But Stevie shivered. Your house is on fire, and your children will burn. She could see the space heater in the kitchen billowing smoke as its asbestos fire grill grew blacker and blacker. She could see gables collapsing, balusters charring like kitchen matches. It was a conflagration only in her mind, but it frightened her anyway. She did not trust the space heaters untended or tended only by children. She was glad she had beaten the Kensingtons’ funereal Lincoln Continental home.
“Let’s go inside,” she said.
XXXV
Stevie waited until the kids were snug in their beds before going into her study to check the Exceleriter. During her absence it had advanced the paper on the cylinder about three and a half feet. She leaned over the machine to see what it had written. At the top of the long sheet, centered, was the Roman numeral XXXI, beneath which this troubling narrative began:
Once in Columbus, Stevie put the folders under the driver’s seat and scrupulously locked the van every time she left it. The afternoon went well. She treated herself to dinner at . . .
And so on, a concise and accurate summary not only of her activities in Columbus, but also of her feelings about them. Now the Exceleriter was reading her mind as well as transcribing her dreams.
Indeed, in retrospect Stevie wondered if the mysterious consciousness behind the machine’s ongoing sleight-of-hand had not influenced her otherwise aimless detour to Hamlin Benecke & Sons. The typewriter had wanted her to go there, and so she had gone. Was that possible? Did she have so little control of her own life? Stevie read the last two sentences of the Exceleriter’s selective narrative:
. . . Stevie, bewildered and frightened, started her Volkswagen, headed it back toward the curving uphill avenue that debouched into Macon Road, and told herself that now, surely, she was going home. She would not be sidetracked again.
Before reaching Barclay, of course, she had stopped at Sister Celestial’s—but the machine had failed to detail the particulars of that visit, choosing to concentrate instead on her stunned reaction to the puzzling duplication of ’Crets outside the office-supply company. Why this spooky episode rather than her meeting with the prophetess? To Stevie’s way of thinking, the choice embodied a suspicious selectivity: it fingered Seaton as the culprit behind the telemanipulation of her typewriter’s keyboard. He could not resist making himself a part of her story or tormenting her by emotional as well as physical intrusions into her life.
Or maybe, Stevie cautioned herself, this suspicious selectivity has another cause. Maybe the machine would have recorded my meeting with the Sister if it had just had enough paper to do the job.
Stevie lifted the strip not yet typed upon and saw that the Exceleriter might easily have set down the gist of her visit to the palmist, omitting the tiresome preliminaries and summarizing their conversations. What writerly rule required that the transcription of an episode make mention of its actors’ every hiccup and garter adjustment? A rhetorical speculation that again led Stevie to blame Seaton Benecke for her persistent harassment. He had even sicced ’Crets on her. What else he might have in store for her was difficult to predict. It would undoubtedly entail something nightmarish. She had been living a nightmare for nearly a week. Seaton Benecke was its author, and ’Crets . . . well, maybe ’Crets was his agent.
Heh-heh, as the jester is wont to say when the king has not yet apprehended the joke: Heh-heh-heh.
But the quatrain centered at the bottom of the strip of paper was no joke. Although she had not seen it before, it now jumped out at Stevie like a death’s-head on a mortally uncoiling spring: the same disturbing nursery rhyme that, nine miles away, Betty Malbon’s Remington had typed:
Ladybug, Ladybug,
Fly away home.
Your house is on fire,
And your children will burn.
“Not tonight they won’t,” said Stevie. “I’ve turned off all the space heaters, and I’m home—home to stay.”
Shivering in her robe, she put a new strip of paper in the Exceleriter. Then she unplugged the machine. If it could type without electricity, let it. She would capture its ravings. Otherwise, she would be set for tomorrow—when she must begin her workday with no clear idea of her mission. The long sheet of paper would be good for notes, a test track on which to marshal and race whatever project concepts she could subconsciously tune up overnight. Let the best concept win. In the meantime, Stevie hoped that by pulling the Exceleriter’s plug she had disqualified Seaton Benecke’s entry even before the race got started. She wanted a good night’s sleep. She wanted dreams she did not remember.
XXXVI
A weight oppressed her ankles. She was trying to sleep, but could not withdraw her legs from the unknown burden on her feet. She wanted to turn to her side, to snuggle deeper into her blankets, but this enigmatic body—a folded quilt? a pile of dirty clothes?—pinioned her and made her dreams go haywire.
Finally Stevie kicked. She pulled one knee up to her abdomen, snapped it toward the foot of the bed, dislodged the annoying object on her ankles—Teddy’s thermal parka?—and sent it flying to the floor. Ah, that was much better.
Almost comfortable again, languidly scissoring her feet, Stevie burrowed beneath the electric blanket like an animal preparing to hibernate. It was as warm as Costa Rica under her GE, as cozy as Colombia—even if neither of those countries had hibernating fauna. No, of course they didn’t. All they had were skinny-dipping salamanders, cockatoos, and monkeys that migrated through the rainforests in marauding troops. Occasionally an Indian with a blowgun would pick off a monkey with a poison dart . . . thwup! . . . and it would fall from its tree and land on her ankles like Teddy’s thermal parka.
Stevie dislodged this monkey with another angry kick. Then she dug down even deeper into the synthetic tropics of her bed.
The type element on her Exceleriter began to buzz.
She heard its muffled blatting even under her blankets. She had unplugged the machine, but now it was giving her sleeping house and everyone in it the raspberry. How so? Stevie opened her eyes and pulled herself through a warm envelope of linen to the edge of her icy pillow. Here she turned to her back and looked down her bed at her cedar chest. There a silver-gray humanoid shadow perched, intently studying her as the typewriter buzzed.
“Damn you, ’Crets!” Stevie shouted. “You don’t belong here! Get out! Get out!” She hurled her pillow at the monkey (it had to be the monkey), and the creature’s flimsy shadow leapt aside and scampered from the room toward the stairwell. She did not hear the capuchin going down the stairs, even though the softest footfall set them creaking, because of the continuous noise from her study. Teddy would be up in a minute, and Marella too.
But before Stevie could stumble out of bed to see about the buzzing, it had stopped. She lay still, hardly breathing.
A scuffling sounded in the stairwell, then the quick wooden outcry of the bottom step, the periodic groans of the steps above that one, and finally a satisfied thump at the carpeted head of the stairs. In perhaps half a minute’s time ’Crets had gone down to the foyer, reversed himself, and come back up.
Stevie sat up, keeping her eye on her own open door. A small shadow glided through this upright rectangle and made an acrobatic leap to the top of the cedar chest. It was definitely ’Crets, young Benecke’s Nosferatu familiar, and Stevie wondered if the beast had come to drink her blood. Well, if he had, he would have to take it cold; that was the only kind she had now. Although it might conceivably curdle, it would never warm, not under these chilling circumstances. Stevie had another pillow, but throwing it would gain no lasting victory. Goose down was not an effective charm against vampires, even when applied, in bulk, like a brickbat.
Maybe light would run off the creature.
Stevie, feeling cold air invade the sleeve of her gown, reached behind her to turn on the Tensor lamp clamped to her headboard. A cone of white light shot into the room. Before the lamp’s hard plastic shade had time to grow hot, Stevie directed this cone towa
rd her cedar chest, where it spotlighted the insolent monkey, making his eyes shine like bolts of liquid mercury. The sight galvanized Stevie with fear, erecting the short hairs on her nape. ’Crets, as if pleased with the impression he had made, grinned. It was impossible to distinguish the whiteness of his face from the whiteness of his teeth. His head was a skull with small silver lanterns behind its eyeholes.
The skull had a body, though, and as ’Crets grinned at Stevie, he also fingered his genitals. He had no shame. Just like those monkeyhouse inhabitants who offend the sensibilities of visitors—families with small children, strolling pensioners, courting teen-agers—he seemed to derive more than tactile delight from this exhibition. His grin conveyed his delight. His fingers conveyed an innuendo. Unsheathed, his thin pink member conveyed an odd threat. What would it be like to bear in your womb the seed of a diminutive agent of death? To be raped by a housebreaker no bigger than a teddy bear?
“Where’s your football jersey?” Stevie blurted.
’Crets cocked his head but continued to jerk off. “I took it off downstairs,” he said in a familiar voice. (What other sort of voice should a familiar have?)
“Why?” Stevie tried to identify his distinctive inflection. Unfortunately, his voice seemed to play at the wrong speed, like the voices of those obnoxious recording “chipmunks” who turned up on the radio every Christmas. “Why should you take your jersey off, ’Crets?”
“I got hot.”
“Hot? How could you get hot? It’s probably two or three degrees below freezing right now.”
“Downstairs it isn’t.”
“It couldn’t be any warmer there than up here,” Stevie said reasonably. “Heat rises. A portion of the heat downstairs always works its way to the upper floors. That’s a well-documented phenomenon.’’
’Crets put a little backhand English into his manipulations. “Interesting. Considering the location of hell, no one should ever go cold.” The monkey’s 78-RPM voice gave this pronouncement a supercilious ring.
“I’m cold,” Stevie said. “I’m always cold this time of year.”
“Go downstairs, then. That’ll warm you up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your kitchen’s in flames, that’s what. You left the space heater on, a draft through the kitchen blew your wall calendar into its grate, and after February and the other months caught fire, the fire spread to the Sunday newspaper—which you carelessly left on the floor near the heater, Stevie—and at this very moment your precious oaken table is blazing away.”
“But I didn’t leave a heater on!”
“I’m sorry, Stevie, but you did.” The monkey tilted his head. “Listen.”
Stevie listened. Fire crackling downstairs: an altogether terrifying sound. Volunteer-fireman Bob Cochran had once described the Crye house as “a two-story tinder-box,” and Stevie further imagined that she could see the shadows of flames leaping on the walls outside her room, at the head of the stairs, flickering like strobes across the floral wallpaper.
“But you just came from down there,” Stevie cried. “The fire couldn’t have spread that fast.”
“I went down there to turn off your smoke alarm,” ’Crets said. “It was making a racket—bzzzzz! bzzzzz! bzzzzz!—almost like a broken typewriter. It’s been over a year since you replaced its battery. I’m surprised it still worked.”
“A lot of good it does shut off! Let me up! I’ve got to get Teddy and Marella out!” Stevie grabbed for her robe, but the capuchin leapt forward, tossed it to the floor, and hunkered at the foot of her bed like a gargoyle.
“Don’t you want to see the climax?” he asked insinuatively, his fingers obscenely tweezering.
“I don’t care who you are or where you’re from,” Stevie said. “You’re a vile, filthy demon, and if you try to keep me from rescuing my children, I’ll tear your ugly head off. That’s the only climax I want to see.”
“Come, come,” said ’Crets.
“I was raised on a Kansas farm. My daddy taught me to wring the necks of chickens. I’ll do the same to you.”
But could she really act with such barbaric ruthlessness? Stevie realized ’Crets’s speech patterns and inflections resembled those of her late husband. Even the amplified crackling of the encroaching flames could not diminish the importance of this weird similarity. Ted had come to her in the guise of a hateful South American monkey! An organ-grinder’s monkey!
“Right you are,” ’Crets declared. “Here’s the climax. I’m so damned hot I’ve just got to get this off.”
Stevie expected a spurt of semen, but instead the creature pulled a tab at his navel and split his capuchin costume right up the middle. One naked leg came out, and then the other—after which tiny human hands gripped the furry lapels of the monkey suit and shrugged it from a tiny pair of human shoulders. Atop her cedar chest strutted a naked homunculus with the face of an elderly white-throated capuchin. But then the creature finished his unmasking by tilting back his head and dropping the capuchin face behind him. Voilà! There, eighteen inches tall, smaller than life, stood Ted!
“That’s better,” he said. “I hate wearing that thing.”
“This is a nightmare,” Stevie said. “The Exceleriter’s doing this. There’s no fire, and Ted isn’t here.”
“Could your nightmare be worse than mine?” Ted asked. The monkey’s know-it-all fiendishness had given way to a plea for understanding. “Dead in my prime, resurrected against my will, plagued with guilt, and condemned by Seaton Benecke to masquerade as his familiar. Marella was taller when she was born than I am now. Imagine that, Stevie.”
“This isn’t happening. You’re not real.”
“I’m as real as you are,” Tiny Ted said sharply. “I know some things you don’t know. I had to die to learn them.”
Flames spurted into the stairwell. Their shadows danced on the wallpaper. Smoke curled sinuously through the upstairs hall, bearing an acrid stench.
“Teddy! Marella! Get up! We’ve got to get out of here!” Stevie swung her feet to the carpet, scooped up the robe ’Crets had flung from her, and, while striding doorward, plunged her arm into a sleeve. Whether this nightmare was real or illusory, she had delayed too long. She and the kids could make their way to safety down the iron steps of the spiral staircase just off the upstairs bathroom. Her allegiance was to her children, not to this naked travesty of the man she had married. Oddly, two years before he died, Ted had built the spiral staircase into an expensive gabled tower off the bathroom as an alternate escape route in the event of fire. Tonight it would be tested. “Teddy, Marella, get up!”
The homunculus—her late husband—jumped from the cedar chest and tangled himself in the hem of her robe trying to grab her right ankle. Stevie crashed headlong to the carpet. Smoke came convoluting dreamily through the hall and over her outstretched body into her bedroom. Stunned, she glanced up to find Tiny Ted hunkering before her, his hands dangling between his knees. His furrowed brow bespoke his concern—for her, if not for the children he had fathered. He was truly a monster.
“What kills most so-called fire victims,” he told her, “is smoke inhalation. Stay on the floor, Stevie. It’s safer down here.”
“Teddy and Marella aren’t safe,” she hissed, trying unsuccessfully to get up. Had she pulled a hamstring? wrenched her knee out of its socket? “We’ve got to get them out, Ted. Please help me. Why don’t you seem to care?”
“I love you, Stevie.”
“About your kids. I mean. They’re your children, too.” As the roof over the front porch just outside her bedroom collapsed, she screamed their names. But maybe Teddy and Marella had already died, victims of smoke inhalation. Her cries—her pleas—mutated into anguished sobbing. “Why don’t you care?” she finally managed. “Why—don’t—you—care? . . . Damn you, Ted. Damn you.”
“That’s an unnecessary stipulation, Stevie.” He stroked her forehead. “It’s just that I’m your baby now. Is that so bad? I don’t
have claws or a satanic golden cast in my eyes. I’m small and cuddly. I can make intelligent adult conversation.”
Stevie struggled to rise. Her forearms would not support her weight. She collapsed as the porch roof had collapsed. Her eyes stung, and her throat felt as if someone had poured a beaker of ammonia down it. “Go away,” she told the demon. “Just let me die.” She rolled back toward her bed and, crawling hand over hand, reached the skirt of the bedspread she had quilted in the early years of their marriage. Clutching it, she pulled herself into a strata of roiling smoke just above the rumpled plateau of her mattress. Here she sprawled, coughing feebly, to await the painful suffocation that would kill her.
Ted jumped onto the bed. At her ear he whined, “I’m hungry, Stevie. I haven’t eaten all day. Remember that fried egg you fixed me yesterday? That was delicious. I could use one now. How ’bout a little midnight snack?”
Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home, Stevie was thinking. The noise in her ear had no more consequence than a mosquito’s buzz. My children, though—my darling children have burned. Nothing inconsequential about that. Everything’s ruined. And . . . it’s . . . all . . . my . . . fault. . . .
“You won’t even have to dirty a frying pan,” Ted was saying. “Just break an egg on the landing. Whaddaya say, honey? I’m famished.”
“No,” Stevie said faintly.
Ted, on all fours, nuzzled her neck. “Remember how I used to give you hickeys when we were dating? You had to wear a scarf to church on Sundays. Remember?” The homunculus bit her sweetly and suckled from the wound. The homunculus suckled and sipped.
For her first time ever, Mary Stevenson Crye fainted. Consciousness left her, and the incubus who had arrived in capuchin drag to bugger her self-respect stole from her nightmare on tiptoe.
Who Made Stevie Crye? Page 19