Pleasantries
Gabby realized she had left her keys in the car the instant the door clicked shut.
It had been a long day at work and an even longer drive home. The gray sky melted into the gray earth in every direction, rain sweeping over the ground with a motion so consistent it didn't register as motion anymore. It simply was- a cold, flat plain that stretched above and beneath her with equal dreariness. She wanted more than anything to get inside her shabby rented home, heat up a frozen dinner, and make reality disappear for a while as she watched someone renovate a mansion on TV.
And now she couldn't do that because her keys were locked inside her car. Fantastic.
She ran a hand distractedly through her dark curled hair while the other dug the phone from her jeans pocket. No other car in the driveway, so Sharon wasn't home. The only real option was to call a locksmith and take shelter from the weather on the stoop. She strode swiftly towards the front door, shoulders shaking from the chill and her thumb poised over the call button.
“Nice weather we're having, isn’t it?”
Gabby turned with a start toward the chain link fence. Her neighbor Miss Johnson stood there, her short graying hair dripping into her smiling face.
This was something of a ritual between Gabby and Miss Johnson. Gabby would come home from work, her neighbor would say the weather was nice, and Gabby would force a laugh and say something like “Yeah” or “If you like the heat” before making her way inside. It was a normal thing, and even now she was tempted to pass it off as a tongue in cheek joke, but… but something wasn’t right about the situation. She wasn’t sure what.
“I mean, it’d be a lot nicer if I could get out of it.” It came out with more curtness than Gabby had intended. Instead of offering a concerned “why not”, Miss Johnson began to laugh and raised a hand to wave off Gabby on her trip to the front door- then paused as she processed what her neighbor had said.
“You. Can’t get out of it. Why?”
Gabby frowned slightly. She realized what had been bothering her. Miss Johnson was wearing the same cardigan and floppy hat she always wore when working in her flower beds. No galoshes adorned her feet, no raincoat covered her shoulders, and absolutely no intent to get out of this wet mess registered on her face. Just a vague confusion that their usual conversation hadn’t gone the way it was supposed to.
“I mean,” Gabby said slowly, trying not to lose her patience. “I locked my keys in my car, Miss Johnson. I can’t get inside until a locksmith comes to let me in.”
“You don’t like being in the rain?”
Miss Johnson still looked nonplussed. Gabby shook her head and bustled toward the little bit of roof that jutted out over her front door. This was weird, and she was too tired to deal with weird today. Her thumb hit the call button, she gave the locksmith her address (there went another forty dollars she couldn’t afford to lose), and Gabby slumped against the door to wait for his truck to arrive in fifteen to twenty minutes.
Her neighbor stood by the fence through all of this without moving, her gaze still fixed in Gabby’s direction. It was impossible to see Miss Johnson’s face clearly through the rain, but Gabby could still feel the awkward tension from the dropped conversation lingering, the woman’s inexplicable confusion at this change in circumstance gnawing at the back of her mind.
Most likely Miss Johnson just didn’t get out enough. Gabby shifted uncomfortably and looked down at her phone.
Miss Johnson cleared her throat. “You could. Get out of the rain. You could come inside. To my house.” The halting cadence did nothing to assuage the mounting unease Gabby felt, but her refusal died on her lips as the heavy sound of the rain became mixed with the plinking of small hailstones hitting her car.
“I mean. Okay, sure. It’s only going to be a few minutes, but if you’re offering...”
This was probably stupid of her. Gabby had seen enough slasher movies to imagine all the ways this could go horribly wrong. At the same time, well, even if they’d never really interacted outside of small talk, something inside of her balked at the idea of considering Miss Johnson a threat just because of an awkward conversation. She was reclusive, probably worked from home, and enjoyed tending to her flowerbeds. Nothing there to be scared of, really.
Miss Johnson nodded and motioned to her front gate. “It’s unlocked. Help yourself. I can, um. Make some… tea. Do you like tea?”
“Tea’s fine.” Gabby circled the fence to let herself in and strode briskly across Miss Johnson’s waterlogged lawn. The grass was brown- of course it was, this was summer in Oklahoma- but the flowerbeds held a good amount of greenery. She glanced down at their contents when she reached the threshold.
Clumps of spiky dandelion leaves dotted the earth in uniform rows, their small yellow flowers peeping up like tiny suns. Gabby paused despite herself.
“You grow dandelions?”
Miss Johnson laughed uncomfortably. “Yes. They’re very easy to keep alive. And they are… yellow. Yellow’s nice.”
Gabby had no reply for this extraordinary statement. She watched several long gray-brown earthworms squirm through puddles on either side of the cultivated weeds, trying to think of any other person she’d heard of that grew dandelions on purpose. Hadn’t she heard they were edible? If so someone might grow them to eat… but then Miss Johnson hadn’t said anything about making dandelion salads. Just that they were easy, and that she liked the color of their flowers.
A peal of thunder reminded Gabby that she wanted to get out of the rain, and with a quick shake of her head she strode into the house. She’d already established that Miss Johnson was weird, and this development didn’t change anything. The dandelions, too, were harmless.
Gabby breathed a sigh of relief once she was inside. The faded wallpaper of the foyer was homey for its dinginess. A piece of driftwood and a few seashells sat on a small table beneath a wall-mounted mirror to her left. To the right, the foyer opened into a bright kitchen. Yellow-checked curtains hung over the windows, covering up the view of the rainy garden.
“You can sit at the table. I will make tea for us.”
Gabby glanced over her shoulder to see the sopping Miss Johnson standing in the doorway, and she quickly moved herself to the table in the next room.
Her neighbor shuffled toward the pantry, leaving a trail of dirty water on the linoleum. “I have… black tea. I think it’s all black tea.”
“Cool.” Gabby seated herself at the table while she glanced around the room. It looked normal enough, which was comforting, and very clean aside from the mud both of them had tracked inside. A small cup of dandelions stood as a centerpiece on the table. The only thing out of place was the smell. Gabby’s nose wrinkled.
“Have you been working on your sink or something?”
“Hmm?” Miss Johnson turned around, two teabags in hand. Her grey eyes were wide with bemusement. “No, I haven’t been working on the sink. Why do you ask?”
“It kind of smells like sealant in here. If you’re working with silicone you’ll want to make sure you’re venting out the room properly, you know?”
Miss Johnson blinked, then slowly, cautiously smiled. “Oh. Yes. That is something we have to worry about, isn’t it? Fumes.” She moved stiffly toward the stove, wet clothes hanging shapelessly off her frame. “I will be more careful from now on.”
Gabby shifted uneasily in her chair at the way her neighbor said ‘we’. The woman’s pudgy hands fumbled with the kettle; something about the movement drew Gabby’s eye. Without knowing why, the memory of the worms curling and twisting in the flowerbed came to the forefront of her mind.
“Y...yeah. What are you doing with silicone anyways?”
“Oh. The… um. Hobbies. I have hobbies.” Miss Johnson licked her lips and glanced nervously- fearfully?- to Gabby. “It’s for. Binding bits of models together. That sort of thing. It’s. Soothing.”
Gabby sat back in her chair, still watching Miss Johnson’s hands as the hairs on the back of her neck rose. “Okay.”
Apparently making small talk was just stressing out Miss Johnson. Gabby didn’t need to know more about her life. She didn’t need to know why this situation felt like a dream brought about by eating burgers and fries an hour before bed, and she definitely wasn’t going to pry into whatever secrets Miss Johnson thought she had to hide that involved silicone.
It was unfortunate, she reflected afterward, that Miss Johnson hadn’t been more careful with the burners.
The injury wasn’t much. Miss Johnson’s hand slipped after putting the kettle down, and the tip of her little finger came in contact with the heated burner. Immediately the sealant smell was cut through by something like burning rubber, and the flesh sagged downward as though melting. No, Gabby realized with dawning horror. It WAS melting.
Miss Johnson pulled back with a grating cry a moment too late. Gabby started to look away, but that didn’t prevent her seeing something gray as the sky outside pull up through the newly formed hole in the skin, or the rippling movement of her neighbor’s hand as though it were a glove containing eels of varying sizes.
Gabby rose from her seat and strode briskly into the foyer, her eyes fixed ahead of her as cold sweat beaded on her forehead. She could wait outside for the locksmith. Whatever this was, she didn’t want to be a part of it.
A sound halfway between a hiss and a sob came from the kitchen. But Gabby was almost out. Her hand was on the doorknob.
The doorbell rang.
Miss Johnson’s sounds of distress cut off immediately. Gabby felt her own breath catch in her chest. In her periphery, she saw her neighbor’s face in the foyer’s mirror.
Miss Johnson may not have really been human, but the terror in her expression was unmistakable.
Gabby set her jaw and wrenched the door open.
A small ferrety man with light brown hair stood in front of her. His brows rose when he saw her face, but a smile came easily to his own.
“Some weather we’re having, huh?”
Gabby frowned as she took in the yard. A dark car was parked outside Miss Johnson’s gate. It looked like someone was still sitting inside. The rain had begun to let up, and the gray of the sky was replaced with that odd greenish hue that sometimes accompanied bad weather.
“Can I help you?” Gabby asked, not bothering to feign politeness. She could see Miss Johnson's reflection shrinking back into the kitchen, her damaged hand over her mouth.
“You want to skip the pleasantries, huh? That’s fine, never had much patience for them myself.” He pulled a card from his blazer pocket with a flourish and held it out. “I’m Jeremy Thane of Thane’s Car Emporium. You probably haven’t heard of it as we’re based out of Texas, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyways, I was told I could find a Danielle Johnson at this address?”
Gabby glanced down at the card, then at the man’s face. He was still smiling broadly. There was no doubt in Gabby’s mind that he actually did run a car dealership, but Miss Johnson’s terrified expression was still burned into her brain.
“Why are you looking for her?”
Jeremy Thane blinked quizzically. His smile never lessened. “Can I ask who I’m speaking with first? Miss Johnson is a client of mine, and I really shouldn’t be sharing information with someone who isn’t intimately involved.”
“Gabriella Aguilar. This is my house.” The lie came easily, and it wasn't a stretch to sound grumpy about the conversation. “As you can tell, I don’t have a car.”
Thane laughed easily. It struck Gabby how natural it sounded compared with the stilted conversation of her neighbor. “My sources informed me that this residence was owned by a Miss Johnson, not a Miss Aguilar. And I have EVERY reason to trust my sources.”
“So? They were wrong this time.” Gabby channeled the frustration from her earlier inconvenience into the words, forcing her dark eyes to stay focused on Thane’s face. “I’m kind of busy, so…”
Thane tilted his head. The lines in his face tightened so his smile moved that much closer toward a rictus. “Okay. Do you know where Danielle Johnson might be? This is somewhat urgent, and I’m sure she’d be very upset to know that I tried to get in contact with her but couldn’t.”
Gabby rolled her eyes. Behind Thane, the figure in the car stirred. “Yeah, I don’t. Maybe she owned the house before me at some point, but I can’t help you. Sorry.”
He opened his mouth to ask another question, but the car’s window rolled down.
“Thane. If she’s not here, we need to move.”
The salesman flinched at this. Gabby got a glimpse of a thin inscrutable face framed with dark hair..
“Well, uh. Thank you Miss Aguilar.” Thane tugged at his collar as he turned to leave. The smile hadn’t once left his face. “If you hear from Miss Johnson, just give me a call.”
“Sure, whatever.” Gabby closed the door before he reached the car and stood there in the quiet, breathing heavily. Her hands had begun to shake.
Miss Johnson wasn’t human. Gabby didn’t know what that meant yet, but no matter how weird she was Gabby had never felt unsafe around her neighbor. Awkward, yes. Uncomfortable, definitely. But these people, Thane and his unnamed accomplice…
Gabby rubbed her face with her hands, trying to think. She had no doubt that Thane was a human being or that he sold cars for a living. She also had no doubt that Danielle Johnson had every reason to be afraid of him.
A soft noise made her look up. Miss Johnson stood in front of her with a face racked with anxiety. One hand was hidden conspicuously inside an oven mit. She shifted in that way that reminded Gabby of worms again.
“You… you did not. Tell them.”
“Sure didn’t.” Gabby felt her own expression soften, and she walked past her neighbor to the yellow curtained kitchen. Miss Johnson cleared her throat again.
“Thane is… bad. I am… Thankful, to you, because. He is. Um.”
Gabby shook her head firmly and sat back down at the table with its cheery cup of dandelions. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Are you sure? You… saw. You saw my hand.”
Gabby shook her head again. The image of the squirming gray didn’t outweigh that look of fear in her neighbor’s face. She wasn’t human, sure. That didn’t mean she wasn’t a person.
“It’s none of my business, Miss Johnson. Now how about that tea?”