Evil, Old and Ugly

I first saw her in the elevator. It was just her and I. It was hard to believe my eyes. She might have been a good person, I don’t know. But it didn’t look like it. She had a glazed-over look. Her eyes were cloudy. She wore an unfocused blank stare.

What’s more, she was horribly old. Furthermore, sorry to say, she was hideously ugly. She looked like she’d die any moment or was already dead. I nodded hello but there was no recognition. She had an angry cast to her leathery, much wrinkled face. She stood there, hovering over her walker. I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary, yet.

There was no question: she was beyond evil.

The next time I saw her it was again in the elevator. This time there were other people. When people got on, the expressions on their faces, shock. There she stood, blank milky stare, looking like the wickedest, darndest, most vile, harridan, dead-looking witch ever.

We were all scared. Some shuddered. Right out of a horror movie, she was. Frizzled long unruly hair. Some, I thought I did well, for one, tried not to have a conniption. A moment of shock, but standing there, as the elevator moved, some could not recover, could not stop their staring. Others came into the elevator, gasped in shock. Some threw their arms out, jumped a bit, maybe juggled whatever they held, eventually calmed down.

The lady stood there, hunched over her walker. She appeared blind but she wasn’t. She stared straight ahead and was silent. When it was her floor, she got off, walked with her walker like a perfectly ordinary old person. She liked our terror, we surmised. Just evil, she was. Probably a too real apparition. Somebody ought to do something. Out of the elevator she walked, smug-like, down the hall toward her room.

She wore old clothes. A nineteen twenties or thirties dress, lacey in design. I didn’t get a whiff of the old girl, but after she exited the elevator, one woman said, “Does she have any family?” The rest of us geezers didn’t know. “Never seen her before yesterday,” I said.

It was uncanny. If she tried to, she couldn’t have frightened us more. She was a vision of terror. Was she trying to appear like that? Dead, a cadaver? Nobody knew. Nobody knew where she came from. She was frightening. We all were old, dying was something that regularly happened at the home, weekly if not daily. Looking at her, it was hard.

She looked dead. Unkempt. Washed or not we didn’t care. She didn’t respond to anyone’s entreaties. She scared us, she reminded us of the dead we’d soon be. I mean, she was scary. One woman, “Is she gonna die?” she asked. Nobody knew what to say. She reminded us of our own short future. And, oh Lord, dead, we’ll look like that!

Yet she was alive. She should have been hidden. Or hidden herself. Her appearance was horrible, ugly, and deathly. She had to know her effect on people. “That’s why her family abandoned her here,” the people said.

Nobody liked her. We feared for our lives. She was too ugly, too hideous, to live. Was she the living dead? She looked it. She didn’t respond like a human. I thought about the crones of old. How often their surliness, bolstered by their old ugliness, nose warts, for example, their supposedly lascivious bewitching of young men, often sealed an old woman’s fate.

I thought, wow, that might happen here. History repeating. Naw….

Nobody saw her. After those few days on the elevator, she seemed to vanish. Nobody appeared to know where she had gone. We breathed a sigh of relief. No one could find her. That night, however, a spontaneous bonfire appeared in the landscaped back area behind the home. Flames leaped among the stacked wood. Woodsmoke smell, screaming, crackling and cackling, was heard all night long.

“Don’t rub it in,” scoffed a longtime resident, watching the old woman burn.

Previously published by Mad Swirl