Sweet Tea and Murder

          He was prone to swigging copious amounts of beer, specifically Bud Light. He also had a tendency to tell awful jokes, spewing liquid from his nostrils. There was also that time when gravity pulled him and, well, that’s what happens when a grown man leans back too far on his self-ascribed throne of autocracy.
          He was mid-swig when the cracks spiderwebbing the television screen burst outwards. Which was more mundane than the proceeding occurrence-
          A series of leech-like figures squeezed their way through the cracks, trigging him to scream in alarm. Behind them, emerging from the fracture was a hand, and then a arm, and then…
          That is how it ended. At least how it ended for Neil Richards. His body was disposed of with utmost dignity, and the scattered glass swept up. Nothing else was done, so when the time came for the next tenant, all that remained was the mingling scents of alcohol and cigarette smoke.
          When Amelia Cottonwater entered the still-furnished apartment, it still smelled vaguely of its former tennant. She slid the key onto the chipped wooden coffee table and briely closed her eyes.
          Her attempt at centering herself was ruined as the door bell rang. It made a kind of merry little jingle, pulling across dusty wooden floors to the front door.
          She opened the door with no small amount of hesitancy to reveal a small child, all flaming hair and a wash of freckles.
          “You doing here?” He asked, this delivered in a pint-sized squeeze.
          She gestured towards the keys. “I live here now. Question is, what are you doing here?”
          ”You got some sugar?” the child requested. “Can’t make no pie if you ain’t got no sugar, Mama said.”
          The two studied each other, the pale wash of hallway light streaming through her ront door. The boy scratched his cheek absent-mindedly then jammed his hands into lint-filled pockets while he waited for her. One bag of sugar and the boy made to depart with a "thank you" and a greasy handshake.
          The door was cracked and his back to him when he mumbled.
          "Best watch out for her," he said, looking over his shoulder before tucking his arm around his sugar and departing down the hallway.
          The oddity of the comment did not go unnoticed, but it did get forgotten. She had a habit of filing away the apparently insignificance when the red-headed boy re-emerged, this time with bloodshot eyes and a scrape on his cheek. He requested sugar and carried it clutched tight to his chest as though holding an object of immense importance
          Before he said that, though, he repeated what his last visit had been ended with.
          “Best watch out for her.”
          It was the third request for sugar that inevitably piqued her curiosity regarding the strange child. He or someone close to him had borrowed 3 bags of sugar in 3 days- hardly a normal consumption rate. She did what any other self-respecting adult would go if faced with a similar situation- she followed at a distance, holding her breath as though the silence was something alive for her to move through.
          She followed, footsteps muffled in the carpet that ran down the hallway. He turned a corner and through a door. There was a musty smell that permeated every inch of the hallway, chasing her through the door and into the stairwell it opened up. The steps were gray and steep, and she took them up, through another door, and into a hallway nearly identical to the one she had just left.
          A few feet away from the door and into the depths of a new hallway, the boy looked over his shoulder at her.
          "Chu doing?" the boy asked.
          "Oh- um I was, that is, um, I was just, walking.:
          "In my direction."
          A soft, humored smile slipped across his face before he pulled back down kind of an unblinking mask.
          "Tell you what," the boy said, "come to our home and my mother will give you a glass or two or ten of sweet tea. Just be warned- she's...different. And the house isn't the cleanest right now. Be careful though."
          "Can I ask a question?" she asked, her words already wrapping around her tongue with a vicelike grip. "Out of all the apartments, why mine? Asking for sugar, I mean. Why mine?"
          The boy's only answer was a shrug of his shoulders and a return to ushering her towards the farthest door.
          The door they arrived at looked identical to every other door, save for the plaque that swung from it, announcing the apartment beyond it as "3B". The boy pulled on the door; it creaked up and revealed the dusty interior of the place the little boy called home.
         The living room was adjoined the kitchen; gray and red and pink near the door exploded into the more blase khaki of the kitchen. At first glance, there was no one, and the couch sat there like an empty invitation. While the couch was empty, the room was not. Every surface was covered with glasses of sweet tea, and the woman at the stove stood there, her hair tightened in a bun and sweat glistening on her forehead while the pot of water in front of her approached a boil.
          She met Amelia with hollow eyes and then returned to frantically nursing the pot of tea. The boy ushered her to the couch, dove into a puddle of the glassware on the couch and wiggled until he had made enough space for the both of them to sit. He stared expectantly; she wasn't sure what else to do so she obeyed his gesticulations and lowered herself down on the scratchy surface of the old creaking couch.
          Small talk was difficult for her, so the silence extended for a few minutes, cradling them in discomfort. The boy, meanwhile, sat twiddling his thumb and singing songs beneath his breath.
          "So," she finally ventured. "My name's Amelia. You?"
          "My name is Trey. Ma's Abigail."
          "Well, if you don't mind- the sugar you borrowed is for this then? Why'd you ask me rather than someone a little closer?"
          The only initial response she got was the cryptic look exchanged between mother and son.
          And then Abigail spoke again, her voice rough and scratchy.
         "You live where he did, didn't you?" She said, a barely perceptible quiver in her voice. "Neil, you know. Right there where he lived and worked and sweated and was. Until he wasn't. Don't know what killed him, they said. Or why. Murder, I say. Neil Richards, who used to live in your apartment until a handful of months ago, was murdered. So, you see, I thought it'd be nice to meet you- the replacement."
         The replacement. It wasn't the best way to phrase it, but now Abigail's back was turned, her attention channeled once more towards her apparently ever-brewing tea. After a few long, crawling minutes, she opened her mouth to speak- only for Abigail to unleash words first.
          "You should try some of that tea," the other woman said, gesturing vaguely to the vast expanse of waiting tea. "I make the best tea."
          She could have said no. She should have said no. She didn't.
          Lips pressed against the dusty rim of drink, she took a careful sip. It was so small, but somehow the taste immediately inundated her senses. More than just the taste of it, there was the movement. A bitter taste flooded; and then she felt it. The wiggling, worming, squirming sensation and she spit into her hands, not just the bitter tasting tea, but a small, squiggling black creature.
          "Sorry about that," Abigail said as she put the finishing touches to yet another pot of sweet tea. "I try to keep them out, but they don't always listen to me. Come to think of it, they never do. But still-"
          She said something else, Amelia was sure.
          But darkness interrupted, expanded, and then became all that there was.

          Waking up again was a slow process, and when she did it was to find herself in her own bed, cocooned in her blankets. After she managed to disentangle herself and stumbled out of the bed on the cool floor, she made her way from the bedroom to the living room, nursing a sore headache. She sat down, closed her eyes, and tried to recall how she had gone from 3B and the boy's couch to her own bed.
          She stumbled to the bathroom, popped a handful of pills to combat the growing headache, then made her way into the dining room for a bowl of cereal suspended in a sugary embrace.
          Halfway through the bowl, there was a knock at the door, frantic and piercing through the self-governed silence of her apartment. Its sheer insistence was what steered her away from her bowl and into the door.
          Amelia opened the door, eyebrows drawing up at the figure of Abigail from 3B standing there. Abigail stepped forward; Amelia stepped aside to let the older woman pass by.
          "May I?" she asked, gesturing to the couch. "I just need to rest for a bit. And, well, I didn't know where else to go now, did I?"
          Amelia nodded, with a dash of uncertainty and troubledness raising goose bumps up. Abigail sat at one end, and Amelia sat as close to the other end as possible, still hearing the boy's voice ringing in her ears. "Best watch out for her..."
          She was considering the politest way to evict someone from your house and presence when there was a resounding knock, a "do you hear me" knock, an "I want sugar" knock. The woman's eyes grew full, resplendent with horror, and before Amelia could find a suitable reaction to this particular occurrence, the other woman had slipped off the couch, her feet slapping against the floor in her effort to be somewhere, anywhere else.
          Amelia opened the door to the hallway- Abigail, to the bedroom. Standing there at the door was the boy, Trey.
          Eyes wide with worry, he said, "You seen Mom? She's gone, and she left the tea on, and...well, not like her."
          She wasn't sure what to say, so she shrugged and made her best attempt at looking oblivious.
          'Well, if you see her, tell me? I'm worried about her. She's not...not okay."
          A short conversation followed, and ended with a worried goodbye on Trey's part. She watched the boy disappear into the distance and then shut the door.
         "Abigail?" Amelia called softly, making her way towards the bedroom door.
          "Are you there?"
          A soft muffled grunt was all she heard.
          She opened the door to find a room drastically different than the one she'd left. The bed was stripped of its linens so that the splotched, stained surface showed. Over one window was the sheets, twisted and balled up so that no light came through it. The other one was draped over the full-length mirror in the corner, and Abigail was tugging it into place with a look of concentration along her worry-lined face.
          "Did he go?" Abigail asked over her shoulder. "I mean, he's not...he's not there, right?"
          She rubbed her hand across wet, tear-stained eyes and took a step away as if to admire her creation.
          "TV," Abigail said. You have a TV."
          The woman exploded from the bedroom, making her way to the living room. Amelia followed her, still perplexed.
          "Would you like sugar?" she asked, but the woman collected clothing from the pile of clothes in theliving room and began to painfully and delicately arrange them over the surface.
         You know that's what he uses the sweet tea for, right?" Abigail said. "To get you. To implant the leech's seed inside of you. It lives in the cup, drinks from the sweet tea, and then moves into you, and you become a breeding ground. And then he comes for you. Through something. The TV, the mirror, the window- leech after leech. What do you think happened to him? I mean the him that lived here before you? All they found was a dead body and a cracked television screen. You're next, unless you can cover up all those surfaces in time.
          She would have said something more useful except she heard it. The sound of cracking. The uncovered window was cracking, fracturing, splintering- and there, forcing its way through those cracks, a stream of leech-like figures, all with their bodies aimed towards Amelia and her guest.
          She lifted up her feet, barreled towards the stream of unwanted guests, and pressed hard down on them, cursing her under her breath about the boy and the sugar and the sweet tea and the way her heart was pounding wildly against her chest. Behind the stream of leeches, a hand began to emerge. And then, as soon as it began, it was over.