by Landon Wark
“We’d like to see the property,” the woman replied, shouldering her purse protectively. Her accent, while not as thick as his own phony one was local and he wondered for a moment if she saw through him. None of the others had.
The man did not even make eye contact. He busied himself with surveying the vista of the hill from beside the car, seemingly content to let her do the talking.
Henpecked. A ‘cuck’ those guys online would call him.
“Well, I can cert-ly do that. Cum’on up to the house. We’ll start there.”
He walked with an adopted mosey and she followed heavily after him. The man looked at the cover of the trees, absently gauging the thickness of the foliage, the spacing of the trees, even the whistling of the wind through them. From time to time he would lean this way and that, trying to catch a view of one of the houses on neighboring hills, miles off in the distance.
“So this here house was started, oh, ‘bout ten years ‘go. Son of some oil magnate was gonna raise some deer or something up here. Still get some wild ones these days, if you’re int’rested in huntin’.”
“We’re not,” the woman said. The man was testing the firmness of the ground.
“Well, they stopped building the house ‘bout six months after startin’ it. Turns out his daddy was takin’ the money his comp’ny earned and sinking it into another comp’ny he owned to get the stock price to go up, or some such thing. Don’t know how it worked myself. Anyways his daddy’s in jail now, money dried up and he just skipped out on the mortgage. Bank auctioned it off, couldn’t find any buyers, still can’t, not with things being the way they are.”
The woman absorbed this without a word. She was eyeing the house intently as they approached, taking mental note of the plastic hanging off of the walls and roof. Henderson edged in front of her, ashamed of the state the place was in.
“House comes as is. You can choose your own color I guess. Kind of nice.”
“What about privacy? If any of the neighbors are loud does it carry?”
“Privacy? Well, I guess neighbors are a relative thing. You got neighbors in the same sense that Canada is our neighbor. Nice folk to have by for supper, but far ‘nough ‘way that you don’t feel bad for not invitin' 'em. I suppose if the wind were just right, and they had the stereo cranked all the way up. Trees absorb most of the sound, and the light too.”
“How many rooms.”
“Six bedrooms, two bathrooms and a half bath. There’s also a little cabin out back if you don’t want guests stayin’ in the main house. Couple hundred feet if you wanna go see it.”
“And besides the siding and shingling everything works?”
Henderson kicked at the gravel a little. “Plumbing’s all in. There’s a septic tank down the hill a little ways. You’ll have to get someone to pump it every once in a while. ‘lectricity’s ready to go, just need to tell the power comp’ny to turn on the juice. Phone, in'ernet and cable connects need to be finished up.”
The woman stopped walking. Her enormous bulk seemed to be stuck in a pensive thick spot in the air. She mused at the house while the man seemed to be listening for sounds on the wind.
“Any you said you want how much?”
“Starting price was a million five when she was at auction. I’ve been authorized to go as low as eight hundred.” It was a lie; seven hundred thousand was the asking price, but she looked like the kind who would haggle. Big women were always the cheap ones.
At the mention of the price the man seemed to come to life. His head pricked up and he swung towards Henderson with a speed that nearly caused him to jump.
“Do you take cash?”
He did not.
The wheels of the real estate world turned far too slow for the liking of Jonah McAllister. There were forms to be signed, escrows to close and a million other little details that he failed to understand. Buying something meant buying something and he wanted it as soon as was humanly possible. His new protégé warned him to be patient and, as it was her name on all of the applications and forms, he was forced to stay on her couch for another two weeks.
The time was passed by making money. By the time they were ready to move they had four months worth of mortgage payments in Sandy's bank account.
Most of the work was done by Sandy. She had suggested that they ferret out some dollar coins, but had yielded to Jonah pointing out that because they were uncommon in these parts they would attract attention at any bank where they deposited them. She made up for the difference by working quickly with the quarters, adapting her voice faster than Jonah had when he was first feeling his way through.
For his part, Jonah did what little he could to flush out new words, but with the quiet and care needed in Sandy's apartment he didn’t get very far and after the first week had passed he reverted to helping make the money.
By the end of the second week she had entirely replaced what they had spent on the house and he was beginning to wonder if the economy was being affected by their activities. He reasoned that with the recession in full swing anything they did would be swallowed up in the mix and forgotten. A little unexplained inflation in a rural region would not even show up on the radar.
They hired a contractor to finish the siding and the shingling on the house while they moved in. The siding had come the wrong colour, but the mistake was accepted and so was the discount. The house was an ear splitting teal by the time they moved in their meager possessions.
Sandy took to the idea of an infinite amount of money as quickly as she had to making it. Jonah began yelling at delivery men arriving at the house, forcing them to leave until one of them produced an invoice with her signature. He grit his teeth and waited out the parade of furniture and fixtures in the small cabin in the backyard. Though, when he did come back he had to admit, if only to himself, that the house did look better.
All of this splurging attracted the attention of a few people, both in town and out. Rumours began circulating about celebrities that had moved in just beyond the city limit, and about the time people got it in their heads to investigate the property a large fence had sprung up around the edge of the forest. After that deliveries to the house promptly stopped and nothing more was heard from within the fence.
With the end of the extravagant activities the rumours died down a little, but the silence increased curiosity and they never really disappeared.
The first night they stayed in the house there was a sense of foreboding. For the most part Jonah stayed in the small cabin in the back and left Sandy to make the money and determine how it would be spent.
She sat in front of the small pile of coins she had created and sighed. What once had been great joy had turned into a chore. Even if it was as easy as speaking the words, making money was less fun than it was spending it, and even less fun than learning to do new things would be.
The idea of being the woman on the cover of the fantasy novel seemed as far off as it ever had in the days before she had met Jonah McAllister. Those women stood up for something, helped the weak, afflicted the comfortable and all that.
A pang of disgustful resentment surged through her, but she stayed put, told herself to be patient and he would give her new things when he thought she was ready. Or when the words were. The words slid across her tongue as the coins multiplied before her.
It was late at night when she decided to go to bed. Being alone had never bothered her very much. She had been alone for most of her life. But the silence of the country and the largeness of the house troubled her. She flicked each light switch she came to, doubling back to turn off the last one at each instance.
Jonah’s black form standing before one of the downstairs windows nearly caused her heart to shatter in her chest.
He took no notice of her condition, merely remained musing.
"It's kind of quiet out here," he said solemnly.
"Well, it's just the two of us," she replied.
"Are you looking to remedy that?"
"I
... well, you're out back. There's people who maybe need what we have."
"I'm not sure we can help people with just some quarters," he muttered.
"Well, more people, more quarters. It all adds up after a while. And you're coming up with new things all the time. Maybe someday we... well, we can save the whole world."
Jonah tapped his foot. The memory of that girl on the hotel roof in the bitter cold came back to him. If he could do something good enough then... And, if he were being honest with himself he would need more people, test subjects as it were. Nothing so grotesque as experimental subjects, but people to... feel things out, determine how the rest of the world would react.
"God help me," he sighed with disappointment, "I need students."
"What?"
"Nothing. These people, how are you going to find them?"
Sandy's face screwed up. "I don't know. I guess I've put more thought into being the chosen one than in being the one doing the choosing."
"Chosen one?"
She sighed. "If this were a book or something there'd be—like—a secret society out there all set up to handle this stuff. Actually they'd probably show up right about now to tell us how everything has worked since... I don't know, ages past."
Jonah snorted, thinking of how slowly his notebooks were filling up. "That would be more convenient."
"Yeah. The Order of Convenience would be all set up with a list of people who were destined for greatness and had to learn the secrets of magic... Sorry. Unknown forces."
Jonah McAllister pursed his lips. Looking at his reflection in the window and past it the illuminated cabin where his research sat, not updated since that morning.
"Then..." he said. "I guess you get to be the first member of the Order of Convenience. Choose us up some chosen ones."
Sandy's eyes gleamed and she seemed to go off in two or three directions at once.
"Bring on the students," Jonah muttered.
The Recruits
Nights were particularly bad.
There were noises that were expected around the house that weren’t there anymore. During the day they were both at work. They wallowed in work. They shoehorned work into the house, into the bedroom, filled every nook and cranny with work when they could, but inevitably they would have to stop. And at that exact moment there was silence. A silence that took over, made everything impossible, drowned out conversation, ate up the food at the table before either of them could get a bite, and then it sat there with them, the invisible third person at the table.
And then there were the bills. If anything loomed as large as the silence it was the bills. At times they were everywhere, mountains of them that threatened to topple over and drown them in a sea of paper. Most were from the hospital. Those went unpaid. Bill didn't see the point. The rest had always been there and, before… they had been eagerly paid, now they just wallowed around with the rest, waiting for money to come in. Some were paid eventually, others just thrown on the pile.
Bill's not paying the bills.
It was hard on them both, he supposed, but it was hardest on Jenny.
He looked over at her sitting in the passenger’s seat. The moonlight made her look so frail. Frail but beautiful. He wanted to tell her that, but… Everything out of his mouth sounded dishonest these days, so frail, like her, easily swallowed up by the silence that existed between them. So he forced a smile and kept on driving, locked away in a cage of false words and actions.
Why they were even bothering was beyond him.
It was a night out of the house he guessed. A night away from the silence and the misery. Oh, it would be waiting there for them when they got back, anxious like a dog left in the house alone all day, but at least for a little while they could get away.
“They didn’t say what this thing is?” Jenny asked.
“Not really. A get together. 'Meet the neighbours', maybe?”
He wanted to tell her the whole story, about how he had gone up on a job himself (he had had to fire all but two of his techs) and while he was patching in the cable box the large woman had come up to him in between navigating furniture movers through what she must have thought were sensitive areas of the main floor. She had seemed pleasant enough and he had grumbled a few things back to her. The conversation interrupted his concentration and meant the job would take longer, but he hadn't really minded. More work meant not having to go back to the cold cafeteria leftovers and the cool sheets in the bed they still shared. Maybe that part he didn't want to tell Jenny. And it was nice to have some conversation other than Jenny's ghostly sighs. Before he knew what was happening he had let slip that, like many people in the area, the Hernandezes were struggling. He had tried to back pedal, his face flushing with masculine embarrassment as he tried to focus on the cable box. But the woman had seemed sympathetic and Bill had walked away with both a box of spare wiring and an invitation to a 'get together'.
He had looked around at the humdrum bourgeois trappings and with whetted curiosity decided to get out his suit and tie.
It had taken very little persuading to get Jenny to come. It took very little persuading to get Jenny to do anything. It took a lot of effort to get Jenny to care. The dinner invitation was, as all things were: ‘fine’, but she had unenthusiastically put on an old dress and skipped over her array of makeup.
The lane was shrouded in darkness as he pulled the car onto it. A pair of pillars where a foreboding gate might hang yawned open before them, beckoning. For a moment he felt lost in an old black and white movie as the large house with its staring windows, which had seemed nowhere near as unnerving when he had been running wire only two days prior, loomed up out of the trees. Its gruesome teal siding did little to dull its nearly gothic appearance or to mask the hideous death that might await unsuspecting strangers (or even suspecting ones) inside.
There was a time in the past when he would have joked about that, back when he had not been afraid of death, but that was no longer the case. He was not afraid of death sneaking up on him, he was afraid of death sneaking into the space between the two of them in the car and in the house and in the bedroom. He had fought tooth and nail to keep it from doing so, keeping it forcefully out of his thoughts in case a stray one here or there would allow it to squeeze in, but his efforts went unrewarded. Death had a way of being inevitable in more ways than one.
Lights shone out of the house windows and onto the gravel. Every one was lit and the house was alive, full of light. All that were missing were Christmas decorations and snow on the roof.
Or an axe murderer on the lawn, he thought before catching himself.
Jenny sighed mournfully as he opened the driver’s side door.
“Let’s go home, Bill.”
He stopped moving. There was no way he was going back to that gloom she called a home.
“We’re already here,” he replied. “We might as well.”
“I just don’t feel like it.”
“It’ll do you good to be around people.” He surveyed the lawn in front of the house wondering if the lack of other cars was indicative that other people were going to show up.
“Let’s just go home, Bill.”
He grit his teeth. The time was fast approaching for something to give. They both knew it and honestly, he was sick of waiting. If something had to blow then it might as well be sooner rather than later.
“Fine, take the car and go. I’ll take a cab back or... I don't know, get a ride or something.”
She stared at him for a moment, her eyes had a paralytic hold on him and he found himself unable to move. His muscles tensed and pulled the door back for a moment before his resolve steeled and he was out of the car, marching calmly up the gravel toward the front door.
Jenny was after him quicker than he had expected. In fact, he had expected her drive off. But nonetheless her shoes scraped in the gravel and then she was beside him at the door.
“I don't want to be here,” she moaned as he rang the doorbell.
&nbs
p; “Do you think we should have brought something?” Bill straightened his tie and waited for the door to open.
Jenny's reaction when the large woman darkened the doorway was a rare look into the small portions of her mind that could still be surprised, that could still care about things. It was odd for Bill to think that maybe she had paid attention to the gossip that supermodels had moved in outside of town and had her expectations dashed when the woman had answered the door.
The two of them awkwardly looked around the entrance with its hardwood floors and various kinds of rugs. Artwork from a lacklustre department store, assembled on multiple, random themes hung sloppily in low light, looking to have been picked more on price than beauty. Down the hall a large stairway led off on a ninety degree angle to the upper floor and two long rugs led off into different parts of the house. This woman might (likely) not be a supermodel, but she did know the best way to spend money, pointlessly.
There were hasty introductions all around.
“Our shoes?” Jenny asked nervously.
“You can just leave them by the door,” their bloated hostess replied. “I’ll go get Jonah, he’s usually out back working.”
Bill was stammering out a question about what was going on when she disappeared down one of the rug-laden halls.
“Quick for a big girl,” he muttered.
Jenny elbowed him in the chest. “Let’s just get out of here, Bill.”
“What for?”
“I just don’t feel like being around people.”
He sighed. “An hour. That’s all, just an hour, then we’ll go.” He said it with conviction though he was having doubts. He had expected there would be other people here, like a dinner party or even one of Jenny’s dreaded TimeShare pitches. If they were going to be the only two here, maybe it would be better that they slip away quietly. No. He needed that one hour.
“Promise?”