Miss Gray stood staring at the tiny U-Haul trailer in the rutted parking lot of the faded-brick apartment building at 210 Quatman, which had been one of the city's best 30 years earlier, but now was going the way of all cities. Elaine Trout, another retiree, still lived in #1. Julie Emmerski, the young librarian, lived opposite Elaine in #2, but Ida Woods, 94, had finally vacated after thirty-five years of bickering with Miss Gray across the narrow hallway in apartment #3.Miss Gray could not quite pinpoint when she had begun to have the uneasy feeling that something evil was about to happen; perhaps it had begun after her nephew had died with the mysterious particles in his lungs. Or perhaps it began when Ida had fallen from the window, broken her neck, gone into a coma, and was removed to the rest home. At any rate it was a horrible feeling that more bad things were about to happen. During the three weeks Ida's apartment had stood vacant, Miss Gray had worried over the phone about its future occupant to Elaine Trout, who always acted so know-it-all and felt put-upon to listen to anyone and spent most of the time complaining about the Republicans and finally said, "Well why should you care if they rent it or not, Mary? One person is as good as the next." What a naive, ignorant remark! "Well," Miss Gray had replied, "you know as well as I, Elaine, it might be rented to someone loud or sloppy." Miss Gray despised sloppy. She kept her life orderly. Arise at dawn; in bed at nine. Closets dust-free. Ancient photographs of her with her students and her nephews, all neatly bundled and categorized by year. Cleansers, poisons, plungers, and dangerous tools safely confined beneath the sink in proper order where a person could put their hands on things as needed. Even the cozy mysteries by British writers she so much adored were arranged alphabetically in the bookcase. As she had always stressed to her students, a thing worth doing was worth doing well. Never undertake a task unless one intends to finish it. The mark of a genius was not originality but rather execution. Now, however, the new tenant had arrived. From behind the blinds Miss Gray spent the humid afternoon watching the stranger move in. From the tiny U-Haul he unloaded a large motorcycle with studded saddlebags, and despite the heat, lumbered about in a black leather jacket. He wore huge boots and had an abnormally strange, large head, his uncut, greasy hair coiling in nasty braids to the shoulders. His puffy face looked warped and bitter, and under his left eye he had a tear tattooed. His whole move-in lasted less than a half hour for he had little to unload beyond the motorcycle, a sleeping bag rather than a bed, a few boxes, and nothing else. The following morning Miss Gray found a discarded pizza box on the stairs. She felt her blood pressure shoot up. "Oh my God, what trash barrel did they find him in?" young Julie Emmerski said three days later. "He looks like an ex-con." "Now I'm sure he'll be fine, dear," Miss Gray, who was not one to panic, said, trying to calm the girl's anxiety. "He may be a musician or perhaps an artist. I've had unconventional students like him. He can be dealt with. We mustn't go overboard. He spoke to me very politely when he passed." "Musician, hell. He's got me afraid to go to the laundry room. He's the lurking type, Mary. He came out from behind the furnace on me the other day, and I nearly jumped out of my panties. We've got to watch him. He's the type that will break into an apartment. Keep your door latched." "Oh my!" Miss Gray said, thinking of "panties" and how young people were a little too vivid in the way they spoke these days. The next evening she woke with a start, blinking at her cuckoo clock -- 11:30. She couldn't place the sound at first, but she felt something evil, something hard to identify, but quite clearly there. Then she recognized it. It wasn't loud, instead the insistent beat of drumsticks in the opposite apartment, clicking against what? The breakfast bar, the living room walls, the front door. Nothing to be alarmed about, Miss Gray told herself, but yet she couldn't fall back to sleep. So un-nerving, the thought of a man preoccupied with drumsticks. What was civilization coming to? If only John Urbanik still owned the building instead of the corporation of doctors who had bought it as an investment. John would have stopped the drumming! After an hour or so the sound mercifully faded, and Miss Gray drifted back into fitful slumber, dreaming of out-of-control motorcycles. The next day as she drove Elaine Trout to her pacemaker checkup appointment, Miss Gray couldn't stop talking about the drummer. "I can't believe they rented to him. Why, John Urbanik would never have even considered a man like him. Drumming! And then that loud awful music. It's barbarian." "Oh, don't exaggerate, Mary. The man has a perfect right to use drumsticks. You Republicans are just a little too anti-civil liberties to suit me. If he upsets you a little, just learn to cope." "Don't you think, at our age, we have a right to some consideration, Elaine? And I did see him up close this morning. He shouldered past me on the steps so close we had to turn sideways to pass, and he didn't even say good morning. I've never seen such a frightening face. And that strange Nazi earring. I tell you he frightens me." "Oh I suppose he ought to be arrested for being impolite and wearing offensive jewelry," Elaine said. Irritated by Elaine's exaggerated liberalism, Miss Gray forced herself to take a different tack. "Well at least he's been here two weeks and nothing beyond the drumming and some loud music has happened. I'm certain the doctors would never have rented to him if there were any real problems." As usual Elaine made the most of the opportunity to disagree. "Oh please, Mary, this is the 1990s. Those doctors who took over this apartment building only care about one thing and that's money. You talked to Julie. She's scared to death to go in the laundry room now. You surely don't think those doctors give a tinker's dam about us here?" "Well I'm sure they're concerned. And at any rate his credit must be fine." "Credit -- of course!" Elaine said. "These people that peddle drugs all have loads of money." Miss Gray inhaled sharply, but didn't reply. The next morning she had just come from her muffin at McDonalds, seen the motorcycle parked under the maple tree, and turned the key in her apartment lock when she saw the thing. The moment she saw it she began to tremble though she hated emotional displays. A flat-eyed black reptile coiled on her clean carpet, its scarlet tongue flicking. Miss Gray swallowed a scream as the door to Apartment 3 suddenly burst open. The drummer stood there in briefs, holding a can of beer. "Oh!" Miss Gray gasped, retreating. The drummer stared at her with a crazed look in his eyes, then came thumping into the hall. "You ain't done anything with my snake, have you?" he cried. She couldn't speak, only managed to point. The drummer disappeared into her apartment. He came back dangling the snake. "Jackie's swell," the stranger said, caressing the snake's head. "You want to pet him? Snakes makes good pets. They're real clean, you see." Terrified, Miss Gray shook her head as the drummer hustled back into his apartment and slammed the door. That evening Julie Emmerski called in a panic. "Mary, did you see The Vindicator this morning? He's been released from the hospital for the criminally insane." "Who" "Cycle man! The drummer. Who do you think? Roland Tubbs --his name's on the mailbox, and there he is plastered across the front page of the newspaper. He strangled his mother and put her body in a trash compactor. The county prosecutor says there's no way he should be out after only serving 12 years. Read it yourself, Mary! Twelve years in a mental hospital and they released him on a psychiatrist's say so because he no longer has 'murder fantasies.' It's a damn scandal, Mary! And here we are. I'm petrified. Simply petrified." "Well, this time I will call the police," Miss Gray said. One often had unpleasant duties in life, but that was no reason to shirk. However, the police dispatcher wasn't terribly sympathetic. "Listen, lady, I understand snakes are scary, but they ain't against the law." "But the snake was deliberately put under my door by a madman," Miss Gray insisted. "The public needs protection." "Okay, we'll send out a car when we get a chance and talk to the guy, but you may stirring up trouble you don't want. I've dealt with this type before. What you've really got here is a landlord-tenant situation. I suggest you contact your owner." "They don't care, officer. They simply don't care. To them it's just an investment." "Sorry, lady, but you understand there's not much we can do." Not much anyone could do! Ha! That was the day before Roland Tubbs tracked huge muddy bootprints up the beige hall carpet. Miss Gray stared angrily at the mess. After all she'd bought the carpet out of her own money. $180 worth of carpet. She scotch-taped a polite protest-note to the door of apartment #3. The next morning she found the note ripped in shreds and scattered in the hall. From that day on, the feeling of impending evil became overpowering. Miss Gray could no longer concentrate on her reading and found herself trembling and sweating as she drank her chamomile tea. Something horribly awful was about to happen; she was sure of it. The eighteenth of November an early frost threatened as the wind howled about the corners of the apartment. Julie Emmerski was out of town at a wedding, and Elaine had gone to visit her daughter in Buffalo for Thanksgiving. Feeling horribly lonely and vulnerable, Miss Gray put herself to bed with a solemn prayer, but couldn't fall asleep. She could feel sweat beading on her forehead as she stared at the ceiling. Then the inescapable rat-a-tat-tatting of the drumsticks began as usual, very quietly, but horrible and hypnotic. After a while, Miss Gray feared she might lose control and scream, but then she got a hold of herself. Often when she made up her mind on a course of action, anxiety dissipated. Then, at last silence prevailed, only to be followed by something worse. Miss Gray heard muffled voices coming from #3. She crept to the door and listened. "Why you son-of-a-bitch. You know what, Roland, you're a pure son-of-a-bitch, plain and simple." It was the woman's voice. Miss Gray had seen her before, driving the rusty blue Ford Falcon with the infant seat. She was a huge, red-headed sow with dirty hair hanging to the shoulders, and her heavy tread always rattled the stairs when she came in. Whatever the man answered, it was in a pitch too low to be discerned, but Miss Gray could hear the sound of bumping and muttered oaths and suddenly a shout, "Don't drink my beer, you bastard." The bumping continued then escalated into high-pitched screams that made the hair on Miss Gray's head stand up straight. "She needs help," Miss Gray thought, her fingers frozen on the security chain. It was absolute insanity to open the door, but maybe she could help; however, she couldn't summon the courage. Then suddenly there was a terrific banging against the opposite living room wall, and the woman thumped down the steps with a curse and a cry. Miss Gray saw the slattern stumble to her car and drive off. The next day the feeling of impending evil was overpowering. Miss Gray could not go to the mall to walk. She spent the morning trying to calm herself doing something she despised -- baking. She was extremely careful with each ingredient. Finally she murmured, "This will do!" as she added the walnuts and the extra chocolate. When the brownies were hot and fresh and delicious looking, she carefully placed them on her last blue paper plate and covered them carefully with foil. Knocking lightly on the stranger's door, she left the brownies to be discovered and then hurried back into her apartment with an intense sigh of relief. To while away the time, Miss Gray picked up her knitting and did a number of cross-stitches on the scarf she was preparing for her great nephew. Actually it was hardly an hour until she heard the vomiting, then she could hear a huge body retching and thrashing on the floor. In fact, she heard a male voice cry out in despair and hurl itself at the door before the noise settled to silence. After that, it was so calm and so peaceful. It would be child's play to dispose of the rest of the brownies and the rat poison in the dumpster at the mall. There was nothing to fear any longer. It was even easier than when she had pushed Ida out the window. Sighing with relief, she began to deliberately compose exactly what she would say to the police on the third day when because of the smell the drummer's body would no doubt be discovered. And then when the police had gone away, and the drummer and the snake were no more, she would deliberately get under the sink and get her cleansers and just scour Apartment #3 until it shined. There was nothing Miss Gray detested like a messy apartment.
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