Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala

by Rick Hautala

  Over the next few days, more and more people began to hear the hum. Sales of white-noise machines, soundproofing materials, and environmental sound CDs went through the roof. People turned their TVs and radios up loud in a futile effort to block out the hum, further irritating their neighbors who were already on edge.

  Dave’s commute to work quickly became a crash course in Type-A driving techniques. One morning, he was trapped for over an hour behind a sixty-five-car pileup on the Schuylkill Expressway that had turned into a demolition derby. It took nearly the entire city police force and an army of tow trucks to break up the melee. After that, Dave kept to backstreets going to and from work.

  Schools began canceling soccer and football games as soccer-mom brawls and riots in the stands became increasingly frequent and intense. Shoving matches broke out in ticket lines and grocery checkout lanes. Neighborhood feuds and other violent incidents escalated, filling the newspaper, TV news, and internet sites with lurid reports. As the week wore on, road rage morphed into drive-by shootings. Gang warfare was waged openly, and police brutality was more often applauded than prosecuted. The slightest provocation caused near-riots in public. The media reported that the hum—and the rise in aggressive behavior—was now a global phenomenon.

  “It’s only a matter of time before some third-world countries start tossing nukes at each other,” Dave muttered one morning at the office staff meeting.

  Mike from Purchasing glared at him.

  “Who died and made you Mr. Know-It-All, huh?” he snarled.

  “Jesus, Mike, don’t be such an asshole,” Dave snapped back. “I was just—”

  “All right. That’s enough,” Jeff said. “This isn’t kindergarten. Let’s try to be professional here, okay?”

  “Professional, schmessional,” Mike grumbled. “Who gives a rat’s ass anymore, anyway?”

  “I said that’s enough.” Jeff thumped the conference table with his clenched fist.

  Sherry from Operations suddenly burst into tears.

  “Stop it, stop it now! Jesus stop it!” she shrieked. “I can’t take it anymore! I can’t eat. I can’t sleep, and I sure as hell can’t stand listening to you morons!”

  Dave noticed with a shock the fist-sized bruise on her cheek. She caught him staring at her face and, covering the bruise with her hand, shouted, “It’s none of your goddamned business!”

  “Wha’d I say?” asked Dave with an innocent shrug.

  “That’s it!” Jeff shouted. “You’re fired! All of you! Every damned one of you!”

  The entire staff turned and looked at him, seated at the head of the table. His face was flushed; his eyes were bulging. In the moment of stunned silence that followed, everyone in the room became aware of the hum, but Dave was the first to mention that he thought it had changed subtly. Now he told them there was a discordant clanking sound. It was still just at the edge of hearing, but it was penetrating.

  “The music of the spheres,” Sherry whispered in a tight, warbling voice. “It’s the music of the spheres.” Her voice scaled up toward hysteria. “The harmony is gone. The center cannot hold. Something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong!” With a loud, animal wail, she got up and ran from the room with tears streaming down her face.

  Mike swallowed hard, trying to control his frustration. “What the hell’s she talking about?”

  “Go on home! All of you! I’m closing the office until the authorities figure out what this sound is.” Jeff’s fists were clenched, and his body was trembling as though he were in the grips of a fever. “If I don’t, I swear to God I’ll have to kill every single one of you assholes … unless you kill me first.” He grinned wolfishly; then he slumped down in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his ears as he lowered his head and sobbed quietly.

  Dave and the others left the conference room without speaking.

  That afternoon, Dave drove home, mindful not to do anything that would irritate anyone on the road. Sitting on the sofa in the living room as he waited for Beth to get home, he couldn’t help but listen to the pervasive hum. He thought about what could possibly be happening but couldn’t come up with a reasonable answer.

  When Beth finally came home, Dave said, “Sit down. We have to talk.”

  She looked at him warily, and the mistrust he saw in her eyes hurt him.

  “What’s her name?”

  “What?” He realized what she meant and shook his head. “No. No. It’s nothing like that.” He took a breath. “Look, Beth, I’m trying to save us here, not break us apart. Listen to me, okay?”

  Beth nodded as she took a breath and held it. He could see she was trying to pull the last shreds of her patience together, and he felt a powerful rush of gratitude and love for her. It was so good to feel something pleasant that, for a brief moment, he could forget all about that damned hum.

  “Jeff closed the office today. Fired all of us.”

  Beth stared at him as if she didn’t comprehend.

  “This sound is getting on everyone’s nerves, and he’s afraid we’re all going to end up killing each other. He’s probably right. I was thinking—we should get out of here.”

  “Get out?” The expression on her face indicated that she barely comprehended what he was saying.

  “Let’s go up to your folks’ place … up in Maine … or anywhere--somewhere, just as long as it’s far away from here and all these people.”

  “But the news says this hum is everywhere. All around the world. There’s no escaping it, Dave,” Beth’s face contorted with barely repressed panic, but she clenched her fists and struggled to regain her self-control. “Besides … what’s the point of going anywhere?”

  “Maybe there isn’t a point, but I … I feel like we have to do something. We have to try. I don’t want us to end up another murder-suicide statistic.” He took her into his arms and held her close. “I love you, Beth.”

  She clung to him and whispered, “And I love you.”

  They sat together silently in the living room as twilight deepened, and the world all around them hummed.

  * * *

  What would normally have been a nine-hour ride to Little Sebago Lake took more than twenty-four hours because Dave wanted to stay off the interstates. The latest news reports indicated that truckers were chasing down and crushing unlucky drivers who pissed them off. Dave had seen the movie “Duel,” and he had no intention of reenacting it.

  As they headed north into New England, the sound became more discordant. Dave noticed a mechanical chunking quality to it that was or at least seemed to be getting more pronounced. The endless, irregular rhythm ground away at his nerves like fine sandpaper, but they finally made it to the cabin on Sebago Lake without incident.

  The camp was on the east side of Sebago, small and shabby, but a welcome sight after such an ordeal. The lake stretched out before them—a flat, blue expanse of water with New Hampshire’s White Mountains far off in the distance, to the west. When they arrived, the sun was setting. It tipped the lake’s surface with sparkles of gold light and streaked the sky with wide slashes of red and purple.

  It was beautiful, and when Dave and Beth looked at each other, the good feelings drowned out the hum, if only for a moment. They embraced and kissed with genuine passion.

  Then the day was over. The sun dropped behind the mountains, and the humming noise became more pronounced. After unpacking the car, they ate a cold supper of baked beans straight out of the can. Beth set about making the bed upstairs and straightening up while Dave took a walk down to the lake’s edge.

  The night was perfectly still except for the hum. All the usual sounds—night birds and crickets and frogs—were silent. The lake looked like a large pane of smoky glass. Stars twinkled in the velvety sky above. It was all so serene as Dave sat down on a weather-stripped tree trunk that had washed ashore. He sighed as he looked up at the night sky.

  The noise was changing again.

  Now, there was an undertone of a long, drawn-out, sque
aky sound that reminded him of fingernails raking down a chalkboard. At least it was the only sound. No blaring TVs … no pounding stereos … no gun shots.

  How long can this go on? he wondered. How long can any of us handle this before we all go mad and exterminate ourselves?

  He heaved a sigh as he looked up at the night sky. The constellations spread across the sky like salt on black velvet. At first, he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing when he noticed something falling from the sky. A few dark flakes drifted down onto the lake’s surface like soot from a bonfire.

  Like a child in a snowstorm, Dave reached up and tried to catch some of the falling flakes.

  Funny, he thought, I don’t smell smoke.

  He looked at his hand. The flakes lay in the cup of his palm, but they weren’t soft and crumbly like ash. They were hard and thin, with a dark, brittle surface. They crunched like fragile glass when he poked them with his index finger. They were falling all around him, now, dusting his upturned face and shoulders.

  Jesus Christ he thought. It looks like paint chips.

  Curious, he looked up again. By now the flakes were sifting down rapidly from the sky. As he watched, he became aware of the low, steady vibration beneath his feet and all around him. It felt like a mild electrical current making the forest vibrate like a tuning fork. As he watched the sky, irregular yellow splotches began to appear overhead as more and more black paint fell away, exposing a dull, cracked surface behind. After a time, silver and yellow flakes began to fall, too. Dave watched in amazement, his mouth dry, his mind numb.

  A crescent moon was rising in the east behind him. He turned to see if it, too, was peeling away from the sky like an old sticker on a refrigerator. The humming noise rose to a sudden, piercing squeal, and then the vibration shook the ground like a distant earthquake.

  “Beth!” he called out, watching as fragments of the moon broke off and slowly drifted down from the sky. They fluttered and hissed like falling snow as they rushed through the trees behind him. And then he saw something overhead that was impossible to believe. The peeling paint had exposed a vast complex of spinning gears and cogs with a huge network of circuits and switches that glowed as they overheated. The humming sound rose even higher until it was unbearable as more and more pieces of the night sky chipped away and fell, revealing the machinery behind the night sky.

  At last, Dave realized—as impossible as it was—what was happening.

  “Beth!” he yelled, as loud as he could so his wife could hear him above the steadily rising rumble. “Come out here! Quick! You’ve got to see this! The sky is falling!”

  Knocking

  The city was on fire.

  For the last six weeks, once the sun was down, Martin Gordon wouldn’t leave his house.

  He didn’t dare.

  He hadn’t seen any news reports since the television and radio stations had gone off the air last week. He didn’t have the Internet, and it had been even longer since he’d read a current newspaper or magazine.

  But he didn’t need anyone to tell him that being out after dark was dangerous. From his second floor bedroom window, he could see marauding bands of young people, their dark silhouettes outlined like hot metal against the dancing flames of the burning city as they roved the streets.

  The millennial celebrations had started in early December. At first they had been nothing more than sporadic nightly celebrations; but for the last few weeks, they had continued from dusk until dawn as throngs of people moved from city block to city block. What had started as a spontaneous celebration quickly turned into wanton destruction as people’s frustrations and insecurities took over. It wasn’t long before the burning and looting began.

  Martin had quit his job last week, on Monday morning. He thought “quit” might be too strong a word. There was no superior left at the bank for him to give his notice to, so he simply stopped showing up.

  He didn’t mind being out of work all that much. He’d never liked his job at the bank in the first place, and now he had plenty of time to do the things he enjoyed doing, such as working on his model railroads. Of course, with no electricity, he couldn’t run the trains. In the gathering darkness, all he could do was admire the work he’d done during daylight hours and hope that eventually, once the electricity was restored, he could run them again.

  For the last several days, however, he’d spent most of the daylight hours reinforcing the barricades around his house. He’d sacrificed nearly all of the heavy oak doors from inside the house to cover the downstairs windows. He picked up some heavy-duty screws at the hardware store—literally picked them up because there was no one there to pay—and, after cutting the doors in half, screwed them—by hand because there was no electricity—into the window frames. Someone would have to be pretty damned determined to break into his house.

  Getting food was becoming an increasing problem. Martin had run out of ready cash a while ago. All of the city’s banks had closed their doors by the second week of December, so his paltry savings were locked up where he couldn’t get at them.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter because all of the grocery stores within walking distance of his house—like the hardware store—had been looted, anyway. Without electricity, all of the frozen food and perishables had gone bad, but Martin had enough dried and canned food squirreled away to last a month, maybe longer if he was careful. As it was, his meals were uninspired—usually nothing more than cold beans or vegetables eaten straight from the can. All he could hope was that the situation would eventually calm down, and the police would restore law and order so everything could start getting back to normal.

  Whatever “normal” was in the year 2000.

  Every day, as soon as the sun started to set, Martin would make sure the front and back doors were secure, then settle down for a cold meal from a can before going upstairs, where he could keep an eye on the front yard from his bedroom window. Then, usually sometime after midnight, he’d settle down to sleep.

  He’d gotten so he could sleep through just about anything, unless a roving party of thugs and partiers came too close to the house. When things started to get out of control, he would wake up and sit on the edge of his bed with a loaded shotgun cradled like a baby in his arms. The only light he used was a single candle, which he placed behind him so it would illuminate the bedroom doorway without blinding him if someone broke into the house.

  So far, though, there hadn’t been any trouble; and for some reason, tonight was unusually quiet. The millennium rioting was still in full swing, but it was a couple of blocks away. When Martin looked out the upstairs window, he could see the fire-lit buildings in the distance and hear the sounds of music and riotous voices, laughing and calling out in wild abandon.

  “Christ, some celebration,” he muttered.

  Having lived alone for the last eight years, ever since his mother died, he had gotten into the habit of talking out loud to himself. He had never known his father who, according to his mother, had left the family when Martin was less than a year old. Like a lot of men in tough economic times, one day he went to the store for cigarettes and never came home.

  There was a sharp winter chill in the air, so after listening to the distant block party for a while, Martin decided it was safe to close the window and settle down to sleep. Because there was no heat in the house—even if there had been electricity to run the furnace, there hadn’t been any oil deliveries in weeks—his mattress was stacked high with blankets and comforters. His breath made puffy white clouds in the darkness as he lay down and watched the dull orange flicker of flames against the city skyline.

  He was drifting off to sleep when he was suddenly startled awake.

  For a panicky instant, Martin wasn’t sure what had awakened him. The sounds of the celebrations were still far off in the distance. Concerned, he looked around the darkened bedroom, sure that he had heard something … but what?

  Is someone in the house?

  A slight rush of apprehension r
an through him.

  It was possible, he supposed, but he didn’t see how anyone could have gotten in without making enough noise to wake him up sooner?

  Moving slowly so as to make as little sound as possible, Martin sat up and reached over the side of the bed to where his shotgun leaned against the wall. He felt better once it was in hand. Tossing the bedcovers aside, he swung his feet to the floor. A numbing chill ran up the back of his legs the instant his bare feet hit the icy floorboards.

  Standing in a defensive crouch, he tried to stop his teeth from chattering as he waited for the sound to come again. Shivers teased like bony fingertips playing the xylophone up and down his spine. The hair at the nape of his neck prickled with anticipation until—very faintly—the sound came again.

  It was the soft sound of someone knocking ... knocking on the front door.

  Martin’s heart pulsed heavily in his chest as he thumbed the hammer back on the shotgun and took a few cautious steps forward. He was breathing rapidly, trailing his frosty breath like a tangled scarf over his shoulders.

  Before he made it to the now door-less doorway of his bedroom, the knocking came again, louder this time. It echoed through the cold, dark house, which resonated like a huge kettledrum.

  Martin was shivering terribly when he stepped out into the hallway and paused to look over the railing. His eyes took too long to adjust to the darkness as he stared at the front door, positive he could see it bulging inward with each heavy blow as the knocking sounded again.

  Tightening his grip on the shotgun, Martin started down the stairs. His gaze was focused on the narrow windows on either side of the door. He wanted to catch some indication of who was out there on the doorstep, but all he could see was the deep, black stain of the night, pressing against the glass like a stray cat, wanting to be let in.

  Martin took a deep breath, preparing to call out a challenge or a warning, but his voice failed him, caught like a fish hook in his throat.

  He didn’t like this.