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4: DECKER

If Decker had known what adorable noises werewolf puppies made when distressed, he would have gotten one years ago. Joshua huddled by the front door, trying to look all directions at once, making cute little whimpers.

“When was the last time you actually cleaned?” Joshua finally cried.

“When I moved in. 1959.” Maybe grinning wasn’t the right approach. Decker smoothed away a smile with his hand. “It will go fast. I’ll help you at night. And maybe we can talk Elise into helping…”

“Oh, she’ll just burn it all down!”

Decker considered and then nodded. “Yes, she has threatened to do that in the past.”

He tried to see his home with fresh eyes. He’d grown used to the clutter. At first it had been a relief to be alone, safe from accidental discovery, no longer afraid that his “trusted” servants would grow too curious for their own good. (To be fair, the last disaster wasn’t his servant’s fault but the results were the same.) The house, though, had been huge and empty and echoed.

Once he realized how clutter could soften the hollowness of his existence, he abandoned all pretense of cleaning. He left things where they were laid; there was plenty of space. Finding what he needed in the clutter was never a problem; all he needed to do was focus his gift on what he wanted.

Every now and then he’d move a pile that had grown too large, shifting it to one of the upstairs rooms by the armful. It wasn’t until the last year or so that he’d noticed that he was running out of space. It was only in the last month that he realized that the clutter was a symptom of an illness. He was sick of the loneliness.

He’d gone out looking for a cure. His gift had taken him clear across the city to find a wolf puppy running into trees. He could not remember the last time he’d laughed so much. Pure luck had dropped Joshua into his lap. Decker would have to be careful not to scare his puppy. And at all costs, he mustn’t let it escape.

To someone young, the job probably looked Herculean in scope. Fifty years of clutter filled the house to bursting.

“We’ll get it cleaned up in no time.” He tried for reassuring. “One room at a time. We don’t even have to do all the rooms. We could just do the rooms you’re going to use.”

“Me?”

“I only use the library when I’m awake.” Decker waved toward the large room. Its floor-to-ceiling built-in cherry bookcases were what made him choose the oversized house. At some point, however, the pleasure he found in reading dimmed. He’d continued buying material out of habit. The room was a static flood of books, fallen piles of novels creating cascades, as the volumes sat waiting to be read.

The clutter had been the first symptom of his illness. The second was that he’d stopped reading altogether. Of late, he didn’t even want to stir from his sleeping chamber. He really needed to keep hold of this puppy if Joshua was the cure to what ailed him.

“There are five bedrooms. Maybe six.” He hadn’t been upstairs to check them for a decade. “We can clear out one for you. Two if you want. Down here on the first floor, there’s the front parlor…”

“The what?”

“It’s the room you receive visitors in.” Not that he ever had visitors beyond Elise.

“A living room. Okay.”

“Yes, a living room!” He remembered that was what the real estate agent had called it. (She’d unfortunately been sensitive enough to be scared silly by him; the woman endlessly repeated the house’s features like a mantra.) “With a fireplace and original moldings. A large dining room, an updated kitchen with a butler’s pantry and first-floor laundry room.” No, he shouldn’t be listing out the rooms. Joshua was whimpering again. “But we can start with just one room. One of the bedrooms. You’ll need someplace to sleep.” There was the small matter that the stairs were currently impassable.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Joshua asked.

Decker stared at Joshua as he tried to remember if there were bathrooms.

“There are bathrooms, right?” And then blushing bright red, Joshua added. “I’ve got to pee.”

“I think there’s one…” Decker scanned the house from the foyer. There were lots of doors he never opened; maybe there was a bathroom behind one of them. Surely there were toilets somewhere in the house. When he was born, the world operated with chamber pots and outdoor privies. He’d noticed the outside accommodations disappearing but he’d never had need for whatever replaced them. He had a shower in his sleeping chamber, along with a dressing room. The house had been newly remodeled when he bought it. Surely the contractor had put in modern plumbing. Or was it before toilets moved indoors?

Joshua opened the coat closet, peeked in and closed it. “Nope.” He went to next closed door, blocked shut by a stack of newspapers hip high. He unearthed the door enough so he could crack it open. “Oh, here’s one.”

“Voila!” Decker waited until Joshua disappeared into the small room before frantically clearing the steps up to the second floor. He hadn’t felt this way since he was a human teenager. He’d forgotten it wasn’t a totally comfortable feeling.

There was a lot of mysterious swearing and banging and the clatter of china on china coming from the bathroom. The pipes started to rattle and knock from air inside the plumping. Decker didn’t think urinating was that large a production—at least it wasn’t when he still needed to do it.

“Is everything okay?” He called, flinging newspaper and junk mail over the railing at reckless speed.

This resulted in more whimpers and curses from the bathroom. “I’m fine!” Joshua cried after a moment. “All the water was turned off! I don’t think anyone ever used this bathroom before!”

That was entirely possible. Would it scare Joshua if Decker confirmed that? It was probably better to delay confessing to all the oddities that living with a vampire might include for as long as possible. Decker neared the top of the staircase and began to use the smallest bedroom to the left as a deposit for all the clutter. Hopefully Joshua would be the practical sort and want the larger bedroom on the right. It had its own bathroom, if Decker remembered correctly.

Decker found the light switch and flipped on the overhead. Oh. Oh, dear. It was much worse than he remembered. Rally! Rally! The puppy is washing its hands. What a good little puppy!

Decker shuffled clutter as quickly as he could, grabbing piles from the big bedroom and flinging them madly into the much smaller room directly across the hall. He managed to clear the first three feet into the room before the water shut off and the bathroom door opened.

“Up here!” Decker called as casually as he could manage.

Joshua came up the stairs cautiously. “What was all that noise?”

“Just moving some stuff around. I was thinking you might like this room. We could clear it out tonight. It would only take a little while.”

Joshua peered into the room. “Cool! Is that round area part of the tower? The ceilings are so high! You could play basketball in here. This is like ten times bigger than my bedroom back home.”

Yes!

Luckily Joshua was wading through the clutter and missed Decker’s victory dance. The boy reached the bay windows and peered out them. “I—I haven’t transformed into a wolf yet. It will be a full moon on Wednesday. I looked it up. Will I change then?”

“No,” Decker said with more authority than he really had. He scrambled to back up his claim. “Other creatures are affected by the moon, which is the basis of the legends, but werewolves aren’t. Ferals run unchecked until they’re killed. Pack wolves can choose when and where they transform. You don’t want to piss a wolf off, but you can sit at a table and talk with them.”

“Do you think we should set up a cage, just in case?”

Cage? He didn’t think they made cages that could hold werewolves. Not a good answer. What could they use as a reasonable substitute? “There’s a room in the basement. It was the coal cellar. The previous owner bricked up the chute and it has a good solid door.” Dusty as hell; it made him glad for gas heat. “Don’t worry too much about it. Even if you lose control, you won’t be able to hurt me.”

At least, he didn’t think so. The boy was scared and needed the reassurance, even if it wasn’t totally true.

* * *

Shifting the clutter was like looking back in time—through a fogged-over window. Certain things like the hula-hoop he remembered distinctly. Uncoordinated creatures of the night with supernatural strength should not play with toys that could become projectile weapons. Luckily he’d learned that lesson before beheading anyone. Nor could he ever forget the box full of unfortunate experiments with tie-dye. He had rainbow color hands for a year. He finally soaked his hands in strong lye to remove the stains and let his unnatural healing deal with the damage. The stack of 45s, however, mystified him. When had he bought them? When did he get the lava lamps? Did he ever think the shag area rug actually looked good?

Joshua unearthed the phonograph player. Surprisingly, he had no clue how it worked. Once Decker explained it, Joshua insisted on playing the 45s as they cleaned out the room. Most of the songs the boy had never heard and Decker didn’t remember, so it was much as if they were both hearing them for the first time. “Wild Thing” by the Troggs went onto repeat play for half an hour, Joshua bouncing with the music as he carried things out.

The campy “Monster Mash” by Bobby Pickett only got halfway through the song before Joshua took it off. It was too soon for him to make light of his new status.

“Do you?” Joshua asked as he shuffled through the records, looking for something emotionally safer.

“Do I what?” Decker eyed a curtain of beads. What had he been thinking?

“Do you sleep in a coffin?” He’d stopped the song where Dracula was complaining from his coffin.

How much creepy could Joshua take?

“I—I—I’ve found that coffins are safe. There’s nothing like waking up and discovering that rats have gotten into your bedroom.” Too much info. “It’s like sleeping with blankets over your head.” If the blankets were pillowed and then stapled to wood. “I’ve got the king-sized version, not one of those little narrow things.” This was probably not helping. The song had probably called up all the horror movie images of dark crypts full of dead. The boy might be desperate for a place to stay the night, but tomorrow he’d be alone all day, with plenty of time for second thoughts. Time to think where Decker might be sleeping. At any time, he could bolt and Decker would be helpless to stop him. “It’s like a bed. The walls of my sleeping chamber are muted blue and the accents are suede, polished gold, and crystal.”

Joshua laughed. “Accents are suede, polished gold and crystal? Did you hire an interior designer?”

“Actually I did. A very good one. Once I dissuaded him from using a monochrome color scheme and burnt orange shag rugs, things went smoothly.”

Joshua laughed and put on “Stay” by Maurice Williams. A simple song, but it struck Decker to the soul.

“Oh won’t you stay, just a little bit longer, please let me hear, that you will.”

What a stupid song to be crying over.

* * *

They’d cleared the room down to the wood floor. The curtains were in tatters from sun rot. The walls were dirty white. The overhead bulb seemed too harsh. Every little sound echoed loudly. At least the floor was in wonderful shape, due to the fact it had been protected by clutter for decades. They used the ugliest of the tie-dye experiments to dust mop the floor and walls. Decker tried not to panic over how horrible the room looked even empty of the clutter.

“I just realized there’s no bed.” Joshua laughed and unrolled a shag carpet that once lived in the front pallor.

“I’ll buy you one.” Decker felt sunrise racing toward them. He would have to shut himself away and pray that when he woke, the boy was still there. “We can go out for dinner and then pick a bed out.”

Anything to cement Joshua into his life. The last few hours had been filled with moments of joy, the first time in decades he’d felt the emotion.

Joshua stretched out on the carpet, yawning deeply. “Dinner and bed?” Joshua yawned again. “M’kay.” And then how that sounded sunk into the boy’s awareness. “I told you no maid’s dress.”

Decker grinned but refrained from the easy taunt. Once he’d fallen asleep, the day would pass in a blink of an eye, and the moment of truth would be quickly at hand. Would Joshua stay? Surely if the puppy stayed for a day, all would be good. So he promised solemnly, “No dress. Big steak dinner.” Or what was that thing Elise always talked about? “Or a clambake. Lobster, mussels, crabs, steamers, quahog, sausages, potatoes, and corn on the cob.” It always sounds like the entire kitchen dumped into a pot, but Elise loved it. “I liked a nice rack of lamb when I was young.”

He realized that Joshua’s breathing had deepened and the boy was asleep on the carpet. He sat watching him sleep for as long as he could, wondering if he should wake him up and ask the boy not to go. In the end, he patted his puppy on the head and went to lock himself away from the unstoppable day.


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Framed