Community

by Graham Masterton

  Michael opened the hatchback and lifted out his case. ‘OK, Sue,’ he told her. ‘Thank you for coming all of this way to see me, and maybe I’ll see you again next week. Hopefully by then a few more pieces of the puzzle will have come together.’

  Sue hugged him and kissed him, but there was still nothing familiar about the way she felt or the perfume she was wearing.

  He and Isobel stood on the snowy sidewalk while Sue turned her SUV around and drove away. They both waved as she blew her horn and disappeared from sight around the bend in the road.

  Isobel turned to Michael and said, ‘Well … welcome home, Greg. I really want you to feel that it is your home. Come along in. I made minestrone soup this morning, if you’re hungry.’

  Michael looked up through the naked branches of the trees at the piercing blue sky. Even the white peaks of Mount Shasta had no clouds around them. Home? He felt as if he didn’t belong here at all. He felt so alone and such a stranger that a lump began to rise in his throat, and his eyes prickled with tears, and he had to give a noisy cough to control himself.

  He followed Isobel inside. It was warm in the living room, and it smelled of soup.

  ‘Here,’ she said, taking him across the hallway. ‘This is your room, at the front. It gets the sun first thing in the morning, and you can see Mount Shasta. I hope you like it.’

  The room was plain, with pale green walls and a dark green carpet, with a shaggy sheepskin rug beside the double bed. There were two tired-looking armchairs, and a portable TV perched precariously on a stool. In front of the window there was a desk, with a clock on it, and a mug full of pencils, and a china figurine of a woman in a long dark green cloak.

  Hanging on the wall beside the bed was a framed print of a wolf catching a wild turkey in its jaws. The wolf’s eyes were bulging with greed.

  ‘This will do me just fine, Isobel,’ said Michael, setting his suitcase down on the bed. ‘Much cozier than a room at the clinic, anyhow.’

  Isobel touched his arm. ‘If there’s anything you need, Greg, anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask. Like I said, this is your home now. This is where you live.’

  He woke up in the early hours of the morning. The clock on the desk in front of the window did not have a luminous dial, so that he was unable to tell what time it was until he switched on his bedside lamp. It was about seven minutes after three.

  He switched his light back off and lay there in the darkness. The house was silent except for the soft, persistent rattling of the television antenna on the roof as it was shaken by the wind.

  Maybe if I just lie here, and empty my mind altogether, some of my memories will rise to the surface. How can I have forgotten so completely who I am, and where I live, and what my job is? I’m supposed to be a marine engineer, but I know nothing at all about marine engineering. I don’t even know what marine engineers actually do.

  How can I have failed to remember my own sister, when she says that we were so close? How come I couldn’t recognize my mother’s voice? Worst of all, how come I don’t really know who I am? Everybody else seems to be so sure that I’m Gregory Merrick, but I’m not sure at all.

  He repeated the name Gregory Merrick, Gregory Merrick, over and over, but it still didn’t sound like him.

  As he lay there, he had another of those very brief flashes of recollection. That female voice saying you shouldn’t – but in a blurry, stretched-out way, like a Doppler effect. And that elusive perfume.

  He lifted up his head and sniffed the cold bedroom air, but the perfume had gone.

  He drew back the bedcover and sat up. He stayed there for a few moments, still trying to keep his mind empty. Think of nothing. Think of the wall. Think of the darkness. Think of the snow outside.

  He stood up and walked across to the window. The drapes were thick, dark green brocade, with patterns of leaves on them. He drew them back with a noisy scraping of brass rings and there was the snow-covered front yard, and the street beyond it. The moon was nearly full, and the sky was still completely clear, so that everything was lit up in a cold, bone-white light.

  What Michael saw outside made his scalp and his wrists tingle, as if he had touched a bare wire. Although the street was silent, it was far from deserted. Standing on the sidewalks and scattered across the road were at least a hundred people, maybe even more. They were all staring back at him, with their arms by their sides, not moving.

  Most of them were men, but he saw at least a dozen women. They were all wearing nightwear – a few of them in bathrobes, but the majority in pajamas and nightshirts and nightgowns. As far as Michael could tell, their ages ranged from their early twenties to sixty or seventy or even older.

  But what the hell were they doing out there, in the middle of the night? The temperature couldn’t be higher than minus five, and it probably felt colder with the wind-chill factor. Yet there they all stood, completely still, their pajamas and nightgowns rippling in the wind.

  Michael stepped back from the window. In the darkness of his bedroom, he wasn’t sure if they could see him or not. But even if they couldn’t, they continued to stare in his direction, and not one of them showed any signs of moving.

  He thought of waking up Isobel, but then he didn’t want to frighten her. He was disturbed enough himself, even though it didn’t look as if any of these people meant to do him any harm. They weren’t armed, and they weren’t making any moves toward the house. They were simply standing there, utterly silent.

  No, he thought. The only thing to do was to go out there and ask them what the hell they were doing. After all, there was no way that he would be able to get back to sleep, knowing they were still gathered outside the house.

  He opened his closet and took out his thick blue sweater and his khaki corduroy pants. He also sat on the bed and pulled on a pair of thick white socks.

  As quietly as he could, he went out into the hallway and took down the navy blue overcoat which the clinic had given him, and put on his Timberland boots. He went right up close to the front door and peered through the hammered glass window in it, to make sure that none of the people were standing directly outside, but the glass was too bumpy and distorted for him to be able to see anything clearly.

  Anyhow, even if somebody were standing right outside, and they went for him, he was sure that despite the fact that he was still convalescing, he was more than a match for some oddball in pajamas.

  He opened the door. The wind that blew in was bitter, and made the glass chandelier in the hallway start jingling. He stepped outside, but he couldn’t completely close the door behind him because he didn’t have a key, and the last thing he wanted was to be stuck outside here in the freezing cold, surrounded by all of these people in their nightwear.

  He turned around. The street was deserted. There was nobody in sight – not even a last straggler running around the corner.

  Frowning, he made his way past Isobel’s Jeep down to the sidewalk. He looked left, and then he looked right. Somehow, over a hundred people in their nightclothes had completely disappeared.

  He walked out into the middle of the street. It had snowed only lightly since Sue had left, so he could still see her tire tracks and the footprints they had made when they had climbed out of her SUV to talk to Isobel. But there were no other footprints anywhere. The snow across the rest of the street was smooth and untouched, apart from the cross-stitches of a few bird tracks.

  I must have dreamed those people. Either that, or I was hallucinating. Catherine warned that the meds she had prescribed for me might give me some strange ideas. She didn’t tell me that I would imagine crowds of people standing outside my bedroom in the middle of the night, though.

  He walked back up to the house. As he reached the porch, Isobel appeared in the doorway, clutching a silky pink bathrobe up to her neck.

  ‘Greg! Where have you been? You left the door wide open and it’s freezing!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Isobel. I thought I saw somebody outside.’

 
‘Well, hurry up and come back in! You’ll catch your death of cold.’

  Michael came back into the house and Isobel closed the door behind him and bolted it. ‘You probably saw a deer,’ she said. ‘They sometimes come down here, during the winter.’

  ‘Yes, maybe,’ said Michael. Even though I didn’t see any deer tracks, either.

  ‘Come on, it’s your first night in a strange house. And you’re not one hundred per cent yet, are you? How would you like some hot milk? Would that help?’

  She had released her hold on her bathrobe and it had opened a little at the front to reveal that underneath she was wearing a thin white satin nightdress. It was low cut, edged with lace, so that Michael could see her very deep cleavage. Although her hair was tousled and she was wearing no make-up, there was no doubt that she was a very attractive woman – physically, anyhow.

  ‘I’ll be OK,’ Michael told her. ‘Like you say – it’s my first night here, and I’ve been having some pretty strange dreams lately.’

  ‘Listen …’ she began. She came closer and laid her hand on his sleeve. ‘If anything like this happens again – you know, if you think you see something in the middle of the night or you have a bad dream – don’t hesitate to wake me up, will you? I’m not your landlady. I’m your housemate. I’m your friend.’

  ‘Thanks, I appreciate it.’

  ‘No more than I do, Greg. It’s been very lonely here since Emilio passed.’

  ‘Emilio? Is he the guy in the photograph in the living room?’

  Isobel nodded. ‘He was such a gentleman. And such a good companion. When he passed, I thought there might be a chance … but no, it doesn’t work that way.’

  ‘Excuse me? You thought there might be a chance of what?’

  ‘Oh my goodness, look at the time!’ Isobel exclaimed. ‘I have my community meeting to go to tomorrow. I don’t want to show up with bags under my eyes! Come on, you and me ought to get back to bed!’

  She bobbed up and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. As she did so, he glimpsed her right breast bouncing. Then she wrapped her robe around herself again and hurried off along the hallway to her own bedroom, which was at the back of the house.

  Michael took off his coat and unlaced his boots. Then he returned to his room and closed the door, pressing his back against it for a moment.

  He turned his head toward the window, half-expecting to see all those people standing out there, but the street was still empty, and a little light snow was falling, whirling around the street lights like swarms of moths.

  He undressed and climbed back into bed. He couldn’t stop thinking about Isobel. For some reason that he couldn’t understand, he felt guilty that he found her so attractive. Why should he feel guilty? He wasn’t married, or engaged. And even though he shared an apartment with a man, he was pretty sure that he wasn’t gay, or bisexual. Or maybe he was. Maybe that was something else that he had forgotten, along with the rest of his life.

  He slept, and the TV antenna on the roof continued to rattle in the wind, like an endlessly repeated message from another planet.

  SIX

  The following morning, when he had hobbled slowly back from his first therapy session with Doctor Connor, he found Isobel in the hallway, wearing her long black coat and her Peruvian beanie, winding a thick white scarf around her neck.

  ‘I’m just off to my community meeting,’ she said, as he hung up his walking-stick. Seeing her dressed like that, Michael thought: That was her that Sue was talking to so intimately on her way to the parking lot. It must have been. So why, he wondered, had she insisted that she didn’t know the woman, and greeted her when she had dropped him off here as if she had never met her before?

  ‘OK,’ said Michael. ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Well – flush-centeredly these meetings only go on for about an hour, but then we have a buffet lunch and socialize. I expect you’re very tired, but why don’t you come along? You can meet the neighbors. Some of them are real nice people. I think you’d enjoy it.’

  ‘I’m not too sure if I’m feeling very sociable.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Isobel coaxed him, tugging at his arm. ‘While you still have your coat on.’

  Michael was feeling tired, and his knees were aching, but the coquettish way in which Isobel tilted her head to one side and fluttered her eyelashes made him think: Why not? It would be good for his ego to walk in anywhere with such an attractive woman on his arm.

  They left the house and walked around the curve and down a long slope until they reached Trinity’s Community Center, which stood in a hollow, surrounded by laurels. It was a plain, modern building with a curved, snow-covered roof. The parking lot outside had been cleared of snow but there were no vehicles parked there. A few residents were walking down the slope from the opposite direction, all of them wearing overcoats or quilted parkas. They looked about the same age range as the people who had been standing outside the house last night – one or two younger faces, but most of them middle-aged or elderly.

  As Michael and Isobel approached the porch, arm in arm, one or two of them lifted up their gloved hands in greeting, and Isobel waved back. They reached the doors where everybody was filing inside, and one elderly man came up to them and said, ‘Hi, Isobel! This must be your new companion.’

  Isobel said, ‘That’s right, Walter. His name’s Gregory Merrick. Greg, this is Walter Kruger. Walter’s our community accountant, aren’t you, Walter? Keeps the books in order.’

  Michael took off his glove and shook Walter Kruger’s hand. It was stunningly cold.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, but at the same time he had a feeling that he had met him before, or seen his picture someplace. He was square-faced, with tangled white eyebrows like snow-covered briars, pale gray eyes, and rimless eyeglasses perched on the end of his nose. For no explicable reason, Michael thought: atom scientist.

  ‘Emilio was a very good man,’ said Walter Kruger. ‘One of the best. Unselfish wasn’t the word for Emilio. Kind, thoughtful, considerate. God rest him. I’m afraid you have a lot to live up to, Gregory.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think I’m going to be here for too long,’ Michael told him. ‘I have a few difficulties remembering stuff, but once I’ve sorted those out …’

  Walter Kruger gave him an odd look with those pale gray eyes of his, as if he couldn’t really understand what he was talking about, but then he patted Isobel on the back and said, ‘We’d better get inside. We don’t want Kingsley getting impatient, do we?’

  ‘Kingsley?’ asked Michael. ‘Is that Kingsley Vane, from the clinic?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Isobel. ‘He’s the chair of the Trinity Community Association. He lives here too, of course. He has a big house out near the lake.’

  They entered the hall, which was already crowded with at least two hundred residents. Isobel led Michael to two seats near the front. After all that walking from the clinic, and then from Isobel’s house, he sat down with relief, propping his walking-stick against the seat in front of him.

  Considering there were so many people here, the hall was strangely hushed. Michael twisted around in his seat to see if he could recognize any of those people who had been standing out in the street last night. Maybe it was his eyesight, which was still somewhat blurry; or maybe it was the white winter light that was coming in through the tall windows which lined the hall on either side; but he found it difficult to focus on any of their faces. There was only one – a pretty girl who was sitting at the opposite end of the row of seats immediately behind him – and she was so familiar that he turned around twice more to look at her.

  He nudged Isobel and indicated the girl with a nod of his head. ‘That girl at the end, the one in the blue knitted hat with the bobble on top. Do you know who she is?’

  Isobel was about to take a look herself when a door at the back of the hall suddenly opened and Kingsley Vane appeared, casually dressed in a white reindeer-patterned sweater and red corduroy pants. He
stalked over to the rostrum with a slit of a smile on his face, carrying a large black folder under his arm.

  He laid the folder on the rostrum and opened it, and then he slowly swiveled his head from side to side to take in his audience, so that to Michael he looked even more like a bird of prey than he had when he had first met him.

  ‘A warm welcome to all of you,’ he said. He paused for effect, and then he said, ‘I won’t pretend that the winter months have been at all easy for the residents of Trinity, and I know that for some of you these months have brought loss, and tragedy. I look around this hall today and there are several familiar and well-loved faces missing. We mourn them, as we mourn the passing of all those who brought richness and love and meaning to our lives.

  ‘Today, however, I also see some new faces – people who will bring to our small community both freshness and vibrancy. We greet them with open arms, and thank them for the contribution that they will be making to our existence here, even if they are not yet aware of how valuable that contribution is going to be.

  ‘Now – to get down to business – I have here a list of all the social events which are scheduled for the next three months, plus all of the committee meetings and special discussion groups that have been organized. The first of these will be tomorrow afternoon at three pm, a symposium on today’s economic crisis, by invitation only.’

  Kingsley Vane went through a long list of community activities, and then he finally closed his folder and said, ‘Any questions? Any problems?’

  One middle-aged man with a gray buzz-cut immediately raised his hand and said, ‘My stepdaughter and me, we haven’t been getting along too good lately. She keeps talking about leaving home. I mean, what happens if that happens? Doesn’t she understand? How can I make her understand without scaring her any?’

  Kingsley Vane said, ‘It’s Jeff, isn’t it? Jeff Billings? And your stepdaughter’s name is Tracey, if I recall?’

  ‘That’s right, Tracey. Should have been christened “Trouble”, if you ask me.’

  ‘Well, don’t you worry, Jeff. Sometimes our younger residents don’t quite grasp the implications of leaving Trinity. They’re not mature enough to understand the concept of mutual support, and how important it is to all of us. But I have people at the clinic who can talk to Tracey for you and put her choices into perspective without causing her overdue anxiety. If you see me afterward, we’ll arrange something.’