by Joe Hill
One idea got me into my pants and out the door. I thought maybe I could just creep up to the house and peek in the windows. If Mrs. Beukes was alone and asleep in her bed—if all was clear—I could park myself in the kitchen with a knife in one hand and my party gun in the other, next to the back door, ready to run and scream like hell if anyone tried to force his way into the house. I still thought, in the late-day gloom, that the party gun might make someone hesitate for a moment. And if it didn’t fool anyone, I could always throw it.
Before I left, I sat down at the kitchen table to write a note for my father. I wanted to put into it all the things I might never have a chance to say to him if the Phoenician turned up. I wanted to let him know how much I loved him and that I’d had a pretty good time on earth right up until I was butchered like a steer.
At the same time, I didn’t want to make myself cry writing the thing. I also didn’t want to scrawl anything terminally embarrassing if I wound up spending the night doing crosswords at Mrs. Beukes’s kitchen table and nothing happened. In the end I wrote:
I’M OKAY. MR. BEUKES ASKED ME TO SIT WITH SHELLY. THEY HAD A FIRE AT HIS GYM. WOW, HAS HIS DAY BIT THE BAG. LOVE YOU. THE PANAMA THRILL WAS GREAT.
8
WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR, the wind hit me with a shove, a guest banging past me and reeling drunkenly into the house. I had to back my way out, hunching my shoulders against the gale.
But when I got around the corner and was on my way up to the Beukes house, I had the wind at my back. The gusts ran at me, turning my light Windbreaker into a sail and carrying me along at a trot. A house on the corner was on the market, and as I went by, the real-estate agent’s metal sign, which was pitching back and forth, snapped free and soared twenty feet before doing a meat cleaver—whap!—into the soft dirt of someone’s front yard. I did not feel I was walking to Shelly’s house so much as I was being blown there.
A fat, warm drop of water splatted the side of my face, just like a mouthful of spit. The wind surged, and a burst of rain, barely a dozen drops, struck the blacktop ahead of me, producing the smell that is one of the finest odors in the world, the fragrance of hot asphalt in a summer shower.
A sound began to build behind me, a thunderous rattle that I could feel in my teeth. It was the sound of torrential downpour driving into trees and against tar-paper roofs and parked cars: a mindless, continuous roar.
I picked up my pace, but what was coming couldn’t be outrun, and in three more steps it caught me. It came down so hard that the rain bounced when it hit the road, creating a shivering, knee-high billow of spray. Water began to pour into storm drains in a brown, foaming flood. It was amazing how quickly it happened. It seemed like I ran fewer than ten steps before I was splashing ankle-deep. A plastic pink flamingo rushed past, carried by the tide.
Lightning popped, and the world became an X-ray photograph of itself.
I forgot my plan. Did I even have a plan? You couldn’t think in a storm like that.
I fled through pelting water, cut across the yard of the house next to Shelly’s. Only the lawn was melting. It came apart under my heels, long runners of grass peeling up to reveal the waterlogged earth beneath. I fell, went down on one knee, caught myself with my hands, and came up filthy and wet.
I staggered on, across the Beukeses’ driveway, which was a wide and shallow canal by then, and around to the back of the house. I scrabbled at the screen door and leapt inside as if I were on the run from wild dogs. The door banged behind me, only slightly less loud than a crack of thunder, which was when I remembered I’d been aiming for stealth.
Water dripped off me, off the party gun. My clothes were sopping.
The kitchen was still and shadowed. I had sat there plenty of times in the past, munching Shelly Beukes’s date cookies and sipping tea, and it had always been a place of pleasant smells and reassuring order. Now, though, there were dirty plates in the sink. The garbage can overflowed, flies crawling on heaped paper towels and plastic bottles.
I listened but couldn’t hear anything except the rain rumbling on the roof. It sounded like a train going by.
The screen door opened behind me and slammed again, and I choked on a scream. I spun, ready to drop to my knees and begin begging, but there was no one there. Just wind. I pulled the screen door tight—and almost immediately a fresh gust overpowered the old latch and sucked the screen open once more, then thumped it shut. I didn’t bother to secure it again.
My insides squirmed at the thought of going any farther into the house. I felt strongly that the Phoenician was already there, had heard me coming in and was patiently waiting for me somewhere in the gloom, down the hall and around the corner. I opened my mouth to call hello, then thought better of it.
What finally got me moving wasn’t courage but manners. A puddle was forming under my feet. I snatched a dish towel and wiped up. It gave me a way to stall going any farther into the house. I liked it close by the screen door, where I could get outside in two steps.
Finally the floor was dry. I was still wet, though, and needed a towel myself. I edged over to the doorway and stuck my head around the corner. A dim and lonely hall awaited.
I crept down the corridor. I used the barrel of the party gun to nudge open each door as I came to it, and the Phoenician was in every room. He was in the tiny home office, standing motionless in one corner. I spotted him in my peripheral vision, and my pulse did a hectic jig, and I looked again and saw it was only a coatrack. He was in the guest bedroom, too. Oh, at first glance, the place seemed empty. It could’ve been a room in a Motel 6, with its neatly made queen-size bed, striped wallpaper, and modest TV. The door to the closet, though, was slightly ajar, and as I stared at it, it seemed to wobble slightly, as if it had only just been pulled closed. I could feel him in there, holding his breath. It took all the will I possessed to walk the three steps to the closet. When I threw open the door, I was prepared to die. The little cabinet within contained a collection of curious costumes—a pink jumpsuit with a fur collar, white silks of the sort Elvis Presley liked to wear in the seventies—but no psychopaths.
Finally only the door to the master bedroom remained. I gently turned the knob and carefully pushed it inward. The screen door in the kitchen chose that exact moment to bang once again, going off like a pistol shot.
I looked behind me and waited. It came to me then that I was trapped here at the end of the corridor. The only way to get out of the house (without leaping through a window) was to retrace my steps. I swayed, ready for the Phoenician to step into the hall, planting himself between me and escape. One moment turned into another.
No one came. Nothing moved. Rain hammered on the roof.
I stuck my head into the bedroom. Shelly was asleep on her side beneath a puffy white comforter, nothing of her showing except her dandelion puff of white hair. Her snore was a soft, rasping buzz, barely audible over the steady rumble of the downpour.
I inched into the room in mincing little steps, feeling jumpy and weak—but quite a bit less jumpy and weak than I’d been when I first entered the house. I used the party gun to push aside curtains. There was no one behind them. No one in the closet either.
My nerves were still jangly, but I wasn’t scared of the house anymore. I didn’t see why a guy like the Phoenician would hide in a closet anyway. What kind of predator hid from a fat thirteen-year-old with a big plastic gun that looked about as threatening as a bullhorn?
The signal from Radio Adulthood was sharpening by then, making its way through the usual static of adolescence. The newscaster was reading tonight’s report in a dry, droll tone. He reminded me of Carl Sagan’s maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He pointed out that I had in the past believed that the Zodiac Killer might break into my house and murder me, simply because I’d once read a book about him. He reminded his listeners that Michael Figlione had, when he was twelve, saved his allowance for six months to buy a metal detector because he thought there was a strong chance
of finding Spanish doubloons buried in his backyard. Radio Adulthood wanted its audience to know that my current theory—that the Phoenician possessed a camera capable of stealing thoughts—was based on the sturdy evidence of an old lady’s demented ramblings and a random scuffed snapshot discovered beneath a trash can.
But, but, but—what about the fire at the gym? Yes, Radio Adulthood admitted, there’d been a shocking blaze at Mr. Beukes’s gym. Considering the lightning storm that had just rolled in, the Cupertino fire department would probably be responding to a lot of fires that evening. Did I think perhaps that the storm was also the work of the Phoenician? Was that another of his “superpowers”? He had a camera that destroyed minds. Did he also have an umbrella that squirted thunderstorms into the sky? I should count myself lucky he hadn’t used his sorcery to make it rain nails.
That was about all the jeering from Radio Adulthood I wanted to hear at the moment. I was wet, and I was cold, and I was safe, and that was good enough. But later—yes, later—maybe I would be tuning back in to hear the rest of the program. Maybe a part of me was looking forward to tearing myself down, taking a good rip at my own overworked Twilight Zone imagination.
I was sick of my soggy clothes and poked my head into the master bathroom. There was a big white robe trimmed in gold thread hanging off a hook by the shower, the kind of robe you’d expect to find in a five-star hotel. It looked like the next best thing to curling up in a bed somewhere.
I patted the party gun dry, set it down next to the sink, and schlopped off my wet shirt. I left the door open between the bathroom and the bedroom, but I stood behind it so if Shelly Beukes woke, she wouldn’t be startled by the sight of my exposed pink blubber.
The rain was slackening by then, had softened to a deep, lulling crackle on the roof. As I toweled off my boy boobs and back, I felt myself softening with it. I had planned to sit in the kitchen, next to the screen door, ready to run at the first sign of a psycho, but now I was beginning to indulge fantasies of hot cocoa and Girl Scout cookies.
The rain was tapering off, but the lightning was still going full throttle. It flashed, close enough to fill the bathroom with a throb of almost blinding silver light. I wrestled off my pants, which were soaked through. I peeled off my waterlogged socks, too. The lightning blinked again, the brightest flash yet. I wiggled into the robe. It was even softer and fluffier than I’d imagined. It was like wearing an Ewok.
I toweled off my wet hair, my neck, and the lightning snapped for a third time, and Shelly responded to it with a low moan of unhappiness. Then I understood and I wanted to moan myself. All those flashes of lightning and not one crack of thunder.
Fear inflated within me like a balloon, a thing expanding in my midsection, pushing organs out of the way. The white glare flashed again, not outside but from within the bedroom.
There was a single window in the bathroom, but I wasn’t getting out that way: it was made of glass bricks, set inside the shower, and couldn’t be opened. The only way out was past him. I reached for my party gun with a shaking hand. I thought that maybe I could throw it at him—at his face—and run.
I peeked around the edge of the door. My pulse thrummed. The flash flashed.
The Phoenician stood by the bed, bent over Shelly with his camera, peering through the viewfinder. He had pulled the covers completely off her. Shelly was curled on her side, a hand protecting her face, but as I watched, the Phoenician grabbed her wrist and forced her arm down.
“None of that,” he said. “Let’s see you.”
The flash went off again, and the camera whirred. The Solarid spit a photo onto the floor.
Shelly made a low, wounded sound of refusal, a noise that was almost but not quite No.
A heap of snapshots surrounded his fancy boots with the high Cuban heels. The flash pulsed again, and another picture fell into the pile.
I took a small step into the bedroom. Even that required too much coordination for a shambling slob like myself, and the party gun clicked against the doorframe. The sound of it made me want to cry, but the Phoenician didn’t look my way, so intent was he on his work.
The camera whined and snapped. Shelly tried to raise her hand to shield her face again.
“No, bitch,” he said, and grabbed her wrist, and shoved her hand down. “What did I tell you? No covering up.”
“Stop it,” I said.
It was out of my mouth before I knew I was going to speak. It was the way he kept shoving her hand down. It offended me. Does that make sense? I wanted more than anything to run, but I couldn’t, because I couldn’t bear the thought of him touching her like that. It was indecent.
He glanced over his shoulder without any real surprise. Flicked his gaze down at the party gun and snorted softly in contempt. It wasn’t fooling anyone.
“Oh, look,” he said. “It’s the fat boy. I thought the old bastard might send someone around to sit with her. Of all the people in the world, if it could’ve been just one person, I would’ve picked you, fat boy. I’m going to remember the next few minutes with great pleasure, all the rest of my life. I am—but you aren’t.”
He turned toward me with the camera. I jerked up the gun. I’m sure I meant to throw it, but instead my finger found the trigger.
The air horn shrieked. Confetti exploded in a shower of glitter. The flashbulbs kapowed. The Phoenician went backward as if someone had struck him in the chest. His high right heel came down on that little pile of photographs—those slick plasticky squares—and squirted out from under him. The backs of his legs thumped an end table. A lamp toppled, hit the floor, and the bulb exploded with a sharp pop. He jumped forward a step, and Shelly reached out and grabbed his pant leg and yanked. He stumbled, with his eyes shut—right toward me.
He made a sound between a snarl and a roar. Glitter spackled his cheeks, flecked his eyelashes. He even had some in his mouth, bright gold flakes on his tongue. He cradled his camera to his chest like a mother with her infant and reached for me with his free hand. In that moment I found a decisive grace I’d never known before and would never know again.
I stepped into him, knowing he couldn’t see me, had been blinded by the flash. When we thudded together, the Solarid slipped. My knee found his groin, not a good hard thump but a weak jostle that made him instinctively clamp his knees together. He bobbled the camera, and I lifted it right out of his hand. He choked on a scream and grabbed for the Solarid. I handed him the party gun instead. He caught it by the trigger, and it went off with another loud squawk. I kept going, was past him in two steps, and then I was behind him, next to the bed.
He stumbled almost as far as the bedroom door before he realized what had happened. He put out his free hand and steadied himself against the doorframe. He blinked rapidly down at the party gun with complete bafflement. He didn’t drop it. He threw it onto the floor with a crack and kicked it away.
A hand stroked the outside of my leg, gently patted my knee. Shelly. She had relaxed and gazed up at me with a dreaming affection.
The pale, colorless worms of the Phoenician’s lips flexed in a look of rage masquerading as humor.
“You can’t imagine what I’m going to do to you. I’m not going to kill you. I’m not even going to hurt you. Either would be showing you a respect you don’t deserve. I’m going to fucking erase you.” His dark eyes shifted to the camera in my hands, then went back to my face. “Put that down, you fat piece of shit. Do you have any idea what that does?”
“Yes,” I said in a shaking voice, and lifted the viewfinder to my eye. “Yes I do. Say cheese.”
9
THERE ARE A LOT OF things I don’t understand about that night.
I took photo after photo of him. The Solarid pictures fell, one after another, into a pile at my feet. A standard Polaroid cartridge contained twelve pictures. The extra-large cartridges allowed you to take eighteen photographs. But the Solarid never needed to be reloaded, and it never ran out.
He didn’t come get me. The first pictu
re dazed him, just as it had dazed Mat. It seemed to put him back on his high Cuban heels, his eyes blank, staring far away at some distant view he would never see again. He stood there fixed in place, a computer trying to boot up. But he could never get unstuck, because I kept firing the camera at him.
After the first dozen photos, he did finally move. But not to charge me. Instead he carefully, almost daintily, crossed his ankles and then slid to the floor to sit like a disciple meditating in an ashram. After another twenty snapshots, he began to tilt over to one side. Ten pictures later he was curled in the fetal position on the floor. In all this time, a sly, subtle, knowing smile remained on his face, but at a certain point one corner of his mouth began to glisten with drool.
Shelly stirred from the narcotic fog created by the Solarid and was able to sit up, blinking sleepily. Her hair floated in bluish tangles around her shriveled-dumpling face.
“Who’s that?” she asked, looking at the Phoenician.
“I don’t know,” I said, and took another picture.
“Is it Alamagüselum? My father says Alamagüselum lives in the walls and drinks tears.”
“No,” I said. “But maybe they’re related.” I don’t think the Phoenician drank tears, but I believe he enjoyed seeing them quite a bit.
Maybe fifty photos in, the Phoenician’s eyelids sank halfway shut and his eyes rolled back to show the whites, and he began to shiver. His breath shot out of him in short, harsh bursts. I lowered the camera, scared he was going to have a seizure. I regarded him carefully, and after a minute the tremors began to subside. He was rag-doll limp, and his face had assumed an expression of forlorn imbecility.
It was perhaps like electroshock therapy. You could fry the brain for only so long before you risked overloading the system and stopping the heart. I decided to give him a chance to get his breath back. I bent and grabbed a fistful of the pictures on the floor. I knew it would be a mistake to look at them, but I looked anyway. I saw: