"She's eccentric," he was told. "No family. You should ignore her."
Easy for the landlord to say. How do you ignore someone who won't let you into your own door?
Weston tried to step around her, but the old woman folded her arms and didn't budge. She had light brown skin, and some sort of fabric tied to the top of her head. Weston couldn't help staring at her ears, which had distinctive, gypsy-like gold hoops dangling from them. The ears themselves were huge, probably larger than Weston's hands. Maybe if his ears were that big, he'd complain all the time about noise, too.
Her dog, some sort of tiny toy breed with long fur and a mean disposition, saw Weston and began to yap at him, straining against his leash. It had a large gold tag on his collar that read ROMI.
"Excuse me," Weston said, trying to get by.
The old woman stayed put. So did Romi.
"I said, excuse me."
She pointed a crooked old finger at him.
"Loud Man! You keep noise down!"
"They have these things called earplugs," Weston said. "I think they come in extra large."
She began to scream at him in a high-pitched native tongue that sounded a lot like "BLAAA-LAAAA-LAAAAA-LEEEE-LAAAA-BLAAA!" Romi matched her, yipping right along. Weston took it for about ten seconds, and then pushed past, heading for his apartment. The chorus followed him inside.
Though it was early, Weston yawned, then yawned again. He hung his keys on a hook next to the door, switched the TV on to one setting above MUTE, and sat on the sofa. There was dog hair on the carpet, which made no sense, because Weston had no dog.
But the crazy old lady had a dog.
Could she be getting in my apartment somehow?
Panicked, Weston did a quick tour, looking for anything missing or out of place. He came up empty, but to his shame he realized he was picking up everything smaller than a matchbook and sticking it in his pockets. He took these items and placed them in a junk drawer in the kitchen.
For some reason, this act drained him of his last drop of energy, and the sun had barely even gone down. He sat back down on the couch, switched to the SciFi Channel, and closed his eyes for just a few seconds.
A ringing sound woke Weston up. He was naked on the kitchen floor, the sun streaming in through the windows. Weston automatically smacked his lips, checking to see if he could taste anything odd. Then he got to his knees and reached for the phone on the counter.
"Mr. Smith? This is Dr. Waggoner's office calling. Please hold for the doctor."
Weston scratched his chest, listening to Neil Diamond singing to a chair who apparently didn't hear him.
"Weston? This is Dr. Waggoner. How did you sleep last night?"
"Not well," he said, noting his nude body.
"Remember to keep your appointment with the psychiatrist today. And also, it wouldn't hurt to see a dentist as well. We got the lab report from your stool sample. It contained three molars."
"Teeth?"
"Yes. Your teeth. There was also a shoelace, and a silver cross on a necklace. The lab is sending the cross over to my office later, in case you'd like to pick it up. It will be cleaned first, of course."
"Doctor, I . . ."
Dr. Waggoner hung up before Weston could finish, " . . . don't own a silver cross."
He got to his feet and padded over to the bathroom, opening wide for the mirror. Weston wasn't missing any molars. Each of his teeth was in its proper place.
What the hell is going on?
His abdomen grumbled. Weston sat on the toilet and rubbed his temples, trying to make sense of any of this. How could he have swallowed teeth, or a silver cross? Why did he keep waking up naked? What was going on?
He didn't want to look, but before he flushed he forced himself. And gasped.
At the bottom of the toilet bowl were two distinct, unmistakable objects: a gold hoop earring, and a silver tag that said ROMI.
When he stopped running around in a blind panic (which took the good part of twenty minutes), Weston forced himself to the computer and Googled "eating+disorder+neighbor." This led him to sites about anorexia, which certainly wasn't his problem. Next he tried "cannibal" and got hits for bad Italian horror movies and death metal rock bands. "Sleep+eating+people" produced articles about sleeping pills, and "I ate human beings" led to a YouTube video of some drunk Klan member who kept saying "I hate human beings" and apparently posted the video so wasted he misspelled the title of his own rant.
Various other word combinations produced pages about Hannibal Lector, Alfred Packer, Sawney Bean, and ultimately Hansel and Gretel.
While on the site about fairy tales, Weston clicked from the old witch who wanted to eat children to the big bad wolf who wanted to eat children. This took him to a site about the history of lycanthropy, which featured several old paintings of wolf people running off with screaming babies in their mouths. Soon Weston was looking up "clinical lycanthropy," which was a real psychiatric term that pretty much meant "batshit crazy."
Could I really be crazy? he thought. Do I subconsciously think I'm a werewolf?
A quick click on a lunar calendar confirmed Weston's fears: The only time he'd had blackouts and found weird things in his poop was during the full moon.
Weston sat back, slack-jawed. He wondered if he should call someone. His parents? A doctor? The cops?
He searched his soul for remorse for eating his mean neighbor and her nasty dog, but couldn't find any.
But he must have killed other, nicer people. Right?
Weston slipped on some shorts and attacked the Internet again, looking through back issues of the local newspaper for accounts of murders or disappearances. He found five.
The first was from yesterday. A hand and partial skeleton found near the River Walk, a popular woodsy trail in Naperville. The prints on the hand belonged to Leon Corledo. His death was attributed to the Naperville Ripper.
How could I have missed hearing about that? Weston wondered. Too much work, probably. And the fact that the news depressed him, so he avoided it. Not to mention the fact that every time he turned on his TV, his recently digested neighbor banged.
Weston read on, found that Mr. Corledo was a registered sex offender. No big loss there. Weston followed the links to articles about the Ripper's other known victims. They included:
Waldemar Daminsky, 66, a local businessman with known ties to Polish organized crime.
Tony Rivers, 17, who was decapitated after robbing a liquor store and beating the owner unconscious.
Ginger Fitzgerald, who had recently lost custody of her daughter for locking her in a closet for a week without food or water.