by Martin Mundt
But not this door.
Little Timmy leaned over the pile of mail and looked closer, and that’s when he saw that the door wasn’t really a door at all, but a false front, just the shape of a door carved into the wall and set back like a real door; except that there was no doorjamb, no doorknob, no lock.
The only part of the door that seemed real – that seemed functional – was a slot covered by a swinging panel, like a doggy door, only larger, two feet high by three feet wide. There were words carved into the panel, also in computer block-letters, but very fine print. He leaned in closer and read them.
PLEASE SLIDE BODIES THROUGH DOOR.
He got that crawly feeling, anthill crawly. He turned around, but no one was there. He turned back. No one, but the doggy door was swinging slightly now, as if something had started to reach out from inside the building when he had turned around, and then had pulled back inside when he turned to face the door again.
Little Timmy got on his bicycle and rode away as fast as he could.
Mrs. Nathaniel Orton simply could not find her husband. She always kept him on the mantel above the fireplace, which seemed, to her, like the most natural place in the house for him. She never moved him, and he never complained.
Today, however, she just couldn’t find him. He was not on the mantel. She checked the entire living room, then the entire first floor, then the entire house, basement, attic, garage, everywhere. He wasn’t there.
She did notice, however, that one of the windowpanes on the back door had been broken. She couldn’t remember if it had been broken before, since it was always covered by white, lace curtains. She supposed someone could have broken the pane of glass, reached inside, unlocked the door, snuck in and spirited Nate away. She supposed that could have happened, but nothing else was missing. Hadn’t she just been over the whole house, from foundations to rafters, and found nothing but Nate missing? Why would a thief steal Nate and nothing else?
She called the police.
“Chief Philby?” she said when the phone was picked up on the other end. Hopkins was a small town. Chief Philby usually answered his own phone. “Chief Philby, this is Nadine Orton. I don’t quite know how to say this. It know it sounds loony, but I swear it’s true. I think someone’s broken into my house and stolen Nate.”
She listened, pressing the receiver tight against her ear so no words would leak out. She nodded once, then twice.
“That’s what I said,” she said. “I believe someone broke into my house and stole the urn with Nate’s ashes in it.”
The next morning, Little Timmy carried an armful of rolled and rubber-banded newspapers out of his garage and piled them into the basket on his bike. He swung one leg over and started to push off down the driveway.
“Little Timmy!” his mother shrieked.
Little Timmy skidded to a stop and turned his head. His mother, holding her threadbare old robe tight around her body, stuck her head out from behind the screen door.
“You be careful crossing the street, Little Timmy,” she yelled, loud enough for all the drivers in all the cars on all the streets in Hopkins to hear.
“Sure, Mom,” said Little Timmy, who had had his paper route for six months now and didn’t think he was so little that he needed to be told about traffic. “Sure. I will,” he said, and then he pushed off down the driveway, rolling his eyes when his mother couldn’t see him anymore.
Mr. Leonidas Abrams lived on the edge of town and kept to himself, mainly because he was a serial killer. Nobody else in Hopkins knew that he was a serial killer, of course, since that knowledge was an intimacy which he shared with only a very few people, and those very few people were all quite dead.
His nearest neighbor lived a mile away, and Mr. Abrams didn’t bother him as long as he was not bothered in return. He lived alongside some soybean fields in a big, turn-of-the-century house filled with moth-eaten furniture and various desiccated pieces of his victims – the skinned face of the girl hitchhiker lining the inside of the Jolly Baker cookie jar, the hooker’s ear under the frayed corner of carpet in the living room, the homeless woman’s teeth strung like popcorn and hanging on the little plastic Christmas tree that Mr. Abrams never took down.
He liked happening upon the bits and pieces of his art at odd times. Seeing a severed finger, or just something as simple as a nice lightning-bolt-shaped piece of smooth skin cut from a woman’s breast always made him feel better about himself, little pleasures which made all the difference in the world between an empty life and a life bright with meaning.
He killed hitchhikers, whores and homeless women because he thought that no one would ever miss them, and, so far, no one ever had. If no one missed his victims, then no one could seek revenge.
Until the day when Mr. Abrams was vacuuming his house – naked, as was his custom – and he discovered that the hooker’s ear that should have been under the living room carpet wasn’t there anymore. And the loose, floppy, eyeless, skinned face wasn’t there either, and the fingers, and the teeth, and the hearts in the freezer, and the skin and the bones and the hair and the eyes and… everything. Everything was gone. The house was clean.
And even then, Mr. Abrams was not a man who concerned himself with thoughts of the police, or of laws broken, or taboos defied. He didn’t worry about what living people might do to him because of the missing bits and pieces. He thought about what the missing bits and pieces themselves might do now that they had seemingly organized themselves. The thought of re-constitution worried Mr. Abrams. The thought of revenge from beyond the grave worried him.
He immediately locked all his windows and doors, and he discovered that the back door had a broken pane of glass, a break he didn’t remember happening. He didn’t know whether something had broken in, or whether a bunch of somethings had broken out, so he nailed the doors shut, and then he nailed the windows shut.
When he finished, he sat, and he thought.
He thought he hadn’t done enough.
He began boarding up the windows and doors. Then he started to work on the air vents. He didn’t know how small a space it might be possible for revenge to require to sneak back inside, so he used a lot of boards, and a lot of nails.
Little Timmy saved von Neumann’s for last. He was two blocks away, pedaling slowly, wondering how far he could throw the newspaper, how fast he could drive past the black marble building and still get the paper up to the door.
He didn’t hear the car coming. There hadn’t been much traffic – there usually wasn’t, not a six in the morning. Little Timmy pedaled down the sidewalk, and the car came up from behind him, and he only heard it at the last second. The car was black, streamlined like a car of the future on the cover of one of his science-fiction magazines, making a noise like an electric fan. Its windows were black.
It was there suddenly; it passed him; it turned left a block up, onto the same block that Little Timmy was going to turn left on, heading down Mockingbird Lane.
But before it disappeared around the corner, Little Timmy recognized its shape.
It was a hearse.
Andy Zambrano opened the Iowa House Restaurant, Best Eats in Town, at five a.m., just like he did every day. It was only when he checked the freezer that he realized today was not like every other day. He’d been robbed, and the only thing missing from the entire store was meat.
All his frozen meat. Ham, bacon, steaks, hamburger patties, even the three ducks he’d bagged himself on his hunting trip with Chief Philby two weeks before. All gone.
“Stealing a man’s meat is just plain low,” he said, standing in the open door of his freezer, a top-of-the-line, walk-in Resurrection 5000. Steady as the Rock of Salvation, the salesman had called it. Always faithful. Cool as the Good News on a hot August Sunday. The Jesus Christ of Freezers, and a 5% discount for the born again. ‘Hallelujah,” Andy had said, and he’d signed on the dotted line.
“What’s this world coming to?” Andy said now, hands on hips, staring into his meatl
ess freezer. “When a man can’t even be safe from roving bands of goddam, thieving, goddam, animal-rights-believing, hippie, vegetarian, goddam, cowhugging meat-stealers? What kinda man steals another man’s meat? I’d like to meet that kinda man.” He glanced over at the shotgun he kept next to his desk. “Yes,” he said. “That kind of man I would really like to meet.”
“Automation, Little Timmy,” said Little Timmy’s father, usually once a night. It was the same speech every night, and though Little Timmy’s presence was required, his participation wasn’t. “Automation is the bane of the American working man. Automation is a foreign concept. A Eu-ro-pean concept. A Jap concept. It’ll put a lot of good, hardworking Americans out of jobs, that’s what it’ll do. Ee-co-nomic warfare, that’s what it is, Little Timmy. Couldn’t beat us in the war, so they want to beat us in the stores, except a Jap or a Kraut can’t build something like an American can, so they have to au-to-mate. There’s no substitute for an American worker’s brain on the assembly-line, Little Timmy. You remember that. People don’t remember that when they’re driving around in their goddam Volkswagens with their goddam Mitsubishi radios. But you’re going to remember, Little Timmy. I’ll see to that. Foreign au-to-mation. Cheap foreign labor. Expensive foreign gas-o-line, and it’s all intended to put America in an early grave. World’s going to hell in a handbasket, Little Timmy. An automated handbasket.”
He sagged into the threadbare cushion of the couch, waving around an open can of Budweiser as punctuation.
“But…” started Little Timmy.
“You mark my words, Little Timmy. Damn foreigners’ economies will never amount to anything. They’re just too goddam… foreign.”
Little Timmy’s father had worked for Lightenberg Enterprises, a GM subcontractor, his whole life after being mustered out of the Navy after WWII, right up until two-thirds of Lightenberg’s employees had gotten laid off the previous year, replaced by automation.
Damn foreign robots, he called them, more than once a night.
Only way to survive in today’s economic climate, the Company called them.
Little Timmy’s father worked part-time in the Lawn and Garden Center at the K-Mart now, when he wasn’t sitting on the couch drinking and watching TV.
“And another thing,” he said. “When you’re thinking about buying some goddam fuel-efficient Mitsubishi with a goddam kraut-made, precision-goddam-engineered, fancy-ass 8-track player, I want you to remember that Hitler made Volkswagens. Didn’t know that, did you? Hell, yes.”
“But…” said Little Timmy.
“And the first time I saw a product of the Mitsubishi goddam corporation, it was flying around on a Sunday morning over Pearl Harbor trying to shoot Americans dead. Hell, yes. A Mitsubishi goddam Zero. And now they’re telling me that I’m obsolete, ob-so-lete, because a goddam robot’s more efficient at my own job than I am. Hell. Americans weren’t obsolete when we dropped an atom bomb right smack on top of the Mit-su-bishi goddam Corporation’s goddam high-and-mighty goddam headquarters back in ‘45, were we?” He sloshed his beer out in salute to the memory of the mushroom cloud. “Here’s to the atom bomb. Shoulda dropped more.”
“Be careful on your bike,” Little Timmy’s mother yelled from behind the screen door as Little Timmy pushed off for another day’s paper route.
Little Timmy knew that his mother didn’t trust the bike, not since the training wheels had come off four years ago. It didn’t help that his feet still didn’t reach the ground unless he leaned the bike way over to the side. He wished he wasn’t so little, but wishing hadn’t done any good so far. He rode away as fast as he could, because he never felt quite so little when he was out of sight of his house.
The paper route was quiet. Nobody but him was up and about, and the ride gave him time to think. This morning he thought about robots.
Little Timmy had never actually seen a robot, of course, not in real life. He had read about robots in magazines and books, and he had seen robots in movies and on late-night TV, but robots in stories and movies pretty obviously did things that real robots didn’t do, like killing people with terrifyingly strong articulated arms, and using their hyper-intelligent but malevolent circuits to plot the vengeful destruction of all humanity.
About all that Japanese robots did was weld cars together on PBS. Little Timmy figured that even he would probably have heard about it if the Japanese had really had robots that were plotting the vengeful destruction of all humanity.
Little Timmy delivered his papers in the morning quiet. Mr. Abrams’ house was all boarded up. Yesterday’s paper was still lying on the front walk. Little Timmy wondered briefly if Mr. Abrams had moved away, but he threw the second paper onto the walk anyway, because no one had told him to change his customer list.
He kept riding through town, delivering papers, the thoughts in his head loud in the morning silence. He didn’t know exactly when he realized that the quiet was more than normally quiet. The silence sort of snuck up on him, but, at the corner of Maple and Main, he stopped his bike and just listened.
Nothing.
Usually he didn’t hear a lot. Maybe a car in the distance, or a dog barking, or birds, but not this morning. This morning there was nothing, no people, no cars, no dogs, no birds, not even any bugs.
He looked around. He cocked his head and listened carefully. Still nothing.
He didn’t hear the hearses coming. He was looking to his right, and they came up the street from his left, like four electric fans that had just been turned on right behind him. The crawly feeling skittered up the back of his neck, and then the four black hearses whooshed past him, one after the other, and sped off towards Mockingbird Lane. After they turned a corner a block away, everything went quiet again, as if the black cars had never existed.
Little Timmy shivered, and decided to turn left, in the direction away from the hearses, and so continue his paper route in a different order. Mockingbird Lane could wait for last on his list.
Even riding past the town cemetery, which was just up ahead, in the direction from which the hearses had come, didn’t give him the willies like Mockingbird Lane.
Until today.
Little Timmy stopped his bike in front of the cemetery, leaning himself over, balancing on his left leg. He stared.
Every grave in the whole cemetery had been dug up, and the neat, mowed grass was churned to mud, crisscrossed from grave to grave by four sets of tire-tracks.
“Ain’t no funeral home on Mockingbird Lane, Little Timmy,” said Chief Philby. He was sitting in his police car on Primrose Lane, gazing straight ahead, talking through his open window to Little Timmy without even looking at him.
“Yes, sir, Chief Philby, there sure is one there now,” said Little Timmy, balanced on his bike next to the black-and-white car. “It’s brand new,” he added, so that he didn’t sound as if he were contradicting the Chief. Little Timmy knew that adults noticed contradictory kids much more readily than they noticed agreeable kids, only it was the wrong kind of noticing.
“Ain’t no funeral home on Mockingbird Lane, Little Timmy,” said Chief Philby again, as if Little Timmy hadn’t said anything, contradictory or not. “Ain’t no hearses. Ain’t no dug-up cemetery.”
“But…” started Little Timmy.
“Ain’t it occurred to you that I would have noticed a new funeral home in town, or a fleet of black, whisper-quiet hearses of the future driving around my streets, or a whole dug-up cemetery that my very own mother and father and their mothers and fathers before them and so on and so forth going way back six generations is buried in, if any of those things actually existed, Little Timmy? What do you imagine that I do all day long at taxpayers’ expense, Little Timmy?”
Sit in this car and set up speed traps or sleep, Little Timmy thought, but he didn’t say it out loud.
“But it’s brand new,” he did say. “And the graves just got dug up this morning, just now, and…”
“Ain’t,” said Chief Philby. “Just… plain�
�� ain’t.”
“But…”
“Little Timmy,” said Chief Philby, and he turned, slowly, squeaking and crunching on his vinyl seat, the better to look Little Timmy in the eye. “When you get a little older, you’ll realize that grown-ups have to deal with a little thing called reality, and believe me, there’s plenty of reality to deal with in this old world without wasting time dealing with fancy stories made up by little kids who are looking to play some kind of joke on a law enforcement officer, and come to think of it, ain’t you got a job to do? Thought your Daddy would have taught you better than to go making up stories when you should be being grateful to be earning money on a paper route, especially since your father’s been put out of work through no fault of his own.
“The world don’t treat story-makers kindly these days, Little Timmy. The world needs good, hard workers, especially in these times of economic dislocation. Now when I was a boy…”
There was a sudden sound like an electric fan, and a streamlined, black hearse drove through the intersection of Primrose and Ivy, right past the front of Chief Philby’s police car, as hushed as if it were hovering on a thick cushion of last breaths.
“Ain’t supposed to be no funeral home on Mockingbird,” said Chief Philby as he and Little Timmy stood in front of von Neumann’s. The Chief took off his smoky hat and scratched his balding head. “Damnedest thing,” he said.
Little Timmy didn’t say anything. He just stood quietly, well back from the false door. The Chief had walked around the entire building twice, muttering ‘Damnedest thing’ and ‘Ain’t that something’ and ‘Never seen anything like it’ the whole while.
The Chief put his hat back on. “Ain’t a door in sight anywhere, except for this little-bitty thing,” he said, and he pushed on the doggy-door, which swung back and forth three times soundlessly before stopping. “Well,” he said finally, hiking up his gun-belt, “if that’s all there is, then I guess that’s what I’ll have to use.” He pushed the doggy-door all the way in and started to stick his head through the opening.