Static!

by Michael R Collings

  He must have missed the credits—but if this was just a nightmare what else could it be maybe there hadn’t been any. That was it, a nightmare, a bad dream. Too much pressure, too much Cathy, too much....

  A name flashed through his mind like a knife, a long and cruel knife, bloody and sharp.

  Cruising.

  Gays.

  Murders.

  Pacino undercover as one of them, one of the S&M underground.

  Payne giggled, the sound suggesting how close he had come to hysteria in the past few seconds. From nowhere, he remembered a ridiculous joke about M&Ms that he had not understood for years. Then the giggle cut off and his jaw tensed again.

  He tried to get up, to turn the set off. He struggled to reach the soda can, to throw it through the monitor or short out the electrical circuit with the rapidly warming residue of soda—to do anything to remove the images flickering across the screen, through his eyes, boring inexorably and perversely into his mind.

  He couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t want to.

  Paralysis sliced like pain through his back. Fiery hands held him down this time, beginning at his hip and surging up his spine, along his shoulders and down his arm, like the numbness he used to get after typing too long on a term paper in school, only this time it was not a numbness but a fire that burned itself out in his fingertips. It was as if he were an electrical conductor, carrying a charge through his body and dispersing it into the fabric of his bed.

  He screamed, once and loudly, just as the monitor’s volume surged, drowning his voice with a black wave of city sounds.

  I give up, he panted to himself, to the monitor, to no one in particular. Do what you want!

  The tendons in his neck retracted as he fell against the pillow.

  He drew a deep breath, quivering with pain and receding tension, sobbing as he stared at the screen.

  Pacino penetrating the underground.

  The murders began—not so much graphic as suggested but hideous nonetheless.

  Twice more he tried to move, tried to wrench himself from the bed as Pacino tried to wrench himself out of that world of darkness and regain the light. Each time the pain returned. The second time brought a tingling pain that focused behind his eyes and turned the room bright with lights. His body seemed to glow, a blue electrical glow that distorted the outlines of his chest and groin and legs until they seemed alien, withered, foreshortened and incomplete. Payne didn’t dare resist anymore, didn’t dare even look closer at the hollowness where his legs joined. He simply stopped struggling, gave in, watched the images as they flickered through their shadow lives, feeling himself like a character in another film, the guy who was pinioned by machines, his eyelids clamped open as he was forced to watch unspeakable violence to the accompaniment of Beethoven’s Ninth.

  When he fell back to the pillow for the last time, he could barely focus on the screen. He didn’t even try to turn away, didn’t try to raise a hand or shift his weight on the sweat-soaked sheets. He lay back and watched, grateful that the blue nimbus was receding, too tired for anything but shallow respirations through his half-opened mouth.

  Peripherally, without moving his eyes even fractionally downward and away from the screen, he could see his chest, the bulge of fabric at his groin, the swells of muscle that were his thighs and legs. But somewhere, deep inside, he felt gouged, defaced, emasculated and sliced into tiny pieces of bloody flesh, like the victims of the deranged killers in the film.

  Like the pictures in the attic.

  The film ground inexorably on. Men touched men, kissed men, killed men—he swallowed bile, nearly vomited on himself but choked it down.

  At the end of the film, the tug returned, along with the skyline and the water, now only faintly rippled and peaceful. Credits began to roll, then faded out....

  And the film began again.

  Payne bit back a scream. He couldn’t take it again, couldn’t lie here, invisibly restrained, forced to watch filth and perversion and....

  Then he did scream.

  This time the black object was no dismembered arm. It was a body. Bloated and scored with wounds. But he recognized it. He recognized Cathy.

  * * * * * * *

  When he woke, his body felt hideously stiff, used and abused. He woke suddenly, his eyes flying open and his head snapping up to glance around the room as if he were expecting something. His heart thumped and his muscles twitched. He couldn’t remember why.

  There had been a dream, he remembered that much. A bad one, from the way he felt.

  All he could recall of it was vague and shadowy. Something unpleasant had happened. To someone.

  He couldn’t remember, but his body knew. He tried not to move. Only his eyes shifted as he surveyed the room.

  The monitor.

  His skin ran cold and curdled into gooseflesh when his eyes passed over the empty gray square.

  There was nothing there now. Only the dead gray of an unused television screen. He breathed deeply, trying to stretch cramped muscles. It felt as if he hadn’t moved all night. He was more tired now than when he went to bed, after Cathy....

  He stretched. He stretched again, this time languidly and liquidly, and smiled.

  Everything about last night had been odd, but in the light of morning he remembered the chess game as unusually exciting. There was something about Cathy in the residue of his dream, but he nudged it aside, remembering instead their moments in the darkness, on the white carpet. He smiled and stretched again. He felt good. Damn good. It felt good.

  He wasn’t even particularly surprised to find the front of his briefs faintly stained and stiff.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The next time Nick saw Payne was early on a Friday afternoon. It had been even hotter than usual a scorcher for Southern California. The air was still and oppressive, boring heavily into lungs and skin even before the sun rose.

  For Nick, it was like a nightmarish repeat of his first day at UCLA years before. The sun had barely risen when he left Chuck’s to drive into school, but his car radio had reported over 80˚ by 5:30 a.m. By 2:00 that afternoon, the thermometer had topped 118˚ in the shade. Temperatures never soared quite that high in Tamarind Valley, probably because of the mountain breezes at night.

  No, it wasn’t record-breaking, 100-degrees-plus sizzling, but it was hot, nevertheless, on that Friday afternoon.

  Nick had walked down to the twenty-four-hour store a couple of blocks away, a more expensive place than the big chain markets that lay embedded like fossils in each of the malls along the main streets leading to the freeways. But the place was conveniently close that’s why they call ’em convenience stores dumbo and anyway he only needed a few things. It would be a good walk, he thought, a little exercise for legs cramped from too much sitting.

  By the time he returned, though, he was soaked through with sweat, panting and enervated. He set the grocery bag on the kitchen table, stopping only long enough to slide the milk into the fridge. The carton already felt warm. Nick had to have his milk ice-cold, otherwise he would have probably opened the carton and drunk the whole two quarts in one gulp. Ice-cold milk was his weakness, especially on hot days.

  But he had to be content with the left-over two inches in a glass of soda he had slid onto the empty top shelf of the fridge that morning. The stuff tasted flat and overly sweet but at least it was cold.

  He was still nursing it along when the doorbell rang. He got up. The vinyl of the chair stuck to his back and legs. He felt sticky and gritty himself and wished that he had showered as soon as he got home. By the time he opened the door, he was irritated, almost angry—at himself, at the day, at the heat, at whoever the hell was interrupting him in his eager pursuit of absolute indolence.

  It was Payne.

  For a moment, Nick was puzzled. Payne seemed oddly out of focus, paler than Nick had last seen him; then Nick blinked to clear his eyes of a sweaty film and Payne shifted into focus again.

  Later, Nick wished that he
had paid more attention, but life is made up of wishful re-livings of critical moments that somehow escaped our attention the first time.

  Even had he thought twice, it might not have changed anything, even at that.

  It might already have gone too far.

  “Hi,” Payne said, rather listlessly Nick thought.

  “Come on in,” Nick said, opening the door and letting in a burst of hot dry air that somehow seemed appropriate, as if it were intimately associated with Payne’s presence.

  Payne shook his head. “No, just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be out of town again for a couple of days.”

  He paused briefly, no more than the space of a single breath, but enough to make Nick feel uncomfortable. “Cathy and me,” he continued. The tone was hurried, rather peremptory and brusque. “I’ll bring her over sometime and let you meet her,” he said, gesturing absently with his right hand, as if that made his lapse in introducing his girl to his friend somehow all right. “Right now, we’re in too much of a hurry. She’s waiting for me in the car,” he added, again rather oddly, as if he wanted to be sure that Nick kept this one datum firmly in the front of his mind.

  Nick glanced over Payne’s shoulder toward the car parked along the front sidewalk. He could see a couple of suitcases jumbled in the back seat and what might have been a head and shoulders outlined in the front. He couldn’t make out any details.

  Just then Payne shifted his weight and inadvertently blocked Nick’s view. Nick looked back to his face—but even that was shadowed by the bright sunlight behind him.

  Payne rushed on. “Sorry to wait so long, but it just slipped my mind. Could you watch the place for a couple of days? Here’s the key. Nothing to do, really, just make sure no moving vans pull up and cart everything off.” He laughed but there seemed little humor in the sound.

  Nick felt worse and worse about taking the key, but Payne just stood there, hand outstretched, the little brass key glinting.

  “By the way,” he finished, “feel free to go over and watch a film any time you want.”

  It was almost the old Payne, but there was an undercurrent of force in his voice. It was as if he knew Nick wouldn’t—couldn’t refuse him. Payne’s tone, his attitude, even the way he held the key out in his cupped palm, the fingers curved and tight so that tendons highlighted along the back of his hand, it all reminded Nick fleetingly of The Greer and the aura she radiated through the black slit of an opening when she thrust her hand out for the rent envelope. She knew that Nick had it. He had no choice.

  That was how it felt standing in front of Payne and watching the little brass key glittering in the sunlight.

  So Nick laughed and said “Sure, any time. Don’t mention it. And have a good weekend.”

  Payne turned and started toward the car. Then he stopped and looked back at Nick. “Thanks, Nick. Have a good time.” He smiled.

  The skin on Nick’s back crawled—from a sudden chill as the afternoon breeze, hot as it was, played along his spine. He nodded and Payne left.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Nick couldn’t concentrate on anything. He tried reading Spenser in the back yard, stretched out on an old recliner in the shadow of a sycamore decades older than he was, sipping lemonade and trying desultorily to make sense out of Una and the Red Cross Knight. It didn’t work.

  Finally, feeling extraordinarily virtuous for having made the valiant effort, he shuffled back into the house—more a hothouse than anything now that the late afternoon heat had settled with a devilish vengeance—stuffed Spenser back into his niche on the shelf and pulled out something lighter.

  Christine. Stephen King’s haunted car. The machine that killed. And loved it.

  The book seemed the right choice. Nick hefted it in his hand.

  Even the weight seemed right, the pressure of the pages against his palm and fingers. Almost immediately he began reading…re-reading, really, for the fifth or sixth time.

  The afternoon cooled down from Inferno to merely unbearable torture. Nick noticed the occasional honk or screech of tires at an intersection, usually at entirely appropriate places in the text. He hadn’t read the novel for a some years, and in between had seen Carpenter’s film version. But even that had been a long while before. Most of his recollections of visual details were vague and at times he couldn’t tell whether the text had just lost some of its force or whether he was remembering something from the film that detracted from his concentration.

  The idea came gradually.

  Why not see if Payne has a copy.

  There was a better than good chance that the film was there, given the extent of his collection.

  Okay, then, that was the plan. Light supper, maybe a short nap. Then cap the evening off with Christine. He would even take his copy of the novel along, work through it while watching the film and make some notes on the changes. He might even pretend that he was doing some kind of literary study on the relationship between verbal and visual in contemporary popular imagination. That should justify the expenditure of time to good ol’ Spenser the next time Nick took him down for another try.

  It was a good enough plan. It just didn’t work out the way Nick anticipated.

  By early afternoon he was logy and hot, and for some reason—heat and inactivity and boredom all combining, probably—he felt far drowsier than he should have. He had given the house a desultory cleaning, a task he normally disliked but that seemed surprisingly fulfilling this time.

  One room led to another and finally there was nothing left except to straighten a few books, put away a pile of clean socks, and wash three water-speckled glasses huddling on the Formica counter under the shade of the kitchen cabinets.

  Five minutes later, even those chore were finished.

  Nick felt gritty. I could probably smell myself a mile away with a cross-wind blowing straight from the factories in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he thought, so he stripped and showered, reveling in the coolness of water pelting his skin. After the heat the coolness was invigorating.

  He finally stepped out of the shower, toweled down, and went into the bedroom. He fully intended to dress but flopped down on the bed instead.

  Just for a second.

  Just to rest his eyes.

  The next thing he knew he was waking up. It was twilight outside, a hot stifling twilight, the smog catching fire at the south-western rim of the basin and spreading its flaming orange eastward to collide with the cooler-tones of darkening blue.

  He felt sick. His head pounded and it was hard to breathe.

  Damn it, I should have known better sleeping during a hot afternoon always does that to me.

  He got up and pulled on clean shorts, slipped a T-shirt over his sleep-rumpled hair, and padded into the kitchen. His stomach grumbled but dinner was the last thing he wanted to face, so he settled for a slice of bread and some cold milk. By now it was icy, just right. He poured a glass, spread a thin layer of raspberry jam on the bread—the slice was already dried out in the minute or so it had sat on the plate while he got the jam bottle from the fridge—and took a bite. He chewed once, twice, three times, then stopped, the lump of bread settling at the back of his throat like a sodden gag. He swallowed hard and gulped some milk to get rid of the bad taste the bread had left.

  For a long time, he sat there by the table, staring at nothing in particular, feeling lonely and tired and depressed. He thought of calling someone to come over then realized that there was really no one he wanted to call, or could call. Most of his friends from school were gone for the summer...and they weren’t really friends, just acquaintances.

  I don’t have any friends, he thought suddenly and felt stark tears welling at the corners of his eyes.

  The guys at school were gone for the summer. Payne was gone for the weekend. With Cathy.

  Nick envied Payne and Cathy, away somewhere together.

  Payne.

  Nick had forgotten all about his earlier intention to go next door and watch a film. That would help ki
ll an otherwise hideous evening.

  He jumped up, nearly spilling the last inch of milk in the glass. He gulped it down, even though it was verging on tepid by now, and slid the carton back into the fridge, slammed the door, and raced through the house, pausing only long enough to grab his copy of Christine and Payne’s key.

  He was halfway across the lawn before he realized that he was still barefoot. But for a change, the normally rough-edged Bermuda grass that flourished in Tamarind Valley’s worn out soil felt soft and cool beneath his feet.

  As soon as he cut through the pyracantha hedge, though, he was wishing for sandals or thongs. Payne’s lawn was harsher than his, rougher, prickly against his soles. Payne hadn’t mowed it for several weeks and the grass was tough and uneven. It was turning brown, too—Nick hadn’t noticed any water on for over a month. He reminded himself to check with Payne and see if he should take care of it. After all, it was only a matter of opening a couple of valves beside the back porch.

  He was still considering making the offer when he stopped, midway between his house and Payne’s, his shirt and thin shorts already sticking to his damp skin, the cover of Christine lurid red and black in the fading sunset.

  He stopped.

  Dead still.

  It was hard to breathe.

  The house was threatening him.

  That sounded stupid, he knew. Months later, as he wrote about that afternoon, trying to make some fragmentary sense of what had happened to them all, the statement looked stupid as he typed the words on paper, sitting in the bright light of a winter afternoon. Over the mountains, thunderheads were piling up for a storm. The air was like crystal. And he looked at what he had just written and wondered about himself and his sanity.

  The house was threatening him.

  It was insane. But it was also true.

  The house glowered, threatened. The front porch receded almost visibly into deeper shadow. The thick oak-paneled front door lay hidden within the darkness. So did the glider, although Nick thought that he heard a faint squeal from its rusted chain—it was patently impossible in that thick twilight stillness, but he thought so anyway.