dressed scruffiness jaundicedly. “Mr. Rob Carleton?” the man said, making his very name sound like a curse.
“Yeah, what?” Rob growled, glaring at him.
“I’m with the city. We had a complaint about your residence, so I’m afraid that I have to serve you with these,” he handed Rob some papers.
“What the hell are these?” the rocker demanded, peering blearily at them.
“It is a citation commanding you to clean up your property. Especially your backyard. If you choose not to be in compliance, you can of course pay the fine instead.”
“The fine?!” Rob squalled. “What fine?!”
The man shrugged slightly. “There is a fine of a hundred dollars a day levied if you don’t choose to clean up your residence. You have one week to do so, in which time an inspector will come and look your house and yard over. If you are not in compliance, you will start accumulating the daily fine. I’m afraid that it can add up very quickly – and if you choose not to pay the fine OR bring your property into compliance with city ordinances, it will eventually have to be confiscated to bring you out of arrears. Good day to you, Mr. Carleton.” He marched stiffly away to his car, obviously having had experience with irate homeowners before this. Standing around only meant that they had time to yell at you or berate you for simply doing your job.
The rocker stared numbly down at the papers in his hand. This was it. The final joke on him. He wondered dimly which one of his neighbors had turned him in, but that wasn’t the really important thing right now. He’d work on finding that out later. For now, he had to do something about this as quickly as possible. He only had a week, after all. Rob closed the door and made his way into the shabby, messy living room to call his sister Laurie.
Rob had to wince as she indulged in a lengthy, triumphant ‘I told you so’ speech, but since he really needed her help he endured it stoically. His sister was the most efficient cleaner that he knew - she was so organized that she made Martha Stewart look messy by comparison. She promised to come over tomorrow with her long-suffering husband Jeff in tow, and also to call their other sister Anne to pitch in, as well. He thanked her with only a touch of irony in his voice, since she was helping to pull his ass out of the fire. If he had to put up with her smug self-righteousness, so be it. Free help was hard to come by, after all. If he could get it he couldn’t complain – well much, anyway.
Rob lay back on his couch and rubbed at his aching head. What was with this week?! Why was all the shit raining down on him at once? Well, they did say when it rains it pours. Which was a pretty stupid saying, since he’d seen it drizzle many times before without turning into a thunderstorm. He heard a meow, and looked over to see Aretha jump lightly onto the couch with a mouse body hanging from her jaws. He groaned. His sisters would freak out when they heard that he had a mouse infestation. Rob knew that he’d have to lock the cat in the basement, and not let his sisters go down there for the duration of the time they were here. Aretha wouldn’t like it, but he’d have no choice.
“Sorry, fur ball. Hope you won’t be too mad at me,” he murmured to the feline. She set the mouse down on the couch and blinked her snake-like eyes at him.
Lord, Saturday was a trial. His sisters and their husbands showed up at fucking nine a.m.! Rob answered the door while sucking on a row of bloody scratches that he’d received when he’d dumped Aretha into the basement. She’d yowled furiously at him, and he knew that the cat wouldn’t be forgiving him any time soon. Rob was feeling really disgruntled when he pulled the door open, revealing his siblings and their spouses standing there.
Laurie lectured him, of course, as she was walking in the door, and she visibly turned up her nose at the mess and grime in Rob’s house. He flinched, and tried not to feel like a misbehaving little boy as she swept by him. Anne gave him a sympathetic look and a wink, which made him feel a bit better about the whole thing. Her husband Patrick looked like he was trying not to laugh. But he sobered (outwardly, anyway) when Laurie began to give orders in a brisk tone of voice that a Major General would have envied.
The men were dispatched to clean up and do yard-work in the back, while the women tackled the inside of the house. Patrick cursed and put his hand over his face when he approached Rob’s favorite deck chair. “Shit, what the hell is that smell, Rob?”
“I have no idea,” the grumpy rocker replied sourly. “It just started to smell like that last week. I don’t know why the smell hasn’t faded, or where it’s coming from. Just another in a long line of bad things that’s happened to me this week.”
“Huh,” Patrick replied. “Just this week? That’s weird. What else has happened besides this smell and the citation thing?”
Rob shrugged. “My car started smelling like nasty old socks. Really bad, too. But I couldn’t find anything that could be causing the smell, even though I tore the car apart. Don’t tell the girls, but my house suddenly got invaded by tons of mice. It got so bad that I had to buy a cat. She’s locked in the basement right now, sulking. She’ll probably kill me when I let her out later. And I haven’t been able to sleep very well, because my neighbor over there decided to pick this week to put up a birdfeeder and a bunch of wind chimes, too.”
Patrick glanced over at Thomas’s yard thoughtfully. “Did he? What’s he like, that guy?”
Rob looked at him in surprise. “Kinda weird. Quiet, though. And his house is way nice and better kept than mine is,” he pointed out wryly. "Ricky claims that he glares at me, though. Asked me if I thought the guy was a serial killer.”
“I see,” Patrick said. “Did anything happen the day before all of your troubles started? I mean did something happen that had to do with your neighbor?” his brother-in-law asked, nodding at Thomas’s house.
Rob blinked. “Uh, not that I know of,” he replied. "We had a big blow-out on Friday night, but as far as I know it was a normal party.”
“Hmm,” Patrick said. “Odd. Are you sure that nothing happened? At all?”
Rob started to shrug, but just then his eyes came to light on the rosebushes that hugged the fence separating him and Thomas’ houses. His jaw dangled as he gaped at the denuded bushes. “Oh, fuck,” he breathed.
“What?” Patrick was giving him a keen look now.
“Those bushes. They used to have roses on them! That guy is always out here working on them – although come to think of it, I haven’t seen him out here all week. I can see why now. They’re all gone, man! Jesus! I wonder what happened?”
“I’d say your party probably did,” his brother-in-law remarked shrewdly. “Did any of your guests have roses on them before they left? Can you remember?”
“Shit, yeah,” Rob said in horror. “The girls were all wearing them in their hair. The guys must have…Christ, that poor guy. I didn’t even know,” he added in remorse. “I gotta go apologize to him, offer to buy him some more bushes or something.”
“That’s a really nice thought, Rob,” Patrick replied dryly. “But you might not be feeling so remorseful when you realize just why all of these things have been happening to you this past week.”
The musician gave him a baffled look. “What do you mean?” he demanded.
Patrick knelt down next to the deck chair and pointed to a print in the soil next to it. “If I’m not mistaken, these are some kind of sandal prints. Do you or your bandmates ever wear sandals?” he asked Rob.
“Are you kidding?!” the rocker said incredulously.
Patrick sighed. “I thought so. I’ll bet that your neighbor does, though. It hasn’t rained at all this week, so this print could have been here since Saturday. The day the chair started to stink. And the smell,” he sniffed cautiously, “Seems like fertilizer to me. A guy who works with plants all the time would have plenty of it lying around.”
Rob stared at him. “What are you saying, Patrick?”
His brother-in-law rose to his feet. “I’m saying that if I go to the driveway and thoroughly look your car over, I’ll bet I’ll find something that shouldn’t be there. Not inside of it, but maybe under it. The bumpers or the engine block. I’m betting the engine block, since the smell has stayed strong. Whatever it is is probably cooked to the underside of your car by now. And what color were those mice? You say your cat has killed a lot of them?"
Rob was completely lost now. “Color? Hell, I don’t know. Black-and-white, tan, brown. Regular colors for mice.”
“Not for wild mice,” Patrick replied promptly. “Wild mice are almost uniformly gray or a mid-brown color. They don’t come in black-and-white in the wild, since predators could spot them easily and would kill them before they could breed new generations of black-and-white mice. Same for any light color rodents. So what you have an infestation of, Rob, is domestic mice.”
“Domestic…you mean like pets?” the bewildered musician said.
“Not exactly. They were probably the kind bred to feed boa constrictors and other reptiles. You can buy them cheap in any pet shop. Somebody bought a few dozen and put them in your house somehow.”
Rob gaped at him. “But who would do that? And why?”
“My money is on your next door neighbor for all of it, including turning you in to the city. It’s retaliation for his roses being demolished. He’s getting his own back.”
The musician was stunned. His neighbor had…this whole horrible week was Thomas’ FAULT?! Anger boiled up in him as he lost his temper spectacularly. Without another word to either Patrick or Jeff, Rob turned and stormed away. His neighbor was going to wish that he’d never fucked with Rob Carleton.
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Rob Carleton was having a bad, bad week. It seemed to the baffled, bewildered musician that everything that could go wrong in his life, had. It had started with those birds, and his neighbor’s unexpected backbone when he’d gone over there to complain - and it had only gone downhill from there. It was as though some malicious deity was out to get him! Saturday evening he’d driven to his latest gig, and for some reason his car had started to smell like old socks. Very old, very nasty socks. He’d been gagging before he’d reached the bar, and had heaved his guts all over the parking lot before going inside. His bandmates had asked him why he was so pale, and Rob had told them that something he’d eaten hadn’t sat well with him.
The stink hadn’t gone away. And even though he’d torn his car apart looking for whatever had been left under the seat or the dash that was causing the stink, he never found anything. He was not only baffled; he was queasy every time he drove his car now. Even rolling down the windows only helped a little – at least it kept him from choking to death, anyway. And that wasn’t the only smell that was driving him nuts.
Sunday his bandmates had come over to hang out in his backyard, to work on their new song. Rob had sat down on his favorite chair, only to spring up holding his nose and cursing when the thick smell of shit had invaded his nostrils. His bandmates had been able to smell it as well, but not as badly as he could. He’d searched all around his chair to see if something had snuck into his yard and had left a large dump under his chair, but like his car there was nothing that he could see. And that smell didn’t go away, either. They were now practicing exclusively in the garage, because he couldn’t stand to be anywhere near his favorite chair.
His neighbor was driving him crazy, too. Not only had the birdfeeder and bath caused havoc in his sleeping schedule, but they’d been joined by at least four large metal wind chimes. Rob wanted to go over there and bawl the guy out, but Thomas would most likely just threaten to call the police on him again. So he’d bought earplugs, and he wore them when he had to sleep during the day, but they didn’t block out all sounds. He could still hear the faint ringing of the wind chimes, and that distant metallic din would wake him from a sound sleep when he least expected it. Why the hell had his uptight neighbor decided to put all of that shit in his yard now? It was as though he were in on the conspiracy that the universe had going to make Rob Carleton as miserable as humanly possible.
Somewhere in the middle of the week, Rob had been horrified to discover that the sheet music for the new song that he’d written had been partially eaten. Searching around, he’d realized to his shock that his house seemed to have been invaded by an army of mice. Where they’d come from he had no idea, they were just suddenly EVERYWHERE. Any food left out was attacked, he kept finding his clothes with ragged edges, and any paper left around got nibbled too. Which meant that he’d lost a lot of music, since he seldom remembered to put it away where the mice couldn’t get at it.
Frantic, about to tear his hair out, Rob had gone to the humane society and had adopted a cat. He'd chosen a really cool-looking beast, a lean tuxedo cat with a glossy black coat and a white bib on her chest. She had four white mittens on her paws, and a pair of green-and-gold eyes that had given him an evil look when he'd first seen her in the cage. He'd paid the fee to adopt her, and had also bought her tags. He'd decided to call her Aretha, after the singer Aretha Franklin. She'd turned out to be a wise purchase, as she took to hunting with a vengeance. The mice were no match for the devil cat, who slaughtered them happily at every turn. The only thing that Rob didn’t like about that was the fact that Aretha had started bringing the bodies into his room, and piling them next to the bed while he slept. He’d stepped on several corpses already, much to his disgust and horror.
Still, the cat was the best part of his hideous week. She wasn’t exactly friendly, but once she’d relaxed and accepted him as her new slave (that’s all that humans were to cats, as any cat owner knows) Aretha had deigned to sleep at the end of his bed near his feet. And he could sometimes stroke her glossy black coat or gently scratch her white bib, although when she decided she was done she’d growl and slash at him. His fingers had bloody scratches on them from her form of ‘love’. Still, damned if the cat hadn’t somehow made him like her, in spite of her devilish behavior. Without Aretha, in fact, his week would have been completely intolerable instead of just really, really horrible.
But the cap on his week came when he heard the doorbell ring on Friday. The rocker was still in bed, and he rolled out of it cursing when he heard the noise. Rob staggered down the hallway, yanking the door open to reveal a pinch-faced person in a suit standing there eyeballing his half-dressed scruffiness jaundicedly. “Mr. Rob Carleton?” the man said, making his very name sound like a curse.
“Yeah, what?” Rob growled, glaring at him.
“I’m with the city. We had a complaint about your residence, so I’m afraid that I have to serve you with these,” he handed Rob some papers.
“What the hell are these?” the rocker demanded, peering blearily at them.
“It is a citation commanding you to clean up your property. Especially your backyard. If you choose not to be in compliance, you can of course pay the fine instead.”
“The fine?!” Rob squalled. “What fine?!”
The man shrugged slightly. “There is a fine of a hundred dollars a day levied if you don’t choose to clean up your residence. You have one week to do so, in which time an inspector will come and look your house and yard over. If you are not in compliance, you will start accumulating the daily fine. I’m afraid that it can add up very quickly – and if you choose not to pay the fine OR bring your property into compliance with city ordinances, it will eventually have to be confiscated to bring you out of arrears. Good day to you, Mr. Carleton.” He marched stiffly away to his car, obviously having had experience with irate homeowners before this. Standing around only meant that they had time to yell at you or berate you for simply doing your job.
The rocker stared numbly down at the papers in his hand. This was it. The final joke on him. He wondered dimly which one of his neighbors had turned him in, but that wasn’t the really important thing right now. He’d work on finding that out later. For now, he had to do something about this as quickly as possible. He only had a week, after all. Rob closed the door and made his way into the shabby, messy living room to call his sister Laurie.
Rob had to wince as she indulged in a lengthy, triumphant ‘I told you so’ speech, but since he really needed her help he endured it stoically. His sister was the most efficient cleaner that he knew - she was so organized that she made Martha Stewart look messy by comparison. She promised to come over tomorrow with her long-suffering husband Jeff in tow, and also to call their other sister Anne to pitch in, as well. He thanked her with only a touch of irony in his voice, since she was helping to pull his ass out of the fire. If he had to put up with her smug self-righteousness, so be it. Free help was hard to come by, after all. If he could get it he couldn’t complain – well much, anyway.
Rob lay back on his couch and rubbed at his aching head. What was with this week?! Why was all the shit raining down on him at once? Well, they did say when it rains it pours. Which was a pretty stupid saying, since he’d seen it drizzle many times before without turning into a thunderstorm. He heard a meow, and looked over to see Aretha jump lightly onto the couch with a mouse body hanging from her jaws. He groaned. His sisters would freak out when they heard that he had a mouse infestation. Rob knew that he’d have to lock the cat in the basement, and not let his sisters go down there for the duration of the time they were here. Aretha wouldn’t like it, but he’d have no choice.
“Sorry, fur ball. Hope you won’t be too mad at me,” he murmured to the feline. She set the mouse down on the couch and blinked her snake-like eyes at him.
Lord, Saturday was a trial. His sisters and their husbands showed up at fucking nine a.m.! Rob answered the door while sucking on a row of bloody scratches that he’d received when he’d dumped Aretha into the basement. She’d yowled furiously at him, and he knew that the cat wouldn’t be forgiving him any time soon. Rob was feeling really disgruntled when he pulled the door open, revealing his siblings and their spouses standing there.
Laurie lectured him, of course, as she was walking in the door, and she visibly turned up her nose at the mess and grime in Rob’s house. He flinched, and tried not to feel like a misbehaving little boy as she swept by him. Anne gave him a sympathetic look and a wink, which made him feel a bit better about the whole thing. Her husband Patrick looked like he was trying not to laugh. But he sobered (outwardly, anyway) when Laurie began to give orders in a brisk tone of voice that a Major General would have envied.
The men were dispatched to clean up and do yard-work in the back, while the women tackled the inside of the house. Patrick cursed and put his hand over his face when he approached Rob’s favorite deck chair. “Shit, what the hell is that smell, Rob?”
“I have no idea,” the grumpy rocker replied sourly. “It just started to smell like that last week. I don’t know why the smell hasn’t faded, or where it’s coming from. Just another in a long line of bad things that’s happened to me this week.”
“Huh,” Patrick replied. “Just this week? That’s weird. What else has happened besides this smell and the citation thing?”
Rob shrugged. “My car started smelling like nasty old socks. Really bad, too. But I couldn’t find anything that could be causing the smell, even though I tore the car apart. Don’t tell the girls, but my house suddenly got invaded by tons of mice. It got so bad that I had to buy a cat. She’s locked in the basement right now, sulking. She’ll probably kill me when I let her out later. And I haven’t been able to sleep very well, because my neighbor over there decided to pick this week to put up a birdfeeder and a bunch of wind chimes, too.”
Patrick glanced over at Thomas’s yard thoughtfully. “Did he? What’s he like, that guy?”
Rob looked at him in surprise. “Kinda weird. Quiet, though. And his house is way nice and better kept than mine is,” he pointed out wryly. "Ricky claims that he glares at me, though. Asked me if I thought the guy was a serial killer.”
“I see,” Patrick said. “Did anything happen the day before all of your troubles started? I mean did something happen that had to do with your neighbor?” his brother-in-law asked, nodding at Thomas’s house.
Rob blinked. “Uh, not that I know of,” he replied. "We had a big blow-out on Friday night, but as far as I know it was a normal party.”
“Hmm,” Patrick said. “Odd. Are you sure that nothing happened? At all?”
Rob started to shrug, but just then his eyes came to light on the rosebushes that hugged the fence separating him and Thomas’ houses. His jaw dangled as he gaped at the denuded bushes. “Oh, fuck,” he breathed.
“What?” Patrick was giving him a keen look now.
“Those bushes. They used to have roses on them! That guy is always out here working on them – although come to think of it, I haven’t seen him out here all week. I can see why now. They’re all gone, man! Jesus! I wonder what happened?”
“I’d say your party probably did,” his brother-in-law remarked shrewdly. “Did any of your guests have roses on them before they left? Can you remember?”
“Shit, yeah,” Rob said in horror. “The girls were all wearing them in their hair. The guys must have…Christ, that poor guy. I didn’t even know,” he added in remorse. “I gotta go apologize to him, offer to buy him some more bushes or something.”
“That’s a really nice thought, Rob,” Patrick replied dryly. “But you might not be feeling so remorseful when you realize just why all of these things have been happening to you this past week.”
The musician gave him a baffled look. “What do you mean?” he demanded.
Patrick knelt down next to the deck chair and pointed to a print in the soil next to it. “If I’m not mistaken, these are some kind of sandal prints. Do you or your bandmates ever wear sandals?” he asked Rob.
“Are you kidding?!” the rocker said incredulously.
Patrick sighed. “I thought so. I’ll bet that your neighbor does, though. It hasn’t rained at all this week, so this print could have been here since Saturday. The day the chair started to stink. And the smell,” he sniffed cautiously, “Seems like fertilizer to me. A guy who works with plants all the time would have plenty of it lying around.”
Rob stared at him. “What are you saying, Patrick?”
His brother-in-law rose to his feet. “I’m saying that if I go to the driveway and thoroughly look your car over, I’ll bet I’ll find something that shouldn’t be there. Not inside of it, but maybe under it. The bumpers or the engine block. I’m betting the engine block, since the smell has stayed strong. Whatever it is is probably cooked to the underside of your car by now. And what color were those mice? You say your cat has killed a lot of them?"
Rob was completely lost now. “Color? Hell, I don’t know. Black-and-white, tan, brown. Regular colors for mice.”
“Not for wild mice,” Patrick replied promptly. “Wild mice are almost uniformly gray or a mid-brown color. They don’t come in black-and-white in the wild, since predators could spot them easily and would kill them before they could breed new generations of black-and-white mice. Same for any light color rodents. So what you have an infestation of, Rob, is domestic mice.”
“Domestic…you mean like pets?” the bewildered musician said.
“Not exactly. They were probably the kind bred to feed boa constrictors and other reptiles. You can buy them cheap in any pet shop. Somebody bought a few dozen and put them in your house somehow.”
Rob gaped at him. “But who would do that? And why?”
“My money is on your next door neighbor for all of it, including turning you in to the city. It’s retaliation for his roses being demolished. He’s getting his own back.”
The musician was stunned. His neighbor had…this whole horrible week was Thomas’ FAULT?! Anger boiled up in him as he lost his temper spectacularly. Without another word to either Patrick or Jeff, Rob turned and stormed away. His neighbor was going to wish that he’d never fucked with Rob Carleton.
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