Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Yeah, I’ll pay half but that’s all I can afford; I’m swamped in bills.”

  “Okay. Alright. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Ray returned to his movie. The artist was describing what the spirits of the dead artists wanted with him and the telephone rang again.

  Ray looked sharply toward the kitchen but didn’t jump up this time.

  He was tempted not to answer. His irritation was more like disgust. And there was something else. Though logic would dictate it would be his aunt again, after two calls in a row from his aunt, and considering that none of his friends would call at such an hour, Ray knew it wasn’t his aunt. He didn’t actually know, but he felt it. And his disgust was also like fear. He was afraid to answer this time.

  Why? If any of the three calls were to make him nervous it should have been the first, coming as it did in the middle of this spooky program at three o’clock in the morning. Why the wariness, the urge not to answer it, now? It had to be his aunt again.

  Fourth ring. Ray got up and walked into the kitchen.

  His disgust masked his nervousness as he lifted the receiver. It was so intense, this defensive disgust almost like repulsion, that he didn’t say

  “hello” into the mouthpiece.

  Instead, he growled, “Yeah?”

  The phone clattered and clunked a little on the other end, and then clicked as if hung up. But no dial tone followed. Dead, heavy air. Like a listening, but not quite.

  “Hello?” Ray grumbled, trying not to sound disturbed. He was disturbed but not surprised. “Hello?” If someone were listening he wouldn’t give them any further satisfaction; he said “Jerk.” And sharply hung up.

  Had his tone frightened some friend—Dicky?—into remaining silent? Having someone answer with a gruff, “Yeah?” wasn’t especially inviting. A timid wrong number dialer? But at three o’clock AM?

  Ray dialed his aunt’s house. She answered.

  “Did you just try calling me again, for a third time?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? How about dad?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Ray nodded grimly. “Okay—thanks—bye.”

  Heidi, he wondered?

  Why? No, he thought. She didn’t care enough to need to talk to him at some impulsive hour, or to listen silently to his voice before she could sleep. She had exorcized him from herself.

  Ray switched his phone’s ringer switch from HIGH to LOW to OFF.

  ««—»»

  The next day Ray talked with Dicky on the phone for several hours and was able to vent some frustration. Dicky didn’t say anything derogatory about Heidi, perhaps afraid to do so, but sensing it Ray felt compelled to make excuses for her, rationalize and justify her behavior.

  Defend her.

  “I’m no better, am I?” he said.

  Dicky asked Ray if he had gotten around to finishing his black room yet. Ray said he had thought about doing that today, as a matter of fact.

  In fact he had thought of it for three minutes and had gone on to other thoughts.

  But after the conversation he determined to make it tonight’s project.

  He stalled, put it off, played a few albums and paced the parlor. Finally with a half empty beer bottle he went in to survey his work thus far. The glossy black walls still looked wet but weren’t, the door and trim and windows all that remained, and these to be red. One window had one coat, the other hadn’t been started, and the baseboard was partially painted.

  The streaky thick red looked just like blood—just like it.

  The newspapers and plastic drop-cloth on the floor looked spattered.

  He stood in the threshold looking in at this, took a slug of his warming beer and sighed. Stepped in. Placing the bottle on the spattered step ladder, he went to take down the stark white shades. Rolling one up in his hands, he glanced some more around him. Like a solid obsidian void. You almost didn’t want to touch it for fear of your arm sinking in and touching some cold alien thing beyond. He could almost see his reflection in the surface.

  Ray leaned the first rolled shade in a corner and went to the window that looked out at his car in the drive. He unhooked the two ends and lowered the shade to roll up.

  He froze, staring out the window.

  It was a little past dusk and enough tinge of sun remained to make the world a vaguely fluorescent dark blue. The outside light wasn’t on. His car glowed blue in the warm evening air. And someone was standing in the direct center of the head of his driveway. Darkly indistinct, a shadow.

  He couldn’t make out features though it seemed to be a girl. Even that was more like a feeling than in evidence. One thing was certain—it was facing down the drive directly at this window that Ray was probably nakedly lighted in, his every feature distinct.

  Turning from the window, he speedily rolled the shade and set it with the other, shut out the overhead light and left the room.

  His heart pulsed thickly with the eerie certainty that this figure was the same one he had seen in the same spot while sitting on his door stoop contemplating a nightmare on that night in April.

  Ray quickly extinguished the livingroom light and poked around a curtain in the bay window—just a tiny sliver.

  He knew the figure would be gone now, vanished. It wasn’t.

  Though the curtain was only held open a fragment and the window would be black as seen from outside at such a distance, Ray could almost feel the eyes of that black form on his spying eyes. He wanted to draw back but didn’t, not even to get his pistol. He held his ground and just watched it. Daring it to move, to withdraw—or advance.

  Several minutes passed. They were long. Ray chanced a glance at the glowing blue digital numbers on his video recorder’s built-in clock. Then out again—still there, like a stone. A little harder to see with each creeping minute as the fluorescent quality waned and true night came closer. What now, five minutes? Ray felt like the killer in The Tell-TaleHeart, peering through the cracked door at his maddening victim for hours.

  What if it’s Heidi? a voice inside him asked, hopeful.

  Was it Heidi in April, before she started work with you? retorted another voice, impatient.

  Ray shifted his position a bit. Snatched another fast check of the digital clock. Eight minutes had passed since last he had looked.

  The figure was so melded with surrounding blackness now as to be very nearly indistinguishable. If Ray had looked out for the first time instead of a mere fifteen minutes ago it might not have even caught his eye. Receding into the obsidian black void. Cold alien thing.

  “Asshole,” Ray hissed. He was sure it was no ghost. It made perfect sense to him…

  He lived in a desolate area, an isolated home. No car in the driveway for nine hours a day. What a temptation to a robber or to just plain asshole punks. The phone calls were to establish if someone were home, if the coast was clear. This a reconnaissance, too.

  Oh? Then why hadn’t the prospective robber left? Lights were still on in the house, the car was home and he had been revealed in a window.

  Why not rob him in the day, while he was gone—why call at three in the morning?

  Punks, assholes, terrorizing an isolated house just for sadistic kicks.

  Or a crazy person, maybe. Someone from that farmhouse that was the closest place to his—how did he know who really lived in there?

  “Okay, good,” Ray whispered to himself.

  He strode purposefully into the kitchen and opened the narrow broom closet. Outside it was almond, inside a dark red-brown. Inside were a mop, a broom, a dust pan and brush, a baseball bat and his .22 semiautomatic rifle with its curving thirty shot magazine, or “banana clip.” He selected the rifle, it being the deadliest of this collection of housewares.

  Ray bolted in the first shot; henceforth he wouldn’t have to bolt again, just squeeze off shot after shot as quickly as he cared to, for an almost machine gun-like effect. He left the safety button on, however, as he carried
the gun to the bay window behind his sofa.

  Out there now it was a further shade of blackness on the spectrum. He squinted. Shit, he couldn’t tell…wait…wait…yes. Still there. Sure enough—still there.

  “You don’t know what you’re dealing with, fucker,” Ray muttered, the curtain hanging across his face. “Come on—I got nothing to lose.”

  There was a sound in his studio room and Kelly began barking in there. Ray spun from the window and crossed the parlor to look in. The room was dark but he could see the animal at a window screen snorting at the night air, growling, then barking, then growling again.

  Had someone tried to cut the screen, not knowing the dog had been curled asleep on the little rug in there?

  An electric current vibrated through every nerve in Ray’s body, wired to the generator of his mind, which promptly supplied him with memories of Sharon Tate’s isolated home at 10050 Cielo Drive, photos of the crime scene, the victims and their murderers, all of which he had read about and imagined so vividly that he had felt teleported, projected Scrooge-like back in time as a witness. He had felt so empathically helpless for the victims, and had imagined how he would have reacted had he been a guest in the house, also—with a gun accessible as now. There would have been helter skelter of another sort, then.

  Come on, his mind hissed, break in—I’d love it.

  But he was trembling all over and dizzy with nausea, his legs feeling deprived of blood. He stood in the doorway of his studio listening to Kelly rumble, torn between which window to attend to. He felt like the last soldier at the Alamo trying to defend all sides at once.

  Was the kitchen door locked? Usually it was, even in the day, but not always…

  Kelly would cover this window; he headed back into the kitchen, flicking off the trigger safety, expecting the kitchen door to burst open and some wild-eyed maniac-fiend to spring through before he could reach it…but instead of locking it he hesitated, and then turned the knob.

  Opened it.

  The back hall was pitch black; someone could be crouching on the dusty stairs that led to the second floor for all he could see. Holding the heavy rifle in his right hand, finger on the trigger, Ray stole a step forward and thrashed his left hand about, catching the overhead light cord and yanking it. Reassuring light strengthened him. He lunged to the door leading outside, relieved to see no one crouched down behind the banister-panel running along the stairs.

  Ray slapped the outside light on, threw open the door and shoved the second, glass and metal storm door out of his way—plunging outside quickly with his rifle before his enemies could get away.

  The bare bulb over the door lit the drive fairly clearly all the way up to the chestnut tree at its head. The figure was gone.

  “Okay,” Ray hissed, easing the storm door shut behind him. He stepped off the door stoop, his eyes fixed on that big fat chestnut tree, its craggy bark and gnarled limbs and weirdly shaped leaves delineated by the outer edge of the pool of light.

  He headed up the upwards-sloping driveway step after stealthy step, the pebbly dirt crunching under his sneakers, eyes and gun barrel riveted on that tree, his ears tuned for tell-tale rustles. Finger tight on the grooved trigger. He had to be hair-trigger ready—no one said maniacs only used knives. The Mansons had used a gun.

  Ray had passed his car. He heard Kelly bark inside his house again and flinched, very nearly looked over his shoulder but caught himself. He was halfway up the long drive and couldn’t turn back now.

  A distant breezing sound—a car. Far away and gliding in this direction. Ray quit advancing but didn’t hide his weapon. It drew nearer…nearer…he saw the lights through bushes and it swam by on the lonely road, breezed away in the night trailing red embers briefly. Ray wondered if the driver had glanced down this lighted driveway and seen a man standing there with a rifle in his hands, ready at waist level. He doubted it—the cars on lonely roads at night didn’t seem to him to have drivers inside them, anyway; they were passing spirits. Another crunchy step forward.

  Again Kelly barked, and barked consistently now.

  Did Ray really want to find someone behind that tree to shoot?

  No—he didn’t—he desperately didn’t. In this country you had to be shot already before you could really get away with shooting your enemy, and besides, Ray could see in his too vivid artist’s imagination the face of the enemy. It would be an emaciated, mad-eyed and grinning possessed face, and he would be paralyzed in horror when he gazed into its eyes, and would hesitate long enough for a butcher knife to arc down and slam into his chest. No, he did not want to meet his enemy face-to-face, definitely not.

  Kelly abruptly ceased her barking, and again Ray ceased advancing.

  Had they gotten her?

  Were they now inside his house?

  He was a fool to have left it. Ray summoned a blind bolt of adrenalin and lunged forward, ran the brief distance that remained to the tree, came to the tree and jumped past it, swinging the .22 around to bear.

  Behind the tree there was nothing but unliving shadow.

  He let out a raspy, trembling sigh and darted down the driveway back to the safe fort of his house.

  But as he stepped into the back hall he cringed. Was it safe? No barking within, no sound. Perhaps he had fallen into a trap, designed to lure him out of his house so that he might blindly step back and be ambushed. He stood staring numbly at the door that led inside, as if at the bloody door to some terrible murder scene beyond.

  Ray knocked on his own door.

  Something came scrambling on the other side. Barking. Kelly.

  Sighing again, Ray let himself in. Locked the door. Chained it, too.

  He found that no one had cut the screen in the studio, or anywhere else in the house. Though it was a warm night he closed and latched each window as he came to it.

  Ray sat on his sofa watching two movies consecutively on pay TV

  until the sun came up and he fell asleep there, his rifle leaning close at hand and Kelly curled close by on the floor.

  ««—»»

  Dicky tried calling Sunday morning and afternoon but Ray had left his ringer on OFF and his friend only heard unanswered ringing. After several hours asleep on the couch Ray roused and dazedly watched some television before going in to his bed for a few more hours. He finally woke around three in the afternoon, the sunlight golden through the windows as in some soft-focused nostalgic movie. Kelly communicated to her master with cowed, distressed eyes that her bladder was ballooned and Ray brought her out on the line and sat on the door stoop to watch her. He sipped a coffee. His eyes were inevitably compelled to find the chestnut tree, the sinister black mass of night now gray like ash and decrepit in day. It occurred to him that he might find footprints in the drive nearby to prove that he hadn’t imagined that figure last night, but that wouldn’t be any good—like a foolish policeman who handles a murder weapon and covers the killer’s prints with his, Ray would only find his own prints. He didn’t need evidence, anyway—he knew what he’d seen had been real. Real as anything was real.

  After Kelly was relieved Ray took her in and dug something out of his back shed, reached through the back hall. An old washing machine in there, a refrigerator, trash and bags of old toys, an old twisted artificial Christmas tree in a box. This room corresponded with the shed upstairs, in which were piled those nineteenth century newspapers Ray liked to browse through. That shed gave into the attic, this one into the damp cob-webbed cellar.

  A figure leaned against a wall in here. Ray walked to it. It was a two-dimensional figure: a colorful cardboard matador, his face in proud lifted profile. His uncle had gotten it from a friend—it was a travel agency display—and given it to Ray to use in a movie if he wanted. Ray had other plans for the five-foot-tall matador.

  He had wanted to take it out to his desolate shooting spot with his cousin Paul so that they might share in the execution. Recently he had been tempted to drag it down into the dungeon-like basement and riddle i
t with his BB gun. But a BB gun was only a BB gun.

  Ray could have driven his condemned prisoner to the desolate spot to shoot, but now he simply didn’t want to. He was not within five hundred feet—or was it yards?—of another house. Actually there was a house closer to his shooting spot. There was the road, but there was a road near the shooting spot.

  Ray dragged the matador outside into his yard and propped him up in such a way that he would be firing in the direction opposite the road, into the unpeopled woods. The matador kept his chin high in courageous pride, refusing to watch Ray as he put some distance between them. Ray picked up his semiautomatic rifle and thumbed off the safety.

  He chewed off the profiled nose with careful, intent shots, and nibbled up the profile bit by bit until there was no profile, just a ragged edge.

  He finished up the clip by seeing how accurately he could nail a hand, the crotch, the ear. He turned his back to the gored matador, then spun and fired from the hip like a gunslinger, stitching the figure across the mid-section. Crack-crack-crack-crack…as fast as he could work the trigger.

  After reloading the thirty shot banana clip, Ray set about decapitating the matador. He fired all thirty shots as quickly as he could pull the trigger and the spent shell casings cascaded, glittering in the brassy sunlight. The head flopped and hung by only a shred of paper skin, but Ray wouldn’t let it go at that. He reloaded a third magazine’s worth.

  Beyond his overgrown yard, beyond a tumbled-down little stone wall, the forest trees were strafed, the deformed lead visibly lodged in their bark and leaves thrashing, tearing, pine needles spraying.

  ««—»»

  During the past few weeks Ray had acquired a sizable loan with which to purchase a beautiful livingroom set for his apartment. His uncle had co-signed. Ray had enjoyed much satisfaction in prowling the vast furniture showrooms of a warehouse, having the freedom to pick out exactly what he wanted and not simply what he could afford…though he would rather have been so extravagant with a wife by his side, with whom to confer on style, than alone. Still, this was the adult fleshing out of his first apartment, a fantasy come true. Some dreams were worth the ball and chain of debt. Ray had done all this with a future lover in mind; he had hoped it would impress Heidi.