Static!

by Michael R Collings

  He swerved the car into the driveway and killed the engine.

  “This it?” Alan said sullenly, craning his neck around to get a better view of the house. In the darkness there was little visible except white window frames caught between the moonlight and the harsh shadows from the eaves.

  “Yeah,” Payne answered in the same harsh tones he had used during the entire drive.

  “Figures,” Alan grunted.

  Payne swung his door open and stepped onto the driveway. He closed the car door quietly and started toward the back porch, his shoes crunching lightly on the thin layer of gravel that led to the back door. Behind him, Alan had gotten out as well. Payne heard a muffled thump as the door closed.

  “Quiet,” he said.

  Alan looked over at him, then glanced around as if he were afraid that the two of them were being watched.

  The neighborhood was dark. Not yet 10:45 and already almost all of the lights were out.

  Halfway to the back porch, Payne changed his mind.

  “This way,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. His foot caught in the ankle-high grass as he walked around to the front, giving a curious swisssh sound to his passing. Alan walked without making any sound.

  They mounted the porch. Alan waited patiently while Payne dug in his pocket for the key and rattled it twice against the lock before managing to insert it. The click of metal against metal rang loudly in the quiet as the lock mechanism slipped and the brass knob turned with a low squeal.

  Payne stepped in without a word. Alan followed, waiting just inside the entryway for Payne to turn the lights on.

  As soon as they were on, Payne motioned Alan ahead. He lingered for a moment to lock the front door and draw the curtains that separated the living room from the shallow entryway. He snapped them shut with a practiced flick of his wrist, yet realized with a distant shock that he was closing them for the first time since great-Aunt Emilia had left the house for the final time.

  “Weird,” Alan said almost immediately, then looked challengingly at Payne. “The color and all. Drab.”

  “I like it,” Payne said curtly.

  “Yeah,” Alan said.

  Again the silence lengthened uncomfortably before either of them moved.

  “Take your jacket?” Payne said suddenly.

  “Sure,” Alan said, shrugging out of the split leather jacket and handing it over by its collar. Payne disappeared into the hall, opened a door and after a few seconds closed it again. He reappeared in the living room without the jacket.

  Alan was stalking around the room, staring at the monitors. As Payne watched him, watched carefully molded muscles move beneath tight layerings of cloth, Alan suddenly seemed more bestial than human, a raving, ravishing beast only partially trained and needing desperately to be caged.

  And tamed.

  And broken.

  And used.

  Ric would like him flickered through Payne’s mind, along with a hazy image of a human form splayed against a static-riven blue-silver screen, screaming silently into an electronic night. Payne shook his head and the image disappeared. For an instant, he felt a cold shock as he saw a stranger standing in the middle of his living room, dressed like a....

  Alan reached out his hand to touch the smooth surface of the wall.

  “Don’t!” Payne said sharply, his voice strained and high pitched.

  The hustler flicked back his finger as if he had burned it. He looked at Payne. There was a question in his eyes, as well as smoldering anger, as if Payne had no right to speak to him like that. As if he were determined to make Payne pay for arrogating that right.

  “Special paint,” Payne said hurriedly. “Has to be kept clean. Spotless. For the video set-up.” His voice sounded apologetic and he hated himself for that. The hustler looked around at the cameras staring down from the four corners and at the blank monitor on the back wall.

  “Never seen anything like this,” he breathed, his purpose for coming with Payne momentarily forgotten, or at least ignored.

  Payne knew that Alan was mentally calculating the value of the equipment hanging so easily within reach on the walls. Let him. It’ll get him as far as it did the other one.

  Again the flash of an image and Payne’s stomach rippled.

  “Pretty wild,” Alan finally said.

  “There’s more,” Payne said. “Come on.”

  He took Alan on a quick tour of the house an abbreviated version of the same tour he had given Nick not so many weeks ago, when everything was still new and intriguing to Payne himself. This time, the whole experience seemed flat and uninteresting in spite of Alan’s obvious interest in the complexity—and expense—of the sound and visual systems. They ended up in the control room.

  “Go ahead,” Payne said. “Pick out a film. We can watch it before we....”

  Alan seemed almost ready to laugh when Payne’s voice choked off. Insultingly he turned away from Payne and scanned the rows of films. Before long, though, his face took on a rapt expression, like a child-in-the–candy-shop sort of thing but touched with hints of experience and perhaps even cruelty that made his face uniquely unsettling.

  Payne watched him skim through the comedies and dramas. He scarcely bothered to look at the musicals. After a few moments, he turned back to Payne.

  “Don’t you have anything...hot.”

  He winked and hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and tugged on his jeans, just enough to show a thin line of skin between his T-shirt and his pants. The skin was smooth and hairless and tanned.

  Payne swallowed and nodded toward the far corner, the one that was hidden most of the time behind the door when it was open. Alan fingered the backs of the cases at shoulder height, then followed them down and finally bent over ostentatiously to examine titles on the shelves nearest the floor. The movement revealed a wider line of skin along his back. He leaned forward and the line widened provocatively. Alan seemed to be studying the titles, to all appearances unaware of the effect his movements had on the state of his clothing.

  When he pulled a case out, he did so quickly and decisively, as if he had found just what he wanted and nothing else would do. Payne didn’t see the title, but he caught a glimpse of the cassette box, garish and highlighted by flesh-toned forms, before Alan pulled the disc out and shoved it into the DVD player.

  “How does this thing work?” he asked Payne abruptly. He left little question as to who was ultimately in charge of this evening.

  “Here, let me,” Payne said quickly. “You go on back into the living room. I’ll set the timer for ten, no, fifteen minutes, that should give us time to...get acquainted.”

  “Sure,” Alan said. He grinned and disappeared into the hallway. Payne shoved the disc in and twisted the timer switch on and left, turning out the light as he closed the door.

  “Hey, man, uh, where’s the john?” Alan demanded as soon as Payne entered the living room.

  “Second door on the right,” Payne said, dropping heavily onto the white sofa in the middle of the room. He pointed down the hall. Alan followed the line of Payne’s finger and left.

  “This one?”

  “Yeah,” Payne nodded.

  Alan opened the door and went in.

  “Light’s on the wall. Right hand side,” Payne called after him.

  A second later a shaft of light split the hallway, then disappeared as the door closed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Payne leaned into the softness of the couch and closed his eyes, feeling the material surrounding and encompassing him. For what seemed a long, long while, he relaxed and let the couch enfold him. Suddenly, enfolding and nurturing transformed into smothering. He choked. He struggled to pull out of the half-dream he had become and back into himself.

  He felt the blackness he had felt so often before pushing irresistibly against his brain—it would push until it punched through and then there would be a blank spot, a place where he would do things and not remember them except for frustr
atingly imprecise and rapid static-filled images that would haunt his waking hours and torture him in dreams.

  Not this time! Not ever again!

  His back teeth ground together from the strain of his decision, catching the tender inner tissue of his cheeks and shredding the flesh. He tasted the salty warmth of blood but his jaws tightened even more, as if he were fighting an enormous battle. The veins in his neck became swollen with blood and his hands clenched and unclenched in his lap. In spite of the struggle going on inside him and the chaos of remembered sound that pummeled him, for the moment the rest of the house was deathly still.

  Then, through his inner turmoil, he heard something out there.

  He opened his eyes at an unexpected hissing crackle.

  It was too soon for the film to begin. There had to be six, seven minutes left. Maybe ten.

  The crackle intensified, sizzling through the air.

  He stared at the monitor hanging on the wall directly opposite him.

  The screen showed nothing but snow at first. Then so quickly that there was no perceptible transition between haze and clarity, it resolved into a startlingly precise picture, mostly black and white in the background but with a single vivid splay of color at the center.

  The scene was playing in Payne’s bathroom. The hustler was obviously unaware that he was being watched.

  The veins throbbed in Payne’s temples again and he struggled to close his eyes to the temptation of the image on the monitor—but to do so was to encourage the blackness to come closer, to press harder. He grabbed his right hand with his left and wrenched the fingers open, twisting so hard and so violently that the pain stabbed more intensely than if he had broken them. He reveled in his decision to endure the pain because for an instant the blackness retreated. He shifted on the couch, contorting his torso and hip in an invitation to pain.

  He moaned, his voice barely loud enough to make itself heard as Alan’s voice sounded through the monitor. The hustler was humming as he washed himself.

  Payne’s head tossed back and forth. He wrenched his eyes open and stared at the monitor and what it revealed, then screwed them shut and turned his head away. But even then it was simply the act of an instant to open his eyes again and watch the monitor before he bit his lips so hard he drew blood and deliberately forced himself not to watch again.

  And again.

  And again.

  All the while wondering how long Alan would take, why he didn’t come out, what he was doing in there, then opening his eyes long enough to see and then closing them again and wishing that Alan were gone, that he were in the room next to Payne and touching him, that Payne were alone and far from here, that Payne were next to Alan and could feel the body heat radiating from him.

  The front door rattled.

  Payne sat straight up. His forehead was bathed in sweat and his eyes started from their sockets as if he had just seen a ghost. He glanced frantically around the room, for the moment unable to place the sound. Then he recognized it.

  Someone was knocking on the door.

  Slowly he worked his way out of the couch and limped toward the door. He passed through the curtains and drew them behind him before he turned on the porch light and opened the door slightly, no more than a crack.

  To anyone outside, he would be at best a faint silhouette, at worst a thin darkness against the backlit curtains.

  Nick stood on the porch, his hand poised to knock on again.

  “Sorry to bother you so late,” he began, “but I...I haven’t seen you around much lately and I was worried about you. Is everything...?”

  “Everything is fine,” Payne said curtly.

  “Well, like I said, sorry it’s so late. I saw a light in back so I figured you might be up. I just wanted to let you know that....”

  “Thanks.” Payne closed the door until all that Nick could probably see would be a shadow and the white tips of his fingers where they grasped the thick oak door. “Good night.”

  He shut the door.

  Quietly but firmly.

  Good-bye.

  He limped back into the living room.

  The monitor chittered softly as it relayed the sounds of sink taps running and skin rasped dry by a rough white towel. Payne tried not to watch, but his hip threw him off balance and as he twisted to regain balance, his eyes locked onto the monitor. Without watching where he was walking, he limped to the sofa and was about to drop back onto it, exhausted and hurting but at the same time excited and nearly breathless.

  The bathroom door opened.

  At the same instant, the monitor fell silent and dark.

  Alan came into the room.

  Payne stared at him.

  He had removed his shirt and his shoes and socks. His toes sank into the carpet pile, dusky tan consumed by white. But Payne’s attention was on the man’s wide shoulders and deep chest and flat belly, all ridged muscle and tan and strength. The top snap on his jeans lay open. The head of his brass zipper glinted coldly.

  Payne’s throat was suddenly dry. His heart thrummed inside his chest as if it were trying to force an escape from some threatening, debilitating prison of its own making.

  From deep inside, from places he didn’t know existed, he felt the first stirrings of...of anger, of fury.

  The shock rattled him. He stared at Alan without seeing him.

  Anger.

  Fury.

  Rage.

  He felt sick, physically sick—he remembered suddenly Nick’s siege of vomiting a few days before and felt as if he were going to be just as sick. Or worse. He swallowed hard against the rising heat and forced his stomach to hold onto its contents, forced his throat to constrict against the nauseating bile that tried to burn its way out. Tried to force the blackness back into secret places of horror he had not consciously known existed until that moment.

  Anger.

  Fury.

  Rage.

  He concentrated on them. Images rose and beat at the wall of his concentration and withered away in futility.

  He could win. He was winning!

  Alan seemed not to notice anything wrong with Payne. He twisted his lips into something that was half grin, half contempt—just the thing he figured would turn this guy on. In an unknowing perversion of Cathy’s actions in that very room, perhaps on that very spot, he began removing the last of his clothing. His actions were studied, teasing, and taunting. Physical action transformed into overt sexuality designed to arouse.

  In spite of himself, Payne was chained to where he stood by the couch. He could not move, could not blink, could not shut out the sight that he wanted/despised watch Alex watch Beethoven’s glorious ninth all ultra-violence o my droogs and still the rage and fury beat at him, trying to force its way out.

  It is possible! I can win!

  The hustler dropped his hand to his zipper.

  “Come on, relax, man,” Alan’s voice said, even though it barely pierced the roaring in Payne’s ears. He stepped toward Payne.

  “Let’s get going.”

  Nooooo!

  The cry started somewhere deep inside but died before it could force its way through Payne’s throat. It was strangled by another complex of rage and envy and confined fury that had plotted and planned and waited for years.

  Yesssss.

  Alan paused, his hand outstretched until it almost touched Payne’s shoulder. Something that might have been fear surfaced in his face.

  Nooooo.

  Payne struggled with everything that was himself and this time the sound emerged, faint and frail, barely a breath. But it was enough.

  Alan stepped hesitantly backward. His expression changed as well, unalloyed and unmistakable fear appearing, disappearing, then surfacing and remaining as he looked at Payne.

  All around them, the walls crackled to life, sputtering and popping like Fourth of July fireworks.

  Alan shot a quick glance at the monitor, as if expecting to see the opening credits of the film he had selected. Instead,
there was nothing on the screen.

  Nothing except blankness gradually replaced by a dim figure, a blue nimbus that pulsed on the screen and grew larger and larger.

  An inarticulate burst of sound ripped through Payne’s throat, escaped the imprisonment of the swirling blackness that sought to restrain it, and exploded into the room. Alan heard it and wrenched his attention back to the other man and then screamed himself.

  Agony tore through Payne, an agony so intense that every cell in his body must be ripping apart, every nerve simultaneously exposed to excruciating stimulation. His body burned from head to foot. He held his hands helplessly in front of him, as if pleading with the hustler, as if he needed something only the other man could give.

  His hands glowed. The flesh trembled and quivered and vibrated with every breath, with every thudding heartbeat.

  He felt a rush of fury that was scarcely less unbearable than the agony, and his hands flared with a blue glow that formed hands superimposed over his own but not his own. He watched in stricken horror as the pseudo-hands tore themselves away from him. The movement generated another wave of pain that nearly forced him into unconsciousness. He didn’t know how he could withstand such pain and live.

  He felt a second wave, a contractive ripping even more agonizing than the first, as legs burst through his legs, shrunken and rounded shoulders shattered his shoulders, as pendulous breasts penetrated the smooth surface of his flesh from within.

  A human figure—vague and ill-defined and insubstantial and incomplete—vibrated between him and the hustler, but Payne barely noticed. All he knew was that the rending pain was suddenly, blessedly over. His tissues were intact, his muscles and bone whole and unencumbered. He suddenly felt...good, healthy and young and stridently male and potent, fully himself. The whorl of blackness was gone, totally gone, and with it the threat he had suffered under since...since he first entered this damned house, he realized with a shock.