Static!

by Michael R Collings

  “It’s in the will.”

  “In the…?”

  “Yeah. It’s really strange. I get the house...both houses plus some property downtown that’s worth as much as these pieces and a whole lot more. And a wad of money that the lawyers found a couple of weeks ago in some long-term investment accounts. They think there may be some more property up north, too. All that from an old woman I never met and barely even heard of.

  “Funny,” he added, looking back to Nick then away again to resume staring at the same blank spot on the same blank wall. “I lost my mother to cancer....”

  “I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I didn’t know. You never said anything.”

  “It was a long siege, painful for both of us, and a relief in some ways when it was finally over. One week later, I lost my job when the mill shut down. Then another week and POW! I get a letter addressed to my mother from some attorneys in California. In spite of cousins and nephews and nieces all over the place, Mom was named specifically as sole heir to everything Great-Aunt Emilia owned, and I was her only heir. Suddenly, out of the blue, I’m rich. I mean, really rich. Filthy rich.” He tried to laugh, but the sound strangled.

  “And the only restrictions in the will,” he continued, “were that Mom…that I must live here, in this place. And that I can’t remove anything from the house, can’t change anything down to the paint on the walls. Would you believe it, there are a dozen cases of white paint stacked up in the garage, along with a formula for making more when that’s gone.

  “The same goes for the furniture. I had to argue with the lawyer for an hour before he allowed me to bring in these two things. And then he had to pass on the materials—just metal and plastic, no natural woods, etc.”

  Nick whistled, the sound low and chilling even to his own ears. He looked around the room again with a new eye. “No pictures? No new paint?”

  “Nothing. It apparently has something to do with the sound system Aunt Emilia was developing. I think she stopped actual work a year or so ago, but by then it was pretty much in place. Pounding nails or hanging pictures or even using any other kind of paint would foul things up. So I’m stuck with this. Through the whole house.”

  Nick shivered. Someone’s walking on my grave, he thought, remembering his grandmother, she of the warmly cluttered cottage with its massive dark oak furniture clustering along each wall, its worn braided rugs made from bits and pieces of her lifetime—even at ninety-two she had been able to tell him where each piece of material had come from, who had worn this suit to Great-Great-Grandma Kerr’s funeral during World War I or that dress to a senior prom at the Grange Hall in the fifties or that pair of pajamas the night his youngest died of diphtheria during the depression.

  Nick overlaid the richness of those memories onto the emptiness of Payne’s house and shivered.

  “Come on,” Payne said quickly, smiling broadly as if to bridge an uncomfortable moment, “let’s forget all that weirdness and get down to some serious chess. Wait here.”

  He disappeared into the hallway. When he returned a moment later, he had a large, flat cardboard box tucked under his arm.

  “Got this yesterday.”

  He set the box onto the white carpeting. It created an ugly splotch of brown against the whiteness. Payne squatted next to the box and lifted the top. Nick noted that Payne didn’t drop the top to the floor; he laid it carefully on the new chair.

  White tissue crackled loudly against the silence as Payne folded the edges to the side to expose a chess set as starkly simple as the room itself. The kings were almost featureless columns, their surfaces faintly rippled by swirls that implied rather than defined faces. The other pieces were equally abstract, equally suggestive of forms without actually being forms. The pieces gleamed in flawless porcelain, white and black. Payne lifted them out and pulled the board from the bottom of the box and unfolded it. It was made of heavy cardboard overlaid with fine-grained leather, luxurious smelling, obviously expensive, with white and pearl-gray squares.

  Payne set the board on the small table, placing each piece painstakingly, precisely in the center of its square. Nick waited to one side, watching. When the game board was ready, Payne straightened and grabbed the empty box. He stuffed the wrinkled tissue to the bottom and slipped the top carefully over each edge.

  “Just a minute, huh? Be right back.”

  He disappeared into the hallway. Nick saw him turn from there into the kitchen. For a few moments, Nick stood next to the new white chair, oddly uncomfortable at the thought of sitting down. He paced, but only a few feet to either side of the small table now crowned with the abstract white and black pieces. He waited for Payne to return but the moments stretched into longer minutes and his patience suddenly wore thin. He hurried down the hallway and looked through the kitchen door, expecting to see the chess box sticking out of the waste can and Payne methodically setting out cheese, crackers, and beer for snacks and drinks.

  “Can I give you...?” he began, then stopped. The room was empty. He glanced through the windows, cleaner now than they had been the first time he visited the house with Payne, but even so they were overlaid with an obviously fresh if thin coating of dust that made the back yard slightly hazy.

  From the kitchen he could see Payne stuffing the chess box into one of the large, battered garbage cans lined like sentinels between the back fence and the alley. Payne replaced the lid carefully, rattling the can once or twice to make sure it was snug, as if he were deathly afraid that the box would come to life and climb out—or that someone would notice that it was in there to begin with. As Payne straightened and headed toward the house, Nick faded quickly into the hallway. By the time Payne entered the living room, Nick was seated, studying the chess set.

  Situation A-OK, everything normal.

  Nick heard Payne come in, knew that the man was standing just over his shoulder. He counted ten seconds, fifteen, and still Payne said nothing. Nick relaxed, waiting for the inevitable joke, the gag, the comment about the chess set and their last game at Nick’s and how badly Nick was going to get the pants beaten off him tonight.

  “Mind if I sit there?” Payne asked quietly. Surprised, Nick looked up. He hadn’t consciously thought about where he was sitting; he had simply chosen the closest chair when he hurried back down the hall. As luck would have it, it was the old one. The Greer’s chair.

  “Sure, help yourself,” he said, and he stood up and stepped around Payne. He moved to the new chair and sat down. He felt more comfortable there anyway.

  Payne dropped into The Greer’s chair, literally dropped, as if he were a puppet and someone had savagely cut his strings with a single snip from a pair of shears. The springs snapped and groaned with the burden of his sudden weight.

  “Okay,” he said, grinning as if nothing were unusual at all, “let’s get into some serious chess. I feel lucky.”

  Without asking Nick to choose a color, he slid a black pawn forward two spaces.

  “Your turn.”

  Nick couldn’t move. Couldn’t raise his arm to touch the gleaming white pawn that would counter Payne’s opening. It was as if there were a threat emanating from the pieces, the ebony burning like Milton’s darkness visible in the brightness of the room. The gray squares almost disappeared from two yards away, blending with the white men. But the black pieces....

  The game itself suddenly seemed sterile, the white pieces invisible, the black obscene intrusions. Nick’s head ached with a sickening, throbbing ache. His stomach flopped over once, twice. The room suddenly seemed hotter than a concrete sidewalk at noon in July.

  “Hey, Nick,” Payne said, leaning across the board to rest his hand on Nick’s knee. “You okay?”

  Nick looked up, his expression dazed. He barely felt the weight of Payne’s hand through the heavy material of his jeans. Someone had said something someone spoke to him he should answer. “Uh, what?”

  “You okay? You’ve been sitting there for a minute or two, barely breathing. You feel a
ll right?”

  “No…yes. No, I guess not. Not for chess, anyway, not today. I’m...I guess I’m just not in the mood.” He massaged his temples with his fingertips, swallowing hard against the bile in his throat.

  Payne looked at him as if about to say something, then shrugged and settled back into the chair and crossed his legs.

  “Okay. Wouldn’t want to force anyone to get the pants beat off him. Another time?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Tomorrow, huh?”

  Payne nodded.

  Ten minutes later, Nick was home, lying on his bed with a cold, damp cloth covering his eyes and shutting out the light. He lay quietly, his body barely moving except for the shallow rise and fall of his chest. But still he felt as if the bed were tossing in a gale. His head pounded more fiercely.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In spite of their best intentions, Nick and Payne were wrong. There was no tomorrow for the chess set in Payne’s living room. It stood unused on the small table until the end, unmoved, untouched as far as Nick could see. The glossy surfaces seemed never dulled by the slightest haze of dust.

  And the black pieces never became part of the room.

  Later, when he started visiting Payne more frequently, Nick could not bring himself to touch even one of the pieces.

  Neither of them said anything, but after that abortive attempt, it was tacitly agreed that chess was played only at Nick’s, using his plastic $4.98 Kmart® special. At Payne’s, they watched films.

  They watched one the next night, in fact. Nick fully intended to begin the aborted chess game. He felt better, his headache had disappeared sometime during the night and his stomach was quiet by breakfast. He went out to the front porch after eating, in time to see Payne leaving the house.

  “How about coming over tonight,” Payne called over the hedge.

  “Sure. Chess?”

  “Only if you want me to beat the pants off of you.”

  “No way you’ll do that,” Nick yelled. “Not this time.”

  “Seven, then,” Payne said, taking up the challenge. He waved and went on down the sidewalk.

  “Seven,” Nick called after him.

  Now it was seven o’clock. Seven-five. Seven-ten. They sat uncomfortably for a few minutes more, their faces and bodies opposed, the chess set stolidly between them, its presence a static obstacle even to speech.

  Finally Payne stood.

  “Let’s forget this for now. Come on into the other room. Let me show you what I’ve figured out.”

  Nick rose—not without a good deal of relief—and followed him down the hall to the Master Control Room. There were no obvious changes in here, not even a second chair. But the shelves seemed subtly more orderly. The cabinet doors that had hidden yards of LPs, their cardboard sleeves fading remnants of another age and time, and more up-to-date CDs in gleaming plastic cases were pulled open. The room looked vaguely more human, more lived in—almost livable. Payne crossed to one of the DVD players.

  “The video set-up wasn’t too difficult to figure out,” he said. “I’ve run it quite a few times now. I’m sure it has functions”—the jargon slipped out smoothly—“that I’m not aware of, but at least I can get us a movie going.”

  Nick remained motionless in the center of the room. He had stopped dead still when Payne approached the DVD player.

  “Don’t!” he thought he had yelled, but the sound emerged as a whisper, barely a breath. Don’t touch it.

  Payne turned at the slight sound.

  Nick rubbed the tips of his fingers along the rough seam of his jeans, trying to wipe away an irritating tingle that ran from tips to palm.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Payne said, remembering and flushing slightly at his innocent oversight. “I’ve been playing this thing for days now and it hasn’t sparked me once. Whatever happened was a fluke. Come on.”

  Nick started over, then stopped, turned, and walked instead to the shelves of DVD cases on the opposite wall.

  Payne shrugged and turned his attention back to the player.

  “How do you find anything here?” Nick asked a few moments later. “All I can see are numbers and letters. Is it some kind of code?”

  “Yeah,” Payne said over his shoulder, his back to Nick. “I haven’t figured it out entirely, but there is a master list in that binder at the end of the shelf. Everything in it is entered alphabetically by title. Go ahead, pick one out.”

  Nick pulled the binder down, its thickness mute testimony to The Greer’s thoroughness in her collecting.

  There must have been a thousand DVD cases along the wall, maybe more.

  He thumbed through the lists.

  “Here’s one,” he said finally. “I haven’t seen it in years, but it was funny. Arsenic and Old Lace.”

  “The Cary Grant film?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Dark old house filled with crazy people. Peter Lorrie. Karloff, too, I think.”

  “What’s the number?” Payne asked as he crossed the room.

  Nick read off the code—several digits and letters in an apparently random arrangement—and Payne began running his fingers over a section of the shelves.

  “No, it wasn’t Karloff,” he said as he checked coding dots on case after case. “The guy just looked like Karloff, I think.” He pulled a thin plastic case down. He flipped it over and scanned the small print on the back.

  “Right,” he said, looking up and grinning, “it was Raymond Massey. He plays the murderous brother.”

  He held the case up.

  “This the one you want, then?”

  Nick nodded. Payne slipped the cartridge into the player and punched a series of buttons before he turned to face Nick.

  “Okay, we have about five minutes to get settled; there’s some kind of delay-relay that lets us go to one of the other rooms to watch. Which do you want, living room or study?”

  “What?”

  “The films automatically show in every room of the house. We can make ourselves comfortable anywhere, even in the bathroom, and watch the screen. Although the tub is a bit cramped for two, I suspect.” Payne laughed. “Or maybe not, if they’re the right two.” His eyes glinted with little-boy glee.

  “That’s crazy!” Nick meant the viewing arrangements.

  “I know,” Payne said, his face still struggling against a smile. “But that’s the way it is here. Let’s go to the front study. The sofa there is pretty good sitting.”

  Nick agreed; he didn’t want to spend a couple of hours sitting in the living room. Not yet, anyway.

  They walked down the hall and into the study. It was the small squarish room on the corner closest to Nick’s place. Payne went in first and drew the curtains. White, as usual. The room went black. Not just dark or dim. Totally, abysmally black.

  “Whatever this stuff is,” Payne said, fingering the heavy drapes, “it really works. Not a bit of light comes in unless I want it to. It’s eerie, total darkness in the middle of the day.”

  “Yeah,” Nick agreed. And even eerier, total darkness from the outside as well. Night after night. Year after year.

  The screen lit up and the credits scrolled across the silvery light. There was no warm-up, no fragmentary static as the disc began. All at once it was Halloween in Brooklyn, with the promise of strange and hilarious occurrences.

  They settled on opposite ends of the sofa—it was comfortable, Nick decided, more so than either chair in the living room—and enjoyed the blue-gray flickering on the screen.

  Halfway through, Nick and Payne were laughing out loud.

  They had forgotten any fleeting cares, worries, and fears.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Given that the two men lived next to each other and that, for a time at least, each was perhaps the nearest thing the other had to a close friend, Nick probably should have noted the gradual changes in Payne. Had Payne’s faceless cousins and aunts and uncles in Pennsylvania been just a little stronger and able to suppress their envy long enough to visit him, or had they been
just a little weaker and willing to succumb to their greed and try to pander to him, they might have seen something, especially after Payne’s first two or three months in California had passed. Even then they might have merely chalked the changes up to his normally reserved personality or, if they were feeling especially nasty, to his becoming stuck up and snooty. But Nick saw Payne nearly every day for weeks. To give Nick credit, though, many of the changes were so gradual that he simply didn’t notice.

  And he was busy, keeping up with his reading schedule and preparing for fall exams. But that wasn’t a good enough reason for him to close his eyes. He should have seen; in fact, perhaps, he did see. Like so many people who are suddenly thrust into unusual and uncomfortable situations, he just didn’t understand what he saw.

  That was that.

  During the early weeks of summer, of course, there was no problem—at least nothing evident to Nick.

  The two got together increasingly often, as many as three or four times a week to play chess at Nick’s or watch films at Payne’s. They chose films more or less by consensus, usually things both had missed or that somebody one of them knew had recommended…by an unspoken consensus, they gravitated toward older titles, things they had seen—or wished they could have seen—as teens.

  There were plenty in the Greer’s collection. Nick had missed most of the later theatrical releases, in part because of the time he spent on studying and the distance from Tamarind Valley to any decent theater, but mostly because of money—$7.50 and more per flick in the better theaters was too steep for his budget.

  Payne hadn’t seen many because the single theater in the backwoods Pennsylvania town he came from just didn’t show them. There was only one movie-house in Brenton.

  “Honest to God, it was really called the Bijou,” Payne said once to Nick.

  From what Payne said about it, Nick didn’t think the ancient manager of the Brenton Bijou ever showed a film made after 1957—certainly nothing like the old Herbert West, Reanimator, or From Beyond or any of the more recent Aliens, Predators, or Hellraiser offerings. At first, the evenings at Payne’s were adventures for both of them.