Nick heard the distant click of a door closing, followed a moment later by a slightly different click as it opened again.
Payne reappeared in a few seconds.
“Just turned the player on,” he said tonelessly.
He sat down as the credits began.
In the darkness, Nick heard Payne breathing heavily, rapidly, as if winded from running.
Alien was darker than Nick had anticipated, both figuratively and literally. He didn’t care for the implications of the plot, with its suggestions of corporate manipulation and the dispensability of humans in the face of profit. Humanity divorced from its essence.
The cinematic manipulations were even worse: strobic lights and pitch-black darkness and cats screeching out of nowhere; everything set up so that the monster could terrify not only the crew of the Nostromo, but the viewers as well.
That was the way it had been designed, Nick knew, but he still didn’t care for it. The result was exciting, generally thrilling, at times even blood-curdling, but for some reason that he found difficult to identify or define, tonight he didn’t like it.
“Hey,” Nick whispered to Payne at one point, just after the third crewman died. The room was still essentially a theater, after all, even if it was in Payne’s home. Anymore when he wanted to say something, he whispered. He was about to suggest that they watch a different film.
“Shhh.”
Nick could see Payne’s profile, the planes of his forehead sharpened and angular in the monitor’s glare, his cheeks alternately lit and shadowed by its flickering blue-gray light.
Tiny beads of sweat glistened like cheap Christmas glitter on the taut skin of his temples. The shifting light made his lips look twisted, his face taut. But somehow it didn’t seem like it was because of the movie, Nick realized, or maybe not just because of the movie. Payne was rapt, enthralled, watching with an intensity that chilled the full length of Nick’s spine.
For the rest of the film, Nick sat stiffly, surrounded by the angles of the Danish modern chair, ill at ease, more uncomfortable than he could remember ever being at Payne’s as he half-watched Alien, half-watched Payne.
He noticed little things. The way Payne’s hands twisted, knuckle over knuckle, like an old man’s crippled with arthritis—but only during the most vividly, visually violent segments. Not during the moments of suspense. Nick noticed the shuddering that wrenched Payne’s hands and arms, especially when the left hand gripped the arm of the sofa at the moment the plucky heroine pinioned the creature—Nick caught the sexual overtness of the image and connected it with Payne’s earlier comments.
Rape.
Violence.
Inversion.
Female raping male.
Payne’s fingertips dug into the thick white upholstery, his knuckles white even in the monitor’s glare.
Then it was over. Woman and cat lay curled in their womb-like pod. Asleep. Safe.
Payne’s fingers slowly relaxed. The tendons on the back of his hand softened into faint lines and disappeared into the texture of his skin.
From where he sat, Nick could see the sweat on Payne’s shirt, at the collar and under the arms. The air in the room suddenly smelled acrid with a musky sweat-odor even though the evening was in fact rather cool and a faint breeze fluttered from somewhere—perhaps through the crack between door and jamb—and chilled the room enough that Nick shivered.
Finally, Payne leaned into the sofa and breathed deeply. They didn’t talk much. Only a few comments, desultory at best, abrupt at worst. Mostly from Payne.
Then Nick left. At his own suggestion, not Payne’s. But Nick thought that Payne was as relieved as he was.
He let himself out.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Looking back later, Nick decided that that evening had begun the overt change. Oh, there were a couple more nights of mutually chosen films, of open discussions, of uninhibited enjoyment. But in spite of them, the pattern had begun to form.
Soon Nick began, however unconsciously, to avoid Payne’s invitations, fabricating excuses, afraid to tell his landlord flat out “No.” And the fact that Nick began thinking of him as the landlord stuck him as even more frustrating, at times threatening.
“Tomorrow night, Payne? Hey, I’m sorry, but I’ve got this book that I have to get back to special collections on Friday, and I’m only half way through. If only....”
Or “Tonight? I wish you’d asked an hour ago. But I’ve got to go....”
If Payne had pressed, Nick would not have been able to give a single, concrete reason not to come over.
Even so the invitations continued, if anything coming more frequently than before. Payne would drop by Nick’s house, three, four times a week, and more often than not, Nick ended up following him across the ragged grass and into Payne’s place to watch a film.
One Saturday they watched two films rather than the usual one, putting Nick a couple of hours behind in his own work and reminding him of C. S. Lewis’s comment about listening to the same symphony twice in one day.
Even with his hesitance about going over to Payne’s too often, the films threatened to eat up more time than he could easily allow. After all, he had to get through The Faerie Queene plus relevant criticism in the next few weeks or his whole schedule would be shot to hell.
Then, too, the kinds of films changed. Alien was only the beginning. Some of the others Payne mentioned had far less to offer in terms of plot, character, development, or literary or cinematic excellence. Some were merely excuses for decapitations or exploding crania or ripped limbs—in short, for spilling as many gallons of blood as possible on the screen. Extro and Videodrome and Silent Night, Bloody Night and Slaughter Junction left Nick with a bad taste in his mouth. Payne’s choices seemed to have degenerated into simple, mindless exercises in blood.
The night came, as perhaps it inevitably had to, when Nick simply walked out on one. The next day, he couldn’t even remember the name of the film. In the middle of a scene detailing with excruciating, almost lovingly depicted care the dismemberment of a six-year-old boy strangled moments before by his rapist, he stood up.
“Got some papers I have to read tonight,” he mumbled, his eyes drawn in spite of his revulsion to the scarlet splashes on the screen. The back of his legs bumped against his chair. “See you tomorrow.”
Payne didn’t seem to notice. He neither looked away from the screen nor answered. In the eerily-lit study, his face was silhouetted by crimson, the light slicing away at the angles of cheek and forehead, throwing his hair into black shadow. Nick shivered and backed out of the room. He made it through the hallway by the reflected light from the monitor. The crimson glare struck the metal-framed diplomas and glittered back at him. He heard sounds from the other rooms—muted sounds of monitors spieling their visual images into emptiness, spinning horrors for no one to see. He shivered again.
At the hallway door, he stopped. The living room was pitch dark. The screen was dead; the white carpet was a flood of blackness except for the first few feet from the hall. There, the nap was tinged with flickering red and blue and silver. He swallowed and stepped into the darkness.
Consciously deciding to cross that living room just might have been the bravest thing he ever did. The fact that the living-room screen had apparently shorted out and then suddenly flared on as he reached for the door knob didn’t help. His fingers were just about to curl around the knob that was visible only as a slight lessening of the darkness, a subtle glow tinged with hints of gold.
Suddenly the antique brass knob burst into flame, faceting light like a thousand shards of fire as it reflected something glowing and red behind him. He whirled, his heart thumping so hard that he could feel the blood pulsing through his temple, his neck. A scream caught behind his teeth and strangled itself on his fear. As he turned, a wave of static distorted the screen on the far wall, throwing the room into silver relief.
Then the static died, as suddenly as it had appeared. In its place, he saw
the red-stained corpse, a hand reaching into the open wound, tugging and pulling at something unnamable that brought the scream—or its twin—back into his throat. In the light of the monitor, the white room was tinged with scarlet, all but the black chess pieces glimmering on the board. In them, Nick saw the blood-red and ebony of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Unmask! Unmask!
He almost retched before he could spin on his heel and wrench the door open and run outside to stand beyond the bottom step of the porch for a long moment, bent over, shaking hands braced on shaking knees, drawing deep breaths of clean air and feeling his pulse gradually calming.
The street lights glowed somberly, sedately. Stars winked from behind occasional coverings of clouds. Somewhere at the end of the block the sounds of a car roared, died, roared again and gradually faded away as someone drove away from Greensward and disappeared into the night. Across the street, a light in a side window blinked off. Then the night was silent and still and cool, and Nick turned to go back up the steps, to cross the envelope of night within the porch and swing the heavy front door closed. It was already closed. He couldn’t remember closing it but the panel stared back at him like a slab of night, darker than the star-haggard sky.
In spite of his parting comment that night, Nick didn’t see Payne for three days. Payne never openly invited Nick over again to watch films. He came to Nick’s place occasionally for chess, but the games were taut, their cordiality forced on both sides. Then, suddenly, days might pass without one seeing the other. When their paths did cross, Payne was courteous, polite, friendly—but an essential something had disappeared.
Finally a week went by without Nick seeing Payne, hearing from him, or speaking to him. At the end of that week, working late one night on a difficult passage from Spenser, Nick suddenly froze, one hand halfway to the edge of the page, ready to turn it but stopped in the middle of the intention. For a moment, he couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He glanced at his clock.
Two-seventeen.
He listened carefully, at first hearing only the mechanical hummmmm of the clock, the faint creaking of the old house settling, sounds that he had grown used to; in fact, now he couldn’t sleep unless he could hear them. Then he heard the other sound, starting so faintly as to be nearly subliminal but even that subtle hint was enough to chill him.
He strained to hear, afraid to move, afraid even to lean over the haphazardly piled papers cluttering his desk and put his ear closer to the open window facing onto Payne’s place. It grew from faint to soft, then became unmistakable and chilling. It was the squeeeeak of the glider-swing on the porch as it swung back and forth, ripping squeals of protest from age-rusted links where they hung suspended from an eye-bolt in the splintered beam.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Yes, there was a girl. And it was true that Nick hadn’t seen her yet or heard her name. Payne had barely mentioned her to Nick. But she existed nonetheless.
Payne had met her purely by accident.
He had pretty much stuck close to the house during the first weeks after his arrival, other than for those occasional trips relating to Great-Aunt Emilia’s properties—as on the weekend when the Harrisons died. In fact, he had lived on Greensward Lane for nearly a month when he realized suddenly and inexplicably one bright Saturday morning that he had been living in Southern California all that time and had not yet even seen the ocean, other than a quick glimpse as his plane swept in at Los Angeles International, and then he had been too tired from the cross-country flight to notice much.
At first, it would have been too much trouble for Payne to get out there since he had no transportation for himself, but in the meantime—after finding out just how extensive Great-Aunt Emilia’s legacy was—he had bought a car, his first, actually. It was a brand new Toyota that cost him more than he had expected, even after becoming reasonably conditioned to Southern California prices by watching the local TV channels and being deluged with automobile commercials. But the mpg estimates seemed good and the engine ran smoothly and it was the right size for him to feel comfortable in the crush of freeway traffic.
About ten o’clock on the first Saturday after he bought it, he backed it down the driveway and pulled along the sidewalk in front of the house. The motor idled quietly. He had his hands draped over the steering wheel and had relaxed back against the bucket seat, smelling the smell of new car—Okay, it comes directly out of an aerosol can labeled “New Car Smell,” he reminded himself, but who cares. It’s a great smell, especially when the car’s mine. He closed his eyes, listening to the soft purr of the motor. The sun was already warm, the sky bright, the air light with the fragrance of flowers and new-mown grass from across the street. He wore a pair of old trunks, a well-worn T-shirt, and an old pair of Adidas runners.
He opened one eye a crack and glanced at his own lawn. Along the crumbling concrete walk, strands of Bermuda grass trailed over the edges, making the whole place look shaggy already, even after the crew-cut he gave it only.... Shit, almost a month ago, he thought. I gotta get on it or it’ll be so tall I’ll never get that mower through it.
An image of Charles Schulz’s claustrophobic Snoopy lost in over-grown grass popped into his mind and he grinned. In fact, he even went so far as to cut the engine, open the car door, and drop one foot to the cracked asphalt before an inner voice sliced through the image, shattering visions of Snoopy and the ragged lawn and any thoughts of work today:
You’ve never even been to the beach.
Right. Stupid. All this time and never seen the beach.
He pulled his foot back in, slammed the door shut, and, then and there, decided it was time to change that insane state of things.
He didn’t know exactly how to get to the beaches, but he did know that the Pacific Ocean was pretty big and lay pretty much to the west of Los Angeles. Since not even he could miss something that big, he began by driving south and east on the 101, back toward the San Fernando Valley, then transitioning (he hated that word, “I transition, you transition, he/she/it transitions!” but the radio traffic-reporters insisted on using it, that was what everyone called it out here, shifting from one freeway to the next) to the south-bound lanes of the 405 that would take him toward LA. After all, it wasn’t as if he were late for an appointment or anything.
He wandered for an hour or so, enjoying the sights, trying to get used to freeway driving, mentally comparing California drivers with the ones he had known back east. Rather to his surprise, he found that most were usually more courteous and only a few sometimes crazier. Finally he found himself on Highway 10 cutting through mid-town Los Angeles toward Santa Monica, heading straight-arrow west. Santa Monica. He recognized the name from television shows and movies
The magic name!
There was a beach out there somewhere if he just kept driving west.
About the time he spotted the first crescent of sand, the freeway died out, arcing north out of a short tunnel to become Pacific Coast Highway—another name to conjure up images of sun and romance, made familiar by film and television.
He kept driving as the highway turned northward, glancing at the stretches of sand to his left, catching inviting glimpses of bikinis and frisbees and volleyballs, trying to keep one eye on the lanes of traffic and another on the ocean. His radio hummed quietly—two characters interspersing old-time records with comedy routines in oddly androgynous voices.
He drove on. After all the time it had taken him to get out and find the ocean (as if it were lost!) he didn’t particularly want to stop. Just driving along with the windows wide open to the breezes, breathing salty air and listening to the subtle roar of the surf was worth the time.
Fifteen minutes later he passed a sign reading “Malibu.” Another Mecca for sun-worshippers, whose fame had penetrated even the heartland of Pennsylvania. You’re really here, Payne old boy, right in the homeland of sun tans and movie stars. He grinned and slowed down, trying to see the magic for himself. Whatever it was that he had expected, Malibu disappoin
ted him. Most of the way he couldn’t even see the ocean for the buildings. The beach side of Pacific Coast Highway was lined with tall, narrow houses—rabbit-hutches, his grandmother would have called them—with garages doors facing PCH like blank faces without mind or soul; the ones that were open revealed dark, raw throats angling back from the pavement.
The fabled golden beaches were hidden, draped, obscured. Further on, he could see where the ocean bowed outward, pulling the houses even farther from the highway and forming The Colony, where the stars really lived. Entry there was obviously by invitation only; Payne passed the formidable guardhouse without slowing.
He headed north over curving hills overgrown with estates and houses surrounded by pools and tennis courts and eroding sandstone abutments cloaked in violet verbena and scarlet ice plant. At a spot called Point Dume, he passed a shopping center that seemed out of place, too normal for Mecca. Just beyond it the highway swung to the left and slid down the ocean side of the hill. At the base, the road split into a Y where a green sign announced “Public Beach” and pointed with a weathered arrow along the left-hand branching.
For no good reason except that the sun was warm and high and the air cool and fresh, he turned left, guiding the Toyota along a two-lane road that threatened to dead-end at the beach. At the last moment, though, the road turned left again, angling south along the base of sandstone cliffs crumbling into rank undergrowth and nascent sand. Lying on his right now, the ocean glittered beyond waves of white sand and tanned flesh. He kept driving.
Halfway along the beach, he shut off the radio. The sounds of kids squealing as they built sand castles and teenagers thump-ing volleyballs across sand courts billowed through his window.
At the end of the stretch, the road bore left again, this time upward, climbing above the beach toward monstrous homes perched like cormorants above the sand. At least one stuck out a dozen feet or more from the cliff, a foot-thick slab of concrete cantilevered into dizzying space. Payne felt momentarily light-headed just glancing up at it.
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