Static!

by Michael R Collings

  Suddenly there was another sharp crackle, a flash of light closer to the ground than lightning had any right to be, and the blue-white shadow of a shower of sparks. The outline on the wall wavered, sharpened, resolved into the ragged semblance of a human form and, with the suddenness of an over-heated light bulb shattering at the touch of an icy wind, disappeared.

  His head jerked toward the window. He jumped out of bed and ran across the room, slipping into his robe as he went, cinching it tightly around his waist with a violent jerk on the velour belt.

  Outside, a power line had fallen. It was the one running in front of Payne’s place. Its ripped end clicked an insidious tattoo against the damp concrete of the sidewalk, spitting sparks with each sinuous shudder. The houses along the other side of the block were pitch dark, whether from power failure or from the people being asleep, he couldn’t tell; but the reassuring hum and glow from his night-stand clock let him know that he at least still had electricity.

  The downed line sparked once more on the wet concrete, then lay momentarily quiescent, like a satiated serpent.

  He hit the wall switch and felt an inordinate relief when the lights burned steadily and brightly. He grabbed the telephone to call the power company and report the down line.

  Something thumped against the window. He whirled toward the sound. Whatever it was, it sounded heavy, sodden, alive.

  A figure appeared, disappeared, reappeared through the wet glass.

  “Shit! Who’s there?” he yelled.

  Someone mumbled something—he couldn’t understand any of the words over the pelting rain sheeting like thick oil on the window pane.

  He edged closer.

  Mrs. Harrison, as wet and bedraggled as an overweight hen caught outside the coop, huddled outside, her shoulders wrapped in a thin sweater half concealing what appeared to be an old-fashioned flannel nightgown. She banged again at the pane, her white knuckles twisting against the glass like five pale slugs, her face wrenched out of recognition by the storm-ridden shadows and by her tears. The distortion from the rain-streaked window, coupled with the eerie back-light of electrical sparks and distant lightning flashes that kept the sky shimmering blue-black, made her look more like a walking corpse than a living woman.

  Nick stood stock-still, staring.

  The apparition motioned jerkily toward the front of the house, then faded into the darkness. He ran down the hall and through the living room, wrenching the front door open before she had a chance to knock again.

  The old woman burst into the house, dripping, breathless, her nightgown plastered to her shoulders and hips and thighs. The thin material hung obscenely transparent where, in the glare of his living room overhead light, the faded, sodden flannel molded tight against sagging breasts and withered flesh.

  “Mrs. Har—”

  “It’s Fred,” she panted before Nick could say anything more. “He’s had...his heart...real bad...I think he’s dying….”

  “Heart attack?”

  She nodded jerkily, her own face unhealthy and pale. Her breathing was deepening but was still shallower than sounded good. Nick motioned to the sofa and reached out to take her arm. She shrugged him away, shaking her head.

  “Phone’s out,” she said. “Call somebody. He’s been bad for years, but never like this. Please call.”

  “Okay,” Nick yelled, trying to outshout the wind that swirled around the porch and through the doorway. “Come in and wait here.”

  “No, I’ll get back to him. Hurry!”

  “I’ll call. Meet you over there in a minute or two. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she yelled, but she was already moving. The expression on her face was more stunned than animate, but she headed purposefully into the shimmering darkness. She almost stumbled on the porch steps but found her footing and lumbered toward the sidewalk. Nick raced to the bedroom, wishing that he hadn’t had his phone installed there instead of in the living room. A few seconds might make the difference for Mr. Harrison, the difference between life and death.

  He punched 911, heard one ring, glanced up, and in the glare of a passing headlight saw Mrs. Harrison clear the corner of the house and dash toward the front of The Greer’s property line.

  Along the horizon, a sheet of lightning-flame split the sky, followed a breath later by the sharp roar of thunder.

  Mrs. Harrison passed the Queen Elizabeth rose, its canes whipped almost leafless by the storm. Nick heard the second ring at the police station.

  “Hurry up, damn it,” he murmured to whoever should have been standing at the desk, hand hovering over the telephone as if waiting for Nick’s call.

  The third ring.

  Another sheet of lightning and instantaneous thunder, so violent that Nick felt it through his naked feet. It must have struck just behind his house.

  For an instant, Mrs. Harrison’s black form was highlighted by the lightning, white-sharp and frozen in mid-stride, her leg hitched, outstretched, one toe almost touching the shimmering concrete of the sidewalk directly in front of The Greer’s place.

  The downed power line whipped out. Mrs. Harrison screamed, threw up her hands as if to protect herself from something hideously unseen, and spun, twisting until she faced directly toward Nick’s bedroom window. The sepulchral whiteness of her face floated against the night. She opened her mouth to scream again and the power line slashed her cheeks and curled around her temple and something exploded against her skull in a burst of violent blue light.

  The phone rang a fourth time, crackled, and a voice spoke, distantly, coldly, echoing through Nick’s numbness.

  “Tamarind Valley substation. How can I help you?”

  Right then, at that moment, before the paramedics arrived or the ambulance or the squad cars, seeing the old woman’s eyes grow distant and cold even as her body struggled to take one step more, Nick knew that Mrs. Harrison was dead.

  He knew as well that Mr. Harrison would not survive this night.

  He screamed the Harrisons’ name and address into the telephone and punctuated it with a shouted “Hurry, for God’s sake!” and dropped the receiver onto the table. It lay in a damp spot on the wood, buzzing like a mortally wounded insect. Barefoot, he raced through the house, out onto his porch, onto the drenched lawn, down to the silvery, slippery sidewalk connecting his yard with The Greer’s. It was dark again; the lightning had stopped for the moment and clouds hung low and heavy, seeming to almost touch the tops of the trees. Mrs. Harrison’s body was a motionless black lump against the glistening dampness of the concrete. The power line lay mute and dark where it twisted beneath her. He stared, afraid to move closer, afraid to come within striking distance of the broken line, yet deeply ashamed not to try to do something to help the old woman.

  But she is already dead, part of his mind said.

  He backed away as far as the porch and waited until he heard the whine of sirens. He was safely shadowed when red lights flashed around the corner and the ambulance and fire engine squealed to a halt in front of The Greer’s. He stood on his porch, his sodden robe heavy on his icy shoulders and clammy against his hips and belly. Water pooled around his naked feet as he watched the activity two houses away. In the back of his mind he saw Mrs. Harrison’s face as it had been when she had fled from his yard that afternoon. Whatever she had seen once in the window of The Greer’s house had etched fear and terror into her eyes. He had seen that same fear and terror as she died, the power line enfolding her body and spitting death.

  He waited in the shadows, unnoticed, while the paramedics covered her body. One of the neighbors across the street hurried over, spoke urgently to the nearest fireman. They scurried across the lawn to the Harrisons and the fireman banged twice, three times, four on the front door.

  The man lunged with his shoulder against the jamb and broke in.

  A moment later, he reappeared.

  “There’s another one. Hurry!” he said, his voice etched with strain. Two men disengaged themselves from the crowd and disappe
ared into the house. Before Mrs. Harrison was two minutes inside the ambulance, her husband had joined her.

  Nick watched the ambulance drive away—no sirens this time. No need to hurry.

  He didn’t go inside for a long while, not until the night wind penetrated his sodden robe and chilled him inside and out. The tie cinched around his waist held the water and cut into his flesh like an icy blade.

  Finally, numb with cold and shock, he entered his house, shutting the door against the wind without even noticing that he had done so. He shuffled into the bathroom and dropped the sodden robe into the bathtub. It slapped the porcelain with a heavy thwump, then lay black and shapeless against the stained white tub.

  For longer than he could remember, Nick stood in the middle of the bathroom, naked and shivering.

  When he did finally return to his bed, it was to lay awake, staring at shapes formed by lightning shadows on the ceiling of his room. He did not sleep for hours, and blessedly, when he did, he did not dream.

  Payne Gunnison wasn’t seen on Greensward Lane for upwards of five days. By then, the Harrisons were buried and their house already had a bright blue “For Sale” sign staked into the lawn.

  CHAPTER TEN

  For most of the next week Nick suffered under the expertly Inquisitorial torture of the summer cold that followed his drenching the night of the Harrisons’ deaths. It kept him in bed, snuffling and bored, methodically decimating a full-sized package of Kleenex per day and ingesting gallons of cold medicines. It forced him to miss the funeral on Wednesday afternoon.

  Why do they always hold those things at one o’clock on Wednesdays, he thought miserably that morning, upset and saddened to realize that his body simply wouldn’t allow him to drive far enough or sit long enough for him to pay his last respects. He didn’t know the Harrisons that well, of course, they were of different generations and all of that, but they had, after all, been next-door-but-one neighbors for three years.

  With the funeral over and Nick’s cold on the mend, the next weeks passed uneventfully. The quarter at UCLA stumbled to an apathetic close. His class at Camarillo came to an equally unsatisfying conclusion. The students at both schools saddled him with batches of inept finals that left a bad taste in his mouth. Fear of his own failure as a teacher struggled with frustration with his students. In the end he virtually ignored them to begin serious research on his dissertation topic and study for the comprehensive exams scheduled in the fall.

  Finally, though—blessedly—summer break arrived.

  He had planned the summer reading schedule carefully: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare. And some work on the moderns—Joyce, Pound, Hemingway—with some science fiction and fantasy worked in around the edges to keep him from getting stale. It was a heavy list but after all, from the perspective of the first fresh week of summer, all things seemed possible.

  Payne had returned shortly after the funeral and resumed work around his house. He began by cleaning up a tangle of branches in the back yard, then refining the landscaping here and there. He hadn’t made as much progress as he should have, though, Nick thought more than once as he stared over the piles of books and papers on his desk and through the window. The side hedge and back yard were still visibly overgrown. The lawn looked shaggy again, but so far Payne hadn’t hauled the ancient mower out for a repeat performance. In the right light, most often under the elongated shadows of evening, the place still reminded Nick of a memory-haunted old woman, haggard and half-naked.

  Still, some days Nick would see Payne outside, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, puttering around the house or the garage, replacing the odd missing shingle, opening and airing the musty garage, making it look less resolutely run-down by re-glazing the shattered pane in the side window.

  At other times, however, Payne seemed less sure of himself, starting one project and shifting to another before the first was even part completed. On those days, it seemed to Nick as if Payne was working outside by default, as if he had decided that staying indoors was simply too much for him and outside was the only alternative.

  Gradually their acquaintance deepened into friendship in spite of Nick’s resolve not to let anything come between himself and his studies. Payne was naturally more aloof than seemed usual for mellow, laid-back Southern California, probably a hold-over of his Eastern upbringing, Nick decided. And there were some oddly awkward moments during the days following the Harrisons’ funeral. Payne was to all outward appearances unaffected by their deaths.

  “Too bad about the old folks,” he said when Nick saw him a few days after the funeral. Then, “What do you think, should I replant that hedge or pull the whole thing out and start over with roses.” It seemed pretty callous to Nick, whose nose and eyes were still painful, puffy reminders of the night the “old folks” had died. But after all, Payne had barely met the Harrisons and could not really be expected to feel anything other than generalized sympathy for their passing—even though Mrs. Harrison had died literally on his front sidewalk. For his part, Nick could not forget the look on her face that afternoon, the terror locked in her dead eyes that night. Somehow, Nick sometimes thought vaguely, Payne seemed...well, not exactly responsible but tangentially involved.

  Nick couldn’t quite work it out.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As the days passed they nodded and spoke when they saw each other on the sidewalk. More frequently Payne called out as he left home, his voice carrying through the open windows to where Nick, seated at his desk, slogged through page after page of Renaissance love poetry. A quick wave through the window, a returned greeting from Nick, and Payne would be gone for the day. Nick didn’t know where nor did he ask.

  After a while, so gradually that neither noticed that a choice had been made, they began meeting once or twice a week at one of the houses for an evening together.

  When they were at Nick’s, they played chess or just talked. Payne had attended a community college back in Pennsylvania long enough to be able to trade stories about gruesome profs or talk reasonably intellectual shop. These evenings began early and ended early. Nick was sticking to his reading schedule, which surprised him no end, and Payne kept busy around The Greer’s place…Nick still had trouble thinking of it in any other terms. Payne wasn’t working an outside job, though, Nick discovered, at least not yet. The Greer’s estate could carry Payne through a decade or more of absolute indolence if he chose, so he was taking a few months to sort out the contents of her study and catalogue everything the old woman left him, generally getting a sense of the estate and what he might do with it. Certainly there would be some cash value in the film collection and equipment, he mentioned to Nick one day, if he could work out arrangements with the lawyers to liquidate it.

  On other nights, the two would meet at Payne’s. The first time, a week or so after their first chess match at Nick’s, they fully intended to play chess. Payne’s first additions to the house’s sparse furnishings were a couple of extra chairs, one in the living room and one in the kitchen. That way, Nick could at least sit in comfort. Payne added a small table in the living room as well. Nick noticed it right away.

  “Something new?” he said as he stepped through the entryway. Payne kept the heavy curtain tied back with the bit of white braided cord, making the transition from dark entry into brightly lit living room less of a psychical and neurological shock.

  “Yeah,” Payne said, almost as if he were embarrassed. “I thought it might be helpful if we wanted to play chess over here to have somewhere to play. The kitchen didn’t seem right.”

  Nick glanced around the room. The white curtains at the living-room windows hung three-quarters open, grudgingly allowing the remnant of late afternoon to spill inside. The room seemed alight with a soft golden glow that reflected from every surface as if the walls themselves were incandescent. Intrusive glimpses of leaves and hedges and yards through the spotless windows created a carnival of colors and shapes and textures juxtaposed to the Arctic same
ness of white draperies, white carpet, white walls, white furniture.

  The new chair was white, too. It didn’t match the old one, though Nick, except in color; the style was subtly but definitely wrong for the room. The small table between them was white also. It looked plastic, modernistic, too much like a squat cube. Somehow it was not what Nick would have expected Payne to buy.

  “Why did you choose that one?” he asked pointedly, gesturing with his thumb at the chair and allowing Payne to interpret the “that one” to mean either color or style. Both seemed wrong.

  “It is pretty awful, isn’t it,” Payne said with a boyish grin. “But it fits the room. The white. I saw others I liked better, but they would have stood out too much in here.”

  “Then change the room. Add color. New carpets. Prints on the walls. Repaint if nothing else.”

  “I can’t.” There was an odd timbre in Payne’s voice when he spoke, as if he were not feeling quite well.

  Nick looked at Payne. Standing as he was next to the wall, with the light reflecting onto his face and burnishing away planes and angles, blotting out shadows, Payne didn’t look all that well either.

  “You don’t want to? You like this…sterility?” Nick was aware suddenly of what he was saying. Payne could very well take it as an intrusion. Nick wished at once that he hadn’t begun this line of conversation. After all, it was Payne’s home. And Payne was his landlord.

  “Hey, I’m sorry for blurting out like that. It’s just that….”

  Payne didn’t take offense. In fact, he nodded his agreement. “You’re right, though. It is sterile. I don’t like it. I think I dislike it more each day.”

  “Then change it. Do something to it.”

  “I can’t.” This time his voice was low, almost a whisper.

  Nick started to say something, but Payne cut him off.

  “No, Nick. I mean it.” He turned away to stare at the blank white wall. “I really can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”