Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  “Reading. I’m in the middle of Fifty.”

  “Shades of Gray? Mother!”

  “Girls will be girls.” She moved off toward the stairs and Rusty looked back with those soupy eyes that never seemed to stop leaking pigment. He was a good boy, usually keeping quiet unless another dog was being walked outside. As far as the kiddies went, he would have hung in the background wagging his tail, most probably too shy to approach. There was a small chance he would try to run out with the door being opened and shut so much, but the few times he’d “escaped” in the past he’d done nothing but sit on the lawn waiting for someone to direct him further. He’d never been a barker. There could have been a Bible salesman pounding on the door then trying to get a foot in, and Rusty would probably just hide behind the sectional. Marissa figured that Mother was just getting him out of the way more than anything (he yelped if you stepped on his paw), and the dog loved her best anyway. He slept with her and Daddy, and maybe Mother was making her daughter feel guilty, having her notice that she’d driven the hawk lady upstairs for snuggles even though it was hours before the time she’d shut off the light up there, pull up the covers, and have the doggie crawl under to curl against her middle.

  The doorbell rang again, and Marissa didn’t start or jump or have some other kind of industrial accident. It was a group of what seemed middle schoolers, including a short, roly-poly Batman, a fabulous Sponge Bob that must have taken hours to craft, a Dracula with big ears and too much makeup, and a kid in his thermal jammies simply wearing an Eagles helmet. Dracula complained about the candy bars and Batman asked for Marissa’s phone number. His voice cracked, and they all had a good laugh about that one. She closed the door and turned. Daddy was wiping his hands with a dishtowel, smiling at the joke.

  “I’m going to get started,” he said. “I’ll be in the den. When you shut it down out here, come keep me company and I’ll show you how everything works.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  The doorbell rang again, and Daddy moved to the room with his turntable and album collection. Marissa opened the door to a lanky kid dressed like Freddy Krueger, looking at something going on down the street and snickering. She frowned. It was Gregory Gibbs, a guy two years behind her from high school. This annoyed her to no end. It was one thing to hold on to your childhood, and another to push it. The night was for kids, and he was walking around probably teasing the smaller ones, ripping off their candy if they were old enough to be doing their rounds without an escort but too young to defend themselves. He was probably drunk or high or both.

  “Trick or treat,” he said through the side of his mouth.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He turned and squinted. He had applied makeup to his face to look like burns, but it was just a bunch of black marks. Both the hat and the striped shirt looked dusty and motheaten, as if he’d found them in the attic as an afterthought and then thought himself clever for figuring out how to be slovenly and still have it work for the outdated character. Marissa wanted to delouse just looking at him.

  “You’re the hot girl,” he said. “From school.”

  She closed the main door just slowly enough to make it seem she wasn’t the rude one here. She was thirsty and thought of hunting the fridge for a Diet Coke, but walked past the piano and down the carpeted step to the den. Dad had his sleeves rolled up and his thick black glasses at the end of his nose. The stereo was playing old Fleetwood Mac at such low volume it was almost indistinguishable, and he’d laid tools out on the folding table they usually kept under the couch. He had her device apart already, and there were little pieces of it placed in complicated patterns that seemed to make sense, at least to him. She sighed. He was a good man, a real worker-bee, and he knew how important this was to her. Well, he thought he did anyway.

  “Go on and tend to the children,” he said without looking up. “I’ve got this. By the time it peters off out there I’ll be deep into the process. Further than you would think.”

  “Thanks, Daddy.”

  He waved a hand. There was a knock at the door, and Marissa went to it, feeling the love for her mother and father so deeply it was draining. She opened the door, and there on the porch were some tween girls wearing costumes far too revealing for their relative age bracket. There was a devil in spandex with knock-knees, an Indian squaw wearing a shitload of rouge, and a cat in black tights showing midriff. In the shadow behind them was their “ugly duckling” friend in a white pants suit and matching smock with her hair tucked behind her ears. It took a second, but Marissa finally concluded it was the Progressive Insurance lady from the television commercials, and she thought, “You go girl. Best costume of the slutty bunch.” The parents were waiting out on the sidewalk, laughing at some joke, one of them braying loud enough to hint she’d dipped too deep into the spiked apple cider before running the kids around. Marissa was actually thinking about approaching them and suggesting the girls drape coats over their shoulders, if not for the sake of decency then because the breeze had picked up. She’d just dropped candy into the devil girl’s bag and straightened when she noticed something. There, through the rippling wind snakes hanging from the porch roof, across the street at the back corner of the cyclone fencing of the mini-substation, there was something odd.

  It was a dark shape. A man. Looking. Marissa couldn’t make out his face because of the distance and the mask, brown and squared off at the top, giving him Frankenstein-head. He was big; in fact, he was humongous. The signs that said “Keep Out” and “Maintenance Only” were six and a half feet off the ground or so; she knew this from when she was little and Daddy took her over there so she could try sounding out letters. Her father was five foot eleven and had had to reach up to point out the characters. This dude was at eye level with them and he was crouching. She folded her arms and glanced down the street to see if anyone else was seeing this guy, and when she looked back he had vanished.

  “Hah,” she said out loud to no one, voice drifting off. It was a Michael Myers moment, on Halloween no less, wind snakes making gentle waves in the wind.

  Marissa closed the door carefully, leaning and resting her head on it. She was going crazy. She really was. Now she was just dying for a cup of hot chocolate and a hug, but she didn’t think there was any in the cupboard and Daddy was not to be interrupted. She thought of her mother saying to her, “Man up,” and she laughed out loud at that one.

  Right at her forehead there was a knock at the door, and she jumped back as if struck in the face. It wasn’t a pleasant triple tap, or even a more commanding “one-two.” It was one hard bang, meat of a fist, and now she was Liv Tyler in The Strangers. My God, was every old-school horror movie cliché making to gather on her porch to say hello? She grabbed the knob and pulled open the door, half expecting to see Jason Voorhees, Pinhead, the Boogeyman, Leatherface, and the girl from The Ring, all arranged like a chorus ready to sing her the opening number to Slaughter on New Ardmore Avenue: The Musical.

  It was a group celebrating the movies, but a different flavor altogether. There was a wizard with close-set eyes and crud in his nose, a Harry Potter with the lightning-bolt scar done on his temple with mascara, and a Lone Ranger holding the hand of his younger sibling wearing a green pillowcase over his or her head with one eye painted on it and cutouts for the arms like the Monsters Inc. Mike Wazowski character.

  “Aren’t you sweet!” Marissa said to the little one, and something caught her eye in the background. Through the black flowing streamers she saw that the big dude had advanced his position and was standing behind the light pole across the street, one palm resting on it, staring through the eyehole that was unobstructed as if the pole gave him some kind of camouflage.

  “Hey!” It was the wizard. “Pay attention!” He snapped his fingers and Marissa’s eyes widened.

  “Calm the ’tude,” she said. “And your robe is too long. It’s filthy because you’re dragging.”

  She shut the door in their faces, thought about it fo
r a moment, and opened it back up again, mostly because the cute kid in the pillowcase deserved better. She also wanted to kick herself because she hadn’t kept her eye on the big dude, and she knew he wasn’t going to be standing behind the light pole anymore.

  He wasn’t.

  The wizard kid muttered something about her being a dumbshit and she hardly heard, handing out the candy and looking up and down the street in flickers and starts.

  Her phone rang. She’d just changed her ringtone to that Warner Bros. whistle, and it sounded creepy as hell. She drew it out of her back pocket. Same area code, but she didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello?”

  “There’s a man in your bushes.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a man—”

  She looked across the street, and it was Phyllis the busybody standing on her steps with her phone to her ear. She pointed toward the evergreens, and Marissa turned.

  There through the ghost webbing she saw a blurred form, hulking and staring.

  “Hey!” she said. She ran at him as if to jump through the webbing like a superhero, and he moved off down the side of the house and most probably through the back yard; she couldn’t see because the angle was cut off. She stopped right there by the porch swing. There was a section of decorator fence back there in the dark and then the ravine, the back yards of adjoining properties blending into the small piece of common woodland forming a short valley, and then the gradual incline up to the houses on Dartmouth. He was gone, and she’d blown it. She couldn’t fake not knowing at this point, and it was done. Just like that. She strode back across the porch and stepped inside, closing the door behind her and dialing 911. She hit the wrong buttons twice and had to dial again.

  “Three times the charm,” she said, and put the phone up to her ear.

  There was a soft knock and Marissa disconnected the call. It couldn’t be. Not this obvious, not right here on her own porch with so many potential witnesses.

  She opened the door and there he was, towering above her. He was wearing a potato sack on his head, and through one of the dark holes that wasn’t quite lined up she could see an eye staring down at her. The mask tilted slightly then, as if in curious study.

  “Yes?” she said, trying to sound brave yet coming off nasal and brittle.

  He just stared.

  “Can I help you?”

  Nothing. And she noticed he didn’t have a trick-or-treat bag.

  “You can’t just stand there,” she tried. “Do I know you?”

  He slowly cocked his head the other way.

  “Use your bathroom?” he said. The voice was muffled through the mask.

  “What?”

  “I gotta pee.”

  “Of course,” Daddy said. Marissa hadn’t heard him come up from behind her, and she looked up at him trying to catch his glance and say with her eyes, “No, Daddy, please! This isn’t the time to be trusting and neighborly! Don’t let the wolf into the fold!”

  Daddy amazed her by saying to the giant,

  “Take off the mask.”

  “Aww, it’s Halloween.”

  Daddy moved forward, reached up, and removed the crinkled Idaho Russet Potato bag. Beneath it was Larry Green, face full of tater-dust, the big mentally challenged guy who had worked for the Pathmark doing maintenance until it closed down a few years ago leaving him jobless. He had been a staple of that place, the only supermarket in the area with underground parking and an elevator, and for years he was the one gathering the carts and lining them back up in front of the pharmacy, pushing around a U-frame with the deli, seafood, and bakery trash and taking it to the back room, filling up the mobile freezer boxes, and gathering up the handbaskets by the registers to restack them out by the front entrance. Everyone knew and loved big Larry. He talked in that low monotone about the weather and the latest sale items that he “tried himself, just ask anyone.” He was weird if you didn’t know him, especially since he sometimes smiled and laughed at his reflection in the metal stand by aisle four if there wasn’t a sign in it, but he was harmless. When the store closed down he never got hired at the SuperFresh in the Manoa Shopping Center or the Giant in Lawrence Park. Lately you often saw him wandering the streets talking to himself, and Marissa felt terrible about it now.

  “Straight back,” Daddy said. “Through the kitchen to the rear of the utility room.”

  The big guy shuffled to where he was told, and Daddy wiped his glasses with a soft white cloth.

  “I’m set pretty well in there, honey. I used one of your old nail files to smooth the contacts, and I’ve got the cloth soaking.” He moved behind the mini-bar and got out some white wine. “It’ll only be an hour or so before I have a reconstituted battery charging.”

  “How long then?”

  He held up the glass and studied the contents as if it were some fascinating potion he’d conjured.

  “A day or two. Earliest tomorrow night some time. I’d explain the flow of electrons, but…”

  “Yeah.”

  He smiled. “Want to watch a movie?”

  She backed to the door, and jerked her thumb toward it. “More candy to give away. Favorite holiday, you know?”

  “Yes, of course.” He took in a mouthful, savoring it as if it weren’t just house wine.

  “Good stuff.”

  Larry came back through from the kitchen area. He was smiling, but his eyes were dulled at trying so hard for so long to figure things out.

  “I flushed, you can check,” he said.

  “I’m sure,” Daddy answered. “You be on your way now.”

  The big man nodded, and looked at Marissa.

  “You’re sure pretty. Sorry I scared you.”

  She let him out, and right on cue there was a group coming up the steps. It was a kid in jeans wearing a werewolf mask, a zombie in a hoodie, a ghost wearing a sheet with a hank of rope around the neck, and an incredibly realistic Voldemort who had the slitted nose done up with some kind of putty and then blended it in at the edges with face paint. He was either bald or wearing a skullcap, and Marissa complimented his effort by giving him a triple portion of Butterfingers.

  She ran out of candy at 7:20 and turned off the porch light. Her father had already gone upstairs to join Mother and Rusty, and things were quiet. She looked in the den and saw Daddy’s work table covered with tins of solution, a soldering iron, three different kinds of tweezers, cotton balls, parts, screws, springs, and neat rows and groupings of other items she couldn’t even begin to identify.

  Tomorrow night if she was lucky. She folded her arms as if chasing a chill and felt suddenly as if someone were watching her. She spun, and there was nothing out of the ordinary—just the house she grew up in, all its shadows and nooks and crannies familiar like an old chair or that special place on the couch where you watched TV all through your childhood, laughing, eating microwave popcorn, dreaming.

  Suddenly she was filled with such an overwhelming loneliness that she almost cried out. She put her hand to her mouth. She made a spot decision then and moved off to the keypad by the front door, tabbing the alarm code that was her parents’ anniversary, “0727.” It started beeping down from sixty seconds, and she made her way through the kitchen. There were motion detectors covering every square foot of the first floor, and all the upstairs windows were on permanent “stay,” making it so that no one could break in without kicking up a hell of a fuss. Made it so that she felt safe in the basement at least, and Mother wouldn’t hear her down there.

  She was going to call Jerome.

  Oh yes she was, girl, because it felt like now or never. Marissa Madison was being stalked by a man clever enough not to have tipped his hand the first night, and she felt things closing in on her, as if she might not live to see another sunset. Promises in the patchwork had been broken before, and she wasn’t going down without a final testament to the only man she’d ever loved.

  If Mother found out she’d kill her, ha, ha.

  Marissa o
pened the basement door by the upstairs clothes dryer, flicked on the light, and shut the door behind her. Her parents would not think it strange that she’d hit the alarm and retreated downstairs to watch some TV as opposed to hanging out on the first floor or heading up to bed. Even though they had a fifty-inch flat-screen in the living room, Marissa often wanted to be by herself in the “sweet dungeon,” and the smaller Sony was nice down here with the black cushy sofa, beanbag chairs, and the two Kashmar Persian area rugs.

  She treaded carefully down the stairs, as the unfinished wall to the left was built “close” and if you weren’t careful you’d scrape an elbow. Mother had put beautiful Asian lamp covers over the bulbs down here, and the soft glow took away all the sharp corners and cracks common to most cellar areas. Just off the stairs there was Marissa’s television space set up in a semicircle by the near catty-corner, and beside it to the right was the second area rug, a soft legend navy rust twelve-footer lying bare across the space all the way to the corner of the basement meeting with the front wall. It was the area they had cleared for the poker table and wet bar Daddy had been talking about arranging down here but had never quite gotten around to. To the right off the landing, of course, the illusion of decor and careful arrangement slowly deteriorated.

  Daddy had put in a false ceiling and PVC covering for the pipes, along with the two keyless padlocks and specialty security bars on the egress window, but the balance of the space had become a stowaway barn, a pleasant eyesore with a clutter of family history. Beneath the stairs were the plastic tubs of Christmas decorations and old books including all the spiral-bounds and research papers accumulated by both parents when they’d earned their respective master’s degrees. Farther back in the darker portion of the basement area was a collection of end tables and small cabinets Mother had bought at a number of flea markets during her antique refurbishing phase, cans of paint, lacquer, and varnish on old groundcloths, a treadmill they rarely used, and a bench-press on a red wrestling mat next to three milk cartons filled with free weights. At the rear against the wall was a wooden cabinet with the winter clothes and a smaller one where they stowed the toolbox, flashlights, duct tape, replacement bulbs, batteries, and coffee cans filled with renegade screws and fasteners, all of it across from the water boiler and the old heater with the chutes and draft hoods that reminded Marissa of steam engines and folktales. The thing still knocked and made noise intermittently, but they’d all gotten so used to it that it didn’t even startle Marissa anymore when she was hanging out down here and it kicked in.