Static!

by Michael R Collings

  When the next weekend rolled around, Payne seemed to have left town. At least he wasn’t visibly in residence in Tamarind Valley. The house next door to Nick’s lay dark and still. No shadows moved inside the part-opened draperies, no one puttered in the yard, even though the manicure job on the front lawn remained unfinished and grew more ragged each day. Nick had not seen Payne leave; but then, Nick reminded himself early Saturday morning as he glanced out his bedroom window and noted that the house seemed strangely neglected, he wasn’t his brother’s keeper—or his landlord’s. He wouldn’t join the frustrated Soap Opera set and stand by the window watching the latest doings next door.

  The Harrisons apparently did, though.

  Late Saturday afternoon, Nick was enjoying the quiet on his porch. The remains of a cold beer was balanced on the floor beside him, the last of the current research papers fluttered loosely and mostly unnoticed in his lap. The few people his age that lived in the area had apparently packed up much earlier and were now probably at the beach. They should have been; it was perfect beach weather. But, on the other hand, that also meant that the masses were no doubt jammed shoulder to shoulder on the beaches. Nick had decided to remain at home and take advantage of an unusual cool breeze swirling down from the mountains and freshening the air in Tamarind Valley. So he was lazing on the porch. The street at the end of his walkway was quiet, dead, not a car moving. He dozed for a while, roused when the papers slipped with a quiet, fluttery thwump onto the wood planking of the porch, then sat back again, half asleep and half awake and not really caring which of the two states would win.

  “Hello, there.”

  A sprightly, almost strident voice startled him. He jerked awake and simultaneously recognized the voice as Mrs. Harrison’s.

  As was their habit in the late afternoons, she and her husband were out walking. Mr. Harrison—Nick had never actually heard his first name—was a retired civil servant who was now by all signs virtually deaf and, if Mrs. Harrison’s hovering attentions were any indications, equally helpless physically. She clutched his elbow and steered him along the rough concrete, a tugboat guiding a liner through the intricacies of some huge modern harbor; only in this case, the tug was at least half again as heavy and substantially larger than the ship it was supposed to safeguard.

  In the past week, the couple had started actually walking in front of Payne’s house, as if the change in ownership had lifted an unspoken ban on passing along that particular stretch of sidewalk. Once Nick had seen them exchange greetings with Payne as he was hurrying toward a cab waiting for him at the curb. The three had seemed neighborly enough, almost friendly.

  “Afternoon,” Nick replied, pitching his voice to carry across the lawn and out to the sidewalk. He sat straighter and waved from the shadows. Mr. Harrison nodded from the walkway but didn’t speak. Nick could not remember ever having heard the man speak. The old fellow glanced distractedly this way and that, apparently more intent on the yellow-freckled under-leaves of an ancient Queen Elizabeth rose struggling to bloom in the corner of the yard than on Nick. When Mrs. Harrison released her grip on his elbow and started walking toward Nick, Mr. Harrison shuffled over to the bush, bent over with obvious difficulty, and examined the leaves and canes closely. Nick had tried to prune it a few weeks before but he could tell by the way Harrison fussed and muttered and glanced toward the shadowed porch that Nick had seriously muffed the job and that his inadvertent ravages would not be lightly forgiven.

  Mrs. Harrison came up the walkway as Nick went down the steps to meet her in the middle of the yard.

  They talked for a few minutes—actually, she talked and Nick listened—about the weather (“wonderful, but fall will probably be far too hot”), illnesses (hers), and other people’s odd habits (mostly her husband’s). Once she called out to Mr. Harrison to “come over and be polite,” but he was too interested in the apparently unique collection of aphids on the Queen Elizabeth’s buds to bother with anything as mundane as another human being. Gradually Nick stopped listening and concentrated on nodding and making appropriately positive or negative noises, whichever seemed required, and on keeping from yawning in front of her. He had had plenty of experience at that kind of non-communication with his grandmother before she died four years before at ninety-two. She had wandered when she talked, but his sitting there and holding her hand and making noises had seemed to satisfy her and made her happier for a while. Mrs. Harrison wasn’t quite so far gone, Nick decided, but the principle was the same. He began casting around for a polite way to tell her to get lost.

  Then he pricked up his ears. She was talking about The Greer—“Miss Emilia,” as she called her. By the time he was back to full attention, she was in the middle of an involved story about a scandal from years before, so long ago that only she and Mr. Harrison remained of the original neighbors. And presumably only they remembered the details.

  “Everyone else that lived on Greensward then is gone now, of course,” she was saying, “and I never speak of it to any of the newcomers.”

  Apparently she either did not consider Nick a “newcomer” (which he believed instinctively to be highly unlikely), or she was simply unaware of what she was saying, carried away by the quiet and by the opportunity to talk.

  What little Nick caught of the story sounded like a bad retelling of “A Rose for Emily”—a haughty young woman, proud of her intellect and her achievements; a wandering suitor who won her over and jilted her; subsequent and lingering rumors of strange happenings at the little house on Greensward Lane.

  “Mind you, I’m not saying anything against Miss Emilia,” Mrs. Harrison chattered on as if unaware herself of what she was saying, “but I looked in that kitchen window, just after the big storm that blew the transformer on the power pole and blacked out the town for miles around—back then, blackouts weren’t so common as they are now, and nobody was ever really prepared for one. We didn’t even have any candles or flashlights handy, and Mr. Harrison was feeling poorly, poor man, so I had to run over to Miss Emilia’s to see if we could borrow something. But now, why it seems like every other day someone hits a power pole or the Arabs decide to charge more for oil or a power plant goes on the blink and the electricity comes and goes whenever it wants to—‘brown-outs’ hah! This new ‘nucular’ power isn’t any better, either. I don’t trust it; atoms running around in the electrical lines, getting into everything, making everything radioactive and all. And it goes out just as much as the old kind. Power failure ruined a whole season’s frozen strawberries last summer, you remember, when the power was out for almost two days. And the summer before….”

  “What did you see, Mrs. Harrison?” Nick asked.

  “What?” she blinked owlishly several times and looked around. When she caught Nick’s eye and noticed his curious expression, she flushed as pink as the Queen Elizabeth buds and dropped her eyes, as if she had just awakened and found herself standing naked in front of strangers in a strange room.

  “In the window,” Nick prompted. “Next door. At The Gre... at Miss Emilia’s. What did you see that time?”

  The flush washed away to the sickly pallidness of terror. Beneath their two highlights of vivid red rouge, her cheeks drained of blood; from Nick’s point of view, they were suddenly the color of death. Her eyes flickered serpent-like from Nick to the house next door. He glanced over his shoulder. The attic window glared down at them from an angle that made it look as if someone were surreptitiously watching beneath canted eyebrows. The missing shrubbery where Payne had trimmed away excess foliage allowed a clear view from the window to Nick’s yard, with the Queen Elizabeth rose bush in the corner and Mr. Harrison, Mrs. Harrison, and Nick frozen where they stood.

  Mrs. Harrison let out a little shriek, threw her hands to her lips in a gesture Nick had sincerely thought only happened in grade-B movies, spun around so fast that he was afraid she might over balance and fall, and jolted down the sidewalk. It was probably the fastest she had ever moved—certainly she had to h
ave set a personal record that went back at least fifty years. Mr. Harrison was just snapping off a couple of green rose hips when she swept by, an irresistible force of nature, and grabbed his arm and pulled him along with her. She was halfway home when she seemed to realize that she was walking directly in front of The Greer’s place. She turned her head to stare at the empty, silent porch. Her face went even paler, if that were possible. She dropped Mr. Harrison’s arm and clutched at her throat as if she were choking. Mr. Harrison still held onto the broken rose hips; they hung stupidly from his hands. He looked around, confused, not sure what was happening or what he was doing.

  Mrs. Harrison’s choking grew into a deep rasping that might have been a heart attack or something else serious. From pasty white her complexion flooded with color, sufficiently for Nick to see the sudden change from half a house away. He ran down the sidewalk toward her, but she must have heard him coming over the sounds of her own breathing and she whirled to face him and screamed, a harsh, ear-splitting sound that to Nick seemed too loud to have issued from the old woman’s throat: “I didn’t see it, I didn’t see anything!” She wasn’t looking at Nick, he realized with a cold shock; she was looking upward, directly into the black window in the attic above The Greer’s porch swing where the afternoon sun reflected back at her like a sheet of white fire.

  As if awakening from a decade of senility, Mr. Harrison suddenly seemed to gather his senses and take charge. He opened his curled fingers and let the rose hips drop dead to the cracked concrete before he waved Nick violently back, propelled Mrs. Harrison along the sidewalk and across their lawn until they were on their own porch, then without further words drew her inside their own house. The door slammed with a resounding thud. The sound echoed along the empty street. For an instant, nothing else moved, nothing else made even the slightest noise.

  A moment later, Nick saw the faded, lace-trimmed living room curtain flutter once, as if someone had twitched it aside to take a furtive look outside. Then, again, there was no visible movement along the whole length of Greensward Lane.

  Eerie, Nick thought. If the old woman had crept at him while making the sign of the evil eye or sporting a genuine, certified, satisfaction-guaranteed-or-your-money-back anti-vampire crucifix hanging from a silver necklace or studded with 100% pure garlic imported directly from Transylvania the night before, he wouldn’t have been more stunned. Worse, he couldn’t forgive himself for not listening to her when he had had the chance. It was probably the first and only time in years that she had opened up about The Greer and talked about why she and her husband refused to cross in front of The Greer’s property. Finally, after all this time, The Greer was dead and Mrs. Harrison could tell what she had seen—at least her subconscious had assured her it was all right to tell. Her conscious mind seemed to have strong reservations in the other direction, however, and Nick had spoiled things, first by not listening closely and then by asking questions. Obviously the wrong questions.

  Were there any right ones, he wondered.

  He stood at the sidewalk, staring at the Harrisons’ house, until he became painfully aware of the hot sun searing his neck and arms.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he repeated aloud as he went inside, not sure quite what he meant by the phrase. But this sudden surge of aggressiveness, this volatile anger—this was the right mood, he decided, to attack the next set of mid-term exams.

  By evening, any lingering sense that the day had begun as perfect had disappeared. Sudden black clouds piling alone the upper ridges of the mountains threatened a storm, while in the valleys, even the most hesitant breeze had long since given up hope and expired. The clouds grew darker and dropped lower as day slid imperceptibly, irritably into night. The hills above Tamarind Valley echoed with occasional thunder, a rarity in California but for Nick the more enjoyable for that. Nick loved thunder—at least he did now that he was grown up, mostly because it reminded him of summer storms in Montana and Idaho when he was a kid. He could lean back in his chair, close his eyes, hum some tuneless noise, and watch replays of the monstrous black thunderheads stacking up along the edge of the plateau surrounding Billings, crouching as if they were sentient beasts waiting for the signal to attack and thrumm the air and terrify every kid under ten in the whole town. When he was a child, thunder brought simply mind- and heart-stopping fright; now, it brought the vaguely nostalgic scent of a pure, long-gone, virginal sort of terror.

  By midnight, the thunder had moved over Tamarind Valley. The claps rang out—close, long, and loud, rumbling until the glass shivered in Nick’s bedroom window and the vibrations transmitted themselves from the floor to his bed frame. It was warm outside in spite of the storm, so his window was open a few inches—not enough to let any rain seep in but enough for him to smell the sweet fragrance of damp heat on freshly washed leaves. He lay back, allowing his head to sink deeply into his pillow, his eyes closed. All the lights were off but the bullet-lamp arched like a vulture—or maybe like a cormorant—on the edge of the desk. He remembered other stormy evenings from long ago and far away and consciously replayed memories of exquisite moments of fear.

  One night, when he could not have been more than eight years old, the thunder had rolled so close to the glass patio doors leading from the family room where he and his brother and sisters had huddled during the storm that he had half believed it would knock the house down. At least he and the other kids did; Mom and Dad seemed demonstrably less worried. Seconds later, a bolt of lightning had struck the power pole in the back yard, arcing electric blue through the night and illuminating the whole neighborhood. Lights flickered and died for an instant; in the darkness, distorted shadows of trees and bushes and shrubs streamed like ghosts into the family room, propelled by the unearthly electric glow. Then the lights blinked on again and abruptly everything seemed normal. Nick’s Dad warned the kids not to touch the television set, though, not even to turn it off. Back then, everyone thought that TVs could store up electrical charges.

  “If you touch that,” Dad had threatened, gesturing with an outstretched thumb over his shoulder toward the static-drowned screen, his voice heavy with sincerity and threat and his broad shoulders shadowing the four children sitting in terror at his feet, “the shock could fry you in your shoes and throw your little charred bodies across the room like so many overdone hot dogs!”

  For days after that, Nick had refused to approach the TV, wondering how long it would take for the murderous charge it had accumulated to die away. And for longer than that, he had punched the on/off button with a long, dry stick he had cut expressly for that purpose from the dead willows along the stream.

  But that was years ago, and with a shocking transition that startled him and set his heart thumping Nick was suddenly thrust back into Tamarind Valley and the present as lightning and thunder struck almost simultaneously, so close over the nearby hills that he could smell the ozone. Then the rain began, torrential, Southern-California-cloudburst rain. The wind kicked up viciously and drove horizontal sheets of wetness against his window pane, through the crack between window and jamb, and into his room in a fine spray that floated in the air before settling onto his desk and bed. He jumped up, slammed the window closed, swiveled the casement lock, then ran through the house shutting and securing the rest of the windows and doors. He even had the presence of mind (for once—because he still remembered what Mrs. Harrison had said about blackouts) to set half a dozen candles and matches in strategic places throughout the place.

  Just in case.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As events turned out, he didn’t have to use them, but he later wished fervently that he had...that a few blown fuses and a few minutes of candle-lit darkness had been the only consequences of that storm.

  The lightning struck again, closer. He tried the old counting game, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, like the father has the kid do in Poltergeist just before the dead tree breaks through the window and tries to pull the kid into never-never nightmare-land.
r />   One-one-thousand, two-one....

  In the real world outside, lightning crashed again, disturbingly near. Nick hadn’t noticed any demonically skeletal trees branching outside his windows, but the sound made him nervous, made the air seem charged with tension and terror.

  “To hell with it,” he muttered finally, refusing to give in to the panic that lay just beneath his consciousness. Instead, he forced himself to relax enough to go to bed.

  He turned out the lights throughout the place, including the one on his desk, and stripped for bed in the darkness. He was caught once, half-naked and vulnerable-seeming, even to himself, when white light exploded nearby and outlined him through the window. In that instant of light, his hands and arms and legs and feet had glowed unearthly pale, dead, moving with a haunting jerkiness that made him shiver. He turned his back to the window, finished undressing, and slid between sheets faintly damp to the touch, clammy, as if the rain had lightly caressed them, but he didn’t want to get up and change them. For a long while, he lay unmoving, stiff, staring at the uneven shadows that played across the ceiling. After a while, he began to drift toward sleep.

  When it came, the lightning bolt lit up his room as if he hadn’t turned any lights off at all, almost as violently blue-white as that time when he was a kid. His eyes flew open at the flash and the instantaneous thunderclap that seemed to deafen him. As if trapped in his childhood nightmare, he saw an outline against the wall opposite the window, a wavering black shape, witch-hands with tree-twig fingers reaching out to him, beckoning, the monstrous, bloated head surrounded by a sickly silvery-white light overlaid with menacing blue.

  He stifled a scream and sat bolt upright, the sheets slipping from his chest to pool at his waist. The air was chilly, brittle with rain-swept dampness.