by Lynn Abbey
"What do you want?" Nic demanded, though the answer to that was obvious and the wiser question would have been, Why do you want a dead hard drive?
The woman didn't—or couldn't—answer. She reached for the box, tears glistening on her luminous cheeks. To Nic's eyes, the woman's fingers touched the box but failed to grasp it. The pieces came together in Nic's mind; theirpattern was irrational, but clear.
"You want what's on the drive," Nic murmured. "You want what's trapped on the drive."
The weeping woman met Nic's eyes with silent eloquence. Her mouth opened, shaped a word Nic couldn't hear, then she vanished, leaving Nic with the impression of a streak of light drilling through the wall.
Blinded by the dark, Nic stayed put, balanced on the cusp between fear and curiosity. Once again, curiosity won. She opened the refrigerator and by its light retrieved the cardboard box. One corner had been slightly crushed by its fall and there seemed to be a faint odor of ozone around the front door, though that dissipated quickly. Nic threw the bolt and opened the door to moonlight.
Nothing—no footprints, not even a squirrel or a glass slipper.
Back inside, Nic closed the refrigerator, turned on a brighter light, and opened the box. Like every hard drive meant to be installed in a personal computer, Nic's dead drive was a factory-sealed slab of metal and plastic, plastered with warranty warnings. Inside the slab were magnetic disks so sensitive that microscopic specks of dust would ruin them. Nic considered breaking the seal, but she couldn't afford to void the warranty. By 100-watt light, her curiosity soured. She turned out all the lights and made her way to the bedroom where sleep came in fitful naps and broken dreams about a luminous woman who opened a hard drive.
Nic was still in bed when Bobby Walker knocked on her door. Wrapping herself quickly in a bathrobe, she faced him at the top of the steps. He'd already loaded his two traps, each seething with frightened squirrels, into his pickup truck.
"Didn't get 'em all," he admitted, "but we got enough. Look around—" He opened his arms to the yard where not a single squirrel chattered or twitched.
"Thanks."
"Ma'am?" Clearly he expected greater enthusiasm. "Ma'am, are you okay?"
Nic nodded. "I haven't had my coffee yet ... didn't sleep too well either."
"Traps must've been snapping all night."
She could have said yes and ended the conversation, but Nic needed coffee before she could lie effectively. "No, I never heard them. It was something else—"
Nic watched the squirrels tumbling over one another. Echoing memories of computer crashes, pallbearer squirrels, a strange man warning her to take the box home, and a stranger woman crouched by the door blurred her vision. She blinked and focused on Bobby Walker's face.
"Did your mother say what a brownie looked like?"
"Ma'am?"
"Yesterday you said your mother told you that squirrels chased brownies. Did she ever say what one looked like?"
He shrugged. "Can't say as I remember. Little fellows, I guess. Couldn't be very big, could they, if the squirrels chased them."
"Not tall, then? Not tall and thin and silvery—or maybe dusty?"
Bobby Walker gave Nic a slow, sidelong stare. "You see something like that?"
"Not exactly." Nic couldn't lie, but she could evade.
A squirrel ran along the utility wires. It jumped from the wires into a pine tree's dense branches and a heartbeat later dropped to the roof of Nic's car where it gave her another version of Bobby Walker's sidelong stare.
Nic said, "They're back."
"They were never here, ma'am."
"The squirrels." She pointed at her car.
"Damn. Thought we'd scared them off."
"They're the pallbearers."
Bobby Walker didn't know what to make of Nic's remark. He stood silent on the porch while a second and third squirrel took position on Nic's car.
"I better get rid of these and reset the traps—" Bobby's voice rose, as though he were asking permission.
"Did your mother ever say anything about brownies, except that squirrels chased them? Like were there special ways to catch them or—or set them free?"
Bobby shrugged. "Only that they were lucky and they'd clean house for you if you set out a bowl of milk and soaking bread for them. I think she was hoping for miracles. She had me and my brothers and my father to clean up after. It was a lot of work, if you know what I mean, and we maybe didn't make it easy for her. She went home to Scotland when I was twelve ... said it was a vacation, but she never came back."
"I'm sorry," Nic said without hesitation.
"She didn't like the weather here either. Missed the rocks and hills and all those cold, dreary days."
"And the tall, thin ghosts?"
Another shrug. "Not ghosts. Fairies—not cute, cartoon fairies, but the nasty kind, one step removed from devils." He glanced at his pickup. "I gotta get to work—"
He paused, as if expecting a similar revelation from Nic. When she said nothing, he promised to reset the traps when he got home. There were four squirrels chasing one another around Nic's car by then and dozens more when he returned in the late afternoon. Nic caught Bobby peeking at her door and windows as he reset the traps.
While Nic watched and fretted, Bobby Walker tucked his second trap under the stairs to her front door and, after a vigorous shake of his head, walk back to his own home without knocking on her door. Try as she might, Nic couldn't blame him. He had a job ... a life. Nic's hands trembled as she typed an e-mail to Sara—
... It's worse than weird, Sara. Ever since I replaced the hard drive, I've been surrounded by obsessed squirrels. No kidding. They're all over this place. I've got a neighbor who's trapping them and carting them away by the dozens. He thinks I'm feeding them. I'm not, of course; I'm too busy sending out resumes to be feeding squirrels. He's got to think I'm a slug, not that I've seen a slug around here, but every time he knocks on the door, I'm just waking up. I didn't sleep well last night. I dreamed there was someone in the trailer with me—a woman all dressed in glowing, silvery gray. In my dream—I'm telling myself it had to be a dream—the fairy woman was trying to steal the dead hard drive because there was a brownie trapped on it because squirrels had chased it into a transformer.
My dream made sense, but nothing makes sense now, except that I'm losing it...
fast.
Nic checked her e-mail throughout the evening. She picked up the phone more than once, but her per-minute long-distance rate was too high for commiseration, even on a night when she found herself more depressed than she'd been when she'd first lost her job. When midnight came and went without communication from the civilized world, Nic shuffled into the kitchen, ready to wolf down some unhealthy snack on her way to bed. Her hand was inches away from a box of generic cookies when she spotted a can of evaporated milk she didn't remember purchasing.
A bowl of milk, Bobby Walker had said: bread soaking in a bowl of milk for brownies, luck, and a clean kitchen. The formula hadn't worked for Mrs.
Walker, but Nic was willing to give it a try. She shredded slices of bread into a milk-filled cereal bowl. Then, because she couldn't feel any more foolish, Nic set the bowl beside the dead hard drive.
It was still there, lumpy, scummy, and utterly unappetizing, when she awoke hours later. So were the squirrels, both in the woven-wire traps and racing free around the trailer. They'd grown destructive overnight. Several of the rodents squatted on the car's hood, stripping away her windshield wipers as though the black rubber were licorice candy. Nic slapped the picture window in a futile attempt to scatter them.
The sound snared the attention of a squirrel perched on the narrow banister beside the door. It launched itself at the window and hung there a moment before sliding down. Another squirrel hit the window hard enough to make Nic jump away with surprise. This second squirrel, more determined than the first, fought the pull of gravity. Its dark claws squealed frantically against the glass before it, too, fell f
rom sight.
When a third squirrel leaped from an overhead branch, Nic had had enough. Grabbing a dish towel, she burst out the door, flailing cloth and shouting. The squirrels scattered, but not far. When Nic turned around, one of them was at the top of the steps, scratching at the door which was closed, but not completely shut. She whirled the towel above her head and charged.
"Whoa!"
The voice came out of nowhere, along with an opposite pull on the towel.
Nic let go of the cloth. She spun around and found herself perilously close to Bobby Walker.
"One more step, and you'd have landed on the ones we already caught."
Nic looked down at the writhing trap inches from her foot. She didn't know what to say, but was spared the need for words when a squirrel flung itself at the window.
Bobby Walker whistled his astonishment. "Never seen a squirrel do that before."
"They're pallbearer squirrels."
"Didn't you say that had something to do with transformers and blowing out your computer?"
She nodded.
"But these fellows are jumping at your windows."
Nic nodded again. "I lost a hard drive when the transformer first blew. It's sitting out on the table by the window. They've spotted it and are trying to getto it."
There was a squirrel—maybe the same squirrel, maybe a different one—scratching at the front door. Bobby clapped his hands. It scampered a few yards, then sat up on its haunches, twitching its tail and poised for another leap at the door.
"Is that something squirrels do?" he asked. "Doesn't seem right to me. It's not like there's anything for them to eat in a computer."
Nic took a breath before explaining. "There's something on the hard drive—something that got trapped there when the hard drive failed. Now, instead of just a few squirrels stuck in a rut, it's attracting more and more of them."
Bobby Walker opened his mouth, but shut it without saying a word as another squirrel leaped at the window. The glass shuddered in sunlight.
"Maybe you should hide that hard drive where the squirrels can't see it. Too bad it's attracting squirrels. If it was turkeys or deer you'd really have something going during hunting season—"
Nic's imagination took a Hitchcockian turn as she imagined Thanksgiving-sized birds hurling themselves at the trailer.
"Or you could just bring it out here and give the little beggars what they want. I'd like to see what they'd do with a worthless hard drive."
"It's broken, not worthless. If I don't get it back to the manufacturer, I've got to pay for the new one."
"Then take it to the post office. Let them worry about the damned squirrels."
Nic sighed and told Bobby Walker about the disappearing man she'd encountered on her way to the post office.
"Just some crazy old man—"
She told him about the luminous woman with silver tears.
"A dream—"
"Not a dream," Nic insisted. "I wished it were a dream. I even tried to wish myself awake, but I wasn't asleep to begin with." She saw disbelief in Bobby Walker's eyes. "You must think I'm the one who's crazy."
"Not crazy. Someone who doesn't want to be here and would give anything to be anywhere else. It's too bad—"
Before Bobby could share the rest of his insight, they were both startled by two squirrels striking the window in quick succession.
"I better hide that hard drive."
Nic bounded up the stairs and didn't object when Bobby Walker followed her. The hard drive was in plain sight on the table. So was the bowl of milk-soaked bread. Nic grabbed it first, but not quickly enough.
"There's where you've made your mistake," he said flatly.
"Where?"
"Well, ma'am—I told you, bread in a bowl of milk won't work. That's for Scottish brownies. What we've got around here are suth'run brownies. You want to catch a suth'run brownie, ma'am, you've got to set out beer and a dish of pork rinds, or some of those little hot dogs in a can—"
Nic froze.
"That was a joke," Bobby Walker insisted. "You've got to laugh at yourself, Nicole Larsens, or whatever's eating at you is gonna make you crazy."
"I don't belong here."
"Nobody belongs here." He opened his arms to include the whole trailer park. "We're just passing through on our way up, or down."
"Which way do you think I'm going?"
"Can't tell yet."
"And you?"
"Can't tell that either. Up, I hope."
Nic offered to make coffee and washed the incriminating evidence out of the cereal bowl while the elixir filtered into the pot. She returned the hard drive to its antistatic pouch and stuffed the pouch into the cardboard box which, after a moment's thought, she put in the oven.
"It doesn't work," she explained. "And it's so dirty, I wouldn't use it, even if it did."
"Why not just take the box to the post office?"
"Because today's Saturday and the post office isn't open at this hour on Saturdays; and, besides, I'm going to try the beer thing."
"Do you believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too?"
Sarcasm sounded different with a mid-Florida drawl, but no less biting when wielded by an obvious expert. Nic had underestimated Bobby Walker and his bright-red pickup.
"There are squirrels knocking themselves silly against my window—"
But the twitchy multitude was fast departing. Only one squirrel chewed rubber on the hood of Nic's car, another pair circled the traps that held their siblings or cousins, the rest had scattered.
"Out of sight, out of mind," Nic and Bobby Walker said together, then fell silent together, wondering if something significant had taken place.
"Can I borrow a can of beer?" Nic asked to break the silence.
"You could, if I had any. Never got a liking for the stuff. Tastes like horse piss. Wouldn't do you any good right now, even if I did. According to my momma, brownies are nocturnal. 'Course, what did my momma know? She never caught one, not in Scotland or Florida. Could be our Florida brownies like their beer in the morning or, could be, they spend the whole day racing squirrels and don't get thirsty till the squirrels go to bed. My daddy's kind of like that."
Nic would have asked a few polite questions about the Walker family if she'd gotten the change, but with coffee still dripping into the pot, Bobby Walker got restless.
"I'd better load those squirrels into my truck and take them out to the woods—it's cruel to leave them trapped up. You going to want me to set 'em out again later today, or do you think the beer will do the trick?"
"Better set them out," Nic decided and knew in a dark corner of her heart that the reason had nothing to do with squirrels.
"You gonna put the beer in the oven with the box or put 'em both where the squirrels can see them?" Bobby asked, with his hand poised about the doorknob.
"I don't know, Nic admitted. "I'll decide tonight and tell you tomorrow."
Bobby Walker drove off with the squirrel traps and was still gone when Nic went shopping for a single can of beer and another of Vienna-style sausages.
His pickup was back in its usual place— partly blocking Nic's end of the dirt road—when she returned. She thought about knocking on his door for a change, but the traps were already set, and she locked herself in for the night.
After a day's contemplation, Nic had rejected both the oven and the table for her Florida-brownie trap, choosing instead to build herself a tower of beer-filled plastic cups, sausage-bearing plates, and noisy silverware on the seat of a warm rocking chair with the naked hard drive tied securely to the back. If anything happened overnight—not that anything possibly could happen— the Rube-Goldberg construction insured that Nic wouldn't sleep through it.
And she didn't. When the tower collapsed somewhere between midnight and dawn, she was sitting bolt upright in bed before the last fork clattered to the linoleum floor. There were no follow-up sounds, but there was light!
Grabbing her broom handle, Nic ra
ced down the corridor in time to see something dark and cat-sized dart behind the refrigerator. The scuttling shadow didn't hold Nic's attention long. The light was in the living room—two lights: one feminine and familiar, the other masculine and also familiar, but more aristocratic now than he'd been in sunlight.
The man's dark eyes shone with an unfriendly temper. He tossed a flowing cape over one shoulder and stalked through the front door. The woman gathered her skirts but hestitated, watching the refrigerator as closely as she watched Nic.
"I set him free," Nic reminded her glowing guest. "Or her. I think that's what you wanted, and if it was, I think I'm entitled to an explanation. What happened? How did he, or she, wind up on a hard drive? What's with the squirrels? And, last but not least, what are you?"
"I am myself," the woman replied without moving her lips. Her voice was whisper-soft in Nic's ears, yet easily understood. "As you are yourself and the little ones—the brownies—" She made it plain that the label was not one she preferred to use. "Are themselves. They know better—" She cast a mother's stare toward the refrigerator. "But the ee-lek-trece-ity—" Another word that did not come easily to the glowing woman, "Is so sweet and their minds are so small. When they play, they cannot always remember the danger."
Darkness surrounded by dust bunnies emerged from beneath the refrigerator. Nic got an impression of spindly limbs and a leathery, sharp-featured face before it was gone—through the door—and only the dust bunnies remained, settling to the doormat.
"And they wind up trapped on a hard drive until you rescue them?" Nic asked.
The woman—the fairy queen, Titania?—shook her head. "Usually," she uttered a birdlike musical sound, "this happening is rare, very rare. We hear them suffering, but rescue is difficult —impossible."
"Without the help of something more irresistible than electricity, something like beer?"
Titania nodded. "There will be great celebration—and fear, too, that they will forget everything and think because one was rescued, there is no longer any danger. This happening was chance, not plan."
Nic heard more fear than celebration in Titania's voice. "If there's ever anything I can do ... set out another round of beer and sausages ... ?"