Static!

by Michael R Collings

  The side yard was pretty well cleared; At least you could get from the front yard to the back without fearing sneak attacks by anacondas, elephants, or such like.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” Nick was startled to hear a small edge of anger in his voice.

  Gunnison turned and smiled, as if he had either not heard the momentary tone or refused to identify it, and defused the situation with an easy gesture. “Mostly I think I just need leverage. I can’t cut and lift at the same time. Lean into the trunk here, would you?”

  He pointed. Nick leaned.

  Nick was not normally an overtly physical person. In fact, it was all he could do to convince himself to jog a block or swim a couple of laps a week at the UCLA pool. But push he could.

  The roots tugged and caught. Gunnison hunkered down, one leg swallowed by the tangled roots, his hand axe flashing in the sun.

  The trunk gave an inch or so. Nick heard cracking and tearing underneath, felt the soil shift, jerked forward half an inch as the stump gave slightly.

  “One more cut, maybe,” Gunnison muttered. Then, louder, “Can you push harder?”

  Nick could and did. The roots now hung dangerously over Gunnison’s ankle but he didn’t seem to notice. If he cut the last root and the trunk shifted the wrong way or if Nick wasn’t pushing hard enough….

  The axe blade dropped, glinted once in the sunlight before disappearing into shadow. Chips splintered in the dark soil. The trunk cracked, wheezed, and suddenly toppled, pulling Nick forward and carrying him with it. He found himself hands and knees in damp grass, his nose almost against the peeling siding on the house.

  Gunnison laughed and reached over, helping Nick to his feet.

  Nick brushed off his knees as Gunnison slapped his back.

  “Thanks. It would have taken me hours by myself.”

  “No problem. That’s what neighbors are for, Mr. Gunnison.”

  The other man nodded. Then very slowly, formally, ritualistically almost, he extended his right hand. “Payne.”

  Nick responded: “Nick.”

  They shook hands. Neighbors meeting, potential friends exchanging possible vows of commitment. That sort of thing, but without words to mar it. Nick remembered his wild wish not to have to meet the man and smiled.

  “Come on in for a drink? Something cool?” Payne asked..

  “Sure. Why not.”

  They walked to the front of the house and started up the steps to the porch. Gunnison took the rickety steps two at a time and had his hand on the knob before Nick had set foot on the first one.

  And, in fact, Nick found to his horror that he couldn’t take that step.

  He stood motionless at the bottom of the steps, one foot firmly on the cracked concrete, the other raised, hovering in mid-air over the splintered wooden riser, frozen. He could not move up onto the step. Literally. He couldn’t force his foot up. It was like standing self-consciously in the corner at a party, he thought, and having the prettiest girl come out of nowhere and say “Hi” and having your jaws lock so tight that not even a groan could escape and she would look at you like you were a genus-subhuman/species-geek and turn away and waltz coolly and gracefully across the floor to flirt with every other person in pants but you. He knew the feeling—knew it well—and hated it.

  But even so, Nick couldn’t take that small step.

  Because of her. The Greer.

  He had no business being here. It wasn’t the first of the month. He didn’t have a white, legal-sized envelope tucked in his pocket. She wouldn’t approve. She wouldn’t even answer if he did ring the buzzer.

  And worse, she would blame me, he thought wildly, indict me in the rape of her house, me, standing here idiotically, one foot off the ground, a hot bead of sweat trickling down my ribs and beneath my waistband as I stare at the naked openness of the porch and at her shadowed swing, her private place.

  Part of his mind kicked in, the rational, conscious part.

  Don’t be ridiculous. Look at Payne. He’s an okay guy, maybe even a friend already, and you’ve only known him a few moments. What’s to worry?

  But he still couldn’t convince his brain to send one simple message through his neurons to his muscles: Brain to foot—move onto the first step, dummy.

  Already at the front door, Payne turned, looked down and Nick, nodded sympathetically, and said with something resembling a choked chuckle, “I know how you feel. That first night I got here, I almost turned around and ran to the nearest hotel. It wasn’t anything specific, just a feeling that…. Anyway, that’s why I decided to get the yard cleaned up so fast, to let in some light, get rid of some shadows. This can be a pretty scary place sometimes—and I didn’t even know her. But wait till you see the inside!” He grinned like a ten-year-old kid with something secret—harmless, sure, but possibly crawly or slithery or creepy—hidden in his pants pocket.

  That did it for Nick: this was a chance to see inside The Greer’s cave.

  Nick’s conscious mind imperiously overruled any subconscious messages and the foot moved. It was hard—like trying to run on a dry sandy beach or to swim through molasses—but he moved. Up the steps, onto the porch, up to the door itself.

  Payne had swung it open. The first thing Nick saw was an entry paneled entirely in dark, lightly grained wood that stretched up the walls and continued across the low ceiling. The floor was dark also, almost ebony. A thick curtain closed off the rest of the house; that material, too, was so dark as to suggest black. It looked heavy, stifling, like overstuffed Victorian at its worse—just what Nick would have expected from The Greer.

  Payne held the door open, inviting Nick in.

  Nick walked into the entry and waited as Gunnison passed and pulled back the curtain, exposing the interior of The Greer’s house to light and vision.

  For far longer than was strictly polite, Nick stood there, speechless, stunned.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Even as Payne closed the outside door behind him, Nick still didn’t quite know what he expected to see; he had never gotten so far as to envision exactly what the inside of The Greer’s place might look like.

  Certainly nothing like the great haunted houses of folktale and film. After all, this was reality, not fiction. In spite of his wildest midnight imaginings, the old woman had been just that—an old woman, crippled and arthritic to boot, living in a modest house on a quiet street in a genteelly aging neighborhood on the outskirts of one of the world’s largest, most cosmopolitan population centers. After all, Tamarind Valley wasn’t some Lovecraftian backwoods New England village with its local variant of the monstrous Marsten House perched on a hill above narrow winding streets and randomly rotting eighteenth-century cottages, crouched and decaying on its hill like a revenant vulture waiting for everything within its purview to die and rot and live again in some unholy manifestation.

  No, nothing like that. The house would be dark though, Nick was sure of that—dark and stale and creaking, like his earliest memories of his grandparents’ farm house, rough-hewn inside and out, rarely aired, heavy with lingering scents of home-cooked meals long past and forgotten; of dust and old bodies that worked too hard and went too long between Saturday-night baths in a tin tub set awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen and replenished with gouts of steaming water from a teapot on the back burner of the cast-iron stove; of patent nostrums for man and beast that smelled heavily of mint and age, and half-filled bottles of rancid petroleum jelly perched on dusty window sills, and mentholated cough drops desiccating in the far back corners of bureau drawers stuffed with forgotten mementos of long-dead relatives.

  It would be full of heavily dark Victorian furniture, probably. Massive stuff with carved ball-and-eagle-claw feet grasping at too-thick dusty-rose carpeting or fading embroidered hangings draped over heavy-grained paneling and drooping limply to the floor and swirling in ostentatious display onto the carpet. Perhaps oak plant stands darkened by the breath of years and hidden beneath gray-green sweeping fronds of Bosto
n ferns dragging loads of accumulated dust and decay almost to the polished hardwood floor. Certainly an antique sideboard with a dust-silvered, flyspecked mirror above deep drawers secret with tarnished flatware bundled in flannel and fragile china so thin as to be translucent, patterned in languishing pink roses twined with ivy leaves.

  He would have expected things heavy and old and dark. That was what The Greer suggested to him: things heavy and old and musty and dark.

  What he saw contradicted anything he could have imagined.

  He stared in shock at what lay before him.

  Payne laughed, a brightly startling sound.

  “Surprised you too, huh?” he said.

  Nick nodded and stepped through the shallow entry niche, past heavy white curtains ruffled on one side and fastened with a white cord, and into The Greer’s living room, still unable to find the right words.

  The living room was white—starkly, literally white.

  Everything in it.

  Not that there was much. The walls gleamed sterilely, their white expanses unbroken by paintings or bric-a-brac. Heavy white draperies shrouded both windows, and a blank television flat-screen was built into one wall. The floor was carpeted in white; not an inch of bare wood peeped around the edge of the room. A white sofa commanded the center of the room; in the corner opposite the TV screen, hunched an armchair—Danish modern or something equally and stridently contemporary—done in white-enameled metal and white leather. That was it.

  Otherwise, the room was as empty as the proverbial tomb.

  No, there was one more thing, Nick noticed belatedly. Along the upper moldings, four white video cameras protruded from equally white brackets, one from each corner. He could see his own reflection in the nearest lens-eye—a small, dark, distorted blot against a flat, white background. Turning, Nick saw that the inside lining of the curtain he had just passed through was also white, dead white without any hint of the dark material facing into the entryway.

  Payne laughed again.

  “It’s something, isn’t it? The first night, I was so surprised I dropped my suitcase. On my foot. It hurt like hell later, but at the time I hardly noticed.” He stepped past Nick into the center of the room.

  “But…,” Nick began.

  “Not what you’d expect of someone like Aunt Emilia—Great-Aunt Emilia,” Payne repeated, punctuating the first syllable with a mock bow. “But this isn’t anything yet. Just the beginning. Wait until you see the rest of the place.”

  Unaccountably, Nick shivered. Get out slipped through his mind so quickly that he actually took a step backward, toward the front door.

  Don’t be stupid, he thought. It’s just a house. Nothing to hurt me here. Just an old house. The floor plan’s probably just like mine. I could probably find my way around here in the dark, blindfolded.

  By that time, he had started forward to follow Payne.

  Payne opened a door thick with matte white enamel that reflected no light; the panel was as depthless and as deep as time. He led the way into a corridor. Here the whiteness was less pronounced, in part because there was barely any light and in part because the carpet ended at the door and the hallway floor was gleaming wood, dark and thickly veined and polished to a mirror gloss.

  Nick felt like tiptoeing, afraid that even his sneakers might scuff the finish.

  He entered the hallway. The temperature dropped appreciably as soon as he was out of the white living room.

  He walked down the cool dimness, staring.

  At rigidly, precisely measured intervals along the wall hung over a dozen certificates. Most were framed in modish brushed silver aluminum and covered with unmarked squares of non-glare glass. Each bore the name of Emilia Kent Greer. Nick counted three doctorates—engineering, electrical engineering, and physics—and assorted master’s degrees surrounded by certificates of merit or achievement from the National Association of This and the International Association of That. He didn’t take time to read each of them.

  He simply stared.

  Payne laughed again, only this time the laughter was tinged with nervousness.

  “No one in the family knew anything about this,” he said, gesturing to the walls. “As far as I know, everyone just thought that she was a slightly dotty old lady who lived out in Hollywood.”

  Nick touched one of the frames with his finger.

  ‘I mean,” Payne continued, “none of us had any idea. I barely knew her name, let alone that she had so much education. I don’t know how or why she kept it from the family all those years, especially since the best any of us has been able to do is to get an occasional BA. You’d think she would be proud of what she accomplished. I never even finished myself, still have a year or so to go. Everyone in the family I talked to before I came out here figured her for a lonesome old crank who chose to hole up in California. Mom had no inkling of anything like this. As far as the family was concerned, Great-Aunt Emilia was an old weirdo, like the other weirdos out west.

  “Obviously none of the family had ever been inside this place, or they would have added levels of weirdness to their descriptions. I’m still trying to figure things out, and I’m right here, staring at all of this.” He reached out toward one of the certificates, stopping just as his finger was about to touch the spotless glass.

  He laughed again, even more nervously, and pulled his finger away. “Don’t want any fingerprints here,” he whispered in a mock-conspiratorial tone.

  “Come on,” he said after a second, this time in a more normal voice. “There’s more.” He gestured down the hall. Nick followed him, a step behind.

  Payne opened the first door. There was no telltale creak, no Inner Sanctum screee, just the smooth silence of well-oiled hinges. The room had originally been a bedroom, a few square feet larger than Nick’s own next door. Now it was empty except for its white carpeting and draperies, a white cloth-covered sofa, a brass floor lamp with white shade, and a flat-screen built into the wall facing the sofa.

  “Come on in,” Payne said to Nick. “Look.” He pointed to a corner. A camera hung from a swivel bracket in the ceiling, like the spy-eye in the local banks—and like the four in the living room.

  “Video camera,” Payne explained. “It works. Picks up anything in this room, like it zeroes in on sound or movement. I’ve tried it. It’s eerie.”

  He backed out of the room and disappeared before Nick had a chance to move. Nick heard the other man’s voice from behind him.

  “Now try this for weirdness.”

  Nick left the bedroom, oppressed by the brightness, the unalloyed whiteness that seemed blatantly symbolic without any referents that would help him interpret the symbol.

  He didn’t like the feeling.

  The next room was a bathroom. Again, everything was white, including the heavy curtains hanging stiffly in front of the enameled tub as if femininely, modestly hiding the interior from their prying masculine eyes. And again, there was a silent television screen in the wall across from the tub, making the tub look like an avant-garde couch. In the opposite corner, another of the ubiquitous video cameras stared blankly down at the head of the tub, reflected in the gleaming silver fixtures. There wasn’t a single water spot or splotch of soap film on any of the metal in the room. Nick did notice, though, that the toilet lid was up; Payne apparently had picked up the same bad habit he had, one that his mother and sisters had screamed at him about for years.

  “In the bathroom?” Nick asked finally, looking up at the camera.

  Payne shrugged his shoulders and grinned. “Great-Aunt Emilia must have had some interesting personal habits.”

  Something about Payne’s voice—an almost little-boy sense that they were sharing intimate not-to-be-spoken ­lightly secrets about adult mysteries—caught Nick unaware, and suddenly he was grinning back at Payne as if the two of them had been pals since kindergarten and could communicate without words as well as with. The chill of the gleaming bathroom warmed slightly, and Nick felt the muscles along the b
ack of his neck and shoulders loosen, even before he had become aware of how tight they had been since he had entered The Greer’s sanctuary.

  “Come on,” Payne said, interrupting Nick’s reverie. “There’s more and merrier.”

  Opposite the bathroom was another bedroom. This one had a single-width bed with a white-painted pine bedstead and thick white comforter tucked beneath a plump pillow. Except for its by-now typical monochromatic effect, the bed seemed out of place, too soft, too fluffy, too feminine for the crisply mechanistic atmosphere of the rest of the house.

  In addition to the bed, there was only a small matching dresser with neither mirror nor tangle of personal effects on the glossy white top...and a television screen in the opposite wall and a video camera on the ceiling.

  At the foot of the bed, a pair of worn blue jeans rumpled on the floor jarred with the pristine clarity of the room. The twisted elastic band of a pair of undershorts peeked out from the waistband of the jeans, and the soiled toe of a white sock from one of the pant legs.

  Payne strode into the room and swept up the jeans with a smooth movement; there was a faintly dark spot, no more than the shadow of the shadow of dirt, where one scuffed knee of the jeans had rested overnight against the soft, white pile. Payne pulled open the closet door and tossed the clothing into the waiting darkness.

  Nick had an image of a mouth opening, swallowing, closing again.

  “Sorry,” Payne said, “I try to keep the place up better than that. I don’t want to get into any bad habits, living alone. Tends to make one sloppy.”

  Nick remembered his own bedroom.

  “Hey,” he began, intending to move into some such cliché as “it’s your house,” or “you should see my place,” but the words refused to come. In fact, Payne’s action seemed eerily—perfectly—appropriate and necessary. Instead of speaking, Nick nodded.

  The kitchen was at the back of the house. The windows seemed grimy but were so only from the outside. Nick realized that these were the first windows he’d seen that actually revealed the outside world, and even they were so thick with dust that the elms along the back fence were little more than monstrous black shadows against a backdrop of gray. All of the other windows in the house had been tightly draped or curtained. It took him a moment to realize that all of the dust and caked-on dirt was on the outside; the inside surfaces glistened spotless and smooth.