Static!

by Michael R Collings

  In an instant Nick could see that Cathy had rung the doorbell. From the way her body arched away from the house, yet her arm stretched stiffly toward a spot by the door jamb, Nick realized that her fingers must still be touching the old-fashioned round button Nick knew so well from delivering so many rent checks on the first day of so many months. He remembered the distant buzzz of the bell, the hollow silence as it died, the haunting sounds of The Greer as she opened the door.

  Cathy never got that far.

  The buzzz rose to a high-pitched crackling whine that Nick could hear even across the two front yards separating them. He saw the electricity flooding out of the buzzer and into Cathy, saw her body go suddenly limp, then twitch and jerk as if it had a life of its own. He saw her and knew that she must surely be dead and then the front door opened and someone—Payne, it seemed, although the figure was somehow wrong—nearly fell through it from inside and in the process knocked against Cathy and broke her contact with the buzzer.

  Both bodies fell to the porch with a hollow thud. They rolled together in an excruciating echo of passion until they lay silent and still beneath the rusted porch glider. Nick could see no more movement.

  By that time, he was halfway across the lawn. In another three seconds, he was on the top step of the porch, looking down at where Cathy and Payne lay intertwined in each other, arm twisting across leg, head resting on stomach in an obscene parody of love-making—obscene because this was a mingling of death, not a mingling of life.

  The door-bell button glowed with a threatening iridescence.

  Nick knelt beside the two bodies. The smell of scorched flesh hung heavily in the air. He could see that Cathy’s hand was badly burned. Her fingers were twisted and blackened. The palm was already a mass of blisters swelling with body fluids rushing to repair the damaged tissues.

  Something moved within the tangle of singed clothing and scorched flesh.

  A hand that was unburnt. The fingers flexed, curled, and straightened.

  It was Payne’s hand.

  Nick knelt and felt at Cathy’s neck, shakily relieved to feel a pounding pulse. She was unconscious but alive.

  By that time, Payne’s eyes had fluttered open. His eyes were dull, his stare vacant, but his lips moved meaningfully.

  “Tried to…,” he said in a voice so feeble that Nick could barely distinguish the sounds. “Make her...stay away...couldn’t control...save her...Cathy!”

  The last sound rose into an anguished cry as Payne raised his head enough to see Cathy lying across him. He seemed to recognize Nick at the same instant, because his eyes suddenly brimmed with tears and he moved his hands as if he were struggling to raise Cathy but could not find the strength to do anything.

  “Take it easy,” Nick said. He carefully lifted Cathy’s body up, surprised at how heavy she felt even though she was inches smaller and pounds lighter than himself. Half-dragging her, he pulled her off Payne until she lay stretched out and silent on the porch.

  By that time, Payne had raised himself onto his elbows and watched Cathy with anguished eyes.

  “Is she...?” he began, then broke off as if he could not bear to hear the answer to his unspoken question.

  “She’s alive,” Nick said, glancing over his shoulder along the visible portions of Greensward. No one moved. Not a single window showed even a glimmer of a light.

  “I’ve got to get help,” he said a moment later. “You stay here, I’ll call the cops.”

  He stood and took a single step toward Payne’s still open front door. He did not want to go in there—he would rather stick his naked arm into a pit full of furious cobras than walk beneath the thick oak lintel and into the black pit of the house...but lives might depend on him getting help as soon as possible. For once he tried not to think of himself. There was Payne to think of first, and Cathy.

  He took another step.

  “No!” Payne said, his voice tinged with terror and barely repressed fury. “Don’t go in there. She’ll.... It will…!”

  Nick took one more step. He had made his resolve; he would keep it come hell or high water.

  Payne struggled to his knees, his arms outstretched toward Nick. “For God’s sake, Nick, don’t go in there!”

  “But I….”

  Payne gestured with his hand. “Call from your place. I’m okay. I’ll watch out for her.”

  Nick hesitated. After all, Payne’s phone was tantalizingly close. It would only take a second and....

  “Go, please. Believe me.”

  “Okay,” Nick said, already pounding down the step and across the lawn. Less than two minutes later, he was running back, breathing heavily as he stood at the bottom of the porch steps.

  “Ambulance should be here soon,” he panted. “How is she?”

  “Okay, I think,” Payne said. He seemed to have recovered quickly. He was kneeling by Cathy, cradling her head with his arm, his hand against her neck as if to reassure himself that there was still a pulse.

  “Let’s get her down from here.”

  “But shouldn’t we leave her where...?”

  “Help me!” Payne said, and suddenly Nick was on the porch and helping to support Cathy’s body as they carried her down the steps.

  “This is far enough,” Payne said after glancing over his shoulder. “I hope.”

  They laid her on the sidewalk halfway to the street. Payne pulled off his shirt and rolled it up and put it beneath her head.

  She moaned faintly at the movement. Nick chose to believe that it was a good sign, a sign that she might be coming out of it. That she might survive.

  Payne stood slowly and turned to face the house.

  Nick listened for sounds of the ambulance, the fire truck that always accompanied it, the police cars that might even now be on the way. He heard nothing except the faint crackle of the power lines.

  He looked up.

  The line cut across the lawn not ten feet from them and disappeared into the corner of Payne’s house. At that moment, he thought he saw a faint blue pulse at the juncture of house and wire.

  He rubbed his eyes.

  There was nothing there.

  He turned to say something about it to Payne, but Payne was already moving up the sidewalk toward the house, slowly, stiffly, as if he did not want to go there but had no choice.

  “Payne,” Nick called. Payne said nothing.

  “Wait here.” Nick ran up to him and put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. He felt muscles stiffen but Payne did not hesitate in his solemn stride toward the house.

  “Come on, man. Cathy’s hurt. She….”

  “Leave me alone,” Payne said quietly. “Leave me alone.”

  He shook Nick’s hand loose and continued on his way.

  Nick looked back at Cathy. She seemed little more than a light blur against the sidewalk. In the seconds it took for him to focus on her, Payne had mounted the porch steps and approached the front door.

  For the second time in ten minutes, Nick made a conscious choice that went against everything he would have expected himself to do. Nick followed Payne onto the porch of The Greer’s house.

  Even before Nick was fully in the shadow of the porch, Payne had stepped inside the house.

  Immediately, the texture of light spilling through door altered. It was as if all light had been simultaneously extinguished, replaced an instant later by the staticky blue-silver glow of the television screen.

  Nick was across the porch and into the house before he had a chance to think any further about what he was doing. He had made his decision.

  Inside, the air stank. He breathed a lungful of the foul stiff and almost retched, but then he saw Payne and forced his stomach to quiet. Payne stood in the center of the room, his attention fixed on the monitor. Nick glance at the screen. It was on. A picture flickered across the glassy surface. From where he stood, he could see the picture clearly.

  It showed Cathy, her face distorted as though viewed through a fish-eye lens, her eyes slant
ed painfully tight, her mouth distended and her teeth curved like a vampire’s. Blue fire flickered around her head, and even though there was no sound other than the static crackling of electrical pulses, Nick knew that she was screaming. The picture flickered and steadied, flickered and steadied, repeating like a tape replaying a loop, endlessly crucifying Cathy and then beginning again.

  Then Payne cried out.

  “No! I refuse!”

  Nick wanted to ask what Payne was yelling about but didn’t trust himself to speak because now through the darkened hallway he saw a ghostly outline. His stomach tightened and for an instant the blue-silver whiteness of the living room swam and Nick thought he might faint. Payne, however, stood straighter and taller than before and turned until he faced the figure straight on.

  “Go ahead, old woman, try,” he said, not raising his voice this time but instead speaking in an icy tone that frightened Nick more than theatrics and histrionics would have. The figure paused halfway down the hall, then continued its slow, inexorable forward progress. Nick backed away until his shoulders struck the door jamb but Payne remained where he was, standing in the center of the room later, Nick would have bet that it was the exact, mathematical center of the room. Payne glared at the apparition that was now only a few inches from the entry into the living room.

  “Do your worst,” Payne said again, his lips twisting into a sneer. “I know what you are now. I understand everything. And I won’t let you get away with it.”

  At the sound of his voice, the figure paused again. One part separated from the rest, became identifiable to Nick as a hazy hand shape that passed in front of what gradually resolved into a head. Nick blinked. The figure looked like something one would see on a badly focused television, vaguely human but without any distinguishable features. Payne, however, seemed certain of who or what he was addressing.

  “Get out of here,” he said, letting his voice to rise until he was yelling. “I refuse to believe you. Get out!”

  The figure lowered its hand and stepped into the living room. The light from the monitor struck it, suddenly endowing the form with weight and solidity and strength. Nick swallowed hard and tried to yell to Payne but no sounds would come.

  The figure stared at Payne for a second. Nick half believed that he recognized the form, the twist of shoulder, the dragging foot he had glimpsed in the instant that the form left the hall shadows and entered the open light. Then the figure raised its hand again, but not to pass it in front of its own head like someone trying to clear his vision. Instead it pointed to each of the four cameras in turn. As the hand passed over Nick, he shuddered. His flesh prickled and the hairs on his arms and hands stood on end, like he remembered once when he was a kid, just before the great-granddaddy of all electrical storms hit. He didn’t have time to remember anything else.

  At the instant that the figure pointed to the last camera, the voice resonated through the room. For the first and only time, Nick Wheeler heard the voice of Death, and it chilled him beyond anything he could have imagined.

  “You are mine,” the voice intoned, gesturing directly at Payne. “You are me.”

  From each corner, a bolt of darkness flashed and converged on Payne. At the same instant, the figure flung a fifth bolt that struck Payne dead in the chest. His mouth opened in a cry of torment, but the sound was swallowed by the static crackle that rose and strengthened until it consumed everything and Nick could hear nothing else, not even the pulse-beat of his own heart as his blood throbbed through his temples. He saw nothing, heard nothing but Payne’s agony and Payne’s silent scream.

  The beams of blue focused and tightened around Payne. Nick saw Payne’s hand curl tightly against his leg, the fingers becoming claw-like, twisted, arthritic. The fingers of an old woman filled with hatred and fear.

  “No!” Nick screamed, and then a wild pulse of electricity hit him and spun him out the door.

  As soon as he was in the darkness, the power abandoned him. He rose shakily to his knees. Through the door, he saw the figure approach Payne and reach out to touch him. Nick could see the form within the nimbus more clearly. And even though he had never seen that face clearly before, he knew it in an instant.

  Nick looked around wildly, searching for some way to save Payne. In two frantic steps he was at the edge of the porch, kicking at the ancient timbers of the glider, feeling the wood give way beneath his feet, hearing the ripping sounds of half rotten fibers separating, and suddenly the glider crashed to the planking. He stepped on one of the seat timbers, bracing it beneath his feet, and pulled on another. The glider fell to pieces beneath his hands, leaving him with a yard-long length of jagged two-by-four that he hefted in his hand like it was a club.

  He started toward the house, then stopped.

  On an impulse, he grabbed the rusty chain that hung from the rafters and jerked. The chain had supported more weight than his for more years than he had been alive. But never all at once. Always before, both chains had held up their end of the glider and distributed the weight evenly. And never before had the weight come as a single sharp jerk. And maybe, just maybe, Nick yanked with more force than he would have guessed he had.

  For whatever reason, the chain gave an anguished screeee and the eye-bolt holding it pulled from the rafter and the chain dropped with a crash onto the porch. One end flashed up and struck Nick on the shin but he didn’t notice it, not even when the warm blood seeped through the gash. Dimly, as if part of him were merely an observer, he heard a distant sound that his brain identified as a siren. That same observer-part reassured him that probably less than two minutes had passed since he had called the police. But the intellectual assurance did little good.

  Because Payne might already be dead.

  Nick grabbed the chain and raced into the house, fully expecting to be met head on with a blast of current that would fry him in his shoes.

  But he wasn’t. Instead, he saw that the figure stood only inches from Payne’s face. Payne still writhed in the twining force of the fields billowing through the camera lenses. His mouth was twisted in a horrifyingly silent scream, his eyes tightly shut as if by closing off vision he could close out the reality of what stood before him. His arms and shoulders were masses of muscle bunched against the effort of trying to break free and for an instant Nick was afraid that the figure—The Greer—would simply lash out and destroy Payne.

  Then he understood in an intuitive flash that she would not. She needed him. Needed his body. Physically, at least, Payne Gunnison was safe.

  The ghostly hand rose closer. The fingers were parodies

  of the twisted claw that hung uselessly at Payne’s side. In another instant it would touch.

  Adam and the finger of God In the Sistine Chapel Nick thought madly and then he lunged.

  “Payne!” he yelled, hoping to break Payne out of the stasis that controlled him.

  He hit Payne full in the shoulder and felt a ripping current tear through his own shoulder and chest, but at the same time, to Nick’s immense surprise, Payne toppled over beneath him. The ghostly hand swept the air just over Nick’s scalp. His skin crawled and he rolled away from the figure and onto his knees.

  He swung at the figure with the board. It passed through unharmed, flames flickering along the splinters at the end. The figure shook with silent laughter and the four cords of current focused again on Payne where he lay groaning on the carpet.

  Without thinking, Nick spun the glider-board like a javelin toward one of the cameras. The splintered end shattered the glass lens and the apparatus behind it exploded in a shower of sparks. One of the lines of light died.

  But even before he saw the effect of his first attempt, Nick had spun to face another corner. He whirled the rusty chain once over his head. It passed through the figure, just as the board had done, but this time there was a difference. The chain did not emerge blackened and smoking. Instead, the figure seemed to part—temporarily, to be sure, but it parted—as the chain passed through.


  He swept it around in a second full circle. This time the figure pulled back just enough for the end links to miss and hum uselessly through the air. The figure seemed to draw into itself, as if the touch of the metal had hurt it. Nick felt a flurry of exaltation.

  It could be hurt!

  He spun the chain, feeling it gain in speed and momentum until the three links he held in his palm pulled at the skin. There was a pinch and a sharp pain and he knew that a rough edge had sliced his palm—the rational observer-part wondered briefly about when Nick last had a tetanus shot but he whipped the chain around for a third time and let it fly.

  Like a rattlesnake striking, the chain flew straight to the corner and in an instant disintegrated the second camera. The lens exploded, sending glass and sparks into the room. Part of the chain hung limply from the camera, the links vibrating and shivering, and then suddenly whipping back and forth in a shower of sparks that chittered and crackled and fell in a torrent of fire onto the carpeting and drapes, smouldering where the sparks landed, then setting the material aflame.

  The figure twisted and howled in agony and writhed into the darkened hallway as the flames surged up and began licking at the white walls, at the paint, and at the internal wiring that had been so critical to The Greer’s experiments.

  But Nick didn’t notice any of that.

  As soon as the chain left his bleeding hand, he plunged sideways and grabbed Payne, who was struggling to stand. Behind them, in the third corner, the camera blew, spitting shards of glass that sliced through the bare skin on Nick’s unprotected hands and arms. He was bleeding and so was Payne, but both men were functional.

  Together, they crossed the room, ducking through the open doorway as the fourth camera burst, scattered even more sparks across the carpeting. Nick looked over his shoulder into the room, in time to see the television monitor explode in a snowstorm of glass shards and fractured tubes and melting wires. The explosion carried such force that it scorched the upholstery of the white sofa and fused the plastic table. One by one, the chess pieces—white as well as black—melted and slipped into the flames. The room burst into flame with a soft whuumph more frightening than a more violent explosion would have been.