Static!

by Michael R Collings

  He also felt unutterably weak. His arms trembled. His legs quivered as if he had just finished a marathon obstacle course. He pulled air into exhausted lungs with great sobbing gasps even as he struggled to keep his eyes open and watch as the phantom figure transformed before him.

  There was another loud crackling sound that would have panicked him if he had not been so close to unconsciousness. Red lights flashed beneath the lenses on each of the four cameras, and from the blank expanse of each lens a thick darkness that was almost solid, almost fluid spewed out. It shot across the living room from each corner simultaneously and struck the figure squarely in the chest.

  The figure and the darkness coalesced into something horrid and solid and ancient, something twisted and diseased that Payne had never seen in the living flesh yet instinctively recognized.

  He recoiled, holding his hand in front of his closed eyes and concentrating on his own fury at what had almost been taken from him.

  The figure moved toward him, then hesitated.

  The monitor crackled to life, showing an identical image on the screen: Payne sprawled on the floor, hand raised in a gesture of defiance and warding, the figure hovering only a few feet from him. Then the figure backed away. The movement was paralleled in the monitor, as if the figure were rehearsing on the screen what it was performing in actuality in the middle of the room.

  Payne caught a glimpse of the screen. Now the camera angle had reversed. Payne no longer lay at the center. Instead the screen focused on Alan, caught the hustler in the act of backing slowly away. His image was suddenly and inexplicably naked.

  The figure approached him. This time, in reality, it was Alan’s turn to scream and cringe in horror. Dimly, Payne heard the slap of bare flesh against the wall as Alan fell back and pressed against the wall as if he were trying to become invisible. And now, in reality, Alan was naked, as naked as the terrified image of himself that played on the monitor.

  Through some trick of nerves, even through his increasing exhaustion, Payne felt the cold wall slap against his own back, saw the horrifying figure approaching him as if he were huddled against the wall, then coupled those sensations with gushing memories of the sickeningly mutilated magazines in the attic.

  Nooo!

  This time Payne’s cry was for Alan, not for himself—and he was himself at that instant, although he could only guess how long he might survive intact. Perhaps it would be long enough.

  The figure was almost touching the hustler. Alan slid further down the wall until his knees buckled in front of him. His hands covered his groin and his head shook back and forth, back and forth, as if the futile act of negating the apparition would somehow destroy it. His throat was working frantically but no sounds were coming out. Tears glistened on his cheeks and dropped onto his chest and shoulders.

  Payne forced himself to move, but it was like struggling against the incoming tide. His muscles worked, his joints worked, every one—but to little effect. He reached out with a hand that was neither crippled nor deformed.

  But slowly.

  So slowly.

  Too slowly.

  The simple effort was almost too much. Black spots swam before his eyes, obscuring the figure.

  And already the figure had changed again. The vague blue electrical nimbus had absorbed the darkness that shot from the cameras until even from behind, even though his exhaustion, Payne recognized the outlines of a woman he had never seen but knew as intimately as if she had been part of him.

  And she had been.

  He felt sickened at the realization, but tried with renewed efforts to move quickly enough.

  The phantom woman reached a twisted finger toward the boy cowering at her feet. There was something contemptuous in the way she ignored Payne and his agonizing but increasingly ineffectual struggle to reach her. There was something even more threatening—contempt joined with equal parts of seething hatred and a thirst for revenge—as she bent and reached down past the boy’s staring eyes, past his face twisted beyond fear, past his heaving chest and trembling shoulders, and touched, oh so gently barely skimmed the soft pliant surface flesh of the hustler’s masculinity.

  Blue electrical nimbus touched solid flesh.

  For an infinite instant, nothing changed.

  Payne seemed frozen, his hand stretching out but lacking yards of touching the figure’s hunched over shoulder. The figure was a statue, equally frozen, a counter-image of the figure that glowed from the monitor. The boy huddled against the wall, his head now thrown back until his throat seemed stretched to the point that it would shatter if he tried to breath.

  She touched him again.

  With a speed that shattered Payne’s consciousness, the blue fire engulfed the boy.

  Payne saw no more.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The hustler’s mouth dropped open in a stupefying scream that never came. He breathed in to form the scream, and the fire plunged into his mouth and down his throat and it felt as if it were in his own lungs, burning and searing tender vital tissue.

  The hustler twisted once, convulsively, and toppled.

  The monitor hissed like a thousand serpents and the screen replayed the instant again and again, the man’s death flickering across the screen while the image broke and re-formed, broke and re-formed, like momentary interruptions of transmission during a thunderstorm.

  Dying. Dead. Dying. Dead. Again and again.

  And now the scene was interspersed with similar scenes in which the man at the center was not the boy.

  First there was one man, dark and young and once arrogant but now broken in spirit and body. Then another man joined the first; this one was not so young, not so arrogant. This man had suffered more than any of them. Something about him suggested years, decades of torturous non-existence imprisoned through the perverted will of one brilliantly insane woman.

  The episodes wound around each other, cutting back and forth among the three with a dizzying speed. Each time Alan appeared, his image was sharper, crisper, more defined—and the other two watched his agonies as if through them they could find even minimal ease from their own. The three drew closer and closer to the center of the screen, the figure circling them exactly the way the phantom was circling Alan’s now lifeless body.

  Finally the three men blended into one, and the shadows that filled the room swirled and spun and the air reeked the acrid tang of burning flesh; and the ghastly remnants of Alan’s body were engulfed in flickering blue and the figure swept through the flames with her hands and pulled the fire into her, onto her, laving her arms and breasts and shoulders with the living flame that reveled in the essence of death.

  She turned toward where Payne lay unconscious on the floor. Her lips—even more substantial now, thin and cruel and tight—curled in a parody of a smile. She moved toward him, gliding more than walking.

  She bent over to touch him, to re-enter him permanently and forever.

  Or at least until that body grew old and withered and diseased and it was time to find yet another.

  The screen crackled.

  She looked up at it.

  It showed a new scene. Someone—that damned busybody woman that didn’t know when to leave well enough alone—was on the porch, reaching out to ring the bell.

  Time froze for an instant, then the figure faded visibly.

  Streams of electrical fire tore from her flesh and were pulled back into the lenses of the cameras; the rest of her body dissipated into insubstantiality like a fog bank on a bright, hot morning and was absorbed silently by the dead-white walls.

  On the screen, the woman’s outstretched finger came closer to the black button staring out from the monk’s cowl of the doorbell.

  When the bell buzzed, the living room suddenly flared with light and then the lights died completely.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  For the first few seconds, Nick simply though his eyes were finally rebelling. It was late, after all. He had been working all day. Now he w
as tired. The single interruption in his reading—that frustrating walk over to Payne’s a little after dark—had resulted in an uneasy mixture of embarrassment and humiliation and concern but had done little to relax him.

  When the lights seemed to dim the first time, he naturally assumed that it was just his body’s way of telling him to pack it in for the night and get some rest. The first diminution in power was too slight for him to think that it was anything but psychological in origin.

  When the lights dimmed the second time, he glanced up at the lamp in time to see the subtle brightening of the bulb through the shade as the power returned to normal.

  When the power dropped for the third time, he thought he heard something as well. He laid the book down and concentrated. Distantly, he could distinguish a moaning sough like a strong wind rustling through dry cattails in the swamps back home in Montana. Or perhaps it was more like the hollow, echoing cry of a scavenger bird circling above the desert floor. He couldn’t be sure.

  But the images that surfaced in his imagination startled him, so much so that for the moment he nearly forgot the sound itself. And it was not repeated.

  At least not for a while.

  After the fourth wave-like dimming of the lights within five minutes, Nick thought he had identified the effect. Had the phenomenon occurred in the middle of the day, he would have called it a brown-out, one of those recurrent rolling power-outages that afflicted the L.A. area during times of peak power usage, especially on hot summer afternoons when air conditioners and humidifiers are coupled to the normal load demanded by millions of refrigerators and washers and driers and vacuums and dish washers and televisions and DVD players. The power lines simply couldn’t support the demand, and the result was a series of vacillations in the power flow.

  Not a full-fledged black-out, although they did occasionally happen. Instead, much of Southern California would get a dose of a brown-out.

  But, Nick reminded himself, they usually happened during the day. As far as he knew, they never happened at night when the power demand had peaked and most of the consumers had tapered off on their use. And so far that summer, there had not even been any brown-outs.

  He waited a while to see if the drop would repeat again, but it did not. He considered going to bed since it was, after all, nearing midnight. He went so far as to close up his books and take a few seconds to straighten the desk so he could begin fresh tomorrow. He turned off the desk lamp, then crossed over to the floor light and turned it off as well and stood in the darkness.

  But he didn’t go to bed.

  Instead he walked through the house and onto the front porch. It was still hot, although not oppressively so. He sniffed. Beneath the scent of roses and jasmine and damp grass he could detect an odd undercurrent, an unusual smell that reminded him of hot wiring or ozone or burnt insulation.

  He sniffed the air more carefully, turning his head in different directions in an attempt at pinpointing the source but the faint odor did not increase. He shrugged and decided to ignore it. It was probably just a car with an overheating engine somewhere down the block.

  He leaned against one of the porch supports and allowed himself to get lost in his thoughts. Mostly he thought about Payne Gunnison. Nick tried not to look at the house next door. In fact, after a few minutes he moved to end of the porch furthest from Payne’s place and next to Nick’s own driveway. From there all he could see was the edge of his house, the sleeping fronts of the houses across the street, and the shadowy masses of hibiscus that overhung like threatening storm clouds over the driveway. Too bad they don’t have any fragrance, he thought as he watched the subtle movement of blossoms highlighted by the bright moonlight.

  From his new position, he resumed his train of thought.

  Something was wrong with Payne. He didn’t sound…well, he didn’t sound natural. Like himself. Nick remembered jokes about funerals—doesn’t he look like himself, doesn’t he just look so natural, just like himself—but for once the punch lines seemed strained and hollow and unnatural.

  This was no joke, he knew. Payne didn’t look like himself. He didn’t look natural. He didn’t sound natural. He didn’t act natural.

  Thinking about Payne and the way he had opened the door and then dismissed Nick like the lowliest of peons made Nick shiver. He hugged himself and leaned his shoulder against the porch pillar. It was almost like….

  He straightened, his heart beating a frantic tattoo inside his ribcage. The whole experience had been almost like handing The Greer her rent check on the first of every month.

  No, that wasn’t right. Not almost.

  It had been exactly like it.

  The same dark silhouette, the same gnarled fingers clutching at the door as if the body attached had expected him to burst in physically and rape her in her own living room.

  Nick swallowed hard.

  What the hell was going on over there?

  He listened hard but could hear nothing beyond the whispering of breezes in the hibiscus and the faint hum and crackle of the power lines as they crossed a corner of his yard and disappeared into Payne’s. The night was normal, a typical summer’s evening on Greensward. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to be concerned about.

  Except that Nick was increasingly convinced that it had not been Payne Gunnison who answered his knock next door.

  Not really.

  Maybe physically it was, but Nick realized with a rush of fear that Payne—the Payne who came over that first morning and asked for help digging out oleander roots, the Payne who had shared laughter over films and had done more than anyone to move Nick closer to becoming part of the human race again—that Payne had disappeared long ago, gradually to be sure, but inexorably.

  And someone...something else had taken his place.

  Nick stared into the night and tried to convince himself that everything he had thought was really as absurd as it sounded.

  Demon possession.

  Transformations.

  Evil souls taking over righteous ones.

  Shit, what insane nightmare would he come up with next?

  Werewolves in the bushes? Vampires in the attic? Frankenstein’s monster creaking around in the run-down garage?

  He shook his head, trying to shake loose the tendrils of worry and replace them with a firmer grip on clear-sighted reality.

  A noise distracted him.

  A car roared down Greensward, cut around sharply in front of Nick’s place, and stopping at Payne’s, its brakes screeching painfully. Whoever was behind the wheel was in a hurry, on drugs, or just naturally the world’s worst driver because the front passenger tire hopped the curb and spun, cutting deeply into the scraggly grass.

  Someone got out and started running up the sidewalk.

  In the half-light that spilled out of the car when she opened the door, Nick realized that at this hour it could only be one person.

  “Cathy,” he yelled, straightening away from the pillar and leaning over the balustrade. “Cathy Litton?”

  She paused on the sidewalk and turned toward his voice.

  “Who’s that?” she said softly.

  He stepped off the porch.

  The stars were out and the moon, where it hung just over the tops of the trees, was nearly full. There was enough light to distinguish shapes and forms. She could probably see him.

  “I’m Nick. Nick Wheeler.”

  She hesitated. Obviously part of her wanted to rush up the sidewalk to Payne’s front door, and just as obviously another part wanted to do anything in the world except that.

  The second part won.

  She turned away from Payne’s house and approached Nick.

  “How is he?” she asked without any preface, indicating Payne’s house with a quick nod of her head.

  “I...I’m not sure,” Nick said, taken by surprise. Her question suggested that her fears paralleled his own. Something was wrong with Payne. They both knew that. But what?

  “He called me tonight,” she said
. “He was...he…he sounded cruel. Abusive. I hated him and never wanted to see him again. And then after he hung up I remembered his face and his smile and his touch. He couldn’t be the kind of person who would say those things to someone he...someone he loved,” she finished weakly.

  Nick felt distinctly uncomfortable. He really hadn’t expected to find himself neck-deep in dialogue that sounded like it was straight out of a bad soap opera. He didn’t know what to say in return, which was all right, because Cathy wasn’t expecting anything from him.

  “At first I swore I wouldn’t even call,” she continued, as if oblivious to Nick’s presence. Her eyes glinted darkly in the dim light but her face seemed as expressionless as her voice. “Then I decided I couldn’t let it end that way. I had to see him, make him say...make him tell me to my face. I started to drive over here, then couldn’t. But here I am.”

  She looked directly at Nick. Now there was open pleading in her eyes. “Maybe you could come over with me, just to....”

  He shook his head.

  “No,” she said after a moment of silence, “you’re right. This is between him and me. Nick,” she said, caressing the name in such a way that he felt as if they had known each other for decades, “he talks a lot about you. He appreciates your friendship. He respects you. I hope that he hasn’t turned on you as well.”

  Nick’s silence was answer enough.

  She squared her shoulders and turned away. Nick watched her until she disappeared into the darkness of Payne’s porch.

  He turned to go into his own house. He was exhausted. Sleep would come easily tonight.

  He had not even reached his front door when she screamed.

  He spun around in time to see a hideous blue glare illuminate Cathy’s body. The unearthly glare threw the entire porch into a harsh brilliance that was terrifying in the clarity of the details it showed.