Except that Payne had not been home working in the yard earlier that day. He had still been gone, out of town, away on a trip.
Well, Nick decided, it could just be a trick of the light—or the fact that it was closing in on three o’clock. But he couldn’t help glancing at that hand moving slowly up and down the nubbed terrycloth as if it had a will of its own (the monster with five fingers the hand that terrible film with Michael Caine as a cartoonist of all things taken over by his own hand that’s not his anymore even the Crawling Eye would be better than that) occasionally catching the edge of the towel with its nail and tugging it up a bit.
Nick swallowed.
If it weren’t Payne sitting over there, he thought, I would be getting the hell out of here, right now. I didn’t need this kind of thing. But it is Payne and he needs me.
They sat for over an hour, watching until the end of the film. Nick never did find out its title or plot. He couldn’t even recognize the characters, so it must have been a low-budget thing, maybe foreign—the pacing and setting suggested Canadian or Australian, but he couldn’t tell for sure.
The screen never flickered once. Nothing unusual happened. Except that Payne finally relaxed. His hand uncurled and rested limply on the arm of the couch, palm up and fingers curved slightly, naturally. He seemed tired, like a marathon runner during the first seconds after a race.
When the closing credits began, he closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the couch.
“I guess there wasn’t anything wrong, after all,” he said after a few moments. The credits finished. The copyright logo flashed by—the film was Canadian, Nick noted—and then there was just static and snow. Payne’s fingers jerked convulsively once or twice when the static began, then relaxed again.
“I must have been dreaming or imagining,” he said at last. “I’m sorry, Nick. I shouldn’t have kept you here all this time. I shouldn’t even have called you. I can’t think now why I did.”
Nick made some slight motion, a wave of the hand to say “Hey, that’s okay, I didn’t have anything else to do but sleep.”
Payne shook his head. “No, I mean it. I’m really sorry for all of this. But I’m glad that you did come. We haven’t seen much of each other lately. You know, with me being out of town, and with Cathy and everything. We’ll have to get together sometime. I want you to meet her. She’s really...well, she’s...I think you’ll really like her.”
He stumbled into silence.
“Yeah, let’s do that.” Nick couldn’t think of anything else to say and hated himself for falling back on that old line—Fer sure! Let’s do lunch sometime! How California! How disgustingly Valley!
He glanced around, as if looking for a clock. It’s getting late, his mind kept urging him, restating the obvious.
“Look, I’ve got to get going now, Payne. But thanks for...the evening.” Payne smiled. When he stood, the towel loosened around his waist. Nick’s heart flipped, missing a beat. Then Payne cinched it tighter, unconscious even of doing it, and led the way back into the living room.
“Thanks again, Nick.”
“It’s okay. Call if you need...well, you know.”
“Here,” Nick said, pulling the robe off. “Thanks for the use of it. I was pretty chilly for a while.”
Payne smiled and took the robe. For an instant his fingers touched Nick’s and Nick had the most disconcerting sensation that it wasn’t Payne smiling at him but someone else. The fingers touched again, and Nick pulled his hand away is he trying to come on to me or something?—No, don’t be stupid, it’s only Payne just like always, only Payne, relax already—and stepped outside onto the porch.
He turned to say goodbye. His glance drifted over Payne’s shoulder, down the long central hallway. It was dark. Payne smiled again and nodded.
“Thanks,” he said quietly.
There was no sound as Payne swung the heavy door closed.
Nick didn’t realize until he was halfway across the lawn that even the thin strips of light that had oozed from beneath the closed doors that faced the hall had disappeared. The hall was dark. The rooms on each side, including the kitchen, were dark. Everything was dark but the living room and the entry hall. But Payne had never left his side all night. He had never touched a light switch.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Payne woke late the next morning. It was almost the next afternoon, in fact, it was so late. He had an odd half-memory of having made a fool of himself somehow, like the after-image of some ridiculously stereotypic lampshade-over-the-head stunt at a party that had suddenly grown wilder than anyone expected. He felt hung-over without having been drunk. For a moment after waking, he couldn’t place the problem.
Then he remembered.
Nick.
He had called Nick for assurance, cried out for help, for all the world like a child imagining some monster lurking in the shadows outside his window and calling to Mommy and Daddy for help. Please Nick save me from the bogeyman from the nasty television that shows things I don’t want to see.
For a second, Payne felt like he had as a child when he had vacationed every summer on his grandfather Gunnison’s farm in the mid-west. Grandpa had lived in a place so small it would probably have fit into the Tamarind Valley shopping mall with room left over for a respectable football field. The old man had been about the last person in the county to invest in indoor plumbing, so even Payne, young as he was, could remember a nightly run to the outhouse. It wasn’t far, maybe a hundred yards, but it seemed a hundred miles through weeping box-elders, past the haunted relic of an antique sleigh long since a rustic (and rusted) condominium for generations of spiders and mice, its runners so heavily oxidized that they had virtually become part of the soil. The dirt path to the outhouse skirted the granary and disappeared between two rows of trees overhung with deadwood that drooped skeletally above the walkway even in summer when the rest of the branches were in full leaf. Farther along, maybe a mile or so, the trail crossed into the apple orchard and intersected the path the cows took on their stately progress morning and evening to the milking shed.
But the outhouse wasn’t that far down the trail. It hunched like a dead thing, directly beneath the heavy-hanging shadows of the trees.
At night, trailing with a couple of the other half-dozen or so grandchildren at Grandpa’s during the summer, Payne knew the trip had to be at least five miles long. One night, at the end of the line heading back to the house, relieved of the growing bladder pressure but if possible even more skittery and frightened than on the way out, Payne saw something.
Even before he glanced over his shoulder, he had known it was there, had felt its presence. With a prickle up his spine that filled his bladder again, he sensed breath hot and heavy against the small hairs of his neck. He almost smelled the stench of the unnamable thing. In another instant the heavy cloying coppery smell would assault his nostrils; they flared wide with fright and anticipation. In another instant....
He shivered, shuddered, waited for the touch of teeth, of claws....
Screwing up his courage, he slowed, his feet kicking tiny whorls in the dust. The toes of his summer-scuffed Keds trudged through dirt suddenly as thick as the dried-up library paste they used in his Sunday School class in the old rock church on the hill. In the church above the shadows and the trees. Where it was safe.
He stopped, his heart thudding. He could break and run, or he could turn to face the monster. It was simple: him, or the thing back there. He couldn’t ignore it any longer. He closed his eyes and strained to hear any small signs of its approach. A leaf crackled. A twig snapped where there shouldn’t have been any sound.
He took a deep breath and held it.
He turned his head.
He screamed.
His feet churning through the dust like furious pinwheels as he ran for the safety of his grandfather’s outstretched arms. The other kids laughed, but Grandpa just scooped Payne up into his arms and cuddled him against the rough denim bib o
veralls he always wore. Payne remembered the cold embossed metal buttons—“Oshkosh” or “Pennys”—against his cheeks as he sobbed out his terror.
That night, he slept between Grandma and Grandpa, listening anxiously to their deep, regular breathing, smelling the stale smells of their bedroom: Grandma’s lavender potpourri bags in the drawers, Grandpa’s liniment pungent and minty on the window sill, age-browned lace cinnamon sachets hanging in the cedar-lined closet. The smells muted and mixed into something uniquely Grandma and Grandpa, echoed by the faint ticking of the antique Seth Thomas clock on the dresser. He didn’t remember sleeping at all, but somehow it was suddenly full morning light and Grandma and Grandpa were gone and he was alone in the old room filled with shadows and memories. From outside, he could hear the other kids yelling and playing.
That morning, after breakfast, Grandpa led Payne by the hand back down the trail. Payne pointed out the place behind the third willow on the left where the monster had crouched. Grandpa circled the trunk. Payne’s heart kept counterpoint to the old man’s movements as Grandpa solemnly examined layers of dirt and decaying leaves, prying at decaying bark with fingers stick-thin and gnarled with arthritis and age. Finally he straightened.
“Payne.”
Slowly, like a condemned man marching to his doom, Payne approached, unable to look into Grandpa’s face, terrified of whatever Grandpa must have found; without seeing, he knew what the marks would look like, deeply cut prints of long claws, curving, slicing into the hard-packed ground.
He looked down.
There was nothing.
Only Grandpa’s mud-caked boots amid wind-whirled piles of disintegrating leaves. A black beetle crawled from beneath the skeleton of a box-elder leaf, then scuttled back when Grandpa shifted his weight and his boot crunched against the leaf. The leaf quavered, then everything was still. The beetle was gone. When Payne looked up, Grandpa smiled, gently and quietly.
But the other kids had followed and now hooted their laughter. They spent the rest of the day weaving in and out of the willows playing monster. Payne hid in the attic among the shadows and the dust and the old forgotten boxes and the bluebottle flies rapping incessantly at the window in the western gable. When the pressure in his bladder built beyond what he could stand, he still couldn’t face the cousins so he slipped out the kitchen door and, ignoring for the moment his fear of snakes and other creepy things, crept through Grandma’s raspberry patch and into the apple orchard on the other side. He finally found a gooseberry bush along the fence, one large enough to blot out most of the world, and pushed back the branches and peed against an old, brittle fence post the bush had long before hidden away while he prayed please god don’t let anyone see me here don’t let grandma see me doing this here!
Even as an adult, Payne blushed at the memory of the terror and the humiliation he had felt that night.
Now he had done the same thing again—panicked over imaginary monsters and gone running to the nearest person for help. At least, he thought, he hadn’t told Nick everything. He hadn’t blithered on to Nick about the images. Be grateful for small favors.
He swallowed. His throat hurt and his hand ached clear up to the elbow as if he had bruised it or over-worked it and the muscles had tightened. He massaged it with his other hand. He wasn’t hungry, which was just as well since there wasn’t much to eat in the house. He would have to do some major shopping soon or content himself with living like old Mother Hubbard’s dog.
(Later, he decided that that final thought had been the last piece in a complex of images: night, fright, day, shame, hiding in an attic, Old Mother Hubbard, like Grandma still wearing those old-fashioned aprons regardless of what she had on underneath. To the end of her life, she wore polyester pantsuits with nylon blouses and flour-sack printed cotton Mother Hubbard aprons, some of them twenty or thirty years old from the looks of them.)
Still in bed, half way to resuming sleep in spite of the lateness, he was startled fully awake by a knock on the front door.
“Minute,” he yelled, his voice echoing down the hallway to bounce off the white walls in the living room. “Minute.”
He struggled into his jeans, pulling a T-shirt over his head as he half-ran barefoot down the hallway and across the living room. He jerked the door open.
“Mr., uh...Mr. Gunnison?”
“Yeah.” Payne searched his memory for some hook, some name to put to the kid standing in the shadows, thumb hitched through a fraying belt loop, a slip of grimy paper in his other hand. The kid looked sixteen, maybe seventeen on a good day. He could use a bath and a clean shirt, Payne thought, maybe even a haircut.
Payne glanced at the slip of paper and saw his name and address scrawled in smudged pencil. He glanced over the kid’s shoulder. A Ford mini-van canted on the pavement, its front passenger wheel settling into the grass just over the curb. “Crusade for the Blind” shouted in red block letters on the white side of the van.
“Yeah,” Payne repeated, shaking his head to remove the last traces of wake-up fog and finally remembering.
“Pick up.” The way the kid said it, the phrase was as much statement as question. He was chewing gum; his jaw muscles moved rhythmically as he chewed.
“Out back,” Payne said.
The kid started into the house but Payne stepped outside and shut the door behind him.
“This way.”
“Sure,” the kid said, eyeing Payne as if to ask whaccha got in there, a crack factory ’r’ somethin’? The chewing speeded up; the jaw muscles bulged and deflated, bulged and deflated.
Payne ignored him.
On the back porch stood the three large cardboard boxes that held most of Great-Aunt Emilia’s cast-offs, the things she directed should be donated to a deserving charity. The boxes had already been packed when Payne arrived, in fact, as if Great-Aunt Emilia had left a list of disposables and some obsequious lesser clerk from the lawyer’s office had spent the day (or maybe several of them) collecting the oddments: tattered books, half-empty notebooks with the used pages neatly severed at the bindings and filed elsewhere, the occasional duplicate VCR cassette or DVD (Payne had checked them carefully; all of those in the boxes were worn, ready to be tossed). Nothing much of value. But the will had directed that they boxes go to a good cause, and who was he to argue.
“These,” he said curtly, pointing to the collection.
The kid said nothing but shouldered the first box and tucked the second, smaller box under his other arm. Payne watched him struggle around the side of the house, the smaller box threatening to slip at any moment and scatter its contents on the ragged grass.
That one had some old catalogues, he remembered. It was heavier than it looked. He glanced at the third one. He hadn’t opened it, hadn’t gotten around to it or had decided that he really didn’t care—he wasn’t quite sure which. The top flaps were folded over but not fastened. Idly he pulled one flap back.
Clothing.
A lot of Great-Aunt Emilia’s things still hung in the closet in the front study, ghostly reminders of mortality sealed behind a two-inch-thick panel door. He would have to pack them up and get rid of them too, but he hadn’t gotten around to that either. The clothes were obviously cast-offs. A torn apron with scorch marks around the hem as if someone had tried to take a hot pan out of the oven using the apron as a hot-pot-holder, and held it too long. Three white bath towels so worn that any design was now more problematical than obvious.
He picked up the towels to see what was underneath.
Underwear.
Payne was not unsophisticated, but for some inexplicable reason, he flushed at seeing the clothing. Unmentionables, he thought, unconsciously using his grandmother’s phrasing: bras so worn that the elastic in the back had begun to flake through the material; slips translucently thin; panties much briefer than he would have expected for someone of Great-Aunt Emilia’s age; half a dozen pair of nylons balled together in the corner of the box.
“That it?”
&nb
sp; The kid’s voice startled Payne. He slapped the cardboard flaps closed and nudged the box with the side of his foot.
“One more.”
“Sure.” The kid reached down for the box. “Want a receipt?”
“Huh.”
“Receipt. For the stuff. Tax deduction come April.”
“No, no, I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Then the kid was gone. The screen door slammed behind him, leaving Payne alone on the porch. Payne followed him with his eyes until the kid disappeared around the corner. A few moments later, he heard the roar of the van and a flash of white reflected in a dusty pane in a back window at Nick’s place. For an instant, the red block letters—backward and cruelly distorted by the aging glass—rippled and flowed, and then the kid and the van and the boxes were gone.
Payne went inside and leaned against the cool kitchen wall, dead-white inside where it was clean and safe but rusty gray outside and streaked with weather and dirt and fading paint that had suffered decades of abusive sunlight. His shoulders sloped back until they touched smooth plaster. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the coolness.
He must have drifted off what kind of an idiot would fall asleep standing up against a wall like that stupid horse in Cat Ballou because gradually he felt the whiteness grow and deepen until it began to seep through his thin T-shirt and twist along the curve of his spine, even in those places where the flesh did not touch the wall at all. The whiteness grabbed his flesh and grew there, knotting him to the wall. Tendrils of terror penetrated deeper and deeper until it seemed as if the whiteness would reach his center and obliterate it. And now along his spine he felt fingers, hands sticky-hot with sweat and sexual fever, reaching through the whiteness to grasp hold of him and twist him into something different, something only partly, perhaps not at all Payne Gunnison. Something he couldn’t understand. The hands pressed slimily against his sides, then penetrated to caress his organs—kidney, heart, intestines—and draw from them their life-bearing heat. His tissues froze at the touch of the probing fingers until Payne was a cold whiteness, a frozen barrenness with heat and life and color diminishing until it survived only at the core.
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